To flee the ice floe and avalanche
Julie or cold reckless fools
It is enough to remain good as gold
With your interior innocence.39
This would be the next-to-last gift that Mallarmé sent to his orphaned protégée, and Julie Manet noted in her journal, “M. Renoir came to see us together with M. Mallarmé who brought each of us [Julie and no doubt her cousin Jeannie Gobillard] a box of candy with a charming quatrain, as he has done for the past nine years. This one is very beautiful, and very ‘Mallarmé.’ ”40
When birthdays came around, the highly domesticated poet sent his family and friends presents inscribed with poems. Easter brought red colored eggs bestowed upon Méry Laurent, Mme Mallarmé, or Geneviève, each inscribed with a verse in gold ink, and numbered to ensure in which order the eggs were to be read. Asked by the journalist Alidor Delzant to compose an inscription for the shelves of his library, the poet complied: “Here lies the noble human span / Remnants bending with these tomes / In order that you give them homes / You must take one in your hand.” And on the mantle of his fireplace: “Here is where fire is reborn / Long lasting, and then charming / Like its master’s friendly chord / Oak with vines all entwining.”41
So attentive was Mallarmé to his family that he inscribed couplets on stones found on the beach at Honfleur, the town in Normandy where Geneviève and Marie vacationed with the Ponsots, family friends. “To Françoise, who serves at table / Many a plate delectable,” he wrote on a stone to the Ponsots’ cook to thank her for her culinary gifts; and, to wife and daughter, “Mesdames, the ladies of Batignolles [the neighborhood of the Mallarmés’s apartment] / Here become lazy and unprofitable.”42 While in Normandy, the home of Calvados liqueur, Mallarmé also inscribed a number of pitchers of this apple brandy. “Friend, drink this apple cordial / You will feel yourself amply male”; “I hold the secret of what men think / Who drain my belly with their drink.”43
The poet was not without humor in his inscription of the things around him. He left a little poem on the wall of the communal outhouse in Valvins to discourage the local villagers from befouling it: “You, who often relieve your tripes / Can in this act hidden from all / Sing or smoke your pipes / Without smearing fingers on the wall.”44 Mallarmé sent a copy of the original, which was taken down and is now exhibited at the Mallarmé Museum in Valvins, to his friend Édouard Dujardin, with a note: “I offer you the following inscription, which I was obliged to post this morning in order to surprise the farmers because they frequently do just this.”45
Outhouse wall inscription.
Photograph by author.
Mallarmé had no illusions, of course, about ever covering the world with words, making of the world a book. But his overwhelming goal, which became a formula for living, was to make life rhyme, whether in the everyday or in the marking of important events, whether in the shape of finished poems or of occasional verse, whether on paper or on the common objects around us. Investing the world with poetry and inscribing our presence on things were ways of situating ourselves in the universe and of affirming what makes us most fully human. Mallarmé recast the famous phrase of Descartes “I think, therefore I am”—which many consider the foundation of modern philosophy—in terms of the activity that made him feel most at home and most powerfully alive: “I write, therefore I am.”
Four
TUESDAYS IN THE “LITTLE HOUSE OF SOCRATES”
For Mallarmé, the move to Paris in the summer of 1871 meant living amid a vibrant community of artists for whom the rebirth of formalist poetry among the Parnassians, the glorification of the everyday among Impressionist painters, and the formation of a Société Nationale of composers to promote French music were part of the national recovery from the devastating blows of the Franco-Prussian War. The move to the capital also offered the poet a new and wider arena in which to accomplish the Grand Oeuvre in the form of a book.
The great rivalrous model for such an undertaking was, of course, the operas of Richard Wagner, who had written Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman during his first sojourn in Paris, from 1839 to 1842. The German composer sought to synthesize music, drama, architecture, song, and dance in an all-embracing total artwork, which would restore the ritual function of art that had existed among the Greeks but was lost with the advent of Christianity. “Only the great Revolution of Mankind, whose beginnings erstwhile shattered Grecian Tragedy, can win for us this Artwork,” Wagner announced in his 1849 essay The Artwork of the Future. Nothing thus far came closer than Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk to the purity of an Idea, nor pointed more powerfully toward the restoration of the true role of art in the remaking of human community, its “future Spectacle,” in Mallarmé’s own phrase. An earthshaking work of poetry, however, might surpass music by exposing the “music of perfect fullness and clarity, the totality of universal relationships,” a pure Idea without the material means of sound, or the often disappointing trappings of stage sets, costumes, and makeup. “Our present task,” Mallarmé claimed, “is to find a way of transposing the symphony to the Book: in short, to regain our rightful due. For, undeniably, the true source of Music must not be the elemental sound of brasses, strings, or wood winds, but the intellectual and written word in all its glory.”1
Wagner, however, had had his setbacks in Paris. The debut of Tannhäuser on March 13, 1861, in a specially revised version for the Paris Opera House, caused an uproar. The Parisian Tannhäuser had come at the request of Napoleon III. Performance at the Paris Opera required, according to the traditions of the house, a ballet, which Wagner had not written into the original Dresden premiere of 1845. The composer’s insertion of the ballet in Act I, however, violated another custom, which was an obligatory ballet in Act II. In this way, the wealthy members of the Jockey Club, having dined previously, might arrive in time to see their mistresses, many of whom belonged to the Opera Ballet, dance. In what was an inversion of the trope of the crude Teuton and the refined Frenchman, the aristocratic clubmen interrupted the Parisian Tannhäuser with whistles and catcalls, some lasting for as long as fifteen minutes. Wagner withdrew his opera after only three performances. Although influence of the Jockey Club hardly spread to the general cultural elite, the German composer became unpopular in some quarters, as would the German-born Paris transplant Jacques Offenbach. A Jew who had converted to Catholicism, Offenbach, whose favor with Napoleon III earned him French citizenship and the Legion of Honor, was forced to flee to Spain during the Franco-Prussian War, and was then reviled by the French public as a result of his adopted country’s defeat of 1870–71.
The Paris Tannhäuser was a dramatic failure, but Wagnerism defined artistic, social, and even political affinities for at least two decades in France. The poets whom Mallarmé most admired worshipped Wagner. Charles Baudelaire, upon leaving a Wagner concert, announced that he had had “the most joyous musical experience of his life.” Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam proclaimed Wagner “a genius such as appears on earth once every thousand years.” Catulle Mendès had originally informed Mallarmé of the new art from Germany when he and Judith Gautier stopped in Avignon on their way back from visiting Wagner in Lucerne, Switzerland. The Mendès-Gautier couple would found the Revue wagnérienne in 1885, and, when they officially divorced three years later, the legacy of Wagner was one of the contested articles in their settlement.
In his early days in Paris, Mallarmé frequented the salon of the pianist Nina Gaillard, whom he had met at the Carrefour des Demoiselles in 1862. Having hosted too many of the vehement supporters of the Commune before 1871, the flamboyant Nina left France for Geneva, but returned when government reprisals died down. In the presence of painters Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Jean-Louis Forain and poets Charles Cros and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Mallarmé listened to Augusta Holmès, Villiers, or Nina herself play the revolutionary, modernistic-leaning music of Wagner. The poet Maurice Rollinat, a member of the circle who called themselves the Hydropaths, maintained that Nina’s sa
lon, “from dinner until late into the night, was a coterie of young minds in revolt, whipped up by alcohol into all possible mental debauchery . . . , in a state of hyperexcitation presided over by a slightly demented muse.”2
Mallarmé, far more modest in demeanor than Wagner but equally ambitious, sought to do for poetry no less than what the German composer had done for opera. In a holiday greetings letter sent at the end of 1877 to the English poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy, who was part of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, the French poet stated his ambition: “I am working like crazy; and I am studying everywhere the fragments of a new Theater which is being prepared in France and that I am working on too; something that will astonish the sovereign people as never a Roman emperor or an Asian prince has been able to do. This is the goal; it’s difficult: it will take time.”3
Time was the one thing that, in the first few years of life in the capital, Mallarmé lacked. The commuting in horse-drawn omnibuses or on foot between the Lycées Condorcet and Saint-Louis was so grueling that the poet was obliged to give up the second post. Thanks to the good offices of Charles Seignobos, father of his former student in Tournon and a deputy from the Ardèche, his situation at Condorcet was regularized to a full-time position and his salary raised sufficiently for the Mallarmés to survive. Even without the cross-town commute, however, teaching consumed an inordinate amount of time that otherwise might have been devoted to art. So, while waiting to write The Book, Mallarmé described and inscribed the things of this world as poetry. He wrote a few poems, notably, the first of his famous literary homages, or “tombeaux”: “Funerary Toast,” upon the death of Judith Gautier’s father, poet Théophile Gautier, and “The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe,” which appeared in a memorial volume to Poe published in the United States. And he began to live as if life itself could be crafted into a work of art according to the natural cycles of summer and winter, and even the days of the week.
For Mallarmé, the secret of living in a disenchanted, increasingly mechanized, and affectless world meant locating the rhythms in the everyday that resonated with the larger rhythms of nature—daily, weekly, and seasonal changes. Even the most mundane existence might participate in the wondrous ritual that once had belonged to the sphere of religion but, with the disappearance of religion, now belonged to art. Gustave Flaubert famously confided to his lover, Louise Collet, that “one must make two parts in one’s life: live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.” Even though Mallarmé may have thought like a demigod and written like a genius, he lived joyfully as a bourgeois. In fact, he did not distinguish between the two. He, like James Joyce, who would follow, found poetry in the most prosaic experiences amid the familiar objects in his immediate surroundings, as it was to be found in the most abstract ideas, inaccessible to any material expression. He undertook to make the most fundamental natural cycles no less part of everyday life.
In the early summer of 1874, Mallarmé visited the area of Fontainebleau with the art critic Phillipe Burty, who, as an editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts, had promoted japonisme in France, and would play a role in the promotion of the Impressionists. Mallarmé and Burty called upon the prominent engraver Alfred Prunaire, whose nearby summer home was a gathering place for poets, painters, and musicians. Prunaire pointed out to the poet a house for rent in Valvins at a modest price. Mallarmé quickly arranged to occupy the ground floor and two rooms on the first floor, one of which would be his study, with a window looking out over the water. Behind the former boatman’s cottage was a large garden filled with apple, pear, and cherry trees, a reminder that the local economy along this particular stretch of the river still depended upon the sale of fruit. From the outset in Valvins, the poet would be surrounded by Burty, Prunaire, and the composer and violinist Léopold Dauphin, whose comic opera, The Chinese Wedding (Le Mariage de Chine) had played at Paris’s Opera Bouffe the previous year. The poet and the musician would enjoy boating excursions and long walks in the woods. For Mallarmé, renting near the Forest of Fontainebleau restored some of the magic of the glorious day in the summer of 1862 at the Carrefour des Demoiselles. Eventually, other artists would come to summer near Mallarmé in what was a country version of a Parisian salon along the banks of the Seine.
In the mind of the poet, the yearly cycle of the sun was captured in the movement between Paris in the winter and Valvins in the summer, which corresponded to an innate difference between writing styles. Summer was the season of poetry, a time for verse. “Winter,” however, was for prose. “With the autumnal burst, verse stops, which makes way for theater [le geste] and a miraculous withdrawal.” What Mallarmé meant by “withdrawal” (recul) was a leaving off of the truest and purest human activity, poetry, in favor of a more active life in the city. Insofar as autumn brought the poet back to Paris, the place of human invention and artifice, it was dramatic play, and occasioned visits to the playhouse. “Far from everything, Nature, in autumn, prepares her Theater, sublime and pure, waiting to illuminate, in solitude, moments of meaning and prestige, so that a lucid eye may penetrate their sense (and it’s a notable one, the destiny of man).” In winter, in the city, “a Poet is recalled to mediocre pleasures and cares.”4
A ritualized weekly rhythm accompanied the yearly rhythms and rites of summer and winter, country and city. Off and on between 1875 and his death, the poet spent Wednesday evenings at the home of Catulle Mendès, Thursday chez Émile Zola, Fridays with Léopold Dauphin, and Saturday afternoons at the salon of Charles Leconte de Lisle or José-Maria de Heredia. Sundays, however, were reserved for afternoon concerts at the Salle Lamoureux, which was one of the halls in which Wagner’s music continued to be played in France. The ritual significance of Mallarmé’s visits to the Concerts Lamoureux did not escape his daughter. “Each Sunday in winter he put aside—for this, by himself—an afternoon of work to go to the Lamoureux concert. ‘I’m off to vespers,’ he said to us in leaving the house.”5 Poet Henri de Régnier reported seeing Mallarmé seated in the concert hall, taking notes. He found there, de Régnier confided, “a secret analogous to nature.”6 De Régnier was married to de Heredia’s daughter and lived one of the famously public ménage à trois of Belle Époque France. Both he and his close friend the novelist Pierre Louÿs loved Marie de Heredia and had made a pact that neither would ask for her hand without asking the other first. When Louÿs was away visiting his brother, a diplomat in Egypt, de Régnier broke their agreement. As he was the wealthier of the two suitors and de Heredia père had run up gambling debts, it was agreed that Marie would be his. She, however, was furious, and apparently kept Louÿs on as a lover, naming her son Pierre de Régnier after Pierre Louÿs, the presumed father. Louÿs eventually married Marie de Heredia’s younger sister, Louise, a marriage that ended in divorce.
The poet Paul Valéry described his mentor delighting in the music of Beethoven or Wagner: “Mallarmé left the concerts full of a sublime jealousy. He sought desperately ways of taking back for our art what too powerful Music had stolen from it by way of marvels and significance.”7 The religious terms in which others perceived the poet’s going to, attending, and leaving the Sunday rites of the Lamoureux orchestra, this “Sunday cleansing of banality,” were confirmed by Mallarmé’s own description in a work called Offices, under the subheading “Sacred Pleasure,” of the concert as a holy ceremony, the equivalent of a church service. For the poet, “music was the last and full human cult.”8
Mallarmé, now installed in Paris and increasingly at the center of a vibrant artistic circle, dreamed of hosting his own salon. He did not have the means to entertain in the grand style of many literary and political salons of the Third Republic. In and around cultural discussion, the host might be expected to offer elaborate dinners, musical performances, occasional balls, and excursions to the theater or opera. In contrast, the Mallarmés’ desperate need for money upon arrival in the capital led to a plan to conduct a salon for profit. The poet had supplemented the family income in Avignon by giving private English lessons. The idea of re
viving the old institution of the salon, where the bourgeois art of conversation had replaced the wit that belonged to the courts of France’s ancien régime, seemed in Paris like a way of making ends meet. The poet printed and circulated a prospectus advertising lessons in culture and charm:
Monsieur Mallarmé, Professeur de l’Université, receives, 29 rue de Moscou, at two-thirty, Tuesdays and Saturdays, young people whose parents desire them to acquire familiarity with ancient and contemporary literature. . . . The price of the course is twenty francs payable at the beginning of the month. . . . Literary taste, once so developed in women, was the source of the charm and renown of our old salons. One cannot hide the fact that such taste is being lost by the lack of necessary culture. . . . This course features one particularity: that it encourages the participation of young people and prepares them for the first secret of conversation, destined to recapture its old luster.9
There is no evidence that Mallarmé’s “literary afternoons” for young people ever attracted the fifteen students he had calculated were necessary to supplement his income in the first few difficult years in Paris.
Beginning with the Mallarmés’ move from the rue de Moscou to the rue de Rome, Tuesdays meant weekly gatherings after dinner for the purpose of listening to the poet hold court on a wide range of topics—from poetry, painting, and music to politics, religion, and fashion—with a freshness, in the phrase of André Gide, that made it appear that “he had just in that instant invented each new proposition.”10 The poet may have written poems that were difficult to understand, but he was famous as a master without equal of the art of conversation. For a quarter of a century, almost everyone who was anyone in the world of the arts in France visited of a Tuesday in winter the “little house of Socrates” on the rue de Rome.
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