And There They Are, Lying, Inventing, Wretches

Poem by Victor Hugo Period 19th century

And there they are, lying, inventing, wretches!
There they are, shameless brows and incurable mouths,
Slandering the honor of the country, withering
All the fighters, those who shed their blood,
Those, even greater, who, seeing that the flame
And hope were dying out, poured out their soul.
These hideous scoundrels insult the heroes!
They hurl at the captive, through his bars,
At the exile, through his mourning, their infamous stone.
They offend the mother, they insult the woman;
They mock the exiled whom shadow overwhelms and follows;
They try to add their blackness to his night;
They heap upon him frightful indictments;
And if, seeing these stories pass and float by,
You ask the pedant, the storyteller, the clown:
— Do you believe all that? — I, he says, not a word.
— Good. But then why do you say it? — For fun.
Ah! The beasts of the woods do not know how to write,
The tiger could not scribble a newspaper,
The fox does not leave the confessional
And could not narrate La Salette in good style;
But at least the asp hisses as an honest reptile;
If, in his candid, frightful, complete howl,
The bear shows himself hungry for murder, it is because he is;
The jaguar does not lie and thinks what he growls;
There is not a lion in the deep forest
Who is not, in the horror of his smoking den,
Sincere, and who does not believe in his roaring.
But, shame and mourning! Black sky! How must one name
These scribes who tomorrow will say of an honest man:
— I am his assassin, but not his enemy! —
Ah! These rogues before whom my youth would have shuddered,
Worse than Mérimée and Planche, horrible dwarfs,
These clowns, whom I would not have believed possible
Formerly, when with hope, alas! I intoxicated myself,
Have not the probity to be true monsters.

Victor Hugo

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-and-there-they-are-lying-inventing-wretches-victor-hugo/