The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de Satin)

Order is the pleasure of Reason,

but Disorder is the delight of the Imagination.

The worst thing is not always surest.

The Satin Slipper. Spanish play in four days. By Paul Claudel.

The scene of this drama is the world

and especially Spain in the late 16th,

unless it be the early seventeenth century.

The author permitted himself to compress countries and periods,

just as at some distance,

several mountain chains form a single horizon.

A touch of trumpet.

Silence.

Silence!

I pray you, brethren that that we now look

at that point in the Atlantic Ocean

located a few degrees above the line equidistant

from the old and the new continent.

We have here represented clearly the hull of a ship dismantled

and floating adrift.

All the constellations of the two hemispheres, the Big Dipper,

Little Bear, Cassiopeia, Orion, the Southern Cross

are neatly suspended like huge chandeliers,

or a huge panoply around the sky.

I could touch them with my cane. Around the sky.

And here below, if a painter would represent the work of pirates

probably British -

on this poor Spanish boat, he would show that mast,

with its yards and its rigging,

fallen all across the deck, those tumbled cannons,

these open hatches, those large pools of blood,

and those corpses scattered everywhere,

especially those in that group of nuns

collapsed one on top of another.

A Jesuit priest tied to a piece of the mainmast, as you see,

extremely tall and thin.

The torn cassock shows his bare shoulder. Hear what he says:

Lord, I thank you for having fastened me so.

But he is going to speak himself. Listen well, do not cough,

and try to understand a little.

What you won't understand is most beautiful,

what is most drawn out is most interesting,

and what you won't find amusing is funniest.

Lord, I thank you for having fastened me so.

Sometimes I find that your commandments are very hard.

And my will, in the presence of your rule,

perplexed, becomes reluctant.

But today there is no way to be more closely bound to you than I,

and I am pleased to see that not one of my limbs

is capable of being separated from you.

I am truly fastened on this cross,

but my cross is fastened to nothing,

but is floating in the sea.

That sea free at the point where the limit of the known sky melts

and which is equidistant from that Old World I have left

and the other world, the New.

My God, I pray for my brother Rodrigo.

My God, I pray for my son Rodrigo.

I have no other son, oh my God,

and he knows well that he will not have another brother.

You know how at first he followed in my footsteps

under the banner that bears your mark,

and now, having abandoned your novitiate,

he thinks he has turned his back on You.

For his mission, as he thinks, is not to stand and wait,

but to conquer and possess.

As if there was anything that did not belong to You,

and as if he could be somewhere You were not.

But, Lord, it is not easy to escape You,

and if he does not follow You in light,

let him follow You in darkness.

And if not for what he has that is direct,

therefore may he go in indirection.

And if not for what he has simple,

let him go by what is manifold

and laborious and complicated.

And if he desires evil let it be evil which is compatible with good.

Teach him that You alone cannot be far away.

Encumber him with the weight of this other being, lacking him,

so beautiful that it calls to him across the space between them.

Make him a wounded man apart

because once in his life he saw the face of an angel.

Fill these lovers with such desire

as shall involve, lacking each other's presence in the daily whirl,

their primal integrity and essence,

as God conceived them in the beginning, in inextinguishable kinship.

And what he shall try to say awkwardly on earth,

I will translate it, Lord, in your heaven.

"God writes straight with twisted lines."

Portuguese Proverb.

"Even sin " Saint Augustine.

Don Sebastian, King of Portugal,

disappeared in the battle of Alczarqui in Morocco

and with him the best of the Portuguese nobility.

Don Sebastian had no children.

His uncle, Philip 11 of Spain, claimed the crown of Portugal.

By the Treaty of Toresillas, Portugal and Spain

had split the world into two hemispheres.

Philip Il now came to dominate the whole world.

The Portugese people rejected the Spanish King

and the clergy attacked him from the pulpit.

When God, our Lord,

wanted to punish David for the sins he had committed

of adultery and murder, and to warn the people,

he was given a choice of three punishments,

namely: Plague, Famine and War.

We honour God, in Portugal, for taking this mercy on us,

because simultaneously He has given us all three penalties together,

provided that with Don Enes you think in analogies,

expressed in letters neither human nor divine.

Now let us pass over the time of Cardinal Henry's reign,

who did not much grasp the past and future evils,

that threatened the complete ruin of this Kingdom.

Entering the year 1580, Portugal began to feel

the great punishments of which I speak, famine, plague and war.

At that time the streets and highways were filled with corpses

from the plague, and, God forbid, others starved.

And just at that moment came an army of 40 thousand men,

riding across the kingdom to Lisbon,

and many of those who escaped the first two punishments

were massacred.

In this same year, on August 24, the captive king fell,

and began the evil, cruel and tedious, which a soothsayer divined

would last sixty years, three months and seven days.

Thus began the reign of King Philip,

and since we did not pay many financial tributes during his time,

perhaps because we had them not,

still, our sufferings were rigorous,

and so that we would not forget his mercy,

many noblemen were slaughtered,

many nobles and commoners were hung,

and in the river of Lisbon many religious ecclesiastics were drowned.

Do not fear, nor lose trust,

but hope for a bright future

although times are so miserable

and one hears that the whole kingdom is lost,

and that the Moors have landed on our beaches

and taken captive many of our people,

and that the Netherlands have taken from us much of Brazil

and India.

Though our armies are defeated,

We must have faith in God and trust in Saint Vincent, our protector.

That these bones will have flesh again

and will have soul, Spirit and life.

This our Kingdom of Portugal

will eventually return to its former prosperity,

and the lost shall be restored

and many other realms will be won anew.

Shall we move our hands like a living body,

since they now shake like a dead body.

We will triumph over the heretics and above all the infidels,

for the Holy Catholic creed is exalted

and the Holy Roman Church is increased.

And so you can see that always and everywhere,

we have God on our side,

and as our protector the martyr Saint Vincent,

through whose merits and intervention God will give us

in adversity and misfortune, endurance;

for our expectations, fulfillment;

for our temporal well being, prosperity;

for our conquests, valuables;

in the service of God, perseverance;

in the spread of the faith, vigilance.

In this life, grace; in the other, glory.

Paul Claudel has situated in the time of Philip 11

this story of two lovers who never come together,

Dona Prouheze and Don Rodrigo.

The house de Don Pelagio, the husband of Dona Prouheze (Dona Maravilla).

Don Balthazar, there are two paths leaving this house.

One, if the eye could see everything at once,

passes through many towns and villages,

rising and falling like the disorderly skein

on a rope maker's trestle,

and goes directly to the sea,

not far from a hostelry I know,

hidden among huge trees.

That way a knight of arms would escort Dona Prouheze.

Yes, I want her taken from my sight.

Meanwhile, by another way, among the broom,

and climbing among the scattered rocks,

I will yield to the call come to me

from that white spot up there,

this letter from the widow in the mountain,

this letter from my cousin I have in my hand.

As to the Lady Maravilla, all that needs to be done

is to scan the horizon to the east,

where those sails will appear which are to bring her and me

to our governorship in Africa.

Oh, Senor, leaving so soon?

This house of your childhood,

after so many months under a barbarous sun, leaving again ...?

True, it is the only place in the world

in which I feel understood and accepted.

Here I sought refuge in silence,

when I was the terrible judge of His Majesty

extirpator of bandits and rebels.

No one loves a judge.

But he quickly learns that the greatest charity

is to kill criminals.

I have spent days here with no other company from morning to night

but my old gardener,