When the Germans were besieging Paris, Hugo seriously proposed that the war be settled by a single combat between himself and the newly crowned Kaiser of Germany. He wrote to the emperor: "You are a great monarch; I am a great poet. We are therefore equals." His notion of himself was summed up in a single epigram: "France is the world. Paris is France. Victor Hugo is Paris." Amiel called him "half genius and half charlatan." Hugo's novels read like prose epics--overwhelming and at times almost convulsive in their effort to give expression to his tremendous imaginings. One of the most striking of them is "Ninety-Three," from which the accompanying passage is taken. The book is a great drama of the breaking out of the French Revolution, a time when every passion was at its height and was exhibited with utter unrestraint. With such a theme Hugo was perfectly at home. He flames and thunders. He flings before the reader actions in which the Titanic energy of the writer is felt in every line, and he revels in the conflict of the two great forces of repression and revolt which made that period memorable. In the passage quoted here many of the author's conspicuous qualities are seen. The translation is that contained in the "International Library of Famous Literature," and is reprinted by the courtesy of the Avil Publishing Company, of Philadelphia. La Vieuville's words were suddenly cut short by a desperate cry, and at the same instant they heard a noise as unaccountable as it was awful. The cry and this noise came from the interior of the vessel. The captain and lieutenant made a rush for the gun-deck, but could not get down. All the gunners were hurrying frantically up. A frightful thing had just happened. One of the carronades of the battery, a twenty-four-pounder, had got loose. This is perhaps the most formidable of ocean accidents. Nothing more terrible can happen to a vessel in open sea and under full sail. A gun that breaks its moorings becomes suddenly some indescribable super-natural beast. It is a machine which transforms itself into a monster. This mass turns upon its wheels, has the rapid movements of a billiard-ball; rolls with the rolling, pitches with the pitching; goes, comes, pauses, seems to meditate; resumes its course, rushes along the ship from end to end like an arrow, circles about, springs aside, evades, rears, breaks, kills, exterminates. It is a battering-ram which assaults a wall at its own caprice. Moreover, the battering-ram is metal, the wall wood. It is the entrance of matter into liberty. One might say that this eternal slave avenges itself. It seems as if the power of evil hidden in what we call inanimate objects finds a vent and bursts suddenly out. It has an air of having lost patience, of seeking some fierce, obscure retribution; nothing more inexorable than this rage of the inanimate.