Muse, a certain Ségur, a bishop, is hostile to me

Poem by Victor Hugo Period 19th centuryPrint

Muse, a certain Ségur, a bishop, is hostile to me;
This violet man damns me in bad style;
His prose delights the owls in their holes.
O Muse, let us have no wrath against him.
Let us leave him this plaything that he takes for thunder,
His hatred.

He is moreover to be pitied. At the seminary,
One day when this little fellow full of boredom
Was bleating an oremus at random before him,
As the gosling clucks, as the cow moos,
He cried out: — My God! I wish I were blind! —
Not finding it dark enough as it was.
The good Lord, making him an idiot, granted his wish.

Insult is today very perfected.
One takes a little soot from a chimney,
A little filth from the corner of a post, from the sewer
Of mire, and that takes the place of wit, of taste,
Of common sense, of syntax and of honor; it is the fashion.
Good ulemas, such is the convenient process
That your zeal puts at the service of heaven,
And it is with the mouth foaming with gall,
With diatribe as a smile,
That you come, damning those whom one dares not proscribe,
To make your big eyes at us, show us your big fists,
Say your big words to us, O our dear talapoins!

We forgive you. Well, what, Ségur exorcises me.
After?

He curses me in a concise way;
He paints me as best he can, and here is the pastel
Approximately:

— “Horrible monster. Nothing like it has been seen.
Formless, appalling and shadowy. A man
Who would burn Paris and demolish Rome.
Voluptuous. A bit the chief of assassins.
In short, capable of anything. Trampling underfoot the saints,
The laws, the church and God. Ruining his publisher.”
Let us make chorus. To howl with the wolf, and to bray
With the bishop, well, that is a right. Let us use it.
I love in this noble abbot this peasant style.
It is fishwife-like, it is exquisite. Bravo. It plunges you
Into a vague ecstasy where one senses the lie.
Sweet priest! One hears Diderot laughing loudly,
Molière, Rabelais, and one does not quite know,
In this vision where the demon whispers,
Whether one sees a bishop with a basket on his back
Or else a ragpicker with the miter on his forehead.
The antiphon, when a little drool interrupts it,
Has charm; one is a priest and one has bile.
Besides, Muse, everyone on earth has his Zoilus,
And Voltaire has Fréron as Dante has Cecchi.
And then it sells. How much? Six sous. To whom? To fools. It is an audience. The fossil jaws
Want to laugh; the mocking clan of imbeciles
Wants to be amused; it is very numerous today;
Does it not then have the right that one work for it?
Since when is it no longer permitted to fill the jugs?
Everything has its instinct. As a hornet flies to the hives,
As Alexander runs six times to Lucretia in bed,
As Corydon follows the charming Alexis,
As a wolf follows the goats, and the goat the cytisus,
As April makes flowers, Ségur makes stupidities.
It must be.

Muse, it befits the indulgent sage
To dream, to listen, and to become a good man while musing,
That he watch the living pass by, that he weigh them,
And that instead of souring him, this spectacle calms him.
So be it.

And then, let us get to the point. Come,
Am I correct? Does the host with all its rays
Dazzle me as much as the sun? Does this priest
See me appear at his mass on Sunday?
Have I ever even pretended to want
To tell him my sins softly in his parlor?
When did I go to his house, denying my doctrine,
To give myself great blows of the fist on my chest?
I am a hardened one. Ségur notices it.
I am atheist to the point of doubting that God is
Charmed to warm his hands at the devil’s fire,
That he has put the incurable and the irremediable
In man, a being ignorant, weak, puny, carnal,
In order to make of it an offering to eternal torment,
That he has purposely stuffed Satan into nature,
And that he, the author of every creature,
Able to empty hell and lock it with a key,
Made a burner, in order to create a burned one;
That the thousand suns whose fire trembles up there
Would one fine day all fall together,
I doubt it; and when I see, in the depths of the blue zenith,
The seven stars of the Bear lit, I hardly believe
That the celestial ceiling will ever fall apart
To the point of no longer being able to bear this candelabra.
I know that in the bible one finds this cliché,
The End of the World; but science has advanced.
Moses is old; is there on earth a quadruped
That lifts its eyes to heaven to see manna rain?
I find at times more wit, I say it,
In the monkeys of today than in the men of old.
Pope, God, they are not the same personage.
I love the cathedral and not the middle ages.

What is a dogma, a cult, a rite? An object of art.
I can admire it; but if it leads a mercenary astray,
If it intoxicates a madman, if it kills a man, I abhor it.
No more idol! And I oppose hellebore to incense.
When an abbess, to whom some nun is displeasing,
Makes her graze on grass next to a mule,
I dare say that it is bad to feed a woman that way;
I admire a flowering tree more than a blazing pyre;
I am not very furious; I love Voltaire in short
Better than Saint Cupertin and than Saint Cucufin,
And I prefer to all that Saint Pancras says,
Saint Loup, Saint Labre or Saint Pachomius, a verse of Horace.
Such are my tastes. I am incorrigible. And when
Floréal, like a chief who wakes the camp,
Sets the nests astir, and when my verse flounders,
Bewildered, in thyme, verbena and sage,
When the plain is in joy, and when the dawn is on fire,
I believe quite simply, quite stupidly in God.

At the same time my soul is sharply intoxicated
With the dark boredom of seeing so many men in livery,
So many mournings, so many bowed heads, so many low hearts,
There, so many beds of purple, and here, so many wretched pallets.
My God is neither pagan, nor Christian, nor biblical;
That God, I implore him in public sorrow;
It is toward him that I am turned, an old weary wrestler,
When I cry out in the midst of darkness: — Alas!
On the shore that all the human sea beats,
Shore where the flux brings, where the reflux carries back
The hideous waves throwing foam at the halcyons,
Who then will bring in the shadow to the nations
Either the lightning of Paris or the ray of France?
Who then will rekindle this beacon, hope? —

So I have this grave fault of not being devout;
I am not even so to the party that prevails;
I do not like that after victory one should be harsh;
It is dreadful, I forgive; and I am in the service
Of the vanquished; and, thinking that my mother at bay
Was once a Vendéenne, fleeing in the woods,
I dare to make propaganda of pity;
I am the brigand son of a brigand mother.
To be clement is to be atrocious; or at least,
Stupid. I am so, always, before witnesses,
Everywhere. Others are the vultures; I am the goose.
Yes, when public cowardice unfolds,
It pleases me to be alone and to be the last.
When the væ victis reigns, and goes so far as to deny
The amount of right that remains to those who fall,
When, no one protesting, the principles succumb,
This flight of all attracts me. Here I am.

How can one expect a priest to accept all that!

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-muse-a-certain-segur-bishop-is-hostile-to-me-victor-hugo/