The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo Read Free Book Online

put an end to this misbehavior. In the reign of Nominoe, a feudatory of Charles the Bold, his relics were stolen by the monks of Lehon-lès-Dinan. All these facts are proved by the Bollandists, the “Acta Sancti Marculphi,” etc., and Abbé Trigan’s “Ecclesiastical History.” Victricius of Rouen, a friend of Martin of Tours, had his cave on Sark, which in the eleventh century was a dependency of the abbey of Montebourg. Nowadays Sark is a fief immobilized between forty tenants.

XII
    RANDOM MEMORIES
    In the Middle Ages poor people and poor money went together. One created the other. The poor improvised the sou. Rags and farthings were brothers: so much so that the former sometimes invented the latter. It was a bizarre kind of right, tacitly permitted. There are still traces of this on Guernsey. A quarter of a century ago anyone who had need of a double 33 tore a copper button off his jacket; the buttons from soldiers’ uniforms were current coin; a scrap metal merchant would cut out pennies from an old cauldron. This coinage circulated freely.
    The first steamship to be seen on Guernsey, on its way to somewhere else, gave the idea of having one on the island. It was called the
Medina
and had a burden of around a hundred tons. It called in at St. Peter Port on June 10, 1823. A regular service of steamers to and from England, by Southampton and Portsmouth, started only much later. The service was run by two small steamships, the
Ariadne
and the
Beresford.
Viscount Beresford was then governor of the islands.
    Isolation has a long memory, and an island is a form of isolation. Hence the tenacity of memory in islanders. Traditions continue interminably. It is impossible to break a thread stretching backward through the night as far as the eye can reach. People remember everything—a boat that passed that way, a shower of hail, a fish they caught, and, still more understandably, their forebears. Islands are much given to genealogies.
    A word in passing about genealogies. We shall have more to say about them. Family trees are venerated in the archipelago. They are much regarded even for cows—more usefully, perhaps, than for people. A countryman will refer to “my ancestors.”
    When Monsieur Pasquier was made a duke, Monsieur Royer-Collard 34 said to him: “It won’t do you any harm.” It is the same with genealogies: they do no harm to anyone.
    Tattooing is the earliest form of heraldry. The innocence of the savage points toward the pride of nobility. And the Channel Islands are innocent, very innocent, and savage, to a certain degree. In these sea-borne territories, where a kind of saltiness preserves everything, even vanities, people have a firm faith in their own antiquity. In a way this is respectable and touching. It leads to impressive claims. If these claims are made in the presence of a skeptical Frenchman he smiles; if he is polite as well as skeptical he bows. One day (May 26, 1865) I had two visitors, a Jersey man and an Englishman, both perfect gentlemen. The Jersey man said: “My name is Larbalestier.” Seeing that this did not sufficiently impress me, he added: “I am a Larbalestier, of a family that went on the Crusades.” The Englishman said: “My name is Brunswill. I am descended from William the Conqueror.” I asked them: “Do you know a Guernsey man, Mr. Overend, who is descended from Rollo?”
    There is a Granite Club in St. Sampson. Its members are stone breakers, who wear a blue rosette in their buttonhole on May 31. May is also the cricket season.
    The Channel Islands are remarkable for their impassiveness. A matter that stirs passions in England seems to pass unnoticed here. The author of this book happened one day to commit a barbarism in the English language, which he did all the more readily because he knows no English. Deceived by false information given by a misprint in a pocket dictionary, he wrote