Victor Hugo's third great romance, "The Toilers of the Sea"
("Les Travailleurs de la Mer"), published in 1866, was written
during his exile in Guernsey. Of all Hugo's romances, both in
prose and in verse, none surpasses this for sheer splendour of
imagination and diction, for eloquence and sublimity of truth.
It is, in short, an idyll of passion, adventure, and
self-sacrifice. The description of the moods and mysteries of
the sea is well-nigh incomparable; and not even in the whole
of Hugo's works can there be found anything more vivid than
Gilliatt's battle with the devil-fish. The scene of the story
is laid in the Channel Islands, and the book itself is
dedicated to the "Isle of Guernsey, severe yet gentle, my
present asylum, my probable tomb." The story was immensely
successful on its appearance, and was at once translated into
several European languages.
_I.--A Lonely Man_
A Guernseyman named Gilliatt, who was avoided by his neighbours on
account of lonely habits, and a certain love of nature which the
suspicious people regarded as indicating some connection with the devil,
was one day returning on a rising tide from his fishing, when he fancied
he saw in a certain projection of the cliff a shadow of a man.
The place probably attracted Gilliatt's gaze because it was a favourite
sojourn of his--a natural seat cut in the great cliffs, and affording a
magnificent view of the sea. It was a place to which some uninitiated
traveller would climb with delight from the shore and sit entranced by
the scene before him, all oblivious of the rising ocean till he was
completely cut off from escape. No shout would reach the ear of man from
that desolate giant's chair in the rock.
Gilliatt steered his ship nearer to the cliff, and saw that the shadow
was a man. The sea was already high. The rock was encircled. Gilliatt
drew nearer. The man was asleep.
He was attired in black, and looked like a priest. Gilliatt had never
seen him before. The fisherman wore off, skirted the rock wall, and,
approaching so close to the dangerous cliff that by standing on the
gunwale of his sloop he could touch the foot of the sleeper, succeeded
in arousing him.