by Edgar Quinet
(The kings go away.)
XII.
CHORUS
1.
Three falcons have gone to the mountain, weeping. In distress, they have let their prey slips from their talons. Their beaks are bloody all the way to their eyes, their claws all the way to their knees. They have also dropped their golden ring, which the torrent has carried away, which the sea will put on her finger—yes, the distant sea, which the falcons will never see, nor the kites, nor the goshawks, nor the merlins with their emerald eyes.
2.
Three mage-kings have retraced their steps, weeping. Their eyes are streaming with tears all the way to their cheeks, which they wipe with their beards. In distress, they have dropped their scepters into a spring. In despair, they have also dropped their crowns into a river, which the stream will take, which the current will draw away, which the ocean will put on its head—yes, the ocean of islands, which the kings will never see, nor the queen with them, nor the pantlers, nor the squires with their silver-stitched baldrics.
3.
A stork, on its roof, which has seen them, has said to the falcons: “What have you done with your claws, which tear your prey so well, and your wings that fly so rapidly over the edges of storms? Have you made war for three days with the hundred-cubit vulture of Jehosophat, that you are so weary?”
“No, no; it’s the chick of a Judean dove who, without emerging from his nest, has mortally wounded all the falcons of Arabia that have gazed upon him.”
4.
A well-constructed city, which has seen the, has said to the mage-kings: “Where are your cloaks and your fine clothes? Where are your crowns and your scepters that I had carved? Who has untied your girdles? Who has thrown your amulets on the road, with your miters? You must have made war with the son of a prince who had a hundred horses, all harnessed to his chariot, and a thousand armies to defend him. The slingshot-wielders have torn your robes, the cavalrymen your tunics, and the archers with their arrows have filled your eyes with tears.”
“No, no; it is a child off Galilee, with three shepherds, who discrowns all the kings of the Orient, as soon as he encounters them.”
THE CARTS
Since the gifts of the mages are worth less than the gifts of slaves, let our wheels no longer follow the kings. Now, the one who shall lead us dwells in Galilee.
THE MULES
Our gilded hooves do not want to walk any further on the paving-stones of the Orient. Now our guardian will set down our litter in another country, where the sun sets, where the shadow is denser.
BALTHAZAR, KING OF BABYLON
Now that it is necessary to travel without carts and mules, what has become of my city with its thousand towers? Ashamed, it has hidden its head in the sand, like an ostrich, and its breast in the brushwood. That child-God has playfully effaced my kingdom with his finger. My people have disappeared without waiting for me, like a knot that he has undone for the sake of amusement. My castles have turned to dust. Hola! Let a lion in this vicinity offer shelter for the night to the king of Babylon in the depths of its lair!
MELCHIOR, KING OF PERSIA
An Arab has passed by on a rapid mare to carry away my people on its rump to his tent. My nations, my satraps and my gods can be held today in the palm of my hand. Beautiful infant, what have you done? In your stable, you have overturned the lands of the Orient like a jug of milk.
THE KING OF SHEBA
Let us sit down on the ground to weep. Everything has been erased; our bodies are vanishing; our royalty is turning to ashes in our hands; our majesty is evaporating like a wisp of smoke in a shepherd’s fire.
BALTHAZAR, KING OF BABYLON
Look! I am no longer a king, nor the son of a king; my tears have become a stream in which cranes come to drink within the walls of my palace.
MELCHIOR, KING OF PERSIA
I am no more than a murmur in the heather of my halls, which repeats endlessly: “Thorny flower, flower of Asia, your crown has fallen.”
THE KING OF SHEBA
And mine, silvered by a ray of moonlight in the darkness, which says to the ruin: “Tower of marble, tower of the Orient, your roof is on the ground.”
CHORUS
1.
Yes, weep, falcons in your nest; weep, kings in your brushwood. The lands of the Orient have lost their summer, whose gold and gods ripened on the branch. The world’s sun is no longer in its morning, it has gone to seek its stable in other climes. Star of shepherds, will you follow it so far, all the way the lands of the evening, where frost hangs from the trees, where the birch pales, where the moss sighs, and where the stag, with his burden of antlers, bells in the black forests?
2.
Listen! The sphinx has made itself a shroud of sand, up to the neck. Entangled, the cities are going back down their staircases. Trembling, they huddle beneath the ardent heather. The arch is broken, the column bends its knee, the summit of the pyramid asks the stork to hide it beneath its wing.
3.
Pale, the crowd disperses; pale, the crowd vanishes. An entire people fattens a palm tree with its ashes, and an entire empire a flowering aloe. Of Babylon, only a goatherd remains, without a cloak, whistling for his goats; of the Persian armies only a herder of mares, who milks their teats.
4.
High up, on the mountain, the cypress has dressed itself in black to moan; the cistern has dried up. Down below, in the valley, the jackal has paused; he gazes, his hackles raised, and howls at a world that is no more: Awaken! The echo on the mountain, the echo in the valley, the oasis that listens, the sea that is open-mouthed and the desert that advances barefoot reply to it: “Our god Pan is dead.”
5.
A God younger than a thousand years has arrived; without jumping, he will overstep the sea in a stride. Grapes of Gaul, ripen beneath your oak; he is the one who will produce your vintage. Figs of Spain, whom no one has planted, he is the one who will pick you.
6.
But you, old Orient, without being able to untie your shores, you shall remain seated on your beach in Byzantium, like a pasha at the prow of his galley; put your turban on your head, fill up your hookah of gum and amber; count the waves that pass by; not one will bring you back the days of summer.
A SPHINX
Passer-by, who sings so well, do you know where there is any more of the wood of Judea in Lebanon, with which to carve a cross?
THE INTERLUDE OF THE FIRST DAY
DANCE OF DEVILS
LUCIFER
As comedies go, the play is good.
ASTAROTH
And the subject quite ridiculous
LUCIFER
The creation, you mean?
ASTAROTH
What else? When the void, ever agape, ever laughing, kisses your hand at your door, it’s a pleasant idea, in truth, to exchange it for a weeping world.
LUCIFER
Agreed. I thought, however, that Leviathan and the serpent would amuse you well enough.
ASTAROTH
About them, I’ve nothing to say; but to round out the sky with his trowel to provide shelter from the storm—for what? A worm? A weed? A thorn, at least; perhaps a mere nothing. No, less than that: a human being! The ending is happy, and merits your affection.
CHORUS OF DEVILS
Peace, now! Listen to Beelzebub.
BEELZEBUB
1.
Angels, dominations, notable masters and doctors in all things, you have heard the first act of our celestial comedy. That act is weak. Our choruses are as lacking in voice as the shades beneath our thongs: the Ocean has remained flat, Babylon has quavered before you, Nineveh has crumbled far too soon. What can be done about it? The fault is in the subject; the Creation is tedious. Neither on high nor down below, neither far away nor nearby, does anyone want it any longer.
2.
If our work is a chaos, is the universe any better? Everyone comes and goes without authorization. Verity, fantasy, what is dream and what is wakefulness? On the
road to Antioch I often thought that the stars were about to go out in the firmament like a boatman’s lamp, for lack of a little oil, at nightfall; and truly, the earth, leaning sideways, limps away at that hour like a drunkard, along the road that leads to my threshold. So go away then, fine drunken poem, limping cripple, to where the void lurks on your border.
3.
Nature is my passion , and an oriental night has always kept me awake around the trunks of fig-trees; but at present, between ourselves, one can admit it: that light darted over the shores, the indigo of the sea, the black shadow of the mountains, those voices sighing in the branches of forests, those spirits burbling in the springs, and that golden dust thrown in handfuls into the eyes of the universe, are of dubious quality; now, the secret is out. We do as much in our chemical crucibles; for three days, give me the firmament earth, sky, matter, sprit, science, glory, amour and four grains of carbonate in my crucible, and in three days, there will be nothing in the bottom but a fire-follet and a little residue the color of my face.
4.
Anyway, in everything, the commencement is difficult; and the Orient, which opened human life, was the Creator’s debut, which merits indulgence. Let’s admit it, our divine master’s hand was trembling, and searching for ideas while he took thousands of years to knead a nation, and he paused in the dark, in Egypt or in India, for time enough to make four worlds. How many centuries he wasted in heavily planting two or three suntanned peoples in the mid of the Nile, always stammering the same idea, in hieroglyphs, in chiseled stone, in murmuring cities, like a novice angel who stops in mid-verse, counting the syllables one by one on his fingers, with his bow!
5.
And then, one day, when he took all the visages of the religions of the Orient, and said without blinking: “With the hawk of Thebes I screech; with the unicorn of Persia I bound; with the dove of Chaldea I coo; with the crocodile, I lament; with the sphinx I crouch down;” did we not all think, my brothers, that the Eternal, having gone mad, was playing a divine comedy in which he was the only character? A marvelous role, I agree, for an accomplished artist, if he had been less bombastic in Babylon and the land of Egypt.
6.
But to him the real, to us the ideal. It’s no lie; on our silken wings, we have raised our subject as high as it could go. Beyond that, one only finds the vault of heaven, where the bird of death roosts, which accompanies each of my words with its chirping. The style has been reviewed and criticized for three centuries; its harmony is as striking as a cherub’s viol, and even a trifle hollow, to better reflect our model; for I strongly suspect that those vagabond skies, those vacillating stars, those gods, those immortal souls and that universal sphere are soap-bubbles clad in etheric colors, by means of which the Infinite is amusing himself, with a pipe blown between his fingers, in the cup of the world.
ASTAROTH
Or rather a round that he’s making to distract himself, while spitting into the well of the abyss.
LUCIFER
Yes, it’s more than probable; this evening, I want to try it in my turn on the pale spring where we drink.
BEELZEBUB
The idea is good; it pleases me entirely, for evil is discovered.
SAINT MADELEINE
I would like to hide my tears beneath my linen robe; when I was sitting by the road to Joppa, when I lowered my eyes to my book of psalms, I heard an exactly similar voice rustling the grass and the daisies of the meadow.
BEELZEBUB
My love, your sensitivity is exaggerated, your imagination is deceiving you; be sure that it’s purely an effect of my declamation, and that art pushed to a certain degree produces these illusions. Save the generosity of your heart for the sciences that follow; in any case, I can already hear the fig-trees falling under the apostles’ billhooks, and the water of baptism quivering in the Jordan. Those two sensations are equally disagreeable to me, so I shall retire.
THE SECOND DAY
THE PASSION
I
THE DESERT
1.
When a camel-driver passes along my road, singing his song for his herd to follow him, I fall silent in my sand. From morning until evening, I sit down at the entrance to my tent on the strand; I listen, I hold my breath while the caravan emerges from the gate of Damascus or Jerusalem. My voice is the wind of Arabia; walls that it shakes, half-closed doors in which it moans, towers whose crenellations it beats, fig-leaves that it dries out, miters and turbans that it loosens on the heads of priests, manes of horses that it heaps up like a flame in brushwood, listen to my song in your turn.
2.
The mountain adores its shadow; the river adores its mud; the boat adores its shore. I have neither shadow, nor mud to knead to make myself an amulet. Jehovah is the idol that I hang around my neck; he is made like me; like me, he is alone; like me, he marches in his sand without finding a companion; like me, he gazes at his bench, and sees nothing but himself traveling day and night on his beach: his breath effaces his years better than my breath efface the footprints of caravans with resonant bells. Worlds, nations and winged stars rest in passing by his cistern, as the migrating storks stop for a night at the water-holes of my wells. To decorate him, I have no Persian bracelets nor Indian ivory not Chaldean gold; the rays of the midday sun are my entire heritage; I make a flamboyant sword of them; and my immensity, without limits without gates, without springs, without confines, is the only ornament that I can give him.
3.
I had a palm-tree that I loved; its trunk was as slender as a daughter of Damascus, its crown bore its foliage as a Samaritan woman carries a pitcher full of water in returning from the well. Why are you sad, beautiful palm-tress with a thousand flowers the color of fire? If you seek shade, I shall go crawling to request it from my heather; if you seek water, I shall turn back to steep a flap of my girdle in dew.
4.
“Neither the shade of your heather nor the moisture of dew will console me. I want a breath to wither my flowers. I want to hollow out the wrinkles of my young trunk. I want to veil my head with my tangled foliage forever, like a priest in mourning. I am mortally saddened by what I have seen, on climbing to the top of my crown, in the direction of Golgotha.”
5.
Do not die, O palm-tree that I love; I have only you for my lips to kiss from daybreak until dusk. Am I not lying at your feet like a faithful dog? Every morning, have I not brought you the dew that I have found? When I wake up in the night, you pour your perfumed tresses over me; my dreams are embalmed when I dream of you. If you sway your crown, I think to myself: she is calling me; and I crawl into your shade. Oh, your shade! It is a crowd that lives in me; it is my spring, where I drink; it is my tent, where I go to sleep. You, the lover of my strand, the spouse of my burning sand, now that I love you, what would I become, my God, if the day, in dawning, no longer said to me: “There she is!”
6.
“What, my crown will not fade! How will the pith of my trunk not dry out beneath the bark? I can see, I can see Christ on the path that leads to Golgotha, dragging himself beneath his cross. For an aureole upon his head he has a crown of thorns. Oh, how slowly he is walking! He is looking behind him, to see if the desert might come to his aid. The crowd is muttering in the city like a winter storm. The tribes are climbing like vine-branches to the heights of their terraces; but the eagle is hiding its head beneath its wing. The summit of Horeb in descending in haste into the valley; at the zenith, two giant eyes, which contain more tears than a cistern has rain-water, half-closed beneath their azure lids, allow one of their burning tears to fall on me. If the God who has given me all my flowers is going up to Golgotha like an aloe to the top of its stem, to drink bitter poison from its calyx, I too want to dry myself out at my summit and die like him.”
7.
Wait one more hour! If I drive my sands before me, perhaps I shall arrive at the gate of Jerusalem before Christ has climbed Calvary. Tell the storks to give me their wings, the horses of Arabia
their rapid stride, the lion his mane, the serpent his coils, in order that I might travel faster than the tribes, than the cross-bearers.
8.
Oh how slowly I creep! Oh, how my saddle is burning my flanks! To cross a river, it takes my more than a year; to trample a city with its obelisks beneath the sole of my foot, I need a century. Before my gaping mouth rises up over the ramparts to drain the cup of that people, will not the cross have been erected? Before I have eaten away the steps of Calvary, will not Christ have drunk his bile and hyssop?
9.
The hour has passed; after the hour, the evening has also passed, and I shall arrive too late. Jehovah no longer has a son; I no longer have a palm tree, or any companion. Jehovah is alone in the firmament; I am alone on my strand; our two deserts come together, and sadden one another. Together we roll on in our immense ennui, without finding any shore therein; we only meet one another, we only hear one another. Our two echoes are similar. Tomorrow, when he passes by, like an Arab in search of his booty, if I ask him: “Where is your son?” he will reply: “And you, where is your shade?”
10.
And me! My voice is the wind of Arabia. Walls that it shakes, half-closed doors in which it moans, towers whose crenellations it beats, fig-leaves it desiccates, miters and turbans it loosens, horses’ manes that it heaps up like flames in dry grass, you have heard my song.
