The Shooting-Range and the Cemetery

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Section fourteen of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The shooting
range and the cemetary symmetary view inn a queer sign,
said our traveler to himself. But it raises a thirst.

(00:22):
Certainly the keeper of this inn appreciates Horace and poet
pupils of Epicurus, perhaps even apprehends the profound philosophy of
those old Egyptians who had no feast without its skeleton
or some emblem of life's brevity. He entered, drank a
glass of beer in presence of the tombs, and slowly
smoked a cigar. Then, his fantasy driving him, he went

(00:45):
down into the cemetery, where the grass was so tall
and inviting, so brilliant in the sunshine. The light and heat, indeed,
were so furiously intense that one had said the drunken
sun wallowed upon a carpet of flowers, that it fattened
upon the corruption beneath. The air was heavy with vivid
rumors of life, the life of things infinitely small, and

(01:09):
broken at intervals by the crackling of shots from a
neighboring shooting range that exploded with a sound as of
Champagne corks to the burden of a hollow symphony, And
then beneath the sun, which scorched the brain, and in
that atmosphere charged with the ardent perfume of death, he
heard a voice whispering out of the tomb where he sat.

(01:30):
And this voice said, Accursed be your rifles and targets,
you turbulent living ones who care so little for the
dead in their divine repose. Accursed be your ambitions and calculations,
importunate mortals who study the arts of slaughter near the
sanctuary of death himself. Did you but know how easy

(01:52):
the prize to win, how faciled the end to reach,
and how all save death is naught? Not so greatly
would you fatigue yourselves, oh ye laborious alive, Nor would
you so often vex the slumber of them that long
ago reached the end, the only true end of life,
detestable end of section fourteen.