Toilers of the Sea quotes

The thick draperies of cobwebs, filled with flies, indicate the quiet reign long enjoyed by innumerable spiders. Sometimes a broken jug may be noticed on a shelf. Such houses are considered to be haunted. Satan is popularly believed to visit them by night.

Houses are like the human beings who inhabit them.

They become to their former selves what the corpse is to the living body. A superstitious belief among the people is sufficient to reduce them to this state of death. Then their aspect is terrible. These ghostly houses are common in the Channel Islands.

In their view, Beelzebub has his ministers in all parts of the earth. It is certain that Belphegor is the ambassador from the infernal regions in France, Hutgin in Italy, Belial in Turkey, Thamuz in Spain, Martinet in Switzerland, and Mammon in England.

Satan is an Emperor just like any other: a sort of Satan Caesar.

His establishment is well organised. Dagon is grand almoner, Succor Benoth chief of the Eunuchs; Asmodeus, banker at the gaming-table; Kobal, manager of the theatre, and Verdelet, grandmaster of the ceremonies. Nybbas is the court-fool;

and from that moment peace reigned within its walls. The Bû de la Rue has found a fit tenant, said the country people. The haunting ceased. There was no longer any light seen there, save that of the tallow candle of the newcomer. “

Witch’s candle is as good as devil’s torch.

” The proverb satisfied the gossips of the neighbourhood.

They take root again somewhere as they can. They have done no harm to anyone, and scarcely comprehend the destiny that has befallen them.

So thus I have seen a poor tuft of grass uprooted and carried away by the explosion of a mine.

No great explosion was ever followed by more of such strays than the first French Revolution.

The reasons for it were abundant. To begin with, as we have already explained, there was the strange house he lived in; then there was his mysterious origin. Who could that woman have been? and what was the meaning of this child?

Country people do not like mysteries, when they relate to strange sojourners among them.

Then his clothes were the clothes of a workman, while he had, although certainly not rich, sufficient to live without labour. Then there was his garden, which he succeeded in cultivating, and from which he produced crops of potatoes, in spite of the stormy equinoxes;

He haunted the druidical stones of the Ancresse, and the fairy caverns which are scattered about in that part. It was generally believed that he had been seen politely saluting the Roque qui Chante, or Crowing Rock.

He bought all birds which people brought to him, and having bought them, set them at liberty.

He was civil to the worthy folks in the streets of St. Sampson, but willingly turned out of his way to avoid them if he could. He often went out on fishing expeditions, and always returned with fish. He trimmed his garden on Sundays.

In justice to Gilliatt, however, it must be added that this volume being in Latin—a language which it is doubtful if he understood—the young man had possibly never read it.

But it is just those books which a man possesses, but does not read, which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.

The Spanish Inquisition have deliberated on that point, and have come to a conclusion which places the matter beyond further doubt.

When a census was taken in the island, in answer to a question about his calling, he replied, “Fisherman; when there are fish to catch.”

Imagine yourself in the place of Gilliatt’s neighbours, and admit that there is something unpleasant in answers like this.

Poverty and wealth are comparative terms. Gilliatt had some fields and a house, his own property; compared with those who had nothing, he was not poor.

He answered, “

I will take a wife when the Roque qui Chante takes a husband.

”

The learned and judicious King James I had women of this kind boiled, and then tasting the water of the cauldron, was able to say from its flavour, “That was a sorceress;” or “That was not one.”

It is to be regretted that the kings of these latter days no longer possess a talent which placed in so strong a light the utility of monarchical institutions.

It was not without substantial grounds that Gilliatt lived in this odour of sorcery. One midnight, during a storm, Gilliatt being at sea alone in a bark, on the coast by La Sommeilleuse, he was heard to ask—

If persons afflicted with scrofula came to him to ask to touch the fleur-de-lys on his skin, he made no other answer than that of shutting the door in their faces. He persistently refused to perform any miracles—a ridiculous position for a sorcerer.

No one is bound to be a sorcerer; but when a man is one, he ought not to shirk the duties of his position.

One or two exceptions might be found to this almost universal antipathy. Sieur Landoys, of the Clos-Landés, was clerk and registrar of St. Peter’s Port, custodian of the documents, and keeper of the register of births, marriages, and deaths.

a few signs of good qualities, as his sobriety, his abstinence from spirits and tobacco; and sometimes they went so far as to pass this elegant eulogium upon him: “He neither smokes, drinks, chews tobacco, or takes snuff.”

Sobriety, however, can only count as a virtue when there are other virtues to support it.

The ban of public opinion lay heavily upon Gilliatt.

His laugh was boyish and pleasing. No ivory could be of a finer white than his teeth; but exposure to the sun had made him swarthy as a moor.

The ocean, the tempest, and the darkness cannot be braved with impunity.

At thirty he looked already like a man of forty-five. He wore the sombre mask of the wind and the sea.

No ivory could be of a finer white than his teeth; but exposure to the sun had made him swarthy as a moor. The ocean, the tempest, and the darkness cannot be braved with impunity. At thirty he looked already like a man of forty-five.

He wore the sombre mask of the wind and the sea.

The people had nicknamed him “Malicious Gilliatt.”

He never carried a gun; but was often seen with his net. He spared the birds, but not the fish. Ill-luck to these dumb creatures! He was an excellent swimmer.

Solitude either develops the mental powers, or renders men dull and vicious.

Gilliatt sometimes presented himself under both these aspects. At times, when his features wore that air of strange surprise already mentioned, he might have been taken for a man of mental powers scarcely superior to the savage.

They become, unconsciously, penetrated with a kind of sacred awe. The shadow in which the mind of Gilliatt constantly dwelt was composed in almost equal degrees of two elements, both obscure, but very different.

Within himself all was ignorance and weakness; without, infinity and mysterious power.

By dint of frequent climbing on the rocks, of escalading the rugged cliffs, of going to and fro among the islands in all weathers, of navigating any sort of craft which came to hand, of venturing night and day in difficult channels, he had become, …

He had, with an extravagant display of his resources, even added to the cargo the little bronze cannon at Herm, which the people were in the habit of firing off on the 5th of November, by way of rejoicing over the death of Guy Fawkes.

Guy Fawkes, by the way, has been dead two hundred and sixty years; a remarkably long period of rejoicing.

Gilliatt, thus burdened and encumbered, although he had the Guy Fawkes’-day cannon in the boat and the south wind in his sails, steered, or rather brought back, the heavy craft to St. Sampson.

The poor people took his gift, but were little grateful, for they knew the secret of his medlar branch. Such devices cannot be permitted.

It is unlawful to trick the sea out of its treasures.

He was a fisherman; but he was something more. He had, by instinct, or for amusement, acquired a knowledge of three or four trades. He was a carpenter, worker in iron, wheelwright, boat-caulker, and, to some extent, an engineer.

Gilliatt was a man of dreams, hence his daring, hence also his timidity.

He had ideas on many things which were peculiarly his own.

The birds are scarcely inhabitants of the air, but rather amphibious creatures passing much of their lives upon the earth. Gilliatt could not believe the air a mere desert.

He used to say, “Since the water is filled with life, why not the atmosphere?”

Creatures colourless and transparent like the air would escape from our observation. What proof have we that there are no such creatures? Analogy indicates that the liquid fields of air must have their swimming habitants, even as the waters of the deep.

All these things which come and go in the troubled atmosphere of sleep, and to which men give the name of dreams, are, in truth, only realities invisible to those who walk about the daylight world.

The dreamworld is the Aquarium of Night.

So, at least, thought Gilliatt.

To climb up to it was easy, for the sea, which had fashioned it out of its rocky base, had also cast beneath it, at convenient distances, a kind of natural stairs composed of flat stones.

The perilous abyss is full of these snares; beware, therefore, of its proffered aids.

The spot was tempting: the stranger mounted and sat down. There he found himself at his ease; for his seat he had the granite rounded and hollowed out by the foam; for supports, two rocky elbows which seemed made expressly for him;

A terrible rock was this in a rising sea.

The tide gathers at first insensibly, then with violence; when it touches the rocks a sudden wrath seems to possess it, and it foams.

Swimming is difficult in the breakers: excellent swimmers have been lost at the Horn of the Bû de la Rue.

In his early years, while still a lad, passing from the stage of cabin-boy to that of sailor, he had heard the Admiral de Suffren say, “There goes a pretty girl; but what horrible great red hands.”

An observation from an admiral on any subject is a command, a law, an authority far above that of an oracle.

The exclamation of Admiral de Suffren had rendered Lethierry fastidious and exacting in the matter of small and white hands.

you feel almost grateful to her for her kindness in not making herself invisible, when it would be so easy for her to be even impalpable; for the beautiful is a necessary of life.

There is, in this world, no function more important than that of being charming.

The forest-glade would be incomplete without the hummingbird. To shed joy around, to radiate happiness, to cast light upon dark days, to be the golden thread of our destiny, and the very spirit of grace and harmony, is not this to render a service?

The forest-glade would be incomplete without the hummingbird. To shed joy around, to radiate happiness, to cast light upon dark days, to be the golden thread of our destiny, and the very spirit of grace and harmony, is not this to render a service?

Does not beauty confer a benefit upon us, even by the simple fact of being beautiful?

Here and there we meet with one who possesses that fairy-like power of enchanting all about her; sometimes she is ignorant herself of this magical influence, which is, however, for that reason, only the more perfect. Her presence lights up the home;

There is one thing which has more resemblance to ourselves than even our face, and that is our expression: but there is yet another thing which more resembles us than this, and that is our smile.

Déruchette smiling was simply Déruchette.

There is something peculiarly attractive in the Jersey and Guernsey race. The women, particularly the young, are remarkable for a pure and exquisite beauty. Their complexion is a combination of the Saxon fairness, with the proverbial ruddiness of the Norman people—rosy cheeks and blue eyes;

This beast, composed of iron and fire, did it not resemble Leviathan? Was it not an attempt to bring chaos again into the universe?

This is not the only occasion on which the progress of civilisation has been stigmatised as a return to chaos.

“A mad notion—a gross delusion—an absurdity!” Such was the verdict of the Academy of Sciences when consulted by Napoleon on the subject of steamboats, early in the present century. The poor fishermen of St.

The religious view of steamboats may be summed up as follows: Water and fire were divorced at the creation. This divorce was enjoined by God himself. Man has no right to join what his Maker has put asunder; to reunite what he has disunited.

The peasants’ view was simply, “I don’t like the look of this thing.”

No one but Mess Lethierry, perhaps, could have been found at that early period daring enough to dream of such an enterprise as the establishment of a steam-vessel between Guernsey and St. Malo.

Nobody was ever more tender than he was on the point of honour; he fought and killed his man. The mother of a pretty actress could not have an eye more watchful for an insult.

He might have stood for the personification of subtlety under an outer garb of enormous strength.

It was the power of his fist, applied one day at a fair, upon a cabeza de moro, which had originally taken the fancy of Lethierry. No one in Guernsey knew anything of his adventures. They were of a chequered kind.

His employment had been to stand at evenings at the doors of the mosque, there to read aloud to the faithful the Koran inscribed upon slips of wood, or pieces of camel leather. It is not improbable that he was a renegade.

He was capable of everything, and something worse.

He had a trick of laughing loud and knitting his brows at the same time. He used to say, “In politics, I esteem only men inaccessible to influences;” or, “I am for decency and good morals;” or, “The pyramid must be replaced upon its base.”

Half ruined, Lethierry did not lose heart, but began at once to think how to repair his misfortune.

A stout heart may be ruined in fortune, but not in spirit.

It was just about that time that people began to talk of the new kind of boat to be moved by steam-engines. Lethierry conceived the idea of trying Fulton’s invention, so much disputed about;

Sieur Landoys, however, had the honesty to support the steamboat. Others followed Landoys. By little and little, these facts multiplied.

The growth of opinion is like the rising tide.

Time and the continued and increasing success of the venture, with the evidence of real service rendered and the improvement in the general welfare, gradually converted the people;

Either by chance or design she had been launched on the 14th of July, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille. On that day, mounted upon the bridge between the two paddle-boxes, looked Lethierry upon the sea, and exclaimed, “

It is your turn now! The Parisians took the Bastille, now science takes the sea.

”

rude and hard in their nature, they have an odd partiality for grace and delicacy. To realise the idea of the uncle, the niece ought to have been rich; so indeed felt Mess Lethierry. His steamboat voyaged for this end.

The mission of Durande was to provide a marriage portion for Déruchette.

She was, indeed, more often reading than stitching; more often playing than reading. This was as Mess Lethierry wished it. To be charming was all that he expected of her.

He had reared the young girl like a flower.

Whoever has studied the character of sailors will understand this: rude and hard in their nature, they have an odd partiality for grace and delicacy. To realise the idea of the uncle, the niece ought to have been rich; so indeed felt Mess Lethierry.

“Qu’elle passait pour telle dans le regiment.”

Mess Lethierry used to say, “She has a head of hair like a ship’s cable.”

From her infancy she had been remarkable for beauty. The learned in such matters had grave doubts about her nose, but the little one having probably determined to be pretty, had finally satisfied their requirements. She grew to girlhood without any serious loss of beauty;

This unshapely block produced a great effect upon Mess Lethierry’s imagination. He looked upon it with an almost superstitious admiration. His faith in it was complete. He was able to trace in it an excellent resemblance to Déruchette.

Thus the dogma resembles the truth, and the idol the deity.

Mess Lethierry had two grand fête days in every week; one was Tuesday, the other Friday. His first delight consisted in seeing the Durande weigh anchor; his second in seeing her enter the port again.

… torments, the perditions, the inexorable chastisements, the burnings without end, the inextinguishable maledictions, the wrath of the Almighty, the celestial fury, the divine vengeance, and other incontestable realities—he was heard to say as he was going out in the midst of the faithful flock, “

You see, I have an odd notion of my own on this matter; I imagine God as a merciful being.

”

He confounded the two cassocks in the same phraseology. He did not take the trouble to vary in favour of Catholics or Lutherans, or whatever they might be, the figures of speech common among military men of that period. He would say to Déruchette, “

Marry whom you please, provided you do not marry a parson.

”

Brought up in the peculiar way already described, Déruchette was little accustomed to responsibility. There is a latent danger in an education not sufficiently serious, which cannot be too much insisted on.

It is perhaps unwise to endeavour to make a child happy too soon.

So long as she was happy, Déruchette thought all was well. She knew, too, that it was always a pleasure to her uncle to see her pleased.

She was ready with a smile, as a cat with a stroke of her claws. So much the worse for the victim of her scratches. She thought no more of them. Yesterday had no existence for her.

She lived in the fullness of today.

Such it is to have too much happiness fall to one’s lot! With Déruchette impressions vanished like the melted snow.

So much the worse for the victim of her scratches. She thought no more of them. Yesterday had no existence for her. She lived in the fullness of today. Such it is to have too much happiness fall to one’s lot!

With Déruchette impressions vanished like the melted snow.

Gilliatt had never spoken to Déruchette; he knew her from having seen her at a distance, as men know the morning star.

At the period when Déruchette had met Gilliatt on the road leading from St. Peter’s Port to Vale, and had surprised him by tracing his name in the snow, she was just sixteen years of age.

He walked no more along the road to St. Peter’s Port.

He had an odd fancy that his name of “Gilliatt” had remained there traced upon the ground, and that the passersby stopped to read it.

By little and little, he had come to conceal himself for hours behind her wall, motionless and silent, seen by no one, and holding his breath as Déruchette passed in and out of her garden.

Men grow accustomed to poison by degrees.

From his hiding-place he could often hear the sound of Déruchette conversing with Mess Lethierry under a thick arch of leaves, in a spot where there was a garden-seat. The words came distinctly to his ears.

What a change had come over him! He had even descended to watch and listen.

Alas! there is something of the character of a spy in every human heart.

There was another garden-seat, visible to him, and nearer. Déruchette would sit there sometimes.

Déruchette was approaching her twenty-first year, and was still unmarried.

Some writer has said that a fixed idea is a sort of gimlet; every year gives it another turn.

To pull out the first year is like plucking out the hair by the roots; in the second year, like tearing the skin; in the third, like breaking the bones; and in the fourth, like removing the very brain itself.

He was considered to have gained by a lucky rashness. Someone in the Isle of Wight who had imitated him had not succeeded. The enterprise had ruined the shareholders. The engines, in fact, were badly constructed. But people shook their heads.

Innovations have always to contend with the difficulty that few wish them well. The least false step compromises them.

One of the commercial oracles of the Channel Islands, a certain banker from Paris, named Jauge, being consulted upon a steamboat speculation, was reported to have turned his back, with the remark, “An investment is it you propose to me? Exactly; an investment in smoke.”

The westerly gales begin from the month of February, and the waves are beaten about from every quarter. Navigation becomes an anxious matter. The people on the coasts look to the signal-post, and begin to watch for vessels in distress.

The sea is then like a cutthroat in ambush for his victim.

An invisible trumpet sounds the alarm of war with the elements, furious blasts spring up from the horizon, and a terrible wind soon begins to blow. The dark night whistles and howls.

The result is a dangerous concealment of the approach of sands and breakers. The vessel steers towards the shoals without receiving any warning. Frequently the fogs leave a ship no resource except to lie-to, or to cast anchor.

There are as many shipwrecks from the fogs as from the winds.

After a very violent squall succeeding one of these foggy days, the mail-boat Cashmere arrived safely from England. It entered at St.

Sieur Clubin was a man who bided his time.

He was short in stature, and his complexion was yellow. He had the strength of a bull. His sea life had not tanned his skin; his flesh had a sallow hue;

His memory was peculiarly retentive. With him, to have seen a man once, was to have him like a note in a notebook. His quiet glance took possession of you.

The pupil of his eye received the impression of a face, and kept it like a portrait.

The face might grow old, but Sieur Clubin never lost it; it was impossible to cheat that tenacious memory. Sieur Clubin was curt in speech, grave in manner, bold in action. No gestures were ever indulged in by him.

Sieur Clubin was a widower; his wife, like himself, had enjoyed a high reputation for probity. She had died with a fame for incorruptible virtue. If the bailli had whispered gallant things in her ear, she would have impeached him before the king.

If a saint had made love to her, she would have told it to the priest.

This couple, Sieur and Dame Clubin, had realised in Torteval the ideal of the English epithet “respectable.” Dame Clubin’s reputation was as the snowy whiteness of the swan; Sieur Clubin’s like that of ermine itself—a spot would have been fatal to him.

Dame Clubin’s reputation was as the snowy whiteness of the swan; Sieur Clubin’s like that of ermine itself—a spot would have been fatal to him. He could hardly have picked up a pin without making inquiries for the owner.

He would send round the town-crier about a box of matches.

One day he went into a wine-shop at St. Servan, and said to the man who kept it, “Three years ago I breakfasted here; you made a mistake in the bill;” and he returned the man thirteen sous.

This period was an epoch of flights and escapes. The Restoration in France was a reactionary movement.

Revolutions are fruitful of voluntary exile; and restorations of wholesale banishments.

During the first seven or eight years which followed the return of the Bourbons, panic was universal—in finance, in industry, in commerce, men felt the ground tremble beneath them. Bankruptcies were numerous in the commercial world;

… scoundrel, who found it convenient to disappear, would take advantage of the general pell-mell, tack himself on to the political refugees, and, thanks to his greater skill in the art, would contrive to appear in that dim twilight more honest even than his honest neighbours.

Nothing looks more awkward and confused sometimes than honesty unjustly condemned.

It is out of its element, and is almost sure to commit itself.

“Good,” he said, “can be extracted out of the knowledge of evil. The gamekeeper may find advantage in knowing the poacher. The good pilot may sound the depths of a pirate, who is only a sort of hidden rock.

I test the quality of a scoundrel as a doctor will test a poison.

” There was no answering a battery of proverbs like this. Everybody gave Clubin credit for his shrewdness. People praised him for not indulging in a ridiculous delicacy. Who, then, should dare to speak scandal of him on this point?

“Yes,” replied the gunsmith. “It is an American weapon.”

“It is a pistol with which a man can carry on a conversation.”

“Exactly: an instrument which comprises in itself both the question and the answer.”

“It is a pistol with which a man can carry on a conversation.”

“Exactly: an instrument which comprises in itself both the question and the answer.”

“Precisely, Monsieur Clubin. A rotatory clump of barrels.”

A contrabandist was entrusted with a good many things, and knew how to keep them secret. An inviolable confidence was the condition of his existence. The first quality, in fact, in a smuggler was strict honour in his own circle.

No discreetness, no smuggling.

Fraud has its secrets like the priest’s confessional.

A contrabandist was entrusted with a good many things, and knew how to keep them secret. An inviolable confidence was the condition of his existence. The first quality, in fact, in a smuggler was strict honour in his own circle. No discreetness, no smuggling.

Fraud has its secrets like the priest’s confessional.

These secrets were indeed, as a rule, faithfully kept. The contrabandist swore to betray nothing, and he kept his word; nobody was more trustworthy than the genuine smuggler.

The annals of criminal procedure against witchcraft and magic prove this in every page.

Human folly unhappily extends even thus far: when terror seizes upon a man he does not stop easily.

He dreams of imaginary faults, imaginary purifications, and clears out his conscience with the old witches’ broom.

“

Besides, it is only fools who believe in spirits.

”

“Besides, it is only fools who believe in spirits.”

Insolence in the face of danger rallies the cowardly, and inspirits them to go on.

The two Torteval lads resumed their march, quickening their steps behind the caulker’s apprentice.

“Cowards are the only traitors. We are men of courage.

The sea is the church of winter. Treason is the church of hell.

”

“

Man with his gold does what he can. Heaven with its winds does what it will.

”

“In the night. We arrive by night; and sail by night.

We have a wife who is called the sea, and a sister called night. The wife betrays sometimes; but the sister never.

”

By stretching the legs, it was possible to walk on both sides of the stream, touching with head or elbows, as you went, the houses either on the right or the left. These old relics of medieval Normandy have almost a human interest.

Tumbledown houses and sorcerers always go together.

Their leaning stories, their overhanging walls, their bowed penthouses, and their old thickset irons, seem like lips, chin, nose, and eyebrows. The garret window is the blind eye. The walls are the wrinkled and blotchy cheeks.

One of these houses in the alley—the largest and the most famous, or notorious—was known by the name of the Jacressade.

The Jacressade was a lodging-house for people who do not lodge.

In all towns, and particularly in seaports, there is always found beneath the lowest stratum of society a sort of residuum: vagabonds who are more than a match for justice; rovers after adventures;

“I see that you are labouring under a mistake.

Robbery is your name, not mine. My name is Restitution.

Hark you, Rantaine. Ten years ago you left Guernsey one night, taking with you the cashbox of a certain partnership concern, containing fifty thousand francs which belonged to you, but forgetting to leave behind you fifty thousand francs which were the property of another.

Sieur Clubin’s tone and manner evidenced that he was extremely angry, or that he wished to appear so.

A well-timed burst of anger sometimes removes responsibility, and sometimes shifts it on to other shoulders.

The captain, standing on the bridge between the two paddle-boxes, fixed his eyes on the helmsman. He repeated, between his teeth, “Drunkard.” The unlucky Tangrouille hung his head.

“Our guardian angel seems to be absent.

There ought to be a decree against celestial absenteeism.

He is at his country-house, and takes no notice of us; so all gets in disorder. It is evident that this guardian is not in the government; he is taking holiday, leaving some vicar—some seminarist angel, some wretched creature with sparrows’-wings—to look after affairs.”

It did not rain, but all felt their clothing wet. The crew took no heed of the way they were making; but there was increased sense of uneasiness. They seemed to have entered into a doleful region.

The fog makes a deep silence on the sea; it calms the waves, and stifles the wind.

In the midst of this silence, the creaking of the Durande communicated a strange, indefinable feeling of melancholy and disquietude.

Tangrouille was sobered.

Nobody is drunk in the moment of a shipwreck.

He came down to the quarterdeck, went up again, and said:

“I have decided to remain here,” said Clubin. “The vessel must inevitably go to pieces in the tempest tonight. I won’t leave her.

When the ship is lost, the captain is already dead.

People shall not say I didn’t do my duty to the end. Tangrouille, I forgive you.”

Lastly, he had the satisfaction of vanishing, leaving behind him a great renown, the crowning point of his existence. As he stood meditating on these things amid the wreck, Clubin might have been taken for some demon in a pleasant mood.

He had lived a lifetime for the sake of this one minute.

His whole exterior was expressive of the two words, “At last.” A devilish tranquillity reigned in that sallow countenance.

He had been the soft-spoken pirate; the bondslave of honesty. He had been confined in garments of innocence, as in oppressive mummy cloths; had worn those angel wings which the devils find so wearisome in their fallen state. He had been overloaded with public esteem.

It is arduous passing for a shining light.

To preserve a perpetual equilibrium amid these difficulties, to think evil, to speak goodness—here had been indeed a labour. Such a life of contradictions had been Clubin’s fate.

The treacherous villain is the despot curbed and restrained, and only able to attain his ends by resigning himself to play a secondary part. He is summed-up littleness capable of enormities.

The perfect hypocrite is a Titan dwarfed.

Clubin had a genuine faith that he had been ill-used. Why had not he the right to have been born rich? It was from no fault of his that it was otherwise.

A bold plunge into wickedness—what a voluptuous sense of relief it brought with it. All the delights known to the fallen angels are summed up in this; and Clubin felt them in that moment. The long arrears of dissimulations were paid at last.

Hypocrisy is an investment; the devil reimburses it.

Clubin gave himself up to the intoxication of the idea, having no longer any eye upon him but that of Heaven. He whispered within himself, “I am a scoundrel,” and felt profoundly satisfied.

For those who worship an ideal wickedness, opprobrium is glory. It is a height from whence they can look down; a superiority at least of some kind; a preeminence in which they can display themselves royally.

A gallows standing high in the gaze of all the world is not without some analogy with a throne.

To be exposed is, at least, to be seen and studied.

Nero burning Rome, Louis Quatorze treacherously seizing the Palatinate, the Prince Regent killing Napoleon slowly, Nicholas strangling Poland before the eyes of the civilised world, may have felt something akin to Clubin’s joy. Universal execration derives a grandeur even from its vastness.

To be unmasked is a humiliation; but to unmask one’s self is a triumph.

There is an intoxication in the position, an insolent satisfaction in its contempt for appearances, a flaunting insolence in the nakedness with which it affronts the decencies of life.

All his original confidence of success returned fanatically to his sombre mind.

It is remarkable how easily knaves are persuaded that they deserve to succeed.

There was but one course to take.

Déruchette, sitting near him on a chair and weeping, held one of Mess Lethierry’s hands in hers. Her hands were joined: his hand was clenched fast. It was the sign of the shade of difference in their two sorrows.

In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clenched fist none.

Mess Lethierry gave up his arm to her, and let her do with it what she pleased. He was passive. Struck down by a thunderbolt, he had scarcely a spark of life left within him.

and that these circumstances had no doubt weighed with Clubin in coming to his determination to remain on the wreck. His duty, however, once fulfilled, and a vessel at hand, Clubin assuredly would not have scrupled to avail himself of its aid.

A hero is not necessarily an idiot.

The idea of a suicide was absurd in connection with a man of Clubin’s irreproachable character. The culprit, too, was Tangrouille, not Clubin. All this was conclusive. The captain of the Shealtiel was evidently right, and everybody expected to see Clubin reappear very shortly.

Save the machinery! It was easy to talk of it; but who would undertake to do it? Was it possible, even?

To scheme and to execute are two different things; as different as to dream and to do.

Now if ever a dream had appeared wild and impracticable, it was that of saving the engines then embedded between the Douvres. The idea of sending a ship and a crew to work upon those rocks was absurd. It could not be thought of.

All the morning of the next day he remained half supporting himself on the table of the office of the Durande, neither standing nor sitting: answering kindly when anyone spoke to him. Curiosity being satisfied, the Bravées had become a solitude.

There is a good deal of curiosity generally mingled with the haste of condolences.

The door had closed again, and left the old man again alone with Déruchette. The strange light that had shone in Lethierry’s eyes was extinguished. The mournful look which filled them after the first news of the disaster had returned.

Mess Lethierry, plunged once more in his overwhelming absorption, no longer listened. Déruchette, seated near him, and thoughtful, also did not raise her eyes, and by her silent presence somewhat increased the embarrassment of a conversation not very animated.

A witness who says nothing is a species of indefinable weight.

Doctor Hérode, however, did not appear to feel it.

Gilliatt had chosen the channel along the coast among the rocks. It was the most dangerous way, but it was the most direct. To take the shortest route was his only thought.

Shipwrecks will not wait; the sea is a pressing creditor; an hour’s delay may be irreparable.

His anxiety was to go quickly to the rescue of the machinery in danger.

Nothing could be more suggestive of haughtiness and arrogance than their whole appearance: the conquered vessel; the triumphant abyss.

The two rocks, still streaming with the tempest of the day before, were like two wrestlers sweating from a recent struggle.

The wind had sunk; the sea rippled gently; here and there the presence of breakers might be detected in the graceful streaks of foam upon the surface of the waters. A sound came from the sea like the murmuring of bees.

She is at once open and secret; she hides away carefully, and cares not to divulge her actions; wrecks a vessel, and, covering it with the waves, engulfs it deep, as if conscious of her guilt.

Among her crimes is hypocrisy. She slays and steals, conceals her booty, puts on an air of unconsciousness, and smiles.

Here, however, was nothing of the kind. The Douvres, lifting above the level of the waters the shattered hull of the Durande, had an air of triumph.

The imagination might have pictured them as two monstrous arms, reaching upwards from the gulf, and exhibiting to the tempest the lifeless body of the ship.

Their aspect was like that of an assassin boasting of his evil deeds.

The solemnity of the hour contributed something to the impression of the scene. There is a mysterious grandeur in the dawn, as of the borderland between the region of consciousness and the world of our dreams. There is something spectral in that confused transition time.

No wild beast can compare with the sea for mangling its prey. The waves are full of talons. The north wind bites, the billows devour, the waves are like hungry jaws.

The ocean strikes like a lion with its heavy paw, seizing and dismembering at the same moment.

The ruin conspicuous in the Durande presented the peculiarity of being detailed and minute. It was a sort of horrible stripping and plucking. Much of it seemed done with design. The beholder was tempted to exclaim, “What wanton mischief!”

… by its weight, delivered up in that solitude to the destructive elements, exposed in the grip of the rock to the action of the wind and wave, could, under the frown of that implacable spot, escape from slow destruction, seemed a madness even to imagine.

The Durande was the captive of the Douvres.

How could she be extricated from that position?

This passage, zigzag in form as the forked lightning, was of about the same width in all parts. The ocean had so fashioned it. Its eternal commotion produces sometimes those singular regularities.

There is a sort of geometry in the action of the sea.

From one extremity to the other of the defile, the two parallel granite walls confronted each other at a distance which the midship frame of the Durande measured exactly.

In the Lyse-Fjord, the sea is almost always tranquil; the sky above is serene; the place terrible. Where is the wind? Not on high. Where is the thunder? Not in the heavens.

The wind is under the sea; the lightnings within the rock.

Now and then there is a convulsion of the water.

Gilliatt’s movements were decisive, as are those of all good sailors. He never wasted force. He always proportioned his efforts to the work in hand. Hence the prodigies of strength which he executed with ordinary muscles.

His biceps were no more powerful than that of ordinary men; but his heart was firmer.

He added, in fact, to strength which is physical, energy which belongs to the moral faculties.

He untied his basket of provisions, opened his knife, cut a slice of smoked beef, took a bite out of his brown loaf, drank a draught from his can of fresh water, and supped admirably.

To do well and eat well are two satisfactions. A full stomach resembles an easy conscience.

This supper was ended, and there was still before him a little more daylight. He took advantage of it to begin the lightening of the wreck—an urgent necessity.

It was their turn now to be aggressive. The birds had taken to reprisals.

Gilliatt had robbed them of their lodging, they deprived him of his supper.

It is not until a task is fairly grappled with that its difficulties and perils become fully manifest.

There is nothing like making a commencement for making evident how difficult it will be to come to the end.

Every beginning is a struggle against resistance. The first step is an exorable undeceiver. A difficulty which we come to touch pricks like a thorn.

This current of air, incessantly renewed, first gave him the notion of the forge. Since it could not be his chamber, he was determined that this cabin should be his smithy.

To bend obstacles to our purposes is a great step towards triumph.

The wind was Gilliatt’s enemy. He had set about making it his servant.

The very materialism of his daily occupation increased the kind of abstraction in which he lived.

To be steeped too deeply in realities is in itself a cause of visionary moods.

His bodily labour, with its infinite variety of details, detracted nothing from the sensation of stupor which arose from the strangeness of his position and his work. Ordinary bodily fatigue is a thread which binds man to the earth;

This kind of rocks, which in the old sea dialect were called Isolés, are, as we have said, strange places. The sea is alone there; she works her own will. No token of terrestrial life disturbs her.

Man is a terror to the sea; she is shy of his approach, and hides from him her deeds.

But she is bolder among the lone sea rocks. The everlasting soliloquy of the waves is not troubled there. She labours at the rock, repairs its damage, sharpens its peaks, makes them rugged or renews them.

These drops fell in the water now and then with a gentle splash. The effect of the scene was singular. Nothing more beautiful could be imagined; nothing more mournful could anywhere be found.

It was a wondrous palace, in which death sat smiling and content.

At every swelling of the wave these flowers increased in splendour, and at every subsidence grew dull again.

So it is with the destiny of man; aspiration is life, the outbreathing of the spirit is death.

One of the marvels of the cavern was the rock itself. Forming here a wall, there an arch, and here again a pillar or pilaster, it was in places rough and bare, and sometimes close beside, was wrought with the most delicate natural carving.

He put the forge in operation at once. Tools were wanting; he set to work and made them.

For fuel he had the wreck; for motive force the water; for his bellows the wind; for his anvil a stone; for art his instinct; for power his will.

He entered with ardour upon his sombre labours.

The days grew longer. The blue of the sky, the gentleness of all the movements of the scene, the serenity of the noontide, seemed to exclude the idea of mischief. The waves danced merrily in the sunlight.

A Judas kiss is the first step to treachery; of such caresses the ocean is prodigal. Her smile, like that of woman’s sometimes, cannot be trusted.

There was little wind. The hydraulic bellows worked all the better for that reason. Much wind would have embarrassed rather than aided it. Gilliatt had a saw; he manufactured for himself a file. With the saw he attacked the wood; with the file the metal.

Gilliatt had around him no voices but those of the wind; no crowd but the assemblage of waves.

There is nothing more remarkable than the timidity of ignorance, unless it be its temerity.

When ignorance becomes daring, she has sometimes a sort of compass within herself—the intuition of the truth, clearer oftentimes in a simple mind than in a learned brain.

Knowledge often enough disconcerts and makes overcautious. Gama, had he known what lay before him, would have recoiled before the Cape of Storms. If Columbus had been a great geographer, he might have failed to discover America.

The second successful climber of Mont Blanc was the savant, Saussure; the first the goatherd, Balmat.

These instances I admit are exceptions, which detract nothing from science, which remains the rule. The ignorant man may discover; it is the learned who invent.

These instances I admit are exceptions, which detract nothing from science, which remains the rule.

The ignorant man may discover; it is the learned who invent.

The sloop was still at anchor in the creek of “The Man Rock,” where the sea left it in peace. Gilliatt, as will be remembered, had arranged everything for maintaining constant communication with it.

Every now and then, for the necessities of his work, he jumped into the water, swam to some point, and gained a footing again.

He simply plunged into the sea and left it, as a man passes from one room in his dwelling to another.

His clothing was never dry. It was saturated with rain water, which had no time to evaporate, and with sea water, which never dries. He lived perpetually wet.

The fire which he made scarcely warmed him.

A fire in open air yields little comfort. It burns on one side, and freezes on the other.

Gilliatt often shivered even while sweating over his forge.

Everywhere about him rose resistance amidst a terrible silence. He felt himself the enemy of an unseen combination.

There is a dismal non possumus in nature.

The inertia of matter is like a sullen threat. A mysterious persecution environed him. He suffered from heats and shiverings. The fire ate into his flesh; the water froze him; feverish thirst tormented him; the wind tore his clothing;

the wintry winds, the clouds, and the beleaguering waves enveloped him, closed round him slowly, and in a measure shut him in, and separated him from companionship, like a dungeon built up by degrees round a living man.

All against him; nothing for him; he felt himself isolated, abandoned, enfeebled, sapped, forgotten.

His storehouse empty, his tools broken or defective; he was tormented with hunger and thirst by day, with cold by night.

The virtue of a man is betrayed by his eyes. How much of the man there is in us may be read in their depths. We make ourselves known by the light that gleams beneath our brows.

The petty natures wink at us, the larger send forth flashes.

If there is no brilliancy under the lids, there is no thought in the brain, no love in the heart. Those who love desire, and those who desire sparkle and flash.

Those who love desire, and those who desire sparkle and flash. Determination gives a fire to the glance, a magnificent fire that consumes all timid thoughts.

It is the self-willed ones who are sublime.

He who is only brave, has but a passing fit, he who is only valiant has temperament and nothing more, he who is courageous has but one virtue. He who persists in the truth is the grand character.

He who persists in the truth is the grand character. The secret of great hearts may be summed up in the word: Perseverando.

Perseverance is to courage what the wheel is to the lever; it is the continual renewing of the centre of support.

Let the desired goal be on earth or in heaven, only make for the goal. Everything is in that; in the first case one is a Columbus, in the second a god.

Everything is in that; in the first case one is a Columbus, in the second a god. Not to allow conscience to argue or the will to fail—this is the way to suffering and glory.

In the world of ethics to fall does not exclude the possibility of soaring, rather does it give impetus to flight.

The mediocrities allow themselves to be dissuaded by the specious obstacles—the great ones never. To perish is their perhaps, to conquer their conviction. You may propose many good reasons to the martyr why he should not allow himself to be stoned to death.

Gilliatt felt no fatigue; or, rather, would not yield to any.

The refusal of the mind to recognise the failings of the body is in itself an immense power.

He saw nothing, except the steps in the progress of his labours.

He endured all this suffering without any other thought than is comprised in the word “Forward.”

His work flew to his head; the strength of the will is intoxicating. Its intoxication is called heroism.

He had become a kind of Job, having the ocean for the scene of his sufferings. But he was a Job wrestling with difficulty, a Job combating and making head against afflictions; a Job conquering!

He endured all this suffering without any other thought than is comprised in the word “Forward.” His work flew to his head; the strength of the will is intoxicating. Its intoxication is called heroism.

He had become a kind of Job, having the ocean for the scene of his sufferings.

But he was a Job wrestling with difficulty, a Job combating and making head against afflictions; a Job conquering! a combination of Job and Prometheus, if such names are not too great to be applied to a poor sailor and fisher of crabs and crayfish.

His eyes were opened upon the black night; the situation was dismal; full of disquietude.

There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness.

A strange roof of shadow; a deep obscurity, which no diver can explore; a light mingled with that obscurity, of a strange, subdued, and sombre kind; floating atoms of rays, like a dust of seeds or of ashes; millions of lamps, but no illumining;

for all around him the roads which bridge that gulf are broken up or gone. No arch exists for him to span the Infinite. But there is attraction in forbidden knowledge, as in the edge of the abyss.

Where the footstep cannot tread, the eye may reach; where the eye can penetrate no further, the mind may soar.

There is no man, however feeble or insufficient his resources, who does not essay. According to his nature he questions or recoils before that mystery. With some it has the effect of repressing; with others it enlarges the soul. The spectacle is sombre, indefinite.

dread defiances to man’s approach; landmarks of the infinite creation; boundaries there, where there are no bounds; sea-marks impossible, and yet real, numbering the fathoms of those infinite deeps. One microscopic glittering point; then another; then another; imperceptible, yet enormous.

Yonder light is a focus; that focus is a star; that star is a sun; that sun is a universe; that universe is nothing.

For all numbers are as zero in the presence of the Infinite.

It is the tempest, and hinders the hastening ship; it is chaos, and trammels the birth of a world.

Good is one; evil is ubiquitous.

Evil dislocates the logic of Life. It causes the bird to devour the fly and the comet to destroy the planet. Evil is a blot on the page of creation.

We are convinced and oppressed—we feel, we know not what dark evidence within us; we realise nothing, but are crushed by the impalpable.

All is incomprehensible, but nothing is unintelligible.

And add to all that, the tremendous question: Is this immanent universe a Being?

Every enigma is propounded in one. The irreducible is before us. Hence we are constrained to some kind of faith. An involuntary belief is the result. But belief does not ensure peace of mind. Faith has an extraordinary desire to take shape. Hence religions.

Nothing is so overwhelming as a formless faith.

And despite of thought or desire or inward resistance, to look at the darkness is to fall into profound and wondering meditation. What can we make of these phenomena! How should we act beneath their united forces? To divide such weight of oppression is impossible.

He understood them little, but he felt them.

His was a powerful intellect clouded; a great spirit wild and untaught.

Some of this marvellous ingenuity Gilliatt possessed. He had once climbed and descended from the cliff at Boisrosé. He was the Baron Trenck of the wreck, and the Latude of her machinery.

The sea, like a jailor, kept watch over him.

For the rest, mischievous and inclement as the rain had been, he had contrived to derive some benefit from it. He had in part replenished his stock of fresh water;

The tide swelling quietly between the two Douvres raised the sloop and brought it nearer to the Durande.

The sea was more than conquered; it was tamed and broken in.

It became, in fact, part and parcel of the organisation of power.

The tide swelling quietly between the two Douvres raised the sloop and brought it nearer to the Durande. The sea was more than conquered; it was tamed and broken in. It became, in fact, part and parcel of the organisation of power.

The rising waters lifted the vessel without any sort of shock, gently, and almost with precaution, as one would handle porcelain.

Gilliatt combined and proportioned the two labours, that of the water and that of the apparatus;

From minute to minute the work advanced; the interval between the wreck and the sloop diminished insensibly. The approach continued in silence, and as in a sort of terror of the man who stood there.

The elements received his orders and fulfilled them.

Nearly at the moment when the tide ceased to raise it, the cable ceased to slide. Suddenly, but without commotion, the pulleys stopped. The vast machine had taken its place in the bark, as if placed there by a powerful hand.

Gilliatt contemplated it, lost in thought.

He was not the spoiled child of success.

He bent under the weight of his great joy. He felt his limbs, as it were, sinking; and contemplating his triumph, he, who had never been shaken by danger, began to tremble.

Nothing is more threatening than a late equinox.

The appearance of the sea presents a strange phenomenon, resulting from what may be called the arrival of the ocean winds.

India knew them as the Maroubs, Judea as the Keroubim, Greece as the Aquilones.

They are the invisible winged creatures of the Infinite.

Their blasts sweep over the earth.

He who perceives their pale lineaments in that wide dispersion, the horizon of the sea, feels himself in presence of an unsubduable power. It might be imagined that the proximity of human intelligence disquieted them, and that they revolted against it.

The mind of man is invincible, but the elements baffle him.

He can do nothing against the power which is everywhere, and which none can bind. The gentle breath becomes a gale, smites with the force of a war-club, and then becomes gentle again.

Chaos is theirs, in which to wreak their mysterious vengeance: the den of the winds is more monstrous than that of lions. How many corpses lie in its deep recesses, where the howling gusts sweep without pity over that obscure and ghastly mass!

The winds are heard wheresoever they go, but they give ear to none.

Their acts resemble crimes. None know on whom they cast their hoary surf; with what ferocity they hover over shipwrecks, looking at times as if they flung their impious foam-flakes in the face of heaven. They are the tyrants of unknown regions.

But it is its air of calm contentment which they dread the most.

A smiling sky in the equinoxes is the tempest in gay disguise.

It was under skies like these that “The Tower of Weeping Women,” in Amsterdam, was filled with wives and mothers scanning the far horizon.

When the vernal or autumnal storms delay to break, they are gathering strength; hoarding up their fury for more sure destruction.

Beware of the gale that has been long delayed. It was Angot who said that “the sea pays well old debts.”

When the delay is unusually long, the sea betokens her impatience only by a deeper calm, but the magnetic intensity manifests itself by what might be called a fiery humour in the sea. Fire issues from the waves; electric air, phosphoric water.

It was this significant whispering which Gilliatt had noted. The phosphorescence on the water had been the first warning: this murmur the second.

If the demon Legion exists, he is assuredly no other than the wind.

The wind is complex, but the air is one.

The mysterious forces had chosen their time well.

Chance, if chance exists, is sometimes farseeing.

While the sloop had been anchored in the little creek of “The Man Rock,” and as long as the machinery had been prisoned in the wreck, Gilliatt’s position had been impregnable. The sloop was in safety; the machinery sheltered.

The sphinx, which men have imagined concealing herself in the cloud, seemed to mock him with a dilemma.

To go would have been madness; to remain was terrible.

This wall, straight lined, vertical, without a crevice in its height, without a rent in its structure, seemed built by the square and measured by the plumb-line.

It was cloud in the likeness of granite.

Its escarpment, completely perpendicular at the southern extremity, curved a little towards the north, like a bent sheet of iron, presenting the steep slippery face of an inclined plane. The dark wall enlarged and grew;

Already the cloudy bank had blotted out one half the space of the sky: shelving like the fearful talus of the abyss. It was the uprising of a dark mountain between earth and heaven.

It was night falling suddenly upon midday.

There was a heat in the air as from an oven door, coming from that mysterious mass on mass. The sky, which from blue had become white, was now turning from white to a slatey grey. The sea beneath was leaden-hued and dull.

That is its strength; but it is also its weakness. Its fury gives the opportunity to human intelligence, and man spies its weak points for his defence; but under what overwhelming assaults! No respite, no interruption, no truce, no pause for taking breath.

There seems an unspeakable cowardice in that prodigality of inexhaustible resources.

All the tumult of the wide expanse rushed towards the Douvres. Voices were heard in the darkness. What could they be? The ancient terror of the sea was there. At times they seemed to speak as if someone was uttering words of command.

The convulsion of the sea reached the heavens. Hitherto the storm had been supreme, it had seemed to work its own imperious will, to give the impulse, to drive the waves to frenzy, while still preserving a sort of sinister lucidity. Below was fury—above, anger.

The heavens are the breath, the ocean only foam, hence the authority of the wind.

But the intoxication of its own horrors had confused it. It had become a mere whirlwind; it was a blindness leading to night. There are times when tempests become frenzied, when the heavens are attacked with a sort of delirium;

It was fortunate that the proximity of the two walls had prevented the mass of wreck from falling to the bottom. This circumstance gave the barricade greater height; the water, besides, could flow under the obstacle, which diminished the power of the waves.

That which passes below cannot pass over.

This is partly the secret of the floating breakwater.

Gilliatt perceived that he was wearied.

Sleep swoops down upon the exhausted frame like a bird upon its prey.

He drooped and sank upon the deck of the bark without choosing his position, and there slept. Stretched at length and inert, he remained thus for some hours, scarcely distinguishable from the beams and joists among which he lay.

He succeeded only in disturbing his persecutor, which wound itself still tighter.

It was supple as leather, strong as steel, cold as night.

A second form, sharp, elongated, and narrow, issued out of the crevice, like a tongue out of monstrous jaws. It seemed to lick his naked body.

A third long undulating shape issued from the hole in the rock; seemed to feel its way about his body; lashed round his ribs like a cord, and fixed itself there.

Agony when at its height is mute.

Gilliatt uttered no cry. There was sufficient light for him to see the repulsive forms which had entangled themselves about him. A fourth ligature, but this one swift as an arrow, darted towards his stomach, and wound around him there.

It is difficult for those who have not seen it to believe in the existence of the devilfish.

Compared to this creature, the ancient hydras are insignificant.

It is difficult for those who have not seen it to believe in the existence of the devilfish.

Compared to this creature, the ancient hydras are insignificant.

At times we are tempted to imagine that the vague forms which float in our dreams may encounter in the realm of the Possible attractive forces, having power to fix their lineaments, and shape living beings, out of these creatures of our slumbers.

no cutting fins, or wings with nails, no prickles, no sword, no electric discharge, no poison, no talons, no beak, no teeth.

Yet he is of all creatures the most formidably armed.

What, then, is the devilfish? It is the sea vampire.

no cutting fins, or wings with nails, no prickles, no sword, no electric discharge, no poison, no talons, no beak, no teeth. Yet he is of all creatures the most formidably armed.

What, then, is the devilfish? It is the sea vampire.

The swimmer who, attracted by the beauty of the spot, ventures among breakers in the open sea, where the still waters hide the splendours of the deep, or in the hollows of unfrequented rocks, in unknown caverns abounding in sea plants, testacea, and crustacea, under …

Underneath it is yellow; above, a dull, earthy hue: nothing could render that inexplicable shade dust coloured. Its form is spider-like, but its tints are like those of the chameleon. When irritated it becomes violet. Its most horrible characteristic is its softness.

Its folds strangle, its contact paralyses.

It has an aspect like gangrened or scabrous flesh. It is a monstrous embodiment of disease.

According to Denis Montfort, one of those observers whose marvellous intuition sinks or raises them to the level of magicians, the poulp is almost endowed with the passions of man: it has its hatreds.

In fact, in the Absolute to be hideous is to hate.

Hideousness struggles under the natural law of elimination, which necessarily renders it hostile.

The devilfish is crafty. When its victim is unsuspicious, it opens suddenly.

A glutinous mass, endowed with a malignant will, what can be more horrible?

It is in the most beautiful azure depths of the limpid water that this hideous, voracious polyp delights. It always conceals itself, a fact which increases its terrible associations. When they are seen, it is almost invariably after they have been captured.

but no horror can equal the sudden apparition of the devilfish, that Medusa with its eight serpents.

No grasp is like the sudden strain of the cephaloptera.

It is with the sucking apparatus that it attacks. The victim is oppressed by a vacuum drawing at numberless points: it is not a clawing or a biting, but an indescribable scarification.

The muscles swell, the fibres of the body are contorted, the skin cracks under the loathsome oppression, the blood spurts out and mingles horribly with the lymph of the monster, which clings to its victim by innumerable hideous mouths.

The hydra incorporates itself with the man; the man becomes one with the hydra.

The spectre lies upon you: the tiger can only devour you; the devilfish, horrible, sucks your lifeblood away. He draws you to him, and into himself;

She regards them from the point of view of their construction, and calls them Cephaloptera; counts their antennae, and calls them Octopedes. This done, she leaves them.

Where science drops them, philosophy takes them up.

Philosophy in her turn studies these creatures. She goes both less far and further. She does not dissect, but meditate. Where the scalpel has laboured, she plunges the hypothesis. She seeks the final cause. Eternal perplexity of the thinker.

… within detaches itself, rolls, floats, condenses, borrows elements from the ambient darkness, becomes subject to unknown polarisations, assumes a kind of life, furnishes itself with some unimagined form from the obscurity, and with some terrible spirit from the miasma, and wanders ghostlike among living things.

It is as if night itself assumed the forms of animals.

But for what good? with what object? Thus we come again to the eternal questioning.

The philosopher determines their characteristics in dread. They are the concrete forms of evil. What attitude can he take towards this treason of creation against herself? To whom can he look for the solution of these riddles? The Possible is a terrible matrix.

Monsters are mysteries in their concrete form.

Portions of shade issue from the mass, and something within detaches itself, rolls, floats, condenses, borrows elements from the ambient darkness, becomes subject to unknown polarisations, assumes a kind of life, furnishes itself with some unimagined form from the obscurity, and with some terrible spirit …

if that chain, which for our part we are resolved to doubt, really exist, the cephaloptera at one extremity proves Satan at the other. It is certain that the wrongdoer at one end proves the existence of wrong at the other.

Every malignant creature, like every perverted intelligence, is a sphinx.

A terrible sphinx propounding a terrible riddle; the riddle of the existence of Evil.

But let us endeavour that death shall be progress. Let us aspire to an existence in which these mysteries shall be made clear. Let us follow that conscience which leads us thither.

For let us never forget that the highest is only attained through the high.

The monster was the inhabitant of the grotto; the terrible genii of the place. A kind of sombre demon of the water.

All the splendours of the cavern existed for it alone.

On the day of the previous month when Gilliatt had first penetrated into the grotto, the dark outline, vaguely perceived by him in the ripples of the secret waters, was this monster. It was here in its home.

He fancied that he perceived, in the furthest depth of the dusky recess, something smiling.

Gilliatt had never heard the word “hallucination,” but he was familiar with the idea.

Those mysterious encounters with the invisible, which, for the sake of avoiding the difficulty of explaining them, we call hallucinations, are in nature. Illusions or realities, visions are a fact. He who has the gift will see them.

There was indeed something smiling.

It was a death’s head; but it was not only the head.

There was the entire skeleton. A complete human skeleton was lying in the cavern.

Limpets had left their slime upon the bony nostrils. For the rest, there were not in this cave within the rocks either seagulls, or weeds, or a breath of air. All was still. The teeth grinned.

The sombre side of laughter is that strange mockery of expression which is peculiar to a human skull.

This marvellous palace of the deep, inlaid and incrusted with all the gems of the sea, had at length revealed and told its secret. It was a savage haunt; the devilfish inhabited it;

It was a dismal sight.

The crabs had devoured the man: the devilfish had devoured the crabs.

There were no remains of clothing anywhere visible. The man must have been seized naked.

It is easy to understand the drama which had taken place there during the ten weeks preceding. One monster had preyed upon another; the devilfish had seized Clubin.

These two embodiments of treachery had met in the inexorable darkness.

There had been an encounter at the bottom of the sea between these two compounds of mystery and watchfulness; the monster had destroyed the man: a horrible fulfilment of justice.

Upon that solitary rock he had been subjected by turns to all the varied and cruel tortures of nature; oftentimes a gentle mother, not less often a pitiless destroyer.

He had conquered his isolation, conquered hunger, conquered thirst, conquered cold, conquered fever, conquered labour, conquered sleep.

He had encountered a mighty coalition of obstacles formed to bar his progress. After his privations there were the elements; after the sea the tempest, after the tempest the devilfish, after the monster the spectre.

… and beneath him the ocean, above him the constellations, under the great unfathomable deep, he sank, gave up the struggle, lay down upon the rock, his face towards the stars, humbled, and uplifting his joined hands towards the terrible depths, he cried aloud, “Have mercy.”

Weighed down to earth by that immensity, he prayed.

He was there alone, in the darkness upon the rock, in the midst of that sea, stricken down with exhaustion like one smitten by lightning, naked like the gladiator in the circus, save that for circus he had the vast horizon, instead of wild beasts …

He was naked, cold, and stiff; but he did not shiver. His closed eyelids were wan. It would have been difficult for a beholder to say whether the form before him was not a corpse.

The sun seemed to look upon him.

If he were not dead, he was already so near death that the slightest cold wind would have sufficed to extinguish life.

The port is a port of ship repairing. The quarrying of stone and the fashioning of timber go on all day long; here the labourer with the pickaxe, there the workman with the mallet. At night they sink with fatigue, and sleep like lead.

Rude labours bring heavy slumbers.

One evening, in the commencement of the month of May, after watching the crescent moon for some instants through the trees, and listening to the step of Déruchette, walking alone in the cool air in the garden of the Bravées, Mess Lethierry had returned to …

The nocturnal cloud, full of confused faces, traversed his brain. Sometimes it was the Emperor Napoleon dictating to him the story of his life; sometimes there were several Déruchettes; strange birds were in the trees; the streets of Lons-le-Saulnier became serpents.

Nightmares were the brief respites of despair.

He passed his nights in dreaming, and his days in reverie.

The bravest men, when deprived of their most cherished idea, will come to this. His life had become a void.

Life is a voyage; the idea is the itinerary.

The plan of their course gone, they stop. The object is lost, the strength of purpose gone. Fate has a secret discretionary power. It is able to touch with its rod even our moral being. Despair is almost the destitution of the soul.

Life is a voyage; the idea is the itinerary. The plan of their course gone, they stop. The object is lost, the strength of purpose gone. Fate has a secret discretionary power. It is able to touch with its rod even our moral being.

Despair is almost the destitution of the soul.

Only the greatest minds resist, and for what?

There was a certain contradiction in that nature, complex as the sea, of which Mess Lethierry was, so to speak, the product. Mess Lethierry’s grief did not seek relief in prayer.

To be powerless is a certain strength.

In the presence of our two great expressions of this blindness—destiny and nature—it is in his powerlessness that man has found his chief support in prayer.

Man seeks succour from his terror; his anxiety bids him kneel.

Prayer, that mighty force of the soul, akin to mystery.

Prayer addresses itself to the magnanimity of the Shades; prayer regards mystery with eyes themselves overshadowed by it, and beneath the power of its fixed and appealing gaze, we feel the possibility of the great Unknown unbending to reply.

Tenacious of his prejudices against the clergy and their sermons, he would have seen with little pleasure these frequent attendances at the parish church. It was not because his own moral condition was not undergoing change.

Sorrow is a cloud which changes form.

Robust natures, as we have said, are sometimes almost overthrown by sudden great misfortunes; but not quite. Manly characters such as Lethierry’s experience a reaction in a given time. Despair has its backward stages. From overwhelmment we rise to dejection; from dejection to affliction;

Manly characters such as Lethierry’s experience a reaction in a given time. Despair has its backward stages. From overwhelmment we rise to dejection; from dejection to affliction; from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state; suffering melts into it and becomes a sombre joy.

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

These elegiac moods were not made for Lethierry. Neither the nature of his temperament nor the character of his misfortune suited those delicate shades.

The effective part of the shock he had received lay in the phenomenon of the seventy-five thousand francs entrusted by Rantaine to Clubin; this was a riddle which compelled Lethierry’s brain to work.

Conjecture is a healthy occupation for the mind.

Reason is awakened: logic is called into play.

The supposition of a wilful destruction of the Durande did not explain everything. There was a revolver in the story, with no part yet assigned to it. The revolver, probably, belonged to the other affair.

The scent of the public is keen and true.

Its instinct excels in those discoveries of truth by pieces and fragments. Still, amidst these facts, which seemed to point pretty clearly to a case of barratry, there were serious difficulties.

Hence a doubt in many minds.

Where there is no motive, it is natural to infer that there was no act.

The missing link was important. The letter from Rantaine seemed to supply it.

These trifling cares wounded him with a thousand tiny points, worse in their aggregate than the old despair. A sorrow is doubly burdensome which has to be endured in each item, and while disputing inch by inch with fate for ground already lost.

Ruin is endurable in the mass, but not in the dust and fragments of the fallen edifice. The great fact may overwhelm, but the details torture.

The catastrophe which lately fell like a thunderbolt, becomes now a cruel persecution. Humiliation comes to aggravate the blow. A second desolation succeeds the first, with features more repulsive. You descend one degree nearer to annihilation. The winding-sheet becomes changed to sordid rags.

The catastrophe which lately fell like a thunderbolt, becomes now a cruel persecution. Humiliation comes to aggravate the blow. A second desolation succeeds the first, with features more repulsive. You descend one degree nearer to annihilation. The winding-sheet becomes changed to sordid rags.

No thought is more bitter than that of one’s own gradual fall from a social position.

Ruin is simple enough. A violent shock; a cruel turn of fate; a catastrophe once for all. Be it so. We submit, and all is over. You are ruined: it is well; you are dead? No; you are still living.

Ah me! to have to condemn her to shabby dresses. The family table is silent. You fancy that those around it think harshly of you. Beloved faces have become clouded. This is what is meant by falling fortunes. It is to die day by day.

To be struck down is like the blast of the furnace; to decay like this is the torture of the slow fire.

An overwhelming blow is a sort of Waterloo, a slow decay, a St. Helena. Destiny, incarnate in the form of Wellington, has still some dignity; but how sordid in the shape of Hudson Lowe. Fate becomes then a paltry huckster.

He imagined her corset with its lace hanging to the ground, her stockings, her boots. His soul was among the stars.

The stars are made for the human heart of a poor man like Gilliatt not less than for that of the rich and great.

There is a certain degree of passion by which every man becomes wrapped in a celestial light. With a rough and primitive nature, this truth is even more applicable. An uncultivated mind is easily touched with dreams.

There is a certain degree of passion by which every man becomes wrapped in a celestial light. With a rough and primitive nature, this truth is even more applicable.

An uncultivated mind is easily touched with dreams.

Delight is a fullness which overflows like any other. To see those windows was almost too much happiness for Gilliatt.

There is a certain degree of passion by which every man becomes wrapped in a celestial light. With a rough and primitive nature, this truth is even more applicable. An uncultivated mind is easily touched with dreams.

Delight is a fullness which overflows like any other.

To see those windows was almost too much happiness for Gilliatt.

He would not have conceived for a moment the audacity of thinking even so far.

Touching in idea is almost like touching with the hand.

Love was with Gilliatt like honey to the bear. He thought confusedly; he knew not what possessed him. The nightingale still sang. He felt as if about to breathe his life out.

He would not have conceived for a moment the audacity of thinking even so far. Touching in idea is almost like touching with the hand.

Love was with Gilliatt like honey to the bear.

He thought confusedly; he knew not what possessed him. The nightingale still sang. He felt as if about to breathe his life out.

Lethierry ran towards him, or rather flung himself upon him; seized his hand between his own, and looked him in the face for a moment, silent.

It was the silence of an explosion struggling to find an issue.

Then pulling and shaking him with violence, and squeezing him in his arms, he compelled him to enter the lower room of the Bravées, pushed back with his heel the door which had remained half opened, sat down, or sank into a chair beside a …

Between the faces of two worthy old women appeared that of Sieur Landoys, who had the good fortune always to find himself where he would have regretted to have been absent.

Men feel a satisfaction in having witnesses of their joys.

The sort of scattered support which a crowd presents pleases them at such times; their delight draws new life from it. Mess Lethierry suddenly perceived that there were persons about him; and he welcomed the audience at once.

conscience has one logic, fate another; and neither coincide. Nothing is foreseen. We live confusedly, and from hand to mouth. Conscience is the straight line, life is the whirlwind, which creates above man’s head either black chaos or the blue sky.

Fate does not practise the art of gradations.

Her wheel turns sometimes so fast that we can scarcely distinguish the interval between one revolution and another, or the link between yesterday and today.

Caudray was a believer whose faith did not exclude reason, and whose priestly training did not shut him out from passion. Those religious systems which impose celibacy on the priesthood are not without reason for it.

Nothing really destroys the individuality of the priest more than love.

All sorts of clouds seemed to darken Caudray’s soul. He looked too long into Déruchette’s eyes. These two beings worshipped each other.

Life seems a perpetual succession of events, to which man submits. We never know from which direction the sudden blow will come. Misery and happiness enter or make their exit, like unexpected guests. Their laws, their orbit, their principle of gravitation, are beyond man’s grasp.

Virtue conducts not to happiness, nor crime to retribution: conscience has one logic, fate another; and neither coincide.

Nothing is foreseen. We live confusedly, and from hand to mouth. Conscience is the straight line, life is the whirlwind, which creates above man’s head either black chaos or the blue sky. Fate does not practise the art of gradations.

Their laws, their orbit, their principle of gravitation, are beyond man’s grasp. Virtue conducts not to happiness, nor crime to retribution: conscience has one logic, fate another; and neither coincide. Nothing is foreseen. We live confusedly, and from hand to mouth.

Conscience is the straight line, life is the whirlwind, which creates above man’s head either black chaos or the blue sky.

Fate does not practise the art of gradations. Her wheel turns sometimes so fast that we can scarcely distinguish the interval between one revolution and another, or the link between yesterday and today.

Do not go. What will become of me? I tell you I shall die. You will be far off when I shall be in my grave. Oh! my heart will break. I am very wretched; yet my uncle is not unkind.”

It was the first time in her life that Déruchette had ever said “my uncle.” Until then she had always said “my father.”

Caudray stepped back, and made a sign to the boatman. Déruchette heard the sound of the boat-hook among the shingle, and the step of the man on the gunwale of the boat.