A Few of My Dreams

by Paul Verlaine, translated by Robert Boucheron

     I undertake to describe as minutely as possible a few of my dreams from each night, those of course which appear to me worthy by their paused images, or by exposure in an atmosphere a bit breathable by people who are awake.

     I often see Paris. Never as it is. It’s an unknown city, absurd in all respects. I surround it with a narrow river between high banks and two rows of trees of any sort. Red roofs gleam among greenery that is very green. The weather is summer, heavy, with large extremely dark clouds, arranged as in the sky of a historic landscape, and shot through by the sun, very yellow. A peasant landscape, you see. And yet when I cast my eyes toward the city on the far bank, there are houses, courts, and blocks where laundry is drying, and where voices are heard, horrible plaster houses of the true suburban Paris, which recall the plain of Saint-Ouen and that military road to the north, but more scattered and irregular. I am always afraid there, and it smells of a threat of attack, nocturnal and otherwise. Would it be a vague reminiscence of a phantom Canal Saint-Martin?

     I don’t know how to get into the city properly so-called, and without transition, here I am in three places in succession, all the same, small square white houses with arcades. On the sidewalk and on the roadway, not a living soul but a delivery man who, I know not why, talks to me and points with a finger at a street sign at a corner of the square. He laughs, I no longer remember about what, something stupid, and I forget the name of the square I have just read. He directs me to the embassy of England, where I betake myself. It’s on another square in one of the low houses with arcades. A grenadier in red stands guard, bearskin hat with nothing on it – plume, cockade, or brass. Short tunic with white facings, black trousers with thin red piping.

     I enter and mount an official stair of white granite with a high rail. On the steps and on the rail are seated or lying sprawled Scotsmen and Scotswomen in more or less abandoned poses. At a kind of mezzanine where the stair leads, the scene changes or rather accentuates. Oh, in what a bizarre way! It’s a kind of guard room, bright weapons stacked in a corner, and on camp beds and on the floor tiles. Almost naked, always with some characteristic scrap of costume, a hat with an eagle feather, a short skirt striped red and green, or ankle boots, men and women, chaste and so white, so nimble, they move in proud figures, in brave banter, punctuated by full-toothed laughs, to those ear-splitting songs from their mountains.

     The vision is lost in a half-waking, and sleep finds me again measuring with long strides one of those streets that are new and not new – you know? – wide, built yesterday, unpaved in spots, without shops, and which bear the names of developers that end in ier or ard. Dust of plaster and dust of sand, shutters and glass panes of houses, the bronze and green of street lamps, and all things there have that air of being badly cleaned that sets your front teeth on edge and makes the ends of your fingernails cold. It climbs, this street, and the reason for my haste is a cortege I follow in the company of my father, himself long dead yet constantly present in my dreams. I probably stopped to buy a wreath or flowers, because I can no longer see the hearse, which must have turned at the top of the street into an avenue that cuts in sharp at the right. Right and not left. On the left is a wasteland of the backs and sides of tall houses in the latest style, a hideous perspective! My father makes a sign for me to walk faster, and I soon catch up with him.

     A gap of one second in my memory allows me to ignore how we climbed – and where? – on the top of a carriage that goes on rails with no apparent means of locomotion. What is this carriage? Ahead of us, threading the rails like a line of bugs, go oblong boxes about two meters high, painted a soiled light blue: they contain coffins, and this is a train to the cemetery. I know this, it’s conventional, the system has functioned for some time. The oblique avenue is still on the right. Great trenches yawn in the clay earth, green and yellow, in beds. Diggers lean on their shovels and watch us file past, the train of the dead and us. These men are grayish in the grayish air. It is cold. It must be November. We keep rolling.

     And here is yet another!

     A market in a strong wind on sloping ground. Wide open. A hundred or so booths. Much

swarming. The extraordinary speed of our course scrambles objects and faces a bit, at the same time as the rumbling of the wheels on the rails drowns out all noises, footsteps, and voices. But the odor assails us, runs with us, whirls and rushes down, the dull and greasy odor of butcher’s pork of the Siege, pastries and English confections sold there, and their forms – fat loaves of pink and yellow, bands of red caramel half melted and studded with bits of rancid almonds, violet heap of unnamed jellies and unnamable galantines, dusty accumulations of meringues, tea and coffee cakes, and spoiled muffins. The market turns round, unravels, and evaporates in the distance swiftly gained and the fog of the dream that erases all.

     Of the cemetery – where the preceding vision does not lead – I have two quite different views.

     Sometimes, in a windy rain storm, toward sunset, evidently in a hurry to arrive somewhere, and not careful to examine my surroundings, I traverse by great steps a high alley, flanked on one side by tombs, trees stripped of leaves, and tall rustling grass, while on the other side sinks a valley where trees – trees of the forest, beech, oak, and ash – come up to my height to groan and crack their tops, and where, between the shade of evening and that of the boughs, gleam pedestals, urns, and crosses.

     Other times, it is ten o’clock on a summer morning, already hot. Shadows are blue along the sidewalk, and they slice with vigor through lozenges of sunlight in the street. At the heart of a pretty neighborhood, Auteuil or Neuilly, without commerce but busy enough, through the glass of a taxi in which I sit, I see far off by snatches a retaining wall, and above it hedges in flower, behind which rise white funerary chapels of every style and height fanned by lovely trees like umbrellas, where sparrows and warblers chirp. It is almost Greek or Sicilian, this necropolis of marble and greenery alive in the midst of the city, which appears from a scattering of elegant hotels that breathe a carefree ignorance of death, like a soft bolt of lightning under a blue sky.

     The true Paris is not uninvolved with these wanderings, but always with some modifications of mine, some innocent public works that furnish a touch of the baroque and the unforeseen. In this way, at the height of the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle, between the boulevard of that name and a street that runs into it, I install a glazed passage like an elbow, for instance. This gallery is very beautiful, wide and mercantile, incomparably better than all that exist of its kind. I also endow the ground floors with barrier grilles, and the basements – exposed in this case – with transverse balustrades as in London.

     On the other hand, if I dream I am there, in London, all this characteristic apparatus disappears. And it’s a provincial town of narrow, twisting streets with signs in Old French. Where by the most disagreeable and wayward of chances, I see myself shamefully drunk and tossed into mortifying episodes.

     To return to Paris and finish with that, I ought to mention one of the dreams of my childhood, when I lived in the provinces, and the city often presented at Rue Saint-Lazare, a little from this side, the current situation of the Trinity, a parking lot of carriages fenced by an interminable barracks. Everyone will remember having seen there the parking lot and barracks. The latter was demolished in 1855, and on the ruins grew a maze of boards which gave way only much later to the church known today. The carriage lot disappeared when the intersection was enlarged. Still, what was my astonishment as a little boy when, years after I had forgotten this dream, so as to abruptly remind me of it, I saw for the first time this street corner I knew so well.

     I have traveled a good deal, lived for many months in the provinces and abroad, there long enough to have picked up habits, gathered passions and adventures, in the end to dream about them. Oh, well! Except in the case of London, described above, all my nights are passed in Paris or Nowhere. Naturally, this Nowhere is difficult to recapture. As much as I can retrieve, it’s a country like any other, towns and landscapes. In one of these towns is a kind of vaulted passage, very dark, very long, damp and narrow as a tunnel, with the odor of urine, where I dread to enter for fear of thieves. But this returns to a nightmare pure and simple, and I pass beyond. What more in these towns? Ah, restaurants that give me indigestion, people I know well from elsewhere and whom I call by their names, forgotten on waking – and that’s all, all. Is it in open country, or as I exit one of these towns in Nowhere, that I encounter a road bordered by trees extremely tall, stripped of leaves, all black, from which without a puff of wind, at every moment branches fall on the wet ground with a splash?

     And then, all evaporates. Memory with it.

     And without having planned it, here I am at the end of my tether. I have plenty of visions left to evoke which, if I bestirred myself a little, probably would come to life in my sight, but so vague, so indistinct and misty, that really these attempts would not be satisfying. Also, I will come to the point and stop, to my great joy and I think to that of the reader, to whom I promised amusing things, at least, and who will have had but a brief disappointment.