196. Enceladus: See note 172.
197. Thomas Fuller: English theologian and historian (1608-61).
198. Piddington: Henry Piddington (1797-1858), English meteorologist.
199. devilfish: an old name for the octopus. The word used by Hugo is pieuvre, the term for an octopus in the dialect of the Channel Islands. Thanks to the popularity of Hugo's novel, pieuvre has largely displaced the older French term poulpe.
200. jararaca: a venomous snake of Brazil.
201. buthus: a particularly venomous yellow scorpion found in the south of France.
202. ell: English unit of measure; equals 45 inches.
203. Buffon: the celebrated eighteenth-century naturalist, author of a monumental Natural History. Denys Montfort, Bory de Saint-Vincent, Peron, Lamarck: eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French naturalists.
204. The entrance is also the exit: Not so: the octopus has in fact two orifices.
205. radiates: animals with radial structure, like polyps and sea anemones: one of the great divisions of the animal world under Cuvier's now discarded system.
206. De Profundis ad Altum: "From the depths to the height": a reference to Psalm 129:1 in the Vulgate (Psalm 130 in the Authorized Version).
207. There Is an Ear in the Unknown: The title of the previous chapter referred to Psalm 129:1 in the Vulgate (Psalm 130 in the Authorized Version). The title of this chapter refers to verse 2, the answer to the appeal in verse 1.
208. Arnal's: Etienne Arnal was a famous comic actor of the early nineteenth century.
209. Hudson Lowe: governor of St. Helena during Napoleon's confinement on the island.
210. the treaty of Campo Formio: treaty between France and Austria in 1797 that preserved most of Napoleon's conquests and marked the completion of his victory over the First Coalition.
211. Vendome Column: in the Place Vendome in Paris. Topped by a statue of Napoleon, it was pulled down in 1871 during the Commune and re-erected under the Third Republic.
212. The Harbor Bell Again: The title is designed to suggest a parallel between Lethierry's vision of the Durande in the previous chapter and Gilliatt's vision of Deruchette in this chapter.
213. Marly waterworks: See note 176.
214. prince of Hohenlohe: a German prince who fought in the emigre army against the French revolutionary forces, took French nationality, and was later appointed marshal and a peer.
215. La Salette: the apparition of the Virgin to two shepherds at La Salette (Isere) in 1846.
216. of panic: associated with the god Pan.
1 Charles Asplet, Beresford Street. (Note by Hugo.)
2 Here, for Guernsey and for the French victims of the 1856 floods, the proportions of money subscribed: France gave, per head of population, thirty centimes; England six centimes; Guernsey thirty-eight centimes. (Note by Hugo.)
A NOTE ON THE DRAWINGS OF VICTOR HUGO
Throughout his life and illustrious career, Victor Hugo, somewhat surreptitiously, produced thousands of extraordinary drawings. From the unconscious meanderings of a brown ink pen that prefigure the abstract experiments of modernism, to skillfully executed landscapes and seascapes of uncommon beauty, Victor Hugo's drawings, little known to his contemporaries, have increasingly captured the public's attention over the past century. In keeping with the ongoing discovery of these masterly creations, the Modern Library has reproduced five of Hugo's brown ink renderings, executed with brush and pen on cream paper, in this new edition of The Toilers of the Sea. Though not specifically created to illustrate the text, the drawings were nonetheless in such perfect harmony with Hugo's novel of sea, storm, and shipwreck that he pasted them into the manuscript to illuminate particular passages and scenes. The five works available to us of the thirty-six Hugo had originally selected have been positioned in keeping with the author's original design.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
JAMES HOGARTH was educated at Edinburgh University and the Sorbonne. While serving in the army during World War II he became a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, and was later undersecretary in the Scottish Office. His recent translations include works from German and French.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
Daniel J. Boorstin
A. S. Byatt
Caleb Carr
Christopher Cerf
Ron Chernow
Shelby Foote
Charles Frazier
Vartan Gregorian
Richard Howard
Charles Johnson
Jon Krakauer
Edmund Morris
Joyce Carol Oates
Elaine Pagels
John Richardson
Salman Rushdie
Oliver Sacks
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Carolyn See
William Styron
Gore Vidal
VICTOR HUGO
Victor-Marie Hugo was born in 1802 at Besancon, where his father, an officer (eventually a general) under Napoleon, was stationed. In his first decade the family moved from post to post: Corsica, Elba, Paris, Naples, Madrid. After his parents separated in 1812, Hugo lived in Paris with his mother and brothers. His literary ambition--"to be Chateaubriand or nothing"--was evident from an early age, and by seventeen he had founded a literary magazine with his brother. At twenty he married Adele Foucher and published his first poetry collection, which earned him a small stipend from Louis XVIII. A first novel, Han of Iceland (1823), won another stipend.
Hugo became friends with Charles Nodier, a leader of the Romantics, and with the critic Sainte-Beuve, and rapidly put himself at the forefront of literary trends. His innovative early poetry helped open up the relatively constricted traditions of French versification, and his plays--especially Cromwell, whose preface served as a manifesto of Romanticism, and Hernani, whose premiere was as stormy as that of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring--stirred up much protest for their break with dramatic convention. His literary outpouring between 1826 and 1843 encompassed eight volumes of poetry; four novels, including The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831); ten plays (among them Le Roi s'amuse, the source for Verdi's Rigoletto); and a variety of critical writings.
Hugo was elected to the Academie Francaise in 1841. The accidental death two years later of his eldest daughter and her husband devastated him and marked the end of his first literary period. By then politics had become central to his life. Though he was a Royalist in his youth, his views became increasingly liberal after the July revolution of 1830: "Freedom in art, freedom in society, there is the double goal." Following the revolution of 1848, he was elected as a Republican to the National Assembly, where he campaigned for universal suffrage and free education and against the death penalty. He initially supported the political ascent of Louis-Napoleon, but turned against him when Louis-Napoleon established a right-wing dictatorship.
After opposing the coup d'etat of 1851, Hugo went into exile in Brussels and Jersey, launching fierce literary attacks on the Second Empire in Napoleon the Little, Chastisements, and The Story of a Crime. Between 1855 and 1870 he lived in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. There he was joined by his family, some friends, and his mistress, Juliette Drouet, whom he had known since 1833, when as a young actress she had starred in his Lucrezia Borgia. His political interests were supplemented by other concerns. From around 1853 he became absorbed in experiments with spiritualism and table tapping. In his later years he wrote the Contemplations (1856), considered the peak of his lyric accomplishment, and a number of more elaborate poetic cycles derived from his theories about spirituality and history: the immense The Legend of the Centuries (1859-83) and its posthumously published successors The End of Satan (1886) and God (1891). In these same years he produced the novels Les Miserables (1862), The Toilers of the Sea (1866), The Laughing Man (1869), and Ninety-Three (1873).
After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, Hugo returned to France and was reelected to the National Assembly, and then to t
he Senate. He had become a legendary figure and national icon, a presence so dominating that upon his death in 1885 Emile Zola is said to have remarked with some relief: "I thought he was going to bury us all!" Hugo's funeral provided the occasion for a grandiose ceremony. His body, after lying in state under the Arc de Triomphe, was carried by torchlight--according to his own request, on a pauper's hearse--to be buried in the Pantheon.
2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Biographical note copyright (c) 1992 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright (c) 2002 by Graham Robb
Translation and notes copyright (c) 2002 by James Hogarth
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885.
[Travailleurs de la mer. English]
The toilers of the sea / Victor Hugo; introduction by Graham Robb;
translated, with notes, by James Hogarth.--Modern Library paperback ed.
p. cm.
I. Hogarth, James. II. Title.
PQ2289.T7 E5513 2002
843'.7--dc21 2002022342
Modern Library website address:
www.modernlibrary.com
Frontispiece: Octopus with the initials VH (ca. 1866).
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-30743269-8
v3.0
Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea
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