One Toss of the Dice

For Mallarmé, the move to Paris in the summer of 1871 meant living amid a vibrant community of artists for whom the rebirth of formalist poetry among the Parnassians, the glorification of the everyday among Impressionist painters, and the formation of a Société Nationale of composers to promote French music were part of the national recovery from the devastating blows of the Franco-Prussian War. The move to the capital also offered the poet a new and wider arena in which to accomplish the Grand Oeuvre in the form of a book.

The great rivalrous model for such an undertaking was, of course, the operas of Richard Wagner, who had written Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman during his first sojourn in Paris, from 1839 to 1842. The German composer sought to synthesize music, drama, architecture, song, and dance in an all-embracing total artwork, which would restore the ritual function of art that had existed among the Greeks but was lost with the advent of Christianity. “Only the great Revolution of Mankind, whose beginnings erstwhile shattered Grecian Tragedy, can win for us this Artwork,” Wagner announced in his 1849 essay The Artwork of the Future. Nothing thus far came closer than Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk to the purity of an Idea, nor pointed more powerfully toward the restoration of the true role of art in the remaking of human community, its “future Spectacle,” in Mallarmé’s own phrase. An earthshaking work of poetry, however, might surpass music by exposing the “music of perfect fullness and clarity, the totality of universal relationships,” a pure Idea without the material means of sound, or the often disappointing trappings of stage sets, costumes, and makeup. “Our present task,” Mallarmé claimed, “is to find a way of transposing the symphony to the Book: in short, to regain our rightful due. For, undeniably, the true source of Music must not be the elemental sound of brasses, strings, or wood winds, but the intellectual and written word in all its glory.”1

Wagner, however, had had his setbacks in Paris. The debut of Tannhäuser on March 13, 1861, in a specially revised version for the Paris Opera House, caused an uproar. The Parisian Tannhäuser had come at the request of Napoleon III. Performance at the Paris Opera required, according to the traditions of the house, a ballet, which Wagner had not written into the original Dresden premiere of 1845. The composer’s insertion of the ballet in Act I, however, violated another custom, which was an obligatory ballet in Act II. In this way, the wealthy members of the Jockey Club, having dined previously, might arrive in time to see their mistresses, many of whom belonged to the Opera Ballet, dance. In what was an inversion of the trope of the crude Teuton and the refined Frenchman, the aristocratic clubmen interrupted the Parisian Tannhäuser with whistles and catcalls, some lasting for as long as fifteen minutes. Wagner withdrew his opera after only three performances. Although influence of the Jockey Club hardly spread to the general cultural elite, the German composer became unpopular in some quarters, as would the German-born Paris transplant Jacques Offenbach. A Jew who had converted to Catholicism, Offenbach, whose favor with Napoleon III earned him French citizenship and the Legion of Honor, was forced to flee to Spain during the Franco-Prussian War, and was then reviled by the French public as a result of his adopted country’s defeat of 1870–71.

The Paris Tannhäuser was a dramatic failure, but Wagnerism defined artistic, social, and even political affinities for at least two decades in France. The poets whom Mallarmé most admired worshipped Wagner. Charles Baudelaire, upon leaving a Wagner concert, announced that he had had “the most joyous musical experience of his life.” Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam proclaimed Wagner “a genius such as appears on earth once every thousand years.” Catulle Mendès had originally informed Mallarmé of the new art from Germany when he and Judith Gautier stopped in Avignon on their way back from visiting Wagner in Lucerne, Switzerland. The Mendès-Gautier couple would found the Revue wagnérienne in 1885, and, when they officially divorced three years later, the legacy of Wagner was one of the contested articles in their settlement.

In his early days in Paris, Mallarmé frequented the salon of the pianist Nina Gaillard, whom he had met at the Carrefour des Demoiselles in 1862. Having hosted too many of the vehement supporters of the Commune before 1871, the flamboyant Nina left France for Geneva, but returned when government reprisals died down. In the presence of painters Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Jean-Louis Forain and poets Charles Cros and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Mallarmé listened to Augusta Holmès, Villiers, or Nina herself play the revolutionary, modernistic-leaning music of Wagner. The poet Maurice Rollinat, a member of the circle who called themselves the Hydropaths, maintained that Nina’s salon, “from dinner until late into the night, was a coterie of young minds in revolt, whipped up by alcohol into all possible mental debauchery . . . , in a state of hyperexcitation presided over by a slightly demented muse.”2

Mallarmé, far more modest in demeanor than Wagner but equally ambitious, sought to do for poetry no less than what the German composer had done for opera. In a holiday greetings letter sent at the end of 1877 to the English poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy, who was part of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, the French poet stated his ambition: “I am working like crazy; and I am studying everywhere the fragments of a new Theater which is being prepared in France and that I am working on too; something that will astonish the sovereign people as never a Roman emperor or an Asian prince has been able to do. This is the goal; it’s difficult: it will take time.”3

Time was the one thing that, in the first few years of life in the capital, Mallarmé lacked. The commuting in horse-drawn omnibuses or on foot between the Lycées Condorcet and Saint-Louis was so grueling that the poet was obliged to give up the second post. Thanks to the good offices of Charles Seignobos, father of his former student in Tournon and a deputy from the Ardèche, his situation at Condorcet was regularized to a full-time position and his salary raised sufficiently for the Mallarmés to survive. Even without the cross-town commute, however, teaching consumed an inordinate amount of time that otherwise might have been devoted to art. So, while waiting to write The Book, Mallarmé described and inscribed the things of this world as poetry. He wrote a few poems, notably, the first of his famous literary homages, or “tombeaux”: “Funerary Toast,” upon the death of Judith Gautier’s father, poet Théophile Gautier, and “The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe,” which appeared in a memorial volume to Poe published in the United States. And he began to live as if life itself could be crafted into a work of art according to the natural cycles of summer and winter, and even the days of the week.

For Mallarmé, the secret of living in a disenchanted, increasingly mechanized, and affectless world meant locating the rhythms in the everyday that resonated with the larger rhythms of nature—daily, weekly, and seasonal changes. Even the most mundane existence might participate in the wondrous ritual that once had belonged to the sphere of religion but, with the disappearance of religion, now belonged to art. Gustave Flaubert famously confided to his lover, Louise Collet, that “one must make two parts in one’s life: live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.” Even though Mallarmé may have thought like a demigod and written like a genius, he lived joyfully as a bourgeois. In fact, he did not distinguish between the two. He, like James Joyce, who would follow, found poetry in the most prosaic experiences amid the familiar objects in his immediate surroundings, as it was to be found in the most abstract ideas, inaccessible to any material expression. He undertook to make the most fundamental natural cycles no less part of everyday life.

In the early summer of 1874, Mallarmé visited the area of Fontainebleau with the art critic Phillipe Burty, who, as an editor of the Gazette des beaux-arts, had promoted japonisme in France, and would play a role in the promotion of the Impressionists. Mallarmé and Burty called upon the prominent engraver Alfred Prunaire, whose nearby summer home was a gathering place for poets, painters, and musicians. Prunaire pointed out to the poet a house for rent in Valvins at a modest price. Mallarmé quickly arranged to occupy the ground floor and two rooms on the first floor, one of which would be his study, with a window looking out over the water. Behind the former boatman’s cottage was a large garden filled with apple, pear, and cherry trees, a reminder that the local economy along this particular stretch of the river still depended upon the sale of fruit. From the outset in Valvins, the poet would be surrounded by Burty, Prunaire, and the composer and violinist Léopold Dauphin, whose comic opera, The Chinese Wedding (Le Mariage de Chine) had played at Paris’s Opera Bouffe the previous year. The poet and the musician would enjoy boating excursions and long walks in the woods. For Mallarmé, renting near the Forest of Fontainebleau restored some of the magic of the glorious day in the summer of 1862 at the Carrefour des Demoiselles. Eventually, other artists would come to summer near Mallarmé in what was a country version of a Parisian salon along the banks of the Seine.

In the mind of the poet, the yearly cycle of the sun was captured in the movement between Paris in the winter and Valvins in the summer, which corresponded to an innate difference between writing styles. Summer was the season of poetry, a time for verse. “Winter,” however, was for prose. “With the autumnal burst, verse stops, which makes way for theater [le geste] and a miraculous withdrawal.” What Mallarmé meant by “withdrawal” (recul) was a leaving off of the truest and purest human activity, poetry, in favor of a more active life in the city. Insofar as autumn brought the poet back to Paris, the place of human invention and artifice, it was dramatic play, and occasioned visits to the playhouse. “Far from everything, Nature, in autumn, prepares her Theater, sublime and pure, waiting to illuminate, in solitude, moments of meaning and prestige, so that a lucid eye may penetrate their sense (and it’s a notable one, the destiny of man).” In winter, in the city, “a Poet is recalled to mediocre pleasures and cares.”4

A ritualized weekly rhythm accompanied the yearly rhythms and rites of summer and winter, country and city. Off and on between 1875 and his death, the poet spent Wednesday evenings at the home of Catulle Mendès, Thursday chez Émile Zola, Fridays with Léopold Dauphin, and Saturday afternoons at the salon of Charles Leconte de Lisle or José-Maria de Heredia. Sundays, however, were reserved for afternoon concerts at the Salle Lamoureux, which was one of the halls in which Wagner’s music continued to be played in France. The ritual significance of Mallarmé’s visits to the Concerts Lamoureux did not escape his daughter. “Each Sunday in winter he put aside—for this, by himself—an afternoon of work to go to the Lamoureux concert. ‘I’m off to vespers,’ he said to us in leaving the house.”5 Poet Henri de Régnier reported seeing Mallarmé seated in the concert hall, taking notes. He found there, de Régnier confided, “a secret analogous to nature.”6 De Régnier was married to de Heredia’s daughter and lived one of the famously public ménage à trois of Belle Époque France. Both he and his close friend the novelist Pierre Louÿs loved Marie de Heredia and had made a pact that neither would ask for her hand without asking the other first. When Louÿs was away visiting his brother, a diplomat in Egypt, de Régnier broke their agreement. As he was the wealthier of the two suitors and de Heredia père had run up gambling debts, it was agreed that Marie would be his. She, however, was furious, and apparently kept Louÿs on as a lover, naming her son Pierre de Régnier after Pierre Louÿs, the presumed father. Louÿs eventually married Marie de Heredia’s younger sister, Louise, a marriage that ended in divorce.

The poet Paul Valéry described his mentor delighting in the music of Beethoven or Wagner: “Mallarmé left the concerts full of a sublime jealousy. He sought desperately ways of taking back for our art what too powerful Music had stolen from it by way of marvels and significance.”7 The religious terms in which others perceived the poet’s going to, attending, and leaving the Sunday rites of the Lamoureux orchestra, this “Sunday cleansing of banality,” were confirmed by Mallarmé’s own description in a work called Offices, under the subheading “Sacred Pleasure,” of the concert as a holy ceremony, the equivalent of a church service. For the poet, “music was the last and full human cult.”8

Mallarmé, now installed in Paris and increasingly at the center of a vibrant artistic circle, dreamed of hosting his own salon. He did not have the means to entertain in the grand style of many literary and political salons of the Third Republic. In and around cultural discussion, the host might be expected to offer elaborate dinners, musical performances, occasional balls, and excursions to the theater or opera. In contrast, the Mallarmés’ desperate need for money upon arrival in the capital led to a plan to conduct a salon for profit. The poet had supplemented the family income in Avignon by giving private English lessons. The idea of reviving the old institution of the salon, where the bourgeois art of conversation had replaced the wit that belonged to the courts of France’s ancien régime, seemed in Paris like a way of making ends meet. The poet printed and circulated a prospectus advertising lessons in culture and charm:

Monsieur Mallarmé, Professeur de l’Université, receives, 29 rue de Moscou, at two-thirty, Tuesdays and Saturdays, young people whose parents desire them to acquire familiarity with ancient and contemporary literature. . . . The price of the course is twenty francs payable at the beginning of the month. . . . Literary taste, once so developed in women, was the source of the charm and renown of our old salons. One cannot hide the fact that such taste is being lost by the lack of necessary culture. . . . This course features one particularity: that it encourages the participation of young people and prepares them for the first secret of conversation, destined to recapture its old luster.9

There is no evidence that Mallarmé’s “literary afternoons” for young people ever attracted the fifteen students he had calculated were necessary to supplement his income in the first few difficult years in Paris.

Beginning with the Mallarmés’ move from the rue de Moscou to the rue de Rome, Tuesdays meant weekly gatherings after dinner for the purpose of listening to the poet hold court on a wide range of topics—from poetry, painting, and music to politics, religion, and fashion—with a freshness, in the phrase of André Gide, that made it appear that “he had just in that instant invented each new proposition.”10 The poet may have written poems that were difficult to understand, but he was famous as a master without equal of the art of conversation. For a quarter of a century, almost everyone who was anyone in the world of the arts in France visited of a Tuesday in winter the “little house of Socrates” on the rue de Rome.

The poet issued written invitations to those whom he knew, sometimes sent with the coquetterie of one of his poetic envelopes with the address in the form of a quatrain. Other times, he would invite an artist to visit him at another hour and day of the week and, at the end of the conversation, suggested that the visitor return on Tuesday after dinner. Climbing the four flights of stairs, the Mardists would knock. The master opened the door to his modest sitting room, filled nonetheless with exquisite paintings on the walls, ceramic pitchers and pewter plates on a long rustic sideboard, and thickly upholstered chairs. Mallarmé would sit in a rocker when he was not standing next to the fireplace, with its open brass louvers under the mantel piece topped by a pair of candlesticks and a small pot of dried flowers. In the center of the room stood a table covered with books, a red lacquer inkwell, a Chinese porcelain bowl, tobacco, and a lamp that cast a low light over the hushed intimacy of the inner sanctum of Paris’s most rarefied literary salon.

The Mardists included such well-known poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, Paul Verlaine, Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, André Gide, Paul Claudel, and Paul Valéry; composers such as Claude Debussy; and painters such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Dégas, Paul Gauguin, James McNeill Whistler, and Auguste Renoir. Georges Clemenceau, the physician, journalist, statesman, and future prime minister, attended several Tuesdays on the rue de Rome.

A number of lesser literary lights left accounts of their Tuesday time with Mallarmé, as if they were in competition with one another to exhibit their closeness to the master. Camille Mauclair, an avid proponent of Wagner, wrote a roman à clef about Mallarmé’s circle, The Sun of the Dead (Le Soleil des morts). Playwright and poet Édouard Dujardin, editor of the Revue indépendante and one of the cofounders of the Revue wagnérienne, left a memoir entitled Mallarmé by One of His Own (Mallarmé par un des siens). Bernard Lazare, the poet, journalist, and anarchist, who was one of the first defenders of Dreyfus, compiled an account of literary figures in fin-de-siècle France, Les Contemporains, in which he compared the Tuesday evenings with his mentor to the philosophical schools of classical tradition. The Belgian Symbolist Albert Mockel, author of Stéphane Mallarmé: A Hero, honed in on Lazare’s thought when he observed that classical philosophers were given to expressing general ideas and that, in Mallarmé’s salon, the feelings of a solitary dreamer were raised to the level of universal truth. The essayist and novelist Henry Roujon worked in the Ministry of Education. There, he was able to support Mallarmé’s career in lycées despite the poet’s flagging devotion to teaching as he became increasingly well-known in the world of literary lights. In his assessment of late-century literary life, Gallery of Busts (La Galerie des bustes), Roujon, who later became a member of the Académie Française, devoted a chapter to Mallarmé, whom he described as “full of enchantments, while pretending to live out his mortal destiny as an English teacher.”11 Henri de Régnier left two accounts of gatherings chez Mallarmé, Our Meetings (Nos Rencontres) and Figures and Characters (Figures et caractères), in addition to a long journal of literary life, which reproduced in detail the words of the master on specific Tuesdays.

Mallarmé at home on the rue de Rome.

Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms MNR 1848.

Of the Mardists who could not wait to get home from the rue de Rome in order to write down what had happened there, the most loyal was Edmond Bonniot, who, as a law student with poetic aspirations, entered the inner circle in 1892. He left a log of the séances he had attended, an assessment of the state of mind of the host, an inventory of topics discussed, along with various anecdotes and aphorisms for which Mallarmé became famous. On the night of January 17, 1893, for instance, Bonniot reported that the poet had the impression that the mothers who waited for their sons outside of the lycée at the end of the school day were angry at him for not teaching the boys enough of what they needed to know about the English language. One day one of his students came up to him, tapped his elbow with a knowing air, and began, “M’sieu, my mother knows what you are up to. Really! You know what I mean, at night.” “How’s that?” Mallarmé asked. “That’s right, M’sieu, I would like to come sometime to hear you sing at the concert of the decadents.”12 Tuesdays chez Mallarmé had apparently entered the popular imagination in the form of nightclub entertainment.

Oscar Wilde appeared once or twice on the rue de Rome and, having spoken at length, incurred the disapproval of all by exercising his wit in the presence of the master. Édouard Dujardin condemned “the abominable Oscar Wilde, who should have known by our mute reprobation that one does not come chez Mallarmé to discourse about oneself.”13 James McNeill Whistler, who was convinced that Wilde had mocked him in The Picture of Dorian Gray, went so far as to ask Mallarmé to insert a copy of an article denouncing Wilde in the American Register, a newspaper owned by Dr. Thomas Evans, whom the poet knew through his confidante Méry Laurent. The poet responded on January 5, 1890, urging Whistler to send along his “fabulous article. You’re becoming a regular James Mac Neill [sic] Buffalo Bill Whistler.”14 The painter wrote to Mallarmé to excuse himself from the gathering of Tuesday, November 3, 1891, since his enemy would be present. “I realize it is a little ungrateful of me not to stay to denounce Oscar Wilde in front of your disciples tomorrow night.” On the day itself, Whistler sent a telegram: PREFACE PROPOSITIONS WARN DISCIPLES PRECAUTION FATAL FAMILIARITY HOLD TIGHT TO YOUR PEARLS BONNE SOIREE—WHISTLER.15 Mallarmé wrote to assure Whistler that the evening had been “as dull as could be.”

Mallarmé intervened on both sides as an unofficial negotiator in the French state purchase of Whistler’s masterwork, known at the time as Arrangement in Grey and Black, and now as Whistler’s Mother. On November 11, 1891, he informed the American painter that Minister of Fine Arts Antonin Proust “seeks, in a spirit of pure admiration for your work and sympathy for you, to buy and present to the State, to put in the Luxembourg Museum, the masterpiece that is that portrait of your mother: this as a French demonstration of the honor in which it holds Whistler.”16 Whistler responded two days later, “Bravo! O! Ministre Mallarmé!” and suggested a price of 25,000 francs. Mallarmé eased the blow of the state’s offer of only 4,000 francs, which he had learned of in a telegram from the minister. He informed Whistler that the painter would receive the Legion of Honor the following year, thanks to the intervention of Georges Clemenceau. “Yes, you have released the fairies,” Whistler responded, “Clemenceau’s influence kept things moving along.”17

Relations between the Tuesday men were not always easy or gracious. Rivalries for the attention of the master was keen, and, in several instances, led the more intensely vain Mardists to risk their lives. Catulle Mendès was enraged over an article published by fellow Mardist Francis Vielé-Griffin in which the American Symbolist poet insinuated that Mendès had somehow intervened with the editors of Le Figaro to remove the name Vielé-Griffin from among a list of poets mentioned by Mallarmé in a newspaper interview published in 1891. Catulle Mendès sent Mallarmé a telegram asking him to intervene: IMPOSSIBLE TO TOLERATE PHRASE OF VIELE-GRIFFIN ABOUT ME, ENTRETIENS LITTERAIRES—PLEASE DECLARE TELEGRAPHICALLY AND PUBLICLY THAT YOU KNOW ME TO BE ABSOLUTELY INCAPABLE OF SUCH A MANEUVER.18 Mallarmé wrote Mendès a personal note, confirming that he was, indeed, “incapable of such a maneuver.” Unsatisfied, Mendès demanded that the offender publish a retraction affirming that “M. Mendès is an honest man.” And, when Vielé-Griffin published in response, “I do not know M. Mendès. I cannot therefore say if he is or is not an honest man,” Mendès challenged him to a duel.

Mallarmé tried to stop the quarrel among his Mardist “children,” but the two combatants met to settle their difference with swords. Mendès engaged the playwright Georges Courteline and Félix Rosati as his seconds. Viélé-Griffin fought with the historical novelist Paul Adam and Félix Fénéon at his side. All assembled on the morning of Sunday, September 20, 1891, on the Île de la Grande-Jatte. (A few years previous to the quarreling Symbolists’s armed confrontation, Georges Seurat had captured a much quieter Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, his painting filled with leisurely picnickers, strollers and bathers.) On the field, his shirt open to show his chest, sword in hand for the “mise en garde,” Mendès was smoking a cigar. “Permit me,” Vielé-Griffin said, and he strolled to the nearest tree where his jacket was hanging, and pulled out a pipe, which he stuffed and tranquilly lit. As the duelists fought and smoked, Mendès, the more experienced swordsman, wounded his opponent in the stomach.19

Mallarmé was saddened by the quarrel between his followers. In a letter written on September 29 to Henri de Régnier, who was caring for the injured Vielé-Griffin, the poet noted that “this story cast a pall over my last days of vacation. I thought that as far as Mendès was concerned, the thing would end with my response to his demand for a public statement.”20 Six years later, Régnier himself would meet Mardist Robert de Montesquiou to settle differences between them with swords. In a report on duels, L’Annuaire du duel, Édouard Dujardin had recorded two thousand such incidents between 1880 and 1889. “Unable to eat us,” the realist Émile Zola commented disdainfully on the quarrels among the Symbolists, “this band of sharks fed on one another.”21

Though the majority of Parisian literary salons were hosted by women who, like Mme. Verdurin in Proust’s Swann in Love or the real-life Nina Gaillard, were the center of attention, women were remarkably absent from Tuesdays chez Mallarmé. Mme Mallarmé and Geneviève sat sewing in a room adjoining the salon. They appeared at an appointed hour with grog, then retired for the night. The sculptor Camille Claudel, sister of Paul and the mistress of Auguste Rodin, and the composer Augusta Holmès were exceptions. Each had attended at least one of the weekly meetings. Berthe Morisot apparently once teased the poet by offering to dress as a man and to show up at his door one Tuesday night. On the eve of his departure for a lecture tour at Oxford and Cambridge in February 1894, Mallarmé invited Morisot to come with her daughter, Julie, “like students to sit on the bench of my friends.” “We’ll smoke as little as possible,” he promised. Morisot refused, claiming the bench of friends “too intimidating.”22

It would have been difficult to refrain from smoking. The poet, whose idea of unhappiness was “doing without cigars,” kept a bowl of tobacco on the table in the center of his sitting room. The room bathed in low light, the incense of cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke, and the ritual grog served at ten o’clock were all integral parts of Mallarmé’s “intimate gala,” which the Mardists experienced as a religious rite, a mass for their time. Bernard Lazare remembered Tuesday evenings “in the discreetly lit salon whose corners of shadow gave off the atmosphere of a temple, or an oratory.”23 Geneviève remarked that young poets behaved as if in the confessional: “Few among them simply recited their verses—they confided them, as at confession, to father.”24 Édouard Dujardin sensed that he had somehow spoken too freely or out of turn on the evening of Tuesday, January 11, 1887. He excused himself in a letter of January 17, acknowledging the “unique magnificence” of his host’s thought, which troubled him emotionally. Dujardin recognized what went on in the Mallarmé apartment as a “serious and gigantic religion.” “It was thus,” Dujardin confessed, “that I saw something like ‘we will raise a tower to the heavens,’ something like ‘we will be like gods,’ something like ‘I will destroy the temple . . . , and stone will not remain on stone.’ ” The abject acolyte, quoting the Gospel of Matthew 16:18, compared Mallarmé with Saint Peter. “What quartet of evangelists will recount this Jesus?” Dujardin asked.25

Albert Mockel spoke of the “religious joy of the spirit” in the atmosphere of Mallarmés’ apartment. André Fontainas, who was a student in Mallarmé’s English class and later joined the inner circle, claimed to have left the rue de Rome on the night of December 21, 1897, “comforted, illuminated.”26 Paul Adam noted that Mallarmé “was more than a hero, he was a saint.”27 Catulle Mendès observed Mallarmé as “the prophet of a messiah without advent.”28 For Camille Mauclair, poetry “was a religion to which we brought the seriousness and the fervor of catechumens.”29

The effects of Mallarmé’s papal-like authority were not always appreciated. The “instrumentalist” poet René Ghil, who practiced a metaphysical materialism combining the scientific writings of Charles Darwin with Buddhism, claimed that a “smiling Mallarmé of the Tuesdays on the rue de Rome liked to remind the gathering that, up until the age of twelve, he had no other ambition than to become a Bishop.”30 Mallarmé wrote the introduction to Ghil’s essay on Symbolism, Traité du verbe (1886), but Ghil broke with the older poet two years later, when, “one Tuesday in April, discoursing on the Idea as the only representative of the truth of the World, he turned to me, and, with some sadness perhaps, but a clear intention, said: ‘No, Ghil, one cannot do without Eden!’ I responded softly, but just as clearly: ‘I think one can, dear Master.’ ”31 Ghil, who never returned, sensed the incident as something on the order of an excommunication from the ecclesiastical atmosphere of Tuesdays chez Mallarmé. Such an exercise of worldly power was, Ghil maintained, “the true instinctive expression of Mallarmé’s soul.”

Sitting in audience in his salon on the rue de Rome, as a high Church official would in Rome, Mallarmé presided “as the supremely bishoplike representative of an occult art, his look fixed in contemplation on the large and magic violet stone set in the sacred ring.”32 The banished poet’s remarks were bitter. They associate Mallarmé’s overwhelming authority to pronounce and to exclude in the realm of pure art with the corruption of the Church’s meddling in worldly affairs. Ghil’s critique did not stand alone, however. Max Nordau, the Hungarian physician turned social critic, attacked the Symbolist poets for the difficulty of their verse. He associated Mallarmé’s “flood of incoherent words” with a propensity for mystical, medieval, neo-Catholic thought—the result of contact with the English Pre-Raphaelites.33

Mallarmé was not a practicing Catholic in the traditional mode of Paul Claudel or Paul Valéry, or in the extreme mode of the novelist Léon Bloy, who was convinced that the Virgin had actually appeared to two children at La Salette, near Grenoble, in 1846, and that the end-time was near. And Mallarmé did not adopt the perverse Catholicism of, say, Joris-Karl Huysmans, who equated decadence with holiness and finished his life in a monastery, or of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, who considered the French Revolution a work of the Devil against God. Nor did he practice the satanic Catholicism of Charles Baudelaire, who wrote blasphemous inversions of the mass. In fact, Mallarmé explicity addressed only once the question of the Catholic mass, in an essay entitled “Catholicism”: “Our communion or sharing of one with all and of all with one, thus, abstracted from the barbaric feast designated by the sacrament—in the consecration of the Host, nevertheless, affirms itself the prototype of ceremonials—despite its uniqueness—within an artistic tradition: the Mass.”34

Mallarmé did not seek to bring back the power of the Eucharist to radically secular Third Republic France. Rather, he looked to the religiously gripping effects of Tuesdays on the rue de Rome to reverse the decline of religion and the rise of capitalism and rational science, which, since the end of the Middle Ages, had reduced the mystery and the meaning of everyday life, or of just being alive. Without recourse to Baudelaire’s “artifical paradises,” and escape into opium and hashish, or Rimbaud’s “unleashing of all the senses,” a self-induced synesthetic excess, or Verlaine’s addiction to alcohol and absinthe, Mallarmé found yearly and weekly rituals a way of reviving the intensity of belonging and purpose that religion once provided. He brought to all he did or said some of the meaningful mystery and communal force of the mass. Through poetry, but also through living wisely, he sought to enchant the universe that so many of his contemporaries found joyless and devoid of sense.

Mallarmé’s annual migration between Paris and Valvins and his weekly gatherings on the rue de Rome were punctuated by daily meetings with Édouard Manet, whom he had first met at the salon of Nina Gaillard. Weekdays, on his way home from school, he would make a slight detour to Manet’s studio on the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. There he encountered other painters, such as Edgar Dégas, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot, who was married to Édouard’s brother Eugène. There, too, the poet first ran into the woman who would become his lifelong confidante and his muse, Méry Laurent.

Daughter of a laundress from Nancy, married at the age of fifteen, and divorced within months, Méry Laurent had moved to Paris to try her fortunes as an actress. According to Antonin Proust, she visited Manet’s studio, which had been rearranged as an exhibition gallery after the jury of the official Salon of 1876 had refused to include his paintings The Artist and The Laundry in that year’s offerings. The forty-four-year-old Manet, standing in an adjoining room, overheard Méry, in front of The Laundry, exclaim, “That’s very good, this one!” In and of itself, the exclamation was not remarkable, but Manet, taking it as portentous revenge against the Salon jury from the mouth of a seductive woman, befriended Méry Laurent, who modeled for at least four portraits and may, for a time, also have been the painter’s mistress.

More famously, Méry Laurent was, over a period of decades, the mistress of Napoleon III’s American dentist, Thomas Evans, whom she first met in the course of having a tooth fixed. The dashing Dr. Evans was one of the pioneers in the use of the amalgamated fillings and of nitrous oxide in his lucrative dental practice on the rue de l’Opéra. In the years following his arrival in Paris in 1847, Evans, who was fluent in French, worked on the teeth of many European heads of state, and it is thought that the intimacy of the dental office, where he found himself alone with patients whose open mouths elsewhere might change the map of Europe, made Evans an unofficial ambassador between France and its neighbors.

In the summer of 1864, the emperor sent Evans as his emissary to Abraham Lincoln to assess the chances of the Union’s winning the Civil War. He returned from Washington and from General Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters near Richmond with firsthand knowledge of surgical field hospitals, one of which he reconstructed at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867. There, both German and French military planners observed the new technology. It was put to good use in the Franco-Prussian War, in which Evans, after the French defeat at Sedan, played a minor but crucial role. On the night of September 5, 1870, with Napoleon III the prisoner of Wilhelm I, the accommodating dentist smuggled Empress Eugénie out of Paris in his carriage amid angry crowds declaring the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic. They eventually reached Deauville, where “the Doctor” chatted up an English “yachtsman,” who carried Eugénie to England, where she was eventually reunited with Napoleon III in exile at Chislehurst. In addition to his editorship of the American Register, Evans published books in French and in English based on his experiences abroad: History and Description of an Ambulance Wagon, Constructed in Accordance with Plans Furnished by the Author (1865), History of the American Ambulance Established During the Siege of 1870–1871 (1873), and, posthumously, a fascinating memoir of Napoleon III and Eugénie.

While living in Paris, Thomas Evans became enormously wealthy. His fortune came neither from his dental practice nor from sale of “Dr. Evans’s celebrated dental preparation, in powder, paste, or elixir form,” but from advanced knowledge—the emperor’s open mouth?—of Baron Haussmann’s plans for the urban renewal of Paris, and smart investment in real estate. At the time of his death in 1897, Evans was worth 25 million francs (by contrast, Mallarmé’s retirement pension brought in only 5,000 francs per annum). A native of Philadelphia, the wealthy dentist left his fortune to found the Thomas Evans Museum and Dental Institute, which eventually became the Dental School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also made a special provision that 1 million francs be set aside to erect a monument in his honor. Julie Manet recorded in her journal that Auguste Renoir, upon hearing of Evan’s bequest, asked, “Of what could such a monument consist? Dentists’ offices covered with rhinoceros teeth?”35

While he was alive, Thomas Evans was extremely generous to his patient turned mistress, and she was openly generous to Mallarmé. On at least two occasions, the three vacationed together at the spa of Royat. This must have been a merry threesome. There is evidence that Evans was not particularly faithful to Méry Laurent, and she claimed that she preferred to deceive him rather than to leave him. Laurent entertained Mallarmé and friends in her Paris residence, Villa des Talus, on the boulevard Lannes. The poet and his muse dined companionably in restaurants, attended concerts together, and exchanged gifts on annual and special occasions. When Mallarmé was not in Paris, they wrote to each other almost every day. In the famous picture of Mallarmé taken by Nadar in 1896, he was wearing a Scottish cashmere shawl that Méry Laurent sent him.

Leo Tolstoy, who claimed not to be able to understand Mallarmé’s verse, maintained in War and Peace that Napoleon I lost the Russian campaign of 1812 because his butler brought him the wrong pair of boots, and the emperor caught cold before the Battle of Borodino. A similar law of unintended consequences might be applied to Mallarmé, who, despite his exquisite taste for luxury goods and his appetite for fine foods, participated in whatever few of the expensive pleasures of the Belle Époque he did because Napoleon III had bad teeth.

Mallarmé and the painter Henri Gervex chez Méry Laurent.

Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms ING 32.

Relations between Méry Laurent and Mallarmé were those of an intimate friendship that may at one time have been amorous, though the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans claimed that Laurent once confided to him over dinner, “and between two cigarettes,” that Mallarmé had made advances, but that she had never slept with him for reasons of personal hygiene. “She spoke of his moth-eaten flannel shirts and collars. He slept once in a room at her house, the sheets were black. The housekeeper raised her arms in despair.”36 Nonetheless, the wealthy courtesan and the impecunious poet grew closer after tragedy struck the Mallarmés in the fall of 1879. Méry Laurent would then offer the kind of joyous affirmation of life and intellectual sustenance that inherently stern Marie, who rarely left home after that diffucult time, was unable to provide.

Having left for London and the International Exposition of 1871 shortly after Anatole was born, Stéphane had not been fully aware of how sickly his son was as an infant. By the time he was two months old, Anatole’s respiratory difficulties had reached a crisis, and Marie wrote, “My Stéphane, we are awaiting his last moment at any time.”37 But the infant did not die. He recovered as mysteriously as he had hovered near death, and was to his parents all the more precious for having nearly disappeared.

In the spring of 1879, however, just as the Mallarmés were preparing to travel to Valvins, Anatole seemed pale, listless, and to suffer rheumatic pain in his joints. Marie decided to stay in Paris with him, while Stéphane and Geneviève boarded the train for Fontainebleau. The specter of rheumatic fever, which had been fatal in the case of his sister, and probably his mother as well, must have filled the poet with apprehension. Marie assured him that Tole, as the boy had come to be known, was cheerful but did not seem to be getting any better. The poet returned to the rue de Rome to supervise the medical visits and to seek freelance editorial work to pay the doctors’ bills. A diagnosis of rheumatoid inflammation of the joints would require a period of long recovery. Little by little, Anatole’s condition grew worse. Swelling of the face and stomach was accompanied by nausea, rapid heartbeat, and a persistent dry cough, attributed, finally, to a pericardial infection. Mallarmé began to correspond with his old friend Henri Cazalis, who had become an eminent physician near Grenoble. Cazalis arranged for a consultation with one of France’s foremost cardiologists, a member of the Academy of Medicine, who confirmed the diagnosis of endocardia.

Against the advice of the doctors, the Mallarmés decided that the fresh air of the country would do Anatole good, so they left together for the country, where the local doctor was no more encouraging than the Parisian specialist. The only bright spot was the arrival at Valvins of an exotic bird in a Japanese cage, the gift of poet and sometimes Mardist Robert de Montesquiou. One of the great dandyish eccentrics of the Belle Époque, Montesquiou had become attached to Anatole and had visited the rue de Rome to play with the sick child in Stéphane’s absence.

The Mallarmés took the suffering child for rides in the little donkey cart along the banks of the Seine and tried to amuse him as best they could. Meanwhile, the cough and joint pain and swelling in the stomach persisted. At the end of September, the family returned to Paris, where a lancing of Anatole’s swollen stomach attested to the seriousness of his condition. Mallarmé found himself in a state of desperation. “Yes, I am quite outside of myself, like someone swept by a terrible and long wind,” he wrote. “No work for a long time now! I had no idea this terrible arrow had been launched at me from some indiscernible shadowy corner.”38

Surrounded by his mother and sister, eight-year-old Anatole died two days later. The poet had left the house briefly to mail a letter. “Just as I was taking a word to you to the post office,” he wrote Montesquiou, “our dear child left us softly, without knowing it. . . . The poor little adored child loved you well.”39 Together with a few close friends such as Catulle Mendès and Léopold Dauphin, the Mallarmés made the sad journey to the cemetery of Samoreau adjoining Valvins, where Anatole was laid to rest, along with many of the poet’s aspirations. “This charming and exquisite child has captivated me to the point where I associate him with my projects for the future and all my dreams,” he wrote to the English poet John Payne.40

The poet’s grief was such that he probably took little note of the France all around him, events like the resignation of president of the Third Republic, Patrice de MacMahon, the military officer who had finally vanquished the Commune in 1871, and a general amnesty declared for the Communards in 1880. MacMahon was replaced by Jules Grévy, who would himself be forced to resign in 1887 as a result of the scandal surrounding his son-in-law’s illegal sales, often negotiated in houses of prostitution, of national decorations like the Legion of Honor. The poet would probably have been indifferent to the adoption of “La Marseillaise” as the national anthem, the declaration of July 14 as the national holiday of France, or the appearance on July 14, 1880, of the motto “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” on the pediments of all French national buildings.

For a long time after Anatole’s death, Mallarmé wrote little verse. He offered for publication several poems written earlier, including “This Virginal Long-Living Lovely Day” (“Le Vièrge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”) and “What Silk with Balm from Advancing Days” (“Quelle Soie aux baumes de temps”), and he managed to finish two works of nonfiction that he had begun before his son took sick. The poet had hoped that they would be commercial successes. The first, The Ancient Gods (Les Dieux antiques) was a translation and adaptation of the English anthropologist William Cox’s Manual of Mythology, which was itself based upon the linguistic writings of the philologist and orientalist Max Müller. A second significant writing project put forth a curious study of the English language, English Words (Les Mots anglais), which was related to the anthropological material. Both contributed conceptually to “One Toss of the Dice” in ways that will be clearer when we begin actually to analyze Mallarmé’s masterwork.

In the wake of Anatole’s death, Mallarmé pursued a mysterious project that, in consonance with The Ancient Gods and English Words, foreshadowed “One Toss of the Dice.” Tuesdays on the rue de Rome resumed in 1881 after a pause of almost two years, and rumor circulated among the Mardists that the master would, finally, strike the spark of The Book. In a volume on contemporary poets he published in 1884, Paul Verlaine alluded to Mallarmé’s “gigantic effort” in the making of a book. The following year, Verlaine requested biographical information for a volume he was editing on The Men of Today (Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui). Mallarmé made it clear that the poems and prose he had published thus far did not live up to the promise of the “magnificent book.” “I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all earthly satisfactions, as once upon a time, one burned the furniture and the rafters of the roof, to feed the furnace of the Grand Oeuvre.”41

The poet imagined that his work would surpass the traditional limits of verse. It would use words to exceed words—that is, to make the jump to things themselves, to change the world, in the catalytic way that has for so long been imagined in the West: in the formulas of alchemy, the Kabbalah, hieroglyphs, the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus or Nostradamus, the secret rites of Freemasonry, the mysterious cartography of Poe’s “The Goldbug,” the esoteric wisdom of Helena Blavatsky, or, in our own time, the physically and metaphysically altered world of Jorge Luis Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

So, like an alchemist working in the secret of his laboratory, Mallarmé began to write under cover a series of notes—sketches, really—in soft pencil, on loose pages, full of smudges, crossed-out words, and scattered lines; these came as close as anything thus far to The Book as it was conceived after the crisis of his midtwenties. Throughout, the notes, some of which are presented here, attest to the incredible pain that Anatole’s death had caused his parents:

child sprung from

the two of us—showing

us our ideal, the way

—ours! father

and mother who

sadly existing

survive him as the two extremes—

badly coupled in him

and sundered

—from whence his death—o-

bliterating this little child “self”42

Anatole’s death had upset the natural succession of the generations, which frames and surpasses the ritual cycles of the year or of the week.

child our

immortality

in fact made

of buried human

hopes—son—

entrusted to the woman

by the man de-

spairing after youth

to find the mystery

and taking a wife

—43

Mallarmé’s early awareness of the life cycle, no doubt inspired by the death of his sister when he was fifteen, can be seen in a poem written two years after Maria’s death, “Everything Passes!”: “Man flows, pushed along by the man who follows / like the wave!”44 It would come back in “One Toss of the Dice” as the boat captain’s “legacy amidst disappearance.”

Should he not complete The Book as he had imagined it, the poet had counted on his son to pursue it after his death. Now that Anatole was no longer there to carry on, the natural cycle has been interrupted. It has been reversed: The son will live on through the father:

no—nothing

to do with the great

deaths—etc.

—as long as we

go on living, he

lives—in us

—

it will only be after our

death that he will be dead

—and the bells

of the Dead will toll for

him45

Anatole’s life would be extended nearly a century later by the appearance of a monumental literary work, which took the shape of notes.Pour un tombeau d’ Anatole, published by the Éditions du Seuil in 1961, reveals many of the defining characteristics of Mallarmé’s masterwork. The loose pages, translated into English in 1983 by Paul Auster as A Tomb for Anatole, were filled with syntactical inversions, as if the reversal of ordinary word order might somehow undo the unnatural sequence of a father surviving his son. The notes lacked orientating markers of punctuation and line breaks, some words were separated in places other than at the end of a syllable, and some verses were separated by a series of hyphens or other diacritic indicators, such as + signs and “x’s,” horizontal ampersands, vertical brackets covering several lines, underlinings, and ellipsis marks. The notes for A Tomb for Anatole contained great compacted jumps that make for difficult understanding, even when the words are arranged in familiar patterns. Most of all, the notes displayed the early signs of a break with the uniform visual appearance of traditional poetry. They were laid out graphically with unjustified lines, empty spaces between lines and between words in a single verse, and rhythmic starts and stops that would be fully developed only in “One Toss of the Dice.”

A Tomb for Anatole, folio 46.

Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms 46022.