that very cause. Infirmity and deformity had by instinct been drawn
towards and coupled with each other. To be beloved, is not that
everything? Gwynplaine thought of his disfigurement only with gratitude.
He was blessed in the stigma. With joy he felt that it was irremediable
and eternal. What a blessing that it was so! While there were highways
and fairgrounds, and journeys to take, the people below and the sky
above, they would be sure to live, Dea would want nothing, and they
should have love. Gwynplaine would not have changed faces with Apollo.
To be a monster was his form of happiness.

Thus, as we said before, destiny had given him all, even to overflowing.
He who had been rejected had been preferred.

He was so happy that he felt compassion for the men around him. He
pitied the rest of the world. It was, besides, his instinct to look
about him, because no one is always consistent, and a man's nature is
not always theoretic; he was delighted to live within an enclosure, but
from time to time he lifted his head above the wall. Then he retreated
again with more joy into his loneliness with Dea, having drawn his
comparisons. What did he see around him?

What were those living creatures of which his wandering life showed him
so many specimens, changed every day? Always new crowds, always the same
multitude, ever new faces, ever the same miseries. A jumble of ruins.
Every evening every phase of social misfortune came and encircled his
happiness.

The Green Box was popular.

Low prices attract the low classes. Those who came were the weak, the
poor, the little. They rushed to Gwynplaine as they rushed to gin. They
came to buy a pennyworth of forgetfulness. From the height of his
platform Gwynplaine passed those wretched people in review. His spirit
was enwrapt in the contemplation of every succeeding apparition of
widespread misery. The physiognomy of man is modelled by conscience, and
by the tenor of life, and is the result of a crowd of mysterious
excavations. There was never a suffering, not an anger, not a shame, not
a despair, of which Gwynplaine did not see the wrinkle. The mouths of
those children had not eaten. That man was a father, that woman a
mother, and behind them their families might be guessed to be on the
road to ruin. There was a face already marked by vice, on the threshold
of crime, and the reasons were plain--ignorance and indigence. Another
showed the stamp of original goodness, obliterated by