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Here is a dramatic reading of Delerium I, part of A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud. A copy of the Louise Varèse translation can be found below:

Delerium I

The Foolish Virgin

The Heavenly Bridegroom

Let’s hear now a hell-mate’s confession.

“O heavenly Bridegroom, my Lord, don not reject the confession of the saddest of your handmaidens. I am lost. I am drunk. I am unclean. What a life!

“Forgive me, heavenly Lord, forgive me? Ah? forgive me? How many tears? And how many more tears later, I hope?

“Later I shall know the heavenly Bridegroom! I was born His slave.–The other can beat me now!

“At Present I am at the bottom of the world! O my friends…no, not my friends … Never delirium and tortures like these…How stupid!

“Ah! I suffer, I scream. I really suffer. Yet everything is permitted me, burdened with the contempt of the most contemptible hearts.

“At any rate let me tell my secret, free to repeat it twenty times again,–Just as dreary, just as insignificant!

“I am slave to the infernal Bridegroom, the one who was the undoing of the foolish virgins. He is really that very demon. He is not a ghost, he is not a phantom. But I who have lost all reason, who am damned and dead to the world,–they will not kill me! How describe him to you! I can no longer even speak. I am in mourning, I weep, I am afraid. A little coolness, Lord if you will, if you only will!

“I am a widow…–I was a widow…–ah, yes, I was really serious once, and I was not born to be a skeleton!…–He was hardly more than a child. His mysterious delicacies had seduced me. I forgot all my duty to society, to follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I have to. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I have to. And often he flies into a rage at me. me, the poor soul. The Demon! He is a demon, you know, he is not a man.

“He says: ‘I do not like women: love must be reinvented, that’s obvious. A secure position is all they’re capable of desiring now. Security once gained, heart and beauty are set aside: cold disdain alone is left, the food of marriage today. Or else, I see women marked with the signs of happiness, and whom I could have made my comrades, promptly devoured by brutes with as much feeling as a log …’

“I listen to him glorifying infamy, clothing cruelty with charm. ‘I am of a distant race: my ancestors were Norsemen; they used to pierce their sides, drink their blood.–I will cover myself with gashes, tattoo my body. I want to be as ugly as a Mongol: you’ll see, I will howl through the streets. I want to become raving mad. Never show me jewels, I should grovel. and writhe on the floor. My wealth, I’d want it spattered all over with blood. Never will I work…” Many nights his demon would seize me and rolling on the ground I would wrestle with him.–Often at night, drunk, he lies in wait for me, in the streets, in houses, to frighten me to death.–’They will really cut my throat; it will be revolting.’ Oh! those days when he goes wrapped in a air of crime!

“Sometimes he speaks in a kind of melting dialect, of death that brings repentance, of all the miserable wretches there must be. Of painful toil, of partings that lacerate the heart. In low dives where we’d get drunk, he used to weep for those around us, cattle of misery! He would lift up drunkards in dark streets. He had the pity of a bad mother for little children. He would depart with the graces of a little girl, going to her catechism. He pretended to have knowledge of everything; business, art, medicine, I followed him, I had to.

“I saw the whole setting with which, in his mind, he surrounded himself. Clothing, fabrics, furniture. I lent him arms, another face. I saw everything relating to him, as he would have liked to have created for himself. When his mind seemed absent, I followed him–yes I–in strange and complicated actions, very far, good or bad. I was certain of never entering his world. How many hours of the night beside his dear sleeping body I kept watch, trying to understand why he so longed to escape reality. Never a man had such a wish. I realized without any fear for him that he could be a serious danger to society. Perhaps he has some secrets for changing life? No, I would say to myself, he is only looking for them.

“In short, his charity is bewitched, and I its prisoner. No other soul would have enough strength, strength of despair, to endure it, and to be protected an loved by him. Moreover, I never imagined him with another soul. One sees ones own Angel, never the Angel of another, I believe.

“I was in his soul as in a palace they had emptied, so that no one should see so mean a person as oneself, that was all. Alas! I was really dependent on him. But what could he want with my dull, my craven life? It was making me know better if he wasn’t driving me to death. Sometimes, chagrined and sad, I said to him, ‘I understand you.’ He would shrug his shoulders.

“Thus my sorrow always renewed. And seeming in my eyes more lost than ever, as in the eyes of all who might have watched me, had I not been condemned to be forgotten by all forever.

“I hungered for his kindness more, and more. With his kisses and his friendly arms, it was really heaven, a somber heaven into which I entered, and where I longed to be left; poor, and deaf and dumb and blind.

“Already it had grown into a habit. I thought of us as two good children, free to wander in the paradise of sadness. We were congenial to each other. Much moved, we used to work together, but after a profound caress, he would say, “How queer it will seem to you when I am no longer here, all you have gone through. When you no longer have my arm beneath your head, nor my heart for resting place, nor these lips upon your eyes. For I shall have to go away, very far away one day. After all, I must help others too; it is my duty–not that it’s very tempting, dear heart.’”

“Right away, I saw myself with him gone, my senses reeling, hurled into the most horrible darkness, death. I used to make him promise never to leave me. He made it twenty times, that lover’s promise. It was as vain as when I said to him, ‘I understand you.’

“I’ve never been jealous of him. He will not leave me, I believe. What would become of him? He knows nothing! He will never work! He wants to live a sleepwalker. Would his goodness and charity alone give him the right to live in the real world?

“There are moments when I forget the abjection to which I have fallen. He will make me strong. We will travel, hunt in the deserts. We will sleep on the pavements in unknown cities, uncared for and with out a care. Or else, I shall awake and the laws and customs will have changed, thanks to his magic power. Or the world, while remaining the same will leave me to my desires, joys, heedlessness. Oh, the life of adventure in children’s’ books to recompense me. I have suffered so, will you give me that? He cannot. His ideal is unknown to me.

“He has told me he has regrets, hopes. That he can’t have anything to do with me. Does he talk to God? I should appeal to God, perhaps. I am in the lowest depths, and I can no longer pray.

“If he explained his sadness to me, would I understand it, any more than his mockery. He assails me, he spends hours making me ashamed of everything in the world that may have touched me, and is indignant if I weep.

“‘You see that elegant young man going into that beautiful, calm house. His name is Duval, Dufur, Armond, Maurice, or God-knows-what. A woman has devoted her life to loving that wicked idiot. She is dead. She must be a saint in heaven now. You will kill me as he has killed that woman. It is our lot, the lot of us charitable hearts.

“Alas, he had days when all busy mean seemed to him grotesque playthings of delirium. He would laugh long and horribly, then he would revert to his manners of a young mother, a big sister. If he were less untamed, we should be saved. But his tenderness, too is deadly.

“I am his slave. Ah! I am mad! One day, perhaps, he will miraculously disappear. But I must know if he is to ascend into some heaven again, so that I’ll be sure not to miss the assumption of my little lover.”

Queer couple!

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