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Come forth from your subterranean dwellings,
Nero, scourge of humankind!
Let the sad clatter of our chains
Awaken you deep in the tomb.
All is full of turmoil and alarms:
Our blood flows with our tears;
To crawl is the first law:
We drag ignoble fetters;
One sees nothing now but slaves:
Come: the world is worthy of you.
They have been laid waste within our temples,
The sacred monuments of kings:
My frightened eye beholds them;
I tremble and I weep at once.
While a common grave,
Of grandeur and of fortune,
Receives the funereal remnants,
A specter, with menacing voice,
Has pierced the recent tomb
That devoured the old tombs.
Its hand is armed with a pike:
A cap conceals its pride;
By death its sight is charmed:
It seeks a tyrant in the coffin.
Bent over the senseless dust,
It seizes a terrible scepter
That has withered the lily’s flower,
And with a Gothic crown
Loading its anarchic cap,
It makes itself king of sorrow.
Behold the supreme phantom,
Frenchmen, who is about to reign over you:
Of the republican diadem
Wear the light and gentle weight.
Anarchy and despotism,
At the vile altar of atheism,
Tie a bloodstained knot,
And embracing in impure shadow,
They take their pleasure in the torture
Of their double sterility.
The scaffold, the smoking torch,
Cover our countryside with mourning.
The gaping Revolution
Swallows up the son and the grandsire.
The adolescent whom its rage strikes
Goes to die on the field of slaughter
Or in an exiled hospice;
Before he falls asleep in the grave,
On a support of oak or elm,
He drags a mutilated trunk:
So when the frightful Chimera
Appeared not far from Ascalon,
In vain the tender and feeble mother
Hid her children in the valley.
The reeds of the Jordan trembled;
The cedars of Lebanon groaned,
The palms at Jezreel,
And the camel left without guides,
Wept in the arid sands
With the women of Ishmael.
Napoleon with his genius
At last crushes the wicked;
Order is reborn: united France
Resumes its rank in the universe.
But, giant, eldest son of man,
Must it be said of a throne that you are named
Usurper? Ill-fecundated,
The illustrious field of your victory—
Was it to disown the glory
Of the old Cid and the great Condé?
Tell, nymphs of Vincennes,
Tell of unheard-of deeds,
You who presided beneath an oak
Over the justice of Louis!
Oh! sublime bard of death,
You who from a magnanimous hero
Make the great memory greater,
What cries would you have made heard,
If, when you wept over his ashes,
Your eye had fathomed the future?
The old king whose sacred key
Guards the ruins of Rome
Could not, within the eternal enclosure,
Find shelter for his brow.
His feeble hands may be loaded
With ungrateful but useless irons,
For there remains to the new Just One
The strength of his divine cross,
And of his crown of thorns,
And of his reed scepter.
Triumpher, our suffering
Grows weary of your laurels;
Far from the gentle sun of France
Were you to leave our warriors?
The Dvina, tormented by Aeolus,
To the pole’s unknown Neptune
Rolls their whitened bones,
While the black Borysthenes
Goes to tell the mourning of the Seine
To the brilliant seas of Colchis.
To the future your soul aspires;
Still greedy for the past,
You want Memphis; the empire of time
By the eagle will be crossed.
But, Napoleon, your memory
Will show itself in history
Only beneath the veil of our tears:
When you draw me on to admire you,
Liberty tells me of her chains,
Virtue informs me of her sorrows.
Paris, 1813.
Chateaubriand
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-ode-les-malheurs-de-la-revolution-francois-rene-de-chateaubriand/