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 down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it?
BOOK SECOND--THE FALL
CHAPTER IX