The Specter I Sometimes Meet Was Laughing

Poem by Victor Hugo Period 19th centuryPrint

The specter I sometimes meet was laughing.
— Why are you laughing? I asked him. — He said: — Anxious man,
Look.
He showed me a cemetery in the shadows.

I saw there a humble cross beside a haughty cross;
One of wood, the other of marble; and the specter went on,
While far off the wind passed like a spirit
And bent the dark heads of deep trees:

— Even in the coffin you are vain and foolish.
Yes, you recumbent dead, you leave vanity standing.
You sculpt it at the threshold of the dreaded tomb,
And you build it towers and cupolas.
And, dead, you are proud.

Yes, in your necropolises,
In those cities of mourning that your misty Paris
Builds beside the tumult and the cries,
One finds everything, woods where warblers chatter,
Jets of water springing from the jasper of basins,
A green landscape, voluptuous, deep,
Where the cloud blends with the plain,
The carriage in which the eye often seeks the stretcher,
Priests in the cool reading their breviaries,
Sun in winter, shade in summer,
Roses, songs, everything except equality.
You have charnel houses and Père-Lachaises
Where Samuel Bernard alone can take his ease,
Sleep in peace, enjoy a well-walled vault,
And give himself the airs of being forever mourned,
And award himself, behind a solid gate,
Flowers that Time keeps in an invalid’s dress.
As for the indigent dead, they are given notice;
The prolonged sob is driven from beside them;
And the poor man has no right to rot.
One day, he is cleared away. His burial place is taken
To enlarge by a fathom a pompous monument.
— Wretch, be off. Become what you can.
What! You claim to molder here among these marbles,
To make passersby hold their noses under these trees,
To strut beneath this grass, to be at the bottom of your hole
Carrion like anyone else, and you haven’t a penny!
What kind of dead man is this who has nothing in his pocket!
Clear out. — And the wheelbarrow and the shovel and the pickaxe
Tear the sleeper from his hard bolster.
Up! Make way for my lord the neighboring sepulcher!
It is nothing to be dead, one must have income.
The carcasses of beggars smell very foul;
The well-born dead keep apart in death;
The titled sepulcher does not fraternize
With the anonymous populace of coffins;
Ashes keep their rank before dust;
And one dead man says: ugh! before another dead man.
The gentleman, at the hour when the mite bites him,
Remains dainty and disgusted. It is sad.
And I laugh at it. The shroud can be of cambric!
Among you, yes, beneath the cross of the humble God Jesus,
The departed short of money are poorly received;
The abyss has its workhouse; the shadow
Puts the elite on one side and the multitude on the other;
One is never less near than when one joins;
In vague and pallid death one does not mingle;
One remains different even in this moonlight;
The people in the tomb are called a common grave.
The impartial tomb! Come now! The here-lies
Sometimes shrinks and sometimes widens;
The toll, set by decree of the mayor,
Makes Beaujon immortal and Chodruc ephemeral.
To rot for free! Never! The ground is too dear.
While, handling what was flesh,
Chemistry, in its lair where the moth flies,
Makes adipocere and spermaceti
From the residue of pale starvelings,
Such a corpse, dressed in a shroud of fine cloth,
Looks smiling at death with tiger eyes,
Throws his purse to the specter, and says: Marquis d’Aligre.
Your catacombs have perpetuities
For these, for those limited respites.
Your tomb is a gulf where the rich float.
This dead man has not paid his term; he moves out.
The phantom, wobbling on its white tibias,
Carrying everything with it, goes off, like Bias;
Living, it was without bread, and, dead, it is without land.
The ossuary is repelled by the bones of the proletarian.
Only Rothschild, in the oblivion of the echoless vault,
Is eaten by rats and by maggots
That he pays and of which he is master and proprietor.
Yes, it is the astonishment of the wall pellitory,
Of the blade of grass, of the yew as black as jet,
Of the cold cypress, of the weeping willow, to see subject
To summary and sudden evictions
Skulls that no longer have their eyes in their orbits.
Your cemeteries are changing, floating places,
Precarious, where the dead go to spend some time,
Barely admitted to the threshold of the dark mysteries,
And dark eternity takes lodgers there.
What! That is your death! It is with pride
That you double the gloomy wood of the coffin!
You keep precedence, honors, rank, advantages!
You preserve floors at the bottom of nothingness!
The chimera is farcical. Ah! Pretension
Is rare, in the place of disappearance!

What! To privilege what is no more! What! To make
Great and small in the unfathomable sphere!
To treat John as plague and Paul as perfume!
To be dead, and still want to be somebody!
What! To carry opulence into the rotting place!
To make one’s gold ring out in the eternal silence!
To have, by virtue of that gold with which one shone on earth,
The right to fall to dust here rather than there!
To arrive in the night like lights!
To take front-row seats in the tomb!
Not to hear God saying to the rich man: enough!
I shall stop laughing at it, O senseless living,
The day I learn that it is true, that, in the shadow
Of the immeasurable and dark ruin,
The archangel with the black wing, seated at his desk,
Measures the dead, gives them all a number,
Discusses their obol, gold or lead, true or false,
And weighs it, and haggles with the skeleton for its grave!
The day I learn that the thing is so,
That Lucullus underground is choice manure,
That the buttercup loses or doubles its riches
If it springs from a grisette or from a duchess,
That a lily born of a poor man is black as coal,
That, dead, Lazarus infects and Aguado smells sweet!
The day I learn that in the terrible azure
The eternal has holes unequal to its sieve;
And that, in the dark sky, terror of your remorse,
If it sees pass, carried by four undertakers,
A fetid and hideous corpse, the thunder
Asks the hurricane: — is he a millionaire?
The day I learn that the tomb, in fact,
That the abyss, according to the prefect’s tariff,
Trades in its night and its horror,
And that death has put the earthworms up for sale!

March 18, 1870.

Victor Hugo

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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