real nature. See how I resemble you. Look at me as if I
were a mirror. Your face is my mind. I did not know I was so terrible. I
am also, then, a monster. O Gwynplaine, you do amuse me!"

She laughed, a strange and childlike laugh; and, putting her mouth
close to his ear, whispered,--

"Do you want to see a mad woman? look at me."

She poured her searching look into Gwynplaine. A look is a philtre. Her
loosened robe provoked a thousand dangerous feelings. Blind, animal
ecstasy was invading his mind--ecstasy combined with agony. Whilst she
spoke, though he felt her words like burning coals, his blood froze
within his veins. He had not strength to utter a word.

She stopped, and looked at him.

"O monster!" she cried. She grew wild.

Suddenly she seized his hands.

"Gwynplaine, I am the throne; you are the footstool. Let us join on the
same level. Oh, how happy I am in my fall! I wish all the world could
know how abject I am become. It would bow down all the lower. The more
man abhors, the more does he cringe. It is human nature. Hostile, but
reptile; dragon, but worm. Oh, I am as depraved as are the gods! They
can never say that I am not a king's bastard. I act like a queen. Who
was Rodope but a queen loving Pteh, a man with a crocodile's head? She
raised the third pyramid in his honour. Penthesilea loved the centaur,
who, being now a star, is named Sagittarius. And what do you say about
Anne of Austria? Mazarin was ugly enough! Now, you are not only ugly;
you are deformed. Ugliness is mean, deformity is grand. Ugliness is the
devil's grin behind beauty; deformity is the reverse of sublimity. It is
the back view. Olympus has two aspects. One, by day, shows Apollo; the
other, by night, shows Polyphemus. You--you are a Titan. You would be
Behemoth in the forests, Leviathan in the deep, and Typhon in the sewer.
You surpass everything. There is the trace of lightning in your
deformity; your face has been battered by the thunderbolt. The jagged
contortion of forked lightning has imprinted its mark on your face. It
struck you and passed on. A mighty and mysterious wrath has, in a fit of
passion, cemented your spirit in a terrible and superhuman form. Hell is
a penal furnace, where the iron called Fatality is raised to a white
heat. You have been branded with it. To love you is to understand
grandeur. I enjoy that triumph. To be in love with Apollo--a fine
effort, forsooth! Glory is to be measured by the astonishment it