by Edgar Quinet
As with the legend of Faust, the contents of the German pamphlet were widely reprinted in new editions, translations and paraphrases; they were almost certainly re-appropriated into oral tradition, where they were amalgamated with other items of folklore. The story was exported to all of the major European languages; while it was told and retold it was presumably continually bolstered, after the manner of modern urban folktales, with news of more recent and local sightings of the immortal wanderer. Such embellishments helped to maintain the immediacy of the tale, and each new addition contributed more apparent substance to the weight of hearsay evidence. The 1602 pamphlet is as near to a “definitive” version of the story of the Wandering Jew as there is; it is the basis of most subsequent transfigurations.
Once the legend had become commonplace it invited both literary recycling and scholarly analysis. The symbolic significance of the accursed wanderer was extensively discussed by Johann Jacob Schudt's Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten (1714-18), which concluded that Ahasuerus ought not to be imagined as a single person, but the entire Jewish people. Schudt’s thesis was reiterated by others, sometimes broadened to make the wanderer a symbol of the existential predicament of the entire human race, and became a kind of standard interpretation, echoed in many literary transfigurations. The most significant use of the figure in 18th century French literature was in Simon Tyssot de Patot’s utopian romance La Vie, les aventures et le voyage au Groenland du Révérend Père Cordelier Pierre de Mésange (1720).
The German pamphlet had first been translated into French in 1605 as Discours véritable d'un Juif errant, and one of its early reprints, in 1609, was supplemented by a complainte—a lyric lament—in which the wanderer makes much of the quality of his suffering, emphasizing that immortality is no boon in combination with eternal restlessness. The complainte remained associated with the story in many subsequent versions, and similar lyrics became at least as important in maintaining the currency of the legend in France as prose versions. The most important item of that kind appeared towards the end of the eighteenth century, relating to an alleged sighting of Ahasuerus in Brussels on 22 April 1774, celebrated in a Belgian complainte that came to be known as the Brabantine ballad, which was spread far and wide throughout France by virtue of an image d’Épinal: a pictorial print illustrating the Jew’s confrontation with the burghers of Brussels, which sold in vast quantities through a distribution network of colporteurs.
The Brabantine ballad stimulated many imitations in France, the best-known derivative being an 1831 lyric by Pierre de Béranger, which was intended to be sung to a familiar tune, although new music was eventually provided for it by Charles Gounod. Quinet undoubtedly heard the original version, which might well have played some part in promoting him to begin work on Ahasvérus, and certainly added to the continuing popularity of the image d’Épinal in maintaining the currency of the legend and making the reference immediately comprehensible to Quinet’s audience.
Quinet was by no means the first writer associated with the Romantic Movement to take an interest in the legend, and was undoubtedly familiar with at least one of several poems by German Romantic writers. The most famous was Christian Schubart’s “Der Ewige Jude” [The Eternal Jew] (1783), an English translation of which prompted Percy Shelley to make use of the figure in “Queen Mab” and two other poems. There was, however, an English ballad, presumably adapted from the French complaintes and reproduced in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which presumably had a similar influence, and was probably responsible for uses of the motif in various Gothic novels, most notably Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796) and William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799). Although the only English Romantic to whom specific mention is made in Ahasvérus is Byron, it is not improbable that Quinet was familiar with other English examples.
Ahasvérus was undoubtedly influential, in its turn, on subsequent works, most obviously in France, although it might also have helped to stimulate the German Romantic Julius Mosen to produce his own epic Ahasvar (1838). By far the most famous subsequent French version was Eugène Sue’s extraordinarily elaborate Le Juif errant (1844; tr. as The Wandering Jew)—in which Ahasuerus plays a purely symbolic role—produced at the height of the newspaper circulation war conducted by means of feuilleton serials, in which it ran head-to-head on a daily basis with Alexandre Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte Cristo.
Sue took up the thesis of Quinet and Michelet’s Des Jésuites in order to make the Society of Jesus the villains of his melodrama. Dumas subsequently set out to write his own far more explicit Wandering Jew epic in Isaac Laquedem (1852-53), which he intended to be his masterpiece, but it ran into trouble with the Second Empire’s censors and Dumas abandoned it in disgust, although that did not stop him making the most of the adumbrated text.
Although neither Sue nor Dumas copies anything directly from Quinet’s particular version of the legend, there can be little doubt that both writers had its symbolism and its radicalism in mind in planning their own alternative versions. The third member of the great triumvirate of mid-century feuilletonists, Paul Féval, added his own version to the canon in “La Fille du juif errant” (1864)3, and although he did not copy anything directly from Quinet either, he too was aware of his work—he was later to pen a fervent rebuttal of Quinet and Michelet’s Des Jésuites—and probably intended his own repentant version of the accursed wanderer partly as an ideological reply to Quinet.
The influence of Ahasvérus undoubtedly waned once the Romantic Movement passed into history and it joined the vast ranks of books that are no longer widely read, but that is partly because its innovative work was done and its prophetic element had worked out. There are still people in the world looking forward to a literal Last Judgment, who can see no reason to anticipate the need to appeal it, but in the main, the idea of such a Judgment has faded into oblivion, for precisely the reasons anticipated by Quinet, and although the third element of his tripartite conclusion still has a way to go before it can be declared fully justified, the signposts do point in that direction—and whether one agrees with that particular post-apocalyptic judgment or not, there is no doubt that the argument supporting it still provides nutritious food for thought.
This translation was made from the version of the “new edition” of Ahasvérus published in 1843 “Au Comptoir des Imprimeurs Unis,” with occasional assistance from the London Library’s copy of the same edition. Although I have anglicized the name of the central character and most of the others employed in the text, I have reproduced Quinet’s idiosyncratic spelling of several names for which he deliberately does not use the conventional French spelling, and have occasionally retained French spellings for reasons indicated in the footnotes.
Brian Stableford
PROLOGUE
VOICES IN THE SKY
Hosannah! Hosannah!
GABRIEL
Silence! The Lord is going to speak.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Listen, Saint Michael, Thomas, Bonaventure, great Saint Hubert who was archbishop at Liège, and you, Pythagoras, Joseph the Just and Marcus Tullius.4 For a thousand years and more your ordeals have been complete and your souls have risen from limbo to the highest seats in paradise, as the dew of the marsh reeds once did, when the sun brought it to my feet. You know that time is complete, after three thousand five hundred years, and the last judgment will soon take place in Jehosophat.
Look! In the depths of the skies, the earth is still trembling; bewildered, it rolls through space, no longer knowing where it is going. Consider whether a leaf fallen from a birch tree in the Ardennes, on the feast of the dead, has ever blown over more mountains and more paths, traveling without knowing where before being engulfed in my well of wrath. You remember. When the hawk of Germany or Judea rose up from the heather, in the early morning, every bird in the fields and every bird in the towns went to hide its head under a twig and suppressed its voice. Consider whether all the worlds that powder the abyss would not like to cowe
r beneath a wisp of thatch, beneath the grass of a spring or the cloak of a man, while I deploy my extended wings over their hiding-places in an eternal circle.
The silence is profound. Do you hear, from the heights of the Empyrean, that sun which is humming so far away that the news has not yet reached it, and the Hosannah of the Cherubim that falls from one world to the other, more monotonous than raindrops into the lake of a grotto? That’s enough rest. Another hundred years would be too many. If the World is weary of its first day, by touching it with a wing, my angel Gabriel, you shall reawaken the worker in my vineyard. I have said to you: the earth is bad, I shall create another tomorrow.
This time, I will make humankind from a better clay, and knead it better. The trees will have more shade, the mountains will be higher. Neither your cope, Saint Hubert, nor your lance, nor your azured shield, nor your diamond-studded miter will shine as brightly as tomorrow’s light on a golden sea. The days will be longer, and your experience will save that world more effectively from all temptation than the Cherubim and Seraphim were able to do of old, in emerging candidly from the cradle of nothingness.
But whatever the state will be into which the world that is about to be born shall eventually fall, in order to prepare yourself better to hold it in your charge, I want the good, the bad and all the deeds and destinies accomplished in the world where you have lived to be retraced now, in eternal figures. I want the secrets that I hid, with my hand, in the hollows of rocks and the shimmering sky of lakes to be revealed. I want you to be shown the earth since it escaped my hand like the grain of the sower to produce its tares, until the day when I reaped them, all dry and withered, in the valley of Jehosophat.
The adulterous woman that I stoned on the edge of the road the day before yesterday, you shall see in veils, beneath the girdle of seas, valleys and forests that she untied on the evening of her eternal night. You shall see by what long sunlit days and arid nights the cup from which my name and my life overflowed gradually emptied, only retaining the lees and the universe in its depths.
SAINT BONAVENTURE
Lord, when a swallow is about to depart for Africa or Asia, its little ones are already fluttering their wings in advance over the roofs of Florence the beautiful. Thus we make haste, divine swallows, to follow you forever into the future worlds that are dormant within you, which you will create. Will this world, Lord, be another world of Calabria, with monasteries and diamond cells? Will there be cypresses with a sea asleep beneath their ivory foliage, boats on the bottomless waves with sails of light, and brothers with their aureoles sitting among hives and golden bees?
SAINT HUBERT
Will there not, Lord, be massive gold cathedrals, thick vaults in stone, stained glass windows made from a flap of your robe? Will there not be, in the surroundings, silver birches and ash-trees, and marble balconies overlooking a river six times as wide as the Rhine in Cologne?
SAINT BERTHE5
Will there not, Lord, be children fast asleep, whom you will rock endlessly in your arms above the clouds? Will there not be souls in ivory cities, in which the tears of a rose will live for a hundred years?
THE ETERNAL FATHER
I have already told you that before creating another star, I want to make known and explain to you the mystery of the world whence you have come. You have lived there without knowing what it is. Some have seen it in the Holy Land, others in Brabant, some for ten years, others a hundred; but not one of you has held the fruit fallen from my branch in your hand to seek the gnawing worm; not one has lifted the seal of the seas and the ruined cities and the tombs of peoples that I always heap up to hide my treasures; not one has bent down to see the seed of my new crops verdant in the abyss, beneath the cloud of the earth.
SAINT HUBERT
Lord, I traveled in Europe and Africa a long time ago, where I’ve seen orange-trees higher than great oaks; around monasteries, waves bluer than your only son’s tunic; on the road to Jericho, spangles and silver sands; on the trees of the desert, gum and the incense of the mage-kings; and in the roses of Joppa, crystal tears. Is it possible, divine Creator, that beneath those myrtle woods, those transparent rivers and streams, you had put more marvels and magical treasures than any man has seen or touched?
THE ETERNAL FATHER
It’s a long story, which oppresses me. My Seraphim will celebrate the terrible mystery before you; everything will have its place therein; every time, every century that I shook, one after the other from the folds of my cloak, will be explained by them in its own language. Mountains and plains will open like flowers; find a voice to speak the secret that that you have kept so well in the depths of your calices. Dead and newborn children, repeat here, in their mothers’ bosoms, your dormant thoughts, your embalmed dreams. Earth, open up to display your genius. The choir of angels will repeat your words with to the sounds of trumpets. Let the stars shine like a night-lamp full of oil. Come, troop of the elect, like mown grass, to pile up around me; lean over without fear from your every cloud, look into the abyss and be attentive; the spectacle will last approximately six thousand years.
THE FIRST DAY OF CREATION
I.
THE OCEAN
Thank you Lord, enough accumulated waves; your urn is full, it is overflowing drop by drop as it emerges from the spring. The trough is full; when will the herds come to drink? Your breath is exhausting me; you are whipping my flanks and tearing my rump; I cannot run any faster, nor bound to lick the fleeing sky with my waves more often under the spur of your whip. I cannot span the abyss any better with my streaming feet, nor shake my mane of foam and further, nor roll my breast and my flanks any harder. Where are you going, Lord? For a long time I have been driving and heaping up my waves, without ever arriving; still I hear nothing but my waves whinnying; still I see nothing but myself in my immensity. Yesterday, when a nascent ray of moonlight chanced to skim the summits of my waves, that was a cause for celebration: I thought that your hand was caressing my breast and wanted to tie me down with a golden thread, or that a wing of flame was passing through my tangled mane; but as soon as it had touched me, the ray trickled like a spring and erupted in foam. Oh, if I ever found a shore, a world other than me, I would make myself a bed there of white foam, the dust of pearls, coral crystals, algal roots and red seashells; my waters would be suspended there, Lord, like the blade from your belt. All night long I would kiss the sand on my shores; my panting waves would swell up without a murmur; there is only you who could say: It is there that they sleep.
LEVIATHAN
launching waters over firm ground
Who has hurled me out of the gulf? Who has given me my polished scales, my gaping jaws, my tail the color of the vegetation of the strand? Water is crawling over the beach, islands are crouching in the mist, the abyss is opening its maw, the wind is mewling in the rocks, the waves are swelling into teats, the wavelets are jostling like a litter of crocodiles hanging on to their mother; the crests of mountains are shining like scales crunched between the teeth of Leviathan.
THE VINATEYNA BIRD6
Lower, Ocean, transparent sea, much lower; fold up your vast waters as I fold my wings when I want to stop; more, more! Let me see all the way to the depths of your bed how beautiful my golden feet, my golden beak and my twenty-cubit wingspan are; you, who know everything, tell me where I am this morning. Have I, then, curled my neck beneath my wing on the edge of chaos, or was I sleeping in my down on a silver rock? Tell me who has come to take me from my nest, who has set me on a cloud; since that time I have been flying, flying without rest; look, it is from my beak that the seeds of life are falling, one by one, that will make plants and forests; I let the water-lily fall into the valleys, the tamala on to the mud, the baobab into the plains, the vine-flower into the hollows in the rocks, the willow-flower at the edges of springs, the heather on mountain-tops. The leaves quiver, the reeds rattle, already the stars are flying like a flock of birds with golden wings setting out for distant lands.
THE SERPENT
Oh, if I had wings like you, before speaking, I would climb up to the highest cloud, I would find out what is around us; since it is necessary, it will be me who will rear up from the mire to see whether the universe has been born; behind the tree of the world, I shall climb around its trunk, knot myself around its branches. Look! My tail is touching the earth, my thousand heads are standing at its summit; above its foliage my tongues dart their venom at the four winds; who wants to pick those bloody flowers? But truly, I see nothing but mountains folding up their coils, nothing but rivers sliding like grass-snakes through the forests, nothing but the horse Séméhé7 racing without ever stopping under the claws of djinn; he is sweating blood, the wind is shaking his silver tail; in his breast two eyes are blazing; at every moment his color changes; he is pale he is black, he is as blue as the sky, bruised like the venom that falls from my mouth. Oh, it’s a pity!
