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I
A great old castle with very high walls.
The steps of the porch tremble, and grass grows,
Shooting long and straight through the cracks of the paving stones
That time has greened with a leprosy of moss.
On the sides, two towers. One, in a pointed hat,
Thins into the air. The other is decapitated.
Its head was, one evening, carried off by the wind;
But an ivy, climbed to the fallen top,
Splays out above like a head of hair,
While, seeping into the tower’s flank,
The water from the sky, relentless and digging each day,
Opened it from top to bottom with an immense crack.
A tree, grown there, thrives in the hollow of the walls,
Vaguely revealing old dark drawing rooms,
Each window is gloomy as an empty gaze.
All this heavy building, decrepit, blackened, faded,
That the crack marks on its brow like a wrinkle,
Whose foot crumbles, undermined by saltpeter,
Whose roof shows the sky its ravaged tiles,
Has the desolate look of neglected things.
All around, a great dark and deep park stretches;
It sleeps under the rising sun, and one hears,
At moments, passing through it, murmurs of foliage,
Like the calmed sounds of waves on beaches,
When the sea shines in the distance under the blue sky.
The trees have grown branches so entangled
That the sun, casting its shower of fire,
Never penetrates the darkness of the paths.
The shrubs are dead beneath these leafy giants,
And the vault has grown like a cathedral;
An ancient and sepulchral odor floats there,
The dampness of places where man no longer goes.
But on the high steps of the porch that overlook
The long lawns that great trees end in the distance,
Servants appeared, supporting by the arms
Two very bent old people walking with small steps.
They drag slowly over the green steps
The hesitations of their stiffened legs,
And feel the way with the ends of their sticks.
Very old—the man and the woman—and wagging their chins,
They have brows so heavy and skin so faded
That one cannot guess what power drove
Into the marrow of their bones this stubborn life.
Fallen into their large armchairs, they were left,
Folded in two, trembling in hands and head.
They have lowered their eyes, which old age dulls,
And look close by, on the ground, fixedly.
They have no more thought. A long trembling
Seems alone to inhabit this decrepitude;
And if they are not dead, it is from long habit
Of living together, always close to each other,
For they have not spoken for many days.
II
But a breath of fire rises over the plain.
The trees in their trunks have shivers of sap,
For over their troubled tops the sun will pass.
Everywhere the heat rises like a tide
And, on each meadow, a golden crowd
Of yellow butterflies floats and seems to dance.
Blooming in the distance, the countryside sizzles,
It is a continuous sound that fills the horizon,
For, frantic in the depths of the grass,
The deafening people of crickets strain their throats.
A fever of inflamed life has run,
And rejuvenated, all white in the warm light,
As in the first days of a vanished past,
The old castle resumes its stone smile.
Then the two old people stir little by little:
They blink their eyes, and in this bath of fire,
Their dried limbs slowly relax;
Their cooled lungs breathe in the sun,
And their minds, confused as after waking,
Are vaguely astonished by the murmurs they hear.
They stand up, leaning their hands on their sticks.
The man turns a little toward his ancient friend,
Looks at her a moment and says: “It is very pleasant.”
She, raising her head still all sleepy
And scanning with her eye the familiar horizons,
Replies: “Yes, the beautiful days have returned.”
And their voice is like the bleating of goats.
Spring joys wrinkle their old lips;
They are troubled, for the scents of new wood
Sometimes pass through them with a sudden jolt,
Like a wine too strong rising to their brain.
They sway their heads very gently
And find in the air breaths of other times.
He, suddenly, with sobs in his voice:
“It was a day just like this that you came
To the first rendezvous, in the great avenue.”
Then they said nothing more; but their bitter thoughts
Climbed back to distant memories of youth,
Like two vessels, having crossed the seas,
Always return by the same wake.
He resumed: “It is very far, that does not come back.
And our stone bench, at the back of the park—over there?”
The woman gave a start as if struck by an arrow:
“Let us go see it,” she said, and, her throat oppressed,
Both suddenly rose with the same effort!
Prodigious couple, so frail and pale.
He, in an old hunting coat with gold buttons,
She, under the strange patterns of an old shawl!
III
They watched, greatly fearing to be seen;
And then, stooped, with the round backs of hunchbacks,
Humble at being so old when everything seemed to live again,
Like children they took each other’s hand
And set off, blocking the width of the path.
For each, wobbling a little like a drunken man,
Sometimes struck the other with a shoulder,
And zigzags guided their doubtful balance.
Their sticks, supporting each arm still free,
Trotted at their sides like two wooden feet.
But, from stop to stop in their breathless course,
They reached the park and then the great avenue.
Their past rose and walked before them,
And on the damp earth they thought they saw, in places,
The still fresh imprint of their loving feet;
As if the paths had kept their tracks,
Waiting each day for the habitual couple.
They went, all puny, near the enormous trees,
Lost under the height of the oaks and elms
That poured around them a perpetual evening.
And like an old book whose page is turned:
“Here it is,” said one. The other said: “There it is:
The place where I kissed your fingers?—Yes, there it is.
—Your lips?—Yes! It is she!” And their pilgrimage,
From kisses to kisses on the mouth or fingers,
Continued like a stations of the cross.
Both overflowed with past joys,
Impulses the heart takes toward finished happiness,
Thinking that long ago, with waists entwined,
Eyes speaking to the depths of eyes, fingers joined,
Silent, their breasts troubled by unknown fevers,
They had walked these same avenues!
IV
The bench awaited them, mossy, aged like them.
“It is he!” said he. “It is he!” she repeated. They sat down,
And under the warm reflections of happy memories
The deep darknesses of the trees brightened.
But then in the grass they saw approaching
A centenarian toad with bloated forms.
He imitated, with his splayed legs,
The movements of a child who does not know how to walk.
A convulsive sob made their breath rattle;
He! the first witness of their distant loves
Who came each evening to listen to their vows!
And he alone recognized these relics of lovers,
For hastening his thick and patient step,
Swelled his belly, with round tender eyes,
Against the trembling feet of the faded lovers
He slowly dragged his confident bulk.
They wept.—But suddenly a little bird’s song
Left the depths of the wood. It was the same
They had heard eighty years earlier!
And in the amazement of a supreme delirium,
From the depths of finished days rushing before them,
By leaps, like a torrent that flows, ever swelling,
All their life, with its joys, its raptures,
And its restless nights of fiery caresses,
And its awakenings together so sweet, weary and broken,
And then, in the evening, running under the floating shadows,
The scents of forests with exciting saps
That endlessly prolong the slowness of kisses!…
But as they soaked in tenderness, the avenue
Opened, letting a frantic breeze pass;
And, perfumed, striking their hearts, as of old,
This breath, which carried the youth of the woods,
Awakened in their blood the dead shiver of seeds.
They felt, burned by the heat of skin,
Their whole bodies quiver and their hands press,
And looked at each other as if to embrace!
But instead of the clear brows and young faces
Appearing through the distance of ages
And filling them with these extinguished desires,
One against the other, were two old faces
Smiling at each other with hideous grimaces!
They closed their eyes, all faint, gripped
By a swift and formidable terror like
The anguish of death!… “Let us go away!” said the man.
But they could not get up; embedded
In the rigidity of the bench, terrified
To be so far, being so old and so feeble.
And their bodies remained so motionless
That they seemed to have become stone people. And then
Both, suddenly, with a great surge, fled.
They moaned in distress, and on their backs the vault
Poured like rain a heavy cold drop by drop;
They suffocated, struck by icy breaths,
Currents of cellar air and moldy odors
That had been germinating down there for a hundred years past.
And on their hearts, a heavy burden, their dead
Poetries weighed down their convulsive efforts,
And made their slow and wheezing steps stumble.
V
The woman collapsed like a spring that breaks;
He, remained without understanding and waited for her, standing,
Worried, thinking her only a little tired,
For her dress was still trembling. Then suddenly
Panic came to him like a squall.
He bent over, took her arms, and with an effort
Terrible, he lifted her, though he was very weak.
But all her poor body hung, sinister and flaccid
He saw that she was suffocating and that she was going to die,
And to seek help he began to run
With little bounds frightening and grotesque,
Describing, without the hand that served him as support,
At a jerky gallop guided by his stick,
Complicated paths like arabesques.
His breath was rapid and hard like a cough.
But he felt his vacillating leg give way,
So soft that he seemed to dance on his knees.
He struck the black trunks in his hopping course,
And the trees played with him, pushing him,
Throwing him from one to the other and seeming
To amuse themselves cowardly with this agony.
He understood that the horrible struggle was over,
And, like a shipwrecked man drowning, he threw
A little plaintive cry falling on his face.
Feeble groan that no wind carried away!
He still heard, somewhere in space,
The long lugubrious croaks of a raven
Mixed with the distant sounds of a broken bell.
And then all noise ceased. The thick and icy shadow
Settled on them, heavy as a tomb.
VI
They remained there. The day went out. Darkness
Filled all the sky with its funeral swells.
They remained there, rolled like two little piles
Of leaves, shivering with their stubborn fevers,
So vague in the night that they were not found.
They formed an obstacle to the astonished beasts
Blocking the path traced each evening.
Some stopped, timid, to look at them;
Others walked over them like wrecks;
Slugs crawled on them, trailing their slime;
Insects searched the folds of their bodies,
And others settled on them, thinking them dead.
But soon a shiver ran through the paths.
A shower opened the lashed leaves,
Streaming and clapping on the ground with noise.
And on the two old people still shivering,
The rain, in thick waves, fell all night.
Then, when the light of dawn reappeared,
Under the persistent drip of the high green foliage
They gathered, all cold in their damp clothes,
Two little lifeless bodies, frightening and rigid
Like drowned people found at the bottom of the seas.
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-the-last-escapade-guy-de-maupassant/