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MAX JACOB: THE DICE CUP
--------------
--Max already had his sadness from
birth. Often he was beaten. At the age of 24 he received his last slap from his
mother for having made a spelling error. --biographer Robert Guiette
***
--The inefficiency of my efforts to
collaborate in the exercises of the barracks exhausted the patience of those
who were directing them and when the benevolent vigilance of the military
authorities interrupted my tasks at the end of six weeks in order to spare me
further trouble, I better dissimulated my embarrassment at having been relieved
of my responsibilities than my chiefs their joy at having acquitted themselves
of theirs. --Max, *Le Roi de Beotie, Nouvelles* (1922)
***
--He relates that he supported
himself by giving piano lessons, supported himself to the extent of "four
sous of bread per day," slept in a hammock offered him by another Breton
as poor as he, and attended courses at the Academie Jullian where the other
students, hardly a prosperous lot, thought *he* had come to sell pencils.
--Gerald Kamber: *Max Jacob and the Poetics of Cubism* (1971)
***
--I returned from the Bibliotheque
Nationale. I set down my briefcase. I glanced down for my slippers and when I
raised my head again there was somebody on the wall. There was someone on the
red wallpaper! My flesh fell to the floor. I was stripped by lightning! Oh,
imperishable second! Oh verity, verity! Tears of verity, joy of verity,
unforgettable verity. The celestial body is on the wall of my poor room. Why
Lord? Oh forgive me! He is in a landscape, a landscape I drew long ago, but
Him! What beauty, elegance and sweetness. His shoulders, his bearing. He is
wearing a robe of yellow silk with blue cuffs. He turns and I see that peaceful
shining face. --Max's vision, October 7, 1909
***
--Derision and parody have always
constituted an essential element of Max's inspiration. Whence the difficulty
that certain persons had in taking his conversion seriously. "The parody
of a conversion," they were saying and with good reason. It was a calumny
to which Max's attitude and his writings lent themselves. His use of ether as
an intoxicant, posterior, he claimed, to his vision of 1909 kept his faith from
being recognized as absolutely sincere. And finally his morals were not good;
that's the least that one can say. --Andre Billy, *Max Jacob* (1946)
***
--There is no doubt that he
fervently believed in his new faith, but it did not affect his personality or
his art. The result was that Christianity tolerated his presence in its midst
with difficulty: numerous are the testimonies that cast doubts on his
conversion. --Sydney Levy, *The Play of the Text* (1981)
***
--Another vision that he had at the
Sacre Coeur of Montmartre was told a few years later among his friends. The
Virgin appeared to him and said: "How crummy you are, my poor Max!"
"Not as crummy as all that, my good Holy Virgin!" Max replied, and
left the church, upsetting the communicants and annoying the Swiss Guard.
--Andre Billy
***
--That part of Montmartre is the
least agreeable. A pervasive humidity slimes over the cobblestones and the
walls, insinuates itself, spreads itself everywhere. In such a street where not
three cars a day roll through and where the housewives, like nuns, slink along
the walls, one could easily enough admit that a special atmosphere favored conversions.
When, a little later, I learned that Leprin was undergoing in his turn the same
crisis, I was hardly surprised since I knew the neighborhood. --Francis Carco,
*Montmartre vingt ans* (1938)
***
--Even a detailed study of a single
period of his life would yield evidence of his marginality: during his
Montmartre phase, penniless, he worked at a variety of jobs--journalist, piano
teacher, tutor, salesman, janitor, expert in horoscopy, art critic, and others.
--Sydney Levy
***
--If I had sinned terribly the night
before, next morning, well before dawn, you would see me crawling on my knees
through the Stations of the Cross. I choke, I weep, I strike my face, my
breast, my arms and legs, my hands. I bleed, I make the Sign of the Cross with
my tears. At the end, God is taken in. --Max, in a letter to Marcel Jouhandeau
***
--We must believe in Hell because it
has been seen and described by seers and saints. There is an herb that makes us
see demons. I drank an infusion of that herb and I saw demons. I must believe
what I saw. I have described them and my description tallies with other
descriptions. --Max
***
--You allow your imagination to
wander far concerning my Saintliness, and concerning the relations between old
rocks and said Saintliness. I would suggest that in principle Saintliness is a
very difficult "art". The base of Saintliness is the mastery of self.
"The religion of he who is not master of his language is vain," says
St. Paul or St. Jacques or St. Jude, or St. John. The letter is less important
than wise and dogmatic thought. Who among us can call himself master of his
language? In any case, not myself. I question what it is to be a "master
of one's language". In order to be a master, one needs long exercise, and
I myself have but thirty years of Catholicism, which supposes inveterate bad
habits from the past. But I stop before "His language". It would
still be necessary for *my language* to belong to me for me to know that I have
a language. And this is the formidable problem of the Me. The Me! The Me! The
Me! All of holiness is in these two letters. Where begins your Me, our Me?
Where does it end? *How* is it, this Me? What separates it from the Me of
others? From nature? Imagine that a giant iron nail holds you on a chaise or
armchair, and that the rest of the world gravitates around you. Even God
himself! You gaze upon him on the outside of yourself. You gaze upon the rest
of the world. This is not all. You listen to your inspiration and the words
that it breathes to you do not belong to you, your ideas of angels and demons
don't belong to you. Your reason itself, does it belong to you? Or to God? I
ask you: where is your Me? You are traversed by the emanations of all nature,
of your heredity, of your digestions of all kinds. Where is your Me? Because
the base of Saintliness is to be master of one's Me--without doubt in order
that one may renounce it and offer it to God. Though it is necessary that it
exists, yet you know not where it is. --Max Jacob, in a letter from
Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire to Clotilde Bauguion, 20 July 1942 (tr. E.M.)
***
--I will not go to Quimper, alas!
The yellow star annoys me:
--If I wear it, I could become the
prey of the first policeman that comes upon me. And even more important: I
scandalize the children.
--If I don't wear it, I am
considered at fault.
At Saint-Benoot, I am well
protected--it's been proven several times now. On the road, however, I am the
humble wandering Jew. But you must believe that I will never again go to
Quimper without making an effort to see Locronan [a friend]--*if such is
permitted*.
Pray for me! It seems that I have a
dossier at the Prefecture of Police in which my relations and numerous visitors
constitute a "Jewish plot". I have conveyed this fact to my
protector. --letter to Clotilde, 28 August 1942 (tr. E. M.)
***
--Between 1930 and 1940 we were
reunited during the summer vacations, among regional and Parisian artists, at
an address on the Rue Saint-Franois, in Quimper.
Present among us, giving tone to the
little group, was Max Jacob, pessimistic and full of verve simultaneously, the
Italian ceramist and sculptor Giovanni Leonardi, the painter and conservator at
the Museum of Brest, Jean Lachaud, the writer and doctor Pierre Minet, my
sister Henriette Bauguion, and myself, poet.
Now and then, Max Jacob, bitter,
glancing back at his past and pining for his youthfulness of those years, would
take from his breastpocket a worn daguerreotype photograph. Exhibiting it with
emotion, he would say: "And here's the young man I was at 20!" He
wasn't far from shedding tears, and ours as well were on the verge of
overflowing our eyelids, knowing to what an extent life effaces all innocence.
Max Jacob had the fine head of a
monastic bishop, and yet there nonetheless flashed forth at times, from behind
his lorgnon, an incisive gaze, searching always for the fault in his
interlocutor's speech. He was not at all only a little proud of his hands,
saying that an artist must ostentatiously display these noble parts of himself.
If for Dr. G. Desse the hand is a claw, for Max Jacob it was a kind of scepter,
able to bless, create beauty, direct, command--a kind of device to uplift the
soul toward God, in an offertory gesture.
One problem Max Jacob did not like
to enter upon was the problem of Love. At those times he became silent, as if
folded into himself, withdrawn. However he resolved this problem, it is certain
that he never loved anyone absolutely, passionately and decisively. The Love of
God was for him the only basis for the problem, human love being but an
accident--and perhaps unfortunately for him, deviating from its normal course.
Women had nothing to fear from him in this area--he treated them always as
comrades, amiably.
This curious man, whose fashion of
moving about through life was so original (and I am not only speaking of his
physical comportment--which was the butt of laughter for the Quimper bourgeois,
when they saw him strolling about on the city quays in a silk shirt and ragged
shoes, for example--but also of his moral, intellectual and spiritual bearing),
this man whom Paris was not far from considering a buffoon--for he put so much
of the fantastic and occasionally such cynicism into his speech in order to
ward off questions, in order to demonstrate the inanity of everything--was in the
last analysis a very serious man, profound, mystical, and almost in despair
because he could not demonstrate the proof of God before the skeptics, which
proof was nevertheless demonstrated in his unquiet and tormented life.
--Clotilde Bauguion on Max
***
--I've unearthed a letter to the
Chinese poet Lo-Ching explaining my early readings of the French prose poet Max
Jacob. After seeing some of Lo-Ching's paintings in Taiwan and reading some of
his poems, upon my return to Madison I sent him some of the translations of Max
Jacob I did with Sydney Levy, previously in the French department here. Part of
the letter reads:
The poems
enclosed are translations of the French poet Max Jacob. I thought you may be
interested in these, because I read in the *Modern Chinese Literature* essay
about you that you studied Zen for awhile. I don't know how to define the
quality that first attracted me to Jacob, but it had something to do with his
knack for setting out on the first few steps of a narrative development and then,
when a certain critical mass had been reached, dissolving the narrative
suspense into a kind of absurd liberation....
It occurred to me early in my
reading of Jacob that his prose poems were structured like jokes: a certain
number of suggestive elements are brought into play, then suddenly comes the
punchline. One doesn't usually laugh with Jacob's "punchlines,"
however: one is rather left with a mixture of perplexity and liberation, a rare
combination in the range of aesthetic experiences. I had a similar feeling
encountering some of your paintings....
I was convinced of the importance of
this particular reaction, and started translating Jacob with Sydney Levy. A few
weeks into the project, I realized that Jacob's poems were perhaps more like
Zen koans than jokes, that a certain amount of mystification was always
present, a mystification to be broken, and that a meditative reading brought
more and more out of him. (I have to acknowledge, however, that a meditative
reading brings more and more out of the Yellow Pages as well.)...
I think of Jacob as a master
narrative technician, a great Jewish humorist in miniature, sort of a Faberge
of narrative irony. That he is not recognized as one of the central modern
French writers is incomprehensible to me. But perhaps it is sadly all too
comprehensible....
Lo-Ching
responded to my letter with several telling quotes from the Taipei phone book.
But as I can't read Chinese, the point was lost on me. --E.M.
***
--Far from wanting to repress
[Max's] marginality in order to tip the balance in favor of his participation
in some group or other...far from wanting to shelve him somewhere, I propose to
take the case of Max Jacob literally: to exploit this very marginality, to
confront it and multiply it. In other words, rather than considering Max Jacob
a failed cubist, a failed surrealist, a failed Jew, or a failure of any sort, I
propose to view his marginality as a front, a narrow boundary that belongs to
none of the systems it separates yet incorporates them all, something which
contains signs of each system, which announces the new yet retains traces of
the old. --S. Levy
***
--Art is a game. Too bad for him who
makes a duty of it. --Max, *La Defense de Tartuffe*
***
--This complex space is also the
space of play. Neither serious nor nonserious, neither real nor imaginary, yet
produced by theses pairs.... --S. Levy
***
--Monsieur de Max showed each of the
two sides all of his profiles in turn, like so many giant prisms. --Max
***
--*The Random House* [Dice House?]
*Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry* gives the following in the
"Notes on the Poets" section, p. 612. I quote it in the way of a
brief biography.
MAX JACOB
1876-1944. Met Picasso in 1901 and
for some time shared a studio with him. Afterward, and for many years to
follow, he lived three doors away from the artist on the Rue Ravignan. One of
the key members of the group that formed around Apollinaire. A painter as well
as poet, Jacob lived in extreme poverty, working at all manner of jobs
throughout his life. Although born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism in 1915,
six years after having a vision of Christ. In 1921 he moved from Paris to the
small village of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, close to a Benedictine church, where
he remained until his arrest by the Nazis in February 1944. He died the
following month in the concentration camp at Drancy.
Principle collections of poetry:
*Les Oeuvres Burlesques et Mystiques de Frere Matorel* (1912), *Le cornet dEs*
(1917), *La Defense de Tartuffe* (1919), *Le Laboratoire Central* (1921), *Les
Penitants en maillots roses* (1925), *Morceaux choisis* (1937), *Derniers
Poemes* (1945).
***
--To understand me well, compare the
familiarities of Montaigne with those of Aristide Bruant or the elbowings of a
sensationalist newspaper with the brutalities of Bossuet jostling the
Protestants. --Max, 1916 Preface to *Le cornet a dEs*
***
--Rimbaud extended the scope of our
sensibility and every literary man must be grateful to him for that, but
authors of prose poems cannot take him as their model, for the prose poem in
order to exist must submit to the laws of all art, which are style or will and
situation or emotion, and Rimbaud leads only to disorder and exasperation. The
prose poem must also avoid Baudelairean and Mallarmean parables, if it would
distinguish itself from the fable. It is probably clear that I do not regard as
prose poems those notebooks containing more or less quaint impressions
published from time to time by my colleagues who have a surplus of material. A
page of prose it not a prose poem, even if it encloses two or three lucky
finds. I would consider as such those so-called finds presented with the
necessary spiritual margin. In connection with this point, I warn the authors
of prose poems to avoid excessively brilliant gems that attract the eye at the
expense of the ensemble. The poem is a constructed object and not a jeweler's
window. Rimbaud is the jeweler's window, not the jewel: the prose poem is a
jewel. --Max, 1916 Preface
--------------
FALSE NEWS! NEW TRENCHES!
--[FAUSSES NOUVELLES! FOSSES NOUVELLES!]
At a performance of *For the Crown*,
at the Opera, while Desdemona was singing "My father is in Goritz and my
heart in Paris," a shot was heard in a loge in the fifth gallery, then a
second in the regular seats, and suddenly rope ladders rolled down. A man
was attempting to descent from the ceiling. A bullet stopped him at the level
of the balcony. All the spectators were armed and it appeared that the room was
full of nothing but... and... Then there were neighbors assassinated, flaming gas jets. The booths were besieged, as was the stage, and there was the
siege of a fold-up chair. The battle continued for eighteen days. The two armies
may have been provisioned, I don't know, but one thing I do know for sure is
that the journalists had come for such a horrible spectacle that one of them,
being ill, had sent in his mother, and she was much interested in the self-control
of a young French gentleman who had held out eighteen days in a front row
without eating anything but a bit of broth. This particular episode from the
Balcony War did much for voluntary enlistment in the provinces. And, on the
bank of my river, under my trees, I know of three brothers in brand new
uniforms who embraced each other with dry eyes while their families searched
for jerseys in the armoires in the attic.
***
POEM
"What do you want from
me?" said Mercury.
"Your smile and your
teeth," said Venus.
"They're false. What do you
want from me?"
"Your scepter."
"I never part with it."
"Bring it here, divine
postman."
It is necessary to read this in the
Greek: it's called an *Idyll*. In school, a friend who often failed his exams
said to me: "If we translated a Daudet novel into Greek, we'd be tough
enough afterwards for the exam! But I can't work at night. It makes my mother
cry!" It is necessary to read this in the Greek also, messieurs, it's an
idyll, *eidullos*, little picture.
***
POEM OF THE MOON
There are upon the night three
mushrooms that are the moon. As brusquely as the cuckoo sings from a clock,
they rearrange themselves at midnight each month. There are in the garden rare
flowers that are small sleeping men, one-hundred of them. They are reflections
from a mirror. There is in my dark room a luminous censer that swings, then
two... phosphorescent aerostats. They are reflections from a mirror. There is
in my head a bumblebee speaking.
***
A POEM FROM JAVA BY M. RENE GHIL
CALLED LES KSOURS
With a stroke of the fingernail,
they enter the fold of their eyelids to give to their eyes the look of statues.
You can't sleep here anymore. Those who have eyes like their stags cafe au
lait. . . Oh! your diadem phallus of corral, Tao-Phen-Tsu!... One will forget
them no more. Three dwarves, officers in the navy, descended in the
champagne-colored precipice to do the boulalaika with some hetaerae from
Champagne, and, that night, two students from a school left their... (here some
straying from the path that doesn't at all become me) to play a painted
bigophone duet under the yards of these... electric. With a stroke of the
fingernail, they enter the fold of their eyelids to give to their eyes the look
of statues, but those who have eyes like virgins of sugar never want anyone to
touch them there. One sings this cicada language and the godprinces eat
jamtoast off the tips of their fingernails.
***
INCONVENIENCE OF SLIPPING
The head was nothing but a little
old ball in the big white bed. The eiderdown of puce-colored silk, adorned with
fine lace, resting perfectly on the seam, was facing the lamp. The mother in
this white valley was caught up in big things, her dentures removed; and the
son, near the night table with the scruff of a seventeen-year-old that couldn't
be shaved because of pimples, was amazed that from this big old bed, from this
hollow valley of a bed, from this little toothless ball, could come a
marvelous, winning personality, and one as clearly congenial as his own.
Nevertheless, the little old ball didn't want him to leave the lamp by the
white valley. It would have been better for him not to leave it, because this
lamp had always kept him from living anywhere else when he was no longer living
near it.
***
A LITTLE ART CRITICISM
Jacques Claes really is the name of
a Dutch painter. Let's take a brief look, if you will, at his origins. When
Jacques was little his mother used to pale her face with vinegar, as she
herself has admitted. Thus we can explain why the master's paintings have a
varnished look. In Jacques' village, on Roofer Saint's Day, it used to be the
custom that the roofers would let themselves fall from the rooftops without
crushing the passersby. They also had to throw their ropes up from the sidewalk
to the chimneys. A very picturesque setting, which certainly must have given
our painter his taste for the picturesque.
***
CUBISM AND SUN, DROWNED
*L'eglisiglia del Amore, l'odore del
Tarquino*, in short, all the monuments of Rome on a bouteglia of wine and the
corresponding register to demonstrate that we have drunk from it copiously, but
that we will abstain: the taste of water in the gullet at the pucker of the
bottleneck. If you must repent, you might as well abstain. The volatile rainbow
is no more than volcanic bauble at the angle of the label. Mum's the word! And
lets compare one liter with the other: *el spatio del Baccio* and the *Bacco
nel cor*.
***
M. LE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC
VISITS THE HORTICULTURE EXHIBITION
Lofty palms so gracious that one
would think one were in Algeria as much by their attitude as by their altitude!
Lofty palms! Alas, if only they were or will turn out to be made of plaster!
Underneath is an enormous head like the Ogre from a Tom Thumb tale! Is he
asleep? No, he's smiling, and his hand that hides the sky, the enormous
Algerian sky, his hand that flies to make the night believable, passing one
nimble finger over the dense foliage, comes back with a bit of dust on the
index finger. Ah! Ah! Madame the housemaid? Ah! Ah! The scene changes: these
are giant dahlias: red, white, arranged as if for a chromolithograph, and
Monsieur le President, Tom Thumb, is now rich enough to relieve some of his
relatives, the palm cutters.
***
NON-AMBULANT PAUPERS AND OTHERS
Municipalities don't look after
ambulant paupers, it's fairies who look after them. A clown from a traveling
circus who had his legs broken and who was following the troupe as a scullion
got from a fairy an iron chair much like those in the front row, and he had the
ability to make a gold louis appear in his pocket, just as the Wandering Jew
would find five sous in his. The circus staff contended for the chair and
wouldn't think of anything else: the gold louis disappeared in orgies and the
circus found itself on the rocks. The chair, one day, was broken by a bunch of
drunks. The circus was sold and all the poor devils had to hit the road. The
fairy should have intervened, because municipalities don't look after ambulant
paupers, but the fairy wasn't around. The saltimbanques had the idea of
becoming themselves non-ambulant paupers so as to touch the heart of some
municipality.
***
TRUE ANECDOTE
The success of Mlle Ratkine at the
Franklin Theater in St. Petersberg was interrupted by screams. The unfortunate
singer had fallen into the pit and broken her arm. Being a doctor, it was I who
went to the beautiful, unconscious woman and had her moved to her dressing
room. I noticed that the director was in love with her: he paced around outside
the room without daring to enter or knock. Finally, he knocks. No answer!
"She's with that little French lover of hers, no doubt!" he said to
me. Her lover, alas! The woman was in the hands of the old stage manager who
was taking advantage of the fact that only one of Mlle Ratkine's hands was
free, kissing it in a frenzy, without fear of getting slapped.
***
UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
The ladder doesn't cling as much as
the virgin vine. My old Greek professor resides here. I come to bid farewell to
the salon where the carpet is half worn-out and the lady, who is a practical
lady, says to me: "In life, one should earn five francs a minute . . . No,
that would be too much, but every three minutes, at least!" "My wife
is a practical woman," says the Greek professor.
***
THE CONCARNEAU REGATTAS
Drowned people don't always sink to
the bottom. And in fact it's enough for someone stranded in the water to
remember that they can swim, and they'll see their pants start to move like
jumping-jacks' legs. That's what happened to me at the Concarneau regattas. I
was perfectly calm before sinking, or maybe those gentlemen going by in the
yawls will notice my efforts, or maybe... in short, a certain optimism. The
shore is right there! With life-sized Israeli personages of the most gracious
sort. What surprised me upon getting out of the water was how little wet I was,
and that I was being looked upon not as a poodle, but as a man.
***
PARISIAN LITERATURE
The memoirs of Mme Sarah Bernhardt
or of any of her female comrades. It starts with the description of the country
with words in Patois. The heath is called *la chigne*, as in the Franche-Comte,
and the brushwood *le chignon*.
***
THE PRESS
I entered timidly. There was an
ostrich that was losing its feathers and, on a pedestal of white stucco, a
bronze bird whose feathers were formed by a series of engraved shells. It was
M. Abel Hermant, or someone just like M. Abel Hermant, who appeared when the
vestibule door opened: "Ah, young man!" he said, "Surely you've
come for the hundred sous!" I learned later on that they gave a hundred
sous to everyone who showed up there. At the mention of the hundred sous, the
ostrich let fall a feather and the bronze bird flew away. Otherwise the
vestibule was deserted and dusty. They kept pins there in iron boxes painted
with the portraits of great men--Cuvier, Buffon, etc. "Ah, young
man!" repeated M. Abel Hermant or the person just like him, "Surely
you've come for the hundred sous!" And the birds started going through
their movement again. "No, Monsieur! It's free. It's a free deposit."
My future director of conscience heard no more: "free deposit" had
enlightened him. He turned his back on me. The ostrich put on his policeman's
hat and looked at me with nervous curiosity. The bronze bird became even more
bronze yet.
***
THE SACRIFICE OF ABRAHAM
During the time of the famine in
Ireland, an admirer said with ardor to a widow: "A cutlet of ewe, my
divine!" "No!" said the widow, "I don't want to damage this
body that you do me the honor of admiring." But she called her child to
her and cut a nice bloody chunk from the area of his cutlet. Did the child's
scar remain? I don't know; he used to howl biblically when one cut him in the
cutlet.
***
1889-1916
In 1889, the trenches would have
been put under glass and in wax. Two-thousand meters under ground, two-thousand
Poles in chains didn't know what they were doing there. Nearby the French
discovered an Egyptian shield. They showed it to the greatest doctor in the
world, the one who invented the ovariotomy. The greatest tenor in the world
sang two-thousand notes in the theater that is two-thousand meters round. He
earned two million and gave it to the Pasteur Institute. The French were under
glass.
***
IN THE SILENT FOREST
In the silent forest, night has not
yet fallen and the storm of sadness has not yet harmed the leaves. In the
silent forest from which the Dryads have fled, the Dryads will return no more.
In the silent forest, the brook no
longer has waves, because the torrent flows almost without water and turns. In
the silent forest, there is a tree as black as black, and behind the tree there
is a bush which has the form of a head and which is inflamed, and which is
inflamed with flames of blood and gold.
In the silent forest where the
Dryads will return no more, there are three black horses, the three black
horses of the Magi, and the Magi are no longer on their horses or anywhere else
and the horses speak like men.
***
A GREAT MAN HAS NO VALET
In a meadow, under the trees, in a
cloth skirt, sits the king, while a feast of lobsters is being prepared. His
maid, Mme Casimir, illegitimate child of a noble and of noble bearing herself,
salutes him in her usual manner, with her hunchback and her eighty years:
"So all's well, then, Mme Casimir?" "Oh, you know me, Sir,"
says the old Parisian, "As long as I have forty sous, I'm a young woman
again." Meanwhile the lobster feast occasioned sneaking from roof to roof,
conversations with legs hanging through skylights, and grease fires from the
frying pans.
***
THE FEMINIST QUESTION
Without admitting it to himself, he
was afraid that one day she would get her animals mixed up. When she was at the
foot of the tower, frail romantic amazon, she reined in her horse, massaged her
fiance, and then whistled for her mount, which returned to her from quite a
ways off. That Mlle de Valombreuse was a masseuse he fiance could pardon. But
that she was a trainer was just too much.
***
IT'S THE GROUND THAT LACKS THE LEAST
Can one plant a beech tree in such a
small garden? The doors and windows of the seven neighboring workshops come
together on the little courtyard where my brother and I are. The seed of the
beech tree is a slightly rotten banana or a potato. There are some old ladies
who are not pleased with you. But if the beech tree grows up, won't it be too
big? And if it doesn't grow up, what's the sense of planting it? Yet while
planting it, my friends found my precious gems that I had lost.
***
CERTAIN DISDAINS AND NOT OTHERS
The swan from the Andersen tale
headed into the river harbor. Our quincunxes were full of nobility, and under
the verdant mountain the workers were nestled in their old neighborhoods. My
friend the Romantic poet and I, on the dock by the washerwomen, were throwing
bread to the swan from the Andersen tale. The disdainful swan didn't see the
bread, but neither was it taken aback by the noise of your clothes beaters, oh
washerwomen, or the faraway sound of your quarrels, you workers at the doorways
after the repast.
***
MY LIFE
The city to take is in a room. The
enemy's plunder is not heavy and the enemy won't take it away because he
doesn't need money since it's a story and only a story. The city has ramparts
of painted wood: we will cut them out so we can glue them to our book. There
are two chapters or parts. Here is a red king with a gold crown mounting a saw:
that's chapter II. I don't remember chapter I anymore.
***
SUPERIOR DEGENERACY
The balloon rises. It is bright and
has a point that is even brighter. Neither the oblique sun which casts its bolt
like a wicked monster casts a spell, nor the cries of the crowd--nothing will
stop it from rising. No! The sky and the balloon are but one soul: for it alone
does the sky open. But, oh, balloon, be careful! Shadows are stirring in your
gondola, oh unlucky balloon! The aeronauts are drunk.
***
MYSTERY OF THE SKY
Returning from the bal, I sat at the
window contemplating the sky. It seemed that the clouds were immense heads of
old men sitting at a table, and that someone was bringing them a white bird
adorned with its feathers. A huge river traversed the sky. One of the old men
lowered his eyes towards me. He was even going to speak to me when the
enchantment dissipated, leaving the pure twinkling stars.
***
[*After we had gotten off to a
modest start, Sydney left Madison to become chairman of the French department
at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Our translation project
necessarily foundered under the weight of his new workload.
Our process of translation was the
following: I would do the initial translation from the French, Sydney would
read this and check it against the original, making notes or possible changes
in the text, and finally the two of us together would discuss the poem and make
the decisions for the final draft. This process didn't work as well through the
mail, of course, which was an added incentive to stop where we were.
The following poems are worked up
from rough drafts of mine that were never studied by Sydney. After a month of
sending drafts to California and receiving letters that Sydney was too busy
still reorganizing the French department there, I had a handful of drafts that
remained unperused by his more fluent and experienced eye.*]
***
MOURNFUL LAST CALL TO THE INSPIRING
PHANTOMS OF THE PAST
I was born by a hippodrome where I saw
horses running under the trees. Oh, my trees! Oh, my horses! Because all of it
was for me. I was born by a hippodrome! My childhood traced my name in the bark
of chestnut and beech trees! Alas! My trees are nothing more than the white
feathers of the bird that calls: "Leon! Leon!" Oh! Diffuse memories
of magnificent chestnut trees where I, a child, inscribed my grandfather's
name! Diffuse memories of races! Jockeys! They are no longer but shabby toys
seen from a distance! The horses have lost their nobility, and my jockeys are
all in black helmets. C'mon! Turn! Turn! Old imprisoned thoughts that will
never take flight! The symbol that holds you back is not the jockeys' supple
gallop in the verdure, but some dusty bas-relief that would hide from my mournfulness
the autumn beeches where my grandfather's name is written.
***
ON THE TRAIL OF THE TRAITOR
Once again the hotel! The Germans
are holding my friend Paul prisoner. My God, where is he? Lautenbourg, it's a
furnished hotel, Rue Saint-Sulpice, but I don't know the room number! The front
desk of the hotel is a pulpit that's too high for my eyes. I would like--do you
have a Mlle Cypriani. . . It must be 21 or 26 or 28, and me, I'm thinking about
the kabbalistic meaning of these numbers. It's Paul who's a prisoner of the
Germans for betraying his colonel. In what epoch do we live? The 21, 26, and 28
are numbers painted in white on a black background with three keys. Who is Mlle
Cypriani? Yet another spy.
***
POEM IN A STYLE NOT MY OWN
*To you, Rimbaud.* My horse stumbled
in the semi-quavers! The notes spatter all the way to the green sky of my soul,
the eighth sky!
Apollo was the doctor, and myself, I
am the heart's pianist. One would have to, with flats and groups of bars,
unload the scribbled steamers, collect the tiny standards, to compose
canticles.
The miniscule is the enormous! He
who conceived of Napoleon as an insect between two treebranches, who painted
him a nose too large in watercolors, who represented his court in colors that
were too soft--is he not larger than Napoleon himself, oh Ataman Prajapati!
The miniscule is the note!
Man bears upon himself photographs
of his ancestors like God did Napoleon, oh Spinoza! Me, my ancestors, we are
harp notes. God had conceived Sainte-Helene and the ocean between two
treebranches. My black horse looks good, although he is albino, but he has
watered in harp notes.
***
ANOTHER POINT OF THE LAW
On the Quay of Flames, the halt man
pointed out the counterdeed to me, which was in tiny Chinese characters. My
correspondent, who announced he was sending me five-thousand francs, added that
he was going to pick up from one of my contractors a certain number of meters
of rough silk of a cream color or crime. Why did he write it so small and in
Chinese, unless to escape the law or my law? The law of the jungle! I continued
my rounds on the Quay. My mother lit the lamp with some cork. My aunt had a
constrained look and didn't say a thing. "My aunt's got a healthy color to
her!" "No," said my mother, "that's her natural
color." I didn't say a thing about the counterdeed in Chinese. And is the
counterdeed in Chinese the natural color of commerce, or is it the color of
health? It is the natural color of the obligatory malady.
***
THE POET'S HOUSE
He's dead, and behold his widow and
two sons. "It's at this window that you'd see his old man's profile.
Alas," says the widow, "a marriage for love! So much courage and
talent! Our parents consented to everything!" The house changed tenants. A
woman hung her linen in the attic. I confronted her on it, and she responded
with fishwivery. A wolfdog fixed its eye on me. There were roses in the garden:
they were withered. The tenants changed again. There was a tiled roof above the
front steps and one drank iced drinks in the garden. What will there be in the
poet's house? Maybe a crime... And you, poor thing, what do you expect from
your house, except treason from your very best friends?
***
TWO LIVES
I knew Dumoulin back when I was a
science student at the Ecole Normale Superieure. An ineffectual man for whom
appearances were all that mattered, he had a big heart but was rather stiff in
his demeanor. Back then I used to enjoy lying in bed in the morning imagining
my friends in different roles. The following is what I came up with for
Dumoulin.
Dumoulin would frequent an ex-sea
captain who had become an autograph collector and who had a sick child. There's
Dumoulin on tenterhooks in front of Mikhlova Anastasia Verounoff who's on
stopover in Paris. The Russian woman knows literature well, which fact
exasperates Dumoulin. Being that she is young and beautiful, he turns the
conversation to dance in the hopes of impressing her. In comes Mme Michel (the
sailor's wife) holding the sick child.
"It's like looking at a Millet!
Truly!" says Anastasia. Dumoulin leaves and then the other life begins.
"None of you earns a
thing!" the mother would say at home. "I was delighted when you
entered the Ecole Normale, but you don't earn a sou. We've lost the case, and
your brother's not good for anything. It's not *him* who's going to feed us!
The poor-house, that's where we'll all end up."
One could do nothing but listen and
allow oneself to fall into despair.
Three months later Dumoulin moved
into a factory in Brittany. He was beloved of the employees, consulted by the
owner, and his mother was allowed to take baths. One day he falls asleep on the
point of forgetting. Forgetting....
***
KALEIDOSCOPE
Everything seemed to be in mosaic.
The animals were walking with their paws toward the sky, except for the donkey
that is, whose belly was covered with written words that changed constantly.
The tower was an opera glass, and there were gold-embroidered tapestries
featuring black cows. As for the little princess in the black dress, one
couldn't really tell if her dress had green suns on it, or if one were just
looking at it through the gaping holes of some tattered rag.
***
WHEN PITY ERRS
I'd rather go to prison with him
than let him escape. And that's just how it happened! There we are, locked in a
big tower. One night, in my sleep, I reached out to hold him fast, but grasped
nothing but a white foot ascending toward the ceiling. Then I'm alone in the
tower. From the tops of huge hay wagons the eyes of peasants watch me through
the windows with pity.
***
SURPRISES
On Murcie roads they use lingams for
kilometer markers. In order "to know," the wandering redheaded man of
letters peers closely at illustrated journals. All of them show the Moulin
Rouge in Paris, women who seem to be actually alive in bed with men who
likewise seem alive. And he just stepped in from the road where he had lost his
way! And he just arrived from the laundress who sold him baked apples! And he
just stepped off the Boulevard Saint-Martin where the stairs and the
tablecloths preside over twenty revolutions per century and one mid-Lent
festival per year!
***
THE DEPTHS OF THE PAINTING
It's a little outing in the country.
A little outing around a pit. The little girl is alone on the beach, on the
rocks that slant down the edge of the dune, and one would even say there's a
halo hovering about her head. Oh, it will be me who saves her! Me, the useless
fatso, I run! I run to her! Down there, around the pit, they're playing the
*Marseillaise*. But me, I run to save her! I haven't yet mentioned the color of
the sky because I wasn't quite sure that it didn't form along with the sea one
vast smooth painting of the color of slate chalkboards dirtied with chalk--yes,
that's it--with one long diagonal trailer of chalk like the blade of a
guillotine.
***
THAT
It was a sordid scene! Very stuffy,
everything done over in thick, dark fabrics. I was reclined and daydreaming on
the divan; he was writing at his low, heavy table. Then the goddess appeared before
us: her helmet was green and she herself was transparent. And the goddess
stayed there, there with us, until the servant came in--alas--with that odor of
hers!
***
THEY'LL NEVER RETURN
When will the gravediggers return to
us here before Ophelia's tomb? Ophelia is not in her immortal tomb yet. It's
the gravediggers who'll be put there if the white horse wants it so. And the
white horse? He comes every day to graze among the pebbles. He's the white
horse from the White Horse Tavern, here in front of the tomb. He has thirty-six
ribs. The tomb is a window opening upon mystery.
***
SPANISH GENEROSITY
Through a Spanish friend of mine,
the King of Spain has offered me a shirt with three large diamonds, a lace
collar on a toreador's jacket, and a manuscript containing recommendations on
the proper conduct of life. Carriages! Boulevards! Calling on friends! You
think the maid will sleep with me? M.S.L. offered his hand to G.A. who refused
it for no reason. I am back in the graces of the Y... family. Here I am at the
National Library, and I notice I'm being watched. Every time I try to read
certain books, four of the employees come at me with a doll-sized sword.
Finally a very young page steps up to me. "Come with me," he says. He
shows me a pit hidden behind the books. He shows me a wheel made of wood that
seems to be some kind of torture instrument. "You've been reading books on
the Inquisition," he says. "You are hereby condemned to death!"
I look and see they've had a death's head embroidered on my sleeve. "How
much?" I ask. "How much can you afford?" "Fifteen
francs." "That's too much," says the page boy. "I'll bring
it for you Monday."
Finally the eye of the Inquisition
falls upon the generosity of the King of Spain.
***
IS THE SUN PAGAN?
The woodcutter (near the church
entrance at the place where the vine and the grazing stag are sculpted) the
woodcutter was sending the split wood to the ray of sunlight and the ray of
sunlight was parrying by sending him split wood in return. The fight sped up so
much that finally the woodcutter stood up straight and said: "I can't take
this any more!" He went into the church and began taking off his vest. The
sun chased him as far as he could with a long stick, but the Sun is a pagan who
hasn't the right to enter the nave.
***
ONE SMILE FOR A HUNDRED TEARS
The horse is breathing with
difficulty. The drug he was given to increase his zeal has dashed the whole
plan. The idols from the mountaintops haven't appeared yet. The idiot kept
digging his heels into the horse's side, and the universe was no bigger than a
gourd. The homeland was marked by a standard of smoke. Retreat? We've never
left this place. Advance? The horse--alas!--is dying as we speak! But suddenly
one can hear musics in the air! It's as if they were just itching for the
ideal! Spring plays petanque with some green trees, and the valley vomits up
forty colts.
***
THE TWO PUBLICS OF THE ELITE
One the day of the Grand
Steeplechase, the Queen Mother was wearing blue velours stockings. Near one of
the guard fences, the King's mistress came towards him. "Prince," she
said, "that woman is not your mother! She's usurping the prerogatives of a
throne on which she has no rights." In a long discourse, the King extolled
prostitution, then married his mistress, a prostitute. A bespectacled servant
sleeping in the kitchen on a decorated porcelain stove was delighted to hear of
the marriage. And what does the elite public think? The upper aristocracy found
the discourse on prostitution a bit long, but the other elite public had much
applause for it.
***
ONE OF MY DAYS
To have brought two blue jugs to the
pump, wanting to draw water. To have been struck with vertigo because of the
height of the ladder. To have come back because I had one jug too many, and not
to have returned to the pump because of the vertigo. To have gone out in order
to buy a tray for my lamp because it leaks oil. To have found nothing but trays
for tea service, square trays, of no use for lamps, and to have left without a
tray. To have headed toward the public library and to have noticed on the way
that I had two false collars on but no tie. To have returned home. To have gone
to M. Vildrac's to request a Review, and not to have taken the Review because
therein M. Jules Romains says bad things about me. Not to have slept because of
remorse, because of remorse and despair.
***
METEMPSYCHOSIS
Shadows and silence here. Pools of
blood have the form of clouds. Blue Beard's seven wives are no longer in the placard.
There's nothing left of them but this organdie [cap, cavalry pennant]. But down
there! Down there on the Ocean! Look! Seven galleys! Seven galleys whose
riggings hang from the topsails into the sea like braids on womens' shoulders!
They're coming! They're coming! They're here!
***
SCENE FROM THE FAIR
A holiday in Quimper. The chestnut
trees shade the banks in the evening. And from so high! The banks are full of
people. The hawkers are in the public square. There was a captain who was
soused. I led him to the coffee house on Chestnut Quay, where, far from the
noise, I comforted him. A little coffee to get him straightened out...
My dear child, my sister, today you
cry. You miss the Quimper fair! Alas! They pampered you, to be sure! You're
reminded of the night when they opened a menagerie door just for you. In the
evening light, we searched from trailer to trailer, just for you, dear sister,
we searched for the cat sick from being a tiger's son. The hawkers were at
their dinner, the cat limped along: it was said he was consumptive. His father
the tiger was dull as a swallow. A married woman, today you cry, my sister! The
hawkers are in Marseille now. Down there the sea is blue-painted wood, almost
grey actually, there's a hinge for the coast, and there's a boat sketched in
the dim, oh-so-dim background! The woman has a handkerchief of the color of
ripened oranges. Her husband wants to shoot her. My dear child, my sister,
think sweet thoughts...
***
THE REAL RUIN
When I was young, I believed that
genies and fairies went out of their way to guide me, and whatever insults were
addressed to me, I believed that others were being magically inspired with
words that were only for my own good and for mine alone. The reality and the
disaster that have made of me a singer in this public square teach me that I
have always been abandoned by the gods. Oh, genies! Oh, fairies! Bring me back
my illusion this very day!
***
GLORY, PILFERING OR REVOLUTION
We arrived at the top in an open
carriage. The setting sun was visible through the trees, and the castle,
mounted on columns, supported geraniums. It was there that they would stage the
synthetic play embodying all of Shakespeare. For me, up to that point, how many
bridges I had crossed! How many ramparts! How many turrets! All those people in
pince-nez I ran into at the top of a tower. Those rivers of jewels! Those
ladies! (They dress better here than in Paris!) Finally the evening is upon us.
The main hall of Lancashire Castle is a sort of Versailles. The room is full. The
ladies are half Ophelia, half bourgeois. There's a gentleman going about with
the air of a crusted Strassbourg pate trying to pass itself off as Romeo. It's
me! There were Mounet-Sullys in rumpled bed-sheets. The next day an army of
friends stormed through the glass doors of the dining room: they ate all day.
The servants were in charge of making sure no one broke through the doors. Was
this glory, pilfering or revolution?
***
HISTORY
The shop had its shudders open like
a poorly folded fan. It's there that the musketeers lived. One was spitting in
the ashes, the other was reading the evening papers, and the third (that's me)
was still in bed when the King entered. One can only see his silhouette. The
King was bringing me my commission as captain. It was a launderer's notebook on
which were written the names of the men, and the objects one needed to be a
captain. What's more, from then on I was to be called Charles de France, and
this fact set my mind going on more than one point. The following day two charming
four-year-olds arrived carrying rifles. These were the sentinels. I took them
up onto my lap.
***
LIFE AND TIDE
Sometimes I don't know what light it
was that allowed us to glimpse the summit of a passing wave, and also on
occasion the sound of our instruments could not cover the roar of the
approaching Ocean. Night at the villa was surrounded by the sea. Your voice had
the inflection of one of the damned, and the piano by then was no more than a
sonorous shade. Then you, calm, in your red smock, you touched my shoulder with
the end of your bow just as the emotion of the flood was bringing me to a halt.
"Start again," you said. O life! O misery! O the pain of having
forever to start again! How many times, just when the Ocean of necessities me in!
How many times have I said--holding back sorrows that had become too real--:
"Start again." And on that night, my will itself was as terrible as
the villa. Nights hold nothing for me but equinoctial tides.
***
M. GILQUIN AND ORIENTAL POETRY
The city is on a hill. Only the
minarets are visible. The chariots are descending: they are in the form of
minarets pulled by galloping horses. There's the carpenter's chariot with its
turrets, and the others. In setting free the cat, Mme Gilquin discovered the
key to the temple. Nurses lead a thousand children to piss in the lake, and we
consider the art objects on display behind glass. What interests me especially
is M. et Mme Gilquin's history album in Chinese ink. Why is M. Gilquin in the
nude? He's pissed in his top-hat just like the children pissed in the lake. As
for me, I won't be entering the city.
***
TO SAY NOTHING
The wheelbarrow of thunder comes to
a head in Spain as a rainbow. I saw it on a horse's tail in a country where the
churches are surrounded by every color of geranium.
***
DAYBREAK OR TWILIGHT
The light falls from an angle of the
stark white vault. The light falls before me, and the stairway descends facing
the light, but one doesn't see it. And one will not see it! One will see
nothing but my back against the edge of a step, nothing but my back at the edge
of a landing. One won't see the walls that remain in the night. One will see
nothing but the men who remain in their nooks. The first is decked out in
shadow: he's decked out in night. As for the second, I haven't seen him. I've
hardly noticed him. The third has come down, he's made it all the way to me.
None of the others have moved. The one who's come down hs pants of a square
pattern. He has hairs in his eyebrows, and his hair is black. He placed my hand
upon his cheek because his cheeks hung slack. He had the air of a man with no
means, and he climbed back up into his night, back to his nook. The light falls
from an angle of the stark white vault, before me, before me. And I understood
that these men were the men in my future books.
***
OLD SAXONY PORCELAIN
I don't know if it's a marionette
theater or reality. The lady pretends to be nude because she's eighty but still
lovely as a child. She speaks with some pride about 1720 because we are now in
1780. The door is adorned with artificial flowers and she is crowned with
roses. A coachman insulted his coach by humming the Sixties anthem. Stretched
out on a sofa, she inquires about my manuscripts, which are illegible. The
horses themselves are tiny and the trees are illegible.
***
LETS BRING BACK ALL THE OLD THEMES
In a country where paintings were
put up for sale in a public square, the higher-ups stood at ground level and
more than three-hundred windows rented out for the purpose were full of butchers.
It was like for the guillotine! They came to see art and happiness killed.
Several of the butchers in the windows had binoculars.
***
RIGMAROLE
The Japanese general passes in
review before the armies of Europe. His pants are so long they crumple into a
corkscrew at the top of his shoes. In the midst of the armies is a bishop in a
lace surplice seated before a dining table. The bishop is fat, several hairs
protrude from his chin, and his eyes are watery. The Japanese certainly would
have anathematized the bishop, but he remarks that he has met him in society,
and so he looks at him, salutes and moves on.
***
SENTIMENTAL POEM
Oh, river port dark with foliage! He
moved along the stone quay, his barque loaded with my friends. Only one of them
warmly offered me his hand. I have enough friends to populate this mountain
with ants, enough to populate an ocean with triremes and rowers too. Oh, river
port dark with foliage! The barque only carried ten of them, they were hidden
under the sail that protects the more delicate ones. They were being protected
from me. Only one of them warmly offered me his hand, and he's not the one I
preferred. In fact, he's the one I'd willingly forget.
***
COSMOGONY
God (there is a God) observes the
earth from his cask. He will see it as an assortment of rotted teeth. My eye is
God! My eye is God! The rotted teeth are classified on the basis of only the
tiniest differences. My heart is God's cask! My heart is God's cask! The
universe is the same for me as for God.
***
ELIZABETH'S PIGS
Such terror in Moscow before dawn!
The servants didn't have their livery on yet. The gas glowed in the kitchen.
Why had I gotten up when it was still night? Perhaps I found doing so poetic,
or perhaps I wanted to see the sun rise over Moscow at least once. The servants
were standing around the kitchen table. There was also a square peasants'
bonnet among them, and I recognized Isabelle the beggar. She was given almost a
whole loaf of bread, for which she offered no thanks. Walking through the dark
suburb, where the lights burned in only a single shop, I came across Isabelle
carrying a heavy sack, and I said to her:
"Poor Isabelle, you have so
many children. You suffer so much for your children."
"Oh, no, Monsieur Max, it's for
my pigs."
So I walked back. My little moujik
stood near the sink considering Moscow freshly bathed by the night. I ordered
my eggs, and we were careful to test them in water so as to get only the
freshest. "The heavy ones will be for my breakfast, the lighter ones will
be for Isabelle's pigs."
***
TRUE POEM
We were separating, my older
brothers and I, near the moats. "Here, take the knife."
We were beneath the pines. It was
all grass and flowers. "Hey! watch out for the water!"
Occasionally we'd come together, a
plant in hand. "It's pink hemlock."
But getting a jar at the house to
carry our harvest in, that was another matter altogether.
The navy officer was asleep in his
bed, his back toward the door.
The cousin was busy with housework,
and sheets were on the chairs. My sisters were singing in the shade, and as for
me, I was sitting there like a child with my flowers in my hands on the steps
of the stairway that leads off into nothing.
***
ALLUSION TO A SCENE FROM THE CIRCUS
Green thorn! Green thorn! The
Marquise is a cowboy! The towering pines resemble ruins. Every bird in the sky
(there is no sky) comes to her musketeer's hat as if to the sea. And all this
was happening in New England! A young blond man, too well dressed in a hunter's
get-up, complains of not having eaten a thing for sixteen hours. But the
Marquise won't give him the little island birds. Instead she'll lead him to a
grotto where he can remove her boots.
***
TO FEAR THE WORST
He was one of those people who think
with the back of their head, and he lived in the second courtyard of a house
that didn't have a third, on a ground floor with no floor above it. Before
allowing these empty depths to be occupied for free, the proprietor wanted to
visit them himself. He entered from the rear courtyard. His curiosity turned to
hatred. He considered the mysterious alcove with its green curtains nothing but
a flea's nest and a caricature and a playbill. In short, some overblown
elliptical design.
His hatred turned to anger when he
met our hero on the other side of the street. He followed him to the lodging of
a sick young woman cared for by an old lady in white bandages whose eyes
gleamed with fear. A rough-mannered financier, he called him "Monsieur
Foreskin" because he himself was a Jew. Oh, what a terrible life began
then! One night, he was woken up by four vulgar and shady persons who claimed
to be occupants of his own room and wanted to kick him out. At other times
they'd set up frightening pranks against him. All of this drove him to the
brink. He took up a revolver.
The proprietor lived in one of the
wings where there was enough room for his daughter to house a coterie of
musician friends. One Sunday he leaned a ladder against the rose trellises with
the intention of killing his enemy. But it was he himself who ended up writhing
in the flowerbed with a hole in his face.
***
THE WALLPAPER OF MR. R.K.
The ceiling of hell is attached with
big gold nails. Above that is the earth. Hell is a huge, luminous, twisted
fountain. As for the earth, there's a bit of hillside: a wheat field mowed
close and a little sky in onion peels under which passes a cavalcade of raving
dwarves. On one and the other side there's a stand of pine and a stand of
aloes. You have been called before the Revolutionary Tribunal, Mademoiselle
Suzanne, for having found one white hair among your many black ones.
***
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