L’Homme qui rit

"Nature had been lavish with her blessings on Gwynplaine. She had given him a mouth that opened all the way to his ears, ears that folded over his eyes, a shapeless nose made for the oscillation of grimacing glasses, and a face that one could not look at without laughing. As we have just said, nature had blessed Gwynplaine with his gifts. But was it nature? Hadn't we helped her? Certainly, nature does not produce such masterpieces on its own. But is laughter synonymous with joy?"

In 1869, Victor Hugo chose to set The Man Who Laughs in England, during the reign of Queen Anne in the 17th century. Comprachicos, a gang of thugs, have disfigured and abandoned a young boy. Wandering around, the boy discovers a newborn baby girl in the arms of a dead woman. Miraculously alive, she has been blinded by the cold and snow. She is Déa. He is Gwynplaine. He will be the Man Who Laughs for life.

In this romantic drama, as the author himself defines it, the grotesque rubs shoulders with the sublime of human nature... and to express the people, the misery, the cruelty, the aristocracy, the laughter and the fatality, Claire Dancoisne, faithful to the spirit of La Licorne, and Francis Peduzzi, who adapted the text, have chosen to traverse this great epic with humour and off-beatness while retaining all the flashes, the weight of the images and the force of the Hugolian verb.