The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo Page B

the alarm to call attention to an advertisement. Guernsey has more posters than the whole of France. This publicity promotes life; frequently the life of the mind, with unexpected results, leveling the population by the habit of reading, which produces dignity of manner. On the road to St. Helier or St. Peter Port you may fall into conversation with a passerby of unexceptionable aspect, wearing a black coat, severely buttoned up, and the whitest of linen, who talks of John Brown 42 and asks about Garibaldi. Is he a minister of the church? Not at all: he is a cattle drover. A contemporary writer comes to Jersey, goes into a grocer’s shop, 1 and sees, in a magnificent drawing room attached to the shop, his complete works, bound, in a tall glass-fronted bookcase topped by a bust of Homer.

XV
    OTHER PECULIARITIES
    The various islands fraternize with one another; they also make fun of each other, gently. Alderney, which is subordinate to Guernsey, is sometimes vexed by this, and would like to become the seat of the bailiff and make Guernsey its satellite. Guernsey ripostes, goodhumoredly, with this popular jest:
    Hale, Pier’, hale, Jean,

L’Guernesey vian.
    Pull (the oar), Pierre, pull, Jean:
Guernsey’s coming!
    These islanders, being a sea family, are sometimes cross with one another, but never feel rancor. Anyone who thinks they utter coarse insults misunderstands them. We do not believe in the proverbial exchange that is said to have taken place between Jersey and Guernsey: “You are a lot of donkeys,” with the retort: “You are a lot of toads.” This is a form of salutation of which the Norman archipelago is incapable. We cannot accept that two islands in the ocean play the parts of Vadius and Trissotin. 43
    In any case Alderney has its relative importance: for the Casquets it is London. The daughter of a lighthouse keeper named Houguer, who had been born on the Casquets, traveled to Alderney for the first time at the age of twenty. She was overwhelmed by the tumult and longed to get back to her rock. She had never seen cattle before; and, seeing a horse, exclaimed: “What a big dog!”
    On these Norman islands people age early. Two islanders meet and chat: “The old fellow who used to pass this way is dead.”—“How old was he?”—“All of thirty-six.”
    The women of this insular Normandy do not like to be servants: are they to be criticized or praised for this? Two servants in the same house find it difficult to agree. They make no concessions to each other: hence their service is awkward, intermittent, and spasmodic.
    They have little care for the well-being of their master, though without bearing him any ill will: he must get along as best he can. In 1852 a French family who had come to Jersey as a result of events in their country took into their service a cook who came from St. Brelade and a chambermaid who came from Boulay Bay. One morning in December the master of the house, having risen early, found the front door, which opened on to the main road, standing wide open, and no sign of the servants. The two women had been unable to get on together, and after a quarrel—no doubt feeling that they had fully earned their wages—had bundled up their belongings and gone their separate ways in the middle of the night, leaving their master and mistress in bed and the front door open. One had said to the other: “I can’t stay in the house with a drunkard,” and the other had retorted: “I can’t stay in the house with a thief.”
    â€œAlways the two on the ten” is an old local proverb. What does it mean? It means that if you employ a laborer or a female servant your two eyes must never leave their ten fingers. It is the advice of a miserly employer: ancient mistrust denouncing ancient idleness. Diderot tells us how five men came to mend a broken pane of glass in his window in Holland: one was carrying the new pane,