[JULES LAFORGUE]
In the Fleurs de bonne Volonté is a little complaint, like the others, called Dimanches:
Le ciel pleut sans but, sans que rien l'émeuve,
Il pleut, il pleut, bergère! sur le fleuve....
Le fleuve a son repos dominical;
Pas un chaland, en amont, en aval.
Les vêpres carillonnent sur la ville,
Les berges sont désertes, sans une île.
Passe un pensionnat, ô pauvres chairs!
Plusieurs out déjà leurs manchons d'hiver.
Une qui n'a ni manchon ni fourrure
Fait tout en gris une bien pauvre figure;
Et la voilà qui s'échappe des rangs
Et court: ô mon Dieu, qu'est-ce qui lui prend?
Elle va se jeter dans le fleuve.
Pas un batelier, pas un chien de Terre-Neuve....
[(Tr. 46)]
And there we have, prophesized, the sudden absurd death, the life of Laforgue. His heart was too cold; he departed.
His was a mind gifted with all the gifts and rich with important acquisitions. With his natural genius made up of sensibility, irony, imagination and clairvoyance, he had wished to nourish it with positive knowledge, all the philosophies, all the literatures, all the images of nature and art; and even the latest views of science seemed to have been familiar to him. He had an ornate flamboyant genius, ready to construct architectural works infinitely diverse and fair, to rear new ogives and unfamiliar domes; but he had forgotten his winter muff and died one snowy day of cold.
That is why his work, already magnificent, is only the prelude of an oratorio ended in silence.
Many of his verses are as though reddened by a glacial affectation of naiveté; they speak of the too dearly cherished child, of the young girl hearkened to—but a sign of a true need of affection and of a pure gentleness of heart,—adolescent of genius who would still have wished to place on the knees of his mother, his "equatorial brow, greenhouse of anomalies." But many have the beauty of purified topazes, the melancholy of opals, the freshness of moon-stones, and some pages, like that which commences thus:
Noire bise, averse glapissante
Et fleuve noir, et maisons closes....
[(Tr. 47)]