Adieu, fiancée au front pur,
Le ciel est noir, le vent est dur.
Adieu, patrie!
Lise, Anna, Marie!
Adieu, patrie.
Azur!
Adieu, patrie!
L'onde est en furie.
Adieu, patrie,
Azur!
Notre œil, que voile un deuil futur,
Va du flot sombre au sort obscur.
Adieu, patrie!
Pour toi mon cœur prie.
Adieu, patrie,
Azur!
The next poem is addressed to a disappointed accomplice of the crime still triumphant and imperial in the eyes of his fellow-scoundrels, who seems to have shown signs of a desire to break away from them and a suspicion that even then the ship of empire was beginning to leak—though in fact it had still seventeen years of more or less radiant rascality to float through before it foundered in the ineffable ignominy of Sedan. Full of ringing and stinging eloquence, of keen and sonorous lines or lashes of accumulating scorn, this poem is especially noteworthy for its tribute to the murdered republic of Rome. Certain passages in certain earlier works of Hugo, in Cromwell for instance and in Marie Tudor, had given rise to a natural and indeed inevitable suspicion of some prejudice or even antipathy on the writer's part which had not less unavoidably aroused a feeling among
