The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo

the girl had stopped. There were two small footprints, and beside them he saw the word she had traced in the snow: “Gilliatt.”
    It was his own name. He was called Gilliatt.
    He stood motionless for some time, looking at the name, the little footprints and the snow; then continued thoughtfully on his way.
    II
    THE BÛ DE LA RUE 69
    Gilliatt lived in the parish of St. Sampson. He was not liked in the parish. There were reasons for this.
    In the first place, he lived in a “ghostly” or haunted house. Sometimes, on Jersey or Guernsey, either in the country or in the town, in some desolate area or in a populous street, you will come across a house whose entrance is barricaded. The doorway is blocked by a holly bush, and the ground-floor windows are closed by unsightly structures of planks nailed together; while the windows on the upper floors are both closed and open: they are bolted shut, but all the panes are broken. If there is an inner courtyard, it is overgrown by grass and the enclosing wall is crumbling. If there is a garden it is a wilderness of nettles, brambles, and hemlock, home to rare insects. The chimneys are cracked and the roof is falling in. Inside, so far as can be seen, the rooms are dismantled; the woodwork is rotten, the stonework is covered with mold. The wallpaper is peeling off the walls, and you can study old wallpaper styles—the griffins of the Empire, the swags of the Directory, the balusters and cippi of Louis XVI. The dense growth of spiders’ webs full of trapped flies points to the deep peace enjoyed by the spiders. Sometimes you will see a broken jar left on a shelf. This is a haunted house—a house to which the Devil comes at night.
    A house, like a man, can become a corpse: it can be killed by superstition, and then it becomes a place of dread. Such dead houses are by no means uncommon in the Channel Islands.
    Country people and seagoing folk are worried by the Devil. The people of the Channel—the English archipelago and the French coastal regions—have very clear ideas about him. The Devil has agents throughout the world. It is well established that Belphegor is the ambassador of Hell in France, Hutgin in Italy, Belial in Turkey, Thammuz in Spain, Martinet in Switzerland, and Mammon in England. Satan is an emperor like other emperors: Satan Caesar. His household is well staffed: Dagon is controller of the pantry, Succor Benoth chief of the eunuchs, Asmodeus banker of the gaming house, Kobal manager of the theater, Verdelet grand master of ceremonies, Nybbas the court fool. The learned Wierus, a good strygologist and a well-informed demonographer, calls Nybbas the great parodist.
    The Norman fishermen of the Channel need to take a great many precautions when they are at sea because of the illusions created by the Devil. It was long believed that Saint Maclou lived on the great square stack of Ortach, in the open sea between Alderney and the Casquets, and in the past many old seamen declared that they had frequently seen him in the distance, sitting on the rock and reading a book. And so seamen sailing past the rock made many genuflections as they passed until the fable was dissipated and gave place to the truth. It was discovered, and is now generally known, that the rock was inhabited not by a saint but by a devil. This devil, one Jochmus, had been clever enough to be accepted for several centuries as Saint Maclou. The Church itself, of course, sometimes falls into errors of this kind. The devils Raguhel, Oribel, and Tobiel were saints until 745, when Pope Zacharias, having found them out, ejected them. In order to carry out such expulsions, which are undoubtedly beneficial, it is necessary to know your way about with devils.
    The oldest inhabitants of the region say—but facts of this kind belong to the past—that the Catholic population of the Norman archipelago was formerly, in spite of itself, more closely in communication with the Devil than