How
many nights it must have taken to make it so thick! How many nightmares
have galloped under this cap? How many dreams have been dreamed beneath
it? And charming ones, too, perhaps,--why not?
If you are neither an engineer, nor a blacksmith, nor a builder, Brest
will not interest you very much. The port is magnificent, I admit;
beautiful, if you say so; gigantic, if you wish. It is imposing, you
know, and gives the impression of a powerful nation. But those piles of
cannons and anchors and cannon-balls, the infinite extension of those
quays, which enclose a calm, flat sea that appears to be chained down,
and those big workshops filled with grinding machinery, the never-ceasing
clanking of galley chains, the convicts who pass by in regular gangs and
work in silence,--this entire, pitiless, frightful, forced mechanism,
this organized defiance, quickly disgusts the soul and tires the eye. The
latter can rest only on cobblestones, shells, piles of iron, madriers,
dry docks containing the naked hulls of vessels, and the grey walls of
the prison, where a man leans out of the windows and tests the iron bars
with a hammer.
Nature is absent and more completely banished from this place, than from
any other spot on the face of the earth; everywhere can be seen denial
and hatred of it, as much in the crowbar which demolishes the rocks, as
in the sabre of the _garde-chiourme_ who watches over the convicts.
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