The Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo

Their divine right is now under water: such is sometimes the fate of divine rights.

On Guernsey, in October 1863, a girl was sentenced to six weeks in prison “for annoying her father.”

The configuration of an island changes over time. An island is a construction by the ocean. Matter is eternal; not its aspect. Everything on earth is being perpetually moulded by death: even extra-human monuments, even granite. Everything changes shape, even the shapeless. Edifices built by the sea crumble like any other. The sea, which has built them up, also demolishes them. In fifteen hundred

Of all the teeth of time the one that works hardest is man’s pickax. Man is a rodent. Everything is modified or changed at his hand, either for the better or for the worse.

Serenity is internal. Our perpetual spring is within us.

The dream world is the aquarium of night. So, at least, thought Gilliatt.

His fear of what was probable was tempered by his instinct for what was possible.

This good old hero of the sea had brought back some surprising tales from his voyages. In Madagascar he had seen birds’ feathers so large that only three were needed to roof a house. In India he

This is the open sea. The water here is very deep. A completely isolated rock like the Douvres attracts and provides a home for creatures that shun the haunts of men. It is like a huge madrepore, a submarine bank of coral. It is a labyrinth engulfed by the sea. Here, at a depth that divers can barely reach, are hidden caves and caverns and dens, a network of dark passageways in which monstrous creatures pullulate. They devour each other: the crabs eat the fish and are themselves eaten. In this dark world roam fearful living shapes, created to be unseen by the human eye. Vague forms of mouths, antennae, tentacles, gaping jaws, scales, claws, and pincers float and quiver in the water, grow larger, decompose, and disappear in the sinister transparency. Fearful swarms of sea creatures swim to and fro, prowling, doing what they have to do. It is a hive of hydras. This is horror in its ideal form. Imagine, if you can, a teeming mass of holothurians. To see the inmost depths of the sea is to see the imagination of the Unknown, and to see it from its most terrible side. This abyss has a likeness to night. Here, too, there is a form of sleep, of apparent sleep at least: the sleep of the consciousness of created things. Here are committed, with no fear of retribution, the crimes of the irresponsible. Here, in a fearful peace, rude forms of life—almost phantoms, but wholly demons—go about the dread business of this dark world.

The sea, in conjunction with the wind, is a composite of forces. A ship is a composite of mechanisms. The sea’s forces are mechanisms of infinite power; the ship’s mechanisms are forces of limited power. Between these two organisms, one inexhaustible, the other intelligent, takes place the combat that is called navigation.

no one is drunk in a shipwreck.