The Toilers of the Sea (50 page)

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 Déruchette in this chapter.

213.
Marly waterworks: See note 176.

214.
prince of Hohenlohe:
a German prince who fought in the émigré 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 (Isère) 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

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Daniel J. Boorstin

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Charles Johnson

Jon Krakauer

Edmund Morris

Joyce Carol Oates

Elaine Pagels

John Richardson

Salman Rushdie

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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

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William Styron

Gore Vidal

VICTOR HUGO

Victor-Marie Hugo was born in 1802 at Besançon, 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 Adèle 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 Académie Française 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'état 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 Misérables
(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 the Senate. He had become a legendary figure and national icon, a presence so dominating that upon his death in 1885 Émile 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 © 1992 by Random House, Inc.

Introduction copyright © 2002 by Graham Robb
Translation and notes copyright © 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: 978-0-307-43269-8

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