THE ILLUMINATIONS ONE Aprs le Dluge As soon as the idea of the Flood was stale,

A hare stopped in the moving sainfoin and bellflowers, and said its prayer to the rainbow, through the spider's web.

Oh! the precious stones that were hiding the flowers that already were gazing.

In the dirty main street, stalls were set up, and boats were hauled to the sea tiered up as in engravings.

Blood ran, at Bluebeard's in slaughterhouses, at circuses, where the seal of God paled the windows. Blood and milk ran.

Beavers built. "Mazagrans" steamed in estaminets.

In the big glass house still wet, children in mourning-clothes saw the marvelous pictures.

A door slammed: and, in the hamlet square, the child turned his arms, understood by weather vanes and cocks on steeples everywhere, in the bursting downpour.

Madame *** set up a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communion were celebrated at the hundred thousand altars of the cathedral.

Caravans started out. And the Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and night at the pole.

From that moment, the Moon heard jackals whimpering in the deserts of thyme and eclogues in sabots growling in the orchard. Then, in the violet stand of trees, Eucharis told me it was spring.

Rise, pond foam, roll on the bridge and over the treetops black sheets and organs, lightning and thunder, climb and roll waters and glooms, climb and raise the Floods again.

For since they vanished oh, the precious stones burying themselves, and the open flowers! it's an annoyance! And the Queen, the Sorceress who lights her coal in the earthen pot, will never want to tell us what she knows, what we know not of.

Childhood I

This idol, black eyes and yellow horsehair, sans parents nor yard, more noble than fable, Mexican and Flemish; its domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs upon beaches named, by waves sans vessels, with names ferociously Greek, Slavic, Celtic. At the edge of the forest the flowers of dream tinkle, shine, beam the girl with orange lips, nudity shaded, traversed and clothed by rainbows, flora, the sea.

Ladies who whirl on terraces by the sea; children and giantesses, superb blacks in verdigris moss, jewels on end on the sticky ground of thawed groves and gardens young mothers and big sisters with looks full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses of tyrannical dress and gait, little foreigners and persons sweetly unhappy.

What boredom, the hour of "dear body" and dear heart". II It is she, the little dead girl, behind the rosebushes the young departed mommy comes down the steps the cousin's barouche squeaks on the sand the little brother (he is in the Indies!) there, before the setting sun, on the meadow of carnations the old men they have buried straight up in the rampart with gillyflowers.

The swarm of golden leaves surrounds the house of the general. They are in the south you follow the red road to arrive at the empty inn. The chteau is for sale; the shutters are detached the priest will have taken away the key to the church around the park, the guards' huts are uninhabited. The fences are so high that you can only see rustling treetops. Besides, there is nothing to see inside.

The meadows go back to hamlets sans roosters, sans anvils. The sluice is open. O Calvaries and desert windmills, isles and ricks!

Magic flowers were buzzing. Embankments cradled him. Beasts of a fabulous elegance circulated. Clouds amassed on the high sea made of an eternity of hot tears. III

In the woods there is a bird, its song stops you and makes you blush.

There is a clock that does not strike.

There is a pothole with a nest of white beasts.

There is a cathedral that descends and a lake that rises.

There is a little carriage abandoned in the coppice or which descends the path, beribboned.

There is a troupe of little actors in costume, glimpsed on the road through the edge of the wood.

There is, at last, when you are hungry or thirsty, someone who chases you off. IV I am the saint, at prayer on the terrace, as peaceable beasts graze to the sea of Palestine.

I am the savant in the dark armchair. Branches and rain crash into the library casement.

I am the pedestrian of the highroad by way of the dwarf woods; the rumor of sluices covers my steps. I see for a long time the melancholy wash of the golden sundown.

I might well be the child abandoned on the jetty gone to sea, the little servant following the lane whose brow touches the sky.

The paths are bitter. The hillocks are covered with broom. The air is motionless. How the birds and springs are far! It can only be the end of the world, advancing. V Let them rent me at last this tomb, whitewashed with lines of cement in relief very far underground.

I put my elbows on the table, the lamp shines very brightly on these journals which I am idiotic to reread, these books without interest.

At an enormous distance above my subterranean parlor, houses are set up, fogs gather. The mud is red or black. Monstrous city, endless night!

Less high, are sewers. To the sides, nothing but the thickness of the globe. Perhaps gulfs of azure, wells of fire. It is perhaps on these planes that moons and comets, seas and fables meet.

In hours of bitterness, I imagine balls of sapphire, of metal. I am the master of silence. Why would a semblance of basement window pale in a corner of the vault?

Tale A Prince was vexed for never having devoted himself but to the perfection of vulgar generosities. He foresaw stunning revolutions of love, and suspected his women could do better than this complaisance embellished with heavens and luxury. He wanted to see the truth, the hour of desire and of essential gratifications. Were it or no an aberration of piety, he wanted. He possessed at least a rather broad human power. All the women who had known him were assassinated: what havoc in the garden of beauty! Under the saber, they blessed him. He did not order any new ones the women reappeared. He killed all those who followed him, after the hunt or libations all followed him. He amused himself slaughtering luxury beasts. He set palaces on fire. He pounced on people and cut them to pieces the crowd, the golden roofs, the beautiful beasts still existed. One may find ecstasy in destruction, and be rejuvenated by cruelty! The people did not murmur. No-one offered the aid of his views. One evening, he was galloping proudly. A Genie appeared, of a beauty ineffable, unavowable even. From his physiognomy and his bearing emerged the promise of a multiple and complex love! of an unspeakable happiness, insupportable even! The Prince and the Genie annihilated each other probably in essential health. How could they not have died of it? Together then they died But this Prince expired, in his palace, at an ordinary age. The Prince was the Genie. The Genie was the Prince savant music is lacking to our desire.

TWO Parade Very solid scamps. Several have exploited your worlds. Without needs, and little pressed to put to work their brilliant faculties and their experience of your consciences. What mature men! Dazed eyes in the fashion of summer night, red and black, tricolored, steel pricked with golden stars; features deformed, leaden, pallid, afire; frisky hoarsenesses! The cruel gait of rags! there are some young how would they regard Cherubim? provided with frightening voices and some dangerous resources. They are sent buggering in town, rigged out in disgusting luxury. O the most violent Paradise of enraged grimace! No comparison with your Fakirs and the other scenic buffooneries. In improvised costumes, with the taste of a bad dream, they perform complaints, tragedies of bandits and demigods spiritual as history and religion have never been. Chinese, Hottentots, bohemians, simpletons, hyenas, Molochs, old dementias, sinister demons, they mix popular turns, maternal, with beastly poses and tendernesses. They would interpret new plays and "nice girl" songs. Master jugglers, they transform place and persons and use magnetic comedy. Eyes burn, blood sings, bones stretch, red tears and dribbles flow. Their raillery or their terror lasts a minute, or whole months. I only have the key to this wild parade.

Antique Graceful son of Pan! About thy brow with bays and flowerets crowned thine eyes, precious balls, bestir. Stained with brown lees, thy cheeks pucker. Thy fangs glisten. Thy breast is like unto a kithara, tinklings round thy blond arms. Thine heart beats, in that belly where the double sex sleeps. Betake thyself, by night, gently moving that thigh, that second thigh and that left leg.

Being Beauteous Before a snow, a Being of Beauty very tall. Whistlings of death and circles of mute music cause to rise, grow and tremble like a specter that adored body; scarlet and black wounds burst in the superb flesh life's own colors deepen, dance, and emerge around the Vision, in progress and the shivers ascend and the frenzied savor of these effects loading up on the mortal whistlings and raucous music that the world, far behind us, hurls at our mother of beauty she recoils, she rises. Oh! our bones are clad in a new amorous body. O the

ashen face, escutcheon of hair, crystal arms! the cannon upon which I must fall across the melee of trees and light air! Lives I O the enormous avenues of the Holy Land, the terraces of the temple! What has become of the Brahman who explained Proverbs to me? Of then, of there, I still see even the old women! I remember hours of silver and sun around the rivers, the hand of the countryside on my shoulder, and our caresses standing in the peppery plains a flight of scarlet pigeons thunders about my thought exiled here, I had a stage on which to play the dramatic masterpieces of all literatures. I would point out to you unheard-of riches . I observe the story of the treasures you found. I see the result! My wisdom is as disdained as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared with the stupor that awaits you? II I am an inventor quite otherwise deserving than all those who have preceded me; a musician even, who has discovered something like the key of love. At present, a gentleman of a harsh countryside with a sober sky, I try to rouse myself with the memory of a beggarly childhood, of apprenticeship or arrival in sabots, of polemics, of five or six widowerhoods, and of weddings where my fine head prevented me from rising to the diapason of my comrades. I do not regret my old part in divine gaiety: the sober air of this harsh countryside feeds most actively my atrocious skepticism. But as this skepticism cannot henceforth be brought into play, and moreover I am dedicated to a new trouble I expect to become a very nasty fool. III In a garret where I was shut in at twelve years of age I knew the world, I illustrated the human comedy. In a storeroom I learned history. At some night feast, in a Northern city, I met all the women of the old painters. In an old passage in Paris I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent dwelling ringed by the entire Orient, I accomplished my immense work and spent my illustrious retreat. I stirred my blood. My duty is remitted. It is not even necessary to dream of that. I am really from beyond the grave, and no commissions.

THREE Departure Saw enough. The vision is to be found on every wind. Had enough. Rumors of towns, at evening, and in daylight, and always. Knew enough. Life's decisions. O Rumors and Visions! Departure in affection and noise anew.

RoyaltY

One fair morning, amongst a very mild people, a superb man and woman shouted on the public square: "My friends, I would that she were queen!" "I would be queen!" She laughed and shook. He spoke to friends of revelation, of hardship ended. They swooned upon each other.

Indeed, they were kings all morning long, whilst carmine hangings went up on the houses, and all afternoon, whilst they moved forward from the palm gardens.

To a reason

One drumtap of your finger discharges all sound and commences the new harmony. One step you take, it's the levying of new men and their forward march. Your head turns away: the new love! Your head turns back: the new love! "Change our fates, flitter the curses, to begin with the weather," these children sing at you. "Lift anywhere our fortunes' and our wishes' substance," they beg of you. Come from forever, you will go everywhere.

Morning of drunkenness

O my Good! O my Beautiful! Atrocious fanfare in which I stumble not at all! Magic rack! Hurrah for the unheard-of work and for the marvellous body, for the first time! It began with the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will stay in all our veins even when, the fanfare turning, we are back in the old

disharmony. O now, we so worthy of these tortures! collect fervently this body and soul: this promise, this dementia! Elegance, science, violence! We were promised to inter in darkness the tree of good and evil, to deport tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with some disgust and it ends not being able to grasp on the spot that eternity it ends with a scattering of perfumes.

Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror of figures and objects here, consecrated be you by the memory of this vigil. It would begin with every boorishness, it ends with angels of flame and ice.

Little vigil of drunkenness, holy! if only for the mask with which you have favored us. We affirm you, method! We do not forget that you have glorified each of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole life every day.

This is the time of the Assassins.

FOUR Phrases When the world will be reduced to one mere dark forest for our two astonished eyes to a beach for two loyal children to a musical house for our bright sympathy I will find you.

Let there be on earth but one old man, calm and fine, surrounded by an "unheard-of luxury" and I am at your knees.

Let me have realized all your recollections let me be she who can garrote you I will smother you.

When we are quite strong who recoils? quite gay who drops with ridicule? When we are quite bad, what might they do with us?

Deck yourself, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw Love out the window.

My comrade, beggargirl, monstrous child! how it's all the same to you, these wretched women and these maneuvers, and my embarrassments. Ally yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! only flatterer of this vile despair.

An overcast morning, in July. An ashen taste flies in the air an odor of oozing wood in the hearth flowers beretted havoc in the promenades canal mizzle in the fields why not already toys and incense? *** I have strung ropes from belfry to belfry; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance. *** The tarn steams continuously. What sorceress will rise up against the white sunset? What violet frondescence fall? *** While public funds flow in feasts of brotherhood, a bell of pink fire rings in the clouds.

*** Arousing an agreeable taste for India ink, a black powder rains softly on my vigil I lower the flames of the lustre, I hurl myself on my bed, and, turned toward the darkness, I see you, my daughters! my queens!

Workers O that hot February morning. The inopportune South came to relieve our memories of absurd indigence, our young misery.

Henrika had on a cotton skirt with brown and white checks, which must have been worn in the last century, a ribbon bonnet and a silk scarf. It was much sadder than mourning. We were going round the suburb. The weather was overcast, and the South wind excited all the nasty odors of the ravaged gardens and the desiccated fields.

That must not have wearied my wife to the same extent as me. In a puddle left by the inundation of the previous month on a rather high path she drew my attention to very small fish.

The city, with its smoke and trade noises, followed us very far in the roads. O the other world, the habitation blessed by heaven, and the shades! The South recalled to me the miserable incidents of my childhood, my summer despairs, the horrible quantity of strength and science that fate has always kept from me. No! we shall not pass summer in this greedy country where we shall always be only engaged orphans. I want this hardened arm to drag no more a dear image.

The Bridges

Skies crystal gray. A bizarre design of bridges, some straight, some humped, others descending or obliquing on corners of the first; and these figures repeating in the other lighted circuits of the canal, but all so long and light that the banks, laden with domes, drop and diminish. A few of these bridges are already laden with ramshackle houses. Others support masts, signals, frail parapets. Minor chords cross, and go off; ropes climb the riverbanks. You make out a red jacket, perhaps other costumes and musical instruments. Are these popular tunes, bits of lordly concerts, scraps of public hymns? The water is gray and blue, broad as an arm of the sea a pallid beam, falling from the height of heaven, annihilates this comedy.

City

I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis believed modern, because all known taste has been eluded in the furnishings and the exterior of the houses as well as in the city plan. Here you would indicate traces of no monument of superstition. Morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, finally! These millions of people who have no need to know each other bring about so alike education, jobs, and old age, that this course of life must be several times less long than what a foolish statistic finds for the people of the Continent. Also as, from my window, I see new specters rolling through the thick and eternal coal smoke our woodland shade, our summer night! new Erinnyes, before my cottage which is my nation and my whole heart since everything here resembles it Death without tears, our active daughter and servant girl, a Love in despair and a pretty Crime whimpering in the mud of the street.

FIVE Ruts On the right the summer dawn awakes the leaves and vapors and noises of this part of the park, and the embankments left hold in their violet shade the thousand rapid ruts of the damp road. Procession of fairylike visions! Indeed: cars charged with animals of gilded wood, masts and canvases of many colors, to the grand gallop of twenty dappled circus horses, and children, and men, on their most astounding beasts twenty vehicles, labored, decked out and beflowered like coaches of old or in stories, filled with children dolled up for a suburban pastoral even coffins on their night dais hoisting their ebony plumes, flying to the trot of black and blue mares.

Cities I

These are cities! This is a people for whom are risen these Alleghenies and Lebanons of dream! Chalets of crystal and wood move on invisible rails and pulleys. Old craters ringed with colossi and copper palm trees roar melodiously in the fires. Amorous feasts knell over the canals suspended behind the chalets. The carillon hunting ground shouts in the gorges. Corporations of giant singers run along in vestments and oriflammes as dazzling as the light of peaks. On the platforms, amidst gulfs, Rolands sound their bravura. On the gangways of the abyss and the innroofs, the ardor of the sky flags the masts. The crumbling of apotheoses unites with fields of heights where seraphic centauresses evolve among avalanches. Above the level of the high aretes, a sea troubled by the eternal birth of Venus, laden with orpheonic fleets and the rumor of precious pearls and conches, the sea darkens at times with mortal flashes. On the slopes, harvests of flowers as big as our weapons and cups bellow. Corteges of Mabs in dresses russet, opaline, climb the ravines. Higher, feet in the cascade and the brambles, stags suckle at Diana. Suburban Bacchantes sob and the moon burns and yells. Venus goes into the caverns of blacksmiths and hermits. Groups of belfries sing the ideas of peoples. From castles built of bone comes unknown music. All legends evolve and elk charge through the streets. The storm paradise breaks down. Savages dance unceasingly the night feast. And, one hour, I descended into the stir of a Baghdad boulevard where companies sang the joy of new work, under a thick breeze, circulating powerless to elude the fabulous phantoms of mountains where one was to meet again.

Vagabonds

What good arms, what fair hour will return me that region whence come my slumbers and my least movements?

Pitiful brother! what atrocious evenings I owed him! "I did not take hold of this enterprise fervently. I have toyed with his infirmity. Because of me we might return to exile, to slavery." He imagined me a very bizarre jinx and innocence, and added disturbing reasons.

I answered by laughing at this satanic doctor, and ended by gaining the window. I created, beyond the countryside traversed by bands of rare music, the phantoms of future nocturnal luxury.

After this vaguely hygienic distraction, I stretched out on straw. And, almost every night, as soon as he was asleep, the poor brother arose, mouth rotten, eyes torn out just as he had dreamed! and drew me into the hall roaring his dream of foolish grief.

I had indeed, in all sincerity of mind, undertaken to return him to his primitive state of son of the Sun and we wandered nourished by the wine of the caverns and the biscuit of the road, I driven to find the place and the formula.

Cities II

The official acropolis outdoes the colossalest conceptions of modern barbarity. Impossible to express the flat daylight produced by this sky, immutably gray, the buildings' imperial clat, and the ground's eternal snow. There is reproduced, in singular taste for enormity, all the classic marvels of architecture, and I visit painting exhibitions in premises twenty times more vast than Hampton Court. What paintings! A Norwegian Nebuchadnezzar had the Ministries' staircases built; the subalterns I've been able to see are already prouder than Brahmins, and I shook at the sight of the colossi watchmen and the building officials. By grouping edifices in squares, courts and terraces, coachmen have been ousted. The parks represent primitive nature worked by a superb art, the old quarter has inexplicable parts, an arm of the sea, with no boats, rolls its sheet of blue hail amidst quays laden with giant candelabra. A small bridge leads to a postern immediately below the Holy Chapel's dome. That dome is an artistic steel armature about fifteen thousand feet in diameter.

On several points of the copper gangways, the platforms, the stairways that wind around markets and pillars, I thought I could judge the depth of the city! The prodigy I can't account for: what are the levels of the other quarters above or below the acropolis? For the stranger of our time, reconnaissance is impossible. The business quarter is a circus in just one style, with galleries of arcades. You see no shops, but the snow on the roadways is dwarfed; some nabobs, as rare as Sunday promenaders in London, dive for a diamond diligence. Some red velvet divans: polar drinks are served whose price varies from eight hundred to eight thousand rupees. At the idea of seeking out theaters on this circus, I tell myself the shops must contain somber enough

dramas. I think there is a police; but the law must be so strange, that I renounce conceiving the adventurers here.

The suburb, as elegant as a fine Paris street, is favored with an air of light; the democratic element numbers a few hundred souls. There again, the houses don't go on; the suburb disappears bizarrely in the country, the "County" that fills the eternal occident of forests and prodigious plantations where wild gentlemen hunt their chronicles beneath the created light.

SIX Vigils I It is repose lit up, nor fever, nor languor, on the bed or on the meadow.

It is the friend nor ardent nor weak. The friend.

It is the loved one nor tormenting nor tormented. The loved one.

The air and the world unsought. Life.

Was it quite this?

And the dream cooled. II The building's skeleton gets the light again. From both sides of the hall, negligible dcors, harmonic elevations join. The wall across from the watcher is a psychological succession of frieze sections, atmospheric bands and geological accidents. Intense and rapid dream of sentimental groups with beings of every character amidst every appearance.

III The vigil's lamps and carpets make the sound of waves, at night, along the hull and about steerage.

The vigil's ocean, like Amelia's breasts.

The tapestries, halfway down, coppices of lace emerald-tinted, the vigil's turtledoves fly at. ....................................... The dark foyer's plaque, real suns of strands; ah! well of magics, sole view of dawn, this time.

Mystic On the bankside angels turn their woolen skirts in steel-and-emerald pastures.

Fields of flame leap to the peak of the hillock. On the left the arete's compost is stomped on by all homicides and battles, and all disastrous noise runs its curve. Behind the arete on the right, the line of Orients, of progress.

And while the band at the top of the picture is formed of the turning leaping rumor of seashells and human nights,

The blooming sweetness of the stars and the heavens and the rest descends upon the bankside, like a basket against our face, and makes the abyss blossoming and blue beneath.

Sunup

I embraced the summer sunup.

Nothing yet budged on the face of the palaces. The tide was neap. Shadow camps had not left the road in the wood. I walked, awaking keen warm breaths; and gems gazed, and wings arose noiselessly.

The first enterprise was, in the path already full of fresh and pallid brilliance, a flower which told me its name.

I laughed at the blond wasserfall tousling through the pines; at the silvery summit I recognized the goddess.

Then I lifted one by one her veils. In the lane, waving my arms. On the plain, where I announced her to the cock. In the great city she fled amongst steeples and domes, and, running like a beggar on the marble quays, I chased her.

At the top of the road, near a laurel wood, I wrapped her with her gathered veils, and I felt a little her immense body. Sunup and the child fell at the bottom of the wood.

Upon waking, it was noon.

Flowers

From a golden step among cordons of silk, gray gauzes, green velvets, crystal disks that darken like bronze in the sun I see the digitalis open on a carpet filigreed of silver, hair and eyes.

Pieces of yellow gold strewn over agate, mahogany pillars supporting a dome of emeralds, bouquets of white satin and wands of rubies ring the water rose.

Like a god with enormous blue eyes and shapes of snow, the sea and sky attract to terraces of marble the crowd of young and strong roses

SEVEN Vulgar Nocturne One breath opens operatic breaches in the barrier blurs the pivoting of worn roofs disperses the limits of the foyers eclipses the casements.

Along the vine, having put my foot on a gargoyle I descended into this coach whose epoch is indicated enough by convex mirrors, curved panels and contour sofas. Hearse of my slumber, isolated, house of the shepherd of my silliness, the vehicle veers onto the grass of the old effaced road: and in a defect at the top of the righthand mirror whirl pale lunar figures, leaves, breasts.

A green and blue very deep invade the image.

Unhitching around a patch of gravel.

Here one will whistle for the storm, and Sodoms and Solymas, and ferocious beasts and armies,

(Postilion and beasts of dream will they again under the most suffocating forests, drop me to the eyes in the wellspring of silk?)

And send us, lashed across lapping waters and spilled drinks, rolling to the baying of mastiffs...

One breath disperses the limits of the foyer.

Seascape

Cars of silver and copper Prows of steel and silver Beat the foam Pull up bramble stumps. The currents of the moor, And the enormous ruts of the ebb, Go off circularly eastward, Toward the forest pillars

Toward the pilings of the pier, Whose angle is hit by whirlwinds of light. Winter Feast

The cascade rings behind the comic opera huts. Girandoles prolong, in the orchards and lanes beside the Meander the greens and reds of sundown. Horatian nymphs with First Empire hair Siberian Rounddances, Chinese women by Boucher.

Anguish

Could it be She will have me pardoned for ambitions continually crushed an easy end repair ages of indigence one day of success lull us on the shore of our fatal inability?

(O palms! diamond! love, strength! higher than all joy and glory! anyhow everywhere, demon, god youth of this being: me!)

Accidents of scientific fary and movements of social fraternity be cherished as progressive restitution of the first frankness?...

But the Vampire who makes us nice commands that we amuse ourselves with what she leaves us, or otherwise be more droll.

Roll on wounds, through the wearying air and sea; in tortures, through silence of murderous waters and air; in torments that laugh, in their silence atrociously howling.

EIGHT Metropolitan From indigo straits to Ossian seas, on pink and orange sand laved by the vinous heavens, have just gone up and crossed boulevards of crystal inhabited incontinently by poor young families who feed at the fruiterer's. Nothing rich the city!

From the bituminous desert flee straight, put to rout with the sheets of fog spaced out in fearsome bands in the sky which curves, recoils and descends formed of the most sinister black smoke to be made by Ocean in mourning, helmets, wheels, boats, croups the battle!

Raise your head: this wooden bridge, arched; these last vegetable gardens of Samaria; these illuminated masks under the lantern lashed by the cold night; silly water sprite in a loud dress, down in the river; these luminous skulls in planes of peas and the other phantasmagoria the countryside.

Roads lined with grillwork and walls, scarcely containing their coppices, and the atrocious flowers that would be called hearts and sisters, Damascus damning with languor possessions of fairy aristocracies ultra-Rhenish, Japanese, Guaranian, liable still to receive the music of the ancients and there are inns which, for always, already open no more there are princesses, and, if you are not too overcome, studying the stars the sky.

The morning when, with Her, you struggled among these flashes of snow, green lips, ice sheets, black flags and blue rays, and these purple perfumes of polar sun your strength.

Barbarian Well after the days and seasons, and beings and lands,

The bleeding meat flag on the silk of seas and arctic flowers (they do not exist).

Back from old fanfares of heroism which still attack our heart and head far from ancient assassins,

Oh! the bleeding meat flag on the silk of seas and arctic flowers (they do not exist)

Sweetness!

The infernos, raining in gusts of rime sweetness! the fires in the rains of a wind of diamonds hurled by the terrestrial heart eternally carbonized for us o world!

(Far from the old retreats and old flames you hear, you feel.)

Infernos and foams. Music, tack of gulfs and shocks of ice and stars.

O sweetness, o world, o music! And there, the forms, sweat, hair and eyes, floating. And the pallid tears, boiling o sweetness! and the feminine voice coming to the deeps of volcanos and arctic grottos.

The flag...

Promontory

The golden sunup and the trembling evening find our brig lying off this villa and its outbuildings as extensive as Epirus and the Peloponnesus, or the big island of Japan, or Arabia! Fanes lit up by the return of processions; immense views of the defense of modern coasts; dunes illustrated with hot flowers and bacchanals; grand canals of Carthage and Embankments of a shady Venice; mushy eruptions of Etnas and crevasses of flowers and waters of glaciers; wash houses ringed by German poplars, singular park embankments bending down the Tree of Japan; and the circular faades of the "Royal" or the "Grand" of Scarborough and Brooklyn; and their railways flank, cross, overhang the arrangements of this Hotel, chosen in the history of the most elegant and the most colossal constructions of Italy, America and Asia, whose windows and terraces, at present full of lights, drinks and rich breezes, are open to the spirit of travelers and noblemen who permit, during daylight hours, all the tarantellas of the coasts and even ritornellos from the illustrious valleys of art to decorate marvelously the faades of the Promontory-Palace.

Scenes

Ancient Comedy pursues its accords and divides its Idylls:

Stage boulevards.

A long wooden pier from one end to the other of a rocky field where the barbaric crowd mills under bare trees.

In corridors of black gauze, following the steps of promenaders with lanterns and leaves,

Birds from the mystery plays swoop down upon a masonry pontoon moved by the covered archipelago of spectators' small craft.

Lyric scenes, accompaniment with flute and drum, bow in cubbyholes managed under ceilings around modern club salons or halls of the ancient Orient.

The extravaganza maneuvers to the summit of an amphitheater crowned with a coppice or bustles and modulates for Boetians, in the shade of trees moving, at the edge of farmlands.

The comic opera divides on our stage at the edge of ten partitions set up from the gallery to the footlights.

NINE Historic Evening On some evening, for example, which finds the tourist naive, retired from our economic horrors, a master's hand animates the harpsichord of the fields; you play cards at the bottom of the pond, mirror evocative of queens and minions; you have sainted women, veils, and strings of harmony, and legendary chromaticisms, at sundown.

He shivers at the passing of huntsmen and hordes. Comedy trickles on the boards of the lawn. And the embarrassment of the poor and weak over these stupid plans!

To his slavish vision, Germany scaffolds itself toward moons; Tartar deserts are lighted; ancient revolts teem in the center of the Celestial Empire; on the stairways and armchairs of the rocks, a little world pale and flat, Africa and Occidents, will be built. Then a ballet of well-known seas and nights, a worthless chemistry, and impossible melodies.

The same middle-class magic at every point the mail train deposits us! The most elementary physicist feels it is no longer possible to submit to that personal atmosphere, fog of physical remorse, noticing which is already an affliction.

No! The steamroom moment, seas borne off, subterranean blazes, the absconded planet, and consequent exterminations, certitudes so little malignly indicated in the Bible and by the Norns and which it will be given to the serious being to observe yet it will not be at all a legendary effect!

Bottom Reality being too thorny for my grand character I found myself nevertheless at my lady's, a great gray-blue bird soaring to the moldings of the ceiling and dragging my wings in the shadows of the evening.

I was, at the foot of the baldaquin supporting her adored gems and physical masterpieces, a great bear with violet gums and hair hoary with grief, eyes on the crystal and silver of the console tables.

All became shadow and ardent aquarium.

In the morning a battlesome June dawn I ran to the fields, an ass, trumpeting and flourishing my grievance, until the Sabines of the outskirts came to fling themselves on my breast.

H Every monstrosity violates the atrocious gestures of Hortense. Her solitude is erotic engineering; her lassitude, amorous dynamics. Under a childhood's surveillance, she has been, in numerous epochs, the ardent hygiene of races. Her door is open to misery. There, the morality of present beings disembodies in her passion or her action o terrible shiver of novice loves on the bloody ground and in bright hydrogen! find Hortense.

Movement

The winding movement on the bank at the river's falls, The sternpost abyss, The celerity of the rail, The current's whims Lead through unheard-of lights And chemical novelty The travelers ringed by waterspouts of valley And strom.

They are the conquerors of the world Seeking personal chemical fortune; Sport and comfort travel with them; They lead on education Of races, classes and beasts, on this vessel Repose and vertigo To diluvian light, To terrible evenings of study.

For from the chat among the gear, blood, flowers, fire, jewels, From the agitated accounts to this runaway riverbank You see, rolling like a dike beyond the hydraulic power way, Monstrous, unceasingly lighted their study stock; They driven into harmonic ecstasy, And the heroism of discovery.

In atmospheric accidents the most surprising, A youthful couple stands aside on the ark Is it ancient unsociableness you pardon? And sings and takes a post.

TEN Devotion To Sister Louise Vanaen de Voringhem her blue cornet turned to the North Sea for the shipwrecked.

To Sister Lonie Aubois d'Ashby Baou the buzzing stinking summer grass for mothers' and children's fever.

To Lulu demon who has kept a taste for oratories from the time of Les Amies and her incomplete education. For men! to Madame ***.

To the adolescent that I was. To that holy old man, hermitage or mission.

To the spirit of the poor. And to a very high clergy.

As well, to every cult in every place of memorial cult and such events as require submission, following the aspirations of the moment or indeed our own serious vice.

This evening, to Circeto of the high ice, fat as fish, and illuminated like the ten months of red night (her heart amber and spunk) for my only prayer mute as those regions of night, and preceding bravuras more violent than that polar chaos.

At all cost and with every air, even in metaphysical travels but no more then.

Democracy

"The flag goes to the unclean landscape, and our patois smothers the drum.

"In the centers we shall feed the most cynical prostitution. We shall massacre logical revolts.

"To peppery and soaked lands! in the service of the most monstrous industrial or military exploitations.

"Farewell to this, no matter where. Conscripts of good will, we shall have ferocious philosophy; ignoramuses for science, rous for comfort; and let the world go hang. This is the real march. Forward, let's go."

Fairy

For Helen conspired ornamental sap in virgin shadows and impassive light in astral silence. The ardor of summer was confided to mute birds and the indolence requisite to a priceless mourning boat by souls of dead loves and subsiding perfumes.

After the moment of the lumberwomen's air on the rumor of the torrent under the ruin of the wood, of cowbells in valley echoes, and cries of the steppes

For the childhood of Helen trembled furs and shadows, and the breast of the poor, and the legends of heaven.

And her eyes and her dance superior even to precious flashes, to cold influences, to the pleasure of the dcor and the hour unique.

War

As a child, certain skies sharpened my optics: every character nuanced my physiognomy. Phenomena stirred at present, the eternal inflection of moments and the infinite of mathematics chase me through this world where I suffer every civil success, respected by strange children and enormous affections I dream of a War, of right and might, of logic quite unforeseen.

It is as simple as a musical phrase.

ELEVEN Youth I

SUNDAY Sums aside, the inevitable descent from heaven and the visit of memories and the assembly of rhythms occupy the dwelling, the head and the world of the spirit.

A horse takes off on the suburban turf, and along farmlands and afforestations, riddled with carbonic plague. A miserable woman of drama, somewhere in the world, sighs after improbable abandons. Desperados languish after storm, drunkenness and wounds. Small children stifle maledictions along the rivers.

Let us resume study in the noise of the consuming work gathering and rising in the masses. II

SONNET Man of ordinary constitution, was not the flesh a fruit hanging in the orchard, o infant days! the body a treasure to lavish; o to love, peril or might of Psyche? The earth had slopes fertile in princes and artists, and lineage and race drove you to crimes and mourning: the world, your fortune and your peril. But at present, that labor fulfilled, you, your sums you, your impatience are nothing more than your dance and your voice, not fixed and unforced, although for a double event of invention and success a reason in fraternal and discreet humanity through the universe without images might and right reflect dance and voice at present only appreciated. III

TWENTY Instructive voices exiled... physical ingenuousness bitterly sobered... adagio ah! the infinite egoism of adolescence, studious optimism: how the world was full of flowers that summer! Airs and forms dying... a choir, to calm impotence and absence! A choir of glasses, of nocturnal melodies... indeed, the nerves go quick to hunt.

IV You are still at the temptation of Anthony. The frolic of curtailed zeal, the tics of puerile youth, subsidence and fright.

But you will sit down to this labor: all harmonic and architectural possibilities will stir around your chair. Beings perfect, unforeseen, will volunteer for your experiments. In your environs will flow dreamily the curiosity of ancient crowds and lazy luxuries. Your memory and your senses will be only the nourishment of your creative impulse. As for the world, when you leave, what will it have become? In any case, nothing of present appearances.

Sale

For sale, what Jews have not sold, what nobility and crime have not tasted, what is unknown to the accursed love and the fatal probity of the masses; what time nor science need recognize:

The Voices reconstituted; the fraternal awakening of all choral and orchestral energies and their instantaneous application; the occasion, unique, of releasing our senses!

For sale priceless Bodies, out of any race, any world, any sex, any descent! Riches leaping at every step! Uncontrolled sale of diamonds!

For sale anarchy to the masses; irrepressible satisfaction for superior amateurs; atrocious death for the faithful and lovers!

For sale habitations and migrations, sports, fairylike visions and perfect comforts, and the noise, the movement and the future they make!

For sale the applications of calculus and the unheard-of leaps of harmony. Discoveries and terms unsuspected immediate possession.

Insensate and infinite lan toward invisible splendors, insensible delights and its fearsome secrets for each vice and its frightful gaiety for the crowd.

For sale bodies, voices, immense unquestionable opulence, what shall never be sold. The sellers are not at the end of the sale! Travelers need not render their commissions so early.

Genie

He is affection and the present since he has made the house open to scummy winter and to the rumor of summer he who has purified drinks and foods he who is the charm of elusive places and the superhuman delight of stations he is affection and the future, strength and love that we, upright in rages and ennuis, see pass in the sky of tempest and the flags of ecstasy.

He is love, measure perfect and reinvented, reason marvelous and unforeseen, and eternity: loved machine of fatal qualities. We have all had the great fear of his concession and of ours: o pleasure of our health, lan of our faculties, egoistic affection and passion for him he who loves us for his infinite life...

And we recollect him and he travels... And if the Adoration leaves, knells, his promise knells: "Get thee behind me these superstitions, these ancient bodies, these mnages and these ages. It is this epoch that has foundered!"

He will not leave, he will not redescend from heaven, he will not accomplish the redemption of women's furies and men's gaieties and all this sin: for it is done, he being, and being loved.

O his breathing, his heads, his racing, the terrible celerity of the perfection of forms and of action.

O fecundity of the mind and immensity of the universe!

His body! the release dreamed of, the breaking up of the crossed grace of new violence! his sight, his sight! all the ancient kneeling and penalties relieved in his train.

His day! the abolition of all sonorous and motile suffering in music more intense.

His treading! migrations more enormous than the ancient invasions.

O he and us! pride more benevolent than lost charities.

O world! and the clear song of new ills!

He has known all of us and loved all of us: let us know how, this winter night, from cape to cape, from tumultuous pole to castle, from crowd to beach, from expressions to expressions, strength and sentiment low, to hail him and see him, and send him back, and, below the tides and atop deserts of snow, follow his sights his breathing his body his day.