The Notre-Dame Pump (small plate)
Charles Meryon French
Not on view
Meryon occasionally composed verse to accompany his prints. In this case, he designed a separate plate for his poem about the Notre-Dame water pump. In translation, the tongue-in-cheek text reads:
It is done,
O perfidy!
Poor pump,
Without pomp,
you must die!
But to diminish
This iniquitous sentence,
Why not, as a touch of Bacchic mischief,
Begin to pump,
Impromptu,
Fine wine,
Instead of pure water,
Which nobody really savors?
Meryon playfully suggests a miracle that might save the pump from demolition even as the tangled, leaking pipes that form the poem’s decorative border evoke the inefficiency of this seventeenth-century structure.
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