This exertion Gwynplaine scarcely ever made.  It was a terrible effort, and an insupportable tension.  Moreover, it happened that on the slightest distraction, or the slightest emotion, the laugh, driven back for a moment, returned like a tide with an impulse which was irresistible in proportion to the force of the adverse emotion.

With this exception, Gwynplaine’s laugh was everlasting.

On seeing Gwynplaine, all laughed.  When they had laughed they turned away their heads.  Women especially shrank from him with horror.  The man was frightful.  The joyous convulsion of laughter was as a tribute paid; they submitted to it gladly, but almost mechanically.  Besides, when once the novelty of the laugh had passed over, Gwynplaine was intolerable for a woman to see, and impossible to contemplate.  But he was tall, well made, and agile, and no way deformed, excepting in his face.

This led to the presumption that Gwynplaine was rather a creation of art than a work of nature.  Gwynplaine, beautiful in figure, had probably been beautiful in face.  At his birth he had no doubt resembled other infants.  They had left the body intact, and retouched only the face.

Gwynplaine had been made to order—­at least, that was probable.  They had left him his teeth; teeth are necessary to a laugh.  The death’s head retains them.  The operation performed on him must have been frightful.  That he had no remembrance of it was no proof that it had not taken place.  Surgical sculpture of the kind could never have succeeded except on a very young child, and consequently on one having little consciousness of what happened to him, and who might easily take a wound for a sickness.  Besides, we must remember that they had in those times means of putting patients to sleep, and of suppressing all suffering; only then it was called magic, while now it is called anaesthesia.

Besides this face, those who had brought him up had given him the resources of a gymnast and an athlete.  His articulations usefully displaced and fashioned to bending the wrong way, had received the education of a clown, and could, like the hinges of a door, move backwards and forwards.  In appropriating him to the profession of mountebank nothing had been neglected.  His hair had been dyed with ochre once for all; a secret which has been rediscovered at the present day.  Pretty women use it, and that which was formerly considered ugly is now considered an embellishment.  Gwynplaine had yellow hair.  His hair having probably been dyed with some corrosive preparation, had left it woolly and rough to the touch.  Its yellow bristles, rather a mane than a head of hair, covered and concealed a lofty brow, evidently made to contain thought.  The operation, whatever it had been, which had deprived his features of harmony, and put all their flesh into disorder, had had no effect on the bony structure of his head.  The facial angle was powerful and surprisingly grand.  Behind his laugh there was a soul, dreaming, as all our souls dream.