Metropolitan

From indigo straits to Ossian seas, on pink and orange sand laved by the vinous heavens, have just gone up and crossed boulevards of crystal inhabited incontinently by poor young families who feed at the fruiterer's. Nothing rich—the city!

From the bituminous desert flee straight, put to rout with the sheets of fog spaced out in fearsome bands in the sky which curves, recoils and descends formed of the most sinister black smoke to be made by Ocean in mourning, helmets, wheels, boats, croups—the battle!

Raise your head: this wooden bridge, arched; these last vegetable gardens of Samaria; these illuminated masks under the lantern lashed by the cold night; silly water sprite in a loud dress, down in the river; these luminous skulls in planes of peas—and the other phantasmagoria—the countryside.

Roads lined with grillwork and walls, scarcely containing their coppices, and the atrocious flowers that would be called hearts and sisters, Damascus damning with languor—possessions of fairy aristocracies ultra-Rhenish, Japanese, Guaranian, liable still to receive the music of the ancients—and there are inns which, for always, already open no more—there are princesses, and, if you are not too overcome, studying the stars—the sky.

The morning when, with Her, you struggled among these flashes of snow, green lips, ice sheets, black flags and blue rays, and these purple perfumes of polar sun—your strength.

Barbarian

Well after the days and seasons, and beings and lands,

The bleeding meat flag on the silk of seas and arctic flowers (they do not exist).

Back from old fanfares of heroism—which still attack our heart and head—far from ancient assassins,

Oh! the bleeding meat flag on the silk of seas and arctic flowers (they do not exist)—

Sweetness!

The infernos, raining in gusts of rime—sweetness!—the fires in the rains of a wind of diamonds hurled by the terrestrial heart eternally carbonized for us—o world!

(Far from the old retreats and old flames you hear, you feel.)

Infernos and foams. Music, tack of gulfs and shocks of ice and stars.

O sweetness, o world, o music! And there, the forms, sweat, hair and eyes, floating. And the pallid tears, boiling—o sweetness!—and the feminine voice coming to the deeps of volcanos and arctic grottos.

The flag...

Promontory

The golden sunup and the trembling evening find our brig lying off this villa and its outbuildings as extensive as Epirus and the Peloponnesus, or the big island of Japan, or Arabia! Fanes lit up by the return of processions; immense views of the defense of modern coasts; dunes illustrated with hot flowers and bacchanals; grand canals of Carthage and Embankments of a shady Venice; mushy eruptions of Etnas and crevasses of flowers and waters of glaciers; wash houses ringed by German poplars, singular park embankments bending down the Tree of Japan; and the circular façades of the "Royal" or the "Grand" of Scarborough and Brooklyn; and their railways flank, cross, overhang the arrangements of this Hotel, chosen in the history of the most elegant and the most colossal constructions of Italy, America and Asia, whose windows and terraces, at present full of lights, drinks and rich breezes, are open to the spirit of travelers and noblemen—who permit, during daylight hours, all the tarantellas of the coasts—and even ritornellos from the illustrious valleys of art to decorate marvelously the façades of the Promontory-Palace.

Scenes

Ancient Comedy pursues its accords and divides its Idylls:

Stage boulevards.

A long wooden pier from one end to the other of a rocky field where the barbaric crowd mills under bare trees.

In corridors of black gauze, following the steps of promenaders with lanterns and leaves,

Birds from the mystery plays swoop down upon a masonry pontoon moved by the covered archipelago of spectators' small craft.

Lyric scenes, accompaniment with flute and drum, bow in cubbyholes managed under ceilings around modern club salons or halls of the ancient Orient.

The extravaganza maneuvers to the summit of an amphitheater crowned with a coppice—or bustles and modulates for Boetians, in the shade of trees moving, at the edge of farmlands.

The comic opera divides on our stage at the edge of ten partitions set up from the gallery to the footlights.