He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man! Victor Hugo's hero was involved thus in a quicksand--but the quicksand in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool--he was wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer. All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven. This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo's writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric. Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.