Jack Hawkins boasted an African
on his coat of arms in 1564.
Black was the color of defeat.
It wasn't cool to be a Moor,
dark-complected—crème cuite.
The coat of arms granted to the slaver Sir John Hawkins by Queen Elizabeth I
Oh, make our faces snow-white, please!
English ladies begged Spirits of Saturn
(blanc d’Espagne, Venetian ceruse).
That ointment, though, was hydrocerussite,
which is to say, white lead,
and Queen Bess died—a ghastly sight,
horribly poisoned, in her bed.
Well, vanity's a dangerous deed:
« Ce sont les belles peaux qui ont des rides » *
as Morand's Bibi later said.
* "It’s the beautiful skins that wrinkle [fastest],” the charlatan cosmetician Habib (“Bibi”), a Lebanese Greek veteran of the Great War sporting an Old Etonian tie, says in Paul Morand’s parody of Proustian high society, “La nuit de Putney” (1923).
Ezra Pound translated some of the multinational "Nights" in Morand's Tendres Stocks (to which Proust contributed the Preface), but not "La nuit de Putney." For Pound's (clunky!) English versions, see Morand, Fancy Goods: Open All Night (New York: New Directions, 1984).
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