Napoleon Peyrat epic poet Michel Begon
February 2009
Few French epic poetry ever attempted. Oh! lists probably does one of the Franciade Ronsard, the Maid of the chaplain or Henriade Voltaire, but that no longer reads much. Nothing beats home the Aeneid, or the Jerusalem Delivered. We lack faith sublime chanson de geste. Yet Victor Hugo in 1859 published his exile in Jersey its grandiose "Legend of the Centuries." Ariege and Peyrat was tempted to do likewise the epic. The Pyrenees do not they offered him this horizon of legends and battles that dream bards and minstrels?
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Napoleon Peyrat was born in the Bordes-sur-Arize in 1809, just north of the department of Ariege, while the imperial armies waged war in Spain. His father was the mayor and the pastor of the town, but fervent Bonapartist, found himself in 1814 to revoke his mandate city, which was created in the son's revenge. The young Peyrat made his first class at the Mas d'Azil, which he loved to delirium huge cave and torrential river at that time deserted and wild, to finish at Montauban, circa 1825, attending a coterie of poets. His pen name was then "Napol the Pyrenees."
Romanticism was the fashion and regionalism too. Stendhal wrote, "romanticism is the liberalism in literature." Arriving in Paris in 1831, Peyrat befriended Lamartine, Beranger, Sainte-Beuve and Lamennais. His early works were stories epic in prose, how to Michelet, where he associated artistically glorious fiction attested to the facts:
History of the Pastors of the Desert and the Great Uprising Camisards in 1842;
the Reformers of France and Italy in the XII century, in 1860;
Captain Dusson and headquarters of the Mas d'Azil 1625, in 1863;
and especially the history of the Albigenses in six volumes, published in 1870, which was to become famous by creating the legend of Montsegur.
In 1847, towards the end of the July Monarchy and both the romance, Peyrat found himself appointed pastor of the church Reformed (Calvinist) Saint Germain en Laye and would remain so until his death in 1881. This quiet village at the foot of the old royal castle, long since deserted by the Court, felt the exile and the legend. Peyrat get bored farm. Ariege countries were missing and the "spleen" tortured. Between sermons and two pastoral visits, he wrote thousands of verses on the Scriptures, the history of France, on birds, on the Normandy, the Pyrenees or the news, always in the style statement of the great literature. He submitted his poems to the mage Jersey, where Victor Hugo replied kindly : "Your poetry is very real and very local."
Actually, it's a very beautiful poetry, involved and enthusiastic, surging like a torrent, swollen with speech and image, however, some excesses, including abuse of mythologies now lost. I confess to being jealous of me and beautiful verses carved Alexandrian I will resume. First read it and tremble in the soul:
"History is the sun of the world youth".
The publication of his poems was late:
in 1863, "Arize, Romancero Religious, Heroic and Pastoral in the Pyrenees;
in 1874," The Cave of Mas d'Azil "
in 1877," the Pyrenees ".
Association of Friends of Napoleon Peyrat just reissued three books for our delectation
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therefore composed Peyrat What? First, of course, hymns to the glory of God, which recognizes the chorale of Luther
"Jeovah, Jeovah, I love you!
I love you, O God victorious, and my heart filial
Burns on your altar, O my Savior Supreme
The incense of praise and triumphant anthem!
The Lord is my rock! He is my fortress!
I take refuge in it, the days of distress,
He is my shield, my armor invincible!
When the storm murmur
I cry unto the Lord, and I am fulfilled! "
(The cave-Azil Jeovah)
He versified the Bible and Christ's life, the gesture of the apostles and hermits, martyrs ancient and modern, the Cathars, and St. Barthelemy. After the example of Victor Hugo, he scratches from his pen the Church and Pope Pius IX. One feels the dawn at his anticlericalism that will soon follow. But the past especially fascinates him. However, the Arize valley seemed a new Jordan River and the cave of Mas d'Azil a new Holy Sepulchre. Hugo's pantheism leads him long before Messiaen, Peopling of birdsong nostalgic speeches:
" Oh! the wind that breaks
Save a sweet nightingale
Crying his green Arize
His English sun. "
(Pyrénées-Thanks)
But the art of the register exceeds Peyrat Hugo's announcement and the ecstasy of a mystic Charles Peguy. But the cave of Mas is one that will be the cathedral of Chartres for the other. Here's how he dares to put into verse, quite accurately, moreover, the great and terrible Psalm 137, who sings the imprecations of the captive Jews in Babylon:
" On the rivers of Babylon
We sat in our grief
Our silent tears fell into the seething waves,
For our hearts were thinking of Zion.
We hung our harps
For hairy willow branches on their side.
Our triumphant victors in beautiful scarves
The crowned with tiaras gold
We have said Hebrew captives,
Raise therefore your brows, take the nebel,
Sing and let us hear Songs of Zion
feasts of Bel ...
[4 verses again, and then ...]
O Babel, raise your eyelids
See the exterminator blast your walls,
And your grandchildren cons of crushed stone,
As fawns leopards.
(The cave-Azil the Desert)
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The "spleen" haunts Peyrat, the distant mirage in the Pyrenees haunts his childhood memories and adult heart. He admits in Sainte-Beuve feeling outside Paris as the shepherd Ariège in the metropolis that welcomes, but the ground, or like the roll of the Arize Mountains resign and dismissed in a hole:
"Me, a young shepherd dark, serious, shy and gentle,
hurled by the hurricane of my cave home
In the howling abyss of the city fatal ..."
(The A-Arize Sainte-Beuve )
course, it is summer, helping the railroad, the Bordes-sur-Arize, old city strong, and the house of his father, Larmissa under the Plantaurel but then he must return to his flock at St. Germain, where nothing really happens. Then he dreams of Foix, Pamiers or breach of Roland to the circus of Gavarnie:
«Foix, what fantastic fairy
Jeta feudal keep your
On your green crown topped
Fog and ideal dream. "
"Where are your old battlements
Pamios, and what new art
Am circulating the scalps
cypress trees on your castellart? "
He imagines returning to the country and just after Toulouse, arises when the distant blue of the Pyrenees chain, toothed like a fortress impregnable
" And yonder, see on the horizon
These great mountains in the blue and the sun drowned!
Their immeasurable edge
Seems a colossal wall of the century giants
Whose feet are beaten by two oceans,
which has plagued the Lightning Ridge. "
(Cave-Azil Homeland)
Sometimes it evoke the mountains of Mount Sinai, Moses climbed that once, by "old white", to receive from God the tablets of the Law. Then there are other fantastic apparitions that haunt: the fires of Montsegur and the heroic resistance to the Mas Azil Headquarters 1625. These visions are superimposed and put one inside the other in a grand perspective:
"Ah! to the heavenly mansions,
Guide the white settlers and old rustic,
And my tearful singer of this earthly exile!
But the shadow off the mountains where the moon falls,
Slipping from one to the other falls,
Montsegur From pale to dark Mas d'Azil.
(Cave-Azil Homeland)
For him, the cave of Mas is martyrium of faith, where early Christians, Cathars and Huguenots are buried together. Ecumenical vision in times of intolerance! In 1840, the deep site, yet that did not violate the main road, remained deserted and beautiful, suitable for prayer and dream. It's called "Spélunque, from the Latin" Spelunca, perhaps thinking of the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, who prophesied, they said, the birth of Christ:
O wonderful! Beyond the green valley of Azil
The Spélunque appears bleak in his bitter exile,
Colossal, and taking the rays of the evening mystical
vapors sunset look fantastic.
In the haze of gold, rock cyclopean
Seems a floating palace, clear, Olympian. "
(The cave-Azil Prologue)
Alas! The industry is now desecrate this holy place. It installs over the course of Arize mills and swifts using power, to his great regret poet. Since the Second Empire, the electricity we now get rid! But here we want to dig and undermine the walls of the cave to raise the road. And this development has remained durable, attractive cars and trucks to their peril, with a lot of noise and gaseous pollutants.
By pretending not to see this double sacrilege too, Peyrat takes refuge in the epic. On the gigantic shoulder covers and surrounds the cave, he thinks again and hear the awful Marshal Thémines battalions, which in 1625 made the seat of the Mas d'Azil and had to retreat, defeated by the courage of Azilians or weather. And to call God and the Admiral de Coligny on the top balcony to rock them admire the spectacle of bitter revenge
"Listen! Thémines soars!
Caraman Ventadour and their black battalions
camped on our rocks where death sways
Playing in the golden lilies of their white flags.
Le Mas d'Azil receives remote villages
Warriors, elderly, children, mothers, sheep bleating;
The Arize its walls embrace the contours;
And Mount huge, curving his antlers ,
Embraced as a double weave,
From a circle of rocks, his armor rounds.
But the cave is the citadel
where fighting God's chariot thundering asleep ...
And the mountain, the city, naked,
begin to move at a time the storm battalion
soared and rising to the sky the hymn known
And Jéovah descends into the dark vortex;
The Lord of the camps comes and goes three times;
Three times a large lightning flashes, and three times the space
rumbles ... Where is his camp and Thémines odious?
And in the evening, the battle still disheveled,
And fiery vapor veiled
The cave and the city chanted: "God, king of the gods. "
(Arize-The Cave of Mas d'Azil)
The" known hymn is perhaps the famous hymn of battle: "God only shows itself ...." A sort of "Gloria in Excelsis Deo," but in French, though calculated to return to their graves, if they were stayed, the Louis XIII, Luynes, Richelieu and the Thémines. Musings of a Reformed pastor? Yes indeed, but much of today Azilians still dream of the same!
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And he, Napoleon Peyrat? His life, his joys and sorrows, his, his wife and daughter? He did say almost nothing by Christian humility. We guess that there is little money, although paid by the state, but it does not penetrate into his consciousness. His political views? Probably Bonapartist. What else? Her voice, he focused on the Word of God, he sings and harsh. He is a patriot for his small country of Val d'Arize, like his great homeland, France, that " Tcheutch "(for" Deutsch ") assails the siege of Paris in 1870. Saint-Germain-en Laye, he has a ringside seat to see pass the spiked helmets, hearing the fighting Buzenval burn the castles of Meudon and St. Cloud, up from around the smoke into the sky and spoof corpses. So, while praising the Lord for choosing the French to be his "chosen people", he lamented that these days it seems cruel to abandon the misfortune
"You love us! And now
Thou hast forsaken! O mighty God and thundering
You do not drive over our battles!
You let us tread the feet of passers-by!
Our cities are on fire! Our people are bleeding!
Our triumphs funeral! "
(Cave of the Fatherland Azil-VI)
And here at the funeral date of May 28, 1871, when the bloody week ends with the shooting of Père-Lachaise, Peyrat sings Requiem for the dead of the Commune of Paris. It recommends that the Lord departed from two camps:
"They spent on this earth,
Down on their ship, the long river of time.
Their songs sounded brilliant on its edges.
Then the bank became silent and solitary.
Where are they? Who knows? - O God of justice and vengeance,
Blessed are the dead in the Lord!
And me these verses funeral
exhale the tears in the great hurricane
Who devoured Paris thundering like a volcano,
And the human holocaust, smoking in the darkness ,
And hovering over Paris's avenging angel!
Blessed are the dead in the Lord! "
(The Cave of Homeland Azil-IX)
Napoleon Peyrat also known enthusiasm when he sings of freedom. Oh! It was not a word, would that distrust, for Napoleon III. Freedom is for him a nobler ideal that a regime that passes and comes undone. In repeating and surpassing the famous poem by Alfred de Vigny, he likes to mix the legend of Roland to that of Napoleon 1st, he is fighting together to liberate the Pyrenees, which the Moors and the Inquisition.
"Our fathers, sun tanned and barrel
Killed as biting their old swords broken
Of all the crowns of Spain!
O Roland! Screws when you fell so!
Answer, it was our great emperor also
Like your uncle Charlemagne?
Ah! If the Ebro to spend one day at Roncesvalles
Our soldiers, our guns, our drums, our horses
our songs And thundering into space
Stand up in the tomb and look oh lion!
is more than Charlemagne and Napoleon
For it is the freedom that goes! "
(Pyrénées-Roland)
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The epic is not over. She still sings. The memory of the pastor and poet is maintained by the Friends of Napoleon Peyrat, whose headquarters is at the town hall of Les Bordes-sur-Arize 09350 Ariege. You can join directly. One can also acquire three collections from above Editor-Lacour Rediviva Nîmes (www.editions-lacour.com). Each summer, the association's general meeting is held at the town hall or temple des Bordes for a conference. It reads the poems and prose writer.
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