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Updated: June 24, 2025
When he had landed this young priest, who had a somewhat feminine cast of features, a clear eye, and a grave manner, Gilliatt perceived that he was holding out a sovereign in a very white hand. Gilliatt moved the hand gently away. There was a pause. Then the young man bowed, and left him. Gilliatt had forgotten all about this stranger, when a voice hailed him.
The spectacle thus presented was a vast portal in the midst of the sea. It might have been a titanic cromlech planted there in mid-ocean by hands accustomed to proportion their labours to the great deep. Its wild outline stood well defined against the clear sky when Gilliatt approached in his sloop. The rocks, thus holding fast and exhibiting their prey, were terrible to behold.
Since the time of the carpenter-mason of Salbris, who, in the sixteenth century, without other helper than a child, his son, with ill-fashioned tools, in the chamber of the great clock at La Charité-sur-Loire, resolved at one stroke five or six problems in statics and dynamics inextricably intervolved since the time of that grand and marvellous achievement of the poor workman, who found means, without breaking a single piece of wire, without throwing one of the teeth of the wheels out of gear, to lower in one piece, by a marvellous simplification, from the second story of the clock tower to the first, that massive clock, large as a room, nothing that could be compared with the project which Gilliatt was meditating had ever been attempted.
Gilliatt climbed to the top of the rock and gazed wildly into space. He had no clothing. He stood naked in the midst of that immensity.
After incredible exertions, the machinery was ready for lowering into the sloop. Gilliatt had constructed tackle, a regulating gear, and made all sure. The long labour was finished; the first act had been the simplest of all. He could put to sea. To-morrow he would be in Guernsey. But no.
The rock in which the rains had hollowed out this giant's seat was so completely vertical, and there was so much water at its base, that in calm weather vessels were able to pass without danger within a few cables' length. The ship was already abreast of the rock. Gilliatt could see the stir of life on the sunlit deck. The deck was as visible as if he had stood upon it.
What would he have thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la Mer, or of the bleeding mouth of Fantine in the first part of Les Miserables, penetrated as it is with a sense of beauty, as lively and transparent as that of a Greek? There is even a sort of preparation for the romantic temper within the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which Winckelmann failed to see.
No shout would reach the ear of man from that desolate giant's chair in the rock. Gilliatt steered his ship nearer to the cliff, and saw that the shadow was a man. The sea was already high. The rock was encircled. Gilliatt drew nearer. The man was asleep. He was attired in black, and looked like a priest. Gilliatt had never seen him before.
By degrees the dusk of heaven began to dawn in them, though gazing still upon the point in space. At the same moment the wide waters round the rock and the vast gathering twilight closed upon them. At the moment when the vessel vanished on the horizon, the head of Gilliatt disappeared. Nothing now was visible but the sea. The Man Who Laughs
Standing in this dripping grotto, with his feet on the edge of a probably bottomless pool, Gilliatt suddenly became aware in the transparence of that water of the approach of some mystic form. A species of long, ragged band was moving amid the oscillation of the waves. It did not float, but darted about at its own will. It had an object; was advancing somewhere rapidly.
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