Even the most supple minds have difficulty reconciling the young man of twenty-one with sunlit voice and mirage eyes who immediately won Rimbaud’s friendship – the latter, preceded by his despicable reputation, has just entered the Tabourey, where they pretend not to recognize him; Nouveau, moved by a boundless admiration, goes up to him; the next day they leave together for England – with the beggar of thirty years later stooped under the portico of Saint-Sauveur d’Aix cathedral, to whom Paul Cézanne, heading in to mass, would each Sunday give one écu in alms. And yet, absolute nonconformism regulated this life from start to finish. ‘The author of Valentines,’ said his friend Ernest Delahaye, ‘was not contrary by nature; instead, he maintained a spirit of tranquil, smiling, and sometimes graciously ironic opposition. This derived from the constant need to construct his ideas by “building the manor house backward,” as well as a perpetual tendency to seek out new sides of things. For him, the simplest thing was the opposite of what normal men say and do.’ After the mechanism of intellectual subversion that he had helped perfect (alongside Cros, Rimbaud, and even Verlaine) exploded one day in his hands – his first mystical crisis in 1879 caught him while he was eating, on Good Friday, a rib steak that he had insisted on cutting himself at the butcher’s – he began devoting the same worrisome zeal, the same total absence of measure to ‘good’ as he had to ‘evil.’ A ministry employee, he was forced to resign following a burlesque duel that he brought upon himself with a colleague. While a drawing instructor at the Janson-de-Sailly lycée, he dropped from the chair to his knees and started chanting a hymn. After a short stay at the Bicêtre hospice and two pilgrimages on foot, one to Rome, the other to Santiago de Compostela, he destroyed his works and spent the last fifteen years of his life haunting the churches of Provence with the spectre of Benoît Labre, the vermine-crowned saint whom he’d taken as his model.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Savoir aimer, 1904. Les Poèmes d’Humilis, 1910. Valentines, 1921. Le Calepin du Mendiant, 1949.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Valentines.
The towel is a servant,
The soap answers your call,
The sponge is a scholar,
But the comb is lord of all.
Yes, Madam, lord of all,
As noble as it is tall,
Pure and clean in its soul,
Yes, the comb is lord of all!
What? they dare use the phrase
Dirty as a comb! What gall!
We should say: Don’t blame, but praise,
For the comb is lord of all!
Yes, if the comb is not so clean
Should blame to its own self befall?
Or to a nature low and mean?
For … the comb is lord of all.
The fault lies with him who leaves it
To wallow in its filth and squalor.
It’s the fault of laziness.
He, the comb, is lord of all.
Yes, our hand is but its vassal,
And if grime should it befall,
Its filth worries it but little,
For the comb is lord of all.
Now, it gladly grooms our scalp,
But only if hand of John or Paul
Should clean its teeth, and I repeat,
That the comb is lord of all.
Yes, it is lord of all, the comb,
Without spite or caterwaul,
Its motto would be ‘care I not,’
For the comb is lord of all.
Lord of all, its scorn doth sting,
Bearing its sword like an ancient Gaul,
Now, that sword is but a needle
If the comb is lord of all.
That needle, gentle and adept
Lands softly as a light snowfall,
On the hands of a little maid
Whose comb, I say, is lord of all.
So if you or I were to confess,
My friend, that it do us appal,
He would let drop such foolishness,
For the comb is lord of all.
For myself, I’ll not opine:
I wouldn’t have … the wherewithal,
To make you smile is not my mind;
And … the comb is lord of all.
So of your fine and spotless teeth,
I have the honour each cock’s call;
To you, dear comb, my kisses sweet:
Your humble servant am I all.
– from Valentines