One Toss of the Dice Read online

  There was nothing inherently shameful about late-nineteenth-century French writers maintaining day jobs as bureaucrats: the novelist and short story writer Guy de Maupassant, as a clerk in the Department of the Navy and later the Ministry of Public Instruction; the anarchist and art critic Félix Fénéon in the War Office; the decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans in the Ministry of the Interior. Yet the life of a copyist in the Registry Office meant entering into the public record tax assessments, payments, and other official documents, a routine of transcription that the aspiring young poet found crushing. Mallarmé must have felt like Bartleby, the anti­heroic hero of Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a copyist who repeatedly refuses to write or to read proof with the phrase, “I would prefer not to.” Stéphane had tried to, but “preferred not to.” Copying the words of others instead of inventing new combinations of words of his own provoked a mood of quiet desperation, a hopelessness compounded by the place itself. The town of Sens was so gloomy, he noted, that “everything that passes through it turns gray!”

  In 1861–62, the year that he worked as a supernumerary in the Registry Office of Sens, Stéphane lived in the household of Numa and Anna Mallarmé, which only added to the gloom. His father began to show signs of senility: slowness in walking, in finding words and ideas, and memory loss, followed by a stroke and paralysis. For a long time, the only bright spot in the period following graduation from the lycée was continued contact with Emmanuel des Essarts, his teacher and a poet. Though only three years older than Mallarmé, des Essarts had already published a book of verse. He must have been privy to Stéphane’s difficult situation at home, and he no doubt recognized his former student’s precocious poetic gifts. Des Essarts expressed a resolve to put young Mallarmé in contact with the poets whom he had met when he lived in Paris. First among these was his classmate at the Collège Henri IV and another budding poet, Henri Cazalis. Cazalis and Mallarmé hit it off immediately, and with an intensity that led to an exchange that lasted almost forty years.

  In a long letter to Cazalis in June 1862, Mallarmé complained of his father’s disorientation and of his stepmother’s stinginess. “The cash box is in the desk of my stepmother, who has never understood what it is to be a young man, and who only has one horrible word on her lips: thrift.”12 Family life, especially dinnertime, had become insufferable: “I feel at each silent meal such a discomfort that I am repulsed.” The late adolescent Mallarmé felt a need to step out and breathe freely, but his stepmother reminded him that “the garden has paths, and the air one breathes is the best there is in Sens.” He felt constantly under surveillance, “looked at by all as if I had three mistresses, I who don’t have a penny in my pocket, and don’t even sleep with the maid.” In the same letter, Mallarmé confided that the “small-minded and stifling atmosphere” of home life in Sens had planted in him the idea of escaping to London.

  As Numa’s health declined, so did his authority over his son, who again found himself under the strong tutelage of his maternal grandfather, behind whom stood the powerful Fanny Desmolins. Stéphane confided to André Desmolins that work in the records office, despite all his goodwill and effort, had turned out to be absolutely hateful, “to absorb not only my time, but my person as well.” With the destination of London still in mind, he announced his desire to become an English teacher, which would not only permit him to grow intellectually over time but carry the further advantage of social distinction. Grandfather Desmolins must have taken umbrage at the suggestion that his career path, as well as that of Numa, lacked distinction. He increased pressure on his grandson and ward to pursue the family bureaucratic calling. He drew attention to Stéphane’s delicate health. His grandson had suffered several bouts of what may have been rheumatic fever over the course of the previous two winters. The grandpaternal figure warned of the physical exertion involved in teaching and reminded Stéphane that his writing style was not up to that required of a language instructor, the very charge of obscurity for which Mallarmé would later become famous among critics and journalists trying to decipher his complex verse.13

  While André Desmolins pressured Stéphane directly about his career, his wife, Fanny, prayed for her grandson to follow the family calling. Deeply devout, she was convinced of the efficacy of prayer in family matters that could not be resolved by argument or reason. At one point, she had believed that her own husband was not sufficiently pious, so she formed a club at whose weekly meetings wives would pray for their spiritually wayward mates. On May 1, 1855, Fanny wrote to her cousin Mélanie Laurent, who had similar concerns about her own father: “I must speak to you about another idea. . . . That is, to form a pious family league, a completely Christian league . . . , for the salvation of the husbands so dear to us, by setting aside each week a day of communion which would be specially dedicated to them.”14 It seems that the Thursday prayers by proxy worked, since, some five years later, which was right around the time of Stéphane’s crisis in the Registry Office, Grandma Desmolins reported to her cousin that André had returned to the fold: “With the help of God’s grace, all has turned out for the best, and I have had the happiness, for which I longed for forty-three years, of finally seeing my good husband on his knees next to me at the holy table, April 8, the very day one consecrates the Annunciation of the Holy Virgin.”15

  Having saved her husband by Thursday meetings to pray for the intervention of the Blessed Virgin, Grandma Desmolins turned her attention to Stéphane. In the same letter, she suggested, “If you do not want to forget our old family good work on Thursdays, we can replace grandfather with Stéphane.” There really was not much need to insist. By the time he was twenty, young Mallarmé had replaced Catholic orthodoxy with faith in the salvific power of verse; and in 1875, he would convert Thursdays in Passy chez Grandma Desmolins into Tuesdays chez Mallarmé on the rue de Rome.

  Youth prevailed in the future poet’s struggle with his father and grandfather about the choice of a career. Supported by des Essarts, as well as by his stepmother, who was, finally, less repressive than he had portrayed her to his friends, Stéphane, it was decided, would take private English lessons five times a week beginning that spring.

  Two completely unpredictable events in the spring of 1862 prepared Mallarmé’s escape from the onerous parental household as well as from the Registry Office. On May 11, 1862, he attended a picnic in an open area of the Forest of Fontainebleau known as the Carrefour des Demoiselles (Girls’ Crossroad). Des Essarts and Mallarmé met guests coming from out of town at the train station in Fontainebleau. From there, they proceeded by carriage down the pathways, named by one of Napoleon’s Old Guard soldiers, the Road of False Steps, the Road of Beauty, and the Road of Tenderness, which set a tone for the outing. Young artists and poets had come from Paris, such as Mallarmé’s new friend Cazalis and the painter Henri Regnault. And there were girls, chaperoned by their mothers: Nina Gaillard, an accomplished pianist, and three young Englishwomen, Miss Mary Green, and Ettie and Isabelle Yapp, accompanied by Mme Yapp, the wife of the Paris correspondent of London’s Daily Telegraph.

  The event itself remained vivid throughout the lifetime of the poet and his friends. Conceived as a performance, the picnic at the Carrefour des Demoiselles became the subject of art. The picknickers ate pâté and strawberries, washed down by white and red wine. As lunch ended, they indulged in songs, charades, and pantomime skits. Des Essarts and Mallarmé recited poems, in what might have been the younger poet’s first public reading since the recitation of “A Mother’s Prayer” at the lycée of Sens. Henri Regnault did a pencil sketch of Ettie Yapp, and des Essarts wrote verse in her honor—“À Miss Ettie Y——” Mallarmé and des Essarts composed a mock heroic epic, which they labeled a “saw” (scie), depicting in rhyme each of the assembled picnickers. We know from the “saw” what the poet wore that day, and how his dress was admired by the ladies, or at least by their mothers. “Amiable mothers of families / Who delighted to behold / Their daughters
’ eyes all sunny / And men of Sens in black from head to toe.” (D’aimables mères de familles / Qui se réjouissaient de voir / Du soleil aux yeux de leurs filles / Et des messieurs Sens habit noir.)16 Wearing black intentionally displayed the smart bohemian garb of the intelligentsia of the mid-nineteenth century. For Mallarmé, however, black was not simply the color of his rebellious youth. In the last Tuesday meeting of his inner circle before leaving for Valvins in the late spring of 1896, he predicted, at the end of a lecture on the almost universal style of men in black in fin-de-siècle France, “that it is so indispensable, so much a part of us, that at the Last Judgement, we will all rise in a black suit.”17

  Gustave Le Gray, Tree, Forest of Fontainebleau, ca. 1856.

  Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:

  Gustave_LeGray_-_Tree,_Forest_of_Fontainebleau_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg.

  Mallarmé portrayed himself in the “saw” as a revolutionary and an outlaw: “Considered suspect by the gendarmerie / The Garibaldian Mallarmé / Still having more arts than arms / Seemed like a Jud who is very alarmed.” (Fort mal noté par les gendarmes / Le garibaldien Mallarmé / Ayant encore plus d’arts que d’armes / Semblait un Jud très-alarmé.) The association with Giuseppe Garibaldi, the general who fought in South America and then helped to unite Italy, and with Charles Jud, an elusive serial killer in French railway cars during the early 1860s, reveals the extent to which Stéphane, who was among the youngest and the least worldly of the entire group, sought to appear as a daring adventurer.

  The two poets specified that their “saw” was to be sung to the tune of a popular song, “There Once Was a Little Boat That Never on the Sea Had Sailed.” For Mallarmé, the title was significant. The picnic at the Carrefour des Demoiselles was his maiden voyage. The song, moreover, tells the story of a shipwrecked sailor about to be eaten by his shipmates. When he hears them discussing how to cook him, right down to what sauce to choose, he prays to the Virgin Mary and is saved by a miracle. Absent the cannibalism, the narrative arc of “There Once Was a Little Boat” would resurface in the shipwreck of “One Toss of the Dice” and in the miraculous alignment of the stars in the shape of a constellation on the final folio of Mallarmé’s epic poem.

  The picnic at the Carrefour des Demoiselles affected all who attended. Cazalis fell madly in love with Ettie Yapp. The friendship between Mallarmé and Henri Cazalis had been affirmed such that five years later, the poet would write, “And then, my old pal, we go back to the party at Fontainebleau! It all started there.”18 For the poet, Fontainebleau became “this magic name.” His settling at Valvins, with the Forest of Fontainebleau in plain view, no doubt had something to do with that day in May 1862 when it all began. He had been initiated into a world of artistic conviviality. Mallarmé, the orphan in the poem by that name, “with the sadness anticipating the Poet, [wandering] dressed in black . . . , seeking [his] family on earth,” found it amid the intellectual youth of his era. The meeting with the Yapps consolidated his plan to visit London, where Ettie would serve as a guide the following year. The poet experienced a sublimated eroticism among “young girls in flower” that was a true sexual awakening, as can be seen in a letter written to Cazalis a little over a week after the event: “You tell me that I pleased the ladies, and I am charmed by that.”19

  Around the time of the picnic at the Carrefour des Demoiselles, Mallarmé spied a woman sitting on a park bench in front of the lycée in Sens. She seemed to be waiting for someone. He, too, was waiting—for des Essarts. At first, he thought she might be English, which would have suited his plans to learn English and to visit London. When they spoke, however, she turned out to be German, born in Camberg to a family of schoolteachers. Keenly attracted, Mallarmé began to lie in wait for her at the end of each school day, to follow her into the Île de l’Yonne where she would walk, and to sit near her in Saint-Étienne Cathedral on Sundays. He discovered that her name was Maria, the same as his sister, and that she worked as a governess in one of the local families of notables. Soon, he obtained her address, and wrote a letter that was somewhat of a toss of the dice: “It’s three months now that I love you violently, and several days now that I adore you even more hopelessly. Will you receive this love?”20

  Tall, thin, blond, and blue-eyed, modestly dressed, not particularly cheerful in her demeanor, melancholic even, seven years his elder, Maria Gerhard must have been plain by the standards of Belle Époque beauty. The poet confided to Cazalis that he was relieved that the woman he loved was not an ideal beauty, for, if she were, he would no doubt someday have been disillusioned. For the budding poet, no woman could match the kind of beauty that belongs rightfully only to the realm of art. Despite his initial bold letter, Mallarmé was not a romantic. He noted in the letter to Cazalis that Maria seemed bored and sad, and that he, too, was bored and sad. “Together,” Mallarmé the lover reasoned, “our two melancholies might make for happiness.”21 To Cazalis’s warning that she was neither sufficiently exciting nor cultured for his sophisticated friend, the poet replied, “Don’t you worry! I will make an artist out of her.”

  At the end of September, Stéphane and Marie, as he began to call her, took a long walk in the Forest of Fontainebleau, the poet hoping that the magic of the picnic at the Carrefour des Demoiselles might rub off on them. Their meetings were clandestine, hidden both from the Desmoulins and from Marie’s host family, the Libera des Presles, one of the richest families in town. In early November, they departed together for London, where Mallarmé was to learn English for teaching in French secondary schools. He had left behind the deadly atmosphere of home, the Registry Office, and Sens. He was at last free to try his hand at becoming a poet. In the autobiographical letter to Verlaine, Stéphane described the scribal genealogy from which he had descended. Yet, he confessed, he was overjoyed “to have escaped the career to which I was destined since I was in diapers. I am happy to be holding a pen for something other than recording administrative acts.”22

  Charles Baudelaire had asked apropos of Victor Hugo, “As a result of what historical circumstances, philosophical fatalities, astronomical conjunction was this man born among us?” The question had to do with how genius might arise amid the mediocrity of everyday life in mid-nineteenth-century France. Mallarmé, who must have felt reborn at the age of twenty, sought to answer this question in his poem “Sonnet,” written in the year of his liberation from the gloom of the paternal nest.

  “Sonnet” begins with a series of seemingly random events in the life of a bourgeois household, not unlike the one he just left. The dinner meat is not fully cooked, the newspaper contains the story of a rape, the maid forgot to button her collar, the bourgeois glimpses on the bedroom clock an “old and crazy couple,” or he is not sleepy, and, without modesty, his leg under the covers brushed fleetingly against another leg. Then, “A fool climbs on top of his cold and dry wife, / Rubs his nightcap against this white bonnet, / And works blowing inexorably: / And since on this night without rage or storm, / These two beings couple in sleeping, / O Shakespeare and you, Dante, a poet can be born!”23

  Two

  THE FOUNDATION OF A MAGNIFICENT WORK

  On his way to London in the fall of 1862, Mallarmé stopped in Versailles, where the Desmolins now lived, to pick up an advance of four thousand francs on the inheritance that would come to him from his mother when he turned twenty-one. His cautious grandparents, resigned to his pursuing a career as a teacher of English, tried to elicit a promise that Stéphane would live while in London in a Catholic residence, where his morals and his daily comings and goings would be properly supervised. He was, after all, still their legal ward, and they must have felt emboldened to exercise their guardianship, given the decline of his father, Numa. Stéphane, who was now in correspondence with poets his own age or slightly older and had a mistress, would have none of it. The lovers had already consummated their relationship sometime in September, though the tie still remained hidden from parents and grandparents. In the small town
of Sens, as well as in the conservative monarchist stronghold of Versailles, the scandal of the sudden departure of the governess in a respectable family with a would-be poet, seven years her junior, would have been unbearable. Both the Mallarmés and the Desmolins would have opposed Stéphane’s cohabitation with any woman to whom he was not married, much less to an au pair of lower social standing. Mallarmé, however, maintained that one of the things that attracted him to Marie was the “melancholy charm” of governesses, who were always a little déclassée.1

  The arrival in London was not easy. Only a week after Stéphane and Marie had rented a small apartment on Panton Square, the young poet was robbed and ended up in court. “English justice sided with the thief under the pretext that he entrapped but did not rob me. Swindling is permitted here, and the court sent me away saying that I was an imbecile to let myself be taken like that.”2 Such a difficult welcome could not, however, dampen the couple’s initial excitement at being on their own.

  The young lovers, as tourists still do today, visited Westminster, Piccadilly, Hyde Park, the British Museum, and the National Gallery, where they admired the Turners. They were charmed by the chocolate-colored omnibuses and the tree-lined squares, and by the street life right outside their window—organ grinders, guitar strummers, trained monkeys in red hats, and commedia dell’arte players. And they were delighted by domestic life, right down to the ordinary objects, the teapot and beer mugs, next to a big double bed. “We have put together a true English household,” Mallarmé wrote to Cazalis in mid-November, “so much so that I feel the need to write to my notary.”3 The letter to his notary would presumably have been to ask him to send money, which he had begun to spend for more than food and rent. Stéphane and Marie acquired a black cat, the first of their pets, and a German clock, purchased in a London antique shop for three shillings. “A superb façade in porcelain! With two painted roses. . . . It has a friendly tick-tock which seems to say: ‘Listen well, you who embrace each other, to how laboriously I work all alone in my little corner.’ ”4