One Toss of the Dice Page 6
Judith did not forget Catulle. They were married in 1866, with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Gustave Flaubert as their witnesses. Théophile Gautier, whose own marriage had unraveled over his wife Ernesta’s more favorable attitude toward their daughter’s betrothal, refused to attend.
Before, during, and after his marriage to Judith Gautier, Catulle Mendès maintained a liaison with the composer Augusta Holmès. Born in Versailles of Irish parents, Holmès, who added the accent to the “e” in her name after the Franco-Prussian War, shared Mendès’s passion for Wagner, and, she too, had visited the musical master at Tribschen on Lake Lucerne. Like Judith, Augusta was a femme fatale, and she attracted the attention of Henri Cazalis after his relationship with Ettie Yapp had ended. Composer Camille Saint-Saëns had asked her to marry him. César Franck wrote his Piano Quintet with her in mind. Augusta, however, remained loyal to Mendès, with whom she had five children, three of whom are pictured in Renoir’s 1888 painting The Daughters of Catulle Mendès. Judith, after a period of mysterious illness in the first years of marriage, gradually detached from Catulle. After his return to France in 1870, Victor Hugo, in the fullness of his glory, became infatuated with Judith Gautier and they became lovers after Théophile’s death in 1872. Hugo was only the beginning. When Judith and Catulle separated in 1878, she drew closer to Richard Wagner, initiating him to the mysteries of oriental religion, and becoming almost certainly the last mistress of the dominating German composer, who died in 1883.
During his time in Paris in the summer of 1864, Mallarmé visited Henri Regnault, whom he had met at the Carrefour des Demoiselles. Regnault, the son of noted chemist and physicist Victor Regnault, was only twenty-one at the time. Yet he had already gained a reputation as a talented painter, who, two years later, would win the coveted Prix de Rome, a grant from the French government to paint at the French Academy in Rome. Regnault’s studio on the rue d’Enfer was already a gathering place for artists and musicians and may have offered the visiting poet from the provinces a first taste of what a Parisian artistic salon might be. On the studio piano, Mallarmé heard music played by Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Augusta Holmès.
The whirlwind trip to Paris sent Mallarmé’s head spinning with notions of living in the capital among like-minded artists who also appreciated his ideas about poetry, painting, and music. The return to Tournon must have seemed like even more of an exile. He delighted in Geneviève’s—he and Marie nicknamed their daughter Vévé—first words and steps. But the time he spent teaching at the lycée, to judge by reports of the inspectors sent annually to evaluate his performance, had little to suggest competence or interest. Mallarmé’s year of study in London had produced no visible effect upon his mastery of English. The end-of-the-year appraisal for 1866 noted that M. Mallarmé, despite his intelligence and his learning, had up until now obtained only poor results from his teaching. His pupils pronounce English very badly and do not know the most common words. “In the first year of special Classes, fourteen students, pooling their efforts, were not able to translate for me, ‘Give me some bread and water.’ ”23 Mallarmé was criticized not only for the poor performance of his pupils but for seeming distracted in class and, acting on complaints from concerned parents, for publishing poems in disreputable avant-garde journals. Because of his publications, he was removed from the classroom in the outlying school district of Tournon and sent summarily, in November 1866, to Besançon, which was almost as far from the capital and arguably harsher and drearier than Tournon.
The move to Besançon provoked a crisis that had a determining effect upon the poet’s life. For some months, he must have been withdrawn, in a deeply meditative state. Then, in something like a trance or syncope, he seemed to have lost consciousness for several days. “All that . . . my being has suffered during this long agony is unspeakable, but happily, I am perfectly dead, and the most impure region to which my Spirit, this regular loner in its own Purity, has ventured is Eternity, which not even the reflection of Time obscures.”24 In this state of altered consciousness, Mallarmé experienced a vision of God in the form of an enormous bird, which bore him under “the bony wing of his old and menacing plumage” to a “realm of Shadows.” There, the poet and the godhead engaged in a frightful struggle from which he emerged victorious, having wrestled God to the ground. Mallarmé awoke three days later—the Christological three days?—from this otherworldly experience in front of the Venetian mirror that he and Marie had purchased together. The mirror itself was a frightening bronze tangle of foliage and serpents with the haunting head of a man, crowned by what could be a laurel leaf, the traditional sign of victorious poets, on top. The transfigured poet recognized the face he had forgotten several months earlier. Like a saint after conversion, he became a vessel of truth. He wrote to Cazalis, “I am no longer the Stéphane whom you have known—but a capacity of the spiritual Universe to look at itself and to develop itself through what was once me.”25
Venetian mirror.
Photograph by author.
Insofar as Mallarmé considered himself to be “a capacity of the spiritual Universe,” he took himself to represent all of humanity. The crisis of his young adulthood was in some deep sense that of the age in which he lived, the period of “the great upheaval,” which he also helped to make.
Modernity, as it took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, was synonymous with rupture, melancholy, skepticism, anxiety, self-criticism, spiritual failure, nihilism, and despair, alongside the perceived loss of individual autonomy as well as the failure of science and technology and of liberal democratic institutions. To philosophers of the mid- to late 1800s, Enlightenment faith in reason seemed less and less plausible. German philosophy—beginning before but, most powerfully, after Nietzsche—was deeply pessimistic. The key catalyzing sentence of the end of the century was, of course, Nietzsche’s famous declaration in 1882 of the death of God, which left man suspended in a world without any fixed point to moor human values: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”26 Martin Heidegger would drive the stake of pessimism even further into the heart of spiritual value with the question “What if in truth the nothing were indeed not a being but also were not simply null?” In which case, “Nihilism would be the essential nonthinking of the essence of the nothing.”27
The development of the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century went hand in hand with philosophical despair. Already in Marx, the evolution from feudalism to capitalism was sensed as a passage from authentic use-value, in the direct relations between men and the things they make and consume, to less authentic market-value, where human relations are mediated—that is to say, debased—by money. Max Weber, writing in the early 1900s, traced a similar loss of human wholeness in the rationalized forms of social relations that took hold in the Protestant work-oriented countries of northern Europe. “The fate of our times,” Weber intoned in a speech delivered at the University of Munich in 1918, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ ” a phrase that coursed richly through the twentieth century.28
Mallarmé may have thought himself a vessel of the crisis of faith as it worked itself out between the Enlightenment and the end of the nineteenth century. Yet, he emerged in the 1860s from the psychological and moral extremity of his midtwenties not disenchanted but invigorated. On the other side of his three days of illumination, he had caught a glimpse of the great universal undefined infinite, which he would henceforth characterize as his “dream” or “ideal,” and which gave direction and meaning to the rest of his life. From that point on, Mallarmé sought to capture that ideal in a book. “I just, in the hour of synthesis, laid out the work. Three poems in verse . . . of a purity that man has not yet attained and will perhaps never attain, for it could be that I am only the plaything of an il
lusion, and that the human machine is not perfect enough to arrive at such results.”29 Mallarmé struggled for the next three decades to transform the pure Idea, eternal and abstract, into writing. The result, imagined as a book, would culminate in “One Toss of the Dice.”
For Mallarmé, this beautiful world-book was no mere metaphor, but a real project. “As for me, I have worked more this summer than in my entire life,” he wrote to the poet Théodore Aubanel on July 16, 1866. “I have laid the foundation of a magnificent work. Every man has a secret within him, many die without ever finding it. . . . I am dead and resurrected with the jeweled key of the ultimate treasure chest of my mind. It is now up to me to open it in the absence of any impression borrowed from elsewhere, and its mystery will spread out into a most beautiful heaven. I need twenty years during which I am going to retreat within myself, avoiding any publicity except for some readings to my friends.”30
The idea of a single book, an epic poem of humanity, would be surrounded by a vocabulary of mystery, magic, miracle, alchemy even. Mallarmé spoke of it in the most hyperbolic terms. He described The Book as a hymn, “all harmony and joy,” and as “an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion.” Man’s duty in this world is to observe with the eyes of the divinity, and the only way of expressing what he observes is through the pages of a book.31
Like the Romantics of the first quarter of the century, and like Baudelaire, who reached his poetic peak in the 1850s, Mallarmé believed in the great universal harmony and connection of all things. In almost everything he wrote, poetry is infused with the burden of spirituality that once belonged to religion. The very sight of a book summoned the spirit—from the Latin spiritus, meaning “breath,” “breeze,” “air”—in a secret, silent communication between letters and the world, even in the absence of any human presence. He imagined a book lying outside on a garden bench, pages blowing in the breeze, as an infusion of life into the inert bound object. “The foldings of a book,” he noted, “form a tomb in miniature for our souls.”32
Mallarmé’s virtual Book was also pictured as a real printed volume. He spoke, even in his twenties, in a second letter to Aubanel, of a project comprising five volumes. In the autobiographical sketch for Verlaine of 1885, it was a question of “a work of many tomes.” The poet René Ghil, writing in 1923, claimed that Mallarmé confided that The Book would be composed of twenty volumes that together would make for a Philosophy of the World. However many tomes Mallarmé imagined would be required for the Poem of Humanity, the book that “would explain all earthly existence,” was unclear. Much clearer was that the poet felt as if he were in a race against time and that, if he originally thought in terms of twenty years, by the time of the letter to Verlaine, “a lifetime would not be sufficient.”33
Mallarmé’s dream of the world as book was in some mundane way rooted in the technology and the spirit of the times. Beginning in the late 1700s, monumental advances were made in the realm of printing and book manufacture, a full three hundred years after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, which in its primitive way had dominated bookmaking until then. Smoother and more easily printable vellum paper began to replace the older wire-laid rag paper, whose supply was limited by the supply of disposable cloth. More efficient mechanical means of making paper came into being, as production shifted away from the single sheet and toward the continuous roll. After the fall of Napoleon I, certain improvements in the actual process of mixing the paper “paste” made it possible in France for factories to produce 1,000 kilos of paper per day instead of the previous 100 produced by hand. It was after the 1840s, however, that the real boon to papermaking came about in the form of paper made from a mixture of pulverized tree pulp bonded chemically (this was the acid paper whose disintegration was not at first foreseen). To the increased capacity of paper manufacture were added immense advancements in the efficiency of the printing press, which had, in fact, changed very little since the invention of printing in the fifteenth century. By the middle of the 1800s, four-cylinder steam engines were driving the presses of France’s major newspapers and print houses. Mechanically driven rollers had replaced, in the phrase of Honoré de Balzac in his novel about print culture, Lost Illusions, the old leather “groaning balls,” originally used for applying ink. The ink itself, once handmade out of organic material, was replaced by industrially produced chemical dyes.
The print industry, thus, grew phenomenally after the Consulate of 1799 to 1804, and during the Restoration, which lasted from 1815 to 1848. The number of print shops increased by 150 percent, or twice as fast as the population, such rapid growth slowing only with the tighter surveillance of the press during the Second Empire and the reign of Napoleon III. The number of Parisian booksellers grew proportionally, as did the sheer mass of printed material, from newspapers and magazines, to advertising brochures, posters, and books. The rate of book publication, which was estimated at fewer than 2,000 titles per year before the Revolution of 1789, grew, according to the Bibliothèque de France, to 2,547 titles in 1814, 8,237 titles in 1826, and 12,269 titles in 1869. Such an exponential increase reflected the growth of literacy among a burgeoning urban intellectual and upper-middle class, with historical reverberations that would play themselves out throughout the nineteenth century.
François Guizot, minister of education under the July Monarchy of 1830, called for French scholars, in a race with their German and English counterparts after the Napoleonic wars, to track down as many documents related to French history as they could find. Guizot submitted an increased budget request of 120,000 francs for fiscal 1835 in order “to accomplish the great task of a general publication of all the important and unedited materials having to do with the history of our country.”34 He proposed editing himself a thirty-volume Collection of Documents Relative to the History of France from the Foundation of the French Monarchy up to the Thirteenth Century. Fifty years later, Prime Minister Jules Ferry, father of the French system of public education, proclaimed in a speech to Parliament, “For us, the book, do you hear me, the book whatever its nature, is the fundamental and irresistible means of freeing the intelligence.”35 The Belle Époque brought changes in written communication equivalent to the current explosion of electronic media. Mallarmé’s project of The Book was, then, part and parcel of the times, and it was, as we shall see by way of conclusion, so far in advance of its time as to set the agenda for today’s digital revolution.
Mallarmé’s total book, which laid the groundwork for “One Toss of the Dice,” was more than a reflection of advances in book manufacture and means of communication. The ambition reached back to the roots of the Western tradition, and it served to put the poet in touch with a long classical and medieval legacy of imagining the world as a book. The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is filled with metaphors of the Book. God writes in the “Book of Life” (Exodus 32:32). The Tables of the Law are “written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18). The Prophet Isaiah’s eschatological vision (Isaiah 34:4) predated the advent of the book as codex, which was part of a revolution in written culture between the third and the sixth century C.E. It promised nonetheless that “the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll.”
In the High Middle Ages, one of the dominant metaphors for the earthly realm was the Book of Nature. Alain de Lille, in the twelfth century, and Jean de Meun, in the thirteenth, linked writing to the natural world. “Sitting in Audience before Goddess Nature,” Jean wrote in the Romance of the Rose, the most copied vernacular manuscript of the Middle Ages, “the willing priest recorded the images (representational figures) of all corruptible things, which he had written in his book, as Nature gave them to him.”36 Dante, at the end of his journey through the underworld and Purgatory, arrives at the highest point of Paradise where he has a vision of the eternal light of the entire spiritual universe:
In its depth I saw contained,
by love into a single volume bound
substances, accidents, and the interplay between them,
as though they were conflated in such ways
that what I tell is but a simple light.37
For the astronomer Galileo at the end of the sixteenth century, “philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.”38
Mallarmé was naturally fascinated by the Middle Ages, which he considered, in the wake of the Romantic turning away from classical antiquity and embrace of the indigenous medieval roots of France, a period of authenticity in which man was conjoined with the world, this vision thus celebrated in all the arts. When the poet was not boating or fishing, one of his activities once he started spending summers at Valvins involved amateur theatricals. In fact, he wrote a version of the late medieval comic drama The Farce of Maître Pathelin and played the role of Pathelin, a clever lawyer who tricks a cloth merchant out of his wares. When in Paris, Mallarmé was also taken by the survival of the Middle Ages in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which had been restored by the architect Viollet-le-Duc between 1847 and 1863. “Close your eyes,” he suggested in “Magic,” an essay, “you cannot miss . . . Notre Dame” which “refuses to fall.”39