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the novelty of the laugh had passed over, Gwynplaine was intolerable for
a woman to see, and impossible to contemplate. But he was tall, well
made, and agile, and no way deformed, excepting in his face.
This led to the presumption that Gwynplaine was rather a creation of art
than a work of nature. Gwynplaine, beautiful in figure, had probably
been beautiful in face. At his birth he had no doubt resembled other
infants. They had left the body intact, and retouched only the face.
Gwynplaine had been made to order--at least, that was probable. They had
left him his teeth; teeth are necessary to a laugh. The death's head
retains them. The operation performed on him must have been frightful.
That he had no remembrance of it was no proof that it had not taken
place. Surgical sculpture of the kind could never have succeeded except
on a very young child, and consequently on one having little
consciousness of what happened to him, and who might easily take a wound
for a sickness. Besides, we must remember that they had in those times
means of putting patients to sleep, and of suppressing all suffering;
only then it was called magic, while now it is called anæsthesia.
Besides this face, those who had brought him up had given him the
resources of a gymnast and an athlete. His articulations usefully
displaced and fashioned to bending the wrong way, had received the
education of a clown, and could, like the hinges of a door, move
backwards and forwards. In appropriating him to the profession of
mountebank nothing had been neglected. His hair had been dyed with ochre
once for all; a secret which has been rediscovered at the present day.
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