The poet issued written invitations to those whom he knew, sometimes sent with the coquetterie of one of his poetic envelopes with the address in the form of a quatrain. Other times, he would invite an artist to visit him at another hour and day of the week and, at the end of the conversation, suggested that the visitor return on Tuesday after dinner. Climbing the four flights of stairs, the Mardists would knock. The master opened the door to his modest sitting room, filled nonetheless with exquisite paintings on the walls, ceramic pitchers and pewter plates on a long rustic sideboard, and thickly upholstered chairs. Mallarmé would sit in a rocker when he was not standing next to the fireplace, with its open brass louvers under the mantel piece topped by a pair of candlesticks and a small pot of dried flowers. In the center of the room stood a table covered with books, a red lacquer inkwell, a Chinese porcelain bowl, tobacco, and a lamp that cast a low light over the hushed intimacy of the inner sanctum of Paris’s most rarefied literary salon.
The Mardists included such well-known poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, Paul Verlaine, Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, André Gide, Paul Claudel, and Paul Valéry; composers such as Claude Debussy; and painters such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Dégas, Paul Gauguin, James McNeill Whistler, and Auguste Renoir. Georges Clemenceau, the physician, journalist, statesman, and future prime minister, attended several Tuesdays on the rue de Rome.
A number of lesser literary lights left accounts of their Tuesday time with Mallarmé, as if they were in competition with one another to exhibit their closeness to the master. Camille Mauclair, an avid proponent of Wagner, wrote a roman à clef about Mallarmé’s circle, The Sun of the Dead (Le Soleil des morts). Playwright and poet Édouard Dujardin, editor of the Revue indépendante and one of the cofounders of the Revue wagnérienne, left a memoir entitled Mallarmé by One of His Own (Mallarmé par un des siens). Bernard Lazare, the poet, journalist, and anarchist, who was one of the first defenders of Dreyfus, compiled an account of literary figures in fin-de-siècle France, Les Contemporains, in which he compared the Tuesday evenings with his mentor to the philosophical schools of classical tradition. The Belgian Symbolist Albert Mockel, author of Stéphane Mallarmé: A Hero, honed in on Lazare’s thought when he observed that classical philosophers were given to expressing general ideas and that, in Mallarmé’s salon, the feelings of a solitary dreamer were raised to the level of universal truth. The essayist and novelist Henry Roujon worked in the Ministry of Education. There, he was able to support Mallarmé’s career in lycées despite the poet’s flagging devotion to teaching as he became increasingly well-known in the world of literary lights. In his assessment of late-century literary life, Gallery of Busts (La Galerie des bustes), Roujon, who later became a member of the Académie Française, devoted a chapter to Mallarmé, whom he described as “full of enchantments, while pretending to live out his mortal destiny as an English teacher.”11 Henri de Régnier left two accounts of gatherings chez Mallarmé, Our Meetings (Nos Rencontres) and Figures and Characters (Figures et caractères), in addition to a long journal of literary life, which reproduced in detail the words of the master on specific Tuesdays.
Mallarmé at home on the rue de Rome.
Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms MNR 1848.
Of the Mardists who could not wait to get home from the rue de Rome in order to write down what had happened there, the most loyal was Edmond Bonniot, who, as a law student with poetic aspirations, entered the inner circle in 1892. He left a log of the séances he had attended, an assessment of the state of mind of the host, an inventory of topics discussed, along with various anecdotes and aphorisms for which Mallarmé became famous. On the night of January 17, 1893, for instance, Bonniot reported that the poet had the impression that the mothers who waited for their sons outside of the lycée at the end of the school day were angry at him for not teaching the boys enough of what they needed to know about the English language. One day one of his students came up to him, tapped his elbow with a knowing air, and began, “M’sieu, my mother knows what you are up to. Really! You know what I mean, at night.” “How’s that?” Mallarmé asked. “That’s right, M’sieu, I would like to come sometime to hear you sing at the concert of the decadents.”12 Tuesdays chez Mallarmé had apparently entered the popular imagination in the form of nightclub entertainment.
Oscar Wilde appeared once or twice on the rue de Rome and, having spoken at length, incurred the disapproval of all by exercising his wit in the presence of the master. Édouard Dujardin condemned “the abominable Oscar Wilde, who should have known by our mute reprobation that one does not come chez Mallarmé to discourse about oneself.”13 James McNeill Whistler, who was convinced that Wilde had mocked him in The Picture of Dorian Gray, went so far as to ask Mallarmé to insert a copy of an article denouncing Wilde in the American Register, a newspaper owned by Dr. Thomas Evans, whom the poet knew through his confidante Méry Laurent. The poet responded on January 5, 1890, urging Whistler to send along his “fabulous article. You’re becoming a regular James Mac Neill [sic] Buffalo Bill Whistler.”14 The painter wrote to Mallarmé to excuse himself from the gathering of Tuesday, November 3, 1891, since his enemy would be present. “I realize it is a little ungrateful of me not to stay to denounce Oscar Wilde in front of your disciples tomorrow night.” On the day itself, Whistler sent a telegram: PREFACE PROPOSITIONS WARN DISCIPLES PRECAUTION FATAL FAMILIARITY HOLD TIGHT TO YOUR PEARLS BONNE SOIREE—WHISTLER.15 Mallarmé wrote to assure Whistler that the evening had been “as dull as could be.”
Mallarmé intervened on both sides as an unofficial negotiator in the French state purchase of Whistler’s masterwork, known at the time as Arrangement in Grey and Black, and now as Whistler’s Mother. On November 11, 1891, he informed the American painter that Minister of Fine Arts Antonin Proust “seeks, in a spirit of pure admiration for your work and sympathy for you, to buy and present to the State, to put in the Luxembourg Museum, the masterpiece that is that portrait of your mother: this as a French demonstration of the honor in which it holds Whistler.”16 Whistler responded two days later, “Bravo! O! Ministre Mallarmé!” and suggested a price of 25,000 francs. Mallarmé eased the blow of the state’s offer of only 4,000 francs, which he had learned of in a telegram from the minister. He informed Whistler that the painter would receive the Legion of Honor the following year, thanks to the intervention of Georges Clemenceau. “Yes, you have released the fairies,” Whistler responded, “Clemenceau’s influence kept things moving along.”17
Relations between the Tuesday men were not always easy or gracious. Rivalries for the attention of the master was keen, and, in several instances, led the more intensely vain Mardists to risk their lives. Catulle Mendès was enraged over an article published by fellow Mardist Francis Vielé-Griffin in which the American Symbolist poet insinuated that Mendès had somehow intervened with the editors of Le Figaro to remove the name Vielé-Griffin from among a list of poets mentioned by Mallarmé in a newspaper interview published in 1891. Catulle Mendès sent Mallarmé a telegram asking him to intervene: IMPOSSIBLE TO TOLERATE PHRASE OF VIELE-GRIFFIN ABOUT ME, ENTRETIENS LITTERAIRES—PLEASE DECLARE TELEGRAPHICALLY AND PUBLICLY THAT YOU KNOW ME TO BE ABSOLUTELY INCAPABLE OF SUCH A MANEUVER.18 Mallarmé wrote Mendès a personal note, confirming that he was, indeed, “incapable of such a maneuver.” Unsatisfied, Mendès demanded that the offender publish a retraction affirming that “M. Mendès is an honest man.” And, when Vielé-Griffin published in response, “I do not know M. Mendès. I cannot therefore say if he is or is not an honest man,” Mendès challenged him to a duel.
Mallarmé tried to stop the quarrel among his Mardist “children,” but the two combatants met to settle their difference with swords. Mendès engaged the playwright Georges Courteline and Félix Rosati as his seconds. Viélé-Griffin fought with the historical novelist Paul Adam and Félix Fénéon at his side. All assembled on the morning of Sunday, September 20, 1891, on the Île de la Grande-Jatte. (A few years prev
ious to the quarreling Symbolists’s armed confrontation, Georges Seurat had captured a much quieter Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his painting filled with leisurely picnickers, strollers and bathers.) On the field, his shirt open to show his chest, sword in hand for the “mise en garde,” Mendès was smoking a cigar. “Permit me,” Vielé-Griffin said, and he strolled to the nearest tree where his jacket was hanging, and pulled out a pipe, which he stuffed and tranquilly lit. As the duelists fought and smoked, Mendès, the more experienced swordsman, wounded his opponent in the stomach.19
Mallarmé was saddened by the quarrel between his followers. In a letter written on September 29 to Henri de Régnier, who was caring for the injured Vielé-Griffin, the poet noted that “this story cast a pall over my last days of vacation. I thought that as far as Mendès was concerned, the thing would end with my response to his demand for a public statement.”20 Six years later, Régnier himself would meet Mardist Robert de Montesquiou to settle differences between them with swords. In a report on duels, L’Annuaire du duel, Édouard Dujardin had recorded two thousand such incidents between 1880 and 1889. “Unable to eat us,” the realist Émile Zola commented disdainfully on the quarrels among the Symbolists, “this band of sharks fed on one another.”21
Though the majority of Parisian literary salons were hosted by women who, like Mme. Verdurin in Proust’s Swann in Love or the real-life Nina Gaillard, were the center of attention, women were remarkably absent from Tuesdays chez Mallarmé. Mme Mallarmé and Geneviève sat sewing in a room adjoining the salon. They appeared at an appointed hour with grog, then retired for the night. The sculptor Camille Claudel, sister of Paul and the mistress of Auguste Rodin, and the composer Augusta Holmès were exceptions. Each had attended at least one of the weekly meetings. Berthe Morisot apparently once teased the poet by offering to dress as a man and to show up at his door one Tuesday night. On the eve of his departure for a lecture tour at Oxford and Cambridge in February 1894, Mallarmé invited Morisot to come with her daughter, Julie, “like students to sit on the bench of my friends.” “We’ll smoke as little as possible,” he promised. Morisot refused, claiming the bench of friends “too intimidating.”22
It would have been difficult to refrain from smoking. The poet, whose idea of unhappiness was “doing without cigars,” kept a bowl of tobacco on the table in the center of his sitting room. The room bathed in low light, the incense of cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke, and the ritual grog served at ten o’clock were all integral parts of Mallarmé’s “intimate gala,” which the Mardists experienced as a religious rite, a mass for their time. Bernard Lazare remembered Tuesday evenings “in the discreetly lit salon whose corners of shadow gave off the atmosphere of a temple, or an oratory.”23 Geneviève remarked that young poets behaved as if in the confessional: “Few among them simply recited their verses—they confided them, as at confession, to father.”24 Édouard Dujardin sensed that he had somehow spoken too freely or out of turn on the evening of Tuesday, January 11, 1887. He excused himself in a letter of January 17, acknowledging the “unique magnificence” of his host’s thought, which troubled him emotionally. Dujardin recognized what went on in the Mallarmé apartment as a “serious and gigantic religion.” “It was thus,” Dujardin confessed, “that I saw something like ‘we will raise a tower to the heavens,’ something like ‘we will be like gods,’ something like ‘I will destroy the temple . . . , and stone will not remain on stone.’ ” The abject acolyte, quoting the Gospel of Matthew 16:18, compared Mallarmé with Saint Peter. “What quartet of evangelists will recount this Jesus?” Dujardin asked.25
Albert Mockel spoke of the “religious joy of the spirit” in the atmosphere of Mallarmés’ apartment. André Fontainas, who was a student in Mallarmé’s English class and later joined the inner circle, claimed to have left the rue de Rome on the night of December 21, 1897, “comforted, illuminated.”26 Paul Adam noted that Mallarmé “was more than a hero, he was a saint.”27 Catulle Mendès observed Mallarmé as “the prophet of a messiah without advent.”28 For Camille Mauclair, poetry “was a religion to which we brought the seriousness and the fervor of catechumens.”29
The effects of Mallarmé’s papal-like authority were not always appreciated. The “instrumentalist” poet René Ghil, who practiced a metaphysical materialism combining the scientific writings of Charles Darwin with Buddhism, claimed that a “smiling Mallarmé of the Tuesdays on the rue de Rome liked to remind the gathering that, up until the age of twelve, he had no other ambition than to become a Bishop.”30 Mallarmé wrote the introduction to Ghil’s essay on Symbolism, Traité du verbe (1886), but Ghil broke with the older poet two years later, when, “one Tuesday in April, discoursing on the Idea as the only representative of the truth of the World, he turned to me, and, with some sadness perhaps, but a clear intention, said: ‘No, Ghil, one cannot do without Eden!’ I responded softly, but just as clearly: ‘I think one can, dear Master.’ ”31 Ghil, who never returned, sensed the incident as something on the order of an excommunication from the ecclesiastical atmosphere of Tuesdays chez Mallarmé. Such an exercise of worldly power was, Ghil maintained, “the true instinctive expression of Mallarmé’s soul.”
Sitting in audience in his salon on the rue de Rome, as a high Church official would in Rome, Mallarmé presided “as the supremely bishoplike representative of an occult art, his look fixed in contemplation on the large and magic violet stone set in the sacred ring.”32 The banished poet’s remarks were bitter. They associate Mallarmé’s overwhelming authority to pronounce and to exclude in the realm of pure art with the corruption of the Church’s meddling in worldly affairs. Ghil’s critique did not stand alone, however. Max Nordau, the Hungarian physician turned social critic, attacked the Symbolist poets for the difficulty of their verse. He associated Mallarmé’s “flood of incoherent words” with a propensity for mystical, medieval, neo-Catholic thought—the result of contact with the English Pre-Raphaelites.33
Mallarmé was not a practicing Catholic in the traditional mode of Paul Claudel or Paul Valéry, or in the extreme mode of the novelist Léon Bloy, who was convinced that the Virgin had actually appeared to two children at La Salette, near Grenoble, in 1846, and that the end-time was near. And Mallarmé did not adopt the perverse Catholicism of, say, Joris-Karl Huysmans, who equated decadence with holiness and finished his life in a monastery, or of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, who considered the French Revolution a work of the Devil against God. Nor did he practice the satanic Catholicism of Charles Baudelaire, who wrote blasphemous inversions of the mass. In fact, Mallarmé explicity addressed only once the question of the Catholic mass, in an essay entitled “Catholicism”: “Our communion or sharing of one with all and of all with one, thus, abstracted from the barbaric feast designated by the sacrament—in the consecration of the Host, nevertheless, affirms itself the prototype of ceremonials—despite its uniqueness—within an artistic tradition: the Mass.”34
Mallarmé did not seek to bring back the power of the Eucharist to radically secular Third Republic France. Rather, he looked to the religiously gripping effects of Tuesdays on the rue de Rome to reverse the decline of religion and the rise of capitalism and rational science, which, since the end of the Middle Ages, had reduced the mystery and the meaning of everyday life, or of just being alive. Without recourse to Baudelaire’s “artifical paradises,” and escape into opium and hashish, or Rimbaud’s “unleashing of all the senses,” a self-induced synesthetic excess, or Verlaine’s addiction to alcohol and absinthe, Mallarmé found yearly and weekly rituals a way of reviving the intensity of belonging and purpose that religion once provided. He brought to all he did or said some of the meaningful mystery and communal force of the mass. Through poetry, but also through living wisely, he sought to enchant the universe that so many of his contemporaries found joyless and devoid of sense.
Mallarmé’s annual migration between Paris and Valvins and his weekly gatherings on the rue de Rome were punctuated by daily meetings with
Édouard Manet, whom he had first met at the salon of Nina Gaillard. Weekdays, on his way home from school, he would make a slight detour to Manet’s studio on the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. There he encountered other painters, such as Edgar Dégas, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot, who was married to Édouard’s brother Eugène. There, too, the poet first ran into the woman who would become his lifelong confidante and his muse, Méry Laurent.
Daughter of a laundress from Nancy, married at the age of fifteen, and divorced within months, Méry Laurent had moved to Paris to try her fortunes as an actress. According to Antonin Proust, she visited Manet’s studio, which had been rearranged as an exhibition gallery after the jury of the official Salon of 1876 had refused to include his paintings The Artist and The Laundry in that year’s offerings. The forty-four-year-old Manet, standing in an adjoining room, overheard Méry, in front of The Laundry, exclaim, “That’s very good, this one!” In and of itself, the exclamation was not remarkable, but Manet, taking it as portentous revenge against the Salon jury from the mouth of a seductive woman, befriended Méry Laurent, who modeled for at least four portraits and may, for a time, also have been the painter’s mistress.
More famously, Méry Laurent was, over a period of decades, the mistress of Napoleon III’s American dentist, Thomas Evans, whom she first met in the course of having a tooth fixed. The dashing Dr. Evans was one of the pioneers in the use of the amalgamated fillings and of nitrous oxide in his lucrative dental practice on the rue de l’Opéra. In the years following his arrival in Paris in 1847, Evans, who was fluent in French, worked on the teeth of many European heads of state, and it is thought that the intimacy of the dental office, where he found himself alone with patients whose open mouths elsewhere might change the map of Europe, made Evans an unofficial ambassador between France and its neighbors.
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