Le rouet d'ivoire
The Ivory Spinning Wheel
Emile Moselly
LORRAINE CHILDHOODS
To my master of French literature
“When I laid aside the purple of childhood, when I hung my bulla around the neck of the household Lares, at the hour when life hesitates and sits down at the crossroads, I came to take refuge with you: to welcome my tender years, you opened the robe of Socrates.” Thus speaks the poet Persius to the philosopher Cornutus, in verses still vibrant with an emotion that the years have not cooled. And I too, O my dear master, I left the smoke-blackened Penates, and the little Lorraine enclosure where a few gooseberry bushes grew and the age-old boxwood, from which my child’s hands would tear sprigs on the sacred day of Palm Sunday. And I found in you the same kindness and the same gentleness. Delicious dawns: never did broader hopes rise on the horizon. You understood your students so well! Romantic daring, naive paradoxes, clumsy pastiches that revealed an ingenuous admiration of the masters — you welcomed everything with sympathy. No one more than you, in the University, knew how to be an incomparable educator. Your kindness knew no irony, for you well knew that there are adolescent sensibilities that would shatter, like a pure crystal, at the mere sound of a burst of laughter. At the hour when a shadow, falling from unknown summits, slowly veils to my eyes the joy of the road, and the singing hedge, and the tumult of life, I come piously, O my dear master, to offer you all my childhood.
EMILE MOSELLY
The roof extends above my head, deep as the vault of the nocturnal sky: the holes in the gutters gleam like stars. Beneath the framework raising its monstrous beams, sheets of shadow crumble, cut by beams of light where myriads of atoms dance.
This is the attic, in my grandfather’s house. A little Parisian, suddenly transported from a bright room on the quays to the Lorraine house that encloses in its corners depths of darkness, I walk with rapture on a voyage of discovery of the world. I advance groping, so small, in the immensity of unknown lands.
Never did a sailor of Ulysses, landing in the country of the Cimmerians, where souls avid for blood whirl in the mist, feel greater terror. The sheaves of oats and wheat, heaped on the threshing floor, cut out…
[Note: The source OCR text of this cahier runs to over 5,300 lines, the vast majority consisting of garbled OCR artifacts interspersed with Emile Moselly’s literary memoir of childhood in Lorraine. “Le rouet d’ivoire” (The Ivory Spinning Wheel) is a sustained prose poem recounting the author’s earliest memories: the attic of his grandfather’s house, the sights and sounds of rural Lorraine, the Moselle River, village life, the passage of the seasons, games and fears of childhood, school days, and the gradual awakening of the artistic sensibility. The work is subtitled “Enfances Lorraines” (Lorraine Childhoods). A full translation will require dedicated attention to the complete readable text.]