Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ‘Vox Populi’ (1880): A New, Annotated Translation

Abstract

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) first published ‘Vox Populi’, the short text translated here, in the magazine L’Étoile française during December 1880. He republished it in La Comédie humaine a year later, before gathering it into the collection Contes cruels, published by Calmann Lévy in February 1883.

It appears there as the third story in the collection and the editors of the Pléiade edition suggest this positioning was intended to signal the variety of forms deployed across the collection as a whole. For this work is more frequently referred to as a poem in prose, rather than a ‘conte’ or story. As well as its brevity, ‘Vox Populi’ is characterised by a set of repeating motifs and phrases. At the heart of its narrative lies the beggar’s cry: ‘Please, take pity on a poor blind man!’, which is repeated six times in the course of the text. (One biographer suggests that the story was inspired by an actual encounter with one such beggar in Paris.) But Villiers also repeats (with variations) references to the setting and Parisian crowds, as ‘Vox Populi’ surveys key political developments between 1868 and 1880. The interplay of difference and repetition at these points measures the cowardice and fickleness of the general population in Paris as they respond with fear or enthusiasm to each successive change of regime.