The Man Who Laughs: A Romance of English History
1869
On a frozen January night in 1690, a ten-year-old boy wanders barefoot through a blizzard, abandoned by the men who've kept him since infancy. He finds a dead woman clutching an infant to her breast, and that child, Dea, becomes his fate. Raised by Ursus, a philosopher-juggler, and Homo, his domesticated wolf, Gwynplaine carries a terrible secret: his face has been surgically carved into a permanent, horrifying laugh. This grotesque mask becomes his identity, and his curse. Hugo uses it to probe what society does to those it marks as different, set against the brutal inequalities of Restoration England. This is Hugo at his darkest: no redemption, no silver lining. A gothic tragedy about the monstrous and the marginalized, for readers who want Hugo without the hope.
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“The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.””
— Victor Hugo
“He who is not master of his own thoughts is not accountable for his own deeds.””
— Victor Hugo
“He had slipped, climbed, rolled, searched, walked, persevered, that is all. Such is the secret of all triumphs.””
— Victor Hugo
“By degrees, however, they began to hope again. Such are our insubmergable mirages of the soul! There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.””
— Victor Hugo
“If one could only get out of a grief as one gets out of a city!””
— Victor Hugo
“Le coeur se sature d'amour comme d'un sel divin qui le conserve; de la l'incorruptible adherence de ceux qui se sont aimes des l'aube de la vie, et la fraicheur des vielles amours prolonges. Il existe un embaumement d'amour. C'est de Daphnis et Chloe que sont faits Philemon et Baucis. Cette vieillesse la, ressemblance du soir avec l'aurore.The heart is saturated with love as if with a divine salt which preserves it; that is what makes possible the incorruptible attachment of those who have loved each other from the dawn of life, and the freshness of old loves which have lasted a long time. Love embalms. Philemon and Baucis come from Daphnis and Chloe. That sort of aging connects evening with dawn.””
— Victor Hugo
“Knowledge is a weight added to conscience.””
— Victor Hugo
“To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue with the divinity which is within.””
— Victor Hugo
“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.””
— Victor Hugo
