The Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo

All Gilliatt’s efforts seemed to be concentrated on the impossible. Success was meager or slow in coming, and much effort was required to obtain very little result. This was what showed his greatness of spirit; this was what was so poignant about his situation. That so much preparation, so much work, so much fumbling effort, so many nights of uncomfortable sleep, so many days of labor had been necessary to rig up four beams over the wreck of a ship, to cut up and set aside all that was worth saving in the ship, and to suspend this wreck within a wreck from four hoists with their cables: this was the terrible thing about his solitary labor. Fatality in the cause; necessity in the effect. Gilliatt had not only accepted this: he had wanted it. Fearful of a competitor, since a competitor might have been a rival, he had not sought any assistant. The whole crushing enterprise, the risk, the danger, the toil that was daily increasing, the possibility that the salvager might be engulfed in his salvage, the hunger, the fever, the nakedness, the distress—in his egotism he had chosen all these things for himself. It was as if he were in a terrifying bell-glass from which the air was being withdrawn. His vitality was gradually leaving him, though he was barely aware of this. The exhaustion of a man’s strength does not exhaust his will. To believe in something is only the second power; to will something is the first. The proverbial mountains that can be moved by faith are nothing compa...