Mallarmé was also captivated by the look of medieval manuscripts, whose varied visual layout, with room in the margins for annotation, historiated and floriated initial letters, miniature illuminations and drolleries, resonate with the multidimensional appearance of “One Toss of the Dice.” Alongside William Morris’s turn to the Middle Ages in the Arts and Crafts movement in England, the French poet was seduced by the medieval arts of the book, a seduction that would come to the fore in the course of a visit to Belgium in April 1890. In Brussels, he dined with several admirers—the poets Iwan Gilkin, Albert Giraud, and Valère Gille—who showed their guest a volume of his own poems, written on parchment in a Gothic hand, bound like a medieval prayer book, with illuminations, decorated letters, and culs-de-lampe (tailpieces). Highly impressed, Mallarmé borrowed the handmade book, which he brought back to Paris and, after showing it to family and friends, returned with a poem added to “this book of hours.”40 The manuscript spoke to the organic, spiritual quality that, having disappeared from contemporaneous uniformly printed books, Mallarmé nonetheless found in medieval handwritten volumes.
Soon, Mallarmé would have occasion to come into contact with a living medieval poetic tradition. From the start of his stay in Besançon, the poet had complained of health problems related to the town’s “black, humid, and glacial climate.” In October 1867, he received a letter from the minister of public education transferring him to the Lycée Impérial of Avignon. Mallarmé was familiar with the medievally significant Avignon, having made several visits to the Mediterranean coast. In the course of one such trip, the poet made it as far as Cannes, where his friend Eugène Lefébure, an aspiring poet who had worked as a postman in Auxerre and who would eventually become one of France’s most accomplished Egyptologists, was living comfortably in a villa as a result of an inheritance that had come his way. Together, Mallarmé and Lefébure spent an evening at the casino in Monaco, which is the only evidence of contact between the author of “One Toss of the Dice” and the real world of gambling. Mallarmé wrote home to his wife at eleven p.m. on the night of April 4, 1866, “I will tell you about all my doings when I get back, I am satisfied with informing you only that the excursion to Monaco was delicious, and that at roulette I won a few sous with which I bought you a pretty little. . . . I won’t tell you what, which surprise will go marvelously with the dress that you will buy this summer!”41
Mallarmé’s stays in southern France, with its more limpid weather, had brought temporary relief from the deeply depressive atmosphere of Tournon and Besançon. He had written to Cazalis as early as 1864, “Ah! My friend, how I would love to be in Avignon! Pray for it to the gods who put the pen pushers in the ministry offices.”42 And, when he heard of his new appointment, he wondered whether someone had uncovered the “intimate and ancient secret” of his dreams. Des Essarts had introduced Mallarmé to his poet friends in Avignon, which was the center of one of the most important indigenous cultural movements in nineteenth-century France. The Félibrige association, founded in 1854, took as its goal the restoration of the Occitan, or Provençal, language and its literature to their rightful place among the arts. Provençal, the language of the first vernacular poets, or troubadours, could trace its origins back to the early twelfth century—that is, to a time before music and verse were distinct from each other. The ambitions of the Félibrige poets to revive medieval lyric thus coincided with Mallarmé’s vision of an integrated work of art. For the young Mallarmé, the revivalist Provençal poets of Avignon—including Frédéric Mistral, Joseph Roumanille, and Théodore Aubanel—may not have been as exciting as the cosmopolitan writers and painters he had encountered in Paris, but in Avignon he joined a circle of active poets with whom he remained lifelong friends.
While in Avignon, Mallarmé began work on Igitur, a semiautobiographical dramatic poem in four acts: “Midnight,” “The Stairs,” “The Dice Throw,” and “Sleep on the Ashes, after the Candle Is Snuffed Out.” Some elements of this enigmatic work cast back to the poet’s struggle to free himself from his family: “The infinite at last escapes the family, which has suffered from it—old space—no chance.” Some are rooted in the psychic crisis of 1867, right down to the poet’s battle with monsters, the attainment of a state of absolute purity, and the disappearance and reappearance of the self in a mirror. Without the visual innovation of “One Toss of the Dice,” still other elements of Igitur anticipate Mallarmé’s last work: the Hamlet-like figure up against a midnight deadline when, “Midnight sounds—The Midnight when the dice must be cast”; an obsession with chance, and, more precisely, the abolition of chance: “having denied chance, he concludes from it that the Idea has been necessary. Then he conceives that there is, to be sure, madness in admitting it absolutely: but at the same time he can say that since through this madness, chance was denied, this madness was necessary”;43 and, of course, a dense, elliptical, unruly syntax that, even in a prose poem, is difficult to decipher.
Toward the end of his three years in Avignon, where he lived within the walls of the medieval city and within walking distance of the fourteenth-century Pope’s Palace, Mallarmé received a letter from Catulle Mendès informing him of the existence of “a new art, which is neither poetry nor music, but which is both music and poetry.” Mendès was referring to the operatic total works of art of Richard Wagner. Mendès and his wife, Judith Gautier, were the chief proponents of Wagner’s music in France. Incredibly, in the summer of 1870, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, the Mendèses, together with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, traveled to see Richard and Cosima Wagner in their house on Lake Lucerne. They were there when the news of the outbreak of war arrived, which did not interrupt the plan also to visit Mallarmé.
Mallarmé read Igitur out loud to his guests in the course of their short stay in Avignon. They reacted with embarrassment and shock. “What!” Mendès would write of the incident many years later. “Is this work, whose subject is difficult to identify and in which words are never used in their proper sense, what Mallarmé ended up with, after such a long effort?”44 Villiers burst out laughing. M. and Mme Mendès beat a hasty retreat: after a quick visit with the Félibrige poets, they left for Paris. Villiers, who never lacked get-rich schemes, stayed on and tried to get Marie Mallarmé to help him translate articles from German newspapers that he intended to publish in the French press. The two poets discussed what Villiers, despite his initial outburst, sensed to be the immense ambition of Igitur. Finally, completely out of money, the impoverished aristocrat borrowed train fare to return to the capital which would be severely disrupted, both physically and existentially, from the time of Kaiser Wilhelm’s capture of Napoleon III at the Battle of Sedan in September 1870 to the defeat of the Commune in May 1871.
Three
ENCHANTING A DEVASTATED WORLD
Perhaps no single event in the entire nineteenth century traumatized the French nation as profoundly as the invasion by Germany in the late summer of 1870. In fact, just as Catulle Mendès, Judith Gautier, and Villers de l’Isle-Adam listened to Mallarmé read Igitur, the early version of what would become “One Toss of the Dice,” the German Confederation, led by the Prussians, was massing and moving west. After several preliminary battles, the German army on September 1, 1870 routed the French in the Ardennes at the northeast town of Sedan, a name that still resonates with infamy in the national conscience. It was a date that would live yet again in infamy almost seventy years later, when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. At Sedan, 17,000 French troops were killed and some 100,000 taken prisoner, among them Napoleon III, who was unceremoniously removed to the castle of Wilhelmshöhe, before going into exile in England. Like so many fellow Frenchmen, Mallarmé was touched by Sedan. Jean-Auguste Margueritte, his cousin by marriage, had been promoted to the rank of divisional general on the morning of September 1 and later that day was wounded by a bullet that passed through both cheeks and his tongue. Unable to sp
eak, he nonetheless gestured with his sword for his men to charge against the advancing wall of German troops who decimated the French First Division Cavalry Reserve. He died four days later.
From the distance of Avignon, Mallarmé recognized the absurdity of the struggle between Kaiser Wilhelm I and Napoleon III. He wrote to Mistral two days after Sedan, “There is in today’s atmosphere an unknown dose of suffering and insanity. And all this because a fistful of fools . . . thought they were insulted and failed to recognize that modern history contains something other than such puerile old stuff.”1 Indeed, the war had begun as a crisis over the succession to the Spanish throne and a series of perceived diplomatic sleights. When Prussian Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was offered the Spanish kingship after the Spanish Revolution of 1868, the French feared being trapped by an alliance between her neighbors to the northeast and the south. The prince’s candidacy was withdrawn under pressure from the French, but Napoleon III demanded a formal apology from Kaiser Wilhelm. The wily Otto von Bismarck, prime minister of Prussia, released Wilhelm’s telegram. The Ems Dispatch, as it came to be known, rejected the French demands, but the ambitious Bismarck, always eager to manipulate the emperor, had also altered the text of the message to make it sound as if the Prussian king had insulted the French ambassador, a move calculated to lead to war.
By the time Villiers arrived in Paris two days after the colossal defeat at Sedan, the Second Empire had been replaced by a Government of National Defense. Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, and Prince Albert of Saxony continued to move toward Paris, and, by the middle of the month, had encircled the capital, which by this point was paralyzed by fear. In his short story “A Duel,” Guy de Maupassant captured the mood of France in the wake of the German victory: “The war was over; the Germans were occupying France; the country was trembling like a beaten warrior beneath the foot of the conqueror.”2
The siege of Paris lasted through the terribly cold winter of 1870–71, a winter so severe that the Seine actually froze for three weeks. Cut off from the surrounding countryside, Parisians suffered devastating shortages of food, firewood, coal, and medical supplies. The novelist Alphonse Daudet wrote to Frédéric Mistral on December 31, “It is cold, it is dark, we are eating horse, cat, camel, and hippopotamus.”3 Risking starvation, Parisians emptied the zoo. A Christmas menu marking the ninety-ninth day of the siege included stuffed donkey’s head, elephant consommé, fried gudgeon fish caught locally, camel roasted with an English sauce, wolf thigh with venison, kangaroo stew, antelope terrine with truffles, bear ribs with peppers, and cat with rats. De Maupassant took the measure of the situation: “Paris was starving, panic-stricken, in despair.”4
Though communication with the outside world had been interrupted, ingenious Parisians foiled the blockade via an early avatar of airmail, if not Twitter. Messages of twenty words or less were grouped together, photographed, and flown to the outside world in multiple copies via carrier pigeon. The photographer Nadar, who was no doubt involved in processing the images, also happened to be a noted balloonist, and he organized a series of regular flights out of the besieged city. The Yapp sisters were trapped in their Parisian apartment at the time of the German invasion, yet they transmitted to London dispatches published in The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper under the rubric “Shut Up in Paris” and the pseudonym Eliane de Marsy. “This morning a balloon containing from thirty to forty thousand letters ascended from the heights of Montmartre, and disappeared from thousands of gazing eyes in the direction of Chartres,” they wrote on September 23. The Yapp sisters’ reports from the center of the siege were particularly concerned with the plight of families: those displaced from the outskirts of Paris, “men, women, and children of the family tramping with baskets, bundles, and bags”; and those, like Monsieur and Madame Jules Legendre, who “lost their daughters, Alice, aged thirteen years and a half, and Clémence, aged eight, both struck by a Prussian bomb.” The war would touch the Yapps more directly. Ettie’s younger sister Isabelle succumbed to the hardships of life in Paris under siege, the first to die of the young girls in flower of the Carrefour des Demoiselles.
After three and a half months of encirclement, the standoff between the Germans and the Parisians appeared interminable. The invaders were not fully supplied for the long winter, and tuberculosis began to spread among the besieging troops. The German high command decided to increase the bombardment of Paris. Beginning in early January, 1871, 300 to 600 shells per day rained down upon the city. Around the middle of the month, the Yapp sisters wrote that “for more than forty hours we have heard the long detonations, bursting forth with fierce explosion and rolling away in sullen thunder, at intervals of one or two minutes with more rapid successions at times.”
On January 18, 1871, Wilhelm I was declared German emperor, a regal promotion of sorts that was designed to instill patriotic fervor in the newly unified nation. That very evening Augusta Holmès hosted a musical gathering with Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Henri Regnault, and her lover Catulle Mendès. Regnault was known for his beautiful tenor voice and had led a combined singing of holiday songs—Adolph-Charles Adam’s “Cantique de Noël” in French and the “Choral of Luther” in German—across enemy lines on Christmas Eve. Villiers recounted that at Augusta Holmès’s soirée Regnault sang a war hymn that she had composed in a “moment of savage hesitation” with the noise of shells in the background. All three men wore their soldier’s hats. Then, around midnight, Regnault sang an impressive melody by Saint-Saëns, which began, “Near this white tomb, we mix our tears.” Upon arriving home, he found an order to join his battalion in the morning. The pressure of the large-caliber Krupp siege guns had provoked the army of the National Guard to attempt to break out along the western fortifications of the city. Heading toward the seat of the government, which had retreated to Versailles, the French troops got as far as the castle of Buzenval, seven miles west of Paris, where they were turned back. Regnault is reported to have said to his comrade in arms, fellow painter Georges Clairin, “just one more shot, and I’ll be back.” Come back he never did. Having taken a bullet in the head, he was among the four thousand killed in this final push to lift the siege of Paris, and among the last to die in the Franco-Prussian War. Anticipating death, he had pinned a note to his shirt, “Henri Regnault, painter, son of M. Victor Regnault, of the Institut [of France],” along with letters addressed to his fiancée. Within days of the Battle of Buzenval, a vanquished French President Adolphe Thiers and a triumphant Chancellor Otto von Bismarck signed an armistice at Versailles.
When Camille Saint-Saëns heard of his friend’s death, he finished composing his Funeral March. And, as the news spread through Paris that hostilities with Germany had ceased, he played it for the first time at the solemn mass for Henri Regnault at the Church of Saint-Augustin. “The poor young painter’s friends were well nigh countless. Truly, I rarely saw mourning so deep as among that crowded concourse, in which even men shed bitter tears,” Ettie Yapp reported to her readers in London. Ernest Meissonier, then a legend among mid-nineteenth-century French painters, delivered the eulogy, and, in the midst of low chanting, a military command was heard. The trumpeters of Regnault’s unit burst forth with a brilliant fanfare. Geneviève Breton, the dead soldier’s fiancée, who had searched alongside his comrades for his body on the field of Buzenval, left the church on the arm of his older brother and only remaining relative. In Meissonier’s historic painting The Siege of Paris, 1870–71, a wounded Regnault is depicted leaning against a pedestal in the center, beneath the statuesque fierce figure of Marianne, national symbol of the Republic, holding a tattered tricolor French flag triumphantly high.
As many as half a million middle-class Parisians had fled the city by the time the siege ended. The French army was in shambles. The eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost to the German Empire, and France found itself obliged to pay an indemnity of 200 million francs. In reaction to the defeat, a sizabl
e proportion of the population in the working-class neighborhoods of Belleville, Montmarte, La Villette, Montrouge, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and Faubourg du Temple rose in revolt against Thiers and the government of Versailles. Some were dedicated revolutionaries, for whom the memory of the failed uprisings of 1830 and 1848 was still alive; some were disgruntled workers seeking better living conditions; some were dedicated patriots who felt France’s surrender to Germany to be a betrayal, “a fever of powerless patriotism,” in Guy de Maupassant’s phrase;5 and some, like the poet Paul Verlaine, who became head of the press bureau of the Central Committee of the Commune, joined for the promise of artistic liberation that a direct democracy of the people seemed to hold.
Even while the armistice of Versailles was being negotiated, members of the National Guard, no longer loyal to the defeated regime, surrounded the Hôtel de Ville with the demand that the military be placed under civilian rule. By the middle of March, the Communards had requisitioned four hundred cannons, originally paid for by a subscription of Parisians, and which represented a credible means of self-defense. The army of Versailles tried to seize the cannons on March 18, but their troops were turned back. Their leaders, Generals Clement-Thomas and Lecomte, were beaten to death by angry mobs. Thiers ordered all regular army troops to regroup in Versailles and all government offices to evacuate the city, which now belonged to those loyal to the Commune in what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would refer to as the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The National Guard occupied the Ministries of Finance, Interior, and War, with headquarters in the Hôtel de Ville, which now flew the red flag of revolution.
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