In the quiet lodgings where the great aunt lives

Everything recalls the bygone days of olden times,

The courtyard with its sonorous wells, the old servant,

And the century-old tarnished mirrors.

The salon still has its Flemish tapestries,

Where nymphs and shepherds dance amid the woods;

When the sun is setting, one believes

A flash of old love is caught in their eyes.

From the dark corner where an antique spinet rests,

Sometimes a long sigh rises and falls at random,

Like the echo of days when, pretty and young,

The great aunt played Rameau, Gluck, and Mozart there.

A rosewood chest is at the heart of the chamber.

Its aromatic drawers hold more than one treasure:

Candy boxes, bottles, bags of iris and amber,

From which the breath of a century is still exhaled.

A book is alone amid these withered relics,

And under the thin, darkened paper of a page,

A dried flower has been sleeping for sixty years:

The book is Zaïre, and the flower, a carnation.

In summers, near the window, with the old volume,

The great aunt turns in her armchair …

Is it the bright sun or the hot air that rekindles

The color in her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes?

She inclines her brow, yellowed like ivory

Towards the carnation, which she is afraid of breaking in her fingers:

A memory of love sings her in her memory,

While the songbirds twitter on the roofs.