ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:A ROMANTIC OF 1830
Inthe preface toPetits Poèmes en Prose, Baudelaire makes respectful reference to a little-known book: “J’ai une petite confession à vous faire. C’est en feuilletant pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameuxGaspard de la Nuit, d’Aloysius Bertrand (un livre connu de vous, de moi et de quelques-uns de nos amis, n’a-t-il pas tous les droits à être appelé fameux?), que l’idée m’est venue de tenter quelque chose d’analogue, et d’appliquer à la description de la vie moderne, ou plutot d’unevie moderne et plus abstraite, le procédé qu’il avait appliqué à la peinture de la vie ancienne, si étrangement pittoresque.†He speaks of Bertrand as“mon mystérieux et brillant modèle,†though, remembering the teaching of Poe, he adds that he is ashamed to have made something so different fromGaspard de la Nuit, sincehe holds that the highest honour of a poet is to accomplish exactly what he set out to perform. A writer who wrote prose poems good enough to be read “twenty times at least†by Baudelaire, good enough to suggest an imitation, a writer but for whom thePetits Poèmes en Prosewould not have been written, or would have been written differently, is more than a literary curiosity. I was led to examine his book, and, presently, to find an interest in the man himself as well as in his accomplishment. M. Anatole France was good enough to direct me in my search for information. My friend, M. Champion, of the Quai Malaquais, generously put his bibliographical knowledge at my disposal. The files of forgotten magazines and newspapers and essays by Sainte-Beuve, Charles Asselineau, and M. Leon Séché combined to build in my mind a portrait of this picturesque and luckless Romantic, a portrait blistered here and there, obliterated in patches, but not without vitality.
* * * * *
Louis-Jacques-Napoleon Bertrand, who took the name of Ludovic and later preferred that of Aloysius, was born on April 20, 1807, atCéva, in Piedmont. Hugo was born in 1802, and Gautier in 1811. He was a child of that old grey-haired army of which Musset speaks in theConfession d’un Enfant du Siècle. His mother was an Italian, his father a Frenchman of Lorraine, an old soldier described by his son, in a fiery letter to a newspaper which had insulted him, as “only a patriot of 1789, only an officer of fortune, who at eighteen rushed to pour out his blood on the banks of the Rhine, and, at fifty, counted thirty years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds.†At the age of seven the young Bertrand was brought to France. He grew up at Dijon, learned in youth of the great things that were being done in Paris, and read Hugo, Nodier, Hoffmann, and Scott, all of whom helped him to turn the modern Dijon into a mediæval city of dreams.
Early in 1828, a few young men of Dijon founded a newspaper,Le Provincial, to be a mouthpiece for their enlightened generation. It endured for a few months, and Bertrand contributed prose and verse to it, including a first draft of a prose poem that, in a much altered form, was printed inGaspard de la Nuit.The paper was not unnoticed in Paris, and when it died and Bertrand left Dijon for the capital, he found some doors already open to him. He was twenty-one, penniless, with rolls of manuscript in his pocket, and a shy eagerness to read aloud from them.
Two portraits of him remain, one by Sainte-Beuve and the other by Victor Pavie. Sainte-Beuve describes him as “... a tall, thin young man of twenty-one, with a yellow and brown complexion, very lively little black eyes, a face mocking and sharp without doubt, rather wretched perhaps, and a long, silent laugh. He seemed timid, or rather uncivilised....â€
Victor Pavie says: “His awkward walk, his incorrect and unsophisticated costume, his lack of balance and of aplomb, betrayed that he had newly escaped from the provinces. One divined the poet in the ill-restrained fire of his timid and wandering eyes. As for the expression of his face, a lofty taste for beauty was combined in it with a somewhat uncivilised taciturnity....â€
Beside these pictures let me print Bertrand’s portrait of the imaginary Gaspard dela Nuit: “A poor devil whose exterior announced nothing but poverty and suffering. I had already noticed in the garden his frayed overcoat, buttoned to the chin, his shapeless hat that never brush had brushed, his hair long as a weeping-willow, combed like a thicket, his fleshless hands like ossuaries, his mocking, wretched, and sickly face; and my conjectures had charitably placed him among those itinerant artists, violin-players and portrait-painters, whom an insatiable hunger and an unquenchable thirst condemn to travel the world in the footsteps of the Wandering Jew....†It is different from the portraits of himself, but not more different than would be such a Germanicised caricature as might have been made by Hoffmann.
Bertrand’s life in Paris was hidden from the celebrated men whom he met at Nodier’s evening receptions and in Sainte-Beuve’s study. He showed himself for a moment, recited some of his verses “d’une voix sautillante,†and disappeared. He had no money, and probably suffered from that lack of confidence which can only be removed by a banking account. Sainte-Beuve, who sawhim two or three times and gave him a copy of theConsolations, with the inscription “Mon ami Bertrand,†speaks of him threading lonely streets with the air of Pierre Gringoire, the out-at-elbows poet ofNotre Dame de Paris. He paints what must be an imaginary portrait of the young and penniless genius leaning on the window-sill of his garret, “talking for long hours with the pale gilliflowers of the roof.â€
Unable to earn a living in Paris, he went back to Dijon in 1830, where he contributed to a Liberal newspaper,Le Patriote de la Côte-d’Or. In spite of his poverty, his blood was young and proud, and as he walked the streets of Dijon he must have felt himself a representative of that exuberant young Parisian manhood that was puttingHernanion the stage and sendingMademoiselle de Maupinto the press. A rival paper jeered at him, and he was able to reply: “Je préfère vos dédains à vos suffrages,†and to quote a letter from Victor Hugo to explain his independence. Hugo had written:“Je lis vos vers en cercle d’amis, comme je lis André Chenier, Lamartine et Alfred de Vigny: il est impossible de posséder à un plus haut point les secrets de la facture.†With sucha testimonial in his pocket he need not care for the scorn or the approval of a provincial journalist.
At this time his Liberalism was as ardent as his youth. Asselineau quotes a fiery article praying for war, bloody war, against the Holy Alliance: “It is time to throw the dice on a drum; and, should we all perish, the honour of France and of liberty shall perish not.†But, as was not unnatural, he presently left France and liberty to take care of themselves, and, full of new plans for literary achievement, returned hopefully to Paris, where he was joined by his mother and sister. He was again unable to earn a living. The last lines of a piteous letter written to Antoine de Latour in September 1833, show how miserable was his condition:
“Si je te disais que je suis au point de n’avoir bientôt plus de chaussures, que ma redingote est usée, je t’apprendrais là le dernier de mes soucis: ma mère et ma sœur manquent de tout dans une mansarde de l’hôtel des Etats-Unis qui n’est pas payée. Qu’est ce pour toi qu’une soixantaine de francs (mon Dieu, à quelle humiliation le malheur me contraint!). Quelques pièces d’argent dans une bourse, pour nous c’est un mois de loger, c’est du pain!
“Si je te disais que je suis au point de n’avoir bientôt plus de chaussures, que ma redingote est usée, je t’apprendrais là le dernier de mes soucis: ma mère et ma sœur manquent de tout dans une mansarde de l’hôtel des Etats-Unis qui n’est pas payée. Qu’est ce pour toi qu’une soixantaine de francs (mon Dieu, à quelle humiliation le malheur me contraint!). Quelques pièces d’argent dans une bourse, pour nous c’est un mois de loger, c’est du pain!
“Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage.Mon camarade de collège!!!“Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.â€
“Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage.Mon camarade de collège!!!“Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.â€
“Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage.Mon camarade de collège!!!“Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.â€
“Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage.
Mon camarade de collège!!!
“Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.â€
It is not known whether the money was sent him, nor whether he found employment as a proof-reader.
In such poverty, in such dejection, he put together the book that preserves his memory, dreaming, when he could forget his empty stomach and the holes in his shoes, of the prose that Baudelaire was to imagine after him, “une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience.†He would not, perhaps, have thought of sudden starts of conscience, for his was a simpler soul than Baudelaire’s, and he never felt that the portrait he was drawing might be only the portrait of a portrait. He was born in 1807 and not in 1821, and, with the Romantic joy in colour and local colour, he had more than the Romantic simplicity. His fantasies are prefaced by quotations, andthese are taken from Scott, Hugo, Byron, folk-song, the Fathers of the Church, Scottish ballads, Charles Nodier, old chronicles, Lope de Vega, Fenimore Cooper, the cries of the night watchmen, Lamartine, Coleridge, Chateaubriand, a medley of the Romantics and the writers and things that they admired. They sometimes mistook the picturesque for the beautiful, and so did Bertrand. He was a man who thought with his eyes. He was not an analyst.
So far indeed did his visual conception of life carry him that he represents, better than any other French writer, the tendency, new at that time, to identify literature with painting. Hoffmann, in Germany, had writtenFantasy-pieces after the manner of Callot. Leigh Hunt, in England, amused himself, inImagination and Fancy, by cutting little bits out of Spenser and proposing them as subjects to the ghosts of Titian and Rubens. Bertrand used words like oil-colours, and inGaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, wrote what, if he had had a palette and brush, he might very well have painted. If he thought through his eyes, his eyes had been trained by thepainters, and he was proud to offer his book as a series of engravings after imaginary pictures, or etchings from plates that had never been bitten.
“Art,†he says in his preface, “has always two antithetical faces; it is a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image of Rembrandt, and the other that of Jacques Callot.... Rembrandt is the white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his retreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes his eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of beauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other hand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the square, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his carbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache.... Now, the author of this book has envisaged art under this double personification, but he has not been too exclusive, and presents, besides fantasies in the manners of Rembrandt and of Callot, studies after Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde,Albert Durer, Peeter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator Rosa, Murillo, Fusely, and many other masters of different schools.â€
Bertrand’s book is one of the documents that must be studied by any historian of the grotesque who would trace the re-awakening of a spirit in art that had dozed during the eighteenth century, a spirit quite different from that of Hogarth, with which it is sometimes confounded. Bertrand’s was not the noble, the sublime conception of the grotesque that ruled the finer drawings and much of the poetry of William Blake. It was akin to that whose love of a gargoyle brought it to life and sent Quasimodo to haunt the dark and winding stairs of the towers of Notre Dame. Bertrand contrasts Rembrandt and Callot, but does not see that in the mind of the man “who consumes himself in penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature†there is the essence of the feeling for the grotesque, which, in such men as Callot, having forgotten its origins, too often becomes mere sport, shadows flung on a wall by a will-o’-the-wisp instead of by a philosopher’s lamp. But inGaspard dela Nuitthis feeling is groping towards consciousness, recognising its food in the etchings alike of Rembrandt and of Callot, of Salvator and of Durer, noticing the more obvious differences between them, but as yet incapable of a more sensitive distinction. It is interesting to notice that he takes suggestions from the Breughel2whose wild and energetic picture made Flaubert, ten years later, set to work onThe Temptation of St. Anthony.
Bertrand’s book is made up of six series of fantasies, labelled “Flemish School,†“Old Paris,†“The Chronicles,†like the rooms in a picture-gallery. The usual form of the pieces is that of a small number of carefully balanced paragraphs, mostly single sentences, sometimes linked by refrains of movement or meaning. Some have minute prologues and epilogues. Some are like prose-ballades, finished by anenvoi. Few cover more than two or three pages in a small book of large type. Each one is complete in itself, and built of a firm, noun-ful prose, richer in colour than in subtlety.
They were written by a man to whom sustained effort was impossible, a man elusive,fugace, who could not settle in one place or in one mood, and perhaps found in these little scraps of goldsmithery the nearest approach to permanence and solidity in his life. He was a hunter of the moment, and these fantasies are the only trophies of his chase. Their form seems made for him and he for it, and he needed no models for the gait of his soul.
Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble personality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming that owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else. His was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet. He felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all he could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of dreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams with their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a cottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights while the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a studyas Faustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in his dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their phantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a Messire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait by Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo’s reconstruction, and the old Dijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to keep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered him her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes of the moon.
This is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries:
“Le Clair de Lune.“‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormezEt priez pour les trépassés.’—Le cri du crieur de nuit.
“Le Clair de Lune.“‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormezEt priez pour les trépassés.’—Le cri du crieur de nuit.
“Le Clair de Lune.“‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormezEt priez pour les trépassés.’—Le cri du crieur de nuit.
“Le Clair de Lune.
“‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormez
Et priez pour les trépassés.’
—Le cri du crieur de nuit.
“Oh! qu’il est doux, quand l’heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d’or!
“Deux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fenêtre, un chien hurlait dans le carrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer vaticinait tout bas.
“Mais bientôt mon oreille n’interrogea plus qu’un silence profond. Les lépreux étaient rentrés dans leurs chenils, aux coups de Jacquemart qui battait sa femme.
“Le chien avait enfilé une venelle, devant les pertuisanes du guet enrouillé par la pluie et morfondu par la bise.
“Et le grillon s’était endormi, dès que la dernière bluette avait éteint sa dernière lueur dans la cendre de la cheminée.
“Et moi, il me semblait,—tant la fièvre est incohérente,—que la lune, grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!â€
“Moonlight.“‘Wake, men who sleep,And pray for the dead.’—Cry of the night-watchman.
“Moonlight.“‘Wake, men who sleep,And pray for the dead.’—Cry of the night-watchman.
“Moonlight.“‘Wake, men who sleep,And pray for the dead.’—Cry of the night-watchman.
“Moonlight.
“‘Wake, men who sleep,
And pray for the dead.’
—Cry of the night-watchman.
“Oh! how pleasant it is, when the hour trembles in the belfry, at night, to look at the moon, whose nose is shaped like a golden carolus!3
“Two lepers were complaining under my window, a dog was howling at the cross-ways, and the cricket on my hearth was prophesying in a whisper.
“But soon my ear no longer questioned anything but a profound silence. The lepers had gone back into their kennels, at the sound of Jacquemart beating his wife.4
“The dog had fled away up an alley, before the halberds of the watch, rain-soaked, and wind-frozen.
“And the cricket had fallen asleep, as soon as the last spark had put out its last glimmer in the ashes of the fire-place.
“And, as for me, it seemed to me—fever is so incoherent—that the moon, wrinkling her face, put out her tongue at me like a man who has been hanged.â€
The moon put out her tongue at her faithful admirer, and helped him neither to honey-dew nor to the milk of Paradise. His biographers do not agree as to the way he lived during his few remaining years. Sainte-Beuve says that he was a private secretary, and that he wrote in various inconspicuous newspapers. M. Séché, to whom we owe a great deal of new information, thinks that these employments are not likely to have held Bertrand for long. About 1835, he found in Eugène Renduel a publisher forGaspard de la Nuit. He sold the right to print an edition of 800 copies, of which 300 were to be called “Keepsake Fantastique,†for the sum of 150 francs. The money was paid and the manuscript was put into the publisher’s desk, where, for some reason or other, it remained for a very long time. Its publication was promised from year to year. In a letter written to David d’Angers, in 1837, Bertrand says:“Gaspard de la Nuit, ce livre de mes douces prédilections, où j’ai essayé de créer un nouveau genre de prose, attend le bon vouloir d’Eugène Renduel pour paraître enfin cet automne....†Bertrand did not make the gallant figure in poverty that wasmade, for example, by Richard Steele, who turned bailiffs into liveried footmen, as Whistler is said to have done more recently; but once, at least, he showed a smiling face to misfortune, even if the smile was a little awry. In 1840, the book being still unpublished, he called on his publisher and left a sonnet on him, as an ordinary person might leave a visiting-card. A more charming protest against procrastination was surely never written:
“Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux,Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange:C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange,Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous.A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous?Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange,Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange;Nous avons une vigne—eh bien, vendangeons nous!Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne,La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne,Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes,A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes.Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.â€
“Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux,Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange:C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange,Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous.A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous?Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange,Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange;Nous avons une vigne—eh bien, vendangeons nous!Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne,La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne,Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes,A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes.Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.â€
“Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux,Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange:C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange,Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous.
“Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux,
Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange:
C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange,
Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous.
A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous?Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange,Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange;Nous avons une vigne—eh bien, vendangeons nous!
A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous?
Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange,
Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange;
Nous avons une vigne—eh bien, vendangeons nous!
Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne,La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne,Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.
Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne,
La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne,
Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.
J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes,A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes.Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.â€
J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes,
A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes.
Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.â€
Six months later Bertrand was dead. At least once he had known for several monthsthe inside of a public hospital. He was attacked by phthisis. David d’Angers obtained a grant of 300 francs for him and the promise of a post as librarian; but he was not to leave the hospital again. David, who was himself ill, did all that could be done for him, sent him oranges, and made portraits of him before and after death, and saw to it that his grave-clothes were not of the coarseness deemed fitting for the bodies of the poor. David alone followed his bier, and, no doubt, supplied Sainte-Beuve with the material for his picture (in the introduction to the first edition ofGaspard de la Nuit, published in 1842 by Victor Pavie, who bought the rights from Renduel for the sum originally paid):—“It was the eve of Ascension; a terrible storm was rumbling; the Mass for the dead had been spoken, and the funeral procession did not come. The priest had ended by leaving; the only friend present watched the abandoned remains. At the end of the chapel a sister of charity was decorating an altar with garlands for the next day’s feast.â€
So ended a life that was like a thread blown in the wind, swung this way and that,without weight, and at last torn from its weak hold and whirled away over the edge of the world. Bertrand’s life was that of the real Bohemian, whose struggle is not the less difficult because his head is high and his eyes, instead of seeing where he is going, are full of magnificent things. Bertrand was like a man trying to speak high poetry when his enemy has him by the throat. He saw, and wrote, and wrestled, in a breath; his achievement was scarcely recognised till he was overthrown. And that achievement, such as it was, that little flame he contrived to light before going out himself, kindled a greater, and in its brighter luminosity almost became invisible. But when we look back from thePetits Poèmes en Proseto this little book that suggested their creation, we find that it is not without an independent interest, personal as well as historical. Bertrand himself was somebody, and no book so well as his lets us share the day-dreams of 1830.
1911.