Stanzas – On Miss ***’s Pompadour Costume

Poem by Alfred De Musset Collection ArrayPeriod 19th century

Voltaire, august and supreme shade,
King of the creamy madrigals
Of vermilions and panniers,
Seated at the foot of your statue,
I was saying to myself: “What has become
Of that wig with three laurels?

O Corisandres! I said to myself,
Beauty patches that, on a breast of snow,
The abbé placed with his fingertip!
Good marchionesses, our grandmothers,
Who, without being too prudish,
Rendered unto God what is owed to him!

And you, heroes struck by lightning,
Alas! – And two reigns of powder,
In half a century wiped away!…”
When, the other evening, at a party,
My gaze suddenly stopped
On a little face from times past!

But it was not, O Voltaire!
A dowager’s beauty patch
Reviving a failing eye;
It was the most discreet patch
That could ever brush a lip
Rosier than the lily is white.

A sly patch, as one might believe,
Which, to place its black wing
Among the roses of the garden,
Had chosen, like the bee,
The freshest and the most crimson
Of all those of the morning.

Remain then, blissful patch.
If that traveling bee,
Which, flying long ago, we are told,
Among the groves of Greece,
Came to tickle the thick lip
Of the great philosopher Plato,

Had found, in the half-closed shadow,
This flower with rose petals,
What would it have done but stop
On this pearl of England,
Lips that heaven could only have made
To smile or to sing?

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-stanzas-on-miss-alfred-de-musset/