so frightful that it was absurd.  It caused as much fear as laughter.  It was a hell-concocted absurdity.  It was the shipwreck of a human face into the mask of an animal.  Never had been seen so total an eclipse of humanity in a human face; never parody more complete; never had apparition more frightful grinned in nightmare; never had everything repulsive to woman been more hideously amalgamated in a man.  The unfortunate heart, masked and calumniated by the face, seemed for ever condemned to solitude under it, as under a tombstone.

Yet no!  Where unknown malice had done its worst, invisible goodness had lent its aid.  In the poor fallen one, suddenly raised up, by the side of the repulsive, it had placed the attractive; on the barren shoal it had set the loadstone; it had caused a soul to fly with swift wings towards the deserted one; it had sent the dove to console the creature whom the thunderbolt had overwhelmed, and had made beauty adore deformity.  For this to be possible it was necessary that beauty should not see the disfigurement.  For this good fortune, misfortune was required.  Providence had made Dea blind.

Gwynplaine vaguely felt himself the object of a redemption.  Why had he been persecuted?  He knew not.  Why redeemed?  He knew not.  All he knew was that a halo had encircled his brand.  When Gwynplaine had been old enough to understand, Ursus had read and explained to him the text of Doctor Conquest de Denasatis, and in another folio, Hugo Plagon, the passage, Naves habensmutilas; but Ursus had prudently abstained from “hypotheses,” and had been reserved in his opinion of what it might mean.  Suppositions were possible.  The probability of violence inflicted on Gwynplaine when an infant was hinted at, but for Gwynplaine the result was the only evidence.  His destiny was to live under a stigma.  Why this stigma?  There was no answer.

Silence and solitude were around Gwynplaine.  All was uncertain in the conjectures which could be fitted to the tragical reality; excepting the terrible fact, nothing was certain.  In his discouragement Dea intervened a sort of celestial interposition between him and despair.  He perceived, melted and inspirited by the sweetness of the beautiful girl who turned to him, that, horrible as he was, a beautified wonder affected his monstrous visage.  Having been fashioned to create dread, he was the object of a miraculous exception, that it was admired and adored in the ideal by the light; and, monster that he was, he felt himself the contemplation of a star.

Gwynplaine and Dea were united, and these two suffering hearts adored each other.  One nest and two birds—­that was their story.  They had begun to feel a universal law—­to please, to seek, and to find each other.