One Toss of the Dice

by R. Howard Bloch

  It would be some time before Mallarmé’s announced assault on verse would come to fruition. In the meantime, much of the poet’s time was taken up tending to his day job, taking on freelance assignments to supplement his income, and in helping others.

  Shortly after his return from England to France, the poet began to play a material role in the protracted legal battle between Whistler and Lord William Eden (father of the future prime minister Anthony Eden). The painter had agreed, upon the recommendation of novelist George Moore, to paint a small portrait of Lady Eden for a fee of between 100 and 150 guineas. Lady Eden began sitting for the portrait in early February 1894. On Valentine’s Day, Lord Eden showed up at Whistler’s door, and informed him he was leaving for India on a hunting trip. He handed the painter a sealed envelope with a check for 100 guineas and a message: “Herewith your valentine. . . . The picture will always be of inestimable value to me, and will be handed down as an heirloom as long as heirlooms last! I will always remember with pleasure the time during which it was painted. My thanks.”22 The painter responded with irony: “My Dear Sir William—I have your valentine. You really are magnificent—and have scored all around.” Of course, he also cashed Sir Eden’s check, keeping the painting. He not only kept it but also exhibited it in the annual Salon on the Champs de Mars with the title Portrait of Lady Eden: Brown and Gold.

  Back from his hunting trip, Lord Eden demanded delivery of the painting. When Whistler refused, he sued him in court for the painting, return of the check, and one thousand francs damages in recompense for the time spent in Paris while Whistler worked on the portrait of his wife. Whistler turned to Mallarmé, who again turned to his neighbor Maître Paul Beurdeley, who had expedited Villier’s deathbed marriage. The quite public trial was complicated by the fact that when Portrait of Lady Eden: Brown and Gold was brought into the courtroom, the face of Lady Eden had been effaced and another appeared in its place. Whistler explained that, since he had another lady’s portrait to do, he simply sat her down on the same canapé in front of the same golden curtain. She had a brown dress about the same color as the other, the same fur collar, the same muff, and assumed the same pose. In the place of Lady Eden, Portrait in Brown and Gold now depicted an American named Mrs Herbert Dudley Hale, “and the painting now belonged to my new model,” Whistler concluded.23

  On the day of the unveiling of the disputed portrait, Whistler had the “genial idea,” in his own phrase, to invite Mrs Hale to be present in court along with Lady Eden. The painting of Lady Eden/Mrs Hale, brought into the courtroom as evidence, was covered in glass. The lawyer for the other side, Maître Bureau, demanded that the glass be removed and that a portion of the face as well as of the dress be rubbed with a cloth. The not completely dry surface of the face was irrefutable proof of Whistler’s alteration of the prime piece of evidence. On the evening of March 11, 1895, between the concluding arguments and the verdict, Beurdeley, Mallarmé, and Whistler dined together.

  Whistler lost the first round in the court, which ordered him to deliver the portrait, return the check, and to pay the thousand francs in damages as well as court costs. When he appealed, Paul Beurdeley argued in favor of the inherent unfairness of Lord Eden’s keeping both the painting and the check. At one point in the proceedings, Beurdeley introduced into evidence a letter Whistler published in the Pall Mall Gazette: “I will read you a translation of his letter, made, not by a sworn translator, but by his intimate friend, the distinguished man of letters, Stéphane Mallarmé.”24 The letter, which was read to the appeals court, showed the fine hands of Whistler and Mallarmé, who compared the product of artistic endeavor to that of a cobbler. A shoemaker had every right to refuse delivery of a pair of boots to the client who had not paid the asking price for his work. On the defensive, Whistler claimed that he was merely being ironic, to which Maître Bureau unleashed irony of his own: “The translation I used at the first trial is said to have been very inaccurate. . . . I much regret, however, that this letter was not translated by M. Stéphane Mallarmé, like the other. What would have been the meaning of an ironical letter on this occasion?”

  The final verdict of the appeals court was that, inasmuch as the agreement between Whistler and Lord Eden was “in no sense a contract to sell, but merely an obligation to execute, so that the portrait had never ceased to be the artist’s property,” the painter had the right to retain his work. However, since Whistler altered only Lady Eden’s face and not the overall “harmony given to his composition,” his right was not absolute, and he “may not make any use of it, public or private.” He was also obliged to refund the hundred guineas with interest to Lord Eden along with the thousand francs damages. Whistler was ordered to pay the costs of the first trial, and Lord Eden those of the second.

  In a less protracted episode, Mallarmé came to the assistance of art critic and Mardist Félix Fénéon. Fénéon’s mother had asked the poet to intervene after her son, who worked in the War Office, was accused of involvement in the anarchist bombings of the mid-1890s, which traumatized not only Paris but the nation as a whole. Fénéon was arrested after a bomb went off at Foyot’s Restaurant on April 4, 1894, blinding the poet Laurent Tailhade in one eye. Tailhade’s injury was particularly poignant since he had declared, upon hearing the news of an explosion in the Chamber of Deputies in late 1893, “What do the victims matter, if the act is beautiful?” Symbolist poets, associated by some with verbal anarchy, were often thought to be allied with the anarchist movement in politics. And, so, Mallarmé, who believed deeply in the power of poetry to shape the mind and therefore the deeds of others, was interviewed by the popular newspaper Le Soir, where he famously quipped that for Fénéon “there was no better bomb than his articles, no more efficient arm than literature.”25 The notorious “trial of the thirty,” one of whom was Fénéon, was not lacking in irreverent repartee. Accused by the judge of having been spotted speaking to a known anarchist behind a lamppost, Fénéon asked the judge “which side of a lamppost was its behind?” Mallarmé testified that neither he nor any of the others attending Tuesday meetings in his apartment had ever heard Fénéon speak about anything other than art. The defendant was acquitted. Many years later, Félix Fénéon, in whose office dynamite capsules had been found, was discovered in fact to have been involved in the bombing at Foyot’s.

  Almost twenty years after Rimbaud left France, Mallarmé was approached by the painter Paterne Berrichon, a sometime vagabond and anarchist who had spent time in prison, for a letter-of-character reference to Rimbaud’s mother in support of his marriage to her daughter, the poet’s sister, Isabelle. “She is very strict, you know, Mme Rimbaud, frightfully severe, but I have told her everything about my past,” Berrichon confided. Mallarmé wrote to Mme Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Rimbaud, “Everything . . . bears witness in Paterne Berrichon to an inflexible desire to live according to established order.26 The marriage was concluded.

  Stéphane Mallarmé, one of the great abstract thinkers of the late nineteenth century, was clever, practical, and resourceful, the man to whom friends turned when in need. Mardist Henry Roujon recounted that one night, between two and three o’clock, a racket disturbed the poet’s peaceable dwelling. Mallarmé jumped out of bed, grabbed a candle, and, half-naked, went to the door to see who was there. It was a giant and affable Englishman, who explained in a few guttural phrases that he had seduced a woman of high social standing. The lady was now downstairs, in a carriage, beset by labor pains. Not knowing where to turn, the seducer thought that the poet, who was always so gracious, might help the two embarrassed lovers find a midwife favorable to clandestine births. Mallarmé, candle in hand, lowered his eyes and said, “I am all yours.”27

  Among the poet’s friends, Méry Laurent occupied pride of place. Mallarmé had put to use his considerable taste and knowledge of the Parisian purveyors of luxury goods, acquired first at the London exposition, then honed through his solo edition of The Latest Fashion, to help Méry Laurent furnish her Parisian home. Whether
it was a question of where to eat or where to shop, Mallarmé knew the best addresses in town. He wrote to Méry Laurent from school on May 17, 1893, to recommend that she visit the Grande Épicerie Anglaise on the avenue Victor-Hugo, where they serve “breakfasts.” He counseled her about what furnishings and decorations to buy, where, and for what price, and worried whether his choices would please Dr. Evans, who paid the bills. “Don’t let the two Saxon porcelain flowerpots at the antique dealer’s get away. . . . You can have them for 75 f., they are marvelous and are worth four times as much. Be careful, the dealer will talk them up.”28 Mallarmé influenced not only Méry Laurent’s choice of what to buy but how the knickknacks, which were such an integral part of the home decoration of the Belle Époque, were to be arranged. To make an interior unified in tone, he advised her to have the glass paneling of her little salon case covered by an upholsterer, on the rue des Martyrs, in an antique fabric, preferably Louis XIV or XV. He specified that she should “run along the edge of your shelves, in the long direction, a braid of old gold, to be had chez Madame Kahn. . . . This will be just right, and pretty.”29

  To those within his circle, Mallarmé was generous to a fault. Not only did he come to the aid of Whistler in his legal struggle against Lord Eden; of Villiers in his dying and of his widow and son after his death; of Félix Féneon in his defense against the terrorist charges against him; of Paterne Berrichon in his suit to marry Isabelle Rimbaud; of the anonymous Englishman in his quest for a discreet midwife; of Méry Laurent in her decoration of Les Talus; but the poet was almost always available to host literary banquets, to contribute to the erection of monuments, to compose verse tributes, and to edit memorial volumes to such worthy dead poets as Baudelaire, Banville, Villiers, and, eventually, Verlaine. All contributed to the deferral of the project of The Book.

  In the years of his growing reputation, Mallarmé continued to teach a full load at the lycée. His evenings and weekends were still filled with Tuesdays on the rue de Rome, Sunday afternoons at the Lamoureux concerts, and the events that he attended as a cultural reporter. The poet wrote regular reviews of musical and dance performances for Le Mercure de France, La Revue blanche, and London’s National Observer. He was especially taken by the American Loïe Fuller, whose whirling veil dances at the Moulin Rouge took Paris by storm in the early 1890s. He attended his first live Wagner opera, Die Walküre at the Paris Opera in May 1893, followed by Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande a week later. Mallarmé dined out several nights a week, with Méry Laurent, Berthe Morisot, and her American friend Mary Cassatt, Dégas, Renoir, or other of his widening circle of friends.

  Mallarmé’s literary production in this period was minimal. He received five hundred francs for rewriting Tales and Legends of Ancient India (Contes et légendes de l’Inde ancienne) of the historian and orientalist Charlotte Foucaux, who wrote under the pseudonym Mary Summer. The project was paid for by Dr. Edmond Fournier, Méry Laurent’s new lover, who thought the poet might improve the style of certain of these anthropological stories published in 1878. The poet worked assiduously on an anthology of his own works, Vers et prose, which contained verse written prior to 1893, prose poems, translations of several poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and the lecture on Villiers, as well as those delivered at Oxford and Cambridge. The frontispiece of Vers et Prose displayed Whistler’s lithographic portrait of the poet.

  Distracted by a whirlwind of social activity and of lesser literary production, reviews of the work of others and the painstaking edition of his own work, Mallarmé sensed in the early 1890s that time was running out for completing the Grand Oeuvre. He undertook to remove the most obvious impediment to realizing his dream—his day job teaching English. In late 1892, he wrote to the poet and journalist Jules Boissière, who had married one of Geneviève’s childhood friends from Avignon, “A new year is beginning, my last, I think, of teaching: I have so much to do and, though aged, have not really given enough to my dream, except a gesture here and there, to those willing to listen.”30 So, the poet submitted a request for a reduced teaching load, and, in the spring of 1893, he filed for early retirement with a well-fashioned letter from his doctor attesting to neurasthenia, heart trouble, dyspepsia, and chronic insomnia.

  Minister of Public Education Raymond Poincaré, a cousin of the celebrated mathematician Henri Poincaré, granted the poet’s petition, effective the beginning of the fall semester. He would receive a supplementary grant from the state, in what amounted to a subsidy for artists, of 1,200 francs a year, which meant that early retirement carried no financial penalty. Mallarmé, in his own phrase, was now finally free to “launch a literary career.” On November 8, 1893, he wrote to Méry Laurent:

  Bonsoir, petit paon; ça y est

  Mr Mallarmé

  rentier31

  Good evening, little peacock, all is OK

  Mr Mallarmé

  rentier

  The freedom to write might have seemed exhilarating, yet Mallarmé also knew that there would be no more deferrals of this last chance to reach the goal he had set for himself almost three decades earlier. “I don’t live in Paris, but in a room,” he wrote in May 1894, “it could be in London, San Francisco, or China. . . . Writing a book today is to write one’s last will and testament.”32

  As the poet contemplated retirement, the Panama Canal scandal swirled all around him. Some eight hundred thousand French men and women had invested in stock in the Panama Canal Company, which went bankrupt in 1889, and many lost their life’s savings. Beginning in 1892, however, the news began to emerge that numerous ministers (including Mardist Georges Clemenceau), members of the Chamber of Deputies, and financial middlemen took bribes from the head of the building project, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to allocate government funds to aid the failing French venture as well as to hide its true financial condition. In the trial that unfolded while Mallarmé negotiated his retirement, Lesseps, his son Charles, engineer Gustave Eiffel, and Baron Jacques Reinach, who had negotiated the bribes, received long jail sentences, which were later annulled. Some historians consider the Panama Canal crisis a source of the social unrest that motivated the anarchist bombers, including Félix Féneon, of the early 1890s. Still others, among them Hannah Arendt, see in the Panama scandal an early phase of the Dreyfus affair, since the chief financial advisors of the project, Jacques Reinach and Cornelius Herz, were both Jews of German origin. Reinach fled to England, where he committed suicide in November 1892. In one of the great ironies of history, his cousin the journalist and politician Joseph Reinach would be one of the earliest and most ardent defenders of Captain Alfred Dreyfus immediately after his false conviction in December 1894.

  Throughout his poetic career, Mallarmé had sought to reclaim for poetry what poetry had lost to music, especially to Wagner’s seductive integration of music, visual spectacle, and words. Augusta Holmès’s Triumphal Ode had gone as far as possible in the direction of the Wagnerian epic spectacle. Beginning around the time of the poet’s retirement, however, a new specter loomed on the horizon, one that threatened to surpass even Wagner, and which was arguably closer to The Book in its potential to “alter the nature of the human community” than the operatic Gesamtkunstwerk.

  Mallarmé, who was a contributor to and a daily reader of Le Figaro, was no doubt aware of an article by his friend Octave Uzanne that appeared on May 8, 1893. On the first page, Uzanne recounted his recent visit to Thomas Edison’s workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where the inventor, “with the air of an old baby,” revealed his latest invention, the kinetograph. “The kinetograph will be for the eye what the phonograph is for the ear. In two years, when it is perfected, Talma, Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt . . . all will continue to live.” Mallarmé was also sensitized to Edison through Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel Tomorrow’s Eve (L’Ève future), in which the wizard of Menlo Park created an artificial woman—­Halady—to replace his friend Lord Ewald’s difficult mistress, Alicia. In Villiers’s account, the synthetic human being, which s
peaks and can be seen, was a prophetic example of what Edison would reveal to Octave Uzanne seven years later as an imminent possibility: “Thanks to this new system, one will see an opera, a play, or a person at the same time as one hears it.”

  Edison, whose outsized ego was more like Wagner’s than Mallarmé’s and whose gift for self-promotion was rivaled only by that of P. T. Barnum, made his new machine available to the public in New York, and by 1894, at least seven kinetoscopes, as the device was now known, were up and running in Paris as well. Antoine Lumière, the photographer father of two inventors, who had made a fortune in the 1880s from the production of fast photographic film, purchased one of the new machines, and brought it back to Lyon. There, Antoine and his sons, Auguste and Louis, disassembled it in order to study the mechanism for making a series of still images appear to move. The kinetoscope was not all they imagined it could be. Only one person at a time could peep into Edison’s viewing apparatus, the images seen through the binocularlike device were disappointingly small, and, while it was true that the figures in the kinetoscope did move, their movement still retained the jerky quality of an animated flip-book.

  Inventors working on cinematic devices knew that the key to smoothing out movements captured in successive individual images lay in the phenomenon of retinal retention. The physiologist A.-M. Bloch noted in 1887 that we have no consciousness of the present moment. By the time we think we know the present, or say “I see lightning, or I hear a sound,” the sight or sound has already passed. However, if two strong sensations follow each other in rapid succession, “they melt into a single one, and appear synchronous.”33 For two sounds, the interval is 1/82 of a second; for two flashes of light, 1/25 of a second; and for two taps of fingers on the hand, 1/42 of a second. When it came to the viewing of moving images, the emission of light through photographic film had to be shuttered such that it would not hit the individual image as it was being drawn into place, or as it was being withdrawn to allow the positioning of the next image in the sequence. The situating and shuttering of individual images must occur, furthermore, some fifteen times a second in order that the process of sequential projections does not become apparent, and that the movement of things and people, photographed in rapid succession, appears, when projected upon the screen, in seamless array. This mechanical problem had eluded all the inventors working on projected moving images until late one night in the fall or winter of 1894.