case some alderman's wife should come.

They began their performances. The crowd immediately flocked to them,
but the compartment for the nobility remained empty. With that exception
their success became so great that no mountebank memory could recall its
parallel. All Southwark ran in crowds to admire the Laughing Man.

The merry-andrews and mountebanks of Tarrinzeau Field were aghast at
Gwynplaine. The effect he caused was as that of a sparrow-hawk flapping
his wings in a cage of goldfinches, and feeding in their seed-trough.
Gwynplaine ate up their public.

Besides the small fry, the swallowers of swords and the grimace makers,
real performances took place on the green. There was a circus of women,
ringing from morning till night with a magnificent peal of all sorts of
instruments--psalteries, drums, rebecks, micamons, timbrels, reeds,
dulcimers, gongs, chevrettes, bagpipes, German horns, English
eschaqueils, pipes, flutes, and flageolets.

In a large round tent were some tumblers, who could not have equalled
our present climbers of the Pyrenees--Dulma, Bordenave, and
Meylonga--who from the peak of Pierrefitte descend to the plateau of
Limacon, an almost perpendicular height. There was a travelling
menagerie, where was to be seen a performing tiger, who, lashed by the
keeper, snapped at the whip and tried to swallow the lash. Even this
comedian of jaws and claws was eclipsed in success.

Curiosity, applause, receipts, crowds, the Laughing Man monopolized
everything. It happened in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing was thought
of but the Green Box.

"'Chaos Vanquished' is 'Chaos Victor,'" said Ursus, appropriating half
Gwynplaine's success, and taking the wind out of his sails, as they say
at sea. That success was prodigious. Still it remained local. Fame does
not cross the sea easily. It took a hundred and thirty years for the
name of Shakespeare to penetrate from England into France. The sea is a
wall; and if Voltaire--a thing which he very much regretted when it was
too late--had not thrown a bridge over to Shakespeare, Shakespeare might
still be in England, on the other side of the wall, a captive in insular
glory.

The glory of Gwynplaine had not passed London Bridge. It was not great
enough yet to re-echo throughout the city. At least not at first. But
Southwark ought to have sufficed to satisfy the ambition of a clown.
Ursus said,--

"The money bag grows palpably bigger."

They played "Ursus Rursus" a