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We put the question without answering it.
Gwynplaine was a mountebank. He showed himself on the platform. No such
effect had ever before been produced. Hypochondriacs were cured by the
sight of him alone. He was avoided by folks in mourning, because they
were compelled to laugh when they saw him, without regard to their
decent gravity. One day the executioner came, and Gwynplaine made him
laugh. Every one who saw Gwynplaine held his sides; he spoke, and they
rolled on the ground. He was removed from sadness as is pole from pole.
Spleen at the one; Gwynplaine at the other.
Thus he rose rapidly in the fair ground and at the cross roads to the
very satisfactory renown of a horrible man.
It was Gwynplaine's laugh which created the laughter of others, yet he
did not laugh himself. His face laughed; his thoughts did not. The
extraordinary face which chance or a special and weird industry had
fashioned for him, laughed alone. Gwynplaine had nothing to do with it.
The outside did not depend on the interior. The laugh which he had not
placed, himself, on his brow, on his eyelids, on his mouth, he could
not remove. It had been stamped for ever on his face. It was automatic,
and the more irresistible because it seemed petrified. No one could
escape from this rictus. Two convulsions of the face are infectious;
laughing and yawning. By virtue of the mysterious operation to which
Gwynplaine had probably been subjected in his infancy, every part of his
face contributed to that rictus; his whole physiognomy led to that
result, as a wheel centres in the nave. All his emotions, whatever they
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