Victor Hugo

“ Gwynplaine was horrible,—made horrible by the hand of man. They had hoped to exile him forever,—first, from his family, if his family existed; and then from humanity. When an infant, they had made him a ruin. Of this ruin Nature had repossessed herself, as she does of all ruins. Nature had consoled this solitary heart, as she consoles all solitudes. Nature comes to the aid of the deserted; when everything fails them she gives them herself. She flourishes and grows green amid ruins; she has ivy for the stones, and boundless sympathy for man. ”

“ Men had recovered from the follies of politics; they sneered at revolution, they jeered at the republic; and as to those times when such strange words as Right, Liberty, Progress, had been in every one's mouth, why, they laughed at such bombast! How admirable this return to common-sense was! England had been in a dream. What joy to be free from such errors! Was ever anything so mad? Where should we be if every one had his rights? Fancy every one's having a hand in the government! Can you imagine a city ruled by its citizens? Why, the citizens are the team, and the team cannot act as driver. ”

“ Ursus, Gwynplaine, Vinos, Fibi, the crowd, every one had succumbed to her dazzling beauty, except Dea, ignorant in her darkness. An apparition was indeed before them; but none of the ideas usually evoked by the word were realized in the lady's appearance. There was nothing diaphanous, nothing undecided, nothing floating, no mist about her. She was a goddess; rose-coloured and fresh, and full of health. ”

“ These speeches only increased the mutual love of Gwynplaine and Dea; and Ursus marvelled at his want of success, like one who might say, "It is singular that with all the oil I throw on the fire, I cannot extinguish it!"
Did Ursus, then, really desire to extinguish their love, or to cool it even? Certainly not. He would have been sorely disappointed had he succeeded. In his secret heart this love delighted him beyond measure. But it is natural to scoff a little at that which charms us; men call it wisdom. Ursus had been, in his relations with Gwynplaine and Dea, almost a father and a mother. ”

“ It was one of those moments when it seems as if the elements were changing into persons, and that one was about to witness the mysterious transformation of the wind into the windgod. The sea becomes Ocean; its power reveals itself as Will: hence the terror. The soul of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul of Nature. Chaos was about to appear. The wind rolled back the fog, and making a stage of the clouds behind set the scene for that fearful drama of wave and winter, which is called a snow-storm. ”

“ Kindness is the sunshine of the spiritual world; so it is little wonder that Gwynplaine quite dazzled poor Dea. To the crowd, which has too many heads to have a thought, and too many eyes to have a clear vision,—to the crowd who, superficial themselves, judge only by the surface, Gwynplaine was a clown, a merry-andrew, a mountebank, a grotesque creature, very little more or less than a beast. The crowd knew only the face. For Dea, Gwynplaine was the saviour who had gathered her up in his arms in the tomb, and borne her out of it; the consoler who made life tolerable ”

“ Nor would anything have caused Barkilphedro to let go his hold. He was biding his time. Would it ever come? Who knows? He was certainly watching for it. Self-love is mixed up in the malice of the very wicked man. To make holes and gaps in a fortune higher than your own; to undermine it at all risks and perils, carefully concealed, yourself, the while,—is, we repeat, extremely exciting. The player at such a game becomes eager, even to passion; he throws himself into the work as if he were composing an epic. To be very mean and to attack that which is great, is in itself a brilliant action. ”

“ Although plump and healthy, Josiana was, we repeat, a perfect prude. At times, her sleepy and voluptuous way of dragging out the end of her phrases was like the creeping of a tiger's paws in the jungle. When one has not got Olympus, one must be content with the Hotel de Rambouillet. Juno resolves herself into Araminta. A pretension to divinity not admitted, creates affectation. Instead of thunder-claps there is impertinence. The temple shrivels into the boudoir. Unable to be a goddess, one becomes a graven image. Besides, there is in prudery a certain pedantry which is pleasing to women. ”

“ What Barkilphedro had put into his brain had left it empty.
The mind, like Nature, abhors a vacuum. Into emptiness, where Nature puts love, the mind often puts hate. There is such a thing as hating merely for the sake of hating. A man hates because he must do something. Gratuitous hatred,—what a strange expression! It means hate which is in itself its own reward. The bear lives by licking his claws,—not indefinitely, of course; the claws must be revictualled,—something must be put into them. A hatred of mankind in general is sweet, and suffices for a time ”

“ There was a sound of creaking in a groove, and Gwynplaine was suddenly face to face with a bit of square light. The sheet of metal had just been raised into a slit in the vault, like the door of a mouse-trap. An opening had appeared. The light was not daylight, but glimmer; but on the dilated eyeballs of Gwynplaine the pale ray struck like a flash of lightning. It was some time before he could distinguish anything. To see with dazzled eyes is as difficult as it is to see in darkness. ”

“ Gwynplaine lived as it were beheaded, with a face which did not belong to him. This face was frightful, so frightful that it was absurd. It caused as much fear as laughter; it was a hell-concocted absurdity; it was the transformation of a human face into the mask of an animal. Never had there been such a total eclipse of humanity in any human face, never a more complete caricature; never had a more frightful apparition grinned in nightmare; never had everything that is repulsive to woman been more hideously amalgamated in a man. ”

“ You may poison yourself with reveries, as with flowers,—an intoxicating suicide, exquisite and malignant. The suicide of the soul is evil thought. In it lurks a deadly poison. Reverie entices, cajoles, lures, entwines, and finally makes you its accomplice. It makes you in part accountable for the trickeries which it plays on conscience. It charms; then it corrupts you. We may say of reverie as of play,—one begins by being a dupe, and ends by being a cheat.
Gwynplaine dreamed. He had never before seen Woman. He had seen the shadow in the women of the populace, and he had seen the soul in Dea. ”

“ More surely than the eagle escapes the arrow, the animalcule escapes being crushed. This security of insignificance, if it had ever existed on earth, was enjoyed by Gwynplaine and Dea, and never before had it been so complete. They lived on, daily more and more ecstatically wrapt in each other. The heart saturates itself with love as with a divine salt that preserves it, and from this arises the incorruptible constancy of those who have loved each other from the dawn of their lives, and the affection which keeps its freshness in old age. ”

“ Biscay is Pyrenean grace as Savoy represents Alpine grace. With dangerous bays, with storms, with clouds, with flying spray, with the raging of the waves and winds, with terror, with uproar, are mingled boat-women crowned with roses. He who has seen the Basque country once longs to see it again. It is a favoured land,—two harvests a year; villages resonant and gay; a stately poverty; all Sunday the sound of guitars, dancing, castanets, love-making; houses clean and bright; storks in the belfries.
But let us return to Portland, that rugged mountain in the sea. ”

“ Perhaps he was not altogether wrong; the foundations of a work settle down in the mind of the public. The fact is, the spectators, attentive to the wolf, the bear, to the man, then to the music, to the howlings silenced by harmony, to the night dispelled by dawn, to the chant releasing the light, accepted with a confused, dull sympathy, and with a certain emotional respect, the dramatic poem of "Chaos Vanquished," the victory of spirit over matter, ending with the triumph of man. ”

“ The king reigns for them, and they must reward him accordingly. Taxation and the civil list are the salaries paid by the people and earned by the prince. The people give their blood and their money, in return for which they are governed. To wish to govern themselves,—what an absurd idea! They require a guide; being ignorant, they are blind. Has not the blind man his dog? Only the people have a lion, the king, who consents to play the dog. How kind of him! Why are the people ignorant? Because it is good for them to be ignorant. Ignorance is the guardian of Virtue. ”

“ We are wrong in saying, "The night falls;" we should say "The night rises," for it is from the earth that darkness comes. It was already night at the bottom of the cliff; it was still day at the top. Any one approaching the vessel's moorings would have recognized a Biscayan hooker. The sun, concealed all day by the mist, had just set. That deep and sombre melancholy which might be called longing for the absent sun already pervaded the scene. As there was no breeze from the sea, the water of the creek was calm. ”

“ Portland is a peninsula; but the child did not know what a peninsula was, and had never even heard the name of Portland. He knew only one thing; that was that one could walk until one drops. An idea is a guide; but he had no idea. They had brought him there, and left him there. They and there. These two enigmas represented his doom. They were humankind; there was the universe. For him in all creation there was absolutely no basis to rest upon but the little piece of hard, frozen ground where he set his naked feet. In the great twilight world, open on all sides, what was there for him? ”

“ An enormous wave came down abeam, and dashed against the vessel's side. There is always in storms a tiger-like wave, a billow fierce and decisive, which after attaining a certain height creeps horizontally over the surface of the waters for a time, then rises, roars, rages, and falling on the distressed vessel tears it limb from limb. A cloud of foam covered the entire deck of the "Matutina." A loud noise was heard above the confusion of darkness and waters. When the spray cleared off, and the stern again rose to view, the captain and the helm had disappeared. ”

“ One all-powerful, indifferent to beauty and splendour, gave herself to a creature of night,—preferred Gwynplaine to Antinoüs. Impelled by curiosity, she entered the slums and even descended into them, and from this abdication of goddess-ship resulted this wonderful exaltation of the wretched. "You are hideous. I love you." These words touched Gwynplaine in the ugly spot of pride. Pride is the heel in which all heroes are vulnerable. Gwynplaine was flattered in his vanity as a monster. ”

“ The world is suddenly converted into a vaulted cave. Out of the night falls a dust of pale spots, which hesitate between sky and sea. These spots, which are flakes of snow, slip, wander, and float. It is like the tears of a winding-sheet putting themselves into life-like motion. A mad wind mingles with this dissemination. Blackness crumbling into whiteness, the furious into the obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind under a catafalque,—such is the snow-storm. ”

“ No purity could be compared to their loves. Dea did not even know what a kiss might be, though perhaps she desired it; because blindness, especially in a woman, has its dreams, and though trembling at the approaches of the unknown does not fear them all. As for Gwynplaine, his unhappy youth had made him sensitive. The more intensely he loved, the more timid he became. He might have dared anything with this companion of his early youth, with this creature as ignorant of fault as of light, with this blind girl who knew but one thing,—that she adored him. ”

“ To say that the lords are mischievous or useless, is to say that the State should be revolutionized, and that men are not made to live like cattle, browsing the grass and bitten by the dog. The field is shorn by the sheep, the sheep by the shepherd. It is all one to me. I am a philosopher, and I attach just about as much importance to life as a fly. Life is only a lodging-house. When I think that Henry Bowes Howard, Earl of Berkshire, has in his stable twenty-four state carriages, of which one is mounted in silver, and another in gold,—good heavens! ”

“ The chances of the abyss are illimitable. Everything is possible in it, even salvation; an issue may be found, though it be invisible. How the child, wrapped in a smothering winding-sheet of snow, lost on a narrow elevation between two jaws of an abyss, managed to cross the isthmus is something he could not himself have explained. He slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered,—that is all; that, indeed, is the secret of all triumphs. At the end of less than half an hour he felt that the ground was rising. He had reached the other shore. Leaving Chesil, he had gained terra firma. ”

“ Such innocence in such darkness, such purity in such an embrace, such foretastes of heaven, are possible only to childhood, and no immensity approaches the greatness of little children. The fearful perpetuity of the dead chained beyond life, the mighty animosity of the ocean to a wreck, the whiteness of the snow over buried bodies, do not equal in pathos two children's mouths meeting divinely in sleep,—a meeting which is not even a kiss: a betrothal perchance ”

“ At night the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. Homo's hair was black, that of Ursus grey. 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 pigs and convicts were fed. He ate them sadly, but resignedly. 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. ”

“ Dea would want for nothing, and they would have love.
Gwynplaine would not have changed faces with Apollo. To be a monster was his happiness. He was so happy that he felt compassion for the men around him. He pitied all the rest of the world. No man's nature is wholly consistent; so, although he was glad to live within an enclosure, he lifted his head above the wall from time to time, but only to retreat again with even more joy into his solitude with Dea, having drawn his comparisons. ”

“ Gwynplaine, who knew naught of penal severities, save through the exaggerations of Ursus, felt as though he had been seized by a sort of gigantic hand. To be caught in the mysterious toils of the law is frightful. He who is brave in all other dangers, is disconcerted in the presence of justice. Why? Is it because the justice of man works in twilight, and the judge gropes his way? Gwynplaine remembered what Ursus had told him of the necessity for silence. ”

“ To carry nothing to extremes is the wise man's maxim. Oppose if you choose, blame if you will, but decently,—crying out all the while, "Long live the King!" The greatest of virtues is common-sense. What falls ought to fall, what succeeds ought to succeed. Providence acts advisedly; it crowns him who deserves the crown. Do you pretend to know better than Providence? When matters are settled; when one régime has replaced another; when success is the scale in which truth and falsehood are weighed,—then doubt is no longer possible. The honest man goes over to the winning side ”

“ The distance between the deck and the water was lessening,—that was all. They could calculate her disappearance to the moment. It was the exact reverse of submersion by the rising tide. The water was not rising towards them, they were sinking into it. They were digging their own grave. Their own weight was their sexton. Their fate was sealed, not by the laws of man, but by the laws of Nature.
The snow continued to fall, and as the wreck was now perfectly motionless, it was covered as with a winding-sheet. The hold was becoming fuller and deeper. ”

“ To the spectators the being loved was Gwynplaine, and the saviour was Dea. "What does it matter?" thought Ursus, to whom the heart of Dea was an open book. And Dea, reassured, consoled, and delighted, adored as an angel what the people regarded as a monster.
True love never wanes. Being all soul it cannot cool. A brazier may become full of cinders; not so a star. These exquisite impressions were renewed every evening for Dea, and she was ready to weep with tenderness whilst the audience was in convulsions of laughter. ”

“ My boy, there are coaches in the world; my lord is inside, the people under the wheels; the philosopher gets out of the way. Stand aside, and let them pass. As for me, I love lords, and yet shun them. I lived with one; the charm of the recollection suffices me. I remember his country house; it would be impossible to conceive of anything more grand and beautiful than Marmaduke Lodge and its surroundings. The houses, country seats, and palaces of the lords form a collection of all that is greatest and most magnificent in this flourishing kingdom. I love our lords. ”

“ Gwynplaine was loved notwithstanding it! Here was a thing that far surpassed all the marvels of dreams. Gwynplaine was loved in consequence of his mask. Far from repulsing the goddess, his hideousness attracted her. He was not only loved, he was desired. He was more than accepted, he was chosen. He, chosen!
Where this woman dwelt, in a region of matchless splendour, and in a state of perfect freedom, there were princes in plenty, and she could have taken a prince; nobles, and she could have taken a noble ”

“ Love will not permit too much of paradise. It requires the fevered skin, the troubled life, the unbound hair, the electrical and irreparable kiss, the clasp of desire. The sidereal is embarrassing, the ethereal is cumbersome. Too much of the heavenly in love is like too much fuel on a fire,—the flame suffers from it. Gwynpiaine fell into an exquisite reverie,—Dea to be clasped in his arms! Dea clasped in them! He heard nature in his heart crying out for her. ”

“ An immense benefit,—doing evil to one who had done good to him. What is an envious man? An ungrateful one. He hates the sun that lights and warms him. Zoilus hated that benefactor of mankind, Homer. To inflict on Josiana what would nowadays be called vivisection; to have her, all convulsed, on his anatomical table; to dissect her alive, at his leisure, in some surgery; to cut her up, bit by bit, while she shrieked with agony,—this dream delighted Barkilphedro! ”