In the scorching evenings around the equator, it was enough for him to give an order to rouse things and beings from their brutish drowsiness.  “Let the music begin, and refreshments be served.”  And in a few moments dancers would be revolving the whole length of the deck, and smiling lips and eyes would become brilliantly alight with illusion and desire.  Behind him, his praises were always being sounded.  The matrons found him very distinguished.  “It is plain to be seen that he is an exceptional person.”  Stewards and crew circulated exaggerated accounts of his riches and his studies.  Some young girls sailing for Europe with imaginations seething with romance were very much aghast to learn that the hero was married and had a son.  The solitary ladies stretched out on a chaise-longue, book in hand, upon seeing him would arrange the corolla of their petticoats, hiding their legs with so much precipitation that it always left them more uncovered; then fixing upon him a languishing glance, they would begin a dialogue always in the same way.

“How is it that any one so young as you has already become a captain?...”

Ah, the misery of it!...  He who had gallantly passed many years cruising from one extreme of the Atlantic to the other with a rich, gay, perfumed world, at times resisting feminine caprice through mere prudence, yielding at others with the secrecy of a discreet sailor, now found himself with no other admirers than the mediocre tribe of the Blanes, with no other hallucinations than those which his cousin the manufacturer might suggest, when waxing enthusiastic because the great apostles of politics were taking a certain interest in the captain.

Every morning, on awaking, his taste now received a rude shock.  The first thing that he contemplated was a room “without personality,” a dwelling that was not characteristic of him in any way, arranged by the maids with excessive cleanliness and a lack of logic that was constantly changing the situation of his things.

He recalled with longing his compact and well-ordered stateroom where there was not a piece of furniture that could escape his glance nor a drawer whose contents he did not know down to the slightest detail.  His body was accustomed to slip without embarrassment through the spaces of his cabin furnishings.  He had adapted himself to all incoming and outgoing angles just as the body of the mollusk adapts itself to the winding curves of its shells.  The cabin seemed formed by the secretions of his being.  It was a covering, a sheath, that went with him from one extreme of the ocean to the other, heating itself with the high temperature of the tropics, or becoming as cosy as an Esquimo hut on approaching the polar seas.