The Man Who Laughs

by Victor Hugo

  The Man Who Laughs

  By Victor Hugo

  * * *

  Translated by Joseph L. Blamire (1888)

  Contents

  PART ONE: THE SEA AND THE NIGHT

  TWO PRELIMINARY CHAPTERS

  I URSUS

  II THE COMPRACHICOS

  BOOK I NIGHT NOT SO BLACK AS MAN

  I PORTLAND BILL

  II LEFT ALONE

  III ALONE

  IV QUESTIONS

  V THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION

  VI STRUGGLE BETWEEN DEATH AND NIGHT

  VII THE NORTH POINT OF PORTLAND

  BOOK 2 THE HOOKER AT SEA

  I SUPERHUMAN LAWS

  II OUR FIRST ROUGH SKETCHES FILLED IN

  III TROUBLED MEN ON THE TROUBLED SEA

  IV A CLOUD DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS ENTERS ON THE SCENE

  V HARDQUANONNE

  VI THEY THINK THAT HELP IS AT HAND

  VII SUPERHUMAN HORRORS

  VIII NIX ET NOX

  IX THE CHARGE CONFIDED TO A RAGING SEA

  X THE COLOSSAL SAVAGE, THE STORM

  XI THE CASKETS

  XII FACE TO FACE WITH THE ROCK

  XIII FACE TO FACE WITH NIGHT

  XIV ORTACH

  XV PORTENTOSUM MARE

  XVI THE PROBLEM SUDDENLY WORKS IN SILENCE

  XVII THE LAST RESOURCE

  XVIII THE HIGHEST RESOURCE

  BOOK 3 THE CHILD IN THE SHADOW

  I CHESIL

  II THE EFFECT OF SNOW

  III A BURDEN MAKES A ROUGH ROW ROUGHER

  IV ANOTHER FORM OF DESERT

  V MISANTHROPY PLAYS ITS PRANKS

  VI THE AWAKING

  PART TWO

  BOOK 1 THE EVERLASTING PRESENCE OF THE PAST: MAN REFLECTS MAN

  I LORD CLANCHARLIE

  II LORD DAVID DIRRY-MOIR

  III THE DUCHESS JOSIANA

  IV THE LEADER OF FASHIONS

  V QUEEN ANNE

  VI BARKILPHEDRO

  VII BARKILPHEDRO GNAWS HIS WAY

  VIII INFERI

  IX HATE IS AS STRONG AS LOVE

  X THE FLAME WHICH WOULD BE SEEN IF MAN WERE TRANSPARENT

  XI BARKILPHEDRO IN AMBUSCADE

  XII SCOTLAND, IRELAND, AND ENGLAND

  BOOK 2 GWYNPLAINE AND DEA

  I WHEREIN WE SEE THE FACE OF HIM OF WHOM WE HAVE HITHERTO SEEN ONLY THE ACTS

  II DEA

  III "OCULOS NON HABET, ET VIDET"

  IV WELL-MATCHED LOVERS

  V THE BLUE SKY THROUGH THE BLACK CLOUD

  VI URSUS AS TUTOR AND URSUS AS GUARDIAN

  VII BLINDNESS GIVES LESSONS IN CLAIRVOYANCE

  VIII NOT ONLY HAPPINESS, BUT PROSPERITY

  IX ABSURDITIES WHICH FOLKS WITHOUT TASTE CALL, POETRY

  X AN OUTSIDER'S VIEW OF MEN AND THINGS

  XI GWYNPLAINE THINKS JUSTICE, AND URSUS TALKS TRUTH

  XII URSUS THE POET DRAGS ON URSUS THE PHILOSOPHER

  BOOK 3 THE BEGINNING OF THE FISSURE

  I THE TADCASTER INN

  II OPEN AIR ELOQUENCE

  III WHERE THE PASSER-BY REAPPEARS

  IV CONTRARIES FRATERNISE IN HATE

  V THE WAPENTAKE

  VI THE MOUSE EXAMINED BY THE CATS

  VII WHY SHOULD A GOLD PIECE LOWER ITSELF BY MIXING WITH A HEAP OF PENNIES?

  VIII SYMPTOMS OF POISONING

  IX ABYSSUS ABYSSUM VOCAT

  BOOK 4 THE CELL OF TORTURE

  I THE TEMPTATION OF ST. GWYNPLAINE

  II FROM GAY TO GRAVE

  III LEX, REX, FEX

  IV URSUS SPIES ON THE POLICE

  V A FEARFUL PLACE

  VI THE KIND OF MAGISTRACY UNDER THE WIGS OF FORMER DAYS

  VII SHUDDERING

  VIII LAMENTATION

  BOOK 5 THE SEA AND FATE ARE MOVED BY THE SAME BREATH

  I THE DURABILITY OF FRAGILE THINGS

  II THE WAIF KNOWS ITS OWN COURSE

  III AN AWAKENING

  IV FASCINATION

  V WE THINK WE REMEMBER; WE FORGET

  BOOK 6 URSUS UNDER DIFFERENT ASPECTS

  I WHAT THE MISANTHROPE SAID

  II WHAT HE DID

  III COMPLICATIONS

  IV MOENIBUS SURDIS CAMPANA MUTA

  V STATE POLICY DEALS WITH LITTLE MATTERS AS WELL AS WITH GREAT

  BOOK 7 THE TITANESS

  I THE AWAKENING

  II THE RESEMBLANCE OF A PALACE TO A WOOD

  III EVE

  IV SATAN

  V THEY RECOGNISE, BUT DO NOT KNOW, EACH OTHER

  BOOK 8 THE CAPITOL AND THINGS AROUND IT

  I ANALYSIS OF MAJESTIC MATTERS

  II IMPARTIALITY

  III THE OLD HALL

  IV THE OLD CHAMBER

  V ARISTOCRATIC GOSSIP

  VI THE HIGH AND THE LOW

  VII STORMS OF MEN ARE WORSE THAN STORMS OF OCEANS

  VIII HE WOULD BE A GOOD BROTHER WERE HE NOT A GOOD SON

  BOOK 9 IN RUINS

  I IT IS THROUGH EXCESS OF GREATNESS THAT MAN REACHES EXCESS OF MISERY

  II THE DREGS

  BOOK 10 CONCLUSION

  THE NIGHT AND THE SEA

  I A WATCHDOG MAY BE A GUARDIAN ANGEL

  II BARKILPHEDRO, HAVING AIMED AT THE EAGLE, BRINGS DOWN THE DOVE

  III PARADISE REGAINED BELOW

  IV NAY; ON HIGH!

  * * *

  PRELIMINARY CHAPTER

  I

  URSUS

  I

  URSUS AND HOMO were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Their dispositions tallied. It was the man who had christened the wolf: probably he had also chosen his own name. Having found Ursus fit for himself, he had found Homo fit for the beast. Man and wolf turned their partnership to account at fairs, at village fêtes, at the corners of streets where passers-by throng, and out of the need which people seem to feel everywhere to listen to idle gossip, and to buy quack medicine. The wolf, gentle and courteously subordinate, diverted the crowd. It is a pleasant thing to behold the tameness of animals. Our greatest delight is to see all the varieties of domestication parade before us. This it is which collects so many folks on the road of royal processions.

  Ursus and Promo went about from cross-road to cross-road, from the High Street of Aberystwith to the High Street of Jedburgh, from country-side to country-side, from shire to shire, from town to town. One market exhausted, they went on to another. Ursus lived in a small van upon wheels, which Homo was civilised enough to draw by day and guard by night. On bad roads, up hills, and where there were too many ruts, or there was too much mud, the man buckled the trace round his neck and pulled fraternally, side by side with the wolf. They had thus grown old together. They encamped at haphazard on a common, m the glade of a wood, on the waste patch of grass where roads intersect, at the outskirts of villages, at the gates of towns, in market-places, in public walks, on the borders of parks, before the entrances of churches. When the cart drew up on a fair green, when the gossips ran up open-mouthed and the curious made a circle round the pair, Ursus harangued and Homo approved. Homo, with a bowl in his mouth, politely made a collection among the audience. They gained their livelihood. The wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his friend would say to him.

  Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicise his misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the stomach has to be consulted. Moreover, this juggler-misanthrope, whether to add to the complexity of his being or to perfect it, was a doctor. To be a doctor is little: Ursus was a ventriloquist. You heard him speak without his moving his li
ps. He counterfeited, so as to deceive you, any one's accent or pronunciation. He imitated voices so exactly that you believed you heard the people themselves. A11 alone he simulated the murmur of the crowd, and this gave him a right to the title of Engastrimythos, which he took. He reproduced all sorts of cries of birds, as of the thrush, the wren, the pipit lark, otherwise called the gray cheeper, and the ring ousel, all travelers like himself: so that at times, when the fancy struck him, he made you aware either of a public thoroughfare filled with the uproar of men, or of a meadow loud with the voices of beasts-at one time stormy as a multitude, at another fresh and serene as the dawn. Such gifts, although rare, exist. In the last century a man called Touzel, who imitated the mingled utterances of men and animals, and who counterfeited all the cries of beasts, was attached to the person of Buffoon-to serve as a menagerie.

  Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and inclined to the singular expositions which we term fables. He had the appearance of believing in them, and this impudence was a part of his humour. He read people's hands, Opened books at random and drew conclusions, told fortunes, taught that it is perilous to meet a black mare, still more perilous, as you start for a journey, to hear yourself accosted by one who knows not whither you are going; and he called himself a dealer in superstitions. He used to say: "There is one difference between me and the Archbishop of Canterbury: I avow what I am." Hence it was that the archbishop, justly indignant, had him one day before him; but Ursus cleverly disarmed his grace by reciting a sermon he had composed upon Christmas Day, which the delighted archbishop learned by heart, and delivered from the pulpit as his own. In consideration thereof the archbishop pardoned Ursus.

  As a doctor, Ursus wrought cures by some means or other. He made use of aromatics; he was versed in simples; he made the most of the immense power which lies in a heap of neglected plants, such as the hazel, the catkin, the white alder, the white briony, the mealy-tree, the traveler's joy, the buckthorn. He treated phthisis with the sundew; at opportune moments he would use the leaves of the spurge, which plucked at the bottom are a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic. He cured sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called Jew's ear. He knew the rush which cures the ox and the mint which cures the horse. He was well acquainted with the beauties and virtues of the herb mandragora, which, as every one knows, is of both sexes. He had many recipes. He cured burns with the salamander wool, of which, according to Pliny, Nero had a napkin. Ursus possessed a retort and a flask; he effected transmutations; he sold panaceas. It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us. The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old Latin poet. He was learned in two forms; he Hippocratised and he Pindarised. He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He could have composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than that of Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity with the venerable rhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures of speech, and a whole family of classical metaphors. He would say of a mother followed by her two daughters, There is a dactyl; of a father preceded by his two sons, There is an anapæst; and of a little child walking between its grandmother and grandfather, There is an amphimacer. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. The school of Salerno says, "Eat little and often." Ursus ate little and seldom, thus obeying one-half the precept and disobeying the other; but this was the fault of the public, who did not always Hock to him, and who did not often buy.

  Ursus was wont to say: "The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. The wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema." Ursus at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted; this helped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed a heroic pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles from London: the knight came and took possession of it. He brought a brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in another-now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his bed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay them"--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.

  Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took after those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his own audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself, blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquising in his van. The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people, used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused himself at times; but there were times also when he rendered himself justice. One day, in one of these allocations addressed to himself, he was heard to cry out, "I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries--in the stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpet, in the mule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy; that is to say, the formation of colours, of smell, and of taste." There was something fatuous, doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but let those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics osmosy, and chymosy cast the first stone at him.

  Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low Countries; there they would certainly have weighed him, to ascertain whether he was of the normal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland this weight was sagely fixed by law. Nothing was simpler or more ingenious. It was a clear test. They put you in a scale, and the evidence was conclusive if you broke the equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged; too light, you were burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers were weighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now used for weighing cheeses; how religion has degenerated! Ursus would certainly have had a crow to pluck with those scales. In his travels he kept away from Holland, and he did well. Indeed, we believed that he used never to leave the United Kingdom.

  However this may have been, he was very poor and morose, and having made the acquaintance of Homo in a wood, a taste for a wandering life had come over him. He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him had gone forth on the highways, living in the open air the great life of chance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skill in everything connected with healing operations, restoring the sick to health, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered a clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for a wizard as well--not much indeed, only a little, for it was unwholesome in those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth, Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himself open to suspicion, seeing that he often went to gather herbs in rough thickets where grew Lucifer's salads, and where, as has been proved by the Counselor de l'Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the evening mist a man who comes out of the earth, "blind of the right eye barefooted, without a cloak, and a sword by his side." But for the matter of that
, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, was too good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, to kill a man with the torment of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fair or foul and full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with four wings. He had no such mischievous tricks. He was incapable of certain abominations, such as, for instance, speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek without having learned them, which is a sign of unpardonable wickedness, or of a natural infirmity proceeding from a morbid humour. If Ursus spoke Latin, it was because he knew it. He would never have allowed himself to speak Syriac, which he did not know. Besides, it is asserted that Syriac is the language spoken in the midnight meetings at which uncanny people worship the devil. In medicine he justly preferred Galen to Cardan; Cardan, although a learned man, being but an earthworm to Galen.

  To sum up, Ursus was not one of those persons who live in fear of the police. His van was long enough and wide enough to allow of his lying down in it on a box containing his not very sumptuous apparel. He owned a lantern, several wigs, and some utensils suspended from nails, among which were musical instruments. He possessed, besides, a bearskin with which he covered himself on his days of grand performance. He called this putting on full-dress. He used to say, "I have two skins this is the real one," pointing to the bearskin.

  The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to the wolf. Besides this house, his retort, and his wolf, he had a flute and a violoncello on which he played prettily. He concocted his own elixirs. His visits yielded him enough to sup on sometimes. In the top of his van was a hole, through which passed the pipe of a cast-iron stove; so close to his bed as to scorch the wood of it. The stove had two compartments; in one of them Ursus cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At night the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. Homo's hair was black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he was sixty. He accepted his destiny to such an extent that, as we have just seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs and convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not tall--he was long. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an old man is the settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him for sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as of the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his youth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord. This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are now. Not so very much, though.