The book is therefore a success; but that success is an evident _tour de force_, and it is nearly as evident to any student of the subject that such a _tour de force_ was not likely to be repeated, and that the thing owed its actual salvage to a rather strict limitation of subject and treatment--a limitation hitherto unknown in the writer and itself unlikely to recur. Also that there were certain things in it--especially the travesties of names and subjects of which the author practically knew nothing--the repetition and extension of which _was_ likely to be damaging, if not fatal. In two or three years the "fatality" of which Victor Hugo himself was dangerously fond of talking (the warning of Herodotus in the dawn about things which it is not lawful to mention has been too often neglected) had its revenge. [Sidenote: _L'Homme Qui Rit._] _L'Homme Qui Rit_ is probably the maddest book in recognised literature; certainly the maddest written by an author of supreme genius without the faintest notion that he was making himself ridiculous. The genius is still there, and passage on passage shows us the real "prose-poetry," that is to say, the prose which ought to have been written in verse. The scheme of the quartette--Ursus, the misanthrope-Good-Samaritan; Homo, the amiable wolf; Gwynplaine, the tortured and guiltless child and youth; Dea, the adorable maiden--is unexceptionable _per se_, and it could have been worked out in verse or drama perfectly, though the actual termination--Gwynplaine's suicide in the sea after Dea's death--is perhaps too close and too easy a "variation of the same thing" on Gilliatt's parallel self-immolation after Deruchette's marriage.[112] Not a few opening or episodic parts--the picture of the caravan; the struggle of the child Gwynplaine with the elements to save not so much himself as the baby Dea; the revulsions of his temptations and persecutions later; and yet others[113]--show the poet and the master. But the way in which these things are merged in and spoilt by a torrent of silliness, sciolism, and sheer nonsense is, even after one has known the book for forty years and more, still astounding.