by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "May 1871 - Paris in Flames"
The Terror is
here again. How far will it go?
How far will you descend
into the depths of murder?
Someone suggested, “Like Moscow.”
Another grimaced and said, “Why not?”
The depth of crime, both
frightening and stupid!
All in a sweep, annihilate
the present and all the past.
In this city that sums up Athens,
Rome, and Tyre, take torch
to the Agora and its portico
where the gods and heroes are painted;
the Forum, too — set history ablaze!
Bring an entire people to the stake
and consume them as a single martyr.
Banishing the ever-rising sun
in favor of unending night,
change Europe into the desolation
of barbarous Asia, because some fool,
some Russian blockhead, that bear
who went by the name Rostropchine,
deprived Napoleon of the wooden ark
of Moscow (a chock-a-block collection
of tinder-box homes and palaces)
by stealth and arson. What idiot proposed
“That was a good trick, burning Moscow,
so why not Paris?”
Because Russia
loved her servitude,
because she wanted, turning her capital
into an ash-heap, to foil Bonaparte
to retain the slavish court of Alexander;
because that wicked deed brought a smile
to the Tsar on his distant sofa,
with one eye fixed on the golden cross,
heir indeed of Ivan the Terrible,
this barbarian eluded history
through an unthinkable crime.
So now star-studded France must fall
into the same abyss of wanton arson!
But you, through whom the rights
of the people are betrayed,
you attain a crime
while losing the nation!
Who called the Russian mayor great
heaps praise on a Hun.
This Rostropchin is swollen up
with a savage grandeur,
self-pride, the tiny possession
of a pitiable slave, and this man,
with torch in hand, harks back
to where the human race is unknown.
He came from old, black-hearted Scythians,
or ancient Gepidus, beyond the pale.
He is fierce, sublime, and stupid.
We know what he did, but not
what in his small brain,
he intended.
If he were only a ghost,
he might seem heroic,
rattling his chains by night.
At the summit
of all the centuries
there were four dark flames —
one where the vile king of infamous
glories shines to a bugled anthem,
the Goths who all but destroyed Ephesus;
another where Umar, the son of Tamerlane,
made ashes of Baghdad, Delhi, Damascus;
the flame usnpeakable that Nero hymned;
add to them now, flamboyant,
a lesser light by far, Rostropchine’s folly.
But you, who have free will and choice —
is this the company you desire to keep?
I see the way, inclining your head,
you turn your attention to Paris. Why?
To light yet another pyre?
To see it melt away like winter snow?
Is there no difference to you between
a city that serves, and one that opposes you?
Russia had might as well have been a
desert,
Moscow its sinister Babel, a den where reason
limped along with a French accent, where truth
was an object of suspicion and arrest,
the citadel of rotten boyars and monks,
so fiercely backward that no progress
could ever dwell there, a nest of raptors
from which Peter, a vulture, flew away.
There’s no comparing the two:
Moscow in Asia, sad relic at best,
Paris, in and of all Europe, the
future!
Would you take the same cheap shroud
one would allow an enemy
and wrap us up with in in a common tomb?
If Moscow vanishes, the
world weeps,
a sad cloud, passing by,
but in the end
of Paris, a shadow
extends to engulf the world.
Without a compass, the whole ship
sinks.
Progress becomes a dullard and loses its way.
Put out the human race’s one great eye,
this Cyclops stumbles blind;
unlit by the lamp of possible facts,
it gropes and strikes out randomly,
with terrible cries that are not even words.
Language will collapse to
random syllables,
words to the phonemes within them,
then nothing but howling vowels,
as of the slope it slides downward,
less than a beast, into the unknown.
Footnote: Fyodor Rostopchin (1763-1826) was governor-general of Moscow during Napoleon I’s invasion. After the Battle of Borodino, half the population of Moscow fled. Rostopchin had the remainder of the population evacuated, including all city officials, leaving behind foreigners. When Napoleon arrived with his army, no one greeted him. Rostopchin had concealed policemen with orders to burn the city to the ground. Fire engines were disassembled and fuses were concealed around the city to accelerate fires. There is no agreement among historians about whether the fires were deliberately set, as any everyday accidental fire would have spread unchecked once the city’s fire services were absent. In the closely-packed city, entirely constructed of wood, a catastrophe might have been inevitable. Rostopchin, in later years, claimed innocence, but later confessed that he had ordered Moscow’s destruction.
Footnote for Russian blockhead: “Rostopcha” means scatter-brain or block-head in Russian.
Another footnote: Rostopchin claimed descent from the Tatars, in the family line of Genghis Khan.
