VLADIMIR NABOKOV
believe my past! My head spins from it as .
as it does from your wine. I've drained the cup
of life in such enormous draughts, such draughts.
And then there were times, too, when death would nudge
my elbow.... Well, perhaps you'd like to hear
the tale of how, the summer of the year
seventeen ninety-two, in Lyon, Monsieur
de Merival- aristocrat, and traitor,
so on , so forth- was saved right from the scaffold
of the guillotine?
Wife
We're listening, tell
us . .
Passerby
I was twenty that tempestuous year.
And the tribunal's thunder had condemned me
to death- perhaps it was my powdered hair,
or else, perhaps , the noble particle
before my name- who knows: the merest trifle
meant execution then.... That very night I
was to appear, by torchlight, at the scaffold .
The executioner was nimble, by
the way, and diligent: an artist, not
an axman. He was always emulating
his Paris cousin, the renowned Sanson:
he had procured the same kind of small tumbrel
and, when he'd lopped a head off, he would hold
it by the hair and swing it the same way . . . .
And so he carts me off. Darkness had fallen,
along black streets the windows came alight,
and street lamps too. I sat, back to the wind,
inside the shaky cart, clutching the side rails
with hands numb from the cold- and I was thinking .
of what?- of various trivial details mostly:
that I had left without a handkerchief,
or that my executioner companion
looked like a dignified physician.... Soon we
arrived . A final turning, and before us
there opened up the square's expanse.... Its center
was ominously lit... . And it was then,
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