Les Petites Vieilles

To Victor Hugo

where everything, even horror, turns to enchantment,

I watch, obeying my fatal humors,

for singular beings, decrepit and charming.

Eponine or Laïs! Monsters broken, hunchbacked

or twisted, let us love them! they are souls still.

Beneath holed petticoats and beneath cold cloth

trembling at the rolling crash of the omnibuses,

and clutching at their side, like so many relics,

a little bag embroidered with flowers or with rebuses;

they drag themselves, as wounded animals do,

or dance, not wishing to dance, poor little bells

where a pitiless Demon swings! Broken all over

glistening like those pools where water sleeps at night;

they have the divine eyes of the little girl

who marvels and who laughs at everything that gleams.

is almost as small as that of a child?

Learned Death sets into these matching biers

a symbol of a strange and captivating taste,

crossing the swarming tableau of Paris,

it always seems to me that this fragile being

is going off, ever so gently, toward a new cradle;

I ask, at the sight of these discordant limbs,

how many times the workman must vary

the shape of the box where all these bodies are laid.

crucibles that a cooled metal spangled over...

these mysterious eyes have invincible charms

for him whom austere Misfortune suckled!

Priestess of Thalia, alas! whose name the buried

prompter knows; some famous madcap

whom Tivoli once shaded in her bloom,

there are some who, making honey of their grief,

have said to the Devotion that lent them its wings:

Mighty Hippogriff, bear me up to the sky!

another, whom her husband overburdened with sorrows,

another, a Madonna pierced through by her child,

all could have made a river with their tears!

One, among others, at the hour when the falling sun

bloodies the sky with crimson wounds,

pensive, would sit apart on a bench,

with which the soldiers sometimes flood our gardens,

and which, on those golden evenings when one feels reborn,

pour some heroism into the hearts of the townsfolk.

drank in avidly that brisk and warlike song;

her eye at times opened like the eye of an old eagle;

her brow of marble seemed made for the laurel!

across the chaos of the living cities,

mothers with bleeding hearts, courtesans or saints,

whose names were once cited by all.

no one knows you now! an uncivil drunkard

insults you in passing with a derisory love;

at your heels gambols a child, cowardly and vile.

fearful, your backs bent low, you hug the walls;

and no one greets you, strange destinies!

wreckage of humanity, ripe for eternity!

my anxious eye fixed on your uncertain steps,

just as if I were your father, O marvel!

I taste, unknown to you, clandestine pleasures:

dark or luminous, I live your lost days;

my multiplied heart delights in all your vices!

my soul shines bright with all your virtues!

each evening I bid you a solemn farewell!

Where will you be tomorrow, octogenarian Eves,

upon whom weighs the dreadful claw of God?