Is It Night? Is It Day?

The Army of Versailles re-enters Paris to fight the Paris Commune, May 21, 1871.

 

by Brett Rutherford

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

The horror comes at twilight,
neither day nor night.
All pale and neutral shades give way
to an immensity of anger.
Thunderbolts flash, but after them
comes only a muffled rumbling.
Pale and shivering, we attend.
Some gesture meant to torture us
gropes imbecilicly in glancing blows.
No steeple or crucifix stand out,
and nothing human flies or floats.
The odds of surviving
in this field of carnage
are slim, where people
already vanquished line up
to be machine-gunned,
clueless as to why, as what
some claimed a duty
was, to others, crime.

Up, up, the shadow ascends
to the peak of Babel’s tower.
Bandits held sixty-four hostages
and killed them; the other side
responds by ordering
six thousand prisoners to die.
He who weeps first,
should the last to mock
another’s misfortune.
Conscience always was, at best,
a dim night-light; this wind
seems to have extinguished it.
O night of blinding haze!
Hour of our peril!

Exterminators, well-dressed
and speaking softly,
make fury pleasing to the palette,
and someone who pleads, “Forgive!”
is made the monster.

It is the Army against the People.
Look, it is only France that bleeds.
Ignorance pitted against
ignorance never wins peace.
The law has fallen on its face.
The last one standing
is always Cain.
Like sooted snow, crime hovers
over everything,
and cannot be brushed away.
The innocent are blackened
as this shadow covers them.
One is sent off to set fire
to Louvre?
“Huh? What is the Louvre?”
He has no idea. Another,
off to horrible exploits,
races ahead of him stupidly.
Where are the laws?

The shadow realm sweeps over Paris,
with flames as its somber progeny,
a greedy sisterhood consuming wood and brick.
Hearts, burned and suffocated, ceased
to beat; souls, not seeing light
to flee to, snuffled out dismally.
One kill with blinded eyes.
Another, knowing nothing, dies.
All perish in one mélange of misery:
the blond child, the terrified slave
chained to his place in the galley,
fathers along with sons, young and old,
the sword that felled the reprobate
cuts down a figure running, a nun.
Death cuts with the same indifferent swath
the philosophic dreamer,
along with the drunk in the gutter.
Into a common abyss they all expire.
In the terrifying inferno we seem to hear
a single voice bellowing, a brazen ox,
but whose voices are compounded there
to make a single scream indicting chaos?

But When the Louvre Caught Fire

 

by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, May 1871, Paris in Flames, Part 5

Oh! the cry of the evil ghosts
     is terrible, and tempting!
People, in your own city,
as in Old Testament times,
when the conflagration came,
when like old Nineveh
in the talons of Jehovah;
as when Lutetia agonized
(O ancient mother of Paris!)
to set itself alight
to stop the advance of Caesar;
these are seductive ideas!

But when the Louvre
caught fire like a cottage-roof
with all its books inside,
this was something more.
Inside were Revolutions, too!
The annals of 1830!
    The records of 1789!

When, under the Pont de Neuf,
     the Seine flowed red;
when the Palace, the school
     that spells out justice,
suddenly broke off from the Saint-Chapelle,
fell like a rag that has come unsewn;
when the destruction threw purple light
     upon the temple where Rousseau
          and Voltaire reposed,
and all this vast mass so dear
     to the people, domes,
triumphal arches, ruins of Roman
amphitheaters, pediments,
bulwarks from which light shines
and from which dire voices come;
when for a moment we thought we saw
the city of glory and hope and azure,
it becomes now a blackened city,
a corpse-Paris engulfed in horrible smoke.

This blaze, lugubrious,
even as April comes to agitate
the doves, awakens the tombs
to sepulchral horror.

O souls departed, dare you remain
to see the death of the sunrise?
The Gorgons laughed with their funereal teeth;
the sky was afraid,
the infamous joy of darkness threatened it,
the shadow came to quench the torch,
and out of the abyss came Torquemada
who looked on and said, “This is beautiful.”

Cisneros exulted: This is the great pyre of Man!
Sanchez squeaked out: The abyss is complete.
     See this, O Rome!
The things we gave such names as law,
our absolute principles, our Republic,
our reason and freedom — these were no more!
Every dead arsonist, from Nero to Zoilus,
rose out of the inferno with brand in hand,
hurling more fire upon poor Paris.
The bloated old Borgia even came to bless.

Look at this crowd of monsters,
like insects approaching a banquet!
Tsars and Sultans, Escobar, Rufinus,
Trimalchion, all avatars of suffering,
arriving to admire the work.
They murmur: It is finished.
     No more France.
Something so thoroughly destroyed
can never rise again.
Forbidden Brunswick shook his fist
at Danton, and from a stable
we heard the song of the Golden Calf.

In this hour when the sky became terrible,
having as our only hope
     the fact of our despair
we witnessed, along with this monstrous
     group of men in black,
Death opening its wings over Paris,
a blackness as deep as eternal night.

Note: Lutetia, the town over which Paris is built, was a chief town of the Parisii, which they themselves set ablaze, along with a bridge, to stop the advance of Julius Caesar’s invading army in 52 BCE.