In early April 1871, the Communard troops of the National Guard marched out of Paris with the intention of capturing Versailles. Roundly defeated, they retreated within the wall of Paris, which meant that there would be fighting in the streets. Barricades were erected along the grands boulevards—the rue de Rivoli, the rue de l’Opéra, and the other streets that had been widened and straightened by Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III. In the weeks following the definitive withdrawal of the government to Versailles, an atmosphere of exultation reigned among the Communards, for whom the future seemed open to a general repeal of the economic inequality, social repression, and arbitrary rule associated with the Second Empire. In the account of photographer and chronicler of Paris Maxime Du Camp, who was not sympathetic to the urban uprising, life for the worker had never been so enjoyable. “Regularly paid, as was the National Guard, the worker always had ‘pocket change,’ which lacked sometimes when he had a regular job in the workshop; he received an allowance for his wife and for his children; the State or local canteens distributed sufficient food: never had he drunk so much wine, never more spirits, than during this period of general scarcity.”6
The mood of gleeful triumph was broken, however, when, on May 10 the armistice of Versailles was ratified by the Treaty of Frankfurt, officially acknowledging the terms of the agreement struck between Thiers and the German chancellor in January. Two days later, the Communards sacked Thiers’s home, offering the works of art in his collection, including bronzes by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to the Louvre. On May 16, by a decree of the Central Committee of the Commune, the Vendôme Column was toppled to the singing of “La Marseillaise.” The painter Gustave Coubet, president of the Commune’s Art Commission, had declared this monument to Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz a “work of barbarism . . . devoid of all artistic value.”
While the makers of revolution celebrated in the streets, in cabarets, and in newly founded political clubs, or parlottes, the French army advanced toward Paris, shelling the neighborhoods of Auteuil, Passy, and Trocadero, and capturing the defensive Fort d’Issy, one of the sixteen fortifications built between 1840 and 1845 to defend the city from attack. On May 19, the forces of Marshal Patrice de MacMahon further penetrated the southwest walls of Paris, and began filing into the city. Maxime Du Camp reported that on the night of May 21, he leaned out of the window of his apartment on 62 rue de Rome and heard the baritone voice of a young man of about twenty-five singing in unison with the crowd a popular tune, “The Proletarian,” the defiant words “God, Workers, People” repeated like a refrain:
Did God make the world so broke,
That in the walls of workhouses,
Vitriol, tallow, soot, and smoke
Pierce the heart with their deadly gases
Under the eyes of a nasty boss? . . .
They have their arms, and we have ours:
What’s one more hole in the rags we wear!7
As the Communards sang in the streets, sixty thousand army troops passed through the Porte de Saint-Cloud and the Porte de Versailles. They spread out over the city in what was to be the beginning of “Bloody Week.”
Many of the Communards had been convinced that the troops of Versailles would not fire upon fellow Frenchmen. Surprised by MacMahon’s rapid penetration of the city walls, they scrambled to build more barricades out of paving stones and sandbags. Fighting broke out along the quai d’Orsay and the boulevard de la Madeleine, and around the Tuileries Palace, Napoleon III’s former residence. The advancing French forces, with the memory of the brutal deaths of General Clement-Thomas and Lecomte still fresh in their minds, took no prisoners, but shot National Guardsmen and resisters, men and women, on the spot. In return, the Communards executed the prisoners held in the prison of La Roquette, among them the archbishop of Paris. When the rebels killed Saint-Saëns’s superior at the Church of the Madeleine, the composer, who had served in the National Guard, escaped into exile in England. The Communards burned public buildings, an order carried out in part by the petroleuses, women carrying oil cans. The Tuileries Palace, the Richelieu wing of the Louvre, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture de Police, and the Hôtel de Ville all went up in flames. On May 28, the army cornered what remained of the defenders of the Commune in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. By nightfall, 150 National Guardsmen had surrendered, and were lined up and executed against the southeast wall of the burial park. At the end of “Bloody Week,” between 10,000 and 20,000 Communards had died. More than 40,000 had been taken prisoner; and, of these, after military trial, 13,500 were found guilty. One hundred were sentenced to death, 250 were sent to forced labor, 5,000 to deportation, 3,500 to prison, and the rest were eventually released. “A desperate Paris,” in Maxime Du Camp’s phrase, “had withdrawn into its walls and ended by devouring itself.”8
Mallarmé opened the newspaper on February 2, 1871, to read the news of Henri Regnault’s death, “this first hole among us,” as he wrote to Cazalis, referring to the bond between young poets and a painter that had been forged at the Carrefour des Demoiselles almost ten years earlier. But the loss of a friend, the source of “unknown suffering,” produced several unforeseeable effects. Regnault’s early death filled Mallarmé with resolve to finish his own life’s work in order to fulfill the artistic promise that his dead friend had left behind. “There is only one way of avenging our brother,” he wrote to Cazalis, “that is, to let him live in the two of us.”9 The poet vowed to finish The Book born in the crisis of his midtwenties, which had quickened in Igitur, and which would reach its final form in “One Toss of the Dice.”
Regnault’s death had another, more tangible effect. The dead painter’s fiancée, Geneviève Breton, who was the granddaughter of the founder of the reigning twenty-first-century Hachette publishing empire, took it upon herself to bring Mallarmé from Avignon to Paris, as if it were the realization of one of the last wishes of Henri. Cazalis, who served as intermediary in the exchange, wrote to the poet in the provinces to ask what kind of work he might do at Hachette. Mendès also informed Mallarmé that a representative of Hachette would be dispatched to Avignon to interview him, as knowledge of English might be of service to the firm either in Paris or in London. The incredulous poet replied that he would be of little use to a large business enterprise because “he was only familiar with the English words contained in the verse of Edgar Allan Poe.”10
While his supporters in Paris worked to secure him a position, Mallarmé went to work on his own. He lobbied Frédéric Mistral, who had friends in high places, to write to the Occitan poet’s admirer Saint-René-Taillander in the Ministry of Public Education, in order to ask that he be transferred from Avignon to a teaching job in Paris. If no teaching job were available, the poet in exile would be willing to put his English-language skills to use as a librarian or archivist. Meanwhile, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam tried to secure for his friend in the provinces a contract writing for the Illustrated London News. They discussed the possibility of his undertaking a series of translations of nineteenth-century English poets, beginning with Poe, always a favorite in France, and of writing plays. For a brief moment, Mallarmé even considered taking a job as the English tutor on a steamboat, a measure of his desperation to be in the capital, for he concluded that the long months at sea would only have kept him away from where he wanted to be.
Several days before the beginning of “Bloody Week,” Mallarmé wrote to Mistral to ask whether he and des Essarts might come to visit Mistral at his home outside of Avignon the following Sunday, Pentecost, which fell that year on May 28. He added that he “would be leaving the next morning, Monday, for the North.”11 Mallarmé had decided that, even without a job, he would try his fortunes in the capital, which had “devoured itself” and was still burning.
On Monday morning, May 29, as the last victims of the Commune began to be counted and buried in mass graves, and as the captured resistance fighters marched under army guard to Versailles, the Mallarm
és left Avignon for the north. Marie was expecting a second child. She planned to give birth at Anna’s house in Sens while Stéphane looked for work. When he arrived to stay with Catulle Mendès and Judith Gautier, Paris still looked like a battle zone, with burned-out buildings, whole blocks decimated, and walls scarred by rifle and artillery fire. The debris of barricades still littered torn-up streets. The Mallarmés moved north with little money. Stéphane, who had inherited money directly from his mother, had also counted on receiving what remained of the Desmolins’ estate when his grandmother, who had no other heirs, died two years previously. But Fanny had left only debts. In a letter to José-Maria de Heredia, the poet Leconte de Lisle noted the precarious situation of the young poet with “a wife and two children, one still to come into this world, and not a centime.”12
With the birth of Anatole Mallarmé on July 16, 1871, the need for money was such that the poet accepted to work as a journalist for the newspaper Le National, which sent him to London to report on the International Exposition of 1871. Housed on Alexander Square by a colleague of Ettie Yapp’s father at the Daily Telegraph, he reconnected with the magical young woman of the Carrefour des Demoiselles, who had weathered the siege of Paris and the Commune. They spoke in confidence of Ettie’s unhappy relationship with Henri Cazalis, which had continued for six years after their meeting in 1862. She asked the poet to intervene on her behalf to persuade her former fiancé to burn her letters. Later that year, Ettie Yapp would marry the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero. Two years after that, she would die in childbirth at the age of twenty-seven.
For the French of the mid-nineteenth century, England—Manchester as much as London—was the place where industrially produced art had been most successfully integrated into everyday life. According to the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach, Mallarmé hoped to do for France what Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet and painter, had done for England when he had cofounded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848; or what William Morris, the textile and book designer, and Walter Crane, the illustrator of children’s books, had accomplished as leaders of the British Arts and Crafts movement: that is, to make more beautiful the useful objects found in every bourgeois home.13 Thus Mallarmé wrote a series of letters from London, which appeared in Le National on October 29, and November 14 and 29, 1871, under the pseudonym L.-S. Price (no doubt a play on the English “priceless” or “list price”). The poet’s English letters showed France to be a worthy rival of its neighbor across the Channel. His descriptions, a blend of nationalism mixed with aesthetics, bestowed a patina of poetry on the French luxury goods—clocks, lamps, furniture, jewels, accessories, vases, table settings, tapestries, carpets, paintings, a Pleyel-Wolf grand piano—on display at the fair in London just six months after the Treaty of Frankfurt.
At the time of his move from Avignon to Paris, Mallarmé reaffirmed his literary calling and dedication to the Grand Oeuvre, no longer a myth, but a version of The Book. As outlined to Cazalis, his life’s work would contain three parts: “a volume of Tales, dreamed,” by which the poet referred to his longer poetic dramas that tell a story, Hérodiade, Afternoon of a Faun, and Igitur; “a volume of Poetry, glimpsed and hummed,” by which he referred to the rest of his poetic output, thus far, “The Azure,” “Windows,” “The Clown Chastised,” “Summer Sadness,” “Sea Breeze,” “Apparition,” “Weary of Bitter Rest,” a series of sonnets, and, of course, the juvenilia written while still in high school; and “a volume of Critique, that is, what used to be called the Universe, considered from a strictly literary point of view.”14 This last component—“the Universe, considered from a strictly literary point of view”—can be understood only as the other side of the project of The Book. If the Grand Oeuvre would capture and change the world, “Critique” would reinscribe the world as it exists with the magic power of poetry.
Mallarmé made poetry out of the industrially produced goods that were part of every middle-class life—“this elusive spirit that presides over the manufacture of the familiar decor of our daily existence.”15 Thus, the world, no matter how difficult, or grim, or filled with the foolishness of political leaders bent on destroying each other, might partake of some of the charm that belongs ordinarily only to the realm of art. Eventually, he would transfer this fascination with luxury from home furnishings to clothes via his writings on feminine dress for a ladies fashion magazine, The Latest Fashion, and he would literally reinscribe the world with beauty and meaning by writing poems on the surfaces of a variety of everyday objects. The poet once confided to a journalist that “the world was created in order to end in a beautiful book.”16 In waiting for The Book to take shape, the poet would capture and catalogue the hidden, indeed the ineffable, poetry in things. Far from the frivolous musings of a late-nineteenth-century dandy or a fashionable flâneur, his writings on furniture, accessories, and fashion raised the most expensive playthings of human vanity to the power of an idea.
Mallarmé meditated on the banality of human time versus the eternal attributes of art in describing a “solemn furnishing, the clock,” manufactured by Ferdinand Barbedienne, whose foundry, obliged to forge cannons during the Franco-Prussian War, had returned to manufacturing luxury goods by the time of the poet’s London sojourn. “This gross exaggerated watch, as if made for the infantile eye of an Indian nabob, is trimmed with arabesques incised into burnished silver, and playing round about a frame, in which yellow and black enamel are married with white enamel.”17 The poet turned cultural reporter found a certain absurdity in late-eighteenth-century and Empire-style clocks, whose allegorical figures sit upon a marble base, but “the manufacture of lamps, differing from that of clocks, has never bordered on the absurd; and for this reason—that the shape has been preserved by that of the vase.”18 As for the jewels of the Maison Froment-Meurice, “such bracelets! A vine of virgin gold;—a succession of clasps, panels and arabesques, pearls and diamonds, burnished gold and emeralds. And these necklaces! One of enamel, pink like flesh, but colder, suspending precious stones of a pale tone, nonetheless alive.”19
Mallarmé was equally fascinated by the relationship of originals to reproductions and by the modern combination of industrially produced objects and handmade fine arts, especially in the manufacture of ceramics and of cloth. MM. Soupireau et Fournier’s renderings of the elaborate Renaissance pottery of Bernard Palissy, in particular, captured the poet’s attention. He noted that the spiny and twisted fish necessary for remarkable fish soups can be found mixed with fanciful salamanders and blazons in the high relief of majolica soup bowls. “I admit that, before these admirable reproductions, the word authentic, frequently pronounced by the exacting collector, oddly loses its meaning.”20 As obsessed as he was by the coincidence of actual things with their artistic reproduction, the poet delighted in the miniature porcelain fish, eels, shellfish, and mollusks swimming in the actual broth that they have made.
Upon his return to Paris in the fall of 1871, Mallarmé was greeted with what finally seemed like welcome news. Through the efforts of Geneviève Breton, who knew Jules Simon, the minister of education, he was appointed to a part-time teaching position at Paris’s Lycée Condorcet, with a secondary appointment at the Lycée Saint-Louis. Though working at two institutions meant a long commute, between the rue du Havre and the upper boulevard Saint-Michel, the full salary meant that the family of four might just make ends meet. The Mallarmés moved into a fourth-floor apartment on the rue de Moscou. Their first Parisian home was not far from some of the most contested lines of urban combat of earlier that spring, within walking distance of the hill upon which Sacré-Coeur would be built as a national penance imposed upon Paris’s most rebellious neighborhood. Four years later, Mallarmé would move to the rue de Rome, within earshot of the spot on which the young Communard with a baritone voice had regaled his neighbors with “The Proletarian” at the beginning of “Bloody Week.”
The onerous task of teaching in those first years in Paris did not prevent Mallarmé from socializing whenev
er he had the chance, especially if there were the opportunity of talking about poetry or meeting other poets. He was convinced, perhaps because of his contact with the Félibrige movement in Provence or his knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, that all poets were spiritually connected. He had the idea of forming an international poets’ union, and even wrote about such a project to John Payne in England and to Mistral, who was uninterested. On one of his evenings out, Mallarmé met the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine at a dinner of the Vilains Bonhommes (Bad, Bad Boys), a monthly gathering of Parnassian poets, advocates of “art for art’s sake,” who read their latest compositions and discussed verse.
At the age of sixteen, Rimbaud had boarded a train without a ticket in the northern town of Charleville, in the Ardennes. Arriving in Paris on September 6, 1870, just five days after the French defeat at Sedan, he was immediately imprisoned and sent home. Ten days later, he was on the road again, drinking, stealing, and composing poems along with a letter, sent in May 1871 to one of his high school teachers, about achieving a higher poetic vision through a “long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.”21 Rimbaud dreamed of returning to Paris, and began sending his poems to Verlaine, among which a sonnet, “The Sleeper in the Valley” (“Le Dormeur du Val”), which depicts a sleeping soldier lying in the grass, and who turns out, like Henri Regnault, to be dead—“Tranquil. He has two red holes in his right side”—one of the victims of the Franco-Prussian War. Verlaine was so taken with Rimbaud’s verse that he sent the young poet a reply, with a one-way ticket to Paris—“Come, dear great soul. We await you. We desire you.” How much he desired, he had little idea.
Rimbaud arrived in Paris in September 1871 and lodged at first with Verlaine and his seventeen-year-old wife, who was pregnant. In short order, the Verlaine-Rimbaud couple displaced the married couple. The two poets stayed out all night or did not come home at all, consumed large quantities of alcohol, absinthe, and hashish, and scandalized the Parisian literary scene—Verlaine because of his unconventional marital arrangement, and Rimbaud because of his unsettling behavior. The younger poet stole from those who housed him and disrupted poetic meetings that, by the standards of this enfant terrible from Charleville, were not disruptive enough. In March 1872, Rimbaud’s repeated cries of “shit!” during one of the readings at the Vilains Bonhommes ended with the young poet’s striking the photographer Étienne Carjat with a cane, and his exclusion from future gatherings. During this period, Mallarmé met Rimbaud, who impressed the older poet with the country redness of his face, his steely blue eyes, and the swollen roughness of his hands, which had “signed beautiful unpublished verses,” though his mouth, “with a sullen and mocking fold, had recited none.”22
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