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| Dea dying |
Sometimes I feel abandoned, frightened, all in pain. Then I think there is no hope for me. Something lays down upon my chest, it crushes my heart. In such moment only pain embraces me, while the whole world fades, then I know I am wandering in the deepest of griefs.
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| Gwynplaine showing his face to the crowd |
During reading this painful, sorrowful book I felt like that all the time. Loneliness, a physical and emotional pain. Can you imagine such a perfect book that it gives you all kinds of pain? Yes, here it is. Not only pain, no… a cosmic spirit of the passing centuries. People do not change as centuries past. I realized it.
I can honestly say I feel like that novel is a part of my soul. In such moments I even start believing in God. Powerful. I don’t believe that there exists a better book than this one. But what’s it about?
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| Gwynplaine and Dea sleeping |
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| Gwynplaine in unbearable pain |
“The wolf had thought the man what he knew – to do without a roof, without bread and fire, to prefer hunger in the woods to slavery in a palace.”
We have a little boy travelling with Comprachicos, which in Spanish means “children trade”. They abduct or buy children in order to deform them and then sell them. The boy, Gwynplaine, has a wide smile cut through his face. The child merchants abandon Gwynplaine in a port town. He walks through ice, snow and dark streets. He encounters a frozen young woman with a yet alive child on her chest, which he saves. He tries hard to get under any roof, but the town is not hospitable for him. The only hope for him is a little carriage with a wolf guarding it.
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| Gwynplaine in the House of Lords |
There lives an old, lonely misanthrope - Ursus – in Latin it means “a bear”. He considers himself an Animal. The wolf beside the carriage is Homo – “a human”. Ursus takes the children and brings them up. The little girl that Gwynplaine had saved called her Dea – “ a goddess”, as in the novel she represents the superior forces of the world.
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| Hardquanonne's torture chamber |
„The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”
We find here the question of poverty and injustice. Exhausting monologues of a romantic writer. It is the main topic of the book – our little bizarre family is really poor – when Gwynplaine and Dea first meet him, Ursus gives them his only food, a bowl of potatoes and a little milk. Gwynplaine is actually a peer of England, which means he is one of the richest men in the world. Circumstances have thrown him in this extraordinary condition of being mutilated and work as a joker. He does not know yet about his maternal wealth, the inheritance after his father.
Despite being poor jokers, they live in happiness and peace. Everything changes, when they come to London, when Gwynplaine is going to face his fate.
