One Toss of the Dice Read online

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  To Caroline, Clara, and Louisa

  All the Great masters, ancient and modern,

  plagiarized Homer, and Homer plagiarized God.

  —STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I.

  A Poet Is Born

  II.

  The Foundation of a Magnificent Work

  III.

  Enchanting a Devastated World

  IV.

  Tuesdays in the “Little House of Socrates”

  V.

  “There Has Been an Attack on Verse!”

  _______________

  Mallarmé’s Original Preface to the 1897 Cosmopolis Edition of

  “UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD”

  “ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER WILL ABOLISH CHANCE”

  “UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD”

  _______________

  VI.

  “There, I’ve Added a Bit of Shadow”

  VII.

  The Dice Are Tossed

  VIII.

  “It’s the Same for the Man of Science”

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

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  Some content of Chapter 5 in this e-book is rendered as images in order to best preserve the formatting of the print edition. After each image is a link to that section rendered as text.

  INTRODUCTION

  The poet Stéphane Mallarmé slept badly in the summer of 1896. He suffered periodically from insomnia, and took analgesics to put him to sleep. Once he joked with a journalist, who asked him about his dreams, that he had not closed his eyes in twelve years. But the bout of insomnia that began that May was especially severe, though in the beginning it was nothing more than worries about house cleaning and home renovation that kept him awake at night.

  For twenty-three summers, Mallarmé and his wife, Marie, and daughter Geneviève had rented the first floor of an old boatman’s house on the banks of the Seine. From the entrance facing the river, one could see the Pont de Valvins, with its steel crisscross girders on stone, a monument to the new technology favored after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The bridge would be destroyed by explosives on the morning of August 23, 1944, as General George Patton’s Third Army, on its way to liberate Paris, engaged German troops stationed on Mallarmé’s side of the river. An Allied shell penetrated the poet’s study. On the far bank lay the eastern edge of the thick Forest of Fontainebleau. The castle had once been a favorite of the Emperor Napoleon III, who was baptized in its rococo chapel. In 1814, his uncle Napoleon I bid farewell to the Old Guard of his army in the courtyard of the castle, after a coalition from Austria, Russia, and Prussia forced him into exile on the island of Elba.

  Napoleon III had been gone for twenty-five years, and summers along this particular stretch of the Seine now brought a harvest of artists and intellectuals. A fourth member of the Mallarmé family, eight-year old Anatole, rested in the nearby cemetery of Samoreau.

  Each year, the poet preceded les dames to Valvins to prepare the house for their arrival. This summer was different, however. Mallarmé had retired from his day job as a high school teacher of English to devote himself to art. The thought of spending more time in the country house, which would now be more of a second home than a summer retreat, meant that repairs could no longer wait. So, having hosted his last of the season’s Tuesday evening gatherings for a circle of select writers and artists, the poet traveled on the morning of May 6, 1896, seventy kilometers by train from Paris to Fontainebleau, where he was met by one of the local residents, Charles Guérin, who took him by carriage to Valvins. There were plasterers, painters, and masons to be hired and kept on task over the long Ascension weekend, minor damage from the winter to be repaired, all combined with a fear that the owners would object to the changes he had made. “I haven’t closed my eyes, with all the worry and bother,” he wrote to Marie and Geneviève after the first week.1

  Mallarmé was no stranger to domestic tasks. He was deeply fascinated by the workings of this house while attuned to the new consumer goods that were making daily life in Belle Époque France easier and more aesthetically pleasing. For a brief period in the mid-1870s, he had edited a ladies’ fashion magazine, giving advice about the latest dress, home decoration and remedies, vacation destinations, and menus for special occasions. At home in Paris and Valvins, the poet surrounded himself with beautiful objects—paintings and drawings, which were gifts from fellow artists: Édouard Manet’s portrait of the poet smoking a cigar, a seascape by Berthe Morisot, a pastel of flowers by Odilon Redon, the plaster cast of a faun by Auguste Rodin, and James McNeill Whistler’s sketch of Geneviève. Stéphane and Marie Mallarmé treasured a few pieces of well-chosen furniture and accessories that had accompanied them on their moves through southern and eastern France before they settled in Paris: an oriental lacquered chest, an elaborate Venetian mirror, and a Saxony porcelain clock that they had purchased in 1863, before their marriage.

  Alongside these inanimate objects were animate ones as well, exquisite pets. “He needed these small living presences, with all their naiveté,” wrote Geneviève: greyhounds named Yseult and Saladin; an owl, Clare-de-Lune; a bluebird, a waxbill, and small green parrots whom the poet referred to as “little academicians”; a white angora cat called Snow and her son, Fog; and the black cat Lilith, who was the granddaughter of poet Théodore de Banville’s cat Éponine, for whom Charles Baudelaire wrote his famous poem “Les Chats.” In an interview about his pets, Mallarmé declared cats to be as worthy of respect as human beings. We may chase them outside because of their intemperance, but they come back inside, “like household gods, the idols of the apartment.” He traveled back and forth between Paris and Valvins with Lilith in a basket.

  On neither his meager salary as a teacher nor his pension of 5,000 francs per year could Mallarmé afford the costly furniture and refined knickknacks of France’s Belle Époque. So, he indulged in bricolage, do-it-yourself tinkering about the house. “I tried to imitate English furniture with your dressing stand, you will see,” he wrote to his wife. “Tomorrow, I will set about painting in off-white the winged chair, a delicate task in view of the trimmings.” When it was done, the poet was as fastidious about the finish as he was about his verse: “My winged chair, too white and shiny, looks new; I am going to apply a coat of matte.” While attempting to clean house amid all the disorder, he realized that the key to a silver clock was lost, and the one he borrowed broke the mainspring. Juliette Hubert, the woman who prepared the poet’s meals and did his laundry when he was alone in the country, promised to have it fixed in nearby Fontainebleau. “I slept badly because of this,” he confessed.2

  In the course of his first stay in the country, the mailman brought news of various kinds: a copy of Émile Zola’s latest novel, Rome; word of the death of Trixie Whistler, the wife of his friend, the painter James McNeill Whistler; and a copy of Argus magazine, which informed its readers in one of its “gossips” that Stéphane Mallarmé received visitors with a bottle of wine, salad, and a round of Camembert cheese. Who was the informant? he wondered. Could it be the Irish novelist George Moore, whom he had invited to lunch the previous summer?

  Local visitors were not shy about dropping by the Mallarmé cottage in Valvins. Thadée Natanson, editor of the high cultural La Revue blanche, and his ravishingly beautiful wife, the pianist Misia Godebski, rode their bicycles over to invite the poet to dine with them at the nearby summer home of Misia’s father, the sculptor Cyprian Godebski. Th
is was before Natanson made a deal with Misia’s lover, Alfred Edwards, the wealthy editor of the daily newspaper Le Matin. Edwards agreed to pay for publishing La Revue blanche as well as for the costs of Natanson’s political activities, in a divorce settlement that was most unusual even for such heady times, when private life was often the stuff of public spectacle. Edwards, in turn, soon replaced Misia with the actress Geneviève “Ginette” Lantelme. Misia was so furious that she sent her rival all of the Edwards family jewels. When Lantelme mysteriously fell off Edwards’s yacht and drowned in 1911, her tomb was desecrated by robbers seeking the jewels with which it was rumored she was buried in Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Misia later married the Spanish painter José Maria Sert. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Renoir, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard all painted portraits of Misia Sert, who was one of the deadliest femmes fatales of fin-de-siècle France.

  Mallarmé may have suffered from insomnia, but he saw to it that in just three weeks the kitchen of the little house in Valvins was enlarged and made lighter. Cracked walls were patched and tiles replaced. Four rooms, the circular staircase leading to the second floor, and both indoor and outdoor furniture were painted. The baking oven was rebuilt, the floors waxed, the garden replanted, and the trees trimmed. “In spite of the workers’ inexperience, it will be pretty; and the faults of execution will disappear in the harmony of the ensemble,” he wrote to Marie and Geneviève on the eve of his departure to fetch them. “Nonetheless,” he mused with typical humor and the understated irony known to anyone who has undertaken home renovation, “these have been strange weeks. . . . One day, I will look back on it perhaps with curiosity. To have something built, only to move back in!”3

  In these final years of the nineteenth century, the poet, despite his modest means, was at the height of his poetic reputation and powers. He was still healthy. On the forms required by the French government for retirement, he testified: “My daily food regimen is mixed; I believe you asked me to indicate my height: 1 meter, 63 centimeters; width of shoulders: 41 centimeters; weight: 150 pounds; age: 53. Exercise, moderate. No medications.”4 He planned in retirement to spend more time sailing and fishing in the ten-kilometer stretch of river between the lock of Héricy and the village of Thomery. Once the house in Valvins was restored, the poet would finish a number of difficult writing projects that had haunted him all his life.

  The poetry review La Plume had elected Mallarmé to succeed Paul Verlaine as France’s “Prince of Poets” after Verlaine’s death in January 1896. Two months later, the editors published a special issue devoted to their new prince, with several of his major poems and a portrait by the celebrity photographer Félix Nadar. Just a few days before his departure for the country, the popular newspaper Le Figaro included in its “Concerts and Spectacles” column the review of a public lecture dedicated to France’s most esteemed poet, delivered at the Théâtre Mondain: an “enormous, exquisite, elite audience interrupted the eloquent lecturer often with applause.” Mallarmé had begun to be known abroad, not only in England, where he had lectured at Oxford and Cambridge, but even across the Atlantic in the United States. The week of his arrival in Valvins, his article on the poet Arthur Rimbaud appeared in The Chap Book, edited in Chicago. “Tuesdays” chez Mallarmé, these renowned afterdinner gatherings in the French tradition of literary salons, attracted an international array of poets, novelists, painters, and composers, who, once a week in winter, climbed four flights of stairs on the rue de Rome to the “little house of Socrates.”

  Upon his return to Paris in the middle of May, Mallarmé sent get-well wishes to the writer Léon Daudet and a letter of condolence to the journalist and art critic Théodore Duret, whose brother had been killed in Africa. He then changed the address of some of his magazine subscriptions, forwarding them to the country. He agreed to head the committee to erect a monument in honor of Verlaine. The poet dined at home the night of his arrival in the capital, and, the next night, at the home of his lifelong confidante and muse, Méry Laurent.

  In the days between his initial trip to Valvins and his return to Paris, Mallarmé heard rumors about a Jewish army officer who had been arrested two years before. Alfred Dreyfus, a graduate of the French military academy Saint Cyr and the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer from Alsace, was tried for espionage and exiled for life to the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. In May 1896, however, the case against Dreyfus began slowly to unravel. Mallarmé’s disciple, the journalist and polemicist Bernard Lazare, had been contacted by Alfred’s brother Mathieu and was one of the first to cast doubt upon Dreyfus’s conviction for selling French military secrets to the Germans. On May 14, Émile Zola, journalist, playwright, and France’s leading naturalist novelist, published an article in Le Figaro decrying the dangers of anti-­Semitism: “I am stupefied that such a return of fanaticism, such a fomenting of religious war, could happen in our era, in our great Paris, among our good people.” Zola was promptly attacked by Édouard Drumont, founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France and author of the incendiary La France juive, which had been hugely successful in stirring up anti-Jewish feelings after it appeared in 1886. Drumont predictably accused Zola of being a lawyer for the Jews and even to be like the Jews themselves because of the “filthy, blasphemous, basely smutty character of his books.” These initial seeds of doubt about Dreyfus’s guilt, planted by Lazare and Zola, would quicken over the next two years into the Dreyfus affair.

  Such unpleasantries did not weigh heavily on the poet’s mind when he brought wife and daughter back to their pastoral home in Valvins. The first task upon his second trip to the country was painting the little sailboat, which brought him solace amid the storms of life. Mallarmé had always been fascinated by water, which he associated with poetry itself. “I no longer write a poem without an aquatic reverie running through it,” he had written some thirty years earlier to Frédéric Mistral, the poet and leader of the Félibrige, or indigenous Provençal literary association.5 Two decades later, in 1885, Mallarmé described himself to Verlaine, who had requested biographical information, as a “simple wanderer in mahogany skiffs, but a furious sailor proud of his flotilla.”6 Boating and writing were deeply entwined in the poet’s mind, poetry, in his own phrase, like an “oar stroke,” and the sail, like a “white page” on which verse is written.7

  The return to Valvins was filled with distractions. Members of the Verlaine memorial committee arrived with the Swiss sculptor Auguste de Niederhäusen, a prominent student of Rodin, to discuss a list of patrons willing to pay for the commission. The painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard also came to visit late one afternoon. Since their earlier visit, the Natansons had bought their own place, La Grangette, so close to the Mallarmés that the sounds of Misia’s piano could be heard in the evenings. The circle of writers and painters around La Revue blanche gathered there nightly, the loudest among them, apparently, Toulouse-Lautrec, who loved to tend bar, his specialties being a multicolored layering of liqueurs known as the “Pousse-Café,” designed to push afterdinner coffee out of the way, and a mixture of absinthe and cognac known as the “Earthquake.” Because of his underdeveloped legs, the painter walked with a cane, which he had hollowed out and filled with alcohol so he would never be without liquid refreshment. One afternoon, Toulouse-Lautrec dropped by the Mallarmés to borrow the poet’s little boat, and, when the “Master” consented, had the effrontery to ask if he might borrow a swimsuit as well. Mallarmé was not very tall, but Lautrec was of such a size that the poet’s bathing trunks drooped about the painter’s knees.

  Julie Manet, whom Mallarmé and Auguste Renoir had cared for after the death of her parents, the painters Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot, was staying nearby with her cousins Paule and Jeannie Gobillard. There were boating parties for everyone, expeditions to paint along the Seine, long walks in the forest, and home concerts with Julie playing the violin, accompanied by Geneviève or Jeannie on piano.8 If ever life imitated art,
it was in and around Valvins in the summer of 1896. Boating on the Seine was a favorite subject of the Impressionists. Vuillard painted several views of the Mallarmé cottage during his stay with the Natansons that year. Julie Manet and Jeannie Gobillard had posed for Renoir’s painting Young Girls at the Piano in 1892.

  Valvins, summer 1896. Seated left to right: Mme Gabriel Séailles, Geneviève Mallarmé, Mme Marie Mallarmé, Mme Henri Normant; standing left to right: Julie Manet, Jeannie Gobillard, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gabriel Séailles, Paule Gobillard.

  Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, MNR ms. 1851.

  When the time came to put pen to paper in the newly renovated rooms at Valvins, Mallarmé picked up a long dramatic poem, Hérodiade, which he had begun at the age of twenty-two. Here, the poet sought to capture via the story of Salomé and Saint John the Baptist a vision of what he referred to through his life as the “Ideal” or “ideal Beauty.” Of the three sections of this exotic treatment of violated virginity and sacrifice, only one was published during the poet’s lifetime. A second writing project, conceived around the same time as Hérodiade and related to it, remained shrouded in mystery. Mallarmé referred to it simply as The Book, a work whose ambition, the poetic equivalent of Richard Wagner’s The Ring, was nothing less than “an orphic explanation of the earth” that would “change the nature of the human community.”9

  A third writing project, which may have been part of The Book, took shape around the theme of water and sailing—“ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER WILL ABOLISH CHANCE” (“UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD”).

  Some of the notes that Mallarmé left for The Book indicate that he conceived of writing a work which would hark back to the origins of Western literature and would supplant Homer, in what would be a new source for poetry in the epic mode. So, in a mythic move that reached all the way back to the beginnings of voyage literature and Homer’s Odyssey, Mallarmé, an avid sailor, took to the sea in this masterwork. “One Toss of the Dice” is, in fact, a seafarer’s tale of a shipwreck, filled with images of water, of a captain, master and helmsman, of waves, surges, and of the shell, sails, tilting deck, plunging prow, toppled mast of a ship, listing to this side or that. In the distance, the horizon frames the sinking boat, while winds howl. Closer in, the general litter of driftwood crowns the depiction of disaster.