Maldoror and Poems

by Comte de Lautreamont

  4

  It was a spring day. The birds were pouring forth their warbling songs, and human beings were going about their different duties, bathed in the holiness of toil. Everything was working towards its destiny: trees, planets, dogfish. Everything, that is, except the Creator! He was lying stretched out on the road, with his clothes all torn. His lower lip was hanging down like a heavy chain; his teeth had not been cleaned, and the blond waves of his hair were full of dust. His body, benumbed by heavy sluggishness, pinned down on the stones, was making futile attempts to get up. His strength had deserted him and he was lying there, weak as an earthworm, impassive as the bark of a tree. Floods of wine filled the ruts which had been hollowed out by the nervous jerkings of his shoulders. Pig-snouted brutishness covered him with its protective wings and cast loving glances at him. His legs, their muscles slack, swept across the ground like two flapping sails. Blood flowed from his nostrils: as he fell he had knocked his face against a post...He was drunk! Horribly drunk! Drunk as a bug which in one night has gorged three barrels of blood; his incoherent words resounded all around; I shall refrain from repeating them here, for even if the supreme drunkard has no self-respect, I must respect men. Did you know that the Creator was drunk? Have pity on the lip, soiled in the cups of debauch. The hedgehog which was passing stuck his needles into his back and said: 'Take that. The sun has run half its course. Just wait till I call the cockatoo with its hooded beak.' The woodpecker and the owl, who were passing, buried their necks in his belly and said: 'Take that. What are you up to on this earth? Is it to offer the spectacle of this lugubrious comedy to animals? But I promise that neither the mole, nor the cassowary, nor the flamingo will imitate you.' The ass, which was passing by, gave him a kick in the temple and said: 'Take that. What had I done to you to deserve such long ears? Even the crickets despise me.' The toad, which was passing by, spat a fountain of slime on to his brow and said: 'Take that. If you had not given me such big bulbous eyes and I had seen you in the state you are in now, I would chastely have hidden the beauty of your limbs beneath a shower of ranunculi, myositis, and camelias, so that no on would see you.' The lion, who was passing by, inclined his royal head and said: 'For my part, I respect him, even though his radiance now seems to be eclipsed. You others, so proud and superior, are mere cowards, since you attacked him while he was asleep. How would you like to be in his place and to have to endure from passers-by the insults which you have not spared him'? Man, who was passing by, stopped before the unrecognizable Creator; and for three full days, to the applause of the crab-louse and the viper, he shat on his august face! Woe to man, for this insult; for he did not respect the enemy, sprawled out in a mixture of blood and wine; defenceless, and almost lifeless! Then the sovereign God; awoken at last by all these mean jibes, got up as best he could; staggering, he went and sat down on a stone, with his two hands hanging down like the consumptive's two testicles; and cast a glassy, lack-lustre glance over all of nature, which belonged to him. Oh human beings, you are enfants terribles; but let us spare, I implore you, this great being who has not yet finished sleeping off the vile liquor and who has not got enough strength left to stand up straight; he has slumped down on to the boulder, on which he is sitting like a weary traveler. Look closely at the passing beggar; he saw the dervish stretching out a thin and hungry hand and, without knowing to whom he was giving alms, threw a piece of bread into the hand of him who was begging for mercy. The Creator expressed his gratitude with a nod of the head. Oh! you will never know how difficult it can be to keep on holding the reins of the universe! Sometimes the blood rushes to one's head when one is seriously trying to conjure a last comet from nothingness, and with it a new race of spirits. The intellect, stirred to the depths, yields like a beaten man and, for once in its life, lapses into the aberrations which you have witnessed!

  5

  A red lantern, the flag of vice, hanging from the end of a tringle, rocking its carcass, lashed by the four winds, above a massive, worm-eaten door. A dingy corridor, smelling of human thighs, led to a yard where cocks and hens, scrawnier than their own wings, were looking for food. On the wall which surrounded the yard, on the east side, several very small openings had been made and were closed off by a metal grating. Moss covered this main part of the building which had no doubt once been a convent and was now used as a residence for all those women who, every day, showed the inside of their vagina to the clients in return for a little money. I was on a bridge, the piers of which went down into the muddy water of the moat. From its raised surface I contemplated the old ramshackle building and I could observe the minutest details of its inner architecture. Sometimes a grating would rise with a creak, as if by the impulsion of a hand which did violence to the metal; a man's head would appear in the half-open space; then his shoulders emerged with flakes of plaster falling on them, followed in this laborious extraction by his cobweb-covered body. Putting his hands like a crown on the filth of all kinds which pressed the ground with its weight, his feet still caught in the twists of the grating, he resumed his natural posture and went to dip his hands in a rickety bucket whose soapy water had seen entire generations come and go; then he made off as quickly as possible, away from these suburban side-streets, to breathe the purer air nearer the town-centre. When the client had gone, a completely naked woman came out in the same manner, and went over towards the same bucket. Then the cocks and the hens rushed up in a crowd from all parts of the yard, attracted by the smell of semen, forced her on to the ground despite her vigorous resistance, swarmed all over her body as if it were a dung-heap and tore at the flaccid lips of her swollen vagina with their beaks until the blood came out. The hens and cocks, sated, went back to scratch around in the grass of the yard; the woman, now clean, got up, trembling and covered in wounds, as when one awakes after a nightmare. She dropped the cloth she had brought to wipe her legs with; no longer needing the communal bucket, she went back to her lair to await the next client. At this sight I, too, wanted to enter that house. I was about to come down from the bridge when I saw, on the coping of the column, the following inscription in Hebrew characters: 'You who cross this bridge, do not go in there. There crime sojourns with vice; one day, the friends of a young man who had passed through the fatal door waited in vain for his return.' My curiosity overcame my fear; a few moments later, I was standing before a grating of solid, intercrossing metal bars, with narrow spaces between them. I wanted to look inside, through that dark screen. At first I could see nothing; but I was soon able to make out the objects in the dark room by means of the rays of the sun, which was setting and would soon disappear on the horizon. The first and only thing which struck my sight was a blond stick consisting of horns which fitted into one another. The stick was moving! It was walking in the room! Its jerking was so violent that the floor shook; with its two ends it was making huge holes in the wall and seemed like a ram battering the gates of a besieged town. Its efforts were in vain; the walls were made of freestone, and when it hit the wall I saw it bend like a steel blade and rebound like an elastic ball. Then this stick was not made of wood! I noticed later that it coiled and uncoiled easily, like an eel. Although it was as tall as a man, it did not stand upright. Sometimes it would try and then its ends could be seen through the grating. It was leaping up wildly and violently, then falling to the ground again. It could not break down the obstacle. I began to look at it more and more carefully, and I saw that it was a hair! After its great struggle with the matter which surrounded it like a prison, it went and rested against the bed which was in the room, with its root on the carpet and its tip against the head of the bed. After a few moments of silence, during which I heard broken sobs, it raised its voice and spoke thus: 'My master has left me in this room and forgotten all about me. He has not come back to look for me. He got up from this bed on which I am lying, combed his perfumed hair and did not realize that I had already fallen to the ground. Yet if he had picked me up, there would have been nothing surprising in such a simple act of ju
stice. He has abandoned me in the confines of this room after being enfolded in a woman's arms. And what a woman! The sheets are still damp from their warm, moist embraces and bear, in their untidiness, the stamp of a night of love...' And I wondered who his master could be! And I pressed my face even harder against the grating. 'While all of nature was slumbering chastely, he coupled with a degraded woman in lewd, impure caresses. He demeaned himself so far as to allow those withered cheeks, despicable in their habitual shamelessness, to approach his august face. He did not blush, but I blushed for him. There is no doubt that he was happy to spend a night with such a spouse. The woman, struck by his majestic appearance, seemed to be enjoying incomparable delights, and kissed his neck madly.' And I wondered who his master could be! And I pressed my face even harder against the grating! 'During this time, irritant pustules began to appear and grow in number as a result of his unaccustomed eagerness for fleshly pleasures; I felt them surrounding my roots with their deadly gall and imbibing with their suckers the generative substance of my life. The more they abandoned themselves to their wild, insane movements, the more I felt my strength diminishing. At the moment when their bodily desires were reaching the paroxysm of passion, I noticed that my root had slumped, like a soldier wounded by a bullet. The torch of life had gone out in me and I fell from his illustrious head like a dead branch; I fell to the ground, without courage, without strength, without vitality; but with deep pity for him to whom I had belonged; but with eternal sorrow for his willful aberration!' And I wondered who his master could be! And I pressed my face even harder against the grating! 'If he had at least taken to himself the innocent breast of a virgin! She would have been worthier of him, and the degradation would not have been so great. With his lips he kisses that mud-covered brow, on which men have trampled, full of dust...he breathes in, with his shameless nostrils, the emanations of those two moist armpits!...I saw the membranes of the latter shrink in shame while, for their part, his nostrils shrunk from the infamous inhalation. But neither he nor she paid any attention to the solemn warnings of the armpits, to the dull, pale revulsion of the nostrils. She raised her arms higher and he, thrusting more strongly, buried his face deeper into their hollow. I was obliged to be a party to this profanation. I was obliged to be a spectator at this unspeakable contortion; to be present at the unnatural alloying of these two beings, whose different natures were separated by an immeasurable gulf...' And I wondered who his master could be! And I pressed my face even harder against the grating! 'When he was sick of breathing his woman, he wanted to wrench off her muscles one by one; but as she was a woman, he forgave her, preferring to make one of his own sex suffer. He called in a young man from an adjoining cell. This young man had come to spend a few carefree moments with one of these women; he was enjoined to come and stand one step from his face. I had been lying on the ground for a long time now. Not being strong enough to get up on my burning root, I could not see what they did. All I know is that the young man was hardly within arm's reach when bits of flesh began to fall at the feet of the bed and came to rest on both sides of me. They told me in hushed tones that my master's claws had ripped them off the adolescent's shoulders. The latter, after some hours in which he had struggled against one of greater strength, got up from the bed and withdrew majestically. He was literally flayed from head to foot; he trailed his skin, which had been turned inside out, over the flagstones of the room. He said that his own character was full of goodness; that he liked to believe that his fellow-beings were good too; for that reason he had agreed to the wish of the distinguished stranger who had called him in; but that he would never have expected to be flayed by such a torturer. By such a torturer, he added after a pause. At last he went towards the grating which compassionately opened to ground level in the presence of this body deprived of an epidermis. Without abandoning his skin, which could still be useful to him, if only as a cloak, he was trying to escape from this cut-throat; once he left the room, I could no longer see if he had had the strength to reach the gate which let out of that building. Oh, how the hens and the cocks moved respectfully away from the long trail of blood on the drenched ground, despite their hunger!' And I wondered who his master could be! And I pressed my face even harder against the grating! 'Then he who should have thought more of his dignity and his righteousness sat up and leant, with some difficult, on his tired elbows. Alone, dark, disgusted, and hideous! He dressed slowly. The nuns, buried for centuries in the convent's catacombs, having been awoken with a start by the noises of that dreadful night, the crashing and the shaking in the cell above the vaults, now held hands, and came and formed a funeral circle around him. And while he looked for the ruined remnants of his former splendour; while he washed his hands with spittle, then wiping them in his hair (for it was better to wash them with spittle than not to wash them at all, after and entire night of vice and crime), they intoned the laments for the dead, which are sung when someone has been buried. And in fact the youth was not to survive the tortures inflicted on him by a divine hand, and his agonies came to an end during the nuns' songs.' I remembered the inscription on the column; I understood what had become of the pubescent dreamer whose friends had been waiting for him since his disappearance...And I wondered who his master could be! And I pressed my face even harder against the grating! 'The walls opened to let him pass; the nuns, seeing him soar into the sky with wings till then hidden beneath his emerald robe, returned to their places beneath the lid of the tomb. He has returned to his celestial dwelling, leaving me here; it is not fair. The other hairs are still on his head; and I am lying in this dismal room on a floor covered with clotted blood and bits of dried meat; this room is damned since he came in; nobody enters; yet I am locked in. It is all over now. I shall never again see the legions of angels marching in thick phalanxes, nor the stars moving in the gardens of harmony. Well...let it be...I shall be able to bear my woe with resignation. But I shall not fail to tell men what happened in this cell. I shall give them permission to discard their dignity like a useless coat, since they have my master's example before them; I shall advise them to suck the verge of crime, since another has already done so.' The hair stopped speaking...And I wondered who his master could be! And I pressed my face even harder against the grating!...Immediately, thunder clapped; a phosphorescent light penetrated into the room. In spite of myself I stepped back, warned by an inexplicable instinct; although I had moved away from the grating, I heard another voice, but this time insinuating, quiet, for fear of being heard: 'Stop leaping up and down! Be quiet...be quiet...if anyone should hear you! I will put you back with the other hairs; but first wait for the sun to set on the horizon, that night may cover your steps...I have not forgotten you; but you would have been seen as you left, and I would have been compromised. Oh! if only you knew how much I have suffered since that moment! When I returned to heaven, my archangels surrounded me inquisitively; they did not want to ask me the motive for my absence. They, who had never dared to look up at me, cast looks of utter amazement on my downcast face as they tried to solve the riddle; although they could not see into the heart of this mystery, their whispered thoughts expressed the fear that an unusual change had come about in me. They were shedding silent tears; and they had a vague sense that I was no longer the same, that I was now inferior to my previous self. They wanted to know what disastrous resolution could have made me cross the frontiers of heaven and come down to earth to indulge in pleasures which they themselves despised. They noticed on my brow a drop of sperm and a drop of blood. The first had shot from the thighs of the courtesan! The second had spurted from the martyr's veins! Odious stigmata! Indestructible rosaces! My archangels found the flaming remnants of my opal tunic in the thickets of space, floating above the wide-eyed people of the earth. They could not piece it together again, and my body remains naked before their innocence; a memorable punishment for abandoned virtue. See the furrows which have hollowed out a bed in my discoloured cheeks: it is the drop of sperm and the drop of blood, slowly oozin
g down over my dry wrinkles. Reaching my upper lip, they make an enormous effort and penetrate the sanctuary of my mouth, attracted, like a lover, by the irresistible throat. They are suffocating me, these implacable drops. Until now I had considered myself the Almighty; but no; I must bow my head before remorse which cries out to me: "You are only a wretch!" Stop leaping up and down! Be quiet...be quiet...if anyone should hear you! but first wait for the sun to set on the horizon, that night may cover your steps...I have seen Satan, my great enemy, rouse himself from his larva-like torpor and, lifting up the bony tangle of his massive frame, harangue his assembled troops; as I deserved, he poured scorn upon me. He said he was very surprised that his proud rival, caught in the act by one of his perpetual spying missions which had at last met with success, could so debase himself as to kiss the dress of human debauch, after a long voyage over the reefs of ether; and that he should brutally torture and kill a member of the human race. He said that this young man, crushed in the machinery of my refined tortures, might have been a genius; might have consoled men on this earth for the blows of misfortune with wondrous songs of poetry and courage. He said that the nuns of the convent-brothel were no longer quiet in their graves; but prowled around the yard, gesticulating like automata, crushing buttercups and lilacs underfoot; that their indignation had driven them mad, but not so made as to forget the cause of the malady which afflicted their brains...(See them advancing, dressed in their white shrouds; they do not speak; they hold hands; their disheveled hair falls on their naked shoulders; a bouquet of black flowers in their bosom. Nuns, go back to your vaults. Night has not yet completely fallen; it is only evening twilight...Oh hair, you can see for yourself; on all sides I am attacked by the maddening feeling of my depravity!) He said that the Creator, who boasts of being Providence for all that exists, has behaved, to say the least, with great negligence, in presenting such a spectacle to the starry worlds; for he clearly expressed his plan to report to all the orbiting planets on how, by my own example, I maintain virtue and goodness in the immensity of my realms. He said that the great esteem in which he had held such a noble rival had vanished from his imagination; and that he would prefer to put his hand on a young girl's breast, although this is an act of execrable wickedness, than to spit in my face, covered in three layers of mingled blood and sperm; he would rather not defile his slimy spittle by such an act. He said he justly felt superior to me, not in vice, but in virtue and modesty; not in crime, but in justice; he said I should be strung up for my countless faults; that I should be burned slowly over a blazing fire and that I should then be thrown into the sea, provided the sea was willing to receive me. That since I boasted of being just, I, who had condemned him to eternal pain for a slight revolt which had not had grave consequences, then I ought to be severely just with myself, and judge my conscience impartially, laden as it was with heinous crimes!...Stop leaping up and down! Be quiet...be quiet...if anyone should hear you! I will put you back with the other hairs; but first wait for the sun to set on the horizon, that night may cover your steps.' He paused for a moment; although I could not see him at all, I judged from the length of the pause that a surge of emotion was heaving in his breast, like a whirlwind arousing a family of whales. Divine breast, defiled one day by the bitter touch of a shameless woman's nipples! Royal soul, which in a moment of forgetfulness abandoned itself to the crab of debauchery, to the octopus of weakness, to the shark of individual abjection, to the boa of amorality, and to the monstrous snail of imbecility! The hair and its master hugged one another close, like two friends who meet one another again after a long absence. The Creator continued, the accused appearing before his own tribunal: 'And what will men think of me, of whom they thought so highly, when they find out about the aberrations of my behaviour, my sandals' hesitant march over the muddy labyrinths of matter, the direction of the dark route I took over the stagnant waters and damp rushes of the pool where dark-footed crime, shrouded in fog, turns blue and roars...I see that i will have to work hard to rehabilitate myself in the future and regain their esteem. I am the Almighty; and yet in one respect I am inferior to the men I created with a grain of sand! Tell them a bold lie, tell them that I have never left heaven, where I am constantly enclosed, with all the cares of the throne, among the marbles, the statues and the mosaics of my palaces. I appeared before the celestial sons of mankind and I said to them: "Hunt evil away from your cottages, and let the cloak of good come in to your hearths. He who lays a hand on one of his fellow men, fatally wounding him in the chest with a murderous knife, let him not hope for any mercy from me, let him fear the scales of my justice. He will go and hide his sorrow in the woods; but the rustling of the leaves through the grove will sing the ballad of remorse in his ears; and he will flee those parts, stung in the hips by bushes, holly, and blue-thistles, his rapid steps caught up in the supple creepers, bitten by scorpions. He will make for the pebbles of the beach; but the rising tide with its spray and its dangerous surge will tell him that it is not unaware of his past; and he will rush blindly towards the cliff tops, while the strident equinoctial winds, whistling down into the natural caves of the gulf and the huge holes gouged in the rock-face, bellow like the huge herds of buffalo on the pampas. The lighthouses will pursue him to the northern limits with their sarcastic lights, and the will o' the wisps of the maremma, simple burning lights dancing in a fantastic style, will make the hairs of his pores shiver and make the iris of his eyes green. Let modesty thrive in your huts, and may it be safe in the shade of your fields. Thus will your sons become handsome and bow down in gratitude to their parents; if not, sickly and stunted as the scrolls of parchment in libraries, they will be led to revolt, and will step forward and curse the day of their birth and the lewd clitoris of their mother. How can men be brought to obey these strict laws if the legislator himself refuses to be bound by them...and my shame is as immense as eternity.' I heard the hair humbly forgive him for confining him, since his master had acted from discretion, and not from carelessness; and the last pale ray of the sun which gave me light disappeared into the ravines of the mountain. Turning towards it, I saw it coil round, like a shroud...'Stop leaping up and down! Be quiet...be quiet...if anyone should hear you! He will put you back with the other hairs. And now that the sun has set on the horizon, cynical old man and soft strand of hair, creep away from the brothel, while night, spreading its shadow over the convent, covers the lengthening of your furtive steps over the plain.' Then the louse, suddenly emerging from behind a promontory, says to me, brandishing its claws: 'What do you think of that?' But I did not want to reply. I withdrew and came back on to the bridge. I effaced the original inscription, and replaced it with this: 'It is painful to keep such a secret, like a dagger, in one's heart; but I swear never to reveal what I witnessed when, for the first time, I entered this terrible dungeon.' I threw the knife I had used to carve out these letters over the parapet. And making a few rapid reflections on the character of the Creator who was in his infancy and who was destined, alas! to make mankind suffer for quite a while (eternity is long) whether by his own acts of cruelty or by the ignoble spectacles of the chancres caused by a great vice, I closed my eyes like a drunken man at the thought of having such a being as my enemy, and sadly went on my way through the mazes of the streets.