Léon Hennique Novel

When We Were Symbolists: Stuart Merrill’s Intimate Portrait of Literary Paris

In this remarkable memoir, American-born French Symbolist poet Stuart Merrill offers an unvarnished glimpse into the bohemian literary world of 1880s Paris. Writing in 1904-05, Merrill looks back with both nostalgia and clear-eyed honesty at the birth of the Symbolist movement, painting vivid portraits of its key figures—from the ethereal Stéphane Mallarmé to the flamboyant Jean Moréas, from the tragic Oscar Wilde to the “savage” Paul Gauguin.

Far from a dry literary history, Merrill’s account crackles with the energy of youth: poets skipping dinner to fund their tiny magazines that nobody read, raucous gatherings at the Café Côte d’Or where literary manifestos were debated over rum, and the legendary Plume soirées where anarchists rubbed shoulders with royalists in smoke-filled cellars. With characteristic wit and occasional melancholy, Merrill captures both the poverty and the passion of a generation that would transform French poetry, making household names of previously obscure masters like Verlaine and Mallarmé. This translation presents Merrill’s lively prose to English readers for the first time, preserving his sophisticated style while making accessible this essential document of literary history.

When We Were Symbolists

Having been away from France between 1885 and 1889, I played only a distant part in the birth of Symbolism, though I did contribute something to most of the reviews that sprang up in those years: Basoche, Scapin, Décadent, Décadence, Écrits pour l’art, Wallonie, Revue Wagnerienne, and others. I believe the only mastheads that didn’t carry my name were those of Lutèce and the first Pléiade.

Let me say something about these reviews, whose stained and dusty pages I turn with deep feeling. We invested in them such hope, such courage and faith—and such hard-won money! The poets of that era would often skip dinner to keep alive some little magazine that nobody read. Today’s beginners cannot conceive of how utterly indifferent the public of 1885 was to poetry. Not a single review would publish verse, and the Parnassians, worn down by the struggle, had thrown in their lot with journalism. Bourget, true, enjoyed critical acclaim, and Rollinat even achieved a kind of publicity success. But Leconte de Lisle—one can say this with confidence—remained, for all the Parnassians’ devoted efforts, completely unknown to the general public until his election to the Académie. As for Verlaine, Mallarmé, Dierx, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam—we had the pride and the glory of making their names known everywhere. Without us they would still be in obscurity. Thanks to our poor little reviews, whose very titles are only now coming to light fifteen years after they folded, these men have become celebrated and are recognised as the true pioneers of the new poetry.

First among these reviews came Lutèce. I will return to it later—it’s been much discussed elsewhere. But La Basoche remains largely forgotten. It was founded in Brussels in November 1884 by Henry de Tombeur, now deceased. The whole Condorcet circle wrote for it, particularly Mikhaël, Quillard, Ghil, Fontainas, Darzens and myself. Other contributors included Jean Ajalbert, Célestin Demblon, Georges d’Esparbès, Émile Goudeau, Stanislas de Guaita, Théo Hannon, J-K. Huysmans, Camille Lemonnier, Jean Lorrain, Catulle Mendès, Émile Michelet, Edmond Picard, and Jean Rameau, whom the Figaro‘s literary prize had just unveiled to innocent Belgium.

I will quote some passages from Jean Ajalbert’s article on Lutèce—not just for the gossip, but to convey the sheer viciousness of literary warfare in the year of our Lord 1885:

“Every summer, some columnist hazards the discovery that literature isn’t just the established names, and lets fall from his pen the name of some unknown. This past sweltering season, word got out that a school of ‘decadents’ existed. Cue the general outcry: ‘What on earth are decadents? Where does one purchase them?’ Apparently one merry evening the Duc de Morny demanded, at Bignon’s, to be served a decadent with watercress. The public was in raptures; reporters, trawling the brasseries of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter, unearthed two or three unflappable poets who let themselves be labelled decadents. The decadents were served up every which way, and the papers set about hammering Lutèce, organ of the young literature.

“The thing is, neither Bourde nor Champsaur could speak about the young writers with any authority. The ‘new literature’ seems as foreign to Bourde as to Edmond Lepelletier—who accuse us of writing metrically incorrect verse! As for Félicien Champsaur, he is supremely unqualified. Whether in verse or prose, he has produced little beyond other people’s verse and prose; he hasn’t forgotten that our friend Darzens, in an article for La Jeune France entitled ‘A Literary Flunkey’, branded him a scavenger of cigar ends. Yet this hired pen of the Figaro supplement, surfacing from his customary mire, tipped his weekly slop-bucket of abuse over the ‘Decadenticulets’ †. Collecting the most idiotic tittle-tattle about their private lives, he took one to task for his physical deformity, another for his friendships, others for their love affairs.

“… Those Right Bank gentlemen must have been rather hard pressed to fill out the two columns and change that constitute their ‘article’. They knew nothing of the various slim volumes that had appeared here and there, and certainly never darkened the door of Trézenik and Rall’s premises. For Lutèce is not much loved, and small wonder. Lutèce delivers a regular boot to the backside of ignorant columnists and dimwit reporters. No sacred cows there—when Zola and Cladel bring out l’Œuvre and la Mi-Diable to the press’s fawning approval, Lutèce raises the alarm: ‘Zola is dying, Cladel is dead!’

“… Lutèce has published verse by Jean Rameau, G. d’Esparbès, Edmond Haraucourt, Fernand Icres, Henri Beauclair (Adoré Floupette), Émile Goudeau, Georges Lorin, Vignier, L. Tailhade, Jean Moréas, Robert Caze, and Paul Verlaine—who may well be the most extraordinary poet of our age.

“… The contributors collect their copies hot off the press on Friday evenings. At the print shop you will find Verlaine, Moréas, Caze, de Régnier, Grenet-Dancourt, G. Lorin, J. Vidal, P. Adam, R. Darzens, E. Mikhaël, Raynaud, Griffin, Norès, Colh, Henri Maugis the theatre critic—and the hours slip by in cheerful character assassination of the absent, everyone on their feet, nobody noticing there are only two chairs in the entire editorial office. Print shop, management, editorial department—it’s all one. Léo Trézenik and Georges Rall are printers, over near the Halle-aux-Vins; and they were wearing their typesetters’ aprons when they received Jean Lorrain one day—gleaming, dripping with style, insisting on seeing ‘the director’. Thanks to their press, they have achieved complete independence: the directors of Lutèce are masters of their own domain; they edit and print exactly as they please—often going too far, often unfair, but always for the love of art.”

I mention only in passing Édouard Dujardin’s Revue Wagnérienne, which on 8 January 1886 published a series of sonnets glorifying Wagner by Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, René Ghil, Stuart Merrill, Charles Morice, Charles Vignier, Téodor de Wyzewa and Édouard Dujardin. These sonnets scandalised the press and put the final nail in our coffin as far as the public was concerned—they much preferred reading Charlot s’amuse.

The first Pléiade, which ran for only six issues, began in March 1886. It was one of the finest of the vanished reviews. It published most of Mikhaël’s prose poems, René Ghil’s famous Traité du verbe, Quillard’s La Fille aux mains coupées, Maeterlinck’s Le massacre des innocents (never reprinted), verses by Van Lerberghe, and lastly, by Grégoire Le Roy—a poet who fell silent for reasons beyond me—a series of poems that announced a remarkable new master. I need look no further than this sonnet for proof:

LES BREBIS MORNES

N’est-ce pas que c’est triste et funèbre, la vie?
Et que nous sommes fous d’empoisonner nos jours
D’illusion de gloire et de rêves d’amour?
Et de loucher toujours des yeux avec envie?

Voyez! ces mains d’épouse, et de mère et de sœur
Qui guériraient nos cœurs avec de la douceur,
Eh! bien, comme un enfant ridicule et qui boude,
Durs, nous les écartons d’un geste avec le coude.

Cette simple maison d’où nous sommes partis
Nous semble trop étroite à nos âmes trop fières,
Nous tendons notre lèvre aux seins froids des chimères…

Vraiment mais on dirait d’un troupeau de brebis
Qui, dans un pré bien vert levant des cous moroses,
Bêleraient sottement après un champ de roses.

[THE DOLEFUL SHEEP]

[Is life not sad and funeral in its way?
And are we not insane to poison hours
With dreams of love and glory's phantom powers,
Forever squinting sideways in dismay?

Behold these hands—of sister, mother, wife—
That might with tenderness heal every strife;
Yet like a silly child who sulks and pouts,
We thrust them off with elbows, cold as louts.

That simple house from which we made our start
Now seems too narrow for our swollen pride;
We press our lips to cold chimeras' side...

We're truly just a flock that stands apart
In verdant fields, with necks raised up morose,
And bleats in folly for a field of rose.]

On 7 January 1887, under the editorship of my old and dear friend René Ghil, Les Écrits pour l’art appeared, ceasing after six issues only to resurface later. This first run featured portraits of Stéphane Mallarmé, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, René Ghil, Henri de Régnier, Francis Viélé-Griffin, Stuart Merrill, and published verses by Émile Verhaeren, George Khnopff, Albert Saint-Paul, and prose pieces by Charles-Eudes Bonin and Mario Varvara.

Here I must salute the memory of Gaston Dubedat, who founded Les Écrits pour l’art and kept it going in a second series until his death. This second run no longer boasted Francis Viélé-Griffin and Henri de Régnier, who wanted no truck with the label ‘evolutive-instrumentalists’, but gained Albert Lantoine, that proud and lavish poet; Pierre Dévoluy, now chief of the Félibrige; Achille Delaroche, who penned for La Plume‘s Moréas issue the shrewdest piece on Symbolism I have ever read; Albert Saint-Paul, exquisite conjurer of Scènes de bal; Georges Docquois, literary heir to Glatigny and Banville; Marcel Batilliat, who hadn’t yet forsaken verse for fiction; and Zévaès, the fierce Guesdist † who then answered to Alexandre Bourson.

Apropos Dubedat, René Ghil once regaled me with a story he swore was gospel truth. Dubedat was then living in Bordeaux. One fine morning he received a summons from his local police commissioner, whom he found thumbing through back issues of Les Écrits pour l’art:

“Monsieur,” the commissioner demanded without preamble, “what exactly is your review’s purpose? What’s the meaning of these word-puzzles masquerading as verse:

Mais les hasards haïs, qui gardent le moment
Traînaient sur d'éveillés vestiges de ramages
Tout le nuage lourd au songe véhément,
Variant d'un vœu vain le somme sans hommages."? [René Ghil]

[But hated hazards, guardians of the hour,
Dragged over wakened vestiges of song
The heavy cloud entire with dream's wild power,
Varying with vain wish the sumless throng.]

“And these prose riddles—crack the code for me: ‘A hundred posters absorbing the days’ uncomprehended gold, betrayal of the letter, have fled, as to the city’s every corner, my eyes, level with the horizon via a rail departure…’” [Stéphane Mallarmé]

“Moreover, I want particulars on all these characters with outlandish names contributing to your review. Nobody has any business being called Khnopff, Verhaeren, Zévaès or Stuart Merrill. As for Mallarmé—obviously an alias.”

Dubedat, utterly flummoxed, hadn’t a clue how to respond to such a bizarre grilling and asked what on earth they wanted. Through countless cunning circumlocutions, the commissioner eventually made his meaning plain. They had taken Les Écrits pour l’art for an international spy ring’s newsletter, its members communicating in code. Dubedat had the devil’s own time exonerating himself and proving that the only thing betrayed in his review was the luminous clarity of the French language.

When Les Écrits suspended publication for several months, its contributors found refuge in La Wallonie, the Liège-based review under Albert Mockel’s direction. I dare say every poet worth mentioning from that period graced the pages of La Wallonie. I shan’t attempt a roll call. The rising generation and their elders mingled there in easy camaraderie, with Mockel presiding over them all with a deft and assured hand. He it was who welcomed French literati to Liège, extending that brand of Belgian hospitality that can prove quite overwhelming—as poor Stéphane Mallarmé learnt to his cost. He had been invited to deliver lectures on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam across various Belgian cities. He had set his heart on a particular bit of stagecraft: delivering his opening lines whilst standing, then settling into his chair. The stage direction even appears in the printed version. “The trouble was,” Mallarmé confided to me, “having invariably dined with Belgian friends before each lecture, I never once managed to remain upright for my opening remarks.”

As Gustave Kahn has elsewhere chronicled the first Vogue and the Revue Indépendante, Adolphe Retté La Cravache and the second Vogue, and Ernest Raynaud Le Décadent, I shall press on to other matters.

Back in Paris in 1889, I swiftly made the acquaintance of my brother Symbolists, with whom I had previously only exchanged letters. One fine day, Adolphe Retté turned up at my door: “Gustave Kahn’s holding court tonight. Perfect opportunity to meet him. Come along.” So off I went with Retté, and come nine o’clock we were knocking at the door of the poet of Les Palais Nomades. We were ushered into a room meagrely furnished with three or four chairs and an oak table bristling with daggers. Pride of place on the table went to a bottle of rum, stout and convivial. Long experience has since taught me that a literary evening consists, at bottom, of a bottle of spirits with poets clustered round it.

What puzzled me were the scars and gouges disfiguring the table. Who could have inflicted such damage on this innocent, serviceable piece? I hadn’t yet got the measure of poets! No sooner was a writer’s name mentioned than Kahn would snatch up a dagger and drive it into the table, pronouncing with distinct malice: “That one needs his guts ripped out!” When I hazarded praise for one of our elders: “Him? We should spool out his intestines!” And in a glinting arc, another blade bit into the oak. Thoroughly cowed, I held my tongue. But some fool or joker lobbed in a third name: “That one? Needs his belly slit!” And action matched word every time, to the table’s mounting grief.

I must say I found this robust violence rather splendid. Truth be told, I warmed to Gustave Kahn straight away. Here was a Jew who wore his heritage proudly, without swagger. In debates, he would address us as “you young Aryans.” Bear in mind, this was before Arthur Meyer had any clout and when Gaston Pollonais was still a nobody. So I won’t make too much of Kahn’s loyalty to his people. I simply salute him for answering the call of Israel’s kings and prophets, Babylon’s keening women, and the master Hebrew poets of Spain.

Adolphe Retté mentions in his book that celebrated Latin Quarter establishment, the Côte d’Or, on the corner of rue de Vaugirard and rue de Médicis. Sadly, it’s been shuttered for months—gone the way of the café François Premier, where we would join Verlaine for an apéritif. Before us, Séverine and Jules Vallès had made it their haunt. I took my dinner there nightly with Moréas, Morice, Gauguin, Dubus, Rambosson, Delaroche, Clément Bellenger, Julien Leclercq, du Plessys, and that marvel Émile Meyerson, who commands every language on earth and a few from neighbouring planets, and to whom Moréas dedicated his Epistle to Æmilius in Le Pèlerin Passionné.

The Côte d’Or was where I first encountered Jean Moréas and came to admire and cherish him. Moréas belonged to that breed of shy but worldly souls who don a fierce public face, partly to repel nuisances, partly to shield their tender core. For years Jean Moréas was thoroughly misread. Even that sharp, wicked observer Jules Huret couldn’t resist sketching him as a caricature in his celebrated Enquête. Yet Moréas was ever the soul of plain, dignified sincerity, even when—with a theatrical twist of his moustache—he would announce in the cafés: “Ronsard and myself…” The public has long since recognised the genius behind Les Stances and Iphigénie. Today I take pleasure in recalling something Moréas said to me years ago, in a rare unguarded moment. I find it magnificently beautiful in its simplicity: “I have never done anything beneath the dignity of a poet.”

Alongside Jean Moréas, Charles Morice held tremendous sway over our circle. His intelligence was both lofty and subtle, his eloquence weighty yet flowing, and he invariably charmed us, often bringing us round to his views. His Littérature de tout-à-l’heure—too easily forgotten nowadays—undeniably pointed Symbolism in fresh directions. Unfortunately, once Moréas had established his École Romane, Morice caught the bug and fancied himself a literary drill-master. In a manifesto to Le Figaro, he launched the École Française, enlisting as disciples several poets, among them Le Cardonnel, Dubus and Samain. The very next day, these alleged disciples issued a dignified riposte, declaring that as Symbolism stood for literary liberation, not one of them would bow to M. Charles Morice’s highly personal aesthetic. I bring up this episode to underscore how sharply the Symbolist poets’ fierce independence contrasts with certain latter-day poets who have resurrected the same school under the same banner. Need I add that M. Charles Morice, proud and painstaking author of L’Action Humaine, commanded no greater devotion than from those very poets who refused to play pupil to his master?

M. Adolphe Retté devotes a special chapter to the dead and vanished: Édouard Dubus, Albert Aurier, Emmanuel Signoret, Louis Le Cardonnel. I’m sorry he didn’t think to mention certain habitués of the Côte d’Or, now gone, alas!—Paul Gauguin, Clément Bellenger and Julien Leclercq. Let me say something about them.

I will shock many a critic who has spun elaborate theories from Gauguin’s works when I reveal that I never once heard the man discuss painting. With extraordinary patience, lips pursed and eyes narrowed in a half-mocking smile, he would endure our high-flown pronouncements on art—its origins, its ends—but he never let slip his own thoughts, supposing he had any. Might I hazard a personal view? I believe Gauguin simply gave free rein to his nature as a brutal colourist and savage manipulator of form, without a jot of concern for any aesthetic whatsoever. What people report of his Pont-Aven teachings strikes me as childish, almost banal. But don’t imagine he lacked intelligence. Quite the reverse—his letters and travel journals display exceptional powers of observation, analysis and reasoning. The truth is, there was simply no common language between his art and that of our painters, however revolutionary. Paul Gauguin remains, in every sense of the word—good and bad—a phenomenon. Even Van Gogh, that lunatic genius, fits into recognisable categories: he has forebears and will surely have heirs. He belongs, in short, to our tribe. Gauguin stood utterly alone amongst us. Small wonder he fled our civilisation to flourish unshackled amongst primitive peoples. Here was a man born to stalk prey through forests and deep waters, to fell ancient trees with his axe, to build his own shelter and adorn it with rough carvings and ingenuous pictures. Our society made him profoundly uncomfortable. Need proof? I recall a cab ride one night en route to Mallarmé’s. I asked why he called himself a Symbolist painter. “Frankly,” I admitted, “I can’t spot any symbolism in your canvases. Gustave Moreau’s a symbolist, even Puvis de Chavannes when he is not muddling symbol with allegory. But you?” Gauguin floundered, struggling to explain the hidden significance of his line and colour; then, in a flash of fury, he bellowed: “Oh, you civilised lot get on my nerves, always splitting hairs, forcing instinct to answer to reason, art to aesthetics. I’m a savage, d’you hear me? A savage!” How splendid he looked, half-risen in the carriage, his Red Indian profile caught in the gaslight.

Though he seldom discussed painting, he loved spinning yarns about his West Indies voyage. He had sailed there “before the mast,” as common seaman. He equally enjoyed showing off his boxing and savate skills. This overconfidence in his physical prowess and marksmanship ultimately proved fatal. Everyone knows how in Brittany he tangled with three sailors who had insulted his Tahitian companion, and in that gallant but lopsided brawl got his legs shattered by a foul kick.

Still, you couldn’t ask for better company. M. Thiébault-Sisson utterly debased himself with his vicious caricature of Gauguin in Le Temps. I can attest, as can all his friends, that Gauguin led an exemplary life of integrity and dignity. He despised posturing and pretension. Work was his only vice, and being careful of his health, he shunned excess. But just as Théophile Gautier outraged the bourgeoisie by sporting a scarlet waistcoat to Hernani‘s premiere, so Gauguin assaulted M. Thiébault-Sisson’s delicate sensibilities with his Breton vest ablaze with yellow embroidery. Naturally, such a technicolour character could only be a charlatan, a wastrel and a drunk.

Julien Leclercq was another of M. Thiébault-Sisson’s victims. Poor Leclercq! He may not have been a great poet, but he possessed a great heart. His grave offence, in M. Thiébault-Sisson’s eyes, was to sport a mane I can only liken to that of a Nubian camel-driver. Worse still, he could be spotted at the Bullier, executing wild chahuts in the company of a painter every bit as shaggy as himself! But do you not realise, you well-fed critics, to what degrading shifts indigent artists are often driven? Can you not detect, beneath the mask of laughter, the anguish ready to dissolve into tears? Julien Leclercq descended through every circle of the Parisian inferno. A dreamer and sentimentalist by nature, he condemned himself to the vilest drudgery of hack journalism. Yet in that hand-to-mouth existence of makeshift and expedient, he managed to preserve intact both his human dignity and his artistic integrity. His penury knew occasional reprieves. He wrote treatises on palmistry that earned him a little money, then secured a post with Bing and travelled to Kristiania to organise exhibitions of French art. During one such journey, he married the woman who would at last acquaint him with happiness. But certain poets whose ideals sit too uneasily with life seem hounded by inexorable fate. Our poor Édouard Dubus, as we know, died in hospital at the very moment an unexpected inheritance might have allowed him—through prolonged and expensive treatment—to repair the ravages of a ruinous passion. Julien Leclercq died in like fashion, mere days before his dream could be realised. Does M. Thiébault-Sisson imagine that this stargazer, this vagabond, this wanderer of pavements, once blessed with love’s tranquillity and fortune’s advantages, simply settled into slippered ease before the hearth? Not at all! Our friend, though aware of his approaching death, threw himself into founding—thanks to certain generous foreigners—a journal dedicated to championing throughout the world the eternal cause of justice and the rights of oppressed peoples. What a magnificent sight: a dying man scattering, with one last gesture, the fertile seeds of thought towards the future! From his deathbed, Julien Leclercq organised the framework of his journal, balanced its books, recruited contributors. He breathed his last before he could read the contents page of L’Européen‘s first issue, bequeathing to others the sacred trust of bringing his vision to life.

And this is the man M. Thiébault-Sisson presented to readers of Le Temps as some sort of organ-grinder’s monkey! I fail to comprehend how my friend Mazel could claim in a recent article that our generation has never had grounds for complaint against the critics. Each time one of us dies, the press responds with the same pretentious incomprehension, the same underhanded malice. I wonder, to paraphrase Baudelaire, whether there oughtn’t to be a law barring journalists from cemeteries.

Among the most devoted habitués of the Côte d’Or was Clément Bellenger. Pale and gaunt, with russet hair and beard, resembling nothing so much as Christ in Gethsemane, he dined alone, seemingly alarmed by our clamour and affronted by our outrageous paradoxes. But I can already hear you asking: who was Clément Bellenger? Simply one of the nineteenth century’s finest wood engravers. He enjoyed fame in England and America, where the magazines still cultivate a taste for an art gradually vanishing in France. Late in life, Bellenger struggled to find commissions. Etching had supplanted wood engraving in luxury editions. Under such circumstances, an artist might be forgiven for guarding his vital interests jealously, for hoarding what remained of his craft. But Clément Bellenger’s heart was too magnanimous for such petty calculations; despite straits that verged on destitution, he continued training apprentices. No one who knew him could forget him. He embodied kindness, gentleness and generosity. To these delightful qualities he added that rarest of gifts: the capacity for admiration. You should have heard him speak of his master, his friend, his deity—Daniel Vierge! This shy soul would sometimes erupt into sudden fury, and with burning cheeks would launch himself recklessly against our paradoxes, which outraged his perfect sincerity.

Others graced the Côte d’Or dinners less regularly—Albert Trachsel, architect of the Fêtes réelles, about whom I once wrote in these pages; de Niederhausern-Rodo, sculptor of the Verlaine monument we still await in the Luxembourg Gardens. Both Swiss, they weathered fortune and misfortune as true brothers-in-arms. One of them—which escapes me now—lodged in a sixth-floor garret in the Latin Quarter, where standing upright meant poking one’s head through the skylight. In flush times, our comrades would purchase a bottle of Goldwasser, and with glasses raised, heads thrust through the roof, they would drink—grave, reverent, fraternal—holding the liqueur up to the dying light, “because it had gold inside.”

Among the regulars we mustn’t overlook Moore the coachman, Victor Hugo’s protégé and Édouard Lockroy’s attacker, who between fares would grab a bite on the Côte d’Or’s ground floor and dispatch to us, via the waiter, his more or less formless verses seeking our judgement.

I cannot take leave of the Côte d’Or without relating a dinner Moréas hosted there for Oscar Wilde. Let me stress I intend no mockery of either Wilde or Moréas. We were, that evening, playthings of mischievous fate—and besides, the episode reflects nothing but credit on Moréas’s three Roman disciples.

Oscar Wilde then stood at his zenith. Though urbane and gracious, he was accustomed in society to holding forth unchallenged; he little relished opposition. We numbered six at table: Wilde, Moréas, Raynaud, La Tailhède, du Plessys and myself. The meal proceeded beautifully. Over dessert, Oscar Wilde bent his imposing frame towards Moréas, requesting a recitation. “I never perform,” Moréas replied, “but perhaps our friend Raynaud might oblige us.” Raynaud rose, formidable fists planted on the table, and proclaimed: “Sonnet to Jean Moréas!” He harvested our applause before Wilde renewed his entreaties. “No, but perhaps La Tailhède…” Up sprang the latter, monocle screwed in place, declaiming in crystalline tones: “Ode to Jean Moréas!” Wilde’s irritation at the Roman school’s cult of personality grew palpable; yet courtesy compelled him to persist. “Du Plessys, share your latest verses,” the Master commanded. Leaping up, du Plessys thundered forth: “The Tomb of Jean Moréas!” Oscar Wilde—suffocated, vanquished, utterly routed, he who commanded reverent silence in London drawing-rooms—called for hat and overcoat and vanished into the night. Surely the first occasion when, around a dinner table, he had been denied the monopoly on incense.

Jacques Daurelle and I introduced Oscar Wilde to Paris. I see no point rehearsing what I have written elsewhere. I could add nothing to the superb tributes by André Gide and Ernest La Jeunesse. I haven’t even the heart to publish a pitiful note in which Wilde—who in prosperity had aided so many ingrates—begged a pittance from me “to see out the week.” Some catastrophes are too tragic for anything but silence.

I can corroborate in passing Retté’s account of Salomé‘s composition. Wilde once handed me his drama, written at white heat, straight off, in French, asking me to remedy its glaring errors. Getting Wilde to accept my emendations proved no simple matter. He wrote French as he spoke it—with an idiosyncrasy charming in conversation but potentially disastrous on stage. A friend recently described how Wilde concluded a tale about royal adventures (his heroes were invariably kings) with: “Et puis, alors, le roi il est mouru.” [“And then, well, the king he is deaded.”]

So I tidied up Salomé as best I could. I recall that most speeches began with that tiresome expletive: enfin! The enfins I excised! But I soon discovered that dear Wilde’s faith in my judgement had limits, and I passed him along to Retté. He took up the work of revision and pruning. But Wilde grew as wary of Retté as of me, and Pierre Louÿs ultimately applied the finishing touches to Salomé.

What a host of the dead already peoples these memories! The other day, leafing through that most rare collection of the original Scapin, I discovered these verses by Dubus, never published elsewhere, which mysteriously rock my melancholy—though I cannot say why:

Nos jours de joie ont de tristes lendemains
Que mieux vaut ignorer à jamais: si tu l’oses,
Dans notre chambre, un soir, les fenêtres bien closes,
Nous épandrons des tubéreuses, des jasmins,
Des lys, des lilas et des grappes de glycine:
Dans l’ombre leur senteur énervante assassine.

[Our days of joy have sorrows in their wake
That we should never know: if you but dare,
Within our chamber, evening, windows closed with care,
We'll scatter tuberoses for passion's sake,
With jasmine, lily, lilac's purple haze,
Wisteria cascading—in shadow their perfume slays.]

I transcribe from the same Scapin (10 January 1886) a poem by Louis Le Cardonnel that was somehow omitted when a pious hand assembled his scattered verses for the Plume anthology:

LE RÊVE DE LA REINE

La Reine aux cheveux d’ambre, à la bouche sanglante,
tient, de sa dextre longue, ouvert le vitrail d’or,
pensant que l’heure coule ainsi qu’une eau trop lente.
En ses yeux le reflet d’une tristesse dort,
et sur sa robe où sont des fleurs bizarres d’or,
elle laisse dormir son autre main si froide
que dans un sombre jour de chapelle qui dort
de moins rigides mains portent la palme roide!
Soudain, quelle moiteur à sa peau fine et froide!
À son front lisse perle une soudaine langueur,
et son corsage en dur brocart semble moins roide;
est-ce toi, si longtemps immobile, son cœur
qui pourras la venir chasser, cette langueur,
et faire étinceler enfin la somnolence
de ses yeux, si longtemps glacés comme son cœur,
qui la feras tomber, l’armure du silence!
Ô crépuscule, dans ta grande somnolence,
un bois à l’horizon s’étage noir et bleu;
haut, le croissant émerge et s’argente en silence.
L’Hippogriffe attendait dans le couchant de feu;
et la Reine, égarant son regard noir et bleu,
Maudit l’heure qui coule ainsi qu’une eau trop lente,
et sous le dur brocart sentant sa gorge en feu,
mord son exsangue main de sa bouche sanglante!


[THE QUEEN'S DREAM]

[The Queen with amber hair and blood-red mouth
Holds open the golden window with her slender hand,
Thinking how time flows like water too slow.
A gleam of sadness slumbers in her eyes,
And on her gown where strange gold flowers bloom,
She lets her other hand rest, so cold
That in the drowsing shadows of some chapel
Less rigid hands would bear the stiffened palm!
But sudden moisture on her delicate, chill skin!
Upon her smooth brow beads a languid dew,
Her bodice of hard brocade seems less constrained;
Is it you, heart so long unmoving,
Who might at last dispel this languor
And finally kindle into flame
Those eyes so long as frozen as her heart,
Who might shatter the armour of silence!
O twilight, in your vast somnolence,
A wood rises black and blue on the horizon;
High above, the crescent emerges, silvering in silence.
The Hippogriff waited in the burning sunset;
And the Queen, her black-blue gaze gone wild,
Curses the hour that flows like water too slow,
And beneath hard brocade, her breast aflame,
Bites her bloodless hand with blood-red mouth!]

Already in these distant verses one discerns the Catholic and legendary backdrop that perpetually drew Louis Le Cardonnel. Yet it would be wrong to regard this admirable poet as a mere religious aesthete. I knew him always—even in full tempest—as grave, reflective and apostolic. He would deliver lengthy exhortations which I received with wandering attention. If some misunderstood him, it was his utter incapacity for hypocrisy. He revealed himself without disguise, concealing neither temptations nor transgressions nor the torments of repentance. Rarely have I encountered a soul more noble or more pure. I recall him with feeling, and hope—though resolutely atheist and opposed to all religion—that he found in his faith the peace of heart and spirit. I am delighted beyond measure to hear he will shortly publish a book of verse. What does it matter if these spring from Catholic inspiration? Who better grasped Verlaine’s mystical volumes—believers or sceptics? The answer admits no doubt. Louis Le Cardonnel stands—with certain others, notably the critic Alphonse Germain and the poet Adrien Mithouard—amongst the glories of the Church. Why must their faith’s opponents be those who most admire, esteem and cherish them? Perhaps, above the empty din of our disputes, there exists—unheard by common men—a mysterious tongue without sign or syllable, intelligible to poets alone?

Leaving the Côte d’Or on Saturday nights, we would repair to the Plume soirées. Of these celebrated gatherings I make no pretence to speak after Léon Maillard, Ernest Raynaud and Adolphe Retté, who helped bring them into being. Others have evoked these assemblies in essays and memoirs. Some perceived them as convivial meetings of good fellows come to declaim verse, enjoy songs, tipple and exchange gossip; others as sabbaths where blood was quaffed from infant skulls to muttered incantations. M. Maurice Le Blond has left us this latter impression:

“At the Plume soirées, every Saturday in a vault off the Boul’Mich, a picturesque mob of mystical bards, soul-painters, balladeers and hoaxers of ridiculous mien would cram themselves together… These young men appeared to derive vain pleasure from self-banishment. They cultivated an outlandish jargon; they affected cynical and mysterious ways.”

To demolish this burgeoning legend, I need merely cite from the register of a single Plume evening (19 December 1890) these names: Paul Verlaine, Jean Moréas, Julien Leclercq, Louis Dumur, P. N. Roinard, Louis Le Cardonnel, Léon Bloy, Raymond de la Tailhède, Léon Maillard, Émile Goudeau, Ludovic Naudeau, Grenet-Dancourt, Louis le Dauphin, Maurice du Plessys, John Grand-Carteret, Gabriel de Lautrec, Charles Buet, Eugène Lemercier, Yann Nibor, Pierre Trimouillat, Léon Durocher, Jules Tellier, Pierre Mille, Édouard Dubus, Lugné-Poe, Franck Vincent, André Veidaux, Georges Bonnamour, Gabriel Fabre, Charles Morice, Jean Rameau, Adolphe Retté, F. A. Cazals, Paterne Berrichon, Niederhausern-Rodo, Lucien Hubert, J. L. Croze, Maurevert, Yvanhoë Rambosson, Alexandre Boutique, Charles Maurras, et cetera… which is to say: poets, novelists, critics, dramatists, journalists, balladeers, musicians, painters, sculptors, architects, theatre directors, even future parliamentarians and city councillors! Their politics proved as varied as their professions: there, lost in the same fog of tobacco, Catholics consorted with Protestants and Jews, royalists with Bonapartists, radicals with socialists, anarchists with mages and Zutistes. One marvels that certain Plume evenings didn’t conclude like the battle of the Kilkenny cats who, Irish legend tells us, so thoroughly devoured one another that come morning not a cat nor a whisker remained on the field.

With Canqueteau, Bailliot, Lemercier and Ferny, that gamin Cazals was the spark, the guffaw, the raised finger of these gatherings. Revering neither man nor institution, he cocked a snook—true child of Paris—at those he held dearest: at Verlaine, whose rum-and-water he hymned; at Moréas, whose final cigar he serenaded. This urchin bore, in piquant paradox, an extraordinary likeness to the young Delacroix. Thus in moments of abstraction he would take himself quite seriously, forgetting himself so far as to sing, in verses of genuine feeling, the loves, griefs and sorry destiny of poor F. A. C. But laughter—that armour of bohemians—would soon triumph over sorrow, and poor F. A. C. would become merry Cazals once more. What rollicking choruses he launched, castanets snapping, in the smoke-blackened vault of the Soleil d’Or, where the most wretched piano in Paris abandoned all attempts at accompaniment! Verlaine’s inseparable shadow—whom he once brought to the Soleil d’Or on Carnival night sporting a preposterous turban—he shared his master’s genial, undemanding philosophy and met life’s caprices with splendid equanimity. He answered misfortune with melody. An entire era lives again in his collection Le Jardin Des Ronces, whose sole defect is its failure to restore our youth. Where now are the songs of yesteryear, Verlaine’s rum-and-water, Moréas’s final cigar?

“Having arrived, as Dante puts it, at the midpoint of life’s journey, I feel a touch of melancholy joy in recounting what memories remain of those days of struggle for sovereign art and burning conviction.” So begins M. Adolphe Retté’s new book devoted to Symbolism.

This smiling melancholy—which at times breaks into outright laughter—is what I felt reading him. Good heavens! All this was barely fifteen years ago, and already it’s ancient history, fodder for reminiscence? Are we entering the annals of literature so soon? Yet the bibliography of Symbolism swells daily. M. Gustave Kahn in Symbolistes et Décadents; M. Jean Carrère in articles I hope he will gather into a volume; M. Adolphe Retté in the present work—all have assembled materials for the definitive Legend of Symbolism that M. Henri Degron is preparing with due diligence, the anticipated sequel to M. Catulle Mendès’s Légende Du Parnasse Contemporain.

Whilst I must fault M. Adolphe Retté for certain indiscretions that could damage one of our generation’s noblest poets, I commend his frank and artless account of our rather riotous youth. Any stern souls who might take umbrage at our innocent larks can rest assured that Symbolism itself could never be tarnished by the thoughtless excesses of a few disciples. Symbolism had its inner and outer circles, just as Romanticism did. After their salad days, one rarely spotted MM. de Régnier, Vielé-Griffin or Albert Samain in the Latin Quarter, our usual field of operations. Likewise, the habitués of Victor Hugo’s salon seldom ventured to that tumbledown house in the impasse du Doyenné, where Théo, Gérard, Arsène Houssaye and Camille Rogier diverted themselves on Sundays—when the downstairs tenant was at mass—by angling through the window for her goldfish left out on the balcony.

But let there be no mistake: for all our high spirits, literature was our sole obsession. We moved in solid phalanxes from the Voltaire to the François Ier, from the d’Harcourt to the Grand Comptoir, spouting verse and far more intoxicated by lyricism than liquor. On those glorious nights when we couldn’t bring our debates to a close, dawn would catch us at Les Halles, where Moréas would invariably purchase a raw artichoke, brandishing it whilst peeling like a sceptre—a regular Agamemnon. He commanded quite a retinue: Charles Morice, prophesying with portentous mien about La Littérature de tout à l’heure; Adolphe Retté, whom we had to prevent from strangling any blue-eyed, fair-haired passer-by, since he mistook them all for his nemesis Rodenbach; Jean Carrère, belting out La Coupo Santo in ringing tones; Paul Gauguin, enraptured by mountains of carrots and frilly cabbages; Albert Aurier, glowering at any policeman who dared remonstrate with us; Frédéric Corbier, wrestling with algebraic problems or perhaps—who can say?—contemplating his eventual suicide; Gaston Dubreuilh, who delighted in needling Henri Quittard with praise for La Dame Blanche; Édouard Dubus, declaring with such melancholy beneath his mocking Pierrot face: “I am but a hair in the hand of Providence!”; Henri Degron, shivering, pallid and unkempt, lost in the rank morning fog dreaming of cherry blossoms in his native Japan; Julien Leclercq and Dauphin Meunier, threading carefully beneath the trees in the Square des Innocents lest they entangle their Absalom-like tresses; the chevalier Maurice du Plessis de Lyman, known familiarly as M. Flandre, whispering Romanesque heresies to his master, the unflappable artichoke-muncher; Louis Le Cardonnel, covertly recruiting knights-errant for his Order of the Lamb, established to restore the Papal States; and lastly Yvanhoé Rambosson, who little imagined he would one day receive Paris’s most celebrated painters in his Petit Palais office.

Sometimes our numbers dwindled, and talk grew more intimate. I shall never forget one night at Baratte’s with Vielé-Griffin and Adolphe Retté. Amid the din of tipsy voices and the tinny strains of an execrable band—to which my two companions slipped coins to play, much to my horror, Boulangist airs—we spent heartfelt hours discussing poets and poetry. Gradually dawn tinged the windows green. Through the door ajar came wafts of that sharp vegetable smell from Les Halles. The café was clearing out. Then Vielé-Griffin drew a manuscript from his pocket and recited to us, in that scene of tawdry dissipation, like a cleansing prayer, one of his masterworks: La Ronde de la Marguerite:

Où est la Marguerite?
Ô gué, ô gué, ô gué,
Où est la Marguerite?
Elle est dans son château de fleurs et de charmilles.

[Where is dear Marguerite?
Hey ho, hey ho, hey ho,
Where is dear Marguerite?
She's in her castle of flowers and green.]

M. Retté’s book prompts me to summon other memories to supplement his and M. Gustave Kahn’s. I shall endeavour to present them as coherently as possible.

Who would imagine that these poets who would later grace Symbolism first congregated as early as 1882 at the Lycée Fontanes (now Condorcet)? My rhetoric classmates then numbered Éphraïm Mikhaël, René Ghil, Pierre Quillard, André Fontainas, Rodolphe Darzens, and Georges Vanor. I mustn’t overlook Gabriel Lefeuve, who kept faith with Parnassian traditions, nor Édouard Guillaumet, son of the Orientalist painter and author of several verse collections, nor Charles-Eugène Bonin, who introduced me to Baudelaire and would have become a major poet had the enigmatic East not beckoned his restless wanderlust. Tristan Bernard, considerably younger, was tracking from a lower form what we published in Le Fou.

Le Fou! Does even one run survive? It was a modest four-page lithographed sheet, edited first by Édouard Guillaumet, then by Georges Vanor, who then styled himself Van Ormelingen. The crowning Dutch touch to this memorable rag was our lithographer’s daunting name: Schouster-Van Hommeslager. I suspect we are still in his debt.

I distinctly recall Le Fou featuring Darzens’s chansons, Quillard’s sonnets, Bonin’s prose poems, and barcarolles by your humble servant. René Ghil contributed impassioned verses to Mlle Marguerite Ugalde, whom he had glimpsed at the Nouveautés and worshipped from afar—very far indeed! Éphraïm Mikhaël made his mark with a Ballade à la concierge de mon cousin, whose slight had wounded his youthful poetic pride. As for Guillaumet, he wrote half the paper single-handed, being prodigiously fertile. Coming down from class, he would ask with swagger: “How many sonnets d’you think I’ve knocked out in two hours?” Having laboured to produce a single quatrain in that time, I would venture: “One and a half?” — “Wrong, old chap—seventeen!”

Things very nearly took a turn for the worse. A newspaper of the day, Le Petit Moniteur Universel, deigned to notice Le Fou in an article entitled “Schoolboy Literature”. They reproduced a naturalist sonnet of mine, “The Glutton”, and, if memory serves, one by Quillard that opened with this impeccable alexandrine:

Un lendemain de fête on a mal aux cheveux.

[The morning after revels brings a throbbing head.]

We came within a whisker of being dubbed the Petroniuses of the Lycée Fontanes. The headmaster grew alarmed and banned the sale of Le Fou at our sole outlet, a bookseller in the Passage du Havre. He launched no inquiry, knowing perfectly well that we would close ranks, and that excessive severity might cost him his finest pupils and several prizes and commendations at the Concours Général. The storm passed and Le Fou resurfaced.

This illustrious journal proved insufficient for our energies. We founded a literary circle, the Moineaux Francs, which convened every Thursday in the parlour of a dubious hotel in the rue de la Victoire. There we declaimed verse, debated the book of the moment, and paid homage to our friend Fontainas, who had just seen his first poem published in La Jeune Belgique. The monthly subscription stood at one franc. But those twenty sous were not always forthcoming, and we had to decamp from the rue de la Victoire, leaving behind a trifling debt to the proprietor, just as we had done with poor M. Schouster-Van Hommeslager. The circle’s final gathering took place al fresco in the Parc Monceau. Alas, a comely nursemaid there utterly corrupted our treasurer, who absconded with the forty-five sous from our coffers. He has since become a distinguished anarchist.

Now I must recount a modest anecdote I might christen: How I Failed to Meet Victor Hugo.

Édouard Guillaumet, then the bosom companion of young Georges Hugo, proposed offering the honorary presidency of the Moineaux Francs to Victor Hugo. His motion carried by acclamation, and a committee—Quillard, Guillaumet and myself—was deputised to entreat the master to accept the honour we presumed to bestow.

Thus one Thursday we boarded the Passy-Bourse omnibus, not without reflecting solemnly that the august hindquarters of the poet of poets might once have graced the very upper-deck bench we occupied. Upon reaching the modest mansion on the avenue d’Eylau, we were obliged to beg Guillaumet to pull the bell—emotion had quite unmanned us—and to initiate proceedings, as our voices had deserted us entirely. A maidservant informed us that she couldn’t say whether Monsieur Victor Hugo was at home (how oddly that “Monsieur” struck our ears!) and bade us wait in the mezzanine salon. Guillaumet abandoned us to visit his friend Georges upstairs.

Was this salon draped in crimson, azure, rose or emerald? Did it boast two windows or three, one door or two? Was its décor Henri IV, Louis XVI or Empire? I haven’t the faintest notion, having been unable to wrench my gaze from a round table bearing Le Tombeau de Théophile Gautier. Neither table nor tome held any particular fascination for me. But my capsizing mind required some concrete detail as an anchor. Thanks to this merciful table, I avoided swooning altogether. By degrees, however, I rallied, and my attention was caught by a splendid cat stalking about the room. I indicated it to Quillard, who looked every bit as wan and decomposed as I felt. Yet he summoned the unthinkable temerity to seize the creature and, in a strangled voice, enquired: “Stuart, have you scissors on your person?” Not imagining he intended to geld the noble beast, I hissed back: “No, but whatever do you need scissors for?” — “To clip a lock from Victor Hugo’s cat as a keepsake!”

I assure you laughter never crossed my mind, particularly as panic was again tightening its grip. I could hear ponderous footfalls descending the staircase. Victor Hugo, beyond question. The tread approached. Quillard perspired with agitation; my heart hammered fit to burst. The mysterious feet reached our threshold; a hand grasped the doorknob. We felt death’s lesser sister breathing on our brows. The door swung open with agonising deliberation… It was the maidservant, come to announce that Monsieur Victor Hugo was not receiving. O merciful falsehood! We thundered down the stairs without pausing for Guillaumet and fled to the corner wine-shop for medicinal refreshment.

That same year—1882, to be precise—Pierre Quillard, heading a delegation from the Lycée Fontanes, joined the endless cortège bearing the felicitations of Paris, France and the cosmos to Victor Hugo on his eightieth birthday. He found the mettle to recite to him, without collapsing, a sonnet laden with martial metaphors (yes, Quillard managed it!). I, being infinitely more craven, had peeled away from the delegation and found myself immobilised, unable to advance or retreat, in the throng massed before Hugo’s residence. I recall one worthy soul, crushed by the multitude, who turned a woeful countenance towards me and lamented, his voice breaking: “To think I can’t even lift m’arms to doff m’cap b’fore the good Lord!” I should add that Victor Hugo, flanked by Georges and Jeanne, stood at his window acknowledging his devoted masses.

I glimpsed Hugo once more, one morning whilst strolling down the avenue d’Eylau. Glancing up at the celebrated window, I beheld the deity adjusting his braces whilst savouring the vernal air.

Yet we had all written verses and dreamt of publishing a book together. At the time, we were contributors to a small journal run by one Henri Jouve, who I believe remains in the book trade to this day. He would organise literary evenings frequented by versifying members of the bourgeoisie and various men of letters, among them Léo Trézenik and Georges d’Esparbès. He also arranged competitions and would publish the prize-winning pieces—for a consideration, naturally. I have before me a slim volume from 1883, Poésies et Nouvelles, which includes, amongst other offerings, L’Étoile des Âmes by Rodolphe Darzens:

J'aime à voir, appuyé le soir sur ma fenêtre,
L'obscurité descendre et les étoiles naître 
Au loin lumières d'or;
J'aime à sentir passer le vent des nuits d'automne
Modulant dans les airs sa chanson monotone 
Qui me berce et m'endort!

[I love to watch, leaning upon my window at evening,
The darkness fall and stars come into being,
Distant golden lights;
I love to feel the autumn night-wind passing,
Modulating through the air its monotonous song 
That rocks me into sleep!]

La Terre Nue by René Ghilbert (today René Ghil):

Ce soir, sur les champs veufs des grands épis moulus,
La pluie ample poudroie, et la terre au corps veule,
Comme une mère énorme et qui soupire seule,
Tend sa mamelle ronde aux mamelons velus.

[Tonight, upon fields bereft of their milled grain,
The heavy rain falls powdering, and the earth with languid frame,
Like some enormous mother sighing in solitude,
Extends her rounded breast with hirsute nipples.]

Le Lunatique by Stuart Merrill:

Ô reine au sein de marbre, ô splendide Astarté,
Qui vas versant ton or dans les nuits inconnues,
Un voile au dur éclat de ta virginité!
Une ombre à tes blancheurs implacablement nues!

[O queen of marble breast, O splendid Astarte,
Pouring forth your gold through nights unknown,
Cast a veil upon your virginity's harsh gleam!
A shadow for your pitiless naked whiteness!]

Le Sillon by Georges Michel (later Éphraïm Mikhaël):

Lentement, sous un ciel implacable et torride,
Traînant d'un pied lassé sa charrue au soc lourd
Et, comme un moribond, tendant sa gorge aride,
Le taureau fait sonner son pas lugubre et sourd.

[Slowly, beneath a pitiless and torrid sky,
Dragging with weary hoof his heavy-bladed plough,
And like a dying man extending his parched throat,
The bull makes his muffled, mournful tread resound.]

Thus far I have quoted merely the opening stanza of each piece. Here in full is a bagatelle signed Samain, whom we had yet to encounter:

Gabrielle, ô ma brunette,
Aimons-nous, le temps est court,
Baisons nos lèvres, minette…
Rien ne vaut encore l'amour.
Il me faut ton frais sourire
Et tes grands yeux plein d'émoi…
Le flot roule où Dieu t'attire,
La chanson va vers la lyre
Et mon cœur s'en va vers toi.

[Gabrielle, O my dark beauty,
Let us love while time is brief,
Kiss my lips, my little cat...
Nothing rivals love's relief.
I must have your tender smile
And your eyes so wide with feeling...
The tide rolls where God compels you,
Song seeks out the waiting lyre,
And my heart takes flight towards you.]

My purpose in quoting these verses is not to hold up to ridicule poets of whom two have already achieved immortality. Indeed, I should be hoisting myself by my own petard. Rather, it is to hearten those poets of eighteen or even twenty who despair of attaining formal perfection. Poetry demands an arduous apprenticeship which, in truth, ceases only at death. Be wary of masters who have barely reached their majority—rest assured that these are not the ones who will lead their generation when the time comes.

To convey something of the contributors’ rather dazed mentality, I offer this story opening: “Everyone knows Yvetot. This Norman beach…” [Yvetot lies, in fact, some thirty kilometres inland from the coast.]

Finally, from one Abbé Louis Vigué, verses of curious relevance which he addressed to the swallows of his day:

Votre tort, ô mes hirondelles,
— Et je ne puis vous disculper 
Votre tort, c'est d'avoir des ailes;
Dans notre siècle il faut ramper.

La force, hélas! prime et domine
Dans nos pays civilisés;
Pauvres oiseaux, allez en Chine,
Vous n'êtes pas autorisés.

[Your sin, O swallows mine,
—And I cannot absolve you—
Your sin is possessing wings;
This age demands we grovel.

Brute force, alas! holds sway
Throughout our civilised domains;
Poor birds, take flight to China—
You lack authorisation here.]

Our most fervent wish was to distance ourselves from these clerical swallows and Yvetot holiday-makers, and bring out an independent anthology. This book never saw the light of day, for reasons I find compellingly set forth in a letter from Éphraïm Mikhaël of 18 October 1883: “We’ve broached with Jouve the celebrated scheme for our collective volume. He’s amenable and offers us, for one hundred and thirty francs, a book in the Bibliothèque Nationale format (priced at 0.25 Fr.), sixty-four pages, three hundred copies. Darzens is wildly keen on the idea. As am I! Behold us grand and illustrious. We have secured a publisher, we shall burst upon the scene, we shall dazzle the Press, our three hundred copies will proliferate with macabre, Rollinat-esque velocity (Les Névroses having just appeared) and sell by the thousand. Sarcey will have us to dinner and spare us the roast goose and haricots verts (our customary fare in the Quarter), we shall be crowned with glory’s aureole. Darzens will reign supreme over every girl in the Latin Quarter, whilst we divide amongst ourselves those from the theatres—leaving the Odéon to Lefeuve and the Nouveautés to Ghilbert. One slight hitch: I have fifty centimes to my name and we require one hundred and thirty francs.”

How delightfully, charmingly young!

Apropos of Éphraïm Mikhaël, I think it worth recording that as early as 1884, whilst strolling through the Luxembourg Gardens, he expounded to me the theory of vers libre, and recited free verses which, as it happened, he never published. This detracts nothing from the laurels of M. Gustave Kahn and Mme Marie Krysinska, who contest the honour of inventing this form. Yet it demonstrates that everywhere at that period, quite independently, poets were seeking to throw off the excessively rigid shackles of classical prosody. The notion of vers libre was, as they say, in the air.

That dear epoch of Sturm und Drang! I am not amongst those who locate all happiness in the past, who maintain that youth alone knows joy. I believe, rather, that the sense of harmony grows more refined with age in those of proper breeding, and I willingly endorse Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s noble sentiment: “The gods have decreed that the intensity of any joy must be measured by the magnitude of despair endured to attain it.” Nonetheless, I recall with a kind of fond irony the artless enthusiasm of our eighteenth year. How genuinely we loathed the bourgeois! I remember Quillard’s habit, upon leaving school, of pausing before a grocer’s shop in the rue Caumartin to fix the proprietor with his calm, guileless gaze whilst abusing him in decidedly robust language, punctuated by the recurring imprecation: “You vile grocer!” The worthy merchant, a mild soul devoid of gall, could never fathom this schoolboy’s unprovoked hostility—the same youth who would later select Sultan Abdul-Hamid as his bête noire.

I confess to having preserved this antipathy towards the bourgeois quite intact, as have many of my comrades. This beneficial hatred has spared us the contamination of society drawing-rooms, newspaper offices and the boulevard stage. It has enabled us to reserve our vital energies for the worship and defence of poetry in an age where, though poets abound, their readers grow ever scarcer. Even should it one day be demonstrated that we possessed no talent whatsoever, none can gainsay our disinterestedness and ardour.

1904-1905.

† A mocking coinage by Champsaur, adding the diminutive suffix “-culet” to “décadents” to belittle the poets—rather like calling them “little decadent babies” or “decadentlings”.

†† A Guesdist was a follower of Jules Guesde (1845-1922), the leading figure of orthodox Marxism in France. Guesde founded the French Workers’ Party (Parti Ouvrier Français) in 1882 and advocated for revolutionary socialism, opposing the more reformist tendencies within the French socialist movement. His followers were known for their doctrinal rigidity and fierce commitment to class struggle.

This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.

→ Browse the complete archive