When Gilliatt, entering that cave for the second time in pursuit of the crab, had perceived the crevices in which he thought the crab had taken refuge, the octopus was lying in wait in that hole. Can the reader picture that lying in wait? Not a bird would dare to brood, not an egg would dare to hatch, not a flower would dare to open, not a breast would dare to give suck, not a heart would dare to love, not a spirit would dare to take flight, if one meditated on the sinister shapes patiently lying in ambush in the abyss. Gilliatt had thrust his arm into the hole; the octopus had seized it. It held it. He was the fly for this spider. Gilliatt stood in water to his waist, his feet clinging to the slippery roundness of the stones, his right arm grasped and subdued by the flat coils of the octopus' thongs, and his body almost hidden by the folds and crossings of that horrible bandage. Of the eight arms of the octopus, three adhered to the rock while five adhered to Gilliatt. In this manner, clamped on one side to the granite, on the other to the man, it chained Gilliatt to the rock. Gilliatt had two hundred and fifty suckers upon him. A combination of anguish and disgust. To be crushed in a gigantic fist, whose elastic fingers, nearly a meter in length, are inwardly full of living pustules which ransack your flesh. As we have said, one cannot tear one's self away from the octopus. If one attempts it, one is but the more surely bound. It only clings the closer. Its efforts increase in proportion to yours. A great struggle produces a great con traction. Gilliatt had but one resource his knife. He had only his left hand free; but, as the reader knows, he could make powerful use of it. It might have been said of him, that he had two right hands. His open knife was in his hand. The tentacles of an octopus cannot be cut off; it is leathery and difficult to sever, it slips away from under the blade. Moreover, the superposition is such that a cut into these thongs would attack your own flesh. The octopus is formidable; nevertheless, there is a way of getting away from it. The fishermen of Sark are acquainted with it; any one who has seen them executing abrupt movements at sea knows it. Porpoises also know it; they have a way of biting the cuttlefish which cuts off its head. Hence all the headless squids and cuttlefish which are met with on the open sea. The octopus is, in fact, vulnerable only in the head. He had never seen the octopus of this size. He found himself seized at the outset by one of the larger species. Any other man would have been terrified. In the case of the octopus, as in that of the bull, there is a certain moment at which to seize it: it is the instant when it thrusts forward its head- a sudden movement. He who misses that juncture is lost. But All that we have related lasted but a few minutes. Gilliatt felt the suction of the two hundred and fifty cupping glasses increasing. The octopus is cunning. It tries to stupefy its prey in the first place. It seizes, then waits as long as it can. Gilliatt held his knife. The suction increased. He gazed at the octopus, which stared at him. All at once the creature detached its sixth tentacle from the rock, and launching it at him, attempted to seize his left arm. A At the same time it thrust its head forward swiftly. second more, and its mouth would have been applied to Gilliatt's breast. Gilliatt, wounded in the flank and with both arms pinioned, would have been a dead man. But Gilliatt was on his guard. Being watched, he watched. He avoided the tentacle, and at the moment when the creature was about to bite his breast, his armed fist descended on the monster. Two convulsions in opposite directions: that of Gilliatt and that of the octopus. It was like the conflict of two flashes of lightning. Gilliatt plunged the point of his knife into the flat, viscous mass, and, with a twisting movement similar to the flourish of a whip, describing a circle around the two eyes, he tore out the head as one wrenches out a tooth. It was finished. The whole creature dropped. It resembled a sheet detach ing itself. The air pump destroyed, the vacuum no longer existed. The four hundred suckers released their hold, simultaneously, of the rock and the man. It sank to the bottom. Gilliatt, panting with the combat, could perceive on the rocks at his feet two shapeless, gelatinous masses, the head on one side, the rest on the other. We say "the rest," because one could not say the body. Gilliatt, however, fearing some convulsive return of agony, retreated beyond the reach of the tentacles. But the monster was really dead. Gilliatt closed his knife. It was time that Gilliatt killed the octopus. He was almost strangled; his right arm and body were violet in hue; more than two hundred swellings were outlined upon them; the blood spurted from some of them here and there. The remedy At for these wounds is salt water; Gilliatt plunged into it. the same time, he rubbed himself with the palm of his hand. The swelling subsided under this friction. THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO From "Les Misérables" VICTOR HUGO ON the morning of Waterloo, then, Napoleon was cheerful, and had reason to be so,—for the plan he had drawn up was admirable. Once the battle had begun, its various incidents the resistance of Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie Sainte; Bauduin killed, and Foy placed hors de combat; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was broken; the fatal rashness of Guillemont, who had no petards or powder bags to destroy the farm gates; the sticking of the artillery in the mud; the fifteen guns without escort captured by Uxbridge in a hollow way; the slight effect of the shells falling in the English lines, which buried themselves in the moistened ground, and only produced a volcano of mud, so that the troops were merely plastered with mud; the inutility of Piré's demonstration on Braine l'Alleud, and the whole of his cavalry, fifteen squadrons, almost annihilated; the English right, but slightly disquieted and the left poorly attacked; Ney's strange mistake in massing instead of drawing out the four divisions of the first corps; a depth of twenty-seven ranks and a line of two hundred men given up in this way to the canister; the frightful gaps made by the cannon balls in these masses; the attacking columns disunited; the oblique battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durotte in danger; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules who came from the polytechnic school, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an ax the gates of La Haie Sainte, under the plunging fire, of the English barricade on the Genappe road; Marcognet's division caught between infantry and cavalry, shot down from the wheat field by Best and Pack, and sabered by Ponsonby; its battery of seven guns spiked; the Prince of Saxe Weimar holding and keeping, in defiance of Count d'Erlon, Frischemont and Smohain; the flags of the 105th and 45th regiments which he had captured; the Prussian black Hussar stopped by the scouts of the flying column between Wavre and Planchenoit; the alarming things which this man said; Grouchy's delay; the fifteen hundred men killed in less than an hour in the orchard of Hougomont; the eighteen hundred laid low even in a shorter space of time round La Haie Sainte; -all these stormy incidents, passing like battle clouds before Napoleon, had scarce disturbed his glance or cast a gloom over this imperial face. Napoleon was accustomed to look steadily at war; he never reckoned up the poignant details; he cared little for figures, provided that they gave the total victory. If the commencement went wrong, he did not alarm himself, as he believed himself master and owner of the end; he knew how to wait and treated destiny as an equal. He seemed to say to fate: "You would not dare!" One half light, one half shade, Napoleon felt himself protected in good and tolerated in evil. There was, or he fancied there was, for him a connivance, we might say, almost a complicity, on the part of events, equivalent to the ancient invulnerability; and yet, when a man has behind him the Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau, it seems as if he could defy Waterloo. A mysterious frown becomes visible on the face of heaven. At the moment when Wellington drew back, Napo |