Léon Hennique Novel

What follows are four articles by Léopold Dauphin on Stéphane Mallarmé, originally published in 1912, translated here for the first time.

I

Great and impeccable artificer of verse, Stéphane Mallarmé was a noble poet. His soul, mysterious, beautiful, and elevated, simply had the flaw of nurturing an artistic ideal even loftier than itself—so high that, to reach it—and indeed, he did reach it—it required, in distancing itself from us, to inevitably forgo our traditional ways of organizing the expressions of our thoughts and also to forge a new mode that would better align with that ideal.

Baudelaire haunted him in his early days, to such an extent that it seemed for a time he could never break free from it. Yet, he triumphed. His will proved stronger. With his proudly artistic nature, could he really settle for being just an imitator when his familiar demon was urging him toward fresh creations? No! His perspective was bound to change, as would his concepts. He was resolute in his intention to venture further than his brother of Les Fleurs du Mal. For him, words transformed into music, fragrances, colours, and even precious gems—cut diamonds whose every facet—depending on how he angled them in the light of thought—reflected, with yet-unimagined glimmers, the prismatic fires of his dream. He loved these words as the Madman of Flowers from Chinese poetry loved the corollas of his garden, frantically darting from one to another, longing for them all at once, no longer certain before which he would kneel, which he would pluck and press to his heart. Similarly, he was hopelessly in love; hardly had he gathered his magical and precious word than he quickly needed to pick, without missing a beat, a second one, entrusting it with the task of illuminating the accessories of his thought. This urgency to soar through the swift paths of ellipsis and reticence is what so often clouds his work for us.

Yet he cared little about being a difficult author. He was well aware that he was obscure to others, just as he was luminous to himself, and that last point mattered most to him. “As long as you understand yourself,” he would often tell me, “and that what you’ve just expressed, you can be sure you’ve articulated beautifully in the art form that you hold dear because you believe it to be the most exquisite; what’s the point of fretting about what may come of it?”

How many times did my Latin mind, ever hungry for clarity, revolt against his deliberately misty skies. And we would debate endlessly, always friendly, yet never able to sway each other. Knowing the radiant beauty of his soul, I had so wished, so deeply hoped, that he might agree to unveil it to us in full daylight—especially since I knew the deftness of his mastery, that rare flexibility that allowed him to juggle effortlessly with any challenging form of his art. But the artist refused, choosing instead to devote himself entirely to his ideal—like a martyr, or a saint, dying for his cause.

To him, Reality had prose at its command, which was more than enough to reveal it to us. Verse, with no kinship to prose, was meant only to serve the Dream, and nothing else. And this Dream, his sacred refuge, he envisioned as a temple where light only filtered in through thick, coloured stained glass windows, casting soft shadows into the recesses of the side chapels, lit only by the flickering blue flames of little glass lanterns. This was how he wanted the light of his artistic Dream: with veil upon veil, each day adding another, softening it further, until it brought with it the obscurity, the cryptic, and the enigmatic elements for which he is so often criticized—yet which no artistically attuned mind could ever deny holds a beauty that endures.

I first met Mallarmé in 1874, at Les Plâtreries, across from Valvins, on the banks of the Seine near Fontainebleau. The river lay between us. He lived on the right bank, in his charming little hermitage, which you reached by climbing a narrow stone staircase, all green and covered with ivy, wild vines, and climbing roses. I was staying on the left bank, at the home of the painter of Louis-Philippe, old Father Biard, whom, despite his seventy-five years, we used to cheekily mock like art students, singing:

When he talks about art,

What an odd fellow is Biard.

The apartment he rented me for my summer retreat had walls covered with his enormous canvases—not his satirical pieces in the Hogarth style, which had made him famous at the Salons of 1830, but portraits of elegant women in low-cut gowns from that era, and scenes from India, where he had once stayed: dances by black performers, bamboulas, and other scenes, including one featuring a scalpel in action. This little private museum had earned quite a reputation in the area, so I wasn’t surprised when Philippe Burty, the art critic, came asking permission to visit. He brought with him a small man dressed in a blue smock and a straw boater hat—it was Stéphane Mallarmé. I hadn’t met him yet, though I knew him by name and through his early poems.

Our friendship blossomed in just a few days. As neighbours, each with our own little canoe, we would meet every morning on the Seine, setting off together—sometimes drifting downstream to Samois, Héricy, Fontaine-le-Port, or Les Chartrettes, other times rowing upstream to Thomery, Champagne, or Moret. We’d pull up close to the banks, tie up our boats, and, stretched out in the grass with our pipes lit, we’d fall into conversation. Both of us loved our arts too much to be troubled by anything else, and his devotion to Poetry and mine to Music were more than enough to fuel our talks.

The engraver Alfred Prunaire, just a short walk from Mallarmé’s home, would gather a circle of friends beneath the shade of his trees: Léon Dierx, Burty, Chevin, our host’s charming old colleague, the poet Gustave Mathieu from Nivernais, and Toussenel, whose delightful discussions on the intelligence of animals never ceased to captivate us. Three years later, after Prunaire, it was the painter Émile Bayard who brought us together in that same garden. And always, the anticipation of Mallarmé’s presence filled us with genuine, heartfelt joy. He possessed an irresistible charm! No one could win people over as effortlessly as he did. The moment he began to speak, you were instantly drawn to him; there was something magnetic about everything he did—his deep, dreamy gaze, like that of a child, but full of wonder; his warm, musical voice, sometimes carrying a slight, lilting tone, almost flute-like, reminiscent of Banville; his gentle manner, his civility, his politeness, his grace—all radiating a kind of perfect and yet utterly simple elegance. His wise and open-minded eclecticism made him capable of grasping, and appearing to accept, even ideas entirely different or opposed to his own. Yes, all of these qualities made him so deeply loved.

The fluidity of his charm, indeed, knew no bounds, but even more remarkable was the astonishing mastery I have already mentioned, and here I will provide undeniable proof.

During our early forest walks, which stretched over more than a dozen summers and autumns, I had made it a habit to ask for his advice on my first attempts at poetry. My verses—crafted purely by instinct, and instinct alone—were the work of a musician who knew almost nothing about serious meter. These were verses that, at best, might be set to music by some village choir master. Yet, my ever-indulgent friend listened to them without mocking, and, even more generously, took the time to point out my mistakes and missteps. Countless times, he would rewrite the entire piece for me—making it clearer, more fluid, and flawless, in a way that would satisfy even the most demanding of critics. Don’t for a moment think he ever intended to mold me into a follower of his own style; you would have had to know him very poorly to believe that. He absolutely could not stand the verses of his imitators. He would have felt utterly cursed if anyone had accused him of wanting to establish a School.

One evening, among the rocks of Samoreau, I recited a line I had crafted that morning to Mallarmé: “Yes, that’s good,” he said, “but do you know how Musset would have rendered it even better?” And just like that, he began improvising a line inspired by my thought, one that could have proudly found its place in Namouna. “Hugo,” he added, “would have approached it differently.” Then, using a fresh rhetorical style, he conjured up a line in Hugo’s manner. To round off his lesson—or perhaps, in an intimate display of playful wit, to showcase what a master juggler he truly was, the very one unjustly accused of being impotent, if not sick or mad—he didn’t stop at imitating just those two poets; after them, it was Banville’s turn, then Leconte de Lisle’s, and even Béranger’s and Pierre Dupont’s, all lending their moulds so he could pour my hapless line into them.

Ah! The clarity of his mind, his philosophy, his wisdom, and his kindness!

How many have passed away among those I could call upon as witnesses, and who would not contradict me, friends whom I encountered or who gathered at his place every Tuesday, at 89, Rue de Rome, initially from 9 PM until midnight. They included Verlaine, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Jean Lahor, Jean Marras, Moore, the English poet, and the painters Manet and Rodenbach. And let’s not forget those who, thank heaven, still live—his cousins the Margueritte and Dierx, along with his devoted and ever-loyal Henry Roujon. Nor can I overlook you, all of you who arrived later, still on Tuesdays, but not in the evening; instead, you would come between four and six in the afternoon—his young friends from back then: Henri de Régnier, Gustave Kahn, Gabriel Mourrey, Ferdinand Hérold, and Vielé-Griffin, Fernand Gregh, Reynaldo Hahn, Thadée Nathanson (Moréas and Vanor are no longer with us!). Yes, you remain to bear witness to how cherished this tiny dining room was for us, where Manet’s Hamlet hung side by side with paintings by Pissarro and Claude Monet, along with a portrait of our Stéphane painted by Whistler. How precious this little corner was to us, and even dearer was that voice, now silenced—this harmonious voice, unforgettable, golden like honey; a winged music that smiled upon our youth, casting its spell on us with its charm and simplicity.

II

The ease—with which I have already mentioned—Mallarmé could improvise verses of all kinds was matched only by his quickness in spotting any structural flaws, even the smallest weakness, and he always knew how to fix them right away. To give you an example, I will just pick two simple cases from a hundred: In a short ode addressed to a friend whose mistress had just left him, and who was ready to end his life, my final quatrain went:

La mort qui nous étale
Avant le couvre-feu,
N’est qu’une horizontale
Vieux jeu

[Death that lays us low
Before the final bell,
Is nothing but a sideways show—
Old spell.]

“Why don’t you just say plainly: est une horizontale vieux jeu?

— Because I want to say it’s nothing but that.

— It seems to me that simply stating it is says all you need; it doesn’t matter to your thought whether death could be anything else here. And, by cutting out that letter ‘n’ and that ‘qu’, your verse flows better and, as Banville would say, it becomes poematic.”

He was right; I took his advice. Certainly, this might seem like a small thing, but it shows how Mallarmé was always after perfection, how much he loved pure sound; no subtle shade of meaning ever escaped him.

I remember an autumn evening when we were rowing together; I can still picture us—both of us with short briar pipes in our teeth—him at the helm, handling his lateen sail with no small amount of skill, working supple tacks; and me, sitting in the middle of the boat, ducking every time the half-filled sail, caught by the breeze, passed over my head so my hat wouldn’t fly off. The sunset was a mix of crimson, mauve, and gold; the piled-up clouds let the sun’s golden arrows break through here and there. It was a late September sky, steeped in a tender melancholy; Mallarmé watched it in silence, and in that quiet, between a swarm of dragonflies flitting above the reeds by the shore and the green flash of a kingfisher darting over us, I saw his eyes lost in a dream… What was he going to say?

“Which, to my mind, is Hugo’s most beautiful line?”

— “There are so many, really, that, well!..”

Le soleil s’est couché ce soir dans les nuées!..

[The sun has set this evening in the clouds!..]

And with that, his heavy eyelid fell again, as if trying to trap all the light from that beautiful sky inside his gaze.

But I snapped him out of his reverie.

— “Alas! I’ll never be able to write anything quite as magnificent as that. Still,”—and as I said this, I gave him the smile that felt right for the moment—”I came up with two lines yesterday that aren’t too bad. They’re addressed to the harvested grapes:

Vous ne griserez plus au soir
L’aile si blonde de l’abeille

[You will no longer intoxicate at evening
The bee's wing so blonde]

He took a puff from his pipe, filled the sail, and gave the helm a twist; I thought he hadn’t heard me and was about to repeat my lines, but then I heard him recite them back to me—with this slight variation:

Vous ne griserez aucun soir
L’aile blonde aussi de l’abeille

[You will never again intoxicate at evening
The bee's blonde wing as well]

I was thrilled! What a lovely turn! Any poet would appreciate the charm, the captivating grace, and the subtlety of that reflected thought. Where I had said just one thing, Mallarmé, with barely a change, had said several. He had done this to avoid the awkward clash of sounds with the two ‘de’ in blonde de l’abeille, and, as was his custom, to give the line a more mysterious, shimmering form, where different ideas seemed to play hide-and-seek, teasing our imagination and his own daydreams. That’s pure Mallarmé! And since I ended up using those two lines, with their delicate music, in the opening rondel of The Blue and Gray Grapes, I’m glad to have this chance to give credit where credit is due.

While crafting, alongside his fellow travellers, the beautiful work that was Le Parnasse contemporain, Mallarmé dreamed of going beyond where they had ventured: he was drawn toward the mirage of a new kind of poetry, one not rooted in the ancient Orient and its fragrances so cherished by the Parnassians. His inner landscapes had a certain likeness to something that might faintly resemble ideal mists—mists of distant ideas—unfurling one after the other through the light of both day and night, at times beneath pale moons, at others beneath radiant suns; they were also the landscapes of pure and lofty abstractions.

A beautiful dream, certainly—like that of a Don Quixote of letters, chasing the ultimate illusion—but a superhuman dream. Mallarmé knew from the start just how many obstacles he would have to overcome, the dangers he would face in trying to reach it, in scaling that height. Yet, on one hand, the crushing weight of the tedium of life in the real world felt unbearable, and, on the other, the beckoning signs and promises of welcome from this dream were so irresistibly alluring that he could hesitate no longer. His yearning for a wider, faraway horizon swept him up, carried him off, and it’s surely at this very moment that he gave voice to that magnificent cry:

The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books.
To flee! Over there, to flee! I feel that birds are drunk
With being among the unknown foam and skies…

And so he leaves behind his companions of Le Parnasse. Despite “the supreme farewell of waving handkerchiefs,” despite “the young woman nursing her child,” his heart is tuned only to the song of the sailors of his ideal. And he sets off, knowing full well what storms lie ahead, fully aware of the scorn he will face. He sets out, ready to face it all—even the very real danger of a dizzying, delirious vertigo…

Why did Mallarmé veil his verse in layers? It was to make its beauty all the more desirable. Isn’t it true that nakedness holds a greater allure when, before fully revealing itself, it only hints at its promise through veils, urging us to peel them away one by one? Doesn’t our longing grow because of this? And can we really fault this clever game that aims for just one thing: to offer us the greatest possible pleasure in the end? Such was the poet’s reasoning—whether right or wrong.

For him, a beautiful verse—whether classical, romantic, or Parnassian—gave up all its beauty from the outset; once the emotion was fully delivered, it couldn’t be experienced again in the same fullness, in the same intensity. It only lived on within us through the memory of that first moment. And this way of seeing things is, in fact, quite accurate. Experience confirms it for anyone who knows how to love poetry and understand its workings. A truly beautiful verse, read or heard for the first time, stirs our imagination; its rhythm enchants us; the idea it expresses, depending on what it is, either moves or delights us. But with each subsequent reading or hearing, those initial feelings begin to fade a little, and they keep fading more with every encounter, until eventually, the excitement, the enchantment, the charm—all the emotions of that first contact—dwindle away, leaving behind only a faint trace in our memory. And it’s then, out of habit, that we say, “This verse is beautiful!” But we no longer feel in harmony with it; its soul—the thought behind it—still lives in us and always will, but its outward, tangible beauty has faded, has died.

It’s much like—if I may say so—the wasp, which dies after it stings, though with one difference: the wasp’s sting leaves us with pain, while that beautiful verse from yesterday gave us nothing but a shiver of art—a pure joy.

Let’s not forget that Mallarmé was, above all, an artist. Yes, he was a thinker; and even more so, a dreamer. But for him, his thoughts and dreams—no matter how deep the one or how lofty the others—were really just a kind of framework, a skeleton on which he shaped his poem, a string vibrating with sound, modulating its music. The idea, the dream—no one can do without them to create; you have to have something to say. So, like everyone else, he drew from them, often better than most. But for him, they were only the starting point, a mere excuse to create the new beauty he glimpsed in his ideal: a mysterious, sibylline verse (he knew himself to be a Vates), full of numbers; a verse gleaming and shimmering, even through its shadows, hungry for reflections, often hiding double meanings within the same word, enriching its imagery, adding to its symbolism. A verse so subtle, flowing, elliptical, and veiled, surprising us with its apparent obscurity, yet one you could almost hold in your hand, like a perfect gemstone, its facets sparkling in the light of thought—a jewel you can set aside and return to without ever growing weary of it, as long as (and this is crucial) you are an artist: because this verse is a work of art, a bronze, a marble, an onyx, an object lovingly sculpted for those who are artists at their very core. To those people alone—those passionate lovers of beauty—will this verse reveal its true meaning, its sense, and all the beauty it holds within.

As for those who mistake this verse for the kind of rhymes you find in riddles and charades, those guessed by the Œdipuses lounging in the Cafés du Commerce or the Comédie—well, tough luck. It’s not meant for them, and they will only waste their time trying to decipher it. But the true worshippers of beauty know how to see through its veils—and even if they cannot always remove them all—they understand just how much Mallarmé’s verse belongs to a Poet, a Poet-Artist, someone true and real poets ought to love.

I have known some of those poets who, even without grasping the full meaning, still found enough in the sheer artistry of his verse to hold the poet of L’Après-midi d’un Faune in high regard and love him like a brother. To name just three of them, I’d mention—his peers—Théodore de Banville, Paul Verlaine, and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam.

III

Clever and wise, the old cook who took care of young Mathurin Régnier had a habit of brushing off his endless curiosity by saying: “That’s enough now, you’ll understand all that when you’re older, and then you’ll see just how many things there are in a ‘thinger!’” In saying this, perhaps without even realizing it, this dear old woman was speaking words as deep as they were memorable. Oh yes, certainly, there are many, many things in a thinger; no thinger is ever simple, each one is a mix, sometimes so complex that its tangle becomes impossible to unravel.

Mallarmé could instantly see into any thinger, and just as easily as he grasped its different elements, he could foresee the consequences, movements, and reflections those elements would stir up. This sharp mental habit of his, this knack for swift analysis and synthesis, let him take in the whole of anything in an instant. Nothing in the makeup of an idea slipped past him; within a sentence, even within a single word, he unearthed multiple meanings, seeing all the distant and hidden images. He could hear all the echoes, correspondences, and analogies calling out to each other—the metaphors, allegories, and symbols they sparked to life. And because he saw and heard all of this—almost all at once—he wanted to pour it all into his verse, not realizing, or perhaps not caring, that by doing so, he was clouding things a bit too much for us, who stand so far from his vision. In his urge to show us everything he sensed, he took the quickest route: a word, the one he considered absolutely essential, just one word, which for him carried several meanings and images, but for us only conjures one, was enough for him. And between each of these words, he took similarly subtle shortcuts, leaping over what might have slowed him down, which explains those many sly ellipses, those kinds of traps where we lose our footing and, sadly, sink in.

Mallarmé’s care wasn’t limited to his verse alone. His strophe, too, demanded his attention. Apart from his earliest poems, he chose to give most of his later works the fixed form of the strictly classical sonnet, or even more so, the quatorzain. It had fourteen lines, like the sonnet, but without the requirement to repeat the same rhyme sounds in the quatrains and tercets. He had borrowed this form—new to us, as he told me—from the English, who themselves inherited it from Shakespeare. It’s made up of three quatrains with independent, alternating rhymes, followed by a closing couplet. Unlike the final line of a sonnet, which usually strengthens the core of the main idea (and how often is a sonnet written precisely for and because of this one pre-composed line, always referred to as the fall of the sonnet!), the closing couplet of the quatorzain should only serve as a kind of faint, distant echo of the central idea—a sort of resonant cadence, a luminous afterglow, a touch of unnecessary luxury, or, as Mallarmé put it with a smile, “a final flourish, the tail of a comet,” when he urged me to embrace this truly delightful form.

For him, every sonnet—indeed, every quatrain—had to form “a block,” so that the whole piece, from start to finish, held together as one. He wanted it to be like a perfect cube of crystal. The main idea and the secondary thoughts were to be so tightly interwoven, so closely fused, that not the slightest gap would disrupt its unity. And he took this unusual theory so far that it led to an extreme I will now explain.

One evening, we were coming back from a sailing trip when he announced that he had finally completed a rather challenging sonnet that had occupied his thoughts for the past eight days. “I’ll show it to you when we get back.” As soon as we returned to Valvins and entered his tiny study (barely two square meters—more akin to a ship’s cabin), he opened the small square window to reveal the marvellous view of the Seine flowing beneath the sumptuous, forested hills (Oh, that view… and what sunsets!). Mallarmé hurried over to his desk, a charming Boulle piece with copper inlays and a curved apron; he pulled out a fine sheet of paper and handed it to me. Mallarmé’s handwriting was typically among the most meticulous; just looking at it made it clear that its author possessed not only respect but also a genuine love for the written word; it seemed as if he had lovingly caressed each letter as he crafted it. The manuscript I held was even more exquisite: the capitals of the verses formed elegant, flowing lines that reflected a rare spirit reminiscent of the refined style of the Japanese; the lowercase letters—upright and unyielding—were uniformly spaced, displayed in the most beautiful calligraphy imaginable. This script could reveal nothing but a beautiful soul. His intertwined initials—a delightful monogram—added a final touch of refinement and rarity that was pleasing to the eye.

Turning towards the light, I gazed at it, silent and unable to read. Mallarmé was observing me. “Isn’t it true,” he said, “that I would make an excellent public scribe?” I didn’t answer and kept my eyes fixed on the sheet; certainly, the writing was neat, and I had noticed that immediately, but it was no longer the writing that intrigued me. Something I had never encountered before, something I couldn’t quite grasp, left me in profound astonishment. What could this be? A mystery! I remained silent, staring at those lines, unable to decipher them.

Noticing my bewilderment, Mallarmé roused me from my reverie.

— “Read! What’s holding you back?”
— “I don’t know! But what is so strange about your manuscript? I feel as though I’m confronted with something I’ve never seen and can’t quite explain to myself.”

He stepped closer, leaned over the page, and smiled.

— “Is it perhaps because you don’t see any punctuation?”

— “Ah, yes, indeed, that was it…” One cannot quite grasp the strange impression one feels when faced with such a spectacle for the first time, especially when it’s presented to you without a hint of what to expect: two quatrains and two tercets perfectly aligned beneath the single word “Sonnet”—on just one page—and all of this without a comma, a period, a semicolon, or a colon, nor question marks or exclamation points. Suddenly, you find yourself at a loss; it’s as if you don’t even notice that these signs are missing, yet you’re left wondering why you remain so utterly astonished. It carries an unsettling, strange, lapidary, solemn, and melancholic air that truly disorients.

— The sonnet shouldn’t be punctuated… At least not the one that, like mine, doesn’t leave any room for punctuation. The missing signs would only serve to needlessly fragment the whole. This way, the thought stays complete, and you can really see how the block structure stands out more.

Certainly, Mallarmé might have pushed this idea a bit too far, even to the extreme, but should we fault him for that? Wasn’t his goal to strive for greater beauty?

I have already touched upon the charm of Mallarmé’s voice; here, I aim to showcase the penetrating power of his words—the extent to which they could become, when he desired, utterly convincing—and how his written obscurities morphed into clarity when he spoke them. Such was the magic of his accent and the depth of his understanding of what he articulated; his thoughts were always clear, and he effortlessly communicated them, almost telepathically, despite the dense clouds he loved to shroud them in.

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam had passed away a few months earlier. Mallarmé received an invitation to give a lecture in Brussels about the genius who had left us far too soon. When he returned, I expressed my eagerness to learn more and asked him to share the manuscript with me. Yet, he had a more delightful way to quench my curiosity; he preferred to read it aloud to me himself. “Even better,” he chuckled, “I’ll perform it for you!” A few days later, he invited me to his home to attend the much-anticipated reading that evening after dinner, a special performance set exclusively for his loyal friend Henry Roujon and me.

I certainly made sure not to miss that appointment.

Nothing from that delightful evening has slipped from my memory. I can still hear the sound of my knock at the door, followed by Mallarmé’s familiar footsteps coming to greet me. I can see his warm smile and the affectionate gesture he made, trying—despite my resistance—to help me with my overcoat in that narrow hallway, which served as a small vestibule. From the back, through the slightly ajar dining room door, I catch the faint, startled jingle of Béhanzin’s little bell as the sleek black Angora darted off toward the kitchen. Madame Mallarmé was clearing the final dishes from dinner, and Geneviève, the poet’s charming daughter, was preparing the coffee service on a tray. Roujon smiled at me warmly as I shook hands with my dear friends, inquiring about everyone’s well-being, even teasingly asking after Clair-de-Lune, their mysterious golden-eyed owl from Valvins. They couldn’t give me a proper update, though, as they’d recently passed her on—through Paul Arène’s help—to Mademoiselle Charcot, the renowned doctor’s daughter, after returning to Paris.

The ladies, apologizing for having to step away to tidy up in the next room, left us to talk and smoke in that unforgettable little dining room.

Charming, pretty, and gleaming, the room’s light furniture—rustic in style with multicoloured straw accents—was a cheerful sight to behold. Near the window, in a small Japanese wooden cage, two tiny inseparable green parakeets chirped softly, always timid and discreet, as if whispering to each other. They were like two well-mannered little beings, perfectly suited to share space with a gracious Muse. On the polished dark Norman buffet, pewter, copper, and glazed pottery sparkled, catching flickers of light as they passed between the shadows, adding vibrant flashes for the eye to enjoy. All this light seemed to spill from the chandelier, where the lamp, encased under a celadon crystal globe, was further adorned with a deep red satin fringed ruffle at its base. In one corner stood a faience stove, while in the other, a tall clock with weight-driven chimes marked the hours. Together they created a soothing harmony—one with gentle warmth, the other with the soft lull of its ticking. You would swear you were miles away from Paris, perhaps even in a distant corner of Holland, so full was the space of charm and soft light, cared for with loving attention by these ladies, whose greatest joy was crafting an atmosphere worthy of their poet’s peaceful reveries.

But, as it turned out, this wasn’t the room for the performance. After a moment, Geneviève, smiling, came to let us know, “Everything’s ready for the show: the stage is set, and the audience is waiting.” With a nod, Mallarmé gestured for us to follow her. He quietly shut the door behind us as we entered the room alone.

This room, their bedroom, glowed softly, with an old upright piano in a warm apricot hue standing between the windows, a gift from Banville to Geneviève. Toward the back, a small square table draped with a cloth held a lamp whose shade cast a perfect circle of light over a neat stack of papers. A lacquered Japanese tray rested beside them, carrying a carafe and a glass. It was the precise replica of the table where Mallarmé had sat during his lecture in Brussels. A few steps away, a sofa awaited the ladies, while two armchairs were reserved for us.

We had barely settled in when Mallarmé made his entrance, striking just the right balance between seriousness and wit. He was solemn yet smiling, his tone both playful and dignified. “Ladies and gentlemen…” he began, sitting down to read from his pages. For the next hour, he held us spellbound, gently lulling us with his words, as Villiers and his work seemed to spring back to life before us. Not once did a single sentence or word interrupt our understanding, or diminish the fascination. And yet, how easily some stumbling block could have thrown us off, had we been reading this text ourselves. But when Mallarmé spoke his words aloud, those obstacles simply disappeared. What he expressed was, at its core, pure clarity, and he transmitted that clarity to us, almost by telepathy, despite the ellipses and obscurities that filled his prose. Whenever he sensed that something might cause confusion, he would subtly fill the gap with a quick flash of his eyes, a shift in his voice, or a small gesture of the hand. And just like that, the difficulty vanished before we even noticed.

As Roujon and I stepped outside, we were both astonished and utterly charmed. “What a pity,” I said, “what a pity this near-miracle doesn’t happen more often, and in front of a larger audience… Mallarmé deserves to be much better known.” Roujon wholeheartedly agreed.

IV

Each year, to wish us a cheerful Merry Christmas, our families would exchange small, simple gifts—chocolates, candies, or little toys for the children. Mallarmé always made sure to include a charming quatrain, delicately penned on his calling card. How I regret losing, in the midst of my various moves, the bundle where I had carefully gathered these treasured cards—there must have been at least fifteen of them! I would have loved to share them here, to show yet again how, even when he was simply having fun, my friend could evoke such elegant, graceful, and delicate imagery. Always true to his poetic ideals, he had a remarkable way of shaping his thoughts in a lighter tone, making sure that those receiving them were spared the burden of puzzling through any difficulty in understanding.

Sadly, my memory doesn’t allow me to recall the exact words of these lovely musings, pinned to their slender little cards like rare butterflies with shimmering wings—these charming verses that felt like precious trinkets set on the shelf of a refined boudoir. However, I do remember a few. These lines were sent to my wife along with a box of candied orange slices:

To bend the branch, so proud and fine,
Toward your brow of pure concern,
You let fall among the grass
The gathered fruits, now returned.

And on a delicate Japanese fan, he wrote:

With spirit high, in heaven’s deep,
Madame Dauphin’s hands do clasp
The wings of Time, in gentle sweep,
And fold them in her tender grasp.

And finally, on the lid of an ark filled with animals, a gift for my youngest daughter, he inscribed this playful couplet, perfectly suited to her age but still revealing the hand of a true craftsman:

Who sails upon the waves? Ahoy!
It’s the Ark of dear Mister Noë.

One winter, however, his quatrain, tucked into a bag of candied fruits, was unusually unclear. As if to gently point this out, I sent him a reply in the form of a playful quatrain of my own, equally challenging. The next day, I received his thanks—gracious and without bitterness—but his final words, well, they didn’t leave any doubt, since I knew how much he detested any form of excess:

“They’re imitating me, I believe, with a touch of decadence.”

A few days later, he came to see me at the very moment I had just finished composing a piano piece (a sorrowful mazurka). I played it for him, and at his kind insistence, I played it again. When I was done, he remained silent behind me. I turned around to see him lost in thought. I imagined that he was struggling to grasp the meaning of my music and, unsure of what to say, felt awkward. But I was mistaken.

He motioned for me to wait, sat down at my desk, wrote something, and handed me a sheet of paper. There, I read these epigraphic verses he had just improvised:

Ainsi qu’une fontaine à la fois gaie et noire,
Etincelle de feux se cache sous le pin,
Coule et veut être celle où la brise ira boire, 
Un sanglot noté par Chopin.

[Like a fountain both joyful and deep, 
Sparkling with fire beneath the pine tree, 
Flows and longs to be where breezes sweep, 
A sob that Chopin set free.]

Overjoyed, I embraced him. And with a mischievous smile, alluding to my last quatrain, he said: “Perhaps these verses aren’t decadent enough for you, my dear and treacherous friend?”

During the summer holidays, Mallarmé, settled in Valvins, had a habit of renting a charming little four-seater English cart, made of pitch pine, along with a pony from Fontainebleau. One year, that pony happened to be a trained circus horse. The lively little creature was certainly cheerful and affectionate, but it wasn’t at all used to feeling the shafts of a cart against its sides! And of course, due to its training, it knew the curve of the circus ring by heart far better than the straight line of any road. Trying to make it go straight ahead was no easy task—it kept wanting to veer off to the side, even as if it might spin the entire cart in circles, if not for the reins pulling against the bit to remind it of its duty. Poor Mallarmé struggled to guide it through the ribbon-like paths of the forest; but when they reached a spacious clearing, thankfully, both found relief: the poet let the reins slacken, taking a break, while the pony, prancing as if it were back in its circus ring, trotted merrily along the mossy edges of the crossroads, delighting in our cheers and applause. Our bravos only heightened its joy, as the clever little creature, basking in its past triumphs, reveled in memories of its former glory!

When unhitched, Mallarmé loved to show off its tricks. Nothing was more entertaining than seeing the poet—the dreamer—take on the role of a circus master, whip in hand, getting his pony to find a hidden handkerchief or watch buried in the sand. Or, within the circle of friends gathered, the pony would playfully point out the biggest liar or drunkard among them.

Another year, his new pony, not as clever as the first, during a brief absence of its master, backed up too close to a steep bank in Champagne. The light little cart slid down the slope, dragging the pony with it, until everything gradually sank into the river. By the time Mallarmé returned, all that was left to see was the top of the whip—swaying like a reed—gently bobbing with the current. Ever since that day, whenever the local peasants passed him on the road, they pointed him out as a sort of unfortunate celebrity, nudging each other and whispering, “That’s the poor burgeois who drowned his horse!”

One summer, as his budget was stretched thin by I can no longer recall which excess of expense, Mallarmé found himself sadly obliged to forgo the annual rental of his little carriage, and it weighed heavily on him to deprive his wife and daughter of this cherished pleasure. He was deeply concerned about this; not a single moment passed without him mulling it over. It became a rather troubling obsession, where, despite his near certainty that he couldn’t realize his beloved dream, there still glimmered a hope that perhaps something unexpected might crop up at the last minute to make it possible: but what? He didn’t know, yet he sought in his thoughts what that might be.

Now, one morning, having just finished lunch with a friend in the Latin Quarter, he was strolling down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, idly browsing the shop windows. One display caught his eye more than the others; he lingered there without knowing why, smoking his cigar, his mind blank, somewhat foolishly gazing at a showcase in a bookstore-stationer-publisher; in front of the door were books, behind the glass, two-sous school notebooks with colourful covers adorned with illustrations depicting historical events alongside their captions, and here were the heads of the kings of France with their chronology; beside them, multiplication tables, further along geography maps… By chance, he glanced up and read the word “publisher” on the sign. Like a madman, or rather like an Archimedes who has just suddenly found the solution to his problem, he stepped into the shop and asked for the owner:

“Monsieur,” he said, “I am M. Mallarmé, an English teacher at the Condorcet High School. I have devised a practical method for teaching students the English language in ten lessons, each of which could fit on the cover of a school notebook just as your various lessons fit on these” (and he pointed to the display).

“Would you, Monsieur, kindly step into my office?” replied the owner; “we’ll be better off in there to discuss business.”

Half an hour later, Mallarmé was on the boulevard, no longer sad but happy and laughing at his clever manoeuvre: he had in his pocket his horse and carriage, meaning the proper contract signed by both parties, the legitimate contract that would allow him to rent it right away.

As for the famous method mentioned in this splendid contract, what would it be? He had no idea yet, but since he was sure he would figure it out the next day, he didn’t dwell on it at that moment; joyfully, he quickened his pace toward the Rue de Rome to share the good news without delay!

Two months later, at Valvins, his joy had not yet waned as he recounted this story to me.

I believe this is the only moment in his life when he had no reason to regret being an English teacher.

He had been one at the start of his academic career, first in Tournon, then in Avignon, where he quickly became friends with Théodore Aubanel, Roumanille, and Mistral. From there, he was appointed to Paris, successively at the Condorcet, Jeanson de Sailly high schools, and lastly at the Rollin College.

This establishment was located just a few hundred meters from the corner of Boulevard Barbès, where I was staying; he would sometimes drop by in the mornings at eleven o’clock after finishing class, and it was truly painful for me to see him so weary and disheartened. Students can be merciless! Not unaware that he was the poet we know, this group of sixty-odd kids made his class a nightmare, not only with their foolish racket but often even by throwing papier-mâché balls at the lectern. The municipal council had disarmed him by stripping away his right to punish and to expel a student from his class, leaving him at a loss for what to do; he remained quite miserable despite all his patience and his wonderfully benevolent philosophy.

How happily he welcomed summer break—those hours of deliverance!—when, with the Forest and the Seine, he could once again claim his canoe, “Vève,” his rowing skiff, his sailboat, his little cart, his pony, and, beyond all that, free the wings of his Dreams to spread wide, safe from the cold, confining walls of his English classroom that stifled them.

Ah, that Valvins! How he loved it…

No place could have been better chosen for the monument his admirers and friends are now planning to raise. I hope the stele will stand just past the bridge as you come from Fontainebleau, on the fork where the road leads left to Vulaines and right to Samoreau (where he lies near his son), so that the bust will gaze upon the forest and the Seine. In this way, Mallarmé will seem to go on dreaming. He will look out over his beloved landscapes, where his singing soul—yes, that soul of a pure, true poet, now dispersed in infinity these fifteen years—found such joy in roaming, a gentle dreamer, with his tireless Chimeras. He would watch them soar and glide, and on tiny sheets of white paper, no larger than twice a cigarette paper, he would, with his English fountain pen, lovingly trace their soaring paths, marking out their high, mystical lines against the sky, beautiful hieroglyphs on the blue.

We artists and poets should all bow before this bust, and my friend Ferdinand Lovio, who is one himself, truly spoke well when he recently wrote to me about Mallarmé: “Perhaps he sinned, but it was from an excess of zeal and love; and so we should forgive him much, like the repentant Magdalene, for he has loved greatly…”

How could he not have loved Poetry with such constant, passionate devotion, he who held the highest, most supreme vision of it, more than anyone, and who dreamed—oh, an impossible dream—of making it speak the inexpressible, of revealing to us, after he had first created it, the soul of smoke, of wind, of fragrances, of sounds, of colours, and even of the faintest shadows, clouds, and rays.

Let us pity ourselves for not always understanding him, but let us never pity him. Mallarmé, aware of the beauty of his dream, was, in a simple, unassuming way, the happiest of us all and drew from this happiness—which I envied then, and envy still—a profound wisdom, a saintly kindness.

How many times I told him so, smiling! And once, on the rocks of Franchart, I repeated to him in all seriousness, “Mallarmé, yes, you are a Saint!” I can still hear his quick response, solemn and witty at once, but in a voice he tried to make sound irritated, as though I had insulted him: “You’re another!” Then, breaking into a laugh, his brow relaxing as he affectionately grabbed my arm and shook it: “Let’s cast off these halos, shall we, Dauphin? And play with them instead, like golden hoops, at a lively game of grace!”

Oh, there’s so much more I could say about him! About the aesthetics of his prose, the books he planned to write, the typographical innovations he dreamed of wrapping them in; about his endless Chimeras, so unexpected, deliberately eccentric but delightful; about his familiar gestures, his words that always conjured images where dry wit mingled with perfect seriousness—a single volume could hardly hold it all, or barely. But I must end here, with deep regret and a heart sincerely moved by such dear memories. Yet I cannot close without saying thank you! to my old and cherished friend; thank you for your kind and generous friendship, your thoughtful and devoted care; thank you for your wise, learned, and lofty advice, and your constant encouragements, offered time and again.

Will I ever forget all that my artist’s soul owes to him! Did he not go so far as to let me believe it was somehow akin to that of a poet? Wasn’t it he who insisted I publish my first volume of verse, who, despite my reluctance, took it himself to the publisher Vanier? Yes, thank you for all this and more; for that fine Example of serenity you offered me, which I strive to draw upon in my old age—an Example where he, the Obscure, the Madman (Madman of words), let me find the long-sought sesame that, if it doesn’t open wide, alas! (oh, that would be too grand!), at least slightly parts the golden and silver doors of Light and Wisdom, and even that ivory one—of kindness.

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