Title page of Feu et Flamme by Philothée O'Neddy (Théophile Dondey),
published by Librairie Orientale de Dondey-Dupré, Paris, 1833.
AVANT-PROPOS
An author, head held high, in his proud preface,
May cry to the public he insults: Make way!...
Long enough, motionless and with arms crossed upon the threshold of my pariah’s hut, have I contemplated, in idle admiration, the adolescent walls of the artistic and moral Babel that the elite intelligences of our age have undertaken to erect.
Having now become deeper, more imperious, more exalted, my sympathy commands me to mingle some action with this contemplation, to go and lose myself amongst the crowd of workers.
Therefore, here I am: I bring to the gigantic flagstones a paltry handful of cement.
Muscular and strong workmen, beware of rejecting my feeble cooperation; never shall you have arms enough for the erection of so great a work! And perhaps I am not entirely unworthy of being called your brother. — Like you, I despise with all the height of my soul the social order and above all the political order which is its excrement; — like you, I mock the ancientists and the academy; — like you, I stand incredulous and cold before the magniloquence and tinsel of earth’s religions; — like you, I have pious yearnings only towards Poetry, that twin sister of God, who bestows upon the physical world light, harmony and perfumes; upon the moral world, love, intelligence and will!
Certainly, though nascent, this Babel is already quite miraculous and grandiose! Its girdle of walls already encircles myriads of stadia. The sublimity of its towers already pierces the most distant clouds. It alone already has more arabesques and statues than all the cathedrals of the middle ages combined. Poetry at last possesses a city, a kingdom where she can deploy at ease her two natures: — her human nature which is art, — her divine nature which is passion.
Doubtless you remember the wondrous aplomb with which, immediately after the fall of the last king of France, certain newspapers prophesied that it was all over for the young literature, that it was entering its coffin along with the old legitimacy. — The young literature has been so little in danger of death, it has so well developed its vital principle, that not only has it managed to increase its own forces tenfold, to perfect its revolution, but it has known how to be still rich enough, powerful enough to prelude gloriously to a metaphysical crusade against society. Yes, now that it has completed all its beautiful reforms in art’s costume, it devotes itself exclusively to the ruin of what it calls the social lie; — as the philosophy of the eighteenth century devoted itself to the destruction of what it called the Christian lie.
Each day, numbers of young people with patriotic convictions come to perceive that, if the political work has a Caliban’s nature, one must directly blame the social work, its mother; — then, they cast off republican fanaticism, and hasten to enrol themselves in the phalanxes of our Babel.
What is incredible is that the strong heads of the financial salons, the sublime capacities who mock chivalry and adore the national guard, obstinately persist in denying even the existence of this great intellectual fermentation. Because external life, material and positive life finds itself, thanks to our mathematically miserly civilisation, more or less reduced to a state of petrification, — they count on an eternity of dead calm; — they do not see that in return the interior life, the romantic and metaphysical life is as turbulent, as adventurous, as free as the Arab tribes in their solitudes.
Let them remember then that, on the very eve of the famous eruption of Vesuvius that buried two cities alive, Herculaneum and Pompeii, ignorant naturalists, out walking not far from the crater’s edge, were asking one another whether it was indeed real that the mountain’s entrails contained a volcano!…
I hasten, before closing this vile prose, to affirm to the honest folk who might deign to let their ivory knife deflower the leaves of my book, that I have not the least vanity in believing the subsequent poems equal to the solemn preoccupations touched upon in these preliminary lines.
This volume has no other pretension than that of being the bundle of my best schoolboy sketches; which consist simply of passionate reveries and artistic studies.
It is quite true, however, that one finds here and there some strong imprints of lycanthropy, some anathemas against social leprosies: but one would be wrong to take these manifestations literally, which are, for the most part, only fiery sallies. — One would be wrong to regard them as the absolute expression of my true sentiments. If I am granted the chance to publish a second work, it will be more logical, more in keeping with my nature as a thinker; I shall say my last word there; — then, one may judge me.
Should the second-hand dealers of civilisation deign to tell me angrily that no one is permitted to place himself outside society, I would have the irreverence to observe to them that two classes of men possess this right in an imprescriptible manner: — those who are worth more than society, — and those who are worth less. — I place myself in one of these two categories.
10th August 1833.
An excellent introduction to O'Neddy's work and life can be found in an article by the renowned scholar Enid Starkie (whose biographical works on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Flaubert I highly recommend):
- “A Little-Known Precursor of Baudelaire: The ‘Bouzingo’ Philothée O’Neddy,” The Modern Language Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (October 1944), pp. 357-367.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
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