Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (42 page)

According to Verlaine, and especially according to Villiers’ biographer and cousin R. du Pontavice de Heussey, he began by writing verses. He awakened to poetry in the Breton countryside, where, like Poe, he had an ill-starred love affair, a sweet, pure dream snatched away by Death. It is curious how all the great poets have suffered the same pain—and it perhaps explains that beautiful constellation of divine dead maidens who shine so brilliantly in the sky of art, and whose names are Beat-rice, Lady Rowena de Tremain, and that sublime lady made to vibrate by the lute of Daniel Gabriel Rossetti. Villiers, at seventeen, was already singing:

Villiers never again loved with as much fire as in his youth; his had been an almost childlike passion, and it was “the love of his life.”

Gautier, speaking in his
Grotesques
³³
about Chapelain, notes that Chapelain’s parents, contrary to a family’s usual horror of a literary career, pushed their son into poetry. The result was that French letters were provided with an excellent bad poet. This was not, by any means, the case of Villiers. From his earliest years, his parents encouraged him in his struggle to become an artist; the family possessed, from time immemorial, a sense of greatness and a trust in every victory. The fond parents—especially that proud marquis, seeker after treasures—never lost hope; they always believed that their Mathias’ head was destined to wear a crown, whether it was the gold of kings or the fresh green laurel of poets. Although this latter diadem was beginning to be seen in the last days of his life—Verlaine went so far as to call him
trés glorieux
—another crown, this one of thorns, had always graced the brow of the unhappy dreamer.

When Villiers arrived in Paris it was the dawn of the Parnassians. In all those brilliant warriors for art, his arrival inspired awe and amazement. Coppée, Dierx, Heredia, Verlaine—they all saluted him as though he were a triumphant captain. “A genius!” exclaimed Mallarmé. And so we understood him to be. The genius revealed itself from the first: a few poems published in a volume dedicated to Comte Alfred de Vigny. Then, in the
Révue Fantastique,
edited by Catulle Mendès, he gave life to the most surprising character ever to animate this century’s literature: Dr. Tribulat Bonhomet. Only a breath of Shakespeare could have made the stupendous
type
that so perfectly symbolizes our incomparable age live and breathe and
work
in the way Villiers did.

Dr. Tribulat Bonhomet is a sort of tragic and malignant Don Quixote, pursuing a Dulcinea of utilitarianism; his figure is painted in such a way as to make a strong man tremble. The deep, mysterious influence of Poe prevails in the creation of this figure, there can be no doubt of that. . . . Both Shakespeare and Poe have, of course, produced similar flashes of brilliance—flashes that half illuminate, if only just for an instant, the shadows of Death, the dark kingdom of the supernatural. In Villiers, this impulse toward the arcana of life persists, and we find it in later works such as
Cruel Tales, New Cruel Tales, Isis,
and one of the most powerful and original novels ever written:
The Eve of the Future
. . . .

His life is another novel, another tale, another poem. Let us look, for example, at the legend of the king of Greece, which appears in narrations by Laujol, Verlaine, and B. Pontavice de Heussey. Heussey’s version is as follows: “In the year of grace 1863, at a time when imperial governments shone with their greatest brilliance, the Hellenes were in need of a king. The great powers that protected the tiny, heroic nation for whom Byron sacrificed his life—France, Russia, England—set about seeking a young constitutional tyrant for their protectorate. During this period, Napoleon III had a determining voice in the congresses of Europe, and there was great concern whether he might present a candidate, who of course would in the course of things be French. The newspapers were filled with rumors, commentaries on this burning matter: the ‘Greek question’ was the order of the day. Periodicals gave free rein to their imagination, for while other nations seemed to have chosen the son of the king of Denmark—the ruler so justly called ‘the taciturn prince’ by Charles Dickens, his friend of gloomy days—the Emperor, studious Napoleon, kept his own quiet counsel. And so things went on until one morning in early March when the grand marquis (the father of our Villiers) rushed like a hurricane into the sad sitting room on rue St.-Honoré, waving a newspaper about and exclaiming in a veritable apoplexy of excitation—a state soon shared by the entire family. This, in a nutshell, is the strange news published that morning by many Parisian dailies: ‘We have learned from a reliable source that a new candidate for the throne of Greece has just emerged. The candidate today is a great French gentleman, well known throughout Paris: none other than Comte Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the last of the noble line which produced the heroic defender of Rhodes, and the first Grand Master of the Knights of Malta. In the most recent reception hosted by Napoleon, the emperor, asked by one of his court about the success that this candidate might meet, simply smiled enigmatically. All our votes to the new aspirant!’ Those who have followed my story thus far will surely imagine the effect that this news produced on the minds and imaginations of the family of Villiers....”

Now of course there might be some sort of joke in this report, but however the case may be, the young pretender was granted an interview at the Tuilleries, where the matter was to be taken up. And the well-dressed—though not, let it be said, with the mantle, or uniform, or suit of armor of his grandparents—young count was received in the royal palace . . . by the Duke of Bassano. Villiers lived in a world of dreams, and any modern monarch would have been naught but a good bourgeois to him, with the possible exception of Louis of Bavaria, the madman. The eccentricities of Mathias I, the poet, left the royal chamberlain a bit disconcerted: the youth believed he had been the victim of occult enemies; he thought this whole thing was some sort of Shakespearean tragedy; he refused to speak with anyone but the Emperor himself.
Il vous faudra donc prendre la peine de venir une autre fois, monsieur le comte, dit le duc en se levant; sa majesté est ocupée et m’a chargé de vous recevoir.
³⁴
And so ended Villiers’ pretension to the throne of Greece, and the Greeks’ chance to see the age of Pindar reborn under the rule of a lyrical king who would have had a real scepter, a real crown, a real mantle, and who, banishing Western abominations—umbrellas, beaver hats, newspapers, constitutions, etcetera—Civilization and Progress, with capital
C
and capital
P
—would have made the old groves fabulous once more, would have celebrated the triumph of Homer in temples made of marble, under the curvets of doves and the soaring flights of bees, and to the magical sound of illustrious cicadas.

There are other admirable pages in the life of this magnificent unfortunate. The beginnings of his literary life have been affectionately and admiringly described by Coppée, Mendès, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Laujol; the last moments of his life, no one has portrayed like the admirable Huysmans . . . .

 

A couple of anecdotes and a few words by Coppée:

The story was told of Villiers arriving at one of the Parnassians’ soirées: Suddenly the group rose as one and cried “Villiers! It’s Villiers!” as a young man with pale azure eyes and unsteady legs, biting on a cigarette, twisting his short blond moustache, and tossing his long, unruly hair entered the room a bit distractedly. He embraced the poets all round, shook hands and so on, and then went straight for the open piano, where he sat and poised his fingers above the keyboard. Then he began to sing in a voice that quivered yet had such a magical quality about it that none of the men present were ever to forget it. It was a melody that he had just conceived as he walked over that night—a vague and mysterious melody by which he accompanied Baudelaire’s gorgeous sonnet:

 

Then, when everyone was thoroughly charmed, the singer abruptly interrupted himself, stood, turned from the piano, and went off to hide himself in a corner of the room, where he rolled another cigarette, gave his astonished audience a sidelong, unsure look, a gaze like Hamlet’s at the feet of Ophelia. . . . This was Comte Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam eighteen years ago, in those friendly soirées on the rude de Douai, in Catulle Mendès house. . . .

When Drumont fired his first anti-Semitic salvo with the publication of
France Juive,
the powerful Israelites of Paris began looking for a writer who might victoriously respond to the broadside writer’s formidable text. Someone mentioned Villiers, whose poverty was common knowledge; they thought to buy his clean conscience, and his pen. An envoy was sent to him for this purpose, a man of the world, a merchant who commanded, in addition to a fortune, fine words and elegant bearing. The envoy entered the humble apartment of the famous poet, flattered him with his best-constructed and most unctuous praise, raised him above the roof of the synagogue itself, explained to him the persistent and implacable injustices done the community by rabid Drumont, and, lastly, pleaded with the descendant of the defender of Rhodes to name his price for his writings, for he would be paid in shining gold louis on the instant. Villiers may not have eaten that day, but he gave the following incomparable reply: “My price, sir? It has not changed since the days of Our Lord Jesus Christ: thirty pieces of silver!”

To Anatole France, when France appeared one day to ask him questions about his family:

“What! You want me to tell you about my forebears the illustrious Grand Master and the famous field marshall, just like that, in broad daylight, at ten o’clock in the morning!”

At the table of Naundorff, the pretender dauphin of France, on the occasion of a fit of snobbery and contempt by Naundorff toward a good retainer, the comte F—, just when the old fellow was leaving the room in tears, abashed:

“Sire, I drink to your majesty. You have proven your titles unimpeachable—you have the ingratitude of a king!”

In his last days, to a friend:

“My flesh is ripe for the tomb!”

And like these, so many memorable phrases, ripostes, witticisms—enough to fill a volume.

His work forms a lovely zodiac, impenetrable to most people: shining and filled with the omens and portents of initiation for those who can find their place in its marvelous light. In the
Cruel Tales,
a book that Mendès rightly calls “extraordinary,” Poe and Swift applaud.

Mysterious and profound pain is manifested sometimes with an indescribable, false, pained smile, sometimes with the wet shine of tears. Few have laughed so bitterly as Villiers. . . .
The Eve of the Future
has no precedent; it is a cosmic, unique work, the work of a wise man and a poet, a work that cannot be summed up in few words. Let it suffice to say that upon its title page one might well engrave, as its symbol, the Sphinx and the Chimera; that the gynoid (that is, the female android) created by Villiers can be compared to nothing, no female creature at all, unless it be to the Eternal Father’s own Eve; and that when one finishes reading the last page, one has been moved, for one believes one has heard what the Mouth of Shadows whispers. When Edison was visiting Paris in 1889, someone introduced him to that novel in which the Wizard is the main protagonist. The inventor of the phonograph was astounded: “Here,” he exclaimed, “is a man who outdoes me! I invent; he creates!” . . .

There is no room within the brief confines of this article for a complete review of the works of Villiers, but I would be remiss not to recall
Axel,
the play just performed in Paris thanks to the efforts of a brave and noble writer, Mme. Tola Dorian.

Axel
is the victory of wish over reality, ideal love over possession. It goes so far as to renounce nature, in order to achieve ascension to absolute spirit. Axel, like Lohengrin, is chaste; the only possible consummation of that burning yet pure passion is death.

This dramatic poem, written in luminous, diamantine language and performed by such wonderful actors—and applauded by a mob of admirers, poets, select listeners—. . . would have been an unparalleled victory in life for Villiers. But he who was so ill-starred never saw the realization of one of his most fervent dreams back in those days when he would wear a pair of his cousin’s pants and eat nothing but a cup of broth a day.

In 1889, in the hospital of the Frères de St.-Jean, in Paris, Comte Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam—descendant of the noble family of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, of Chailly, originally of the Isle de France, and among whose ancestors were Pierre, grand master and porte-oriflamme
de France
; Philippe, grand master of the Order of Malta and defender of the isle of Rhodes during the siege laid by the forces of Suleyman the Magnificent; and François, marquis and
grand louvetier de France
in 1550—married, on his deathbed, a poor uneducated girl with whom he had had a child. The reverend father Silvestre, who had helped Barbey d’Aurevilly die, married the count and his bride, who had loved and served him with adoration in the bitter hours of his illness and poverty, and that same priest prepared him for his last, eternal journey. Then, after receiving the sacraments, surrounded by only a few friends, among them Huysmans, Mallarmé, and Dierx, he gave up his soul to God—that most excellent poet, that king, that dreamer. It was August 20, 1889. Sire,
va oultre!