Letter to a Lady

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “January 1871”

From Paris, terrible and gay, and fighting on —

Good-day, Madame.

 We are one people, one world, one soul.
We give of ourselves to everyone,
      and no one thinks of himself alone.
We endure without sun, without support,
     and without fear.

 Things will be fine if we never sleep.
Schmitz sends out engraved bulletins
     on the enormous war,

like Aeschylus translated by Father Brumoy.[1]
I paid fifteen francs for four fresh eggs, not for me,
but for my little George and little Jeanne.
Paris eats donkeys and horses now,
     along with bears and rats.

Paris is so well besieged and surrounded,
     walled up, tied up, and guarded,
that her belly is Noah’s ark.
Into our flanks every beast, honest or ill-famed,
enters, and dog and cat, from mammoth
to pygmy, hippo to flea, everything enters,
and the mouse meets the elephant.
If we see a tree, we cut it down, we saw, we split;
the Champs-Elysées goes up the flues of Paris.
With frost on our windows, our fingers are numb.

Washhouses lack fuels to dry our laundry,
and we don’t change our shirts anymore.
In the evenings a great dark murmur
swells up on the street corners,
it’s the crowd; sometimes gruff voices threaten,
sometimes a song calms them, sometimes
a loud voice stirs all to bellicose shouts.

The Seine drags slowly on, with archipelagos
     of hesitant, heavy ice cubes,
and the gunboat runs, leaving behind a foaming rut.
We live on nothing, we live on everything,
     we are, in our mad way, content.

 On our napkinlessless tables, where hunger awaits us,
a potato plucked from its crypt is hailed as a queen,
and onions are with the gods as in Egypt.[2]
We lack coal, but then our bread is black.
No more gas; Paris sleeps under a large snuffer;
by six o'clock in the evening, we are plunged in darkness
Bomb-storms make monstrous noise above our heads.
I use a well-formed piece of shrapnel as an inkwell.
Murdered Paris does not deign to scream.

Townspeople stand on guard around the wall;
These fathers, husbands, brothers, get machine-gunned,
     keeping their caps rolled up in their pea coats,
Others wait to be called, no bed but the plank of their benches.
It’s one or the other, ramparts or down-below:
     Moltke cannonades us here,
      and Bismarck starves us everywhere.
Paris is a hero, Paris is a woman;
He knows how to be valiant and charming; her eyes shine,
smiling and pensive, in the great deep sky,
in the pigeon that lights on the rising balloon.

It’s quite something; the formidable has emerged,
     putting aside the frivolous.
I’m happy just to see that nothing collapses.
I tell everyone to love, to fight, to forget,
to have no enemy but the enemy; I cry out:
my name is not my name anymore,
     my name is Patrie!

As a woman, you can be very proud of ours:
while everything is tottering, they are simply sublime.
Theirs is the beauty of the ancient Romans,
who under their humble roofs, tended domestic life,
their fingers were not dainty, but black and hard
from the harsh wool they spun and wove;
their sleep was short, and they feigned calm,
with Hannibal outside the walls,
and their husbands standing on the hill-gate.

Such times have returned. The feline giantess,
Prussia, holds Paris, and, tigress, she bites
half to death this great beating heart of the world.
Well, in this Paris, under such inhuman embrace,
the man is only French, but the woman is Roman.
They accept everything, the women of Paris,
their hearths extinguished, their feet bruised by the ice,
holding nocturnal watch at the black threshold of butchery,
cold urns of snow and hurricane emptying upon them,
famine, horror, combat, seeing nothing but the company
of the great gone before them, and the great duty now;
and poet Juvénal, deep in the shadows of time,
     would recognize them as Roman.[3]

The bombardment makes our citadels rumble.
The dawn drum speaks, the bugle calls distantly.
Diana wakes up, in the fresh morning wind.
The great city, pale and still in shadow, takes form.
A vague fanfare wanders from street to street.
We fraternize, we dream of success;
we offer our hearts to hope, our brows to lightning.
The city chosen by glory and misfortune
sees one more terrible day and salutes it.

Indeed, we shall be cold! True, we shall be hungry!
What is this but night? And what will the end be?
A dawn! We are suffering, but with certainty.
Prussia is the dungeon and Paris is Latude.[4]
Courage! the old days will repeat themselves.
Paris will drive out the Prussians within a month.
Then we plan, my two sons and I, to live
out in the country, with you,
     who say you are willing to follow us,
Madame, and we will come in March to ask you,
that is, if we are not killed in February.

 

Praestabat castas humilis fortunas Latinas,
Casulae, somnique breves, et vellere tusco
Vexatae duraeque manus, et proximus urbis
Annibal, et stantes Collina in turre mariti.
                                                         —Juvenal

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[1] Father Brumoy. Pierre Brumoy (1688-1742), a Jesuit scholar and editor who published Le Théâtre des Grecs (1730), with abridged versions of seven Greek dramas, some no more than summaries.

[2] Onions were used in many Egyptian rituals, including the Opening of the Mouth in the awakening of the dead in the afterlife.

[3] Roman poet Juvenal praised the virtues of Roman women under duress and some of Hugo’s praise is paraphrased from Juvenal’s Satire VI, 287.

[4] Latude. Jean Henri Latude (1725-1805), a French writer who repeatedly escaped from imprisonment in the Bastille.