by Edgar Quinet
MOB
As an Easter procession emerges from the doors of San Marco in Venice or San Pietro in Rome, a mitered swarm that buzzes your name in quitting your hive, my peoples and my swarms of empires will emerge from my black cathedral, by means of a door that stands ajar, into the light. At the head, I shall carry the banner; lounging Absence will lie down beneath the awning. From their baskets, the nations will allow many faded flowers to fall as they pass, many hopes plucked too late. Into their hands, the censer shall throw only ashes, and the cracked bell in my tower will howl to call their names. My finest dead are the gods; it is with their Eternities that I commence, singing with them Psalm 99, verse 3.42
CHORUS OF THE DEAD GODS
Amen.
1.
For humans, it is hard to die; but for gods the agony is a hundred times worse. The knell tolls for a thousand years; our breath, in fading away, causes an entire world to sigh. On our invisible tomb, the lamp, without knowing it, illuminates our oblivion; and the worm that has eaten away or eternity, is enthroned and sibyllizes in our stead, clad in our names.
2.
Our funerals are sadder than the funerals of kings or doges; our life is everywhere, our death as well; our cadavers lie in everything that is breathed, in the air, in the night, in the star, in the flower, and in sound, and in hatred, and in love, and in the heart that we have made. To dig our grave requires nothing more than a name greater than ours. That name falls upon us like the earth that one throws on the dead; and the great gravedigger, who carries is in his barrow to the abyss, writes above our heads: Here lies a god; and that is all.
3.
Who are we? Either all or nothing; either the universe or less than a word; perhaps a shadow, but a shadow of what? of infinity, which comes and goes, and climbs and descends all day in its tower? tell us: smoke or ash, what are we in the censer?
THE ETERNAL FATHER
You have been dust and dust you are. Titans and hundred-cubit giants, Brahma, Jupiter, Mohammed, eternities of a week, you shall be my squires, my cavaliers, my court fools and crowned dwarfs, to amuse me, when I wish, in my empty infinity.
MOB
Approach, cities, towers and colossi of the Orient.
BABYLON, with the cities of the Orient
Woe! We are the first.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Who are you?
BABYLON
Babylon.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
And those peoples crowding in your wake, more numerous than the flakes of my beard on my breast?
BABYLON
They are all of the orient. This is Nineveh, this is Bactra, this is Thebes,
THE ETERNAL FATHER
What have you done?
ALL THE CITIES OF THE ORIENT
Lord, Babylon is our elder sister. When we were all little, sitting on our thresholds, she it was who taught us to climb our steps to the highest of our towers; she it is who will speak for us.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
I approve of that.
BABYLON
The desert that you had made around us was naked and voiceless. To populate it, we sent the sphinxes, porphyry goats and golden-winged gryphons cast in our crucibles to graze the sand. Not one bird raised its brood there; we fattened hawks with human breasts by hand on our obelisks, sculpted ibises in the rock and storks of granite. Going up every evening to our terraces, we looked at the vault of heaven to see whether you had written some new line on your tablet, with the gold of the stars.
When the desert, in the night, rose up with a start, awakened by the wind of the sirocco, and said while propping itself up: “Where has my master gone?” we replied: “He is there, in the clouds.”
When the sea, shaking its shore, said to the tempest: “Do you know where my pilot has gone?” we replied: “Look, he is there, on the Erythrean sand.”
When the horses of Arabia said, whinnying: “Where is our divine rider, with his diamond bit and azure spurs?” we said: “Look, there he is, on the summit of Horeb, having tied to his whip the spikes of the storms.”
It was us who sang you canticles, in the morning of the world, while kneeling on our steps; it was us who wore miters of crenellated rock on our heads, and took upon our shoulders, like a priest, our alb of walls; it was us who, for forty centuries, without raising our heads, prostrating the sand and dust of our ruins beneath our crumbled doors, like a Chaldean slave when he has brought his master his full cup and embroidered sandals.
And Master, we have given you our religions and our faith: India beneath its mountains shook its censer; Persia lit its candle in the fire of the desert; Memphis leaned over the Nile to was the sacrificial plate there; Judea drank, without drawing breath, the chalice of blood, at the height of the altar; and all of us, hands joined, lost in the crowd, Nineveh, Thebes with the ivory teeth, Bactra with the eye of an antelope, Ecbatana with the golden girdle, Tyr with the teats swollen with love, marched toward the altar, taking one step every thousand years, beneath the nave of the firmament that you had built with beautiful azure bricks.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
I remember. But why did you build your tower of Babel so high that I was obliged, with my angels, to descend to the perron to send away the workers and break their towers?
BABYLON
Lord, everything in the Orient surpassed our heads by more than ten cubits. The mountain of Kashmir was a wall that closed the sky to us; the palms you had planted rose high enough to touch the clouds; the rivers ran so rapidly on the evening of the day when you had filled their urns that we could not bestride their banks; the sea was so large that we could not follow its course to its source with our eyes. When we raised our towers higher than your palms and your mount of Kashmir, we wanted thus to climb by the art of our hands higher than your creation, to see you passing beyond your work, like a man whose children look from his courtyard behind the enclosure of his inherited field. Now let us be reborn; let us turn backwards, toward the cistern from which we drank. If you wish, we shall load our camels once again to pass over the desert of death in caravans. This time, Lord, our vases will be made of a purer gold; our walls will be better painted, and we shall polish our new pyramids with our own hands.
ALL THE CITIES OF THE ORIENT
Yes, Lord, let us live again; we shall make you more obelisks of porphyry and subterranean temples to rest in the shade thereof for more than a thousand years. We shall send forth our armies of cavaliers, archers, infantrymen as messengers by the same road, we shall count the same centuries on our fingers, tirelessly, as a woman counts the pearls in her necklace after she has finished it; we shall throw the same names, I swear, into our sand and our tombs, as the goat of Iran, in retracing its steps, throws the same dust after it. We still know our old hymns and our poems, of which you were the hero; suspending our harps from the same willows, we shall recite them at the same times; and when we lean over the wells of our deserts, the crocodile, in seeing us again, will believe, in our absence, that we have gone to carry water in our pitchers to water our flocks in our camps.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
I cannot go back myself to my garden of Eden. How can you recross your threshold through the door that I have closed? My son and I are marching forwards in our infinity, driving before us our flock of stars and worlds. But you, you think you can find by yourselves, in the darkness that falls behind us, the bench where you might sit down? What you have been, you shall not be again. I know your obelisks, and the weight of your temples. I have held your walls and crenellated towers in my hand, with the daisies and ferns of the meadows. To fill my eternity, I now need names that have never been, noises that have never resounded, swords that have never shone outside the scabbard.
To build the city that I am making I need towers that have never resonated to footfalls. Give me back the walls, red and gold-tinted by the sun, that I have given you. Go, if you wish to sit down, to the gate of my new city, like mendicant queens, to show the way to
those who ask for directions. For your resuscitated peoples, I have planted a thousand tents outside my walls in that part of the sky over there, on the edge of my Milky Way, which whitens beneath my footsteps more than the road of Assyria. The kings shall be clad in emeralds there; the princes silver, and the slaves in fine linen woven by my angels.
ATHENS
From my shore, Master, I heard as I was born the noise they were making in the Orient on the rim of their walls. To listen to them, I leaned over the sea, and, to make myself more beautiful, I looked at myself in the mirror of its waves. The bandlets of their priestesses hindered them; I untied my long hair over my marble forehead, which shook the aurora over the world from my hill. With my chisel, I sculpted in my Pentelic rock the blocks that you had sketched with your hand in the workshop of the universe. If an errant idea, image or thought had remained inadvertently incomplete beneath your hand, on the waves, the mountains, or the air that surrounded me, it was me who finished the creation with my chisel, and who sent it forth lightly, in marble, to ask at your door for it to live every day, with the stars, the springs, the sea, to which you gave existence day and night, without ever refusing. If you are making a new world, Lord, take me into your service. I shall knead in my fingers, with my Corinthian clay, the urns in which to store the tears of the new human race. In your courtyard, I shall carve in advance cornelian tombs into which to pour the ashes of peoples to come; and I shall raise, if you wish, a funerary column of the fine marble of my islands over the world that is to die.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
You have never thought of anything but your beauty. Life, for you, has been but one grace more, an ornamentation for your void, a glittering sash to veil my star. Even now, with the alabaster dust that you trample underfoot, with the acanthus leaves of corroded marble with which you crown your head, with the odor of hyacinth that you sow after you, with your paving-stones that the horses of voivodes have worn away, with your columns extended in the wheat like white crops resting in the shadow, your charms are greater than in your pagan feasts.
ATHENS
Do you remember, Lord, the work of your hands? Your mountains were made of marble. If I raised my eyes, the stars germinated in my nights of spring. Their embalmed flowers turned their azure stems toward me to say: “Can you see, pour city of reeds? I am more beautiful than you.” If I lowered them toward the sea, your islands, in their blue-tinted mist, floating like a flock of swans, seemed to say: “Can you see? Our rocky wings, which skim your shores, are whiter than your walls; and your amorous gulf likes us better than you in your ship of misery.” Lord. I was jealous of stars and islands, of the shade of your olive-woods, the crystal tears of your grottoes. To please you as much as they did, I collected from the marble my garlands of acanthus; I poured out my rapid glory and impatient days with full hands. As far as the summits where the olive groves stopped, which the chamois never reach, where the hawks have vertigo, to which the heather is afraid to climb, I have carried my burden of columns on my shoulders, in order to see you, on my own, unrivaled, at close range.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Go! Leave your burden of pagan columns at your feet now. Their stumps are too broken to serve for my work. Put on the new habit of a Klepht that Botsaris43 and your archbishop have given you. Attach your pasha’s saber and silver pistols to your belt; put your amulet around your neck. In my new city, at the foot of my diamond walls, I shall make you a hut of reeds to sing your sings of war, to your guzla, better than a Romelian bird with golden wings.
MOB
Here’s Rome, Lord!
ALL THE DEAD AT THE SAME TIME
Condemn her! Curse her! She it was who led us, with our hands tied behind our backs, to give us to her Abyssinian lions in her circus. She it was who made this cold wound in our breast with her gladiator’s sword.
ROME
Don’t believe them, Lord; I was working my field tranquilly on my hillside. Leaning on the heads of my oxen, I was watching my wheat grow, and my grapes ripen on my trellis, when all your peoples, escaped from your hands, like wild horses that had broken out of their enclosure, passed close by, dispersed at hazard throughout the world, running from your lash. Each one was going by a different path, each one following the spur on another god than you. The Orient had broken its ring; Greece, disheveled, went crying through its islands: “The god Pan died last night.” Then, on my furrow, I took my sword in my hand, as a shepherd of Albano takes his knotty staff to herd his cattle in the paths of my marshes. In Asia, in Africa, and where the Rhine turns back in its bed, I went to search for their flock. All the way to the enclosure of my walls I drove their crowd before me whinnying furiously. For three centuries, I muzzled their anger at my ease, and when my circus enclosed them all, sitting on the ground on their elbows, no longer in tears, and crying with infantile voices: “Thank you! Thank you!” I went of my own accord to seek Byzantium, with my emperor, in order to give you the key to your stable.
Oh, how much easier it would have been for me to lead my two obedient oxen along my furrow, to train my vine on my trellis, and to make a path for my goats instead of my triumphal road!
THE ETERNAL FATHER
It was you who killed my son on Golgotha.
CHORUS OF SAINTS, SAINT BERTHE, SAINT HUBERT, SAINT BONAVENTURE
Let her be chastised and condemned, and let her tower collapse with her battlements! If you believe us, Lord, no pardon! Her sin is too great; she would repeat it tomorrow. Ite, maledicti!
ROME
The Vatican expiates Golgotha. To efface my crime, it was me who first cried from my walls: “Christ is my king.” To pay for the tunic that my soldiers tore, it was me who gave your son the house of my emperors with their heritage; and to wipe away the blood from his side, it was me who extended to him, on the tip of my sword, the shroud of the old world. Within my walls there are two Romes: one kneeling in the squares, amid incense and sighs, begging you, day and night, to forgive the other. The pope redeems the emperor, the Vatican the Capitol; the church prays for the temple, the cross prays for the sword, the miter for the crown, the monk’s habit for the purple, the ruin for the triumph, the lamp of the madonna for the torch of the gods. And every evening, the bell that the saints have given to me goes to trample with its silvery feet the steps of the Coliseum, and the stones of my gates, and the battlements of Belisarius’ wall search my surrounding from afar for some relic of a resonant vault, in order to weep there, like a night-bird, over my crumbled sins.
CHORUS OF SAINTS, SAINT BERTHE, SAINT HUBERT, SAINT BONAVENTURE
Her words have touched me; I’m shaken by what she has just said, and no longer know what to advise. She, once so great, is now so small, that my heart wants to weep. Should he have pity, have pity on Rome? put a little honey on her bitter lips? For myself, I forgive her. Miserere! Miserere!
THE ETERNAL FATHER, to Rome
Give me your sword, your javelins, your bronze breastplate, your golden cross and your miter. I shall make a trophy of them, which I shall attach to the banister of the stairway of my new city. I shall take away your walls and your entire history, as a picture engraved on my shield, which I shall hang, during my eternal night, above my bed-head. This very evening, four bloody comets will be harnessed, to drag your weeping souls day and night around my circus on your triumphal chariot; and the world will tremble when they shake their tresses over their shoulders, soiled with your dust.
PEOPLES OF THE MIDDLE AGES
As a child lowers his head toward the ground when his master summons him to read from his book, so, under our arches and battlements, we tremble at this hour. To make ourselves a beverage for heroes, we have mixed in our witch’s cauldron the claws of the gryphons of Persia, the myrrh of Arabia, the seashells of the bays of Greece, the honey of the golden bees of our long-haired kings, all the names, all the gods and all the tears at the same time. On the dust of the human race we have climbed up, as on our hill. That summit surpassed, we built our tower in or
der to see the coming of the messenger of the last judgment from a distance. If a birch tree trembled in our courtyard, if the visor of a helmet came down, if Ahasuerus knocked on our door, we thought to ourselves: here is the messenger coming with his iron-clad shoes; we must go.
Our pale years have germinated in the shadow of our stained-glass windows, without our having thought to bend down to pick the fruit. Beneath the real world we have searched, groping, for your invisible spirit, as, for want of a breastplate, one searches with a lance for the warm heart of a knight. Beneath our windows, Lord, we have made our colonnettes so frail as only to last until evening. Today, Babylon has the debris of her terraces; Rome has the steps of her circus on which to sit down; Athens has her marble bench at her gate; but my steps are worm-eaten, my towers, turrets and fragile cells are hidden beneath the brambles. What shall become of me, poor naked soul that faith clad, a people of spirits without bodies, a crowd without cities and without walls, who never thought of making any other shelter than my heart against the night and tempest of your eternity?
THE ETERNAL FATHER
The dreams of the hearts that you covered with their wings are worth more than the brick terraces of Babylon and the circus of Rome. Enter into my city. All your dreams are built there in diamond stones. Illuminate with your diaphanous souls, which I have kneaded in vermilion and gold, the windows of my porch; and if the morning wind ever strikes your resounding eyelids, fill the city and the crossroads with sighs and mysteries, like the murmur of a world that is no more and which asks to live again. Look! I have built your dwelling at the crossroads of the empyrean, up there where my evening stars are heaped up one atop another, and my suns, like bricks that are still hot, built in turrets and blazoned towers, in gleaming arches of onyx and opals, and in cathedrals of light. (To Mob.) Who are these peoples over here that I do not know?