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. The Primacy of Paris, – To understand what happened to Eliot in Paris during his year of study there, –, it is best first to look ahead at Eliot’s state of mind and imagination some decades after that magical year. In , in the April issue of the Criterion, a journal that Eliot then edited in London, Eliot filled his regular column “A Commentary” with words written in praise of the French writer Henri Massis’s Evocations (Souvenirs –):“The book should be, for anybody , an interesting and valuable document upon a period; but has a more personal interest for me, inasmuch as M. Massis is my contemporary, and the period of which he writes includes the time of my own brief residence in Paris” (, ). At the time of that “brief residence,” Eliot was twentytwo . In , Eliot experienced the arrival of his forty-sixth year. His year in Paris lay nearly a quarter-century in his past, and much had happened in his life in the intervening time. But clearly the experiences of – in Paris remained intact and vivid in his memory and imagination. Eliot’s little essay is not so much devoted to the book under review as to Eliot’s nostalgic remembrance of things past. In his first paragraph he quotes Massis’s comment lifted from Charles Péguy:“je vais fonder un parti, le parti des hommes de quarante ans; vous en serez aussi, mon garçon. Un jour, vous [5] – . .    () The Primacy of Paris, –, ; () Jean Verdenal: “Mon Meilleur Ami,” ; () Matthew Prichard: A Blurred Portrait, ; () Henri Bergson: A Brief Conversion, ; () Charles Maurras: The Action Française, ; () Finding the Personal in the Poem: Drafts of “Portrait” and “Prufrock,” ; () Poems Written –,  serez mûr” (I am going to found a party, the party of forty-year-old men. One day, you will be mature) (, my translation). The mature Eliot—or, as he called himself later in the essay, the quadrégenaire—described the England and America of  as “intellectual desert[s]” in contrast to the France of , in which there was everywhere intellectual ferment. Many of the figures that Eliot mentions in his review will be found scattered throughout Jean Verdenal’s letters (see below), the best concrete evidence of what Paris was like for young Eliot: Péguy himself, Barrès, Gide, Claudel, Verlaine, and so on. It may be the summoning up of all those names that brought back so vividly to Eliot his memory of Verdenal,a scene that seems so vibrant and compelling in its intensity that it bursts forth and takes over in the middle of the essay: “I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipolli ” (). The “outburst”—it seems irrepressible in the relaxed intellectual context surrounding it—is perhaps the most revealing comment by Eliot on Verdenal that has survived. It is consonant with the dedicatory quotation from Dante that appears in his Poems, –, below the  dedication to Verdenal in the first grouping of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations ():“For Jean Verdenal, – / mort aux Dardanelles / Or puoi la aquantitate / Comprender dell’ amor ch’a te me scalda, / Quando dismento nostra vanitate / Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda” (CPP, ). (Now canst thou comprehend / the measure of the love which warms me toward thee, / when I forget our nothingness, / and treat shades as a solid thing [Dante, Purgatorio, ]). If the image of Verdenal coming across the Luxembourg Gardens bearing a branch of lilac in his hands burned brightly in Eliot’s memory, so did the image of “the camelots cheering the cuirassiers who were sent to disperse them, because they represented the Army, all the time that they were trying to stampede their horses.” The incident described involved the Camelots du Roi of the Action Française of Charles Maurras, a writer turned political leader in the extreme right movement that was both antidemocratic and anti-Semitic.Maurras was described in an editorial note in La Nouvelle Revue Française in March  (Eliot continued to subscribe to the Revue after he returned to Harvard) as embracing three conservative traditions—“classique, catholique, monarchique”—uncannily close to Eliot’s self-description in  as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (FLA, ). Eliot had been recruited by Verdenal as one...

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