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“GIVE a man a taste for reading, and the means of gratifying it, and you place him in contact with the best society in every period of history, with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the truest characters who have adorned humanity." Herschel.

CHOICE LITERATURE

Book II

FOR GRAMMAR GRADES

VICTOR HUGO

1802-1885

VICTOR HUGO, born at Besançon, France, in 1802, is the foremost literary Frenchman of the nineteenth century. He is the greatest French poet and one of the great poets of the world, yet more generally known as a novelist. His great novels are "Notre Dame de Paris," "Les Misérables," and "Ninety-three."

66

Among his political writings are History of a Crime," and "Napoleon the Little." It is well worth one's while to read these two works. Every one should read at least one of the novels named, all three if possible. Hugo wrote other novels, but none that rank with these.

His dramatic masterpiece is "Hernani," and his best collection of Lyrics "Les Châtiments."

ONE

THE CARRONADE

From "Ninety-three"

VICTOR HUGO

NE of the carronades of the battery, a twenty-fourpounder, had got loose.

This is, perhaps, the most formidable of ocean accidents. Nothing more terrible can happen to a vessel in open sea and under full sail.

17

A gun that breaks its moorings becomes suddenly some indescribable, supernatural beast. It is a machine which transforms itself into a monster. This mass turns upon its wheels; has the rapid movements of a billiard ball; rolls with the rolling; pitches with the pitching; goes, comes, pauses, seems to meditate; resumes its course, rushes along the ship from end to end like an arrow, circles about, springs aside, evades, rears, breaks, kills, exterminates. It is a battering-ram which assaults a wall at its own caprice. Moreover, the batteringram is metal, the wall wood. It is the entrance of matter into liberty. One might say that this eternal slave avenges itself. It seems as if the power of evil, hidden in what we call inanimate objects, finds a vent and bursts suddenly out. It has an air of having lost patience, of seeking some fierce, obscure retribution; nothing more inexorable than this rage of the inanimate.

The mad mass has the bounds of a panther, the weight of the elephant, the agility of the mouse, the obstinacy of the ax, the unexpectedness of the surge, the rapidity of lightning, the deafness of the tomb. It weighs ten thousand pounds, and it rebounds like a child's ball. Its flight is like a wild whirl abruptly cut at right angles. What is to be done? How to end this? A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes, a wind falls, a broken mast is replaced, a leak is stopped, a fire dies out; but how to control this enormous brute of bronze? In what way can one attack it?

You can make a mastiff hear reason, astound a bull, fascinate a boa, frighten a tiger, soften a lion; but there is no resource with that monster, a cannon let loose. You cannot

kill it,
a sinister life bestowed on it by Infinity.

it is dead; at the same time it lives. It lives with

The planks beneath it give it play. It is moved by the ship, which is moved by the sea, which is moved by the wind.

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