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I
Oh ! when a heavy sun heated the great flagstones
Of the bridges and of our deserted quays,
When the bells howled, when the hail of bullets
Whistled and rained through the air;
When in all Paris, like the rising sea,
The uprising people roared,
And to the gloomy accent of the old iron cannons
The Marseillaise replied,
Indeed, one did not see, as on the day we now see,
So many uniforms at once;
It was under rags that men’s hearts beat,
It was then filthy fingers
That loaded the muskets and sent back the thunder;
It was the mouth with vile oaths
That chewed the cartridge, and, black with powder,
Cried to the citizens: Let us die!
II
As for all those fine fellows with tricolor flames,
In fine linen, in elegant frock coats,
Those men in corsets, those womanly faces,
Heroes of the Boulevard de Gand,
What were they doing, while through the grapeshot,
And under the hated saber,
The great populace and the holy rabble
Rushed to immortality?
While all Paris was strewn with marvels,
These gentlemen trembled in their skins,
Pale, sweating fear, hands on their ears,
Crouched behind a curtain.
III
For Liberty is not a countess
Of the noble Faubourg Saint-Germain,
A woman whom a cry makes faint,
Who puts on powder and carmine;
She is a strong woman with powerful breasts,
With a hoarse voice, harsh charms,
With brown on her skin, fire in her eyes,
Agile and walking with great strides,
Who delights in the cries of the people, in bloody mêlées,
In the long roll of drums,
In the smell of powder, in the distant peals
Of bells and muffled cannons;
Who takes her loves only from the populace,
Who lends her broad flank
Only to people strong as she, and who wants to be embraced
With arms red with blood.
IV
She is the fiery virgin, child of the Bastille,
Who formerly, when she appeared
With her bold air, her vulgar ways,
Set the whole people in heat for five years;
Who, later, intoning a war march,
Tired of her first lovers,
Threw down her cap, and became vivandière
To a captain of twenty years;
She is this woman, finally, who, always beautiful and nude,
With the tricolor sash,
In our bullet-riddled walls suddenly reappeared,
Has just dried our weeping eyes,
Has in three days restored a lofty crown
To the hands of the risen French,
Has crushed an army and ground a throne
With a few piles of paving stones.
V
But, oh shame! Paris, so beautiful in its wrath,
Paris, so full of majesty
On that day of storm when the popular wind
Uprooted royalty,
Paris, so magnificent with its funerals,
Its debris of men, its tombs,
Its unpaved roads and its sections of wall
Pierced like old flags;
Paris, this city all encircled with laurels,
Of which the whole world is jealous,
Which all moved peoples call the holy one,
And name only on their knees,
Paris is now only an impure sink,
A sordid and muddy sewer,
Where a thousand black currents of slime and filth
Come to drag in their shameful floods;
A hovel overflowing with cowardly scoundrels,
With brazen salon-crawlers,
Who go from door to door, and from floor to floor,
Begging some scrap of braid;
A cynical market with insolent clamors,
Where each seeks to tear off
A miserable scrap of bloody rags
From the power that has just expired.
VI
Thus, when deserting its solitary wallow,
The boar, struck dead,
Lies there, all palpitating, stretched on the ground,
And under the sun that bites it;
When, whitened with foam and tongue hanging out,
No longer moving in its bonds,
It dies, and the horn has sounded the curée
To all the pack of dogs,
The whole pack, then, like an immense wave,
Leaps; then each mastiff
Howls as a sign of joy, and prepares in advance
Its broad fangs for the feast;
And then comes the mob, and the ferocious bayings
Roll from valley to valley;
Scent-hounds and bloodhounds, and bulldogs, and mastiffs,
All rush forward, and all cry: Let’s go!
When the boar falls and rolls on the arena,
Let’s go, let’s go! the dogs are kings!
The corpse is ours; let us pay ourselves for our trouble,
Our bites and our bayings.
Let’s go! we no longer have a valet who thrashes us
And hangs on our neck:
Hot blood, flesh, let’s go, let’s make merry,
And gorge ourselves to our fill!
And all, like workers put to the task,
Dig into its flanks with full muzzle,
And with claw and teeth work without respite,
For each wants a piece;
For the kennel requires that each of them return
With a half-gnawed bone,
And that, finding at the threshold its proud bitch,
Jealous and with bristling hair,
He show her his still red muzzle, and that growls,
His bone stuck in his teeth,
And cry to her, throwing his quarter of carrion:
“Here is my share of royalty”
August 1830.
Auguste Barbier
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/la-curee-poem-auguste-barbier/