Martyr, Volcano, Goddess, Avatar, Part 2

 by Brett Rutherford

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

 

[Poem XI]

III

City, your fate is beautiful!

High on a hill, and at the heart
of all humanity, you re-enact
an almost-biblical Passion.
None can approach without hearing
how your tender voice emerges

from your august torture,

because you suffer this for all
and for them all your blood is shed.

The peoples before you
will form a circle on their knees.

 

The nimbus glow at the top of Aetna
fears not Aeolus or any other wind.

Just so, your fierce halo
     cannot be smothered out.
Illustrious and terrible at once,
your light burns everything
    that threatens life,

     defending honor, and work and talent,
     upholding duty and right,
     healing with balm, perfume, and medicine.

You gleam the future purple
     even as you burn the past away,

because in your clarity, sad
     and pure, pale flowers spring
to life amid the embers.

In your immense love,
     gnaws an immenser pain.

 

Because you exist, and will continue so,
O city, mankind believes in progress,
seeing it born clean and viable once more.

Your tragic fate attracts the Muses’ envy.
Your death would orphan the whole universe.

The star in your wound, would, if it could,
ascend and join the heavens, but no!
Empires would trade their plunder in,
yes, even Berlin, or Carthage,
to lay hands on your crown of thorns.

Never was an anvil so hammer-bright.

 

City, no matter what,
     Europe will call your name
          as its founding goddess,
but what you must suffer
     until that day arrives!

Paris, what your glory attracts,

the tribute they come to pay you,

     costs you a martyrdom.
The challenge is accepted.

Go on, live large. Let the people show her
they always know how to be heroic.

She is still calm, you see,
     after the tyrants flee,
     after the executioners
have done their worst,
    look, there she stands!

 

It happened so gradually
    no one saw how you managed it:
the sword in your hand

     became a branch of palm.

City, do as the Greeks did,
     the Romans and Hebrews,
breaking the urn of war
     to offer up the splendid bowl
          of unity and peace.

 

The peoples will have seen you,

O magnanimous city,

after having been the light of the abyss,

after having fought as was her duty,

after having been reduced to a crater,

after the churning of volcanic chaos
    whose lava bubbled forth
    the visage of Vesuvius,
        the memory of circuses and forums
               reduced to ash,
the freedom of the world at risk
     until you returned from ash in glory
after having chased away Prussia,
     that frightful giant,

 

now rising anew from the yawning abyss,
     you, bronze-robed deity of eternity,
from flaming lava cooled,
a colossal statue, Paris!

 

IV

The “men of the past” imagine
they still exist. Just barely, I would say.
They imagine themselves living;
and the work they perform
     is all done in the shadows.
In the viscous sliding
     of their numberless folds,
     their comings and goings
     all flat on their belllies,
they are only a swarm
     of deluded earthworms.
The dead weight of the sepulcher
     presses them down to ooze.

 

Ignore them, sacred city!

Nothing of you is dead,
for, Paris, your own agony
gives birth, and your defeat
was an onset of new creation.

We will refuse you nothing.

Whatever you want, will come to pass.

The day you were born, the Impossible
reached and surpassed its expiration date.

I will affirm and will repeat it tirelessly
to the face of the perjurer,

into the ears of the deceiver,
plain on the page, where traitors
and cowards cannot avoid it.

They wounded you, oh queen,
but you live! Oh goddess, you live!

 

Against you they added insult to injury,
but still you live, Paris! From your aorta,
earth’s blood, man’s blood, alike
spurt out in never-stopping flow.
It seems the wound might never heal.

Yet in your womb, o mother in labor,
we felt the whole city move. Fetal,
an unknown universe stirs there.
We feel the beat and pulse of the future.

 

Who cares about these sinister clowns?
All will be well. No doubt, there are clouds.
We search, we see nothing. Well, it is night.
Around us is a fenced-in horizon.
Crown of future Europe, we fear for you.

Alas, what a ruin! She seems more fit
for a coffin than for a temple mount;
no model for a civic goddess here,
but instead the type of eternal mourning.

 

On looking upon her, even a man
of firm resolve must hesitate,
give out a shiver instead of a sigh.

Doubting, we weep and tremble,
but pacing around to listen,
we vaguely hear,
    from the walled shadow no torch can light,
    from the depth of defeat’s sink-hole,
from what they called your tomb,
arising, the song of a soul immense.
Huge and indomitable
     something is indeed beginning.

From out of the mist it comes:
     a new century!

 

All of our steps down here might seem
to be no more than a dark procession,
in vain, nocturnal, dubious.
“Men of the past” will scoff at me.
To them, all life, despite our work,
despite desire, is earthy stuff.
Nothing can be divine to them
until implacable eternity
     devours all in quest
of that one great living Thing.
Their pretext for doing nothing,
or doing ill, is that they’re blessed.
Death always offers a getaway.

 

For “men of the past”
     sure happiness awaits in Heaven.

Earth offers only hope,
     and nothing more.
I say that growing hope,
and waiting out the time
   it takes regrets to fade,
is Progress. One atom of hope
is a new seedling star.
Greater well-being dawns

in lesser misery.
My critics prefer the dreary darkness.

Darkness they love, to the point of blindness.

They hate the seer and would blind the soul.
What a terrible dream!

 

You hold the shroud of the city
before us and cry, “She is dead!”
That shroud for us is pricked with holes
through which the flames appear.

What does the dark zenith matter
when rays shine forth,
and constellations never seen before
arise, suns beaming to one another
profound and august affirmations.
There! The True. There! The Beautiful!
There! The Great! There! The Just!
On each and every world a form of life
with a thousand golden halos,

each life of Life partaking!

 

Amid this fest of hope,
you only contemplate the shadow.

“Look over there! A shadow!” —

“No use! There’s yet another shadow!”

Be that as it may. You cannot help yourselves.

Caught under triple veils,
you want us all to stumble about
in what you think is darkness.

 

“Men of the past,” we seek what serves.
You scurry about to invent new harms.

Our clock ascends to midnight
     and hopes for what will come;
your midnight, vertiginous,
     seems only a falling-off.
Each has his own way of seeing night.

Martyr, Volcano, Goddess, Avatar, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

[Poem XI]

1

This, from all that has gone before,
from the dark abyss where Fate itself
seems destined to go to die, the Furies,
hatred incarnate that howls from the graves,
this, my people, is what emerges at last:
a glimmer of clarity and certitude.

Progress, and brotherhood, and faith!
A clarion voice amid my solitude
affirms it, so let the crowd acclaim
our struggle’s coda with a loud cry.

The let hamlet, relieved and joyful
whisper it up to the great Paris,
and may the Louvre, a-tremble
pass the word to every cottage.

 

This dawning hour is as clear
    as the night was dark,
and from the fierce black sky we hear
the sound of something magnificent
giving itself great birth above us.

Even in our present shadow, we hear
the rustling of titanic wings above us,
and I, in these pages so full of shock
and horror, of mourning and battle,
of fears that will not let one sleep —
hear me, if anguish’s clamor
     broke out in spite of me,
if I let fall too many words
     of our own suffering,
if I negated hope, I disavow myself!
I erase my obscure sobbing
which I would rather have lost
than uttered. Words I crossed out
and never published, o so many!

 

I strive to be, above all this
the navigator serene, the one
who fears no shock
    as the deep waves batter him.
Yet I admit my doubts, the fear
that some hideous hand might hold
the past in talon clutches
and refuse to let it go.

 

What did I fear the most?
That crime would seize justice
in stranglehold, that some
grim shadow would smother
the star we needed most
to aim toward the solstice,
that kings with whips
would drive before them
conscience made blind
and progress lamed.

If all the human spirit’s pillars
(like law and honor, Jesus
and Voltaire, reason and virtue)

remained complicit in silence,
if Truth would put its finger
to its lips in cowardice,
this century would pass away
and never pay its debt to the past.
The ship of the world
     would tilt and sink,
and we would witness

    the slow devouring,
eternal and implacable,
into uncountable layers
of shadow upon shadow,
the slow disappearance
of all thinkers, one by one!

 

With shaking pen, I pause.
My voice cries, “No!”

You will remain, O France,
the vanguard, the first.

Do they think they can kill the light?

A vulture attacks the sun, and what
does the sun bleed? More light!

It can only shed more of itself.

What fool would think to hurt the sun?

All Hell, if it tries,
will only bring forth waves of dawn
from every gaping wound it make.
Thus France goes forth,
     her spear at her side,
and where she smites
     the trembling kings
will see the bursting-out of Freedom.

 

 

II

Is this a collapse around us?
No, it is a genesis.

O Paris, what does it matter to you,
bright, burning furnace, well of flame,
that a thick fog passes by,
that it comes sideways at you
as the blowing of one more wind,
a fray as meaningless
as a medieval joust?

Some puffing away at a bellows-forge,
what does that matter
when so many storms already torment you?

 

O proud volcano, already full
of explosions, noises, storms and thunder,
tremors that make the whole earth tremble,

the metals’ melting-pot, the hearth
at which souls set themselves on fire,
do you think God’s breath is punishing you?
Do you fear this is the end for you?

No! Wrath from on high
only rekindles your fire.

Your deep swell boils over.

Fusion, not fission, for the world!

 

Paris is like the sea, a force
that cannot stop itself. Its work
is never finished. God might as well
tell the pounding tides
     “That’s quite enough!”
as put a hold on Paris.
Sometimes a man,
     who leans toward your ringing hearth
thinks he sees hellfire instead
     of the rosy hue of dawn.
We trust you: you know what kind of fire
it takes to build and transform!

 

City, whoever irritates you
     can only make you foam.

The stones they hurl
     down into the seeming abyss
yield up from you a spit of sparks.

Kings come with feeble hands
     to cut and thrust at you.
With hammer-blows of beaten iron,
lit up with lightning at the Cyclops’ forge,
you laugh at their blows
    and cover them with stars.

 

O Destiny! With ease you tear those webs
set out to catch you, those gleaming traps
sepulchral spiders build by night
dotting the dawns in morning dew.

  

Charles, My Son, I Feel Your Presence Now

Charles Hugo

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

 

X

Charles, my son, I feel your presence now.
Sweet martyr, beneath the earth
     that takes everyone,
I look for some sign of you
when through the tiny fissures of your tomb
pale dawn juts out its coruscating rays.

 

The dead, boxed up at last in their coffins,
attend to themselves in their final cradles,
and while I weep on bended knees, these two,
dear Georges and Jeanne, these little children sing.
Sing to me, unaware of my sorrows.
How like your father in both dark and light
you are, gloomed by his absented shadow,
yet gilded by his vague illumining.

 

Alas, what did we know, anyway,
if we were not aware of Death
alive and striding among us?

Do angels, enjoining amid the stars
look down from paradise and laugh at us?

 

Yet such a paradise is in the child.
Even the orphan has God inside him.
God, even as I suffer in my cloud
of sorrow, tries to defend these little ones
with the celestial glow of innocence.

 

Be joyful then. Children, go out and play!
Let me be overwhelmed, alone in grief.
So much has been borne, so much still to come!
It has never occurred to them to count
their years so few against mine so many,
to say “Grandfather has lived in this world
for near a hundred years, a century!”
At this age, a man is troubled by ghosts,
shadows and shadows and doubts and regrets.
He tallies up the good he did and asks —
“This much and more again, would that suffice?”

 

Is there less hate now that I’ve come and gone?
Have I treated my enemy brother,
and did he grasp the hand I extended?
Even best efforts, sometimes, are not enough.
Celebrations one day, remorse the next.

The irony is that I triumphed best
in heart and mind, in moments of defeat
because my greatest foe was Compromise.

 

Thus, seeing myself defeated, I grew.
That we still live, pain re-assures us.
Blood-lust has never been my nature.
Instead, I am the one blows fall upon.

 

Sad law, it seems that with vitality,
an even more vital illness tags along.
Young, unknown, one has a certain power.
In fame, one walks around as a target.
More branches than ever spread out from me,
and as they spread, my shadow terrifies.
It might not be safe to be around me.

 

I would spare you the gloom of my mourning,
you two, in your own charmed spell encircled.
You are the opening of souls in bloom,
and here with the dawn comes Nature immense.
Georges blooms, like a shrub that means to fill out
the empty, dismal field of my mourning.
Jeanne, in her flowering, corolla bright
that hides within, a still-trembling spirit.
Amid our noises, distantly, it speaks.

 

Let children stammer on and hesitate
(they know yet what misfortunes await them!)
as humble plants, vermilion-hued, exhale
the murmur of flowers, the buzz of bees,
in their tiny world not bound by limits.

 

That everything you see must slip away,
you all too soon shall learn, alas for you!
That only in a storm’s tumult and roar
does lightning come, our beaming torch and brand,
whenever we try to liberate the people,
that self-same Atlas who bears up the world.

 

What some say is Fate, is to others, Chance:
this you will learn, and will bear up under.
Humans are so augustly ignorant,
they must endure, adapt, in such a way
that later the truth seems what was dreamt of.

 

When I am gone to wherever it is
that one goes to after death, I suppose
I shall grasp only then my “Destiny,”
a topic on which I plead ignorance.
Will I look back at you, and hover there
all full of mystery and intimations?

 

Sure, I will carry within me always
the stigma of exile, thrown like a shroud
over your childhood, and the more recent wounds
by which one’s own justice and gentleness
was made to seem a crime, offense to all.

 

Once I am incorporeal, perhaps
I will glean why, while children sang
beneath my funeral boughs, while I
pled pity instead of retribution
to all who hear, as evil’s antipode,
was made to retreat in so much darkness.
Perhaps it makes more sense to ghosts.

 

Once I am beyond affront, and the sting
of bearing up to so many monsters,
I will know why
     implacable shadows follow me,
why there are lists
     of massacres one after another
why endless winter envelops me,
why everywhere I go
     I lie on someone’s grave
why I was weighed down
     with fights and tears and regrets
     and so many sad things,
and why,
     when you two were roses
God chose to make me a cypress tree.

The Church's Pamphleteers, Part 2

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l”Année Terrible, “July 1871”

We see you. You frolic over Paris,
shrill birds whose screams
     only the wind attends.

You invent new epithets
     in jargon as obscure
     as flapping semaphore.
We have no idea what you mean
as you mumble in Latin about us,
but we clearly perceive your goal.

The cup of blame that France
     and Europe lined up to drink,

you, murderers, desire
     that we willingly drink again.

Oh, boy! Here comes the sacred Host from Rome,
and wouldn’t you know, the Pope
has declared himself infallible!

See, on his robes, the blood

that Divine Right spattered there.

Did no one think to launder them?

The terror of what pleases them,
our schoolbooks still recall,

their vices, rich enough,

to sate the palate of a Sultan,

they way their visions cloud over
when contemplating crime.

The way they feast among themselves

while the poor must make do with crumbs,

hope dead again, oblivion
the best that dreams can offer.

 

In order to win,
we must pull down this Christ,
and carry Barrabas instead

upon our shoulders. We must,
if we are to live at all, remake
all things of spirit an empty slate
and start all over. Each time
this ancient thing rears up
its head we must undo it.

To make the first become the last,
we need Voltaire in the mix,
and Jean-Jacques,[1] too!

If a word from Cato will fit the need,
let him be cited at the bar. And let

Monsieur Gaveau[2] spout Tacitus.

If you plan to coat over the past with tin,
that calls for insult and defamation,
denunciations, lies, slanders,
all kinds of slobbering inanities,
even a little howling and biting,

restoring good taste as well as good order.

 

And under this black sky, with France
in mourning, you dare to laugh?

Who is it you accuse? You put
our old honor and pride to shame.
Among the crimes you accuse us of,
even France lifts her widow’s veil to see:
of setting mankind at liberty  oh, my! —
of having made up Sparta
out of the ashes of Sodom;
of having debased herself
by wiping the sweat from the brow
of the poor; of being both brash
and brilliant, like a cleansing
thunderstorm; of blocking
the dullard’s horizon view
with her formidable silhouette;
of having risen lark-time tirelessly
to show the workers what must be done;

of saying to anyone who blusters,
“Look to Rome for word of God!”

a firm “No! He is elsewhere!”;

of confronting dogma with conscience;

of having patience so inexhaustible
that no one knows where it’s from;

of keening out the slim white hope
that must appear on our horizons
when the prison doors creak open;
forever calling out behind us “Walk!”
when old yokes and old regimes
seemed more than some could bear;
for goading all to weigh the scales,
no matter what, of right against duty.

 

What do you blame us for? It’s always the same!
Oh, the end of serfdom, for one thing.

The fall of the black wall Henri Latude[3]
made mock of by multiple escapes
(who misses the Bastille and its dungeons?)

For every beacon someone lit
to flash allegiance as we marched on by?

For the fact that the same constellations rise
one after another in regular order,
uninterrupted by biblical events?

For the stars’ refusal to usher in just yet
another era in the cosmos? For the smile
that Molière still brings us, apostle-wise?

For the fact that Pascal and Diderot
     have never been refuted,

that Danton and Mirabeau’s names
have not been suppressed, but amplified?

For the grievous illusions
     that some of us pursue,
like the True, the Good, the Great, the Beautiful?

For our bad attitude, ever and always
striding among the stars and looking profound?
For the way some of us embody still
the idea of Revolution,
     through which the world reborn
in a second creation, makes Man
anew, amalgam of Christ, Cecrops, Japteth?
Unbearable to you, o pamphleteers
that we and you walk
     beneath the same forgiving sky!

 

Such rascals you are, to put
     the whole nation on trial again,
as if to violate an immense angel,
eagle-wings and all, because the sight
of her diminishes you. Well, then,
what if you defeat her? Her blood
is on your hands. Your shrieks
of “Down with her glory, Down
with her wishes, her struggles, her work!
She is the culprit of all disasters!”
Your dark feet would trample her.
Although immortal, you’d brand her
a perverse and immoral madwoman.

As these indignities stun France,
you cannot refrain from a hideous laugh,
as though a sacred misfortune earned
no more than your school-yard taunts.

Vile jesters and pedants, you stoop so low
as to insult your own mother. Now that
is a sinister project, the kind of crime
that used to make the sky break open
to show the wrath of offended gods.
Monsters, to pay for mother’s milk
with an offering of gall, gangrene
upon her wound, a venom philter
to treat her fever, to bow and scrape
“O Mother Dear, O France!”
lip-service while planning a parricide!
The way your pens are scurrying,
it seems you never seem to tire of this evil.

 

A bad minute, alas, can hurt
the century it overshadows.
I pity these men for being the ones
expected by History, whose
shadowy black Muse will shudder
before she relegates them all
to footnotes in her chronicle.

These smudgy pamphlets stun
her nonetheless, as she reads
how those who did their duty
were pilloried, how the people
are little more than prey to them,
and targets of their ferocity,
that mass killing is still possible,
and that in the present century
after Locke and Voltaire,

the cesspools of infamy re-open
and the Frérons,[4] the Sanchezes,
the Monlucs,[5] and the Tavannes[6]
were able to re-appear,
like mushrooms in the corrupted air,
more numerous than the flowers
on some boundless grass savannah.

 

People, these dwarves
cannot reduce your giants’ stature.

O France, one day on the Rhine,
and on the Apennines,
bearing the lightning of Prometheus
beneath your blazing brow,
you shall rise again, great risen one.

One view of your visage will send
the black gravediggers scurrying.
Your shouts of “Freedom! Peace!

Clemency! Hope!” will prevail.

Aeschylus in Athens, and Dante
in Florence, lean on the edge
of their beleaguered tombs, awake
again, regarding you with tearful eyes,
joyful and proud to see you,

mother of reason and revolutions.
One will see Greece in you,
     the other, Italy.

 

France then will say to all,
     Now here I am. I come to soothe,
and to untie your bonds!
All men are one Mankind! One people! One God!
Oh, happy globe, from Pole to Pole,
O Fatherland, in every place
our hands will be upraised toward you.

Snakes, hydras, and demons
cannot prevent your great works.
We are not yet done with being French.
The world is waiting for this sequel,
and wants, if anything, even more.
The sound of chains breaking is beautiful.

She returns. She is on the march.
We shall see the great oaks tremble again!

 

 

---

[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

[2] Gaveau, one of the cruelest, and stupidest, of the judges condemning citizens to death or imprisonment in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. He died in an insane asylum a few months after his service. Lissagaray calls him “a savage simpleton, without a shadow of talent.”

[3] Henri Latude (1725-1805), French writer whose multiple escapes from the Bastille were the basis of his 1787 memoir, Despotism Unveiled.

[4] Élie Catherine Fréron (1718-1776), literary critic who opposed the French Enlightenment, and an avowed enemy of Voltaire.

[5] Blaise de Monluc (1502-1577), general and Marshal of France, known for brutal killings and for founding one of the earliest militant Catholic organizations.

[6] Gaspard de Saux, sieur de Tavannes (1509-1573), French general who helped plan the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.

The Church's Pamphleteers, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

 

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l”Année Terrible, “July 1871”

 

From His mouth, to their ears.

God bellows, not homilies, but
deafening diatribes.
Who gets these divine messages?
Oh, random priests, or Prussians,
or anyone with an urge to scribble
at a madhouse window. Their prose
skims off the surface of religion
the way a beadle mumbles his way
around and through a litany.

 

Each one of them cries “Credo!”
and claiming authority from that,
chides, “Let us pray!”, but, oh,
what’s prayed for is a thrust here,
     and bullets sprayed there.
These clergy may be weaklings
     but their spirit is lively.

 

They are quick to issue, with seal and cross,
some holy proclamation. Their aim
seems random and drenches the uninterested
the way the sloppy bottle-brush
     throws holy water.

Things never move fast enough
to suit their somber pretentiousness.
They prod the executioners’ behinds
and say to them,
     “Get moving, lazy bones!”
It is as though Death came to them,
a supplicant, and begged, “Send more!”
If only they resurrected Besme[1]
and all the assassins who struck
at the Saint Barthomew’s Massacre,
now that would stir things up!
And why not get Leffamas,[2]
     that pamphleteer of old
back up from his place in Hell?
Where then is Trestaillon,[3]
that self-proclaimed mass-killer
exterminating Protestants in Nimes
at the end of The Hundred Days,
whose acts were justified
    as instrumentum regni?
Where are the good Christians
who once chopped up in bits
     their Protestant neighbors —
why not invite them, too?

Since the events of Eighty-Nine
(the Revolution, I mean),
offend you so, go resurrect
King Charles with his arquebus,
and Montrevel, wild beast
    and rough companion?[4]

 

Where are the complicit workers of Avignon
who dragged dead Brune[5] along the Quai de Rhone
after the royalist mob had murdered him?
Are there still great butchers too ready to serve
both altar and throne, whose sweaty brows
beneath the sun of Cevennes, stalked Bâville[6]
to his mysterious “suicide”
and earned the Bossuet’s[7] approval?

 

I am sure Oppède[8] could provide us a president!

How welcome a Laubardemont[9] would be,
to add new twists to the art of torture!
Their rainbow of peace reveals itself
as a great and unsheathed naked sword.

The blade is, after all, the best
thing known to help one sleep at night.
No society can survive without
some threat suspended over it:
a dogma to which we must get used.

If, now and then, to save
us from our own worse selves, the sword
drops down to kill us, so be it.

 

You pamphleteers must be
     in quite a state of confusion.

One day you are the emperor’s lieutenant,
on another, the Pope’s vicar, and all the while
Death’s self-anointed agent, too!

Amid your calls for hush and peace,
you are the ones who bark, and bite, and lie.

 

You come, suspicious, vile, devout,

ready to knock Rochefort[10] to the ground,

that proud archer, the powerful sagittarius

whose arrow is on the side of the fallen empire.

You dig up the grave of Flourens,[11] jackal!

what will you do with his poor bones?

 

When widows weep, you insult their tears.

You mock your victims’ funerals,

painting crows white,
     and blackening the doves.

The sight of a cradle
     wrapped in a shroud
offends you. The stones you throw
wound God in the people,
the child in the grandfather,
the fathers in the sons,
the men in the women remembered.

You think you are strong

because your infamy is shameless!

 

---

[1] Besme, a Bohemian named Charles Dianovitz, who led a group of paid assassins against Protestant leaders at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572.

[2] Isaac de Leffemas (c.1587 – c. 1657), a poet and playwright, author of some libelous political pamphlets. Hugo seemed to have a special scorn for him, mentioning him in his drama Marion Delorme.

[3] Jacques Duport, nicknamed Trestaillon, led a massacre and pillage carried out by Catholic zealots against the Protestants of Nimes, immediately after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, and just as the monarchy was being restored. Among other outrages, his men shot anyone who could not recite a Latin prayer. (For a detailed account, see Fox’s Book of Martyrs.)

[4] King Charles … Montrevel. King Charles IX (r. 1550-1574) was responsible for the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Huguenots, which, after spreading to the provinces, accounted for more than 10,000 deaths. Antoine de La Baume, 8^th compte de Montrevel (1557-1595), was a Gentilhomme ordinaire at the court of Charles IX, and a soldier. He died in 1595 in the Siege of Vesoul, a battle in which French forces, accepting the town’s capitulation, entered and broke their promise of a peaceful occupation with acts of violence and looting.

[5] Guillaume Brune (1764-1815), a Napoleonic military commander and politician, killed in Avignon by a mob of royalists. His body was thrown into the river Rhone, recovered by fishermen, and buried locally. The murder was covered up.

[6] Chrétien François de Lamoignon, marquis de Bâville (1735 – 1789) French statesman who issued the Edict of Versailles in 1787, which gave French Protestants civil rights and freedom of worship. The same edict abolished judicial torture.

[7] Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet (1627 – 1704) French bishop and theologian who published famous homilies against the Protestants. He was also an ardent orator preaching the divine right of kings.

[8] Jean Maynier (1495-1558), baron of Oppède, led the 1545 massacre of the Vaudois (Waldensians) in Provence. He was the First President of the Parliament of Aix-en-Provence. As for the place called Oppède, Le Vieux Oppède, a mountaintop medieval village in Provence, had a long history of dissension between the authorities on the hill-top, and the villagers and farmers below. During the period of rival papacies, the French Pope Benedict XIII fled from Avignon to Oppède’s fortress, where he was besieged by enemies. The town is a microcosm of civil discord.

[9] Jean Martin, Baron de Laubardemont, (c1590 – 1656), French magistrate involved in the infamous trial of Urbain Grandier, accused of sorcery and child-killing (the basis of Aldous Huxley’s book, The Devils of Loudun.)

[10] Victor Henri Rochefort (1831-1913), a beleaguered journalist and newspaper editor, playwright and pamphleteer who had fled Paris in May 1871, only to be arrested by the government and sentenced to life imprisonment. He had served with Hugo in the National Assembly and, like Hugo, had resigned from it.

[11] Gustave Flourens (1838-1871), writer, journalist, and revolutionary, a general of The Paris Commune. He was summarily killed after his arrest.

Penmanship

by Brett Rutherford

Aside from her religion,
she prides herself best
in the classroom, where
"Round, round, ready, right!"
she teaches young girls
to progress from curlicues
to long pen flourishes,
from clumsy single letters
to a cursive flow, each word
a single unit in which
the pen is hardly lifted.

One might stand out
for almost calligraphic
talent, but that was not
Miss Martel's objective.
Uniformity mattered.
Handwriting that matched
the guiding textbook
earned the top grade.

Today they will write,
for practice, each
her own communique
to the Prefect of Police.
No love notes on her watch!

She will walk the rows,
sharp eyes on their hands
and how they hold their elbows.
After the ink-well dip of pen,
the address,
the Salutation, "Dear Sir,"
they are on their own.

She will scoop all the papers up
and send the best
to the Prefect himself.

"I saw through a window,"
one says, "a man who read
from a foreign newspaper
while others gathered round
to hear. They nodded.
Some even shouted.
They all had beards."

"Someone sleeps under
the Fourth Street bridge.
This ought not to be allowed."

"Old Mrs. Hartman is not
who you think she is.
Men come to her door
long after midnight
with packages,
then leave without them."

"Schmitt's wife
was expecting,
only now she isn't."

"One corner of the park,
it's all men walking
back and forth, and back
and forth. I saw
the Reverend there, too."

"On the street behind the grocers,
at Number Four,
there are Jews in the attic."