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To Georges Landry.
One evening, in the Sierra, Campéador was passing.
On his golden cuirass the sun mirrored the gold
Of the last flaming gleams of an ardent evening
And seemed the hero’s blazing splendor!
He was nothing but gold everywhere, from crest to heels.
The gold of his thigh-pieces chafed the gold of his horse’s trappings.
Grenadine rubies flashed fire on his helmet,
But his eyes flashed even more beneath his mask…
Superb, and at leisure, he went without equal,
And having nothing to fight, he fought the Sun!
And the shepherds perched on the slopes of the mountains
Showed him to one another blazing, far off in the fields,
Like a tower of fire, that great golden horseman,
And said: “It is Saint James or else Campéador!”
Confounding both in one same glory,
The one to admire him better, the other to believe in him better!
Now, as he passed there, magnificent and powerful,
And calm, and grave, and slow, the radiant passerby
Heard in the hollow of a solitary ravine
A voice that seemed, sad, to rise from the earth:
And it was, stretched out on the ground, a leper,
A human filth, a monster, a frightful being,
Whose aspect made the horse’s two feet rise straight up
In the dust, rearing backward,
If they should touch that being, they would remain soiled,
As if it had understood that the irons of its feet,
And that it could no longer wipe away the mire!
However the hero, in his splendor of an Archangel,
Bending his dazzling plume, perceived
The hideous tramp, dirty and vile, the refuse
From the top of his rearing horse, as from a throne,
Of the world; — he nobly held out his alms to him
To that impure leper, contagious and accursed,
Who was asking it of him in the name of Jesus Christ.
It was then that one could see a touching thing:
Stretching toward the Cid his powdery hand,
The crouching leper rose onto his knees,
Surprised — he who was rejected! — to see a gentle man
Not show the horror that his presence inspired
And not push him away with the hard wood of his lance;
And touched in the heart to see that pity,
He dared, he the vile, the frightful, the humiliated,
In one of those impulses stronger than nature,
To press his impure mouth to the steel gauntlet.
The wretch knew that he could lean
Without giving him his disease, on the shining steel,
Wet it with his lip, trail his breath on it.
He, who had never kissed a human hand,
And who gave death with a single touch,
Rolled his scabby forehead on the steel of that glove.
And the Cid let him do so very calmly,
Without disdain, without disgust, without hatred, without anger.
Motionless, he remained the great Campéador!
What could he be thinking beneath the golden grating
Of his ruby helmet, when he saw that audacity?
What feeling passed beneath the gold of his cuirass?
But he stared long at the leper, — then, suddenly,
He tore off his glove and gave him his hand.
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
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-the-cid-jules-barbey-d-aurevilly/