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shoulders of a man--an everlasting laugh!
An everlasting laugh!
Let us understand each other; we will explain. The Manichæans believed
the absolute occasionally gives way, and that God Himself sometimes
abdicates for a time. So also of the will. We do not admit that it can
ever be utterly powerless. The whole of existence resembles a letter
modified in the postscript. For Gwynplaine the postscript was this: by
the force of his will, and by concentrating all his attention, and on
condition that no emotion should come to distract and turn away the
fixedness of his effort, he could manage to suspend the everlasting
rictus of his face, and to throw over it a kind of tragic veil, and then
the spectator laughed no longer; he shuddered.
This exertion Gwynplaine scarcely ever made. It was a terrible effort,
and an insupportable tension. Moreover, it happened that on the
slightest distraction, or the slightest emotion, the laugh, driven back
for a moment, returned like a tide with an impulse which was
irresistible in proportion to the force of the adverse emotion.
With this exception, Gwynplaine's laugh was everlasting.
On seeing Gwynplaine, all laughed. When they had laughed they turned
away their heads. Women especially shrank from him with horror. The man
was frightful. The joyous convulsion of laughter was as a tribute paid;
they submitted to it gladly, but almost mechanically. Besides, when once
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