The Transcendental Friend no. 8, 2/99

Issue No. 8, February 1999

Idiosyncratica

Poems of Aloysius Bertrand
translated & presented by Irène Eulriet & Rob Guthrie

Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841) is both Romantic in his use of Medieval motifs and in the sentimental and fantastical tone of his work, and Modernist in his historical significance as the author of the first poem in prose. His "Gaspard of the Night" was of great influence on such writers as Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Baudelaire, the latter of which acknowledges Bertrand as an inspiration to the Quatorze petits poèmes en prose. Gaspard of the Night (1842), Bertrand's major work, is made up of the self-titled, introductory prose poem and of the six books of the "Fantasies of Gaspard of the Night." The poems of the "Fantasies," from which the "Five Fingers of the Hand" is drawn, are, according to the author, from the pen of one Gaspard of the Night, who is said to be the devil himself. —I.E. & R.G.

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from Gaspard of the Night
Fantasies in the style of Rembrandt and Callot

I love Dijon like the child, the wet nurse, whose milk he sucked, like the poet, the damsel who initiated his heart. — Childhood and poetry! How the one is ephemeral and the other deceitful! Childhood is a butterfly that hastens to burn his white wings in the flames of youth and poetry is like the almond tree: its flowers are perfumed and its fruits are bitter.

I was sitting apart one day in the garden of Harquebus, — so called after the arm which there distinguished, in the past, the skill of the rider of the popinjay. Motionless on a bench, one could have compared me to the statue of the Bazire bastion. This masterpiece of the figurist Sévallée and of the painter Guillot represented an abbot, sitting and reading. His dress wasn't missing a thing. From afar, one took him for a personage; from up close one saw that it was a plaster cast.

The walker's cough dissipated the swarm of my dreams. He was a poor devil whose appearance spoke only misery and suffering. In this garden I had already noticed his threadbare frock coat that buttoned up to the chin, his deformed felt hat which never a brush did brush, his hair long like a willow, and combed like a bush of hair, his fleshless hands, akin to the ossuaries, his mocking, sly and sickly physiognomy, that was streamlined from a Nazarene beard; and my conjectures had kindly settled him among the pedestrian artists, violin players and portrait painters, whose insatiable hunger and inextinguishable thirst condemn them to roam the earth in the footsteps of the Wandering Jew.

The two of us were now on the bench. My neighbor leafed through a book, from the pages of which a dried flower issued without his knowing it. I picked it up to give it back to him. The stranger, politely nodding, lifted it to his withered lips and put it back in the mysterious book.

"This flower," I hazarded to tell him, "is without a doubt the symbol of some sweet, shrouded love? Alas! We all have one day in the past that disenchants our future!"

— "You are a poet!" he replied to me, smiling.

We were now bound in conversation. On which spool was the thread going to wind?

"Poet, if that means one who has searched for art!"

— "You searched for art! And did you find it?"

— "Heaven grant that art were no chimera!"

— "A chimera!... I too searched for that!" he cried out with the enthusiasm of genius and an emphasis of triumph.

I besought him to tell me to which charlatan he owes this discovery, art having been for me a needle in a haystack....

"I had resolved," he said, "to search for art like the Rosicrucians searched for the philosopher's stone in the Middle Ages; —art, that philosopher's stone of the nineteenth century!

"One question that first taxed my scholasticism. I asked myself: What is art? — Art is the science of the poet. — A definition as limpid as a diamond of the first water.

"But what are the elements of art? — a second question which I hesitated to answer for a few months. — One evening as I dug by the light of a smoky lamp in the charnel house of an old bookseller's stall, I unearthed a little book in an eccentric and unintelligible language, the title of which was emblazoned with an amphipter that uncoiled these two words on a banderole: Gott — Liebe. For this treasure I paid but a few pennies. I climbed to my attic, and there, in front of the window flooded with moonlight, as I was curiously deciphering the enigmatic book, it suddenly seemed to me that the finger of God was lightly brushing the keyboard of the universal organ. Thus, droning emeralds rose from the bosom of the flowers, whose lips swoon to the kisses of the night. Oh, surprise! Was I dreaming? A terrace, which I did not suspect by the suave emanation of its orange tree, a young girl, clothed in white, who was playing harpsichord, an old man, clothed in black, who was preying on his knees! — The book fell out of my hands.

"I walked down to the tenants of the terrace. The old man was a minister of the reformed religion, who had swapped his cold Thuringian homeland for the mild exile of our Burgundy. The musician was his unique child, blond and frail seventeen year old beauty, whose leaves languidness was thinning out; and the book requested of me was a German eucologe for use in Lutheran churches and bearing a prince's arms of the House of Anhalt-Coëthen.

"Ah! Sir, don't let an ash be stirred that is not yet smothered. Elisabeth is now just a Beatrix with an azure dress. She is dead, Sir, dead! And here is the eucologe where she used to pour forth her timid prayer, the rose where she exhaled her innocent soul. — Flower dried in full bud, as she was! — Closed book like the book of her destiny! — Blessed relics she won't ignore in eternity, because of the tears in which they'll be bathed, after the archangel's trumpet having broken my tombstone, I'll dash beyond all worlds toward the adored Virgin to finally sit by her under the eyes of God!..."

— "And art?" I asked him.

— "What feeling in art is, was my dolorous conquest. I had loved, I had prayed. Gott — Liebe, God and Love! — But what idea in art is, still deluded my curiosity. I thought I would find art's complement in nature. I therefore studied nature.

"I left my dwelling place in the morning and didn't come back until evening. — Sometimes, leaning on the parapet of a bastion lain in ruins, I liked, during long hours, to breathe in the wild and pervasive perfume of the gillyflower that flecked, with its gold bouquets, the ivy husk of Louis XI's feudal and obsolete citadel; to see the tranquil landscape being broken up by a gust of wind, a ray of sunlight, or a shower of rain, the warblers and the fledglings of the hedges dupe each other in that nursery, scattered with shadows and light, the thrushes, which hastened from the mountains, gathering grapes from a vine, high and bushy enough to hide the fable's hart, the crows, set off in a tired flock, swooping down from all points of the sky onto the horse's carcass, now abandoned by the pialey in some verdant shallow; to hear the washerwomen, who let their joyful rouillot ring out at the edge of the Suzon, and the child, who was singing a plaintive melody by turning the rope maker's wheel under the high wall. — Sometimes, I cleared a path for my reveries—of moss and of dew, of silence and of tranquility, far away from the city. How many times did I rob the malevolently haunted thickets of their distaffs of red and tart fruits at the fountain of Jouvence and at the hermitage of Notre-Dame-d'Étang, the fountain of the spirits and the fairies, the devil's hermitage! How many times did I pick up the petrified whelk and the fossilized coral on Saint-Joseph's stony heights, so gullied by the storm! How many times did I catch crayfish in the frenzied fords of Tilles, among the watercresses which shelter the freezing salamander and among water lilies from which the indolent flowers yawn! How many times did I spy the grass snake on those bogged beaches of Saulon which hear only the monotonous coot's scream and the dirge grebe's moaning! How many times did I stud a candle in the subterranean caves of Asnières, where the stalactite slowly distills the eternal drop of water from the clepsydra of the centuries! How many times did I wail my horn atop the perpendicular rocks of Chèvre-Morte, the diligence struggling up the path three hundred feet under my smog's throne! And even at night, the summer night, balsamic and diaphanous, how many times did I, like a lycanthrope around a fire lit in the grassy, deserted valley, jig until the first knocks of the lumberjack's axe shook the oaks! — Ah! Sir, how much allure does solitude have for the poet! I would have been happy to live in the woods, making no more noise than the bird that quenches its thirst in the spring, than the bee that pecks at the hawthorn, than the acorn, whose fall bursts the foliage!...

* * *

The Five Fingers of the Hand

An honest family where there's never been bankruptcy, where
no one was ever hung.
—The Kin of Jean de Nivelle

The thumb is that fat Flemish innkeeper of a mocking, saucy temperament, who is smoking at his door under the sign of the double beer of March.

The index finger is his wife, dry virago like a stockfish, who, from morning on, slaps her servant, of whom she is jealous and caresses the bottle, of which she is amorous.

The middle finger is their son, rough hewn companion, who would be a soldier if he weren't a brewer and who would be a horse if he weren't a man.

The ring finger is their daughter, nimble and annoying Zerbine, who sells lace to the ladies and doesn't sell smiles to the gentlemen.

The pinky finger is the youngest of the family, crying brat who always shakes about at his mother's belt like a little child hung at the fang of an ogress.

The five fingers of the hand are the most fantastic stock that ever ornamented the borders of the noble city of Harlem.

Notes:

Popinjay. TN: a heraldic charge or bearing; the sign of an inn; the figure of a parrot fixed on a pole as a mark to shoot at.

Amphipter. EN: In the terminology of heraldry, a winged serpent or dragon that one sees on the occasional coat of arms.

Eucologue. EN: A prayer book for Sunday church services and religious feasts.

Anhalt-Coëthen. EN: The dukedom of Anhalt was one of the states of Germany, enclaved within the Prussian province of Saxony. Coëthen was a city of this dukedom.

Citadel. This castle, which was forced upon Dijon as a result of Louis XI's tyrannical mistrust at the time after Charles the Bold's death, when he seized the dukedom to the detriment of the legitimate heiress Marie of Burgundy, shot many times against the city, that certainly paid it back in its own coin. Nowadays, its hoary towers are used as the retreat of a regiment of gendarmes.

Pialey. Skinner of dead horses.

Rouillot. EN: Name of the battledore in the Burgundian dialect.

Suzon. A torrent that, in the past, used to run freely through Dijon. Its waters are nowadays collected in vaulted canals at the ramparts of the city. — The Val-de-Suzon's trout are famous in Burgundy.

Hermitage. Notre-Dame-d'Étang's chapel, nowadays closed, was occupied in 1630 by both a chaplain and a hermit. The latter having been murdered by his companion, a judgement of parliament condemned him to be put to the wheel on Morimont's place.

Tilles. Generic name given to many little rivers which water the plains-region between Dijon and the Saône.

Lycanthrope. EN: Werewolf, man-wolf, a kind of goblin, which, according to the legend, wanders the night transformed as a wolf.

Zerbine. Allusion to the Zerbinette of Molière's Treacheries of Scapin (Fourberies de Scapin), personage of the Italian comedy: a lively, vivacious, young, albeit dignified girl.