One Toss of the Dice

On his way to London in the fall of 1862, Mallarmé stopped in Versailles, where the Desmolins now lived, to pick up an advance of four thousand francs on the inheritance that would come to him from his mother when he turned twenty-one. His cautious grandparents, resigned to his pursuing a career as a teacher of English, tried to elicit a promise that Stéphane would live while in London in a Catholic residence, where his morals and his daily comings and goings would be properly supervised. He was, after all, still their legal ward, and they must have felt emboldened to exercise their guardianship, given the decline of his father, Numa. Stéphane, who was now in correspondence with poets his own age or slightly older and had a mistress, would have none of it. The lovers had already consummated their relationship sometime in September, though the tie still remained hidden from parents and grandparents. In the small town of Sens, as well as in the conservative monarchist stronghold of Versailles, the scandal of the sudden departure of the governess in a respectable family with a would-be poet, seven years her junior, would have been unbearable. Both the Mallarmés and the Desmolins would have opposed Stéphane’s cohabitation with any woman to whom he was not married, much less to an au pair of lower social standing. Mallarmé, however, maintained that one of the things that attracted him to Marie was the “melancholy charm” of governesses, who were always a little déclassée.1

The arrival in London was not easy. Only a week after Stéphane and Marie had rented a small apartment on Panton Square, the young poet was robbed and ended up in court. “English justice sided with the thief under the pretext that he entrapped but did not rob me. Swindling is permitted here, and the court sent me away saying that I was an imbecile to let myself be taken like that.”2 Such a difficult welcome could not, however, dampen the couple’s initial excitement at being on their own.

The young lovers, as tourists still do today, visited Westminster, Piccadilly, Hyde Park, the British Museum, and the National Gallery, where they admired the Turners. They were charmed by the chocolate-colored omnibuses and the tree-lined squares, and by the street life right outside their window—organ grinders, guitar strummers, trained monkeys in red hats, and commedia dell’arte players. And they were delighted by domestic life, right down to the ordinary objects, the teapot and beer mugs, next to a big double bed. “We have put together a true English household,” Mallarmé wrote to Cazalis in mid-November, “so much so that I feel the need to write to my notary.”3 The letter to his notary would presumably have been to ask him to send money, which he had begun to spend for more than food and rent. Stéphane and Marie acquired a black cat, the first of their pets, and a German clock, purchased in a London antique shop for three shillings. “A superb façade in porcelain! With two painted roses. . . . It has a friendly tick-tock which seems to say: ‘Listen well, you who embrace each other, to how laboriously I work all alone in my little corner.’ ”4

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.

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

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 illusion, 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

the pages scattered through the universe:

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

Mallarmé was also captivated by the look of medieval manuscripts, whose varied visual layout, with room in the margins for annotation, historiated and floriated initial letters, miniature illuminations and drolleries, resonate with the multidimensional appearance of “One Toss of the Dice.” Alongside William Morris’s turn to the Middle Ages in the Arts and Crafts movement in England, the French poet was seduced by the medieval arts of the book, a seduction that would come to the fore in the course of a visit to Belgium in April 1890. In Brussels, he dined with several admirers—the poets Iwan Gilkin, Albert Giraud, and Valère Gille—who showed their guest a volume of his own poems, written on parchment in a Gothic hand, bound like a medieval prayer book, with illuminations, decorated letters, and culs-de-lampe (tailpieces). Highly impressed, Mallarmé borrowed the handmade book, which he brought back to Paris and, after showing it to family and friends, returned with a poem added to “this book of hours.”40 The manuscript spoke to the organic, spiritual quality that, having disappeared from contemporaneous uniformly printed books, Mallarmé nonetheless found in medieval handwritten volumes.

Soon, Mallarmé would have occasion to come into contact with a living medieval poetic tradition. From the start of his stay in Besançon, the poet had complained of health problems related to the town’s “black, humid, and glacial climate.” In October 1867, he received a letter from the minister of public education transferring him to the Lycée Impérial of Avignon. Mallarmé was familiar with the medievally significant Avignon, having made several visits to the Mediterranean coast. In the course of one such trip, the poet made it as far as Cannes, where his friend Eugène Lefébure, an aspiring poet who had worked as a postman in Auxerre and who would eventually become one of France’s most accomplished Egyptologists, was living comfortably in a villa as a result of an inheritance that had come his way. Together, Mallarmé and Lefébure spent an evening at the casino in Monaco, which is the only evidence of contact between the author of “One Toss of the Dice” and the real world of gambling. Mallarmé wrote home to his wife at eleven p.m. on the night of April 4, 1866, “I will tell you about all my doings when I get back, I am satisfied with informing you only that the excursion to Monaco was delicious, and that at roulette I won a few sous with which I bought you a pretty little. . . . I won’t tell you what, which surprise will go marvelously with the dress that you will buy this summer!”41

Mallarmé’s stays in southern France, with its more limpid weather, had brought temporary relief from the deeply depressive atmosphere of Tournon and Besançon. He had written to Cazalis as early as 1864, “Ah! My friend, how I would love to be in Avignon! Pray for it to the gods who put the pen pushers in the ministry offices.”42 And, when he heard of his new appointment, he wondered whether someone had uncovered the “intimate and ancient secret” of his dreams. Des Essarts had introduced Mallarmé to his poet friends in Avignon, which was the center of one of the most important indigenous cultural movements in nineteenth-century France. The Félibrige association, founded in 1854, took as its goal the restoration of the Occitan, or Provençal, language and its literature to their rightful place among the arts. Provençal, the language of the first vernacular poets, or troubadours, could trace its origins back to the early twelfth century—that is, to a time before music and verse were distinct from each other. The ambitions of the Félibrige poets to revive medieval lyric thus coincided with Mallarmé’s vision of an integrated work of art. For the young Mallarmé, the revivalist Provençal poets of Avignon—including Frédéric Mistral, Joseph Roumanille, and Théodore Aubanel—may not have been as exciting as the cosmopolitan writers and painters he had encountered in Paris, but in Avignon he joined a circle of active poets with whom he remained lifelong friends.

While in Avignon, Mallarmé began work on Igitur, a semiautobiographical dramatic poem in four acts: “Midnight,” “The Stairs,” “The Dice Throw,” and “Sleep on the Ashes, after the Candle Is Snuffed Out.” Some elements of this enigmatic work cast back to the poet’s struggle to free himself from his family: “The infinite at last escapes the family, which has suffered from it—old space—no chance.” Some are rooted in the psychic crisis of 1867, right down to the poet’s battle with monsters, the attainment of a state of absolute purity, and the disappearance and reappearance of the self in a mirror. Without the visual innovation of “One Toss of the Dice,” still other elements of Igitur anticipate Mallarmé’s last work: the Hamlet-like figure up against a midnight deadline when, “Midnight sounds—The Midnight when the dice must be cast”; an obsession with chance, and, more precisely, the abolition of chance: “having denied chance, he concludes from it that the Idea has been necessary. Then he conceives that there is, to be sure, madness in admitting it absolutely: but at the same time he can say that since through this madness, chance was denied, this madness was necessary”;43 and, of course, a dense, elliptical, unruly syntax that, even in a prose poem, is difficult to decipher.

Toward the end of his three years in Avignon, where he lived within the walls of the medieval city and within walking distance of the fourteenth-century Pope’s Palace, Mallarmé received a letter from Catulle Mendès informing him of the existence of “a new art, which is neither poetry nor music, but which is both music and poetry.” Mendès was referring to the operatic total works of art of Richard Wagner. Mendès and his wife, Judith Gautier, were the chief proponents of Wagner’s music in France. Incredibly, in the summer of 1870, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, the Mendèses, together with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, traveled to see Richard and Cosima Wagner in their house on Lake Lucerne. They were there when the news of the outbreak of war arrived, which did not interrupt the plan also to visit Mallarmé.

Mallarmé read Igitur out loud to his guests in the course of their short stay in Avignon. They reacted with embarrassment and shock. “What!” Mendès would write of the incident many years later. “Is this work, whose subject is difficult to identify and in which words are never used in their proper sense, what Mallarmé ended up with, after such a long effort?”44 Villiers burst out laughing. M. and Mme Mendès beat a hasty retreat: after a quick visit with the Félibrige poets, they left for Paris. Villiers, who never lacked get-rich schemes, stayed on and tried to get Marie Mallarmé to help him translate articles from German newspapers that he intended to publish in the French press. The two poets discussed what Villiers, despite his initial outburst, sensed to be the immense ambition of Igitur. Finally, completely out of money, the impoverished aristocrat borrowed train fare to return to the capital which would be severely disrupted, both physically and existentially, from the time of Kaiser Wilhelm’s capture of Napoleon III at the Battle of Sedan in September 1870 to the defeat of the Commune in May 1871.