Petrus BOREL: “Prologue,” in Madame Putiphar (1839)

PROLOGUE.

One sorrow is reborn as another fades;
When one grief gutters out, a new grief has unfurled;
Life is a briar that blooms in the tears it has made.

Within my sombre breast, as in a tilting-yard,
Three horsemen dash and clash and will not be at peace,
And these three horsemen, to my very self attached,
Contend for what I am; beneath the axe of each
My nature groans aloud — yet on these maddened three
My cries fall as the drums and brazen trumpets fall
Upon the weariest soldier, till in savage glee
He hurls himself, laughing, through the leaden squall,
His heart drunk with the rage and clamour of the fray.

The first is young and fresh, alert in every limb;
He wears with easy grace a corselet of steel
That glitters through a net of green encompassing him
As glacier glints through the pine-trees’ dark reveal.
His eye is amorous; his handsome golden head
Is helmeted and plumed with mantling richly wrought,
Whose heavy crest envelops him in floods outspread
As lampas-silk enwraps a swaying palanquin.
His Andalusian horse shakes out its streaming plume
And caracoles beneath its stirrups wrought of gold,
While dagger-flash and buckler-blaze light up the gloom
With all the nimbleness of some vain toreador.

The second horseman, like a reliquary raised,
Sits gravely perched upon a mule’s declining back —
A mule that would have set some Gothic scholar crazed,
For on its bony spine, that angular knuckled rack,
A faded housing has been carefully bestowed:
A housing that once draped some ancient chancel-stool,
Or decked the snow-white palfrey prancing down the road
On which Isabeau of Bavaria made her rule.
He’s stout and fat and wheezing; his cadaverous mount
Beneath him seems to crack and lean towards the vale:
A walking antithesis — a jest to recount —
Of Shrovetide riding out with Carnival in trail!
For he’s a penitent, a cowled and cassocked friar,
Entombed within his trailing habit, veiled in hood,
Who hides from earth below to sell himself the higher —
Beatifically astride his rectitude.
But Sabaoth inspires him: he rages, swears, and sweats,
And hurls at both his rivals challenges of pride
Well bolstered by a mace whose weight no man forgets:
He’s stained with blood, and kisses Christ the Crucified.

Now for the third: a man of stone is he entire,
Who seems the dread Commendatore, foul and dark —
A Hyperborean gnome whose lidless eyes are fire,
Whose hollow skull rings out, pupil-less, blank, and stark,
Like some despoilèd tomb struck by a passing blade.
He bears a scythe whose steel weeps blood in streaming red;
Behind his saddle hangs a caltrop, grimly laid,
From which there rots and grins a gallows-ripened dead —
Foul gibbet-game! And last, for scimitar he wears,
Swung heavy at his flank, an iron hook of vast
Proportions, threaded through with nets that trail their wares
Of earth-born grubs and carrion worms — his angler’s cast.

The first combatant, he the fairest — he’s the World!
Who crowns my head with flowers to draw me to his side,
And when the road is foul, his cloak beneath me furled,
He lays it for my steps, then dries the tears I’ve cried.
He’d have me follow him — he’d have me wholly yield
My self to him, without remorse or second thought,
And plunge into his breast and, on that crimson field
Of wave, be rocked to sleep, surrendered, gladly caught.
He is the joyous World, that smiling effigy,
Who flings before my youth, on both its leaves thrown wide,
The garden of the future, full of sorcery,
Where all my glorious days blaze forth in splendid pride.
Ineffable horizon! Starry sky above!
He is the clamorous World, with all its passions here,
Its veiled and lovely loves, its shameless ugly love,
Its thousand luxuries, its harlotries laid bare!
The World, its balls, its nights, its gaming-rooms, its dames,
Its feasts, its steeds, its sumptuous and groaning boards,
Where simple folk are base and wretchedness defames!
Where he who revels most the highest praise affords!
The World, its vast and shining cities, blazing bright,
Its Orient, its brigs upon the rolling main,
Its reputations thundering through the world’s delight,
Its deathless heroes and its conquerors’ proud refrain,
Its poets — very gods! — whose works strewn on the way
The drunken nations kiss with rapture as they pass,
Its temples, palaces, its royalties’ display,
Its clash of steps, of voices, hands upon the glass!
The World! He speaks to me: “Come with me now, young man;
Put all your trust in me — I’ll sate your each desire.
However vast they be, I’ll pay you all I can!
You want for glory? Here! Take pleasures? I’ll set fire
To men with them — and so to you! Those women, too,
Whose sight alone drives senses mad — they shall be thine,
And on their wanton flesh your passions, ever new,
You’ll whet as on a stone, and sharpen by design!”

The second combatant — he of the solemn mien,
The mild and benign air, whose face compunction shades —
He is the Solitude, the Desert, wastes unseen;
He is the Cloister, where the Lord’s devotion wades
In torrents down, where dews of silence and of calm
Transform the bitter gall to sweetness, where the soul
Is bathed in ceaseless light and steeped in holy balm:
The mountain where the Christian speaks with God, made whole!
The Cloister! And he says: “Ascend to me, young man;
Put all your trust in me. Forsake a world that lies,
Where all things fade away as when the dreamer’s plan
Dissolves with morning’s light. Go — if you would be wise,
The one redeemer of our miseries below
Is this: the monastery, stern, contemplative!
All things on earth are vice and pestilence. And so
Know this: that glory’s vain, and what posterity can give
Is but a prideful error, an absurd conceit!
Would you erect, along your road, a monument
That lives? Alas! the world forgets. The years delete
All record, and our life has no day subsequent.
Come, taste with me the stillness of the hermitage;
Leave carnal love, its filth, its gross impurity;
Break free — it is not late. Your soul in its green age
Was never made for such a world; its purity
Demands a faithful keeper. Come! And if in prayer
And meditation you find not enough to drink,
Then you shall descend into the sombre lair
Of holy learning; bend your vigil-pallid brink
Of brow above its sacred crucibles, and raise
The name of Christ — and pour contempt upon the stage
Where Philosophy, that mountebank, displays
Its blasphemies atop its trestle-boards of age.
Or if you choose the beloved study of the arts,
Then worship them within the shadow of this place;
Upon this dome and wall, with all your fervent parts,
A second Bartholomew, Lesueur in grace
Though not in fortune — paint the Bible and paint God!”

The final combatant, that resonant cavalier,
The frigid spectre, gnome with nets and fishing-rod —
It’s he I fondle close and secretly revere:
Eternal leveller, implacable of blade,
It’s Death, it’s Nothingness! In subterranean tone
He calls to me unceasingly: “Child, come to my shade;
Child, plunge into my breast, for Sorrow sits the throne
Of this accursèd earth, and Infamy is king!
Come, descend again; come, plunge back in the mire,
Chrysalis, ephemeron, shadow, wavering!
Come soon, not late; I never weary, never tire —
I harvest one by one the grapes from Mankind’s vine.
Before the heavy pestle of all suffering
Has ground your heart to dust, snuff out that flame of thine!
Our Lady of Rejoicing and of Ransoming —
That’s Death! The promised Canaan — that’s the tomb!
What do you wait for? What’s your will? Pay no regard
To that seducing Cloister’s tongue — believe the gloom
Of mine instead. You do not know, child, how ’tis hard,
How binding is the Cloister! Rest it swears to give;
It’s but a gypsy cheat who lies and wheedles well,
Then casts you in his net! And there a man must live
Still prey to his obsessions. In that desert’s spell
There is no calm; at leisure it inflames the fire
Of passions. In the Cloister, heed me well, you suit
No better than the World. Fear its deceitful choir
Of peace; fear Anthony’s fell satyrs at the root;
Fear temptation, fear remorse, fear every danger,
The sieges of the flesh, the fallings of the soul.
Beneath the desert wind your longings grow no stranger
But blaze the more; solitude racks and rends the whole,
It grips, it tortures, breaks, enkindles — and your sense
Shall sink to sufferings no tongue has ever told!”
“No happiness is true, no rest is more than pretence,
Save in the grave alone. Upon the earth, the cold
Fares ill; beneath it, well. There, no corroding bliss;
There, no false fellowship; there, no ambition’s sting,
No hope betrayed — just Nothing! Nothingness! The abyss —
An absence, a dead bolt, a sea unsounding,
A void with no echo! Come, I say to you!
At my voice you shall crumble into powder — all,
As Jericho’s high walls before the trumpets blew!”

So, for a weary age, this hellish trio brawl
And hack at one another — three proud bravos, these —
Who’ve seized upon (the villains!) for their battle-hall
My wretched heart, all bruised beneath their batteries;
My wretched, stricken heart, that buckles and is ground —
Doubting, devout, and mad, worldly and miscreant!
When shall the struggle end, and who shall claim the mound
Of me — God knows! — the Desert, World, or Vacant?