We Shall See

Poem by François-René De Chateaubriand Collection Miscellaneous PoemsThemes TimePeriod 19th century

The past is nothing in our life,
And the present is even less:
It is in the future we trust
To give us joy and treasure.
Every mortal in his wishes outruns
That future toward which we run;
Happiness lies in hoping,
We live, saying: We shall see.

But that future full of charms,
What is it when it has arrived?
It is the present that with our tears
Morning and evening is drenched!
As soon as opens the scene
That with ardor we desire,
We yawn, we barely look at it;
We see, saying: We shall see.

This old man leans toward the earth;
He touches his final moments:
Does he think of it? No; he hopes
To live still seventy years.
A doctor, strong in experience,
Wants to prove to him that we die:
The old man laughs at the sentence,
And dies saying: We shall see.

Valère and Damis have but one soul;
They are the model of friends.
Valère in a misfortune claims
The purse and the care of Damis:
“I come to you, sincere friend,
Or tonight in the depths of prison…
— What! This very night? — Yes! — Dear Valère,
Come back tomorrow: We shall see.”

Look out! Make way for the carriages
In which swells the proud peasant
Who once drove two nags
At thirty sous, for the passerby.
The people crushed by the wheel
Curse the child of the Porcherons;
I, from the prince avoiding the mud,
I step aside, and say: We shall see.

We shall see is a magic word
That serves in all vexing cases:
We shall see, says the politician;
We shall see, says the wretched man.
The great men of our gazettes,
The kings of the day, the braggarts,
The false friends and the coquettes,
All of them tell you: We shall see.

Paris, 1810.

Chateaubriand

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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