As I walked across First Court, the chapel bells rang out over centuries of college tranquillity, and I thought about the strange journey of the letter which, from a desolate beach in Kent, had made the wife of a professor in Cambridge weep.

13

‘Who is my reader? . . . Every book is a message in a bottle tossed into the sea with the hope it will reach a different shore. I feel very grateful when someone finds it and reads it, particularly someone like Noriega.’

Isabel Allende, My Invented Country, on hearing that General Noriega had been arrested with two books: the Bible and her novel The House of the Spirits

The Professor had said that the letter-writer was imbued with the spirit of Hugo, Rimbaud and other nineteenth-century authors. I realized that my lack of knowledge of French literature was so complete that I had not even seen the musical Les Misérables. There was a cultural abyss to fill. In my ignorance, Victor Hugo seemed the most accessible.

I started with Les Misérables. There were phrases that jumped out at me – in so far as anything can jump from a book over a thousand pages long. A man who has slipped overboard swims on for hours in a desperate struggle for life. ‘He feels at once buried by these two infinities, the sea and the sky; one is a tomb, the other a shroud.’ The letter-writer had used the imagery of sky and sea, but for her the sky was an escape rather than a shroud. It was not much to show for the many pages consumed.

Three years after Les Misérables, Hugo wrote a fragment called The Sea and the Wind that was initially supposed to have formed part of Toilers of the Sea. In it he wrote: ‘One can hear the sob of creation. The sea is the great mourner. She takes on all sorrows; the ocean laments on behalf of all those who suffer.’ In the same extract he acknowledged the siren call of the sea on a sunny day, when the ‘grandiose hilarity of a clear sky spreads over the sea’, and ‘the whole immensity of the ocean is a caress, and the waves sigh, and the reefs sing and the seaweed kisses the rock’ and so forth. But of course this letter-writer did not throw the bottle into the sea on a balmy summer’s day.

I turned to another of Hugo’s works, The Man Who Laughs. The story is set on the English coast on a stormy January night in 1690. Pirates escaping from a raid abandon their latest victim, a child whom their ‘diabolic surgery has transformed into a monster destined as a fairground amusement’. With their knives they had carved a big happy grin into the child’s face. However, retribution stalks the pirate ship, for she immediately runs into a succession of terrible storms. The ship begins to founder and all hope of escape or rescue is abandoned.

The ship’s doctor advises the rest of the crew: ‘Let us throw our crimes into the sea. They are weighing on us. That is what is sinking the ship. Let us not think about rescue any more, let us think about our salvation . . .’ He writes a note explaining their crime, and the torchlight illuminates the pale faces of the multinational band of sailors. Occasional sobs break the silence. The ship continues to sink.