external world. Not the least of the effects frequently created in theComplaintes is that of the pathos of objects: pianos and barrel-organs, an abandoned villa or an empty casino, hospital beds or old photographs; less obviously, but equally poignantly, such things as a Sèvres vase illustrating a pastoral idyll, or a lopsided windowblind on which hangs a forgotten pair of gaiters.

In 'Plainte d'automne', a prose poem that … Laforgue admired, Mallarmé had asked why the vulgar music of the barrel-organ, which can, of course, be seen as the musical equivalent of the folk-song, should have the power to move him deeply: 'Maintenant qu'il murmurait un air joyeusement vulgaire et qui mit la gaîté au cœur des faubourgs, un air suranné, banal: d'où vient que sa ritournelle m'allait à l'âme et me faisait pleurer comme une ballade romantique?' What has been described as 'une esthétique de la platitude', is based on the paradox of the banality that gives rise to deep emotion, and fittingly, it owed its origin to an event similar to that referred to by Mallarmé.

It was the celebration of the inauguration of the lion of Belfort, the statute in the place Denfert Rochereau, on 20 September 1880, and Laforgue recorded it vividly in a fragment that reveals the triviality of the occasion, as well as his own sense of alienated desolation.

—Fête de nuit. Inaugurat, du lion de Belfort—pauvre—triste—temps triste. place d'Enfer, Observatoire, fête foraine. Des chevaux [de] bois tourant. des balançoires, des marchands de ferrailles, des faiseurs de caramels, des somnambules, des tourniquets où des étudiants ont gagné un vase de nuit au fond duquel un œil en émail peint regardait. Un cirque avec des toiles grossièrement peintes éclairées par des quinquets fumeux et fétides, deux femmes en maillot fané se promenant sur les planches, gueulant. Des musiciens faisant rage dans des cuivres bosselés dominés par la grosse caisse, boum! boum! Un paillasse avec un large pantalon, montant jusqu'au cou et serrant les chevilles, au dos une horloge brodée, perruque d'étoupe rouge, chapeau pointu blanc, masque de farine qui se plissait, se ridait quand il se pâmait sans conviction (ce monsieur, ce frère a ses soucis comme vous et moi—Drôle!).

Une noce entière occupait un manège de chevaux de bois, la mariée en jupon sali dans tous les gargots graisseux de l'arrondissement, se disputait avec le loueur, lui mettait ses deux poings sous le nez. Le marié bêtement s'esclaffait. Une femme de la noce vomissait des flaques de vin, où un chien lappait. Une autre lui tapait maternellement dans le dos pour exciter, faciliter; bougonnant—il n'y avait pas de bon sens après avoir bu et mangé toute la journée à aller tourner sur des chevaux de bois.

Des ménages d'ivrognes. Un souteneur faisant sortir une bande de filles dont l'une adorable et triste avait un bleu sous l'oeil, elles buvaient du vin—odeurs de quinquets, glapissement des montreurs, mélancolie des orgues jouant des airs de carrefours d'automne, en haut les étoiles vierges et éternelles—Drôle de planète!

In this passage Laforgue observes the human pathos of the failed festivity. Dissonances prevail: the crude student humour, the hints of dingy poverty, the clowns' unconvincing gestures, the vulgar arguments of bride and groom, the bride's soiled dress, the pretty young prostitute with a black eye. An outsider, Laforgue could have written with Charles Cros: 'Moi je vis la vie à côté, | Pleurant alors que c'est la fête.' He was to relive even these memories 'à côté', as he revived them for the Complaintes amid the luxury of the German court, which, while it suited his innate yearning for elegance, contributed a further sense of exile. Already in these 1880 notes he registered an ironic distance from the scene, with his concluding 'Drôle de planète'. The complainte emerged specifically from the singing of the two women, an unaccompanied singing that Laforgue described unromantically as 'gueulant'. That and other refrains, of course: 'Pour goûter cette chose', he wrote later to Kahn, 'il faudrait chanter les refrains sur un air de cor de chasse que j'ai entendu dans mon enfance en province.' But it took time for him to see that he must in a sense be these women, and that he must impersonate not only them, but the many voices at the festivity. The truth that the 'sincere' tone was inevitably insincere, that only oblique methods could hope to capture the actual complexity of his response to life had still to be fully assimilated. He continued, at first, simply to record his personal lament:

Oh! la vie est trop triste, incurablement triste!
Aux fêtes d'ici-bas j'ai toujours sangloté.
('Soir de carnaval')

or to describe such scenes objectively:

J'errais par la banlieue en fête, un soir d'été.
Et, triste d'avoir vu cette femelle enceinte

Glapissant aux quinquets devant sa toile peinte,
Près des chevaux de bois je m'étais arrêté.
('Hue, carcan!')

Two early complaintes, 'Complainte de l'organiste de Nice' and 'La Chanson du petit hypertrophique', which Laforgue rejected for his volume, prefigure his later style. In both of them the main character is a double, on whom the poet projects his suffering. He probably rejected them because of the strong emotional element that they both contain, allowing into his volume rewritings of early poems with a more obviously satirical slant, but this now seems a mistake. Both are subtle poems that show how cliché can be rejuvenated to serve effects of pathos. In the first Laforgue describes the artist's exaggerated sorrow at the imagined death of a girl he does not know, and the final irony is directed at the poet for trying to compose a poem from so 'fictional' a subject. The idea is one that Laforgue did not abandon: he developed it in a later complainte and in the eleventh of the Derniers Vers. The irony of 'La Chanson du petit hypertrophique' is of a similar kind. There is no attempt to mock the sufferings of the child narrator, but childish slang and metrical abbreviations ridicule the kind of poetry that might be expected to result from such a theme.

The simplest form of complainte used by Laforgue is that based on a popular song. The well-known words and tune form a background to the revised version. The method—if we consider the 'Complainte du pauvre jeune homme', based on 'Quand le bonhomm' revint du bois'—takes a tragic narrative, here the suicide of a young man whose wife has abandoned him, and treats it with the anonymity and detachment of a newspaper item. As with Mallarmé's barrel-organ, the insistently cheerful rhythm drives home the pathos of the banal but tragic plot. The simplicity is deceptive, and must be so if the poem is not to be merely trivial itself. The young man is a persona of the poet, sensitive, lonely, given to ennui. His wife's desertion causes the tragedy, but the scene has already been well prepared. His is a 'belle âme', ill at ease in the modern world. While nostalgia for the nobility of soul of former happier times pervades the poem, it is simultaneously mocked: a belle âme is not merely something not 'found' in modern times: it is something, apparently man-made, that is no longer 'produced'. Laforgue's 'rewritings' complicate and fuse worlds, as do the neologisms that he invented most successfully at this period, and which he described as 'cet accouplement de mots qui n'ont qu'une harmonie de rêve mais font dans la réalité des couples impossibles (et qui ont pour moi le charme insoluble, obsédant, entêtant des antinomies en métaphysique …)'. In the 'Complainte de l'époux outragé', the rewriting of the little tale of adultery that is the subject of the song 'Qu'allais-tu faire à la fontaine?', Laforgue mixes religion and the erotic, parodying the solemn treatment often given to this combination in contemporary verse. In the 'Complainte de Lord Pierrot' the folk-song 'Au clair de la lune', a common-place rhyme about the ruses of physical seduction, is the prelude to the most melancholy, idealistic, and rambling of divagations on the subject of sexual desire. 'Mon ami Pierrot' becomes the enigmatic 'Lord Pierrot', half English reticence, half commedia dell'arte mask. It is his 'cervelle' not his 'chandelle' that is dead, and the shared assonance ironically drives home the distance between the worlds that the two versions inhabit. As the later moralité 'Persée et Andromède' moves from one legend, that of Perseus and Andromeda, to a second, that of Beauty and the Beast, so here one folk-song, 'Au clair de la lune', gives way to another, 'Il pleut, il pleut bergère', appropriate to the poem's final plunge into melancholy.

In the 'Complainte de cette bonne lune' the folk-song 'Sur le pont d'Avignon' serves to introduce a celestial dance in 'l'giron du Patron' (God), in which the moon, a Cinderella-figure among the dazzling stars, far from finding her Prince Charming, rejects all invitations to the dance, because of her concern for her poor sister, the earth. So, instead of a picture in which 'all's right with the world'—and with heaven, too—which the original owed to the magical and religious associations of ritual dances on bridges, we are offered a humorous debunking of all such 'certainties', as the dialogue between the two parties degenerates into a vulgar brawl between celestial bodies. 'Est-ce assez idiot?', Laforgue wrote to [Gustave] Kahn when he sent him the preposterously inventive 'Complainte du fœtus de Poète', and one might ask the same of this poem.

There are rewritings that are less frivolous but equally transform their 'model'. Goethe's poem 'Es war ein König in Thule', the model for the 'Complainte du roi de Thulé', is a lyric celebrating marital fidelity, symbolized by the golden goblet bequeathed to the king by his wife on her death, which he hurls into the waves as his own death approaches. Against this uplifting example, Laforgue sets one that he places even higher. His king substitutes renunciation for fidelity. Instead of the devoted couple, we have a solitary figure, described in a cosmic landscape of great splendour, descending to mysterious polar regions to console a dying sun. In the final stanza the image of the absolute, to which the 'real' is sacrificed, is offered to young lovers as a more elevated and inspiring goal than theirs—a vision of 'amour pur'. Goethe's romantic depiction of conjugal love in the face of age and death lingers behind a poem that offers a more modern and ambiguous image, the power of which depends on the beauty of exalted negation:

This poem, like the 'Complainte de Lord Pierrot', might well be described as 'de la psychologie dans une forme de rêve', but poems where the model is woven into the text, itself forming part of the dream, best fit this description. The 'Complainte des pianos qu'on entend dans les quartiers aisés' is an example, Here the complainte, 'Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses I Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas', is introduced as the words that accompany the piano notes that the narrator, a solitary flâneur, hears as he wanders through the streets in the town's well-to-do suburbs. The poem is composed of four regularly repeated strains, each set in counterpoint to the others. Differing line- and stanza-lengths make the pattern perfectly clear: two belong essentially to the narrator, and are followed by two that represent the thoughts of the girls whom he imagines playing the piano in the seclusion of their homes or convent schools. The poem moves from present to future as the narrator envisages the loveless mariages de convenance for which the girls are destined in place of the romantic love to which they aspire and which is the subject of the ritournelles they practise on the piano. The whole poem—both the image of the narrator, similarly lost in an inner world that aspires to the romantic, and the image of the present desert and future emotional death reserved for the girls—has sprung from the overheard piano tune, itself inseparable from the words of a popular song. Two lines from the song, repeated five times, are subtly modulated by the lines that complete the quatrain, in each case offering a glimpse of a different aspect of the girls' lives, and moving in an imaginative progression that leads to the final brutal glimpse of a future, the reverse of their aspirations, from which they will look back to their bored piano-playing days with longing:

'Tu t'en vas et tu nous laisses,
Tu nous laiss's et tu t'en vas.
Que ne suis-je morte à la messe!
O mois, ô linges, ô repas!'

The complainte is not impenetrable, as has been suggested, but it is built on an elliptical technique that asks the reader to juxtapose and reconstruct its contrasting and mobile elements. The elements are themselves elliptical, and this is appropriate since the barely conscious world towards which the poem is directed speaks most convincingly in brief, intense ejaculations. The poem represents a journey inwards from the deceptively urbane and leisurely opening stanza, with its undercurrents of obsession and its reference to nerves where the heart would be more natural:

Menez l'âme que les Lettres ont bien nourrie,
Les pianos, les pianos, dans les quartiers aisés!
Premiers soirs, sans pardessus, chaste flânerie,
Aux complaintes des nerfs incompris ou brisés.

Laforgue's volume of Complaintes was found incomprehensible by most reviewers, and this despite the fact that the 'modern' and the burlesque were fashionable at the time, with the supposed Adoré Floupette's Les Déliquescences, which appeared in May 1885, being an example of a more frivolous excursion into parody. The tradition by now included Charles Cros's Le Coffret de Santal (1873), Corbière's Les Amours jaunes (1873), and Richepin's La Chanson des gueux (1876). But the Complaintes were just too baffling, too 'modern'—'de l'ultra-moderne', as one perceptive reviewer put it: 'Si vous aimez la vraie modernité, pas celle d'hier ni d'aujourd'hui, mais celle de demain, je vous conseillerai … Les Complaintes de M. Jules Laforgue. C'est de 1' ultra-moderne.' The majority of reviewers felt that they were being fooled. 'Si ça continue', one wrote, 'il suffira dans six ans … d'écrire comme un Javanais: pour être un poète de génie.' Laforgue wrote one review himself, made emendations to another, written by Charles Henry, and was amazed at the perspicacity of one critic, Léo d'Orfer. His review stressed the remarkable range of the Complaintes, the aspect that we shall consider next. But it also described what has been the present subject: how 'des lambeaux de refrains populaires, des demicouplets de vieilles romances criaillées dans les cours, … toutes les chansons et chansonnettes des rues, des bois, de l'alcôve, de l'église, de la causerie bourgeoise, des grands discours, du peuple et de la solitude' could be accommodated to 'la sauce de la complainte'. 'Pour ma part', d'Orfer wrote, 'j'avais rêvé un genre de poèmes où tous les prosaïsmes et les vulgarités de la vie réelle trouveraient place à côté d'envolées superbes, les uns étant l'intelligence des autres.' This combination was what he had found in Laforgue's Complaintes, and it is one that the twentieth century, schooled to an aesthetic that finds dissonance indispensable, is prepared to take seriously.

MULTIPLE VOICES

J.-P. Richard points out the variety and ambiguity to be found in even the titles of the Complaintes. Some are votive laments, pleas dedicated to an external power ('Complainte propitiatoire à l'Inconscient', 'Complainte à Notre-Dame des soirs'); some are laments whose theme is an aspect of the insufficiency of life ('Complainte sur certains ennuis', 'Complainte sur certains temps déplacés'); most use the genitive form (de, du, des), but, since they employ both subjective and objective genitives, even this does not confer unity on them. The reader is, as Richard suggests, disorientated:

Il arrive pourtant que l'ambiguïté, toujours grammaticalement possible, de la préposition s'actualise peu ou prou dans l'énoncé de tel ou tel titre, et que le lecteur ne sache plus dès lors, au cœur d'un petit trouble signifiant, si l'être nommé dans la seconde partie de la séquence titre est celui qui porte la parole ou celui que la parole vise.

As we have seen in the case of the 'Complainte des pianos', the poem cannot be read simply as the lament of the pianos. It is dependent on a range of agents, and illustrates a number of subjectivities: on the one hand, the notes of music, the popular song, the Catholic bourgeois setting; on the other, the 'psychologies' of the girls, the narrator, and the poet. The result, in the laments of musical instruments, is a situation in which the discourse (again in Richard's words) 'tout à la fois s'adresse à eux [musical instruments], traite d'eux et constitue une transposition (phrasée) de ce qu'ils sont censés prononcer (directement) ou connoter (indirectement) sur le mode musical', and the final effect is 'un certain flou de l'énonciation qui répond, on le sait, à l'un des effets les plus vivement recherchés par la poétique laforguienne: la délocalisation du moi, la confusion discursive du sujet et de l'objet, le demi-naufrage (joué) du sens.' This effect is further increased by the fact that the representation of a multiplicity of voices is a deliberate aim; voices that are merely overheard, that emerge from a void, mobile voices representing moments in a changing narrative, and whose mobility matches that of the equally variable moods and personae of the narrator. Laforgue had learnt from Hartmann, as Warren Ramsey points out [in Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, 1953], 'to think of the human individual as an aggregate, a sum of many individuals'.

In this climate of ambiguity and uncertainty what order and consistency do we find? Y.-A. Favre argues that we have a 'livre' rather than an 'album'; that is, a highly structured whole, and there is evidence that this is the case with all Laforgue's volumes, with the exception of the Derniers Vers, about whose intended final structure we know almost nothing. Plans were not rigid, however. The original Complaintes, significantly called simply 'Quelques Complaintes de la vie', first numbered twenty poems, then grew to forty and to fifty with the help of Laforgue's publisher Léon Vanier, 'Fabius Cunctator', as Laforgue named him. The new poems were interpolated casually, and when Laforgue sent Vanier a fiftieth poem, he told him to place it 'n'importe où' in the volume. He insisted on the placing of two key poems, however: the opening 'Préludes autobiographiques', which was to be 'answered' by the late 'Complainte du Sage de Paris': 'Cette préface explique la dernière et longue litanie qui ferme le volume.' But, with characteristic flexibility, he added two short poems to this litany, closing his volume in a more oblique and light-hearted fashion. One is the 'Complainte des complaintes', which serves as an apology for, and defence of, the volume: the other, the 'Complainte-épitaphe' uses disyllabic quatrains and tercets in a parody of the sonnet form. Pointing forward to future exercises in ellipticism, such as 'Avant-dernier Mot', and taking a leaf from various contemporary fumiste productions, it sums up the themes and the method of the volume, the latter by reference to other art-forms, in a supreme distancing act:

La Femme,
Mon âme:
Ah! quels
Appels!
Pastels
Mortels,
Qu'on blâme
Mes gammes!
Un fou
S'avance,
Et danse.

Silence …
Lui, où?
Coucou.

'La Femme', 'mon àme' are, of course, seen through a dedication to the unconscious, which, deliberately blurred with an ascetic Buddhism, is the subject of the early votive poems. Even the 'Complainte-Placet de Faust fils' is, as Favre points out, a plea to nature. (It is simultaneously a parody of Sully Prudhomme's sentimental poem 'Prière' and of Goethe's Faust's intellectual and guilt-ridden universe.) The volume represents a personal and moral journey from rejection and disillusionment to some kind of acceptance or resignation, a schema surprisingly parallel to Laforgue's plans for the Sanglot, a fact that might easily be overlooked because of the new volume's contrasting register and because love, which was largely absent from the Sanglot poems, has now become a central theme.

The second poem of the volume, 'Complainte propitiatoire à l'Inconscient', already sets up the technique of parallel discourses that we saw in the 'Complainte des pianos'. Here, more simply, the leading couplet takes the form of a prayer addressed to the unconscious, while the following quatrain develops an interior monologue in which 'la Pensée', from which the unconscious should deliver man, is, all too obviously, failing to find a solution to his distress. Both discourses follow a linear progression: the couplets offer ordered parodie echoes of the Lord's Prayer ('Votre Nom', 'Volonté', 'quotidienne', 'Pardonnez-nous nos offenses', 'délivrez-nous'), while the quatrains move through the obvious range of possible human ideals: love as an absolute, the Christianity of the mystic, that of the missionary, the 'religion' of art. The intellect from which man is to be delivered is both a 'lèpre originelle' and an 'ivresse insensée', since it has created these false and impossible ideals. The advance in technique over such a Sanglot poem as 'Marche funèbre pour la mort de la terre', which also functions by ordered antithesis, is striking. In 'Marche funèbre' the refrain is unchanging and the monologue explicit. Here we inhabit immediately a puzzling, elliptical, and challenging world, with parody at its centre.

Fifteen of the Complaintes are composed on this model, which can, as we saw in the 'Complainte des pianos', become more intricate. In that poem each voice was subdivided. In other complaintes the dialogue is extended by a third voice, frequently that of a narrator, who either introduces the poem, encloses it in a first and final stanza, or develops a contrasting point of view in its conclusion. The two opposed but interrelating main voices usually contrast a general with a particular view. In the 'Complainte de l'orgue de barbarie', for example, the barrel-organ regurgitates the commonplaces of life in disabused and cynical five-syllable quatrains. These alternate with couplets—a stanza not commonly employed for the nerve-centre of a poem—expressing individual emotion: here that of a woman, and moving from ecstasy to fear and despair. These ordered snatches of an individual's life, which nevertheless illustrate the idées reçues of the street organ, progress, as in the 'Complainte des pianos', from romantic dreams to desolation, and emphasize here also that 'la vie est vraie et criminelle'. The poem thus conveys a sense of passing time by means of narrative, and of simultaneity by means of its parallel discourses.

In the 'Complainte des grands pins dans une villa abandonnée' the personified street organ is replaced by the pines, and the personal lament of a disinherited and lonely young man provides the human narrative. The personification of objects that act as witnesses to the human situation is one way of diversifying the moi, since Laforgue's voice, already lent to the introductory narrator and to the young man (or girl) who is the main character, has 'become' also the voice of the pines (or street organ). The poem is an amalgam of voices, functioning in relation to each other. It is an amalgam or 'fugue' of moods also, since wit constantly breaks through, tempering the evident pathos. The sun is sulking, the clouds are 'paquets de bitume', the young man will go to Montmartre 'en cinquième classe'. And yet the lament, carried by the moaning of the pines in the wind, has the ability to inspire what Mallarmé, speaking of the street organ, called 'desperate reverie': 'l'orgue de Barbarie, dans le crépuscule du souvenir, m'a fait désespérément rêver…. Je la [its crude music] savourai lentement et je ne lançai pas un sou par la fenêtre de peur de me déranger et de m'apercevoir que l'instrument ne chantait pas seul.'

A complainte of which we happen, quite exceptionally, to have an early draft, 'Complainte du fœtus de poète', introduces the contrasting strain only in the later version, illustrating Laforgue's inclination to complicate and to 'blur' his original texts. 'Je les retoucherai, je les noierai un peu plus', he wrote to his sister: 'La poésie doit être à la vie ce qu'un concert de parfums est à un parterre de fleurs.' As he did this, he was drawing poetry closer to the related art-forms of music and painting, establishing the 'pont mystérieux' of which Delacroix wrote: 'L'écrivain écrit presque tout pour être compris. Dans la peinture il s'établit comme un pont mystérieux entre l'âme des personnages et celle du spectateur.'

The techniques of theatre were useful to Laforgue in this attempt. Two complaintes ('Complainte des voix sous le figuier bouddhique', and 'Complainte des formalités nuptiales') employ named characters and, consequently, display considerable formal variety. The former, expanding mingled Buddhist and Hartmannian sentiments, was one that Laforgue considered important, writing to his publisher: 'Une erreur dans cette pièce me désolerait.' Both point forward in their form to Le Concile féerique, a drama composed of unpublished poems taken from Des Fleurs de bonne volonté.

Techniques drawn from the monologue form developed in the theatre of Coquelin the Younger abound: colloquialisms, the direct address to a supposed spectator, the apostrophe, the aside. One remembers that Mallarmé had originally hoped that 'L'Après-midi d'un faune' might be recited at the Théâtre-Français, and that its second title, after he rejected 'Improvisation d'un faune', was 'Monologue d'un faune'. A number of the personae that Laforgue employs for the self are … connected with legend or folk-song: the Pierrot, the King of Thule, the knight errant, the poor young man, the betrayed husband, the 'blackboulé', or more fantastic versions of the self: the son of Faust, the foetus of the poet, the incurable angel, the poor human body. They are 'characters' who, however strange, are lent familiarity by the definite article that always introduces them. But this familiarity is also belied by the twist that Laforgue gives to the expected personage. We have a knight errant whose only concern appears to be his inability to inspire love, an angel who regrets nothing so much as his purity, a poet-foetus in place of Baudelaire's infant-poet. Antecedents are not necessarily literary. Bizet's Carmen, an opera much in vogue throughout Western Europe in 1885, provides the twist in the 'Complainte des blackboulés'. By quoting the opening words of the famous Escamillo/Carmen duet, 'Si tu m'aimes', Laforgue places behind the 'blackboulé', who is nursing a sadistic revenge, the dramatic figure of the betrayed Don José, and thus behind the harsh introspection of an apparently morbid psyche the normalization provided by the legitimate passions of a tragic narrative.

Sometimes the stylized persona is abandoned, and we are given monologues more directly attributable to the poet. The result is not simplification—rather the reverse. The more successful and substantial of these poems illustrate the divisions in the self that will be further developed in the Derniers Vers. 'Complainte d'une convalescence en mai', for example, is an occasional poem with a mockphilosophical theme. The tedium of convalescence leads to meditation on life's fundamental problems and to a recognition that the narrator's 'grandes angoisses métaphysiques I Sont passées à l'état de chagrins domestiques'. The fragility of the narrator's affirmations is stressed in a dialogue with the self that employs mobile pronouns, a technique that Laforgue uses elsewhere. A 'je' takes issue with a self-addressed 'tu' in free Apollinairean fashion ('Et toi, cerveau confit dans l'alcool de l'Orgueil'), and the two add up to an internal 'nous' ('Nous savons ce qu'il nous reste à faire'). This 'nous' echoes the external 'nous' of the poem's epigraph, the well-known statement referring to Pascal's barbed iron belt: 'Nous n'avons su toutes ces choses qu'après sa mort', an epigraph that, while it indicates that the subject of the poem will be concealed pain, emphasizes also the distance between the Pascalian world and the mundane region inhabited by this poem. The complainte employs the alexandrine couplet to combine the presentation of suffering with its subversion ('Convalescence bien folle, comme on peut voir'), while offering on the way a number of bold elliptical formulations: 'Si la Mort, de son van, avait chosé mon être', for example, or 'Qui m'a jamais rêvé?' [emphasis added].

'Complainte d'un certain dimanche', another interior monologue, is an occasional poem whose occasion, the departure of the loved woman, becomes clear only in the third stanza. Before this we have aphorisms about the relations between the sexes, strongly coloured by the endof-the-affair moment of which we are as yet unaware. Employing the discontinuous technique that Laforgue was to develop further in free verse, it again evokes the disunity of the self. The stanza that introduces the love theme displays three stances towards love in only four lines. We move from apparently bewildered self-questioning to an expression of overstated devotion, and from this to a stock romantic description, the cliché element in which leaves the emotion (such as it is) intact:

Shifting stances, again emphasized by a mobile narrative method (the girl is both 'elle' and 'tu'), reflect the frightening inner lack of centre, which is set against the equally alarming anonymity of the external world. Loss of a sense of identity does not imply any absence of feeling, however. Philosophical generalizations and pseudo-conclusions are interrupted by shock expressions of fear or horror:

Que d'yeux, en éventail, en ogive, ou d'inceste,
Depuis que l'Être espère, ont réclamé leurs droits!
O ciels, les yeux pourrissent-ils comme le reste?

When the narrator finally confesses his fear of solitude, which was the theme of many Sanglot poems, we find that we have now been offered a landscape in which to situate it, and that it is a nuanced landscape, created from a series of fleeting perceptions—snapshots, as it were, necessarily surrounded by unbridgeable gaps between the pictures, which nevertheless inhabit a recognizable and all too human psychological terrain.

Frequently, the narrator surfaces from these explorations of inner turmoil in a final neat reversal or disclaimer, a technique that we find in the Derniers Vers. In this poem it is the shift in the last line from 'Faudra-t-il vivre monotone?' to 'Tâchons de vivre monotone'; in the 'Complainte d'une convalescence en mai' we have the (already quoted) dismissive 'Convalescence bien folle, comme on peut voir'; it is the 'C'était donc sérieux?' of 'Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot'; the unexpected throw-away, 'Ces êtres-là sont adorables', of 'Complainte sur certains ennuis'; or the Eliotesque ending of 'Complainte des débats mélancoliques et littéraires':

O Hélène, j'erre en ma chambre;
Et tandis que tu prends le thé,
Là-bas, dans l'or d'un fier septembre,
Je frissonne de tous mes membres,
En m'inquiétant de ta santé.
Tandis que, d'un autre côté …

The reversals and disclaimers, like the use of the refrain, illustrate the centrality to the volume of techniques of counterpoint. They can be found almost buried in stylistic devices. 'Grande Complainte de la ville de Paris'—a poem that hurls discord and fragmentation at the reader, and is, correspondingly, the only poem in the volume to be written in prose—contains units recuperable as octosyllables and alexandrines, as well as many rhyming effects that set up disturbing echoes of the traditionally rhythmical at the heart of the poem's prose modernity. 'Complainte d'un autre dimanche' uses internal crossed rhyme, as Grojnowksi has convincingly shown [in Jules Laforgue et l'originalité, 1988], to create the en abyme effect of a poem within a poem. Contrapuntal links are formed between poems; this poem, for example, stands in apposition to its predecessor, 'Complainte d'un certain dimanche', confronting and reflecting it. The same can be said of the two Lord Pierrot poems. But chiefly, of course, systems of opposition and relationship function between the parts of the poem. The narrator's personal lament in 'Complainte d'un autre dimanche' is set against the apparent objectivity of a precisely observed pictorial setting that turns out to be an accurate reflection of the narrator's internal landscape. The transience of the former, emphasized by first and last lines (C'était un très-au vent d'octobre paysage'; 'Ce, fut un bien au vent d'octobre paysage … '), echoes the human instability that, as we have seen, is the true subject of the poem.

Ultimately, despite the scope it offered for the portrayal of a range of different and changing voices, Laforgue began to find the complainte form limiting rather than liberating. It had enabled him to discover and explore a number of ironic distancing techniques, but the many voices had become, self-confessedly, 'gerbes … d'un défunt moi'. He moved on, at first to the still greater artifice of L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la lune, and finally, in the Derniers Vers, to an abandonment of formal stylization—and even of versification—in his constant attempt to record the impact of reality, or, in Gide's later words, to present 'la rivalité du monde réel et de la représentation que nous nous en faisons'.

The aim pursued in the Complaintes necessarily involved breaking some of the venerated rules of French versification and, therefore, adopting a vers libéré. This might be thought natural in any case in a volume that derived its inspiration from folk-song. But the same critics who found the work intolerably obscure no doubt considered that Laforgue, like Donne before him, 'for not keeping of accent deserved hanging'. Laforgue's handling of rhyme came in for particularly vehement treatment. One critic had the wit at least to realize that the transgressions were intended: 'Il est évident qu'on dira des Complaintes que ce n'est pas rimé suivant les règles données par le maître Banville. Mais cette indépendance prosodique a au moins cela pour elle, qu'elle n'est pas le résultat de l'impuissance. C'est voulu.'

Laforgue insisted that his poems were 'rimées à la diable', and by this he meant that he had sought out bold and interesting rhymes and had neglected convention. Instead of alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, 'Complainte d'un autre dimanche' uses feminine rhymes throughout, a technique that Verlaine had pioneered for effects of delicate evocation. Laforgue rhymes for the ear and not the eye. He seems actually to cultivate the juxtaposition of singular and plural rhyming words that he had recommended to Mme Mültzer already in 1882. Rimes pauvres are common, but so are intensive rhyming effects, created by repeating a rhyme three or more times, often in complex patterns related to the formal structure of the poem. ('Complainte de la bonne défunte' uses the same two feminine rhymes throughout the entire poem; 'Complainte des printemps' uses the same feminine rhyme in the poem's quatrains only; 'Autre Complainte de l'orgue de barbarie' uses each rhyme in its main stanzas three times, the refrain rhyme six times.) Experimentation is constantly in evidence. In 'Complainte des pubertés difficiles' one rhyme is regularly carried over from one stanza to the next, reducing the separateness of stanzas. In 'Complainte de la fin des journées' the refrain uses the same rhymes throughout, and is thus set apart from the main stream of the poem. In 'Complainte de l'ange incurable' the rhymes of the first two couplets are regularly repeated in the poem's short refrain, and act as wan echoes of the main text. Dissonances occur in place of, and in addition to, rhymes, as in the complex patterning of 'Complainte du roi de Thulé', and can result, as here, in a sense of subtle musicality, caused by the combination of rhyme and the related dissonance, of repetition and a variation on it. Rhyming on proper names or on words drawn from foreign vocabularies (and sometimes on both at once) lends the rhyme exoticism or humour; as in 'Missouri' and 'Paris' ('Complainte de la lune en province'), 'draps' and 'Lèda' ('Complainte de Lord Pierrot'), or 'affiche' and 'sandwiche' ('Complainte du pauvre chevalier-errant'). The 'sans-gêne' of Laforgue's rhymes, the quality he twice praised in Kahn's, is one of their most engaging characteristics, as can be seen in the following:

Les fiords bleus de la Norwège
Les pôles, les mers, que sais-je?
('Complainte de la lune en province')

Si tu savais, maman Nature,
Comme Je m'aime en tes ennuis,
Tu m'enverrais une enfant pure,
Chaste aux "et puis?"('Complainte-Placet de Faust fils')

or in the more provocative lines of 'Complainte d'une convalescence en mai', with their humorous hesitancy:

Je ne veux accuser personne, bien qu'on eût
Pu, ce me semble, mon bon cœur étant connu …

Laforgue's sensitivity to the weighting of syllables and to relative degrees of stress leads to a range of novel rhythmical effects, which we can be sure were calculated. Short lines, like stanzas, are contrasted with long, the caesura is eradicated or the line disrupted by unexpected or frequent breaks, the impair is used for effects of disharmony and ambivalence, notably in the hendecasyllable of 'Complainte du fœtus de poète', with its constantly shifting main stress. In 'Complainte du pauvre chevalier-errant' Laforgue created what he called a 'strophe absolument inédite à vers de 14 pieds', which he asked Henry to emphasize in the review that he wrote of the Complaintes. These experimental rhyming and syllabic combinations formed part of Laforgue's attempt to make details of technique relate to meaning. 'Que pensez-vous du vers de onze pieds?', he wrote to Kahn, 'et par la même occasion, que pensez-vous aussi de l'infini?' As a result, even his experimental lines have an integrity such as might be expected from more predetermined forms. A more rigid approach towards prosody would have seemed to him, paradoxical as this may appear, a betrayal of the artistic purity to which he aspired. He set out the position most directly when he defended himself against accusations of imitating Corbière: 'Corbière ne s'occupe ni de la strophe ni des rimes (sauf comme un tremplin à concetti) et jamais de rythmes, et je m'en suis préoccupé au point d'en apporter de nouvelles et de nouveaux. J'ai voulu faire de la symphonie et de la mélodie.' The 'melody' involved using a vocabulary that frequently appeared unpoetic—familiar and tongue-in-cheek—when this contributed to the particular poetic effect that he desired. It involved shocking his critics by rhyming 'Saint-Malo' with 'sanglots', and 'bocks' with 'coq'. It involved using varied and eccentric syllabic lengths and intricate contrapuntal patterning, so that the poetic line, far from being a mechanical unit, became the base for a series of live combinations. Being concerned with 'stanzas and rhymes' meant the creation of new effects, rather than adherence to the formulations of the past, offering the reader a constant interplay between the traditional and the original, the expected and the novel. Laforgue was no doubt in agreement with (and perhaps behind) these sentences from Henry's review of the Complainte: 'M. Jules Laforgue fut ainsi conduit à un genre de composition où la tenue prosodique conventionnelle n'est pas de rigueur. De là ces complaintes … entrelacis de notes perpétuelles, échos d'humour de belle race, trouvailles de formules, bouquet de rythmes et de rimes dont la variété réjouit le savant parfois inquiet du nombre.'