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"
O monster!" she cried. She grew wild.
Suddenly she seized his hands.
"Gwynplaine, I am the throne; you are the footstool. Let us join on the
same level. Oh, how happy I am in my fall! I wish all the world could
know how abject I am become. It would bow down all the lower. The more
man abhors, the more does he cringe. It is human nature. Hostile, but
reptile; dragon, but worm. Oh, I am as depraved as are the gods! They
can never say that I am not a king's bastard. I act like a queen. Who
was Rodope but a queen loving Pteh, a man with a crocodile's head? She
raised the third pyramid in his honour. Penthesilea loved the centaur,
who, being now a star, is named Sagittarius. And what do you say about
Anne of Austria? Mazarin was ugly enough! Now, you are not only ugly;
you are deformed. Ugliness is mean, deformity is grand. Ugliness is the
devil's grin behind beauty; deformity is the reverse of sublimity. It is
the back view. Olympus has two aspects. One, by day, shows Apollo; the
other, by night, shows Polyphemus. You--you are a Titan. You would be
Behemoth in the forests, Leviathan in the deep, and Typhon in the sewer.
You surpass everything. There is the trace of lightning in your
deformity; your face has been battered by the thunderbolt. The jagged
contortion of forked lightning has imprinted its mark on your face. It
struck you and passed on. A mighty and mysterious wrath has, in a fit of
passion, cemented your spirit in a terrible and superhuman form. Hell is
a penal furnace, where the iron called Fatality is raised to a white
heat. You have been branded with it. To love you is to understand
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