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_ Towards the end of October, in that same year, 1823, the inhabitants
of Toulon beheld the entry into their port, after heavy weather,
and for the purpose of repairing some damages, of the ship Orion,
which was employed later at Brest as a school-ship, and which then
formed a part of the Mediterranean squadron.
This vessel, battered as it was,--for the sea had handled it roughly,--
produced a fine effect as it entered the roads. It flew some
colors which procured for it the regulation salute of eleven guns,
which it returned, shot for shot; total, twenty-two. It has been
calculated that what with salvos, royal and military politenesses,
courteous exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of
roadsteads and citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day
by all fortresses and all ships of war, openings and closings
of ports, etc., the civilized world, discharged all over the earth,
in the course of four and twenty hours, one hundred and fifty
thousand useless shots. At six francs the shot, that comes to nine
hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred millions a year,
which vanish in smoke. This is a mere detail. All this time the
poor were dying of hunger.
The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the
Spanish war."
This war contained many events in one, and a quantity of peculiarities.
A grand family affair for the house of Bourbon; the branch of France
succoring and protecting the branch of Madrid, that is to say,
performing an act devolving on the elder; an apparent return to our
national traditions, complicated by servitude and by subjection to the
cabinets of the North; M. le Duc d'Angouleme, surnamed by the liberal
sheets the hero of Andujar, compressing in a triumphal attitude
that was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the ancient
and very powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance with the
chimerical terrorism of the liberals; the sansculottes resuscitated,
to the great terror of dowagers, under the name of descamisados;
monarchy opposing an obstacle to progress described as anarchy;
the theories of '89 roughly interrupted in the sap; a European halt,
called to the French idea, which was making the tour of the world;
beside the son of France as generalissimo, the Prince de Carignan,
afterwards Charles Albert, enrolling himself in that crusade of kings
against people as a volunteer, with grenadier epaulets of red worsted;
the soldiers of the Empire setting out on a fresh campaign, but aged,
saddened, after eight years of repose, and under the white cockade;
the tricolored standard waved abroad by a heroic handful of Frenchmen,
as the white standard had been thirty years earlier at Coblentz;
monks mingled with our troops; the spirit of liberty and of novelty
brought to its senses by bayonets; principles slaughtered by cannonades;
France undoing by her arms that which she had done by her mind;
in addition to this, hostile leaders sold, soldiers hesitating,
cities besieged by millions; no military perils, and yet possible
explosions, as in every mine which is surprised and invaded;
but little bloodshed, little honor won, shame for some, glory for no one.
Such was this war, made by the princes descended from Louis XIV.,
and conducted by generals who had been under Napoleon. Its sad fate
was to recall neither the grand war nor grand politics.
Some feats of arms were serious; the taking of the Trocadero,
among others, was a fine military action; but after all, we repeat,
the trumpets of this war give back a cracked sound, the whole
effect was suspicious; history approves of France for making a
difficulty about accepting this false triumph. It seemed evident
that certain Spanish officers charged with resistance yielded
too easily; the idea of corruption was connected with the victory;
it appears as though generals and not battles had been won,
and the conquering soldier returned humiliated. A debasing war,
in short, in which the Bank of France could be read in the folds
of the flag.
Soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom Saragossa had fallen in
formidable ruin, frowned in 1823 at the easy surrender of citadels,
and began to regret Palafox. It is the nature of France to prefer
to have Rostopchine rather than Ballesteros in front of her.
From a still more serious point of view, and one which it is also
proper to insist upon here, this war, which wounded the military
spirit of France, enraged the democratic spirit. It was an enterprise
of inthralment. In that campaign, the object of the French soldier,
the son of democracy, was the conquest of a yoke for others.
A hideous contradiction. France is made to arouse the soul of nations,
not to stifle it. All the revolutions of Europe since 1792 are
the French Revolution: liberty darts rays from France. That is a
solar fact. Blind is he who will not see! It was Bonaparte who said it.
The war of 1823, an outrage on the generous Spanish nation,
was then, at the same time, an outrage on the French Revolution.
It was France who committed this monstrous violence; by foul means,
for, with the exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies
do is by foul means. The words passive obedience indicate this.
An army is a strange masterpiece of combination where force results
from an enormous sum of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity
against humanity, despite humanity, explained.
As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal to them. They took it
for a success. They did not perceive the danger that lies in having
an idea slain to order. They went astray, in their innocence,
to such a degree that they introduced the immense enfeeblement of a
crime into their establishment as an element of strength. The spirit
of the ambush entered into their politics. 1830 had its germ in 1823.
The Spanish campaign became in their counsels an argument for force
and for adventures by right Divine. France, having re-established
elrey netto in Spain, might well have re-established the absolute king
at home. They fell into the alarming error of taking the obedience
of the soldier for the consent of the nation. Such confidence
is the ruin of thrones. It is not permitted to fall asleep,
either in the shadow of a machineel tree, nor in the shadow of an army.
Let us return to the ship Orion.
During the operations of the army commanded by the prince generalissimo,
a squadron had been cruising in the Mediterranean. We have just
stated that the Orion belonged to this fleet, and that accidents
of the sea had brought it into port at Toulon.
The presence of a vessel of war in a port has something about it
which attracts and engages a crowd. It is because it is great,
and the crowd loves what is great.
A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations
of the genius of man with the powers of nature.
A ship of the line is composed, at the same time, of the heaviest
and the lightest of possible matter, for it deals at one and the same
time with three forms of substance,--solid, liquid, and fluid,--
and it must do battle with all three. It has eleven claws of
iron with which to seize the granite on the bottom of the sea,
and more wings and more antennae than winged insects, to catch
the wind in the clouds. Its breath pours out through its hundred
and twenty cannons as through enormous trumpets, and replies
proudly to the thunder. The ocean seeks to lead it astray in the
alarming sameness of its billows, but the vessel has its soul,
its compass, which counsels it and always shows it the north.
In the blackest nights, its lanterns supply the place of the stars.
Thus, against the wind, it has its cordage and its canvas;
against the water, wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead;
against the shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle.
If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions which,
taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line, one has only to
enter one of the six-story covered construction stocks, in the ports
of Brest or Toulon. The vessels in process of construction are
under a bell-glass there, as it were. This colossal beam is a yard;
that great column of wood which stretches out on the earth as far
as the eye can reach is the main-mast. Taking it from its root
in the stocks to its tip in the clouds, it is sixty fathoms long,
and its diameter at its base is three feet. The English main-mast rises
to a height of two hundred and seventeen feet above the water-line.
The navy of our fathers employed cables, ours employs chains.
The simple pile of chains on a ship of a hundred guns is four feet high,
twenty feet in breadth, and eight feet in depth. And how much
wood is required to make this ship? Three thousand cubic metres.
It is a floating forest.
And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question
here of the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple
sailing-vessel; steam, then in its infancy, has since added
new miracles to that prodigy which is called a war vessel.
At the present time, for example, the mixed vessel with a screw
is a surprising machine, propelled by three thousand square
metres of canvas and by an engine of two thousand five hundred horse-power.
Not to mention these new marvels, the ancient vessel of Christopher
Columbus and of De Ruyter is one of the masterpieces of man.
It is as inexhaustible in force as is the Infinite in gales;
it stores up the wind in its sails, it is precise in the immense
vagueness of the billows, it floats, and it reigns.
There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that sixty-foot
yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast four hundred feet tall,
when that anchor, which weighs tens of thousands, is twisted in the
jaws of the waves like a fisherman's hook in the jaws of a pike,
when those monstrous cannons utter plaintive and futile roars,
which the hurricane bears forth into the void and into night,
when all that power and all that majesty are engulfed in a power
and majesty which are superior.
Every time that immense force is displayed to culminate
in an immense feebleness it affords men food for thought,
Hence in the ports curious people abound around these marvellous
machines of war and of navigation, without being able to explain
perfectly to themselves why. Every day, accordingly, from morning
until night, the quays, sluices, and the jetties of the port
of Toulon were covered with a multitude of idlers and loungers,
as they say in Paris, whose business consisted in staring at the Orion.
The Orion was a ship that had been ailing for a long time;
in the course of its previous cruises thick layers of barnacles
had collected on its keel to such a degree as to deprive it of half
its speed; it had gone into the dry dock the year before this,
in order to have the barnacles scraped off, then it had put to
sea again; but this cleaning had affected the bolts of the keel:
in the neighborhood of the Balearic Isles the sides had been
strained and had opened; and, as the plating in those days was not
of sheet iron, the vessel had sprung a leak. A violent equinoctial
gale had come up, which had first staved in a grating and a porthole
on the larboard side, and damaged the foretop-gallant-shrouds;
in consequence of these injuries, the Orion had run back to Toulon.
It anchored near the Arsenal; it was fully equipped, and repairs
were begun. The hull had received no damage on the starboard,
but some of the planks had been unnailed here and there,
according to custom, to permit of air entering the hold.
One morning the crowd which was gazing at it witnessed an accident.
The crew was busy bending the sails; the topman, who had to
take the upper corner of the main-top-sail on the starboard,
lost his balance; he was seen to waver; the multitude thronging
the Arsenal quay uttered a cry; the man's head overbalanced his body;
the man fell around the yard, with his hands outstretched towards
the abyss; on his way he seized the footrope, first with one hand,
then with the other, and remained hanging from it: the sea lay
below him at a dizzy depth; the shock of his fall had imparted
to the foot-rope a violent swinging motion; the man swayed back
and forth at the end of that rope, like a stone in a sling.
It was incurring a frightful risk to go to his assistance; not one of
the sailors, all fishermen of the coast, recently levied for the service,
dared to attempt it. In the meantime, the unfortunate topman was
losing his strength; his anguish could not be discerned on his face,
but his exhaustion was visible in every limb; his arms were contracted
in horrible twitchings; every effort which he made to re-ascend served
but to augment the oscillations of the foot-rope; he did not shout,
for fear of exhausting his strength. All were awaiting the minute
when he should release his hold on the rope, and, from instant
to instant, heads were turned aside that his fall might not be seen.
There are moments when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a tree,
is life itself, and it is a terrible thing to see a living being
detach himself from it and fall like a ripe fruit.
All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility
of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict;
he wore a green cap; he was a life convict. On arriving on a level
with the top, a gust of wind carried away his cap, and allowed
a perfectly white head to be seen: he was not a young man.
A convict employed on board with a detachment from the galleys had,
in fact, at the very first instant, hastened to the officer of
the watch, and, in the midst of the consternation and the hesitation
of the crew, while all the sailors were trembling and drawing back,
he had asked the officer's permission to risk his life to save
the topman; at an affirmative sign from the officer he had
broken the chain riveted to his ankle with one blow of a hammer,
then he had caught up a rope, and had dashed into the rigging:
no one noticed, at the instant, with what ease that chain had
been broken; it was only later on that the incident was recalled.
In a twinkling he was on the yard; he paused for a few seconds
and appeared to be measuring it with his eye; these seconds,
during which the breeze swayed the topman at the extremity
of a thread, seemed centuries to those who were looking on.
At last, the convict raised his eyes to heaven and advanced a step:
the crowd drew a long breath. He was seen to run out along the yard:
on arriving at the point, he fastened the rope which he had brought
to it, and allowed the other end to hang down, then he began
to descend the rope, hand over hand, and then,--and the anguish
was indescribable,--instead of one man suspended over the gulf,
there were two.
One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly,
only here the spider brought life, not death. Ten thousand glances
were fastened on this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor
contracted every brow; all mouths held their breath as though they
feared to add the slightest puff to the wind which was swaying
the two unfortunate men.
In the meantime, the convict had succeeded in lowering himself
to a position near the sailor. It was high time; one minute more,
and the exhausted and despairing man would have allowed himself
to fall into the abyss. The convict had moored him securely with
the cord to which he clung with one hand, while he was working
with the other. At last, he was seen to climb back on the yard,
and to drag the sailor up after him; he held him there a moment
to allow him to recover his strength, then he grasped him in his
arms and carried him, walking on the yard himself to the cap,
and from there to the main-top, where he left him in the hands
of his comrades.
At that moment the crowd broke into applause: old convict-sergeants
among them wept, and women embraced each other on the quay,
and all voices were heard to cry with a sort of tender rage,
"Pardon for that man!"
He, in the meantime, had immediately begun to make his descent
to rejoin his detachment. In order to reach them the more speedily,
he dropped into the rigging, and ran along one of the lower yards;
all eyes were following him. At a certain moment fear assailed them;
whether it was that he was fatigued, or that his head turned,
they thought they saw him hesitate and stagger. All at once the crowd
uttered a loud shout: the convict had fallen into the sea.
The fall was perilous. The frigate Algesiras was anchored alongside
the Orion, and the poor convict had fallen between the two vessels:
it was to be feared that he would slip under one or the other of them.
Four men flung themselves hastily into a boat; the crowd cheered
them on; anxiety again took possession of all souls; the man had not
risen to the surface; he had disappeared in the sea without leaving
a ripple, as though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded,
they dived. In vain. The search was continued until the evening:
they did not even find the body.
On the following day the Toulon newspaper printed these lines:--
"Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the detachment on
board of the Orion, on his return from rendering assistance to a sailor,
fell into the sea and was drowned. The body has not yet been found; it is
supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the Arsenal point: this
man was committed under the number 9,430, and his name was Jean Valjean." _
Read next: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK THIRD - ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN: CHAPTER I. The Water Question at Montfermeil
Read previous: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK SECOND - THE SHIP ORION: CHAPTER II. In which the reader will peruse Two Verses which are of the Devil's Composition possibly
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