Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs (first published under the French title L'Homme qui Rit in April 1869) is a sad and sordid tale -- not the sort of tale of the moment Hugo was known for. It starts on the night of January 29 1690 a ten-year-old boy abandoned -- the stern men who've kept him since infancy have wearied of him. The boy wanders barefoot and starving through a snowstorm to reach a gibbet bearing the corpse of a hanged criminal. Beneath the gibbet is a ragged woman frozen to death. The boy is about to move onward when he hears a sound within the woman's garments: He discovers an infant girl barely alive clutching the woman's breast. A single drop of frozen milk resembling a pearl is on the woman's lifeless breast...
