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Louis Quatorze once said, "L'Etat, c'est moi!" but this figure of speech becomes an empty, meaningless phrase beside what an army ant could boast, "La maison, c'est moi!"
And Gard sat still with his hand in Nance's two, feeling very weak and shaky, and looked vaguely back at L'Etat as it faded and dwindled into a dim black triangle of rock. This is what had happened. Since Tom Hamon's death, his friend Peter and his widow Julie had, as we know, found themselves drawn together by a common detestation of Stephen Gard and a common desire for his extinction.
That man Gard is still on L'Etat, though those fools who went across for him couldn't find him. Cré nom! What are you all staring at, then?" "Where's our Peter?" demanded Mrs. Guille shrilly, with the strident note of fear in her voice, as she becked and bobbed towards the Frenchwoman like an aged cormorant. "Peter? I'm asking you. I want him. Where is he?"
Whether it is Louis XIV who says "l'état c'est moi" or the citizens banded together in a state, who claim that the functions of the state are to meddle with the business of every man, matters little.
For Francoise d'Aubigne, the widow of Scarron, the governess of the children of Louis XIV, had caused the mother of these children, the beautiful Madame de Montespan, to be cast away, and she became the friend, the beloved, the secret spouse of the king: and the lofty Louis, who could say of himself, "L'etat c'est moi" he, with all the power of his will, with all his authority, was the humble vassal of Franchise d'Aubigne, Marquise de Maintenon!
And Stephen Gard lay there under the ridge on L'Etat, with the wonder and beauty of it all in his face and in his heart, and said to himself that it was probably the last sunset he would ever see, and he was glad to have seen it at its best.
Here the kings of France held their Beds of Justice; here the Fronde held its sittings, and here on 15th April, 1654, the young king Louis XIV. strode in, booted and spurred, and is said to have uttered the famous words l'État c'est moi.
He thought of ghosts, of which, if popular belief was anything to go by, Sark was full; and there was nothing to hinder them coming across to L'Etat for their Sabbat. And he thought of monster devil-fish climbing, loathsome and soundless, about the dark rocks.
"Where are you taking me?" he asked, as they crept past the miners' cottages on the cliff above Rouge Terrier. "To Brenière.... To L'Etat.... Bernel went on to find a boat." And presently they were out on the bald cliff-head, and slipping and sliding down it till they came to the ledge, below which Brenière spreads out on the water like a giant's hand.
And at times his eye would light on the grim black pile of L'Etat, lying out there in the silvery shimmer like some great monumental cairn, a rough and rugged heap of loneliness and mystery the grimmer and lonelier by reason of the twinkling brightness of its setting.
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