7.40 Hugo — Quatrevingt-treize — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the most famous episode of Victor Hugo's last novel, Quatrevingt-treize : a cannon that breaks loose on a warship at night. Follow Hugo's epic style, in which a machine becomes a monster and a fight becomes a myth. Recognise his favourite devices: accumulation, antithesis, short sentences after long ones. Understand the moral problem the episode sets, which is the problem of the whole novel: justice without mercy. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Ceci est le plus redoutable peut-être des événements de mer. This is perhaps the most fearsome of all events at sea. Chaque mouvement de la caronade en liberté ébauchait l’effondrement du navire. Every movement of the loose carronade began the collapse of the ship. Il s’agissait de terrasser cette foudre. The task was to bring down this thunderbolt. Ce mouvement décisif et périlleux n’eût pas été exécuté avec plus de justesse et de précision par un homme rompu à tous les exercices décrits dans le livre de Durosel sur la Manœuvre du canon de mer. This decisive and perilous move could not have been carried out with more accuracy and precision by a man trained in every exercise described in Durosel's book on the Handling of Naval Guns. L’homme, d’un mouvement de levier imprimé à la barre, le fit basculer. The man, giving the bar a levering movement, tipped it over. il y avait une nécessité plus impérieuse encore, le sauvetage immédiat. there was a more pressing necessity still, immediate rescue. Prerequisites : 7.39 — this reading follows 7.39 Reading . You read Hugo's bishop in Les Misérables in 7.23 Reading ; the periods of 5.26 Vocabulary and the figures of speech of 5.24 Vocabulary , especially l'antithèse , will help. About this text Victor Hugo (1802–1885) published Quatrevingt-treize in 1874, his last novel. Its title is the year 1793, the year of the Terror and of the royalist uprising in the Vendée and Brittany, which the Republic crushed. Three men carry the story: the old Marquis de Lantenac, leader of the royalist rebels; his great-nephew Gauvain, a young republican general; and Cimourdain, a former priest who has become the Republic's pitiless commissioner. In this episode, from the second book of the first part, the corvette Claymore , manned by French royalists but sent by the English, carries Lantenac secretly from Jersey to Brittany. He is disguised as a peasant, and the crew know only that he is an important passenger. At night, a cannon breaks its chains. This lesson gives about 3,800 words: the opening description of the ship and the whole of the episode of the cannon, from the first cry to its end. The text is that of the Œuvres complètes published in Paris by the Imprimerie nationale and Ollendorff, edited by Gustave Simon, in 1924, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Hugo The monster. The paragraph that begins Un canon qui casse son amarre turns a piece of artillery into a living beast. Hugo piles up verbs, pirouette, se dérobe, s'évade, se cabre, heurte, ébrèche, tue, extermine , and animals, the panther, the elephant, the mouse. Then the antithesis: Vous ne pouvez pas le tuer, il est mort ; et en même temps, il vit. The duel. The gunner who let the cannon loose goes down alone to fight it. Hugo calls it la bataille de la matière et de l'intelligence , le duel de la chose contre l'homme , and calls the man a tamer of monsters, an ant, a pygmy. The fight is told in short paragraphs, sometimes a single sentence, that reproduce its rhythm. The judgement. When the cannon is stopped, the old passenger, revealed as a general, pins the captain's cross of Saint Louis on the gunner for his courage, and then orders him shot for his negligence. Courage must be rewarded; negligence must be punished. Both are just, and both happen. The whole novel will return to this question: can justice be absolute, and should it be? Reading it a second time, part by part The ship. The Claymore , a warship disguised as a merchant ship, leaves Jersey in the fog with thirty cannons hidden between decks. The cry. A cannon has broken loose. Hugo explains why it is the most terrible event at sea, and describes the monster in one immense paragraph. The damage. The cannon kills five men, breaks other guns, cracks the masts; the crew flee; mattresses and bales thrown in to stop it are torn to pieces. The passenger watches from the foot of the ladder. The gunner. The man responsible jumps down with an iron bar and a rope, and fights the cannon. At the last moment the passenger throws a bale of forged banknotes under its wheels, and the gunner overturns it. The reward and the sentence. On deck, the passenger decorates the gunner with the cross of Saint Louis, then has him shot. He explains: at sea, every fault is committed in the face of the enemy. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Ninety-Three One evening, on the first of June, in Jersey, in the small deserted bay of Bonne-Nuit, about an hour before sunset, in one of those misty spells of weather that are convenient for fleeing because they are dangerous for sailing, a corvette was setting sail. This vessel was manned by a French crew, but belonged to the English flotilla stationed, as if on sentry duty, at the eastern point of the island. The Prince de La Tour-d'Auvergne, who was of the house of Bouillon, commanded the English flotilla, and it was by his orders, and for an urgent and special service, that the corvette had been detached from it. This corvette, registered at Trinity House under the name of the Claymore, was in appearance a cargo corvette, but in reality a corvette of war. She had the heavy and peaceful look of a merchant ship; yet she was not to be trusted. She had been built for two ends, cunning and force: t