Xavier Forneret, or ‘The Man in Black,’ or ‘The Stranger of Romanticism.’ ‘For the literary annals of the current part of the nineteenth century,’ he said in 1840, ‘there will be a book filled with an infinite quantity of names (not including mine): you know the main ones. Let us not forget the cover, which will bear the words “half the Academy” and “Scribe.” Everyone knows that the old cover of a rebound book is meant to be discarded.’
In fact, we would know nothing about this multifariously engaging personality if not for the article that Charles Monselet devoted to him some time back in Le Figaro, excerpts of which were reprinted in the auction catalogue of his works. This article, moreover, is more liable to excite our curiosity than to satisfy it. I maintain without hesitation that there exists a Forneret case, whose persistent enigma would justify patient and systematic research. How could it be that the author of twenty such singular works should have gone completely unnoticed? How can we explain the uneven quality of his output, in which the most authentic innovation coexists with the worst cliché, in which the sublime rubs shoulders with the inane, in which the constant originality of expression frequently reveals a poverty of thought? Who was this man, whose external behaviour seems to have been entirely geared toward attracting the public’s attention, even though his way of writing could not fail to alienate that same public; this man who was vain enough to run a newspaper advertisement for one of his books that said: ‘The new book by Xavier Forneret will be sold only to those who submit their names to the printer, M. Duverger on Rue de Verneuil, and after their request has been reviewed by the author,’ and who at the same time was humble enough to apologize for his lack of talent at the end of several of his works, and to beg the public’s indulgence? In various respects, this attitude presents striking analogies with the one that Raymond Roussel would later adopt. Forneret’s style, moreover, seems to foreshadow Lautréamont’s, just as his repertoire of fresh and daring images already announces Saint-Pol-Roux. A poem such as ‘Jeux de mère et d’enfant’ [Games of a Mother and Her Child], in Vapeurs ni vers ni prose [Vapours Neither Verse Nor Prose], anticipates with disconcerting naivety the clinical illustration of current psychoanalytic theory.
‘Dijon,’ Monselet wrote, ‘still remembers the first performance of L’Homme noir [The Man in Black], a prose drama in five acts. It was in 1834 or 1835. The author was a rich young man from Burgundy, whose habits, so unlike those of the provincial bourgeoisie, had the privilege of arousing his fellow townsmen’s mistrust. First of all, he did not dress like them – one mark against him. He fancied velvet and overcoats; he wore a rather peculiar hat and carried a black-and-white cane. Strange things were said about him, such as that he lived in a Gothic tower where he played the violin all night long. For these reasons and more, the citizens of Dijon remained on their guard against Xavier Forneret; and so their curiosity was piqued by the announcement of L’Homme noir. Xavier Forneret had spared no expense. On the eve of the premiere, halberdiers, heralds costumed as in the Middle Ages canvassed the streets, waving banners bearing the name of the play. One could therefore count, if not on success, at least on the box office receipts.
‘The theatre was indeed filled, but L’Homme noir was hardly a success; I believe that it did not even make it to the end, such was the hullabaloo and the cabal. Xavier Forneret printed his play with a symbolic cover: white letters on a black background. More than that, he adopted the nickname “The Man in Black,” and signed several of his works that way. At the same time, he retreated more than ever into unconventionality. This personality, clearly defined but without sharp edges, irritated the populace of Dijon and Beaune for nearly twenty years. The town papers could not resist poking fun at his expense. He became the local eccentric, and people tried to interpret his isolation; there were numerous trials and scandals. Through all of it, Xavier Forneret stood firm.’
After mentioning the various eccentricities that characterized the presentations of his works (composition in very large type; immoderate use of white space: two or three lines to a page, or the text only on the recto; the word ‘end’ not necessarily interrupting the story, which might continue in an ‘after the end’; the insertion of, among other things, a single poem printed in red ink; peculiar titles – which, moreover, were almost always extremely felicitous), Monselet subtly notes: ‘As such, we are certain of coming upon a humorist.’ And he adds: ‘But that is the danger rather than the attraction. France has never been short of humoristic writers, but they are less appreciated here than anywhere else … Much has been written about the audacity of Pétrus Borel, the werewolf, or about the ramblings of Lesailly; they are all surpassed by Xavier Forneret.’
Monselet, more courageous in this regard than all the critics of the past hundred years, is not afraid to admire what is admirable in Forneret: ‘Temps perdu! contains a masterpiece’ – an opinion to which I totally subscribe – ‘which is “Le Diamant de l’Herbe”[The Diamond in the Grass], a story no more than twenty pages long. The strange, the mysterious, the sweet, and the terrible have never flowed from a single pen with such intensity.’ Its author therefore underestimated his own talent when he said: ‘Everything for me is a matter of feeling, without my ever being able to truly express it.’ The evidence suggests that Monselet saw more clearly, and that posterity will follow his lead: ‘Xavier Forneret exaggerates his weaknesses. In his efforts and his feverish aspirations, he is worth more than a hundred writers in their stupid and serene abundance. There is a true personality in him. Under the pickaxe of the critic who strikes it, this unexplored terrain sometimes yields a gleaming vein of pure metal.’
Let us observe that we could hardly discredit the author of Sans titre [Untitled] by alleging that he was more or less irresponsible or unaware of the effect he had on impartial and attentive readers – he who placed his book under the invocation of this phrase by Paracelsus: ‘Often there is nothing above and everything below. Seek.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: L’Homme noir, blanc de visage, 1834 or 1835. Deux Destinées, 1834. Vingt-trois, trente-cinq, 1835. Et la lune donnait, et la rosée tombait. Rien, au profit des pauvres, 1836. Vapeurs ni vers ni prose, 1838. Sans titre, 1839. Encore un an de Sans titre, 1839. Pièce de pièces, temps perdu, 1840. A mon fils naturel, 1847. Rêves. Lettre à M. Victor Hugo, 1851. Voyage d’agrément de Beaune à Autun, fait pour la première fois le 8 septembre 1850. Quarante-sept phrases à propos de 1852. Lignes rimées, 1853. Mère et fille, 1855. Caressa, 1856. Ombres de poésie, 1860. Mon mot aussi, 1861. Lettre à Dieu. Broussailles de la pensée, 1870. Mort de Monseigneur l’Archevêque de Paris (3 janvier 1857): un crime de l’Enfer.
He pulled it out
Of his pocket worn,
Held it up,
And gazed forlorn,
Saying, ‘Poor thing!’
He blew on it
With moistened lips.
He shudders once
At the thought that grips
His heart.
He wet it
With a frozen tear
That chanced to melt;
His room is drear
As a junk shop.
He rubbed it,
Did not warm it,
Barely felt it;
For, pierced by chill,
It held back.
He weighed it
Like a bright idea,
Upon the air.
Then with some wire
He measured it.
He touched it
With his wrinkled pout.
In frantic terror
It cried out:
Kiss me farewell!
He kissed it,
And then crossed it
O’er his body’s clock:
Poorly wound, it gave off
A dull and heavy tock.
He felt it
With a hand resolved
To put the thing to death.
‘Yes, it will make a hearty snack,’
He muttered ‘neath his breath.
He folded it up,
He broke it off,
He set it down,
He cut it up.
He washed it off,
He carried it over,
He fried it up,
He swallowed it down.
When he was little, they told him:
If you’re still hungry, you can eat your hand.
– from Vapours Neither Verse nor Prose
One can walk perfectly well without a head. —
*
Certain hearts are very much like a full bottle that has been wrapped in a wet cloth and placed in the sun. – The cloth gets burning hot, the inside of the bottle is ice cold. —
*
Promises and truth are like balls that people toss each other back and forth and that remain hanging in the air. —
*
The pine tree, from which they make coffins, is an evergreen. —
*
Oh, how sad it is that women eat! – even strawberries in cream. —
*
There is no 1 truer than a 2 that makes a 3. —
*
I like women too much not to confess this truth: That they can sometimes be wicked. – May they forgive my use of the word; it’s a smiling bone from out of my graveyard. —
*
A small city is a big hole, and its great ideas, a little rat. —
*
I have seen a mailbox mounted on a cemetery wall. —
*
I would laugh if everything one grabbed hold of attached itself to one’s hands like bolts, because in that case the only thing left in the World would be brimstone merchants. —
*
At the exhibits of the Louvre and the large department stores – so many grand portraits IN MINIATURE, so many statuettes IN PLASTER – which are missing a name, just as two preceding words are missing the downstroke of an m to make the one that – according to the Academy – designates the object Figaro used on lost eyes.1* —
*
ALL or NOTHING. – These three words are a pair of glasses, to be sent to the woman who claims she can READ only what is in our hearts. ALL and NOTHING would be the two lenses, and OR, the part that rests on the nose. —
*
Minutes in a hotel are wings without the bird. —
*
How frightening beautiful hands are, with their long nails.2 —
*
NEWSPAPER: What great paper is the earth; what a typeface is the Day; what ink the Night! – Everyone prints, everyone reads; no one understands. —
*
It is not that one is good; one is happy. —
*
To think bitter thoughts, you need only see a lock touched by a living hand – and a cemetery in which dead hands are never GRASPED. —
– from Untitled and Another Year of Untitled, by a man in black, with face of white
1. In Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, the eponymous barber from Seville uses a poultice to treat the eyes of a blind donkey. Forneret’s rather abstruse pun is based on the fact that one word for poultice in French is emplâtre, and that, with ‘the downstroke of an m,’ this is precisely what the phrase en plâtre (‘in plaster’) becomes. [trans.]
2. These words seem to have changed season; they would have become passé if beautiful hands, first, and their long nails, second, were not for all time – [Forneret’s note]