the stone should refuse obedience to the laws of gravitation?

These are material questions, which are moral questions as well.

After he had received the letter of the duchess, Gwynplaine had

recovered himself. The deep love in his nature had resisted it. But the

storm having wearied itself on one side of the horizon, burst out on the

other; for in destiny, as in nature, there are successive convulsions.

The first shock loosens, the second uproots.

Alas! how do the oaks fall?

Thus he who, when a child of ten, stood alone on the shore of Portland,

ready to give battle, who had looked steadfastly at all the combatants

whom he had to encounter, the blast which bore away the vessel in which

he had expected to embark, the gulf which had swallowed up the plank,

the yawning abyss, of which the menace was its retrocession, the earth

which refused him a shelter, the sky which refused him a star, solitude

without pity, obscurity without notice, ocean, sky, all the violence of

one infinite space, and all the mysterious enigmas of another; he who

had neither trembled nor fainted before the mighty hostility of the

unknown; he who, still so young, had held his own with night, as

Hercules of old had held his own with death; he who in the unequal

struggle had thrown down this defiance, that he, a child, adopted a

child, that he encumbered himself with a load, when tired and exhausted,

thus rendering himself an easier prey to the attacks on his weakness,

and, as it were, himself unmuzzling the shadowy monsters in ambush

674

The Man Who Laughs