Jules Laforgue
In the Fleurs de bonne Volonté is a little complaint, like the others, called Dimanches:
Le ciel pleut sans but, sans que rien l’émeuve,
Il pleut, il pleut, bergère! sur le fleuve....
Le fleuve a son repos dominical;
Pas un chaland, en amont, en aval.
Les vêpres carillonnent sur la ville,
Les berges sont désertes, sans une île.
Passe un pensionnat, ô pauvres chairs!
Plusieurs out déjà leurs manchons d’hiver.
Une qui n’a ni manchon ni fourrure
Fait tout en gris une bien pauvre figure;
Et la voilà qui s’échappe des rangs
Et court: ô mon Dieu, qu’est-ce qui lui prend?
Elle va se jeter dans le fleuve.
Pas un batelier, pas un chien de Terre-Neuve....
(Tr. 46)
And there we have, prophesized, the sudden absurd death, the life of Laforgue. His heart was too cold; he departed.
His was a mind gifted with all the gifts and rich with important acquisitions. With his natural genius made up of sensibility, irony, imagination and clairvoyance, he had wished to nourish it with positive knowledge, all the philosophies, all the literatures, all the images of nature and art; and even the latest views of science seemed to have been familiar to him. He had an ornate flamboyant genius, ready to construct architectural works infinitely diverse and fair, to rear new ogives and unfamiliar domes; but he had forgotten his winter muff and died one snowy day of cold.
That is why his work, already magnificent, is only the prelude of an oratorio ended in silence.
Many of his verses are as though reddened by a glacial affectation of naiveté; they speak of the too dearly cherished child, of the young girl hearkened to—but a sign of a true need of affection and of a pure gentleness of heart,—adolescent of genius who would still have wished to place on the knees of his mother, his “equatorial brow, greenhouse of anomalies.” But many have the beauty of purified topazes, the melancholy of opals, the freshness of moon-stones, and some pages, like that which commences thus:
Noire bise, averse glapissante
Et fleuve noir, et maisons closes....
(Tr. 47)
have a sad, consoling grace, with eternal avowals: forever on the same subject, Laforgue retells it in such fashion that it seems dreamed and confessed for the first time. And I think that what we must demand of the translator of dreams is, not to wish to fix forever the fugacity of a thought or air, but to sing the song of the present hour with such frank force that it seems the only one we could hear, the only one we could understand. In the end, perhaps, it is necessary to become reasonable and delight us with the present and with new flowers, indifferent, except as a botanist, to the faded fields. Every epoch of thought, art or sentiment should take a deep delight in itself and go down from the world with the egoism and languor of a superb lake which, smiling upon the old streams, receives them, calms them, and absorbs them.
There was no present for Laforgue, except among a group of friends. He died just as his Moralités Légendaires was coming to birth, but still offered to a minority, and he had just learned from some mouths that these pages consecrated him to live the life of glory among those whom the gods created in their image, they, too, gods and creators. It is a literature entirely new and disconcertingly unexpected, giving the curious sensation (specially rare) that we have never read anything like it; the grape with all its velvet hues in the morning light, but with curious reflections and an air as if the seeds within had become frozen by a breath of ironic wind come from some place farther than the pole.
On a copy of l’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, offered to Bourget (and since thrown among old papers in the quay) Laforgue wrote: “This is only an inter-mezzo. I pray you to wait yet awhile, and give me until my next book”;—but he was of those who ever look forward to finding themselves in their next work, the noble unsatisfied who have too much to say ever to believe that they have said other things than prolegomenae and prefaces. If his interrupted work is but a preface, it belongs to those which counterbalance a finished work.