There was no gilding, except on the ceiling.  Laid on it, at equal distance from the four angles, was a huge round shield of embossed metal, on which sparkled, in dazzling relief, various coats of arms.  Amongst the devices, on two blazons, side by side, were to be distinguished the cap of a baron and the coronet of a marquis.  Were they of brass or of silver-gilt?  You could not tell.  They seemed to be of gold.  And in the centre of this lordly ceiling, like a gloomy and magnificent sky, the gleaming escutcheon was as the dark splendour of a sun shining in the night.

The savage, in whom is embodied the free man, is nearly as restless in a palace as in a prison.  This magnificent chamber was depressing.  So much splendour produces fear.  Who could be the inhabitant of this stately palace?  To what colossus did all this grandeur appertain?  Of what lion is this the lair?  Gwynplaine, as yet but half awake, was heavy at heart.

“Where am I?” he said.

The man who was standing before him answered,—­“You are in your own house, my lord.”

CHAPTER IV.

FASCINATION.

It takes time to rise to the surface.  And Gwynplaine had been thrown into an abyss of stupefaction.

We do not gain our footing at once in unknown depths.

There are routs of ideas, as there are routs of armies.  The rally is not immediate.

We feel as it were scattered—­as though some strange evaporation of self were taking place.

God is the arm, chance is the sling, man is the pebble.  How are you to resist, once flung?

Gwynplaine, if we may coin the expression, ricocheted from one surprise to another.  After the love letter of the duchess came the revelation in the Southwark dungeon.

In destiny, when wonders begin, prepare yourself for blow upon blow.  The gloomy portals once open, prodigies pour in.  A breach once made in the wall, and events rush upon us pell-mell.  The marvellous never comes singly.

The marvellous is an obscurity.  The shadow of this obscurity was over Gwynplaine.  What was happening to him seemed unintelligible.  He saw everything through the mist which a deep commotion leaves in the mind, like the dust caused by a falling ruin.  The shock had been from top to bottom.  Nothing was clear to him.  However, light always returns by degrees.  The dust settles.  Moment by moment the density of astonishment decreases.  Gwynplaine was like a man with his eyes open and fixed in a dream, as if trying to see what may be within it.  He dispersed the mist.  Then he reshaped it.  He had intermittances of wandering.  He underwent that oscillation of the mind in the unforeseen which alternately pushes us in the direction in which we understand, and then throws us back in that which is incomprehensible.  Who has not at some time felt this pendulum in his brain?

By degrees his thoughts dilated in the darkness of the event, as the pupil of his eye had done in the underground shadows at Southwark.  The difficulty was to succeed in putting a certain space between accumulated sensations.  Before that combustion of hazy ideas called comprehension can take place, air must be admitted between the emotions.  There air was wanting.  The event, so to speak, could not be breathed.