In the summer of 1864, the emperor sent Evans as his emissary to Abraham Lincoln to assess the chances of the Union’s winning the Civil War. He returned from Washington and from General Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters near Richmond with firsthand knowledge of surgical field hospitals, one of which he reconstructed at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867. There, both German and French military planners observed the new technology. It was put to good use in the Franco-Prussian War, in which Evans, after the French defeat at Sedan, played a minor but crucial role. On the night of September 5, 1870, with Napoleon III the prisoner of Wilhelm I, the accommodating dentist smuggled Empress Eugénie out of Paris in his carriage amid angry crowds declaring the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic. They eventually reached Deauville, where “the Doctor” chatted up an English “yachtsman,” who carried Eugénie to England, where she was eventually reunited with Napoleon III in exile at Chislehurst. In addition to his editorship of the American Register, Evans published books in French and in English based on his experiences abroad: History and Description of an Ambulance Wagon, Constructed in Accordance with Plans Furnished by the Author (1865), History of the American Ambulance Established During the Siege of 1870–1871 (1873), and, posthumously, a fascinating memoir of Napoleon III and Eugénie.
While living in Paris, Thomas Evans became enormously wealthy. His fortune came neither from his dental practice nor from sale of “Dr. Evans’s celebrated dental preparation, in powder, paste, or elixir form,” but from advanced knowledge—the emperor’s open mouth?—of Baron Haussmann’s plans for the urban renewal of Paris, and smart investment in real estate. At the time of his death in 1897, Evans was worth 25 million francs (by contrast, Mallarmé’s retirement pension brought in only 5,000 francs per annum). A native of Philadelphia, the wealthy dentist left his fortune to found the Thomas Evans Museum and Dental Institute, which eventually became the Dental School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also made a special provision that 1 million francs be set aside to erect a monument in his honor. Julie Manet recorded in her journal that Auguste Renoir, upon hearing of Evan’s bequest, asked, “Of what could such a monument consist? Dentists’ offices covered with rhinoceros teeth?”35
While he was alive, Thomas Evans was extremely generous to his patient turned mistress, and she was openly generous to Mallarmé. On at least two occasions, the three vacationed together at the spa of Royat. This must have been a merry threesome. There is evidence that Evans was not particularly faithful to Méry Laurent, and she claimed that she preferred to deceive him rather than to leave him. Laurent entertained Mallarmé and friends in her Paris residence, Villa des Talus, on the boulevard Lannes. The poet and his muse dined companionably in restaurants, attended concerts together, and exchanged gifts on annual and special occasions. When Mallarmé was not in Paris, they wrote to each other almost every day. In the famous picture of Mallarmé taken by Nadar in 1896, he was wearing a Scottish cashmere shawl that Méry Laurent sent him.
Leo Tolstoy, who claimed not to be able to understand Mallarmé’s verse, maintained in War and Peace that Napoleon I lost the Russian campaign of 1812 because his butler brought him the wrong pair of boots, and the emperor caught cold before the Battle of Borodino. A similar law of unintended consequences might be applied to Mallarmé, who, despite his exquisite taste for luxury goods and his appetite for fine foods, participated in whatever few of the expensive pleasures of the Belle Époque he did because Napoleon III had bad teeth.
Mallarmé and the painter Henri Gervex chez Méry Laurent.
Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms ING 32.
Relations between Méry Laurent and Mallarmé were those of an intimate friendship that may at one time have been amorous, though the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans claimed that Laurent once confided to him over dinner, “and between two cigarettes,” that Mallarmé had made advances, but that she had never slept with him for reasons of personal hygiene. “She spoke of his moth-eaten flannel shirts and collars. He slept once in a room at her house, the sheets were black. The housekeeper raised her arms in despair.”36 Nonetheless, the wealthy courtesan and the impecunious poet grew closer after tragedy struck the Mallarmés in the fall of 1879. Méry Laurent would then offer the kind of joyous affirmation of life and intellectual sustenance that inherently stern Marie, who rarely left home after that diffucult time, was unable to provide.
Having left for London and the International Exposition of 1871 shortly after Anatole was born, Stéphane had not been fully aware of how sickly his son was as an infant. By the time he was two months old, Anatole’s respiratory difficulties had reached a crisis, and Marie wrote, “My Stéphane, we are awaiting his last moment at any time.”37 But the infant did not die. He recovered as mysteriously as he had hovered near death, and was to his parents all the more precious for having nearly disappeared.
In the spring of 1879, however, just as the Mallarmés were preparing to travel to Valvins, Anatole seemed pale, listless, and to suffer rheumatic pain in his joints. Marie decided to stay in Paris with him, while Stéphane and Geneviève boarded the train for Fontainebleau. The specter of rheumatic fever, which had been fatal in the case of his sister, and probably his mother as well, must have filled the poet with apprehension. Marie assured him that Tole, as the boy had come to be known, was cheerful but did not seem to be getting any better. The poet returned to the rue de Rome to supervise the medical visits and to seek freelance editorial work to pay the doctors’ bills. A diagnosis of rheumatoid inflammation of the joints would require a period of long recovery. Little by little, Anatole’s condition grew worse. Swelling of the face and stomach was accompanied by nausea, rapid heartbeat, and a persistent dry cough, attributed, finally, to a pericardial infection. Mallarmé began to correspond with his old friend Henri Cazalis, who had become an eminent physician near Grenoble. Cazalis arranged for a consultation with one of France’s foremost cardiologists, a member of the Academy of Medicine, who confirmed the diagnosis of endocardia.
Against the advice of the doctors, the Mallarmés decided that the fresh air of the country would do Anatole good, so they left together for the country, where the local doctor was no more encouraging than the Parisian specialist. The only bright spot was the arrival at Valvins of an exotic bird in a Japanese cage, the gift of poet and sometimes Mardist Robert de Montesquiou. One of the great dandyish eccentrics of the Belle Époque, Montesquiou had become attached to Anatole and had visited the rue de Rome to play with the sick child in Stéphane’s absence.
The Mallarmés took the suffering child for rides in the little donkey cart along the banks of the Seine and tried to amuse him as best they could. Meanwhile, the cough and joint pain and swelling in the stomach persisted. At the end of September, the family returned to Paris, where a lancing of Anatole’s swollen stomach attested to the seriousness of his condition. Mallarmé found himself in a state of desperation. “Yes, I am quite outside of myself, like someone swept by a terrible and long wind,” he wrote. “No work for a long time now! I had no idea this terrible arrow had been launched at me from some indiscernible shadowy corner.”38
Surrounded by his mother and sister, eight-year-old Anatole died two days later. The poet had left the house briefly to mail a letter. “Just as I was taking a word to you to the post office,” he wrote Montesquiou, “our dear child left us softly, without knowing it. . . . The poor little adored child loved you well.”39 Together with a few close friends such as Catulle Mendès and Léopold Dauphin, the Mallarmés made the sad journey to the cemetery of Samoreau adjoining Valvins, where Anatole was laid to rest, along with many of the poet’s aspirations. “This charming and exquisite child has captivated me to the point where I associate him with my projects for the future and all my dreams,” he wrote to the English poet John Payne.40
The poet’s grief was such that he probably took little note of the France all around him, events like the resignation of president of the Third Republic,
Patrice de MacMahon, the military officer who had finally vanquished the Commune in 1871, and a general amnesty declared for the Communards in 1880. MacMahon was replaced by Jules Grévy, who would himself be forced to resign in 1887 as a result of the scandal surrounding his son-in-law’s illegal sales, often negotiated in houses of prostitution, of national decorations like the Legion of Honor. The poet would probably have been indifferent to the adoption of “La Marseillaise” as the national anthem, the declaration of July 14 as the national holiday of France, or the appearance on July 14, 1880, of the motto “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” on the pediments of all French national buildings.
For a long time after Anatole’s death, Mallarmé wrote little verse. He offered for publication several poems written earlier, including “This Virginal Long-Living Lovely Day” (“Le Vièrge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”) and “What Silk with Balm from Advancing Days” (“Quelle Soie aux baumes de temps”), and he managed to finish two works of nonfiction that he had begun before his son took sick. The poet had hoped that they would be commercial successes. The first, The Ancient Gods (Les Dieux antiques) was a translation and adaptation of the English anthropologist William Cox’s Manual of Mythology, which was itself based upon the linguistic writings of the philologist and orientalist Max Müller. A second significant writing project put forth a curious study of the English language, English Words (Les Mots anglais), which was related to the anthropological material. Both contributed conceptually to “One Toss of the Dice” in ways that will be clearer when we begin actually to analyze Mallarmé’s masterwork.
In the wake of Anatole’s death, Mallarmé pursued a mysterious project that, in consonance with The Ancient Gods and English Words, foreshadowed “One Toss of the Dice.” Tuesdays on the rue de Rome resumed in 1881 after a pause of almost two years, and rumor circulated among the Mardists that the master would, finally, strike the spark of The Book. In a volume on contemporary poets he published in 1884, Paul Verlaine alluded to Mallarmé’s “gigantic effort” in the making of a book. The following year, Verlaine requested biographical information for a volume he was editing on The Men of Today (Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui). Mallarmé made it clear that the poems and prose he had published thus far did not live up to the promise of the “magnificent book.” “I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all earthly satisfactions, as once upon a time, one burned the furniture and the rafters of the roof, to feed the furnace of the Grand Oeuvre.”41
The poet imagined that his work would surpass the traditional limits of verse. It would use words to exceed words—that is, to make the jump to things themselves, to change the world, in the catalytic way that has for so long been imagined in the West: in the formulas of alchemy, the Kabbalah, hieroglyphs, the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus or Nostradamus, the secret rites of Freemasonry, the mysterious cartography of Poe’s “The Goldbug,” the esoteric wisdom of Helena Blavatsky, or, in our own time, the physically and metaphysically altered world of Jorge Luis Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
So, like an alchemist working in the secret of his laboratory, Mallarmé began to write under cover a series of notes—sketches, really—in soft pencil, on loose pages, full of smudges, crossed-out words, and scattered lines; these came as close as anything thus far to The Book as it was conceived after the crisis of his midtwenties. Throughout, the notes, some of which are presented here, attest to the incredible pain that Anatole’s death had caused his parents:
child sprung from
the two of us—showing
us our ideal, the way
—ours! father
and mother who
sadly existing
survive him as the two extremes—
badly coupled in him
and sundered
—from whence his death—o-
bliterating this little child “self”42
Anatole’s death had upset the natural succession of the generations, which frames and surpasses the ritual cycles of the year or of the week.
child our
immortality
in fact made
of buried human
hopes—son—
entrusted to the woman
by the man de-
spairing after youth
to find the mystery
and taking a wife
—43
Mallarmé’s early awareness of the life cycle, no doubt inspired by the death of his sister when he was fifteen, can be seen in a poem written two years after Maria’s death, “Everything Passes!”: “Man flows, pushed along by the man who follows / like the wave!”44 It would come back in “One Toss of the Dice” as the boat captain’s “legacy amidst disappearance.”
Should he not complete The Book as he had imagined it, the poet had counted on his son to pursue it after his death. Now that Anatole was no longer there to carry on, the natural cycle has been interrupted. It has been reversed: The son will live on through the father:
no—nothing
to do with the great
deaths—etc.
—as long as we
go on living, he
lives—in us
—
it will only be after our
death that he will be dead
—and the bells
of the Dead will toll for
him45
Anatole’s life would be extended nearly a century later by the appearance of a monumental literary work, which took the shape of notes.Pour un tombeau d’ Anatole, published by the Éditions du Seuil in 1961, reveals many of the defining characteristics of Mallarmé’s masterwork. The loose pages, translated into English in 1983 by Paul Auster as A Tomb for Anatole, were filled with syntactical inversions, as if the reversal of ordinary word order might somehow undo the unnatural sequence of a father surviving his son. The notes lacked orientating markers of punctuation and line breaks, some words were separated in places other than at the end of a syllable, and some verses were separated by a series of hyphens or other diacritic indicators, such as + signs and “x’s,” horizontal ampersands, vertical brackets covering several lines, underlinings, and ellipsis marks. The notes for A Tomb for Anatole contained great compacted jumps that make for difficult understanding, even when the words are arranged in familiar patterns. Most of all, the notes displayed the early signs of a break with the uniform visual appearance of traditional poetry. They were laid out graphically with unjustified lines, empty spaces between lines and between words in a single verse, and rhythmic starts and stops that would be fully developed only in “One Toss of the Dice.”
A Tomb for Anatole, folio 46.
Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms 46022.
Five
“THERE HAS BEEN AN ATTACK ON VERSE!”
In the long dormant period of the early 1880s following Anatole’s death, Mallarmé was discouraged by a lack of progress in creating a total and transformative work of art rooted in poetry and not in music. At times, he seemed aware of the immensity of the undertaking and uncertain that he would ever write this work in its entirety. “I don’t know who could!” he wrote to Paul Verlaine. “I can nonetheless prove by the portions already done that the book exists, and that I was aware of what I could not accomplish.”1 Because of the mystery surrounding the project, it is hard to tell exactly how it happened, or when, but the contents and the physical appearance of the notes for Anatole did morph, over a period of years, into notes for The Book.
Like A Tomb for Anatole, the folios for The Book took the shape of disjointed writing, jottings, lines, dots, arrows, isolated arithmetic calculations (addition, multiplication, and division), and, again, great blank spaces like those of “One Toss of the Dice.” They were interspersed with computations of all kinds—of page numbers, of print layout, of the print runs of editions, of potential book sales, of the cost and potential earnings of this great poem of Humanity that “
would explain all earthly existence.”
Always tempted by stage performance, rivalrous with the overweening figure of Wagner, Mallarmé imagined The Book along dramatic lines as a “new theater,” a “future spectacle.” It was the poet’s deepest desire that literature would provide a theater, one whose performances would be the true modern religion, providing an “explanation of man, sufficient to our most beautiful dreams.”2 The specificity of his planning could have been a page taken from a Wagner score. He pictured, on the model of theatrical Tuesdays chez Mallarmé, how the performances of the Grand Oeuvre would take place, the quantity and pacing of sessions during which The Book would be read aloud, the number of attendees, their seating arrangement. The poet envisioned a series of readings or presentations. Each sitting would involve twenty-four participants, divided into three groups of eight, each participant reading a prescribed number of folios. Mallarmé’s own role in the performance was ambiguous. He sometimes referred to himself as a “simple reader,” the “first reader,” “me, the twenty-fifth,” or the “operator.”
The poet laid out a plan for the publication of two editions of The Book, one for an elite public, presumably the twenty-four readers plus the “operator,” the other for a general readership. Given that the whole would contain twenty volumes, he planned to print 24,000 copies, for a total sale of some 480,000 books, an enormous printing by the standards of late-nineteenth-century France. In the kabbalistic calculation of the relationship between print runs and money, the final folio of Mallarmé’s notes for The Book was key:
One Toss of the Dice Page 12