Exiled and renamed "Gwynplaine", he travels with his protector and companion, the vagabond philosopher Ursus, and Dea, who he rescued as a baby during a storm.

[4] Hugo wrote The Man Who Laughs over a period of 15 months while he was living in the Channel Islands, having been exiled from his native France because of the controversial political content of his previous novels.

[citation needed] Despite an initially negative reception upon publication,[5][6] The Man Who Laughs is argued to be one of Hugo's greatest works.

Making a parallel between the mutilation of one man and of human experience, Hugo touches on a recurrent theme in his work "la misère", and criticizes both the nobility which in boredom resorts to violence and oppression and the passivity of the people, who submit to it and prefer laughter to struggle.

Hugo also drew 'Le Lever ou la Duchesse Josiane' in quill and brown ink, for Book VII, Chapter IV (Satan) in part 2.

In late 17th-century England, a homeless boy named Gwynplaine rescues an infant girl during a snowstorm, her mother having frozen to death.

Gwynplaine's mouth has been mutilated into a perpetual grin; Ursus is initially horrified, then moved to pity, and he takes them in.

The spoiled and jaded Duchess Josiana, the illegitimate daughter of King James II, is bored by the dull routine of court.

The King sold Fermain to a band of wanderers called "Comprachicos", criminals who mutilate and disfigure children, and then force them to beg for alms or be exhibited as carnival freaks.

She is interrupted by the delivery of a pronouncement from the Queen, informing Josiana that David has been disinherited, and the Duchess is now commanded to marry Gwynplaine.

When he addresses the peerage with a fiery speech against the gross inequality of the age, the other lords are provoked to laughter by Gwynplaine's clownish grin.

Hugo's romantic novel The Man Who Laughs places its narrative in 17th-century England, where the relationships between the bourgeoisie and aristocracy are complicated by continual distancing from the lower class.

Gwynplaine specifically can be seen to be the supreme embodiment of Stallybrass and White's "rat" analysis, meaning Hugo's protagonist is, in essence, a sliding signifier.

[15][clarification needed] Film adaptations of The Man Who Laughs include: Mark Twain wrote a parody of L'Homme qui Rit which attempted to offer parallels between Gwynplaine and Andrew Johnson.