X. À COLOMBINELes fleurs pâles du clair de lune, Comme des roses de clarté, Fleurissent dans les nuits d’été : Si je pouvais en cueillir une !
Pour soulager mon infortune, Je cherche, le long du Léthé, Les fleurs pâles du clair de lune, Comme des roses de clarté.
Et j’apaiserai ma rancune,
Si j’obtiens du ciel irrité
La chimérique volupté
D’effeuiller sur ta toison brune
Les fleurs pâles du clair de lune !
X. TO COLOMBINEThe pale flowers of moonlight, like roses of insight, bloom in the summer nights: if I could pick just one!
To throw off my misfortune, I search the length of Lethe for the pale flowers of moonlight, like roses of insight.
And I will appease my rancor, if I obtain from angry heaven the chimerical sensuality of plucking onto your brunette fleece the pale flowers of moonlight!
NOTES (by line number, starting with the title)
2 pâles : See III.4.
3 clarté : « [F]igurément, surtout en poésie, de Tout ce qui éclaire l’esprit », Figuratively, especially in poetry, of All that enlightens the spirit’ (DAf1878).
5 cueillir : To pick, to gather. This verb can (according to all editions of DAf through the present) take as its only literal objects nothing but flowers, fruits, vegetables, branches, etc.; and as its only figurative objects nothing but palms, laurels, or a kiss—in which last case it may be either pris, ‘given’, or donné, ‘taken’.
6 soulager : The principal literal meaning of this verb in modern French, ‘to relieve, to unburden’, has been generalized from an original meaning (still in nautical use) ‘to jettison, to throw heavy cargo overboard in a storm’. Its figurative meaning is to relieve someone’s travails, evil, pain, or—as here— misfortune.
7 le long du Léthé : The length of Lethe, the infernal river of forgetfulness. Giraud’s use of « soulager » in 6 suggests—though I am not sure it demands—that his narrator be traveling the length of Lethe aboard a vessel in its stream (perhaps Pierrot’s galley of IX.5, salvaged and refloated), rather than afoot on its banks. High and dry either way, he could not rely on Lethe’s waters to relieve his remembered misfortune without undertaking a positive act like jettison.
11 du ciel irrité : Le ciel is a common metonym for Dieu. The more specific le ciel irrité for Dieu offensé (or the like), if not common, is at least attested in works of Catholic theology, for instance in J. Monsabré’s Exposition de Dogme Catholique [etc.] (Paris, 1889), p. 248. I have no doubt this was Giraud’s meaning.
12 chimérique volupté : DAf1878 glosses « volupté » as purely corporal, sensual pleasure, and « chimérique » as with no solid, real foundation: jointly, a paradox.
13 effeuiller sur : Literally, applied to a flower or flowers as direct object of the verb « effeuiller », ‘to strip off’ its petals onto the object of the preposition « sur ». For example, in Almanach des muses, vol. 57, 1820, Guy Menuau included in his elegy Aux mânes de Thélaïs the couplet « Permets-moi, Thélaïs, d’effeuiller une rose / Sur la tombe isolée où ta cendre repose », ‘Allow me, Thélaïs, to strip from a rose / Petals on the lone tomb where thy ashes repose’.
toison : Literally, a fleece. But I suggest that Giraud had good reason to believe his readers (at least, his fellow young men in his literary circle) would not take this line literally. (1) Figuratively, « toison » is (or could be) a woman’s pubic hair. Gautier, in Poésies de Théophile Gautier qui ne Figureront pas dans ses Œuvres Précédées d’une Autobiographie [etc.] (privately printed, France, 1873) includes this quatrain in Musée Secret (the first of a series of Galanteries): « Au soleil tirant sans vergogne / Le drap de la blonde qui dort, / Comme Philippe de Bourgogne / Vous trouveriez la toison d’or », ‘In sunlight pulling shamelessly / Aside the sleeping blonde’s bedsheet, / Like Duke Philippe of Burgundy / You would find the golden fleece’. More explicitly, in Dictionnaire Érotique Moderne (anonymously published as at Freetown by Imprimerie de la Bibliomaniac Society in 1864—the date might even be true!), « Toison de la femme », ‘A woman’s fleece’, is defined as « Les poils qui défendent l’entrée de son divin sanctuaire », ‘The hairs that defend the entrance of her divine sanctuary’. (In the 1891 edition, published as by Alfred Delvau and printed openly at Bâle by Imprimerie de Karl Schmidt, « divin sanctuaire » is forthrightly replaced by « con », ‘cunt’.) I do not claim Giraud read either of those particular sources; but their existence is sufficient evidence that this figurative sense had currency in literary circles. (2) Certainly « effeu-iller » had some sexualized figurative meaning(s). In É. de Parny’s 1808 revision of his long, obscene, anticlerical, blasphemous, and very funny poem La Guerre des Dieux Anciens et Modernes, Panther—a Roman soldier, lover of Mary and father of Jesus—addresses Hortense, a young nun who he sees move her hand under her clothing: « on voit […] une rose s’ouvrir ; / Mais jeune encore elle s’ouvrait à peine : / Un joli doigt, qu’assouplit le désir, / En l’effeuillant y cherche le plaisir », ‘one sees […] a rose bloom, / But so young yet it’s barely open: / A pretty finger that makes desire supple / By plucking it seeks pleasure there’. Quoting just the last two of those lines from Parny as an illustration, Delvau defines Effeuiller as « Masturber en parlant de la femme », ‘To masturbate when speaking of a woman’. But given those lines in the context of the preceding lines just quoted, surely Parny/Panther refers to digital (self-)defloration, not to digital masturbation; and in fact Delvau’s very next definiendum is « Effeuiller la couronne virginale », ‘To pluck the virgin’s crown’—in other words, literally To de-flower. On this basis, I think defloration is Giraud’s desired « chimérique volupté ».
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