In September, Verlaine abandoned his wife and infant son. The lovers—“two poets in ferocious pain,” in Mallarmé’s phrase23—left for London, where they lived “in orgiastic misery.”24 Throughout the affair, Verlaine supported his new couple by offering English lessons, and was supported by his mother, who repeatedly urged him to return home. Verlaine did come back to Paris in June 1873, but the period of renewed domestic respectability was short-lived. A month later he telegraphed Rimbaud to meet him in Brussels, where he and his mother traveled together; and, on July 10, the older poet, jealous and furious at his young lover’s threats to leave, shot him twice. Verlaine was originally indicted for murder, a charge reduced to assault with a firearm. He served two years in prison, during which time he converted to Roman Catholicism. Rimbaud, on the other hand, left France and poetry before he was twenty, landing first in Indonesia, where he enlisted in and deserted the Dutch colonial army, and then in the Horn of Africa—Yemen and Ethiopia—where he sold weapons, coffee, and apparently slaves as well, before dying of bone cancer at the age of thirty-seven.
Upon his release from prison, Verlaine returned to England, and then immigrated briefly to Boston, where he taught English, Latin, and Greek. He would return definitively to Paris in 1877. There, he and Mallarmé resumed a relationship of mutual respect for each other’s poetic gifts. According to Mallarmé, Verlaine divided his time in two equal halves. He wrote poetry, and he drank. When in misery, with a couple of difficult months ahead, Verlaine would write to the director of a hospital he frequented, as if it were a hotel, to announce that he would arrive on such and such a day. But, Mallarmé observed, “certain verses of Verlaine to Rimbaud are so beautiful!”
Mallarmé showed no evidence of the desperate agony, none of the excesses or scandalous capers, the bankruptcies and binges of so many of the Romantic, Parnassian, and Symbolist poets. If he had a vice by today’s standards, it was smoking—cigarettes, cigars, and a pipe. The flume from his cigar in Manet’s portrait of the poet, completed in 1876, is one of the great captures of smoke in all of Western art. In one of those Belle Époque parlor games, which involved completing a questionnaire to be shared with others, Mallarmé indulged in a game of “confessions.” His response to the question of “Your idea of unhappiness,” which Marcel Proust once famously answered with the plaintive “being separated from Maman,” was, simply, “doing without cigars.”25
Mallarmé’s appetites and afflictions were remarkably plain. Although he liked fine wine and eventually became known for his toasts at literary banquets, he was modest in his consumption of alcohol. The poet suffered from chronic insomnia, for which he took analgesics, and wore a prosthetic dental device, yet he indulged in none of the artificial paradises synonymous with the circles in which he moved. Unlike many of the writers of the nineteenth century—who sought, via exotic travel, escape from what was among the Romantics “the sickness of the century” (mal du siècle), “boredom and spleen” (Baudelaire), or Europe’s “bad blood” (Rimbaud)—Mallarmé, having raised some of the money to send Paul Gauguin to Tahiti, himself traveled no farther than London, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Côte d’ Azur.
The poet’s reports from the London International Exhibition had, however, given him a taste for and a knowledge of luxury goods. So, six months after his return to Paris, he wrote to fellow poet José-Maria de Heredia of his dream of editing a magazine devoted to the decorative arts. “I am gathering, now, in various parts of Paris the necessary subscriptions to found a beautiful and luxurious review, the thought of which obsesses me: L’Art Décoratif, Gazette Mensuelle, Paris, 1872.” He sought Heredia’s help in encouraging his friend Claudius Popelin, a well-regarded history and portrait painter, to design the cover.26 The moment, too, seemed right for such a venture. With the memory of the war and the Commune fading, French industry and commerce flourished in what was the beginning of a period of intense consumerism, aided by the extension of railway lines, the continued migration of rural population to large cities, improved techniques of advertising, and the building of shopping arcades and department stores in the capital.
Together with a friend, Charles Wendelen, who lived just up the street on the rue de Moscou, Mallarmé published eight issues of a biweekly ladies’ magazine, The Latest Fashion (La Dernière Mode). He was meticulous about the appearance, and even the feel, of his guide to the arts of gracious living. Elegance of dress and decoration went hand in hand with elegant writing, paper, illustration, and printing.
When it came to fashion, cooking, and household management, Mallarmé ironically picked up where Isabella Beeton, the author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), had left off. From his time in London, the French poet would surely have known about the ubiquitous English guide to running a Victorian household, which, like The Latest Fashion, began as a serialized magazine and was only later collected into a book. Isabella’s husband, Samuel Orchart Beeton, had founded The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper, where the Yapp sisters published their dispatches from Paris. It is inconceivable that the Yapps, in whose London and Paris homes Mallarmé was a frequent visitor, did not possess a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a work that helped define domestic Victorian mores. The English book was enormously successful, selling nearly two million copies by 1868, even though Isabella Beeton died in 1865, as Ettie Yapp would eight years later, of puerperal fever. Mallarmé had also read copies of The Queen, which contained the latest society gossip from the court of Queen Victoria alongside advice about the latest in fashion, decoration, cooking, and entertaining. Upon his return from London to Paris, the poet must have seen the publication of a magazine for upper-class ladies as a means of getting rich.
Mallarmé, perhaps sensing that such pieces would mar his reputation as a poet, wrote the entirety of every issue of The Latest Fashion under a variety of pseudonyms, each with a different specialty in the arts of living: Marguerite de Ponty for ladies’ fashion; Miss Satin for fashion houses; Ix, a male, for book and theater reviews; the Chef de Bouche de chez Brébant for cuisine; Madame de P. for education; Toussenel for naturalist activities and sports; and “A Grandmother” when it came to tried-and-true home remedies—“A Syrup to cure a cold,” “Ointment for chilblains”—that have been “practiced for generations.” In case such obvious disguise might raise suspicion, Mallarmé assured his readers of the reality of the fabrication: “Have full confidence, Mesdames, in the foreign pseudonym of a well-known Parisian lady: Miss Satin.”27 It was not so much that the poet had inverted traditional gender identities, but he was capable of identifying with women, of imagining their sensitivities to decoration and dress. He spoke in the voice of a woman.
The persona adopted for food suggestions, the Chef de Bouche de chez Brébant, summoned the luxury dinners of the real Paul Brébant, who, in 1863, had purchased Chez Vachette, 32 boulevard de la Poissonière, the restaurant frequented by Paris’s intellectual, journalistic, and literary elite. It was at Chez Brébant where dramatist Alexander Dumas fils honored his novelist father with a nineteen-course meal, not counting cheese or fruit. In The Latest Fashion, Mallarmé’s fictitious chef proposed a comparatively modest seven-course “menu for a luncheon by the seaside,” and a midnight supper consisting of Ostend and Marennes oysters, for a first course; consommé of plovers’ eggs, black pudding à la Richelieu, fillets of sole with Montpellier butter, saddle of Nîmes lamb with asparagus tips, for an entrée; truffled bartorelles, thrush pâté with juniper berries, new peas française, and buisson of crayfish with Ribeauvillé wine, for the main course; and louvers in pastry with chocolate, for dessert.
Mallarmé’s recipes for a less luxurious home-cooked meal tended still toward the exotic. Instructions for cooking chicken gumbo, an excellent bisque and a spicy dish, were attributed to a “a Creole Lady,” and a recipe for coconut jam to Zizi, a mulatto maid from Surat. The ingredients and all the spices “can be found at 5, boulevard Haussmann, at the shop of an old friend of our Read
ers.”28 Mallarmé was quite taken by the advertising industry that blossomed in the late 1800s in France, and the last pages of The Latest Fashion contained a series of advertisements accompanied by what look like business cards of recommended purveyors of luxury goods and services: “Marliani—Carpets and Decoration,” “Henri Laudron, S—Luxury Gloves,” “Mathilde Leclerc—Marie-Antoinette Style Corsets,” “Carjat—Photographer,” “Anchor Line Steam Ships—Paris to New York.”
The Latest Fashion was filled with tips for home decoration, some of which are so curious that one wonders how serious Mallarmé could have been. The poet saw no contradiction, in any case, between his goal of “purifying the words of the tribe,” on the one hand, and making upper-middle-class households more beautiful, on the other. Thus, he provided instructions for adapting Jewish Dutch lamps (by which I assume he referred to menorahs) to gas, and for “the application of leather on leather: an afternoon occupation.”29 He offered advice for creating a movable false ceiling for a rented apartment with the same concern for the ideal space behind openings in the sky that are an obsessive theme in his most serious verse. For those who live in flats, “the obstacle to the realizing of many a dream is inevitably the ceiling: for the wall, with its wallpaper is hidden, and doors can be painted; but white as a sheet of paper without a poem, only larger, or veiled with cloud on a sky-blue background at so much the yard, is the Sky offered to the tenant’s eyes, as he looks up from his armchair.”30
Flowers were an integral part of the Belle Époque decorative arts and would culminate in the organic aesthetic of Art Nouveau. The Latest Fashion included monthly advice on flower arrangement. In the issue of December 20, 1874, Mallarmé outlined instructions for decorating an “ordinary Christmas tree”: “Acclimatized in France from the North (especially since the war) by patriotic efforts, the Christmas tree, once reserved for rich cosmopolitan children, is now accessible to all.” Mallarmé provided his readers with cultural hints about noteworthy events at Parisian theaters and opera, about new volumes in bookstores, and about museum and gallery exhibitions in the world of fine arts. The Latest Fashion featured counsel from “a professor in one of the Parisian lycées” on which books and educational methods are worthy of maternal attention.31 The leisure class, which the poet targeted as his readers, summered away from Paris, and The Latest Fashion was filled with vacation suggestions—commentary on railways and stations, a list of suitable bathing resorts in Normandy, Brittany, south of the Loire, and along the Paris–Lyon–Mediterranean line. The poet, who had just begun to spend his summers in Valvins, made recommendations about keeping busy in Paris during the indolent summer months. Fall, of course, was hunting season, and Mallarmé, under the pseudonym of his gaming expert Toussenel, described in The Latest Fashion of October 4, 1874, a “Lark-hunt, with a Draw-net.”
The Latest Fashion aimed to please the ladies, and women’s clothes were its defining topic. Mallarmé acted as a permanent fashion advisor, answering questions from subscribers about particular questions of style. To Mme D. in Toulouse: “Yes, Madame, you may safely trim a plum-colored silk dress with light blue: but you must confine it to borders and rouleautés [a portion of material rolled round on itself], or the effect will be simply ugly: and it must be a very pale blue.” To Mme Marie de L., who had asked about wedding dresses in the issue of December 20, 1874, Mallarmé first extended “smiling congratulations.” In the matter of the latest bridal fashion, however, the poet urged caution. Wedding dresses are the last to change in style. So: “There would be something not quite proper—particularly in your case, living so far from the capital as you do—in a bride’s wishing to be in advance of fashion.”32
In a tradition that stretches all the way back to the early fathers of the Church, Charles Baudelaire famously believed that a woman’s dress was part of her body. “What poet would dare,” he asked, “in the portrayal of pleasure caused by the apparition of a beauty, separate the woman from her clothes?”33 Mallarmé, on the other hand, not only distinguished between the body and its dress, but he was capable, unlike Baudelaire, of dreaming of the dress alone. Miss Satin’s article in the issue of November 1, 1874, featured a “blue-of-dreams” outfit by Charles Worth, who dominated French fashion in the second half of the nineteenth century. “We have all of us been dreaming of that gown, without knowing it. M. Worth, alone, has the art of creating a toilette as elusive as our own thoughts. Picture (you can if you try) a long skirt with a rep train, of the most ideal sky-blue silk—that blue so pale, with gleams of opalescence, that one sometimes sees, like a garland, round silvery clouds.”34 Years later, Mallarmé admitted to Paul Verlaine that certain of his works had been written out of economic necessity, “of which it is better not to speak.” His essays on style, however, were another matter. His writings on women’s dress, in the poet’s phrase, “still make me dream for a long time.”35
Anticipating astonishingly “One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance,” Mallarmé maintained in The Latest Fashion that the correct choice of garments and accessories and just the right department store—Paris’s flourishing Bon Marché—will abolish chance. Miss Satin promised, “No more long hours or days hunting for a particular ribbon! It is not just chance that makes us write down, before all others, the name of the Bon Marché. We have a deep conviction that the Lady Reader who, when she gets into her carriage, utters the words ‘rue du Bac’ or ‘rue de Sèvres,’ will not return dissatisfied either with our advice or her own journey.” The poet went on to sing the praises of the department store, which, unlike the specialty boutiques that sold only one type of good, umbrellas, gloves, ribbons, furs, or cloth, might meet all of a woman’s consumer needs—“yours, Madame, yours Mademoiselle, and those of all you Mademoiselles and Mesdames.”36 Eight years after the rise and fall of The Latest Fashion, Émile Zola published his great shopping novel, Ladies’ Paradise, which chronicles the devastating economic struggle between Paris’s new department stores, “cathedrals of commerce,” and the old shopkeepers in and around the Bon Marché in the capital’s seventh arrondissement.
Mallarmé recognized that poetry may never change the world, as one toss of the dice never will abolish chance. The poet might, however, reinvest the world with meaning and magic by literally covering it with writing, by making the world rhyme. If the Book of Nature is no longer visible to be read, nature and all its contents were nonetheless available to be written upon, and so he wrote poems on surfaces that ordinarily do not contain verse as well as on surfaces that do not ordinarily contain writing. In waiting to write The Book, Mallarmé wrote upon the physical world as if it were a giant notebook.
Almost twenty poems written on fans—from a mere couplet dedicated to his confidante Méry Laurent, to five quatrains to his daughter—attest to Mallarmé’s predilection for objects associated with the Far East. The fan in particular attracted the poet because of the comparison, present in almost every example, between the opening of the fan and the outstretching of wings. In the Mallarméan spiderweb of meaningful connections, he associated wings with angels, and with sails, which are the equivalents of the pen with which one writes and the paper on which one writes.
Mallarmé made the fan-wing-sail metaphor explicit in the fan poem dedicated to his daughter:
O dreamer, that I might
Plunge into pure delight,
Learn through a subtle stratagem
How to guard my fragile wing in your hand.
Crepuscular breezes blow
Their freshness out to you
As lightly each imprisoned stroke
Presses the whole horizon back.37
As in the constellation at the end of “One Toss of the Dice,” where the layout of type takes the shape of the Big Dipper, Mallarmé’s fan poem to Geneviève is one of those instances in which form and content coincide. The poem about the fan’s breeze is inscribed on a fan, which makes the breeze. The poem says and is what it does.
Mallarmé maintained that the shape of
an envelope reminded him of a poetic quatrain, and he addressed more than a hundred letters with such four-line strophes to friends, fellow artists, and his publishers. Not a single one of the poet’s rhymed labels failed to reach its destination, the postmen of France having become readers of his verse.
Their laughter will expand
in harmony should your way wend
Chez Monsieur Whistler and Madame,
Old Rue Bac, number 110.
At the Villa des Arts, near the Avenue
De Clichy, paints Monsieur Renoir
Who gets something other than all blue
In front of a shoulder with no peignoir.
Halt, postman, at the tones
Groaned by the cellos: it’s well
The home of Monsieur Ernest Chausson,
22 Boulevard de Courcelles.38
Mallarmé regularly dispatched books and photographs with rhymed inscriptions in the flyleaf or on the surface of the image. Each new year, he sent baskets of candied fruit to friends. Over sixty of the poems accompanying the traditional offerings survive. On January 1, 1897, Mallarmé accompanied his yearly gift of a box of candied fruit with a note to Julie Manet, the daughter of Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot:
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