The Man Who Laughs | Page 5

that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless,
indeed, he was sixty. He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as

we have just seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they
fed pigs and convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not
tall--he was long. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an
old man is the settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed
him for sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been
able to weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well
as of the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a
ruin was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a
prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his youth
he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord.
This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are
now.
Not so very much though.

II.
Homo was no ordinary wolf. From his appetite for medlars and
potatoes he might have been taken for a prairie wolf; from his dark hide,
for a lycaon; and from his howl prolonged into a bark, for a dog of
Chili. But no one has as yet observed the eyeball of a dog of Chili
sufficiently to enable us to determine whether he be not a fox, and
Homo was a real wolf. He was five feet long, which is a fine length for
a wolf, even in Lithuania; he was very strong; he looked at you askance,
which was not his fault; he had a soft tongue, with which he
occasionally licked Ursus; he had a narrow brush of short bristles on
his backbone, and he was lean with the wholesome leanness of a forest
life. Before he knew Ursus and had a carriage to draw, he thought
nothing of doing his fifty miles a night. Ursus meeting him in a thicket
near a stream of running water, had conceived a high opinion of him
from seeing the skill and sagacity with which he fished out crayfish,
and welcomed him as an honest and genuine Koupara wolf of the kind
called crab-eater.
As a beast of burden, Ursus preferred Homo to a donkey. He would

have felt repugnance to having his hut drawn by an ass; he thought too
highly of the ass for that. Moreover he had observed that the ass, a
four-legged thinker little understood by men, has a habit of cocking his
ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense. In life the ass is a third
person between our thoughts and ourselves, and acts as a restraint. As a
friend, Ursus preferred Homo to a dog, considering that the love of a
wolf is more rare.
Hence it was that Homo sufficed for Ursus. Homo was for Ursus more
than a companion, he was an analogue. Ursus used to pat the wolf's
empty ribs, saying: "I have found the second volume of myself!" Again
he said, "When I am dead, any one wishing to know me need only
study Homo. I shall leave a true copy behind me."
The English law, not very lenient to beasts of the forest, might have
picked a quarrel with the wolf, and have put him to trouble for his
assurance in going freely about the towns: but Homo took advantage of
the immunity granted by a statute of Edward IV. to servants: "Every
servant in attendance on his master is free to come and go." Besides, a
certain relaxation of the law had resulted with regard to wolves, in
consequence of its being the fashion of the ladies of the Court, under
the later Stuarts, to have, instead of dogs, little wolves, called adives,
about the size of cats, which were brought from Asia at great cost.
Ursus had communicated to Homo a portion of his talents: such as to
stand upright, to restrain his rage into sulkiness, to growl instead of
howling, etc.; and on his part, the wolf had taught 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.
The van, hut, and vehicle in one, which traversed so many different
roads, without, however, leaving Great Britain, had four wheels, with
shafts for the wolf and a splinter-bar for the man. The splinter-bar came
into use when the roads were bad. The van was strong, although it was
built of light boards like a dove-cot. In front there was a glass door with
a little balcony used for orations, which had something of the character
of the platform tempered by an air of the pulpit.