Nhâm-Dần 2022

L’isolement

Lamartine

Souvent, sur la montagne, à l’ombre du vieux chêne,

Au coucher du soleil, tristement je m’assieds ;

Je promène au hazard mes regards sur la plaine,

Dont le tableau changeant se déroule à mes pieds.

Ici gronde le fleuve aux vagues écumantes ;

Il serpente et s’enfonce en un lointain obscur ;

Là, le lac immobile étend ses eaux dormantes

Où l’étoile du soir se lève dans l’azur.

Au sommet de ces monts coronnés de bois sombres,

Le crépuscule encor jette un dernier rayon ;

Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres

Monte, et blanchit déjà les bords de l’horizon.

Cependant, s’élançant de la flèche gothique,

Un son religieux se répand dans les airs !

Le voyageur s’arrête, et la cloche rustique

Aux derniers bruits du jour mêle de saints concerts.

Mais à ces doux tableaux mon âme indifférente

N’éprouve devant eux ni charme ni transports ;

Je contemple la terre ainsi qu’une ombre errante :

Le soleil des vivants n’échauffe plus les morts.

De colline en colline en vain portant ma vue,

Du sud à l’aquilon, de l’aurore au couchant,

Je parcours tous les points de l’immense étendue

Et je dis : “Nulle part le bonheur ne m’attend.”

Que me font ces vallons, ces palais, ces chaumières,

Vains objects dont pour moi le charme est envolé ?

Fleuves, rochers, forêts, solitude si chères,

Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé !

Que le tour du soleil ou commence ou s’achève,

D’un oeil indifférent je le suis dans son cours ;

En un ciel sombre ou pur qu’il se couche ou se lève,

Qu’importe le soleil ? je n’attends rien des jours.

Quand je pourrais le suivre en sa vaste carrière,

Mes yeux verraient partout le vide et les déserts ;

Je ne désire rien de tout ce qu’il éclaire ;

Je ne demande rien à l’immense univers.

Mais peut-être au delà des bornes de sa sphère,

Lieux où le vrai soleil éclaire d’autres cieux,

Si je pouvais laisser ma dépouille à la terre,

Ce que j’ai tant rêvé paraîtrait à mes yeux !

Là, je m’enivrerais à la source où j’aspire ;

Là, je retrouverais et l’espoir et l’amour,

Et ce bien idéal que toute âme désire

Et qui n’a pas de nom au terrestre séjour !

Que ne puis-je, porté sur le char de l’Aurore,

Vague object de mes voeux, m’élancer jusqu’à toi !

Sur la terre d’exil pourquoi resté-je encore ?

Il n’est rien de commun entre la terre et moi.

Quand la feuille des bois tombe dans la prairie,

Le vent du soir se lève et l’arrache aux vallons ;

Et moi, je suis semblable à la feuille flétrie

Emportez-moi comme elle, orageux aquilons !

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Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859)

One of the most gifted poetesses of the Romantic period, Mme Marceline Desbordes-Valmore found in her poetry a solace from a life buffeted by misfortunes.

Born in the northern French town of Douai on 20 June 1786, in the midst of a textile-dependent economy in crisis, Marceline-Félicité-Joseph was the youngest daughter of Antoine-Felix Desbordes, a painter of armories and church ornaments and Catherine-Cécile Lucas both descendants of Swiss immigrants. The Revolution ruined the family fortune, forcing the barely adolescent Marceline and her mother to take a trip to Guadeloupe in search of relief with a successful cousin. Marceline was chosen from among her parents’ four children.to accompany her mother. To earn the fare for the trip, Marceline had to join a theater in Lille, then in Rochefort and Bordeaux, learning the cruelty of life along the way. Finally, in 1801, three years after leaving Douai, they began the perilous journey during a time when England and France were at war on the seas. When they arrived, Guadeloupe was convulsed by a violent revolt of the slaves against the French colons. The cousin, having lost his property and his wife during the uprising, had fled (Pougin 45)1. Shortly afterwards her mother died of yellow fever. Thanks to the compassion of strangers, she was finally returned at Dunkirk, now sixteen, destitute, and with her physical safety barely intact. Back to Douai, she plunged headlong into a career of acting and singing first in Rouen, then at the Opéra Comique (in 1805), where she gained the protection of the famed composer Grétry, with whom she maintained a steady correspondance after she left Paris. In 1813 she appeared in Paris again, this time at l’Odéon. It is in this town that she met in 1808 Henri de Latouche, her first true love, which lasts thirty years according to one account, whose identity she never revealed, except as “Olivier” in her poems. From this union a child was born who did not survive. Though very successful as an actress, Desbordes-Valmore left the Opéra Comique to return to the theater in Rouen, and from there in 1815 she left for a role of Rosine in Rossini’s Barber of Séville at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. Here she married in 1817 a second-rate actor, Prosper Lanchantin also called Valmore, from whom she had two daughters and a son. The first legitimate child died within a few weeks. Of the next three childen, two girls and one boy, the first-born, Ines, died during adolescence; Ondine died as a young woman, after she herself had seen her own daughter die in childhood. Only Hippolyte survived both his parents; he served twenty years in the army, seven of which in captivity by the Spaniards and then by the English..

In spite of the numerous personal tragedies Desbordes-Valmore started to write, prolifically, as a girl, a sister, a friend, a woman, and a mother, producing 25,000 verses, thousands of pages of prose, more than 3,000 letters not intended for publication. Written sometimes out of pecuniary necessity, sometimes for her own therapeutic purposes, the healing or palliating of a love life rent by heartaches, sometimes as a weapon with which to defend the weak against the powerful, her poetry easily retains the values and qualities which move her contemporaries and the modern reader to appreciate her as a significant voice among the Romantics. For twenty years, she and her husband would travel from city to city to earn a living, which hovered on the brink of indigence, until she finally gave up the theater in 1832 to devote full time to literature. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore died in Paris on 28 February 1859, at last finding peace from a tormented and painful life..

Her collections of Élégies, Marie et Romances (1819), Élégies et Romances nouvelles (New Elegies and Romances, 1825), Poésies (1830), Les Pleurs (Tears, 1833), Pauvres Fleurs (Poor Flowers, 1839), Bouquets et Prières (Bouquets and Prayers, 1843) charmed the habitués of the salons of her days. She also wrote children’s and family-oriented books: Contes en vers pour les Enfants (Tales in Verse for Children, 1840), Contes en prose (1840), Livre des Mères et des Enfants (Book for Mothers and Children, 1840), Anges de la Famille (1849), Jeunes Têtes et Jeunes Coeurs (Young Heads and Young Hearts, 1855). Among posthumous works are Poésies inédites (Unpublished Poems, 1860), Poésies de l’Enfance (Poems of Childhood, 1868), Contes et Scènes de la Vie de Famille (Tales and Scenes of Family Life, 1865), Poésies en Patois (1896). The novels include Une Raillerie de l’Amour (The Mocking of Love, 1833) L’Atelier d’un Peintre (The Workshop of a Painter, 1833) Violette (1839), and the novellas Salon de Lady Betty (1836), Domenica (1843), Huit Femmes (Eight Wives, 1845)

Her poetry, very much a spontaneous and lyrical effusion of a tender heart touching upon the elegiac and the epic, brims with female emotions and anxieties of love, the joys of motherhood, social concerns, political concerns, and religious fervor. Her pesonal lyricism evinces beauty, sincerity, and spontaneity that reach a sublime intensity. Woven with a soft texture, her verse delights the ear with the euphonious sounds that herald the musicality of Verlaine. The musicality of her verse must have benefited from the sense of musical rhythm she developed as a singer. Her style and rhythm, the odd number of syllables in verse (she introduced the eleven-syllable verse before Verlaine), her melancholy, her doleful passion, her pains and miseries form an amalgam that is strikingly original and modern. Detractors were outnumbered by admirers, among whom great men of letters such as Lamartine, Béranger, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, Verlaine, even Baudelaire. As if in recognition of a kindred soul, André Breton says of her, “Desbordes-Valmore is surrealist in love.” Findng in her a soulmate for her love pains and politics, Louis Aragon, too, joins the encomium and is largely responsible for thrusting Deabordes-Valmore, who incorporates in her verse the major movements of the 19th century, into the modern consciousness. Her inspirations encompass the elegiac elements of a Lamartine and Alfred de Musset, the epic of a Victor Hugo, the symbolist of a Stéphane Mallarmé and Baudelaire, even the socio-political, and the humanist, not to mention the not so hidden feminist. Partly due to her lack of an academic background and any intellectual orientation, she is an independent, free-thinker who ranges across a wide spectrum of themes, anything that touches her heart, her conscience, her sensibility as a woman, a sister, a friend, a wife, a mother, a struggling artist who experienced first-hand the inequities and deceptions of life.

Considered a minor poet partly because of her status as a woman writer (She even wrote, “Women, I know, should not write; however, I write.”), Desbordes-Valmore has elicited a new burst of interest among modern critics. Her ability to deal with personal sufferings, an unforturnate love (with Henri de Latouche? with Dr. Alibert of the Opéra Comique?), loss of her children and friends, and an existence vitiated by near-poverty strikes the modern reader as admirable strength and fortitude. Although this renewed interest was fueled in no small part by feminist criticism, Desbordes-Valmore’s works proffers fertile ground for investigating other themes such as those abounding in the social and political arenas. Her poems capture the essence of love with tenderness and precision; the distresses and dreams of a woman in search of identity; the compassion for and defense of the children, the poor, the poor children, the women, the prisoners; in short, the downtrodden and vulnerable. Another dimension of this long-suffering soul is her spirituality. In spite of all the trials and vicissitudes she never loses faith in God2.

Charles Baudelaire, the eminent critic Sainte-Beuve, Paul Verlaine, Alexandre Dumas, Théodore de Banville, among a host of others, wrote critically of Desbordes-Valmore, paying tribute to her exquisite poetry and to “the modern Sappho,” as the great Paganini called her, who was “born for love, suffering, and poetry,” as Arthur Pougin (7) put it in La Jeunesse de Mme Desbordes-Valmore (The Youth of Mrs. Desbordes-Valmore). Pougin characterizes Desbordes-Valmore thus, “If Marceline has so far arranged her rhymes, if she has tried to express her feelings and sensations in verses more or less sonorous, more or less harmonious, it is the sole torture of her heart that draws from it the accents of a vibrant, pathetic, ardent poetry, always impregnated with intense emotions, which were later to elicit admiration and earn her an imperishable reputation.” (Pougin 82)

In his Les Poètes maudits3 (The Accursed Poets), Verlaine reviews six poets, including himself as Pauvre Lelian (anagram of Paul Verlaine), whom he calls Poètes absolus, absolute in imagination, absolute in expression. There is no definition, just an assertion, of the term maudit. After dwelling at length on the merits of Desbordes-Valmore’s verse with copious examples, Verlaine concludes, with hyperbolic flourish, “being powerless to further dissect such an angel.” (76) Then in a memorable finale, “And, pedant as is our pitiable métier, we must proclaim with a loud and intelligible voice that Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is simply — along with George Sand, who is so different, so hard, yet not without charming graces, great sense, and of proud and rather masculine disposition — the only woman of genius and talent of this century and of all centuries alongside Sappho, perhaps, and St. Theresa.” (76)

If by “poète maudit” is meant a poet of talent, who has difficulty fitting in, and is thus forced to live on the fringe by circumstances, rejecting the values of or being rejected by society, and sometimes engaging in asocial, provoking, dangerous, or self-destructive behavior (such as drug and alcohol abuse), possibly paying the price of early death for it or receiving only belated or incommensurate recognition, then Desbordes-Valmore does not exactly fit the mold. Yet, this romantic notion, pushed to an extreme, has a curious appeal, and by its measure some of Desbordes-Valmore’s admirers, namely Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, certainly would qualify. If to the designation is attached such descriptive terms as incomprehensible, hermetic, misunderstood, over the top, then one could add Stéphane Mallarmé for his impenetrable poems (Jules Renard calls Mallarmé, intraduisible, même en français, untranslatable, even in French), Lautréamont for his potentially blasphemous depiction of evil, Lautréamont, who died young at 24.

Desbordes-Valmore’s two most famous poems are highlighted here, Les Roses de Saadi and Les Séparés, the latter having been set to music by Julien Leclerc.in his album “Julien” published in 1997.

1Pougin, Arthur. La Jeunesse de Mme Desbordes-Valmore. Paris:Calman-Levy, 1898.

2Le Poème d’une vie. Le site officiel de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. 7 Jul 2007

http://www.desbordes-valmore.net/poeme.html

3Verlaine, Paul. Les Poètes maudits. Paris: Léon Vanier, 1888.

7 July 2007

Les Roses de Saadi

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

J’ai voulu ce matin te rapporter des roses ;

Mais j’en avais tant pris dans mes ceintures closes

Que les noeuds trop serrés n’ont pu les contenir.

Les noeuds ont éclaté. Les roses envolées

Dans le vent, à la mer s’en sont toutes allées.

Elles ont suivi l’eau pour ne plus revenir.

La vague en a paru rouge et comme enflammée.

Ce soir, ma robe en est toute embaumée.

Respires-en sur moi l’odorant souvenir.

Les Séparés

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

N’écris pas – Je suis triste, et je voudrais m’éteindre

Les beaux étés sans toi, c’est la nuit sans flambeau

J’ai refermé mes bras qui ne peuvent t’atteindre,

Et frapper à mon coeur, c’est frapper au tombeau

N’écris pas !

N’écris pas – N’apprenons qu’à mourir à nous-mêmes

Ne demande qu’à Dieu … qu’à toi, si je t’aimais !

Au fond de ton silence écouter que tu m’aimes,

C’est entendre le ciel sans y monter jamais

N’écris pas !

N’écris pas – Je te crains; j’ai peur de ma mémoire;

Elle a gardé ta voix qui m’appelle souvent

Ne montre pas l’eau vive à qui ne peut la boire

Une chère écriture est un portrait vivant

N’écris pas !

N’écris pas ces mots doux que je n’ose plus lire :

Il semble que ta voix les répand sur mon coeur;

Et que je les vois brûler à travers ton sourire;

Il semble qu’un baiser les empreint sur mon coeur

N’écris pas !

L’Amour

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Vous demandez si l’amour rend heureuse;

Il le promet, croyez-le, fût-ce un jour.

Ah! pour un jour d’existence amoureuse,

Qui ne mourrait? la vie est dans l’amour.

Quand je vivais tendre et craintive amante,

Avec ses feux je peignais ses douleurs:

Sur son portrait j’ai versé tant de pleurs,

Que cette image en paraît moins charmante.

Si le sourire, éclair inattendu,

Brille parfois au milieu de mes larmes,

C’était l’amour; c’était lui, mais sans armes;

C’était le ciel. . . qu’avec lui j’ai perdu.

Sans lui, le cœur est un foyer sans flamme;

Il brûle tout, ce doux empoisonneur.

J’ai dit bien vrai comme il déchire une âme:

Demandez-donc s’il donne le bonheur!

Vous le saurez: oui, quoi qu’il en puisse être,

De gré, de force, amour sera le maître;

Et, dans sa fièvre alors lente à guérir,

Vous souffrirez, ou vous ferez souffrir.

Dès qu’on l’a vu, son absence est affreuse;

Dès qu’il revient, on tremble nuit et jour;

Souvent enfin la mort est dans l’amour

Et cependant….oui, l’amour rend heureuse!

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Sully-Prudhomme (1839-1907)

Winner of 1901 Nobel Prize for Literature

Reacting against the excesses of Romanticism, a new poetry movement, the Parnasse, propounded art for art’s sake, lifted poetry to Parnasse, the abode of the Muses, and restored art to its former purity and dignity, from which Lamartine had dragged it down. Three reviews contributed to the Parnassian movement, La Revue fantaisiste (1861), founded by Catulle Mendès, who defamed romantic declamation and rehabilitated virtuosity, La Revue du progrès (1863-64), founded by Xavier de Ricard, who extolled scientific poetry, and L’Art (1865-66), dominated by the influence of Leconte de Lisle. The first collection of Parnassian poetry, Le Paranasse contemporain was edited in 1866 by Lemerre, who assembled works from thirty-seven poets, including Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Francois Coppée, Catulle Mendès, José-Maria de Heredia, Verlaine, Mallarmé. This collection was succeeded by two others that were published in 1871 and 1876. All Parnassians shared the cult of formal perfection.

Sully-Prudhomme, by his attention to the precise form and style, belongs in the Parnassian movement. However, his inspiration runs counter to the movement; he sings of his intimate feelings, the dictates of his moral conscience, and the troubles of his thoughts. His lyrical works, Stances et Poèmes (Stanzas and Poems 1865), Les Épreuves (The Trials, 1866), Les Solitudes (1869), Les Vaines Tendresses (Vain Tenderness 1875), are followed by philosophical poems, La Justice (1878) and Le Bonheur (Happiness, 1888). Certain of his poems have a melancholy and delicate charm.

Le vase brisé

Sully Prudhomme

Le vase où meurt cette vervaine

D’un coup d’éventail fut fêlé ;

Le coup dut effleurer à peine,

Aucun bruit ne l’a révélé.

Mais la plus légère meurtrissure,

Mordant le cristal chaque jour,

D’une marche invisible et sûre

En a fait lentement le tour.

Son eau fraîche a fui goutte à goutte,

Le suc des fleurs s’est épuisé ;

Personne encore ne s’en doute,

N’y touchez pas, il est brisé.

Souvent aussi la main qu’on aime,

Effleurant le coeur, le meurtrit ;

Puis le coeur se fend de lui-même,

La fleur de son amour périt ;

Toujours intact aux yeux du monde,

Il sent croître et pleurer tout bas

Sa blessure fine et profonde ;

Il est brisé, n’y touchez pas.

Les yeux

Sully-Prudhomme

Bleus ou noirs, tous aimés, tous beaux,

Des yeux sans nombre ont vu l’aurore ;

Ils dorment au fond des tombeaux,

Et le soleil se lève encore.

Les nuits plus douces que les jours,

Ont enchanté des yeux sans nombre ;

Les étoiles brillent toujours,

Et les yeux se sont remplis d’ombre.

Oh ! qu’ils aient perdu le regard,

Non, non, cela n’est pas possible

Ils se sont tournés quelque part,

Vers ce qu’on nomme l’invisible.

Et comme les astres penchants

Nous quittent, mais au ciel demeurent,

Les prunelles ont leurs couchants,

Mais il n’est pas vrai qu’elles meurent :

Bleus ou noirs, tous aimés, tous beaux,

Ouverts à quelque immense aurore,

De l’autre côté des tombeaux

Les yeux qu’on ferme voient encore.

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Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

An only child, spoiled and turbulent, Verlaine was placed in a boarding school. After graduation from high school he attempted law, quickly became bored, quit, and drifted from a job with an insurance company to one with the City of Paris. Soon he took to the bohemian lifestyle and alcohol, frequented cabarets and the literary circles. His Poèmes Saturniens, written at age 16 while still at the Lycée, were published in 1866 in Paris, to the critical acclaim of Anatole France et Mallarmé. But his addiction to absinthe caused one scandal after another. In 1870, the year of the publication of Les Fêtes Galantes, he married 17-year-old Mathilde Mauté, settled down, and even got involved in political events. During the Commune he joined the insurgents.

In September 1871, he met Arthur Rimbaud, who had sent him his poems, and now had come from Charleville to join him. Falling in love with the youth, he reverted to his cabaret ways. During bouts of drunkenness, he would quarrel with Mathilde or beat her. When the couple’s son arrived in October, Rimbaud went back to Charleville. Verlaine’s family enjoyed a period of relative calm. Before long Rimbaud and Verlaine got back together, and they fled to Belgium, where Mathilde failed to beg him to come back, then to London, where his mother tried in vain to bring him around.

With Rimbaud he drank, quarreled, and fought, until Rimbaud finally grew tired and left for Charleville, where Verlaine could not persuade him to resume their wanderings. In July 1873, for having shot Rimbaud in the arm Verlaine served a two-year sentence in Brussels, during which time he rediscovered the Christian faith of his childhood. Out of prison Verlaine went to London to teach French and drawing. Back in Paris in 1882, he returned to absinthe, forsaken by his wife, who finally divorced him. He tried to publish Rimbaud’s work, wrote for magazines, and published his own poems, Jadis et Naguère (1884), and Parallèllement (1889). Refusing to belong to any literary schools and romantic that he was, he lived in bars surrounded by young women admirers.

He spent the income from his poems and articles on drinks. His friends pooled their resources to help him out with a monthly stipend. Afflicted by rheumatism and leg ulcers, he spent extended periods in the hospital, where he found a measure of tranquillity. Always a maverick, he submitted his candidacy to the Académie Française, but received no votes.

However, in 1894, he was elected “Prince of Poets” by his peers to succeed Leconte de Lisle. The only other accolade was bestowed at his funeral one day after his death on January 9, 1896. The Latin Quarter, whose every single bar and tavern he had patronized, became thick with mourners, who formed an honor guard all the way to the Clichy cemetery, to pay tribute to the inveterate drunkard who incarnates Poetry and has joined the ranks of the accursed poets.

Verlaine’s art resides in the music of his poetry. It is this inebriating quality, combined with the finely wrought melancholy, the sadness of love and unattained happiness, the delicate and sentimental touch, that set him apart as a magician of the word.

In the short mood poem Chanson d’automne, which encapsulates his Weltschmerz, taken from the Poèmes Saturniens, Verlaine at an early age sees his spirit sink to its nadir. The star-crossed poet, whose tormented life he was to live on the brink of perdition, lets autumn fill his soul with leaden sadness. The languorous sobs of the violin rend his heart. He cries about the past, and faces the future with the vulnerability of an autumn leaf at the mercy of the evil wind. With just a few words in each verse in three six-line stanzas, he creates a haunting lament that clings tenaciously to the psyche. Let the musique verlainienne then begin. To submerge and transport us to an autumn of melancholic heartbreak.

Chanson d’automne

Verlaine

Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l’autonne

Blessent mon coeur

D’une langueur

Monotone.

Tout suffoquant

Et blême quand

Sonne l’heure,

Je me souviens

Des jours anciens

Et je pleure.

Et je m’en vais

Au vent mauvais

Qui m’emporte

Deçà, delà

Pareil à la

Feuille morte.

Il pleure dans mon coeur

Verlaine

Il pleure dans mon coeur

Comme il pleut sur la ville

Quelle est cette langueur

Qui pénètre mon coeur ?

Ô bruit doux de la pluie

Par terre et sur les toits !

Pour un coeur qui s’ennuie

Ô le chant de la pluie !

Il pleure sans raison

Dans ce coeur qui s’écoeure.

Quoi ! nulle trahison?

Ce deuil est sans raison.

C’est bien la pire peine

De ne savoir pourquoi

Sans amour et sans haine

Mon coeur a tant de peine !

Nevermore

Verlaine

Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu ? L’automne

Faisait voler la grive à travers l’air atone,

Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone

Sur le bois jaunissant où la bise détonne.

Nous étions seul à seule et marchions en rêvant,

Elle et moi, les cheveux et la pensée au vent.

Soudain, tournant vers moi son regard émouvant :

“Quel fut ton plus beau jour?” fit sa voix d’or vivant,

Sa voix douce et sonore, au frais timbre angélique.

Un sourire discret lui donna la réplique,

Et je baisai sa main blanche, devotement.

– Ah! Les premières fleurs, qu’elles sont parfumées!

Et qu’il bruit avec un murmure charmant

Le premier oui qui sort de lèvres bien-aimées!

Mon rêve familier

(Poèmes saturniens)

Verlaine

Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant

D’une femme inconnue, et que j’aime, et qui m’aime

Et qui n’est chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même,

Ni tout à fait une autre, et m’aime et me comprend.

Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur transparent

Pour elle seule, hélas! cesse d’être un problème;

Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front blême,

Elle seule les sait rafraichir, en pleurant.

Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse? Je l’ignore.

Son nom? Je me souviens qu’il est doux et sonore

Comme ceux des aimés que la vie exila.

Son regard est pareil au regard des statues;

Et pour sa voix, lointaine et calme, et grave, elle a

L’inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues.

Green

Verlaine

Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches

Et puis voici mon coeur, qui ne bat que pour vous.

Ne le déchirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches

Et qu’à vos yeux si beaux l’humble présent soit doux.

J’arrive tout couvert encore de rosée

Que le vent du matin vient glacer à mon front.

Souffrez que ma fatigue, à vos pieds reposée,

Rêve des chers instants qui la délasseront.

Sur votre jeune sein laissez rouler ma tête

Toute sonore encor de vos derniers baisers ;

Laissez-la s’apaiser de la bonne tempête,

Et que je dorme un peu puisque vous reposez.

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Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)

Guillaume Apollinaire, born Wilhelm Apollinaire de Kostrowitzki in Rome on August 26, 1880, of an expatriate Polish mother and an Italian father, received a good education at the College of Saint-Charles de Monaco. Two years after moving to Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire took in 1901 the position of tutor to Miss Gabrielle de Milhau, whose maternal grandmother owned properties in the Rheinland. Following his pupil’s family to the Westwald, he lived in Neu-Glück then in Munich. He traveled all across Germany and Austria, then on to Bohemia. Some of his early poems evoke the “firs with pointed caps” of the Rheinish landscape. He fell in love with a young English governess of the Milhaus, Annie Playden, whom he followed to London. The rebuff of her parents and her subsequent departure to America left him so deeply hurt that he wrote the Chansons du mal-aimé (Songs of the Unloved) in 1903.

Back in Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire got frenetically involved in literary activities, joining a small band of poets (among whom André Salmon and Alfred Jarry) who met in the basement of the Soleil d’Or on Quai Saint-Michel, and another group headed by Paul Fort and Moréas at the Closerie des Lilas before leading as editor-in-chief the short-lived review Le Festin d’Esope. He made friends with the young modernist painters Vlaminck, Derain, and finally Picasso, who introduced him to the poet Max Jacob, and with whom he later formulated the cubist esthetics. Guillaume Apollinaire joined all avant-garde movements, witnessed the advent of fauvism, and introduced the public to the naive art of the Customs officer Henri Rousseau. Published in 1908 his first volume, L’Enchanteur pourrissant (The Rotting Wizard), illustrated by Derain, recounted in strange poetic prose the dialogue between Merlin and the fairy Viviane. The following year appeared a collection of short stories, l’Hérésiarque et Cie, which were told with energetic verve. In 1911 the refined poems of the Bestiaire revealed the boldness of his symbolism and the delicacy of his taste. But it was another wider and more varied collection published in 1913 entitled, Alcools, that confirmed his poetic talent, and his lust for an intense life.

In the fall of 1914 he was infatuated with a flirtatious young woman he met at Nice named Lou, who was to cause him untold suffering. Soon after enlistment in Nîmes Guillaume Apollinaire served in an artillery unit. At his request, he was sent to the front line in April 1915. In March 1916 now a second lieutenant in the infantry, he received a head wound from an incoming shell while in a trench. After surgery he went back to Paris, where he published Les Mamelles de Terésias (Teresa’s Breasts), a “surrealist drama” of repopulation. In Le Poète assassiné (The Murdered Poet), he recounted with somber humor the symbolic history of a misunderstood genie, Croniamantal, who was stoned to death by a mob, victim of an ingrate mistress and an absurd century. In the manifesto L’Esprit nouveau (The New Spirit) he laid down the canon of the modern art. His Calligrammes, published in 1918, poems on the war and his passion for Lou, contained some in which the words were arranged in the shape of a drawing that suggested the visual image of the object whose theme was being treated. Thus, the poem titled Il pleut (It rains) spread from the top to the bottom of the page in parallel oblique lines reminiscent of a driving rain. His esthetic experimentations were cut short by the relapse of his wound. A Spanish flu epidemic took him away just two days before the war’s end. His remaining poems for Lou were collected in the 1947 volume Ombre de mon amour (Shadow of my Love), and the rest appeared in Le Guetteur mélancolique (The Melancholic Sentry) in 1952.

Guillaume Apollinaire, heir to the romantic tradition, revealed in his intimate verse the secret torment of his suffering soul, the melancholy of an ill-understood solitude from which he was unable to escape, a nostalgic lament expressed with mysterious harmony and purity. Innovator in the realm of poetic expression, he not only invented the calligrammes, but also, as in the first poem of Alcools entitled Zone, experimented with the esthetics of cubism by a chaotic juxtaposition of disparate motifs. Throwing together themes heard from the cafés and other public places with disarming spontaneity and intentional confusion, he deliberately created bold associations and astounding images that shocked the reader into a sense of bewilderment and wonder. By his very boldness Guillaume Apollinaire was a trailblazer who fought the battle between tradition and invention to the bitter end, proclaiming the primacy of the spirit of adventure over the sterility of well-worn ways.

The audacity of his ideas and his bold experimentations with form and content helped to point the way for French poetry to discover hitherto unexplored potentialities.

Le pont Mirabeau

Guillaume Apollinaire

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Et nos amours

Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne

La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure

Les jours s’en vont je demeure.

Les mains dans les mains restons face-à-face

Tandis que sous

Le pont de nos bras passe

Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure

Les jours s’en vont je demeure.

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante

L’amour s’en va

Comme la vie est lente

Et comme l’espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure

Les jours s’en vont je demeure.

Passent les jours et passent les semaines

Ni temps passé

Ni les amours reviennent

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure

Les jours s’en vont je demeure.

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Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Orphaned at age six, when his father a defrocked priest turned civil servant died in his sixties, Charles Baudelaire took an aversion to his stepfather Aupick, an officer who was later promoted to general in command of the Paris area, that his mother married shortly after his father’s death. Bored at the boarding school he dreamed of becoming sometimes a pope, sometimes a comedian.

After completion of high school he rejected a diplomatic career, which his stepfather supported. He frequented the literary youth of the Latin Quarter, and wanted to be a writer. A family council under General Aupick’s pressure decided to send him to India in 1841. Baudelaire, having no taste for foreign adventure, jumped ship at the Isle of Reunion, and in time returned to Paris, where now a major he claimed his part of his father’s estate.

He became involved with the actress Jeanne Duval, and through thick and thin remained her lover and support for the rest of his life. With his friends Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville, Sainte-Beuve et Gérard de Nerval, he plunged headlong into the Romantic movement. He led a dandy’s life, and incurred heavy debts. His family was forced to put him under Court’s supervision to rein in his eccentric high living.

Destitute and humiliated, Baudelaire was constantly moving to keep one step ahead of his creditors, hiding among his mistresses, and writing furiously for a living while working on his poems.

After a blotched suicide attempt he temporarily reconciled with his mother. In 1846 he discovered this other accursed and misunderstood kindred soul across the Atlantic, Edgar Allen Poe, and for the next seventeen years undertook to translate and reveal his works.

In the wake of the 1848 Revolution he worked as a journalist and critic. The publication of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857, which was quickly judged obscene, forced him to pay a heavy fine. In spite of the support of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier and other young admiring poets Baudelaire isolated himself in bitterness.

His health began to deteriorate. To alleviate the pain caused by gastric problems, and the recurrence of syphilis after ten years, he smoked opium. In his self-imposed exile, he received the homage of two as yet unknown poets, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. During his stay in Belgium in 1866 a stroke left him paralyzed and nearly speechless. For a year he hung on tenuously to life while his friends came to his bedside to play him Wagner to relieve his sufferings. In 1867 at age 46, Baudelaire expired in his mother’s arms.

With just one book, Baudelaire blazed a trail for modern poetry, by the melody of his verse, the depth of his emotions, his response to the universality of evil, which his proud spirit transcends.

In his song of autumn, Baudelaire reveals a gloomy mood jaundiced by a presentiment of an impending departure from the world. The long bright summer days are gone, yielding to the ominous steps of the winter’s death inexorably coming ever closer by the moment. He can hear it in the echo on the paving of the courtyard. He can feel it entering his being with all the force of anger, hatred, horrors to reduce his heart to an insensate block of ice.

His spirit is crumbling under the relentless assault of the battering ram of evil, and the monotonous blows seem like a hasty pounding of the nails into someone’s coffin signifying a voyage of no return.

Baudelaire desperately clings to the love of a woman, to the fast disappearance of the summer sun, to the glorious but declining fall, even to the setting sun because they are his only hope of salvation in the bitter present that is slipping from his grasp. The end looms, and he wants to savor the modest pleasure of resting for just a fleeting moment on the sweet remaining rays of autumn.

Poignant lugubrious thoughts for a man who had ten years or so to live!

Le balcon

Charles Baudelaire

Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses,

Ô toi, tous mes plaisirs! Ô toi, tous mes devoirs

Tu te rappelleras la beauté des caresses,

La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,

Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses !

Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon,

Et les soirs au balcon, voilés de vapeurs roses,

Que ton sein m’était doux! que ton coeur m’était bon !

Nous avons dit souvent d’imperissable choses

Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon.

Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirées !

Que l’espace est profond ! que le coeur est puissant !

En me penchant vers toi, reine des adorées,

Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang.

Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirées!

La nuit s’épaississait ainsi qu’une cloison,

Et mes yeux dans le noir devinaient tes prunelles,

Et je buvais ton souffle, ô douceur! ô poison !

Et tes pieds s’endormaient dans mes mains fraternelles.

La nuit s’épaississait ainsi qu’un cloison.

Je sais l’art d’évoquer les minutes heureuses !

Et revis mon passé blotti dans tes genoux.

Car à quoi bon chercher tes beautés langoureuses

Ailleurs qu’en ton cher corps et qu’en ton coeur si doux ?

Je sais l’art d’évoquer les minutes heureuses !

Ces serments! ces parfums! ces baisers infinis,

Renaîtront-ils d’un gouffre interdit à nos sondes

Comme montent au ciel les soleils rajeunis

Après s’être lavés au fond des mers profondes ?

Ô serments! ô parfums! ô baisers infinis!

Harmonie du soir

Charles Baudelaire

Voici venir le temps où vibrant sur sa tige

Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir ;

Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir ;

Valse melancolique et langoureux vertige !

Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir ;

Le violon frémit come un coeur qu’on afflige ;

Valse melancolique et langoureux vertige !

Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.

Le violon frémit come un coeur qu’on afflige,

Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir !

Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir ;

Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.

Un coeur tendre qui hait le néant vaste et noir,

Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige !

Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige…

Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir !

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Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855)

Born Gérard Labrunie in the Valois, Gérard de Nerval spent his early years roaming the forests and listening to local folklore, which imbued him with the propensity toward reverie. He adapted nimbly to life in Paris, where he studied with Théophile Gautier at the collège Charlemagne. He was a very likable fellow, and as a dandy led a life filled with fun, balls, parties. His early works reflected this carefree period.

Well versed in German culture, Gérard de Nerval translated Goethe’s Faust in 1828. Enamored of Hoffman’s fantasies, he wrote a tale, La Main de gloire (The Hand of Glory) in 1832, in which magic and humor dominate. His poetry showed delicate taste. In one of his early poems, a dame dressed in antique garb was conjured up, whom he seemed to have known from a previous life, a fantasy that was to become the dominant theme of his later works.

In 1836, Gérard de Nerval fell in love with the singer-comedienne Jenny Colon, who was touched by his advances, but who sacrificed romantic love to a prosaic but more rational union with an Opera-Comique flutist. Though the painful experience entailed no immediate consequences, its effects worked subliminally inside him. No longer within his ken, Jenny still remained the feminine ideal in his memory. After reading the Second Faust, he was further confirmed in his mystical delusion. Like Faust, he believed himself in love with the eternal feminine figure, who was incarnated in human form as Jenny. This psychotic delusion led to his being institutionalized in 1841.

During his brief remission, Gérard de Nerval learned of Jenny Colon’s death. In place of the fading memory of her, a more brilliant image of a heavenly being emerged. In his 1843 travels to the Orient, he studied the region’s mythologies, including the Greek Venus and the Egyptian Isis, who represented to him the paragon of feminine perfection. Back from his travels, he immersed himself in esoteric research. A new crisis in 1851 required him to enter an asylum for a time. With the premonition of impending madness Gérard de Nerval wrote furiously, and produced La Bohème galante (The Loose Bohemian), Lorely, Les Nuits d’octobre (October Nights) in 1852.

From 1853 until his death, he alternated between periods of relative calm and periods of delirium. He entered Dr. Emile Blanche’s health clinic until May 1854. After his release, he travelled in Germany, but had to be readmitted on his return until October 1854. On 25 January 1855 he was found hanging in an alley of Paris ending an existence of excruciating mental suffering.

His Voyages en Orient (Travels in the Orient) appeared in 1851, in which he related for the first time the hauntings in his soul amidst details of customs he observed. His recurring thought, however, was a familiar dream of equating the ephemeral charm of a beloved woman with the eternal perfection of a virgin.

Among his most moving works, Sylvie (1853) stood as the best of novellas he assembled in one volume titled Les Filles du feu (The Daughters of Fire). He wrote Sylvie during a time when he genuinely sought to escape from his torments by evoking memories of his early life, in his misty Valois, where his mysticism germinated during adolescence.

Les Chimères, a collection of sonnets also published in 1853, depicted Gerard’s early experiences and bookish reminiscences. The sonnet Artémis exalted the female figure he named Aurélia, whom he glorified during the dark days of madness. In the tale Aurélia he recounted the history of his internal life from his breakup with Jenny Colon, with faithful details of his delirious dreams. In his final tale of Pandora (1853-1854), he opposed the myth of Aurélia the deified female to the myth of Pandora the root of human sufferings.

At the end of his life Gérard de Nerval had become disillusioned with the feminine ideal and reached intellectual and emotional collapse. He had used poetry as a means to capture the images of his dreams.

Une allée du Luxembourg

Gérard de Nerval

Elle a passé, la jeune fille,

Vive et preste comme un oiseau :

À la main une fleur qui brille,

À la bouche un refrain nouveau.

C’est peut-être la seule au monde

Dont le coeur au mien répondrait,

Qui, venant dans ma nuit profonde

D’un seul regard l’éclaircirait !

Mais non, ma jeunesse est finie…

Adieu, doux rayon qui m’as lui,

Parfum, jeune fille, harmonie…

Le bonheur passait, il a fui !

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Félix Arvers (1806-1850)

Poet and playwright, a friend of Alfred de Musset’s, Félix Arvers became famous for a moving sonnet dedicated to Marie Nodier, daughter of the writer Charles Nodier. This piece appeared in his Mes heures perdues (My Lost Hours), for which Théodore de Banville wrote a preface.

At 30 Arvers abandoned his legal career to embrace drama, reaping recognition with his tragedy La Mort de François 1er (Death of Francis I), and his comedy Plus de peur que de mal (More of Fear than of Pain) as well as some vaudevilles.

But it is to A Secret that Arvers owes his fame. The sonnet was wildly popular among literary salons, of which he was an habitué.

Un secret

Félix Arvers

Mon âme a son secret, ma vie a son mystère;

Un amour éternel en un moment conçu;

Le mal est sans espoir, aussi j’ai dû le taire,

Et celle qui l’a fait n’en a jamais rien su.

Hélas! J’aurais passé près d’elle inaperçu,

Toujours à ses côtés, et pourtant solitaire,

Et j’aurais jusqu’au bout fait mon temps sur la terre,

N’osant rien demander et n’ayant rien reçu.

Pour elle, quoique Dieu l’ait fait douce et tendre,

Elle ira son chemin, distraite, et sans entendre

Ce murmur d’amour élevé sur ses pas;

A l’austère devoir pieusement fidèle,

Elle dira, lisant ces vers tout remplis d’elle:

“Quelle est donc cette femme?” et ne comprends pas.

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Alfred de Musset (1810-1857)

Elegant, witty, and worldly-wise, admitted at barely age eighteen to the literary group Le Cénacle de la rue de Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Alfred de Musset found his early verse wildly acclaimed, and himself termed a wunderkind. He faced a future bright with promises. During these early years, he published his first verse collection, Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie (The Tales of Spain and Italy, 1830), in which he depicted these countries, which he never knew, with fictitious characters. The harsh land of Spain came to life with its violent hidalgo character, and the love capital of Venice hosted an impassioned Byronic hero, whose murderous hands wrought innocent death. It is a work in which his rowdy romanticism did not sit well with the politicized romanticism of his contemporaries. His independence soon led him, in 1831, to break free from the tutelage of Victor Hugo, whose virtuosity he emulated, and with the Cenacle along with Alfred de Vigny, Nodier, and the others. Now he extolled Greece as the mother of the arts as well as Renaissance Italy, both giving him inspiration for his romantic musings and the eternal classical spirit.

Twelve years later, the broken, disillusioned, love-lorn maverick Musset had been through it all. He had written plays, some unsuccessful such as La Nuit vénitienne (A Venitian Night, 1830), others becoming chefs-d’oeuvre. In the work entitled Les Caprices de Marianne, Musset played the dual role of the passionate romantic and of the romantic libertine. Fantasio‘s protagonist sparkled with an admixture of frivolity, imagination, and melancholy. The tragic On ne badine pas avec l’amour (Don’t Trifle with Love, 1834), where a love triangle of one man and two women led to death, took the audience from the light-heartedness of flirtation, through the pathos of a darkening plot, to the tragic demise of a trusting female. Just as one should not trifle with love, so should one never trifle with debauchery, as the prose drama Lorenzaccio (1834) reminds us.

Musset had written poetry, a semiautobiographical La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, 1836), where the libertine hero disillusioned with pleasure, which he equated with happiness, finally reconciled to a loveless life. Then came the four most celebrated of his poems, Les Nuits (The Nights, 1835-1837) stretching over thirty months: the Night of May, the Night of December, the Night of August, and the Night of October are dialogues of the poet with his Muse or his own alter ego in which he lost all inspiration in May, lived with solitude in December, regained the illusions of bliss in love in August, and finally purged of the suffering of the past, indulged in the earthly pleasure of living.

The crisis of Musset’s life occurred during the years 1833-1837. Musset and his mistress George Sand took a trip to Genoa and Pisa, where the first signs of trouble had begun to appear. But it was at Venice that they broke up; George Sand being disillusioned with his flightiness left him for the doctor Pagello. After he got back in Paris in 1834, Musset kept in touch with George Sand, and the two erstwhile lovers continued their relationship through ardent letters until their final rupture in March 1835. Although Musset tried to rebuild his life through worldly pursuits and further creations, he had been forever broken by his Venice experience.

The remaining twenty years was marked by a steady decline in health and outlook. He deliberately plunged into a dissolute existence. At the age of thirty, the former “enfant terrible” became a spent force, tired, and exhausted. His inspiration, resurgent on occasions, was heading toward extinction. A few more successes graced his waning years: sonnets, tales in prose, L’Espoir en Dieu (Hope in God, 1838), Souvenir (1841) evoking his love adventure with George Sand, success of the Caprice in Russia and Paris, and finally admission to the French Academy in 1852. A premature death overtook him at forty-six.

Musset’s poetic sensibility, imagination and inspiration manifest themselves with verve in acrobatics of rhyme and rhythm, at least at the beginning of his career. Just as Musset is capable of capricious musings and light-hearted bantering, he is equally moving in his poignant effusions that reflect the struggle, the joys, the feelings, the tribulations and the torments of his life. Through the success of his plays, which are just as lyrical as his poetry, Musset has invested drama, hitherto considered rather frivolous, with an aura of credibility and even glory.

Nuit d’Août

Alfred de Musset (1810-1857)

O Muse! que m’importe ou la mort ou la vie ?

J’aime, et je veux pâlir; j’aime et je veux souffrir ;

J’aime, et pour un baiser je donne mon génie ;

J’aime, et je veux sentir sur ma joue amaigrie

Ruisseler une source impossible à tarir.

J’aime, et je veux chanter la joie et la paresse,

Ma folle experience et mes soucis d’un jour,

Et je veux raconter et répéter sans cesse

Qu’après avoir juré de vivre sans maîtresse,

J’ai fait serment de vivre et de mourir d’amour.

Dépouille devant tous l’orgueil qui te dévore,

Coeur gonflé d’amertume et qui t’es cru fermé.

Aime, et tu renaîtras; fais-toi fleur pour éclore.

Après avoir souffert, il faut souffrir encore ;

Il faut aimer sans cesse, après avoir aimé.

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Louise Labé (1524-1566)

Je vis, je meurs : je me brûle et me noie – I live, I die; I burn, I drown. (Sonnet VIII)

Does this Petrarchan verse aptly summarize the life and death of Louise Labé, fictitious personage created by Maurice Scève and the Lyon humanists in his entourage? Or is Louise, whoever she is (a courtesan, a bourgeoise, a poetess, an impostor, a paper invention), the most celebrated feminist in French literature? Poor Louise, the experts do not agree. And why should they? In vain does she turn in her real or imagined grave, the world of literature will spill countless amount of ink before the dust settles, if ever.

To believe Mireille Huchon1, professor of French at the Sorbonne-Paris IV and eminent scholar of the 16th century, and her supporters, Louise Labé never existed as the author of Euvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize. In her much-admired book published by Droz in 2006, Louise Labé, une créature de papier, Mireille Huchon revived an old thesis that the Belle Cordière (the beautiful rope maker as Labé is also called) was no more a flesh-and-blood poetess than Petrarch’s Laura or Medusa was a person, with whom Louise Labé was associated and who figured in a portrait made of her by Pierre Woeiriot in 1555.

This explosive debunking of the myth of the “French Sappho” with the erudition of a seiziémiste of Mireille Huchon’s caliber creates an uproar among the French academic establishment, especially after Louise Labé was placed in the program for the competitive examination of Concours d’agrégation de lettres modernes for the first time in 2005, four centuries and a half after the Euvres’ publication.

The reaction did not take long to crystallize, ranging from the incredulous “how dared she?” to the dismissive non-Parisian (who else?) who asserts that when Paris sneezes, France is not obligated to catch a cold, as well as from serious academic apologists and detractors.

Fueling the debate is the enigma surrounding the sudden rise of Louise Labé, a bourgeoise with presumably a good education in languages, literature, humanism, equestrian art, music, and even the handling of arms, when her first and only work, Euvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize, was published in 1555 by the celebrated Lyon printer/publisher Jean de Tournes. This one-hundred-and-seventy-eight-page book consists of a dedicatory epistle to Mademoiselle Clémence de Bourges Lyonnoise (a prominent aristocrat who died young), three elegies, the Débat de Folie and d’Amour, and twenty-four sonnets. About one third of the tome, written in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, contains the Escriz de divers Poëtes, à la louenge de Louïze Labé Lionnoize, laudatory poems by the School of Lyon poets: Maurice Scève, Olivier de Magny, Claude de Taillemont, Pontus de Tyard (also a member of the Pleiades). These writings should be nothing more than éloge paradoxal (tongue-in-cheek praise). This is a program done, according to Mireille Huchon, to heed Clement Marot’s urging to louer Louise2 (praise Louise), a phrase that echoes Petrarch’s laudare Laura, even though both beauties are likely to be pure literary invention, i.e., scriptae puellae (written demoiselles, paper demoiselles). These imaginary females are not uncommon creations among the Greek and Latin elegiac poets, who make them out of whole cloth as an excuse to sing their loves.

So mysterious is Louise Labé’s sudden eclipse after the second edition the following year, leaving behind no traces and no further mention in the literature, that the one plausible explanation might be that the hoax, once perpetrated, has served its purpose and there is no longer need for a sequel.

Using internal analysis of texts, exegesis, comparison as well as external comparison and analysis of period sources, Mireille Huchon argues that the Louise Labé oeuvres are the result of the collective work of the Lyon poets who congregated around their chef de file Maurice Scève. Many of Olivier de Magny’s sonnets have been attributed to Louise Labé. The two quatrains of her Sonnet II are identical to those of Sonnet LV in his Soupirs. Maurice Scève is the supposed author of the Debat, Claude de Taillemont that of the Epistle, and Olivier de Magny of the elegies and sonnets. How such a collective work done in jest, or worse as a fraud, got a royal privilege (permission) to publish is anybody’s guess.

Mireille Huchon’s hypothesis spawned fierce debate among the literati, who align themselves among three camps: the supporters, the skeptics, and the fence-sitters. Finding M. Huchon’s proof irrefutable, historian and academician Marc Fumaroli pronounces the final scene of the final act of the Louise Labé drama by announcing, “Exit Louise Labé.”3 He further applauds M. Huchon for having buried exegetes and biographers, who in general do not question the existence of the poetess Louise Labé. Already there is evidence that those supposed to be eight feet under ground not only refuse to play dead, but fight back. Among the fence-sitters there is a spectrum of opinions. Emmanuel Buron4, of Université Renne 2, agrees with some of M. Huchon’s analyses, but remains unconvinced by her conclusions. Buron found in his own research that some poems in the Escriz, written independently of Louise Labé by Jean-Antoine de Baif, Pontus de Tyard, and Maurice Scève, were reused in Euvres. Did Scève write the Debat, as alleged by M. Huchon? Buron does not think so. My thought is that at a time when borrowings, imitations, and even forgeries were commonplace, it is almost pointless to pinpoint original authorship, since it does not prove or disprove current authorship. Great authors have borrowed without much hindrance and will continue to do so. Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Molière, to name just a few, were not above pilfering from older sources without in any way diminishing their own artistry or literary quality. Back to Euvres, Maurice Scève, reputed to be the Mallarmé of the 16th century, is not exactly easy to decipher. Did the Debat attributed to him evince any of the style, quality, and thoughts for which Scève is known to possess as his hallmark?

Professor François Rigolot5, of Princeton University, straddles the debate with a concession that Euvres carries the signs of collective work. After all, from Rabelais to Ronsard, authors routinely borrowed, consulted, and imitated, from Petrarch to neoplatonism. But the age reeks of Petrarchism and neoplatonism, especially in Lyon, which was among the first French cities to be invaded by the Italian Renaissance. In the sixteenth-century Lyon was the French Renaissance center. From the learned to the bourgeoisie, it would be improbable to find anyone with an education who is not aware of the intellectual movement or the modus operandi of the writers of the day.

Daniel Martin6, of Université de Provence, also questions the attribution of Euvres as alleged by M. Huchon. While conceding that there are some borrowings from existing authors, the conclusion that Louise Labé was not the author of the work to him lacks convincing support. To M. Huchon there is a bundle of converging indices, signs that should lead to the inescapable conclusion she advocates. Martin can only concede that at most it is a question mark, but certainly not a definitive proof.

And so the debate continues. To provide a forum for this ongoing controversy, the Société Internationale pour l’Étude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime7 (SIEFAR, International Society for the Study of Women in the Ancien Regime) calls for contributions to the topic at its site.

There remains the question of how to associate Louise Labé the courtesan with Louise Labé the poetess or the impostor. Her contemporaries were already vilifying her. A beautiful woman who writes sensual poetry and argues for women the right to education and science invites controversy. The historian-magistrate-public prosecutor Claude de Rubys, on whom one of M. Huchon’s major arguments rests, calls her the most notorious of courtesans. Jean Calvin, founder of a reformed church, in his Pamphlet contre Gabriel de Sconay, précenteur de l’Église de Lyon8 (1560) characterizes her as

« […] plebeia meretrix, quam partim a propria venustate, partim ab opificio mariti, Bellam Cordieram vocabant. » [cette prostituée de bas étage que l’on nommait, en partie à cause de sa beauté, en partie à cause du métier de son mari, La Belle Cordière. This lowly prostitute called in part for her beauty, in part for the occupation of her husband, La Belle Cordière].

Why would these eminent personages stoop to decry a plebeian prostitute, unless she was someone with the intelligence and the achievement that command respect? And in fine why should they waste their time on a paper poetess? If the erudite humanists were using the real but much-maligned Belle Cordière to play their pranks, a trick which was supposedly so evident to their contemporaries, does not such an act redound on them for abusing a vulnerable human being? The purported perpetrators of the hoax are not ordinary men in the street. Maurice Scève, the leader, is an échevin (magistrate); all are members of the intellectual elite of their city. Again there are unanswered questions.

Let us now leave the controversy to present and future specialists and concentrate on Louise Labé, the poetess.

Rediscovered after three centuries of obscurity by the Romantics, Louise Labé emerges as a thoroughly modern poet, with a lyricism and a sensuality that rival those of any poets since her time, when she made a great deal of stir among her contemporaries. “The sweetest pleasure after love itself is to talk about it.” And Labé has the gift of doing just that. Her sensual poetry resonates with an authenticity, a delicateness, and a sensibility that endear and charm. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore found in this “nymph on the banks of the Rhône” a soul not unlike her own.

Louise Labé was born between 1516 and 1524, on rue de L’Arbre-sec St., Lyon, the daughter of a rich rope maker from Lyon, Pierre Charly and of Etiennette Roybet. The surname Labé came from an earlier marriage of her father with a widow whose husband’s name was Jacques Humbert, alias Labé (or L’Abbé, l’Abé, Labbé).

She seems to have received an excellent Italian-style education. By the liberty of her behavior, she could rank among the feminists of our days. At 25, between 1543-1545, she married Ennemond Perrin, a merchant of ropes twenty-five years her senior, hence her nickname “la Belle Cordière” (the pretty rope maker).

Her daring, lewd sonnets and amorous adventures earned her the aspersions and ill-will of her scandalized and unsympathetic contemporaries. We have seen above that Jean Calvin called her plebeia meretrix (common whore). Whether Louise Labé is a courtesan remains problematic as there is a historical figure by that name who was a courtesan, according to a contemporary historian, Claude de Rubys. The story of how a courtesan is assimilated to a poet, the Belle Cordière, is a complex one for the researchers, who ineluctably come to no consensus. Therein also lies one thorny issue in the ongoing debate over the existence of Louise Labé as a poet.

[As a brief digression, this debate recalls one that centers on the great 18th-century Vietnamese poetess Ho Xuan Huong, whose daring poetry laced with not-so-hidden sexual innuendos written in a language redolent of double entendre raised questions about her very own existence. How could a Confucian society, with its strictures on male-female relationship and constraints on female expression of any kind, give rise to a thoroughly emancipated poet, a “Vietnamese Sappho,” if you will? Surely there must be some male pranksters who took on female identity to titillate an audience who was always ready to relish incursions into the taboo world of sex in literature with perfect anonymity and impunity. Although many uncertainties surround the biography and work of Ho Xuan Huong, there seems to be consensus among scholars that such a personality did exist, as well as her 49 or so poems written in the demotic script called Chu Nom.]

In spite of the brouhaha surrounding Louis Labé’s identity and her undeserved stigma, she presided over a refined society, and held court in her salon whose habitués included among others the very same Lyon poets that M. Huchon claims wrote all her works. Extolling joie de vivre and singing of the torments of love, Labé possessed a sure grasp of the verse rivaling the best of the poets in the Pleiades, and showed remarkable vivacity in her Euvres. This work went through a second edition in Lyon in 1556 and the fifth edition appeared in 1762. But it was not until the 19th century that the romantics rediscovered it.

She bequeathed her fortune to various individuals and liberally to the poor at her premature death probably in 1566. In her testament, she wanted a simple funeral:

 “veult estre enterrée sans pompe ni superstitions, à sçavoir de nuict, à la lanterne, accompagnée de quatre prestres, outre les porteurs de son corps” (to be interred without pomp and superstition, namely at night, in lantern light, accompanied by four priests besides the pallbearers.)

Notes:

1. Mireille Huchon. Louise Labé, une créature de papier..

2. Clement Marot (1496-1544).Académie de Lyon.

3. Marc Fumaroli. Louise Labé, une géniale imposture.

4. Emmanuel Buron. Claude de Taillemont et les Escriz de divers Poëtes à la louenge de Louïze Labé Lionnoize: Discussion critique de Louise Labé, une créature de papier de Mireille Huchon.

5. Edouard Launet. Louise Labé, femme trompeuse. Section Instrument de mystification.

6. Daniel Martin, Louise Labé est-elle « une créature de papier » ?

7. LouiseLabé attaquée!

8. Rumeurs à propos des moeurs de Louise.

Bibliography

Angard, Laurent. «Louer Louise» ou l’énigme Louise Labé. Fabula – La recherche en littérature. 4 August 2007.

.<http://www.fabula.org/revue/document1316.php>

Buron, Emmanuel. Claude de Taillemont et les Escrizde divers Poëtes à la louenge de Louïze Labé Lionnoize: Discussion critique de Louise Labé, une créature de papier de Mireille Huchon. L’Information littéraire 2, 2006, p. 38-46. 30 July 2007.

<http://www.siefar.org/RessourcesEtudes/Buron-Louise-Labe.pdf>

Fumaroli, Marc. Louise Labé, une géniale imposture. Le Monde, 12 Mai 2006. 30 July 2007.

<http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html#ancre%20Fumaroli>

Huchon, Mireille. Louise Labé, une créature de papier, Geneva: Editions de La librairie Droz, 2006.

Launet, Edouard. Lousie Labé, femme trompeuse. Libération, 16 June 2006, p. 38-46. 30 July 2007. .

<http://profshistoirelcl.canalblog.com/archives/2006/06/15/2130425.html >

La vie de Louise Labé. Académie de Lyon. 4 August 2007.

< http://www2.ac-lyon.fr/enseigne/lettres/louise/lyon/biolab.html>

Louise Labé a-t-elle vraiment existé ? (2007-02-27 12:21:15). Lyoncapitale.fr. 4 August 2007.

<http://www.lyoncapitale.fr/index.php?menu=04&article=272>

Louise Labé attaquée! Société Internationale pour l’Étude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime. 30 July 2007.

<http://www.siefar.org/ActuSIEFAR-Labe.html >

Louise Labé, Une créature de papier ? Lectura. 4 August 2007.

<http://www.lectura.fr/fr/actualites/fiche.cfm?mois=2&annee=2007&idac=68>

Marot, Clement (1496-1544). Académie de Lyon. 8 August 2007.

<http://www2.ac-lyon.fr/enseigne/lettres/louise/lyon/marot.html >

Martin, Daniel. Louise Labé, est-elle « une créature de papier » ? RHR (Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance) 63, déc. 2006, p. 7-37. 30 July 2007.

<http://www.siefar.org/RessourcesEtudes/Martin-Louise-Labe.pdf >

Paoli, Angèle. Carte Blanche à Angèle Paoli : le mystère Louise Labé. 4 August 2007.

<http://poezibao.typepad.com/poezibao/2006/05/carte_blanche_a_1.html >

Résumé- Oeuvres – Choix bibliographique – Jugements. Société Internationale pour l’Étude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime. 30 July 2007.

<http://www.siefar.org/DictionnaireSIEFAR/SFLabe.html>

Rumeurs à propos des moeurs de Louise. Académie de Lyon. 4 August 2007.

<http://www2.ac-lyon.fr/enseigne/lettres/louise/lyon/legende.html >

11 August 2007

Baise m’encor’

Louise Labé (1526-1566)

Baise m’encor, rebaise-moi et baise :

Donne-m’en un de tes plus savoureux ,

Donne m’en un de tes plus amoureux ;

Je t’en rendrai quatre plus chauds que braise.

Las, te plains-tu ? ça, que ce mal j’apaise

En t’en donnant dix autres doucereux

Ainsi mêlant nos baisers tant heureux ,

Jouissons-nous l’un de l’autre à notre aise.

Lors, double vie à chacun en suivra,

Chacun en soi et son ami vivra

Permets m’Amour penser quelque folie ;

Toujours suis mal, vivant discrètement

Et ne puis donner contentement,

Si hors de moi ne fais quelque saillie.

Sonnet VIII

Louise Labé

(interprétation de l’Ode à l’Aimée de Sappho)

Je vis, je meurs : je me brule et me noye.

J’ay chaut estreme en endurant froidure :

La vie m’est et trop molle et trop dure.

J’ai grands ennuis entremeslez de joyes :

Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoye,

Et en plaisir maint grief tourment j’endure :

Mon bien s’en va, et à jamais il dure :

Tout en un coup je seiche et je verdoye.

Ainsi amour inconstamment me meine :

Et quand je pense avoir plus de douleur,

Sans y penser je me treuve hors de peine.

Puis quand je croy en ma joye estre certeine,

Et estre au haut de mon désiré heur,

Il me remet en mon premier malheur.

Sonnet XIV

Louise Labé

Tant que mes yeux pourront larmes épandre

A l’heur passé avec toi regretter,

Et qu’aux sanglots et soupirs résister

Pourra ma voix, et un peu faire entendre;

Tant que ma main pourra les cordes tendre

Du mignard luth, pour tes grâces chanter;

Tant que l’esprit se voudra contenter

De ne vouloir rien fors que toi comprendre;

Je ne souhaite encore point mourir.

Mais, quand mes yeux je sentirai tarir,

Ma voix cassée, et ma main impuissante,

Et mon esprit en ce mortel séjour

Ne pouvant plus montrer signe d’amante,

Prierai la mort noircir mon plus clair jour.

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Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)

Around mid-sixteenth century French poetry rejoined the humanistic tradition, and a number of ambitious young men congregated to form the Pleiades, consisting of seven members: Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Remy Belleau, Antoine de Baïf, Jodelle, Pontus de Tyard, and the great humanist Dorat, principal of the Parisian college of Coqueret, who taught Ronsard, Baïf and du Bellay greco-latin poetry as well as the cultures and thoughts of greco-latin antiquity. The group’s manifesto, Défense et illustration de la langue française, drafted by du Bellay, is a program for the apology of the French language and its enrichment with the thoughts, styles, forms of great masterpieces of ancient Greece and Rome. Before long Ronsard, the most erudite of the pupils, emerged as the leader of the group.

Born into a noble family in the chateau of La Possoniere in the Vendomois, Ronsard was destined for a courtly life, and a military or diplomatic career. Thwarted in his ambitions by an illness that left him deaf, Ronsard turned to poetry. Following the proclamations of the Défense, Ronsard started out with a servile imitation of the Greek lyrical poet Pindar, and the Roman lyrical poet Horace. His Pindaric odes (1550), too affected and artificial for modern ears, have fallen into oblivion. But through his Horatian odes, published 1553-1556, Ronsard showed an easy expression for his genius, an Epicurean outlook, a carpe diem preoccupation.

Probably his most enduring legacy came from the sonnets of his Les Amours. He dedicated Les Amours de Cassandre (1552) to a barely nubile daughter of an Italian banker he had met during a Court fête at Blois. In these sonnets, he expressed a genuine passion for Cassandra through the rhythm and harmony of language though the overall effect was marred by artificiality and over-refinement. In contrast, the sonnets of Les Amours de Marie (1555) dedicated to the young peasant Marie Dupin sparkled, in spite of its Catullian imitation, with inspiring imagery of nature, and references to such nature’s cheery aspects as the rose and beautiful women.

An official poet at the court of King Charles IX from 1560-1574, Ronsard sang of flighty loves, and nature’s charms, and attempted unsuccessfully to aspire to greatness with serious works. During the wars of religion he composed the Discours (1560-1563), in which he took a firm stand as a Catholic. However, his epic poem Franciade (1574) failed for following his model Virgil too closely.

When Charles IX died, Ronsard lost his position at the court. The new king Henri III had his own poet. Now in the autumn of his years and struck with illness, Ronsard nevertheless continued to publish his poems. He lived with reminiscences of Marie, a country gentleman occupied with details of rustic life and thoughts of impending demise. A belated love for the young Hélène de Surgères was tinged with melancholy, and inspired his sonnets Les Amours d’ Hélène (1578), in which he urged the young maiden to seize the day before it is too late.

During his lifetime, Ronsard’s genius earned him deserved fame throughout Europe, where his poems were avidly read and he himself was honored. Yet an ironic twist of fate relegated him to obscurity during the seventeenth century, the age of classicism, inspite of his profound influence on French poets of his days. For three hundred years Ronsard lay forgotten. Then the Romantics came along, rehabilitated this prince of poets and proclaimed him a precursor. They found in Ronsard the voice of the heart, a modern attitude toward love, and an inner life enriched by exalted feelings and passion. The Parnassians, who advocated a return to the ancients, esteemed his imitations of the Greeks and Romans an illuminating service to poetry.

Prends cette rose…

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)

Prends cette rose aimable comme toi,

Qui sert de rose aux roses les plus belles,

Qui sert de fleur aux fleurs les plus nouvelles

Dont la senteur me ravit tout de moi.

Prends cette rose, et ensemble reçois

Dedans ton sein mon coeur qui n’a point d’ailes :

Il est constant et cent plaies cruelles

N’ont empêché qu’il ne gardât sa foi.

La rose et moi différons d’une chose :

Un Soleil voit naître et mourir la rose,

Mille Soleils ont vu naître m’amour,

Dont l’action jamais ne se repose.

Que plût à Dieu que telle amour, enclose,

Comme une fleur, ne m’eut duré qu’un jour.

Maitresse, embrasse-moi…

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)

Maitresse, embrasse-moi, baise-moi, serre-moi,

Haleine contre haleine,  échauffe-moi la vie,

Mille et mille baisers donne-moi, je te prie,

Amour veut tout sans nombre, amour n’a point de loi.

Baise et rebaise-moi; belle bouche pourquoi

Te gardes-tu là-bas, quand tu seras blêmie,

À baiser (de Pluton ou la femme ou l’amie),

N’ayant plus ni couleur, ni rien semblable à toi ?

En vivant, presse-moi de tes lèvres de roses,

Bégaye, en me baisant, à lèvres demi-closes

Mille mots tronçonnés, mourant entre mes bras.

Je mourai dans les tiens, puis, toi ressuscitée,

Je ressusciterai, allons ainsi là-bas,

Le jour tant soit-il court vaut mieux que la nuitée.

Sonnet pour Hélène

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle

Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant

Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant

Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle

Lors vous n’aurez servante ayant telle nouvelle

Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant

Qui au bruit de Ronsard ne s’aille réveillant

Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle

Je serais sous la terre, et phantôme sans os

Par les ombres myrrtheux je prendrais mon repos

Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie

Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain

Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain

Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie

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Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560)

A nobleman from Anjou, issued from an illustrious noble family of Liré, Joachim du Bellay nevertheless retained only a bitter memory of his tender years. Orphaned and sickly, he was robbed of the innocence of childhood under the care of an older brother. A long illness left him half-deaf, and for the rest of his life he always lived in ill health.

Near Poitiers, where he had come to pursue a law education, he met Ronsard in 1547, and followed him to Paris to study under the humanist Dorat at the College of Coqueret. He steeped himself in humanism with zeal, and soon his talent was recognized by his classmates, many of whom later founded the Pleiades. It devolved upon him to write and sign the Défense et illustration de la langue française, the Pleiades’ manifesto. In 1549 putting the group’s doctrine to work, du Bellay wrote the sonnets of L’Olive (an anagram of Viole, the woman he adulated), where he, like other poets of the School of Lyon, made Petrarch a model of imitation. He sang of love with flowery Petrarchan language and mythological allusions, but with an artistry that hinted at a great poet.

For four years (1553-1557), he served as secretary to his cousin Cardinal Jean du Bellay in a mission to Rome, which King Henry II dispatched to secure the Pope’s support. In this ancient capital, he saw its great ruins, and could now explore the grandeur that he had so admired. Though having all the opportunities for a diplomatic career, for an ecclesiastical benefice, and for an exalted place in the literary world, du Bellay soon tired of the drudgery of a mission that ended in failure. Yet it is in Rome that, battling the onset of consumption, he wrote the sonnets of Les Antiquités de Rome and Les Regrets, which were published in 1558 after his return to France. In the Antiquities, du Bellay showed an ambivalent attitude of great admiration for the achievements of Rome, and of melancholy for its fall to ruins, in a savant language laced with scholarly reminiscences. More moving and intimate are his Regrets, in which du Bellay, now seized with a nostalgic love of his native land, gave free rein to his elegiac and satirical verve. On the elegiac front, his sonnets spoke of his exile, the lassitude he felt in his body and mind, his nostalgia, his sinking into oblivion in the face of Ronsard’s rise at the court of Henry II. In the satirical poems, he castigated the rapacity of the moneyed class, the vainglorious fastidiousness of the Roman courtiers, the luxury of the clerics, and in general, the pettiness and vices of contemporary Roman life.

A fit of apoplexy on 1 January 1560 took him at age thirty-seven. Du Bellay left the sonnet, of which he was a master, an instrument with the suppleness and agility to express alike deep emotions and grand themes. His Alexandrines lend themselves equally well to the amplitude of the epic in the Antiquities, and to the melancholic mood of his Regrets. Be it the rise and fall of the Romans, the ennui of the daily rut of diplomatic life, the disgust with courtly sycophancy, they all found eloquent expression in his masterly poems, which du Bellay moulded with prosodic techniques ranging from alliteration and bold caesura to antitheses and repetition. With Ronsard, du Bellay reigned as poet of King Henry II, much to the jealous annoyance of the followers of Clément Marot. Du Bellay proved that poetry was not a means of gaining favor by fawning poetasters, but a foundation on which to build the grand edifice of French poetry.

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse…

From Les Regrets, Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560)

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,

Ou comme celui-là qui conquit la Toison,

Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,

Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge !

Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village

Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison

Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,

Qui m’est une province et beaucoup davantage ?

Plus me plaît le séjour qu’ont bâti mes aïeux,

Que des palais romains le front audacieux ;

Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l’ardoise fine,

Plus mon Loire gaulois que le Tibre latin,

Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin,

Et plus que l’air marin la douceur angevine.

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Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

Rimbaud, who had shown precocious gifts as a poet, had the mindset and temperament of a maverick. He was full of violent wrath: against the social order, against Emperor Napoleon III, against the Prussians, against the humiliating war with Germany (1870), against the Catholic religion . He felt deeply for the Parisian uprising and for the downtrodden, but conceived unmitigated hostility to modern society as he saw it through the smugness of those people who represented the establishment. Impatient with the confines of his small town, where he indulged in reveries and escapades, he skipped the Baccalaureate exam, then embarked on misadventures that took him briefly to Paris and Belgium, only to return to Charleville, bitter with his brief prison stint in Paris and unsuccessful job search in Belgium.

For all this experience, his poetic career, though brief and not lasting beyond 1875, was remarkably influential, made all the more remarkable for a short life that was punctuated by adventures of all sorts.

Born in Charleville in 1854, Rimbaud was early a rebel against a stern, unyielding mother. He evinced this rebelliousness in his fractious behavior, and his hatred of social conformism. Encouraged by his rhetoric professor Georges Izambard, Rimbaud manifested a mastery of the poetic art, wrote with sensuality, vivid imagination and intimacy while not being above castigating the petty bourgeoisie of his home town for its complacent obtuseness.

Like Baudelaire, he set out to discover a world of dream. With the poem in prose Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat, 1871), he gave free rein to a frenetic imagination and depicted with bold, bizarre images his own self perceived as the boat navigating exotic waters. (“I have dreamed the green night with blinded snows, slowly kissing the seas, welling in its eyes the flow of astonishing sap, and the yellow and blue awakenings of singing phosphors.”) It is this poem that prompted Verlaine to invite him to live together. Thus, for a few adolescent years (1871-1873), Rimbaud was the young companion of Verlaine, leading a bohemian life in Paris, in Belgium, then in England. It was in Brussels (1873) that Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the arm with a revolver in a fit of passion, and served two years for the crime.

Already into alcohol, Rimbaud sank deeper into dissoluteness and debauchery in Paris while living with Verlaine. At long last, disillusioned by the bitter experience with Verlaine, Rimbaud left him for good, and wrote Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), in which the remorseful Rimbaud expressed his regrets over a wayward existence, and was now heading toward self-redemption. Gone were the days of wanderings, of rebellion, of living on the edge. When Une Saison en enfer met with an indifferent public, it was about time to turn his back on literature. And after one last attempt, Les Illuminations, another work of poetic prose, written in London in 1874, in which Rimbaud was at once illunimator and enlightened in his invention of a universe sometimes like the real one, sometimes unlike anything known, in a language moulded to express the startling revelations of his imagination, he was ready to call it quits.

After the Illustrations Rimbaud turned his back to poetry, and opened a new chapter in his life, which he filled with overseas endeavors. He traveled through Europe, enlisted in the Dutch army, ended in desertion. At age 23, he left Charleville to reappear in Africa, Cyprus, Aden, now a manager in a trading company, now an arms dealer in Ethiopia. Leading an ascetic life, he genuinely wanted to live honorably. A tumor in the knee brought him back to France for treatment. After his amputation, he wanted to return to Ethiopia, but died in Marseille in 1891.

Rimbaud’s poetry distinguished itself with a dazzling virtuosity, and though emulating the romantics and the Parnassians, he soon exhausted their craft and looked beyond. In an escape from despair, he employed the resources of his genius, threw himself headlong into delirium in an attempt to make himself into a seer, and produced some of his weirdest poems. His senses escaped all constraints to be free to mingle, intersect, fuse in all sorts of impossible combinations that translated into chimerical sensations and thoughts. To express such phatasm, he invented a transcendental poetic language, by which symbolists and surrealists recognize him as a precursor. It is to this legacy that modern and contemporary poetry owes so much of its distinctive character.

Sensation

Arthur Rimbaud

Par les soirs bleus d’été, j’irais dans les sentiers,

Picoté par les blés, fouler l’herbe menue:

Rêveur, j’en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.

Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien:

Mais l’amour infini me montera dans l’âme,

Et j’irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,

Par la Nature, heureux comme avec une femme.

Première soirée

Arthur Rimbaud

Elle était fort déshabillée

Et de grands arbres indiscrets

Aux vitres jetaient leur feuillée

Malinement, tout près, tout près.

Assise sur ma grande chaise,

Mi-nue, elle joignait les mains,

Sur le plancher frissonnaient d’aise

Ses petits pieds si fins, si fins.

Je regardai, couleur de cire,

Un petit rayon buissonnier

Papillonner dans son sourire

Et sur son sein, mouche au rosier.

Je baisai ses fines chevilles.

Elle eut un doux rire brutal

Qui s’égrenait en claires trilles,

Un joli rire de crystal.

Les petits pieds sous la chemise

Se sauvèrent: “Veux-tu finir!”

La première audace permise,

Le rire feignait de punir!

Pauvrets palpitants sous ma lèvre,

Je baisai doucement ses yeux:

Elle jeta sa tête mièvre

En arrière: “Oh! C’est encor mieux!…

Monsieur, j’ai deux mots à te dire…”

Je lui jetai le reste au sein

Dans un baiser, qui la fait rire

D’un bon rire qui voulait bien…

Elle était fort déshabillée

Et de grands arbres indiscrets

Aux vitres jetaient leur feuillée

Malinement, tout près, tout près.

Ophélie

Arthur Rimbaud

I

Sur l’onde calme et noire où dorment les étoiles

La blanche Ophélia flotte comme un grand lys,

Flotte très lentement, couchée en ses longs voiles…

– On entend dans les bois lointains des hallalis.

Voici plus de mille ans que la triste Ophélie

Passe, fantôme blanc, sur le long fleuve noir,

Voici plus de mille ans que sa douce folie

Murmure sa romance à la brise du soir.

Le vent baise ses seins et déploie en corolle

Ses grands voiles bercés mollement par les eaux;

Les saules frissonnants pleurent sur son épaule,

Sur son grand front rêveur s’inclinent les roseaux.

Les nénuphars froissés soupirent autour d’elle;

Elle éveille parfois, dans un aune qui dort,

Quelque nid, d’où s’échappe un petit frisson d’aile

– Un chant mystérieux tombe des astres d’or.

II

O pâle Ophélia! belle comme la neige!

Oui tu mourus, enfant, par un fleuve emporté!

– C’est que les vents tombant des grands monts de Norwège

T’avaient parlé tout bas de l’âpre liberté;

C’est qu’un souffle, tordant ta grande chevelure,

A ton esprit rêveur portait d’étranges bruits;

Que ton coeur écoutait le chant de la Nature

Dans les plaintes de l’arbre et les soupirs des nuits;

C’est que la voix des mers folles, immense râle,

Brisait ton sein d’enfant, trop humain et trop doux;

C’est qu’un matin d’avril, un beau cavalier pâle,

Un pauvre fou, s’assit muet à tes genoux!

Ciel! Amour! Liberté! Quel rêve, ô pauvre Folle!

Tu te fondais à lui comme une neige au feu:

Tes grandes visions étranglaient ta parole

– Et l’Infini terrible effara ton oeil bleu!

III

– Et le Poète dit qu’aux rayons des étoiles

Tu viens chercher, la nuit, les fleurs que tu cueillis;

Et qu’il a vu sur l’eau, couchée en ses longs voiles,

La blanche Ophélia flotter, comme un grand lys.

15 mai 1870.

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François Villon (ca. 1431 – after 1463)

A master of arts, a ruffian, a gang leader, a robber, a killer, a gallows bird, a poet.

If ever there was a highly educated man, whose life rarely rose above the most sordid layer of society, whose fortune was tied to crime and poverty, whose genius won the admiration of contempaneous poets and eminent personalities, such as the Duke of Orleans, and whose immortal fame rested on about 3000 verses of stark realism, it is this unusual man about whom we know little except through his unsavory judicial records and his own poems: François Villon.

From the meager records available, François Villon was born ca. 1431 to a poor family in Paris in one of the most turbulent periods of French history. The Black Death of the thirteenth century had decimated French population. Then came The Hundred Years War with England. which had by the time of Villon’s birth dragged on for almost a hundred years. Joan of Arc, the Maid of Domremy, had delivered Orleans thereby saving the country, but was captured by the Burgundians in 1430, who sold her to the English for 10,000 livres. She was burned at the stake at Rouen for heresy, a sentence pronounced by the court of Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais the year Villon burst into the world . France was wallowing in economic and social shambles, prostrated by this fitful war of succession and economic ambition, which had another quarter century to run its course, brigandage, and lawlessness. The University of Paris was churning out graduates with degress but no jobs. Criminal behavior was rampant from the riffraff.to the nobles, and public hangings abounded..

Also known as François de Montcorbier and François des Loges, Villon took his surname from Guillaume de Villon, chanoine and chaplain of the Church of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné and professor of canon law, who sent him to the University of Paris, where he obtained the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1449 and the Master’s degree in 1452. Little is known of Villon’s life from this date to 1455, when he killed the priest Philippe Chermoye or Sermoise in a barroom fight, after the latter had drawn a dagger and injured him. Villon fled and was banished from Paris. In January 1456 he obtained a pardon from King Charles VII acting on exculpatory evidence that the priest Sermoise had forgiven Villon on his deathbed.

According to Pierre Jannet1, Villon got into trouble with the law for the first time after a love affair that turned bad. He fell in love with a woman of easy morals, whom he called variously Denise, Rose, Katherine de Vauzelles, who at first encouraged him then rejected him. Stung, he wrote a few biting ballads and rondeaus; she complained; and the ecclesiastical court condemned him to lashing. In the aftermath of this incident Villon decided to leave Paris, but not until after he had written in 1456 the Lais or Legs (Legacy), which became known as the Petit Testament. In this work, he facetiously bequeathed various imaginary possessions to equally imaginary friends and foes.

Then in December 1456 Villon and other members of a group of thieves known as the Coquille stole 500 gold coins from the chapel of the College of Navarre. A year later, one of the accomplices accused him of being the leader, and he was again banished from Paris. Now a wanderer, he was taken in for a period (in 1457) by the Duke of Orléans, an admirer and a poet in his own right, at his court in Chateau Blois. Here Villon wrote the Épître à Marie d’Orléans to celebrate the birth of the Duke’s daughter Marie d’Orléans, then disappeared from view shortly afterwards. When he next reappeared in 1461, he was in the prison of Meung for rather obscure reasons, condemned to be hanged. Thanks to a general amnesty accorded during King Louis XI’s visit in company of Charles d’Orléans to this city, he was released. And after an unsuccessful attempt to regain the good graces of the Duke with Requeste au prince and to gain favor of the King with the Ballade contre les ennemis de la France (Ballad against the enemies of France), Villon went to Paris, where he composed his most important work, Le Testament. (known as Le Grand testament), which included some ballads he had written earlier.

In November 1462, Villon was again arrested for petit larceny and detained in the Chatelet. Then the old charge of the College of Navarre was revived, from which he was released for a promise of restitution. It wasn’t long before Villon was again enmeshed in another street brawl involving the pontifical official Ferrebouc, who had been involved in the interrogation of Guy Tabarie, former member who.testified against La Coquille. This time recidivist Villon was incarcerated, tortured, and condemned to the gallows. He appealed the sentence, and while waiting in jail, he was believed to have written the Ballade des pendus (Ballad of the Hanged), full of touching realism about death and humanity. Finally, in January 1463, the parliament of Paris commuted his sentence to a ten-year banishment from the city. From this time on, Villon disappeared from history, feeding the emergence of the Villon legend.

Villon is the first poet to break with his medieval environment to herald the future in forms and themes not generally encountered in the courtly poetry of the day while reintroducing the realistic and personal tradition of the minstrels of the 13th century. In place of the courtly love and chivalric ideals of aristocratic poetry, his works.reflect the lives of criminals, including his own, regrets over his youthful misbehavior, the haunting of death, and remorse. Above all Villon rose beyond the abjection of his life to evince lofty sentiments such as filial piety, patriotism, human love, religious charity, all great timeless lyrical themes. Future generations, including the Romantics, recognized in him the first lyrical genius of French literature.

Yet rather than giving in to excessive sentimentality, Villon turned his irony upon himself, coloring his macabre obsession with death and his horrifying vision of the gallows. This criminal elicited sympathy by his candor, his utter humanity, and his direct appeal to our heart. His is a cri du coeur, which is at once touching and sobering in its invocation of the wretchedness of the human condition. His too is the tragic reality of a wasted youth and of a path to perdition and ruination of no return. His simple yet forceful language and the realism of his images pack a remarkable evocative power. From the brutality of the Ballad of the Hanged to the gracefulness of the Ballad of the Ladies of Yore, Villon exhibited a masterly grasp of the verse and his themes, to which later generations did not take long to render justice. Clément Marot edited his works in the 16th century; Boileau discussed Villon in his “Art Poétique” in the 17th; and the Romantics recognized Villon as their precursor. Villon is to us one of the greatest poets in French literature (Lagarde & Michard).

Note:

1. Oeuvres Complètes de François Villon, p.viii.

Bibliography

Jannet, Pierre. Oeuvres Complètes de François Villon, 3rd ed.. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre. 1873.

Lagarde & Michard. La Poésie de François Villon. 1 December 2007.

< http://www.ac-strasbourg.fr/pedago/lettres/lecture/Villonpresent.htm >

Lagarde & Michard. Poésies diverses de François Villon : notes, 1 December 2007.

< http://www.ac-strasbourg.fr/pedago/lettres/lecture/Nvillon.htm >

Prompsault, J.H.R. (ed.) Oeuvres de Maistre François Villon, ed. Paris: Ebrard. 1835.

Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis

François Villon (ca. 1431 – after 1463)

Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays,

Est Flora la belle Rommaine,1

Archipiades ne Thaïs,2

Qui fut sa cousine germaine,

Echo parlant quant bruyt on maine

Dessus riviere ou sus estan,

Qui beaulté ot trop plus q’humaine.

Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

Ou est la tres sage Helloïs,3

Pour qui chastré fut et puis moyne

Pierre Esbaillart a Saint Denis?4

Pour son amour ot ceste essoyne.

Semblablement, ou est la royne5

Qui commanda que Buridan

Fust geté en ung sac en Saine?

Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

La royne Blanche comme lis6

Qui chantoit a voix de seraine,

Berte au grand pié, Beatris, Alis,7

Haremburgis qui tint le Maine8,

Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine9

Qu’Englois brulerent a Rouan;

Ou sont ilz, ou, Vierge souvraine?

Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

Prince, n’enquerez de sepmaine

Ou elles sont, ne de cest an,

Qu’a ce reffrain ne vous remaine:

Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

Notes:

1. Flora: a famous courtesan loved by Pompey.

2. Archipiada and Thais are equally famous courtesans. Thais arrived in Athens in the middle of the fourth century while Archipiada, likely to be Archippa, was Sophocles’ mistress.

3. Heloïse (1101-1164), niece of Chanoine Fulbert, whose secret love of her tutor Abelard resulted in a child. Upon their separation she entered a convent, where she maintained a correspondance in Latin with Abelard, which was translated in 1870.

4. Pierre Esbailard or Abelard (1079-1172), philosopher and theologian, whose passion for Heloïse and resulting emasculation gained notoriety. He taught theology and logic in Paris.

5. This is Marguerite de Bourgogne, Queen of Navarre then Queen of France, first wife of Louis X Le Hutin, who ordered her death by strangulation for adultery in 1315. She would have relations with students, and would order them thrown in the Seine when they became exhausted. One of them, Buridan, escaped and fled to Vienna, where he later founded a university.

6. It could be the Queen Blanche de Bourbon, married to Peter the Cruel in 1352. This princess is as beautiful as she is intellectual. Here the word “blanche” (white) seems to serve double duty as name and as quality.

7. Berthe ou Bertrade, daughter of Caribert, the Count of Laon, married to Pepin the Short. She is the mother of Charlemagne. Beatrice of Provence was married in 1245 to Charles of France, son of Louis VIII. Alice of Champagne was married the French King Louis The Young in 1160. She died in 1206.

8. Haremburgis or Eremburges, fille and sole heir of Elie de La Fleche, Count of Maine, died in 1110.

9. Joan of Arc was born in Dom Remy, Duchy of Bar, considered as part of Lorraine.