One Toss of the Dice

In the long dormant period of the early 1880s following Anatole’s death, Mallarmé was discouraged by a lack of progress in creating a total and transformative work of art rooted in poetry and not in music. At times, he seemed aware of the immensity of the undertaking and uncertain that he would ever write this work in its entirety. “I don’t know who could!” he wrote to Paul Verlaine. “I can nonetheless prove by the portions already done that the book exists, and that I was aware of what I could not accomplish.”1 Because of the mystery surrounding the project, it is hard to tell exactly how it happened, or when, but the contents and the physical appearance of the notes for Anatole did morph, over a period of years, into notes for The Book.

Like A Tomb for Anatole, the folios for The Book took the shape of disjointed writing, jottings, lines, dots, arrows, isolated arithmetic calculations (addition, multiplication, and division), and, again, great blank spaces like those of “One Toss of the Dice.” They were interspersed with computations of all kinds—of page numbers, of print layout, of the print runs of editions, of potential book sales, of the cost and potential earnings of this great poem of Humanity that “would explain all earthly existence.”

Always tempted by stage performance, rivalrous with the overweening figure of Wagner, Mallarmé imagined The Book along dramatic lines as a “new theater,” a “future spectacle.” It was the poet’s deepest desire that literature would provide a theater, one whose performances would be the true modern religion, providing an “explanation of man, sufficient to our most beautiful dreams.”2 The specificity of his planning could have been a page taken from a Wagner score. He pictured, on the model of theatrical Tuesdays chez Mallarmé, how the performances of the Grand Oeuvre would take place, the quantity and pacing of sessions during which The Book would be read aloud, the number of attendees, their seating arrangement. The poet envisioned a series of readings or presentations. Each sitting would involve twenty-four participants, divided into three groups of eight, each participant reading a prescribed number of folios. Mallarmé’s own role in the performance was ambiguous. He sometimes referred to himself as a “simple reader,” the “first reader,” “me, the twenty-fifth,” or the “operator.”

The poet laid out a plan for the publication of two editions of The Book, one for an elite public, presumably the twenty-four readers plus the “operator,” the other for a general readership. Given that the whole would contain twenty volumes, he planned to print 24,000 copies, for a total sale of some 480,000 books, an enormous printing by the standards of late-nineteenth-century France. In the kabbalistic calculation of the relationship between print runs and money, the final folio of Mallarmé’s notes for The Book was key:

The Book, folio 258.

Harvard University, Houghton Library, ms Fr 270.

In order to increase the revenue of the alchemical project, which was to turn printed words into gold, Mallarmé proposed using the blank spaces of The Book for “the insertion of newspaper advertisements.”4 Here is where the poet’s fantastical printing adventure revealed, alongside “One Toss of the Dice,” the influence of the poster art of the Belle Époque, with its varied type sizes, forms, and irregular spatial layout. Folios 166, 167bis, and 168 (217–219), for example, were presented as if they were a cross between a commercial billboard and daily tabloid sheet:

----- ----- --- poster

advertisement gibberish

pays for printing folio

and paper

hunting yacht burial baptism

war marriage---

--- war

ball --- mealbomb

theft

ball meal dessert fire works.5

Mallarmé computed the revenue from advertising in the overall calculation of the cost of the “orphic explanation of the earth” on folio 182 (234): “Advertising pays for printing and paper (lottery)—and the price was to be shared between the seller and the author.”6 It seemed that as long as the Grand Oeuvre was pure and isolated from the world, there would be no author; but, as soon as money was involved, the author reappeared to share in the profit.

Beginning in the summer of 1889, six years after Wagner’s death in Venice, a number of events conspired to affirm Mallarmé’s resolve to finish The Book. Some came in the form of a warning, and others as a challenge.

That spring of 1889, Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam had come down with a mysterious ailment, and Mallarmé, through the good offices of Méry Laurent, arranged for him to see a doctor. The destitute aristocrat had moved from Paris to a less expensive apartment in the eastern suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne with Marie Dantine, his cleaning woman and the mother of his son, Victor, known as Totor. A diagnosis of stomach cancer prompted Mallarmé, together with Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose conversion to Catholicism stood him in good stead with the Church, to arrange for Villiers to be moved to the Maison des Frères Saint Jean de Dieu on the rue Oudinot in central Paris. There, Villiers expressed the desire to marry Marie Dantine in order that she not be listed on the death certificate as a common charwoman, but as Mme Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. In this way, too, their son might benefit from state assistance to the children of deceased artists. Given that the shortness of the time left would not permit the publication of banns, given that Marie was from Luxembourg and not French, and given that all this took place in the middle of August when most Frenchmen were away from their desks in Paris, a timely marriage seemed nearly impossible. Yet, with the aid of a neighbor on the rue de Rome, Paul Beurdeley, a lawyer who was also mayor of the eighth arrondissement, Mallarmé managed to expedite the paperwork.

On August 15, 1889, Villiers on his deathbed, exclaimed, “I’m getting married today, we’ll drink a bottle of champagne, and all the commotion will finish me off.”7 When the time came to sign the marriage certificate, however, it became painfully clear that the wife of one of France’s greatest literary geniuses could not even write her own name. “I’ll sign,” she said to the embarrassment of all, “as I did in my first marriage.” Huysmans and Mallarmé apparently helped her with the required signature, and the priest, after administering the last rites, arranged for Marie to spend the night among the brothers of Saint Jean de Dieu. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam died four days later; his last words were “I’m leaving so many beautiful things.”

Unlike Henri Regnault’s death, which could be attributed to the folly of war, and unlike that of Anatole, which struck a singular cruel blow, the disappearance of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam impressed Mallarmé as part of the natural cycle of life and death. The poet, who was forty-seven years old at the time of Villiers’s death at the age of fifty-one, surely thought to himself that he might be the next to go. In fact, he had an accidental brush with death just before that of Villiers. Coming back to Valvins after visiting his ailing friend, Mallarmé missed his step descending from the train, which was still moving as it came into the Fontainebleau station.

“It was nighttime, I was thrown the length of my body with a wild violence, and dragged under the running board, which grabbed me by the shoulder, for seven or eight meters. I felt close to my last hour, just like Villiers,” he wrote.8 Reminded of his own mortality by the dying Villiers and by his fall, Mallarmé did not want to leave Marie and Geneviève in the kind of financial straits that befell Marie Dantine and Totor. He, in fact, tried to ease the difficulties of Villiers’s dependents even before death by organizing a subscription of five francs per month from various of his literary friends. After Villiers’s passing, Mallarmé advised his widow and son about how to hold on to the small sum collected in the face of creditors’ demands to be paid. And, again, Mallarmé recognized that the most worthy homage to the writer he considered without equal would be to complete his own life’s work, with however little time he might have left.

Public life in Paris during the summer of 1889 was taken up by the Universal Exposition to commemorate the Revolution of 1789. It attracted 32 million visitors to the area of Trocadéro, the quai d’Orsay, and the Champs de Mars, on which the Eiffel Tower had been erected. Given his experience reporting on the London International Exposition of 1871, Mallarmé should have been interested in its French avatar. We know that he visited it quickly. “I looked in on the Exposition,” he wrote to Henri Cazalis. “I was asked to write an article, but I only came up with these words: ‘The Eiffel Tower surpasses my expectations.’ ” Much of his effort and time that summer had gone into traveling back and forth between Valvins and Paris to care for Villiers. Still reverberating from his loss, the poet vacationed with Méry Laurent and Dr. Evans at Royat in early September. He could not have failed, however, to be aware of at least one of the major events of the celebration of the centenary of the French Revolution, one where the Wagnerian project of the total work of art found its most stunning expression to date.

Augusta Holmès, the longtime mistress of Mallarmé’s friend Catulle Mendès and one of the few women to attend one or more Tuesdays on the rue de Rome, had composed a Triumphal Ode to the French Revolution. Holmès’s Ode was performed on September 11, 1889, in the lavishly decorated Palace of Industry, an enormous hall built to celebrate machines. The epic composition called for 900 singers and 300 instrumentalists on a stage that measured 197 feet across, 164 feet deep, and 148 feet high. The hall, located between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, held 22,000 spectators. The staging had been modeled on Wagner’s innovative design of a sunken orchestra pit at Bayreuth, and the split curtain opened to reveal painted forests, mountains, and cities in the background. Incense burned around an altar to the Republic in what was a clear mix of elements from Christian, nationalist, and Masonic traditions. The first choral entry was that of the winemakers of France, who chanted, “This wine is the blood / Hot and turning red / From the earth which made us!” They were followed by the harvesters: “This bread is the flesh / Of the three-times cherished soil / That the plow tears and penetrates!” To the invocation of the bread and wine of the mass, soldiers and sailors called on France to fulfill its colonialist ambition of conquering the world. Lady Republic appeared, as lightning accompanied a call to prayer from the people, to which she replied:

O people, here I am!

the heights of the heavens

Where I rule forever your

glorious destiny

I come at your call, and

surrounded by flames,

I appear to your eyes.10

By the late 1880s, Wagnerism in France had waned, and there was no visible rival to Mallarmé’s project of The Book. Yet the staggering aspiration of Augusta Holmès’s Triumphal Ode to reproduce in Paris the combined effects of ancient Greek drama and the Catholic mass must have awakened in Mallarmé some sense of the dramatic power of the “future spectacle” that he still hoped to capture in The Book.

In February 1890, Mallarmé honored the memory of Villiers with a lecture delivered in Brussels. He spoke in the loftiest terms of the sacred calling of the poet. “A man used to dreaming comes before you to speak of another who is dead. Ladies and gentlemen, Do you know what it is to write? An ancient and very vague but jealous practice, whose meaning lies in the mysteries of the heart.”11 The lecture was not universally acclaimed. A retired general exclaimed audibly, “This man is drunk or crazy,” then left the room, where, in the phrase of one witness, “his word is law.”12 The reviewer for the Belgian newspaper La Patriote reported that “you had to be drunk to understand what remains, nonetheless, a beautiful meditation on literature, written in mourning for Villiers six months after his death.”

Even those sympathetic to Mallarmé found the lecture difficult. Henri de Régnier reported having trouble reading it, but he also observed that when the poet read it out loud before invited guests chez Berthe Morisot later that spring, the homage to Villiers became comprehensible. This was not the case for Edgar Dégas, who apparently threw his hands up in despair, blurting, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” The painter claimed once to have asked Mallarmé how he would speak to a maid, to which the poet replied, “No differently.” On the night of Mallarmé’s reading in honor of Villiers, Dégas might still have been smarting from the poet’s reaction to his own attempt to write sonnets. “It is not with ideas that one writes verse, Dégas” Mallarmé reminded him, “it is with words.”13

The lecture in honor of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was Mallarmé’s first public address. It would not, however, be his last. In 1893, he received an invitation to speak at both Oxford and Cambridge, which was only natural, given his occupation as an English teacher, his previous trips to London, and his growing reputation among British poets.

The Times of London of February 23, 1894, published an article on the current state of French letters, with special reference to the Académie Française. Lamenting the conservatism of this venerable institution for the preservation of the French language, The Times noted, “Literary fashions die hard. The tradition of grace and perfect form which has so long attached to French Academical work will not disappear just yet, even though much of the new production will be mediocre and common.” The editors declared, “Still, the Academy is advancing. It has nearly elected M. Zola; who knows whether it may not soon take M. Stéphane Mallarmé, the Symbolist—or is it Luminist, or Décadent?—who is just about to lecture at Oxford? Then it may come to be the turn of M. Paul Verlaine himself. We move quickly nowadays; we adore today what we burned yesterday; schools and creeds in the arts follow one another with bewildering rapidity; and even the French Academy, that most conservative of bodies, is affected by the spirit of change.”14

By the time The Times had published its report on official literary France, Mallarmé was already in England, having hosted his regular Tuesday on the rue de Rome on the evening of February 20. The poet’s first stop was Sussex Bell, Haslemere, Surrey, the estate of Mr. Charles Whibley, a literary journalist and Whistler’s brother-in-law. He wrote to Marie and Geneviève that he was working on his English with Whibley, and that in two days, “I will no longer know French, except to write to you.”15 As things turned out, the French poet became terrified at the idea of reading his talk in what he referred to delicately as “the local clause” (la clause locale), a requirement of the Taylorian Association, which sponsored his Oxford visit. The night before he was to speak, he had it retranslated by Frederick York Powell, Regius professor of modern history—“my friend for three days now and forever.” Powell would first read the English version, then Mallarmé, the French.

The poet was astonished by the beauty of Oxford, with its medieval cloisters in the middle of parks and water, fields with cows and stags, and a dinner in a refectory “as beautiful as a cathedral.” Amid the high wood-paneled walls with portraits of distinguished graduates, he indulged in afterdinner drinks with the professors, who may have taken off their robes, but who retained their bizarre hairstyle, “a cross between the chapska and a blotter.”16

Mallarmé’s lecture at Cambridge, however, met with bad luck. It was scheduled to take place at the same time as the performance of a visiting theater troupe. Tickets for both events had been available at a local bookshop, but only twenty people paid five shillings apiece for the privilege of hearing Mallarmé’s “proper French,” which many in France would have considered far from proper. He reported to Marie and Geneviève that the audience of Pembroke College listened religiously and applauded tactfully as he read his notes by the light of two high silver candelabra. “The lover of rare things in me was seduced.”

Mallarmé concluded that Oxford and Cambridge were worlds of study and sport, where, “like peacocks adorning a garden, a select breed of men received salaries just for being charming people.”17 Democracies, the poet reflected, ought to create such cities for poets. Upon his return, he published a plan for doing just that in Le Figaro, on August 17, 1894. Young struggling poets were, Mallarmé reasoned, the true heirs of the successful writers who had preceded them. They should therefore share in the royalties earned by publishers of works in the public domain, such profit sharing to be supervised by a Ministry of Poetry with offices in the National Library.

At Oxford, Mallarmé encountered the essayist, art critic, and novelist Walter Pater, who taught classics and philosophy, and who shared the poet’s belief that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” At Cambridge, where Poe once lectured to Whistler, Mallarmé was interviewed on the topic of the present state of French men of letters. His interviewer, R. A. Neil, a librarian at Pembroke College, was struck by the poet’s unassuming manner, describing him as “a man of modest height, casual in his dress, who speaks English badly, completely simple and liebenswürdig (amiable), full of anecdotes and wit, intensified when he lifts his eyebrows.”18 They must have discussed Paul Verlaine’s visit to England the previous year. Mallarmé recounted to Neil the story of the difficult beginning of a public lecture that Verlaine had delivered, the location unspecified. With the audience all gathered in the absence of the lecturer, someone asked the security guard if he had not seen someone who looked like Verlaine. “Oh,” the guard replied, “a man who matches that description tried to get in, he said he was supposed to give a lecture, but I found he was not presentable and didn’t let him enter.”

Mallarmé’s Oxford lecture was also poorly attended, yet he was reassured by how well behaved the two or three professors, a few students, and the ladies were, with “correct and long applause at the end.” But, the poet feared that his lecture has been on too high an aesthetic plane, and he lamented that he could have delivered it without preparation, “on an empty stomach, during the day in a frock coat.” He wondered if it was worth the trouble to have made the long trip in order to distract sixty people from the world of studies or to provide an occasion to hear spoken French.19 Mallarmé may have wondered about the context of these English lectures, but “Music and Letters” and “Crisis in Poetry” remain among the most important literary essays of the nineteenth century.

Like a messenger from the Greek gods warning of impending doom or a newsboy selling the Daily Sun with headlines proclaiming the outbreak of war, Mallarmé arrived in Oxford and Cambridge to announce, “I bring the most surprising news. Nothing like it has ever been seen. There has been an attack on verse! Governments change; yet prosody has always remained untouched: either because in revolutions, it passes unseen, or because the revolutionaries fail to convey the belief that it might ever change.”20

When the French poet proclaimed an “attack on verse,” he was referring to traditional alexandrine verse, inherited from the neoclassical seventeenth century and, beyond that, from the High Middle Ages, where it first appeared in the thirteenth-century Roman d’Alexandre. The alexandrine, a twelve-syllable line, usually divided by a caesura between the sixth and seventh syllables, was every bit as strong an organizing principle of French national identity as the flag, the national anthem, or the constitution. Yet, increasingly, as the long nineteenth century began to sound a drumbeat, at first faint but ever louder with the approach of modernity, the alexandrine was threatened by the vers libre, or free verse: poetry that does not respect regular patterns of rhythm or rhyme, and which may involve irregular line length. Heinrich Heine, Walt Whitman, and Arthur Rimbaud had experimented with free verse earlier in the century, as had Jules Laforgue, the Symbolist poet who was impressed by Leaves of Grass and who, in turn, would influence Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The Mardist Gustave Kahn, a Jew from Lorraine and ardent Dreyfusard, claimed in the 1880s to have invented the looser form.

However much earlier or contemporaneous poets may have experimented with free verse, none attacked the alexandrine more violently than Stéphane Mallarmé, who worked quietly on the notes for A Tomb for Anatole and for The Book until “One Toss of the Dice” would take the shape of an attack—yea, an annihilation—of traditional poetic form. The beginning of the process of the dissolution of uniform meter, with justified lines of poetry singly spaced in stanzas separated by a double space, began shortly after Mallarmé’s proclamation of an “attack on verse.” In writing to Charles Bonnier, a teacher of French at Oxford who had initiated his English tour, Mallarmé spoke of a decision to “put in a line of poetry only very short whole phrases, interrupted on purpose, solely to counterbalance other long sentences; to erase duration, only to restart.”21

It would be some time before Mallarmé’s announced assault on verse would come to fruition. In the meantime, much of the poet’s time was taken up tending to his day job, taking on freelance assignments to supplement his income, and in helping others.

Shortly after his return from England to France, the poet began to play a material role in the protracted legal battle between Whistler and Lord William Eden (father of the future prime minister Anthony Eden). The painter had agreed, upon the recommendation of novelist George Moore, to paint a small portrait of Lady Eden for a fee of between 100 and 150 guineas. Lady Eden began sitting for the portrait in early February 1894. On Valentine’s Day, Lord Eden showed up at Whistler’s door, and informed him he was leaving for India on a hunting trip. He handed the painter a sealed envelope with a check for 100 guineas and a message: “Herewith your valentine. . . . The picture will always be of inestimable value to me, and will be handed down as an heirloom as long as heirlooms last! I will always remember with pleasure the time during which it was painted. My thanks.”22 The painter responded with irony: “My Dear Sir William—I have your valentine. You really are magnificent—and have scored all around.” Of course, he also cashed Sir Eden’s check, keeping the painting. He not only kept it but also exhibited it in the annual Salon on the Champs de Mars with the title Portrait of Lady Eden: Brown and Gold.

Back from his hunting trip, Lord Eden demanded delivery of the painting. When Whistler refused, he sued him in court for the painting, return of the check, and one thousand francs damages in recompense for the time spent in Paris while Whistler worked on the portrait of his wife. Whistler turned to Mallarmé, who again turned to his neighbor Maître Paul Beurdeley, who had expedited Villier’s deathbed marriage. The quite public trial was complicated by the fact that when Portrait of Lady Eden: Brown and Gold was brought into the courtroom, the face of Lady Eden had been effaced and another appeared in its place. Whistler explained that, since he had another lady’s portrait to do, he simply sat her down on the same canapé in front of the same golden curtain. She had a brown dress about the same color as the other, the same fur collar, the same muff, and assumed the same pose. In the place of Lady Eden, Portrait in Brown and Gold now depicted an American named Mrs Herbert Dudley Hale, “and the painting now belonged to my new model,” Whistler concluded.23

On the day of the unveiling of the disputed portrait, Whistler had the “genial idea,” in his own phrase, to invite Mrs Hale to be present in court along with Lady Eden. The painting of Lady Eden/Mrs Hale, brought into the courtroom as evidence, was covered in glass. The lawyer for the other side, Maître Bureau, demanded that the glass be removed and that a portion of the face as well as of the dress be rubbed with a cloth. The not completely dry surface of the face was irrefutable proof of Whistler’s alteration of the prime piece of evidence. On the evening of March 11, 1895, between the concluding arguments and the verdict, Beurdeley, Mallarmé, and Whistler dined together.

Whistler lost the first round in the court, which ordered him to deliver the portrait, return the check, and to pay the thousand francs in damages as well as court costs. When he appealed, Paul Beurdeley argued in favor of the inherent unfairness of Lord Eden’s keeping both the painting and the check. At one point in the proceedings, Beurdeley introduced into evidence a letter Whistler published in the Pall Mall Gazette: “I will read you a translation of his letter, made, not by a sworn translator, but by his intimate friend, the distinguished man of letters, Stéphane Mallarmé.”24 The letter, which was read to the appeals court, showed the fine hands of Whistler and Mallarmé, who compared the product of artistic endeavor to that of a cobbler. A shoemaker had every right to refuse delivery of a pair of boots to the client who had not paid the asking price for his work. On the defensive, Whistler claimed that he was merely being ironic, to which Maître Bureau unleashed irony of his own: “The translation I used at the first trial is said to have been very inaccurate. . . . I much regret, however, that this letter was not translated by M. Stéphane Mallarmé, like the other. What would have been the meaning of an ironical letter on this occasion?”

The final verdict of the appeals court was that, inasmuch as the agreement between Whistler and Lord Eden was “in no sense a contract to sell, but merely an obligation to execute, so that the portrait had never ceased to be the artist’s property,” the painter had the right to retain his work. However, since Whistler altered only Lady Eden’s face and not the overall “harmony given to his composition,” his right was not absolute, and he “may not make any use of it, public or private.” He was also obliged to refund the hundred guineas with interest to Lord Eden along with the thousand francs damages. Whistler was ordered to pay the costs of the first trial, and Lord Eden those of the second.

In a less protracted episode, Mallarmé came to the assistance of art critic and Mardist Félix Fénéon. Fénéon’s mother had asked the poet to intervene after her son, who worked in the War Office, was accused of involvement in the anarchist bombings of the mid-1890s, which traumatized not only Paris but the nation as a whole. Fénéon was arrested after a bomb went off at Foyot’s Restaurant on April 4, 1894, blinding the poet Laurent Tailhade in one eye. Tailhade’s injury was particularly poignant since he had declared, upon hearing the news of an explosion in the Chamber of Deputies in late 1893, “What do the victims matter, if the act is beautiful?” Symbolist poets, associated by some with verbal anarchy, were often thought to be allied with the anarchist movement in politics. And, so, Mallarmé, who believed deeply in the power of poetry to shape the mind and therefore the deeds of others, was interviewed by the popular newspaper Le Soir, where he famously quipped that for Fénéon “there was no better bomb than his articles, no more efficient arm than literature.”25 The notorious “trial of the thirty,” one of whom was Fénéon, was not lacking in irreverent repartee. Accused by the judge of having been spotted speaking to a known anarchist behind a lamppost, Fénéon asked the judge “which side of a lamppost was its behind?” Mallarmé testified that neither he nor any of the others attending Tuesday meetings in his apartment had ever heard Fénéon speak about anything other than art. The defendant was acquitted. Many years later, Félix Fénéon, in whose office dynamite capsules had been found, was discovered in fact to have been involved in the bombing at Foyot’s.

Almost twenty years after Rimbaud left France, Mallarmé was approached by the painter Paterne Berrichon, a sometime vagabond and anarchist who had spent time in prison, for a letter-of-character reference to Rimbaud’s mother in support of his marriage to her daughter, the poet’s sister, Isabelle. “She is very strict, you know, Mme Rimbaud, frightfully severe, but I have told her everything about my past,” Berrichon confided. Mallarmé wrote to Mme Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Rimbaud, “Everything . . . bears witness in Paterne Berrichon to an inflexible desire to live according to established order.26 The marriage was concluded.

Stéphane Mallarmé, one of the great abstract thinkers of the late nineteenth century, was clever, practical, and resourceful, the man to whom friends turned when in need. Mardist Henry Roujon recounted that one night, between two and three o’clock, a racket disturbed the poet’s peaceable dwelling. Mallarmé jumped out of bed, grabbed a candle, and, half-naked, went to the door to see who was there. It was a giant and affable Englishman, who explained in a few guttural phrases that he had seduced a woman of high social standing. The lady was now downstairs, in a carriage, beset by labor pains. Not knowing where to turn, the seducer thought that the poet, who was always so gracious, might help the two embarrassed lovers find a midwife favorable to clandestine births. Mallarmé, candle in hand, lowered his eyes and said, “I am all yours.”27

Among the poet’s friends, Méry Laurent occupied pride of place. Mallarmé had put to use his considerable taste and knowledge of the Parisian purveyors of luxury goods, acquired first at the London exposition, then honed through his solo edition of The Latest Fashion, to help Méry Laurent furnish her Parisian home. Whether it was a question of where to eat or where to shop, Mallarmé knew the best addresses in town. He wrote to Méry Laurent from school on May 17, 1893, to recommend that she visit the Grande Épicerie Anglaise on the avenue Victor-Hugo, where they serve “breakfasts.” He counseled her about what furnishings and decorations to buy, where, and for what price, and worried whether his choices would please Dr. Evans, who paid the bills. “Don’t let the two Saxon porcelain flowerpots at the antique dealer’s get away. . . . You can have them for 75 f., they are marvelous and are worth four times as much. Be careful, the dealer will talk them up.”28 Mallarmé influenced not only Méry Laurent’s choice of what to buy but how the knickknacks, which were such an integral part of the home decoration of the Belle Époque, were to be arranged. To make an interior unified in tone, he advised her to have the glass paneling of her little salon case covered by an upholsterer, on the rue des Martyrs, in an antique fabric, preferably Louis XIV or XV. He specified that she should “run along the edge of your shelves, in the long direction, a braid of old gold, to be had chez Madame Kahn. . . . This will be just right, and pretty.”29

To those within his circle, Mallarmé was generous to a fault. Not only did he come to the aid of Whistler in his legal struggle against Lord Eden; of Villiers in his dying and of his widow and son after his death; of Félix Féneon in his defense against the terrorist charges against him; of Paterne Berrichon in his suit to marry Isabelle Rimbaud; of the anonymous Englishman in his quest for a discreet midwife; of Méry Laurent in her decoration of Les Talus; but the poet was almost always available to host literary banquets, to contribute to the erection of monuments, to compose verse tributes, and to edit memorial volumes to such worthy dead poets as Baudelaire, Banville, Villiers, and, eventually, Verlaine. All contributed to the deferral of the project of The Book.

In the years of his growing reputation, Mallarmé continued to teach a full load at the lycée. His evenings and weekends were still filled with Tuesdays on the rue de Rome, Sunday afternoons at the Lamoureux concerts, and the events that he attended as a cultural reporter. The poet wrote regular reviews of musical and dance performances for Le Mercure de France, La Revue blanche, and London’s National Observer. He was especially taken by the American Loïe Fuller, whose whirling veil dances at the Moulin Rouge took Paris by storm in the early 1890s. He attended his first live Wagner opera, Die Walküre at the Paris Opera in May 1893, followed by Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande a week later. Mallarmé dined out several nights a week, with Méry Laurent, Berthe Morisot, and her American friend Mary Cassatt, Dégas, Renoir, or other of his widening circle of friends.

Mallarmé’s literary production in this period was minimal. He received five hundred francs for rewriting Tales and Legends of Ancient India (Contes et légendes de l’Inde ancienne) of the historian and orientalist Charlotte Foucaux, who wrote under the pseudonym Mary Summer. The project was paid for by Dr. Edmond Fournier, Méry Laurent’s new lover, who thought the poet might improve the style of certain of these anthropological stories published in 1878. The poet worked assiduously on an anthology of his own works, Vers et prose, which contained verse written prior to 1893, prose poems, translations of several poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and the lecture on Villiers, as well as those delivered at Oxford and Cambridge. The frontispiece of Vers et Prose displayed Whistler’s lithographic portrait of the poet.

Distracted by a whirlwind of social activity and of lesser literary production, reviews of the work of others and the painstaking edition of his own work, Mallarmé sensed in the early 1890s that time was running out for completing the Grand Oeuvre. He undertook to remove the most obvious impediment to realizing his dream—his day job teaching English. In late 1892, he wrote to the poet and journalist Jules Boissière, who had married one of Geneviève’s childhood friends from Avignon, “A new year is beginning, my last, I think, of teaching: I have so much to do and, though aged, have not really given enough to my dream, except a gesture here and there, to those willing to listen.”30 So, the poet submitted a request for a reduced teaching load, and, in the spring of 1893, he filed for early retirement with a well-fashioned letter from his doctor attesting to neurasthenia, heart trouble, dyspepsia, and chronic insomnia.

Minister of Public Education Raymond Poincaré, a cousin of the celebrated mathematician Henri Poincaré, granted the poet’s petition, effective the beginning of the fall semester. He would receive a supplementary grant from the state, in what amounted to a subsidy for artists, of 1,200 francs a year, which meant that early retirement carried no financial penalty. Mallarmé, in his own phrase, was now finally free to “launch a literary career.” On November 8, 1893, he wrote to Méry Laurent:

Bonsoir, petit paon; ça y est

Mr Mallarmé

rentier31

Good evening, little peacock, all is OK

Mr Mallarmé

rentier

The freedom to write might have seemed exhilarating, yet Mallarmé also knew that there would be no more deferrals of this last chance to reach the goal he had set for himself almost three decades earlier. “I don’t live in Paris, but in a room,” he wrote in May 1894, “it could be in London, San Francisco, or China. . . . Writing a book today is to write one’s last will and testament.”32

As the poet contemplated retirement, the Panama Canal scandal swirled all around him. Some eight hundred thousand French men and women had invested in stock in the Panama Canal Company, which went bankrupt in 1889, and many lost their life’s savings. Beginning in 1892, however, the news began to emerge that numerous ministers (including Mardist Georges Clemenceau), members of the Chamber of Deputies, and financial middlemen took bribes from the head of the building project, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to allocate government funds to aid the failing French venture as well as to hide its true financial condition. In the trial that unfolded while Mallarmé negotiated his retirement, Lesseps, his son Charles, engineer Gustave Eiffel, and Baron Jacques Reinach, who had negotiated the bribes, received long jail sentences, which were later annulled. Some historians consider the Panama Canal crisis a source of the social unrest that motivated the anarchist bombers, including Félix Féneon, of the early 1890s. Still others, among them Hannah Arendt, see in the Panama scandal an early phase of the Dreyfus affair, since the chief financial advisors of the project, Jacques Reinach and Cornelius Herz, were both Jews of German origin. Reinach fled to England, where he committed suicide in November 1892. In one of the great ironies of history, his cousin the journalist and politician Joseph Reinach would be one of the earliest and most ardent defenders of Captain Alfred Dreyfus immediately after his false conviction in December 1894.

Throughout his poetic career, Mallarmé had sought to reclaim for poetry what poetry had lost to music, especially to Wagner’s seductive integration of music, visual spectacle, and words. Augusta Holmès’s Triumphal Ode had gone as far as possible in the direction of the Wagnerian epic spectacle. Beginning around the time of the poet’s retirement, however, a new specter loomed on the horizon, one that threatened to surpass even Wagner, and which was arguably closer to The Book in its potential to “alter the nature of the human community” than the operatic Gesamtkunstwerk.

Mallarmé, who was a contributor to and a daily reader of Le Figaro, was no doubt aware of an article by his friend Octave Uzanne that appeared on May 8, 1893. On the first page, Uzanne recounted his recent visit to Thomas Edison’s workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where the inventor, “with the air of an old baby,” revealed his latest invention, the kinetograph. “The kinetograph will be for the eye what the phonograph is for the ear. In two years, when it is perfected, Talma, Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt . . . all will continue to live.” Mallarmé was also sensitized to Edison through Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1886 novel Tomorrow’s Eve (L’Ève future), in which the wizard of Menlo Park created an artificial woman—Halady—to replace his friend Lord Ewald’s difficult mistress, Alicia. In Villiers’s account, the synthetic human being, which speaks and can be seen, was a prophetic example of what Edison would reveal to Octave Uzanne seven years later as an imminent possibility: “Thanks to this new system, one will see an opera, a play, or a person at the same time as one hears it.”

Edison, whose outsized ego was more like Wagner’s than Mallarmé’s and whose gift for self-promotion was rivaled only by that of P. T. Barnum, made his new machine available to the public in New York, and by 1894, at least seven kinetoscopes, as the device was now known, were up and running in Paris as well. Antoine Lumière, the photographer father of two inventors, who had made a fortune in the 1880s from the production of fast photographic film, purchased one of the new machines, and brought it back to Lyon. There, Antoine and his sons, Auguste and Louis, disassembled it in order to study the mechanism for making a series of still images appear to move. The kinetoscope was not all they imagined it could be. Only one person at a time could peep into Edison’s viewing apparatus, the images seen through the binocularlike device were disappointingly small, and, while it was true that the figures in the kinetoscope did move, their movement still retained the jerky quality of an animated flip-book.

Inventors working on cinematic devices knew that the key to smoothing out movements captured in successive individual images lay in the phenomenon of retinal retention. The physiologist A.-M. Bloch noted in 1887 that we have no consciousness of the present moment. By the time we think we know the present, or say “I see lightning, or I hear a sound,” the sight or sound has already passed. However, if two strong sensations follow each other in rapid succession, “they melt into a single one, and appear synchronous.”33 For two sounds, the interval is 1/82 of a second; for two flashes of light, 1/25 of a second; and for two taps of fingers on the hand, 1/42 of a second. When it came to the viewing of moving images, the emission of light through photographic film had to be shuttered such that it would not hit the individual image as it was being drawn into place, or as it was being withdrawn to allow the positioning of the next image in the sequence. The situating and shuttering of individual images must occur, furthermore, some fifteen times a second in order that the process of sequential projections does not become apparent, and that the movement of things and people, photographed in rapid succession, appears, when projected upon the screen, in seamless array. This mechanical problem had eluded all the inventors working on projected moving images until late one night in the fall or winter of 1894.

Auguste and Louis Lumière had married two sisters on the same day, and the two couples lived with their children in a large house near the factory where their famous fast Etiquette Bleue film was manufactured. That night, Louis Lumière, on his way to bed, stopped to chat with the family seamstress when he experienced an extraordinary breakthrough—a “eureka!” moment. The mechanism capable of making the individual still photos of the film band stop long enough for the light to pass through it, and then move on, was that of the sewing machine, whose technology, within a matter of months, the Lumière brothers had adapted to the photographic shutter.

The Lumière brothers had solved the problem of the intermittent-stop-motion shutter, which allows the projected picture to fade while the retina still retains its image, causing the viewing eye to experience simultaneously both an instant in time and the aftereffects of a previous instant. However short the persistence of luminous impressions on our retina may be, the overall sensation is one of temporal duration, the passage of time as a continuous stream and not a succession of separate points. Further, by reversing the relationship between the light source and lens of the traditional camera, Auguste and Louis Lumière also managed, using the older technology of the magic lantern, to project moving images so that more than one person could view them at the same time.

While their lawyers worked on patents, the wizards of Lyon shared their invention with the members of the Congress of Photographic Societies in June 1895. A filmshot of congress attendees disembarking from a boat in the morning was processed and projected that very night. And, on December 28, 1895, in the Salon Indien du Grand Café on Paris’s boulevard des Capucines, the Lumière brothers offered to the world the first public movie projection.

The event created an immediate sensation, which resonated with Mallarmé’s calculations of the interactive sessions for the Grand Oeuvre. On the model of the Tuesday gatherings in his home, which was within walking distance of the Salon Indien, the poet imagined an audience guided by a leader or “opérateur,” which is the French term for projectionist. He spoke in the preface to “One Toss of the Dice” of an “implicit guiding thread” (fil conducteur latent—a more literal translation would be “latent conducting wire”); and he foresaw, in the performances of The Book, electrically projected images along with the commercial trappings of the movies—ticket sales and advertisements. And, as we shall see, Mallarmé’s ambitions for The Book coincided uncannily with the vitalizing effects of moving pictures.34

Newspaper reports stressed the animating power of film. In what may be the first movie review ever, La Poste reported in its edition of December 30 on a Lumière film called Exit from the Lumière Factory in Lyon. From the workshop door that opened poured forth a sea of workmen and women, with bicycles, dogs that run, and cars. “It all moves, it swarms. It is life itself, movement captured live.” Someday, the reviewer predicted, these machines will be available to the public. Then we can all photograph those most dear to us, no longer in their immobile form, but in their movements, with their familiar gestures, with speech on the tip of their tongues. At that moment, “death will cease to be absolute. . . . Life will have left an indelible trace.” Le Radical of the same day noted that man had already captured and reproduced words, and now one has reproduced life. “We will be able to see our loved ones move long after we have lost them.”35

By sheer coincidence, on the same day that the world learned of the Cinématographe, as the Lumières called their device, in Paris, Wilhelm Röntgen published in Würzburg, Germany a paper announcing the discovery of X-rays. The actual experiment had taken place two months earlier. In the first focus upon a human subject, Röntgen X-rayed the hand of his wife, Anna Bertha, who, looking at the ghostly image of the bones of her hand, declared, “I have seen my death!” If the moving pictures made the dead come alive, the still shot of the skeleton reminded the living of their mortality.

In the imagination of the first moviegoers, the Cinématographe seemed to conquer death and to offer the possibility of time travel. Journalist Henri de Parville had noted only a month before the Lumière brothers revealed their invention to the public, “It is clear that from now on any historic scene can be reproduced. Up until now all we had were paintings and photographs. Henceforth, we will have kinétogrammes. Our descendants will be able to attend the marriage of their grandmothers. They will see the fiancés approach the altar, the maids of honor present their velvet and satin purses. . . . They will all be alive, gay, young, and primped . . . secula seculorum. ‘O Time! Suspend your flight!’ ”36 This last line, quoting Alphonse de Lamartine, was especially appropriate, appearing as it had in “The Lake” (“Le Lac”), an elegiac evocation of the Romantic poet’s dead lost love, an attempt to make her live again. Who knows if Romanticism, a poetic movement based upon lost and dead loves, would have come about in a world with Cinématographes, and the possibility of attending one’s grandmother’s wedding?

Mallarmé was clearly aware of the advent of cinema. In April 1896, the poet Charles Morice delivered a lecture on France’s new “Prince of Poets.” Mallarmé, who was at the time nursing a prolonged bout of influenza, read the review of Morice’s lecture in Le Figaro, since he wrote the lecturer a note of thanks. He must have read on the same page of Le Figaro a report by his friend Jules Huret, who had famously interviewed him for the same newspaper in 1891, that “between two and six o’clock, the Cinématographe-Lumière recorded more than 1200 admissions.” In the first year, the short clips of the first movie shows—Leaving the Lumière Factory at Lyons, Feeding Baby, The Blacksmith, Arrival of a Train, Boat Leaving the Port—attracted as many as 2,500 viewers a day. Among the numerous projection houses that sprang up in Paris during the year 1896, the Pirou-Normandin, at 86, rue de Clichy, in Mallarmé’s own neighborhood, would have caught his attention. Even closer, on May 1, 1897, the Lumières, who at first resisted selling the Cinématographe on the open market, opened a dealership at 35, rue de Rome.

Mallarmé was known to have commented directly on movies only once. In January 1898, in response to a poll on illustrated books, the print-bound poet told Le Mercure de France, “I am for—no illustrations. Everything that a book evokes should happen in the mind of the reader: but, if you replace photography, why not go all the way to the Cinématographe, whose unrolling will supplant favorably many a volume, images and text.”37

Mallarmé’s fear that Wagner had usurped the proper place of poetry and that “nothing was left to do” must have paled next to the effects of early cinema. Indeed, the close chronological relationship between the invention of cinema in late December 1895 and Mallarmé’s composition of “One Toss of the Dice” six months later was not accidental, and one can imagine the following scenario. For thirty years, the poet had wrestled with the next-to-impossible project of The Book. During the whole long period between the crisis of his midtwenties and retirement, the only rival form was Wagnerian opera, which, alongside the spectacular but singular performances of Augusta Holmès’s Triumphal Ode in 1889, came as close as one could imagine at the time to the total work of art. The advent of the movies in late 1895, however, represented a powerful reminder of the possibility of transformative “future spectacle.” For the poet, it was now or never, and within six months, having made the necessary home improvements to the poetry-writing cottage in Valvins, he began his masterwork.

to the 1897 Cosmopolis Edition of “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard”

I would prefer that this Note not be read or, if skimmed, that it be forgotten. It offers the clever Reader little beyond his own perceptions: but it might confuse the inexperienced one obliged to look at the first words of this Poem, so that those that follow, arranged as they are, lead to the last, the whole of it without novelty except for the spacing of the text. The “blanks,” in effect, assume importance because they strike the reader first; the versification usually demanded them, as the surrounding silence, to the point that any one portion, of a lyric or even of just a few measures, occupies about a third of the page on which it is centered: I do not violate this procedure, only scatter it on the page. The paper intervenes every time an image, on its own, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others; and, since it does not concern, as it usually does, regular sound patterns or verse so much as the prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, the instant they appear and for the duration of their role in some exact spiritual setting, near or far from the implicit guiding thread, for the sake of verisimilitude, the text imposes itself. The literary advantage, if I may call it that, of this copied distance which mentally separates groups of words or words from each other, is that it seems to accelerate or slow down the movement, stressing it, even intimating it by a simultaneous vision of the Page: this being the leading principle, as elsewhere the verse or the perfect line is. The fiction shows through, then quickly dissipates, following the expressiveness of the writing, around the fragmentary interruptions of a central sentence, introduced by the title and continuing on. Everything that occurs is, by foreshortening, hypothetical; narrative is avoided. Add that from this stripped-down method of thought, with its withdrawals, prolongations, flights, or from its very layout, there results, for whoever reads it aloud, a musical score. The difference in typefaces, between the dominant size, a secondary and adjacent ones, dictates their importance for oral performance, and the range, in the middle, at the top or bottom of the page, will indicate how the intonation may rise or fall. Only a certain number of daring directions, infringements, etc., forming the counterpoint to the prosody, remain in their elementary state in a work which lacks precedents: not that I respect the appropriateness of timid attempts; but it does not seem right to me, except in one’s own self-publications, in a Periodical however valiant, gracious and open to experiments, to step too far beyond custom. I shall have pointed out, nevertheless, about this Poem a “state” rather than a sketch, and one that does not break with tradition at all; extended its application in many senses without having offended anyone: sufficiently to open some eyes. Today, or without presuming on the future that will follow on it—nothing or something like a new art—let us readily acknowledge that the attempt participates, in unforeseen ways, in a number of pursuits dear to our time, free verse and the prose poem. They are joined, I know, under a strange influence, that of Music as heard at a concert; one discovers here several methods which seemed to apply to Literature and which I adopt. Its genre, if it should gradually become one like the symphony, alongside the art song, leaves intact the ancient technique of verse, which I continue to worship and to which I attribute the empire of passion and of dreams; this would be the preferred place to treat (as may yet follow) subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect: there is no reason to exclude them from Poetry—the unique source.