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II
It was the seventh of August. O somber destiny!
It was the first day of their final year.
Alone in a royal place, walking side by side,
Two men, at moments touching elbows,
Were talking. A great memory that engraves itself in my heart!
The first looked weary, sad and grave,
Like a too-weak brow bearing a heavy plan.
A double epaulette with a crown weighed down
His green uniform with a purple-edged braid,
And the order and the fleece made on his breast,
Near the broad watered ribbon of changing blue,
Two luminous centers, one of gold, the other of silver.
He was a king; an old man with a whitened head,
Bent by the weight of years and of monarchy.
The other was a young man, a stranger among kings,
A poet, a passerby, a useless voice.
They spoke to each other, without witnesses, without mystery,
In a large cabinet, simple, bare, solitary,
Yet majestic. What men do
Leaves a mark on the walls. Beneath that same ceiling
Had passed long ago, O faded splendors!
Great events and great thoughts.
There, behind his back, crossing his strong hands,
Shaking the floor beneath his superhuman steps,
Very often the emperor, when he was the master,
From the door, dreaming, went to the window.
In a corner a table, a velvet armchair,
Mirrored in the parquet their gilded and heavy feet.
Through a glass door, outside, the eye in crowds
Perceived in the distance Boulle cabinets,
Japanese vases, lacquers, enamels,
And golden candelabras with immense branches.
A red salon adorned with Venetian mirrors,
Full of those Greek bronzes that the divine spirit idealizes,
Multiplied endlessly its crystal chandeliers;
And, like a statue with metal blades,
One saw, helmet on brow, gleaming in the corner
A guard in silver and blue of a proud bearing.
Now between the poet and the old bowed king,
What was it about?
Of a poor fallen angel
Whose love remade the soul with its breath;
Of Marion, washed like Magdalene,
Who limped and dragged her crippled step,
The censorship, a serpent, having bitten her foot.
The poet wanted one evening to bring on stage
Louis thirteen, that king over whom a priest reigned;
— A whole century, marquises, executioners, fools, buffoons;
And that the crowd come, and that through tears,
At moments, in a dazzling and somber drama,
One might think to see the shadow of the pale cardinal pass.
The old man hesitated: — What use is it to lay bare
Louis thirteen, that puny and ill-born king?
What good is it to disturb a dead man in a tomb?
What do they want? Where are they running? Do they know well where they fall?
Is not everything already crumbling on every side?
Is not everything going away in too much liberty?
Is it not rather time, after fifteen years of trial,
To raise the dike and stop the river?
Surely, a king can take back when he has given.
As for the theater, one must, the throne being undermined,
Stifle with both hands its too-bold flame;
For the crowd is the people, and from a comedy
May spring the spark with livid rays
That sets fire in the shadows to revolutions. —
Then he denied history, and, whatever might come of it,
To this young dreamer disputed his ancestor;
Welcoming him well otherwise, kind, royal, gracious,
And questioning him about his own ancestors.
While leaving to kings the names by which they are named,
The poet struggled firmly, like a man
Enamored of liberty, passionate for art,
Yet respectful toward this noble old man.
He said: — Everything is grave in this century where everything leans.
Art, tranquil and powerful, wants a frank pace.
Dead kings are its prey; it must be left to it.
It is not an enemy; why anger it,
And deliver it in the shadows to torturers,
It whose closed hand is full of thunderbolts?
That hand, if it opened, a redoubtable envoy,
On dazzled France and frightened Louvre,
One would be terrified – too late, if it must be said –
To see suddenly so many thunderbolts shine there!
Oh! the tyrants below harm the king above.
The people are always there to take the muse at its word,
When indignation, up to the king one reveres,
Rises from the pensive brow of the severe artist!
— Sire, is one well supported by what totters?
Censorship is a bad roof, poorly propped,
Always ready to fall on the names it shelters.
Sire, an imprudent breath, far from extinguishing it, irritates
The hearth, suddenly terrible and swirling,
And from a luminous art makes a flaming art!
Besides, even if one sought only royal splendor,
For this mocking but loyal nation,
Instead of the great pictures offered by the great Louis,
Sun-king, fertilizing the blooming lilies,
Who, holding under his scepter a world in balance,
Made Racine happy, left Molière free,
What a spectacle, great God! than a group of censors
Armed and speaking low, vile slave hunters,
Flat on their bellies, watching the hour when returns
The drama, proud lion, into history, its den! —
Here, seeing toward him, with a more inclined brow,
This astonished old man turn gently,
He hazarded further his uneasy thought,
And, leaving aside the drama and the poet,
Attentive, he sounded the vast and black design
That at the bottom of this sad king he had just glimpsed.
Could it be? Someone would have that hope?
To break the right of all! To cut off from France,
As one takes a toy from a spiteful child,
Air, light, and liberty!
The king would not want that! He, wise king and just king!
Then, choosing words for this august ear,
He said that times have sovereign waves;
That nothing, neither bold bridges, nor underground canals,
Ever, except God, nothing stops and subdues
The people who grow or the ocean that rises;
That the strongest vessel sinks and is often lost
That seeks to break head-on both wave and wind;
And that, to shatter against it, in the insane struggle,
One has behind oneself, rock everywhere raised,
All one’s century, mores, the spirit one wants to defy,
The very port where the ship could have saved itself!
He dared to be frightened. Son of a Vendéenne,
A heart having no more love, but having no hate,
He begged that at least one believe him for a moment,
He who over the past bows gravely,
And whose piety, ivy that takes root,
Alas, clings to kings as to every ruin!
Destiny sometimes has formidable games.
Kings must reflect in these stormy days
When, sea that comes, spirit of the times, dark cloud,
Behind the horizon something murmurs!
What good is it to provoke in advance and stir up
The generations one hears arriving?
To distracted eyes France was serene;
But in that troubled sky with barely a bit of mist,
Where all seemed azure, where nothing stirred the air,
He, a dreamer, saw at moments a flash of lightning! —
Charles ten smiling answered: — O poet!
In the evening, everything radiated with light and celebration.
Teeming with soldiers, princes, valets,
Saint-Cloud joyful and green, around the proud palace
Whose beautiful marbles the fleeing Seine reflects,
Seemed with love to press its tuft of trees.
The triumphal arch adorned with bronze victories,
The glittering Louvre, fleur-de-lis-strewn, serene,
Answered him from afar in the middle of the city;
All this royal ensemble had a tranquil air,
And, in the calm aspect of a solemn repose,
I know not what great thing that seemed eternal.
Holyrood! Holyrood! O fatal abbey,
Where the law of destiny, harsh, bitter, obeyed,
Inscribes itself on every side!
Cloister! palace! tomb! that under your austere walls
Guard kings, death and God; three great mysteries,
Three somber majesties!
Discrowned castle! Expiatory valley!
Where the thinker hears in the air and in history,
As a double counsel for our ambitions,
As a double voice that mingles and rumbles,
The rumor of the deep sea,
And the distant noise of revolutions!
Solitude where sometimes from neighboring hills
One sees coming the fawns that trample under the oaks
The sleeping grass,
And who, to breathe the wind in the clearing,
Frightened, shivering, on their hind feet
Stand up halfway!
Proud church where the king of ancient times prayed,
Grave, having for pavement under the Gothic arches
The ancestral tombs he wore with his knee!
Gate where so many archers and guards once superbly
Watched, multiplying the flash of halberds,
And which a shepherd today closes with an old nail!
Homeland where, when war stirred their shores,
The great mountain lords counted their savage clans
And their black battalions;
Where now on the grass, in the sun, under ivy,
Old barefoot women who walk on the stones
Dry rags!
Holyrood! Holyrood! the bramble is on your flagstones.
The kid grazes at the foot of your feudal towers.
O fury of rivals eager to seek each other!
Loves! — Darnley! Rizzio! what nothingness is yours!
Both are there, — one near the other; —
One is a shadow, and the other a stain on the floor!
Alas! how many lessons under your funereal vaults!
Oh! how many teachings one reads in the darkness
On your overturned threshold,
On your walls all imprinted with a strange fortune,
Vaguely lit in that reflection of moonlight
That the past casts!
O palace, be blessed! Be blessed, O ruin!
May an august halo forever illuminate you!
Before your black battlements, pious, we bow down,
For the old king of France has found under your shadow
This melancholy and somber hospitality
That one receives and returns from Stuarts to Bourbons!
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-seventh-of-august-eighteen-twenty-nine-victor-hugo/