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It was finished. Splendid, glittering, superb,
Shining over the city like the scythe over the grass,
Broad steel that daylight turned into radiance,
Having I know not what in its tranquility
Of the dazzling glow of the mystic triangle,
Like the gleam deep within an ancient temple,
The fatal blade, raised again, triumphed.
It had kept nothing of what it had done
But a tiny, imperceptible red stain.
The executioner had gone back to his hovel;
And the death penalty, taking back its servants,
Judges, priests, had returned to its palace,
With its terrible cart whose wheel,
Silent, leaves a furrow in the mud
That fills with blood as soon as it has passed.
The crowd said: good! for man is senseless,
And those who follow everything, and whose way it is,
Follow even this cart and even this rut.
I was there. I was thinking. The sunset was empurpling
The grave Hôtel de Ville, always ready for struggles,
Between Yesterday it meditates and Tomorrow it dreams.
The scaffold was finishing, left alone on the Grève,
Its day, watching the sun expire.
Twilight came, like ghosts.
And I was still there, I was looking at the axe,
The night, the immense city and the little stain.
As in the depths of the dark firmament
The darkness grew like a frightful wall,
The scaffold, hideous block of funereal timbers,
Filled with blackness and became shadow;
The clocks struck, not the hour, but the death knell;
And always, on the steel, though the cleaver
Was no more than a dreadful and dark form,
The redness of the stain appeared in the shadow.
A star, the first one seen in the evening,
While I was musing, rose in the black sky.
Its light made the scaffold more deformed.
The star repeated itself in the enormous triangle;
It cast there as into a lake its reflection,
A mysterious and sacred gleam; it seemed
That on the horrible axe, accustomed to murders,
The star let fall its tear of light.
Its ray, like a dart that strikes and rebounds,
Struck the iron with a luminous shock; one would have said
That the star was seen rebounding from the axe.
Like a falling coal that detaches from a fire,
It was reflected in that mirror of dread;
On human justice and on human law
An august, calm splatter of eternity.
“”Has this iron wounded heaven?
I thought. On whom then does the haggard man strike?
What then is your mystery, O blade?”” And my gaze
Wandered, seeing nothing more except through a veil,
From the drop of blood to the drop of star.
March 30, 1856.
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-the-scaffold-victor-hugo/