One Toss of the Dice Read online

  Saxony clock.

  Photograph by author.

  It was not clear that Mallarmé was in any rush to enroll in English lessons, and, without the encumbrance of family or school, he was free to devote himself to writing, “all alone and in his little corner.” “I read, I write, she embroiders and knits,” he confided to Cazalis. The usual French complaint about English bad weather did not detract from the poet’s experience of the city. He saw poetry everywhere. “I love this perpetually gray sky. You don’t need to think. The bright blue sky and the stars are really frightening things. You can feel at home here, and God cannot see you. His spy, the sun, does not dare crawl out of the shadows.”5

  While the joys of domestic life might have excited the young lovers at first, they pleased Stéphane more than Marie. With her reputation now in tatters, she began to doubt the poet’s intentions. She suffered from insomnia and loneliness and was often in tears, which elicited guilt. “It’s me who is killing her,” he confided to Cazalis. Stéphane and Marie moved from the apartment on Panton Square to Albert Terrace, Knightsbridge. After a sad Christmas Eve spent with the Yapps, Marie threatened to leave.6 Two weeks later, she booked passage back to the Continent. Mallarmé was so dispirited that he would not let her depart from the quay in London, but insisted on accompanying her as far as Calais.

  The boat trip from Dover to Calais on the night of January 9, 1863, was no ordinary crossing of the English Channel. It was so tumultuous as to suggest that the portrayal of a shipwreck in “One Toss of the Dice” may stem from the poet’s actual experience of a violent storm at sea. The fog that protected the poet in the city surrounded the boat at the mouth of the Thames, and the wind battered it about until the passengers thought they might drown, the result being a thirteen-hour delay. “The night before the boat had been five days to sea. The wind destroyed five hundred boats on the coast of England. Marie was sick, and as for me, I am only exhausted.”7 Once on the French side, Mallarmé could not resolve to return to England. “It is impossible to leave tonight; I feel in this moment a sort of loathing that I cannot overcome for any travel by sea.” The ferocity of the elements while at sea was inseparable from the turmoil of the couple’s emotional distress—“Oh! A voyage. If I write to you from here nonetheless,” he scribbled to Cazalis from Boulogne-sur-Mer, “it is to say that, since this morning, we feel a mortal upset.” Occasionally, despite the equanimity of poet’s external demeanor, the psychic storm manifested to offer a glimpse at how this mild-mannered man might come to write such turbulent verse.

  Marie proceeded to Paris, where she met her sister and Cazalis, whom Mallarmé, who often served as an intermediary between his friend and Ettie Yapp, had enlisted in the effort to try to get Marie to change her mind. His confidant, who had never favored the union, was unsuccessful and wrote to remind the budding poet, “You cannot marry Marie. . . . Marie is your sister: she has returned to her calm duty, as the other has returned to heaven.”8

  Mallarmé did not return to England but, unannounced, arrived in Paris, where he saw Cazalis, but not Marie, who had taken lodging in the house of a woman whose job it was to place governesses in respectable households. He then returned to London, where a letter from Marie awaited him, announcing, “All is finished for me.”9 At his mistress’s words, the young poet was again filled with guilt, in his delicate phrase, for “having deflowered her.” “It would be dishonest, criminal even,” he reasoned, not to marry her. Such self-rebukes summoned the reproaches of the dead: “My mother, my sister, who see things from above.” Like the honor-bound hero of a neoclassical drama, he resolved, “I must do it, and I will do it, and I will be proud of it, because it is a beautiful and rare deed.”10 In what was an act of desperation, Mallarmé wrote Cazalis, who was still in contact with Marie, that she had a choice between staying in Paris definitively, coming to London, where they might understand each other better in person than by an exchange of letters, coming back without any commitment on his part, or, finally, coming back to get married. “It’s up to her to decide. . . . But she should hurry, because I am going crazy here, yes, crazy.” After some hesitation, Marie boarded a train for Boulogne, crossed the Channel, and arrived in London the next day. “I am in ecstasy to see her,” Mallarmé wrote to Cazalis.11 The respite was temporary, however, as a disappointed Marie left London for Brussels at the beginning of March.

  Mallarmé gained some small measure of financial and moral independence as the result of the small inheritance that came to him from his mother when he turned twenty-one, on March 18, 1863. On his way back to Sens to complete the paperwork for the transfer of funds, he stopped to see Marie in Brussels and the Desmolins in Versailles. Once in Sens, he discovered that Anna Mallarmé had known all along about his relationship with Marie, and he confessed to having misjudged her. Anna agreed to prepare the Desmolins for the possibility of an impending marriage. On Stéphane’s way back to London, he went to visit the Yapps in their sumptuous Parisian apartment on the avenue de Wagram, and it was there that he learned that Numa had suffered another stroke and had lost consciousness. He returned to Sens barely in time to see his father before he died.

  A true orphan, at last, with a modest sum of money at his disposal, Mallarmé proceeded to Brussels and reconciled with Marie. The couple returned to London and a new apartment on Brompton Square. Six months of emotional turmoil had ended, with the prospect of calm seas ahead. “The life of a high school teacher is simple, modest, calm. We will be at ease that way. It’s what I’m aiming for,” the poet wrote Cazalis on June 3, 1863.12 After a respectable period of mourning, the young exiles were married in the Catholic church of Kensington that August, returning to Paris in time for the September state-administered teachers’ exam. From then on, M. and Mme Stéphane Mallarmé led a quiet, bourgeois existence, what the French call “a little life in the kitchen.”

  Mallarmé, the poet who would seek in his poetry to raise language to the abstract level of an Idea, to “purify the words of the tribe,” was no less taken by the relationship between art and everyday life. There would be no point at which he did not live under constrained circumstances, and he was always anxious about having sufficient money to provide for his family. Yet, he took comfort in his modest immediate surroundings. There, he found physical refuge in a “little corner” next to the German clock where he might withdraw to write. He once described his daily routine to the English poet John Payne as that of a “silent termite, burrowing and working in our little chest of drawers, the apartment.”13

  Despite the turbulent London sojourn, the prolonged absences, and the lack of formal studies, Mallarmé passed the examination certifying his competence to teach the English language at the high school level, although it was without distinction. He was the ninth out of ten candidates. The passages that he was required to analyze as part of the explication de texte portion of the exam were particularly appropriate: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. He must have thought to himself at the time that he had managed not to die for love and, given his grandparents’ surveillance and their severe morality, he had caused only a minimum of scandal.

  After a brief stay in Paris, and a reunion with des Essarts and Cazalis, the novice teacher was dispatched to the Lycée Impérial of Tournon, a town at least as gloomy as Sens and five times as far from the capital. Upon arrival, he wrote to Albert Collignon, a jurist and the editor of La Revue nouvelle, whom he had just met in Paris, that the inhabitants of this dismal village live in great intimacy with their pigs. “The pig encapsulates the spirit of the household just as the cat does elsewhere. I have not managed to find accommodations that do not remind me of a stable.”14 When the young couple did find an apartment on the rue de Bourbon, they suffered under difficult living conditions. Charles Seignobos, one of the poet’s students at the lycée, who later became a professor at the Sorbonne, reported that his father, a deputy from the Ardèche, socialized with the newlyweds. He described a house exposed to sun
, very hot, and so full of bugs that the Mallarmés put the feet of their bed in saucers full of water to prevent the cockroaches from climbing up. Eventually, they moved to live by the Rhône in a house exposed to the northern winds and freezing in winter.

  At the beginning of this period of exile, Mallarmé wrote a number of poems—“The Azure” (“L’Azure”), “The Clown Chastised” (“Le Pître châtié”), “Weary of Bitter Rest” (“Las de l’Amer Repos”)—while Cazalis and des Essarts, acting informally as his agents in Paris, submitted them to the editors of La Revue nouvelle and showed them to other poets. On one notable occasion, des Essarts read Mallarmé’s verses at the salon of Cazalis’s cousin Valentine Lejosne, which was frequented by Édouard Manet, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Charles Baudelaire. Des Essarts reported to his friend in the provinces that Baudelaire had listened “without disapproving, which is a great sign of favor.”15 He assuaged Mallarmé’s skepticism at the great man’s reaction by assuring him, “If he had not liked them, he would have interrupted.”

  In the spring of 1864, Marie announced that she was expecting a child. It suddenly occurred to the poet, who had been fascinated by happy accidents of birth, such as the issue of a poet of genius from the coupling of the intensely dull couple in the poem “Sonnet,” that the opposite was also possible. “I tremble at the idea of becoming a father,” he wrote to Cazalis that April 25. “What if I were to have an half-wit or a homely child?”16 Marie suffered from morning sickness in the first months of pregnancy and left the miserable climate of Tournon to visit a friend who owned a farmhouse outside Vienne, a nearby town, also on the Rhône. In her absence, Mallarmé inexplicably spent a few days in the monastery of the Grande-Chartreuse, writing to Cazalis, “I almost took the habit.”17 Then, escaping Tournon in a whirlwind of travel, he visited des Essarts, who had been transferred to Avignon, his stepmother, Anna, in Sens, the Desmolins in Versailles, and Cazalis in Paris.

  Geneviève Mallarmé emerged on November 19, 1864. Stéphane wrote proudly to his grandmother to remind her that she had been born on his mother Élizabeth’s feast day. Despite his initial fear of birth defects, he wrote to Cazalis that the newborn was “ravishing, big and beautiful, for her age.”18 He was surprised at the disruption to his writing introduced by care for an infant and his temporarily taking charge of housework. Nonetheless, Geneviève’s birth marked the beginning of a productive period for the poet, who began Hérodiade, a dramatic poem whose ostensible subject is the biblical story of Herodias, Salomé, and John the Baptist, and Afternoon of a Faun, an erotic soliloquy whose typographical alternation between the meditative parts in Roman type and the narrative parts in italics prefigured the wild graphic newness of “One Toss of the Dice.”

  The poet brought Afternoon of a Faun to Paris, hoping to arrange a dramatic reading at the Comédie Française. Though France’s most prestigious theater refused to present the work of the neophyte poet, the trip was by no means a loss. In the course of his stay in the capital, he made new acquaintances, some of whom would be of lasting value. He met the Cuban-born poet José-Maria de Heredia, the novelist Léon Cladel, and the writer François Coppée.

  Heredia was the leader of the Parnassians, formalist poets who, in the wake of Romanticism, were the foremost proponents of art for art’s sake in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the several of Mallarmé’s friends who would enter the Académie Française, Heredia ended his life as director of the Arsenal Library, a post that carried some measure of social surface and prestige. The Franco-Cuban poet loved to entertain, and many eligible young artists would visit his apartment on the rue des Moines for the pleasure of admiring his three beautiful daughters, two of whom would marry writers in his immediate circle. Cladel, a regional poet and novelist from the southern town of Montauban, had at first attracted the attention of no lesser light than Charles Baudelaire, who wrote the preface for his first novel, The Ridiculous Martyrs. François Coppée worked as a librarian in the French Senate and became the archivist of the Comédie Française, ending his career, like Heredia, among the immortels of the Académie Française.

  While in Paris, Mallarmé reunited with two writers he already knew, and who would become fast and reliable friends, Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Catulle Mendès—to the extent, that is, that anyone as vain as Mendès or as wacky as Villiers could be reliable.

  Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was the son of an impoverished Breton marquis who further ruined one of the aristocratic lineages of France with various get-rich schemes. Villiers’s father was convinced that at the time of the Revolution wealthy families had buried treasure near their castles and country houses. He thus bought land and excavated, selling it afterward if the subsoil yielded no valuables. After the Restoration in 1815, the marquis developed the equivalent of a real estate agency, Agence Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose main activity was to research and to restore to its rightful owners land that had been wrongfully misappropriated after 1789. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam père’s highly litigious character was inherited by his son, who also pursued get-rich schemes, including a frivolous suit against a playwright who, he claimed, had insulted one of his ancestors. For the most part, however, he was obliged to work for a living. Villiers had been employed at a funeral parlor, as a sparring partner and boxing instructor in a gymnasium, as, in his own phrase, “comptroller of the waggonage of the cattle transported from the South to Paris,” and as a planted “cured madman” whose job it was to sit calmly in the waiting room of a doctor specializing in mental illness.

  In October 1862, two years before the reunion with Mallarmé in Paris, the Greek king Otto I had been deposed as a result of a coup d’état ending the constitutional monarchy and rule of the German-linked Wittelsbach dynasty in Greece. With no candidate in line, Russia, Great Britain, and France were the protectorate powers responsible for ensuring succession. Villiers, possibly misled by a friend who planted false rumors that Emperor Napoleon III had him in mind, put himself forward for the sovereign post. He applied for a loan from the Rothschild Bank, which had financed many loans to Greece at the beginning of Otto I’s rule. He sought an audience with the emperor, and presented himself at the imperial residence in the Tuileries, only to be ushered out as a madman. There is no way of knowing, of course, whether or not this implausible story, which was not the maddest of Villiers’s capers, was true. However, as Mallarmé emphasized in a portrait of his lifelong friend, “the credible legend, was never, by the one involved, denied.”19

  Catulle Mendès, son of a Sephardic Jew from Bordeaux and a Catholic mother, was one of the great rakish literary intelligences and promoters of the second half of the nineteenth century. By the age of twenty, he had founded his own literary journal, La Revue fantaisiste, and published poems by Baudelaire, Villiers, and Théophile Gautier. Mendès was also an early and avid follower of Wagner, to whom he wrote as a nineteen-year-old to request an article with La Revue fantaisiste in mind. In 1866, at the age of twenty-five, he was admitted to the editorial circle of the Parnassian poets, joining Gautier, Heredia, and the older Charles Leconte de Lisle as editors of The Contemporary Parnassian. In a decision that many in Paris of the 1860s could not understand, the journal refused to publish Mallarmé’s Afternoon of a Faun in its second issue.

  Catulle Mendès met Judith Gautier, daughter of Parnassian poet Théophile Gautier, at a Wagner concert. The attraction between them was immediate. He was extraordinarily handsome, adventuresome, capricious, and self-absorbed, yet he radiated energy, wit, and talent. Mendès was also an epic womanizer, addicted to pornography as well as laudanum, and had spent a month in prison in 1861, a victim of the tight censorship under Napoleon III, for inserting obscene lines in his verse drama, The Novel of a Night. Judith Gautier, a fitting complement, was ravishingly beautiful and passionate. She was also a talented writer with a deep interest in Asian culture. At twenty-two, she would translate an anthology of poems from the Chinese, The Book of Jade. She sent a copy to her father’
s friend Victor Hugo, who had lived outside of France since she was a little girl, with an inscription: “To the triumphant exile who walks with solemnity, saying immortal things.” Hugo responded, “I see my name as written by you, transformed into a luminous hieroglyph, as if by the hand of a goddess.”20 Three years later, Judith Gautier published her first novel, The Imperial Dragon.

  Catulle was drawn to Judith because of her beauty and her literary gifts, but also because of her father’s prominent place in the Parisian literary scene. An invitation to the Gautiers’ house in Neuilly must have struck to the root core of his ambition. As he smoked a cigarette down to the butt on that first visit, she warned him, “Be careful, Catulle, you’ll burn your claws.”21 On his third visit, Mendès brought his friend the decadent Catholic writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly along as a decoy to occupy the attention of Théophile, while he, alone with Judith, proposed marriage. The imperious Catulle demanded an immediate answer, but matters were not so simple. Before attaining majority, a woman might not marry without her father’s consent. At first Théophile agreed but then, having looked into his future son-in-law’s background—his philandering as well as the financial situation of his parents—he withdrew his approval. The lovers had a choice between eloping and biding their time until Judith’s twenty-first birthday.

  Catulle became increasingly frustrated by waiting for Judith’s heretofore indulgent and mild-mannered father to change his mind. He published an announcement of their forthcoming marriage, which Théophile, furious, forced him to withdraw. Meanwhile, Judith became increasingly unsure of her unofficial fiancé’s intentions. He treated her badly, provoking scenes of jealousy, questioning her love for him, threatening to leave. At one point, she suggested that they take laudanum together, which apparently cemented the bond between them, at least for her. This was something that Gautier père might have understood. Upon his first visit to the Club des Hashischins, Gautier reported that the master of before-dinner ceremonies informed him that time spent in the presence of the mustard-colored paste on a spoon the size of his thumb “would be deducted from his time in paradise.” Gautier thought that hashish was paradise itself: “Nothing material was mixed with such ecstasy; no earthly desire could alter the purity. Love itself could not increase it. Romeo on hashish would have forgotten Juliet.”22