Читать книгу Champavert - Petrus Borel the Lycanthrope - Страница 4
ОглавлениеA BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF CHAMPAVERT
It is always a difficult task to puncture illusions, always a painful duty to relieve the public of its comforting errors, the lies to which it is devoted and has pledged its faith. Nothing is more dangerous than to create a void in the human heart. I would never risk such a scabrous mission. Believe, believe! Abuse yourselves and be abused! Error is almost always pleasant and consoling.
In spite of that reluctance, my religious sincerity gives me the duty today to unmask a deception, fortunately unimportant: a pseudonymy. Please, do not get upset, as you usually do, when you are told that “Clotilde de Surville” does not exist, that her book is apocryphal; that the correspondence of “Ganganelli” and “Carlino” is apocryphal; that “Joseph Delorme” is a pseudograph and his biography a myth.1 Please, please, I beg you, don’t get upset!
Pétrus Borel killed himself last spring. Pray for him, in order that his soul, in which he no longer believed, might find mercy before the God that he denied, in order that God will not strike error with the same arm as crime.
Pétrus Borel, the rhapsodist, the lycanthrope—or, to tell the truth, as we have promised, the poor young man who concealed himself under that soubriquet, which he adopted when scarcely emerged from childhood—has killed himself. Thus, few of his comrades knew his real name; none ever knew the cause of that disguise. Did he do it out of necessity or eccentricity? No one knows for sure. The same name was once made illustrious in literature and science by Pétrus Borel de Castres, a learned doctor and antiquary, physician to Louis XIV, the son of the poet Jacques Borel.2 Was he descended from that family maternally, did he want to resume the name of one of his ancestors? No one knows, and doubtless no one ever will know.
So, as we have reestablished in the title of his book, his real name was Champavert.
There is no sweeter pleasure than that of being accepted into the intimacy of a sensitive—which is to say, superior—individual who is dead; it is a very praiseworthy indiscretion to want to initiated into the secret of the life of a great artist or an unhappy man. One loves the writer who consents to display like tapestries the often-hidden lives of people who are dear to us. Although that of the young and fatal poet with whom we are concerned will not excite any great interest in you, I nevertheless think that you will not find it unwelcome that I have been able to unearth a few details and circumstances of that anomalous life—of which, regrettably, little is known. Champavert rarely talked about himself; he generally came into society like an apparition, without any known antecedents or any presumed future.
There is some reason to believe that he was originally from the Hautes-Alpes, born in ancient Segusia,3 often having been heard to curse his father for coming down from the Mountains, and proudly to name as his compatriots Philibert-Delorme, Martel-Ange, Servadoni, Audran, Stella, Coisevox, Coustou and Ballanche.4 He had, however, left his fatherland at a young age.
He represented himself to those who knew him as no older than twenty or twenty-two, but his features, grave at first sight, aged him considerably.
He was rather tall and slim, perhaps even thin; he had a dark complexion, a characteristic profile, large eyes, black and white, and something in his gaze that was exhausting when it was fixed, like the covetous eye of a snake attracting a prey.
Contrary to the habit of our epoch, like Leonardo da Vinci in contrast to his own, he wore his beard long after the age of seventeen; the most insistent pleas could never persuade him to cut it. In that eccentricity, he was four years in advance of the apostles of Henri Saint-Simon.5 The most accurate way to convey an idea of him is to say that he bore a strong resemblance to Saint Bruno.6
His voice and his mannerisms were soft, to the great surprise of anyone seeing him for the first time and who had imagined him, on the basis of his poetic writings, to be an ogre or a devil. He was kind, gentle, affable, proud, steadfast, obliging and benevolent; his loving heart—amoroso con los suyos, to use the divine Spanish expression—had not yet been spoiled by egotism and gold. When he was deeply wounded, however, his hatred, like his love, became implacable.
When he was dragged into society he brought into it an impression of painful melancholy, like a deer expelled from its thicket.
With regard to details of his childhood, almost none are known; even those he confided to his intimates are unknown. Willfulness was always developed in him to the highest degree; he was bold, headstrong and imperious; scorn for habits and customs was innate in him; he never gave in, even at a very young age. He had a horror of clothes and spent his early years entirely naked; it was only later that anyone succeeded in making him put on the most necessary garments.
There is also a vague suspicion that his education was confided to priests—an opinion to which his irreligion lends adequate support. There is no a hero to a valet, no God to those who live in a temple.
He often took a kind of delight in relating that he had always been exasperating for his masters, always feared by them, without their exactly knowing why; perhaps he often put them in a quandary by his questions à La Condamine,7 and, scenting their crass ignorance, treated them with scorn and disgust! He also said, with pride, that he had been expelled from every school he had attended.
As study was his only passion, and Latin alone did not slake his thirst for knowledge, he was always surrounded by five or six dictionaries of ancient and modern languages, and scholarly works that he obtained with difficulty, which his ashamed masters burned in succession.
Already, in those days, he was afflicted by a sadness, and an indefinite, vague and profound chagrin; melancholy was already his “idiosyncrasy.” Some of his former schoolfellows recalled having seen him spend entire days weeping bitter tears, without any known or apparent cause; later, he was never able to define these desolations himself. Assuredly, life in forced community had thrown him into that chronic state of suffering, and that suffering, that ennui, excited his sensitive organism and tormented his grievous irritability.
The course of his brief career was similar to that of one of those torrents whose source is unknown, which sometimes flood valleys and sometimes run underground.
That first epoch of his life was followed by a number of years about which we have not been able to obtain the slightest information—except that we have found the following two brief notes among his papers, which give rise to the presumption that his father had placed him, against his will, in apprenticeship to some artist or artisan.
November 1823
Yesterday my father said to me: “You’re grown up now, and one needs a profession in this world. Come with me; I’m going to offer you to a master who will treat you well; you’ll learn a trade that ought to please you, you who draw on walls, who make poplars, hussars and parrots so well; you’ll have a good position.” I didn’t know what all that meant; I followed my father, and he sold me for two years.
January 1824
So this is what a position is, a master and an apprentice. I don’t know whether I really understand, but I’m sad and I think about life; it seems to me to be very short! On this transitory earth, then, why so many cares, so many painful cares—what’s the point? Now, I laugh when I see a man who is settled, or in the process of settling. What does a man need, then, to make his life? A bearskin and a few substances. If I’ve dreamed of a life it isn’t this one, Father! If I’ve dreamed of a life, it’s that of a camel-driver in the desert, an Andalusian muleteer, a Tahitian!
* * * * *
It is probable that the man with whom he served his apprenticeship was an architect, for someone recalls having seen him, a few years later, working in the architecture studio of Antoine Garnaud; otherwise, we not been able to discover anything about this phase of his life; doubtless he was engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with poverty, and in the intervals left to him by his stupid labors and hunger, he abandoned himself to study. Architectural designs and poems have been found among his papers bearing the same dates. His assiduity at the Antoine Garnaud studio gradually became less frequent, and he disappeared entirely therefrom. His aversion for ancient architecture, whose exclusion is well-known, was surely caused by that withdrawal.
He retreated into the shadows in order to devote himself to the studies of which he was fond; he was only seen to reappear at rare intervals, directing a few constructions, or in the studio of some skillful painter whose amity he had obtained.8 It was also about this time, approximately two years before his death—toward the end of 1829—that he associated himself with a few young and timid artists, in order to be stronger as a bundle, in order not to be broken and knocked down on entering into society. He was even regarded by many as the high priest of that rough-hewn camaraderie, which was considered very scandalous, and whose intentions and title were perverted by ignorance and malice. But let us not anticipate; Champavert, in a collective work that will be published shortly, has reestablished the veracity of the facts and enlightened the public that the newspapers have deceived.
His last companions, whose names are cited in the Rhapsodies, and who knew him very intimately, would have been able to provide exact and positive information about him; but, as he did not approve this publication, they have closed their doors to us.
It was toward the end of 1831 that Champavert’s poetic essays appeared, under the title Rhapsodies, par Pétrus Borel. No little book ever caused such a great scandal—a scandal, moreover, such as is always caused by every book written with heart and soul, without politeness for an era, in which art and passion are forged with the head and the hand, beating the breast on every page. We are too favorably disposed to pass judgment on those poems; no one would believe us to be impartial—so we shall only say that they seem to us to be abrupt, suffered, felt, full of fire, and, if we may be forgiven the expression, sometimes “flowery” but more often “cast-iron.” It is a book impregnated with venom and pain; it is the prelude to the drama that followed it, and which the most naïve had foreseen. A work of that sort has no second volume; its epilogue is death.
We shall, for the benefit of our readers who are unfamiliar with them, present a few extracts, in support of what I have just said.
This is the piece that opens the collection; we are giving preference to its citation because it is full of dolor of a rare frankness, and contains a few circumstances of his life about which we have been unable to speak; it is addressed to a friend who had given him hospitality, it seems, in a time when, like Metastasio,9 he had no shelter but the sky and the roadway.
When your Pétrus or your Pierre10
Had not even a stone
On which to rest, dry-eyed,
Or a nail in a miserly wall
On which to hang his guitar,
You gave me a shelter.
You said: Come, my Rhapsodist,
Come finish your ode in my home,
For your sky is not azure
Like the skies of Homer
Or the Provençal troubadour;
The air is cold, the ground is hard.
Paris has no boscage;
Come then, I’ll open the cage,
In which I live, cheerfully poor;
Come, amity unites us,
Together shall share
A few seeds of hemp.
Quietly, my shameful soul
Blessed your soothing voice
Which caressed its misery;
For you alone, at the austere fate
That overwhelmed my solitude,
Shed a tear, Léon.
What! My frankness wounds you?
Would you wish, out of weakness,
One’s poverty to be veiled?
No, no, new Malfilâtre,11
I want, in the visible century,
To display my nudity!
I want everyone to know
That I am not a coward,
For I had two portions of dolor
At that banquet of the earth,
For while still young, poverty
Could not break my vigor.
I want everyone to know
That I have only my moustache,
My guitar and my heart
Which laughs at distress;
And that my masterful soul
Always emerges victorious.
I want everyone to know
That, without toga or shield,
Neither chancellor nor baron,
I am no gentleman
Nor a cheap hireling
Parodying Lord Byron.12
At the court, in its orgies,
I have made no elegies,
No hymn to the deity;
On the side of some duchess,
Wallowing in wealth
No lay on my poverty.
Here are a few other verses and a few fragments chosen, so to speak, at random, all similarly full of chagrin and venom, and of the thought mutedly underlying them, and which was to doom him a short while later.
COMPLAINT
Joyful, importunate sound of a melodious keyboard,
Speak—what do you want of me?
Have you come into my attic to heap further insult
Upon this defeated heart?
Joyful sound, come no more; pour intoxication on others;
Their life is a feast
That I have not disturbed; you’re troubling my distress,
My clandestine agony!
Imprudent, were do you come from? Doubtless a white hand,
A beautiful finger imprisoned
In rich jewels, has struck your reed
Of ebony and ivory;
Are you accompanying an angelic child
In her timid lesson?
Perhaps the somber rhythm and the melancholy tune
Betray her song to me.
No, I hear the muffled footsteps of a noisy crowd
In a narrow room;
It is whirling around, excited by the waltz,
Shaking the walls and roof.
Outside, confused sounds, cries and whinnying horses,
Flowers, slaves, torches;
The rich spread their joy and the poor moan
Ashamed in their rags!
Around me there is only a palace, indecent joy
Wealth, sumptuous nights,
Future, glory, honors; in the midst of that world
Poor and suffering I am
As if surrounded by the great, the king, the Holy Office
On the quémandero,13
All in pomp assembled to inhale a sacrifice,
A Jew on the brazero!
For everything overwhelms me: oblivion, misery, desire,
Are parceling out my days!
My amours embroidered the crêpe of my life with gold,
No more amours henceforth.
Poor girl! I was the one who dragged you
Along the path of pain;
But with a stronger poison, before it withered you.
You killed unhappiness!
Oh I, no more than a child, timid, weak, force-fed
With that sharpened blade
Have not sliced with this cowardly arm
My ulcerated breast!
I ruminate my disgrace; its shadow is pursued
By a customary regret.
What renders me so spineless and chains me to life?
Poor Job on his dung-heap.
HYMN TO THE SUN
There, in the sunken path, a solitary stroller
In my clandestine disgrace,
I come, suffering, and lie down on the ground
Like a brute beast
I nurse my hunger, head on a stone
Appealing to sleep
To staunch my burning eyelids a little;
I have exhausted my ration of sunlight!
Back there in the city, the sordid avarice
Of the king, over every Champart,14
Sunlight and void are sold to the human flock;
I have paid; I have my share!
But over everyone, all equal before you, just sun.
You shed your rays,
Which are no gentler on the face of an august prince
Than the dirty face of a beggar in rags.
Excerpt from a piece entitled
HAPPINESS AND UNHAPPINESS
He is a bird, the bard! He must remain wild;
By night in the branches, he twitters his song;
A muddy duck strutting on the river-bank
Saluting every rising or setting sun.
He is a bird, the bard! He must grow old austere,
Sober, poor, ignored, grim and careworn,
Singing for no one, and having nothing on earth
But a torn cape, a dagger and the skies!
But the bard today is a womanly voice,
A tight-fitting suit, a scrubbed pretty face,
A parrot on a perch, singing for Madame,
In a gilded cage, a pet canary;
He is marvelously fat, weeping warm tears
Over obligatory evils after a long meal,
Carrying an umbrella and swearing by his arms,
And, elixir in hand, invoking death,
Jewels, balls, flowers, horses, châteaux, slender mistresses
Are the materials of his leaden poems:
Nothing for poverty, nothing for the humble in distress;
Always insulting them in his velvet verses.
Please! Spare us your autocratic airs;
Good for you, if you glean wealth by the handful,
But don’t dress your verses up like your servants,
Which cause our foreheads, circled in rags, to blush.
Hey you, fluffy perihelion of those suns,
Don’t take so much care to hide your tatters,
It’s only in their refuge that the mind unwinds;
The bard only grows intoxicated by need!
I have caressed death, laughing at suicide,
Often and gladly, when I was happier;
Now I hate it, and am afraid of it,
Wretched and undermined by homicidal hunger.
POVERTY
By my cheerful expression, laughter on my lips.
You deem me happy, comfortable, unleavened and fever-free,
Living from day to day with no ambition,
Ignorant of remorse, virginal to affliction;
Through the walls of a noble breast,
Can one see the desiccating heat and the undermining fire?
In a dull lamp that is exhaustible,
It is necessary, like the heart, to open it or break it.
When you took your head to the executioners, poor André,15
You struck your forehead upon the cart in rage;
Having not done enough for immortality,
For your country, its glory and its liberty.
How many times, on the rock that borders life,
Have I kicked my foot, banged my desirous head,
Crying my long and painful torment to the skies;
I sensed my power, and I felt shackles!
Power...shackles...so what? Nothing! One more poet
Who would make the divine, but his Muse is mute,
His power is in shackles—get away! We no longer believe
In this sighted century in any but accomplished talents;
Work, we no longer believe in marvelous futures.
Work! Oh, the need that howls in my ears
Stifling any thinker that rears up in my bosom!
What reply can I make to the chords of my lute? I’m hungry.
Oh, all of that makes the heart bleed. Let us pass on.
His independent stance and his violent love of liberty had caused him to be labeled a redoubtable Republican. He thought he ought to respond to that accusation in the preface to his Rhapsodies, “I am a Republican,” he said, “as a lynx would understand it; my Republicanism is that of lycanthropy! If I speak of a republic, it is because that word, to me, represents the broadest independence that association and civilization can permit. I am a Republican because I cannot be a Carib Indian; I need an enormous sum of liberty; will the Republic give that to me? I have no personal experience of it, but when that hope is dashed, like so many others, I shall still have the Missouri!”
Because of that, the newspapers called those verses lycanthropic, him a lycanthrope and his turn of mind lycanthropism. The epithet had a great success in society, and stuck. He was pleased to hear it; so, we have deemed him worthy of our respect for not disowning that characteristic banner.
In the midst of all the hateful criticisms hurled at him, which would have saturated a soul less steeped than his, he did not doubt his strength for an instant, and received in private many gentle consolations, a little sincere applause, and true advice.
Among others, there was a letter and some lines that were addressed to him in this regard, which was found among his manuscripts, and which we shall reproduce here.
Monsieur,
Forgive me for being so long delayed in thanking you for the gift that you were kind enough to make me of your poems. Monsieur Gérard16 only gave me your address a few days ago.
If molten metal has rejected its scoria, those scoria can be presumed to be metallic, and although it might annoy you to presume too much about your future, I would like to believe that it will be remarkable. I have been young too, Monsieur, young and melancholy, like you, and I have often blamed the social order for the anguish I experienced; I still have a fragment of verse—for I wrote verses when young—in which I expressed a desire to go and live among the wolves. A great confidence in the divinity has often been my sole refuge. My first tolerable verses will attest to that; they are not as good as yours, but, I repeat, they are not without numerous parallels. I tell you that in order that you might judge the sad but profound pleasure that yours gave me. I have all the more sympathy with some of your ideas because, although my destiny has undergone a great transformation, I have neither forgotten my first impressions, nor acquired much taste for the society I cursed at twenty years of age. Although I no longer have any complaint to make on my own account today, I mourn when I encounter its victims. But Monsieur, you were born with talent, you have received a better education than me; you will, I hope, triumph over the obstacles with which the road is strewn. If that happens, as I hope it will, always conserve the fortunate originality of your mind, and you will have cause to bless providence for the ordeals to which it has subjected you in your youth.
You probably do not like eulogies, so I will not add anything to what I have already said. I think, in any case, that you would prefer to know the reflections that your poetry has suggested to me. You will see that it is not out of egotism that I have said so much to you about myself.
Accept, Monsieur, with my sincere thanks, the assurance of my consideration and keenest interest.
Béranger17
16 February 1832.
TO PÉTRUS BOREL
Brave Pierre, why the melancholy
That reigns in your verses; why, on the future,
That dolorous gaze, followed by a long sigh,
Why that disgust for life?
It is, however, beautiful; look at the horizon
That is opening before us, bright with light...
Come, we shall cross these feeble barriers
That hold us like a prison.
What does a little pain matter in the morning of life,
Or the dark cloud wandering at our zenith?
The name that one engraves in rude granite
Escapes the fingernail of envy.
And when evening comes, we shall rest,
We shall find the glory at the end of the quarry,18
And love will be there, seductive chimera!
Pouring its balm upon our distress.
Look at those immobile masses around us
Ignorant of the sweet embraces of love,
Or the fine transports of ambition,
Incomplete and crippled beings!
Do they not have more right than us to denounce
Heaven,
Those who, thrown naked on this arid road,
Pressing the empty cup to their fiery lips,
Encounter nothing but bile?
And you, you complain, when, full of youth,
You run free and strong, like a brave charger,
Of a few days of mourning that make you forget
The sweet kisses of a mistress.
What more do you ask, then, for your share?
Love, glory, amity will fall due to you in part,
Is that not enough to charm the voyage?
Fortune will only come in time!
Forward, forward! Be brave, Pierre!
Bear your heavy cross along wretched roads,
Without showing to others your hands and keens
Bruised by the edges of stones.
For glory is a bad mother to her poor children!
Bow down before the laureates of the world entire;
But it ought not to see the crown of thorns
That tears their burning foreheads.
Those verses bear the signature of a great artist who honors France; we would have liked to be able to publish it, but we are afraid of offending his modesty and of seeming too indiscreet in revealing the source of a naïve poetry that is utterly and confidentially intimate.
On comparing the two sides, one of abuse and the other of noble and friendly advice, one will see, in this as in all cases, that vile criticism only emerges from below.
This is all that we have been able to collect regarding the material life of Champavert; as for the history of his soul, its entirety is in his writings; we shall see it again, first in the present volume of stories, and then in the Rhapsodies, whose second edition will appear shortly. Finally, for details regarding his disgust for life and his suicide, we shall refer to the story entitled “Champavert,” which concludes this volume.
Monsieur Jean-Louis, his inconsolable friend, has been kind enough to confide all of Champavert’s manuscripts and papers of which he was the owner to us, in order that we could put them in order, and he has authorized us to publish any that seemed to us to be worthwhile; to begin with, we have selected and collected these unpublished stories from among many others. If the world gives them a good reception, we shall publish them all successively, as well as several novels and plays, which we also have in our hands.
Is the premature death of the young writer a real and regrettable loss for France? We cannot answer that ourselves; it is for France to judge. It is for France to assign his rank, for Lyon, his homeland, to redeem and secure the apotheosis of its young and excessively unfortunate poet. We think it only polite, however, to warn readers who seek out and like “lymphatic”19 literature to close this book again and go to another. If, however, they desire to have some notion of Champavert’s state of mind, they have only to read what follows.
On receipt of the letter in which Champaverrt informed him of his extreme determination, Monsieur Jean-Louis left immediately, hoping to arrive in time to deflect him from his fatal plan; he was too late. As soon as he arrived in Paris he went to Champavert’s domicile; he was told that he had gone away on a long voyage. He was unable to obtain any information in the city. That evening, however, while reading the Tribune in the Café Procope he found cruel and positive news. The next day, he collected his friend’s cadaver, which had been exposed in the Morgue for three days, and had it buried in Mont-Louis cemetery; close to the grave of Héloïse and Abelard, you can still see a broken mossy stone on which, by leaning over, one can, with difficulty, read these words: To Champavert. Jean-Louis.
Greatly moved by the suicide of that young heart, and touched—tears having escaped me during the tale that Jean-Louis told over coffee—he approached me and said: “Did you know him?”
“No, Monsieur; if I had known him, we would have died together.”
I acquired his friendship, and that worthy young man, before returning to Lachapelle in Vaudragon, made me a gift of the portfolio found on Champavert.
This is almost all that it contained: a few whimsical notes, scribbled at random in red pencil, almost totally illegible, and a few verses and letters.
To begin with, I deciphered these pensées on donkey-skin.
* * * *
It is always advisable for men not to do anything futile, of course; but one might as well tell them to kill themselves, for, to be honest, what is the good of living? Is there anything more futile than life? A useful thing is something whose objective is known; a useful thing must be advantageous in itself and in its result, to serve some purpose, at least potentially; in sum, it is a good thing. Does life meet even one of these conditions? Its objective is unknown, it is neither advantages in itself nor in its result; it does not serve, and cannot serve, any purpose; in sum, it is harmful. Let someone prove to me the utility of life, the necessity of life, and I shall live....
For myself, I am convinced of the opposite, and I often repeat, with Petrarch:
Che più giorno é la vita mortale
Nubil’e, brev’e, freddo e pien di noia;
Che pò bella parer, ma nulla vale.20
* * * *
The thought that has always pursued me bitterly, and thrown the greatest disgust into my heart, and this: that one only ceases to be an honest man on the day when the crime is discovered; that the vilest scoundrels, whose atrocities remain hidden, are honorable man, greatly enjoying favor and esteem; that men must often be laughing quietly inside when they hear themselves treated as good, just, honest, most serene highnesses!
Oh, that thought is heart-rending!
Thus, I am reluctant to shake the hands of people other than intimate friends; I shiver involuntarily at the idea, which never fails to assail me, that I might perhaps be shaking a faithless, treacherous, parricidal hand!
When I see a man, I look him up and down and sound him out involuntarily, and I ask in my heart whether he is really, in truth, a man of probity, or a fortunate brigand whose assaults, thefts and murders are unknown, and will be so forever. Indignant and nauseated, with scorn on my lips, I am tempted to turn my back on him.
If men were, at least, classified like other animals, if their various forms reflected their penchants, their ferocity and their bounty, like other animals—if there were a form for the ferocious murderer as there is for the tiger and the hyena; if there were one for the thief, the usurer and the avaricious man, as there is for the kite, the wolf and the fox—it would then be easy to know one’s society; one could love judiciously and one could avoid the evil, chase them away and expel them, as one flees and expels the panther and the bear, while loving the dog, the deer and the ewe.
* * * *
“Merchant” and “thief” are synonymous
A poor man who steals the smallest object out of necessity is sent to the penitentiary, but merchants, who are privileged, open shops on the sides of roads in order to rob the passers-by who stray into them. Those thieves have neither skeleton-keys nor pliers, but they have scales, account-books and haberdasheries, and no one can get out of them without telling themselves that they have just been robbed. Those petty thieves eventually get rich and become “property-owners,” as they call themselves—insolent property-owners!
At the slightest political disturbance they flock together and take up arms, howling that they are in danger of pillage, and slaughtering with a clear conscience anyone who rises up against tyranny.
Stupid brokers—it’s a fine thing for you to talk about property and kill as looters the worthy people impoverished at your counters! Defend your property, then! Unfortunate rustics who, leaving the countryside, have come to fall upon you in the city, like flocks of crows or hungry wolves, to feed on carrion! Defend your property! Dirty dealers, what would you have without your barbaric pillaging? What would you have, if you did not sell brass as gold, dye for wine? Poisoners!
* * * *
I do not believe that one can become rich without being ferocious; a sensitive man never accumulates. In order to be rich it is necessary to have but one idea, one obsession, hard and immutable: the desire to make a heap of gold; and, in order to increase the size that heap of gold, it is necessary to be a usurer, a crook, an inexorable extortionist and murderer, especially maltreating the weak and the small. And when a mountain of gold is made, one can climb it, and from the height of its summit, with a smile on one’s lips, contemplate the valley of despair that one has made.
* * * *
The big businessman steals from the wholesaler, the wholesaler steals from the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper steals from the householder, the householder steals from the laborer and the laborer dies of hunger. It is not people who work with their hands who succeed; it is exploiters of humankind.
* * * *
In a notebook these verses were written, which I presume to be his, being unable to recall having seen them anywhere else.
TO A CERTAIN MORALIST
It is as well, at the height of the pulpit where one is enthroned,
At one’s ease, with a mocking smile,
Festooning one’s utterances and decorating one’s sermons
Not to be lying in one’s heart!
It is as well when one has just said something new,
To rebuke mores and good taste,
Not to go forth to extract one’s parables
From guard-rooms or the gutter!
Above all, it is as well, when a bard puts on
The mantle of the apostolate,
Not to shoot from a balcony of the Louvre
On the populace down below!
But who, then, Brothers, is that rude anchorite?
Who is this surly monk?
This harsh quibbler, this fat man in a biretta,
Who has come to remonstrate with us?
Who, then, is this torturer with the canine muzzle,
Lacerating everything, denying the beautiful,
Sullying art, who says that our age is in decline,
Only good to feed the crows?
Who is he, Brothers? He sings dirty songs,
Drives the people and raises a hue and cry!
On the thresholds of brothels he preaches morality,
Like a drover shouting at his herd!
* * * *
I shall say nothing about the death penalty; enough eloquent voices have condemned it since Beccaria;21 but I shall rise up and proclaim the infamy of the witness for the prosecution, and cover him with shame. Can one imagine being a witness for the prosecution? What horror! Only humankind offers such examples of monstrosity! Is there a barbarism more refined, more civilized, than evidence for the prosecution?
* * * *
In Paris there are two caverns, one of thieves, the other of murderers; that of thieves is the Bourse, that of murderers the Palais de Justice.
1. “Clotilde de Surville” was the notional fifteenth-century author of a book of poems published in 1803, probably forged by the Marquis de Surville who had died in 1798, after trying to provoke an insurrection against the Directoire in Provence. Carlino was an eighteenth-century actor, famous for playing Arlequino [Harlequin] whose supposed exchange of letters with the contemporary Pope, surnamed Ganganelli, was fraudulent. Joseph Delorme was the subject of Vie, Poésie et Pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) by Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve; no serious pretence was ever mounted that he was a real person.
2. The reference is to Pierre Borel (c1620-1671), an early microscopist, who might have been blurring the truth slightly when he referred to his father Jacques as a “mathematician and poet,” as it seems more likely that he was an astrologer, and no examples of his poetry survive.
3. Julius Caesar’s account of his wars in Gaul includes mention of a people called the Segusiani, living in the region where the city of Lyon was eventually founded. The name was further popularized by a thirteenth-century religious writer who signed himself Henricus de Segusia.
4. Philibert Delorme, Étienne de Martelange, Jean-Nicolas Servan, alias Servandoni, various members of the Audran family of artists, Jacques Stella, Antoine Coysevox, and Pierre-Simon Ballanche were all born in Lyon, Borel’s birthplace.
5. The reference is probably to the Comte de Saint-Simon’s sometime secretary Léon Halévy, who wore his beard uncultivated for a while during the period when Borel knew him in Paris; it was not typical of Saint-Simonians in general.
6. The reference is presumably to the cycle of paintings of St. Bruno painted by Eustache Le Sueur and displayed in the Louvre, although only one of them represents the saint with an unkempt beard.
7. Charles Marie de La Condamine (1701-1774) was a geographer and mathematician who became famous when he supported Isaac Newton’s suggestion that the Earth was not a perfect sphere, continually making scrupulous measurements that proved his case, but to which the orthodox supporters of imaginary sphericity steadfastly refused to pay any heed.
8. Théophile Gautier was a student in an artist’s studio when Borel met him, and when they organized the Hernani claque, the other students in the studio were recruited along with other friends of the members of the petit cénacle.
9. The pseudonym of the Italian poet and librettist Pietro Trapassi (1698-1782)
10. I have translated all the poems in the volume literally, without making any attempt to reproduce their rhyme-scheme of scansion.
11. The poet Jacques Clinchamps de Malfilâtre (1732-1767) was poorly born and unsuited to the salon society that was the principal broker of literary fame in his day, but his reputation grew even if his income remained meager.
12. Byron had established a stereotypical stance of irreducible world-weary gloom that attracted many imitators, most of whom were faking it. Borel wasn’t.
13. An adaptation, for rhyming purposes of quémando [burning—i.e., of heretics]
14. A tax levied on landowners in Medieval France
15. The poet André Chenier (1762-1794) was one of the precursors of the Romantic Movement; he was exceedingly unlucky to be arrested by mistake, and then sent to the guillotine by Robespierre, whom he had once criticized in a poem, a mere three days before the end of the Terror.
16. Gérard Labrunie, better known as Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855), also cited simply as “Gérard” when his verses are quoted in the headpieces to two of the stories in the collection.
17. The lyric poet Pierre-Jean Béranger (1780-1857) became enormously popular as a popular songwriter.
18. The French carrière [quarry] also means “career,” so there is an untranslatable double meaning here, related to the previous reference to granit [granite]. Borel echoes the double meaning in one of his own stories.
19. In the pseudo-Classical medical theory of the humors a lymphatic temperament is one that lacks energy.
20. From Francesco Petrarca’s Triumphus Temporis [The Triumph of Time] Approximately: What more is mortal life than a single day/Cloudy, cold, short and filled with grief/That has no value, fair though it might seem?
21. Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; tr. as On Crimes and Punishments) by Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) was the Classic Enlightenment text arguing against the death penalty.
