Charles Garnier

RICHARD HOWARD

CHARLES GARNIER

The portrait by Nadar

If no one had heard of you, it was hardly

your fault, more likely a foretaste

of the stubborn obscurity still to come-

graduating with a Grand Prix,

you buggered away your hopes in Greece, begging

permission from the puzzled Turks

to measure intervals between the pillars

of Zeus Panhellenios, coy

yourself about the purpose but doggedly

coloring the friezes faded

past recognition while Aegina lay ripe

for the taking under your hands:

the boys, the nymph and her polychrome marbles

were no preparation for fame,

nor a dozen water-colors "well-received"

at the 1860 Salon...

Who was more astonished than yourself, next year,

when your Opéra was chosen

from all their monumentalities? But if

we have accepted everything

we have missed something-war. Until that came too,

and your monster had to abide

thirteen years and a German occupation

before it stood revealed-exposed-

to history and your doom: preposterous

success and silence to the end,

which included your plans for the Casino

at Monte Carlo and sculptures

commissioned from Doré and Sarah Bernhardt!

Chance and Art, superior sports

between your wars and ours, diversions made you

immortal, loved, and forgotten.

Your coat bulges below the Order of . . . what?

and your hair is beyond disorder:

did they wear steel-wool wigs in the Paris of

Napoléon III? You regard

what Nadar called the objective straight on, young

still, and with the intrepid stare

of a very brave ram, cornered but not cowed.