Marched to Her Death through the Streets of Paris

 by Brett Rutherford

 

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

IX

 

A woman they imprisoned — who knows
her name? — is on the street outside.
Not free, no not at all. They march
her to her execution now. Let’s watch!

 

This promenade of shame
     may take a while.

Her injuries have not yet healed.
She limps along, with who knows what
unsaid confessions on her darkened brow.
Soldiers on either side, and one to push
if she resists — hand-shackles prevent
her lashing out, her feet too lame to run.

She must endure the crowds’ shaking fists.
Their curses seem to roll right off;
beneath her tangled hair, one eye
glares out the way a caged beast regards
tormenters it has grown familiar with.
Her other eye is swollen shut; a bruise
runs down from ear to chin. A witch
she seems, or a surly brute or beast.
All view her through a haze of hate.

 

She is moved about
     like some chessboard pawn,
forward, then turned, and forward again,
for a maximum audience.
A religious procession
     could not be better planned.
What was her crime? What class
of category of offender describe her?
Was there a formal indictment
that listed her offence? Who knows?
Charges fly back and forth amid
the terrible smoke of Paris. Ask her —
has she a clue why she was arrested?

 

They say, “If a man does such-and-such,”
that is a crime, no questions asked.
Is it as blunt as that? Look at an act,
and see the spirit of the thing —
famine, rumors and some bad advice,
a call to arms from the loudest mouth,
some popular bandit so monstrous proud
people love him and do anything he says —
that’s all it takes for some dark agent
to turn and distort a person’s good nature.

 

This swell of violence, once entered on,
this adventure goes one way only,
driven by instinct down an inclined plane,
backed by bad luck’s fatal hurricane,
wrath upon wrath compounding depravity,
hurling itself in fury into civil war,
revealing beneath a well-lit city,
a tangled black forest with no way out.
The Cyclops eye of want and exclusion
provokes a mass howl of envy:
“Others have everything, and I have nothing!”

 

Thinking is dangerous when you sit in rags.
Evil springs up from an empty belly.

You wander why a man becomes terrible,
when he sits at a table that has no bread.
A neighborhood the mice desert
is bound to be a place of wrath.

 

She is made to cross an open square.
Crowds show no mercy as she passes through.
The well-off have their triumph, already
they have enjoyed the thrill of punishment.
Do their tears of joy blind them to her?
Is her bloody silence their kind of victory,
a silence heard all the way out
     to the feasting at Versailles?

 

On every block, the passersby laugh
to see the prisoner stumble by.
A swarm of children chases behind;
their mocking bright cries assault her.
Bubble of bitter spittle line her mouth.
Deaf to their insults, she flinches not.
Various crimes are shouted out,
     a gelid raven-cloud of blame,
fading out only
     when her Gorgon locks pass
     and the corner is turned.

 

Now, in a better neighborhood,
a crowd of women emerge from a park:
nursemaids and courtesans,
schoolgirls and nuns and seamstresses.
They open umbrellas against the sun
and follow along, their eyes
     dark stars of ferocity.
Look! How amusing! Let’s follow!
How close can we get to the execution?

 

A house-door opens — a betrothal party
pours to the sidewalk to see the show.
Look at those diamonds! Who would have thought
there was a war on? A spinster pokes
with her umbrella toward the prisoner’s face.
There! She’s bleeding! Serves her right!

 

I pity the wretch; I condemn the crowds.
I recoil in horror at this day-lit Paris,
as she-dogs come slathering forth
to bite and main a wild she-wolf.

 

Their laughter is worse
     than her firing squad.