Thus hatred had made a mistake.  The persecutors of Gwynplaine, whoever they might have been—­the deadly enigma, from wherever it came—­had missed their aim.  They had intended to drive him to desperation; they had succeeded in driving him into enchantment.  They had affianced him beforehand to a healing wound.  They had predestined him for consolation by an infliction.  The pincers of the executioner had softly changed into the delicately-moulded hand of a girl.  Gwynplaine was horrible—­artificially horrible—­made horrible by the hand of man.  They had hoped to exile him for ever:  first, from his family, if his family existed, and then from humanity.  When an infant, they had made him a ruin; of this ruin Nature had repossessed herself, as she does of all ruins.  This solitude Nature had consoled, as she consoles all solitudes.  Nature comes to the succour of the deserted; where all is lacking, she gives back her whole self.  She flourishes and grows green amid ruins; she has ivy for the stones and love for man.

Profound generosity of the shadows!

CHAPTER V.

THE BLUE SKY THROUGH THE BLACK CLOUD.

Thus lived these unfortunate creatures together—­Dea, relying; Gwynplaine, accepted.  These orphans were all in all to each other, the feeble and the deformed.  The widowed were betrothed.  An inexpressible thanksgiving arose out of their distress.  They were grateful.  To whom?  To the obscure immensity.  Be grateful in your own hearts.  That suffices.  Thanksgiving has wings, and flies to its right destination.  Your prayer knows its way better than you can.

How many men have believed that they prayed to Jupiter, when they prayed to Jehovah!  How many believers in amulets are listened to by the Almighty!  How many atheists there are who know not that, in the simple fact of being good and sad, they pray to God!

Gwynplaine and Dea were grateful.  Deformity is expulsion.  Blindness is a precipice.  The expelled one had been adopted; the precipice was habitable.

Gwynplaine had seen a brilliant light descending on him, in an arrangement of destiny which seemed to put, in the perspective of a dream, a white cloud of beauty having the form of a woman, a radiant vision in which there was a heart; and the phantom, almost a cloud and yet a woman, clasped him; and the apparition embraced him; and the heart desired him.  Gwynplaine was no longer deformed.  He was beloved.  The rose demanded the caterpillar in marriage, feeling that within the caterpillar there was a divine butterfly.  Gwynplaine the rejected was chosen.  To have one’s desire is everything.  Gwynplaine had his, Dea hers.

The abjection of the disfigured man was exalted and dilated into intoxication, into delight, into belief; and a hand was stretched out towards the melancholy hesitation of the blind girl, to guide her in her darkness.