Maldoror and Poems

  If the face of the earth were covered with lice as the seashore is covered with grains of sand, the human race would be destroyed, a prey to dreadful pain. What a sight! With me, motionless on my angel wings in the air to contemplate it!

  10

  Oh rigorous mathematics, I have not forgotten you since your wise lessons, sweeter than honey, filtered into my heart like a refreshing wave. Instinctively, from the cradle, I had longed to drink from your source, older then the sun, and I continue to tread the sacred sanctuary of your solemn temple, I, the most faithful of your devotees. There was a vagueness in my mind, something thick as smoke; but I managed to mount the steps which lead to your altar, and you drove away this dark veil, as the wind blows the draught-board. You replaced it with excessive coldness, consummate prudence and implacable logic. With the aid of your fortifying milk, my intellect developed rapidly and took on immense proportions amid the ravishing lucidity which you bestow as a gift on all those who sincerely love you. Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Awe-inspiring trinity! Luminous triangle! He who has not known you is a fool! He would deserve the ordeal of the greatest tortures; for there is blind disdain in his ignorant indifference; but he who knows you and appreciates you no longer wants the goods of the earth and is satisfied with your magical delights; and, borne on your sombre wings, wishes only to rise in effortless flight, constructing as he does a rising spiral, towards the spherical vault of the heavens. Earth only offers him illusions and moral phantasmagoria; but you, concise mathematics, by the rigorous sequence of your unshakable propositions and the constancy of your iron rules, give to the dazzled eyes a powerful reflection of that supreme truth whose imprint can be seen in the order of the universe. But the order surrounding you, represented by the perfect regularity of the square, Pythagoras' friend, is greater still; for the Almighty has revealed himself and his attributes completely in this memorable work, which consisted in bringing from the bowels of chaos the treasures of your theorems and your magnificent splendours. In ancient epochs and in modern times more than one man of great imagination has been awe-struck by the contemplation of your symbolic figures traced on paper, like so many mysterious signs, living and breathing in hidden ways not understood by the profane multitudes; these signs were only the glittering revelations of eternal axioms and hieroglyphs, which existed before the universe and will remain after the universe has passed away. And then this man of vision wonders, leaning towards the precipice of a fatal question-mark, how it is that mathematics contains so much imposing grandeur and undeniable truth, whereas, when he compares it with mankind, he finds among the latter only false pride and deceitfulness. And then this saddened superior spirit, whose noble familiarity with your precepts has made him even more aware of the pettiness and incomparable folly of mankind, buries his white-haired head in his fleshless hands and remains engrossed in his supernatural meditations. He kneels before you and in his veneration pays homage to your divine face, the very image of the Almighty. In my childhood you appeared to me one May night by the light of the moonbeams in a green meadow beside a clear stream, all three equal in grace and modesty, all three full of the majesty of queens. You took a few steps towards me in your long dresses floating like mist and lured me towards your proud breasts like a blessed son. Then I ran up eagerly, my arms clenched around your white throats. I fed gratefully on your rich manna, and I felt humanity growing within me, becoming deeper. Since that time, rival goddesses, I have not abandoned you. How many mighty projects, since that time, how many sympathies which I had believed to be engraved on the pages of my heart as on marble, have been slowly effaced from my disillusioned reason by their configurative lines, as the oncoming dawn effaces the shadows of the night! Since that time, rival goddesses, I have seen death whose intention, clear to the naked eye, was to people graveyards, I have seen him ravaging battlefields fertilized by human blood from which morning flowers grow above human remains. Since then I have witnessed revolutions on this globe, earthquakes, volcanoes with their blazing lava, the simoun of the desert and tempest-torn shipwrecks have known my presence as an impassive spectator. Since that time I have seen several generations of human beings lift up their wings in the morning and move off into space with the inexperienced joy of the chrysalid greeting its first metamorphosis, only to die in the evening before sunset, their heads bowed like withered flowers blown by the plaintive whistling of the wind. But you remain always the same. No change, no foul air disturbs the lofty crags and immense valleys of your immutable identity. Your modest pyramids will last longer than the pyramids of Egypt, those anthills raised by stupidity and slavery. And at the end of all the centuries you will stand on the ruins of time, with your cabbalistic ciphers, your laconic equations and your sculpted lines, on the avenging right of the Almighty, whereas the stars will plunge despairingly, like whirlwinds in the eternity of horrible and universal night, and grimacing mankind will think of settling its accounts at Last Judgment. Thank you for countless services you have done me. Thank you for the strange qualities with which you enriched my intellect. Without you in my struggle against man I would perhaps have been defeated. Without you, he would have made me grovel in the dust and kiss his feet. If it had not been for you, he would have flayed my flesh and bones with his perfidious claws. But I have kept on my guard, like an experienced athlete. You gave me the coldness of your sublime conceptions, free of all passion. And I used it to reject scornfully the ephemeral pleasures of my short journey, and spurn the well-meaning but deceptive advances of my fellows. You gave me the dogged prudence which can be deciphered at every step of your admirable methods of analysis, synthesis and deduction. I used it to outdo the pernicious wiles of my mortal enemy and to attack him skillfully in turn, plunging into his entrails a sharp dagger which will forever remain buried in his body; for it is a wound from which he will never recover. You gave me logic which is, as it were, the soul itself of your teachings, full of wisdom, and with its syllogisms, the complex labyrinth of which makes it nonetheless intelligible, my intellect felt its audacious strength increasing twofold. By means of this terrible auxiliary, I discovered in mankind, as I swam towards the depths, opposite the reef of hatred, the black and hideous wickedness which lurked amidst the noxious miasmata admiring its navel. First I discovered in the darkness of his entrails that nefarious vice, evil! superior in him to good. With the poisonous weapon you lent me I brought down from his pedestal, built by man’s cowardice, the Creator himself! He gnashed his teeth and was subjected to this ignominious insult; for he had as adversary one stronger than he. But I will leave him aside like a bundle of string, in order to fly down lower...The thinker Descartes once observed that nothing solid has ever been built on you. That was an ingenious way of pointing out that not just anybody can immediately discover your inestimable value. In fact, what could be more solid than the three principal qualities above mentioned which rise up, joined in a single crown, to the august summit of your colossal architecture? A monument which is incessantly growing as discoveries are made daily in your diamantine mines, and with all the scientific researchers carried out in your domains. O holy mathematics, may I for the rest of my days be consoled by perpetual intercourse with you, consoled for the wickedness of man and the injustice of the Almighty!

  11

  'O lamp with the silver burner, my eyes perceive you in the air, companion of cathedral vaults, and they ask why you are hanging there. It is said that at night your light illuminates the rabble who come to adore the Almighty, that you show the repentant the way to the altar. Listen, that is very probable; but...do you need to perform such services for those to whom you owe nothing? Let the columns of the basilica remain plunged in darkness; and when a blast of the tempest, on which the demon is borne whirling through space, penetrates with him into the holy place, spreading terror, instead of struggling courageously against the foul gust of the Prince of Evil, go out, suddenly as he blows feverishly on you, so that he may select his victims unseen from among the kneeling believers
. If you do that, you may say I owe you all my happiness. When you shine thus, spreading your dull but adequate light, I dare not succumb to the promptings of my character and I remain standing beneath the sacred portico, looking through the half-open door at those who escape my vengeance by hiding in the bosom of the Lord. O poetic lamp! you who would be my friend if you could understand me, when my feet are treading the basalt of churches in the night hours, why do you begin to shine in a way which, I must confess, seems extraordinary to me? Your gleams are then tinged with the white hue of electric light; the eye cannot look at you; and you illuminate with a new and powerful flame every detail of the Creator's kennel, as if you were in the throes of holy wrath. When, having blasphemed you, I withdraw, you become imperceptible, pale and modest again, sure in the knowledge that you have accomplished an act of justice. Tell me now; would it be because you know all the windings of my heart, that when I happen to appear where you are keeping watch, you eagerly indicate my pernicious presence, drawing the attention of the worshippers to the direction where the enemy of man has just appeared. I am inclined towards this view; for I, too, am beginning to know you; and I know you who you are, old witch, keeping watch so well over sacred mosques where your curious master struts like a cock's crest. Watchful guardian; your mission is a mad one; I warn you; the first time you point me out to my cautious fellow-beings by increasing the strength of your phosphorescent light (I do not like this optical phenomenon which is not, by the way, mentioned in any textbook of physics), I will take you by the skin of your breast hooking my claws into the scabs of your scurvy nape, and I will fling you into the Seine. I do not intend, when I leave you alone, that you should deliberately behave in a manner harmful to me. There I will allow you to shine as much as I please; there you will defy me with your inextinguishable smile; there, convinced of the ineffectiveness of your criminal oil, you will urinate bitterly.' Having spoken thus, Maldoror does not leave the temple and remains with his eyes fixed on the lamp of the holy place...He believes there is a kind of provocation in the attitude of this lamp, which he finds in the highest degree irritating because of its untimely presence. He says to himself that if there is a soul enclosed in the lamp it is cowardly of it not to answer his honest attack with sincerity. He beats the air with his sinewy arms, wishing the lamp would change into a man; and then it would have a hard time for a quarter of an hour, he could promise it that. But by what means can a lamp change into man; it is unnatural. He does not give up, and goes in search of a flat stone with a filed-down edge on the floor of the wretched pagoda. He hurls it violently into the air; the chain is cut in the middle like grass by a scythe, and the implement of worship falls to the ground, spreading its oil on the tiles. He seizes that lamp to take it outside with him, but it resists and grows bigger. He seems to see wings at its sides, and the top part takes on the shape of an angel. The whole thing is trying to rise into the air and fly off; but he holds it back with a firm hand. A lamp and angel forming one and the same body, that is something one does not often see. He recognizes the form of the lamp; he recognizes the form of the angel; but he cannot separate them in his mind; in fact they are in reality cleaving to one another, and form only one free and independent body; but he thinks that some cloud has passed before his eyes; causing him to lose something of the excellence of his eyesight. Nevertheless, he prepares courageously for the struggle, for his adversary shows no fear. The naive tell those credulous enough to believe them that the sacred portal closed of its own accord, turning on its anguished hinges lest anyone should witness the impious struggles whose changes of fortune were going to occur within the walls of the profaned sanctuary. The man in the coat, though serious wounds are being inflicted on him by an invisible sword, tries to bring his mouth near to the angel's face; he thinks only of that, and all his efforts tend towards this goal. The angel's energy is ebbing, and he seems to have a presentiment of his fate. He only struggles weakly now and one can see the moment coming when his adversary will be able to kiss him with ease, if that is what he wishes to do. Well, the moment has come. With his muscles he strangles the angel who can no longer breathe. For a moment he is moved at the thought of the fate which awaits this celestial being whose friend he would gladly have become. But he says that he is the Lord's envoy and cannot control his wrath. It is done; something horrible is going to return to the cage of time! He leans over and puts his tongue, dripping with saliva, on to the cheek of the angel, who is looking up imploringly. For some time, he moves his tongue up and down his cheek. Oh!...Oh...look...look!...the white and pink cheek has become black as coal! It is emitting putrid miasmata. It is gangrene; there is no longer any room for doubt. The gnawing evil spreads all over his face and from there ravages the lower parts; soon the whole body is nothing but one vast vile sore. He himself, terror-stricken (for he did not think that his tongue contained such strong poison), picks up the lamp and rushes out of the church. Once outside, he sees a blackish shape with burnt wings laboriously flying towards the regions of heaven. They look at one another as the angle climbs towards the serene regions of the good, whereas he, Maldoror, descends into the vertiginous abysses of evil...What a look! All that mankind has thought for sixty centuries, all that it has yet to think in the centuries to come, could easily be contained in that supreme adieu, so much did it say! But it is obvious that these were thoughts far higher than those which spring from human intelligence; first of all because of the two characters and then because of the circumstances. This look bound them in eternal friendship. He is astounded that the Creator can have such noble envoys. For a moment, he thinks that he has made a mistake and wonders if he ought to have followed that road of evil as he has done. His disquiet has passed; he persists in his resolution; and it is glorious, according to him, to conquer the Almighty sooner or later, in order to reign in his stead over the entire universe, and over legions of such beautiful angels. The angel makes it clear without speaking that he will reassume his original form as he flies nearer heaven; and he lets fall a tear which cools the brow of him who gave him gangrene; and gradually disappears, rising like a vulture amidst the clouds. The guilty one looks at the lamp, the cause of all the preceding events. He runs like a madman through the streets towards the Seine and flings the lamp over the parapet. It whirls around for a few seconds and then plunges down into the murky waters. Since that day, every evening from nightfall onwards a shining lamp can be seen which rises and floats gracefully on the water, passes beneath the arches just off the Pont Napoleon, bearing instead of handles two charming little angel's wings. It moves forwards slowly on the water, passes beneath the arches of the Pont de la Gare and the Pont d'Austerlitz, and continues on its silent course along the Seine as far as the Pont d'Alma. Once there it turns easily again to follow the course of the river, returning after four hours to its starting point. Its light, white as electric light, eclipses that of the gas-lamps bordering the banks between which she advances like a queen, solitary, inscrutable, with and inextinguishable smile, not bitterly spilling its oil. In the beginning, the boats gave it chase; but it foiled these vain efforts, escaped from all pursuits, diving like a coquette to reappear a long way further on. Now superstitious sailors stop singing when they see it, and row in the opposite direction. When you are crossing a bridge by night, be careful; you are bound to see the lamp shining somewhere or other; although it is said that it does not show itself to everyone. When a human being with something on his conscience crosses the bridge, its light suddenly goes out, and the man, terror-stricken, vainly and desperately peers at the surface and the mudbanks of the river. He knows that that means. He would like to believe that he has seen the celestial light; but no, he says that the light only came from the front of the boats or from the reflection of the gas-lamps; and he is right...He knows that he is the cause of the lamp's disappearance; and, plunged in sad reflections, he quickens his step to arrive at his house. Then the lamp with the silver burner reappears on the surface and continues on its way with elegant and
capricious arabesques.