Les Contemplations

First, there is a morning, a morning of youth, a morning so clear it seems invented: the poet goes out into the fields, he admires, he adores, he listens to a lyre within himself, and the flowers, all the flowers, the little golden flowers, the little blue flowers, assume slightly tilted airs or highly coquettish graces to welcome him, while the great deep trees living in the woods offer him grand bows and bend their leafy heads and ivy beards down to the earth. He is the lover of nature, the dreamer recognized by all, the man beside whom children come to sit because they know he never grows angry, that he tells charming tales at the hour when the lamp is lit, that he makes things out of cardboard and pen-and-ink drawings. His two daughters sit at the garden threshold in the cool chiaroscuro of the charming falling evening, one like a swan and the other a dove, and a bouquet of white carnations leans over them like a flight of butterflies paused in ecstasy.

But the poet is not solely a contemplator of roses and nests: he is also an insurgent. He has placed a red cap on the old dictionary, he has declared words equal, free, and of age, he has called the pig by its name, he has blown a revolutionary wind over the battalions of square alexandrines and over the Academy, that dowager ancestress. Against the pedagogues who petrified the language in its castes, against the pedants who martyred Horace by inflicting him as a punishment, he hurled his verses like proclamations, and he shattered the bastille of rhymes. Words are living beings, he proclaims; they tumble pell-mell into the dark chasm of prose or make the verse roar like a stormy forest, and each of them casts a shadow or shakes a flame.

Then comes love, and everything conjugates the verb to love. A woman appears, barefoot, her hair undone, sitting with bare feet among the leaning reeds, and the poet tells her to come into the fields. His verses would flee, soft and frail, toward a garden, if they had wings like a bird, like the spirit, like love. There are cherries gathered from a tree and stolen kisses, letters written from the shore of the Norman sea where one sees some winged vessel passing superbly, spring nights where the stars shine less than the gaze of the beloved. But there are also words spoken in the shadows, those of a woman who says softly, without reproach, that she would like to be looked at a little, from time to time, when one spends a whole evening deep in his books.

Yet, beneath the joy, suffering is already at work. A child sings while his mother is dying. Wretches shiver in the suburbs, eight-year-old girls work fifteen hours in the factories, and the poet sees misfortune hollowing out its galleries beneath the world everywhere. Saturn casts a leaden gaze upon those born under his sign. The owl nailed to the barn door bleeds in the twilight. And then, suddenly, a blank page, almost empty, bearing only a date—September 4, 1843—and a line of dots, like a silence so profound that nothing will ever be able to fill it.

Léopoldine is dead. Drowned in the Seine at Villequier with her young husband, one September day, while her father was traveling in the South and learned of it from a newspaper, in a café, mindlessly reading the local news. Thus begins the other side of the book, that of mourning and night. The father remembers: she had fallen into this habit, in her childhood years, of coming into his room every morning, and he awaited her as one awaits a ray of light. He remembers the days when they all lived together, the set table, the fire in the hearth, the young girl's laughter, the walks in the garden. He sees again the white dresses, the running in the grass, the open books, and all of this is swallowed up. He cries out his rebellion, he asks God why, he collapses, he rises, he falls again. He walks the streets like a madman, he weeps, he no longer eats, he no longer sleeps. Three years later, he is still writing to this dead girl as if she could hear him, and he tells her that when evening comes, he will place a bouquet of green holly and blossoming heather upon her grave.

And one morning, he rises before dawn, and he sets out. He will walk for a long time, through the forest, over the mountain, without seeing anything outside, without hearing any sound, alone, unknown, his back bowed, his hands crossed, sorrowful, and day for him will be like night. He will go toward Villequier, toward the tomb, and he will lay upon it a bouquet of green holly and blossoming heather. It is the barest pilgrimage in all of French poetry, twelve lines that say nothing other than a father's walk toward his dead daughter, and that ask nothing of the world, neither consolation nor answer.

But the book does not stop at the tomb. The exiled poet, standing on the cliffs of Jersey and Guernsey, facing the immense ocean, looks at the infinite and throws himself into it. He is on the march, he advances into the night, he questions the stars, the abysses, the specters. He sees apparitions, he hears voices, he converses with the shadow. On the shore, a shepherdess tends her sheep while the sea roars behind her, and this utterly simple scene becomes dizzying because the shepherdess is a child and the sea is eternity. The beggar enters the poet's house on a winter evening, he sits by the fire, and the holes in his cloak let the stars shine through.

Little by little, the contemplator ascends. He climbs toward the light through the darkness, he crosses the layers of doubt, terror, and despair, he confronts the chasms where the soul plunges and brings back doubt, he looks squarely at the horror of nothingness and the sorrow of the world. And then, at the very edge of the abyss, a mouth of shadow speaks to him. It reveals to him that everything lives, that everything suffers, that the stone itself is a prison, that evil is a fall, and that all of creation is slowly ascending back to God. Death is not what we believe: it is a door, a passage, taking flight. Our loved ones are not lost, they are elsewhere, they wait, they see, they love still. And the poet, after twenty-five years of an afflicted life, at the end of this immense night, glimpses a glimmer, distant, trembling, but certain—the hope of a dawn that does not yet have a name.