This time – on 15 February 1893 – it was a poet presiding over the banquet. A toast was de rigueur, and naturally, it was expected that the poet would offer one in verse. And so he rose from his seat; on his lips was a soft, subtle half-smile; his gaze was vague, as though intent on a distant daydream. Everyone thought him nervous, ill at ease before so many eyes. Resolute, he took his glass and began to recite a poem. His voice was sonorous, textured, but wavering: not the voice of a man accustomed to think of verse as something to be uttered in public and aloud. The poem was brief, and was received with three ovations in succession. Slightly surprised, the poet heard the echoes of the applause. Outside, the Paris sky was frozen and clear.
What can a poet say in a toast? After all, the time of the elegant poetry of the baroque is past, the time when – at the court of a lesser Italian noble, or in some surly and solitary palace – any theme served as a canvas for the execution of a bit of verbal filigree: a portrait of the concept in the mind, of sound arranged in rhythm. Nor are we in a medieval tavern, with vagabond goliards chanting in corrupted Latin, or one of those palaces where the troubadours crooned their winged versicles, gentle and sweet. No: we are in the final act of the nineteenth century, in a big, enigmatic, faceless city, where tenderness abides only in select recondite refuges. And the poet, at the moment of toasting, is simply a man, a glass of champagne clutched in his hand. And he must talk about his glass, this glass which will make of him a person absurd or majestic: on what he can manage to say of a thing as fragile and fleeting as a glass of champagne will depend, at that moment, the triumph or the triviality of poetry.
Triviality? Poetry may not be much more profound – or more trivial – than this thing: champagne in a glass. Inside or perhaps overflowing the crystal, white foam capping the luster of liquefied gold. Nothing, foam… That is:
Rien, cette écume.
Yes, the toast must begin thus: with the foam – which is nothing – in the glass. Saying, then, from the beginning, that it is nothing. Everything that comes afterward will be the exclusive proceeds of the poem.
Five years later, a few weeks before his death, the poet – Stéphane Mallarmé, retired English teacher – gave his final indications concerning the ordering of his poems. Pride of place – the portico, the prelude, if you prefer: the point of access, the entrance, but also, in a way, a declaration of what is to be his work’s overarching tone – is granted to that toast, distinguished by its airiness, to a piece that appeared merely circumstantial. It is nothing, this foam… The nothing, the foam – the invisible, the transitory, inexistent were it not for an existence imparted by the power of the word – stands at the beginning of the work, just as, toward the end, in the last poem Mallarmé would write, the significance of emptiness will equal that of the printed letters. From nothing to nothing: in a pause, in a blank space, foam. Nothing: a poem. Our word.
27 December 1979