Gwynplaine, who is in fact Lord Clancharlie, mutilated as a child for political reasons is fatefully abandoned with his face frozen in a mask of laughter. He becomes a travelling performer and is a triumphant success in the fairs with Dea, a blind fortune-teller, Ursus, a philosopher-healer-jester and Homo, the wolf.From the shipwreck to the House of Lords, between gallows and prisons, happiness and revolt, we move through the maze of a dark and symbolic adventure that the actor-narrator-jester of today performs in his makeshift theatre. Superposition of theatricality on literature.