One Toss of the Dice

Perhaps no single event in the entire nineteenth century traumatized the French nation as profoundly as the invasion by Germany in the late summer of 1870. In fact, just as Catulle Mendès, Judith Gautier, and Villers de l’Isle-Adam listened to Mallarmé read Igitur, the early version of what would become “One Toss of the Dice,” the German Confederation, led by the Prussians, was massing and moving west. After several preliminary battles, the German army on September 1, 1870 routed the French in the Ardennes at the northeast town of Sedan, a name that still resonates with infamy in the national conscience. It was a date that would live yet again in infamy almost seventy years later, when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later. At Sedan, 17,000 French troops were killed and some 100,000 taken prisoner, among them Napoleon III, who was unceremoniously removed to the castle of Wilhelmshöhe, before going into exile in England. Like so many fellow Frenchmen, Mallarmé was touched by Sedan. Jean-Auguste Margueritte, his cousin by marriage, had been promoted to the rank of divisional general on the morning of September 1 and later that day was wounded by a bullet that passed through both cheeks and his tongue. Unable to speak, he nonetheless gestured with his sword for his men to charge against the advancing wall of German troops who decimated the French First Division Cavalry Reserve. He died four days later.

From the distance of Avignon, Mallarmé recognized the absurdity of the struggle between Kaiser Wilhelm I and Napoleon III. He wrote to Mistral two days after Sedan, “There is in today’s atmosphere an unknown dose of suffering and insanity. And all this because a fistful of fools . . . thought they were insulted and failed to recognize that modern history contains something other than such puerile old stuff.”1 Indeed, the war had begun as a crisis over the succession to the Spanish throne and a series of perceived diplomatic sleights. When Prussian Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was offered the Spanish kingship after the Spanish Revolution of 1868, the French feared being trapped by an alliance between her neighbors to the northeast and the south. The prince’s candidacy was withdrawn under pressure from the French, but Napoleon III demanded a formal apology from Kaiser Wilhelm. The wily Otto von Bismarck, prime minister of Prussia, released Wilhelm’s telegram. The Ems Dispatch, as it came to be known, rejected the French demands, but the ambitious Bismarck, always eager to manipulate the emperor, had also altered the text of the message to make it sound as if the Prussian king had insulted the French ambassador, a move calculated to lead to war.

By the time Villiers arrived in Paris two days after the colossal defeat at Sedan, the Second Empire had been replaced by a Government of National Defense. Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, and Prince Albert of Saxony continued to move toward Paris, and, by the middle of the month, had encircled the capital, which by this point was paralyzed by fear. In his short story “A Duel,” Guy de Maupassant captured the mood of France in the wake of the German victory: “The war was over; the Germans were occupying France; the country was trembling like a beaten warrior beneath the foot of the conqueror.”2

The siege of Paris lasted through the terribly cold winter of 1870–71, a winter so severe that the Seine actually froze for three weeks. Cut off from the surrounding countryside, Parisians suffered devastating shortages of food, firewood, coal, and medical supplies. The novelist Alphonse Daudet wrote to Frédéric Mistral on December 31, “It is cold, it is dark, we are eating horse, cat, camel, and hippopotamus.”3 Risking starvation, Parisians emptied the zoo. A Christmas menu marking the ninety-ninth day of the siege included stuffed donkey’s head, elephant consommé, fried gudgeon fish caught locally, camel roasted with an English sauce, wolf thigh with venison, kangaroo stew, antelope terrine with truffles, bear ribs with peppers, and cat with rats. De Maupassant took the measure of the situation: “Paris was starving, panic-stricken, in despair.”4

Though communication with the outside world had been interrupted, ingenious Parisians foiled the blockade via an early avatar of airmail, if not Twitter. Messages of twenty words or less were grouped together, photographed, and flown to the outside world in multiple copies via carrier pigeon. The photographer Nadar, who was no doubt involved in processing the images, also happened to be a noted balloonist, and he organized a series of regular flights out of the besieged city. The Yapp sisters were trapped in their Parisian apartment at the time of the German invasion, yet they transmitted to London dispatches published in The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper under the rubric “Shut Up in Paris” and the pseudonym Eliane de Marsy. “This morning a balloon containing from thirty to forty thousand letters ascended from the heights of Montmartre, and disappeared from thousands of gazing eyes in the direction of Chartres,” they wrote on September 23. The Yapp sisters’ reports from the center of the siege were particularly concerned with the plight of families: those displaced from the outskirts of Paris, “men, women, and children of the family tramping with baskets, bundles, and bags”; and those, like Monsieur and Madame Jules Legendre, who “lost their daughters, Alice, aged thirteen years and a half, and Clémence, aged eight, both struck by a Prussian bomb.” The war would touch the Yapps more directly. Ettie’s younger sister Isabelle succumbed to the hardships of life in Paris under siege, the first to die of the young girls in flower of the Carrefour des Demoiselles.

After three and a half months of encirclement, the standoff between the Germans and the Parisians appeared interminable. The invaders were not fully supplied for the long winter, and tuberculosis began to spread among the besieging troops. The German high command decided to increase the bombardment of Paris. Beginning in early January, 1871, 300 to 600 shells per day rained down upon the city. Around the middle of the month, the Yapp sisters wrote that “for more than forty hours we have heard the long detonations, bursting forth with fierce explosion and rolling away in sullen thunder, at intervals of one or two minutes with more rapid successions at times.”

On January 18, 1871, Wilhelm I was declared German emperor, a regal promotion of sorts that was designed to instill patriotic fervor in the newly unified nation. That very evening Augusta Holmès hosted a musical gathering with Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Henri Regnault, and her lover Catulle Mendès. Regnault was known for his beautiful tenor voice and had led a combined singing of holiday songs—Adolph-Charles Adam’s “Cantique de Noël” in French and the “Choral of Luther” in German—across enemy lines on Christmas Eve. Villiers recounted that at Augusta Holmès’s soirée Regnault sang a war hymn that she had composed in a “moment of savage hesitation” with the noise of shells in the background. All three men wore their soldier’s hats. Then, around midnight, Regnault sang an impressive melody by Saint-Saëns, which began, “Near this white tomb, we mix our tears.” Upon arriving home, he found an order to join his battalion in the morning. The pressure of the large-caliber Krupp siege guns had provoked the army of the National Guard to attempt to break out along the western fortifications of the city. Heading toward the seat of the government, which had retreated to Versailles, the French troops got as far as the castle of Buzenval, seven miles west of Paris, where they were turned back. Regnault is reported to have said to his comrade in arms, fellow painter Georges Clairin, “just one more shot, and I’ll be back.” Come back he never did. Having taken a bullet in the head, he was among the four thousand killed in this final push to lift the siege of Paris, and among the last to die in the Franco-Prussian War. Anticipating death, he had pinned a note to his shirt, “Henri Regnault, painter, son of M. Victor Regnault, of the Institut [of France],” along with letters addressed to his fiancée. Within days of the Battle of Buzenval, a vanquished French President Adolphe Thiers and a triumphant Chancellor Otto von Bismarck signed an armistice at Versailles.

When Camille Saint-Saëns heard of his friend’s death, he finished composing his Funeral March. And, as the news spread through Paris that hostilities with Germany had ceased, he played it for the first time at the solemn mass for Henri Regnault at the Church of Saint-Augustin. “The poor young painter’s friends were well nigh countless. Truly, I rarely saw mourning so deep as among that crowded concourse, in which even men shed bitter tears,” Ettie Yapp reported to her readers in London. Ernest Meissonier, then a legend among mid-nineteenth-century French painters, delivered the eulogy, and, in the midst of low chanting, a military command was heard. The trumpeters of Regnault’s unit burst forth with a brilliant fanfare. Geneviève Breton, the dead soldier’s fiancée, who had searched alongside his comrades for his body on the field of Buzenval, left the church on the arm of his older brother and only remaining relative. In Meissonier’s historic painting The Siege of Paris, 1870–71, a wounded Regnault is depicted leaning against a pedestal in the center, beneath the statuesque fierce figure of Marianne, national symbol of the Republic, holding a tattered tricolor French flag triumphantly high.

As many as half a million middle-class Parisians had fled the city by the time the siege ended. The French army was in shambles. The eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost to the German Empire, and France found itself obliged to pay an indemnity of 200 million francs. In reaction to the defeat, a sizable proportion of the population in the working-class neighborhoods of Belleville, Montmarte, La Villette, Montrouge, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and Faubourg du Temple rose in revolt against Thiers and the government of Versailles. Some were dedicated revolutionaries, for whom the memory of the failed uprisings of 1830 and 1848 was still alive; some were disgruntled workers seeking better living conditions; some were dedicated patriots who felt France’s surrender to Germany to be a betrayal, “a fever of powerless patriotism,” in Guy de Maupassant’s phrase;5 and some, like the poet Paul Verlaine, who became head of the press bureau of the Central Committee of the Commune, joined for the promise of artistic liberation that a direct democracy of the people seemed to hold.

Even while the armistice of Versailles was being negotiated, members of the National Guard, no longer loyal to the defeated regime, surrounded the Hôtel de Ville with the demand that the military be placed under civilian rule. By the middle of March, the Communards had requisitioned four hundred cannons, originally paid for by a subscription of Parisians, and which represented a credible means of self-defense. The army of Versailles tried to seize the cannons on March 18, but their troops were turned back. Their leaders, Generals Clement-Thomas and Lecomte, were beaten to death by angry mobs. Thiers ordered all regular army troops to regroup in Versailles and all government offices to evacuate the city, which now belonged to those loyal to the Commune in what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would refer to as the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The National Guard occupied the Ministries of Finance, Interior, and War, with headquarters in the Hôtel de Ville, which now flew the red flag of revolution.

In early April 1871, the Communard troops of the National Guard marched out of Paris with the intention of capturing Versailles. Roundly defeated, they retreated within the wall of Paris, which meant that there would be fighting in the streets. Barricades were erected along the grands boulevards—the rue de Rivoli, the rue de l’Opéra, and the other streets that had been widened and straightened by Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III. In the weeks following the definitive withdrawal of the government to Versailles, an atmosphere of exultation reigned among the Communards, for whom the future seemed open to a general repeal of the economic inequality, social repression, and arbitrary rule associated with the Second Empire. In the account of photographer and chronicler of Paris Maxime Du Camp, who was not sympathetic to the urban uprising, life for the worker had never been so enjoyable. “Regularly paid, as was the National Guard, the worker always had ‘pocket change,’ which lacked sometimes when he had a regular job in the workshop; he received an allowance for his wife and for his children; the State or local canteens distributed sufficient food: never had he drunk so much wine, never more spirits, than during this period of general scarcity.”6

The mood of gleeful triumph was broken, however, when, on May 10 the armistice of Versailles was ratified by the Treaty of Frankfurt, officially acknowledging the terms of the agreement struck between Thiers and the German chancellor in January. Two days later, the Communards sacked Thiers’s home, offering the works of art in his collection, including bronzes by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to the Louvre. On May 16, by a decree of the Central Committee of the Commune, the Vendôme Column was toppled to the singing of “La Marseillaise.” The painter Gustave Coubet, president of the Commune’s Art Commission, had declared this monument to Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz a “work of barbarism . . . devoid of all artistic value.”

While the makers of revolution celebrated in the streets, in cabarets, and in newly founded political clubs, or parlottes, the French army advanced toward Paris, shelling the neighborhoods of Auteuil, Passy, and Trocadero, and capturing the defensive Fort d’Issy, one of the sixteen fortifications built between 1840 and 1845 to defend the city from attack. On May 19, the forces of Marshal Patrice de MacMahon further penetrated the southwest walls of Paris, and began filing into the city. Maxime Du Camp reported that on the night of May 21, he leaned out of the window of his apartment on 62 rue de Rome and heard the baritone voice of a young man of about twenty-five singing in unison with the crowd a popular tune, “The Proletarian,” the defiant words “God, Workers, People” repeated like a refrain:

Did God make the world so broke,

That in the walls of workhouses,

Vitriol, tallow, soot, and smoke

Pierce the heart with their deadly gases

Under the eyes of a nasty boss? . . .

They have their arms, and we have ours:

What’s one more hole in the rags we wear!7

As the Communards sang in the streets, sixty thousand army troops passed through the Porte de Saint-Cloud and the Porte de Versailles. They spread out over the city in what was to be the beginning of “Bloody Week.”

Many of the Communards had been convinced that the troops of Versailles would not fire upon fellow Frenchmen. Surprised by MacMahon’s rapid penetration of the city walls, they scrambled to build more barricades out of paving stones and sandbags. Fighting broke out along the quai d’Orsay and the boulevard de la Madeleine, and around the Tuileries Palace, Napoleon III’s former residence. The advancing French forces, with the memory of the brutal deaths of General Clement-Thomas and Lecomte still fresh in their minds, took no prisoners, but shot National Guardsmen and resisters, men and women, on the spot. In return, the Communards executed the prisoners held in the prison of La Roquette, among them the archbishop of Paris. When the rebels killed Saint-Saëns’s superior at the Church of the Madeleine, the composer, who had served in the National Guard, escaped into exile in England. The Communards burned public buildings, an order carried out in part by the petroleuses, women carrying oil cans. The Tuileries Palace, the Richelieu wing of the Louvre, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture de Police, and the Hôtel de Ville all went up in flames. On May 28, the army cornered what remained of the defenders of the Commune in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. By nightfall, 150 National Guardsmen had surrendered, and were lined up and executed against the southeast wall of the burial park. At the end of “Bloody Week,” between 10,000 and 20,000 Communards had died. More than 40,000 had been taken prisoner; and, of these, after military trial, 13,500 were found guilty. One hundred were sentenced to death, 250 were sent to forced labor, 5,000 to deportation, 3,500 to prison, and the rest were eventually released. “A desperate Paris,” in Maxime Du Camp’s phrase, “had withdrawn into its walls and ended by devouring itself.”8

Mallarmé opened the newspaper on February 2, 1871, to read the news of Henri Regnault’s death, “this first hole among us,” as he wrote to Cazalis, referring to the bond between young poets and a painter that had been forged at the Carrefour des Demoiselles almost ten years earlier. But the loss of a friend, the source of “unknown suffering,” produced several unforeseeable effects. Regnault’s early death filled Mallarmé with resolve to finish his own life’s work in order to fulfill the artistic promise that his dead friend had left behind. “There is only one way of avenging our brother,” he wrote to Cazalis, “that is, to let him live in the two of us.”9 The poet vowed to finish The Book born in the crisis of his midtwenties, which had quickened in Igitur, and which would reach its final form in “One Toss of the Dice.”

Regnault’s death had another, more tangible effect. The dead painter’s fiancée, Geneviève Breton, who was the granddaughter of the founder of the reigning twenty-first-century Hachette publishing empire, took it upon herself to bring Mallarmé from Avignon to Paris, as if it were the realization of one of the last wishes of Henri. Cazalis, who served as intermediary in the exchange, wrote to the poet in the provinces to ask what kind of work he might do at Hachette. Mendès also informed Mallarmé that a representative of Hachette would be dispatched to Avignon to interview him, as knowledge of English might be of service to the firm either in Paris or in London. The incredulous poet replied that he would be of little use to a large business enterprise because “he was only familiar with the English words contained in the verse of Edgar Allan Poe.”10

While his supporters in Paris worked to secure him a position, Mallarmé went to work on his own. He lobbied Frédéric Mistral, who had friends in high places, to write to the Occitan poet’s admirer Saint-René-Taillander in the Ministry of Public Education, in order to ask that he be transferred from Avignon to a teaching job in Paris. If no teaching job were available, the poet in exile would be willing to put his English-language skills to use as a librarian or archivist. Meanwhile, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam tried to secure for his friend in the provinces a contract writing for the Illustrated London News. They discussed the possibility of his undertaking a series of translations of nineteenth-century English poets, beginning with Poe, always a favorite in France, and of writing plays. For a brief moment, Mallarmé even considered taking a job as the English tutor on a steamboat, a measure of his desperation to be in the capital, for he concluded that the long months at sea would only have kept him away from where he wanted to be.

Several days before the beginning of “Bloody Week,” Mallarmé wrote to Mistral to ask whether he and des Essarts might come to visit Mistral at his home outside of Avignon the following Sunday, Pentecost, which fell that year on May 28. He added that he “would be leaving the next morning, Monday, for the North.”11 Mallarmé had decided that, even without a job, he would try his fortunes in the capital, which had “devoured itself” and was still burning.

On Monday morning, May 29, as the last victims of the Commune began to be counted and buried in mass graves, and as the captured resistance fighters marched under army guard to Versailles, the Mallarmés left Avignon for the north. Marie was expecting a second child. She planned to give birth at Anna’s house in Sens while Stéphane looked for work. When he arrived to stay with Catulle Mendès and Judith Gautier, Paris still looked like a battle zone, with burned-out buildings, whole blocks decimated, and walls scarred by rifle and artillery fire. The debris of barricades still littered torn-up streets. The Mallarmés moved north with little money. Stéphane, who had inherited money directly from his mother, had also counted on receiving what remained of the Desmolins’ estate when his grandmother, who had no other heirs, died two years previously. But Fanny had left only debts. In a letter to José-Maria de Heredia, the poet Leconte de Lisle noted the precarious situation of the young poet with “a wife and two children, one still to come into this world, and not a centime.”12

With the birth of Anatole Mallarmé on July 16, 1871, the need for money was such that the poet accepted to work as a journalist for the newspaper Le National, which sent him to London to report on the International Exposition of 1871. Housed on Alexander Square by a colleague of Ettie Yapp’s father at the Daily Telegraph, he reconnected with the magical young woman of the Carrefour des Demoiselles, who had weathered the siege of Paris and the Commune. They spoke in confidence of Ettie’s unhappy relationship with Henri Cazalis, which had continued for six years after their meeting in 1862. She asked the poet to intervene on her behalf to persuade her former fiancé to burn her letters. Later that year, Ettie Yapp would marry the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero. Two years after that, she would die in childbirth at the age of twenty-seven.

For the French of the mid-nineteenth century, England—Manchester as much as London—was the place where industrially produced art had been most successfully integrated into everyday life. According to the Belgian poet Georges Rodenbach, Mallarmé hoped to do for France what Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet and painter, had done for England when he had cofounded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848; or what William Morris, the textile and book designer, and Walter Crane, the illustrator of children’s books, had accomplished as leaders of the British Arts and Crafts movement: that is, to make more beautiful the useful objects found in every bourgeois home.13 Thus Mallarmé wrote a series of letters from London, which appeared in Le National on October 29, and November 14 and 29, 1871, under the pseudonym L.-S. Price (no doubt a play on the English “priceless” or “list price”). The poet’s English letters showed France to be a worthy rival of its neighbor across the Channel. His descriptions, a blend of nationalism mixed with aesthetics, bestowed a patina of poetry on the French luxury goods—clocks, lamps, furniture, jewels, accessories, vases, table settings, tapestries, carpets, paintings, a Pleyel-Wolf grand piano—on display at the fair in London just six months after the Treaty of Frankfurt.

At the time of his move from Avignon to Paris, Mallarmé reaffirmed his literary calling and dedication to the Grand Oeuvre, no longer a myth, but a version of The Book. As outlined to Cazalis, his life’s work would contain three parts: “a volume of Tales, dreamed,” by which the poet referred to his longer poetic dramas that tell a story, Hérodiade, Afternoon of a Faun, and Igitur; “a volume of Poetry, glimpsed and hummed,” by which he referred to the rest of his poetic output, thus far, “The Azure,” “Windows,” “The Clown Chastised,” “Summer Sadness,” “Sea Breeze,” “Apparition,” “Weary of Bitter Rest,” a series of sonnets, and, of course, the juvenilia written while still in high school; and “a volume of Critique, that is, what used to be called the Universe, considered from a strictly literary point of view.”14 This last component—“the Universe, considered from a strictly literary point of view”—can be understood only as the other side of the project of The Book. If the Grand Oeuvre would capture and change the world, “Critique” would reinscribe the world as it exists with the magic power of poetry.

Mallarmé made poetry out of the industrially produced goods that were part of every middle-class life—“this elusive spirit that presides over the manufacture of the familiar decor of our daily existence.”15 Thus, the world, no matter how difficult, or grim, or filled with the foolishness of political leaders bent on destroying each other, might partake of some of the charm that belongs ordinarily only to the realm of art. Eventually, he would transfer this fascination with luxury from home furnishings to clothes via his writings on feminine dress for a ladies fashion magazine, The Latest Fashion, and he would literally reinscribe the world with beauty and meaning by writing poems on the surfaces of a variety of everyday objects. The poet once confided to a journalist that “the world was created in order to end in a beautiful book.”16 In waiting for The Book to take shape, the poet would capture and catalogue the hidden, indeed the ineffable, poetry in things. Far from the frivolous musings of a late-nineteenth-century dandy or a fashionable flâneur, his writings on furniture, accessories, and fashion raised the most expensive playthings of human vanity to the power of an idea.

Mallarmé meditated on the banality of human time versus the eternal attributes of art in describing a “solemn furnishing, the clock,” manufactured by Ferdinand Barbedienne, whose foundry, obliged to forge cannons during the Franco-Prussian War, had returned to manufacturing luxury goods by the time of the poet’s London sojourn. “This gross exaggerated watch, as if made for the infantile eye of an Indian nabob, is trimmed with arabesques incised into burnished silver, and playing round about a frame, in which yellow and black enamel are married with white enamel.”17 The poet turned cultural reporter found a certain absurdity in late-eighteenth-century and Empire-style clocks, whose allegorical figures sit upon a marble base, but “the manufacture of lamps, differing from that of clocks, has never bordered on the absurd; and for this reason—that the shape has been preserved by that of the vase.”18 As for the jewels of the Maison Froment-Meurice, “such bracelets! A vine of virgin gold;—a succession of clasps, panels and arabesques, pearls and diamonds, burnished gold and emeralds. And these necklaces! One of enamel, pink like flesh, but colder, suspending precious stones of a pale tone, nonetheless alive.”19

Mallarmé was equally fascinated by the relationship of originals to reproductions and by the modern combination of industrially produced objects and handmade fine arts, especially in the manufacture of ceramics and of cloth. MM. Soupireau et Fournier’s renderings of the elaborate Renaissance pottery of Bernard Palissy, in particular, captured the poet’s attention. He noted that the spiny and twisted fish necessary for remarkable fish soups can be found mixed with fanciful salamanders and blazons in the high relief of majolica soup bowls. “I admit that, before these admirable reproductions, the word authentic, frequently pronounced by the exacting collector, oddly loses its meaning.”20 As obsessed as he was by the coincidence of actual things with their artistic reproduction, the poet delighted in the miniature porcelain fish, eels, shellfish, and mollusks swimming in the actual broth that they have made.

Upon his return to Paris in the fall of 1871, Mallarmé was greeted with what finally seemed like welcome news. Through the efforts of Geneviève Breton, who knew Jules Simon, the minister of education, he was appointed to a part-time teaching position at Paris’s Lycée Condorcet, with a secondary appointment at the Lycée Saint-Louis. Though working at two institutions meant a long commute, between the rue du Havre and the upper boulevard Saint-Michel, the full salary meant that the family of four might just make ends meet. The Mallarmés moved into a fourth-floor apartment on the rue de Moscou. Their first Parisian home was not far from some of the most contested lines of urban combat of earlier that spring, within walking distance of the hill upon which Sacré-Coeur would be built as a national penance imposed upon Paris’s most rebellious neighborhood. Four years later, Mallarmé would move to the rue de Rome, within earshot of the spot on which the young Communard with a baritone voice had regaled his neighbors with “The Proletarian” at the beginning of “Bloody Week.”

The onerous task of teaching in those first years in Paris did not prevent Mallarmé from socializing whenever he had the chance, especially if there were the opportunity of talking about poetry or meeting other poets. He was convinced, perhaps because of his contact with the Félibrige movement in Provence or his knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, that all poets were spiritually connected. He had the idea of forming an international poets’ union, and even wrote about such a project to John Payne in England and to Mistral, who was uninterested. On one of his evenings out, Mallarmé met the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine at a dinner of the Vilains Bonhommes (Bad, Bad Boys), a monthly gathering of Parnassian poets, advocates of “art for art’s sake,” who read their latest compositions and discussed verse.

At the age of sixteen, Rimbaud had boarded a train without a ticket in the northern town of Charleville, in the Ardennes. Arriving in Paris on September 6, 1870, just five days after the French defeat at Sedan, he was immediately imprisoned and sent home. Ten days later, he was on the road again, drinking, stealing, and composing poems along with a letter, sent in May 1871 to one of his high school teachers, about achieving a higher poetic vision through a “long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.”21 Rimbaud dreamed of returning to Paris, and began sending his poems to Verlaine, among which a sonnet, “The Sleeper in the Valley” (“Le Dormeur du Val”), which depicts a sleeping soldier lying in the grass, and who turns out, like Henri Regnault, to be dead—“Tranquil. He has two red holes in his right side”—one of the victims of the Franco-Prussian War. Verlaine was so taken with Rimbaud’s verse that he sent the young poet a reply, with a one-way ticket to Paris—“Come, dear great soul. We await you. We desire you.” How much he desired, he had little idea.

Rimbaud arrived in Paris in September 1871 and lodged at first with Verlaine and his seventeen-year-old wife, who was pregnant. In short order, the Verlaine-Rimbaud couple displaced the married couple. The two poets stayed out all night or did not come home at all, consumed large quantities of alcohol, absinthe, and hashish, and scandalized the Parisian literary scene—Verlaine because of his unconventional marital arrangement, and Rimbaud because of his unsettling behavior. The younger poet stole from those who housed him and disrupted poetic meetings that, by the standards of this enfant terrible from Charleville, were not disruptive enough. In March 1872, Rimbaud’s repeated cries of “shit!” during one of the readings at the Vilains Bonhommes ended with the young poet’s striking the photographer Étienne Carjat with a cane, and his exclusion from future gatherings. During this period, Mallarmé met Rimbaud, who impressed the older poet with the country redness of his face, his steely blue eyes, and the swollen roughness of his hands, which had “signed beautiful unpublished verses,” though his mouth, “with a sullen and mocking fold, had recited none.”22

In September, Verlaine abandoned his wife and infant son. The lovers—“two poets in ferocious pain,” in Mallarmé’s phrase23—left for London, where they lived “in orgiastic misery.”24 Throughout the affair, Verlaine supported his new couple by offering English lessons, and was supported by his mother, who repeatedly urged him to return home. Verlaine did come back to Paris in June 1873, but the period of renewed domestic respectability was short-lived. A month later he telegraphed Rimbaud to meet him in Brussels, where he and his mother traveled together; and, on July 10, the older poet, jealous and furious at his young lover’s threats to leave, shot him twice. Verlaine was originally indicted for murder, a charge reduced to assault with a firearm. He served two years in prison, during which time he converted to Roman Catholicism. Rimbaud, on the other hand, left France and poetry before he was twenty, landing first in Indonesia, where he enlisted in and deserted the Dutch colonial army, and then in the Horn of Africa—Yemen and Ethiopia—where he sold weapons, coffee, and apparently slaves as well, before dying of bone cancer at the age of thirty-seven.

Upon his release from prison, Verlaine returned to England, and then immigrated briefly to Boston, where he taught English, Latin, and Greek. He would return definitively to Paris in 1877. There, he and Mallarmé resumed a relationship of mutual respect for each other’s poetic gifts. According to Mallarmé, Verlaine divided his time in two equal halves. He wrote poetry, and he drank. When in misery, with a couple of difficult months ahead, Verlaine would write to the director of a hospital he frequented, as if it were a hotel, to announce that he would arrive on such and such a day. But, Mallarmé observed, “certain verses of Verlaine to Rimbaud are so beautiful!”

Mallarmé showed no evidence of the desperate agony, none of the excesses or scandalous capers, the bankruptcies and binges of so many of the Romantic, Parnassian, and Symbolist poets. If he had a vice by today’s standards, it was smoking—cigarettes, cigars, and a pipe. The flume from his cigar in Manet’s portrait of the poet, completed in 1876, is one of the great captures of smoke in all of Western art. In one of those Belle Époque parlor games, which involved completing a questionnaire to be shared with others, Mallarmé indulged in a game of “confessions.” His response to the question of “Your idea of unhappiness,” which Marcel Proust once famously answered with the plaintive “being separated from Maman,” was, simply, “doing without cigars.”25

Mallarmé’s appetites and afflictions were remarkably plain. Although he liked fine wine and eventually became known for his toasts at literary banquets, he was modest in his consumption of alcohol. The poet suffered from chronic insomnia, for which he took analgesics, and wore a prosthetic dental device, yet he indulged in none of the artificial paradises synonymous with the circles in which he moved. Unlike many of the writers of the nineteenth century—who sought, via exotic travel, escape from what was among the Romantics “the sickness of the century” (mal du siècle), “boredom and spleen” (Baudelaire), or Europe’s “bad blood” (Rimbaud)—Mallarmé, having raised some of the money to send Paul Gauguin to Tahiti, himself traveled no farther than London, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Côte d’ Azur.

The poet’s reports from the London International Exhibition had, however, given him a taste for and a knowledge of luxury goods. So, six months after his return to Paris, he wrote to fellow poet José-Maria de Heredia of his dream of editing a magazine devoted to the decorative arts. “I am gathering, now, in various parts of Paris the necessary subscriptions to found a beautiful and luxurious review, the thought of which obsesses me: L’Art Décoratif, Gazette Mensuelle, Paris, 1872.” He sought Heredia’s help in encouraging his friend Claudius Popelin, a well-regarded history and portrait painter, to design the cover.26 The moment, too, seemed right for such a venture. With the memory of the war and the Commune fading, French industry and commerce flourished in what was the beginning of a period of intense consumerism, aided by the extension of railway lines, the continued migration of rural population to large cities, improved techniques of advertising, and the building of shopping arcades and department stores in the capital.

Together with a friend, Charles Wendelen, who lived just up the street on the rue de Moscou, Mallarmé published eight issues of a biweekly ladies’ magazine, The Latest Fashion (La Dernière Mode). He was meticulous about the appearance, and even the feel, of his guide to the arts of gracious living. Elegance of dress and decoration went hand in hand with elegant writing, paper, illustration, and printing.

When it came to fashion, cooking, and household management, Mallarmé ironically picked up where Isabella Beeton, the author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), had left off. From his time in London, the French poet would surely have known about the ubiquitous English guide to running a Victorian household, which, like The Latest Fashion, began as a serialized magazine and was only later collected into a book. Isabella’s husband, Samuel Orchart Beeton, had founded The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper, where the Yapp sisters published their dispatches from Paris. It is inconceivable that the Yapps, in whose London and Paris homes Mallarmé was a frequent visitor, did not possess a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a work that helped define domestic Victorian mores. The English book was enormously successful, selling nearly two million copies by 1868, even though Isabella Beeton died in 1865, as Ettie Yapp would eight years later, of puerperal fever. Mallarmé had also read copies of The Queen, which contained the latest society gossip from the court of Queen Victoria alongside advice about the latest in fashion, decoration, cooking, and entertaining. Upon his return from London to Paris, the poet must have seen the publication of a magazine for upper-class ladies as a means of getting rich.

Mallarmé, perhaps sensing that such pieces would mar his reputation as a poet, wrote the entirety of every issue of The Latest Fashion under a variety of pseudonyms, each with a different specialty in the arts of living: Marguerite de Ponty for ladies’ fashion; Miss Satin for fashion houses; Ix, a male, for book and theater reviews; the Chef de Bouche de chez Brébant for cuisine; Madame de P. for education; Toussenel for naturalist activities and sports; and “A Grandmother” when it came to tried-and-true home remedies—“A Syrup to cure a cold,” “Ointment for chilblains”—that have been “practiced for generations.” In case such obvious disguise might raise suspicion, Mallarmé assured his readers of the reality of the fabrication: “Have full confidence, Mesdames, in the foreign pseudonym of a well-known Parisian lady: Miss Satin.”27 It was not so much that the poet had inverted traditional gender identities, but he was capable of identifying with women, of imagining their sensitivities to decoration and dress. He spoke in the voice of a woman.

The persona adopted for food suggestions, the Chef de Bouche de chez Brébant, summoned the luxury dinners of the real Paul Brébant, who, in 1863, had purchased Chez Vachette, 32 boulevard de la Poissonière, the restaurant frequented by Paris’s intellectual, journalistic, and literary elite. It was at Chez Brébant where dramatist Alexander Dumas fils honored his novelist father with a nineteen-course meal, not counting cheese or fruit. In The Latest Fashion, Mallarmé’s fictitious chef proposed a comparatively modest seven-course “menu for a luncheon by the seaside,” and a midnight supper consisting of Ostend and Marennes oysters, for a first course; consommé of plovers’ eggs, black pudding à la Richelieu, fillets of sole with Montpellier butter, saddle of Nîmes lamb with asparagus tips, for an entrée; truffled bartorelles, thrush pâté with juniper berries, new peas française, and buisson of crayfish with Ribeauvillé wine, for the main course; and louvers in pastry with chocolate, for dessert.

Mallarmé’s recipes for a less luxurious home-cooked meal tended still toward the exotic. Instructions for cooking chicken gumbo, an excellent bisque and a spicy dish, were attributed to a “a Creole Lady,” and a recipe for coconut jam to Zizi, a mulatto maid from Surat. The ingredients and all the spices “can be found at 5, boulevard Haussmann, at the shop of an old friend of our Readers.”28 Mallarmé was quite taken by the advertising industry that blossomed in the late 1800s in France, and the last pages of The Latest Fashion contained a series of advertisements accompanied by what look like business cards of recommended purveyors of luxury goods and services: “Marliani—Carpets and Decoration,” “Henri Laudron, S—Luxury Gloves,” “Mathilde Leclerc—Marie-Antoinette Style Corsets,” “Carjat—Photographer,” “Anchor Line Steam Ships—Paris to New York.”

The Latest Fashion was filled with tips for home decoration, some of which are so curious that one wonders how serious Mallarmé could have been. The poet saw no contradiction, in any case, between his goal of “purifying the words of the tribe,” on the one hand, and making upper-middle-class households more beautiful, on the other. Thus, he provided instructions for adapting Jewish Dutch lamps (by which I assume he referred to menorahs) to gas, and for “the application of leather on leather: an afternoon occupation.”29 He offered advice for creating a movable false ceiling for a rented apartment with the same concern for the ideal space behind openings in the sky that are an obsessive theme in his most serious verse. For those who live in flats, “the obstacle to the realizing of many a dream is inevitably the ceiling: for the wall, with its wallpaper is hidden, and doors can be painted; but white as a sheet of paper without a poem, only larger, or veiled with cloud on a sky-blue background at so much the yard, is the Sky offered to the tenant’s eyes, as he looks up from his armchair.”30

Flowers were an integral part of the Belle Époque decorative arts and would culminate in the organic aesthetic of Art Nouveau. The Latest Fashion included monthly advice on flower arrangement. In the issue of December 20, 1874, Mallarmé outlined instructions for decorating an “ordinary Christmas tree”: “Acclimatized in France from the North (especially since the war) by patriotic efforts, the Christmas tree, once reserved for rich cosmopolitan children, is now accessible to all.” Mallarmé provided his readers with cultural hints about noteworthy events at Parisian theaters and opera, about new volumes in bookstores, and about museum and gallery exhibitions in the world of fine arts. The Latest Fashion featured counsel from “a professor in one of the Parisian lycées” on which books and educational methods are worthy of maternal attention.31 The leisure class, which the poet targeted as his readers, summered away from Paris, and The Latest Fashion was filled with vacation suggestions—commentary on railways and stations, a list of suitable bathing resorts in Normandy, Brittany, south of the Loire, and along the Paris–Lyon–Mediterranean line. The poet, who had just begun to spend his summers in Valvins, made recommendations about keeping busy in Paris during the indolent summer months. Fall, of course, was hunting season, and Mallarmé, under the pseudonym of his gaming expert Toussenel, described in The Latest Fashion of October 4, 1874, a “Lark-hunt, with a Draw-net.”

The Latest Fashion aimed to please the ladies, and women’s clothes were its defining topic. Mallarmé acted as a permanent fashion advisor, answering questions from subscribers about particular questions of style. To Mme D. in Toulouse: “Yes, Madame, you may safely trim a plum-colored silk dress with light blue: but you must confine it to borders and rouleautés [a portion of material rolled round on itself], or the effect will be simply ugly: and it must be a very pale blue.” To Mme Marie de L., who had asked about wedding dresses in the issue of December 20, 1874, Mallarmé first extended “smiling congratulations.” In the matter of the latest bridal fashion, however, the poet urged caution. Wedding dresses are the last to change in style. So: “There would be something not quite proper—particularly in your case, living so far from the capital as you do—in a bride’s wishing to be in advance of fashion.”32

In a tradition that stretches all the way back to the early fathers of the Church, Charles Baudelaire famously believed that a woman’s dress was part of her body. “What poet would dare,” he asked, “in the portrayal of pleasure caused by the apparition of a beauty, separate the woman from her clothes?”33 Mallarmé, on the other hand, not only distinguished between the body and its dress, but he was capable, unlike Baudelaire, of dreaming of the dress alone. Miss Satin’s article in the issue of November 1, 1874, featured a “blue-of-dreams” outfit by Charles Worth, who dominated French fashion in the second half of the nineteenth century. “We have all of us been dreaming of that gown, without knowing it. M. Worth, alone, has the art of creating a toilette as elusive as our own thoughts. Picture (you can if you try) a long skirt with a rep train, of the most ideal sky-blue silk—that blue so pale, with gleams of opalescence, that one sometimes sees, like a garland, round silvery clouds.”34 Years later, Mallarmé admitted to Paul Verlaine that certain of his works had been written out of economic necessity, “of which it is better not to speak.” His essays on style, however, were another matter. His writings on women’s dress, in the poet’s phrase, “still make me dream for a long time.”35

Anticipating astonishingly “One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance,” Mallarmé maintained in The Latest Fashion that the correct choice of garments and accessories and just the right department store—Paris’s flourishing Bon Marché—will abolish chance. Miss Satin promised, “No more long hours or days hunting for a particular ribbon! It is not just chance that makes us write down, before all others, the name of the Bon Marché. We have a deep conviction that the Lady Reader who, when she gets into her carriage, utters the words ‘rue du Bac’ or ‘rue de Sèvres,’ will not return dissatisfied either with our advice or her own journey.” The poet went on to sing the praises of the department store, which, unlike the specialty boutiques that sold only one type of good, umbrellas, gloves, ribbons, furs, or cloth, might meet all of a woman’s consumer needs—“yours, Madame, yours Mademoiselle, and those of all you Mademoiselles and Mesdames.”36 Eight years after the rise and fall of The Latest Fashion, Émile Zola published his great shopping novel, Ladies’ Paradise, which chronicles the devastating economic struggle between Paris’s new department stores, “cathedrals of commerce,” and the old shopkeepers in and around the Bon Marché in the capital’s seventh arrondissement.

Mallarmé recognized that poetry may never change the world, as one toss of the dice never will abolish chance. The poet might, however, reinvest the world with meaning and magic by literally covering it with writing, by making the world rhyme. If the Book of Nature is no longer visible to be read, nature and all its contents were nonetheless available to be written upon, and so he wrote poems on surfaces that ordinarily do not contain verse as well as on surfaces that do not ordinarily contain writing. In waiting to write The Book, Mallarmé wrote upon the physical world as if it were a giant notebook.

Almost twenty poems written on fans—from a mere couplet dedicated to his confidante Méry Laurent, to five quatrains to his daughter—attest to Mallarmé’s predilection for objects associated with the Far East. The fan in particular attracted the poet because of the comparison, present in almost every example, between the opening of the fan and the outstretching of wings. In the Mallarméan spiderweb of meaningful connections, he associated wings with angels, and with sails, which are the equivalents of the pen with which one writes and the paper on which one writes.

Mallarmé made the fan-wing-sail metaphor explicit in the fan poem dedicated to his daughter:

O dreamer, that I might

Plunge into pure delight,

Learn through a subtle stratagem

How to guard my fragile wing in your hand.

Crepuscular breezes blow

Their freshness out to you

As lightly each imprisoned stroke

Presses the whole horizon back.37

As in the constellation at the end of “One Toss of the Dice,” where the layout of type takes the shape of the Big Dipper, Mallarmé’s fan poem to Geneviève is one of those instances in which form and content coincide. The poem about the fan’s breeze is inscribed on a fan, which makes the breeze. The poem says and is what it does.

Mallarmé maintained that the shape of an envelope reminded him of a poetic quatrain, and he addressed more than a hundred letters with such four-line strophes to friends, fellow artists, and his publishers. Not a single one of the poet’s rhymed labels failed to reach its destination, the postmen of France having become readers of his verse.

Their laughter will expand

in harmony should your way wend

Chez Monsieur Whistler and Madame,

Old Rue Bac, number 110.

At the Villa des Arts, near the Avenue

De Clichy, paints Monsieur Renoir

Who gets something other than all blue

In front of a shoulder with no peignoir.

Halt, postman, at the tones

Groaned by the cellos: it’s well

The home of Monsieur Ernest Chausson,

22 Boulevard de Courcelles.38

Mallarmé regularly dispatched books and photographs with rhymed inscriptions in the flyleaf or on the surface of the image. Each new year, he sent baskets of candied fruit to friends. Over sixty of the poems accompanying the traditional offerings survive. On January 1, 1897, Mallarmé accompanied his yearly gift of a box of candied fruit with a note to Julie Manet, the daughter of Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot:

To flee the ice floe and avalanche

Julie or cold reckless fools

It is enough to remain good as gold

With your interior innocence.39

This would be the next-to-last gift that Mallarmé sent to his orphaned protégée, and Julie Manet noted in her journal, “M. Renoir came to see us together with M. Mallarmé who brought each of us [Julie and no doubt her cousin Jeannie Gobillard] a box of candy with a charming quatrain, as he has done for the past nine years. This one is very beautiful, and very ‘Mallarmé.’ ”40

When birthdays came around, the highly domesticated poet sent his family and friends presents inscribed with poems. Easter brought red colored eggs bestowed upon Méry Laurent, Mme Mallarmé, or Geneviève, each inscribed with a verse in gold ink, and numbered to ensure in which order the eggs were to be read. Asked by the journalist Alidor Delzant to compose an inscription for the shelves of his library, the poet complied: “Here lies the noble human span / Remnants bending with these tomes / In order that you give them homes / You must take one in your hand.” And on the mantle of his fireplace: “Here is where fire is reborn / Long lasting, and then charming / Like its master’s friendly chord / Oak with vines all entwining.”41

So attentive was Mallarmé to his family that he inscribed couplets on stones found on the beach at Honfleur, the town in Normandy where Geneviève and Marie vacationed with the Ponsots, family friends. “To Françoise, who serves at table / Many a plate delectable,” he wrote on a stone to the Ponsots’ cook to thank her for her culinary gifts; and, to wife and daughter, “Mesdames, the ladies of Batignolles [the neighborhood of the Mallarmés’s apartment] / Here become lazy and unprofitable.”42 While in Normandy, the home of Calvados liqueur, Mallarmé also inscribed a number of pitchers of this apple brandy. “Friend, drink this apple cordial / You will feel yourself amply male”; “I hold the secret of what men think / Who drain my belly with their drink.”43

The poet was not without humor in his inscription of the things around him. He left a little poem on the wall of the communal outhouse in Valvins to discourage the local villagers from befouling it: “You, who often relieve your tripes / Can in this act hidden from all / Sing or smoke your pipes / Without smearing fingers on the wall.”44 Mallarmé sent a copy of the original, which was taken down and is now exhibited at the Mallarmé Museum in Valvins, to his friend Édouard Dujardin, with a note: “I offer you the following inscription, which I was obliged to post this morning in order to surprise the farmers because they frequently do just this.”45

Outhouse wall inscription.

Photograph by author.

Mallarmé had no illusions, of course, about ever covering the world with words, making of the world a book. But his overwhelming goal, which became a formula for living, was to make life rhyme, whether in the everyday or in the marking of important events, whether in the shape of finished poems or of occasional verse, whether on paper or on the common objects around us. Investing the world with poetry and inscribing our presence on things were ways of situating ourselves in the universe and of affirming what makes us most fully human. Mallarmé recast the famous phrase of Descartes “I think, therefore I am”—which many consider the foundation of modern philosophy—in terms of the activity that made him feel most at home and most powerfully alive: “I write, therefore I am.”