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."

Henri V of France

by Brett Rutherford

 

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

 

i

They came to call on the Comte de Chambord.
In his reception hall, festooned
with armor and portraiture,
they offer him the crown of France,
a Bourbon Restoration. Henri, the last
of his line and childless, had one
and only one main condition:

 

“The hated tricolor flag must go,
to cancel the guillotine, the blood,
the Terror. Our banner must bear
a single fleur-dy-lys.” — 

                                      “Your majesty,
a people weaned on Revolution
are not about to surrender
freedom, equality, fraternity.
Why not three colors behind
one fleur-de-lys, embroidered
in the finest white and gold?
Or let the nation have its flag,
while you retain the lily proud
as your personal emblem?
Surely Monsieur will not object?” —

“Impossible! One line
from Hugh Capet to Louis the Last
runs in my blood. The state is me,
and my standard is the fleur-de-lys.

It is that, or nothing.” —

 

“On this, Monsieur,
     no compromise is possible.
Paris would go up in flames again!” —

 

“Well, then, this audience is over.”

 

The members of the deputation bow.
They are shown the door. Their carriages
roll down the dusty colonnade.

 

2

Henri, if I may address you informally:
I was an adolescent when you were a child.
Some of my earliest poems were sung
around your fragile and triumphant cradle.

Now winds from the abyss have thrown
you onto one peak, me onto another,
because misfortune has a way
of hurling thunderbolts,
     stranding some men on mountaintops.
The gulf between us,
     makes us seem antipodes to one another.

You go about with a king's mantle
     weighing your shoulders down,
and in your hand
     you wield a once-dazzling scepter,
          with the same ease I wield my pen.
I exceed you in white hairs, and years,

and I know a good man when I see him.
That man is virile and strong,
     who turns a pitiable end
          into a suicide,
who knows how to abdicate everything,
     except his original honor,
who would rather be Hamlet in Elsinore,
and who, knowing himself a ghost already,
     refuses to sell his flag
          even with a kingdom offered.

 

Well, fine. You stood your ground,
as I stood mine, in exile.
They hailed you King for less time
     than it takes to consume
          a carafe of coffee.
Did you enjoy it? The lily is,
as the lily is, all white. It is
what it is, and cannot be otherwise.

It is good, certainly, to remain Capet,
and being Bourbon, you are inclined
    to be an honest man, after all.
(What a shock to the House of Orleans
who had every intention
     of succeeding you!)

 

The ups and downs of history
make many upright persons crawl
where once they strode triumphant.
The sinkholes are piled full of us.
It is better to come out well, prince,
     than to make a bad entrance.

Henri, I tip my tricolor cap
     in honor of your uncrowned head.

 

Last Rites

 by Brett Rutherford

If ever they came
around with Bibles,
they stopped that long ago.
One German New Testament
that came over from Alsace,
somewhere in the cupboard,
was not of any use,

for Harry’s death
was never expected,
not even three knocks
at the window like when
the Grim Reaper came
for ailing Aunt Leni.

Seldom more formal
than long underwear,
he had lorded the table
that night. Three games
of gin rummy, and
wouldn’t you know
he won all three.

They had some beers, of course,
and something they ate provoked
a farting contest. Even Grandma
let loose, but Harry won, of course,
ass-trumpeting the bass clef.

Contented with himself,
he dozed on the day-bed.
They let him be.
While Grandma slept
in her downy feathers,
his heart gave out.

I watched them burn
the day-bed mattress.
When you die, they said,
you pee the bed. There’s
nothing dignified about dying.

A Revolution on Trial

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

You, judges, sitting at the high bar,
imagining the verdict you might make
if Revolution herself were brought to trial,
a harsh, barbaric ferocious defendant
whom even screech-owls flee in panic, who,
respecting no magic makes way through dervishes
and fakirs and marabouts,
not even sparing the church, priests and nuns
scattered, Jesuits in terror and deshabilé.
Knowing that half of this was done
when Revolution merely showed her face,
you, judges, are inflamed with anger.

 

If kings are nothing but inflated men,
and gods are only men exaggerated,
those ghosts that lorded over us
from mountaintops just fade away.
A ghost in armor is a pile of junk.
The reliquary, sacral Popes
are nothing but dried-up ghouls.
That unexpected wind that blows
upon your august brows, o judges,
is a blast from Nature’s bowels.
Your faces distort in outrage.

 

What mourning! What agonies!
Here no fiery burning bush —

instead a black shrub that weeps.

Night’s festivals, voracious and cruel
are done, and only groans remain.

 

An awful day of trial has come.
Smiting their own broad chests,
the interrogators have failed.

Dredging the dark for evidence,
they have come up empty.

The blind bat cannot bear witness;
the weasels wander aimlessly
and shriek in an unknown language;
the lowly worm has lost its dignity
and cannot be pressed for answers.
A solitary fox cries out;
alas, the nocturnal animals

who hunted in that realm of night

     while the birds slumbered,
are at bay, and do not
      respond to summonses.

Wolves are about, and make the woods
too desolate for the bailiffs.

There is no calling up the dead:
the ghosts, oppressed, no longer speak
and jostle one another randomly.

 

Where will you find the evidence?

Have you a good description, even,
of what Revolution looks like,
     and what kind of garb she wears?

Her last known address was everywhere
a month ago, and nowhere at all today.

 

The sun is all wrong: you squint,
     adjust the shades against
     too early light: too hard to read
those endless indictments
     that looked so fine in candle-light!

If things go on this way, goldfish
will dart from ray to shade until
they droop and fall exhausted;
the ravens will hover overhead,
but never choose a place to land;
too weak to lift their coffin lids,
even the loathsome vampires starve.

 

Your inquiries have turned
all Nature topsy-turvy, and you
are no wiser than when you began.

You, in your robes, daring to think
that Revolution could be put in chains,
and marched away to the galleys,
the truth is right before you —
it is the dawn itself you try to stop.