, diverts, distracts, teaches, enchants, consoles
me; flings me into an ideal world, is agreeable and useful to me. What
evil can I do him in return? Humiliate him. Disdain is a blow from afar.
Let us strike the blow. He pleases me, therefore he is vile. He serves
me, therefore I hate him. Where can I find a stone to throw at him?
Priest, give me yours. Philosopher, give me yours. Bossuet,
excommunicate him. Rousseau, insult him. Orator, spit the pebbles from
your mouth at him. Bear, fling your stone. Let us cast stones at the
tree, hit the fruit and eat it. "Bravo!" and "Down with him!" To repeat
poetry is to be infected with the plague. Wretched playactor, we will
put him in the pillory for his success. Let him follow up his triumph
with our hisses. Let him collect a crowd and create a solitude. Thus it
is that the wealthy, termed the higher classes, have invented for the
actor that form of isolation, applause.

The crowd is less brutal. They neither hated nor despised Gwynplaine.
Only the meanest calker of the meanest crew of the meanest merchantman,
anchored in the meanest English seaport, considered himself immeasurably
superior to this amuser of the "scum," and believed that a calker is as
superior to an actor as a lord is to a calker.

Gwynplaine was, therefore, like all comedians, applauded and kept at a
distance. Truly, all success in this world is a crime, and must be
expiated. He who obtains the medal has to take its reverse side as well.

For Gwynplaine there was no reverse. In this sense, both sides of his
medal pleased him. He was satisfied with the applause, and content with
the isolation. In applause he was rich, in isolation happy.

To be rich in his low estate means to be no longer wretchedly poor--to
have neither holes in his clothes, nor cold at his hearth, nor emptiness
in his stomach. It is to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty. It is
to have everything necessary, including a penny for a beggar. This
indigent wealth, enough for liberty, was possessed by Gwynplaine. So far
as his soul was concerned, he was opulent. He had love. What more could
he want? Nothing.

You may think that had the offer been made to him to remove his
deformity he would have grasped at it. Yet he would have refused it
emphatically. What! to throw off his mask and have his former face
restored; to be the creature he had perchance been created, handsome and
charming? No, he would never have consented to it. For what wou