BOOK
The Toilers of The Sea

The Toilers of The Sea

Victor Hugo

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Contents

I   FIRST PART SIEUR CLUBIN
1  THE HISTORY OF A BAD REPUTATION.
    1.1  A WORD WRITTEN ON A WHITE PAGE.
    1.2  THE BU DE LA RUE.
    1.3  FOR YOUR WIFE: WHEN YOU MARRY.
    1.4  AN UNPOPULAR MAN.
    1.5  MORE SUSPICIOUS FACTS ABOUT GILLIATT.
    1.6  THE DUTCH SLOOP.
    1.7  A FIT TENANT FOR A HAUNTED HOUSE
    1.8  THE GILD-HOLM-'UR SEAT.
2  MESS LETHIERRY.
    2.1  A TROUBLED LIFE, BUT A QUIET CONSCIENCE.
    2.2  A CERTAIN PREDILECTION.
    2.3  MESS LETHIERRY'S VULNERABLE PART.
3  DURANDE AND DERUCHETTE.
    3.1  PRATTLE AND SMOKE.
    3.2  THE OLD STORY OF UTOPIA.
    3.3  RANTAINE.
    3.4  CONTINUATION OF THE STORY OF UTOPIA.
    3.5  THE "DEVIL BOAT"
    3.6  LETHIERRY'S EXALTATION.
    3.7  THE SAME GODFATHER AND THE SAME PATRON SAINT.
    3.8  "BONNIE DUNDEE."
    3.9  THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED RANTAINE'S CHARACTER.
    3.10  LONG YARNS.
    3.11  MATRIMONIAL PROSPECTS.
    3.12  AN ANOMALY IN THE CHARACTER OF LETHIERRY.
    3.13  THOUGHTLESSNESS ADDS A GRACE TO BEAUTY.
4  THE BAGPIPE.
    4.1  STREAKS OF FIRE IN THE HORIZON.
    4.2  THE UNKNOWN UNFOLDS ITSELF BY DEGREES.
    4.3  THE AIR "BONNIE DUNDEE" FINDS AN ECHO ON THE HILL.
    4.4  "A serenade by night may please a lady fair
But of uncle and of guardian let the troubadour beware.
                Unpublished Comedy
    4.5  A DESERVED SUCCESS HAS ALWAYS ITS DETRACTORS.
    4.6  THE SLOOP "CASHMERE" SAVES A SHIPWRECKED CREW.
    4.7  HOW AN IDLER HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE TO BE SEEN BY A FISHERMAN.
5  THE REVOLVER
    5.1  CONVERSATIONS AT THE JEAN AUBERGE.
    5.2  CLUBIN OBSERVES SOME ONE.
    5.3  CLUBIN CARRIES AWAY SOMETHING AND BRINGS BACK NOTHING.
    5.4  PLEINMONT.
    5.5  THE BIRDS'-NESTERS
    5.6  THE JACRESSADE.
    5.7  NOCTURNAL BUYERS AND MYSTERIOUS SELLERS.
    5.8  A "CANNON" OFF THE RED BALL AND THE BLACK.
    5.9  USEFUL INFORMATION FOR PERSONS WHO EXPECT OR FEAR THE ARRIVAL OF LETTERS FROM BEYOND SEA.
6  THE DRUNKEN STEERSMAN AND THE SOBER CAPTAIN.
    6.1  THE DOUVRES.
    6.2  AN UNEXPECTED FLASK OF BRANDY.
    6.3  CONVERSATIONS INTERRUPTED.
    6.4  CAPTAIN CLUBIN DISPLAYS ALL HIS GREAT QUALITIES.
    6.5  CLUBIN REACHES THE CROWNING-POINT OF GLORY.
    6.6  THE INTERIOR OF AN ABYSS SUDDENLY REVEALED.
    6.7  AN UNEXPECTED DENOUEMENT.
7  THE DANGER OF OPENING A BOOK AT RANDOM.
    7.1  THE PEARL AT THE FOOT OF A PRECIPICE.
    7.2  MUCH ASTONISHMENT ON THE WESTERN COAST.
    7.3  A QUOTATION FROM THE BIBLE.
II   SECOND PART
1  MALICIOUS GILLIATT.
    1.1  THE PLACE WHICH IS EASY TO REACH, BUT DIFFICULT TO LEAVE AGAIN.
    1.2  A CATALOGUE OF DISASTERS.
    1.3  SOUND, BUT NOT SAFE.
    1.4  A PRELIMINARY SURVEY.
    1.5  A WORD UPON THE SECRET CO-OPERATIONS OF THE ELEMENTS.
    1.6  A STABLE FOR THE HORSE.
    1.7  A CHAMBER FOR THE VOYAGER.
    1.8  IMPORTUNAEQUE VOLUCRES.
    1.9  THE ROCK, AND HOW GILLIATT USED IT.
    1.10  THE FORGE.
    1.11  DISCOVERY.
    1.12  THE INTERIOR OF AN EDIFICE UNDER THE SEA.
    1.13  WHAT WAS SEEN THERE, AND WHAT PERCEIVED DIMLY.
2  THE LABOUR.
    2.1  THE RESOURCES OF ONE WHO HAS NOTHING
    2.2  PREPARATIONS.
    2.3  GILLIATT'S MASTERPIECE COMES TO THE RESCUE OF LETHIERRY.
    2.4  SUB RE.
    2.5  SUB UMBRA.
    2.6  GILLIATT PLACES THE SLOOP IN READINESS
    2.7  SUDDEN DANGER.
    2.8  MOVEMENT RATHER THAN PROGRESS.
    2.9  A SLIP BETWEEN CUP AND LIP
    2.10  SEA-WARNINGS.
    2.11  MURMURS IN THE AIR.
3  THE STRUGGLE.
    3.1  EXTREMES MEET.
    3.2  THE OCEAN WINDS.
    3.3  THE NOISES EXPLAINED.
    3.4  TURBA TURMA.
    3.5  GILLIATT'S ALTERNATIVES.
    3.6  THE COMBAT.
4  PITFALLS IN THE WAY.
    4.1  HE WHO IS HUNGRY IS NOT ALONE.
    4.2  THE MONSTER.
    4.3  ANOTHER KIND OF SEA-COMBAT.
    4.4  NOTHING IS HIDDEN, NOTHING LOST.
    4.5  THE FATAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SIX INCHES AND TWO FEET.
    4.6  DE PROFUNDIS AD ALTUM.
    4.7  THE APPEAL IS HEARD.
III   THIRD PART
1  NIGHT AND THE MOON.
    1.1  THE HARBOUR CLOCK.
    1.2  THE HARBOUR BELL AGAIN.
2  GRATITUDE AND DESPOTISM.
    2.1  JOY SURROUNDED BY TORTURES.
    2.2  THE LEATHERN TRUNK.
3  THE DEPARTURE OF THE CASHMERE
    3.1  THE HAVELET NEAR THE CHURCH.
    3.2  DESPAIR CONFRONTS DESPAIR.
    3.3  THE FORETHOUGHT OF SELF-SACRIFICE
    3.4  "FOR YOUR WIFE WHEN YOU MARRY."
    3.5  THE GREAT TOMB.

Book 1
Preface

"Religion, society, nature: these are the three struggles of man. These three conflicts are, at the same time, his three needs: it is necessary for him to believe, hence the temple; it is necessary for him to create, hence the city; it is necessary for him to live, hence the plow and the ship. But these three solutions contain three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life springs from all three. Man has to deal with obstacles under the form of superstition, under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple ananke1 weighs upon us: the ananke of dogmas, the ananke of laws, the ananke of things. In Notre-Dame de Paris the author has denounced the first; in Les Miserables he has pointed out the second; in this book he indicates the third.
With these three fatalities which envelop man is mingled the interior fatality, that supreme ananke the human heart."

Part 1
FIRST PART SIEUR CLUBIN


Book 2
THE HISTORY OF A BAD REPUTATION.

 

2.1  A WORD WRITTEN ON A WHITE PAGE.

CHRISTMAS DAY in the year 182- was somewhat remarkable in the island of Guernsey. Snow fell on that day. In the Channel Islands a frosty winter is uncommon, and a fall of snow is an event.
On that Christmas morning the road which skirts the seashore from St. Peter's Port to the Vale was clothed in white. From midnight till the break of day the snow had been falling. Towards nine o'clock, a little after the rising of the wintry sun, as it was too early yet for the Church of England folks to go to St. Sampson's, or for the Wesleyans to repair to Eldad Chapel, the road was almost deserted. Throughout that portion of the highway which separates the first from the second tower only three foot-passengers could be seen. These were a child, a man, and a woman. Walking at a distance from each other, these wayfarers had no visible connection. The child, a boy of about eight years old, had stopped, and was looking curiously at the wintry scene. The man walked behind the woman at a distance of about a hundred paces. Like her, he was coming from the direction of the church of St. Sampson. The appearance of the man, who was still young, was something between that of a workman and a sailor. He wore his working-day clothesa kind Of Guernsey shirt of coarse brown stuff, and trousers partly concealed by tarpaulin leggings-a costume which seemed to indicate that, notwithstanding the holy day, he was going to no place of worship. His heavy shoes of rough leather, with their soles covered with large nails, left upon the snow as he walked a print more like that of a prison lock than the foot of a man. The woman, on the contrary, was evidently dressed for church. She wore a large mantle of black silk, wadded, under which she had coquettishly adjusted a dress of Irish poplin, trimmed alternately with white and pink; but for her red stockings, she might have been taken for a Parisian. She walked on with a light and free step, so little suggestive of the burden of life that it might easily be seen that she was young. Her movements possessed that subtle grace which indicates the most delicate of all transitionsthat soft intermingling, as it were, of two twilightsthe passage from the condition of a child to that of womanhood. The man seemed to take no heed of her.
Suddenly, near a group of oaks at the corner of a field, and at the spot called the Basses Maisons, she turned, and the movement seemed to attract the attention of the man. She stopped, seemed to reflect a moment, then stooped, and the man fancied that he could discern that she was tracing with her finger some letters in the snow. Then she rose again, went on her way at a quicker pace, turned once more, this time smiling, and disappeared to the left of the roadway by the footpath under the hedges which leads to the Ivy Castle. When she had turned for the second time the man had recognised her as Deruchette, a charming girl of that neighbourhood.
The man felt no need of quickening his pace, and some minutes later he found himself near the group of oaks. Already he had ceased to think of the vanished Deruchette, and if at that moment a porpoise had appeared above the water, or a robin had caught his eye in the hedges, it is probable that he would have passed on his way. But it happened that his eyes were fixed upon the ground; his gaze fell mechanically upon the spot where the girl had stopped. Two little footprints were there plainly visible; and beside them he read this word, evidently written by her in the snow,
"GILLIATT."
It was his own name.
He lingered for a while motionless, looking at the letters, the little footprints, and the snow; and then walked on, evidently in a thoughtful mood.
 

2.2  THE BU DE LA RUE.

GILLIATT lived in the parish of St. Sampson. He was not liked by his neighbours; and there were reasons for that fact.
To begin with, he lived in a queer kind of "haunted" dwelling. In the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, sometimes in the country, but often in streets with many inhabitants, you will come upon a house the entrance to which is completely barricaded. Holly bushes obstruct the doorway, hideous boards, with nails, conceal the windows below; while the casements of the upper stories are neither closed nor open, for all the window-frames are barred, but the glass is broken. If there is a little yard, grass grows between its stones, and the parapet of its way is crumbling away. If there is a garden, it is choked with nettles, brambles, and hemlock, and strange insects abound in it. The chimneys are cracked, the roof is falling in; so much as can be seen from without of the rooms presents a dismantled appearance. The woodwork is rotten, the stone mildewed. The paper of the walls has dropped away and hang loose, until it presents a history of the bygone fashions of paper-hangingsthe scrawling patterns of the time of the Empire, the crescent-shaped draperies of the Directory, the balustrades and pillars of the days of Louis XVI. 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.
The rural and maritime populations are easily moved with notions of the active agency of the powers of evil. Among the Channel Isles, and on the neighbouring coast of France, the ideas of the people on this subject are deeply rooted. 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 othera 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, grand-master of the ceremonies. Nybbas is the court fool; Wierus, a savant, a good strygologue, and a man of much learning in demonology, calls Nybbas the great parodist.
The Norman fishermen who frequent the Channel have many precautions to take at sea, by reason of the illusions with which Satan environs them. It has long been an article of popular faith that Saint Maclou inhabited the great square rock called Ortach, in the sea between Aurigny and the Casquiets; and many old sailors used to declare that they had often seen him there, seated and reading a book. Accordingly the sailors, as they passed, were in the habit of kneeling many times before the Ortach rock, until the day when the fable was destroyed, and the truth took its place. For it has been discovered, and is now well established, that the lonely inhabitant Of the rock is not a saint, but a devil. This evil spirit, whose name is Jochmus, had the impudence to pass himself of; for many centuries as Saint Maclou. Even the Church herself is not proof against snares of this kind. The demons Ragubel, Oribel, and Tobiel were regarded as saints until the year 745, when Pope Zachary, having at length exposed them, turned them out of saintly company. This sort of weeding of the saintly calendar is certainly very useful; but it can only be practiced by very accomplished judges of devils and their ways.
The old inhabitants of these parts relatethough all this refers to bygone timesthat the Catholic population of the Norman Archipelago was once, though quite involuntarily, even in more intimate correspondence with the powers of darkness than the Huguenots themselves. How this happened, however, we do not pretend to say; but it is certain that the people suffered considerable annoyance from this cause. It appears that Satan had taken a fancy to the Catholics, and sought their company a good deala circumstance which has given rise to the belief that the devil is more Catholic than Protestant. One of his most insufferable familiarities consisted in paying nocturnal visits to married Catholics in bed, just at the moment when the husband had fallen fast asleep and the wife had begun to doze: a fruitful source of domestic trouble. Patouillet was of opinion that a faithful biography of Voltaire ought not to be without some allusion to this practice of the evil one. The truth of all this is perfectly well known, and described in the forms of excommunication in the rubric de erroribus nocturnis et de semine diabolorum. The practice was raging particularly at St. Helier's towards the end of the last century, probably as a punishment for the Revolution; for the evil consequences of revolutionary excesses are incalculable. However this may have been, it is certain that this possibility of a visit from the demon at night, when it is impossible to see distinctly, or even in slumber, caused much embarrassment among orthodox dames. The idea of giving to the world a Voltaire was by no means a pleasant one. One of these, in some anxiety, consulted her confessor on this extremely difficult subject, and the best mode for timely discovery of the cheat. The confessor replied, "In order to be sure that it is your husband by your side, and not a demon, place your hand upon his head. If you find horns, you may be sure there is something wrong." But this test was far from satisfactory to the worthy dame.
Gilliatt's house had been haunted, but it was no longer in that condition; it was for that reason, however, only regarded with more suspicion. No one learned in demonology can be unaware of the fact that when a sorcerer has installed himself in a haunted dwelling, the devil considers the house sufficiently occupied, and is polite enough to abstain from visiting there, unless called in, like the doctor, on some special occasion.
This house was known by the name of the Bu de la Rue. It was situated at the extremity of a little promontory, rather of rock than of land, forming a small harbourage apart in the creek of Houmet Paradis. The water at this spot is deep. The house stood quite alone upon the point, almost separated from the island, and with just sufficient ground about it for a small garden, which was sometimes inundated by the high tides. Between the port of St. Sampson and the creek of Houmet Paradis rises a steep hill, surmounted by the block of towers covered with ivy, and known as Vale Castle, or the Chateau de l'Archange; so that, at St. Sampson, the Bu de la Rue was shut out from sight.
Nothing is commoner than sorcerers in Guernsey. They exercise their profession in certain parishes, in profound indifference to the enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Some of their practices are downright criminal. They set gold boiling, they gather herbs at midnight, they cast sinister looks upon the people's cattle. When the people consult them they send for bottles containing "water of the sick," and they are heard to mutter mysteriously, "the water has a sad look." In March 1857 one of them discovered, in water of this kind, seven demons. They are universally feared. Another only lately bewitched a baker "as well as his oven." Another had the diabolical wickedness to wafer and seal up envelopes "containing nothing inside." Another went so far as to have on a shell' three bottles labelled "B." These monstrous facts are well authenticated. Some of these sorcerers are obliging, and for two or three guineas will take on them selves the complaint from which you are suffering. Then they are seen to roll upon their beds, and to groan with pain; and while they are in these agonies the believer exclaims, "There! I am well again." Others cure all kinds of diseases by merely tying a handkerchief round their patients' loins, a remedy so simple that it is astonishing that no one had yet thought of it. In the last century the Cour Royale of Guernsey bound such folks upon a heap of faggots and burnt them alive. In these days it condemns them to eight weeks' imprisonment; four weeks on bread and water, and the remainder of the term in solitary confinement. Amant alterna catenae.
The last instance of burning sorcerers in Guernsey took place in 1747. The city authorities devoted one of its squares, the Carrefour du Bordage, to that ceremony. Between 1565 and 1700 eleven sorcerers thus suffered at this spot. As a rule the criminals made confession of their guilt. The Carrefour du Bordage has indeed rendered many other services to society and religion. It was here that heretics were brought to the stake. Under Queen Mary, among other Huguenots burnt here, were a mother and two daughters. The name of this mother was Perrotine Massy. One of the daughters was enceinte, and was delivered of a child even in the midst of the flames. As the old chronicle expresses it, "Son ventre eclata." The new-born infant rolled out of the fiery furnace. A man named House took it in his arms; but Helier Gosselin the bailli, like a good Catholic as he was, sternly commanded the little child to be cast again into the fire.
 

2.3  FOR YOUR WIFE: WHEN YOU MARRY.

WE must return to Gilliatt.
The country people told how, towards the close of the great Revolution, a woman, bringing with her a little child, came to live in Guernsey. She was an Englishwoman; at least, she was not French. She had a name which the Guernsey pronunciation and the country folks' bad spelling had finally converted into "Gilliatt." She lived alone with the child, which, according to some, was a nephew; according to others, a son; according to others, again, a strange child whom she was protecting. She had some means; enough to struggle on in a poor way. She had purchased a small plot of ground at La Sergentee, and another at La Roque Crespel, near Rocquaine. The house of the Bu de la Rue was haunted at this period. For more than thirty years no one had inhabited it. It was falling into ruins. The garden, so often invaded by the sea, could produce nothing. Besides noises and lights seen there at night-time, the house had this mysterious peculiarity: any one who should leave there in the evening, upon the mantelpiece, a ball of worsted, a few needles, and a plate filled with soup, would assuredly find in the morning the soup consumed, the plate empty, and a pair of mittens ready knitted. The house, demon included, was offered for sale for a few pounds sterling. The stranger woman became the purchaser, evidently tempted by the devil, or by the advantageous bargain.
She did more than purchase the house; she took up her abode there with the child; and from that moment peace reigned within its walls. The Bu 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.
The woman cultivated some acres of land which belonged to her. She had a good cow, of the sort which produces yellow butter. She gathered her white beans. cauliflowers, and "Golden drop" potatoes. She sold, like other people, her parsnips by the tonneau, her onions by the hundred, and her beans by the denerel. She did not go herself to market, but disposed of her crops through the agency of Guilbert Falliot at the sign of the Abreveurs of St. Sampson. The register of Falliot bears evidence that Falliot sold for her, on one occasion, as much as twelve bushels of rare early potatoes.
The house had been meanly repaired, but sufficiently to make it habitable. It was only in very bad weather that the raindrops found their way through the ceilings of the rooms. The interior consisted of a ground-floor suite of rooms, and a granary overhead. The ground-floor was divided into three rooms: two for sleeping, and one for meals. A ladder connected it with the granary above. The woman attended to the kitchen and taught the child to read. She did not go to church or chapel, which, all things considered, led to the conclusion that she must be French not to go to a place of worship. The circumstance was grave. In short, the newcomers were a puzzle to the neighbourhood.
That the woman was French seemed probable. Volcanoes cast forth stones, and revolutions men, so families are removed to distant places; human beings come to pass their lives far from their native homes; groups of relatives and friends disperse and decay; strange people fall, as it were, from the cloudssome in Germany, some in England, some in America. The people of the country view them with surprise and curiosity. Whence come these strange faces? Yonder mountain, smoking with revolutionary fires, casts them out. These barren aerolites, these famished and ruined people, these footballs of destiny, are known as refugees, emigres, adventurers. If they sojourn among strangers, they are tolerated; if they depart, there is a feeling of relief. Sometimes these wanderers are harmless, inoffensive people, strangersat least, as regards the womento the events which have led to their exile, objects of persecution, helpless and astonished at their fate. They take root again somewhere as they can. They have done no harm to any one, 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 strange woman whom the Guernsey folks called "Gilliatt" was possibly one of these human strays.
The woman grew older; the child became a youth. They lived alone and avoided by all; but they were sufficient for each other. Louve et louveteau se pourlechent. This was another of the generous proverbs which the neighbourhood applied to them. Meanwhile, the youth grew to manhood; and then, as the old and withered bark falls from the tree, the mother died. She left to her son the little field of Sergentee, the small property called La Roque Crespel, and the house known as the Bu de la Rue; with the addition, as the official inventory said, of "one hundred guineas in gold in the pid d'une cauchethat is to say, in the foot of a stocking." The house was already sufficiently furnished with two oaken chests, two beds, six chairs, and a table, besides necessary household utensils. Upon a shelf were some books, and in the corner a trunk, by no means of a mysterious character, which had to be opened for the inventory. This trunk was of drab leather, ornamented with brass nails and little stars of white metal, and it contained a bride's outfit, new and complete, of beautiful Dunkirk linenchemises and petticoats, and some silk dresseswith a paper on which was written, in the handwriting of the deceased,
"For your wife: when you marry."
The loss of his mother was a terrible blow for the young man. His disposition had always been unsociable; he became now moody and sullen. The solitude around him was complete. Hitherto it had been mere isolation; now his life was a blank. While we have only one companion, life is endurable; left alone, it seems as if it is impossible to struggle on, and we fall back in the race, which is the first sign of despair. As time rolls on, however, we discover that duty is a series of compromises; we contemplate life, regard its end, and submit; but it is a submission which makes the heart bleed.
Gilliatt was young, and his wound healed with time. At that age sorrows cannot be lasting. His sadness, disappearing by slow degrees, seemed to mingle itself with the scenes around him, to draw him more and more towards the face of nature, and farther and farther from the need of social converse and, finally, to assimilate his spirit more completely to the solitude in which he lived.
 

2.4  AN UNPOPULAR MAN.

GILLIATT, as we have said, was not popular in the parish. Nothing could be more natural than that antipathy among his neighbours. 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; and then there were the big books which he kept upon a shelf, and read from time to time.
More reasons: why did he live that solitary life? The Bu de la Rue was a kind of lazaretto, in which Gilliatt was kept in a sort of moral quarantine. This, in the popular judgment, made it quite simple that people should be astonished at his isolation, and should hold him responsible for the solitude which society had made around his home.
He never went to chapel. He often went out at night-time. He held converse with sorcerers. He had been seen on one occasion sitting on the grass with an expression of astonishment on his features. 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. He had a bagpipe which he had bought from one of the Highland soldiers who are sometimes in Guernsey, and on which he played occasionally at twilight, on the rocks by the seashore. He had been seen to make strange gestures, like those of one sowing seeds. What kind of treatment could be expected for a man like that?
As regards the books left by the deceased woman, which he was in the habit of reading, the neighbours were particularly suspicious. The Reverend Jaquemin Herode, rector of St. Sampson, when he visited the house at the time of the woman's funeral, had read on the backs of these books the titles "Rosier's Dictionary," "Candide" by Voltaire, "Advice to the People on Health," by Tissot. A French noble, an emigre, who had retired to St. Sampson, remarked that this Tissot "must have been the Tissot who carried the head of the Princess de Lamballe upon a pike."
The reverend gentleman had also remarked upon one of these books the highly fantastic and terribly significant title, "De Rhubarbaro."
In justice to Gilliatt, however, it must be added that this volume being in Latina language which it is doubtful if he understoodthe 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.
The book in question, however, was no other than the Treatise of Doctor Tilingius upon the Rhubarb plant, published in Germany in 1679.
It was by no means certain that Gilliatt did not prepare philtres and unholy decoctions. He was undoubtedly in possession of certain phials.
Why did he walk abroad at evening, and sometimes even at midnight, on the cliffs? Evidently to hold converse with the evil spirits who, by night, frequent the seashores, enveloped in smoke.
On one occasion he had aided a witch at Torteval to clean her chaise: this was an old woman named Moutonne Gahy.
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. One day, to test this, and perhaps also as a step towards a correspondencefor there are base women who would marry a demon for the sale of richesa young girl of the neighbourhood said to Gilliatt, "When are you going to take a wife, neighbour? " He answered, "I will take a wife when the Roque qui Chante takes a husband."
This Roque qui Chante is a great stone, standing in a field near Mons. Lemezurier de Fry's. It is a stone of a highly suspicious character. No one knows what deeds are done around it. At times you may hear there a cock crowing when no cock is nearan extremely disagreeable circumstance. Then it is commonly asserted that this stone was originally placed in the field by the elfin people known as Sarregousets, who are the same as the Sins.
At night, when it thunders, if you should happen to see men flying in the lurid light of the clouds, or on the rolling waves of the air, these are no other than the Sarregousets. A woman who lives at the Grand Mielles knows them well. One evening, when some Sarregousets happened to be assembled at a cross-road, this woman cried out to a man with a cart, who did not know which route to take, "Ask them your way. They are civil folks, and always ready to direct a stranger." There can be little doubt that this woman was a sorceress.
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 Somrneilleuse, he was heard to ask,
"Is there a passage sufficient for me?"
And a voice cried from the heights above,
"Passage enough; steer boldly."
To whom could he have been speaking, if not to those who replied to him? This seems something like evidence.
Another time, one stormy evening, when it was so dark that nothing could be distinguished, Gilliatt was near the Catiau Roquea double row of rocks where witches, goats, and other diabolical creatures assemble and dance on Fridaysand here it is firmly believed that the voice of Gilliatt was heard mingling in the following terrible conversation:
"How is Vesin Brovard?" (This was a mason who had fallen from the roof of a house.)
"He is getting better."
"Ver dia! he fell from a greater height than that of yonder peak. It is delightful to think that he was not dashed to pieces."
"Our folks had a fine time for the seaweed-gathering last week."
"Ay, finer than to-day."
"I believe you. There will be little fish at the market to-day."
"It blows too hard."
"They can't lower their nets."
"How is Catherine?"
"She is charming."
Catherine was evidently the name of a Sarregouset.
According to all appearance, Gilliatt had business on hand at night; at least none doubted it.
Sometimes he was seen with a pitcher in his hand, pouring water on the ground. Now water, cast upon the ground, is known to make a shape like that of devils.
On the road to Saint Sampson, opposite the Martello tower, number 1, stand three stones, arranged in the form of steps. Upon the platform of those stones, now empty, stood anciently a cross, or perhaps a gallows. These stones are full of evil influences.
Staid and worthy people, and perfectly credible witnesses, testified to having seen Gilliatt at this spot conversing with a toad. Now there are no toads at Guernsey, the share of Guernsey in the reptiles of the Channel Isles consisting exclusively of the snakes. It is Jersey that has all the toads. This toad, then, must have swam from the neighbouring island, in order to hold converse with Gilliatt. The converse was of a friendly kind.
These facts were clearly established, and the proof is that the three stones are there to this day. Those who doubt it may go and see them; and at a little distance there is also a house on which the passer-by may read this inscription:
"DEALER IN CATTLE, ALIVE AND DEAD, OLD CORDAGE, IRON, BONES, AND TOBACCO FOR CHEWING. PROMPT PAYMENT FOR GOODS, AND EVERY ATTENTION GIVEN TO ORDERS."
A man must be sceptical indeed to contest the existence of those stones and of the house in question. Now both these circumstances were injurious to the reputation of Gilliatt.
Only the most ignorant are unaware of the fact that the greatest danger of the coasts of the Channel Islands is the King of the Auxcriniers. No inhabitant of the seas is more redoubtable. Whoever has seen him is certain to be wrecked between one St. Michel and the other. He is little, being in fact a dwarf; and is deaf, in his quality of king. He knows the names of all those who have been drowned in the seas, and the spots where they lie. He has a profound knowledge of that great graveyard which stretches far and wide beneath the waters of the ocean. A head, massive in the lower part and narrow in the forehead; a squat and corpulent figure; a skull, covered with warty excrescences; long legs, long arms, fins for feet, claws for hands, and a sea green countenancesuch are the chief characteristics of this king of the waves. His claws have palms like hands; his fins human nails. Imagine a spectral fish with the face of a human being. No power could check his career unless he could be exorcised, or mayhap fished up from the sea. Meanwhile he continues his sinister operations. Nothing is more unpleasant than an interview with this monster: amid the rolling waves and breakers, or in the thick of the mist, the sailor perceives sometimes a strange creature with a beetle brow, wide nostrils, flattened ears, an enormous mouth, gap-toothed jaws, peaked eyebrows, and great grinning eyes. When the lightning is livid, he appears red; when it is purple, he looks wan. He has a stiff, spreading beard, running with water, and overlapping a sort of pelerine, ornamented with fourteen shells, seven before and seven behind. These shells are curious to those who are learned in conchology. The King of the Auxcriniers is only seen in stormy seas. He is the terrible harbinger of the tempest. His hideous form traces itself in the fog, in the squall, in the tempest of rain. His breast is hideous. A coat of scales covers his sides like a vest. He rises above the waves which fly before the wind, twisting and curling like thin shavings of wood beneath the carpenter's plane. Then his entire form issues out of the foam, and if there should happen to be in the horizon any vessels in distress, pale in the twilight, or his face lighted up with a sinister smile, he dances, terrible and uncouth to behold. It is an evil omen indeed to meet him on a voyage.
At the period when the people of Saint Sampson were particularly excited on the subject of Gilliatt, the last persons who had seen the King of the Auxcriniers declared that his pelerine was now ornamented with only thirteen shells. Thirteen! He was only the more dangerous. But what had become of the fourteenth? Had he given it to some one? No one would say positively, and folks confined themselves to conjecture. But it was an undoubted fact that a certain Mons. Lupin Mabier of Godaines, a man of property, paying a good sum to the land tax, was ready to depose on oath that he had once seen in the hands of Gilliatt a very remarkable kind of shell.
It was not uncommon to hear dialogues like the following among the country people:
"I have a fine bull here, neighbour; what do you say?"
"Very fine, neighbour? "
"It is a fact, tho' 'tis I who say it; he is better though for tallow than for meat."
"Ver dia!"
"Are you sure that Gilliatt hasn't cast his eye upon it?"
Gilliatt would stop sometimes beside a field where some labourers were assembled, or near gardens in which gardeners were engaged, and would perhaps hear these mysterious words:
"When the mors du diable2 flourishes, reap the winter rye."
"The ash tree is coming out in leaf. There will be no more frost."
"Summer solstice, thistle in flower."
"If it rain not in June, the wheat will turn white. Look out for mildew."
"When the wild cherry appears, beware of the full moon."
"If the weather on the sixth day of the new moon is like that of the fourth or like that of the fifth day, it will be the same nine times out of twelve in the first case, and eleven times out of twelve in the second, during the whole month."
"Keep your eye on neighbours who go to law with you. Beware of malicious influences. A pig which has had warm milk given to it will die. A cow which has had its teeth rubbed with leeks will eat no more."
"Spawning time with the smelts; beware of fevers."
"When frogs begin to appear, sow your melons".
"When the liverwort flowers, sow your barley."
"When the limes are in bloom, mow the meadows."
"When the elm tree flowers, open the hot-bed frames.'
"When tobacco fields are in blossom, close your greenhouses."
And, fearful to relate, these occult precepts were not without truth. Those who put faith in them could vouch for the fact.
One night, in the month of June, when Gilliatt was playing upon his bagpipe, Upon the sand-hills on the shore of the Demie de Fontenelle, it had happened that the mackerel fishing had failed.
One evening, at low water, it came to pass that a cart filled with seaweed for manure overturned on the beach in front of Gilliatt's house. It is most probable that he was afraid of being brought before the magistrates, for he took considerable trouble in helping to raise the cart, and he filled it again himself.
A little neglected child of the neighbourhood being troubled with vermin, he had gone himself to St. Peter's Port, and had returned with an ointment, with which he rubbed the child's head. Thus Gilliatt had removed the pest from the poor child, which was an evidence that Gilliatt himself had originally given it; for everybody knows that there is a certain charm for giving vermin to people.
Gilliatt was suspected of looking into wellsa dangerous practice with those who have an evil eye; and, in fact, at Arculons, near St. Peter's Port, the water of a well became unwholesome. The good woman to whom this well belonged said to Gilliatt,
"Look here at this water," and she showed him a glassful. Gilliatt acknowledged it.
"The water is thick," he said, "that is true."
The good woman, who dreaded him in her heart, said, "Make it sweet again for me."
Gilliatt asked her some questions: whether she had a stable? whether the stable had a drain? whether the gutter of the drain did not pass near the well? The good woman replied, "Yes." Gilliatt went into the stable, worked at the drain, turned the gutter in another direction, and the water became pure again. People in the country round might think what they pleased. A well does not become foul one moment and sweet the next without good cause; the bottom of the affair was involved in obscurity; and, in short, it was difficult to escape the conclusion that Gilliatt himself had bewitched the water.
On one occasion, when he went to Jersey, it was remarked that he had taken a lodging in the street called the Rue des Alleurs. Now the word alleurs signifies spirits from the other world.
In villages it is the custom to gather together all these little hints and indications of a man's career; and when they are gathered together, the total constitutes his reputation among the inhabitants.
It happened that Gilliatt was once caught with blood issuing from his nose. The circumstance appeared grave. The master of a barque who had sailed almost entirely round the world affirmed that among the Tongusians all sorcerers were subject to bleeding at the nose. In fact. when you see a man in those parts bleeding at the nose, you know at once what is in the wind. Moderate reasoners, however, remarked that the characteristics of sorcerers among the Tongusians may possibly not apply in the same degree to the sorcerers of Guernsey.
In the environs of one of the St. Michels he had been seen to stop in a close belonging to the Huriaux, skirting the highway from the Videclins. He whistled in the field, and a moment afterwards a crow alighted there; a moment later, a magpie. The fact was attested by a worthy man who has since been appointed to the office of Douzenier of the Douzaine, as those are called who are authorised to make a new survey and register of the fief of the king.
At Hamel, in the Vingtaine of L'Epine, there lived some old women who were positive of having heard one morning a number of swallows distinctly calling "Gilliatt."
Add to all this that he was of a malicious temper.
One day a poor man was beating an ass. The ass was obstinate. The poor man gave him a few kicks in the belly with his wooden shoe, and the ass fell. Gilliatt ran to raise the unlucky beast; but he was dead. Upon this Gilliatt administered to the poor man a sound thrashing.
Another day, Gilliatt seeing a boy come down from a tree with a brood of little birds, newly hatched and unfledged, he took the brood away from the boy, and carried his malevolence so far as even to take them back and replace them in the tree.
Some passers-by took up the boy's complaint; but Gilliatt made no reply, except to point to the old birds, who were hovering and crying plaintively over the tree. as they looked for their nest. He had a weakness for birdsanother sign by which the people recognise a magician.
Children take a pleasure in robbing the nests of birds along the cliff. They bring home quantities of yellow, blue, and green eggs, with which they make rosaries for mantelpiece ornaments. As the cliffs are peaked, they sometimes slip and are killed. Nothing is prettier than shutters decorated with sea-birds' eggs. Gilliatt's mischievous ingenuity had no end. He would climb, at the peril of his own life, into the steep places of the sea rocks, and hang up bundles of hay, old hats, and all kinds of scarecrows, to deter the birds from building there' and, as a consequence, to prevent the children from visiting those spots.
These are some of the reasons why Gilliatt was disliked throughout the country. Perhaps nothing less could have been expected.
 

2.5  MORE SUSPICIOUS FACTS ABOUT GILLIATT.

PUBLIC opinion was not yet quite settled with regard to Gilliatt.
In general he was regarded as a Marcou; some went so far as to believe him to be a Cambion. A cambion is the child of a woman begotten by a devil.
When a woman bears to her husband seven male children consecutively, the seventh is a marcou. But the series must not be broken by the birth of any female child.
The marcou has a natural fleur-de-lis imprinted upon some part of his body, for which reason he has the power of curing scrofula, exactly the same as the king of France. Marcous are found in all parts of France, but particularly in the Orleanais. Every village of Gatinais has its marcou. It is sufficient for the cure of the sick that the marcou should breathe upon their wounds, or let them touch his fleur-de-lis. The night of Good Friday is particularly favourable to these Ceremonies. Ten years ago there lived, at Ormes in Gatinais, one of these creatures who was nicknamed the Beau Marcou, and consulted by all the country of Beauce! He was a cooper named Foulon, who kept a horse and vehicle. To put a stop to his miracles it was found necessary to call in the assistance of the gendarmes. His fleur-de-lis was on the left breast; other marcous have it in different parts.
There are marcous at Jersey, Auvigny, and at Guernsey. This fact is doubtless in some way connected with the rights possessed by France over Normandy, or why the fleur-de-lis?
There are also, in the Channel Islands, people afflicted with scrofula, which, of course, necessitates a due supply of these marcous.
Some people, who happened to be present one day when Gilliatt was bathing in the sea, had fancied that they could perceive upon him a fleur-de-lis. Interrogated on that subject he made no reply, but merely burst into laughter. From that time, however, no one ever saw him bathe: he bathed thenceforth only in perilous and solitary places, probably by moonlighta thing in itself somewhat suspicious.
Those who obstinately regarded him as a cambion, or son of the devil, were evidently in error. They ought to have known that cambions scarcely exist out of Germany. But The Vale and St. Sampson were, fifty years ago, places remarkable for the ignorance of their inhabitants.
To fancy that a resident of the island of Guernsey could be the son of a devil was evidently absurd.
Gilliatt, for the very reason that he caused disquietude among the people, was sought for and consulted. The peasants came in fear, to talk to him of their diseases. That fear itself had in it something of faith in his powers; for in the country the more the doctor is suspected of magic, the more certain is the cure. Gilliatt had certain remedies of his own, which he had inherited from the deceased woman. He communicated them to all who had need of them, and would never receive money for them. He cured whitlows with applications of herbs. A liquor in one of his phials allayed fever. The chemist of St. Sampson, or pharmacies, as they would call him in France thought that this was probably a decoction of Jesuits' bark. The more generous among his censors admitted that Gilliatt was not so bad a demon in his dealings with the sick so far as regarded his ordinary remedies. But in his character of a marcou he would do nothing. If persons afflicted with scrofula came to him to ask to touch the fleur-de-lis 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-Landes was clerk and registrar of St. Peter's Port, custodian of the documents, and keeper of the register of births, marriages and deaths. This Landoys was vain of his descent from Peter Landoys, treasurer of the province of Brittany, who was hanged in 1485. One day, when Sieur Landoys was bathing in the sea, he ventured to swim out too far, and was on the point of drowning. Gilliatt plunged into the water, narrowly escaping drowning himself, and succeeded in saving him. From that day Landoys never spoke an evil word of Gilliatt. To those who expressed surprise at this change he replied, "Why should I detest a man who never did me any harm, and who has rendered me a service?" The parish clerk and registrar even came at last to feel a sort of friendship for Gilliatt. This public functionary was a man without prejudices. He had no faith in sorcerers. He laughed at people who went in fear of ghostly visitors. For himself, he had a boat in which he amused himself by making fishing excursions in his leisure hours; but he had never seen anything extraordinary, unless it was on one occasiona woman clothed in white, who rose about the waters in the light of the moonand even of this circumstance he was not quite sure. Moutonne Gahy, the old witch of Torteval, had given him a little bag to be worn under the cravat, as a protection against evil spirits. He ridiculed the bag, and knew not what it contained, though, to be sure, he carried it about him, feeling more security with this charm hanging on his neck.
Some courageous persons emboldened by the example of Landoys, ventured to cite, in Gilliatt's favour, certain extenuating circumstances; 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, nor 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.
In any case, as a marcou, Gilliatt had it in his power to render great services. On a certain Good Friday, at midnight, a day and an hour propitious to this kind of cure, all the scrofulous people of the island, either by sudden inspiration or by concerted action, presented themselves in a crowd at the Bu la de Rue, and with pitiable sores and imploring gestures called on Gilliatt to make them clean. But he refused; and herein the people found another proof of his malevolence.
 

2.6  THE DUTCH SLOOP.

SUCH was the character of Gilliatt.
The young women considered him ugly.
Ugly he was not. He might, perhaps, have been called handsome. There was something in his profile of rude but antique grace. In repose it had some resemblance to that of a sculptured Dacian on the Trajan column. His ears were small delicate, without lobes, and of an admirable form for hearing. Between his eyes he had that proud vertical line which indicates in a man boldness and Perseverance. The corners of his mouth were depressed, giving a slight expression of bitterness. His forehead had a calm and noble roundness. The clear pupils of his eyes possessed a steadfast look, although troubled a little with that involuntary movement of the eyelids which fishermen contract from the glitter of the waves. 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. The people had nicknamed him "Malicious Gilliatt."
There is an Indian fable to the effect that one day the god Brahma inquired of the Spirit of Power, "Who is stronger than thee?" and the spirit replied, "Cunning." A Chinese proverb says, "What could not the lion do if he was the monkey also?" Gilliatt was neither the lion nor the monkey, but his actions gave some evidence of the truth of the Chinese proverb and of the Hindoo fable. Although only of ordinary height and strength, he was enabled, so inventive and powerful was his dexterity, to lift burdens that might have taxed a giant, and to accomplish feats which would have done credit to an athlete.
He had in him something of the power of the gymnast. He used, with equal address, his left hand and his right.
He never carried a gun, but was often seen with his net. He spared the birds, but not the fish. His knowledge and skill as a fisherman were, indeed, very considerable, 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. At other moments an indescribable air of penetration lighted up his face. Ancient Chaldea possessed some men of this stamp. At certain times the dullness of the shepherd mind became transparent, and revealed the inspired sage.
After all, he was but a poor man; uninstructed, save to the extent of reading and writing. It is probable that the condition of his mind was at that limit which separates the dreamer from the thinker. The thinker wills, the dreamer is a passive instrument. Solitude sinks deeply into pure natures, and modifies them in a certain degree. 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 an weathers, of navigating any sort of craft which came to hand, of venturing night and day in difficult channels, he had become, without taking count of: his other advantages, and merely in following his fancy and pleasure, a seaman of extraordinary skill.
He was a born pilot. The true pilot is the man who navigates the bed of the ocean even more than its surface. The waves of the sea are an external problem, continually modified by the submarine conditions of the waters in which the vessel is making her way. To see Gilliatt guiding his craft among the reefs and shallows of the Norman Archipelago, one might have fancied that he carried in his head a plan of the bottom of the sea. He was familiar with it all, and feared nothing.
He was better acquainted with the buoys in the channels than the cormorants who make them their resting-places. The almost imperceptible differences which distinguish the four upright buoys of the Creux, Alligande, the Tremies, and the Sardrette were perfectly visible and clear to him, even in misty weather. He hesitated neither at the oval, apple-headed buoy of Anfre, nor at the triple iron point of the Rousse, nor at the white ball of the Corbette, nor at the black ball of Longue Pierre; and there was no fear of his confounding the cross of Goubeau with the sword planted in earth at La Platte, nor the hammer-shaped buoy of the Barbees with the curled-tail buoy of the Moulinet.
His rare skill in seamanship showed itself in a striking: manner one day at Guernsey, on the occasion of one of those sea tournaments which are called regattas. The feat to be performed was to navigate alone a boat with four sails from St. Sampson to the Isle of Herm, at one league distance, and to bring the boat back from Herm to St. Sampson. To manage, without assistance, a boat with four sails is a feat which every fisherman is equal to, and the difficulty seemed little; but there was a condition which rendered it far from simple. The boat, to begin with, was one of those large and heavy sloops of bygone times which the sailors of the last century knew by the name of "Dutch Belly Boats." This ancient style of flat, pot-bellied craft, carrying on the larboard and starboard sides, in compensation for the want of a keel, two wings, which lowered themselves, sometimes the one, sometimes the other, according to the wind, may occasionally be met with still at sea. In the second place, there was the return from Herm, a journey which was rendered more difficult by a heavy ballasting of stones. The conditions were to go empty, but to return loaded. The sloop was the prize of the contest. It was dedicated beforehand to the winner. This "Dutch Belly Boat" had been employed as a pilot-boat. The pilot who had rigged and worked it for twenty years was the most robust of all the sailors of the Channel. When he died no one had been found capable of managing the sloop; and it was, in consequence, determined to make it the prize of the regatta. The sloop, though not decked, had some sea qualities, and was a tempting prize for a skilful sailor. Her mast was somewhat forward, which increased the motive-power of her sails, besides having the advantage of not being in the way of her pilot. It was a strong-built vessel, heavy, but roomy, and taking the open sea well; in fact, a good, serviceable craft. There was eager anxiety for the prize; the task was a rough one, but the reward of success was worth having. Seven or eight fishermen, among the most vigorous of the island, presented themselves. One by one they essayed, but not one could succeed in reaching Herm. The last one who tried his skill was known for having crossed, in a rowing-boat, the terrible narrow sea between Sark and Brecq-Hou. Sweating with his exertions, he brought back the sloop, and said, "It is impossible." Gilliatt then entered the bark. seized first of all the oar, then the mainsail, and pushed out to sea. Then, without either making fast the boom, which would have been imprudent, or letting it go, which kept the sail under his direction, and leaving the boom to move with the wind without drifting, he held the tiller with his left hand. In three-quarters of an hour he was at Herm. Three hours later, although a strong breeze had sprung up and was blowing across the roads, the sloop, guided by Gilliatt, returned. to St. Sampson, with its load of stones. 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 one hundred and sixty yearsa 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.
Seeing which, Mess Lethierry exclaimed, "There's bold sailor for you!"
And he held out his hand to Gilliatt.
We shall have occasion to speak again of Mess Lethierry. The sloop was awarded to Gilliatt.
This adventure detracted nothing from his evil reputation.
Several persons declared that the feat was not at all astonishing, for that Gilliatt had concealed in the boat a branch of wild medlar. But this could not be proved.
From that day forward Gilliatt navigated no boat except the old sloop. In this heavy craft he went on his fishing avocation. He kept it at anchor in the excellent little shelter which he had all to himself, under the very wall of his house of the Bu de la Rue. At nightfall he cast his nets over his shoulder, traversed his little garden, climbed over the parapet of dry stones, stepped lightly from rock to rock, and jumping into the sloop, pushed out to sea.
He brought home heavy takes of fish; but people said that his medlar branch was always hanging up in the boat. No one had ever seen this branch, but every one believed in its existence.
When he had more fish than he wanted, he did not sell it, butt gave it away.
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. No one could mend a broken wheel better than he could. He manufactured, in a fashion of his own, all the things which fishermen use. In a corner of the Bu de la Rue he had a small forge and an anvil; and the sloop having but one anchor, he had succeeded, without help, in making another. The anchor was excellent. The ring had the necessary strength; and Gilliatt, though entirely uninstructed in this branch of the smith's art, had found the exact dimensions of the stock for preventing the overbalancing of the fluke ends.
He had patiently replaced all the nails in the planks by rivets, which rendered rust in the holes, impossible.
In this way he had much improved the sea-going qualities of the sloop. He employed it sometimes when he took a fancy to spend a month or two in some solitary islet, like Chousey or the Casquets. People said, "Ay, ay! Gilliatt is away;" but this was a circumstance which nobody regretted.
 

2.7  A FIT TENANT FOR A HAUNTED HOUSE

GILLIATT was a man of dreams, hence his daring, hence also his timidity. He had ideas on many things which were peculiarly his own.
There was in his character, perhaps, something of the visionary and the transcendentalist. Hallucinations may haunt the poor peasant like Martin, no less than the king like Henry IV. There are times when the unknown reveals itself in a mysterious way to the spirit of roan. A sudden rent in the veil of darkness will make manifest things hitherto unseen, and then close again upon the mysteries within. Such visions have occasionally the power to effect a transfiguration in those whom they visit. They convert a poor camel-driver into a Mahomet; a peasant girl tending her goats into a Joan of Arc. Solitude generates a certain amount of sublime exaltation. It is like the smoke arising from the burning bush. A mysterious lucidity of mind results, which converts the student into a seer, and the poet into a prophet: herein we find a key to the mysteries of Horeb, Kedron, Ombos; to the intoxication of Castilian laurels, the revelations of the month Busion. Hence, too, we have Peleia at Dodona, Phernonoe at Delphos, Trophonius in Lebadea, Ezekiel on the Chebar, and Jerome in the Thetais.
More frequently this visionary state overwhelms and stupefies its victim. There is such a thing as a divine besottedness. The Hindoo fakir bears about with him the burden of his vision, as the Cretin his goitre. Luther holding converse with devils in his garret at Wittenburg, Pascal shutting out the view of the infernal regions with the screen of his cabinet, the African Obi conversing with the white-faced god Bossum, are each and all the same phenomenon, diversely interpreted by the minds in which they manifest themselves, according to their capacity and power. Luther and Pascal were grand, and are grand still; the Obi is simply a poor, half-witted creature.
Gilliatt was neither so exalted nor so low. He was a dreamer, nothing more.
Nature presented itself to him under a somewhat strange aspect.
Just as he had often found in the perfectly limpid water of the sea strange creatures of considerable size and of various shapes, of the Medusa genus, which out of the water bore a resemblance to soft crystal, and which, cast again into the sea, became lost to sight in that medium by reason of their identity in transparency and colour, so he imagined that other transparencies, similar to these almost invisible denizens of the ocean, might probably inhabit the air around us. 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. These aerial fish would, of course, be diaphanous; a provision of their wise Creator for our sakes as well as their own. Allowing the light to pass through their forms, casting no shadow, having no defined outline, they would necessarily remain unknown to us, and beyond the grasp of human sense. Gilliatt indulged in the wild fancy that if it were possible to exhaust the earth of its atmosphere, or if we could fish the air as we fish the depths of the sea, we should discover the existence of a multitude of strange animals. And then, he would add in his reverie, many things would be made clear.
Reverie, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier. The discovery of a new world, in the form of an atmosphere filled with, transparent creatures, would be the beginning of a knowledge of the vast unknown. But beyond opens up the illimitable domain of the possible, teeming with yet other beings, and characterised by other phenomena. All this would be nothing supernatural, but merely the occult continuation of the infinite variety of creation. In the midst of that laborious idleness, which was the chief feature in his existence, Gilliatt was singularly observant. He even carried his observations into the domain of sleep. Sleep has a close relation with the possible, which we call also the invraisemblable. The world of sleep has an existence of its own. Night-time, regarded as a separate sphere of creation, is a universe in itself. The material nature of man, upon which philosophers tell us that a column of air forty-five miles in height continually presses, is wearied out at night, sinks into lassitude, lies down, and finds repose. The eyes of the flesh are closed; but in that drooping head, less inactive than is supposed, other eyes are opened. The unknown reveals itself. The shadowy existences of the invisible world become more akin to man; whether it be that there is a real communication, or whether things far off in the unfathomable abyss are mysteriously brought nearer, it seems as if the impalpable creatures inhabiting space come then to contemplate our natures, curious to comprehend the denizens of the earth. Some phantom creation ascends or descends to walk beside us in the dim twilight: some existence altogether different from our own, composed partly of human consciousness, partly of something else, quits his fellows and returns again, after presenting himself for a moment to our inward sight; and the sleeper, not wholly slumbering, nor yet entirely conscious, beholds around him strange manifestations of lifepale spectres, terrible or smiling, dismal phantoms, uncouth masks, unknown faces, hydra-headed monsters, undefined shapes, reflections of moonlight where there is no moon, vague fragments of monstrous forms. 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.
So, at least, thought Gilliatt.
 

2.8  THE GILD-HOLM-'UR SEAT.

THE curious visitor, in these days, would seek in vain in the little bay of Houmet for the house in which Gilliatt lived, or for his garden, or the creek in which he sheltered the Dutch sloop. The Bu de la Rue no longer exists. Even the little peninsula on which his house stood has vanished, levelled by the pickaxe of the quarryman, and carried away, cart-load by cart-load by dealers in rock and granite. It must be sought now in the churches, the palaces, and the quays of a great city. All that ridge of rocks has been long ago conveyed to London.
These long lines of broken cliffs in the sea, with their frequent gaps and crevices, are like miniature chains of mountains. They strike the eye with the impression which a giant may be supposed to have in contemplating the Cordilleras. In the language of the country they are called "Banques". These banques vary considerably in form. Some resemble a long spine, of which each rock forms one of the vertebrae; others are like the backbone of a fish; while some bear an odd resemblance to a crocodile in the act of drinking.
At the extremity of the ridge on which the Bu de la Rue was situate was a large rock, which the fishing people of Houmet called the "Beast's Horn." This rock, a sort of pyramid, resembled, though less in height, the "Pinnacle" of Jersey. At high water the sea divided it from the ridge, and the Horn stood alone; at low water it was approached by an isthmus of rocks. The remarkable feature of this "Beast's Horn" was a sort of natural seat on the side next the sea, hollowed out by the water, and polished by the rains. The seat, however, was a treacherous one. The stranger was insensibly attracted to it by "the beauty of the prospect," as the Guernsey folks said. Something detained him there in spite of himself, for there is a charm in a wide view. The seat seemed to offer itself for his convenience; it formed a sort of niche in the peaked facade of the rock. 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; against his back the high vertical wall of rock which he looked up to and admired, without thinking of the impossibility of scaling it. Noting could be more simple than to fall into reverie in that convenient resting-place. All around spread the wide sea, far off the ships were seen passing to and fro. It was possible to follow a sail with the eye till it sank in the horizon beyond the Casquets. The stranger was entranced: he looked around, enjoying the beauty of the scene and the light touch of wind and wave. There is a sort of bat found at Cayenne which has the power of fanning people to sleep in the shade with a gentle beating of its dusky wings. Like this strange creature, the wind wanders about, alternately ravaging or lulling into security. So the stranger would continue contemplating the sea, listening for a movement in the air, and yielding himself up to dreamy indolence. When the eyes are satiated with light and beauty, it is a luxury to close them for a while. Suddenly the loiterer would arouse; but it was too late. The sea had crept up step by step; the waters surrounded the rock; the stranger had been lured on to his death.
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 keen lost at the Horn of the Bu de la Rue.
In certain places, and at certain periods, the aspect of the sea is dangerousfatal; as at times is the glance of a woman.
Very old inhabitants of Guernsey used to call this niche, fashioned in the rock by the waves, "Gild-Holm-'Ur" seat, or Kidormur; a Celtic word, say some authorities, which those who understand Celtic cannot interpret, and which all who understand French can"Qui-dort-meurt";3 `such is the country folks' translation.
The reader may choose between the translation Qui-dort-meurt and that given in 1819, I believe in The Armorican, by M. Athenas. According to this learned Celtic scholar, Gild-Holm-'Ur signifies "The resting-place of birds."
There is, at Aurigny, another seat of this kind, called the Monk's Chair. so well sculptured by the waves, and with steps of rock so conveniently placed, that it might be said that the sea politely sets a footstool for those who rest there.
In the open sea, at high water, the Gild-Holm-'Ur was no longer visible; the water covered it entirely.
The Gild-Holm-'Ur was a neighbour of the Bu de la Rue. Gilliatt knew it well, and often seated himself there. Was it his meditating place? No. We have already said he did not meditate, but dream. The sea however, never entrapped him there.

Book 3
MESS LETHIERRY.

 

3.1  A TROUBLED LIFE, BUT A QUIET CONSCIENCE.

MESS LETHIERRY, a conspicuous man in St. Sampson, was a redoubtable sailor. He had voyaged a great deal. He had been a cabin-boy, seaman, topmast-man, second mate, mate, pilot, and captain. He was at this period a shipowner. There was not a man to compare with him for general knowledge of the sea. He was brave in putting off to ships in distress. In foul weather he would take his way along the beach, scanning the horizon. "What have we yonder?" he would say; "some craft in trouble?" Whether it were an interloping Weymouth fisherman, a cutter from Aurigny, a bisquine from Courseulle, the yacht of some nobleman, an English craft or a French onepoor or rich, mattered little. He jumped into a boat, called together two or three strong fellows, or did without them, as the case might be, pushed out to sea, rose and sank, and rose again on rolling waves, plunged into the storm, and encountered the danger face to face. Then afar off, amid the rain and lightning, and drenched with water, he was sometimes seen upright in his boat like a lion with a foaming mane. Often he would pass whole days in danger amidst the waves, the hail, and the wind, making his way to the sides of foundering vessels during the tempest, and rescuing men and merchandise. At night, after feats like these, he would return home, and pass his time in knitting stockings.
For fifty years he led this kind of lifefrom ten years of age to sixtyso long did he feel himself still young. At sixty he began to discover that he could no longer lift with one hand the great anvil at the forge at Varclin. This anvil weighed three hundredweight. At length rheumatic pains compelled him to be a prisoner; he was forced to give up his old struggle with the sea, to pass from the heroic into the patriarchal stage, to sink into the condition of a harmless, worthy old fellow.
Happily his rheumatism attacks happened at the period when he had secured a comfortable competency. These two consequences of labour are natural companions. At the moment when men become rich, how often comes paralysisthe sorrowful crowning of a laborious life!
Old and wearymen say among themselves, "Let us rest and enjoy life "
The population of islands like Guernsey is composed of men who have passed their lives in going about their little fields or in sailing round the world. These are the two classes of the labouring people: the labourers on the land, and the toilers of the sea. Mess Lethierry was of the latter class; he had had a life of hard work. He had been upon the Continent; was for some time a ship-carpenter at Rochefort, and afterwards at Cette. We have just spoken of sailing round the world; he had made the circuit of all France, getting work as a journeyman carpenter, and had been employed at the great salt-works of Franche-Comte. Though a humble man, he had led a life of adventure. In France he had learned to read, to think, to have a will of his own. He had had a hand in many things, and in all he had done had kept a character for probity. At bottom, however, he was simply a sailor. The water was his element; he used to say that he lived with the fish when really at home. In short, his whole existence, except two or three years, had been devoted to the ocean. Flung into the water, as he said, he had navigated the great oceans both of the Atlantic and the Pacific, but he preferred the Channel. He used to exclaim enthusiastically, "That is the sea for a rough time of it!" He was born at sea, and at sea would have preferred to end his days. After sailing several times round the world, and seeing most countries, he had returned to Guernsey, and never permanently left the island again. Henceforth his great voyages were to Granville and St. Malo.
Mess Lethierry was a Guernsey manthat peculiar amalgamation of Frenchman and Norman, or rather English. He had within himself this quadruple extraction, merged and almost lost in that far wider country, the ocean. Throughout his life and wheresoever he went he had preserved the habits of a Norman fisherman.
All this, however, did not prevent his looking now and then into some old book; of taking pleasure in reading, in knowing the names of philosophers and poets, and in talking a little now and then in all languages.
 

3.2  A CERTAIN PREDILECTION.

GILLIATT had in his nature something of the uncivilised man; Mess Lethierry had the same.
Lethierry's uncultivated nature, however, was not without certain refinements.
He was fastidious upon the subject of women's hands. 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. His own hand, a large club fist of the colour of mahogany, was like a mallet or a pair of pincers for a friendly grasp, and, tightly closed, would almost break a paving-stone.
He had never married; he had either no inclination for matrimony, or had never found a suitable match. That, perhaps, was due to his being a stickler for hands like those of a duchess. Such hands are, indeed, somewhat rare among the fishermen's daughters at Portbail.
It was whispered, however, that at Rochefort, on the Charente, he had, once upon a time, made the acquaintance of a certain grisette, realising his ideal. She was a pretty girl with graceful hands; but she was a vixen, and had also a habit of scratching. Woe betide any one who attacked her! yet her nails, though capable at a pinch of being turned into claws, were of a whiteness which left nothing to be desired. It was these peculiarly bewitching nails which had first enchanted and then disturbed the peace of Lethierry, who, fearing that he might one day become no longer master of his mistress, had decided not to conduct that young lady to the nuptial altar.
Another time he met at Aurigny a country girl who pleased him. He thought of marriage, when one of the inhabitants of the place said to him, "I congratulate you; you will have for your wife a good fuel maker." Lethierry asked the meaning of this. It appeared that the country people at Aurigny have a certain custom of collecting manure from their cow-houses, which they throw against a wall, where it is left to dry and fall to the ground. Cakes of dried manure of this kind are used for fuel, and are called coipiaux. A country girl of Aurigny has no chance of getting a husband if she is not a good fuel maker; but the young ladies especial talent only inspired disgust in Lethierry.
Besides, he had in his love matters a kind of rough country folks' philosophy. a sailor-like sort of habit of mind. Always smitten but never enslaved, he boasted of having been in his youth easily conquered by a petticoat, or rather a cotillon; for what is nowadays called a crinoline, was in his time called a cotillona term which, in his use of it, signifies both something more and something less than a wife.
These rude seafaring men of the Norman Archipelago have a certain amount of shrewdness. Almost all can read and write. On Sundays, little cabin-boys may be seen in those parts, seated upon a coil of ropes, reading, with book in hand. From all time these Norman sailors have had a peculiar satirical vein, and have been famous for clever sayings. It was one of these men, the bold pilot Queripel, who said to Montgomery, when he sought refuge in Jersey after the unfortunate accident in killing Henry II at a tournament with a blow of his lance. "Tete folle a casse fête vide." Another one Touzeau, a sea-captain at Saint Brelade, was the author of that philosophical pun, erroneously attributed to Camus, Apres la mort, yes papes deviennent papillons, et les sires deviennent cirons."
The mariners of the Channel are the true ancient Gauls. The islands, which in these days become rapidly more and more Englishpreserved for many ages their old French character. The Peasant in Sark speaks the language of Louis XIV. Forty years ago, the old classical nautical language was to be found in the mouths of the sailors of Jersey and Aurigny. When amongst them, it was possible to imagine oneself carried back to the sea life of the seventeenth century. From that speaking-trumpet which terrified Admiral Hidde, a philologist might have learnt the ancient technicalities of manoeuvring and giving orders at sea, in the very words which were roared out to his sailors by Jean Bart. The old French maritime vocabulary is now almost entirely changed, but was still in use in Jersey in 1820.
It was with this uncouth sea dialect in his mouth that Duquesne beat De Ruyter, that Duguay Trouin defeated Wasnaer, and that Tourville in 1681 poured a broadside into the first galley which bombarded Algiers. It is now a dead language. The idiom of the sea is altogether different. Duperre would not be able to understand Suffren.
The language of French naval signals is not less transformed; there is a long distance between the four pennants, red, white, yellow and blue, of Labourdonraye, and the eighteen flags of these days, which, hoisted two and two, three and three, or four and four, furnish, for distant communication, sixty-six thousand combinations, are never deficient, and, so to speak, foresee the unforeseen.
 

3.3  MESS LETHIERRY'S VULNERABLE PART.

MESS LETHIERRY'S heart and hand were always readya large heart and a large hand. His failing was that admirable one, self-confidence. He had a certain fashion of his own of undertaking to do a thing. It was a solemn fashion. He said, "I give my word of honour to do it, with God's help." That said, he went through with his duty. He put his faith in Godnothing more. The little that he went to church was merely formal. At sea he was superstitious.
Nevertheless, the storm had never yet arisen which could daunt him. One reason of this was his impatience of opposition. He could tolerate it neither from the ocean nor anything else. He meant to have his way; so much the worse for the sea if it thwarted him. It might try, if it would, but Mess Lethierry would not give in. A refractory wave could no more stop him than an angry neighbour. What he had said was said; what he planned out was done. He bent neither before an objection nor before the tempest. The word "no' had no existence for him whether it was in the mouth of a man or in the angry muttering of a thunder-cloud. In the teeth of all he went on in his way. He would take no refusals. Hence his obstinacy in life, and his intrepidity on the ocean.
He seasoned his simple meal of fish soup for himself, knowing the quantities of pepper, salt, and herbs which it required, and was as well pleased with the cooking as with the meal. To complete the sketch of Lethierry's peculiarities, the reader must conjure a being to whom the putting on of a surtout would amount to a transfiguration; whom a landsman's greatcoat would convert into a strange animal; one who, standing with his locks blown about by the wind, might have represented old Jean Bart, but who, in the landsman's round hat, would have looked an idiot; awkward in cities, wild and redoubtable at sea; a man with broad shoulders, fit for a porter; one who indulged in no oaths, was rarely in anger, whose voice had a soft accent, which became like thunder in a speaking-trumpet; a peasant who had read something of the philosophy of Diderot and D'Alembert; a Guernsey man who had seen the great Revolution; a learned ignoramus, free from bigotry, but indulging in visions, with more faith in the White Lady than in the Holy Virgin; possessing the strength of Polyphemus, the perseverance of Columbus, with a little of the bull in his nature, and a little of the child. Add to these physical and mental peculiarities a somewhat flat nose, large cheeks, a set of teeth still perfect, a face filled with wrinkles, and which seemed to have been buffeted by the waves and subjected to the beating of the winds of forty years, a brow in which the storm and tempest were plainly writtenan incarnation of a rock in the open sea. Add to this, too, a good-tempered smile always ready to light up his weatherbeaten countenance, and you have before you Mess Lethierry.
Mess Lethierry had two special objects of affection only. Their names were Durande and Deruchette.

Book 4
DURANDE AND DERUCHETTE.

 

4.1  PRATTLE AND SMOKE.

THE HUMAN body might well be regarded as a mere simulacrum; but it envelopes our reality, it darkens our light, and broadens the shadow in which we live. The soul is the reality of our existence. Strictly speaking, the human visage is a mask. The true man is that which exists under what it called man. If that being, which thus exists sheltered and secreted behind that illusion which we call the flesh, could be approached, more than one strange revelation would be made. The vulgar error is to mistake the outward husk for the living spirit. Yonder maiden, for example, if we could see her as she really is, might she not figure as some bird of the air?
A bird transmuted into a young maiden, what could be more exquisite. Picture it in your own home, and call it Deruchette. Delicious creature! One might be almost tempted to say, "Good-morning, Mademoiselle Goldfinch." The wings are invisible, but the chirping may still be heard. Sometimes, too, she pipes a clear, loud song. In her childlike prattle the creature is, perhaps, inferior; but in her song, how superior to humanity! When womanhood dawns this angel flies away; but some-times returns, bringing back a little one to a mother. Meanwhile, she who is one day to be a mother is for a long while a child; the girl becomes a maiden, fresh and joyous as the lark. Noting her movements, we feel as if it was good of her not to fly away. The dear familiar companion moves at her own sweet will about the house; flits about from branch to branch, or rather from room to room; goes to and fro; approaches and retires; plumes her wings, or rather combs her hair, and makes all kinds of gentle noisesmurmurings of unspeakable delight to certain ears. She asks a question, and is answered; is asked something in return, and chirps a reply. It is delightful to chat with her when tired of serious talk; for this creature carries with her something of her skyey element. She is, as it were a thread of gold interwoven with your sombre thoughts; 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 humming-bird. 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; her approach is like a cheerful warmth; she passes by, and we are content; she stays awhile, and we are happy. To behold her is to live: she is the Aurora with a human face. She has no need to do more than simply to be: she makes an Eden of the house; Paradise breathes from her; and she communicates this delight to all, without taking any greater trouble than that of existing beside them. Is it not a thing divine to have a smile which, none know how, has the power to lighten the weight of that enormous chain which all the living, in common, drag behind them? Deruchette possessed this smile; we may even say that this smile was Deruchette herself. 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. Deruchette smiling was simply Deruchette.
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 peoplerosy cheeks and blue eyes; but the eyes want brilliancy. The English training dulls them. Their liquid glances will be irresistible whenever the secret is found of giving them that depth which is the glory of the Parisienne. Happily Englishwomen are not yet quite transformed into the Parisian type. Deruchette was not a Parisian; yet she was certainly not Guernesiaise. Lethierry had brought her up to be neat and delicate and pretty; and so she was.
Deruchette had at times an air of bewitching languor, and a certain mischief in the eye, which were altogether involuntary. She scarcely knew, perhaps, the meaning of the word love, and yet not unwillingly ensnared those about her in the toils. But all this in her was innocent. She never thought of marrying.
Deruchette had the prettiest little hands in the world, and little feet to match them. Sweetness and goodness reigned throughout her person; her family and fortune were her uncle Mess Lethierry; her occupation was only to live her daily life; her accomplishments were the knowledge of a few songs; her intellectual gifts were summed up in her simple innocence; she had the graceful repose of the West Indian woman, mingled at times with giddiness and vivacity, with the teasing playfulness of a child, yet with a dash of melancholy. Her dress was somewhat rustic, and like that peculiar to her countryelegant, though not in accordance with the fashions of great cities; for she wore flowers in her bonnet all the year round. Add to all this an open brow, a neck supple and graceful, chestnut hair, a fair skin slightly freckled with exposure to the sun, a mouth somewhat large, but well-defined, and visited from time to time by a dangerous smile. This was Deruchette.
Sometimes, in the evening, a little after sunset, at the moment when the dusk of the sky mingles with the dusk of the sea, and twilight invests the waves with a mysterious awe, the people beheld, entering the harbour of St.  Sampson, upon the dark-rolling waters, a strange, undefined thing, a monstrous form which puffed and blew; a horrid machine which roared like a wild beast, and smoked like a volcano; a species of Hydra foaming among the breakers, and leaving behind it a dense cloud, as it rushed on towards the town with a frightful beating of its fins, and a throat belching forth flame. This was Durande.
 

4.2  THE OLD STORY OF UTOPIA.

A STEAMBOAT was a prodigious novelty in the waters of the Channel in I82. The whole coast of Normandy was long strangely excited by it. Nowadays, ten or a dozen steam-vessels, crossing and recrossing within the bounds of the horizon, scarcely attract a glance from loiterers on the shore. At the most, some persons, whose interest or business it is to note such things, will observe the indications in their smoke of whether they burn Welsh or Newcastle coal. They pass, and that is all. "Welcome," if coming home; "a pleasant passage," if outward bound.
Folks were less calm on the subject of these wonderful inventions in the first quarter of the present century; and the new and strange machines, and their long lines of smoke, regarded with no goodwill by the Channel Islanders. In that Puritanical Archipelago, where the Queen of England has been censured for violating the Scriptures4 by using chloroform during her accouchements, the first steam-vessel which made its appearance received the name of the Devil Boat. In the eyes of these worthy fishermen, once Catholics, now Calvinists, but always bigots, it seemed to be a portion of the internal regions which had been somehow set afloat. A local preacher selected for his discourse the question of "Whether man has the right to make fire and water work together when God had divided them. 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 notiona gross delusionan 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.  Sampson may be excused for not being in scientific matters any wiser than the mathematicians of Paris; and in religious matters a little island like Guernsey is not bound to be more enlightened than a great continent like America. In the year 1807, when the first steamboat of Fulton, commanded by Livingston, furnished with one of Watt's engines, sent from England, and manoeuvred, besides her ordinary crew, by two Frenchmen only, Andre Michaux and another, made her first voyage from New York to Albany, it happened that she set sail on the 17th of August. The Methodists took up this important fact, and in numberless chapels preachers were heard calling down a malediction on the machine, and declaring that this number 17 was no other than the total of the ten horns and seven heads of the beast of the Apocalypse. In America, they invoked against the steamboats the beast from the book of Revelation; in Europe, the reptile of the book of Genesis. This was the simple difference.
The savants had rejected steamboats as impossible; the priests had anathematised them as impious. Science had condemned, and religion consigned them to perdition. Fulton was a new incarnation of Lucifer. The simple people on the coasts and in the villages were confirmed in their prejudice by the uneasiness which they felt at the outlandish sight. 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. He alone, as an independent thinker, was capable of conceiving such an idea, or as a hardy mariner, of carrying it out. The French part of his nature, probably, conceived the idea, the English part supplied the energy to put it in execution.
How and when this was, we are about to inform the reader.
 

4.3  RANTAINE.

ABOUT forty years before the period of the commencement of our narrative, there stood in the suburbs of Paris, near the city wall, between the Fosse-aux-Loups and the Tombe-Issoire, a house of doubtful reputation. It was a lonely, ruinous building, evidently a place for dark deeds on an occasion. Here lived, with his wife and child, a species of town bandit; a man who had been clerk to an attorney practicing at the Chatelethe figured somewhat later at the Assize Court; the name of this family was Rantaine. On a mahogany chest of drawers in the old house were two china cups, ornamented with flowers, on one of which appeared, in gilt letters, the words, "A souvenir of friendship," on the other, "A token of esteem"' The child lived in an atmosphere of vice in this miserable home. The father and mother having belonged to the lower middle class, the boy had learnt to read, and they brought it up in a fashion. The mother, pale arid almost in rags, gave "instruction" as she called it, mechanically, to the little one, heard it spell a few words to her, and interrupted the lesson to accompany her husband on some criminal expedition, or to earn the wages of prostitution. Meanwhile, the book remained open on the table as she had left it, and the boy sat beside it, meditating in his way.
The father and mother, detected one day in one of their criminal enterprises, suddenly vanished into that obscurity in which the penal laws envelop convicted malefactors. The child too disappeared.
Lethierry, in his wanderings about the world, stumbled one day on an adventurer like himself, helped him out of some scrape, rendered him a kindly service, and was apparently repaid with gratitude. He took a fancy to the stranger, picked him up, and brought him to Guernsey, where, finding him intelligent in learning the duties of a sailor aboard a coasting-vessel, he made him a companion. This stranger was the little Rantaine, now grown up to manhood.
Rantaine, like Lethierry, had a bull neck, a large and powerful breadth of shoulders for carrying burdens, and loins like those of the Farnese Hercules. Lethierry and he had a remarkable similarity of appearance: Rantaine was the taller. People who saw their forms behind, as they were walking side by side along the port, exclaimed, "There are two brothers." On looking them in the face the effect was different: all that was open in the countenance of Lethierry was reserved and cautious in that of Rantaine. Rantaine was an expert swordsman, played on the harmonica, could snuff a candle at twenty paces with a pistol-ball, could strike a tremendous blow with the fist, recite verses from Voltaire's "Henriade," and interpret dreams; he knew by heart "Les Tombeauk de Saint Denis," by Treneuil. He talked sometimes of having had relations with the Sultan of Calicut, "whom the Portuguese call the Zamorin." If any one had seen the little memorandum-book which he carried about with him he would have found notes and jottings of this kind: "At Lyons in a fissure of the wall of one of the cells in the prison of St. Joseph, a file." He spoke always with a grave deliberation; he called himself the son of a Chevalier de Saint Louis. His linen was of a miscellaneous kind, and marked with different initials. 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. If the great theatre of destiny had a special wardrobe, Rantaine ought to have taken the dress of harlequin. He had lived, and had seen the world. He had run through the gamut of possible trades and qualities; had been a cook at Madagascar, trainer of birds at Honolulu, a religious journalist at the Galapagos Islands, a poet at Oomrawnttee, a freeman at Haiti. In this latter character he had delivered at Grand Goave a funeral oration, of which the local journals have preserved this fragment: "Farewell, then, noble spirit. In the azure vault of the heavens, where thou wingest now thy Bight, thou wilt, no doubt, rejoin the good Abbe Leander Crameau, of Little Goave. Tell him that, thanks to ten years of glorious efforts, thou hast completed the church of the Ansa-a-Veau. Adieu, transcendent genius, model mason!" His freemason's mask did not prevent him, as we see, wearing a little of the Roman Catholic. The former won to his side the men of progress, and the latter the men of order. He declared himself, a white of pure caste, and hated the negroes; though, for all that, he would certainly have been an admirer of the Emperor Soulouque. In 1815, at Bordeaux, the glow of his royalist enthusiasm broke forth in the shape of a huge white feather in his cap. His life had been a series of eclipsesof appearances, disappearances, and reappearances. He was a sort of revolving-light upon the coasts of scampdom. He knew a little Turkish instead of "guillotined" would say "neboisse". He had been a slave in Tripoli, in the house of a Thaleb, and had learnt Turkish by dint of blows with a stick. 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." His manner was rather cheerful and cordial than otherwise. The expression of his mouth contradicted the sense of his words. His nostrils had an odd way of distending themselves. In the corners of his eyes he had a little network of wrinkles, in which all sorts of dark thoughts seemed to meet together. It was here alone that the secret of his physiognomy could be thoroughly studied. His flat foot was a vulture's claw. His skull was low at the top and large about the temples. His ill-shapen ear, bristled with hair, seemed to say, "Beware of speaking to the animal in this cave."
One fine day, in Guernsey, Rantaine was suddenly missing.
Lethierry's partner had absconded, leaving the treasury of their partnership empty.
In this treasury there was some money of Rantaine's, no doubt, but there were also fifty thousand francs belonging to Lethierry.
By forty years of industry and probity as a coaster and ship carpenter, Lethierry had saved one hundred thousand francs. Rantaine robbed him of half the sum.
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; and by one of these fire-boats to connect the Channel Islands with the French coast. He staked his all upon this idea; he devoted to it the wreck of his savings. Accordingly, six months after Rantaine's flight, the astonished people of St. Sampson beheld, issuing from the port, a vessel discharging huge volumes of smoke, and looking like a ship a-fire at sea. This was the first steam-vessel to navigate the Channel.
This vessel, to which the people in their dislike and contempt for novelty immediately gave the nickname of "Lethierry's Galley," was announced as intended to maintain a constant communication between Guernsey and St. Malo.
 

4.4  CONTINUATION OF THE STORY OF UTOPIA.

IT may well be imagined that the new enterprise did not prosper much at first. The owners of cutters passing between the island of Guernsey and the French coast were loud in their outcries. They denounced this attack upon the Holy Scriptures and their monopoly. The chapels began to fulminate against it. One reverend gentleman, named Elihu, stigmatised the new steam-vessel as an "atheistical construction," and the sailing-boat was declared the only orthodox craft. The people saw the horns of the devil among the beasts which the fire-ship carried to and fro. This storm of protest continued a considerable time. At last, however, it began to be perceived that these animals arrived less tired and sold better, their meat being superior; that the sea-risk was less also for passengers; that this mode of travelling was less expensive, shorter, and more sure; that they started at a fixed time, and arrived at a fixed time; that consignments of fish travelling faster arrived fresher, and that it was now possible to find a sale in the French markets for the surplus of great takes of fish so common in Guernsey. The butter, too, from the far-famed Guernsey cows made the passage quicker in the "Devil Boat" than in the old sailing vessels, and lost nothing of its good quality, insomuch that Dinan, in Brittany, began to become a customer for it, as well as St. Brieuc and Rennes. In short, thanks to what they called "Lethierry's Galley," the people enjoyed safe travelling, regular communication, prompt and easy passages to and fro, an increase of circulation, an extension of markets and of commerce, and, finally, it was felt that it was necessary to patronise this "Devil Boat", which flew in the face of the Holy Scriptures, and brought wealth to the island. Some daring spirits even went so far as to express a positive satisfaction at it. Sieur Landoys, the registrar, bestowed his approval upon the vesselan undoubted piece of impartiality on his part, as he did not like Lethierry. For, first of all, Lethierry was entitled to the dignity of "Mess," while Landoys was merely "Sieur Landoys." Then, although registrar of St. Peter's Port, Landoys was a parishioner of St. Sampson. Now, there was not in the entire parish another man besides them devoid of prejudices. It seemed little enough, therefore, to indulge t themselves with a detestation of each other. Two of a trade, says the proverb, rarely agree.
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; and the day at length arrived when, with the exception of a few wiseacres, every one admired "Lethierry's Galley."
It would probably win less admiration nowadays. This steamboat of forty years since would doubtless provoke a smile among our modern boat-builders; for this marvel was ill-shaped; this prodigy was clumsy and infirm.
The distance between our grand Atlantic steam-vessels of the present day and the boats with wheelpaddles which Denis Papin floated on the Fulda in 1707 is not greater than that between a three-decker, like the Montebello, 200 feet long, having a mainyard of 115 feet, carrying a weight of 3,000 tons, 1,100 men, 120 guns, 10,000 cannon-balls, and 160 packages of canister, belching forth at every broadside, when in action, 3,300 pounds of iron, and spreading to the wind, when it moves, 5,600 square metres of canvas, and the old Danish galley of the second century, discovered, full of stone hatchets, and bows and clubs, in the mild of the seashore, at Wester-Satrup, and preserved at the Hotel de Ville at Flensburg.
Exactly one hundred yearsfrom 1707 to 1807separate the first paddle-boat of Papin from the first steamboat of Fulton. Lethierry's galley was assuredly a great improvement upon those two rough sketches; but it was itself only a sketch. For all that, it was a masterpiece in its way. Every scientific discovery in embryo presents that double aspecta monster in the foetus, a marvel in the germ.
 

4.5  THE "DEVIL BOAT"

"LETHIERRY'S GALLEY" was not masted with a view to sailing well; a fact which was not a defect; it is, indeed, one of the laws of naval construction. Besides. her motive power being steam, her sails were only accessory. A paddle steamboat, moreover, is almost insensible to sails. The new steam-vessel was too short, round, and thickset. She had too much bow, and too great a breadth of quarter. The daring of inventors had not yet reached the point of making a steam-vessel light; Lethierry's boat had some of the defects of Gilliatt's Dutch sloop. She pitched very little, but she rolled a good deal. Her paddle-boxes; were too high. She had too much beam for her length. The massive machinery encumbered her, and to make her capable of carrying a heavy cargo, her constructors had raised her bulwarks to an unusual height, giving to the vessel the defects of old seventyfours, a bastard model which would have to be cut down to render them really seaworthy or fit to go into action. Being short, she ought to have been able to veer quicklythe time employed in a manoeuvre of that kind being in proportion to the length of the vesselbut her weight deprived her of the advantage of her shortness. Her midship-frame was too broada fact which retarded her; the resistance of the sea being proportioned to the largest section below the water-line, and to the square of the speed. Her prow was vertical, which would not be regarded as a fault at the present day, but at the period this portion of the construction was invariably sloped at an angle of forty-five degrees. All the curving lines of the hull agreed well together. The rudder was the old-fashioned bar-rudder, not the wheeled one of the present time. Two skiffs, a species of you-yous, were suspended to the davits. The vessel had four anchors: the sheet anchor, the second or working anchor, and two bower anchors. These four anchors, slung by chains, were moved, according to the occasion, by the great capstan of the poop, or by the small capstan at the prow. At that period the pump windlass had not superseded the intermitting efforts of the old handspike. Having only two bower-anchors, one on the starboard and the other on the larboard side, the vessel could not move conveniently in certain winds, though she could aid herself at such times with the second anchor. Her speed was six knots an hour. When lying-to she rode well. Take her as she was, "Lethierry's Galley" was a good sea-boat; but people felt that in moments of danger from reefs or water-spouts she would be hardly manageable. Unhappily her build made her roll about on the waves, with a perpetual creaking like that of a new shoe.
She was, above all, a merchandise boat, and, like all ships built more for commerce than for fighting, was constructed exclusively with a view to stowage. She carried few passengers. The transport of cattle rendered stowage difficult and very peculiar. Vessels carried bullocks at that time in the hold, which was a complication of the difficulty. At the present day they are stowed on the fore-deck. The paddle-boxes of Lethierry's "Devil Boat" were painted white, the hull, down to the water-line, red, and all the rest of the vessel black, according to the somewhat ugly fashion of this century. When empty she drew seven feet of water, and when laden fourteen.
With regard to the engine, it was of considerable power. To speak exactly, its power was equal to that of one horse to every three tons burden, which is almost equal to that of a tug-boat. The paddles were well placed, a little in advance of the centre of gravity of the vessel. The maximum pressure of the engine was equal to two atmospheres. It consumed a great deal of coal, although it was constructed on the condensation and expansion principles. For that period the engine seemed, and indeed was, admirable. It had been constructed in France, at the works at Bercy. Mess Lethierry had roughly sketched it: the engineer who had constructed it in accordance with his diagram was dead, so that the engine was unique, and probably could not have been replaced. The designer still lived, but the constructor was no more.
The engine had cost forty thousand francs.
Lethierry had himself constructed the "Devil Boat" upon the great covered stocks by the side of the first tower between St. Peter's Port and St. Sampson. He had been to Breme to buy the wood. All his skill as a ship-wright was exhausted in its construction; his ingenuity might be seen in the planks, the seams of which were straight and even, and covered with sarangousti, an Indian mastic, better than resin. The sheathing was well beaten. To remedy the roundness of the hull, Lethierry had fitted out a boom at the bowsprit, which allowed him to add a false spritsail to the regular one. On the day of the launch he cried aloud, "At last I am afloat!" The vessel was successful, in fact, as the reader has already learnt.
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."
Lethierry's boat made the voyage from Guernsey to St.  Malo once a week. She started on the Tuesday morning, and returned on the Friday evening, in time for the Saturday market. She was a stronger craft than any of the largest coasting-sloops in all the Archipelago, and her capacity being in proportion to her dimensions, one of her voyages was equal to four voyages of an ordinary boat in the same trade; hence they were very profitable. The reputation of a