Still disappointed, if not exactly disillusioned, with his inability to get within 500 yards of General Aupick during the day’s convulsions, Baudelaire looked round at his pack of unlikely revolutionaries. Baudelaire glared, almost froglike, above the fresh power burns still ashing his cheek. I, for one, looking at him, felt awkward and demure. I wouldn’t have gone half a step in the direction of rebellion–if it hadn’t been for the magnetized gaze and vivid rhetoric of this impossible poet. Such grand imprecations against the ‘imperial scheme of things’ followed by the almost chuckling ‘Allons-y!’ of a New Year’s merrymaker, as if our war tasks would be no more dangerous or imposing than a good afternoon’s gallop and giggle. Sweet liberty! We were the very figures of the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.
“Come along, my castaways of fate, foiled ministers of a refreshened ‘state of the people first and the state second,’ let’s still console ourselves by making more than a ruin of our honors this day. Eh? Let us bash at this disaster’s gate and bend the flimsy whim of chance with the hard iron of our ardor!” Already there was an improvised ire in his eyes, and I found myself smiling slyly, wondering what was in store for we poor four horsemen of the slobpocalypse.
Our chance of participating in any real action in the rebel fight had slipped away when the students Baudelaire had at first inspired stopped off to man at a smoking barricade about two miles from Aupick’s HQ at the Academy Militaire. We last saw them getting shot and cursing the gods while the survivors reloaded and more cobblestones were being piled on the barricade. Now it was just we few friends of Baudelaire’s, straggling along a side-street, eyeing the empty windows suspiciously. Auberge had fallen asleep in his cups behind a barricade. We looked like four sportsmen who had lost their dog, their duck, and their dignity. The aleady long day had gotten very long indeed.
“Follow me, my men, to the very barrow of our ignorance, the whited ground of our being, the veritable plot of is and is not. We must in the meantime, however, trade these outrageous rifles for regular shovels, and be content to store our warrior selves in M. Foulcault’s garden shed next to the flats of unplanted purple pansies–lest some passing gendarme feel his legal heart blip an uncivil alert at our morbid trooping past his assigned lamppost. Let us study war no more! That is work for students, not poetasters. Let us learn what peace may yet greet us in the plot of is and is not! Not the plot, swealter, and sweat of the farmer’s planted lot, his earnest endeavors so necessary for our daily bread; let us delve into another dirt, a lower and more august realm of realty. Hush! I see the shock on your faces: how can we abandon our marching for soiling ourselves with soil-work? Follow me, my mazed men, to that rough and ready country that refuses all further banishment. Walk with me into the mystery! Creep into the steeping night with me, and crawl under the crepe slipcover of a maggoty grave. For Death shall be our drinking-companion this night, no less a spectre than Death himself! Come with me, and bow before his barbèd helm. Rumor is rife that he favors a Rhinish draft….”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.