The following reminiscence appears in Ernest Raynaud’s La Mêlée symboliste: Portraits et souvenirs, Volume II (1890-1900), 1920.
An Evening at Paul Verlaine’s
Back in 1885, Paul Verlaine was living with his mother in a squalid furnished lodging-house in the rue Moreau, deep in the working-class quarter on the fringes of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The street opened beneath the arches of the Vincennes railway—that grim expanse of brickwork whose sinister shadow unfurled endlessly across the district. The hotel(1) festered at the back of a dank courtyard where passing trains belched forth hurricanes of soot, cinders and smoke. The yard lay cluttered with cast-off clothing, scrap metal, and a barricade of handcarts where neighbourhood children ran wild, to the torment of every ear within range. From dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, this wretched dead-end rang with ceaseless footfall, a tempest of noise and outcry, singing, shouting, barking, laughter and quarrels—all the hullabaloo and uproar of a workers’ quarter in its pitiful human ferment.
Madame Verlaine mother lodged on the first floor. Verlaine, whose bad leg forbade him the stairs, occupied a ground-floor room. This chamber drew its air and light solely through a barred window giving onto the courtyard, and commanded no vista save the nightmare of tall, naked walls, sightless and daubed in ochre and brown. The corner bed sported threadbare calico curtains, black scattered with red flowers. Everything else matched: faded wallpaper, chipped tiles, a walnut chest bearing the remnants of a washbasin; one rickety, stained table and four decrepit chairs completed the furnishings. The walls displayed prints and lithographs: a portrait of the poet as a child; another of his mother in flounced skirts, in the full bloom of her thirties; a Christ painted by Germain Nouveau after the original in Saint-Géry church at Arras; and in the alcove, an old picture salvaged from former affluence—a Greuze(2) maiden pressing a turtle-dove to her naked breast. Yet neither these embellishments nor the potted flowers at the window could disguise the lodging’s destitution.
Verlaine, confined to bed, read voraciously—but borrowed books only, his library having been scattered to misfortune’s four winds. His entire personal holdings consisted of a few recent volumes of verse, presents from their authors, which a small ink-blackened wooden shelf amply contained. From his old library, Verlaine had preserved only an original edition of Corbière’s Amours jaunes, Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer, and Calderón’s works. He was besotted with this poet—the mere mention of whose name would launch him into raptures.
Verlaine’s mother was a septuagenarian still robust, unpretentious and warm-hearted, though age and setbacks had somewhat addled her wits. Her portrait at thirty proved she had been a beauty, worthy of Germain Nouveau’s apostrophe:
Femme de militaire et mère de poète.
Il vous restait un bruit de bataille et de vers.
Quelque chose de noble et de fier dans la tête.
[Soldier’s wife and poet’s mother,
There lingered in you an echo of battles and verses,
Something noble and proud about the head.]
She doted on her son and kept careful watch over his associations. Verlaine had warned me before my first visit: “She’s wary of strangers. I’ll introduce you as a ministry clerk. Not a word about literature in her presence!” So it was arranged. The ruse succeeded. My title of ministry clerk won me instant favour with Madame Verlaine mother, and by way of initiation, the dear woman promptly bade me close my eyes and open my mouth, whereupon she slipped in a handful of rock candy with impish delight. Age had given her this fancy. It was her way of welcoming visitors she approved of.
Their circumstances were hardly enviable. They had just arrived from Juniville, an Ardennes village where the remnants of their fortune had vanished in an ill-fated farming venture. The mother had managed to rescue from the wreckage a bundle of bonds, which she kept hidden from her son. The income scarcely reached 900 francs. On this they had to survive. Verlaine had resolved to live by his pen. Though the newspapers were beginning to take notice of him, his author’s rights brought in nothing. Worse, he had just plunged rather deeply into debt by publishing Jadis et Naguère at his own expense. They were destitute. They bore it bravely, but what temptation to drink for Verlaine under such a crushing load of worries! Mercifully, his mother stood guard, barricading her door against spirits and unwholesome influences.
This proved, despite illness and hardship, a fruitful period in the poet’s life. He laboured feverishly, writing Amour, Parallèlement, and Mémoires d’un veuf. Friends came to visit, gathering round his bedside. One might encounter Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmond Lepelletier. The younger generation was finding its way to his retreat. I brought Francis Vielé-Griffin, whom I had collected from his smart studio in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and who, unaccustomed to such spectacles of penury, was painfully affected. “We must get Verlaine out of here,” he confided as we left. My thoughts exactly—but where to find the necessary means? Maurice Barrès would soon lend a hand.
I brought Adrien Remacle, Édouard Dubus, and others besides. All were charmed by Verlaine’s open manner, his good humour, and a buoyancy that, given the circumstances and such dismal surroundings, truly deserved the name of heroism. I never once heard Verlaine complain or play for sympathy. He might rail against his lot, but only in brief outbursts, quickly checked. In his company one spent golden hours in an atmosphere heated by enthusiasm, faith, and elevated discourse. A delightful talker, he never held forth. He didn’t pursue refinements like Stéphane Mallarmé. He conversed freely, in the Socratic vein. No venom, no backbiting. Sound, steady judgement. With his familiars he affected the Ardennes patois, rich and flavoursome. His talk sparkled with racy expressions culled from rural or suburban slang, yet never strayed beyond the bounds of propriety. How I loved my visits to him!
One encounter in particular remains etched in memory. It was evening. Verlaine, propped in bed, was reading to me by lamplight—the lamp set on the bedside table—passages from a recently received book of poems that had made a strong impression: René Ghil’s Légendes d’âmes et de sangs. Just as he was introducing me to this work’s innovations, the author himself appeared, responding to a cordial invitation.
René Ghil was then twenty-three. He radiated vigour and inspired immediate sympathy. His clipped speech, economical gestures, olive complexion, and thick black hair brushed upright gave no immediate hint of his Flemish ancestry. Only in his verses, feverish and highly coloured, did the blonde and rosy sensuality of Flanders declare itself, “long mingled with ardent Castilles”. Ghil’s poems took their subjects from news items. They were realistic tableaux transfigured by lyrical feeling and expression. The author proclaimed himself a disciple of Balzac and Zola. He claimed to have turned from fashionable poets because he couldn’t detect in them “the smell of the wind that passes”. This confession, which many newcomers might have echoed, bears remembering. It highlights the mediocrity of Parnassian art and shows how all the aesthetic vitality of the moment, all innovation, all poetry had sought refuge in prose.
Following his masters, René Ghil drew inspiration from the crowd, haunting streets, markets, churches, railway stations, pausing pensively to watch a wedding or funeral cortège pass. For him, each poem must be a novel, “the novel of an hour, a minute, a psychological and physiological moment, complete with milieu, the frame of the Fact, a Fact that signifies something”. In capturing that hour, minute, or moment, he strove to “convey the impression of milieu upon body, of body upon soul, for he couldn’t conceive the body without its milieu, the soul without its body—that is, the idea without the sensation”. As for language, he dreamed of “the word that impresses rather than the word that merely narrates”. He had forged a distinctive style bound to alienate the common reader—a language addressing every sense, bristling with onomatopoeia and typographical tricks, where adverbs sporting unexpected capitals would career wildly through sentences, where parenthetical asides recurred with the insistence of a leitmotif; a musical, orchestrated language.
Among the collection’s finest achievements was La Terre qu’on laisse [The Land One Leaves], evoking a country lad bound for the city who, deaf to his native soil’s entreaties, marched resolutely station-ward with military stride. “Off he goes,” the poet sighed, “off he goes…”
Tandis que, lueur vague au noir des peupliers,
Très morne a lui la gare et, qu’au loin, singuliers.
Vont des appels pressés de quelque Télégramme,
Triangle soûl qui sonne au noir des impliés.
Derrière, à l’horizon dérougi qui s’aveugle.
Mi-levée et, Travail! sa grossesse de grains,
Plissée à pleine peau par les sillons sanguins,
La Terre désaimée, ainsi qu’un Taureau meugle.
Immense de douleur se hausse sur les reins!…
Il s’en va. Le noir vit et dans le gaulis erre.
Si rempli de douleurs que nul ne le rêva,
Un inouï soupir; et d’une voix qu’on n’a
Que lorsqu’on va mourir, quelqu’un se désespère:
Un de plus, un de plus, un de plus qui s’en va!.,.»
[Whilst, vague gleam in the poplars’ black,
Most mournful to him the station, and afar, strange,
Press urgent calls of some Telegram,
Drunken triangle ringing in the implicated dark.
Behind, on the reddening horizon going blind,
Half-risen and, Work! her pregnancy of grain,
Creased to the full skin by the blood-red furrows,
The Earth unloved, like a Bull bellows,
Immense with pain rearing on her loins!…
Off he goes. The dark lives and wanders in the copse.
So filled with sorrows none ever dreamed,
An unheard-of sigh; and with a voice one has
Only when about to die, someone despairs:
“One more, one more, one more going away!…”]
You had to hear René Ghil declaim this poem, his voice strangled with passion, to grasp the full emotive force that words could wield.
Tomorrow, René Ghil would repudiate this volume. He already foreshadowed his evolution in the preface, where he sketched out an ambitious philosophical system, envisioning humanity portrayed in vast frescoes from primordial times to the future. He would soon embark on a vertiginous epic, L’Évolution de l’être humain, a Herculean labour to which he has devoted himself ever since, with lengthy fragments appearing in volumes at irregular intervals. Yet I wonder whether, in his determination to trespass on music’s domain, René Ghil hasn’t lost his way. Still, with talent so robust, a voice so genuine, one must be circumspect in one’s reservations. What remains beyond dispute is that the author of Traité du verbe knows the resources of vocabulary better than anyone, that his integrity is unimpeachable, and that if he sometimes stumbles in harness, it’s through neither incompetence nor weakness. René Ghil endures as one of the Symbolist movement’s most intriguing figures. His dogged perseverance and fearless disinterestedness command respect at the very least…
We were still reeling from the nervous jolt, the inner tremor that fine poetry induces, when the door opened tentatively, silhouetting against the shadows a feverish, uneasy figure. A man of middling height with a long fringe of black beard, wearing blue serge, who hesitated on seeing us and made to retreat, whispering inaudibly to an unseen companion. He was soon propelled forward by a small, clean-shaven dynamo who burst in behind him crying: “No, no, I won’t leave. I came to see Verlaine. I must see him!” Continuing to hustle his predecessor, he crossed the threshold in turn, slammed the door to prevent escape, rushed to Verlaine’s bed, pumped his hands effusively, and with the triumph of a conqueror planting his standard on a hard-won citadel, flung his name aloft: “Louis Le Cardonnel!” He explained breathlessly: “Can you credit it? For weeks I’ve been badgering Nouveau to bring me here, and now Nouveau wants to bolt because he finds people here and crowds terrify him—but anyone one meets at Verlaine’s must be a friend!” Wheeling towards us: “I’m certain these gentlemen are poets!” Verlaine performed introductions. “There, you see!” crowed Le Cardonnel, fixing Nouveau with his gaze. “No strangers here. We’re all family. Let’s talk!”
This swashbuckling entrance raised smiles all round. A current of sympathy flowed. I knew Le Cardonnel by reputation—his verses in Le Chat Noir had attracted considerable notice. I knew his escort better still, having read poems of his in Charles Cros’s Revue du Monde Nouveau. This poet, an old comrade of Verlaine and Rimbaud, enjoyed celebrity in literary circles. I had heard confidences about him from Verlaine himself and Ernest Delahaye. I knew he suffered from acute neurasthenia. His constrained demeanour distressed more than surprised me. He crumpled onto a chair and remained frozen in truculent silence. But Le Cardonnel was oblivious. He exulted in his wish fulfilled at last. Verlaine, meeting him for the first time, was eager to hear his verses. Le Cardonnel needed no urging and treated us to several poems already displaying his mastery. Among them, this piece of startling freshness and intensity, its language fluid, edgeless, with contours as vague as dream-mist:
VILLE MORTE
Lentement, sourdement, des vêpres sonnent
Dans la grand ‘paix de cette vague ville;
Des arbres gris sur la place frissonnent.
Comme inquiets de ces vêpres qui sonnent.
Inquiétante est cette heure tranquille.
Un idiot qui va, revient et glousse.
Content, car les enfants sont à l’école;
A sa fenêtre une vieille qui tousse.
Elle fait des gestes, à moitié folle,
A l’idiot qui va, revient et glousse.
Murs décrépits, lumière décrépite
Que ce novembre épand sur cette place:
Sur un balcon, du linge froid palpite.
Pâle, dans la lumière décrépite.
Et puis le son des cloches qui se lasse…
Tout à coup, plus de cloches, plus de vieille.
Plus de pauvre idiot, vaguement singe.
Et l’on dirait que la ville sommeille.
Plus d’idiot, de cloches, ni de vieille:..
Seul, maintenant, le blanc glacé du linge.
DEAD CITY
[Slowly, dully, vespers sound
In the great peace of this vague town;
Grey trees upon the square are trembling,
As if made anxious by these vespers sounding,
Disquieting this tranquil hour.
An idiot who goes, returns and clucks,
Content, for children are at school;
At her window an old woman coughing,
Making gestures, half a fool,
At the idiot who goes, returns and clucks.
Walls decrepit, light decrepit
That November sheds upon this square:
On a balcony, cold linen flutters,
Pallid in the light decrepit,
And then the sound of bells grows weary…
Sudden—no more bells, no more old woman,
No more wretched idiot, vaguely ape,
And you’d say the city slumbers.
No idiot, no bells, no old woman:
Alone remains the linen’s glacial shape.]
Grogs arrived. Their steam and the ambient charm eventually coaxed Nouveau from his shell. Yielding to Verlaine’s persistent entreaties, he agreed to recite. He was then composing Valentines, a suite of gallant pieces, madrigals in the eighteenth-century manner but executed with ravishing freedom and delicacy of touch. What a loss to French letters that this poet’s work should be largely destroyed! Nouveau would soon collapse into mystical delirium. He would fancy himself Saint Labre, abase himself to expiate his sins by begging on country roads, in villages, beneath church porches. He would burn his manuscripts, be seized by a mania to shed his identity, erase himself from the living, obliterate even his name’s memory. But let’s not dwell on the sombre future. Let’s surrender to the present’s intoxication. The hour proffers a chalice of honey. Let’s savour it like philosophers who understand the worth of things and their fragility.
The modest festivities were at their height when a final visitor materialised. This was Forain—not the caustic, disillusioned Forain later revealed, but a youthful Forain, bright, brisk, debonair, seemingly delighted with existence. You would have thought some benevolent spirit had summoned him from the lofty Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where he resided, to crown our revelry. This sharp-witted native of Reims regaled us with his quicksilver humour, his coruscating talk peppered with witticisms, paradoxes and barbed observations. He recounted his delights as artist and observer, his adventures as boulevardier(3) and night prowler. Paris enthralled him. “What a miraculous city!” he exclaimed. “So suggestive, teeming with mysteries and astounding spectacles! I often find myself, at ungodly hours, surveying it from my balcony. Not a soul in the streets, which resemble corridors in burial vaults. Everywhere a vast, hushed, illuminated expanse. Ranks of street lamps blaze away along deserted avenues, encircling the Arc de Triomphe like a colossal black catafalque. The city might then declare, with Stéphane Mallarmé’s Hérodiade:
Oui! c’est pour moi, pour moi, que je fleuris, déserte.
[Yes! it is for me, for me, that I bloom, deserted.]
These strings of fire seem arranged for some phantom gala. You expect to see burst forth a stupendous cavalcade, a glittering dream procession. Sometimes the fevered imagination, as in Zedlitz’s ballad, fancies it beholds beneath invisible, billowing standards a riotous parade of spectres.”
Forain was then executing a ceiling commissioned by some Highness or other. I had seen the sketch in his studio—a nude Diana suspended in space, all fluidity and vapour in the Fantin-Latour mode. Ah, Forain’s studio! A bathtub held centre stage, and entering eyes were dazzled by a triple rank of patent boots, flawlessly aligned like troops on parade. Here was that passion for precision and correctness that had so vexed Alexandre Dumas père in his son, prompting him to declare: “You’re too orderly—you’ll never be anything but a bourgeois!” Proof that the finest minds can err. The great novelist had proved a false prophet. Forain’s example furnished a second refutation. The artist cultivated dandyish airs. He rode daily in the Bois. Gone were the days when he had shared Rimbaud’s vagrant misery, when each nightfall meant hunting for shelter. Forain now lived in splendour. His anecdotes initiated us into the glories of high society, threw open exclusive haunts—the Opera’s wings, Madame Caron’s(4) box “with her regal bearing”, the ballet foyer, the Armenonville pavilion(5) — conjured up Parisian revelry: sensational premieres, private views, race meetings, dinners, balls, cotillions(6). His discourse glittered with gold leaf and brilliant flashes, the rattle of carriages and costly things. He summoned into Verlaine’s mean quarters radiant visions of society women, equestriennes, ballerinas in gauze tutus mingling with men in evening dress. A festive hum seemed to accompany him, as if gypsy violins played in his wake. Certain of his remarks exploded like champagne corks. He produced Levantine cigarettes from an exquisite case, gift of the Duke of M… and bearing his arms, then proposed whisking us all off to supper at some boulevard establishment. What became of this plan for my companions I cannot say, but I found myself regretfully obliged to decline, given the late hour—my work demanded I rise at dawn, and my sole concern was catching the last omnibus home to my distant quarters.
Thus Verlaine’s lodgings, however bereft of comfort, provided the setting for refined discourse. But his mother’s death some months later threw everything into disarray. Verlaine, stripped of her protective presence, fell prey once more to his demons. His leg had improved. He could rise, shuffle along supporting himself against walls. His room lay just across a corridor from the taproom. He succumbed to the temptation of lingering there. The packet of bonds discovered in his mother’s room had been handed to him—a windfall of several thousand francs. His enjoyment proved brief. Days after the funeral, Verlaine received a bailiff dispatched by his wife, to whom he had failed to pay his divorce settlement arrears. Accounts must be settled. The poet might have pleaded poverty—the squalor of his surroundings argued eloquently enough. But he was an honourable man. Without a moment’s hesitation, he extracted the precious papers from his mattress and surrendered them with a simple gesture to the bailiff, who pocketed them (less than was owed) and departed, whilst the landlord, witnessing this scene, stood thunderstruck. Appalled to see his tenant’s solvency evaporate, he exploded in fury, going so far as to brand him a “fool” and declaring him henceforth unworthy of credit. By good fortune, Verlaine retained some pocket money. Reconciliation was promptly sealed with a round of drinks, enthusiastically accepted.
Winter had set in. Verlaine had every reason to linger in the warm, bright taproom. There he could economise on fuel and candles. There he worked. There he entertained friends. You might find him drinking with navvies—but let’s not be too scandalised. He maintained his dignity. The establishment’s rougher elements addressed him only with respect. Even to the local streetwalkers, he remained “Monsieur Paul”.
What a peculiar world poverty had backed him into! The hotel let rooms by the hour. The landlady would sit knitting among her children, monitoring from her post the evening traffic of couples whose shadows flitted across the corridor’s spyhole. At times the eldest, a boy of twelve or so, would slip away at his mother’s signal to proffer a candlestick or towel—a ritual so routine that nobody noticed unless rows erupted through drink or haggling. Verlaine’s friends braved these awkward proximities for love of him and made the best of things. Aesthetic debates proceeded before the bar under the noses of the dive’s habitués. To their credit, they never forgot themselves in front of company. When verses were recited, they fell silent. Whether they derived pleasure I cannot say, but they listened reverently and displayed far more respect for the Muses than one sees from certain society folk in drawing rooms. I never detected in them those knowing smirks, those masks of crushing boredom or insolent indifference one catches on well-bred faces. I thought of Verlaine’s labourers on the night they unveiled his monument, at that banquet where three hundred intellectuals created an unholy din, hurled plates at the readers and refused even to listen to his poetry—and the comparison hardly flattered the literati.
I recall the joy of a young mason, fresh from military service, whom Verlaine had permitted to copy passages from Sagesse. He transcribed them painstakingly, with something approaching religious devotion, in his old barrack-room notebook where he had collected regimental songs. He took pride in this privilege as in a medal of honour or letters patent of nobility. Ah, good Saint Verlaine, how right you were to seek the company of the humble and simple! Those whom life had treated harshly proved indulgent towards your failings and felt for you. They didn’t slap you with contempt whilst preening over their own virtue like those self-satisfied bourgeois who parade their respectable facades, those Pharisees whose selfishness and hypocrisy moved Thomas De Quincey to observe: “Everyone who has excited my disgust in this world was rich and flourishing.”
NOTES:
(1) In 19th-century France, an “hôtel meublé” (furnished hotel) was a type of cheap lodging house that rented rooms by the week or month, typically to workers, the poor, and those on society’s margins. Unlike modern hotels, these establishments provided basic furnished rooms with minimal services. As Raynaud’s description makes clear, this particular hotel also functioned partly as a “maison de passe” – renting rooms by the hour for illicit encounters.
(2) Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), French painter known for his sentimental and moralizing genre scenes, often featuring young women in states of innocence or distress. His works were highly popular in the 18th century and widely reproduced as prints.
(3) A man about town who frequents the fashionable boulevards, cafés, and nightspots of Paris. The term captures a particularly Parisian type: the sophisticated urban stroller who makes an art of observing city life, being seen in the right places, and cultivating worldly pleasures. In the 1880s, this meant someone who haunted the grand boulevards of Baron Haussmann’s newly redesigned Paris, particularly the Boulevard des Italiens and Boulevard Montmartre, where the most elegant cafés, restaurants, and theatres were located.
(4) Rose Caron (1857-1930), celebrated French operatic soprano, particularly renowned for her Wagner interpretations at the Paris Opera. She was one of the most admired singers of her era.
(5) The Pavillon d’Armenonville was an elegant restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, one of the most fashionable dining establishments in late 19th-century Paris. It was a favourite haunt of the wealthy and aristocratic.
(6) Elaborate ballroom dances popular in the 19th century, typically performed at the end of formal balls. They involved complex figures with frequent changes of partners and often included party favours and elaborate choreography.
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