Hashish, Wine, Opium by Charles Baudelaire & Théophile Gautier

Author:Charles Baudelaire & Théophile Gautier [Baudelaire, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: French Literature, Classics, Philosophy, Poetry, Writing
ISBN: 9781847490933
Publisher: Oneworld Classics
Published: 1851-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

Don’t Trust Chronometers

On coming round, I saw the room was full of gentlemen dressed in black, greeting each other sadly and shaking hands with a melancholy friendliness like those afflicted by a common sorrow.

They were saying: “Time is dead. Henceforth there will be no years or months or hours. Time is dead and we are going to his funeral.”

“It’s a fact that he was pretty well on in years but I did not expect it. He was remarkably healthy for his age,” added one of the mourners whom I recognized as a painter friend of mine.

“Eternity was used up, it had to end,” rejoined another.

“Great Heavens,” I exclaimed as an idea struck me, “if Time is no more, when can it be eleven o’clock?”

“Never…” cried Daucus-Carota in a voice of thunder as he threw his nose into my face and revealed himself in his true character, “Never… it will be a quarter past nine for ever! The clock-hand will stay at the minute when Time ceased to be and your torment will consist of going to look at the motionless hand and returning to your chair only to recommence your quest until you are walking on the bones of your heels.”

Driven by a superior power, I began the journey, carrying it out four or five hundred times and questioning the clock face with a hideous disquiet.

Daucus-Carota sat astride the clock and cut horrific grimaces at me.

The hand would not budge.

“Wretch! You’ve stopped the pendulum,” I cried, mad with rage.

“Not at all. It is swinging as usual, but suns will crumble into dust before this steel arrowhead advances by a millionth of a millimetre.”

“Come, I see we shall have to exorcize the evil spirits, we are getting splenetic,” announced the Seer. “Let’s have some music. This time David’s harp will be replaced by an Erard Piano.”

And, sitting down on the piano stool, he played tunes in quick tempo and in gay mood.

This seemed greatly to vex the man-mandrake who began to diminish, flatten out and fade in colour, uttering inarticulate groans all the while, until he lost all human appearance and rolled over the parquet in the form of a salsify on two stalks.

The spell had been broken.

“Hallelujah! Time is born again,” cried happy, childlike voices, “Let’s go and look at the clock!”

The hand pointed to eleven.

“Your carriage is waiting, sir,” the servant told me. The hashish-eaters went their ways, like the officers after Marlborough’s funeral.

And I ran lightly down the staircase that had caused me so much torment, and some minutes later was back in my room and on the solid ground of reality; the last vapours raised by the hashish had dispersed.

My reason had returned to me, or at least what I call my reason for want of a better expression.

My lucidity of mind would have sufficed even to write an account of a pantomime or a vaudeville, or to indite a poem in triple rhymes.

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