The Defeat at Sedan, Part 3

 by Brett Rutherford

     Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

WHEN THEY FALL

When a comet falls into the well of night,
does it have stars as witnesses when it fades out?
Satan cast down remains grandiose;
his crushing retains an air of apotheosis;
and over a proud destiny, vision unshakeable,
the ill star falling shines a final ray.

Once the first Bonaparte fell; his crime,
although immense, did not dishonor the abyss;
God had rejected him, but over this great rejection
something vast and lofty floated;
one side lit, obscured the side in shadow;
so that glory loved this tarnished man,
and human consciousness retained a doubt
about the harm that the colossi do.

To consecrate a crime is evil
and God saw the need to set a new example.

 Once a thief Titan has climbed a peak,

every thief wants to follow him there;

but it is now necessary to show

that a strutting Sbrigani[1] cannot imitate Prometheus;

it is time for the earth to learn in terror

how much the small can surpass the big,

how a polluted stream can worse than a flood,

and stupefied fate finds that its hands are full,

even after Waterloo, even after Saint Helena!

 

God sends the dead of night to discourage his rising.

how fitting and right it was to accomplish

Brumaire for the first Bonaparte in that month of fog,

and this one’s December mist-shrouded coup,[2]

by a smear that blotted the stars themselves

and even effaced the enormous memories

      of yesteryear,

As it is necessary to throw the last weight on the scale,

He who weighs everything wanted to show the world,

after one’s great end, the other’s filthy collapse,

so that mankind might learn a lesson,

to feel contempt instead of the shiver of the sublime,

so that after the epic we have the parody,

and so that we are made to see how a tragedy

may encompass horror, and ash and nothingness

when we witness a dwarf bring down a giant.

 

This man’s existence was itself a crime,

and as the wretched have all the misery,

his statue will have mourning as its pedestal;

the end of this fatal crook had to be

that an ambush could seize his empire,

and the mud of the earth would weep with shame.

 

And this modern-day Caesar,
holding his nose at the smell of dogs,
     stumbled and fell into a storm drain,
and the sewer was offended.

---

[1] Sbrigani. A trickster character, akin to Figaro, who uses cleverness and deceit, in Molière’s 1669 comedy-ballet Monsieur de Pourceaugnac.

[2] On 18 Brumaire (a month named after seasonal fog), or 9 November 1799, the first Napoleon accomplished the coup that made him First Consult. Louis Bonaparte’s coup was on December 2, 1851. Therefore these lines are contrasting the two Napoleons and comparing the dates of their respective coups.