PREFACE✦

Religion, Society, and Nature! these are the three struggles of man. They constitute at the same time his three needs. He has need of a faith; hence the temple. He must create; hence the city. He must live; hence the plough and the ship. But these three solutions comprise three perpetual conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life results from all three. Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition, under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple [Greek: anagkê] weighs upon us. There is the fatality of dogmas, the oppression of human laws, the inexorability of nature. In Notre Dame de Paris the author denounced the first; in the Misérables he exemplified the second; in this book he indicates the third. With these three fatalities mingles that inward fatality--the supreme [Greek: anagkê], the human heart.

HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, March, 1866.

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THE ROCK OF HOSPITALITY AND LIBERTY TO THAT PORTION OF OLD NORMAN GROUND INHABITED BY THE NOBLE LITTLE NATION OF THE SEA TO THE ISLAND OF GUERNSEY SEVERE YET KIND, MY PRESENT ASYLUM PERHAPS MY TOMB.

V.H.

CONTENTS

PART I✦

SIEUR CLUBIN

Book I.--THE HISTORY OF A BAD REPUTATION✦

CHAP. PAGE

I. A Word written on a White Page 1

II. The Bû de la Rue 3

III. For your Wife: when you Marry 7

IV. An Unpopular Man 9

V. More Suspicious Facts about Gilliatt 18

VI. The Dutch Sloop 20

VII. A Fit Tenant for a Haunted House 25

VIII. The Gild-Holm-'Ur Seat 27