Voyage Beneath the Waves. Jules Rengade

a half and three-quarters. Sometimes, alas, it only retains its head, and is very glad when it can find something to eat.

      As the day went by, however, the Éclair continued traveling toward the Azores. When night fell and Trinitus calculated that the islands could not be far away, he took the boat up to the surface, which slowed its progress considerably but allowed the voyagers to interrogate the horizon through the windows.

      The sea extended in all directions, seemingly infinite. Its high and rapid waves shook the boat forcefully, and after half an hour of continual shocks, Trinitus was on the point of deciding to go back down to calmer layers when Marcel saw an almost-imperceptible light shining on the horizon. It looked to him like a kind of gray needle outlined against the wan background of the sky, in which numerous stars were twinkling, and he thought he recognized the mast of a vessel.

      Nicaise, whose sight was rather weak, could not make anything out, even with the aid of a powerful telescope, but Trinitus, on seeing the needle identified by Marcel uttered a cry of joy.

      “Land! Land, my friends! It’s the volcanic peak of the Azores; we’ll have disembarked within the hour.”

2. Maître Jacques is Harpagon’s cook in L’Avare [The Miser] (1668)

3. The first telegraphic cable linking England and France was laid between Dover and Calais in 1850 by John Watkins Brett and his brother. It had to be replaced in 1851 with an armored version after a French fisherma cut the first one.

4. The zoologist Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810-1892) had been a pupil of Georges Louis Duvernoy (1777-1855). His paper on the “Synapte de Duvernoy” was published in 1841.