Note: This is Napoleon III, in 1870, imprisoned and ill, at Wilhelmshoehe in Prussia. Émile Ollivier, his Minister at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, who failed to oppose its declaration, is the ‘Accomplice’.

The Famous Victory of Saarbrucken

(L’Éclatante Victoire de Sarrebrück)

(Belgian print, brilliantly tinted,

sold at Charleroi, 35 centimes)

At centre, the Emperor, blue-yellow, in apotheosis,

Gallops off, ramrod straight, on his fine gee-gee,

Very happy – since everything he sees is rosy,

Fierce as Zeus, and as gentle as a Daddy is:

The brave Infantrymen taking a nap, in vain,

Under the gilded drums and scarlet cannon,

Rise politely. One puts his tunic back on,

And, turns to the Chief, stunned by the big name!

On the right, another, leaning on his rifle butt,

Feeling the hair rise at the back of his neck,

Shouts: ‘Vive L’Empereur!!” – his neighbour’s mute…

A shako rises, like a black sun…- In the midst

The last, a simpleton in red and blue, lying on his gut

Gets up, and, - showing his arse - asks: “On what?”

A Winter Dream

(Rêvé pour l’Hiver)

To … Her

In winter we’ll travel in a little pink carriage

With cushions of blue.

We’ll be fine. A nest of mad kisses waits

In each corner too.

You’ll shut your eyes, not to see, through the glass,

Grimacing shadows of evening,

Those snarling monsters, a crowd going past

Of black wolves and black demons.

Then you’ll feel your cheek tickled quite hard…

A little kiss, like a maddened spider,

Will run over your neck…

And you’ll say: “Catch it!” bowing your head,

- And we’ll take our time finding that creature

- Who travels so far…

In the railway carriage, 7 October 70

Evil

(Le Mal)

While the red spittle of the grape-shot

Whistles all day in the infinite blue sky:

While the battalions, scarlet or green, fly,

By the King who jeers, en masse, into the pot:

While the terrible stupidity grinds and crushes,

And makes a smoking heap of a thousand men:

- Poor Dead! In summer, among the rushes,

In your joy, sacred Nature, who created them!…

- There’s a God, who laughs at altar-cloths

Of damask, incense, and great gold chalices:

Who dozes to Hosannas for lullaby,

And wakes when mothers, gathered in their grief,

Weeping under their old black bonnets, sigh

And yield Him the coin knotted in their handkerchief.

My Bohemia: A Fantasy

(Ma Bohème: Fantaisie)

I ran off, fists in my ragged seams:

Even my overcoat was becoming Ideal:

I went under the sky, Muse! I was yours:

Oh! What miraculous loves I dreamed!

My only pair of pants was a big hole.

- Tom Thumb the dreamer, sowing the roads there

With rhymes. My inn the Sign of the Great Bear.

- My stars in the sky rustling to and fro.

I heard them, squatting by the wayside,

In September twilights, there I felt the dew

Drip on my forehead, like a fierce coarse wine.

Where, rhyming into the fantastic dark,

I plucked, like lyre strings, the elastics

Of my tattered shoes, a foot pressed to my heart.

At The Green Inn

(Au Cabaret-Vert)

For eight days, I’d ripped up my boots

On the road stones. I’d made Charleroi.

- At the Green Inn: I ordered bread

Buttered, along with half-cold ham.

Happy, I stretched my legs out under the table,

A green one: considering the naïve prints

On the walls. – And it was charming,

When the girl with big tits and lively eyes,

- That one, just a kiss wouldn’t scare her! –

Smiling, brought me slices of bread and butter,

With lukewarm ham on a coloured platter,

Ham, white and pink, a fragrant garlic clove,

- And filled a huge beer mug high, its foam

Turned by a ray of late sunlight to gold.

The Sly Girl

(La Maline)

In the brown dining-room, its perfumed air

Full of the smell of wax and fruit, at ease

I gathered a plate of who knows what Belgian

Dish, and marvelled in my enormous chair.

Eating I listened to the clock – silent, happy.

The kitchen door opened with a gust,

- And the serving girl came in, who knows why,

Shawl half-off, hair dressed cunningly.

And, touching her little finger tremblingly

To her cheek, a pink and white velvet-peach,

And making a childish pout with her lips,

She tidied the plates to put me at my ease:

- Then, just like that – to get a kiss, for certain –

Whispered: ‘Feel: It’s caught a cold, my cheek...’

Charleroi, October 70

The Sleeper in the Valley

(Le Dormeur du Val)

It’s a green hollow where a river sings

Madly catching white tatters in the grass.

Where the sun on the proud mountain rings:

It’s a little valley, foaming like light in a glass.

A conscript, open-mouthed, his bare head

And bare neck bathed in the cool blue cress,

Sleeps: stretched out, under the sky, on grass,

Pale where the light rains down on his green bed.

Feet in the yellow flags, he sleeps. Smiling

As a sick child might smile, he’s dozing.

Nature, rock him warmly: he is cold.

The scents no longer make his nostrils twitch:

He sleeps in the sunlight, one hand on his chest,

Tranquil. In his right side, there are two red holes.

Poets at Seven Years

(Les Poëtes de Sept Ans)

And the mother, closing the work-book

Went off, proud, satisfied, not seeing,

In the blue eyes, under the lumpy brow,

The soul of her child given over to loathing.

All day he sweated obedience: very

Intelligent: yet dark habits, certain traits

Seemed to show bitter hypocrisies at work!

In the shadow of corridors with damp paper,

He stuck out his tongue in passing, two fists

In his groin, seeing specks under his shut lids.

A doorway open to evening: by the light

You’d see him, high up, groaning on the railing

Under a void of light hung from the roof. In summer,

Especially, vanquished, stupefied, stubborn,

He’d shut himself in the toilet’s coolness:

He could think in peace there, sacrificing his nostrils.

When the small garden cleansed of the smell of day,

Filled with light, behind the house, in winter,

Lying at the foot of a wall, buried in clay

Rubbing his dazzled eyes hard, for the visions,

He listened to the scabbed espaliers creaking.

Pity! His only companions were those children

Bare-headed and puny, eyes sunk in their cheeks,

Hiding thin fingers yellow and black with mud

Under old clothes soiled with excrement,

Who talked with the sweetness of the simple-minded!

And if his mother took fright, surprising him

At his vile compassions: the child’s deep

Tenderness overcame her astonishment.

All fine. She’d had the blue look, - that lies!

At seven he was making novels about life

In the great desert, where ravished Freedom shines,

Forests, suns, riverbanks, savannahs! – He used

Illustrated weeklies where he saw, blushing,

Smiling Italian girls, and Spanish women.

When the daughter of next door workers came by,

Eight years old - in Indian prints, brown-eyed,

A little brute, and jumped him from behind,

Shaking out her tresses, in a corner,

And he was under her, he bit her buttocks,

Since she never wore knickers:

- And, bruised by her fists and heels,

Carried the taste of her back to his room.

He feared the pallid December Sundays,

When, hair slicked back, at a mahogany table,

He read from a Bible with cabbage-green margins:

Dreams oppressed him each night in the alcove.

He didn’t love God: rather those men in the dusk,

Returning, black, in smocks, to the outer suburbs

Where the town-crier, with a triple drum beat,

Made the crowds laugh and murmur at the edicts.

- He dreamed of the amorous prairies, where

Luminous swells, pure odours, gold pubescences,

Stirred in the calm there, and then took flight!

And above all how he savoured sombre things,

When, in his bare room behind closed shutters,

High, and blue, and pierced with acrid damp,

He read his novel, mooned over endlessly,

Full of drowned forests, leaden ochre skies,

Flowers of flesh opening in star-filled woods,

Dizziness, epilepsies, defeats, compassion!

- While the street noises rumbled on below,

Lying alone on pieces of unbleached canvas,

With a violent presentiment of setting sail!

The Seekers of Lice

(Les Chercheuses de Poux)

When the child’s brow, tormented by red,

Implores the white crowd of half-seen dreams,

Two charming sisters come close to his bed

Slender-fingered, with silver nails, it seems.

They sit the child down in front of the window,

Wide open to where blue air bathes tangled flowers,

And through his thick hair full of dewfall,

Move their fine fingers, fearful, magical.

He hears the sighing of their cautious breath

That flows with long roseate vegetal honeys,

And is interrupted sometimes by a hiss,

Saliva caught on the lips or desire to kiss.

He hears their dark lashes beating in perfumed

Silence: and their fingers, electrified and sweet

Amidst his grey indolence, make the deaths

Of little lice crackle beneath their royal treat.

It’s now the wine of Sloth in him rises, the sigh

Of a child’s harmonica that can bring delerium:

Prompted by slow caresses, the child feels then

An endlessly surging and dying desire to cry.

The Drunken Boat

(Le Bateau Ivre)

As I floated down impassive Rivers,

I felt myself no longer pulled by ropes:

The Redskins took my hauliers for targets,

And nailed them naked to their painted posts.

Carrying Flemish wheat or English cotton,

I was indifferent to all my crews.

The Rivers let me float down as I wished,

When the victims and the sounds were through.

Into the furious breakers of the sea,

Deafer than the ears of a child, last winter,

I ran! And the Peninsulas sliding by me

Never heard a more triumphant clamour.

The tempest blessed my sea-borne arousals.

Lighter than a cork I danced those waves

They call the eternal churners of victims,

Ten nights, without regret for the lighted bays!

Sweeter than sour apples to the children

The green ooze spurting through my hull’s pine,

Washed me of vomit and the blue of wine,

Carried away my rudder and my anchor.

Then I bathed in the Poem of the Sea,

Infused with stars, the milk-white spume blends,

Grazing green azures: where ravished, bleached

Flotsam, a drowned man in dream descends.

Where, staining the blue, sudden deliriums

And slow tremors under the gleams of fire,

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our rhythms,

Ferment the bitter reds of our desire!

I knew the skies split apart by lightning,

Waterspouts, breakers, tides: I knew the night,

The Dawn exalted like a crowd of doves,

I saw what men think they’ve seen in the light!

I saw the low sun, stained with mystic terrors,

Illuminate long violet coagulations,

Like actors in a play that’s very ancient

Waves rolling back their trembling of shutters!

I dreamt the green night of blinded snows,

A kiss lifted slow to the eyes of seas,

The circulation of unheard-of flows,

Sung phosphorus’s blue-yellow awakenings!

For months on end, I’ve followed the swell

That batters at the reefs like terrified cattle,

Not dreaming the Three Marys’ shining feet

Could muzzle with their force the Ocean’s hell!

I’ve struck Floridas, do you know, beyond belief,

Where eyes of panthers in human skins,

Merge with the flowers! Rainbow bridles, beneath

the seas’ horizon, stretched out to shadowy fins!

I saw the great swamps boil, and the hiss

Where a whole whale rots among the reeds!

Downfalls of water among tranquilities,

Distances showering into the abyss.

Nacrous waves, silver suns, glaciers, ember skies!

Gaunt wrecks deep in the brown vacuities

Where the giant eels riddled with parasites

Fall, with dark perfumes, from the twisted trees!

I would have liked to show children dolphins

Of the blue wave, the golden singing fish.

- Flowering foams rocked me in my drift,

At times unutterable winds gave me wings.

Sometimes, a martyr tired of poles and zones,

The sea whose sobs made my roilings sweet

Showed me its shadow flowers with yellow mouths

And I rested like a woman on her knees…

Almost an isle, blowing across my sands, quarrels

And droppings of pale-eyed clamorous gulls,

And I scudded on while, over my frayed lines,

Drowned men sank back in sleep beneath my hull!…

Now I, a boat lost in the hair of bays,

Hurled by the hurricane through bird-less ether,

I, whose carcass, sodden with salt-sea water,

No Monitor or Hanseatic vessel would recover:

Freed, in smoke, risen from the violet fog,

I, who pierced the red skies like a wall,

Bearing the sweets that delight true poets,

Lichens of sunlight, gobbets of azure:

Who ran, stained with