Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/69

Rh of the wave; a haughty and impassive mien, combining coldness with provocation, and evidently content in its own glory; hair the colour of the reflection from a furnace; a splendour of adornment producing in herself and in others a thrill of voluptuousness; the half-revealed nudity betraying a disdainful desire to be coveted at a distance by the crowd; an inextinguishable coquetry; the charm of impenetrability; a temptation heightened by the zest which always attaches to that which is forbidden; a promise to the senses and a menace to the soul, and a two-fold fascination,—one desire; the other, fear: he had just seen all these things. He had just seen Woman. The mystery of sex had just been revealed to him.

And where? On inaccessible heights. At an infinite distance. mocking destiny! The soul, that celestial essence, he possessed; he had it in his grasp,—it was Dea. Sex, that thing of the earth earthy, he perceived in the heights of heaven,—in that woman. A duchess! "More than a goddess," Ursus had said. What a precipice. Even dreams recoiled before such a wild flight as this.

Was Gwynplaine going to commit the folly of dreaming about the unknown beauty? He debated with himself. He recalled all that Ursus had said of these almost royal personages. The philosopher's disquisitions, which had hitherto seemed so useless, now became subjects for meditation. A very thin layer of forgetfulness often coats our memory, through which at times we catch a glimpse of all beneath it. His fancy ran on that august world, the peerage, to which the lady belonged, and which was placed so immeasurably above the inferior world, the common people, of which he was one. And was he one of the common people even? Was not he, the mountebank, below the lowest of the