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XIX
Children, fair innocent brows bent around me,
Mouths with enamel teeth always saying: Why?
You who, questioning me on more than one great problem,
Want of each thing, obscure even to myself,
To know the true meaning and the decisive word,
And who touch everything in my pensive mind.
— So much so that, once you leave, children, I often spend
Hours, quite sullen, putting back in place
Deep in my brain my plans, my visions,
My eternal subjects of meditation,
God, man, the future, reason, madness,
My systems, dark heap, immense scaffolding,
Suddenly disturbed, through no fault of yours,
By a child’s question, asked at random!
Since at last here you are probing my destinies,
And you speak to me of my young years,
Of my first instincts, of my first hope,
Listen, sweet friends, who want to know everything!
I had in my blond childhood, alas, too ephemeral,
Three masters: — a garden, an old priest, and my mother.
The garden was large, deep, mysterious,
Closed by high walls from curious eyes,
Sown with flowers opening like eyelids,
And with vermilion insects running over the stones;
Full of buzzings and confused voices;
In the middle, almost a field, at the back, almost a wood.
The priest, wholly nourished on Tacitus and Homer,
Was a gentle old man. My mother — was my mother!
Thus I grew under this triple ray.
One day — Oh! if Gautier would lend me his pencil,
I would draw for you in one stroke a figure
That one day entered my mother’s house, ominous omen.
A doctor with a poor brow, solemn bearing,
And I would see blossom on your mouths without gall,
Doors of your heart that no care undermines,
That dazzling laughter that sometimes illuminates me!
When this man entered, I was playing in the garden,
And merely seeing him I suddenly stopped.
He was the principal of some college or other.
The tritons that Coypel groups around a conch,
The fauns that Watteau led astray in the woods,
The sorcerers of Rembrandt, the gnomes of Goya,
The varied devils, true nightmares of a monk
With which Callot laughing teases Saint Anthony,
Are ugly, but charming; deformed, but filled
With a fire that animates every fold of their face
And sometimes casts a rapid flash into their eyes.
— Our man was very ugly, but he was stupid
Forgive me, I still speak of him like a frank schoolboy
It is wrong. What I have said, try to forget;
For from your happy age, which a pedant embarrasses,
I have kept the anger and I have lost the grace.
This bald and black man, very frightening to me,
And of whom my mother also at first felt some fear,
While multiplying humble attitudes,
Brought advice and solicitations:
— That the child was not guided; — that sometimes
He carried his book away dreaming into the woods;
That he grew haphazardly in this solitude.
That one should think of it; that severe study
Was daughter of shadow and of deep cloisters;
That a lamp hung from dark ceilings,
Which guides the agile pen of a hundred schoolboys,
Lit Horace and Catullus and Virgil better,
And poured into the mind rays far better
Than the sun that plays through the flowering tree;
And that finally children needed, — far from mothers, –
The yoke, hard work and bitter tears.
Thereupon, the college, amiable and triumphant,
With a sweet smile offered to the young child
Drunk with freedom, air, joy and roses,
Its black oak benches, its long morose dormitories,
Its halls that one bolts and on all their pillars
Sculpts with an old nail the boredom of schoolboys,
Its schoolmasters who, among the piles of paper,
Make the hour of play be eaten by voracious impositions,
And, without water, without grass, without trees, without ripe fruit,
Its great paved courtyard between four great walls.
The man dismissed, struck by his speeches,
My mother remained sad and preoccupied.
What to do? what to want? who then was right,
Either the gloomy college, or the happy home?
Who knows better how to accomplish the austere work of life,
The turbulent schoolboy, or the solitary child?
Problems! questions! she hesitated much.
The matter was very grave. A humble woman after all,
A soul made by destiny, not by books,
With what face to repel this tragic prophet,
With tone so magisterial, with gestures so certain,
Who spoke to her in the name of the Greeks and Romans?
The priest was learned no doubt; but, what do I know?
Does one learn from the master or from the college?
And then finally, — often thus we triumph.-
The most vulgar man has great profound words:
—”It is indispensable! — it is fitting! — it matters!”
That sometimes trouble the strongest woman.
Poor mother! which of the two paths to choose?
All the fate of her son weighed in her hands.
Trembling, she held this heavy balance,
And believed she indeed saw it at moments in silence
Lean toward the college, alas! opposing
My future happiness to my present happiness.
She mused thus without sleep and without truce.
It was summer: Toward the hour when the moon rises,
On one of those beautiful evenings that resemble day
With less clarity, but with more love,
In her park, where the ray and the breeze played,
She wandered, always sad and always undecided,
Questioning in a low voice the water, the sky, the forest,
Listening at random to the voices she would hear.
It is in these moments that the peaceful garden,
The brushwood where an invisible insect stirs,
The beetle friend of leaves, the lizard
Running in the moonlight at the bottom of the old drain,
The blue-flowered faience where the fat plant lives,
The oriental dome of the dark Val-de-Grâce,
The cloister of the convent, broken, but still gentle,
The chestnut trees, the green path with buttercups,
The statue where without noise the shadow of branches moves,
The pale morning-glories, the white daisies,
The hundred flowers of the bush, the tree, the reed,
Which give back its songs to the bird in perfumes,
Mirror themselves in the pond or hide in the grass,
Or which, loading the superb brow of the laburnum,
At the edge of clear ponds mingling with the birch,
Tremble in golden clusters in the moirés of the water;
And the scintillating sky behind the foliage,
And the roofs spreading charming smoke,
It is in these moments, as I tell you,
That all this beautiful garden, radiant paradise,
All these crumbling old walls, all these young roses,
All these pensive objects, all these gentle things,
Spoke to my mother with the wave and the wind,
And said to her in a low voice: — “Leave us this child!
“Leave us this child, poor troubled mother.
This ardent, ingenuous, starry pupil,
This head with pure brow that no mourning veiled,
This soul still new, mother, leave it to us!
Do not go throw it at random into the crowd.
The crowd is a torrent that breaks what it rolls.
Like birds, children have their fears.
Leave to our limpid air, to our moist vapors,
To our sighs, light as the wing of a dream;
This mouth through which never has passed a lie,
This naive smile that its candor defends!
O mother with deep heart, leave us this child!
We will give him only good thoughts;
We will change into day his begun gleams;
God will become visible to his enchanted eyes;
For we are the flowers, the branches, the clarities,
We are nature and the eternal source
Where every thirst pours out, where every wing bathes;
And the woods and fields, understood by the sage alone,
Form the education of all great minds!
Let the child grow among our sublime noises.
We will penetrate him with these intimate perfumes,
Born of the celestial breath scattered in every beautiful place,
That make rise from man and mount up to God,
Like the song of a lute, like the incense of a vase,
Hope, love, prayer, and ecstasy!
We will bend his eyes toward the shadow here below,
Toward the secret of everything half-open under his steps.
From child we will make him man, and from man poet
To form from his senses the restless corolla,
It is us one must choose; and we will show him
How, from dawn to evening, from oak to midges,
Filling everything, reflections, colors, mists, breaths,
Life with a thousand aspects laughs in the green plains.
We will give him back simple and dazzled by the skies:
And we will make germinate on all sides in him
For man, sad effect lost under so many causes,
That pity which is born from the spectacle of things.
Leave us this child! we will make him a heart
That will understand woman; a mind not mocking,
Where dream and chimera will be born easily,
That will take God for a book and the fields for grammar
A soul, pure hearth of secret favors,
That will shine gently on all dreamy brows,
And, like the sun in fertilized flowers,
Will cast rays on all ideas.”
Thus spoke, at the hour when the city is silent,
The star, the plant and the tree, — and my mother listened.
Children! did they keep their sacred promise?
I do not know. But I know that my adored mother
Believed them, and, sparing me wearisome prisons,
Entrusted my young soul to their gentle lessons.
From then on, waiting for night, hour when study
Recalled my thought to its grave attitude,
All day, free, happy, alone under the firmament,
I could wander at ease in this charming garden.
Contemplating the golden fruits, the rapid or stagnant water,
The blossomed star and the radiant flower,
And the meadows and the woods, which my spirit in the evening
Saw again in Virgil as in a mirror.
Children! love the fields, the valleys, the fountains,
The paths that evening fills with distant voices,
And the wave and the furrow, flank never drowsy,
Where thought germinates beside the ear of grain.
Take one another by the hand and walk in the grass;
Look at those who go binding the blond sheaves;
Spell in the sky full of letters of fire,
And, when a bird sings, listen to God speaking.
Life with the shock of contrary passions
Awaits you; be good, be true, be brothers;
United against the world where the spirit is corrupted,
Read in the same book touching foreheads,
And never forget that the humble and chosen soul
Made for light and for poetry,
That hearts where God places serious echoes
For all the noises that a mysterious meaning animates,
In a cry, in a sound, in a vague murmur,
Hear the counsels of all nature!
May 31, 1839.
Victor Hugo
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-what-happened-at-the-feuillantines-around-1813-victor-hugo/