Clough’s Amours de voyage and Arsène Houssaye: An Epigraphic Mystery Solved

Largely written in 1849, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de voyage begins with four epigraphs. As noted by Patrick Scott in his annotated edition of the poem,¹ the first of these, “Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, / And taste with a distempered appetite!” is a verbatim quote from Twelfth Night, I.v.96–97. The third, “Solvitur ambulando”—a Latin proverb meaning “It is solved by walking” or “by traveling,” as in the voyage of the poem’s title—is used, Scott writes, “to advocate practical action against impractical theorists.”² And the fourth, “Flevit amores / Non elaboratum ad pedem,” is a deliberate misquotation of Horace’s Epodes, 14.11–12, so as to mean “He mourned for his loves”—plural as in the Amours of Clough’s title; Horace has amorem, “love” singular—“in simple verse” (p. 22).

As to the second of the four epigraphs, “Il doutait de tout, même de l’amour” (He doubted everything, even love), Clough attributed it to a French novel, as he attributed the other three to Shakespeare, Solutio Sophismatum (sophistical solution), and Horace, respectively. While Scott in his edition says of the second epigraph that “the sentiment occurs” in Alfred de Musset’s dramatic poem La coupe et les lèvres (1831), “Doutez, si vous voulez, de l’être qui vous aime, / D’une femme ou d’un chien, mais non de l’amour même,”³ the epigraph’s specific source has remained a mystery⁴—but one that may now be deemed solved.

Clough’s apparent source was not a French novel but the short story of a French novelist, Arsène Houssaye—more specifically, the story as first published in a French literary journal a decade before Clough began work on Amours de voyage and two decades before Houssaye’s revisions of the tale for book publication eliminated nearly all of the text on which Clough’s epigraph appears to have been based.

Born in Bruyères, near Laon, in 1815, Houssaye by 1849 had already emerged as one of the leading writers and editors of nineteenth-century France. At twenty-one, he was the author of two published novels, over the course of his long life writing several more as well as short fiction, poems, plays, biographical sketches, art histories, and critical essays. From 1844 to 1849 (and again from 1859 to 1880), he was owner-editor of the literary journal L’artiste, opening its pages to many talented young writers; for six years after that (1849 to 1856), head of the Comédie Française; from 1856 to 1870, inspector-general of France’s provincial museums, a sinecure created for him by the Emperor Napoleon III; and in 1861 and 1862, editor-in-chief of La Presse, a French daily newspaper—all the while and until his death at eighty in 1896 playing an active role in the literary, artistic, cultural, social, and political life of his time. His friends included Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Alfred de Musset, Eugène Delacroix, and Alexandre Dumas; another, for a time, was Charles Baudelaire, several of whose short prose poems first appeared in La Presse while Houssaye was its editor and all fifty-one of which were collected in Baudelaire’s posthumously published Le spleen de Paris (1869), which began with a dedicatory essay addressed to Houssaye.

After Clough resigned his tutorship at Oriel College, Oxford, in April 1848, he traveled to Paris in early May and over the next month—while dining daily with his American friend Ralph Waldo Emerson—personally witnessed the political turmoil sweeping the city that year, turmoil in which Houssaye, as a writer, editor, and (unsuccessful) legislative candidate, was deeply and directly involved. There appears to be no documentary evidence that Clough and Houssaye ever crossed paths during Clough’s stay in Paris or thereafter, but there is also no basis on which to conclude that they did not. In any case, it would appear that before, during, or after...