THE FISH OF BOUILLABAISSE 



These moving creatures and others, crawling worms, 

 shrimps, and a host of Crustacea of different sorts, move 

 about in disorder in the heap of which they form a 

 part. Others, less active, even inert, lie beside them. 

 We pick up a sea cucumber or trepang, which looks 

 like a black pudding, and feel it palpitate as we take 

 it into the hand, and contract with so much force 

 that it expels through the mouth almost the whole of 

 its digestive tube. Next to it are large sea-urchins, 

 spiny balls of different colours, black, brown, purple, 

 light yellow, or mottled with white or violet. Not 

 far away, we see with their five radiating arms, star- 

 fish, of different colours, most a blazing vermilion, 

 such as no painter or blossom could ever hope 

 to equal. Branching corals, blocks of seaweed 

 incrusted with lime and hardened, brought up from 

 the bottom where they occupy the spaces between 

 the grass-wrack, bearing, either on them or in their 

 crevices, transparent sea-squirts like diaphanous jelly; 

 shell-fish and other animals, as many as they are 

 varied. The field of grass-wrack, beneath the mass of 

 water, reveals itself as a realm of intense life, prodigious 

 in its diversity and abundance, of which nothing about 

 us can give us the faintest idea. We obtain this idea, 

 create it within ourselves, only by considering the 

 product of this fishing. So we reconstruct a strange, 

 surprising, almost startling world, which surpasses our 

 powers of imagination. 



We may have in fleeting glimpses a direct vision of 

 this world. While we are engaged in our work of 

 sorting, the boat nears the shore; the bottom of the 

 water comes nearer, and we are able to see it better. 

 The sunlight, almost vertical now that it is nearly 

 noon, sheds a bright light upon it. The surface of 

 the sea, motionless beneath the shelter of the cliffs, 

 allows our glance to penetrate right to the bottom. 

 Leaning over the side, I see below me tufts of grass- 

 wrack, with long upright leaves; they cover the 

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