One Toss of the Dice

Two years after beginning “One Toss of the Dice,” and a little over a year after its publication, Mallarmé was plagued by bouts of what was thought to be tonsillitis. He had been coughing all spring. The return to Valvins in late April 1898 to prepare the house for the arrival of Marie and Geneviève brought intermittent relief. The discomfort seemed at some times to subside and, at others, to be chronic, often within the space of a single day. On May 1, he wrote to his wife and daughter that he “was practically no longer coughing, and felt, even, the good encroachment of repose.” Later that evening, after a dinner with the poet Édouard Dujardin at which he remained “completely sober,” he wondered if he had not caught whooping cough from one of the local girls who brought it home from school that winter.

The poet made the usual calls at neighboring houses, and some of the local residents dropped by to indulge in the yearly round of gossip and news with the humble man who sometimes appeared lost in his thoughts, and who was now world famous. A purveyor of construction materials, Monsieur Maire, predicted that there would be no unemployment in the coming year. The postman was bitten in the leg by a dog, and had to be taken home in a horse-drawn cart. He would be incapacitated for a few days. The liberal candidate from Fontainebleau, Gustave Hubbard, was not reelected to the Chamber of Deputies. Queen Victoria, then in the fifty-first year of her reign, passed through on the rail line just behind Valvins on her way back to London from Nice. The weather had been so intemperate that Méry Laurent, who was to spend time with Mallarmé and other friends near Valvins, postponed her holiday. Once he had settled in, the poet visited the cemetery where Anatole lay, writing plaintively back to wife and daughter, “for we had been four, my poor friends. . . . I carried your thoughts with me there. . . . I have almost stopped coughing.”1

In the France all around him, tension between the accusers and the defenders of Captain Alfred Dreyfus came to occupy more and more space in newspapers and in popular debate. The arc of what would become the Dreyfus affair and that of “One Toss of the Dice” were, in some uncanny sense, entwined. In the summer of 1896, as Mallarmé began to write his masterwork, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, head of the Bureau of Statistics, the French intelligence services, received a packet of thirty or forty shredded pieces of paper collected by a cleaning lady from the wastebasket of the German military attaché in Paris, Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen. Once he had reassembled the fragments of the “little blue” pneumatique, Picquart recognized that the evidence used to convict Captain Dreyfus had been falsified. It would be another three years before Dreyfus was, if not exonerated, at least pardoned. The case against him began to unravel in the spring and summer of 1898.

That January, Mallarmé’s friend Émile Zola had published an article in Georges Clemenceau’s newspaper L’ Aurore under the banner headline “J’accuse.” In what was perhaps the most powerful speech act of the nineteenth century, Zola accused President Félix Faure and the general staff of the French army of judicial misconduct and anti-Semitism in the prosecution of the case against Captain Dreyfus. Condemned to life imprisonment, Dreyfus languished in a military prison on Devil’s Island. Within a month, the author of “J’accuse” found himself as well on trial, and he was convicted of criminal libel on February 23, 1898. To avoid prison, Zola fled to London, where he registered under the name of M. Pascal, one of the characters in The Rougon-Macquart, his epic series of novels about a family under the Second Empire.

Mallarmé and Zola admired each other from a distance, but their views of literature could not have been further apart. Zola criticized Mallarmé for being “so constantly preoccupied with the rhythm and arrangement of words that he ends up losing awareness of their meaning.”2 Mallarmé had written to Zola on February 3, 1877, to congratulate him on the success of his novel about alcoholic decline, L’ Assommoir, with the provocative claim that the apathy of modern life may be more destructive than alcohol.3 Despite their differences in matters of art, the poet wrote to the novelist on the very day of his conviction in Paris’s supreme court to praise the courage of his intervention in the Dreyfus affair, which would divide the French into factions whose enmity has endured in one form or another to the present day. Mallarmé confided to Marie at the end of April that he felt as if he were in prison “in Zola’s place.”4 He noted that Fernand Labori, Dreyfus’s and Zola’s lawyer, summered in nearby Samois. Labori, who would be shot by an anti-Dreyfusard in August 1899 in the course of Dreyfus’s retrial in Rennes, had converted a former convent into a summer home that, in its sumptuous heyday, accommodated up to a thousand guests for lunch.5

That spring and summer, artistic circles in and around Mallarmé were in an uproar about the rejection of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of Honoré de Balzac. The sculptor had been commissioned in 1891 by the Société des Gens de Lettres to create the official monument to France’s greatest epic novelist before Zola. Balzac had been one of the Society’s original founders and its former president. Zola was instrumental in persuading this guild of writers to grant the commission to Rodin, who was at the time less well-known than the other contenders, Henri Chapu and Marquet de Vasselot. Yet, Rodin took an unheard-of seven years, during which time he read Balzac’s prodigious novelistic corpus and, despite his goal of creating a psychological rather than merely a physical portrait of the writer, depicted Balzac nude and clothed. He even went so far as to order a reproduction of the novelist’s writing cloak to be made by Balzac’s former tailor. When the final result in plaster was unveiled at the yearly salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1898, those who had originally bestowed the commission upon Rodin refused to accept the finished work, or to pay him. Rodin wrote a personal note to Mallarmé as the “Aeropagite,” or arbiter of taste in France, to inform him of the unhappy outcome of his dealings with the Société des Gens de Lettres. The poet, who in the “Rodin affair” was resolutely on the side of the sculptor, wrote to console his fellow artist: “nothing, caddishness above all, can touch the profound serenity of your work.”6

The poet sailed very little, if at all, between June and August 1898. Paul Valéry visited his mentor for the July 14 holiday and reported that “on the sill of a window, which opened onto the calm landscape, Mallarmé had spread out the magnificent proof-sheets of the great edition composed at Lahure’s. He did me the honor of asking me for my opinion about certain details.”7 The Lahure edition of which Valéry spoke would have been the authoritative copy of “One Toss of the Dice” meant to appear with illustrations by Odilon Redon; it had occupied the poet’s attention ever since the original publication two years before in Cosmopolis. Valéry wrote to André Gide that in the course of this visit, Mallarmé “changed his shirt in front of me, gave me some water for my hands and poured a bit of his cologne over me himself.”8 Whistler, too, came to Valvins. The poet, the painter, and Geneviève took long walks along the Seine. Mallarmé, who was once categorized in an interview about cats as a “catophile,” suggested that Whistler paint the Mallarmé family’s old black cat, Lilith. The artist managed to place only a couple of strokes of ink on paper when Lilith scampered under the table.9 It was a perfect lesson, in the mode of “One Toss of the Dice,” about the difficulty of capturing the essence of things on canvas or in print.

Having published two years before “One Toss of the Dice,” which was as close as he ever came to a version of The Book, Mallarmé returned to the unfinished epic poem Hérodiade and, apparently, to The Book, to which he referred in a letter as “jottings for the dream,” both conceived in the psychic crisis of his midtwenties. Sometime, too, in August, Mallarmé responded to an interview conducted by Le Figaro: “Your ideal at age twenty?” “I chose to write,” the poet wrote, “to which I was faithful, in order that my life might have a meaning. This implies . . . removing daily from my native illumination the perilous [hasardeux] layer of dust that gathers under the name of experience. Fortunate or vain, my choice at age twenty survives intact.”10

Mallarmé’s faith in the redeeming power of poetry sustained him throughout a lifetime of economic difficulty, professional frustration, and personal loss. “One Toss of the Dice,” in turn, nourished from the outset the literary works, painting, and music that would, over the course of the century following its publication, come to define modernism in the arts. The poet’s urge to reconcile the shape of his verse with its meaning, along with his modeling of the effects of time simultaneity in his difficult body of works, struck to the core of twentieth-century art, and would surface in twentieth-century scientific thought as well.

Of all the poets of that first generation not to have known Mallarmé personally, Apollinaire put forth in his Calligrammes a striking example of graphic poetry in the wake and mode of “Un Coup de dés.” Guillaume Albert Wladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky could not have been more unlike Mallarmé when it came to lifestyle or the contents of his works. By the age of twenty-one, he was earning a living as an author of such pornographic novels as Mirely, or the Little Hole That Doesn’t Cost Much; Memories of a Young Don Juan; and The 11,000 Penises. The last was a play on the Catholic veneration of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, in which the French word for “virgin” (vierge) mixes with the word for “stick” (verge), which is slang for the male member. At one point, Apollinaire founded a literary review, Aesop’s Feast; when it failed, he changed the name to The Immoralist’s Review, and continued to edit it out of a building owned by the Catholic Church. The poet and pornographer nourished the legend that began to grow around him of an obscure foreign birth, of market expertise coupled with financial fraud, of formidable appetites, and a capacity for conversation. Apollinaire loomed as a poet, editor, journalist, bohemian, and overall exotic personality, yet one who still visited his mother every Sunday for a meal and to pick up his clean laundry. He was known for his art criticism, having invented the term “les peintres cubistes,” and for a futurist manifesto proclaiming “suppression of poetic grief . . . syntax, punctuation, lines and verses, houses, boredom.”

In 1914, Apollinaire fought two duels and began Les Calligrammes, which continued Mallarmé’s project of concrete visual poetry. That same year, he volunteered for military service, and, in March 1916, was wounded by a shell while reading in a trench. The poet survived the operation to remove the shrapnel that had lodged in his brain but died on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice ending World War I, a victim of the pandemic Spanish flu.

In Les Calligrammes, Apollinaire stripped poetry of all rhetorical ornament. The rhythm base of poetry—its relation to music, measure, beat, and time—disappeared. Like the disposition of type that took the shape of a listing boat or a constellation in “One Toss of the Dice,” the layout of the calligrammes reproduced the actual subject of verse. Their original title, “lyric Ideograms” (Idéogrammes lyriques), captured the poet’s desire, a Mallarméan ambition if ever there was one, that alphabetic writing take on the visual power of the hieroglyph.

In May 1897, just a week after the appearance of “One Toss of the Dice,” Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated that wireless signals were capable of crossing open water. Apollinaire, who was fascinated by the telegraph, composed his calligramme “Wireless” (“TSF”) to mimic the shape of radio waves dispersed in all directions. The words on the page are like snippets of telegraphic speech and sound, including political slogans (“Vive le Roy,” “Vive la République,” “Down with priests”), slang expressions and sexual innuendos, street utterances (“Stop driver,” “Move on please ladies”), and newspaper advertisements (“Proprietor of 5 or 6 apartments”).

The verses of the calligramme “It’s Raining” are aligned diagonally with a vertical pitch, as if the lines of poetry were sheets of rain falling from the sky to the ground. The elegiac tone and the evocation of lost loves contained in the words themselves render, like tears, a liquidation of sentiment and a freeing from the past: “listen to it rain while regret and disdain cry an old music / listen to the falling of the cords [liens] which hold you back from top to bottom.” The play on the French expression “raining cords,” equivalent to the English “raining cats and dogs,” is reproduced in the typographic bands that stretch from top to bottom of the page, and are doubled by reference to the cords or sentimental ties which bind.

In his masterwork, “Zone,” Apollinaire picked up the Mallarméan ambition of being at once in and outside of chronological time. The title “Zone” referred to the border between France and Switzerland, where Apollinaire found himself in 1912; to the periphery or zone surrounding Paris, where much of the narrative of the poem takes place; and to the zone to which the marginalized urban dweller is displaced by the city’s seeming lack of center. The varied length of lines in “Zone” and its uneven stanzas, from one to twenty-nine lines, its lack of punctuation, its abrupt transitions, work, as in Mallarmé’s epic poem, to obscure traditional time and space relations. “Zone” is a pan-Parisian, trans-European, global poem in which we move instantaneously through the city—from the Eiffel Tower, across bridges, down familiar streets, such as the rue Aumont-Thiéville and avenue des Ternes; to the Gare Saint-Lazare, the Jewish ghetto on the rue des Rosiers and the rue des Écouffes, Montmartre, and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame; on to the Mediterranean, Marseilles, Coblenz, Rome, Amsterdam, and Gouda; to the Near East; then, at the end, all the way to the Far East.

Guillaume Apollinaire, “It’s Raining”

As in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, which joins two distinct cultural zones—a classical triad of muses on the left two-thirds of the canvas, and two women with the faces of African masks on the right—Apollinaire superimposes a shared “Greek and Roman antiquity” upon a communal Christian religious past: “God who dies Friday and rises on Sunday.” Within the Catholic past, “Zone” contains elements from the medieval past, such as “Notre Dame has seen me at Chartres,” which mingle with elements from the present: “The most up-to-date European is you Pope Pius X.”

Along with Apollinaire’s cubist poem, cubist painting followed the trail of simultaneity blazed by Mallarmé’s masterwork. The loss of Renaissance perspective and the flattening of pictorial space, as well as the dissolving of the substance of objects—whose outlines are broken, whose parts are fragmented into smaller areas within larger masses, whose seemingly distinct planes dovetail and overlap with one another—go hand in hand with the global syncretism of “Zone” and the splicing of enclaves of meaning in “One Toss of the Dice.” The presentation of a single object from multiple points of view collapses time into space in a way that, like Mallarmé’s virtual simultaneous syntax, makes it seem as if one is at once part of punctual chronological time and the flow of endless duration.

In autumn 1913, the futurist journal New Men (Les Hommes nouveaux) published a visual and verbal poem by Blaise Cendrars, a Swiss novelist, and Sonia Delaunay, a Russian painter, both living in Paris: “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France.” This design poem, like a multicolored version of “One Toss of the Dice,” was printed on a single sheet of paper, seven feet long, in an edition of 150 copies, which, unfolded and placed end to end, attain the height of the Eiffel Tower. An accompanying advertisement described “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian” as a “simultaneous book,” in which text and image were meant to be read at the same time. Apollinaire’s commentary on Cendrars and Delaunay’s syncretic color poem emphasized the identity of their ambition with that of “One Toss of the Dice”: “Blaise Cendrars and Mme Delaunay-Terk have carried out a unique experiment in simultaneity, written in contrasting colors in order to train the eye to read with one glance the notes placed up and down on the bar, even as one reads with a single glance the plastic elements printed on a poster.”11

Simultaneity was part of the Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist Manifesto of 1912, which stressed the “synthesis of what one remembers and what one sees.”12 Fellow futurist Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog in Motion of that same year showed the blurred feet and tail of a dog, the sweep of a leash, and the steps of the dog’s master, all presented as a series of motions, which the viewer sees simultaneously, but which he knows unfold sequentially through time. So, too, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which combines the cubist overlapping of fragmented semisolid planes with the futurist commitment to motion, captured on a single flattened plane the dynamic steps of a figure through the successive stages of a single continuous action. Duchamp’s 1913 painting was the heir not only to the intermittent stop-motion of cinema but also to “One Toss of the Dice.”

The legacy of Mallarmé’s masterwork extended to modern music, and was especially felt in the works of Erik Satie. Like Apollinaire, the composer could not have been further from Mallarmé in temperament or life course. Satie was born in 1866 in the coastal town of Honfleur of a French father and an English mother, who died when the child was two. Raised by grandparents, Satie joined his father at the age of twelve in Paris, where he entered the music conservatory. When the time came for the obligatory year of military service, Satie joined the army and contracted bronchitis on purpose in order to be discharged. Around that time, be began work on his first musical composition, “Les Gymnopédies,” and to play piano at the café Le Chat Noir. Upon his father’s death in 1892, Satie moved to Montmartre to an apartment rigged up as a musical studio and religious shrine, which he called “the closet,” and, after a brief infatuation with the Rosicrucians, founded his own religion, the “Metropolitan Church of the Order of Jesus the Conductor.” With the small inheritance his father had left him, the increasingly quirky composer bought a dozen identical corduroy suits and presented himself, well dressed, for election to the Académie Française.

In 1898, the composer moved across Paris to Arcueil, carrying a chest, a bed, and his suits in a wheelbarrow. He continued to play in the music and dance halls of Montmartre, often walking the six miles from home with a hammer in his pocket for protection. Satie made an infinitesimal income from the publication rights to his compositions, noting that he earned seventy-three centimes in the first quarter of 1903. Some large proportion of the money he made from his piano playing was spent on drink, as he grew increasingly eccentric. He was seen wearing a clay pipe in his suit pocket with the stem in his ear. In cafés, he demanded the bottom portion of cognac out of a graduated carafe. He applied for a scholarship to the Schola Cantorum, France’s institute of sacred music, which he attended, graduating first in his class in 1908. While continuing to compose fanciful piano pieces—“Irksome Example,” “Agreeable Despair”—the composer turned to politics, joining the radical-socialist party of Arcueil, where he organized a series of musical events for children, wrote a social column in the local newspaper, “A Fortnight in Society,” and offered free music lessons every Sunday at ten a.m. Satie’s only other musical work of this period is Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, written in response to Claude Debussy’s criticism that his music lacked form. Then, after seven years of complete silence, Satie began in 1910 a series of humorous pieces, including “Sketches and Annoyances of a Fat Good Fellow in Wood,” “Chapters Turned in All Directions,” “Unappetizing Chorale,” “Dried Embryos,” “Next to Last Thoughts,” and “Bureaucratic Sonata,” often with such facetious notations on scores as “Like a nightingale with a toothache” and “Turn page with an amiable and smiling finger.”

In the mode of Mallarmé’s alliance of the shape of words with their meaning and of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, Satie wrote concrete visual music in which the arrangement of notes on a musical score corresponds not so much to the sound, but to the visual appearance of the page of sheet music. In the collection Sports et Divertissements, written in 1914, the composer reproduced, in the graphic layout of “La Balançoire,” the leisurely back-and-forth motion of a seesaw or swing. In the thirty-six sixteenth notes that descend from treble clef high F sharp to low D in line three of “Le Water-chute,” Satie imitated the cascade of a waterfall. The humorous piece was composed without a key signature or bass notations, techniques akin to Mallarmé’s and Apollinaire’s lack of punctuation in poetry. Satie warned the listener: “If you have solid nerves, you will not be too sick. It will be like falling off a scaffolding. You will see how curious it is. Watch out! Don’t change color. I feel uncomfortable. That proves that you needed to be amused.” A similar series of rising sixteenth notes in line four of “Le Golfe” is the unmistakable visual sign of the swing of a golf club. A certain buoyant constancy in the treble clef on top of the regular rise and fall of eighth notes in the bass clef of the first line of “Le Bain de Mer” reproduces visually the lapping of waves and the sensation of swimming in the sea, which was reinforced by a doodle in Satie’s own hand of wavy water at the very beginning of this short composition.

Erik Satie, “Le Water-chute”

Harvard University, Houghton Library, Typ 915.14.7700.

As in the time simultaneity of Apollinaire’s “Zone,” cubism and futurism in painting, and Cendrar and Delaunay’s “Prose of the Trans-Siberian,” Satie’s musical rhythms were part of the legacy of “One Toss of the Dice.” The syncopated cadences, beat and offbeat, of his ragtime music-hall numbers resonate with the Mallarméan syntax insofar as they produced the sensation of being both in the moment and slightly beyond the moment. The iconic work of ragtime, Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” was published in 1899. Satie encountered the rhythms of ragtime sometime after John Philip Sousa’s visit to the International Exposition of 1900, and especially after he listened to recordings of Jelly Roll Morton brought back to France by the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet in 1916. The cakewalk figured prominently in Satie’s ballet Parade, performed at the Théâtre de Châtelet a year later.

Parade featured the insertion, amid musical strains, of the actual sounds of revolver shots, a siren, a Morse code ticker, a typewriter, an airplane propeller, a lottery wheel, and what Satie called “squish puddles” (flaques sonores), made by striking a cymbal with sponge-tipped sticks. As zany as they may seem, such antics were the logical end points of Mallarmé’s conscious alignment in “One Toss of the Dice” of the shape of things and their artistic representation, which, in Satie’s ballet, have become one and the same.

The poet, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau recognized that Satie’s “acoustical illusions” were introduced “in the same spirit as the cubist painters used optical illusion.”13 The cubist integration of everyday objects to their works—newspaper, sheet music, matchbook covers, chair caning, and stamps, textures of marble, or cloth—reached an extreme in the readymades of the Dadaists in Zurich and Paris, beginning in 1914. Without even the frame of music or painting, Marcel Duchamp, who withdrew from traditional painting after 1913, transformed everyday objects—a bicycle wheel, a urinal, a bottle rack, a check to his dentist, a Monte Carlo bank bond—into freestanding works of art. Duchamp’s insight—that art can be made by changing the context of ordinary things—would culminate in the pop art of the middle of the twentieth century, in Andy Warhol’s reproductions of common commodities like Campbell’s tomato juice or Brillo boxes, or his carrying of a portable recorder with him wherever he went (his “wife,”as he delicately referred to it), in order to tape everything he or anyone around him said. All are part of the evolution that began with “One Toss of the Dice” to align the shape of artistic expression with its meaning.

“One Toss of the Dice” inspired Satie’s minimalist musical compositions, where traditional theme and variation were replaced by “circular melodic motion” that obscures progression. And Satie’s “furniture” or white music, in turn, anticipated the trance music of the 1980s. In his late twenties, Satie had become involved briefly with Susanne Valadon, a former tightrope walker, painter, and model for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as the mother of Maurice Utrillo. Bitter over their breakup, he composed “Vexation,” thirteen bars of music to be repeated 840 times, with the warning: “It would be advisable to prepare oneself in advance, in the most profound silence, by a period of serious immobility.” John Cage’s Pocket Theatre Relay Team performed “Vexation” in New York in September 1963. The eleven participating pianists remained seriously immobile at the piano for eighteen hours and forty minutes, after which one of the six remaining members of the audience shouted, “Encore!”14

The most compelling English successor to “One Toss of the Dice” was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot initially had been wary of what he referred to as Mallarmé’s “mossiness.” Yet by the early 1920s, he recognized that “every battle” the French poet “fought with syntax represents the effort to transmute lead into gold, ordinary language into poetry.” In 1926, Eliot wrote an essay in French on Poe and Mallarmé in which he praised the latter’s “discovery of new objects for new emotions,” expressed in a syntax so complex that “it prevents the reader from swallowing the phrase or verse in a single blow [d’un seul coup],” which may, in fact, be a direct reference to Un Coup de dés. The American-born poet admired Mallarmé’s ability to transform the “accidental into the real” via an “incantation . . . which relies on the primitive power of the Word.”15

In The Waste Land, Eliot transforms the “accidental into the real” by inserting quotidian sounds and conversations that are part of daily life in London. Some are imitated from nature: the nightingale’s “ ‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears,” “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc’d / Tereu” or the cock’s crow, “Co co rico co co rico.” Others are banal dialogues, overheard or imagined: “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad / Stay with me. Speak to me / Why do you never speak? Speak / What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think.” Still others belong to cries heard on the street or tavern talk, as in the famous monologue interspersed with notice of the closing pub that reproduces the diverse typography of Mallarmé’s masterwork: “When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said / I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself / HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME / Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.”16

Eliot produced in The Waste Land effects of time simultaneity analogous to those of Mallarmé in “One Toss of the Dice.” Current perceptions of the city are mixed with personal memories of a recent and more distant past, both blended with the collective history of an entire civilization. Yet, unlike “One Toss of the Dice,” in which a rudderless boat, after rocking wildly, managed to right itself, and a disorienting universe was finally tethered to the North Star, The Waste Land manifests a world so thoroughly unmoored as to offer only a minimal sign of life and no hope of catching one’s bearing:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.17

Where the collapse of time for Mallarmé—the creation of the sensation of an eternal present—was a means to secular salvation, time for Eliot was not redemptive, but a sign of disenchantment with the world. He no longer identified with the great Platonic tradition that nourished Mallarmé’s belief in the insuperable but divine relation between words and ideas. In the two epigraphs that preceded the “Burnt Norton” section of the Four Quartets, Eliot reached beyond Plato to Heraclitus, whose cryptic affirmations of the hidden harmonies of nature only confirmed for him a sense of his own alienation (“Although logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own”) and paralysis (“The way upward and the way downward are the same”). “One Toss of the Dice” may be challenging to understand, but, as Mallarmé repeatedly affirmed, the things we do not understand, the “mystery in letters,” is the guarantee of poetry’s power to heal the broken relation between consciousness and the world.

In his articulation of time simultaneity in “One Toss of the Dice,” Mallarmé participated in the evolution of elemental ideas about time and space since Descartes and Newton. The poet’s great intuition about the relation of a unique event to the infinite possibility of all such events anticipated in its own artistic way the coming into being of quantum physics in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the very year following the publication of “One Toss of the Dice,” the mathematician Henri Poincaré, cousin of Raymond Poincaré, the minister of public education who had signed the paper authorizing Mallarmé’s retirement, psychologized Newton’s absolute, theological time by making all time into a construct, a social convention. For H. Poincaré, there was no direct intuition of simultaneity, nor was it possible to assess the relative length of two durations. “If we think we have this intuition,” the great mathematician wrote, “this is an illusion.” The rules for measuring time were not necessary, and could be discarded without compromising the laws of physics, mechanics, or astronomy. We choose these rules, Poincaré concluded, not because they are true, but because they are convenient.18

Poincaré’s dematerializing of space and time was only a prelude to that of Albert Einstein, who, having completed his studies at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, took a job in 1902 as technical expert class three in the Bern Patent Office.19 There, he examined applications for patents on a variety of inventions, among which were numerous devices for coordinating clocks in local schools, railway stations, and businesses. Einstein’s life in Bern resembled that of Mallarmé in superficial ways. Both were domestically situated with wife and children, both worked for the state in essentially bureaucratic jobs, and both maintained informal evening gatherings for the purpose of enriching intellectual life. Tuesdays chez Mallarmé found a Swiss, scientific, Jewish equivalent in the Olympia Academy, created by Einstein, the mathematician Conrad Habicht, and the philosopher Maurice Solovine. Along with the mechanical engineer Michele Besso, the mathematician Marcel Grossman, and Einstein’s wife, Mileva Mari´c, they met regularly in the Einstein apartment on the second floor of Kramgasse No. 49 to discuss philosophy and physics. But the author of what may be the world’s most difficult poem and the author of the world’s most famous equation resembled each other in some ways that are not so superficial. They expressed similar fundamental ideas about the source of poetic and scientific genius, about time and space, about simultaneity, about the intersection of particular things and abstract concepts, and, finally, about the mystery underlying all such relations.

It is unlikely that Einstein, however well versed he was in literature and philosophy, read Mallarmé’s epic work. How is it, then, that what is arguably the scientist’s most famous sentence about nonscientific matters takes up the terms of “One Toss Of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance”? Einstein wrote to his friend Max Born in December 1926, “The quantum mechanics is very imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘old one.’ I, at any case, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.”20

Mallarmé and Einstein were each concerned with the thought process writ large, and with the nature of poetic and scientific inspiration. The French poet was obsessed with how images formed in the mind are translated into words, how an idea such as chance (which remained pristine and unified as long as it was only an idea) might be expressed in words, which, by their particular material quality, make the concept seem less whole, satisfying, or necessary. Einstein, too, attributed an independence of “the miracle of thinking” from language. In his account, shared with psychologist Max Wertheimer, of how he came to the theory of relativity, the scientist distinguished between concepts and words. “These thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward.”21

Einstein was acutely aware of the identity of poetic and scientific inspiration. In the 1930s, after Einstein had resettled in the United States, he invited the French poet and diplomat Saint-John Perse to Princeton University, where he asked him, “How does the idea of a poem come?” The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. “It’s the same for the man of science,” Einstein responded with delight. “It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.”22

Both Mallarmé and Einstein were convinced of the primordial role of intuition in artistic and scientific creation. The poet relied upon flickers and sparks in “One Toss of the Dice” to reproduce the effects of what he defined as “the aspect of things, which perpetually lives but dies every moment.” The scientist claimed that his greatest insights came as a result of sudden intuitive flashes. The first occurred just before the astonishing months in the spring and summer of 1905 during which he wrote the five papers in and around “The Special Theory of Relativity.” “I’m going to give it up,” Einstein is reported to have lamented to his friend and coworker Michele Besso, whom he had run into on the street. As they discussed it, however, “I suddenly understood the key to the problem.” When Einstein saw Besso the next day, he declared without greeting him, “Thank you. I’ve completely solved the problem.”23 What he had understood was that “an analysis of the concept of time was my solution. Time cannot be absolutely defined, and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity.” Five weeks after this “eureka” moment, Einstein completed his paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which formed the basis of the special theory of relativity.

The scientist, whose extraordinarily abstract and mathematical thought often emerged from concrete examples, began his founding article with a visual problem with significance for understanding “One Toss of the Dice”: “It is known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics—as usually understood at the present time—when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor.”24 Einstein noted that it was generally assumed that, in a field where each moves relative to the other, the effect is different when the conductor moves relative to the magnet from when the magnet moves relative to the conductor. Yet, he had come to understand, the effects in both cases were the same. It not only made no difference which moves relative to the other, but there was no such thing as a body in motion or a body at rest. Extended to the cosmos, a conceptual state of absolute rest implicit in the Newtonian worldview, Einstein’s insight meant that there was no way of determining whether an object orbiting around the earth moves or the earth moves, as long as each was in motion relative to the other.

The disparate syntactic zones of “One Toss of the Dice” unfold independently of each other in a way thoroughly analogous to Einstein’s discovery. It is impossible to tell whether the spinal core sentence “ONE TOSS OF THE DICE NEVER . . . WILL ABOLISH . . . CHANCE” or the intervening words that make up the rest of the poem takes priority, one over the other. They move, in other words, relative to each other, as in the case of Einstein’s magnet and conductor, or earth and orbiting object. There is a great logical leap, of course, and more than eight chronological years, between the poem of 1897 and the first relativity of 1905. Yet Mallarmé’s poem brings to the imagination of the reader discrete verbal clusters, and subclusters, circling one another in such a way as to open new possibilities of meaning, new mental structures that—on a different level and in a different cultural medium—open vistas to Einstein’s thinking about the relativity of moving bodies.

The one physical law that remained invariable for Einstein, like Mallarmé’s North Star at the end of “One Toss of the Dice,” was the speed of light, which was central to the theory of relativity. He attempted to reconcile theories of light as a series of discrete quanta or particles with theories of light as a continuous electromagnetic wave.25 The ultimate effect of Einstein’s synthesis of the particle and wave theory of light, along with his banishment of fixed coordinates of time and space, was the elimination of the ether, a nebulous undetectable substance that was supposed to reside between the solid masses which make up our world, as well as to be the fluid through which electromagnetic effects and light were transmitted. “According to this theory,” Einstein wrote in an explanation of relativity for the general public, “there is no such thing as a ‘specially favored’ (unique) coordinate system to occasion the introduction of the ‘aether-idea,’ and hence there can be no aether-drift, nor any experiment with which to demonstrate it.”26 Einstein’s elimination of the ether—reckoned by Newton, in the eighteenth century, and by James Clerk Maxwell and Hendrik Lorentz, in the nineteenth, to reside in the interstices of matter—coincided with Mallarmé’s own definition of the novelty of “One Toss of the Dice”: the introduction of space between the words on the page. “The whole of ” the poem “without novelty except for the spacing of the text. The ‘blanks,’ in effect, assume importance because they strike the reader first” (see p. 163).

Einstein influenced, among other things, cubist painting, whose overlapping visual planes necessitate the simultaneous perception of a single object from multiple points of view; the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and T. S. Eliot, with its fractious spatial displacements; and the novels of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, for whom time became elastic, detached from any notion of regular chronological sequence. James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf also practiced powerfully the technique of time compression. Woolf condensed several lifetimes into a single day in Mrs Dalloway (1925), and Faulkner did the same in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Joyce played all kinds of tricks with time in Ulysses (1922), squeezing as he did Odysseus’s twenty years of travel into sixteen hours in the life of Leopold Bloom. In an epic smearing of time calculations, Joyce’s unheroic hero tries to determine when he last weighed himself, scrambling methods for the calculation of time: “the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year one thousand nine hundred and four of the Christian era (jewish era five thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammedan era one thousand three hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9, dominical letters C B, Roman indication 2, Julian period 6617, MXMIV.”27

Mallarmé’s epic poem suggests that the loosening of time and space relations began earlier, and began not only among scientists and mathematicians but among the makers of modern poetry. “One Toss of the Dice” was the first poem of literary relativity. The equation would not have surprised Einstein, who regarded scientific principle as a kind of fiction, arrived at not through observation and deduction, but by a purely conceptual act of mind that Mallarmé called the “ideal.” “The rational and empirical components of human knowledge stand in eternal antithesis,” the father of scientific relativity wrote in 1933, “for propositions arrived at by pure logical means are completely empty as regards reality. In this sense, the fundamentals of scientific theory, being initially free inventions of the human mind, are of purely fictional character.”28 Like the poet, the scientist sought a single key, a central idea, a general field theory that would explain all observable phenomena of the natural world. “Will we ever in our lifetime,” he asked his friend Michele Besso, “get hold of the redeeming idea?”

Einstein’s “redeeming idea” might look something like Mallarmé’s project of The Book. The poet, haunted by “the mystery of letters,” the Book of Nature before which we stand in reverent awe, anticipated the scientist, who described the world in his Autobiographical Notes as “a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.”29 Mallarmé may have aimed in his masterwork to write the sentence that God pronounced when He created the world, but Einstein wanted “to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”30 In rehearsing his theory, as it developed between special and general relativity, the scientist compared what he had done to the very kind of mystery that Mallarmé identified with letters. “Hardly anyone who has truly understood this theory,” Einstein noted in a paper presented in 1915, “will be able to resist being captivated by its magic.”31

Some of the irresistible magic of Einstein’s theory began with the vision of a poet like Mallarmé, who, in “One Toss of the Dice,” stretched the perceptual world out of which so many new cultural forms, including scientific theories, emerged. Mallarmé and Einstein worked in the same mental universe, which, for several decades and on multiple fronts, had been immersed in the question of time simultaneity. The poet expressed the blurred boundary between continuous space and linear time via the medium of verse whose scattered words were meant to be read one after the other, yet taken in all at once—an approximation of the simultaneity that Einstein articulated via imaginary thought problems and mathematical equations. Mallarmé’s prescient poem defined the spirit of the age, what the historian of science Peter Galison called a “critical opalescence,” and the popular psychologist Malcolm Gladwell termed a “tipping point” toward the digital revolution.

At its furthest reach, Mallarmé’s practice of interactive reading, as expressed in “One Toss of the Dice,” and his vision of an infinitely connected universe, as expressed in the idea of The Book, have materialized in the hypertext of contemporary media, and in the global, public computer network system, the World Wide Web.

“One Toss of the Dice” is a seafaring poem, and “cybernetics” is a nautically derived term: its roots, in the Greek word “kubernetes,” hark back to the third-century philosopher Plotinus, who used it to refer to the “steersman” of a boat. Almost all the characteristics of our cybernetic world are as if preordained in the terms that Mallarmé used to describe this “total word” and “Poem of Humanity”; this “terrifying and harmonious plenitude”; this “immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion”; this “latent conducting wire” that “would explain all earthly existence”; this Universal Library whose fluid pages exceed the bindings of any traditional book; and this alchemical source of limitless wealth that would transform the nature of the human community. In turn, the ambitions of those who made computers, their software, and the Internet elide surprisingly with those of France’s “Prince of Poets.”

Early contributors to the development of the Internet emphasize the associational logic that we have seen to be an integral part of “One Toss of the Dice.” In a landmark article published in The Atlantic Monthly of July 1945, Vannaver Bush, an engineer and inventor in charge of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, spoke of “wholly new forms of encyclopedias . . . , ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them.” Information technology pioneer Ted Nelson, the son of Hollywood director Ralph Nelson and actress Celeste Holm, wrote in 1965 of “literary machines,” computers that would enable people to write and publish in a new, nonlinear format, hypertext, which, when combined with graphics, video, and audio, constituted a new way of imagining knowledge: hypermedia. For Nelson, “hypermedia” meant “nonsequential” text, “in which a reader was not constrained to read in any particular order, but could follow links and delve into the original document from a short quotation.” The English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in the late 1980s, developed HTML, a universal language by which various computer software programs might communicate with one another. He emphasized the decentered nature of hypertext in the earliest version of the Web, Enquire, which allows us to break out of ordinary linear modes of thought and to “make intuitive leaps across the boundaries—those coveted random associations.”32

Mallarmé’s integral vision of The Book is echoed in the totalizing push of the World Wide Web. Vannaver Bush asked us to imagine a “future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library.” He suggested we call this device a “Memex,” “in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications.” Tim Berners-Lee imagined that the universal HTML language might connect “all the bits of information . . . on the planet” into “a single, global information space.”33

Cybernetic information sharing and storage, in the wake of Mallarmé’s original poetic articulation, have revived the ancient dream of assembling boundless, unified fields of knowledge in a single volume. The poet’s Grand Oeuvre may, in fact, be most fully realized in the electronic encyclopedia, available worldwide in a plethora of languages, Wikipedia, and in Google’s attempt, announced around the beginning of the twenty-first century, to organize the world’s books by scanning the holdings of five American research libraries. A Chinese company, Superstar, reported that, as of 2006, it had digitized 1 million books in Chinese, or half the titles published since 1949. With whole libraries accessible online, we imagine that whatever we wish to know or to have or to do is somehow to be found or obtained or done via the World Wide Web, a virtual mirror of the universe that carries to completion Mallarmé’s vast project of writing on everything by assembling writing about everything.

The Internet has brought to fruition the poet’s ambition to compose a work that would “change the nature of the human community,” whose isolated parts are now connected worldwide. Mallarmé, writing in the 1880s and 1890s, imagined his project of The Book along the lines of a peculiar theatrical performance, one in which those in attendance would read a series of folios alongside the “operator,” the “simple reader,” or the “first reader.” The poet provided for a participatory community of readers that anticipated the new communities of readers on the Web. Whether in a bar in Brazil, an office in Bangalore, a basement in Beijing, an attic in Brooklyn, a beach on the Riviera, or a bistro in Beirut, internauts are potentially in contact with one another. As long as someone has an online device, he or she can read, author, correct, comment, and contest information on the World Wide Web. Today’s global websites are forums in which participants exhibit still photographs and video; make restaurant and travel reservations; read dining, hotel, theater, and shopping reviews; play interactive games; meet online, and mingle via social media; rent apartments and houses; and buy and sell real estate as well as all manner of consumer goods and services.

Mallarmé, who suffered from a lack of money his whole life, may have seen The Book, alongside The Latest Fashion, as a get-rich scheme. Ready to burn “the furniture and the rafters of the roof, to feed the furnace of the Grand Oeuvre,” he described its potential for generating wealth in alchemical terms. When it came to an actual business plan, however, his ideas focused on the conventional means of selling a large quantity of books, whose blank spaces, like those in “One Toss of the Dice,” would be loaded with advertising inserts. The poet, who wrote an advice column for women and endorsed some of the most exclusive luxury merchandise of fin-de-siècle France, could not have imagined the potential of the Internet for generating exponential sums via the sale of advertising, commissions on transactions over commercial websites, or the explosive increase in the market value of stocks in companies that in some cases have yet to turn a profit. Both the Web and the poet’s unrealized project of The Book hold the potential for mysterious, wanton wealth, whose source and limits are unclear.

Mallarmé’s master poem indisputably and unapologetically set the agenda for artistic modernity, for the associative logic of the modern novel and poetry, the flattened perspective of modern painting, the atonal harmonies and syncopated rhythms of modern music. The poet’s masterwork was the first of a series of great breaks with traditional notions of time and space, which, along with an emphasis upon the quanta of matter, are the stuff of modern physics. The enchantment of the world that Mallarmé envisaged via poetry prefigured astonishingly the World Wide Web, whose speed, vastness, and endless possibilities of connection bring the times in which we live closer than any in the past to that great Platonic harmony, of which “One Toss of the Dice” is an early beacon and a guiding light.

Throughout the summer of 1898, Mallarmé continued to experience a general fatigue. The “Pen Man” complained in a letter to old friend and musician Léopold Dauphin that a “laziness of the pen had set in.”34 A cough persisted despite the prognosis of the country doctor in Valvins that the discomfort in his throat would pass in a few days. Congestion on the night of September 8 was cause to summon the doctor back. By morning the gagging had subsided, and the poet managed to dictate a letter to his daughter. When the doctor arrived around eleven a.m., Mallarmé, who loved turning the smallest everyday things and events into imaginative fancy, joked that the redness in his face made him look like a puffing “snake charmer” or a “ruddy cock.” The doctor again pronounced the patient fit, but, as he began to leave, Mallarmé, seized by a sudden loss of breath, fell to his knees. Grasping the doctor, and looking in horror toward Marie and Geneviève, France’s most celebrated poet choked to death within a matter of minutes. Together, wife and daughter lifted him onto the bed. Geneviève picked up her father’s pen and began to write to friends, “Oh! Dear Sir, father died this morning. The burial is Sunday afternoon.”

On the hot Sunday of September 11, 1898, the train that the poet had taken so often between Paris’s Gare de Lyon and Valvins brought the poets José-Maria de Heredia, Henri de Régnier, and Paul Valéry to Fontainebleau. They were joined by Julie Manet, painters Edouard Vuillard and Auguste Renoir, sculptor Auguste Rodin, Mardists Edouard Dujardin, Edmond Bonniot, and Henry Roujon, poets Catulle Mendès and Léon Dierx, intimate friend Méry Laurent, Thadée and Misia Natanson, Georges Clemenceau, and a crowd of local farmers and boatmen in their Sunday best. Many of the Parisians, taken by surprise at the suddenness of the event, rushed to Valvins still wearing their everyday clothes. Unlike the large crowd that had attended the public funeral of Paul Verlaine, including the bohemians and prostitutes whom he had frequented in the course of decades of carousing in Paris’s Left Bank, this was an intimate gathering of neighbors and the best-known artists and writers of the Belle Époque. The crowd of mourners assembled on the lawn between the boatman’s house and the Seine. They walked with the coffin on a horse-drawn cart to the cemetery of Samoreau, where Mallarmé, who had visited his son earlier that summer, was buried next to Anatole.

In the course of the customary words of adieu, some of the most articulate writers in France were now mute with grief. Henri Roujon, who was designated to pay homage on behalf of the poets of an older generation, broke down in tears before he could finish. Valéry, who was to represent younger poets, was also unable to speak. He would not write another poem for twenty years after his mentor’s death. At the gathering at the Mallarmé house after the burial, Rodin, a towering figure with the sadness on his face of one of his Burghers of Calais, was reported to have said, “How long will it take for nature to make another such a mind?” Renoir remarked enigmatically, “It’s not every day that one buries Mallarmé.” Vuillard, Bonnard, and Renoir spent the night with the Natansons at their nearby summer house, La Grangette. The crowd of mourners, artists inside and local residents outside the cottage, lingered late into the night, the poet’s boat bobbing without a captain on its mooring along the Seine.

Mallarmé’s boat without its captain.

Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, ms MNR 1876.

In the days following the funeral, Geneviève—no longer wearing her habitual white long dress with balloon sleeves but cloaked in black, like her mother had been ever since the death of Anatole—began to delve through the papers on her father’s desk. Next to a book on Beethoven and Wagner, she found a note scribbled in pencil and tucked inside a pad of blotting paper. It seemed that only he had suspected the worst. “The terrible fit of coughing which I have just suffered may return in the night and see me off . . . ,” he had written the night before his death. “My thoughts turn to this semisecular mountain of notes, which will only cause you difficulties. . . . I alone could make sense out of what remains. . . . Burn everything. . . . There is no literary heritage, my poor children. . . . I leave no unedited papers, except a few printed bits and pieces that you will find, then the ‘Coup de Dés’ and Hérodiade, finished if fate so wills.”35 He referred, of course, to the definitive edition, still in progress, of his master poem, a work about chance that he had left to chance.

Geneviève would not burn her father’s papers. Rather, she shared them with the man she would marry in 1901, Dr. Edmond Bonniot, a Mardist who began as a law student and subsequently completed medical school. After Geneviève died of cancer in 1919, Bonniot published a number of unedited pieces by his late father-in-law before his own premature death in 1930. His literary executor, the poet Henri Charpentier, would become the secretary of the Académie Mallarmé, founded in 1937. The direct chain continued when Charpentier left his share of the Mallarmé’s papers to his daughter Françoise Morel, who, finally, after over a century, published in 2007 an edition of “One Toss of the Dice” to the poet’s specifications. After Mme Morel’s death, the handwritten copy of “One Toss of the Dice” that was to be published by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard came up for auction at Sotheby’s Paris. A few days before the sale, lot 163, which Vollard originally had described as “the mythic manuscript of the most beautiful edition in the world,” was declared by the French Ministry of Culture to be a national treasure, and thus not eligible for export. As representatives of foreign libraries and dealers stepped aside, bidding on the night of October 15, 2015, became fierce. When the hammer finally fell, the house burst into resounding applause. The autograph copy of Mallarmé’s masterwork had been sold for 963,000 euros to art collector Marcel Brient.

Dr. Henri Mondor, whose biography of Mallarmé is the primary source of information about his last days, had amassed some 8,000 to 10,000 letters and documents connected to the poet. Mondor was a professor of surgery and, more than anyone else, was responsible for the revival of interest in the poet after almost half a century of neglect. He began his Life of Mallarmé with an evocation of the terrible events of June 1940: “June 14, when one saw the German regiments occupy Paris . . . , we chose to study an existence that no one had yet tried to capture, and in which one finds, in order to reconcile the present with certain French glories of the past, extraordinary virtues.”36 As crowds were fleeing the capital in automobiles, on bicycles, and on foot, Mondor stayed behind, with the image of Mallarmé as an example of courage in adversity fixed in his mind.

A week after the German bombardment of Paris in June 1940, Mondor confided his collection of Mallarmé papers, along with a brand-new Chrysler sedan to the poet Raymond Cortat, with instructions to drive both to his native Auvergne, in central France, but to deposit the papers in the National Library should he not survive the war. Cortat recounted that he got as far as the suburbs of Moulins, some 200 miles from Paris, when he encountered the invading German army. He decided to abandon the “flaming new” Chrysler and to continue on foot and whatever public transportation was available.37

At the end of the war, the Chrysler was miraculously retrieved in perfect condition, having spent four years under a canvas awning. Mondor recovered his collection of letters and other documents, all completely unscathed. He eventually donated them to the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, where they occupy fifty-nine linear feet of shelf space. The poet’s notes for A Tomb for Anatole can be accessed online at http://bljd.sorbonne.fr/resource/
a011429863484jFv9sT/. Mallarmé’s notes for The Book now reside in Harvard University’s Houghton Library and are available online at http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/46152340. A copy of the corrected proofs of “One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance,” mentioned in a holographic will composed the night before the poet’s death, turned up for sale in 1960 at the Parisian rare book dealer Pierre Bérès; it was purchased by an American, who either sold or donated it to the Houghton Library, where, like Stéphane Mallarmé next to Anatole in the cemetery of Samoreau, it lies entombed next to The Book.