One Toss of the Dice Read online

  The Desmolins had other reasons for not participating as fully as they might have in the economic and national expansion of the July Monarchy. They were preoccupied by the health of their only daughter, Élizabeth, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and heart trouble. André Desmolins’s wife, Fanny, an extraordinarily pious woman and the driving force of both households, spent much time in prayer, trusting in the will of God as much as in the skill of doctors. Élizabeth followed in her mother’s footsteps. When her health worsened in the summer of 1847, the Mallarmés left Stéphane and Maria with their grandparents and undertook a pilgrimage to Rome in search of a cure. The hoped-for miracle did not materialize, however. That August, Élizabeth Desmolins Mallarmé died, probably still clutching the cross that had been blessed by the Pope in the Vatican.

  A family council was convened. While Numa would remain the legal guardian of the Mallarmé children, grandfather Desmolins was appointed their deputy guardian (subrogé tuteur), representing the interests of their dead mother in the absence of their natural father, or even against him, if need be. Such an arrangement protected the inheritance that would come to them from their mother when they attained majority. It also attested to a certain confusion in the parental status of the two generations. From then on, the children would live either with their father on the rue de l’Hameau de Boulainvilliers or with their grandparents in Passy, which was then a nearby suburb.

  Étienne was only five years old when his mother died. His childhood comprised a series of devastating blows. A second shock came a little over a year after Élizabeth’s death, when Numa married Anna Mathieu, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a military officer. Fanny Desmolins described the children’s reaction to their father’s remarriage in a letter to her cousin and confidante Mélanie Laurent as “a ruinous piece of work.” A half sister, Jeanne Mallarmé, was born a year later, which caused Fanny to complain to Mélanie that it fell to her to “encourage affection for this new arrival, who does not yet elicit the sympathy” of her stepsiblings. In rapid succession, the birth of two other children solidified the marriage of Numa and Anna Mallarmé.

  In the overwhelming loss of wife and daughter and the quick rebuilding of a new family, the Mallarmés and the Desmolins took little note of the tumultuous events of February 1848, which saw the abdication of Louis-Philippe, rioting in the streets of Paris, and the installation of a provisional government led by the poet Alphonse de Lamartine. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte returned to France after almost a decade of exile in London, and was elected president of the Second Republic in December 1848. In the space of only four years, the government passed from monarchic, to republican, to imperial rule, when Louis Napoleon, after the coup d’état of December 1851 and the referendum of November 1852, declared himself Emperor Napoleon III.

  While France as a country was changing all around him, Étienne Mallarmé, whose first name changed about that time to Stéphane, had sufficient upset all his own. Upon the advice of Numa’s half sister, Herminie du Saussaye, a woman with aristocratic pretensions, eight-year-old Stéphane was placed in a boarding school in the nearby suburb of Auteuil. The institution was filled with the sons of high nobility, who made such fun of Stéphane Mallarmé’s modest origins that he invented for himself yet a third name: the Marquis of Boulainvilliers, a reference to the street on which Numa’s house was located. In fact, Numa lived there for only two more years. In 1853, he was promoted in the Registry Office to serve as “keeper of mortgages” in the town of Sens, a distance of some seventy miles southeast of Paris. Stéphane stayed behind, to be looked after by his maternal grandparents.

  In the absence of Numa, with whom relations had always been strained, and in keeping with her own piety, which had only been strengthened by her daughter’s death, Fanny Desmolins enrolled Stéphane as a boarder in the Jesuit College of the Christian ­Brothers—in Passy. Reports from the school showed a lackluster performance: “Religious study: passing; work: marginally satisfactory; conduct: leaves much to be desired; religious observance: not satisfactory; neatness: not careful about his belongings; appearance at recess, at the dining table: lack of cleanliness.”1 At the age of thirteen, Stéphane Mallarmé was expelled for insufficient scholastic assiduity and an “insubordinate attitude.” After a year away from any formal learning environment, he enrolled as a boarder in the Lycée Impérial of Sens, though his father and stepmother lived nearby. Maria, still supervised by the Desmolins, remained at boarding school in Paris.

  Tragedy struck again in August 1857, when Maria, who had last visited Stéphane and her father in Sens the previous September, and whom Stéphane was preparing to visit in Passy, died suddenly of the same rheumatic disorder that had carried off their mother exactly ten years earlier. The pathos of a letter sent five years later to his most intimate friend, the poet and doctor Henri Cazalis, reveals the depth of the shock. Mallarmé described Maria as “this young phantom, who was thirteen years my sister, and the only person whom I adored.”2

  For Stéphane Mallarmé, the first decade and a half of life must have felt like a shipwreck during which he had been tossed overboard. One of his earliest recorded memories, recounted in the journal of poet Henri de Régnier as Mallarmé related it to him many years later, harked back to the bewilderment he experienced a few days after his mother’s death. “He was called into the drawing-room where his grandmother was entertaining a friend. As the latter referred to the unfortunate event, the child, who felt embarrassed by his lack of grief which prevented him from acting as he was expected, decided to throw himself on the tiger-skin rug lying on the floor and tear at his long hair which kept getting into his eyes.”3 The passage has been taken by critics and biographers as an indication that Mallarmé felt little grief at the loss of his mother. Yet, such helpless pitching on the floor, conscious of the inappropriateness of his external display of emotion, was akin to flailing in water over his head. It is the primal scene of the powerless castaway that will find expression in his earliest poetry and that will surface fifty years later in the shipwreck of “One Toss of the Dice.”

  The young Mallarmé had been thrust back and forth between so many parental, grandparental, stepparental, child-care, guardian, and scholastic figures that it must have been unclear to him just where he belonged. In the first edition of a prose poem, “The Orphan” (1867), subsequently published in several different versions, Stéphane saw himself as being without parents altogether: “Orphan, already, child with the sadness anticipating the Poet, I wandered dressed in black, eyes turned away from the sky and seeking my family on earth.”4

  “The sadness anticipating the Poet” captures what must have been a deep desire to grasp something by which the hapless child might anchor himself in the ever-changing and unpredictable world of infancy and early boyhood. As things turned out, he did not have to wait very long.

  Anna Mallarmé had a friend on the rue de l’Hameau de Boullainvilliers, Madame Dubois-Davesne, whose daughter Fanny Dubois-Davesne introduced Stéphane to the art of making verse when he was seven years old. He thanked her with a poem in her honor: “My dear Fanny / My good friend / I promise to be wise / All my life / And always to love you / Stéphane Mallarmé.” (Ma chère Fanny / Ma bonne amie / Je te promets d’être sage / A tout âge / Et de toujours t’aimer / Stéphane Mallarmé.) This is, of course, not much of a poem, but it does rhyme, and it shows traits of character that will be obvious throughout the poet’s life: gratitude for the gift of poetry in the epithet “my good friend”; forbearance in the face of difficulty in the “promise to be wise”; and constancy in love in the promise “always to love you” and the rhyme aimer / Mallarmé.

  Either on the same occasion or in another visit to the Dubois-Davesnes’s, Stéphane Mallarmé encountered Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the poet and the most popular songwriter of nineteenth-century France. Béranger was almost seventy at the time, and the meeting clearly meant more to the boy than to the old man. As Mallarmé later wrote to Paul Verlaine, the contact with B
éranger marked him deeply, and set the artistic course of the rest of his life: “I lost as a child, at seven [sic], my mother, adored by a grandmother, who raised me at first; then I passed through various boarding schools and lycées, with a Lamartinian [i.e., romantic] soul and a secret desire to replace, one day, Béranger, since I had met him in the house of a friend.”5 The trajectory could not be clearer: from devastating loss, to disorientation in a world of constantly shifting people, places, and things, to poetry as the one activity that might, as he would later phrase it, “fix his place in the universe.”

  The deaths of Stéphane Mallarmé’s mother and sister haunted his earliest verse, as poetry became the way out of grief and provided consolation. “The Guardian Angel” (L’Ange gardien), a biographical prose poem written when the poet was twelve, evoked a distant past where safety and stability, and not death and a passing “through various boarding schools and lycées,” might sustain him at every stage of existence. The poet appealed to the tutelary gods of Antiquity, which protect each family, each person, through childhood, maturity, and until death. “And when he is launched out into the world, you alone watch over him, only you never leave him, you replace a mother whom he perhaps has lost.”6

  The guardian angel, a mother substitute, reappeared in a poem written after the death of his sister, as, again, poetry made up for irretrievable loss. “Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow” (“Hier. Aujourd’hui. Demain”), dated March 1859 and dedicated “to the one who sleeps,” is situated physically “in coming back from the cemetery of Passy” where Maria was buried. In this lamenting lyric—“Oh Maria! Maria! The coffin / Is it cold?”—the dead sister appears as “A beautiful angel [which] under the feather of its wing made me a nest.”7

  “Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow” reinforced the continuity of life among the dead as among the survivors, but it introduced a significant new element: the feathered wing. In the scribal culture of the mid-nineteenth century, the feather was the writing instrument par excellence. The nest under the feathers of the angel’s wing points to the shelter provided by writing verse. The tone and context of the two poems connected to the deaths of his mother and sister are explicitly religious. Faced with disorienting loss, the young Mallarmé, who was a devout child, converted the orthodox Catholic religion all around him into the religion of art.

  While at boarding school among the Christian Brothers and later at the public lycée of Sens, Mallarmé either could not afford or was denied access to the books of verse he wanted to read. So, beginning at the age of twelve, he copied by hand, like a medieval scribe, more than eight thousand lines of traditional French poetry which he obtained from either edited books or another such notebook that he had borrowed. Here we see just how inextricably religion and writing were entwined. The first line of this notebook, “June 18, 1854: First communion,” yokes the act of writing poetry, even if it was copying, with the sacrament of communion.

  Three poems written in late adolescence affirm the connection between loss, suffering, and writing, between the feathered wings of a guardian angel and the consolation of putting pen—from the Latin penna, plural for “wing feathers”—to paper. The poet wrote a “Cantata for the First Communion” (“Cantate pour la première communion”), dated July 1858, as part of the state-required religious education at the Lycée Impérial in Sens. The following July, he read another poem, “A Mother’s Prayer” (“La Prière d’une mère”), at a public ceremony, presided over by the archbishop of Sens. A mother, alone, in tears, on her knees before the cross, emits “bitter pains.” Her prayer is received by God as a “joyful song”: “Oh! On this day, O Lord, / A song of joy rises to you on the wings of an angel, weak echo of my heart!”8

  In “The Cloud” (“Le Nuage”), composed around the same time, Mallarmé appealed to another guardian angel. Formations of clouds in the sky are transformed into the shapes of foam in the sea, and the pattern of clouds summons an angel’s wing.

  Cloud, are you the foam

  Of the celestial ocean on a limpid and pure wave?

  Are you the white wing

  Detached by the breeze, in crossing the blue sky,

  From the wing of one of our angels?

  Eventually, the shifting clouds, sea foam, white feather, and angel’s wing assume the shape of a shroud enveloping the body of a dead child:

  “I am the messenger of the Lord.

  I carry on my breast a blond child, of the age

  When one doesn’t know about death.

  I took it: it was sleeping on its mother’s breast:

  The wing of an angel is its shroud!”9

  The grieving voice asks the cloud, which reminds him of the censer of the Catholic mass, if “it is” also, “when our praises / fly with incense to the feet of God / the perfume which the child, ravished before the cross, swings in the urn on fire?” “The Cloud” affirmed the power of the imagination to prevail over the reality of a cruel world. Such a parallel universe may exist only in the mind, yet it becomes no less real when the feather of the protective angel’s wing is put to paper in the making of elegiac verse.

  From the age of twelve, and perhaps even well before, Mallarmé found salvation through the writing of poetry. Those responsible for his upbringing, however, had very different ideas. He complained, in the autobiographical letter to Verlaine, that the notebook in which he kept his verses, the intimacy of which can be seen in its title, “Between Four Walls,” was repeatedly confiscated. Somehow, too, the young Mallarmé had acquired a copy of Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857), which was his first contact with contemporary verse. Grandpa and Grandma Desmolins, in their long effort to direct his moral and professional upbringing, managed to remove this volume as well. The fifteen-year-old aspiring poet immediately procured another copy of the writings of France’s premier poète maudit.

  The Desmolins had every reason to be concerned. Baudelaire’s masterpiece, whose original title was The Lesbians, was filled with images of death, corruption, and the artificial paradises of alcohol, drugs, and sex. The reviewer for the daily newspaper Le Figaro wrote, “Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid.” Under the heavy hand of Napoleon III’s censors, the French courts successfully prosecuted the author, the publisher, and the printer of The Flowers of Evil. Six of the poems in the collection were suppressed until a Belgian edition appeared in 1866. Baudelaire was outraged at the way his book had been treated. He protested to his mother that he had known that his poems would upset the reading public, and had thus removed fully a third of the most offensive ones from the collection. At other times, however, he tried to appear worse than he was. “Exasperated that people always believed what I said,” he wrote to a friend in 1865, “I let it be known that I had killed my father and eaten him, . . . and they believed me! I have taken to disgrace like a duck to water.”10

  Baudelaire’s reputation for indolence and dissolution must have offended to the core the Desmolins’s sense of bourgeois decorum. In the bohemian mode of the late Romantics, and in anticipation of the end-of-the-century decadents, Baudelaire practiced satanic cultism under the influence of laudanum in the Hôtel de Lauzun, his elegant Parisian residence on the Île Saint-Louis and the headquarters of the Club des Hashischins. He had inherited a little fortune from his deceased father when he turned twenty-one, and he began to spend it generously on paintings, furniture, alcohol, clothes, prostitutes, and on his Creole mistress, Jeanne Duval, who for twenty years was his muse. The Desmolins, knowing that Stéphane would inherit money from his mother when he turned twenty-one, must have trembled at the thought that he would follow the example of the profligate author of The Flowers of Evil.

  During Stéphane’s last year at the lycée in Sens, Numa Mallarmé wrote a letter to Grandpa Desmolins expressing concern over “our poor child, who dreams about poetry, and only admires Victor Hugo, who is far from being a classic.”11 Victor Hugo, a Romantic and the most prolific poet of nineteenth-cent
ury France, was a liberal opponent of Louis Napoleon. He left France, when, in his own phrase, the “Little Napoleon” became Emperor Napoleon III, and was still in exile on the island of Guernsey when Mallarmé’s father sounded the alarm about Stéphane’s future. Hugo’s political tracts had been banned in France. It just would not do for the son and grandson of two registry officers working for the government of the Second Empire to be reading the poetry of such an outspoken enemy of the regime.

  In the same letter expressing alarm at the adolescent Mallarmé’s reading habits, Numa confided that “his future preoccupies me greatly, and, all things considered, I would favor our administration, which at least puts bread on the table and might build a nest egg for the future. . . . Try to reinforce this idea, I beg of you.” The troubled father had written on the eve of Stéphane’s departure to visit his grandparents in Passy. During this stay near Paris, the aspiring poet visited Pierre-Jean de Béranger’s tomb in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Béranger had died in 1857, some eight years after the encounter “at the home of a friendly neighbor,” which set Mallarmé on course for a career in the arts.

  Numa Mallarmé and André Desmoulins had reason for further concern. Stéphane was supposed to graduate from the lycée the following year, and the family, while moderately well off, did not have sufficient property or revenues to support an impecunious poet. If Stéphane must write, father and grandfather must have reasoned, why not use the pen in the manner of his ancestors. After all, it is his birthright.

  Stéphane Mallarmé failed the baccalauréat exam, needed to graduate from a lycée, in the summer of 1860, but he did pass a make-up test that fall. To the great satisfaction of his father and grandfather, the title of bachelier qualified him for government service, and the following month, Stéphane took a job as a probationer, the equivalent of a student intern, in the Registry Office of Sens.