However, his laugh was to Gwynplaine quite a talent.  He could do nothing with it, so he turned it to account.  By means of it he gained his living.

Gwynplaine, as you have doubtless already guessed, was the child abandoned one winter evening on the coast of Portland, and received into a poor caravan at Weymouth.

CHAPTER II.

DEA.

That boy was at this time a man.  Fifteen years had elapsed.  It was in 1705.  Gwynplaine was in his twenty-fifth year.

Ursus had kept the two children with him.  They were a group of wanderers.  Ursus and Homo had aged.  Ursus had become quite bald.  The wolf was growing gray.  The age of wolves is not ascertained like that of dogs.  According to Moliere, there are wolves which live to eighty, amongst others the little koupara, and the rank wolf, the Canis nubilus of Say.

The little girl found on the dead woman was now a tall creature of sixteen, with brown hair, slight, fragile, almost trembling from delicacy, and almost inspiring fear lest she should break; admirably beautiful, her eyes full of light, yet blind.  That fatal winter night which threw down the beggar woman and her infant in the snow had struck a double blow.  It had killed the mother and blinded the child.  Gutta serena had for ever paralysed the eyes of the girl, now become woman in her turn.  On her face, through which the light of day never passed, the depressed corners of the mouth indicated the bitterness of the privation.  Her eyes, large and clear, had a strange quality:  extinguished for ever to her, to others they were brilliant.  They were mysterious torches lighting only the outside.  They gave light but possessed it not.  These sightless eyes were resplendent.  A captive of shadow, she lighted up the dull place she inhabited.  From the depth of her incurable darkness, from behind the black wall called blindness, she flung her rays.  She saw not the sun without, but her soul was perceptible from within.

In her dead look there was a celestial earnestness.  She was the night, and from the irremediable darkness with which she was amalgamated she came out a star.

Ursus, with his mania for Latin names, had christened her Dea.  He had taken his wolf into consultation.  He had said to him, “You represent man, I represent the beasts.  We are of the lower world; this little one shall represent the world on high.  Such feebleness is all-powerful.  In this manner the universe shall be complete in our hut in its three orders—­human, animal, and Divine.”  The wolf made no objection.  Therefore the foundling was called Dea.

As to Gwynplaine, Ursus had not had the trouble of inventing a name for him.  The morning of the day on which he had realized the disfigurement of the little boy and the blindness of the infant he had asked him, “Boy, what is your name?” and the boy had answered, “They call me Gwynplaine.”  “Be Gwynplaine, then,” said Ursus.