Billows and Shadows — Les Misérables

A man overboard. What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre ship has a path it is forced to pursue. It passes on. He disappears, reappears, plunges, rises, calls, stretches out his arms. He is not heard. The ship, trembling under the hurricane, is absorbed in its own workings. Passengers and sailors do not even see him. His head is a speck. The retreating sail is a spectre. He gazes until it grows dim. A moment ago he was one of the crew. He went and came on the deck. He had his part of breath and of sunlight. He has slipped. He has fallen. All is at an end.

Underfoot he has nothing but what flees and crumbles. Tongues of water dash over his head. A populace of waves spits on him. Each time he sinks he glimpses precipices of night. Unknown plants knot his feet. He is becoming an abyss, part of the foam. He drinks the bitterness. The ocean plays with his agony. It seems as though all that water were hate. Nevertheless he struggles. He swims. His petty strength combats the inexhaustible. The ship is barely visible on the pale horizon. Night descends. He has been swimming for hours. The distant thing in which there were men has vanished. He is alone in the twilight gulf. He shouts. Help. There are no more men. Where is God? Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven. He implores the expanse, the seaweed, the reef. They are deaf. The tempest obeys only the infinite.

Around him darkness, fog, solitude. In him horror and fatigue. Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. His hands grasp nothingness. Useless stars. The desperate man gives up. He chooses the alternative of death. He lets himself go, and tosses in the depths of engulfment. Then Hugo names the figure. Implacable march of human societies. Losses of men and of souls on the way. Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip. Disastrous absence of help. Moral death. The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness. The soul, going downstream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it?