Maldoror and Poems

by Comte de Lautreamont

  14

  A human body is dragged along in the Seine. In the circumstances, she flows solemnly. The swollen body is buoyed up on the water; it disappears beneath the arch of a bridge; but further on it can be seen turning round and round like a mill-wheel and going under now and then. A boatman hooks it with a rod as it goes by and brings it back to earth. Before it is brought to the morgue the body is left on the bank for some time to revive it if possible. A dense crowd gathers around the body. Those who cannot see because they are at the back push those in front, as much as they can. Everyone says to himself: 'I would never have drowned myself.' They pity the young man who has killed himself; they admire him; but they do not imitate him. And yet he found it quite natural to take his life, judging that there was nothing on earth capable of satisfying him, and aspiring towards higher things. His face is distinguished, his clothes are expensive. Is he seventeen yet? That is dying young! The stunned crowd continues to gape at him. Night is coming on. Everyone moves quickly away. No one has dared to turn the drowned man over and make him throw up the water which fills his body. They are afraid of showing any feeling, and no one has moved, they all keep to themselves. One of them goes away singing discordantly an absurd Tyrolean air; another snaps his fingers like castanets...Troubled by his dark thoughts, Maldoror, on horseback, passes near the place with the speed of lightning. He sees the drowned man; that is enough. Immediately, he brings his courser to a halt and gets down from the stirrup. He lifts up the young man with no sign of squeamishness, making him throw up large amounts of water. At the thought that this inert body could re revived by his hands he feels his heart leap and under this excellent impression his courage redoubles. Vain efforts! Vain efforts, I said, and it is true. He rubs his temples; he rubs this limb and that; he breathes into his mouth for an hour, pressing his lips against the unknown young man's. At last he seems to feel a slight beating of the young man's breast. The drowned man lives! At this supreme moment several wrinkles could be seen disappearing from the horseman's forehead, making him ten years younger. But alas! the wrinkles will return, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps as soon as he has left the banks of the Seine. Meanwhile the drowned man opens his lusterless eyes and thanks his benefactor with a wan smile; but he is still very weak, and he cannot move at all. How fine it is to save someone's life! And how many faults are redeemed by this action! The bronze-lipped man, preoccupied till then with snatching him from the arms of death, looks at the young man more attentively, and his features are not unfamiliar to him. He says inwardly that there is not much difference between the blond-haired young man who had just nearly drowned and Holzer. Look how effusively they embrace one another. It is nothing! The man with the pupils of jasper is anxious to maintain a harsh an undemonstrative appearance. Saying nothing, he takes his friend and puts him up behind him on the saddle, and the steed moves off at a gallop. O Holzer, who thought you were sensible and strong, do you not see, from your very own example, how difficult it is, in a fit of despair, to maintain the composure you boast of! I hope you will not cause me such grief again, and I for my part have promised you never to take my life.

  15

  There are moments in life when man with his louse-ridden hair casts wild staring looks at the green membranes of space; for he believes he hears, somewhere ahead, the ironic hoots of a phantom. He staggers and bows his head; what he has heard is the voice of conscience. Then with the speed of a madman he rushes out of the house, takes the first direction his wild state suggests and bounds over the rough plains of the countryside. But the yellow phantom never loses sight of him, pursuing him with equal speed. Sometimes on stormy nights, while legions of winged octopi, which look like ravens at a distance, hover above the clouds, moving ponderously towards the cities of men, their mission to warn them to change their conduct; on such nights the dark-eyed pebble sees two things pass by, lit up by the flashes of lightning, one after another; and wiping a furtive tear of compassion which flows from its frozen eye, it shouts out: 'Yes, he certainly deserves it; it is only justice being done.' Having said that he reassumes his grim attitude and continues to watch, trembling nervously, the manhunt, and the big lips of the shadowy vagina from which immense dark spermatozoids flow unceasingly like a river and then soar up into the lugubrious ether, hiding all nature with the vast span of their bat's wings, including the solitary legions of octopi, now gloomy at the sight of these dumb inexpressible fulgurations. But all the time the steeplechase between these two tireless runners is going on, and the phantom hurls torrents of fire from his mouth on to the singed back of the human antelope. If, while he is accomplishing this duty, he comes upon pity trying to bar his way, he gives in disgustedly to her supplications, and allows the man to escape. The phantom makes a clicking sound with its tongue, as if to tell itself that it is giving up the chase, and then returns to its kennel for the time being. His is the voice of the condemned: it can be heard even in the furthest layers of space; and when its dreadful shrieking penetrates the human heart, then man would prefer, as the saying goes, to have death as his mother than remorse as his son. He buries his head up to his neck in the earthy windings of a hole; but conscience volatilizes this ostrich-trick. The hole disappears, a drop of ether; light appears with its train of beams, like a flight of curlews swooping down on lavender; and man, his eyes open, is face to face with his pale and ghastly self again. I have seen him making for the sea, climbing a jagged promontory, lashed by the eyebrow of the surge; and flinging himself arrow-like down into the waves. The miracles is this: the corpse reappeared next day on the surface of the ocean, which had brought this flotsam of flesh back to the shore. The man freed himself from his body's imprint in the sand, wrung the water from his drenched hair, and silently, stoopingly, returned to the way of life. Conscience judges our most secret thoughts and acts severely, and is never wrong. Being powerless to prevent evil, it never ceases to hunt man down like a fox, especially in the hours of darkness. Avenging eyes, which ignorant science calls meteors, shed a livid flame of light, revolving on themselves as they pass and uttering mysterious words...which he understands! Then his bed is battered by the convulsions of his body, burdened by the weight of insomnia, and he hears the sinister breathing of night's vague rumours. The angel of sleep himself, having been struck a mortal blow on the forehead from a stone whose thrower is unknown, abandons his task and reascends towards heaven. Now this time I am here to defend man; I, the scorner of all virtues; I, whom the Creator has never forgotten since the day when I knocked from their pedestal the annals of heaven where by some infamous intrigue his power and his eternity had consigned, and I applied my four hundred suckers to his armpits, making him utter dreadful cries. They changed into vipers as his mouth uttered them and went and hid in the undergrowth, among ruined old walls, on the watch by day, on the watch by night. These cries crawled, endowed with countless rings and a small flat head, and wickedly gleaming eyes. They have vowed to stop at the sight of human innocence. But when men in their innocence are out walking in the tangles of the maquis, on steep slopes or on the dunes of the sand, they soon change their mind, something makes them want to go back. If, that is, there is still time; for, at times, men notice the poison is creeping along the veins of their leg by means of an almost imperceptible bite, before they have had time to turn back and escape into the open. Thus it is that the Creator, admirably cool even in the presence of the most appalling sufferings, extracts from the very breasts of men the germs which are harmful to those who live on earth. Imagine his astonishment when he saw Maldoror changed into an octopus coming towards him with his eight monstrous tentacles, each one of them which was a solid lash which could easily have encompassed a planet's circumference. Caught unawares, he struggled for some moments against the viscous embrace, which was getting tighter and tighter...I feared some foul trick on his part; having fed copiously on the globules of his sacred blood, I suddenly pulled away from his majestic body, and went and hid deep in a cave, which has been my abode since then. Afte
r many fruitless searches, he was still unable to find me. That was a long time ago; but I think he knows now where I live; he is wary of entering; the two of us live like monarchs of neighbouring lands, who know their respective strengths, cannot defeat one another, and are weary of the useless battles of the past. He fears me, and I fear him; each of us, though undefeated, has felt the savage blows of his adversary, and it is stalemate. However, I am ready to take up the struggle again whenever he wishes. But I advise him not to wait for the right moment for his hidden schemes. I will always be on guard, I will always keep my eye on him; let him not visit the earth with conscience and its torments. I have taught men what weapons to use to combat it successfully. They have not yet grown accustomed to conscience; but you know that, for me, it is as the wind-blown straw. And I treat it as such. If I wanted to used the opportunity to indulge in subtle poetic discussion, I would add that a straw is more to me than conscience; for straw is useful for the ox chewing the cud, whereas conscience has only its claws of steel to show. These claws suffered a painful setback the day they came before me. As conscience had been sent by the Creator, I did not think fit to allow it to bar my way. If it had come to me with the modesty and humility proper to its rank (which it ought never to have tried to rise above), then I would have listened to it. I did not like its pride. I stretched out my hand and ground its claws with my fingers; they fell as dust to the ground, beneath the pressure of this new kind of mortar. I stretched out my other hand and pulled off its head. Then I hunted that woman out of my house with a whip, and I never saw her again. I have kept her head as a souvenir of my victory...Gnawing the skull of the head which I held in my hand, I stood on one leg, like a heron, beside a precipice on the side of a mountain. I was seen going down the valley, while the skin of my breast remained as still and calm as the lid of a tomb! Gnawing the skull of the head which I held in my hand, I swam in the most dangerous gulfs, along by lethal reefs, and I dived deeper than any current, to witness, as a stranger, the combats of sea-monsters; I swam so far the shore that it was out of my piercing sight; and hideous cramps, with their paralysing magnetism, prowled around my limbs as they cleaved the waves with their forceful movements, but they did not dare to approach. I was seen returning safe and sound to the beach, while the skin of my breast remained as still and calm as the lid of a tomb! Gnawing the skull of the head which I held in my hands, I mounted the steps of a high tower. I reached the platform, high above the ground. I looked out over the countryside and the sea; I looked at the sun, the firmament; kicking hard against the granite which did not give way, I challenged death and divine vengeance with a supreme howl of contempt and then hurled myself like a paving-stone into the mouth of space. Men heard the painful resounding thud which occurred as the head of conscience, which I had abandoned as I fell, hit the ground. I was seen descending, slow as a bird, borne on an invisible cloud, and picking up the head, so that I could force it to witness a triple crime, which I was to commit that day, while the skin of my breast remained as still as the lid of a tomb! Gnawing the skull of the head which I held in my hands, I made for the place where the guillotine is. Beneath the blade, I placed the smooth and delicate necks of three young girls. Executor of fine works, I released the rope with the apparent deftness of a lifetime's experience; and the triangular blade, falling obliquely, lopped off three heads which were looking at me sweetly. Then I put my own head beneath the weighty razor, and the executioner prepared to do his duty. Thrice the blade slid along the grooves with renewed force; thrice, my material carcass was moved to the very depths, especially at the base of my neck, as when one dreams that one has been crushed to death beneath a collapsing house. The stunned crowd let me pass and leave the gloomy square. It saw me opening up with my elbows its undulating waves, carrying the head straight in front of me, while the skin of my breast remained as still and as calm as the lid of a tomb! I said I wanted to defend man, this time; but I fear my apologia is not an expression of the truth; and consequently I prefer to remain silent. Mankind will applaud this prudence with gratitude!

  16

  The time has come to draw in the reins of my inspiration and to stop for a moment along the way, as when one looks at a woman's vagina; it is wise to look over the ground I have covered, and then, having rested my weary limbs, to soar off with a bold leap. To cover such a stretch in a single breath is by no means easy; one's wings get very tired, flying high, without hope or remorse...No, let us not lead any further the haggard pack of pickaxes and spades across the explosive mines of this impious song. The crocodile will not change a word of the vomitings from beneath his skull. So much the worse, if some lurking shade, excited by the praiseworthy object of avenging mankind whom I have so unjustly attacked, stealthily opens the door of my room, and brushing against the wall like a seagull's wing, buries a dagger in the side of the plunderer of heavenly wrecks! The atoms of clay may just as well be dispersed in this way as any other.

  THIRD BOOK

  1

  Let us recall the names of those imaginary beings of angelic nature, creations of a single mind, who, in the second song, shone with a light of their own. Once born, they die, like the sparks whose swift extinction on the burning paper the eye can hardly follow. Leman!...Lohengrin!...Lombano!...Holzer! for a moment you appeared on my charmed horizon covered in the insignia of youth; but I let you fall back into chaos, like diving bells. You will never come forth again. It is enough for me to keep the memory of you; you must give way to other substances, less beautiful perhaps, engendered by the stormy flood of a love resolved not to quench its thirst with the human race. A hungering love, which would devour itself, if it did not seek sustenance in celestial fictions: creating, in the long run, a pyramid of seraphim more numerous than the insects which swarm in a drop of water, he will weave them into an ellipse which he will whirl around himself. During this time, the traveler, who has stopped at the sight of a cataract, will, if he looks up, see a human being in the distance, borne towards hell’s depths on a garland of living camellias! But...silence! The floating image of the fifth ideal slowly takes shape, like the blurred nuances of the aurora borealis, on the vaporous forefront of my intellect, where it takes on more and more of a precise consistency...Mario and I were going along the strand. Our horses, with straining necks, rent the membranes of space and struck sparks from the stones on the beach. The cold blast struck us full in the face, billowing out our cloaks; and the hair of our twin heads was blowing in the wind. The seagull, by its cries and the beating of its wings, tried to warn us of the possible proximity of the tempest. It cried: 'Where are they going, at this mad gallop?' We said nothing; plunged in reverie, we let ourselves be borne along on the wings of this wild career; the fisherman, seeing us pass by, swift as the albatross, and believing that here, fleeing before him, were the two mysterious brothers, so called because they were always together, hastened to make the sign of the cross and hid with his petrified dog behind a huge boulder. Those who lived on the coast had heard strange things told of these two characters, who would appear on earth amid the clouds in times of great calamity, when a dreadful war threatened to thrust its harpoon into the breasts of two enemy countries, or cholera with its sling was preparing to hurl death and corruption into entire cities. The oldest beachcombers would frown gravely as they explained that these two phantoms, the vast span of whose black wings everyone had noticed in hurricanes, above sandbanks and reefs, were the spirit of the earth and the spirit of the sea, whose majestic forms would appear in the sky during the great revolutions of nature, and who were joined together by eternal friendship, the rarity and glory of which have astonished the endless cable of generations. It was said that, flying side by side, like two Andean condors, they liked to hover in concrete circles among the layers of the atmosphere nearest to the sun; that in those regions they lived on the purest essence of light; that with great reluctance they decided to direct their vertical light down towards the orbit in which the fear-stricken human globe deliriously revo
lves, inhabited by cruel spirits who massacre one another on the fields where battle rages (when they are not treacherously and perfidiously killing one another with the dagger of hatred or ambition in the middle of towns), and who feed on beings as full of life as themselves, but lower down in the scale of existence. Or when, to urge men to repentance by the strophes of their prophecies, they firmly resolved to swim with huge and powerful strokes towards the sidereal regions where a planet moved amid the thick exhalations of greed, pride, imprecations and sneers which rose like pestilential vapours from its hideous surface; this planet seemed only as big as a bowl, being almost invisible because of the distance; and there, sure enough, there were many opportunities for them to regret bitterly their spurned and misunderstood kindness; and they went and hid in the bowels of volcanoes to converse with the enduring fires of lava which bubble in vats in the center of the earth, or at the bottom of the sea, where their disillusioned gaze could linger pleasantly on the fiercest monsters of the depths, who seemed models of gentleness in comparison with the bastards of mankind. And then when the propitious darkness of night fell, they would rush out of the porphyry-crested craters and from the undersea currents, leaving behind them the stony chamber-pot where the constipated anus of the human cockatoo strains, till they could no longer make out the shape of the vile planet suspended in space. Distressed at their fruitless attempt, the spirit of the earth and the spirit of the sea embraced and wept, amid the stars who shared their grief, and beneath God's eye. Mario and he who galloped by his side were not unaware of the vague and superstitious rumours spread by fishermen as, with doors bolted and windows closed, they whispered to one another around the fireside of an evening; while the night wind, wishing to warm itself, whistles around the straw cabin, shaking with its force the fragile walls, surrounded at the base with shells brought in by the dying undulations of the waves. We were not speaking. What have those who love to say to one another? Nothing. But our eyes expressed everything. I told him to pull his cloak around him more and he remarked that my horse was moving too far from his; each of us was as much concerned for the other's life as for his own; we are not laughing. He tries to force a smile. But I notice hat his face is deeply lined, and bears the terrible weight of reflection, which is constantly struggling with the sphinxes who, with their squinting eyes, baffle mortal intelligence in all its anguished endeavours. Seeing that his attempts are futile, he averts his eyes and bites his earthly rein, raging and foaming at the mouth and looking towards the horizon, which flees at our approach. In turn, I try to remind him of his gilded youth, which need only advance like a queen in the palace of pleasures; but he notices how difficult it is for my thin mouth to utter these words, how the years of my own spring have passed, sad and glacial, like an implacable dream passing over banquet tables, satin beds where love's pale priestess sleeps, paid with the glitter of gold, the bitter pleasures of dis-solitude and the torches of sorrow. Seeing that my attempts are futile, I am not surprised that I cannot make him happy; the Almighty appears with his instruments of torture in the resplendent aureole of his horror. I avert my eyes and look towards the horizon which flees at our approach...Our horses were galloping along the shores, as if they fled the eyes of men...Mario is younger than I; the dampness of the weather and the salt water which spurts up on us bring cold to his lips. I said to him: 'Take care!...Take care!...close your lips on one another; do you not see the sharp claws of the cold which will chap your skin, furrowing it with its smarting wounds?' He fixed his eye on my brow and answered with the movements of his tongue: 'Yes, I see these green claws, but I will not alter the natural position of my mouth to get rid of them. Since this appears to be the will of Providence, I wish to submit to it. Its will could have been less harsh.' And I exclaimed: 'I admire this noble revenge.' I wanted to tear out my hair, but he forbade me with such a stern look that I obeyed him respectfully. It was getting late, the eagle was returning to its nest amid the jagged mountain rocks. He said: 'I will lend you my cloak to protect you from the cold. I do not need mine.' I replied: 'Woe to you, if you do as you say. I do not want another to suffer instead of me, and especially not you.' He did not answer, because I was right; but I began to comfort him, because of the violent and hasty tone in which I had spoken. Our horses were galloping along the shore, as if they fled from the eyes of men...I looked up, like the prow of a ship borne upon a huge wave and I said to him: 'Are you crying? Tell me, king of the snows and the fog. I see no tears on your face, lovely as the cactus flower, and your eyes are dry as the bed of the stream; but in the depths of your eyes I see a blood-filled vessel in which your innocence boils, bitten in the neck by a scorpion of the largest kind. A violent wind blows down on the fire beneath the cauldron, spreading the dark flames outside your sacred eyeball. I moved close to you, my hair near your rosy brow, and I smelt burning, because my hair had been singed. Close your eyes; for, if you do not, your face, burning like the lava of the volcano, will fall in ashes into the palm of my hand.' And he turned towards me again, heedless of the reins he was holding in his hands, gazing at me tenderly, raising and lowering his lily eyelids like the ebb and flow of the sea. He wished to reply to my bold question, and did so as follows: 'Do not worry about me. Just as the mists of rivers drift over hillsides and on reaching the top rise into the atmosphere to form clouds; so have your anxieties on my account increased imperceptibly without any reasonable grounds, forming the illusory shape of a desolate mirage in your imagination. I assure you there is no fire in my eyes, although I feel as if my skull had been plunged into a basin of burning coals. How could my innocent flesh be burning in the cauldron, since I can hear only weak and indistinct cries which are but the moans of the wind passing over our heads. A scorpion could not have taken up residence and fixed his sharp pincers in my torn sockets; rather I feel as if there are more powerful tentacles grinding my optic nerves. Yet I am of your opinion, that the blood which fills the cauldron was extracted from my veins by an invisible torturer as I slept at night. I waited a long time for you, beloved son of the ocean; my sleep-weakened arms engaged in vain combat with the One who had stolen into the vestibule of my house...Yes, I feel my soul padlocked in the bolt of my body and it cannot get out and flee from the shores lashed by human waves, no longer witness to the livid pack of miseries relentlessly pursuing the human lizards over the sloughs and pits of immense despair. But I shall not complain. I received life as a wound, and I have forbidden suicide to heal the scar. I want the Creator to contemplate the gaping crevasse for every hour of his eternity. That is the punishment I inflict on him. Our coursers slow down, their bodies trembling like the hunter set upon by peccaries. They must not start listening to what we are saying. By dint of attention, their intelligence would increase and they might understand us. Woe to them! for they would suffer more. Just think, in fact, of the boars of mankind: does it not seem that the degree of intelligence which separates them from other beings has only been granted at the irremediable price of incalculable suffering? Follow my example and dig your spur into your courser's side. 'Our horses were galloping along the shore, as if they fled the eyes of men.'