Our Fatherland

Our Fatherland

cahier for the journey of visitation of the president of the French Republic to Spain (and to Portugal)

Then in Besançon, old Spanish town…

It was a revelation, and I shall not make this time the cahier that I had reserved for myself, that I had promised myself to write of the four years of this legislature; that will be for another time, and, as usual, that other time will doubtless never come; a cahier of summary and of looking back, a cahier of recapitulation, a little summary of contemporary history for the use of patient dauphins, in which I proposed to assemble, to organize, to call back to mind, in a certain order, several studies that it seemed to me indispensable to pursue, or to begin, for the beginning of this seventh series, studies bearing themselves, as they must, upon the political and social movement since the beginning of this Chamber, and particularly, as one would expect, since the beginning of Combism.

I expected it, myself like everyone. One must expect one’s trade, and the obligations of one’s trade, the periodic obligations. No trades imply periodic obligations, the word itself says it, as does the manufacture of periodicals. One must expect it. One gets used to it. One gets through it by rotations, and one comes very well, like modern lands, to do without fallows.

In spite of myself, through the ministry of these cahiers, I have nevertheless become a little bit of a journalist; that is to say a man who follows events; I do not defend myself from it; I must have neither shame nor remorse of it; fortnightly journalist, if one may say so, I shall not deny the trade I do; journalist by the month or by the semester, journalist in the end, my misery is the common misery: I must follow the events, an excellent exercise for completing the conviction that truly events do not follow us.

They have doubtless something else to do; better or worse; journalist, fortnightlyman or semesterman, I could not let this legislature fall and the next elections prepare without trying to cast back a historian’s glance over the events of these last four years; a fairly great number of these events appeared to me important, serious; as they were produced they had seemed important to me; I was not very sure they would appear so to me as much today; but, in our miserable trade, we must make a show of believing it; of themselves they arranged themselves, ranged themselves in stages, sketched the plan of the cahier I had to make; truly that cahier was already made, like those cahiers that certain authors bring to me; there was no longer anything to do but to write it; that is to say there was no longer anything to do but to make it; the resignation of Waldeckism and the beginning of Combism; how Combism claimed to be the direct filiation of Waldeckism; sincerely perhaps, at least for certain men, and for certain circumstances, and for a certain part, and for certain ideas; falsely indeed, for almost all the persons, in almost all the circumstances, for the greatest part, and for almost all the ideas; to measure, to dose the legitimacy of this claim; how yes, Combism was in a certain sense the filiation of Waldeckism; how it was not the direct filiation, but a bastard filiation; how it was to become, how it became rather rapidly its very negation; how, in fact and in possession, it became master of the heritage, legitimate heir in a certain sense, supposed heir for the greatest part, usurper, unworthy from day to day more and more; how this filiation, real, pretended, slipped away from day to day as Combism made its way toward the domination of the Republic; the Combist domination; whether the establishment of the Combist domination was not essentially an establishment of the Jaurèsist domination; the Combist domination; whether the exercise and the maintenance of the Combist domination was not essentially the exercise and the maintenance of the Jaurèsist domination; entirely during almost all the time; barely lightened toward the end, with unforeseen returns all the more frenetic, all the more senseless, in that everyone, and the interested parties almost as much as anyone, felt imminent the ruin of the system; and that this ruin, once obtained, once acquired, would remain definitive; that one would not return to it again; how and by how much this form of Caesarism was more dangerous than all the previous forms; how and by how much this form not yet tried, precisely, in part, because it had not yet been tried, was deeply more dangerous than all the forms hitherto known and classified; how it manifested itself; how it was organized; how it acted; by what procedures; or even by what methods; how it culminated and came down again radiating; in what it resembled the known forms; in what it was new; that the government of the Republic and the true, ancient, traditional and religious republicans, I mean the men who had this true religion of the Republic, by dint of having their eyes fixed on the old realities, on the recent menaces, on the present intentions, on the new appearances of military Caesarism, by dint of being frightened, terrified, fascinated by it, were inevitably to fall, and quite innocently, into the realities of civil Caesarism; which is the more dangerous, military Caesarism or civil Caesarism; that it is perhaps civil Caesarism; precisely because hitherto one has mistrusted it much less; of the moral innocence of the old republicans; and also of their mental innocence, which we commonly call ignorance; that by fear and by fascination with military Caesarism this ignorance was infallibly to fall into civil Caesarism; that by fear and by fascination with Caesarism in epaulettes, it was infallibly to fall into Caesarism in a frock-coat; that it is today demonstrated that a man can with impunity exercise a pitiless Caesarism in the Republic, provided he is not a handsome man, that he is not a military man, that he bears badly even civil dress, especially that he does not know how to ride a horse; finally, that one may name him the little father So-and-so; that if need be his being popularly ugly, that would only be the better; of the capital importance of the designation of little father in our contemporary history; and in the organization of demagogy; that the popularity of the kind called little father is the most essential of all for an ambitious man; that it is therefore also the most dangerous for the reality of the Republic; thus, that the very characteristics that were so to speak of rigor and constitutional for the old classical Caesarian ambitions, on the contrary have become, for modern contemporary Caesarist ambitions, the most automatic causes of impediment; that M. Berteaux has done the greatest harm to his candidacy for the presidency of the Republic by mounting a horse, with boots, even civil ones, at the last great military maneuvers of this September; that one of his friends ought to tell him so; that one must not know how to ride a horse, to dress, even in a frock-coat, to have spurs, to bear oneself handsomely; above all, that one must absolutely not recall Félix-Faure; that everything on the contrary is permitted, and that everything is promised to every little fellow little father little populist; suitably backed by a whole network of arrondissement political committees; how the law of congregations was applied, heritage of the government that had preceded; how it was applied disloyally, despite the great protest, smothered in an agreed-upon silence, of the great Bernard-Lazare; that it was applied quite otherwise than it had been voted, by a forcing of the text; that consequently its application was an operation of public disloyalty; not only that this application was an act of public disloyalty, but that it was a new application of the principle of raison d’État; that raison d’État, which had triumphed in the corruption of Dreyfusism, was never so powerful as in the triumph of Combism; the abdication, the great abdication of M. Waldeck-Rousseau; the grandeur and the unique sadness of this departure, which appeared from the start an eternal departure; how, in his retreat itself, and in the preparation of his death, he tried, a second, and a last time, to save the Republic; of the resistance which little by little recognized itself among the true republicans; of this resistance which was organizing itself; what admirable efforts, quickly repressed by illness and by the advances of death, M. Waldeck-Rousseau imposed upon himself to give, with a last turn of the helm, the right line; and the shameful reception he received; from men who owed him everything; who without him would have been nothing, condemned to or condemned by reactionary nationalist demagogy; in what spirit the separation of the Churches and of the State was prepared; but in what spirit it was to be carried out; conceived in a Combist spirit; but carried out in a much more republican spirit; that the law in the course of being voted on the Separation of the Churches and of the State appears to be the continuation of the law on Congregations; but that what happens to the law on Separation is the contrary of what came to pass with the law on Congregations; that the law on Congregations, prepared, made, and voted Waldeckist, was executed, applied Combist; and that the law bearing separation of the Churches and of the State on the contrary, prepared Combist, was amended juridically, will be voted rather juridically, that is to say, in a certain sense a little Waldeckist; what was the policy of the Government toward the Holy See; and what had been the policy of the Holy See toward the French government; how the anticlericals conducted themselves; how the anti-Catholics conducted themselves; how the clericals conducted themselves; how the Catholics did not conduct themselves; how the liberals, the libertarians, the men and the citizens of liberty, began to take hold of themselves again, and how at last they conducted themselves; how at last the great death of Waldeck-Rousseau was known; how this death, this slow death, was at once judged a misfortune absolutely irreparable; how the law of workers’ pensions was adjourned, how the law establishing an income tax was further adjourned; why; whether it is true that General André, minister of war, today forgotten, disorganized the army, which was still rather organized; in what sense and how; whether it is true that M. Camille Pelletan, today a journalist, then minister of the navy, finished disorganizing a naval force which was scarcely any longer an organized force; in what sense and how; whether there was not, in the same sense, a disorganization of France itself; that there was assuredly a disorganization, a decomposition, and a corruption of the old Dreyfusism; assuredly a disorganization, a decomposition, and a corruption of the old socialism; that Dreyfusism, becoming governmental, political, parliamentary, ceased to be a true Dreyfusism; that socialism, becoming governmental, political, parliamentary, became statism and ceased to be a true socialism; how the revolutionary spirit was wounded in its deepest sources; how the French revolutionary tradition was injured in its most ancient resources; how a universal Jaurèsism for nearly four years held sway; for it is not enough to say that it reigned; that is to say, a political and social opportunism without the grandeur and without the competence of the old opportunists; how anarchism itself did not remain unharmed; having received many blows, having admitted many political and literary contaminations; how a little popular and jesting fellow can become a great tyrant without one’s perceiving it; how the popularity of Caesarism makes the most dangerous outcome of democracies; how easy it is to establish an autocracy in France, provided one respects certain forms, at the cost of respecting no reality, no liberty; how the Republic, by dint of guarding itself against the invasions of external Caesarisms, in a manner so to speak professional, was condemned not to see the intra-vasions of the much more dangerous interior Caesarism rising; but how there still remained a few free citizens; how delation, which had always been in the practice of governments and parties, was organized into an official theory, governmental, political, parliamentary, and ostensibly republican; thus how Freemasonry, which in heroic times had rendered so many and so true services to the Republic, to liberty, to free thought, all at once, having betrayed liberty, free-thought, came near making the Republic lose all the advantage it had once helped her to obtain; and free-thought all the advantages it had once helped to obtain for free thought; how from the beginning of this ministry favor, the privilege of favor, political favor, governmental favor, which had always been in the practice of governments and parties, in political mores, was scandalously erected into an official theory, governmental, political, parliamentary, and ostensibly republican; how a League instituted for the defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen itself became, despite courageous resistances, fairly numerous, a parliamentary political organism; how it somewhat neglected the old rights of the old men, and the old rights of the old citizens; how all these old rights became the least of its cares, far from remaining the eldest of its principles; how this great League, instituted by serious authors, by just men, by Fathers of the Republic for nobler destinies, despite courageous resistances came to miss no occasion of demagogy; how it did political work in the accomplishment of an officious Combism, a second Combism doubling, redoubling official Combism; an annex of official Combism; how it intervened in the execution of the anti-congregationist law; how it did not intervene as it should have in the separation of the Churches and of the State; how it made itself, despite courageous resistances, the fomenter of delation; how at last Combism collapsed suddenly; at least in appearance, for, after all, the collapse was not sudden; under what apparent and real thrusts; under what real, non-apparent pressures; that there were in the foundering of Combism, besides a growing general disgust, besides a sort of impossibility of continuing almost officially noted in due parliamentary language, political causes, perhaps singular, and a little mysterious; good ones and bad ones, as always; perhaps, this time, and by exception, as many good ones as bad ones; that there had always been during the Combist domination antagonism between the presidency of the council and the presidency of the Republic; but that this antagonism, begun in muffled struggles, continued in political campaign, finally pursued in almost open and sentimental battle, does not explain everything; that these sorts of external campaigns doubtless never explain everything in a foundering, in such a foundering; how the foundering of the Combist domination was perhaps above all an interior foundering, in which the principal complicity was doubtless the complicity of the government which was disappearing; of certain members at least of this government; not so much perhaps of that very important and united group of members of the government which inside the ministry had formed from the beginning a permanent counter-government, perfectly constituted, in opposition to the president of the council, but on the contrary of the president of the council himself and of the few members of his cabinet who accompanied his fortune; thin company, despite certain appearances of force and domination; how perhaps, at bottom, the cunning fellow was not displeased to disappear at that moment; how his departure was singular, precipitate, apparently voluntary, doubtless voluntary in another sense and more automatic, more willed than one has generally thought; than he showed it himself; or let it be seen; that the cunning little populist felt difficulties approaching, impossibilities coming on; that being all the same head of the government he had reasons, which we did not know, to feel rising that storm which we have known since; and that he must indeed have ended by perceiving that questions were rising, which would be more difficult to resolve than simply to bother the priests; here, for the path must not be too direct either, here I would have made a return upon the theory of governmental favors; I would have shown how the practice of governmental favors belonged to all governments and to all parties; but how, in the order of public or private scandal, there is an abyss between practice and theory; how the putting into official theory of an old governmental procedure had unhinged consciences not accustomed; not accustomed to resolve cases of conscience anywhere but in manuals of morals or of literature; here one had a case admirably real; with all the exigencies of the real, all the inconveniences, all the malversations, that perpetual refusal to enter into our preliminary frameworks; how, M. Combes having fallen, M. Rouvier remained the only possible president of the council; whether M. Rouvier had not already been the only possible minister of finance designated for the constitution of the preceding cabinet; whether in the constitution of that preceding cabinet the unanimous designation of M. Rouvier for the ministry of finance had not really had a capital, primordial importance; whether in that constitution the unanimous attribution of the portfolio of finance to M. Rouvier had not had much more importance, and especially much more real importance, than the attribution, half spontaneous, half calculated, half neglected, of the portfolio of the interior and of the presidency of the council to a senator former minister of public instruction, vague, of poor memory, M. Justin-Louis-Émile Combes; I would have examined, more generally, and more durably, whether the financial policy of M. Rouvier has not commanded the whole government of the Republic since the very constitution of the Combes ministry, whether it has not been, for a long time, the only brake, whether, for a long time, it alone has not made the lower limitation of Combism; whether, still more generally, and more durably, all our policy has not been commanded, for several years already, by the greatest financial difficulties, by the gravest budgetary menaces; aggravated still by so many promises of so many onerous reforms; democratic virtues overloading financial vices, and democratic vices overloading financial virtues, in such a way that in the last analysis virtues and vices, democracy and finance, everything falls back as a burden on the back of the taxpayer; from which I would have returned to the internal dissensions of the cabinet so singularly constituted by M. Combes, and so singularly commanded; so rebellious, so badly obedient, so badly in hand, so disobedient, and, at the same time, so obedient; I would have examined particularly M. Rouvier’s systematic opposition to Combism; finally passing to the ministry of M. Rouvier, a little tired, I would have marked the relaxation, the easing, perhaps a little deceptive, that followed the departure of M. Combes; I would have rested there like everyone, wrongly, perhaps; doubtless wrongly, for a storm was rising, which none of us saw coming; and during the year which remained to us before the end of the legislature I would have like everyone made my separation of the Churches and of the State; I would have like everyone noted that this separation had been made, at least in the Chamber, more or less honestly; that is to say that it had been made in no way as M. Combes had imagined it, and as he had taken care to announce it himself, that it had not been an exercise of persecution, an attempt at persecution, at suppression of the Church by the State, an attempt at oppression, at anti-Catholic domination, pretendedly anticlerical, but that it had revealed a sincere effort of mutual liberation, that one had seen there what the parliamentarians had almost weaned us from seeing: work, parliamentary; that it had resulted in a first serious program of organized mutual liberty; in a word that it had not been Combist, but much more republican.

After the separation what to do, except, like all the parliamentary political world, to go on vacation; thus in the torpor which never fails to be provoked by officially important events, and during what we pleasantly call the leisures of vacations, patiently I should have written my cahier of recapitulation; I should have enumerated the events; I should have counted, measured in all tranquillity the events present; I should have invoked the events absent; in an imperious voice, which is the proper voice of the historian; and when I should not have found myself in agreement with the events, I should have declared, in that voice, that it was the events that were wrong; the docile events, present, absent, all equally serious, all equally important, all equally organized, all equally explained, would have formed one or several single-file lines that I would have unrolled, wound up skillfully; out of all these lay events, I should have made rosaries; beforehand I would have aligned them; at length, as one used to do in the old military army; event number three, step out; event number twenty-five, step back, you are stepping out too much; I should have fattened the lean events, slimmed down the over-fat facts; by such individual observations one used to obtain the fine alignments; by such corrections I should have regularized the facts; and my facts being all put back on the same plane, as is just, none surpassing the other, none surpassing his neighbor on the left or his neighbor on the right, enumerated in this perfectly democratic equality, we too should have formed chains, and the rosaries of events formed the linking of my discourse, and I was at peace, and I was becoming a serious historian, and my old comrade Ischarioth, — I put two h’s so that his name may be more a savant’s name, — my old comrade Ischarioth no longer said to me amiably that I, at least, had the habit of speaking of subjects of which I did not know the first word.

It was a shock; I should have made my cahier quite quietly at the corner of my fire, at least on the side of work; we should all have plied our trades quite quietly; especially those who have none, and who are the most serene of men; and indeed there would have been nothing left but to write it, this cahier; writing is nothing, all our young people know it; it was made in advance; there was nothing left but to draft it; a vacation exercise, in short; naturally, and like every good Frenchman, I should have known nothing of foreign policy; but I should have spoken of it a little, out of international politeness; and because a good historian must leave untreated no part of the subject which his schoolmasters or his masters the events have given him to treat; to mistreat is worth a hundred times better than not to treat at all: such is the great modern principle of international work.

It was a start; for a whole week, or nearly so, in short for a certain number of days that seemed to make more than a week, but which made a whole, an ensemble like a week, Paris, capital of the world, had received the king of Spain; an event at once glorious, solemn, and unnoticed; a king: under the Republic, we have seen so many of them, kings; singular week, customary event, half rejoicing, half festival, half fine weather, half work; without interrupting anything, because the year was not finished, because there had been much work, and there was still much in progress, all the same one was going to watch the king pass a little, just to call upon him, as one of our good collaborators had said; half fine weather, half gray weather, half sunny weather; year half elapsed; work half lapsed; half time of rest, half time of work, half time of leisure, half time of sleep; time of puns and of rhymes, which are puns risen in the world; not time of serious prose, of honest and serious prose, of seriated prose; not the end of a year, finished end, completed end, noted, correct, official, but a finishing, slow secret finishing of a year which still was not entirely finished and which nevertheless was hollowing itself from within; of a year which still could bring us what surprises, what griefs; work, sleep, and leisure, the three eights together and no longer end to end; no longer juxtaposed, jointed, but melted, functioning simultaneously, for the greatest confusion of the mind itself and of images, for the greatest rest and the maximum unwinding; melted like that melted weather of vapor and sun; of half sun together; or finally one arranged, as if by chance, to find oneself on the path of certain itineraries that one knew vaguely to be the itineraries of the cortèges, and that some pretended not to know, but they found themselves there all the same, and that the newspapers gave every morning; one never read the newspapers; but one knew the itineraries all the same, one knows not how; and then the king seemed to do it on purpose, that morning, not to leave the quarter; it was his fault; his; and not ours, who are neither royalists nor lazy; he never went away; the Panthéon, Notre-Dame, the Hôtel-de-Ville, circuits to hold for a whole morning, slownesses, stops, attentions, restraints, stages which certainly would not finish at the stroke of noon, all the houses of ceremonies; the squares, the parvises, the bridges; worn out by an enormous series, which was the sixth, scarcely out of the Gobineau, which was considerable among all, the head heavy with cares, racked with worries, it was amusing to take the arm of a true friend, — we know one another, — and to go for a quarter of an hour to mingle as idlers with the old good people of Paris; the quarter of an hour became half an hour, three quarters of an hour; infallibly one met some friend, who, sly, was doing the same, and who without more ado reproached you with being a frightful militarist.

Houses, old houses of ceremonies; houses of ancient ceremonies and likewise perpetually the same houses of young ceremonies; houses of the elders; houses of the glorious dead; imperishable monuments, which fatally shall perish; the four cardinal points of the glory of Paris; and through this perpetual capital representation of Paris, through this representation eternally eminent, at the same time and inseparably the four cardinal points of all the glory of all France; memory of cut stone; memory living nevertheless, perfectly living, more living than so many men who today walk along the modern paths; French monumental memory; monarchical monuments and inseparably profoundly popular monuments; monuments ancient and perpetually new; monarchical monuments and perpetually democratic, and today properly republican, and tomorrow whatever one will, provided they exist, and on all the days to come whatever it will be necessary that they be, because they exist, monuments which shall be on all days, until the day of their death, and which shall not perish, like so many precarious modern monuments, long before the day of their natural death; monuments eternally monuments; always full of an eternal interior meaning, eternally manifested by the worth of the stone, eternally drawn by the exterior eternity of the line; monarchical monuments, royal monuments, religious monuments, monuments of the old regime and of every new regime, imperial monument, everywhere and always not only popular monuments, but monument-people; the four great god-Termini of the glory of Paris; the Arc de Triomphe, — a little more familiarly the Étoile for the drivers of the Thomson buses, French company, — the most considerable monument that has been built in this kind, says the little Larousse, the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, that perfect monument of French imperial glory; built under Louis-Philippe, approximately, or under the Restoration, older nevertheless than the Roman world; the Invalides, that pure masterpiece, that perfect monument of the old royal France; the Panthéon, much more republican, having been built under Louis XV, the dynastic republican Panthéon, the deconsecrated Panthéon, which had never, by its very plans, been seriously consecrated, the Panthéon, which it is very elegant to mock, but which it would be better to learn to know how to look at a little as this monument demands. Notre-Dame, finally, whose name says everything. New monuments.

[To know to what degree the Invalides is a perfect monument perfectly, one must look at it, for example, from the windows of the drawing-room of the apartment situated on the fifth floor of number 2 of the avenue de Villars.]

It is true that one watched the soldiers pass by; ever since the Dreyfusist parliamentary political General Staff has done everything to reconcile us with the military General Staff, we have refused to reconcile ourselves with the military General Staff, but time has passed, we have become cowardly, and we no longer think ourselves bound to look at the simple soldiers of the second class with a tragic gaze; half consenting we had gone to watch the soldiers pass; the Republic excels at organizing for the pleasure of our eyes and for the satisfaction of our loyalism these great sunlit parades; we went therefore arm in arm, the head heavy, the eyes occupied, the spirit amused, the heart half participating; his comrade was doing the same as he; and it could last a long time.

Singular people of Paris, a people of kings, a king people; the only people of whom one can say that it is the king people without making a shameful literary figure; profoundly and truly people, just as profoundly, just as truly king; in the same sense, in the same attitude and the same gesture people and king; of the same spirit people and king; a people which receives kings between two times, between two labors, between two pleasures, without ado, without awkwardness, without unseemliness and without any coarseness; a people familiar and at once respectful, as true intimates are; truly the only people which without preparation knows how to give kings an ancient and royal reception; truly the only one which has made revolutions and which has remained not only traditional, but traditionalist to this point; the only one which is traditionalist in full consent of its good will; the only one which is at ease and which knows how to bear itself and to present itself in history, having a long habit of it, having an inveterate habit of this form and of this level of existence, and which is not insolent there, unseemly, coarse, parvenu; the only people that does not slip on the waxed floors of glory; the only people which is revolutionary, and when events present themselves, which introduce kings to it, not only does it know how to receive them, but it finds itself having at hand, to receive them, royal monuments such as no king in the world in any country of the world could bring forth in the same time, could ever bring forth in any time of his country.

Nothing is so good for rest as these apparently tiring strolls in the midst of the people of Paris; the mind is occupied just enough for rest to penetrate it and reign there, sovereign itself, without any contestation; full vacancy would tire, at such moments; but this half-full half-empty is what there is most restful; and there is in this people, all spoiled though it be by half a century of demagogy, so much courage, so much good humor, so much endurance, so much joy; gone out to see the king, one watched the people, the old and already named king people; it was above all he, the people, who was passing and parading, whom one watched pass and parade, who himself watched himself pass and parade; in this time of mutuality to excess, the mutual parade in the simple street, the mutual spectacle make of it an application, of mutuality, the oldest and most durable of applications; and it is a popular theater that beats all the laborious Popular Theaters of our bookish folk; at bottom it was all one; the people, the king; the king, the people; it was all one because it was all one same spectacle, and, together, in a sense, all one same spectator; and even this old king people was more royal, more king, more accustomed to its trade than this young heir of a relatively young dynasty; the year had been heavy, painful, unhappy for everyone; I myself bore on the nape of my neck the whole heaviness of this enormous sixth series; of which I have not finished telling you it was enormous; I had eyes drowned from having read so many proofs; the enormous cahier of the Separation, whatever enormous labor, and whatever devotion the author himself had brought to it, I mean fabrication-work, not counting the other, naturally, had left me stupefied, as it seemed to me, for the rest of my days; but what fatigue would resist the frequenting of all this people amused, valiant, courageous of that courage which consists in perpetually beginning again every morning. The old three eights at last realized.

The only people which appears worthily as a king in the old monuments of its great ceremonies.

We too shall perpetually begin again every morning; every morning of all the rapid days; and all the returns from vacation, which are the darkened mornings of the longest years; singular play of climates, antithetical distribution of dates, which makes the mornings of brief days rise upon the growing day, upon the dawns and upon the growing daybreaks, and the returns from vacation, on the contrary, which are nevertheless the mornings of years, false mornings, false matinees of false days, on the contrary rise upon the diminutions, upon the rains, upon the darkenings of autumns.

How not to imitate this people, of whom we are, which we are; that is to say how not to imitate ourselves, how not to be of our own race; how not to prepare ourselves to begin again perpetually tomorrow morning; let us begin therefore by mingling with the amusements of our people, since indeed these amusements are the secret of its strength, giving it the times of halt and the points of resurgence; indispensable; let us watch pass the people who watches the king pass; let us ourselves watch the king pass; here comes the cortège; brouhaha, rumors, and almost immediately the impression that the whole cortège has this in common, that it marches at one same lengthened trot, perfectly cadenced, like a very great mechanical toy; carriages which one guesses at; as much and more than one sees them; at the heart of the cortège, one no longer sees anything: it is the king, and the president of the Republic; here two moving hedges, on either side, like two great herds almost merging into one moving enormous herd; enormous croupes of horses; it is now nothing but these croupes of horses that file past and pass; one does not see the cuirassiers mounted on these horses, because they are higher than one’s gaze; they were giant men on colossal horses; one was in the first rank; it is over; but the general and dominant impression that alone remains is of an immense automatic rhythm, of a lengthened trot, easy, well articulated, lifted nonetheless, common to all the cortège, which carried the whole cortège along the ground and made it that it had already passed; this common movement, this primary rhythm commanded the whole spectacle; all these people who paraded for our amusement and who formed a cortège left in memory only the recollection of the common rhythm of all this cortège; in memory carriages, president, king, whom one had not seen, prefect of police, whom one had seen at the head, horses, soldiers were soon no more than apparatuses, half-phantoms rolling and marching at the same pace, with that singular trot, flowing, lifting, solemn and pressed.

Must I confess that there were many people in the streets? I must. Our democratic hearts will bleed at it, but I must. There were many people who passed in the streets, came and went, looked, allowed themselves to be looked at and got themselves looked at. I must say it: there were many more people pressing in the streets that day than we see hastening to the evening sessions of our useful Popular Universities. Singular people, which does not hasten to the learned lessons of our learned Popular Universities, and which presses itself to ceremonies more or less popular, truly, rather less than more, of a contestable popularity, to royal festivals, to presidential cortèges; which nevertheless are not officially named popular. Ungrateful people. Singular people. Antithetical people. When one gives it these fine little Popular Universities very well-behaved, very prim, sagely scientific, sagely tedious, sagely anarchist if need be, and, if necessary, revolutionary, in the home-cooking style, and, at the outer limit, doctorally undoctrinated, one cannot say, between us, that it hastens there. There are no accidents because of people being crushed at the doors. And on the contrary, let only three horses pass in the street, and immediately there it is, already out, on the threshold of its door. As if three wretched horses, who pass, stamping their feet, the fools, formed a more interesting spectacle than that which so many honorable professors give us gratis, who speak, seated, behind a little desk with green cloth, some standing, some even walking and gesticulating on the platform with their great thin arms, their cuffs, and their false collars. A spirit a little refined, like ours, refuses to conceive even the thought of establishing, between three horses, who pass, and so many learned doctors, who teach, so coarse a comparison.

Antithetical people, already ready for Hugo.

Nothing is so propitious to work as these apparently frivolous amusements; at least now and then; nothing chases away as rapidly, at least for a time, the cares, the worries, the laborious fatigues, all those troubles, all those pains, all those miseries with which the threads of our ordinary lives are woven; truly the memory of that rhythm alone remained in memory; known humanity was divided in two; and in each of the two parts there reigned a perfect equality; one humanity, standing, watched pass, perfectly equal among itself, being entirely immobile in conformity with the same vertical; a passing humanity allowed itself to be watched pass, perfectly equal too, equal among itself, entirely equalized among itself, being entirely mobile in conformity with the same horizontal rhythm, entirely rolling and passing in one same sacred rhythm; the king was no longer a king, nor the soldiers soldiers, but together they were mobiles, as our mechanicians say, mobiles in movement, together they formed an indivisible cortège, just as the people formed an indivisible people of spectators; and the cortège paraded for the pleasure and for the honor of the people, just as the people watched for the accompaniment and for the honor of the cortège; and just as the most severe vertical equality reigned in the standing people, so the most exact and most commodious equality of movement reigned in the passing cortège; the king was worth a soldier, a soldier was worth the king, since they were magnitudes that passed at the same trot.

Ungrateful people, as Racine says. And truly singular people. Which, having such spectacles, hastens to them. And which in the evening does not hasten to lessons which are nevertheless made expressly for it. When one thinks that this people, every evening, from nine to eleven or from ten to twelve, after an exhausting day of work, could go into halls often well lit to be bored on benches like normaliens at lectures; to listen to the latest verses of our little poets, the extreme hypotheses of our latest savants; and it prefers to play hooky during the day to go in fine sunshine to watch military horses parade.

Truly. Nothing is so propitious to work as these apparently idle strolls; decidedly I saw very well how I would do my cahier; the great abdication of Waldeck-Rousseau, announcement and presage and anticipated imitation of his great death, political death before the natural death, death of the situation before the death of the body, death of the statesman before the death of the man, made for me an excellent starting-point; to which I saw the means of giving an equally excellent sequel; I had found how I should obtain an excellent continuity; without breaking at all the regular linking, without making any part stick out unequally, I should nevertheless insist a little upon this: — and this would furnish me the unity of my cahier; for our masters require of us at once to have no idea, but to have a master-idea, which makes the unity; — I should examine whether for several years the political politics has not been covering, masking a whole financial politics, and I should ask myself whether this financial politics did not present the most serious difficulties, the most serious dangers; Paris truly is unique for ceremonies of this kind; and how all these royal pomps of republican manifestations curiously recalled Hugo; through them as one obtained the true resonance and the true depth and the true unity of Hugo, his true inspiration; an inspiration, a taste, a sense, an idea of pomp, exterior, and of traditional ceremony; thereby were joined and are still joined in him, as they are joined in the programs of the festivities, Notre-Dame and that Panthéon, of which he never said ill except by coquetry, because from that time he had the back-certainty that, dead, he would be buried there; a ceremonial and ceremonious Hugo, the true Hugo at last; forgotten today, because he was a democrat in the last of his days; but, even in democracy, a senator and processional; a manifester of manifestations and a manifester of ceremonies; like the people, with the people, in the people, a Hugo putting himself out to go and see horses pass by, even if they be military, preferably, military, and, upon those military horses, military men, with boots, and red trousers, and white gloves going up to the shoulders, and dark tunics with bright red facings, and helmets of metal; like that immense helmet of bronze and of gold which that Dôme des Invalides makes; a Hugo pacifist no doubt, like the people, in the people, but, like the people, pacifist of grand army; an old Hugo popular military; a Hugo of parades and of march-pasts…

When the regiment of halberdiers passes,…

another Hugo than the one our good masters have busied themselves to represent to us, a new and an ancient Hugo, eminently and anciently Parisian, the very unity of the history of Paris, a whole quite other Hugo; a whole Hugo of cortèges, of pomps and of pageantry, of ceremonies at Notre-Dame, were it with those gentlemen of the clergy, commanded if need be, commanded preferably by His Eminence Monsignor the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, parades passing over the bridge of the Seine, ecclesiastical, lay, military, civil, on the bridges of the Seine themselves framed quadrilaterally by the straight and perfect lines of the empty quays, empty today and reserved as they were empty and reserved for the festivities, for the parades of the last century, the Hugo of old memories and of ancient ceremonies, who asked only to become the God of the new ceremonies, half royalist, half imperialist, half legitimist, half Orleanist, half popular, half chamberlain, altogether poet, a Hugo Louis-Philippe and English alliance, in short the Hugo of the return of the ashes; what does it matter, provided there be alignments and that there be masses; and that he might always remain faithful to his God, to his king, I mean to Hugo himself; and how easily Paris, on the parvis and on the quays, on the bridges, found itself again the old Paris; how it found itself again, faithful to memories; same crowd, same ceremonies, same monuments; being the same people; same old Panthéon, same antique Notre-Dame; same Seine, especially, and same quays, even though they should not be the same; and even though there should not have been any once; same bridges, even though they have been redone since; and even though once they should not have existed at all; same parvis, even though it should have been opened, created, raised, even though one should have one day buried the feet of Notre-Dame under that horizontal equality of plane earth; and what joy, suddenly, joy of feeling and of intelligence, of memory and of history, together and inseparably of spirit and of senses, and ravishment of surprise of the historian soul, to understand suddenly, to seize, to seize again, to see, to know, to know again, abruptly, with a single glance, — and is it not rather with an inner glance, — to find suddenly within oneself and to understand at last a whole forgotten poet, a whole period one believed abolished, a whole city, a whole past of a whole city; and what a city, Paris, city of stone, people of monuments, people of memories, people of ancient actions, Paris, capital of the world, capital city, a whole age that one believed elapsed.

To Paris, capital of the peoples, as that Hugo says in his dedication of l’Année terrible.

Himself a singular Hugo, king of royal popular festivities, prince of cortèges, duke of grand burials, introducer of ambassadors, and grand organizer of national funerals, beginning with his own, friend of pomps, even funereal, friend of pomps, even republican, friend of orations, even funeral, which he excelled at making in great sad verses, ordainer of sumptuous funerals; you would have seen him, weak folk who exhaust yourselves to institute among us a new cult, you would have seen him, if he lived: it is he who would have buried Zola magnificently for you; much less well than himself; but still very well, very far below; it was not he who would have confused for you national funerals with official obsequies (Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza); dreaming thus, walking thus, strolling on the left foot, and looking as one could, what other verses than his, what other verses than verses of Hugo could come back into memory: I defy you indeed to see in passing forty Republican Guards on horseback ranged before the Panthéon on the place du Panthéon, rue Soufflot, in a half-circle, in a platoon, in a line, and were it to ensure there the most banal of order-services, without immediately verses of Hugo imperiously coming up from the depths to the surface of your memory; at such moments, public, in those public solemnities, when man is no longer himself, a man, a citizen, a conscience, a heart, but himself, he too a public man, at such moments what becomes of the greater poets, more loved, a Lamartine, a Vigny even, so great and perhaps unique in the world, even a Racine; only Corneille, perhaps, the greatest of all, only Corneille could have sustained the comparison, perhaps, if he had wished; but when he had Polyeucte in his belly, he would have had time to spare to amuse himself making military musics; and when he had no more Polyeucte in his belly, he had become quite incapable of making even military musics.

Imperious Hugo; not verses that sing in memory, but verses that imperiously, imperially sound, beat, resound, hammered, scanned, with such a rhythm and such a drum that they command the step at which one marches, that they enter into the hams, and that once they have entered into the memory, read once, heard once, not only will they no longer leave the memory, never, but that when the moment comes, they shall chase, imperial brutes, unbearable regiments, all the other verses of all the other poets, and will force you to march in step, with the same step, with their step.

Not verses that sing in memory, but verses that in memory sound and resound like a fanfare, vibrant, throbbing, sounding like a fanfare, sounding like a charge, eternal drum, and which shall beat in French memories long after the regulation drums shall have ceased to beat at the head of regiments.

Verses that sing, if you will, but like a marching song, brutal and rhythmed, not like a melody, verses that bawl, verses that declaim, verses that shout, like a road-song, like a soldiers’ song; I will say more: like a song for soldiers, which is good, for a full-fledged pacifist; like a song of foot-artillerymen, who in the first third of the stage, make the hard ground of the road sound, scanning with their heavy boots a luckless refrain.

Singular Hugo. Singular like this people, in this people, which he eminently represents. Peer of France. Old sly one. The glory of Notre-Dame, in his work, is not only, is not so much that poem and that novel, that prose-poem in the form of a novel of his half-youth, as the perpetual persistence, as the eternal presence, in all this work, of those two raised towers, of the standing monument. In all his work, in his imagination, in his perpetual vision, in his creation itself. In his perpetual vision of Paris, of his Paris always present. In all his work, until the end, until the last works, until those Châtiments, the most ardent of his works, the greatest perhaps and the strongest, perhaps the only sincere one, absolutely. For me the glory of Notre-Dame and the glory of Hugo is much less in that novel of half-youth in prose than in the eternal presence, apparent or implied, suddenly reappearing, in the abrupt reapparition, in the unexpected profiling, in the sudden apparition of the two twin towers in poems like the following, in works where they would not have been indicated, had they not been eternally present; les Châtiments, book III, x, the Emperor amuses himself, a song; the refrain of this song:

Sound today the knell, great bell of Notre-Dame,
And tomorrow the tocsin!

O mourning! by a ferocious bandit
The future is dead, stabbed!
Today is the great wedding,
The bridegroom mounts his coach;
It is he! Caesar the well-guarded!
Peoples, sing the epithalamium!
France weds the assassin. —

Sound today the knell, great bell of Notre-Dame,
And tomorrow the tocsin!

Jersey, December 1853. — What an admirable invention of rhythm; what a refrain of bell; and again that apparition of the bell-towers in that night, same Châtiments, book I, v; and that sense and that vision of Paris, of all the ancient and new Paris, gathered up, of all the history of Paris:

As all three came out of the Bancal house,
Morny, Maupas the Greek, Saint-Arnaud the jackal,
Seeing that oblique and taciturn group pass,
The bell-towers of Paris, ringing the nocturnal hour,
Strove in vain to imitate the tocsin;
The paving-stones of July cried: To the assassin!
All the bloody spectres of the ancient carnages,
Awakened, pointed out those personages;
The Marseillaise, archangel of aerial chants,
Murmured in the heavens: To arms, citizens!

Paris was sleeping, alas! and soon, on the squares,
On the quays, the soldiers, docile populace,
Janissaries led by Reybell and Sauboul,
Paid as at Byzantium, drunk as at Stamboul,
Those of Dulac, and those of Korte and of Espinasse,
Cartridge-pouch at the flank and in the eye the menace,
Came, regiment after regiment,
And along the houses they passed slowly,
With muffled steps, as one sees the tigers in the jungles
Crawling on their bellies stretching out their claws;
And the night was dismal, and Paris was sleeping
Like an eagle asleep caught under a black net.

The chiefs awaited the dawn smoking their cigars.

O cossacks! thieves! firemen! highwaymen! Bulgars!
O brigand generals! prison, I give them back to you!
The judges of old for lesser crimes
Burned La Voisin and broke Desrues alive on the wheel!
Lighting their infamous poster at the street-corner
And the cowardly armament of those bold pickpockets,
The day appeared. The night, accomplice of the bandits,
Took flight, and, hastily dragging her veils,
In the folds of her robe carried off the stars
And the thousand suns in the shadow sparkling,
Like the gold sequins that a girl carries off as she goes,
Used to the kisses of crime,
Who dresses herself again after having prostituted herself!

Brussels, January 1852. — When M. Fernand Gregh, Paris 1905, brings us verses like those that came back to our memory in this beginning of June, I shall proclaim that he is, as we are made to say, the Hugo of this generation.

More present still the bell, and more resounding in the poems where it is not named, in the poems of rhythm, when it is the rhythm itself and the rhythm alone that sounds today the knell, and tomorrow the tocsin; powerful and singular inventions of rhythms; houses of resonances, buildings of musics, monuments of sounds, powerful and singular structures, constructions which he loved above all; same Châtiments; book II, ii; to the people:

Everywhere tears, sobs, funereal cries.
Why dost thou sleep in the darkness?
I do not wish thee to be dead.
Why dost thou sleep in the darkness?
This is not the moment to sleep.
Pale Liberty lies bleeding at thy door.
Thou knowest it, thou, dead, she is dead.
Here is the jackal on thy threshold,
Here are the rats and the weasels,
Why hast thou let thyself be bound with cere-cloths?
They are biting thee in thy coffin!
Of all the peoples they are preparing
The funeral train… —
Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus!
Rise up!

What exact reconstitution of bells, of the great bell, by the rhythm, by the rhyme, by the assonances and by the consonances, by all the movement, by all the strophe and by all the couplet; by the architecture, by the drawing of those very lines that are the verses. He himself knew it well, he the first, the great poet, the able man. And when he succeeded, that one, one can be sure that he himself, he the first, was not ignorant of the how or of the why of his success. Let us pass over all these strophes or all these couplets, all equally strong, all equally made, all equally beautiful. Let us finish on the last, whose last words enclose the confession:

But it seems one is awakening!
Is it thou whom I have in my ear,
Humming of the sombre swarm?
In the hive the bee shivers;
I hear a vague tocsin welling up.
The Caesars, forgetting that there are gibbets,
Fall asleep in the symphonies,
From the Baltic lake to Mount Etna;
The peoples are in the black night;
Sleep, kings; the clarion says to the tyrants: Victory!
And the organ chants to them: Hosanna!
Who answers this fanfare?
The belfry… —
Lazarus! Lazarus! Lazarus!
Rise up!

Jersey, May 1853. — These last verses, these words tocsin, fanfare, belfry, that is what I call the confession of the guilty man, a precious confession of the man of the trade; the mark and the confession of the maker. That is indeed where he meant to come to, to the tocsin, to the great bell. That is indeed what he was making, a fanfare. There what he was edifying, towers and belfry-peals. They are always towers, and, if you will, the bell-tower of Notre-Dame. That is indeed what he was representing to us, what he gave us to hear, what he forced us to listen to, what his rhythm represented to us. We did not need that explicit confession to know what his rhythm wanted of us, and what was his image behind the head.

Together, inseparably, not analyzed, because he was a great poet, not unsoldered, visual image and auditory image. Together images of belfries of Town Halls and of cathedral towers.

He knew his trade, that one; and nothing of his trade remained foreign to him. He knew how to make a tocsin with nothing but words, a fanfare, with rhymes, a great bell, with nothing but rhythms. He was not ignorant. One could reproach him with many things, well founded: one will not reproach him with having been ignorant. Spoken and declaimed sounds, poetic words gave him as much as sung sounds and as instrumental words ever gave to anyone. He was not ignorant of the effect of immense lengthening, of disproportionate, absolute grandeur, that an isolated alexandrine gives, cast into a strophe of simple verses. And since it is a question of hearing great bells, of listening to tocsins, he was not ignorant of the enormous swing that this alexandrine all alone yields when sounded in a battery of lesser verses. And he knew, reciprocally he knew the effect that there is given, at the end of the strophe, at the end of the same strophes, by a quite little expiring verse; and the doubling of this little verse, the doubling of this expiration; and the immediate succession of this little verse to major verses, or to a major verse.

He was right to know his trade. So many others do not know it, who have not his genius. Sound today the knell, great bell of Notre-Dame,

and tomorrow the tocsin, when such verses, so imperious, so commanding, so powerful, come up to the surface, invade the memory, the way is all made for them to rise as far as the lips; one must therefore obey the interior, mechanical military thrust of memory; one must recite these verses which rise, these couplets which come, these strophes which return, all this military, sumptuary, ceremonial and triumphal Hugo who comes back up.

Good verses, bad verses, platitudes or abundances, marquetries and pegs, at least he knew how to draw out his rhythm, that one knew how to make his strophes and to construct his periods; he knew his couplets.

One must therefore recite these verses which come back to you, one must therefore go arm in arm, reciting Hugo, and when one stops, the other, who knows further on, being a librarian and so a conservator of poems, the other continues. And it is the same poet in two memories, in two friendships, in two friendly memories.

Sound today the knell, great bell of Notre-Dame,
and tomorrow the tocsin,

It is this same great bell which today sounds in the ears of this same people for the coming of this king. Today bell of joy, of amusement and of festival. Tomorrow, bell of what? Bell which yields the same sound to successive ears, for what knell shall it ever sound? Shall it ever sound, ever again, some tocsin.

What tocsin of civil war or of foreign war; what tocsin of social or religious war; as in ancient times; what tocsin of more than civil war; what tocsin of invasion; shall it ever sound the knell of all this people?

What tocsin of riot and of social uprising; what tocsin of levée en masse and of national uprising?

Peer of the kingdom. Peer of France. Old sly one. Like this people, in this people, of which in this sense he is one of the most eminent representatives, he plays tricks, he uses ruses with war. When, old, he sees that decidedly it is pacifism that will succeed, at least officially and in verbal declarations, when he sees that it is pacifism that will make glories and universal popularities, international circulations, when he sees that in the war between peace and war it is in the end peace which, formally at least and officially, has made on war a victorious war, when the victory of peace is officially assured, he no longer hesitates: he makes himself the king, he becomes the god of pacifism; at least in congresses, in ceremonies, in discourses, in everything one can name the origins and the beginnings of our modern and our contemporary meetings; he seats, he consolidates thus that formidable popularity in which he died, that uncontested glory in which he triumphed, he prepares that unheard-of apotheosis in which he survived himself several weeks. The soldiers paid for it. They are good people, all the same, these soldiers, and very useful for these sorts of ceremonies. The soldiers, who made him such fine funerals, by order, it is true, but in the end there had to be some so that one might give them that order, so that the government of the Republic might make them march, — and besides, they asked nothing better than to march, because they ask only to parade, — the cuirassiers, who had watched over him so theatrically beneath that same Arc-de-Triomphe, with torches, served him to two ends. As simple soldiers, as soldiers, commanded on service, in full service-dress, they served to make for him, for his obsequies, military parades such as had never been seen in any monarchical country; and on the contrary, as scapegoats, they had served him no less, having served him to cut out for himself one of those popularities such as only pacifists can hope for, now that war, which was the national industry of Prussia, has become the national industry of almost all peoples.

Admirable double utilization of war by a pacifist. I mean by a professional pacifist, and as such glorious. These same cannons, which make so much noise when they roll on the pavement of our streets, these same batteries, these same regiments, these same horses, which directly served him to make him cortèges, to organize for him sumptuous parades, contrariwise, as the objects of his eloquent maledictions, had already served him an incalculable number of times.

On the one hand they had served to make him antitheses; on the other hand they served to make him parades.

And all these objects of malediction had served him above all to make beautiful verses. Old sly one, cunning like the people, in the people, and double like it, like that people which he represented so eminently, when he wanted to make bad poems or when he did not want to make poems at all, he took care to make them pacifist; and when on the contrary he wanted to make beautiful poems, the sly one, as if by chance, ran to ask for more of them from his enemy friends gentlemen the soldiers.

One may take absolutely at random. The same Châtiments, book VI, stability is assured, i, Napoléon III. And at random among the verses:

It is for thee that the whole of this Iliad was made!
It is for thee that those unheard-of combats were waged!
It is for thee that Murat, to the dazzled Russians,
Terrible, appeared, lashing their army!
It is for thee that through the flame and the smoke
The pensive grenadiers advanced with slow steps!

We have here only a sketch, or, if you will, a first lesson. And again, same poem, a little further on; still at random:

It is for Monsieur Fialin and for Monsieur Mocquart,
That Lannes had his thigh cut off by a cannon-ball,
That the brow of the soldiers, half-opened by the sword,
Bled under the shako, the helmet and the colback,
That Lasalle at Wagram, Duroc at Reichenbach,
Expired struck down in the midst of their road,
That Caulaincourt fell in the great redoubt,
And that the old guard is dead at Waterloo!

Here again we have only a first lesson; and already one cannot say that these verses are precisely pacific verses; still less are they pacifist verses. But the definitive lesson:

The anxious man
Felt that the battle was bending in his hands.
Behind a knoll the guard was massed,
The guard, supreme hope and supreme thought!
— Come now! Let the guard be brought in, he cried, —
And lancers, grenadiers in drill-cloth gaiters,
Dragoons whom Rome would have taken for legionaries,
Cuirassiers, gunners who dragged thunders,
Bearing the black colback or the polished helmet,
All, those of Friedland and those of Rivoli,
Understanding that they were going to die in this festival,
Saluted their god, standing upright in the storm.
Their mouth, in a single cry, said: long live the Emperor!
Then, with slow steps, music at the head, without fury,
Tranquil, smiling at the English grapeshot,
The imperial guard entered into the furnace.

I ask, these unforgettable verses, these military verses, culmination of war and of glory, these verses which are successful, are these pacifist verses?

Alas! Napoleon, bent over his guard,
Was looking on; and, as soon as they had emerged
Under the dark cannons spitting jets of sulphur,
Saw, one after another, in that horrible gulf,
Melting those regiments of granite and of steel.
As wax melts at the breath of a furnace.

They went, arm at the rest, head high, grave, stoical,
Not one drew back. Sleep, heroic dead!
The rest of the army hesitated upon their bodies
And watched the guard die. — It was then…

O Waterloo! I weep and I stop, alas!
For these last soldiers of the last war
Were great; they had conquered all the earth,
Driven out twenty kings, crossed the Alps and the Rhine,
And their soul sang in the bronze clarions!

These verses are so well-made, are printed in memory so sovereignly, that afterwards they present themselves all together, on a single and vast plane of representation, and that it no longer matters from what end one begins to recite the poem to oneself:

In the twinkling of an eye,
As a burning straw flies in the wind,
Vanished that noise which was the grande armée,
And that plain, alas! where one dreams today,
Saw fleeing those before whom the universe had fled!
Forty years have passed, and that corner of the earth,
Waterloo, that funereal and solitary plateau,
That sinister field where God mingled so many nothingnesses,
Trembles still at having seen the flight of giants!

Napoleon saw them flowing away like a river;

[Singular effects of optics in our singular memories: forty years have passed, less than forty years, thirty-seven years and a few months, from Waterloo to those Châtiments, Jersey, 25-30 November 1852; and in our memories, it seems to us there is an enormous space, a century, between Waterloo and les Châtiments, and, on the contrary, that we touch upon les Châtiments. And nevertheless it is more than fifty years, today almost fifty-three years, from those Châtiments to us. The ninety years, almost the century, that there is between Waterloo and us, we see them between Waterloo and les Châtiments, as much, so to speak, truly as much as between Waterloo and us; and between les Châtiments and us, we see nothing; this perhaps holds in part to the astonishing longevity of Hugo: we have seen his death; we see so to speak on the same plane, I mean on the same plane of date, on the plane of the date of that death, all his work, at least since the beginning of his duel against Napoléon III; since the beginning of his republican representation; this perhaps holds also in part to the fact that les Châtiments have made or strongly contributed to make our primary republican education, and that we have a tendency to consider all the recent past on the plane of the date of our first childhood, when we began to know.]

There is not a successful peace-poem in all the work of Victor Hugo; I mean a poem of peace military, social, national or international; of pacific peace; and still less of pacifist peace; the only successful peace-poem there is in all the work of Victor Hugo, but one may say it is successful, that one, is a poem of biblical, patriarchal, nocturnal peace, since it is Booz endormi.

To ask of war, of soldiers, firstly cortèges such as they alone can give, secondly objects of malediction such as they alone can furnish, thirdly and above all subjects of inspiration such as he could not ask of peace: there is in that an undeniable, an unbearable duplicity, a particular triplicity. It is truly making them serve three ends, all too contradictory. These soldiers make the escort; they make the reprobation; and they make the inspiration. Truly it is too much, at once.

One may be for or against war, for or against soldiers; Hugo, like the people, in the people, is together and at once for and against war, for and against soldiers; he draws from it thus a triple utilization, a maximum utilization.

It is exactly what the people also does, of which Hugo is in this, as in many other respects, the eminent representative; like Hugo, his master and his God, the people, like the popular Hugo the popular people utilizes war and the soldiers to three ends at least, contradictory; it asks of the soldiers parades such as they alone can furnish, reviews of the 14th of July and all other pageantries, all other demonstrations; it asks of war and of soldiers an exercise of malediction, of moral, sentimental, public, oratorical, official, philanthropic, scientific, eloquent, learned, socialist, historical materialist, revolutionary syndicalist reprobation; thirdly it asks of war and of soldiers a subject of inspiration, an exercise of imagination when, going back into the past, when, interpreting the present, when, anticipating the future, it wants to make itself believe that it has not lost the taste for adventures; when, finally, it is weary of getting bored in images of peace.

There is there, toward war and the soldiers, an unbearable duplicity, almost universally spread. It is so convenient. These soldiers serve as amusement, as foil, as inspiration. Through them one can procure for oneself: sumptuous festivals; good reputation by making a show of zeal, of virtue pacifist, antimilitarist; ostensibly adventurous imaginations, almost ventured.

There is commonly today, in this consummation of the modern world, an unbearable duplicity toward war and the soldiers. One must be for or against war. Loyally. Every double situation is a false situation. Every double situation is a disloyal situation.

One must be for or against war, for or against the soldiers. Our collaborator M. Charles Richet is against war, against the soldiers. At least, with him, one knows where one stands.

Our collaborator M. Charles Richet is against. It shows from the first word of his cahier. Likewise he has no tenderness, no weakness, no affection, secret, for the military pomps or grandeurs. His situation is perfectly loyal, being perfectly simple. For myself, foreseeing that we too should have to speak this year of war and of peace, of the fatherland and of humanity, and of the relation of the fatherland to humanity, I expressly wished that the thesis of the purest pacifism should be presented in these cahiers at the beginning of this series; that it should form so to speak the overture, or, to speak a nobler language, being more contemporary, the introduction; without abusing a word that has been hopelessly hackneyed for thirty years, I expressly wished that the thesis of integral pacifism should be integrally also the thesis that would appear here at the beginning of this new year of work. I have therefore been particularly happy to find, to present here the thesis of pure pacifism, a pure pacifist, to present the thesis of integral pacifism, an integral pacifist.

Quite different is the situation of the people, a false situation, double, triple, like most of the modern popular situations; the people wants: to amuse itself with the army; to insult, to revile the army, which is still indeed, if you will, a way of amusing itself with it; to dream of wars.

The people wants to insult, to revile the army, because today that is very well taken; that goes down extremely well in meetings and all other glorious public orations. That has become indispensable in all political manifestations and operations. Otherwise, you do not appear advanced enough.

One will never know all that the fear of not appearing advanced enough will have caused our Frenchmen to commit in cowardice.

There is a popular coquetry, a worldliness of the people, as imperious as the worldliness of the world, as undisputed; moreover made in the image and likeness of the worldliness of the world; for the moment and for a long time, this worldliness of the people requires that one be advanced.

Peer of the kingdom. Peer of France. Old sly one. Senator of the Republic. Senator of the department of the Seine. Senator of Paris. The people too is a senator of Paris, because not everyone can be a deputy.

At the same time the people wants to dream of wars; it takes delight as much as ever in the narrations of past wars; it loves as much as ever wars, provided they are made by others, by other peoples; remember only how, only a few weeks ago, the people devoured in the newspapers the accounts of the Asian war. The people is much more cowardly than formerly, for making war. But it is always as violent, as formerly. It always loves war as much. All it asks is that its precious epidermis remain outside the debate. It asks only that it should be others who make it, who make it for its every-day amusement. And all that it has retained from the class struggle, tirelessly taught it by the intellectuals of socialism, is that it was, or that it would be a war, more precisely a military war.

For whoever wants to represent to himself the recent adventures of socialism truly, without illusion, it is evident that all that the people has retained of the old struggle of the intellectual class is that it would be a war, military.

From the fact that they do not love, or do not love any more, to make war, from the fact that they no longer wish to make war, one must not hasten to conclude that they no longer love war. It would be temerity. They love nothing so much as war, today as much as ever, provided it be others who make it. And formerly, when one loved war, one made it oneself.

There is in this a perfectly unbearable pacifist hypocrisy. One curses war openly, formally, officially, to give oneself merit and virtue, to acquire pacifist renown, leading to humanitarian glory. And secretly, slyly, let us say the shameful word, clandestinely, one asks of war, of the soldiers, firstly the pageantries of external pomps, secondly the enjoyments, the excitations of internal imaginations. Triple benefit. Occult diversion.

All this pacifist hypocrisy, so eminently represented in Hugo, for reasons and for causes of which we could only indicate too briefly a few, was bound to culminate upon the name of Napoleon, whom one considers, doubtless with much reason, as the very genius of modern war, perhaps even as the genius of war of all time. Nothing therefore is so interesting, nothing is so representative, significant, as the attitude taken by modern peoples, in particular by the French people, toward the memory of Napoleon. No memory, officially, was ever so proscribed, so cursed, so solemnly, as has been the memory of Napoleon since the beginning of pacifist domination. And the French have cursed him more than anyone, by a sort of national exaggeration, by a vauntery, and, at bottom, a national pride, because he was ours, one might almost say by a sort of nationalist pacifist coquetry. But in the depths of hearts, and perhaps especially of imaginations, he received cults. Occult admirations, which easily became adorations. And during those five long weeks of the month of June last past, today we know, by later infiltrations, that a certain number of Frenchmen said to themselves that if at last the imminent fact had to come about, it would all the same have been more agreeable to have for general-in-chief a certain general Napoléon Bonaparte, and to be commanded by him, than to have for general-in-chief an excellent general of republican defense, the honorable Monsieur le général Brugère. There are moments, in the life of a people, when instinct so impudently regains the upper hand, that one would be capable of preferring a general-in-chief of military defense to a general-in-chief of republican defense.

All this popular pacifist hypocrisy, so eminently represented in Hugo, and moreover culminating upon the name of Napoleon, was bound to culminate eminently in the personal situation of Hugo toward Napoleon. And indeed nothing is, in this order, so eminently and uniquely representative as that situation. Nothing is so curious. Nothing is so striking. Let us say the word, for old Hugo did not bore himself every day like a burgrave, nothing is so amusing. There is not a man in the world, there has never been a man in all the history of the world, who has rendered as many services to Victor Hugo as Napoléon Bonaparte, except for Napoléon the First, no man, not even God, of whom however he made much use, not even Hugo himself. Admirable, unique purveyor of inspirations. And were it only that admirable antithesis between the grandeurs of Napoléon the Great and the pettinesses of Napoléon the Little.

Re-read with a little critical attention les Châtiments; that is to say, reading them in the book or in your memory, on the text, struggle a little, if you can, against the formidable carrying-away of the image and the rhythm: and then, beneath the furious apparent and real, sincere wrath, against Napoléon III and against the second or the Second Empire, as official arithmetic names it simultaneously, easily you will sense a secret plenitude, the intimate satisfaction of the maker, the contentment of the poet, that this old Napoléon the First permitted this unique Victor Hugo to bring forth such verses.

Officially therefore it was necessary, like every good populist, to proscribe, to exterminate, to curse Napoleon. But within the poet, one took advantage of it to make verses like no one. In reality Victor Hugo poet, — and what is Victor Hugo apart from Victor Hugo poet, — Victor Hugo poet never came out of the Napoleonic cult. The true Napoleon, it is the Napoleon in whom one finds rhythm. And in les Châtiments itself, in les Châtiments as much as and more than nowhere else, one feels running a vein of interior contentment, of having made such good use of Napoléon the First.

That Napoléon the First who doubtless in himself boasted of never serving. And who had spent his life serving himself so much of others.

Not only, like his people, naively nationalist and pretentiously internationalist, but more particularly pretentiously militarist and equally pretentiously pacifist: but those go together very well.

Not only in the works where it was so to speak his trade to make use of him, in the works public, political, social, military, historical, polemical, but in the private works, in the works where one did not expect him, in the works where he was not indicated, — implied in the second Contemplations, Aujourd’hui, which were contemporary with les Châtiments, — but clearly stated in les Voix intérieures, in les Rayons et les Ombres. He is indeed of this people so deeply traditionalist, not traditionalist by heaviness and by impotence to make revolution, but traditionalist on the contrary by a certain taste for tradition itself and for good bearing, he is of this people that easily receives kings between two trains, which conquered is never flat, and above all which conqueror is never insolent. He does not leave the figured monuments of the commemoration of this people. He does not come out of the Arc-de-Triomphe. He comes down from the column only to parade beneath the said Arc-de-Triomphe. This is in the Chants du Crépuscule; II, to the column. Several petitioners had asked that the Chamber intervene to have the ashes of Napoleon transported beneath the column of the place Vendôme.

After a short deliberation, the Chamber had passed to the order of the day.

(Chamber of Deputies, session of October 7, 1830)

I pass over the odes and the lyrical rhythms of the six first parts of this poem. Here too, we must come to the Alexandrins (it is too bad that the competition of the ancient Alexandrines forbids us to write the alexandrins of Victor Hugo as Alexandrins; those of others, one could with impunity continue to call them alexandrins; but for those of Hugo, it is not great enough; reverence, honor would demand that one be officially authorized to entitle them Alexandrins); VII:

Sleep, we shall come to seek thee! that day will come perhaps!
For we have thee for god without having had thee for master!
For our eye has been moistened by thy fatal destiny,
And, beneath the three colors as beneath the oriflamme,
We do not hang ourselves upon that infamous rope
Which tears thee from thy pedestal!

Oh! go, we shall make thee fine funerals!
We too shall perhaps have our battles;
We shall shadow thy respected coffin with them!
We shall invite all to it, Europe, Africa, Asia!
And we shall bring thee young Poetry
Singing young Liberty!

Whatever repugnance I have to underline words in a text, as the barbaric Germans do, who from their awful typographical spacing end by underlining so many words in their texts that there end up being more underlined words than non-underlined words, which naturally draws attention to the non-underlined words, which would only be very witty if it were done on purpose, I could not refrain from underlining this verse which I did not make him say:

Oh! go, we shall make thee fine funerals!
We too shall perhaps have our battles;

October 9, 1830. — If one wished to refer oneself to the poems of legend and of history, to the poems of war and of peace properly speaking, to the polemical poems, to the professional poems of war and of peace, I should triumph too easily myself; Eviradnus, le petit roi de Galice, which are successful, so many others, are those peace-poems? But let us leave la Légende des Siècles; in that nebula of old poems, private, more or less intimate, ignored today, forgotten, lost, some wrongly, one has only to leaf through his work; les Rayons et les Ombres; IV; glance cast into a garret; i; ii; iii:

The corner of the cell shelters a peaceful bed.
Upon the table is that book in which God makes himself visible,
The legend of the saints, sole and true pantheon.
And in an obscure corner, near the fireplace,
Between the good Virgin and the boxwood of the year,
Four pins on the wall fix Napoleon.

That eagle in that cage! — and why not? in the shadow
Of this narrow and calm chamber, where nothing is dark,
Where the beautiful child sleeps, gentle as her lily,
Where so much peace, of grace and of joy is poured out,
I do not hate to hear at the depth of my thought
The noise of the heavy cannons rolling toward Austerlitz.

And beside the emperor before whom all bows,
— O legitimate pride of the poor orphan girl! —
Shines a cross of honor, sign humble and triumphant,
Cross of a soldier fallen as every hero falls,
And who, sleeping father, makes from the depth of his tomb
A little glory keep watch beside his child.

IV

Cross of Napoleon! warrior jewel! thought!
Crown of laurel traversed by rays!
When he led his brave men to fierce combats,
He left it, in order to conquer the earth,
To hang upon every brow throughout the war,
Then, the great work done, he said to them: Come!

Then he gave his cross to those stoical men,
And tears flowed from their heroic eyes,
Mute, they adored their conquering demi-god.
One would have said that lighting their soul with his soul,
And touching their breast with his finger of flame,
He made spring forth in them this star of the heart!

And again:

IX

Oh! thy father’s cross is there which looks upon thee!
The cross of the old soldier dead in the old guard.
Let thyself be counseled by it, tempted angel.
Let thyself be counseled…

[It is a question of defending oneself from Voltaire;]

Voltaire, the serpent, the doubt, the irony,
Voltaire is in a corner of thy blessed chamber
With his eye of flame he spies upon thee and laughs.

Oh! tremble! that sophist has sounded many a mire!
Oh! tremble! that false wise man has lost many an angel!
That demon, black kite, swoops down on pious hearts,
And breaks them, and often, beneath his cruel claws,
Feather by feather I have seen those white wings fall
Which make a soul fly off and flee into the heavens!

He counts the numberless beatings of thy bosom.
The least movement of thy spirit in the shadow,
If it leans a little toward him, makes his eye flash.
And, like a prowling wolf, like a tiger that watches,
At moments, of Satan, visible only to the poet,
The monstrous head appears at thy threshold!

VIII

Alas! if thy chaste hand opened that infamous book,
Thou shouldst feel suddenly God dying in thy soul.
This evening thou wouldst lean…

Et cætera. One would never believe, today, one no longer recalls that Hugo could ever have made verses so bad. They are there, nevertheless. They are in his work, in the same right as the rest. In the same right as the rest, they entered into our childhood memories. Thus in the same right as the rest they shall remain eternally in our memories as men.

There was the Victor Hugo of the consecration.

It is one of Hugo’s forces, perhaps his principal force, one can say that it was Hugo’s force, this tranquil shamelessness. More than this shamelessness of serenity, this shamelessness. To make bad verses was perfectly indifferent to him, provided that every morning he should make, he should have his quota of verses. He thought it was better to make bad verses than to make none at all. He was like a great river. He thought that above all, one must assure, maintain the current. He was like a great river, which does not refuse, which does not refuse itself, to roll dirty and yellow waters, on certain days, because above all one must roll waters, and one must roll dirty and yellow waters, on certain days, in order that there come, on certain other days, the lucid waters, the transparent waters, the clear and blue waters. All weaknesses appeared to him better than odious sterility. And who knows besides whether these waters that we from the shore judge yellowish, brackish, dirty, he himself, the father river, did not love them as much.

And in these flowings of weakness, what unforeseen awakenings. What beautiful verse, suddenly, what announcement, what promise, what anticipation,

The noise of the heavy cannons rolling toward Austerlitz,

or what recollection of the beautiful poems to come; what coming-up, of the future; workman above all, in this sense, workman of writing in verse, he has had his reward at last, and this reward was literally a wage; workman of every morning, one too easily forgets today how many times he had tried, made the poems which he definitively succeeded in. The imperious memory we have kept of these definitive poems, and which imposed itself, which imposes itself on us today, which commands us today, which will always command, have much effaced, sometimes totally, have violently chased from our memories so many previous attempts. One has easily recognized here the sketches, the first executions of so many poems which alone have remained famous. Afterward. One will never know how many times he had made certain poems, before making them, before that time was the good time. One will always forget by what ascents he ascended daily, up to the day, alone today known, alone commemorated, when at last that ascent, officially, became an ascension.

All along this ascent, the thought of Napoleon pursued him; and it did not leave him during his ascension itself. For me this perpetual presence of Napoleon, manifested in the very poems in which he has nothing to do, is for me the index of an incontestable obsession.

June 1839. — There was already an ode à la colonne de la place Vendôme, parva magnis, book III, ode the seventh, in the Odes et Ballades; February 1827:

Beware, foreigners: — we know not what to do!
Peace cradles us in vain in its idle sphere,
The arena of war has for us so much attraction!
We crumple in our hands, alas! unoccupied,
Lyres in default of swords!
We sing as one would fight!

Same Odes et Ballades, mon enfance, Behold all that has passed… my childhood is no more; it is dead, so to speak, although I still live. Saint Augustine, Confessions. Book V. Ode the ninth; i; 1823:

I have dreams of war in my anxious soul;
I should have been a soldier, if I were not a poet.
Be not astonished that I love the warriors!
Often, weeping over them, in my mute grief,
I have found their cypress more beautiful than our laurels.

A child, on a drum was my cradle laid.
In a helmet the holy water was drawn for me.
A soldier, shading me with a warlike sheaf,
From some old shred of a worn banner
Made the swaddling-clothes of my cradle.

Among the dusty chariots, the gleaming arms,
A muse of the camps carried me off beneath the tents;
I slept upon the gun-carriage of the murderous cannons;
I loved the proud steeds, with floating manes,
And the spur scraping the raucous stirrups.

I loved the thundering forts, of difficult approach;
The naked sword of the chiefs guiding the docile ranks,
The picket lost in an isolated wood,
And the old battalions that passed through the cities,
With a mutilated flag.

My envy admired both the swift hussar,
Adorning with golden sheaves his intrepid breast,
And the white plume of the agile lancers,
And the dragoons, mingling on their Gepid helmet
The spotted fur of the tiger with the black manes of the steeds.

And I accused my age: — “Ah! in an obscure shadow,
“To grow up, to live! to let cool without murmuring
”All this blood young and pure, boiling in my fellows,
“Which in a black combat, on the steel of an armor,
“Would flow in floods so vermilion!”

And I invoked war, with its frightful scenes;
I saw, in hope, in the noisy plains,
With a thousand rumors of men and of horses,
Shaking at once their thundering wings,
One upon the other with great cries falling two rival camps.

I heard the clear sound of the trembling cymbals,
The rolling of the chariots, the whistling of the bullets,
And, from heaps of dead sowing their bloody steps,
I saw clashing, in the distance, at intervals,
The sparkling squadrons!

II

With our victorious camps, in enslaved Europe
I wandered, I traversed the earth before life;
And, still quite a child,…

There, I saw the fires of the military halts
Blackening the crumbling walls of the solitary cities;
The tent invaded the threshold of the church;
The laughter of the soldiers, in the holy monasteries,
Repeated by the echo, seemed like cries of mourning.

What pains, eh; what labors; what work; what gratings of the file; what searching for words, which do not come, for all the words, the epithets, which are missing, which infallibly miss the mark. Sacristy and metaphor. How all that was moldy, rotten with literature. 1823, he was twenty-one years old. He has gained, since. He did not steal his glory, that one.

But let us wash our faces. Everything has an end. Before going back up, among this people that is dispersing, before going back up by the bridges, boulevard Saint-Michel, and as far as the rue de la Sorbonne, where the neglected work awaits us, let us wash off all these attempts, let us wash from our memory all these bad verses. Before parting, let us recite to ourselves some of these definitive verses, definitively successful. Let us take them from among the corresponding successful poems. I mean corresponding to the trial poems which we have wiped clean.

Napoleon held him so well. He was so haunted by that name and that image of Napoleon that Napoleon serves him as a calendar. And what a calendar. For what a date. For the most important date of universal history, which is the date of the birth of Victor Hugo: les Feuilles d’automne, I Data fata secutus, motto of the Saint-Johns, [what are the Saint-Johns?]

This century was two years old! Rome was replacing Sparta,
Already Napoleon pierced through under Bonaparte,
And of the First Consul already, in many a place,
The brow of the Emperor broke the narrow mask.
Then in Besançon,…

June 1830. And Chants du Crépuscule, V, Napoléon II, i:

Eighteen-hundred-eleven! — O time when peoples without number…

What his eye sought in the profound past,…

It was not Madrid, the Kremlin and the Pharos,
The reveille at morning humming its fanfare,
The bivouac dozing in the starry fires,
The hairy dragoons, the epic grenadiers,
And the red lancers swarming amid the pikes,
Like flowers of crimson in the thickness of the wheats;

August 1832. — That successful poem, that gay poem, in this strophe, and beneath a covering of sadness, are those pacific verses? And that poem in which he himself has gathered up, as early as les Orientales, as early as 1828, his whole Napoleonic ensemble; Lui.

In epigraph:

I was a giant then, and a hundred cubits tall. buonaparte I

Always him! him everywhere! — Either burning or icy,
His image without cease shakes my thought.
He pours into my mind the creative breath.
I tremble, and in my mouth the words abound
When his gigantic name, surrounded by haloes,
Stands up in my verse in all its height.

There, I see him, guiding the shell to swift bounds;
There, massacring the people in the name of the regicides;

There, soldier, snatching their powers from the tribunes;
There, young and proud consul, made thin by vigils
Which dreams of empire filled with marvels,
Pale beneath his long black hair.

Then, mighty emperor whose head inclines,
Governing a combat from the height of the hill,
Promising a star to his joyful soldiers,
Making sign to the cannons that vomit forth flames,
Arming with his soul for the war six hundred thousand souls,
Grave and serene, with a lightning in the eyes.

Then, poor prisoner, jeered at and tormented,
Crossing his idle arms upon his fermenting breast,
Prey to vile jailers like a vile criminal,
Vanquished, bald, bending his brow black with clouds,
Walking over a rock where the storms pass
His thought, eternal storm.

How great he is, there especially! when, broken power,
Wretched mockery of the English jailers,
At the consecration of misfortune he tempers his rights anew,
Holds at the sound of his steps two worlds in breath,
And dying of exile, cramped in Saint Helena,
Lacks air in the cage in which the kings expose him!

How great he is at that hour when, ready to see God himself,
His eye that goes out rolls a supreme tear!
He calls up at his death his old army in mourning,
Complains to his warriors of expiring solitary,
And, taking for shroud his military coat,
From the camp-bed passes to the coffin!

II

At Rome, where the conclave inherits from the senate,
At Elba, at the mountains whitened with snow or black with lava,
At the menacing Kremlin, at the laughing Alhambra,
He is everywhere! — At the Nile I find him again.
Egypt resplends with the fires of his dawn;
His imperial star rises in the orient.

Victor, enthusiastic, dazzling with prestige,
Prodigy, he astonished the land of prodigies.
The old sheikhs venerated the young and prudent emir;
The people dreaded his unheard-of arms;
Sublime, he appeared to the dazzled tribes
Like a Mahomet of the West.

Their fairy-tale has already claimed his history.
The Arab’s tent is full of his glory.
Every free Bedouin was his bold companion;
The little children, their eyes turned toward our shores,
On a French drum regulate their savage steps,
And the ardent horses neigh at his name.

It is difficult to verify these pieces of geographical and historical information. And of natural history. But there is here, this time, his entire Napoleon.

Sometimes he comes, borne upon the Numidian hurricane,
Taking for pedestal the great pyramid,
To contemplate the deserts, sandy oceans;
There, his shadow, awakening the sonorous sepulchre,
As for the battle resurrects there once more
The forty giant centuries.

He says: “Up!” Suddenly each century rises,
These bearing the sceptre and those girded with the sword,
Satraps, pharaohs, magi, frozen people.
Immobile, dusty, mute, his voice counts them;
All seem, adoring his brow which surmounts them,
To make for this king of the times a court of the past.

Thus all, beneath the steps of the ineffaceable man,
All becomes monument; he passes upon the sand;
But what does it matter that Assur should be covered by its waves,
That Aquilon should weary its wing there without cease?
His colossal foot leaves an eternal trace
Upon the moving brow of the desert.

III

History, poetry, he joins with his foot your summits.
Distraught, I cannot in those sublime worlds
Stir anything great without touching upon his name;
Yes, when thou appearest to me, for the cult or the blame,
The chants fly in haste upon my lips of flame,
Napoleon! sun of which I am the Memnon!

Thou dominatest our age; angel or demon, what matter?
Thy eagle, in its flight, panting, carries us away.
The very eye which flees thee finds thee again everywhere.
Always in our pictures thou castest thy great shadow;
Always Napoleon, dazzling and dark,
On the threshold of the century stands upright.

Thus when of Vesuvius exploring the domain,
From Naples to Portici the foreigner walks,

When he troubles, dreaming, with his importunate steps,
Ischia, with its flowers perfuming the happy wave,
Whose noise, like the song of an amorous sultana,
Seems a voice flying in the midst of the perfumes;

Whether he haunts Paestum’s august colonnade,
Whether he listens at Pozzuoli to the lively serenade
Singing the tarantella at the foot of a Tuscan wall;
Whether he wakens in passing this mummy city,
Pompeii, lying body of a sleeping town,
Seized one day by the volcano;

Whether he wanders by Posilipo with the nimble boat
From which the brown mariner sings Tasso to Virgil;
Always, beneath the green tree, on beds of grass,
Always he sees, from the bosom of the seas and of the meadows,
From the tops of capes, from the edge of flowery peninsulas,
Always the black giant who smokes on the horizon!

December 1828. — Les Orientales, XL, for the scientists. And finally, before going back into our houses, since it is a question of a God, let us listen to the prayer. Let us listen to the prayer of the young Arab Hugo. This Lui, Orientales XL, follows naturally an Orientale XXXIX, and this Orientale XXXIX is none other than Bounaberdi.

This Bounaberdi says nothing to you. But a clever sociologist would easily discover in this word an alteration of the word Bonaparte, especially if you write it Buonaparte and if you pronounce it Bouonaparté. A Filolog would certainly discover the laws of this alteration. Before sitting down again to go through the day’s mail, let us listen to the prayer to Bounaberdi; great as the world:

Often Bounaberdi, sultan of the Franks of Europe,
Whom, like a black mantle, the simoom enwraps,
Mounts, a giant himself, to the brow of a giant mountain,
Whence his gaze, wandering over the sand and over the wave,
Embraces with one glance the two halves of the world
Lying at his feet in the yawning abyss.

He is alone and standing on his sublime summit.
On his right side lying down, the desert which celebrates him
With a cloud of dust importunes his eyes:
On his left the sea, of which once he was the guest,
Lifts up to him its profound and lofty voice,
As at the feet of its master a joyous dog barks.

And the old Emperor, whom by turns awaken
This cloud to his eyes, this noise to his ear,
Dreams, and, as one sees the lover muse over the beloved,
Believes that it is an army, invisible and without number,
Which makes that dust and that noise for his shade,
And beneath the gray horizon eternally passes!

prayer

Oh! when thou shalt come again to dream upon the mountain,
Bounaberdi! look a little into the countryside
At my tent which whitens in the rumbling sands;
For I am free and poor, an Arab of Cairo,
And when I have said: Allah! my good warhorse
Flies, and beneath his eyelid has two burning coals!

November 1828. — Decidedly my cahier would be a very well-behaved cahier, that would please everyone, even my friends, and that would earn me the compliments of my comrades; a good cahier of recapitulation; without any master-idea: facts, nothing but facts; events well equalized, carefully passed under the roller; enumeration; gradation; nothing more; historical idealism would receive there a discreet adoration, because we must revere the old gods; historical materialism would receive there a more marked homage, because we must husband the new gods; the one and the other adoration would nevertheless be skillfully combined, dosed, because one never knows who will be the god of tomorrow; and neither the one nor the other homage would make me fail in the sacred rule of pure fact; for this idealism and this materialism resemble each other in this at least, that they are in no way ideas, since they are systems.

Become wise in this time of wisdom, much of our past misdeeds would be forgiven me; the historians would no longer reject me; the philosophers would no longer reject me…

This seizure took place one morning; perhaps a Monday; perhaps a Tuesday morning; in any case one had the impression that it made a beginning of a week, and a serious beginning of a week; by an effect of looking back, one had immediately the impression that the journey of the king of Spain had also lasted exactly a week, that it had made a week, settled, that this week had been the week of the king of Spain, that it was finished, that there was no longer occasion to speak of it, that one had something else to do; this week itself had ended badly; an attentat, the most stupid and most criminal of attentats, breaking universal security, had broken the joy, having broken the charm; even before the arrival of the sovereign, well-informed people had indeed said that the police were extremely uneasy, that one knew there was a plot being prepared; that one feared an attentat; no one wished to believe anything of it; first because these prognostications came from the perpetual well-informed people; then because these sinister pieces of information disturbed the idea that one had formed, the idea that one wished to have; one morning, one learned from the newspapers that the attentat had been carried out; it was as a first darkening, and a first derangement; an irruption of rebel reality; but someone troubled the festivity; one had the impression that people who had not been invited were entering into the course of events; the arrangements so well taken were collapsing; not only was this attentat criminal and odious, but and above all it was not according to the rules of the game; it broke a contractual security commonly consented to; with it and through it returned for everyone the common cares, the worries, the embarrassments, the bothers of our ordinary lives.

There is something singularly ferocious in the immutability of official programs; one evening death, which had not been foreseen, appearing inscribes itself in the program; and everyone is officially forced to do as if it had not inscribed itself there; these first two bombs could introduce others; one knew that there were others one knew not where; and nevertheless one had to continue the festivities, to follow the program exactly as if nothing of the sort had happened; under penalty of hesitation, of panic, of distraction, of official cowardice; thus the two sovereigns had to continue to play the two personages of the settled festivities and ceremonies; they had to immutably continue to be popular and smiling personages of national and popular festivities; under the menace of death, for the protections of the police, as had been well seen, never procure a hermetic security. Thus understood, the trade of king becomes the most difficult of trades, the most dangerous, and the one that requires the most of the most exact courage; no trade perhaps requires to this degree that the threatened man do exactly as if the menace did not exist; neither the worker in dangerous trades, nor the wretch in his wretchedness, nor the sailor nor the officer on his ship, nor the soldier nor the officer under fire are bound to do exactly as though there were no menace of any danger; without being afraid, they have the right to show, or to let it be seen, that they know; generally they apply themselves to letting nothing be seen, or by a natural or acquired courage in effect they let nothing be seen; but it is much already not to be bound to it; on the contrary the king is bound to conduct himself exactly as though there had never been anything done.

This odious, this criminal attentat had not only darkened the end of these festivities, it had not only revealed a permanent danger, but, what was more serious, it had broken the truce; one must repeat the word, it had broken the charm; one had immediately the impression that this abrupt intervention had broken a whole enchantment, that it was it, the attentat, that was real, and that it was the festivities that were imaginary, feigned, that the linking-up of this painful year had not been broken, that the week which was about to recommence would resemble the previous weeks of the same life, that one would have to take up the collar again, that nothing new had come, that these strolls had had no meaning, that these dissipations had been vain, that life was always the same; this attentat was not only an attentat; it was the reappearance of the daily bothers which one had neglected to invite.

It was above all the abrupt reappearance of reality itself; the joys and the relaxations had been imaginary; the attentat alone was real, not factitious, not benevolent and gracious; how one waited anxiously, with bated breath, that all those festivities should be over, oppressed, that the king should have departed, releasing us at last from the care of his guarding and from the honor of his security; how one waited that he should have departed at last, and that he should have arrived somewhere that was not in our domain; that was not of our domain, for at once, immediately, everyone had felt that we had a domain, where we were responsible; how one waited that everything should be removed, the king, the menace, the misfortune, the perpetual bother.

One had to return to Paris in order to recommence the week; an old French song, which no one today knows any more, which would be the despair of our modern anti-alcoholists, itself begins with the following teachings:

Let us begin the week
By drinking good wine;

These old teachings are lost forever; we generally begin our weeks by drenching ourselves in bothers, in work, in presence; and we continue them, and we finish them as we began them; we were therefore coming back to Paris that morning at the beginning of the week, — was it a Monday, was it a Tuesday, was it another day, no one today knows, — but what each knows, and what no one henceforth shall forget, is the beginning-of-the-week that this unforgettable day made of itself.

Like everyone I had returned to Paris at nine in the morning; like everyone, that is to say like about eight or nine hundred persons, I knew at eleven-thirty that in the space of these two hours a new period had begun in the history of my own life, in the history of this country, and assuredly in the history of the world.

If these cahiers were not the cahiers, that is to say if they were a review like all the reviews, and if I were proposing to write an article such as one writes for all the reviews, drawing near to the end of this first cahier that I have been able to make, this would be the beginning of lying; having to speak of an event so capital, I should borrow the noble language, the grand style, I should excite myself; but we have precisely instituted ourselves to give, as much as we should be able, exact, scrupulous, patient notations.

We had therefore come to Paris a little relieved all the same of our previous cares; the king had left, in good condition; that was one big care the less; there remained only a known world, the explored world of daily cares, the world enemy and kin of the familiar cares.

How in the space of one morning everyone, I mean everyone thus enumerated, knew that France was under the blow of an imminent German invasion, that is what I wish to note first of all.

We had arrived thinking of quite other things; one has so much to do at a beginning of a week, especially after a slight interruption; life is so loaded; we are not of those great geniuses who always had one eye on the tsar and the other on the mikado; the destinies of empires interest us enormously; but we are bound to earn our poor living; we work from morning to evening; we make days of much more than eight hours; we have, like all honest people and simple citizens, many personal cares; one cannot think always of the revolutions of Babylon; one must honestly live the life of every day; it is gray and woven with common threads.

The life of him who does not wish to dominate is generally of unbleached canvas.

Everyone, thus counted, everyone at the same time learned that the threat of a German invasion is present, that it was there, that the imminence was real.

It was not a piece of news that was communicated from mouth to mouth, that one communicated, laterally, like ordinary news; what people who met communicated to each other, it was not the news, it was only the confirmation, for each one of them, of news coming from within; the knowledge of this reality was indeed spreading from neighbor to neighbor; but it was spreading from one to another like a contagion of interior life, of interior knowledge, of recognition, almost of Platonic reminiscence, of anterior certainty, not like an ordinary verbal communication; in reality it was within himself that each of us found, received, found again the total, immediate, ready, muffled, immobile and entirely made knowledge of the menace that was present.

The enlargement, the unfolding of this knowledge which gained from neighbor to neighbor was not the discontinuous dusty disseminating of ordinary news by verbal communications; it was rather a common interior recognition, a muffled, profound knowledge, a common resounding of one same sound; at the first release, at the first intonation, every man heard in himself, found again, listened to, as familiar and known, this profound resonance, this voice which was not a voice from outside, this voice of memory engulfed there and as it were heaped up one knew not since when nor why.