dress your verses up like your servants,
Which cause our foreheads, circled in rags, to blush.
Hey you, fluffy perihelion of those suns,
Don’t take so much care to hide your tatters,
It’s only in their refuge that the mind unwinds;
The bard only grows intoxicated by need!
I have caressed death, laughing at suicide,
Often and gladly, when I was happier;
Now I hate it, and am afraid of it,
Wretched and undermined by homicidal hunger.
POVERTY
By my cheerful expression, laughter on my lips.
You deem me happy, comfortable, unleavened and fever-free,
Living from day to day with no ambition,
Ignorant of remorse, virginal to affliction;
Through the walls of a noble breast,
Can one see the desiccating heat and the undermining fire?
In a dull lamp that is exhaustible,
It is necessary, like the heart, to open it or break it.
When you took your head to the executioners, poor André,15
You struck your forehead upon the cart in rage;
Having not done enough for immortality,
For your country, its glory and its liberty.
How many times, on the rock that borders life,
Have I kicked my foot, banged my desirous head,
Crying my long and painful torment to the skies;
I sensed my power, and I felt shackles!
Power...shackles...so what? Nothing! One more poet
Who would make the divine, but his Muse is mute,
His power is in shackles—get away! We no longer believe
In this sighted century in any but accomplished talents;
Work, we no longer believe in marvelous futures.
Work! Oh, the need that howls in my ears
Stifling any thinker that rears up in my bosom!
What reply can I make to the chords of my lute? I’m hungry.
Oh, all of that makes the heart bleed. Let us pass on.
His independent stance and his violent love of liberty had caused him to be labeled a redoubtable Republican. He thought he ought to respond to that accusation in the preface to his Rhapsodies, “I am a Republican,” he said, “as a lynx would understand it; my Republicanism is that of lycanthropy! If I speak of a republic, it is because that word, to me, represents the broadest independence that association and civilization can permit. I am a Republican because I cannot be a Carib Indian; I need an enormous sum of liberty; will the Republic give that to me? I have no personal experience of it, but when that hope is dashed, like so many others, I shall still have the Missouri!”
Because of that, the newspapers called those verses lycanthropic, him a lycanthrope and his turn of mind lycanthropism. The epithet had a great success in society, and stuck. He was pleased to hear it; so, we have deemed him worthy of our respect for not disowning that characteristic banner.
In the midst of all the hateful criticisms hurled at him, which would have saturated a soul less steeped than his, he did not doubt his strength for an instant, and received in private many gentle consolations, a little sincere applause, and true advice.
Among others, there was a letter and some lines that were addressed to him in this regard, which was found among his manuscripts, and which we shall reproduce here.
Monsieur,
Forgive me for being so long delayed in thanking you for the gift that you were kind enough to make me of your poems. Monsieur Gérard16 only gave me your address a few days ago.
If molten metal has rejected its scoria, those scoria can be presumed to be metallic, and although it might annoy you to presume too much about your future, I would like to believe that it will be remarkable. I have been young too, Monsieur, young and melancholy, like you, and I have often blamed the social order for the anguish I experienced; I still have a fragment of verse—for I wrote verses when young—in which I expressed a desire to go and live among the wolves. A great confidence in the divinity has often been my sole refuge. My first tolerable verses will attest to that; they are not as good as yours, but, I repeat, they are not without numerous parallels. I tell you that in order that you might judge the sad but profound pleasure that yours gave me. I have all the more sympathy with some of your ideas because, although my destiny has undergone a great transformation, I have neither forgotten my first impressions, nor acquired much taste for the society I cursed at twenty years of age. Although I no longer have any complaint to make on my own account today, I mourn when I encounter its victims. But Monsieur, you were born with talent, you have received a better education than me; you will, I hope, triumph over the obstacles with which the road is strewn. If that happens, as I hope it will, always conserve the fortunate originality of your mind, and you will have cause to bless providence for the ordeals to which it has subjected you in your youth.
You probably do not like eulogies, so I will not add anything to what I have already said. I think, in any case, that you would prefer to know the reflections that your poetry has suggested to me. You will see that it is not out of egotism that I have said so much to you about myself.
Accept, Monsieur, with my sincere thanks, the assurance of my consideration and keenest interest.
Béranger17
16 February 1832.
TO PÉTRUS BOREL
Brave Pierre, why the melancholy
That reigns in your verses; why, on the future,
That dolorous gaze, followed by a long sigh,
Why that disgust for life?
It is, however, beautiful; look at the horizon
That is opening before us, bright with light...
Come, we shall cross these feeble barriers
That hold us like a prison.
What does a little pain matter in the morning of life,
Or the dark cloud wandering at our zenith?
The name
