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A young man walked along the boulevard
And without thinking of anything, he went alone and fast,
Not even grazing with his vague gaze
Those girls whose laughter invites you as they pass.
But a perfume so sweet struck him suddenly
That he looked up. A divine woman
Was passing. To be frank, he saw only her neck;
It was supple and round above a slender waist.
He followed her — why? — For nothing; as one follows
A pretty arched foot that trots and flees,
A bit of white petticoat that passes and wiggles.
One follows; it’s an instinct of love that drives us to it.
He sought her story while looking at her stockings.
Elegant? Many are. — Had destiny
Made her be born high or low?
Poor but dishonest, or wise and fortunate?
But, as she heard a step following hers,
She turned around. It was a marvel.
He felt in his heart a bond being born
And wanted to speak to her, knowing well that the ear
Is the path to the soul. They were separated
By a crowd at a street corner.
When he had fully cursed the idle loiterers
And sought his lady, she had disappeared.
He first felt a real boredom,
Then, like a soul in pain, wandered from place to place,
Refreshed his brow at the Wallace fountains,
And went back to bed well before nightfall.
You will say he had too ingenuous a soul;
If one did not dream, what would one often do?
But is it not charming, when the wind moans,
To dream, by the fire, of a beautiful unknown woman?
From that moment so brief, for eight days he was happy.
The bright swarm of dreams danced around him
That ceaselessly awakened in his amorous heart
The gentlest thoughts and the sweetest lies.
His dreams were foolish enough to sleep standing up;
He endlessly built great adventures.
When the soul is naive and young blood boils,
Our hope feeds on mad impostures.
He followed her then to foreign lands;
Together they visited the plains of Hellas
And like a knight from an old ballad
He always snatched her from strange dangers.
Sometimes on the mountainside, at the edge of a precipice,
They would go exchanging sweet words of love;
Often he even knew how to seize the propitious moment
To steal a kiss that she always returned.
Then, hands in hands, and leaning over the doors
Of a post chaise carried off at a gallop,
They remained there dreaming for whole nights,
For the moon shone and was mirrored in the water.
Sometimes he saw her, a dreamy chatelaine,
At the sculpted balusters of Gothic balconies;
Sometimes mad and light and following through the plain
The swift greyhound or the flight of falcons.
As a page, he had the wit to make her love him;
The lady with the old baron was quickly unfaithful.
He followed her everywhere, and in the great dark woods
With his chatelaine he always lost his way.
For eight whole days he dreamed in this way,
To his best friends he barred his door;
Received no one, and sometimes, in the evening,
On an old deserted bench, alone, he would go sit.
One morning, it was still early,
He woke up, yawning and rubbing his eyes;
A troop of friends invaded his dwelling
All talking at once, with joyful cries.
The plan of the day was to go to the countryside,
To try a canoe and wander in the woods,
To scandalize the honest bourgeois greatly,
And to dine on the grass with ice and champagne.
He first replied, full of perfect disdain,
That their party was hardly appealing to him;
But when he saw the noisy cohort leave,
And found himself alone, he suddenly reflected
That one is fine for dreaming on flowery banks,
And that the water that flows and flees murmuring
Softly lifts sad reveries
Like dead branches carried off by the current;
And that it is a deep and sweeping intoxication
To run at random and drink with full lungs
The great free and pure air that goes from meadows to mountains,
The harsh scent of hay and the coolness of the water;
That the bank murmurs and makes a charming sound,
That to the songs of rowers sorrows are cradled,
And that the mind wanders and floats gently,
Like in the river’s current, in the current of thoughts.
Then he called his groom, jumped out of bed,
Dressed, had lunch, went to the station,
Left quietly smoking a cigar,
And soon found all his people at Marly.
The plain was damp with the tears of the night;
A light mist still floated in the distance;
The gay birds sang; and the beautiful golden sun
Cast many a spark on the fresh and limpid water.
When the sap rises and the wood turns green,
When great life bursts forth on all sides,
When at sunrise everything sings and shines,
The body is full of joy and the soul expands.
It is true that he had nobly lunched,
Some vapors of wine were rising to his head;
The air of the fields finally put his heart in a festive mood,
When he saw himself carried off by the river’s current.
The canoe slowly went adrift;
A light wind made the reeds murmur,
Frail and singing people that grow on the bank
And draw their soul from the calm breast of the waters.
Then came the rowers’ turn, and, following custom,
Their rhythmic song struck the surrounding echo;
And, guided by the voice, into the white foaming water
Moment by moment the oars fell.
Finally, as they were thinking of heading to the kitchen,
Other canoes suddenly passed near them;
A sharp laugh burst from a neighboring boat
And came straight to the heart to strike my lover.
Her! in a boat! Stretched out at the stern,
She held the tiller and passed singing!
He remained dismayed, pale and with beating heart,
While his Beauty fled on the river.
He was still sad at dinnertime!
They stopped before a small inn,
In a charming garden bordered by vines,
Shaded by lindens, and running along the bank.
But other boaters had already come
They hurled curses in a formidable voice,
And, making a great noise, they prepared the table
Which they sometimes lifted with their strong bare arms.
She was with them and drinking an absinthe!
He remained mute. The wench smiled,
Called him. — He stayed stupefied. — She resumed:
“So, you took me then, you fool, for a Saint?”
So he approached her trembling; he dined
At her side, and even at dessert was astonished
To have been able to dream of her as from a high family,
For she was charming, and gay, and a good girl.
She said: “My monkey,” and “my rat,” and “my cat,”
Fed him from the end of her fork.
They left, in the evening, the two of them secretly,
And no one ever knew in what bed he slept!
A poet with a naive heart, he was looking for a pearl;
Finding a fake jewel, he took it and did well.
I approve the good sense of this old adage:
“When you have no thrush, you must eat a blackbird.”
Guy de Maupassant
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-a-conquest-guy-de-maupassant/