know these chaste dawns, these gay noon hours, these
pensive evenings and starry nights! . . . These endless distances where the soul expands, where sorrows
dissolve. . . Ah! I know them! . . . Beyond this horizon line, beyond this sea, are there no countries like
the rest? Are there no people, no trees, no noises?
'There is no rest, no silence for me! . . . To die! . . But who can assure me that the thought of Juliette will not come to mingle with the worms to eat me up? . . . One stormy day I was face to face with Death and I prayed to be taken by him. But Death turned away from me. . . . He spared me, me who am useless for anything or to anybody, to whom life is more of a torture than the carcass of a condemned criminal or the chain-shot of a galley-slave, and he took another instead a strong, brave and kindly man for whom poor creatures were waiting! Yes, one time the sea snatched me, rolled me on its waves and then cast me up alive again upon the seashore, as if I were unworthy to perish in it.
The solid mass of clouds breaks up, becomes whiter. The sun showers the sea with rays of brilliant light, the changing green of the sea grows softer, becomes golden in some places and opalescent in others, and near the shore above, the bubbling line is variegated with all the shades of pink and white. The reflections of the sky which the waves endlessly divide, which they break up into a multitude of small fragments of light, glitter upon the agitated surface. Behind the harbor the slender mast of a cutter, which men are towing on the bowline, glides along slowly, then the hull appears, the hauled-up sails swell out, and gradually the vessel moves aways, dancing on the waves. Along the beach which the ebb tide uncovers, an angler is walking hastily, and ship-boys come running to the shore bare-legged, wade in the mud
