“Le Mont des Oliviers” is one of the best known of Vigny's poems. Vigny recounts Jesus' mental anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane, with a wealth of detail culled from the Gospels. Vigny's own footnotes to his manuscript attest to his precise and detailed knowledge of all four Gospels, and the selective use he made of them. The poem is confusing to a considerable degree because the Gospels are chronologically distorted to make Jesus enumerate actual details of his crucifixion. But critics have assumed that Vigny's Biblical borrowings were taken solely from the New Testament, and, understandably, have discounted the possibility of any borrowing from an Old Testament source. Marc Citoleux, for example, writes: ‘Après 1842, par un renversement singulier … Vigny délaisse l'Ancien Testament au profit du Nouveau.’¹ [“Le Mont des Oliviers” was published in 1843]. Another critic, Vera Summers, states categorically that this is ‘le seul de ses poèmes d'inspiration évangélique où des souvenirs de l'Ancien Testament ne viennent pas se mêler.’² Not surprisingly, therefore, the New Testament has been adduced in explanation of difficult passages in the poem. One such passage is contained in the second section. On lines 69-70 Jesus exhorts his Father: ‘Eloigne ce calice impur et plus amer / Que le fiel, ou l'absinthe, ou les eaux de la mer.’ This couplet's first line has been broadly understood, the second either misunderstood or ignored in numerous anthologies and editions.

Jesus' plea to remove this ‘cup’ is less terse than in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 26. 39; Mark 14. 36; Luke 22. 42). The reference is to the figurative ‘cup of suffering’, to which Jesus already alluded before his entry into Jerusalem, as an indirect reference to his death. Vigny's use of the phrase would appear to be linked to the differing accounts of the drink offered Jesus on the Cross. According to Matthew this was wine (or vinegar in some translations) mingled with gall (an Old Testament phrase found in Psalm 69. 22); in Mark wine mingled with myrrh, this last an analgesic. Vigny's Jesus apparently anticipates details of the ways in which his tormentors will taunt him on the Cross.

Critics have accordingly explained the couplet in the light of New Testament exegesis. From the general observation that gall (fiel, ‘bile’) is one of the humours in the body of man and beast, they have proceeded to note the metaphorical use of the term ‘in the gall of bitterness’ which occurs once in the New Testament, in Acts 8. 23. Vigny's commentators have also noted that wormwood (absinthe), a non-poisonous plant typifying grief and disaster, is also found just once in the New Testament, in Revelation 8. 10-11, where a star called ‘Wormwood’ falls from heaven and makes a third of the rivers and fountains so bitter that men who drink their waters die.

However, the critics have failed to point out that the linked phrase ‘fiel et absinthe’ is not to be found in the New Testament, but only in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Lamentations and Amos. Jeremiah 9. 15 and 23. 15 read ‘eau de fiel’ and ‘absinthe’, Lamentations 3. 19 ‘fiel’ and ‘absinthe’. In the translation by David Martin (which Vigny may have used because both he in “Moïse,” and it in Exodus 34. 35, failed to incorporate the standard misinterpretation of the verb ‘sent forth beams’ as ‘horns’ common to the Vulgate translation of the Bible used during the Middles Ages and immortalized by Michelangelo) Amos 6. 12 likewise reads: ‘Les chevaux courront-ils par les rochers? ou y labourera-t-on avec des bœufs? mais vous avez changé le jugement en fiel, et le fruit de la justice en absinthe.’ Amos compares the destruction of Jerusalem to the bitterness of wormwood and gall (5. 7), here used as a metaphor for sin.

Vigny's allusion in the second line of his couplet to the bitterness of the ‘waters of the sea’ has suffered total neglect at the hands of his critics. The phrase is surrounded by a number of dense, Biblical images of calamity. It lies between the ‘cup’ more bitter than ‘gall or wormwood’, and the ‘lashes’, ‘crown of thorns’, ‘nails’ to be driven into Jesus' hands, and the ‘spear’ that was to pierce his side in the Johannine account. These dense Biblical images suggest that ‘les eaux de la mer’ must also have a Biblical provenance, and be something more than a self-explanatory expression, or one common to the literary tradition. Yet nobody has ever attempted to explain it. The New Testament is of no avail. Again it is the Old Testament, and again Amos, that provides us with the key to its meaning:

Cherchez celui qui a fait la poussinière et l'orion, qui change les plus noires ténèbres en aube du jour, et qui fait devenir le jour obscur comme la nuit; qui appelle les eaux de la mer, et les répand sur le dessus de la terre, le nom duquel est l'Eternel

(5. 8).

Car c'est le Seigneur, l'Eternel des armées, qui touche la terre, et elle se fond; et tous ceux qui l'habitent mènent deuil: et elle s'écroule toute comme un fleuve, et est submergé comme par le fleuve d'Egypte;

Qui a bâti ses étages dans les cieux, et qui a établi ses armées sur la terre; qui appelle les eaux de la mer, et qui les répand sur le dessus de la terre: son nom est l'Eternel

(9. 5-6).

The sense of Jesus' allusion to his cup being more bitter than gall or wormwood or the salinity of brine is thus expanded to comprise the destructive power of the waters of the sea poured over the land. The context makes clear that this is not a reference to the munificence of God, because the forces unleashed wreak havoc and the earth's inhabitants ‘mènent deuil’. The ‘eaux de la mer’ can refer only to a flood, or possibly a tidal wave. Amos spoke in accents of doom about the destructive power of God to punish iniquity, and excluded the possibility of all but a remnant of Israel being saved.³

That both ‘fiel et absinthe’ and ‘les eaux de la mer’ are to be found in Amos allows Vigny's borrowing to be ascribed to this source. Just as Jesus' use of ‘cup’ in connection with the Lord's Supper is, together with ‘gall and wormwood’ figuratively related to the Old Testament, so too, the ‘waters of the sea’ fix “Le Mont des Oliviers” within the topographical setting of the Old Testament, and more specifically of Amos.⁴ I would not claim for the borrowing more importance than it deserves—the interest of the poem and its focal point clearly lie elsewhere—but it does serve to emphasize Vigny's dense and imaginative fusion of images borrowed from both covenants, the subversive use to which he put them, and, incidentally, confounds the assumption that after 1842 he completely turned away from the Old Testament—the source of inspiration for so many of the Poèmes antiques et modernes.

Notes

1. Marc Citoleux, Alfred de Vigny. Persistances classiques et affinités étrangères (Paris, Champion, 1924), p. 370.

2. Vera A. Summers, L'Orientalisme d'Alfred de Vigny (Paris, Champion, 1930), p. 166. None of Vigny's more recent commentators has raised this question.

3. One other reference, Psalm 33. 7: ‘Il assembla les eaux de la mer comme en un monceau’ refers to God in an awe-inspiring but providential light, and can be dismissed. The only non-Biblical, non-literary provenance of the ‘bitter sea’ that I know of is the Babylonian creation story: ‘La cosmogonie babylonienne connaît … le chaos aquatique, l'océan primordial, apsû et tiamat; le premier personnifiait l'océan doux sur lequel, plus tard, flottera la terre, tiamat est la mer salée et amère peuplée de monstres.’ Quoted from Mircea Eliade, Traité d'histoire des religions, nouvelle édition revue et mise à jour (Paris, Payot, 1968), p. 167; translated as Patterns in Comparative Religion (Meridian Books, Cleveland and New York, World Publishing Company, 1963), p. 191. Although Le Mont des Oliviers is both a dense and a diffuse poem, I think it doubtful that Vigny would, in medias res, borrow from outside a Judeo-Christian source.

4. That Vigny used Amos elsewhere there can be no doubt. Three commentators—all of them early critics who appear to have been more in tune with form criticism in Bible Studies and in inter-textuality than their modern counterparts—have traced the influence of Amos in other poems. Edmond Estève, in his critical edition of the ‘Poèmes antiques et modernes’ (Paris, Hachette, 1914), p. 70, footnote 1, makes a rapprochement between line 216 of Eloa and Amos 8. 10; Vera Summers, op. cit., between line 6 of La Femme adultère and Amos 4. 4, to which Clemenceau Le Clercq, in L'Inspiration Biblique dans l'œuvre poétique d'Alfred de Vigny (Anne-masse, Imprimerie Granchamp, 1937), adds a further one between line 6 of this poem and Isaiah 3. 16, describing these lines as ‘ce patient travail de marqueterie’ (p. 66). Referring to Moïse, Clemenceau Le Clercq writes: ‘Le prophète pliant sous le poids de la vision qui lui est communiquée, c'est dans la tradition la plus pure de la Bible’ (p. 88), and cites Jeremiah and Amos in support of this statement. Finally, although not citing Amos as source or influence, Le Clercq opposes the notion of a human holocaust in Judges—the basis for La Fille de Jephté—to Amos, citing chapter 5. 21-25 in support of the statement: ‘Il faut se souvenir qu'à l'époque plus tardive, plus éclairée des Prophètes, les conceptions d'Israël s'étant affinées, Dieu, par la bouche de son prophète Amos, réprouve nettement l'holocauste’ (pp. 55-56).