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Jacques Callot, Man with a drooping belly and a very tall hat, from the series Gobbi, about 1621

Scarbo Suite
by Aloysius Bertrand
Translations: Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Gothic Chamber

Nox et solitudo plenae sunt diabolo.
[Night and solitude are full of devils.]
—The Fathers of the Church

—"Oh! This earth," I cooed to the night, "is a scented calyx whose pistil and stamens are the moon and the stars!"

And, eyes leaden with sleep, I latched the window encrusted with the cross of Calvary, black against the yellow aureole of the opaque encasement.

*

—If only it weren't midnight—the hour emblazoned by dragons and demons!—and the gnome who gets drunk on the oil of my lamp!

If only it weren't for the nurse who, with monotone chant, lulls in my father's breastplate an infant born dead!

If only it weren't for the skeleton of the landsknecht imprisoned in these panels; two dents in his armor: at the throat, and at the knee!

If it weren't that my forebear comes crawling, comes clanking, from the worm-riddled walls of his cabinet long-crumbling, and soaks his gauntlet in the sanctified water of the brimming basin of the holy stoup!

But it's Scarbo who is gnawing at my neck, and who, to cauterize my bleeding wound, plunges into it a finger of iron forged in the fires of Hell!

Jacques Callot, Duellist with two sabres, from the series Gobbi, about 1621

Scarbo

Mon Dieu, accordez-moi, a l’heure de ma mort,
les prieres d’un pretre, un linceul de toile,
une biere de sapin et un lieu sec.
[May God grant me, at the hour of my death,
a priest's prayers, a linen shroud,
a pine box, and a dry place.]
—The Paternosters of M. Le Marechal

—"Whether you die absolved or damned," Scarbo muttered this evening in my ear — "for your shroud you shall have a spider's web, and I shall wrap the spider snugly alongside of you."

—"Oh! Then at least I'll have a shroud," I answered him, eyes red with tears, — trembling like a leaf buffeted by the zephyrs which waft from the lake.

—"No!" — roared the mocking dwarf — "You will be the food of the beetle who hunts by night, for the gnats blinded by the setting sun!"

—"Would you like it better, then" — I replied to him, weeping all the while — "would you like it better if I were sucked away, like a tarantula sucked up an elephant's trunk?"

—"Ah, well," — he added — "Console yourself; I'll wrap you in bandages flecked with gold from a serpent's scales, and I'll enamel you like the most magnificent of mummies."

"And from the tenebrous crypt at Saint-Benign, where I shall lay you out before the somber gates, you can listen at your leisure to the children; the little children sobbing in Limbo."

Jacques Callot, The violin player, from the series Gobbi, about 1621

Lunacy

Reveillez-vous, gens qui dormez,
Et priez pour les trepasses.
[Awake, awake, sleeping men,
And pray forgiveness for your sins.]
—Cry of the night watch

How soft the night, how sweet, when the hour trembles in the belltower, and the sky is lit by a moon whose nose is shining like a golden coin!

*

Two lepers lament beneath my sill: a dog who howls at the crossroads, and the cricket in my hearth whispering prophecies to itself.

But soon my ear interrogates naught but profoundest silence. The outcasts have withdrawn within their kennels, to the strokes of the jack-o-the-clock, as he cudgels his wife.

The dog has taken to its heels, slipping down an alleyway before the halberds of the watchmen, driven by rain and chilled by icy winter blasts.

And the cricket falls asleep as the last spark sputters amidst the madcap swirl of chimney-fleeting cinders.

For my part, I can only say it seemed—fever breeds incoherence—that the moon, screwing up his face, stuck out his tongue at me; a tongue which lolled like a hanged man's!

Jacques Callot, The duellist with a rapier and a dagger, from the series Gobbi, about 1621

The Dwarf

—Toi, a cheval!
—Eh! porquoi pas? J'ai si souvent galope
sur un levrier du laird de Linlithgow!
[To horse!
Well and why not?
I have often galloped on one of Lord Linlithgow's hounds.]
—Scottish ballad

I have caught, behind my chair, in the shadow of my curtains, this furtive moth, hatched by a ray of the moon or by a drop of dew.

Palpitating phalaena who, in order to disentangle his captive wings from between my fingers, pays me a ransom of perfumes!

Suddenly the vagabond bug flits away, abandoning my lap—o horror!—a larva monstrous and deformed, with human face!

*

—"Where is your soul, that I may sit astride her?" — "My soul, shambling nag of the day's exertions, now reposes on the gilded litter of dreams."

And she spurts away, my soul, eloping in fright across the livid web of the spider of dusk, skimming the inky horizons dotted with black gothic steeples.

But the dwarf, dangling mid-catapult in whinnying flight, clings all the more and tightens his grip; spinning like a spool, he is lunging, plunging, tumbling headlong, spiraling, clutching at the gyroscopic coils of her shocking white mane...

Jacques Callot, Man preparing to draw his sword, from the series Gobbi, about 1621

Dementia

Un carolus ou bien encore,
Si l'aimez mieux, un agneau d'or.
[A minted coin or, better by half,
If you love me true, a golden calf.]
—from a manuscript found in the Royal Library

The moon primps her hair with an ebony comb which silvers into a rain of glowworms on the hills, woods, and pastures.

*

Scarbo, gnome who makes all treasures grow, pounds on my roof; he rains, to the cries of the weathercock, a drizzle of ducats and florins, which bounce in cadence; jingling counterfeits spill onto the street below.

His sneering laugh is like that of the maniac heckler who roves, each night, the forsaken streets, one eye on the moon and the other—gouged out!

—"Stuff the moon!" — he snarls, raking up the Devil's chips. "I will buy a pillory and warm myself in the sun."

But so long as the moon is high, Scarbo abides in my attic, pounding, deafeningly minting ducats and florins, furiously flipping the gleaming tokens onto the pans of the mystic scale.

At the same time, a snail, two horns in front, has strayed in the night, looking for his way while climbing my luminous window panes.

Jacques Callot, Masked man with twisted legs, from the series Gobbi, about 1621

Scarbo

Il regarda sous le lit, dans la cheminee,
dans le bahut; personne. Il ne put comprendre
par ou il etait introduit, par ou il etait evade.
[He looked under the bed, up the chimney, in the closets; nothing.
He couldn't understand how it got in, or how it got out.]
—Hoffmann, Nocturnal Tales

How often I have seen and heard you, Scarbo, when at midnight the moon is shining in the sky like a silver shield emblazoned on an azure banner oversprinkled with golden bees!

How often I have heard your laughter ooze from the shadows of my alcove, and the rasp of your fingernail scratching at the silk of my bed curtains.

How often I have watched you drop from the ceiling, pirouette on one foot, and roll across the room, like a bobbin fallen from a sorceror's loom!

Do I believe he has gone? The dwarf looms between me and the moon, like the spired belfry of a gothic cathedral, a jester's golden bell jangling at the tip of his pointed cap!

But soon his body turns bluish, diaphanous as candle wax; his face becomes bluish as a candle-end—which suddenly blinks out.




ALOYSIUS BERTRAND (1807–1841) by Alter-Gilbert

French writer generally acknowledged as the progenitor of the prose poem, as elaborated in his posthumously published volume Gaspard de la Nuit (Rat About Town or Fly-by-Night). Bertrand's creative vision was shaped, to a great extent, by his admiration for painters, and he dedicated his ground-breaking Gaspard to the artists Rembrandt and Callot. Bertrand is noted for recreating medieval milieux and for vivid, highly-colored evocations of settings and scenes. A tubercular wretch, Bertrand reached the end of an existence made miserable by ill-health and impecuniousness at the age of thirty-four. His funeral expenses were borne by his friend, the sculptor David d'Angers. Bertrand was designated, in a famous essay by Paul Verlaine, as a charter member of the circle of "cursed poets," and his influence has been emphatically acknowledged by such Symbolist poets as Charles Baudelaire, Tristan Corbiere, Jules Laforgue, and Stephane Mallarme, and by the Surrealist group as a whole.

In English from Black Coat press (though the Amazon listing is very confusing): Gaspard de la Nuit, adapted by Donald Sidney-Fryer


Peacay at BibliOdyssey helped with images. He covered Callot back in 2005.