The Scaffold

Poem by Victor Hugo Themes DeathPeriod 19th centuryPrint

— Eye for eye! Tooth for tooth! Head for head! To death!
Justice! The scaffold is better than remorse.
Retaliation! retaliation!

— Silence to savage cries!
No! enough of misery, murder and ravage!
Enough of throat-cutting! enough of mourning! enough
Of headless phantoms and dreadful dead!
Enough of funeral visions in the mist!
Enough of hideous fingers, pointing to smoking blood,
Black, and counting the holes of shrouds in the night!
No tortured men whose cry pursues us!
No specters casting their shadow on our heads!
We are streaming with all the storms;
There remains but one duty and one truth,
It is, after so much anguish and calamity,
Man, to open his heart, bird, to open its wing
Toward that sky which the great eternal soul fills!
The people, whom kings crushed under their heels,
Is the stone promised to the temple, and we want
The stone to build and not to stone!
No blood! no death! It is a stupid reflux,
Ferocity upon ferocity.
A scaffold pillar poorly supports the city.
You want to make die! I want to make be born!
I wall up the sepulcher and I open the window.
God did not make blood, reserved for love,
For it to be given to drink to the cracks of the pavement.
Is it a matter of slaughtering? Peoples, it is a matter of being.
What! you want revenge, passerby? on whom? on the master?
If you are not worth better, what have you come here to do?
Every mystery where a murder is thrown is darkened;
The bloodstained enigma is harsher to solve;
The shadow opens terrible after the thunderbolt;
To kill is not to create, and one would be mistaken
If one believed that everything ends at the chopping block;
It is there that, unexpected, impenetrable, immense,
Full of sudden flashes, the question begins;
It is of good and evil; but evil is greater.
Satan laughs through the transparent scaffold.
The executioner, whoever he may be, has his foot in the abyss;
Whatever she does, alas! the axe commits a crime;
A lugubrious night smokes on that blade;
When he has just killed, how, approaching it,
One shudders to see it all streaming, and how
One feels that he has struck in the shadow more than a man
As soon as the immolated guilty one has disappeared
Out of the tragic basket where the head has rolled,
The innocent, divine, inviolable principle,
With its star-like gaze, like the dawn,
Rises, august specter, a red circle around its neck.
Man is pitiless, alas, without knowing where.
How does he not see that he lives in a problem,
That man is jointly liable even with his monsters,
And that he cannot kill anything but Abel!
When a head falls, one feels the sky tremble.
Decapitate Nero, that senseless hyena,
Universal life is wounded in Nero;
Put Tiberius on the scaffold tomorrow,
Tiberius will bleed the blood of humankind.
We are all mixed into what the Grève does;
When a man, in public, seeing us as a dream,
Dies, imploring in vain our cowardly abandonments,
That murder is our murder and we answer for it;
It is with a piece of our carelessness, it is with a rag of our conscience,
With our soul of all, that the weary executioner
Wipes, going away, his hideous cutlass.
Man can forget; importunate things
Are erased in the rippling brilliance of fortunes;
The past, the future, veil themselves at moments;
Feasts, torches, fires, diamonds,
The triumphant illumination of celebrations,
Can eclipse the enormous shadow of the prophets;
Around the great basins, at the edge of clear waters,
Radiant children can, to the cries of birds,
Mingle the confused noise of their flowered lips,
And, in the Luxembourg or in the Tuileries,
Before the old marble heroes with clenched fists,
Dance, laugh and sing: the laurels are cut!
The low-browed Courtille can drown in glasses
The memory of illustrious and severe days;
The waltz can delight, dazzle, intoxicate
Women of satin, happy to deliver
The most nudity possible to eyes of flame;
Hymen can murmur its chaste epithalamium;
The masked ball, lascivious, adorned, noisy, charming,
Can light its torch and leap madly,
Ghoul with joyful shroud, larva in flowers, rose specter;
But, whatever the time, whatever the cause,
It is always a fatal night for the entire people
That one where, leading a priest, a jailer
Searches in the bunch of keys hanging at his belt
To go, on the bed of fever and torture,
Wake before the hour a poor sleeping man,
While, on the Grève, half glimpsed,
Under the hammer blows that make the owl flee,
Frightening beams raise their silhouette,
Reddened by the horrible lantern of the executioner,
The old sword of the judge has the night for a sheath.
The tribunal cannot from that livid sheath
Draw anything but pain, anxiety, emptiness,
Nothingness, remorse, ignorance and fright.

Whether it strikes in the name of the people or avenges in the name of the king.
Justice! you say. — What do you call justice?
Let people help one another, let them be brothers, let them clothe
Those who are naked, let them give to all the sacred bread,
Let them break the dreadful prison where the poor man is walled up,
But let them not touch the dark balance!
The sepulcher where, pensive, man is shipwrecked and sinks,
Beyond today, tomorrow, seasons,
Days, the blazing of our vain horizons,
And chimeras, prey and fruit of our study,
Has its sky full of dawn and made of certainty;
Justice is its immutable and distant star.
Our justice, like our destiny,
Is groping, confusion, error, cloud, doubt;
Martyr, I applaud myself; judge, I dread myself;
The infallible one, is it me, say? is it you? answer.
You cry: — Our sorrows are our right. Let us strike.
We are too much the target of the fate that overwhelms us.
We are too much struck by an inexplicable evil.
We have too many mournings, too many yokes, too many winters.
We are too suffering, in our various destinies,
All, the great, the small, the obscure, the famous,
Not to condemn someone in our darkness. —
Since you see nothing clear in fate,
Do not hasten too much to conclude death from it.
Were it the death of a king, of a master and a despot;
In the unfathomable mist where everything bleeds and sobs,
Do not hasten too much to take your misfortunes,
Your days without fire, your days without bread, your cries, your tears,
And that mourning which falls on you and your race,
To make them serve to build a tomb.
What step will you have taken for having added
To your obscure destiny, shadow and fatality,
That other obscurity which you name justice?
To make of the scaffold, menacing building,
An altar to bless newborn progress,
O living ones, is madness; and what will you have gained
When, lamentable ministers of a cult of death,
You will have married these sinister infirm ones,
Lame justice and blind ananke?
The sword always seeks an always missed target;
The palm, that flame with sparkling flowers,
Made of azure, trembles before bloody hands,
And recoils and flees, sensitive plant of the heavens!
Satisfied anger has a troubled brow.
As for me, you know it, calm night where I breathe,
I would have there, under my feet, my enemy, the worst,
Cain judge, Judas pontiff, Satan king,
That I would open my door and say: Save yourself!

No, the enlargement of bleak cemeteries
Is not the goal. Let us walk, let us push back the frontiers
Of life! O my century, let us always go higher!
Let us grow!

What then does the scaffold want of us,
That specter framework accustomed to crowds,
That black islet besieged and beaten by its swells,
The multitude with restless and moving waves,
That sepulcher which comes to attack the living,
And which, on palaces as well as on hovels,
Surging, raising a sword at the end of its red arms?
Mystery that delivers itself at crossroads, piece
Of the tomb that comes to soak in the gutter,
Braving the day, the noise, the cries; brazen coffin
Which, ferocious, cynical and cowardly, seems atheistic!
O spectacle execrated in the most repulsive,
A death that lets itself be brushed against by passersby,
That allows a crier outside the shadow to draw it!
A death that does not have the terror of laughter,
Unveiling the staircase that descends into the night,
Saying: see! walking in the street, and letting
Mud splash its shroud sown with stars;
Which, on a trestle, shows between two vile pillars
Its horror, its black brow, its basilisk eye;
Which consents to come work in public,
And which, prostituted, accepts, on the squares,
The familiarity of wild populace!

O living one of the tomb, living one of the infinite,
Jehovah! God, clarity, ray never tarnished,
To make of death, of night, of darkness,
They have put your triangle between two funeral stakes;
And their crowd, which sees your gleam resplendent,
Does not feel on its brow a harsh sweat break out,
And horror does not grip this dark unanimous people,
When they make, to punish what they have named crime,
In the name of what they have called truth,
On life, O terror, eternity fall!

Victor Hugo

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