He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly, combats the inexhaustible.
Where, then, is the ship?
Yonder.
Barely visible in the pale shadows of the horizon.
The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him.
He raises his eyes and beholds only the lividness of the clouds.
He witnesses, amid his death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea.
He is tortured by this madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region beyond.
There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human distresses; but what can they do for him?
They sing and fly and float, and he, he rattles in the death agony.
He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.
Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous billows of the invisible; he shouts.
There are no more men.
Where is God?
He shouts.
Help!
Help!
He still shouts on.
Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.
He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are deaf.
He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the infinite.
Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult, the undefined curling of those wild waters.
In him horror and fatigue.
Beneath him the depths.
Not a point of support.
He thinks of the gloomy adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow.
The bottomless cold paralyzes him.
His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp nothingness.
Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars!
What is to be done?
The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths of engulfment.
Oh, implacable march of human societies!
Oh, losses of men and of souls on the way!
Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip!
Disastrous absence of help!
Oh, 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?
CHAPTER IX—NEW TROUBLES
When the hour came for him to take his departure from the galleys, when Jean Valjean heard in his ear the strange words, Thou art free! the moment seemed improbable and unprecedented; a ray of vivid light, a ray of the true light of the living, suddenly penetrated within him.
But it was not long before this ray paled.
Jean Valjean had been dazzled by the idea of liberty.
He had believed in a new life.
He very speedily perceived what sort of liberty it is to which a yellow passport is provided.
And this was encompassed with much bitterness.
He had calculated that his earnings, during his sojourn in the galleys, ought to amount to a hundred and seventy-one francs.
It is but just to add that he had forgotten to include in his calculations the forced repose of Sundays and festival days during nineteen years, which entailed a diminution of about eighty francs.
At all events, his hoard had been reduced by various local levies to the sum of one hundred and nine francs fifteen sous, which had been counted out to him on his departure.