Alphonse de Lamartine arrives to Aix-les-Bains in Savoy the 1^er October 1816. Lamartine places in a pension in top of the city. In the close room resides a young woman, Julie Charles. She suffers from pulmonary tuberculosis, and knows herself condemned. During a voyage in Hautecombe, on the sudden lake in storm, the poet saves Julie of a boat in perdition. Their idyll transitory and impassioned, more desperate than adultery, will be the emblem of the love such as will conceive it the XIX^2nd century. Lamartine leaves on October 26. He returns to Aix-les-Bains the next summer, but Julie cannot leave Paris any more, where she will die little afterwards.
The solitary poet writes "the Lake", long poem melancholic person, egeria of the broken love:

Publication of the "Poetic Meditations" where figure the poem "the Lake" will make the effect of a literary revolution. It is a genuine proclamation of all the romantic topics.

The Lake

Thus, always thorough worms of new shores,
In the eternal night carried without return,
We will never be able on the ocean of the ages
To drop anchor only one day?

O lake! the year hardly finished its career,
And close to the dear floods that it was to re-examine,
Look at! I only come to sit down on this stone
Where you live it to sit down!

You mugissais thus under these deep rocks;
Thus you broke on their torn sides;
Thus the wind threw the scum of your waves
On its adored feet.

Does one evening, t'en remember it? we sailed in silence,
One did not hear with far, on the wave and under the skies,
That noise of the oarsmen who struck in rate
Your harmonious floods.

Suddenly unknown accents with the ground
Charmed shore struck the echoes;
The flood was attentive, and the voice which is expensive to me
Dropped these words:

"O time, suspend your flight! and you, favourable hours
Suspend your course!
Let enjoy the rapids delights to us
More beautiful nowadays!

"Enough unhappy there down beseeches you:
Run, run for them;
Take with their days the care which devours them;
Forget the happy ones.

"But I ask for a few moments again in vain
Time escapes to me and flees;
I say to this night: "Would be slower"; and dawn
Will dissipate the night.

"thus Let us like, thus like! fugitive hour,
We hasten, enjoy!
The man does not have a port, time does not have a bank
He runs, and we pass! "

Jealous time, may be it that these moments of intoxication,
Where the love with long floods pours us happiness,
Fly away far from us same speed
What days of misfortune?

Hé what! will not be able about it we to fix at least the trace?
What? passed forever? what! any lost entireties?
This time which gave them, this time which erases them,
Will not return them more to us?

Eternity, nothing, past, dark abysses,
What do you make days that you absorb?
Speak: you will return these ectasys sublimes to us
What charm you us?

O lake! dumb rocks! caves! obscure forest!
You that time saves or that it can renovate,
Keep this night, keep, beautiful nature,
At least the memory!

That it is in your rest, that it is in your storms,
Beautiful lake, and in the aspect of your laughing slopes,
And in these blacks fir trees, and these wild rocks
Who hang on your water!

That it is in the zephyr which quivers and which passes,
In the noises of your edges by your repeated edges,
In the star with the money face which bleaches your surface
Of its soft clearnesses!

That the wind which groans the reed which sighs
That light perfumes of your perfum air,
That all that one hears, one sees or one breathes,

All says: "They liked! "

Alphonse de LAMARTINE (1790-1869)

[The cave] - [The Last Inhabitant] - [The Star] - [The Poem] - [Summary Old Stones]

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