Dea assisted Gwynplaine in his performances.  If human misery could be summed up, it might have been summed up in Gwynplaine and Dea.  Each seemed born in a compartment of the sepulchre; Gwynplaine in the horrible, Dea in the darkness.  Their existences were shadowed by two different kinds of darkness, taken from the two formidable sides of night.  Dea had that shadow in her, Gwynplaine had it on him.  There was a phantom in Dea, a spectre in Gwynplaine.  Dea was sunk in the mournful, Gwynplaine in something worse.  There was for Gwynplaine, who could see, a heartrending possibility that existed not for Dea, who was blind; he could compare himself with other men.  Now, in a situation such as that of Gwynplaine, admitting that he should seek to examine it, to compare himself with others was to understand himself no more.  To have, like Dea, empty sight from which the world is absent, is a supreme distress, yet less than to be an enigma to oneself; to feel that something is wanting here as well, and that something, oneself; to see the universe and not to see oneself.  Dea had a veil over her, the night; Gwynplaine a mask, his face.  Inexpressible fact, it was by his own flesh that Gwynplaine was masked!  What his visage had been, he knew not.  His face had vanished.  They had affixed to him a false self.  He had for a face, a disappearance.  His head lived, his face was dead.  He never remembered to have seen it.  Mankind was for Gwynplaine, as for Dea, an exterior fact.  It was far-off.  She was alone, he was alone.  The isolation of Dea was funereal, she saw nothing; that of Gwynplaine sinister, he saw all things.  For Dea creation never passed the bounds of touch and hearing; reality was bounded, limited, short, immediately lost.  Nothing was infinite to her but darkness.  For Gwynplaine to live was to have the crowd for ever before him and outside him.  Dea was the proscribed from light, Gwynplaine the banned of life.  They were beyond the pale of hope, and had reached the depth of possible calamity; they had sunk into it, both of them.  An observer who had watched them would have felt his reverie melt into immeasurable pity.  What must they not have suffered!  The decree of misfortune weighed visibly on these human creatures, and never had fate encompassed two beings who had done nothing to deserve it, and more clearly turned destiny into torture, and life into hell.

They were in a Paradise.

They were in love.

Gwynplaine adored Dea.  Dea idolized Gwynplaine.

“How beautiful you are!” she would say to him.

CHAPTER III.

“OCULOS NON HABET, ET VIDET.”