A page later Ishmael is rubbing the knots out of big vats of whale sperm:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings. . . . Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!

If Melville can invoke both the female and the male principles through the guise of whales, Giono’s Melville summons up the whole universe, out riding in a carriage and discoursing with Adelina, in the book’s most stunning passages, so poetically and resourcefully translated by Paul Eprile, who has studied the French so carefully and, as an outstanding poet in his own right, has found the exact nuanced wording needed:

So now Herman started to talk about the world that lay before them. He rolled up the sky, from one edge to the other, as though it were made out of colored silk. And, for a brief moment, there was no more sky. Then, after an interval of four hoofbeats at a gallop, he rolled the sky open again, but now it had turned into a huge skin, tightly enclosing earth’s arteries and veins.

Herman is able to take a bay leaf and make Adelina fully grasp it, until it is transplanted in her heart:

He made the woods come closer. Had she ever seen a wood the way he was making her see it?

“No.”

He revolved it for her, turned it upside down, turned it inside out: the eastern edge, the western edge, the mysteries of the north and the south, the moss, the fungus, the scent, the color.

“Had you seen it?”

“No.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yes.”

He sent the woods back to where they’d come from. They retreated, shrank, lay down again at the rim of the horizon. Had she really noticed the birches with their horsehide bark?

“No.”

He summoned the birches. And the birches came. She felt them, not just right next to her, as if she was in an ordinary field and had leaned against one; she felt them in her heart.

When he invokes the smell of rain, “He sustained everything else, only he lowered its register, as if he were lifting off, ever so slightly, the pressure from the pedal of a big cathedral organ.” Giono’s Melville has the power to summon all of nature—like Prospero. It’s a strange, erotico-mystic-botanical form of courtship. Prospero? No, like God. Giono, who lost his faith at the end of his childhood, does not hesitate to deify himself (“She could plainly feel that he was granting her his own world”). Even though their romance is chaste (in the book), we can feel her body; when she removes her hoops and gathers up the excess silk around her childlike hips, we can see and touch her.