by Edgar Quinet
MOB
They come from the land where incense grows on trees.
CHORUS OF ARABS
A saber sculpted in Damascus, when one draws it from its scabbard, shines more brightly than a torch in the night; and I, my Master, have drawn myself from my darkness, like a sculpted saber, to make myself sparkle at the saddle-bow in the hour of battle. My cutting edge has been whetted on the stone of the sepulcher of Calvary, and my blade has resounded upon the breastplates of Cordova and Grenada the Beautiful. When your son died and Carmel trembled, I departed to sow sand and salt before me everywhere that my prophet of wrath took me. On my illuminated shield I bore for a motto: Fire and Blood.
I have raised my minarets in the desert, like lighthouses over the sea. And if any stray city, thinking itself alone, raised itself up on its elbow to look in the direction of Golgotha, I decapitated it, and I buried its heavy head in my cisterns, with its tresses of columns that I loosened over its shoulders. I have led the wind of Arabia by the bridle and spurred it along the road as far as the valley of Roncevaux, under the banner of Charlemagne. I have bound in the Alhambra, by my iron ring, two shores that sought one another murmuring aloud, the Atlas and Spain, the Orient and the Occident, which you had forgotten to attach to one another.
When my desert had thus increased to surround your son’s tomb, I sat down to keep watch on his rock, for fear that a gazelle, or a stork, or a wild chamois might take shelter there. Now I have finished my day’s work, where are the virgins that the prophet promised me? In what ship have you been able to bring them without its sail leaning over to catch their breath? In what star have they been sold to you, without the star dreaming of kissing them with its rays? Have you painted their eyelids yourself with the brush with which you made the nights of winter? Have you wound a turban of light about their heads as for the wives of emirs? Have you whitened their shoulders, as the source of the Guadalquivir does its foam? And have you taught them to spin their cotton on their mats, until their master, on arriving, shakes the sand of death from his feet at their door?
PEOPLES OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Back, Moors and Saracens! On hearing your voice the sword rattles in the scabbard; the iron mouth of the halberd cries out beneath the crest; and Babieca, the worthy horse of the Cid, Rodrigo de Bivar, weeps beneath the iron caparison that Valencia forged for him. Our helmets are fastened. If you wish, Lord, we shall all return, with our gilded shields, our swords of furbished steel and our colored banners, to help you unseat them.
CHORUS OF ARABS
We are ready for combat, and our chestnut horses too; our arrows are strung.
CHORUS OF SAINTS
Another battle! What will happen? There they run; there they cry. The east and the west, crossing lances! Two open tombs! Which will be filled? Everyone carries the same number of feathered arrows in his quiver. I tremble that a poisoned dart might reach this far, unwittingly to inflict an eternal wound on a divine spirit.
SAINT CHRISTOPHER
I am the strongest; on my shoulder, far from the battle, one after another, I shall carry Christ, the Virgin, his mother, and his Father too, like hurried travelers who pass without paying the toll.
SAINT MICHAEL
The Father is too old to quit his accustomed heavens henceforth. Before him, in the battle, I shall extend my wing like a shield.
SAINT GEORGE
Beneath my azure escutcheon, I shall shelter the firmament, as a hen shelters her brood, and the heavens beneath the iron of my lance.
THE HEAVENS
The bow is drawn. Before the arrow, I too want to flee.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Heavens, do not tremble or flee; remain here. Saints, fold up my banner. I have seen jousting for a long time between east and west without turning a hair. From the tower of the Bosphorus to the jetty where the lemon-trees of Andalusia bathe, the two worlds have risen every day with their shores, to overflow and collide with one another. All their promontories have extended their arms, armored with cities and battlements like gauntlets, to seek one another out and attack one another in their eternal struggle. Strip off your gauntlets on the road, Moors and Saracens; I have made you azured spurs in advance; saddle your Arabian horses; race forward off the bridle, far from here, for a thousand years, to discover where the edge of my immensity is. Say to Oblivion, as you pass by: “Get up; emerge from your tent; my master is following me.”
To my left, I hear other people buzzing. Their kings have neither scepters nor names nor crowns; they are recognizable on by the blindfolds I have placed over their eyes. No heart beats within their breast; they go barefoot, before the crowd, like a woman being stoned.
MOB
They are the peoples of France, Germany and England. I have wounded them so deeply in the soul that they do not recognize you, and pass by without seeing you. Listen to their songs.
CHORUS OF SAINTS
1.
Don’t listen to them. Their songs are drunken, your eyes with weep harsh giant tears. Over your thousand-year beard, Lord, that eternal weeping will flow; and tomorrow, and forever, it will make a sea, yes, a bottomless sea, in which every hull will drown, with its mast, its sail inflated with love and its anchor of hope.
2.
Close, close your great eyelid in order no longer to see the universe passing, upright, over your paving-stones, without bending the knee. Like a little bird that has woken up too early in its nest, and, saying nothing, half-fledged, has quit the wing of its father or mother, it will go, for its sin, to be caught in your fowler’s net, and nested in Oblivion. Our voices sing more softly without it; only listen to our chorus.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Nothing makes me weep, and it is necessary for me to know everything.
MODERN PEOPLES
Beneath the wind of the tempest, in the heather and the brambles, we are going to seek our God, whom we have lost. He is not in life; let us search all the crannies of death. (To the Eternal Father.) Hola, Old Man, looking at us from the top of your wall, what are you doing there? Can’t you see that our feet are bruised and that our lips are drying out in our breath? Tell us, then, if you know, which way our God has gone?
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Until the end, without turning your head, continue on your road, which descends into the abyss; when you reach the bottom, you’ll find a path that I’ve made to climb back up toward him.
THE PEOPLES
Adieu, Old Man! Sleep well! The night is drawing in; we can no longer see anything but your beard, which is whitening on your bosom, like an Alpine torrent.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
March! March!
THE PEOPLES
Now we can no longer see anything but the belt of your robe, which shines around you like a river of lava around the waist of a mountain.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
March! March!
THE PEOPLES
Now I can no longer see anything but the edge of the sword by your side; oh, raise it against our kings!
CHORUS OF KINGS
Lord, we are the ones who, until the end, have filled your lamp with oil. Show us the road to our future thrones.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
The oil that I wanted lights up in souls, not in the lamp.
CHORUS OF KINGS
We are the ones who have written your name in letters of gold on our crowns of brass.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Back, go away! You have eaten away the skull of my peoples, like Count Ugolin,44 for long enough. Disappear, accursed ones! I want none of you in my new city.
THE VOID
Master, give me their mantles in which to dress myself, and to pasture their bitter tears.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Also take their fleur-de-lis scepters from their hands. (To Mob.) Have I seen everything now? Is the world finished?
MOB
Not yet, my God! Here’s America emerging from its canoe.
AMERICA
What, already, Lord? The water of the deluge has scarcely wetted my shoulders. I don’t yet know my shores, nor the paths of my forests, nor the springs of my pampas. I’ve only looked at myself once, in passing, in the lakes of my savannahs. In a day, I moored my islands in my gulfs, like brand new canoes. I have thrown my rope-bridges, which I haven’t yet crossed, over my torrents. Why have you made the shadow so dense in my valley as not to let me rest there for one night?
Like an infant whose mother cradles him beneath a palm-branch, the Ocean rocked me in its waves, and I listened to the plaint of the old world on the breeze, which as dying. Oh, if it’s weary of its long years and its memories, if its towers and heavy walls are too burdensome to keep, carry it up to your summit as the royal vulture carries away in its claws the rattlesnake that it has found dead on the beach; but a for me, Lord, my towers are light, and the memory of my years is as easy to carry as the lianas of my forests. A single Mexican flower opening in the morning contains all my tears in its calyx. My kings are young date-palms standing on their mountains; my nations are wild pineapples leaning over their shadow, which no one has picked.
Lord, when the condor has made its nest on my summit, with the scales of the crocodile, the wool of the cotton-plant and the cane of the reed, it lays its eggs there; and your aerie is made of the sides of my mountains, the trunks of my forests, the water-drop of my lake, the blades of grass of my field and the shores of my islands. Why don’t you want to hatch out your peoples there beneath your breast at leisure, until they can follow you, wings extended, into your eternity?
THE ETERNAL FATHER
I had made for you, in hollowing out your profound valley, a mold in which to pour your thought and your soul. I had sent your rivers on ahead to show your cities the way. As a master spells out for his pupil the word that he must repeat, I had filled your forests and shores with the voices of my cataracts, in order that you might learn in good time to echo in the voices of your cities, to rumble in the hosts of your peoples, as loudly as they with their waves. I had built the summit of your Cordilleras stone by stone, in order that you might see how high your pride and your towers ought to rise. But while my peoples where working for more than a thousand years, you, nonchalant on your elbow, playing with your sea-shells, had not yet turned your head toward the giant-world that sent you so many sighs.
Now that it is at rest, raise your genius around me as high as the Andes. Give me, in order to riffle through them, more names in one day than a palm tree has flowers in spring. Unfurl in my ears the poem of your years, better than a forest liana runs from one trunk to another, from one bank to another. As the cotton-plant waves its cotton on its bench, weave the future for me henceforth, every day.
If you make me a banner, I want it to be embroidered better than the girdle of your shores; if you make me a church, I want the arches under its vault to be denser than my virgin forests, and the pillars to expand there at the summit better than my aloes n their stem; I want the organ there to have more pipes than there are voices in the swaying of date-palms, the whistling of pampas grass, the serpent’s rattle, the lowing of bison, the jaws of caimans, and the Ocean that lashes you with its rods without awakening you.
ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC SEA
And we, whom you have led so far, to the end of the world, to close the chain around your neck, have learned to polish our diamond flowers. We can make you, if you wish, a Babylon with ebony-wood towers, and another town of Bethlehem with a sapphire manger for a new Christ, if he is ever to be reborn.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
I consent to that. Work. Here are ten centuries, which I’ll give you in our hour-glass. Now, in the earth, the foam of the wave, the cloud of the sky, does any secret still remain that no voice has pronounced?
MOB
Not one more. If some excessively timid flower in its hedge, some excessively modest spring on its sand, has not dared to tell its mystery, the great voices of cities and peoples have told it to you in their stead to the sound of trumpets.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
1.
Now my city is complete and populated, full to the brim with souls. All the world makes up but one closed city with battlements and walls of azure. Every star is the house in which a soul dwells. From its terrace it gazes, smiling, beneath its painted eyelid, at my streets full of people, my gilded bridges over the bottomless abyss, my palaces built with the stones of the firmament, the glittering stairway that my squire, fearlessly, goes up and down, and the stars that spring forth beneath the hoof of my horse. My outskirts extend to the ends of the universe, without fear of getting lost; and nothing knocks on my door but the waves of the sky when it is angry.
2.
Waves on the sky, hear me. No longer break my boat. It is full, now, of resuscitated spirits that your foam will salt. Mares with golden manes, no longer flinch at my threshold. You all draw immortal thoughts in your chariot now, which your saliva would soil.
3.
In my city of souls, the same language will be spoken everywhere, the name of which is poetry. Made, without letters and without words, of the sighs of receding water, the last plaint of a bird falling asleep, the voice of a primerain flower in its silvery bell, the murmur of a sea-shell of its shore and desire in its decline, it will be understood without having been learned. Everyone weary of being awake, who would like to stop, need only say, when a star arrives in the morning, in the house of Sagittarius or Gemini: “Open up, beautiful Sagittarius; open up to shelter me”—and the heavens will understand.
4.
Gathered more carefully in my hand, my peoples will be better able to listen to me henceforth. Of a hundred kingdoms, I shall no longer make but one kingdom, greater, more beautiful and more powerful. Of a thousand laws, I shall make just one, easier to obey. Written on my vault every day, with a ray of sunlight, it will only be necessary to look up to see it. Following their golden orbits in their profound groves, my empires shall rotate their fiery wheels around me every year, in my carousel. Look! they have set forth again! Behind them the firmament totters. Courage! Faster! Let’s go! Faster” I shall await them to watch them pass. Disheveled, out of breath, let them lean forward over their constellations, with their flaming whips. The first that touches my barrier without falling, I shall crown.
5.
As in Holy Rome, when it is time for the Ave, the Byzantine bell-towers shall quiver and cry: Kyrie eleison, and the bell-turrets reply lower down, in chorus: eleison; and all the people shall emerge from their houses and go to church, and the sound rises up to me on its bronze wheels; thus the worlds in my azure campanile bound, shiver and hum. For my celebration, they shall ring easily, as a bird flaps its wing. If I wish, they shall toll; if I prefer, it shall be the baptism of a new universe. Vibrant under their golden hammers, the sun shall bellow and rumble eternally.
For the day that is dying the evening stars are silvery plaints; those of the morning are an aubade and a crystalline chant for the day that is lighting up again. The earth has a murmur that never stops, day or night; and all those voices of worlds make up one voice, all the sighs make up one brazen sigh, which summons from the void, to kneel down barefoot in my nave, days to come, future empires, half-born hopes and regrets already commencing.
6.
It’s getting late; from my mound I see, like a shepherd, my flocks returning to the fold. On the grass of my hill, my Taurus, who has hollowed out, all alone, under my goad, the furrow on my zodiac, has lain down, and is thinking, while ruminating: I have done my work. Since dawn, my Aries, walking at random, has left his fleecy wool hanging in vapor on the hedge of the firmament. Bounding, my Capricorn, browsing the heather of the clouds, is already butting the red threshold of tomorrow with his forehead. I his blue quiver, the color of time, my Sagittarius has replaced his feathered arrow; and there my Scorpio, with his feet of stars, is scuttling hideously on his golden abdomen through the ruins of the old world.
7.
That�
�s enough. The earth has listened, the earth has wept, the earth has uttered a sigh to the distance heavens. Like an echo, the heavens have understood the venomous plaint, and have thrown it back; yes, the heavens in their empty abyss. And now, everything is silent. Have I nothing else to forgive?
THE UNIVERSE
No, Lord.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Nor anything else to curse?
MOB
There is still one man who marches day and night. His beard falls to his feet. He remains in my shadow in order that your eyes might not see him. He has folded his head over his knees in order that you might not hear his breath. His name is Ahasuerus.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Where is he?
MOB
There, in the bottom of my valley. To climb out, he will traverse all the dead.
THE ETERNAL FATHER
Have him approach, Saint Michael.
XI.
