Chastelard's Last Poem

The jailer brought him paper without being asked. It was, Chastelard suspected, the closest thing to mercy the man's position allowed him to offer.

"You're still writing," the jailer said, some hours before dawn, finding him bent over the small table with ink already drying on two discarded sheets.

"It's the only thing I've ever known how to do properly. I'm not going to stop for lack of an audience."

"Verses for the queen again?"

"No." Chastelard set the pen down. "I've written the queen enough verses. Look where the writing got me."

He had started, years back, the way any court poet starts: flattering couplets about a queen's grace, the ordinary currency of a man paid partly in coin and partly in favor to make his patrons sound good in rhyme. He'd been good at it. Good enough that the queen herself had once smiled at a verse of his in front of the whole court, and he had carried that single smile around for months afterward like a coal he couldn't put down.

"That's where it started," he told the jailer, who had settled by the door, apparently in no hurry to leave a condemned man's last conversation unheard. "A compliment I was paid to write. I don't know exactly when I stopped writing it as a compliment and started believing it as the truth."

"Does the difference matter now?"

"It's the only thing that still matters to me. I could have gone on writing pretty lies about her beauty forever, and been paid for it, and died an old man in his bed. Instead I started believing my own lies, and then acting on them, and now I'm going to die considerably sooner than that, for a distinction I couldn't manage to hold onto when it counted."

He picked the pen back up. "This one isn't for her beauty. This one's just the truth, as plainly as I can manage it in the time I've got left."

"Read it to me, if you'd like an audience."

Chastelard read four lines, plain and unrhymed and nothing like his earlier work: an admission, not a compliment: that he had frightened a woman who had done nothing to deserve his fear-making, that his gift had curdled into exactly the danger no one had warned him poetry could become.

The jailer said nothing for a moment. "That's not much of a poem."

"No. It's the first true one I've written in three years, though. I'd rather leave that behind than one more pretty lie about her eyes." He folded the page carefully. "See that it reaches someone who'll believe I meant it. That's all I'm asking of tonight."