"The ship, the Marie, prepares for bad weather, and begins to fly to leeward.
"Overhead it had become quite dark, a dead vault that seemed as if it would crush you—with a few spots of a yet blacker blackness, which were spread over it in formless patches. It seemed almost like a motionless dome, and you had to look closely to see that it was in the full whirl of movement. Great sheets of grey cloud hurrying by and unceasingly replaced by others, rose from the bottom of the horizon, like gloomy curtains unrolling from an endless coil.
"The Marie fled faster and faster before the storm, and the storm fled after her as if from some mysterious terror. Everything—the wind, the sea, the ship, the clouds—was seized with the same panic of flight and speed towards the same point. And all this passion of movement grew greater, under an ever-darkening sky, in the midst of ever-increasing din.
"From everything arose a Titanic clamour, like the prelude of an apocalypse foreboding the horror of a world's catastrophe. Amidst it you could distinguish thousands of voices; those above were shrill or deep, and seemed far off because they were so mighty; that was the wind, the great soul of this confusion, the invisible power that dominated it all. It filled one with fear, but there were other sound nearer, more material, more ominous of destruction, which came from the writhen water, that hissed as it were upon embers."[10]
After the pages which we have just read there is nothing more in the way of progress possible. The only thing to be done would be to return to the great simplicity of Homer, Lucretius, and Virgil, to obtain the same emotions in two or three lines.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's style is bald beside that of Pierre Loti; it requires an effort to return to it. The arrival at Port Louis of the ship, disabled, and filled with scurvy-smitten people, is, however, striking in its simplicity. "Just imagine this riven mainmast, this ship with her flag of distress, firing guns every minute; a few sailors, looking like spectres, seated on the deck; the open hatches, whence rose a poisonous vapour; the 'tween-decks full of dying people, the deck covered with invalids exposed to the heat of the sun, and who died whilst speaking to one. I shall never forget a young man of eighteen, to whom the evening before I had promised a little lemonade. I sought him on the deck amongst the others; they pointed him out to me lying on a plank; he had died during the night."
The passages in which the thought and the expression are thus wedded are unfortunately rare in the Voyage to the Isle of France. In general, the writer does not yet understand how to make the best use of his sketches and notes; and he did not hesitate later on to go over his first sketches and develop them. This makes it very convenient for following his progress in the difficult art which he was creating. One can judge of it in his account of a sunset at sea in the tropics, which he re-wrote for the Études de la Nature. Here is the sketch as it appeared in the Voyage to the Isle of France:
"One evening the clouds gathered towards the west in the form of a vast net, resembling in texture white silk. As the sun passed behind it each strand appeared in relief surrounded with a circle of gold. The gold gradually dissolved into flame-colour and crimson tints, and low on the horizon appeared pale tones of purple, green, and azure.
"Often in the sky there are formed landscapes of singular variety, where you can find the most fantastic shapes, promontories, steep declivities, towers, and hamlets, over which the light throws in succession all sorts of prismatic colours."