The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Postscript. Public Works: Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire”

p o s t s c r i p t Public Works Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” At the same time a decadent and a beginning. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo In 1892, Stéphane Mallarmé helped organize a committee to raise money for a monument in memory of Baudelaire. The committee tapped Auguste Rodin to design the monument, but he never completed the commission (the monument was not erected until 1902, several years after Mallarmé’s death; it was designed by a young sculptor named José de Charmoy). Although Mallarmé yielded the lead role on the commission to the older poet Leconte de Lisle, he was instrumental in crafting another monument for Baudelaire: the January 1895 issue of the Parisian literary journal La Plume. The issue included original poems about Baudelaire, critical essays, brief memoirs, a bibliography, and a selection of Baudelaire’s unpublished poetry; it was released the following year as a book entitled Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire. Mallarmé’s memorial sonnet, here called “Hommage,” and later retitled “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire,” stands at the head of the poetry section. This volume was the formal culmination of the canonizing work done by fin-de-siècle writers in the wake of Gautier and Swinburne, emerging out of the dense network of allusion, tribute, imitation, and pastiche that defined Baudelaire’s reception as the supreme precursor of decadence in the decades after his death. Mallarmé’s poem itself feels like a Public Works 165 culmination, a monument commemorating the history of the decadent republic of letters. Baudelaire’s first interpreters compared their discovery of the poet’s writing to a private revelation; he is a friend, a brother, a mentor, a savior, a fellow exile, or a comrade in arms. Mallarmé characterizes Baudelaire in terms of what can best be described as public works. Rather than monstrous flowers and exotic landscapes, he describes a temple, a sewer, a streetlight, the city, and a public cemetery. This imagery clearly alludes to Baudelaire’s increasing importance in the period as the archetypal urban poet, but it also embodies a broader reflection on the relationship between the decadent poet and the public. Mallarmé tries to reclaim Baudelaire not as an outcast writing for other outcasts but as a foundation for the broader community. “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” has long been a frustrating and even disappointing enigma for critics. Robert Greer Cohn describes it as “overwritten , turgid, crammed,” as if Mallarmé were showing off for his deceased master. Paul de Man argues that the sonnet, which he describes as “oddly unsatisfying,” demonstrates that Baudelaire was for Mallarmé an “enigmatic stranger” whom he could only imitate, not comprehend or surpass. Mallarm é’s tombeau poems publically commemorate deceased fellow writers. Taking the form of graveside orations, they speak not only for the poet himself but also to and for a larger community, defending the value of figures overlooked or misunderstood by the public as well as by their casual admirers. Like the image of Baudelaire evoked by its lines, the poem is a manifestly public work, and it is best read in those terms: Le temple enseveli divulgue par la bouche Sépulcrale d’égout bavant boue et rubis Abominablement quelque idole Anubis Tout le museau flambé comme un aboi farouche Ou que le gaz récent torde la mèche louche Essuyeuse on le sait des opprobres subis Il allume hagard un immortel pubis Dont le vol selon le réverbère découche Quel feuillage séché dans les cités sans soir Votif pourra bénir comme elle se rasseoir Contre le marbre vainement de Baudelaire 166 postscript Au voile qui la ceint absente avec frissons Celle son Ombre même un poison tutélaire Toujours à respirer si nous en périssons. [The buried temple through the sepulchral sewer-mouth drooling mud and rubies divulges abominably some Anubis idol, the muzzle flaming like a savage bark. Or if the recent gas twists the shady wick—wiper away, one knows, of insults undergone—it lights up haggard an immortal pubis, whose flight/theft sleeps out according to/along the street lamp. What foliage dried out in the cities without dusk, votive, will be able to bless as it reclines vainly against the marble of Baudelaire? From the veil that surrounds it, absent, with shivers, the one, his very Shade, a tutelary poison, always...