Victor Hugo is a giant of French literature, whose mark on the language is rivaled perhaps only by Molière. He was also politically active during the heart of the 19th century, a period I know shamefully little about. Hugo is best known today, especially among Americans, for his two novels Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), each of which has been adapted for the stage and screen many times.
The 30 year gap between these two masterpieces has three explanations. First, during the 1800’s novels were not considered the preeminent literary form. They shared the stage, as it were, with theater and, to a lesser extent, essays. The many modern French prizes for best novel (from Prix Goncourt on down) were originally marketing gimmicks by publishers struggling to get the theater-focused public interested in novels. Although Hugo wrote one other novel between Notre Dame and Misérables (the 1834 Claude Gueux), most of his literary output during that period was in the form of plays, poems, and political pamphlets. The second reason for the publication gap was the death of his oldest daughter Léopoldine in 1843 at the age of just 19. Léopoldine drowned in the Seine river while Hugo was visiting the southwest France, and overcome with grief he stopped publishing entirely for nearly a decade.
The event that pushed him back onto the literary stage was also the third explanation for his 30 year abstention from novel writing: the coup d’état by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1851, which brought the end of the Second Republic of France and began the Second Empire. Hugo was serving as a deputy in the Assembly when the coup happened, and organized a failed resistance movement. He fled from France to Belgium in December 1851, and in January 1852 he was officially exiled from France (along with 60 other former Assembly members). Later that year he judged Belgium too precarious a resting place and retreated further to the Channel Islands, which were British protectorates at the time and so relatively safe from French interference. From this remove he wrote scathing critiques of the Second Empire government, including both polemics and poems. Hugo lived on the island of Jersey for 3 years, and then on the island of Guernsey for another 15, until finally returning to France on September 5, 1870, the day after the declaration of the Third Republic (the date of which is immortalized by the downtown Paris metro station named “Quatre-Septembre”).
All of this preamble is to explain how it is that Hugo came to set his 1866 novel Les Travailleurs de la Mer on the island of Guernsey, an otherwise odd choice for a French literary giant. I listened to Travailleurs in audiobook form after Steven Galante (of the French Library of Boston) recommended it to me as his favorite of Hugo’s work. It’s a relatively short novel, whose unabridged recording weighs in at only eight hours. I finished it in three or four weeks of irregular listening during my commute to work. (Note that most modern paper editions of the book include an 80 page introduction (!) that Hugo wrote for the 1883 edition, and which presents a non-fiction treatment of the island of Guernsey. The audio edition I listened to omits this text).
Les Travailleurs de la mer, the proper novel, also starts off as a portrait of island life and the people of Guernsey. There’s a lot of initial descriptions of landscapes, seascapes, buildings, social classes, and individuals. After this rather slow, extended set-up, we move on to what critic Marc Eigeldinger dubbed “an Iliad of one”. Gilliatt, a 30-year-old sailor, has fallen hopelessly in love with the much younger Déruchette. He is a loner, considered an odd duck by his fellow islanders, but recognized as a polymath who has mastered sailing, fishing, boat-building, and iron-smithing (plus reading and writing). She is the delicate niece of Mess Lethierry, a rough but wealthy steamboat owner, who has vowed to give her every comfort imaginable and to keep her cosseted until the perfect husband can be found. When the prized steamboat aground on a mid-channel rocky outpost (un écueil), Lethierry promises Déruchette’s hand in marriage to anyone who can save the vessel. Gilliatt announces he will go, spends the better part of 4 months completing the task single-handedly, and returns to claim his bride. Alas, he finds that she has fallen in love with another (the Reverend Ebenezer Caudray), and so he selflessly helps the young couple elope before tranquilly drowning himself in the incoming tide off Guernsey. There’s also some stuff about a treacherous captain who sabotaged Lethierry’s boat, which is how it came to crash on the rocks in the first place.
On the whole, I enjoyed the book greatly, especially hearing Hugo’s rich vocabulary and poetic sentences read aloud. I don’t have statistics for this, but I suspect that the total number of distinct words in this novel is much higher than in contemporary novels of comparable length. There’s all kinds of boat words and waterfront words and words for ropes pulleys and winches and cords and barricades – all the stuff you need to describe meticulously the operation of one man solo freeing an engine from a crashed steamboat and loading it onto a sailboat. To top it off, after the false climax of withstanding the onslaught of a hurricane, we get the real climax of Gilliatt surviving a giant squid attack by means of cutting out its eye and brain with a knife. Prior to Hugo’s book, the French word for squid was «poulpe». But Hugo coined a new word for the monster, «pieuvre» (possibly a blend of two other words from French fishermen, «poufre» and «pouvre». Shortly after Les Travailleurs de la Mer was published, «pieuvre» became the dominant form (according to Wikipedia; however the Google N-gram viewer suggests the two forms are pretty much equally frequent since 1870).
Since I was listening while driving, I did not note unfamiliar vocabulary words or underline memorable phrases. But every few minutes I remarked to myself “now that’s a sentence.” One example that I can recall occurs after Gilliatt has spent countless weeks carefully preparing for the engine-hoisting operation. When the day approaches and the weather turns threatening, he abandons his usual caution and hurries to complete the final steps. Hugo writes: «À ce point d’achèvement et si près de la fin, la hâte est prudence.» Good stuff. I am not usually a fan of poetry, but based on the poetic language of this novel, I went to the French Library of Boston to look for some of Hugo’s most famous collections of poems works (Les Châtiments, Les Contemplations, La Légende des siècles). Unfortunately, they are still unboxing their collection from a multi-year renovation… and the boxes of poetry are last on the schedule to be reshelved. So I guess I’ll just have to wait.
