Worthy of One Another (September 1870)

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible

SEPTEMBER 1870

III.

So look: Here is our simpleton of crime;
And over there, madly served by his oppressed victims,
That ogre of divine right, devout, correct, moral.
Born to be emperor and yet always a corporal,
Here is the Bohemian and there is a Sicambre,[1]
(one the night-idler of the dank taverns,
   the other a crude Clovis chided for his heathen ways)
The cutthroat fights nocturnally,
      as the second of December attests.[2]
The hare on one side, the jackal on the other.
The Ollioule ravine[3] and the Bancal house[4]
seem to have furnished some kings; the Calabrians
had no one more frightening than these saber-draggers;[5]
Looting, extortion, it’s their war; such art
would charm the gods in the upper balcony,
but would disturb some military theorists.[6]
It’s as easy as the night-time arrest of a carriage.[7]

Yes, Bonaparte is vile, but Wilhelm is atrocious,
and nothing is so stupid, as, alas, the challenge-glove
this naïve joker hurls at the feet
     of that black bandit.

One attacks with nothing; the other allows the approach
and suddenly draws lightning from his pocket.
The German thunder, soft and treacherous, concealed itself.
Their emperor took ours by holding out a baby’s rattle.
He laughed: “Come this way, child!”
     and the little one ran,
          his short legs stumbling,
and the trap-door closed over him.

Carnage, heaps of dead, mourning, horror, betrayal,
infamous tumult around a sinister horizon;
and the thinker, faced with these numberless attacks,
is overcome by who knows what dark glare.
What crimes, fair heaven! Oh! the terrible outcome!
O France! one gust of wind in a moment dissipates
this shadow Caesar and his shadow of an army.

War where one was the flame
      and the other was only smoke.

 

 

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[1] Sicambre. An allusion to Clovis, first king of the Franks, ordered by a bishop to remove his pagan necklaces at his baptism.

[2] Second of December. The date of Napoleon III’s coup.

[3] Ollioule. The gorges at Ollioule near Toulon were settled in Neolithic times, and the town of Ollioule was founded in the sixth century BCE by the Romans as Oppidum de la Courtine.

[4] Bancal. Jean-Louis Bancal de Saint-Julien, French brigadier general 1789-1815, who also fought in the American Revolution.

[5] Calabrians. The Calabrians in Italy offered a surprising peasant resistance to the French invasion of 1806-1807. French soldiers were captured, castrated, and burned alive by peasants whose last food rations the invaders were attempting to confiscate.

[6] Gods in the balcony. Hugo employs “Poulaillier,” literally, a chicken coop, a term used to describe “the gods,” the uppermost cheap seats in a theater. Hugo then mentions the Chevalier de Folard (1669-1752), a French military theorist who studied battlefield tactics.

[7] Arrest of a carriage. Many readers would read this as an allusion to the arrest of the fleeing King Louis XVI in June 1791.