Les Misérables, page 29
CHAPTER VIII--BILLOWS AND SHADOWS
A man overboard!
What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombreship has a path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.
The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to thesurface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. Thevessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its ownworkings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man;his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. Hegives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre isthat retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It retreats,it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just now, he wasone of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the rest, he hadhis part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man. Now, what hastaken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an end.
He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what fleesand crumbles. The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass himhideously; the tossings of the abyss bear him away; all the tongues ofwater dash over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confusedopenings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpsesof precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations seizehim, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that he isbecoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss himfrom one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly oceanattacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his agony.It seems as though all that water were hate.
Nevertheless, he struggles.
He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makesan effort; he swims. He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly,combats the inexhaustible.
Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows ofthe horizon.
The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his eyesand beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid hisdeath-pangs, the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by thismadness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyondthe limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful regionbeyond.
There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above humandistresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float,and he, he rattles in the death agony.
He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky,at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.
Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength isexhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, hasvanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, hestiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrousbillows of the invisible; he shouts.
There are no more men. Where is God?
He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.
Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.
He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they aredeaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only theinfinite.
Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult,the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue.Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomyadventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless coldparalyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and graspnothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What isto be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses thealternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandonshis grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depthsof engulfment.
Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and ofsouls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip!Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!
The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws flingtheir condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.
The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shallresuscitate it?
