The Novels of Victor Hugo, Fully Translated (V. 19)

Seitenzahl:

126

Gewicht:

195 g

Erschienen bei:

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Kurzbeschreibung

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VI. BATTLE BETWEEN DEATH AND NIGHT The child was before this thing, mute, astonished, with fixed eyes. For a man it would have been a gibbet, for the child it was an apparition. Where a man would have seen a corpse, the child saw a phantom. And, besides, he did not understand. The fascinations of the abyss are of all kinds; there was one on the top of that hill. The child took one step, then two. He went up, though he felt like going down, and went nearer, though he felt like moving away. He came, quite close, bold and quivering, to survey the phantom. When he reached the gibbet, he raised his head and examined. The phantom was tarred. It shone here and there. The child could distinguish the face. It was coated with bitumen, and this mask, which seemed viscous and sticky, modeled itself into form, in the moving shadows of the night. The child saw the mouth which was a hole, the nose which was a hole, and the eyes which were holes. The body was wrapped and as if tied in a coarse canvas soaked in naphtha. This canvas had grown mouldy and broken. A knee passed through it. A crack allowed the ribs to be seen. Some parts were corpse, others skeleton. The face was earth-colored, slugs which had wandered over it, had left vague silvery ribbons upon it. The canvas, sticking to the bones, presented reliefs, like the draping of a statue. The skull, cracked and split, had gaps like rotten fruit. The teeth had remained human, they had preserved a laugh. The remnant of a cry seemed to sound in the open mouth. There were a few hairs of beard on the cheeks. The inclined head had an air of attention. Some repairs had recently been made. The face was freshly tarred, as was also the knee which came out of the canvas, and the ribs. Below, the feet protruded. J...

Portrait

Victor Hugo (1802-1885), der große Literat der französischen Hochromantik, musste 1851 Frankreich verlassen und lebte bis 1870 in Belgien, Jersey und Guernsey. Die Jahre im Exil wurden zu seiner literarisch fruchtbarsten Zeit.

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Mehr von:  Victor Hugo, Cambridge Scholars Publishing