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At first I laughed.
I was in my field, full of roses.
I wandered. My soul attentive to the chiaroscuro of things,
I see at the bottom of everything a vague torch glowing.
It was morning, the hour when the woods become beautiful,
When nature seems an immense pupil
Dazzled, with God almost visible in it.
To celebrate the dawn, at the edge of sleeping waters,
The brambles covered themselves with a heap of diamonds;
The coquettish blades of grass put on all their pearls;
The sea sang; the jays chatted with the blackbirds;
Butterflies flew from broom to myrtle.
A friend enters. — Hello. Do you know? He says to me,
They just burned you in the public square.
— Where? — In an honest and Catholic country.
— I suppose so. — Plague take it! They took you alive
In a book where one sees the prison and the convent,
Burned you, you devil and Jew, with a scandal,
Then they had your ashes thrown to the wind.
— It would be hardly decent if it were otherwise.
But when? — The other day. In Spain. — Really.
— They cooked at the end of their big pincers
Myriel, Jean Valjean, Marius and Cosette,
Your Les Misérables, you, all your soul at last.
You are one of those whom Escobar hungers for.
There you are, a little grilled like Voltaire.
— So I’m hot in Spain and cold in England.
Such is my fate. — The thing is in all the newspapers.
Ah! If only you weren’t with those good Huguenots!
The trouble is that so far they can’t pursue you.
Unable to roast the man, they have set the book ablaze.
— That’s the least. — You can imagine all the details.
Big black goodmen before great portals,
A fire, enough to burn a library.
— A bishop did me this honor! — A bishop?
Zounds! To damn you they assembled,
And not just one, it’s all of them. — You overwhelm me. —
And we laugh.
And then I go home, and I meditate.
They have come to that.
In the time of Venus Aphrodite,
Sometimes, alone, listening to who knows what voices,
The goddess wandered naked and white in the depths of the woods;
She walked tranquil, and her beauty without veils,
Her hair made of foam and her eyes made of stars,
Were in the forest like a vision; However, holding their breath,
Seeing in the distance this brightness pass, the fauns
Approached; the aegipan, the satyr with yellow eyes,
Slid behind her drunk with a vile desire,
And suddenly stretched out their arms to seize her,
And the woods shuddered, and the supernatural one,
Pale, turned around feeling their hand on her.
Thus, in our century of deceptive mirages,
The human conscience has strange stupefactions;
Luminous, it walks in our twilight,
And suddenly, before the faun, it recoils.
Tartuffe is there, new Satan of another Eden.
We observe in the shadow, at every moment, suddenly,
The vague lengthening of some infamous claw
And the shadowy attempt to take our soul.
The human spirit feels itself touched by an executioner.
But gently. They throw into the black quemadero
What they can, but later they’ll do better perhaps,
And your murderer is timid; he is a priest.
He would almost ask your permission.
He lights a brazier, makes his procession,
Puts logs on the fire, bitumen on the hairshirt,
So be it; but so gently that after your torture
You laugh.
Grillandus is no longer but Loyola.
You say to him: my faith, that’s funny. Put it there.
Well then, laugh. That’s good. Wait, imbeciles!
He who carries in his eyes the soul of the black Basils,
He laughs to see you laugh. He is Vishnu, Mithra,
Teutates, and this fire for laughing will grow.
Ah! You cry: bravo! Your rage is my servant.
Burn my books. Good, very good! Boost sales!
And he dreams. He says to himself: — The thing succeeded.
When the book is burned, the writer is singed.
The rest tomorrow. — You, you mock. He shares
Your joy, with the air of a priest of Carthage.
He says: their blindness always protected me.
His jaw, which still laughs, already bites you.
Isn’t that so? This burner treats us kindly,
And his auto-da-fé is only a warming pan!
Ah! The true whirlwinds of flame will have their turn.
In it, as an egg contains the great vulture,
The little spark has the enormous fire.
Just wait until France falls asleep,
And you will see.
Can one calculate the path
That would make step by step, yesterday, today, tomorrow,
The frightful turtle with its fossil feet?
Who knows? Soon perhaps we’ll have councils!
We’ll hear, who knows? A man say to God:
— The infallible one is me. Make way! Move back a bit. —
What! Are we starting again? Heaven! Could it be possible
That man becomes again pasture, prey and target!
And that we see again deformed times! That we see again
The double yoke that kills as much as it enslaves!
That we see again rise on the globe, vile hovel,
Next to the bronze scepter the crook of red iron!
Our fathers endured it, that double power! Night! Death! Melchizedek complicated by Attila!
They saw on their brows, they countless pariahs,
The frightful side by side of the two scepters in the shadow;
They heard their thunder in the depths of the firmament,
Less frightening still than their whispering.
— Take the peoples, Caesar. — You, Peter, take the souls.
— Take the purple, Caesar. — But you, what have you? — The flames.
— And then? — That’s enough. — Let us reign.
Hideous ages!
The white man, the dark man. They are one. They are two.
There the warrior, here the pontiff; and their retinues,
Confessors, massacrers, killers, executioners, Jesuits!
Oh mourning! On the pyres and the sanbenitos
Rome has, for four hundred years, bawled its vile pathos,
Throwing on the terrified universe that suffers
With one hand holy water and with the other sulfur.
All these priests wore the frightful mask with black holes;
Their mitres resembled in the shadow candle-snuffers;
They were Night in the dark Middle Ages;
They are quite ready to play that role again,
And even into our century, at this numb hour,
We would see them, with their torch in broad daylight,
With their crosier, with their beadles, populace,
Reappear and come back in, if they found room
To pass, O Voltaire, between Jean-Jacques and you!
No, no, no! Back, false power, false faith!
Oh! The Rome of frocks! Oh! The Spain of monks!
Disappear! Preachers grabbing inheritances!
Square bonnets! Camails! Cowls! Clerks! Abbots!
Heap of horrible low brows, tonsured or haloed!
O mournful visions of the brand and the sword!
Execrable past that always rises again
And stands threatening over humanity!
Saulx-Tavannes, foaming a foam of blood,
Crying: kill them all! God will do the sorting!
The sixteen-year-old Jewess burned at the marriage
Of Charles two with Louise of Orléans,
And in the auto-da-fé full of gaping braziers
Offered to the betrothed as a wedding candle;
Campanella broken by the ferocious church;
Giordano Bruno bound under a stream of pitch
That gnaws by its flame and digs by its weight;
D’Alba who in the horror of the pyres walks
Drying his bloody hand at that human ember;
Galileo lowering his repentant knees;
The square of Abbeville where Labarre at twenty,
For having lampooned all that rabble,
Had his tongue torn out with pincers,
And howled in the fire, twisting his black stumps;
The market of Rouen whose dark gables
Have the red reflection of your torture, O Joan!
Huss burned by Martin, the eagle killed by the donkey;
Farnese and Charles V, Gregory and Sigismund,
Always seated together as on a mountaintop,
At their feet all human soul terrified
Under that frightening God who makes the world atheist;
This past appears to me! You fill me with horror,
Collapse, you monster pope, and you monster emperor!
Victor Hugo
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-tip-of-the-ear-victor-hugo/