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To Madame ***.
So it is true, you complain as well,
You whose dark eye, gay as a holiday,
Could drive away the world’s weariness.
How heavy, then, was the care
That made you bow your head?
It is, I imagine, as heavy a burden
As the wren of the fable;
This great sorrow that weighs you down
Reminds me of the reed.
I am far from being the oak,
But tell me, you whom in another time
(When our forebears lived as good folk)
I would have named Iris, or Phillis, or Climene,
You who, in this bourgeois age,
Still dare sometimes to allow me
To call you my godmother,
Is it really you who write to me thus,
And did you think that one must answer you?
Do you know that, in your ennui,
Without thinking, madam and dear blonde,
You scold me like a friend?
Laziness and lack of courage,
You say; if that is so,
I shall set back to work.
Alas! the bird returns to its nest,
And sometimes even to its cage.
On my laurels I am thought asleep;
That is too much honor for a moment’s forgetfulness,
And in my bed laurels have no business;
That would not be my affair.
I was only half dozing,
Beside a sprig of verbena
Whose fragrance barely lived,
And which in dreaming I had picked.
I will admit it, this guilty silence,
This long repose, so mistreated by you,
Laziness, love, folly or nonchalance,
All that lost time was sweet to me.
I will say more, it was profitable to me;
And, if ever my inconstant spirit
Knows how to clothe in some fable
What truth taught me,
I shall appear less guilty to you.
Silence is a counselor
Who reveals more than one mystery;
And whoever wants one day to speak well
Must first learn to be silent.
And, though one were silent forever,
From the moment one lives and loves,
What matters the rest? and you yourself,
When did you ever count the days?
And since all must vanish,
Is it not then a foolish avarice,
To keep as a treasure
What a gust of wind takes from us?
The best of my life has passed like a dream
So light, that it is still dear to me.
But let us return to you, my charming godmother.
So you believe you are bored?
And the winter that comes, rekindling the hearth,
Has set the chatelaine to dreaming.
A novel, you say, could cheer you up;
A sad thing to send you!
Why not ask La Fontaine for a tale?
It is with him that it is good to keep vigil;
Open him on your pillow,
You will see the dawn rise.
Molière predicted it, and I am convinced of it,
Many things will have lived
When our children still read
What the good man told,
Flower of wisdom and gaiety.
But what! fashion comes, and kills an old usage.
People no longer want it, the sober and frank language
Whose sweetness he taught,
The only French, and which comes from the heart;
For, no offense to Italy,
La Fontaine, know it well,
In taking everything imitated nothing;
It grew out of the soil of the homeland,
The green laurel that covers his tomb;
Like the antique, he is new.
My beloved protectress,
When your perfumed letter
Arrived at your spoiled child,
I had just been conversing in all freedom
With the great friend Shakespeare.
Of the subject, however, Boccaccio was the author;
For he fertilizes everything, that charming inventor;
Even after the other, he had to be reread.
I was therefore alone, his Tales in hand,
And the azure glow of the night,
Playing with the morning,
Sparkled on the gilded edge
Of the little Florentine book;
And I was musing, whatever one says or does,
How true it is that the Muses are sisters;
That he was right, that brush full of grace,
Who shows them to us on the summit of Parnassus,
Like a garland of flowers!
La Fontaine laughed in Boccaccio,
Where Shakespeare melted into tears.
Will it be too much to embolden my muse
To attempt in turn to translate
In this amorous book a love story?
But all is good that amuses you.
I would not dare, if it were not for you,
For it is much to try this style
So forgotten, which was once so sweet,
And which today is thought easy.
There was, then, in our city,
According to what has been told to us
(Boccaccio speaks thus; the city is Florence),
A fat merchant, rich, a man of importance,
Who had a child by his wife;
After which, almost at once,
Having set his affairs in order,
He passed from this world elsewhere.
The mother survived; guardians were named,
Loyal, prudent and severe folk;
Capable of bringing honor to themselves
By guarding a minor’s property.
The young man, running about the neighborhood,
Felt at first a sweetness of heart
For a girl of his own age,
Whose father was a tailor;
And little by little the child becoming a man,
Time changed habit into love,
So that Jerome
Could not live a day without seeing Silvia.
To her neighbor the girl, accustomed to him,
Soon loved as she was loved.
Of this danger the mother took heed,
Scolded her son, moralized at length,
Gaining nothing by force or by guile.
She believed that wealth
In this world must change everything,
And from a bush can make an orange tree.
Having therefore taken the guardians to task,
The mother said: “This child here,
Who is not yet fourteen, thank God!
Will desolate the rest of my life.
He has so fallen in love
With a mercenary’s daughter,
That one of these days, if he is not prevented,
I shall wake up a grandmother.
Neither evening nor morning does he leave her.
It is, I believe, Silvia that she is called;
And, if he is to see another in his arms,
He will waste away for her.
We must therefore, with your consent,
Send him away on some journey;
He is young, the girl is wise,
She will surely forget him;
And we shall marry him to some honest woman.”
The guardians said that the lady
Had spoken very wisely.
“You are grown up,” they said to Jerome,
“It is good to see the country.
Go spend a few days in Paris,
See what a gentleman is,
The fine usage, and how people live down there;
In a short time you will come back.”
To this advice, the boy, as one may think,
Answered that he would do no such thing,
And that he could see just as well
How people lived in Florence.
Thereupon, the mother in fury
Answers first with a gross insult;
Then she takes the child by gentleness;
He is reasoned with, he is implored,
He must obey his guardians;
They promise to keep him away
Only a year at most. So much and so long is he begged,
That he yields at last. He leaves his homeland;
He departs, full of his loves,
Counting the nights, counting the days,
Leaving behind him half of his life.
The exile lasted two years; that long term past,
Jerome returned to Florence,
More wounded than ever by the malady of love,
Believing doubtless he would be rewarded.
But absence is a great wrong.
While the young man was running far away,
The girl had married.
On seeing again the banks of the Arno,
He found there only the tomb
Of his forgotten hope.
At first he did not murmur at it,
Knowing that the world, on this point,
Rarely acts otherwise.
He knew the door of the unfaithful one,
And every day he passed on the threshold,
Hoping for a sign, a glance,
A nothing, as one does when one loves.
But all his steps were lost
Silvia no longer knew him,
For which he felt an extreme pain.
Meanwhile, before dying of it,
He wanted from his memory
To try to speak himself.
The husband was not jealous,
Nor was the wife well watched.
One evening when the new spouses
Were at a neighbor’s for the vigil,
In the house, at nightfall,
Jerome entered, hid near the bed,
Behind a piece of cloth;
For the husband was a weaver,
And made that kind of veil
That is put on a Tuscan balcony.
Soon after the married couple returned,
And almost at once went to bed.
As soon as he heard the husband sleeping,
In the shadow toward Silvia Jerome makes his way,
And laying his hand on her breast,
He said softly to her: “My soul, are you sleeping?”
The poor child, thinking she saw a ghost,
Wanted to cry out; the young man added
“Do not cry out, I am your Jerome.
— For the love of God, said Silvia,
Go away, I beg you.
It is past, that time of our life
When our childhood had leisure to love,
You see, I am married.
In the duties to which I am bound,
It no longer becomes me to think
Of seeing you again or hearing you.
If my husband were to surprise you,
Think that the least of evils
Would be for me to lose my peace;
Think that he loves me and that I am his wife.”
At this speech, the unhappy lover
Was wounded to the depths of his soul.
In vain he painted his torment,
And his constancy and his misery;
By promise or by prayer,
All his sorrow could obtain nothing.
Then, feeling death coming,
He asked that, as a last favor,
She let him lie down
For a moment beside her,
Without moving and without touching her,
Only to warm himself,
Having in his heart a mortal ice,
Promising her not to say a word,
And that he would leave at once,
Never to see her again in his life.
The young woman, having some compassion,
On that condition,
Wished to satisfy his desire.
Jerome took advantage of a moment of pity;
He lay down beside Silvia.
Considering then what a long friendship
For this woman he had had,
And what her cruelty was,
And the hope forever lost,
He resolved to cease suffering,
And gathering in a last sigh
All the forces of his life,
He pressed the hand of his beloved,
And gave up his soul at her side.
Silvia, not without some surprise,
Admiring his tranquillity,
Remained at first undecided for some time.
“Jerome, you must get out of here,
She said at last, the hour is advancing.”
And, as he kept silent,
She thought he had fallen asleep.
Raising herself therefore half up,
And softly calling him in a low voice,
She stretched out her hand toward him,
And found him cold as ice.
She wondered at it at first;
Soon, having touched him more strongly,
And seeing her effort useless,
Her friend remaining motionless,
She understood that he was dead.
What to do? it was not easy
To know in such a moment.
She thought to ask advice
Of her husband, woke him from his sleep,
And told him the story of Jerome,
As a misfortune that had recently occurred,
Without saying to whom or in what place.
“In such a case, answered the good man,
I believe the best would be
To carry the dead man in secret
To his home, leave him there without rancor,
For the wife has not failed,
And the evil is fortune’s fault.
— It is for us, then, to do so,”
Said the wife; and, taking her husband’s hand
She made him touch beside her
The body stretched out on her bed.
Although troubled by this unforeseen blow,
The husband rises, lights his candle;
And, without entering into more words,
Knowing that his wife is faithful,
He loads the body on his back,
Secretly carries it to his house,
Lays it down before the door,
And returns without having been seen.
When it was found, the day having come,
The young man lying on the ground,
There was a great uproar;
And the worst, in this misfortune,
Was the mother’s despair.
The doctor at once consulted,
And the body examined everywhere,
As no wound was seen on it,
Each spoke in his own way
Of this sinister adventure.
The popular opinion
Was that the love of his mistress
Had cast Jerome into this adversity,
And that he had died of sadness,
As was the truth.
The body was therefore carried to the church,
And there came the unhappy mother,
Amid grieving friends,
To exhale her bitter sorrow.
While the coffin was being carried,
The weaver who, in the depths of his soul,
Was nonetheless uneasy:
“It is good, he said to his wife,
That you take your cloak,
And go to that church
Where they are burying this boy
Who died yesterday at the house.
I am somewhat afraid that people may gossip
About this unexpected death,
And it would be a bad pass,
Innocent as we are of it.
I shall keep among the men,
And pray to God, all the while listening to them.
On your side, take care to do the same
In the place occupied by the women.
You will remember what these good souls
Say of us, and we shall do
According to what we hear.”
Pity too late in Silvia
Had come, and this speech pleased her.
He whose life a kiss would have preserved,
Wishing to see him again, she went.
It is strange, it is almost incredible
How inexplicable a thing
The power of love is.
That heart, so chaste and so severe,
Which seemed closed without return
When fortune was prosperous,
Suddenly opened to misfortune.
Scarcely entered in the church,
With compassion and horror
Silvia felt herself penetrated;
The old love awoke entirely.
With lowered brow, veiled in her cloak,
Crossing the sad assembly,
She had to go as far as the bier;
And there, under the mortuary cloth
As soon as she saw her friend,
Fainting and uttering a cry,
As a sister embraces a brother,
She fell upon the coffin;
And, as sorrow had killed Jerome,
Of her sorrow Silvia thus died.
This time it was the young man’s turn
To yield half the bed:
One beside the other they were buried.
Thus these two lovers, separated on earth,
Were united, and death did
What love had not been able to do.
Alfred De Musset
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-silvia-alfred-de-musset/