“_Et la vie les a massacrés, Mes mains les ont ensevelis, Mes yeux les ont beaucoup pleurés._”
His “_Espoir_,” in which he dreams of a sweetheart, is a veritable Eugène Carrière in verse.
Another poem containing much of the same sad, tender beauty, strangely commingled with piquant malice, mischievous _esprit_, broad humour, and bitter satire; a poem which, in spite of startling liberties of vocabulary, rhythm, and rhyme, is said to have brought honest tears to the eyes of the impeccable De Hérédia, is “_Le Revenant_.” The “_Revenant_” is Jesus Christ. The appearance of Christ in nineteenth-century Paris is a much-worn _motif_ in French literature and painting; but the slum poet’s handling of it is so new, bold, and strong that it seems to be altogether fresh.
Part I. is a query as to what would happen if Jesus Christ should come back, and introduces a summary of the principal events of his career and a strikingly original appreciation of his personality and character. He is the “man of the beautiful eyes and the beautiful dreams, whose heart was larger than life.” But he is also “the anarchist,” the “Galilean tramp,” the “carpenter on a strike,” the “boon companion of thieves,” the “quack hated by the doctors,” the “duffer who wore another cross than that of the Legion of Honour, who boxed the bourgeois shop-keepers, and who wasn’t over-polite to the muffs of his time,”—phrases through whose vulgar, uncouth, seemingly sacrilegious envelope are plainly visible intense love and admiration, and which accurately represent the religious attitude of the submerged, who, proverbially, applaud the name of Christ while they hiss the barest mention of his professed followers and his church.
In Part II. Jesus Christ suddenly appears on a corner of one of the exterior boulevards. The surprised poet greets him with bluff good-nature, laments drolly his inability to do the proper thing by him in the matter of drinks, and overwhelms him with eager, naïve questions. Then, touched to the heart by his dazed look and apparent helplessness, he assumes a kindly superiority, taking him under his protection, as he might a lost infant, warning him against many things, especially against the police, who will be certain to arrest him as a vagabond if he falls within their view. Finally, he discovers that the figure he has taken to be that of the Christ is his own figure mirrored in the window of the wine-shop before which he has been standing.