SOURCE: “The Voices of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: Deference, Self-Assertion, Accountability,” in French Forum, Vol. 22, No. 3, September, 1997, pp. 261-77.

[In the following essay, Kaplan examines gender-related and political themes in Desbordes-Valmore's poetry.]

A focus on the “feminine” versus the “feminist” aspects of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's poetry introduces the wide range of poetic and political attitudes in French Romanticism. Critical assessments of her works from Sainte-Beuve, through Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine (who canonized her among his Poètes maudits) tend to view her primarily as a woman (as Eliane Jasenas has shown), a female of the species with conventional attributes: sentimentality, naïveté, sheer passion, motherhood, simple faith, and a life resigned to suffering.¹ In other words, the stereotypes usurp the biography as much as the putative life usurps the texts.

Desbordes-Valmore defined herself with an uncommon variety of female personae: in addition to “mothering”—family responsibilities and socially legitimated love—she commands ardor with a certain type of sexual freedom, a woman's right to experience pleasure and to write about it. Her submissive religious poetry, if examined closely, includes politically militant decisions. In fact, her stated views of prevailing gender standards demonstrate complexities beyond those recognized during her era. Vividly, she emerges in her own right as an author, an autonomous subject.

Two scholars in particular have clarified her place in relation to Romantic gender stereotypes.² Christine Planté (1989) examines judgments of Desbordes-Valmore based upon the binary exclusions or polarities male/female or feminine/feminist. Planté appropriately warns against classifying (and judging) a writer—especially a poet—by her coincidence with or divergence from an ideological norm.

Michael Danahy explains how poets accepted self-stereotyping in order to launch their work: “gender-specific paradigms of genre are one of the mediating structures that give writers, as well as readers, access to the canon.”³ Desbordes-Valmore was not naïve. Like Lamartine, Hugo, and many others, she took enormous initiatives to get her works—novels for adults, children's books, as well as lyric poetry—published, distributed, and favorably reviewed.

This essay is pragmatic: to hew a path in Desbordes-Valmore's voluminous and somewhat disorganized mass of poetry, making her work accessible while highlighting the originality of her so-called “female themes.” Her poetry is especially effective in the classroom. Although students may be intimidated by the length of some poems, and teachers by the apparent disarray within collections, judicious editing provides much quality verse.

Two editions are available: 1) the presentation by Yves Bonnefoy in Gallimard's Collection Poésie, with its thought-provoking introduction; and 2) the two-volume critical edition of the complete poetry by Marc Bertrand, with copious notes.⁴ Teachers can compose their anthology of an anthology by starting with the Bonnefoy selection and then consulting Bertrand's volumes with their (almost exclusively biographical) commentaries. A representative unit can be composed with selections from Poésies inédites (1860) in the Bonnefoy anthology, supplementing them from Bertrand, and finally with poems from other collections as selected by Bonnefoy.

DIALOGUES AND SELF-PORTRAITS

Gender issues in Romantic poetry are fundamental. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore presents herself as a woman poet who combines assertion and self-effacement. We begin with the conventional subordinate posture in her epistles, a traditional way for poets to relate themselves to people of prestige or power.

Desbordes-Valmore participated in such an exchange with Lamartine, whose Méditations poétiques in 1820—the year after her first collection, Poésies, appeared—launched the new Romantic lyricism. By an amusing misreading, Lamartine had encountered a poem of Desbordes-Valmore, “À M.A. de L.” (M. Aimé de Loy), in which she depicts herself as a woman poet.⁵ Thinking that she had addressed the epistle to him, Lamartine responded with this proud self-definition entitled “À Mme Desbordes-Valmore”:

Souvent, sur des mers où se joue
La tempête aux ailes de feu,
Je voyais passer sous ma proue
Le haut mât que le vent secoue,
Et pour qui la vague est un jeu.(6)

In contrast with his mastery of the deep, Lamartine spies a humble family, a pitiful “foyer flottant du pêcheur.” With boat imagery he defines Desbordes-Valmore's maternal persona, subordinate to fate though benefitting from its tribulations:

Cette pauvre barque, ô Valmore!
Est l'image de ton destin.
La vague, d'aurore en aurore,
Comme elle te ballotte encore
Sur un océan incertain!
Tu ne bâtis ton nid d'argile
Que sous le toit du passager;
Et, comme l'oiseau sans asile,
Tu vas glanant de ville en ville
Les miettes du pain étranger.
Ta voix enseigne avec tristesse
Des airs de fête à tes petits,
Pour qu' attendri de leur faiblesse
L'oiseleur les épargne, et laisse
Grandir leurs plumes dans les nids!

(ibid.)

Lamartine cites images of birds, nests, etc., which evoke Marceline's itinerant life as an actress and singing to children as a source of poetic inspiration. Hers is indeed a poetry of suffering, motherhood, and the like. Lamartine's praise restricts her idiom, featuring her husband's name—despite the poem's title—and not the author's full status as Desbordes-Valmore.

Her answer, “À M. de Lamartine” (105 lines), is suitably modest, echoing his rhythm and his images. She seems willingly to advance the stereotypes Lamartine had introduced, as she thanks him for his encouragement (Bertrand 224-26):

Car je suis une faible femme;
Je n'ai su qu'aimer et souffrir;
Ma pauvre lyre, c'est mon âme,
Et toi seul découvres la flamme
D'une lampe qui va mourir.
Devant tes hymnes de poète,
D'ange, hélas! et d'homme à la fois,
Cette lyre inculte, incomplète,
Longtemps détendue et muette,
Ose à peine prendre une voix.
Je suis l'indigente glaneuse
Qui d'un peu d'épis oubliés
A paré sa gerbe épineuse,
Quand ta charité lumineuse
Verse du blé pur à mes pieds.

(ll. 81-95)

Grateful for his attention to her humble verse, the woman poet agrees to wait for the male cultivator, another Boaz, to leave a few scraps for her to glean—as if she could not generate her own imagery. In her collection, Les Pleurs (1833), she confirms Lamartine's dominance by placing his “response” after her epistle to him.⁸

Desbordes-Valmore's “Une lettre de femme,” the poem which opens the 1860 Poésies inédites, speaks more boldly for herself toward the end of her career. (Verlaine enthusiastically quotes “Une lettre de femme” in Les Poètes maudits.) Highlighting an assertive woman's unavoidable self-contradictions, she begins by declaring herself against male control; then, immediately after, she submits:

Les femmes, je le sais, ne doivent pas écrire;
                                        J'écris pourtant,
Afin que dans mon cœur au loin tu puisses lire
                                        Comme en partant.
Je ne tracerai rien qui ne soit dans toi-même
                                        Beaucoup plus beau:
Mais le mot cent fois dit, venant de ce qu'on aime,
                                        Semble nouveau.
Qu'il te porte au bonheur! Moi, je reste à l'attendre,
                                        Bien que, là-bas,
Je sens que je m'en vais, pour voir et pour entendre
                                        Errer tes pas.

(Bonnefoy 171; Bertrand 506/727)

Although the woman's ego becomes absorbed into her lover's distant destiny, her independence remains equally potent. Reinforced by the prosody, the alexandrine “Les femmes, je le sais, ne doivent pas écrire” of line one is counterbalanced by the four syllable proclamation which immediately follows: “J'écris pourtant.” Her self-expression perseveres.

Desbordes-Valmore's specific idiom was imposed by her historical condition as a woman raised and (poorly) educated in the provinces. In reality, she was also a wise, practical professional who recognized that deference was the price required for entering the kingdom of poetry, usually reserved for men. Her self-assertions thus maintain an ironic undercurrent within traditionally feminine themes, which the raised consciousness of present literary studies makes manifest.

Once alerted to these sexist conventions—which Desbordes-Valmore may have accepted consciously—evidence to the contrary in her life becomes increasingly salient: her numerous publications and correspondence to promote her works; her support—both financial and emotional—for her husband, Prosper Valmore, whose theatrical career was less successful than hers as poet and novelist; even her adulteries and illegitimate children. Her professional and personal friendships with men, as well as with women, also confirm her independence and dignity.⁹

Nevertheless, teachers and interpreters should feature her written words. She was in fact constituted by her voice—not by her social roles, nor by nineteenth-century stereotypes, nor even by the conventional themes of many of her poems, their most obvious content.

Recent studies emphasize the poetic coherence of Desbordes-Valmore's œeuvre. Tracy Forrest Cooke defines the emergence of the poet's voice in terms of the Demeter-Persephone myth.¹⁰ According to this reading, a cycle—presence, absence, regeneration—is specified thematically by the poet's relation with her mother: “The key to a more thorough understanding of these poems, an understanding encompassing both poetic structure and image, lies in the concomitant ideas of cycle (so that mother is replaced by daughter) and identity, the coexistence of sameness and otherness (so that mother and daughter are one and the same)” (12). Cooke's close reading of the first section of Poésies of 1830, “Idylles,” features those poems which define the female poet as daughter and the Muse as her mother. Laurence Porter provides a detailed interpretation of “Elégies,” the second section of Poésies of 1830. Offering astute analyses of literary quality, Porter surveys previous judgments of the poet and evaluates them critically.¹¹

PLURALITY AS COHERENCE

The final collection, Poésies inédites (1860), which Desbordes-Valmore herself arranged over a number of years, provides the best initiation. The book was published within a year of her death from cancer and can be considered to be her poetic testament. Its 117 poems—many of them short and quite readable—comprise a historically authentic anthology of her several voices. Divided into three parts—AMOUR, FAMILLE, FOI—it reveals how her poetry is energized by its contradictions.

The first poem of Poésies inédites, “Une lettre de femme,” opens the section AMOUR, introducing the collection's fundamental ambiguity: the woman's voice includes both passivity and self-assertion—almost, but not quite, to the point of rebellion. After using this poem to clarify issues of gender, the following poems can be studied in groups, many of which develop extended images systems, deepening poetic thematics with elemental archetypes such as air-earth-fire-water.

A triptych retained in the Bonnefoy anthology magnifies the often subtle erotic intensity of Desbordes-Valmore's apparently commonplace sentimental pieces (Bonnefoy 180-82; Bertrand 509-10). The powerful poem “Les Éclairs,” celebrating love's passions in four lines, serves as a paradigm:

Orages de l'amour, nobles et hauts orages,
Pleins de nids gémissants blessés sous les ombrages
Pleins de fleurs, pleins d'oiseaux perdus, mais dans les cieux,
Qui vous perd ne voit plus, éclairs délicieux!

Apart from the weak, irregular rime (see the dieresis in the final word), there is a concentration of primary, maternal images—nests, birds—with raw passion. (Later in class discussion it may be mentioned that the title “Éclairs” can metaphorically suggest “orgasm”).

A woman's freedom of sexual desire is reaffirmed in the nine lines of “Les Roses de Saadi,” which deserves extensive analysis (see Jasenas, Cooke, and others). Here is the beginning:

J'ai voulu ce matin te rapporter des roses;
Mais j'en avais tant pris dans mes ceintures closes
Que les nœuds trop serrés n'ont pu les contenir.
Les nœuds ont éclaté. …

(ll. 1-4)

Readers appreciate the savor of memory and traces of passion evoked by these Valmorian flowers (“Respires-en sur moi, l'odorant souvenir,” 1.9). Images of innocence, we realize, can be imbued with carnal desire and turbulent love, just as sexuality can retain its maternal virtue.

The triptych ends with “La Jeune Fille et le ramier” (12 lines). Its final stanza summarizes the storm and flower imagery of preceding poems:

Laissez pleuvoir, ô cœurs solitaires et doux!
Sous l'orage qui passe il renaît tant de choses.
Le soleil sans la pluie ouvrirait-t-il les roses?
Amants, vous attendez, de quoi vous plaignez-vous?

(ll. 9-12)

The confluence of desire and writing is truly her particular poetic gift. A series of pieces linked by water imagery further explores the complexity of love (Bertrand 510-11). Among them, “L'entrevue au ruisseau” continues the sexual symbolism of “Les Roses de Saadi” as it evokes a deeper, more communicative intimacy between the poet and her lover: “L'eau nous sépare, écoute bien: Si tu fais un pas, tu n'as rien.” While the following piece, “L'Image dans l'eau” (not in Bonnefoy), using fresh water to depict the poet's consciousness, memory and illusion are confused.

In “L'eau douce” (also not in Bonnefoy) Desbordes-Valmore revises Lamartine's negative portrait of her as victim, as she evokes her active engagement with life:

Pitié de moi! j'étais l'eau douce;
Un jour j'ai rencontré la mer;
À présent j'ai le goût amer,
Quelque part que le vent me pousse.

(ll. 1-4)

“Moi, je suis l'ardent voyageur,
Incliné sur la nappe humide,
Qui te jure, ô ruisseau limpide,
De bénir partout ta fraîcheur.”

(ll. 21-24)

The “indigente glaneuse” of her poem to Lamartine has become a liberated “ardent voyageur.” Brooks and streams prevail over his ocean.

Issues of personal communication now predominate. These poems lead to ones concerning friendship—with men or with women. “La Voix d'un ami” further extends the preceding imagery:

Si tu n'as pas perdu cette voix grave et tendre
Qui promenait mon âme au chemin des éclairs
Ou s'écoulait limpide avec les ruisseaux clairs,
Éveille un peu ta voix que je voudrais entendre.

(ll. 1-4)

The final lines confirm the salutory power of intimacy: “Ta voix ouvre une vie où l'on vivra toujours!” (l. 16). In the poem that follows, “L'ami d'enfance,” the woman-poet's voice becomes the instrument of renewal. Faithful friendship equals the value of sensual love—and it lasts longer than the éclairs of passion.

One other notable poem from the first section, AMOUR, “Au livre de Léopardi,” reinforces the poet's authority (Bonnefoy 189; Bertrand 515-16). Lightning remains a source of positive energy, as she affirms the power of love to save the Italian poet from despair:

Ne risquez pas vos yeux sur les tendres éclairs
De l'orage éternel enfermé dans ces vers,
Dans ces chants, dans ces cris, dans ces plaintes voilées,
Tocsins toujours vibrants de douleurs envolées.
Oh n'allez pas tenter, d'un courage hardi,
Tout cet amour qui pleure avec Léopardi!

(ll. 7-12)

The poet's retrieval of her voice as mother and woman deserves emphasis. The Bonnefoy anthology retains the most significant poems from section two, FAMILLE, without indicating the division. It begins with “Le Nid solitaire,” which asserts the poet's need to separate herself from the tumultuous world:

Moi, je veux du silence, il y va de ma vie;
Je m'enferme où rien, plus rien ne m'a suivie;
Et de son nid étroit d'où nul sanglot ne sort,
J'entends courir le siècle à côté de mon sort.

(Bonnefoy 194; Bertrand 521).

As a most relevant digression, to explore the ambiguity and semantic richness of the term MOTHER, we examine “La Maison de ma mère” (135 lines), the impressive opening poem of Pauvres fleurs (1839) (Bertrand 374-76; Bonnefoy omits many lines, 109-110). I cite the beginning as an homage to my first contact with Desbordes-Valmore's poetry, in Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace, hypersensitive to intimate and cosmic space:¹²

Maison de la naissance, ô nid, doux coin du monde!
O premier univers où nos pas ont tourné!
Chambre ou ciel, dont le cœur garde la mappemonde,
Au fond du temps je vois ton seuil abandonné.
Je m'en irais aveugle et sans guide à ta porte,
Toucher le berceau nu qui daigna me nourrir;
Si je deviens âgée et faible, qu'on m'y porte!
Je n'y pus vivre enfant; j'y voudrais bien mourir

(ll. 1-8)

These lines almost anticipate a Surrealist poetics, an oneiric identity of ciel and chambre, nest and universe—pure Bachelardian dreaming of “primary images.” Desire for rebirth arises from nostalgia for death and the idealized happiness never truly experienced during childhood. The antitheses of infancy and old age are concrete and quite moving.

This return to the maternal home, the womb of death and rebirth, unveils the source (historic as well as mythic) of Desbordes-Valmore's own voice: “Ciel! où prend donc sa voix une mère qui chante, / Pour aider le sommeil à descendre au berceau? (“Le Nid solitaire,” ll. 23-24).¹³ The next poem in this series of patently autobiographical poems, “La Fileuse et l'enfant” (68 lines) (Bonnefoy 194; Bertrand 522), further explores the woman's recovery of her poetic voice.

Desbordes-Valmore then resorts to a self-portrait as a woman with a limited education. In addition, she applies to herself the misogynistic exegesis of the biblical Fall, whereby Eve is blamed for asserting her will against God. But here the result is positive as the poet speaks of her mother who unexpectedly liberated her daughter through song:

Elle se défendait de me faire savante;
“Apprendre, c'est vieillir, disait-elle, et l'enfant
“Se nourrira trop tôt du fruit que Dieu défend;
“Fruit fiévreux à la sève aride et décevante;”

(ll. 96-99)

Je n'avais rien appris, rien lu que ma prière,
Quand mon sein se gonfla de chants mystérieux;
J'écoutais Notre-Dame et j'épelais les cieux
Et la vague harmonie inondait ma paupière;
Les mots seuls y manquaient; mais je croyais qu'un jour,
On m'entendrait aimer pour me répondre: amour!

(ll. 110-15)

The poet surpasses her mother's fearful and simplistic orthodoxy. This rich poem summarizes several pieces of the preceding collection, Les Pleurs (1833), such as “Tristesse,” “Le Mal du pays,” and poems devoted to the vicissitudes of her early years.

The development of her own children then receives significant elaboration. Evocations of the education of boys and girls, grouped in the section AUX PETITS ENFANTS (“Adieu d'une petite fille à l'école,” “Le Premier Chagrin d'un enfant,” “Le Coucher d'un petit garçon,” “L'Oreiller d'une petite fille”) are particularly concrete, anecdotal.

Returning to the 1860 collection, we clarify the poet's assessment of the contemporary educational system. “À mon fils, avant le collège” and “Mon fils, après l'avoir conduit au collège” (Bertrand 529-31) describe her sadness at her son's going off to school. These personal poems prepare the implicit critique of France's patriarchal ideology in “Ondine à l'école,” which treats her daughter's education.

As a magnificent transition between poems devoted to her son and her daughter, “Le Rêve intermittent d'une nuit triste” (112 lines, in couplets of eleven syllables) (Bonnefoy 206-10; Bertrand 531-33; see Jasenas, Le Poétique 119-23) returns to her “pays natal”—a powerful general theme as well as being a characteristic locus of her poetic energy. It ends with a subtle melding of male and female images:

O champs paternels, hérissés de charmilles
Où glissent le soir des flots de jeunes filles.
Que ma fille monte à vos flancs ronds et verts,
Et soyez béni, doux point de l'Univers!

(ll. 109-112)

“Ondine à l'école” reconstructs her internal struggle, taking pride in Ondine's intelligence but fearing for her social success. (This poem repeats her struggle with her own worried mother, without asserting female autonomy as strongly.) While glorifying her daughter's academic prizes (“Vos lauriers m'alarmaient à l'ardeur des flambeaux, / Ils cachaient vos cheveux que j'avais faits si beaux!” ll. 31-32), she suspects that her own suffering was caused by her independence; after all, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was an author, a professional actress and a singer, as well as a mother and a wife and a lover. Ondine, like the poet-mother herself, might become a victim of too much knowledge of self or of the world, as the final lines suggest:

Ne sachant bien qu'aimer je priais Dieu pour vous,
Pour qu'il te gardât simple et tendre comme nous;
Et toi tu souriais intrépide à m'apprendre
Ce que Dieu t'ordonnait, ce qu'il fallait comprendre.
Muse, aujourd'hui, dis-nous dans ta pure candeur
Si Dieu te l'ordonnait du moins pour ton bonheur!

(ll. 43-48)

“L'âme errante” (32 lines) brings together many of Desbordes-Valmore's featured themes and images, while introducing a self-assertion far surpassing the intimacy of nests, empty or otherwise (Bonnefoy 215-16; Bertrand 536-37). It begins by anticipating her immortality as a poet:

Je suis la prière qui passe
Sur la terre où rien n'est à moi;
Je suis le ramier dans l'espace,
Amour, où je cherche après toi.
Effleurant la route féconde,
Glanant la vie à chaque lieu,
J'ai touché les deux flancs du monde,
Suspendue au souffle de Dieu.

(ll. 1-8)

Then celebrating the poet's “tendresse” (the “feminine” emotion of compassion), the second stanza passes from the passivity of “mon chant plaintif” to bold political vision:

Ce souffle épura la tendresse
Qui coulait de mon chant plaintif
Et répandit sa sainte ivresse
Sur le pauvre et sur le captif.
Et me voici louant encore
Mon seul avoir, le souvenir,
M'envolant d'aurore en aurore,
Vers l'infinissable avenir.

(ll. 9-16)

The next stanza is even more militant, and courageous, in its message: “J'y verrai monter les phalanges / Des peuples tués par la faim” (ll. 20-21). Although the final stanza returns to conventional diction, beginning with “Laissez-moi passer, je suis mère,” the poet has transmuted her feminine clichés into firm judgments. The protective mother proclaims herself to be an active subject. Ethical lyricism enriches her political propaganda.

Nineteenth-century Christianity provided Desbordes-Valmore with a highly charged idiom, from banal to insurgent. FOI—the third and final section of Poésies inédites—combines reassuring, unobtrusive femininity with bold dissent; yet it remains dominated by the unthreatening view of religion as consolation. The first three titles almost say it all: “Tristesse,” “Refuge,” and “Retour dans une église,” which lead to evocations of the poet's deceased mother: “Ma mère est dans les cieux, les pauvres l'ont bénie; / Ma mère était partout la grâce et l'harmonie” (ll. 1-2).

Bonnefoy's anthology features “Les Prisons et les prières” (32 lines) and recalls the poet's harsh historical experience—in this instance, her witnessing the brutal repression in 1834 of workers' rebellions in Lyon (Bonnefoy 230-31; Bertrand 546). The poem depicts her personal torment as a source of her capacity to challenge abuses of power, whether they proceed from government or Church:

Pleurez! Comptez les noms des bannis de la France;
L'air manque à ces grands cœurs où brûle tant d'espoir.
Jetez la palme en deuil au pied de leur souffrance;
Et passons: les geôliers seuls ont droit de les voir!
Passons: nos bras pieux sont sans force et sans armes;
Nous n'allons point traînant de fratricides vœux.

(ll. 1-6)

Desbordes-Valmore thus transforms the idiom of helpless womankind into a militant voice of protest. The “mother,” epitome of a woman's limits and powers, calls for subversive action. The two final lines summarize the ambiguity: “O France! il faut aimer, il faut rompre les chaînes, / Ton Dieu, le Dieu du peuple, a tant besoin d'amour!” (ll. 31-32). We are no longer surprised to see the poet apply the “feminine” word amour to righteous rebellion: “il faut aimer, il faut rompre les chaînes.”¹⁵ She has recast a sentimental idiom of inwardness into a shout for violent action.

For pedagogical purposes we might include other overtly political poems from Bonnefoy's selection of Pauvres fleurs (1839) and highlighted in his notes. The poet actually sent “Cantique des mères” (104 lines), dated Lyon 1834, to the Queen, Marie-Amélie, after the repressions (Bonnefoy 126-29; Bertrand 406-408). This epistle calls for the monarch's wife to take a politically independent role, like the Jewish Queen of Persia:

Comme Esther s'est agenouillée
Et saintement humiliée
Entre le peuple et le bourreau,
Rappelez le glaive au fourreau;
Vos soldats vont la tête basse,
Le sang est lourd, la haine lasse:
Priez d'un courageux effroi
Pour tous les prisonniers du roi!

(ll. 33-40)

“Cantique des bannis” (88 lines), dated 1835, presents an even more radical request, as does “Amnistie.” Perhaps the most daring in this series is “Dans la rue, par un jour funèbre de Lyon”; rejected by a newspaper editor, it was not published until after Desbordes-Valmore's death (Bonnefoy 143; Bertrand placed it in “Pièces isolées,” 635-36). It begins:

Nous n'avons plus d'argent pour enterrer nos morts.
Le prêtre est là, marquant le prix des funérailles;
Et les corps étendus, troués par les mitrailles,
Attendent un linceul, une croix, un remords.

(ll. 1-4)

Now the poet as “mother” appears as stirring, outspoken—while remaining multivalent. She exercises compassion, a desire to retreat and shelter herself and her children, while at the same time her tenderness for others nourishes her anger, as she bravely challenges her lethally repressive government. This mother-writing generates action; poetry not only provides immortality for her deceased children, but also forms propaganda in defense of those banished in the French civil wars and class conflict.

POETRY AND SOLIDARITY

Reading as well as writing is a cognitive experience, ethical as well as esthetic. In a study of polemical verse, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's partisan poetry could compare with Hugo's more vituperative Châtiments and the “ethical irony” of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, compassion disguised as anger or gross insensitivity.¹⁶ Her sentimentality is buttressed by firm ethical decisions and, in her poems about the Lyon massacres, civil courage. “Dans les rues,” for example, if published, might have deprived her of a government subsidy or even put her in jail. There is no contradiction between Desbordes-Valmore's time-bound woman's idiom, her quest for poetic immortality, and politics.

To conclude, what sort of pedagogic idealization (if any) can approximate this complex image of the poet? I favor an open conclusion, a poem as an appropriate finale. Bonnefoy and Bertrand both end their editions with an “epitaph,” admitting that the poems were not placed there by the poet herself.

Bonnefoy's choice evokes the death of Desbordes-Valmore's daughter Ondine, portraying the author with images of water, stars, sparkling light, and an enigmatic mirror:

Tu n'auras pas semé ta couronne étoilée
Sur le miroir tari du ruisseau de tes jours.
Toute pleine de jours, toi, tu t'en es allée
Et ton frais souvenir en scintille toujours.

Bertrand (756) cites a quatrain originally chosen by Lucien Descaves, author of the outdated La Vie Amoureuse de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1910):

Que mon nom ne soit rien qu'une ombre douce et vaine,
Qu'il ne cause jamais ni l'effroi ni la peine!
Qu'un indigent l'emporte après m'avoir parlé
Et le garde longtemps dans son cœur consolé!

Both texts highlight the notion of memory, either as a “frais souvenir” of stars or light, stressing the poet's excellence, or of consolation in a poor person's heart, which redeems the poet's self-effacement. Charity and compassion (the moral message, not the poetry itself) earn her the right to be summoned.

I also succumb to the hypothetical epitaph. The final quatrain of “Madame Émile de Girardin” (Bonnefoy 237; Bertrand 566)—also published in Poésies inédites—evokes the recent death of the daughter of poet Sophie Gay, to whom Desbordes-Valmore dedicated a poem in the 1830 collection:

O beauté! souveraine à travers tous les voiles!
Tant que les noms aimés retourneront aux cieux,
Nous chercherons Delphine à travers les étoiles,
Et son doux nom de sœur humectera nos yeux.

Several aspects of the poet's authentic voice come together. First, the dead person is the daughter of another poet-mother and was also married to the influential journalist and owner of La Presse, Émile de Girardin. Delphine de Girardin—named after the heroine of a novel written by another woman, Mme de Staël, becomes a sisterly companion to the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore—herself a mother of prematurely deceased daughters. “Delphine” also echoes the name of Marceline, the author. All these women became sister stars, like the Pleiades protected from Orion, the hunter. (Orion was eventually killed by Artemis.) These deceased sisters are, finally, des non-aimées, if I may risk a pun, whose names we love.

In our persistent culture wars, what sort of solidarity can we establish with these women writers? Will the male canon—also consecrated by constellations—achieve a similar transfiguration? As we contemplate these skies together, reflection on poetry and gender may foster a literary sisterhood—which includes a brotherhood. With several shortcomings she shared with Hugo and other Romantics, major and secondary, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore remains a poet of quality, subtlety, and passion, sustained by her liberated poetic voices and keen moral judgment.¹⁸

Notes

1. Eliane Jasenas, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore devant la critique (Geneva: Droz, 1962). The authoritative biography is Francis Ambrière, Le Siècle des Valmore: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore et les siens (Paris: Le Seuil, 1987). See the critique of Barbara Johnson, “Gender and Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” in Understanding Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium, ed. Stamos Metzidakis (New York: Garland, 1994): 209-35.

2. Christine Planté, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: l'autobiographie indéfinie,” Romantisme 17 (1987): 48-58; Christine Planté, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: ni poésie féminine, ni poésie féministe,” French Literature Series 16 (1989): 78-93. Michael Danahy, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” in French Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source, ed. Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (New York: Greenwood, 1991): 121-33.

3. Michael Danahy, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and the Engendered Canon,” Yale French Studies 75 (1988): 130.

4. Poésies, ed. Yves Bonnefoy, Coll. Poésie (Paris: Gallimard, 1983); Œuvres poétiques de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, ed. Marc Bertrand, 2 vols. (PU de Grenoble, 1973). Quotations are from these editions, indicated as Bonnefoy and Bertrand.

5. “Doucement captivée / Au bord d'un nid de fleurs, / Sur ma jeune couvée / J'ai ri de mes douleurs; / Et l'on trouvait des charmes / À mes chants d'autrefois; / Mais ma voix a des larmes, / Et j'ai peur de ma voix!” (Bertrand 227, ll. 25-32). This poem should not be confused with the later poem, “AM.A.L.” (Bertrand 670-71), which evokes the bloody repression in Lyon after the workers' rebellion of 1834.

6. Lines 525-26; Alphonse de Lamartine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed., Marius-François Guyard (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).

7. “À M. Alphonse de Lamartine” (Bertrand 224-26, 105 lines) written around 1831 and published first in Le Mémorial de la Scarpe, 1832 (Bertrand 356-57), and then in Les Pleurs (1833). See Michael Danahy, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and the Engendered Canon,” 129-47, esp. 134 on the obvious differences of self-representation.

8. Compare this gendered dialogue with a later exchange between Lamartine and Alfred de Musset. The male-female dialectic was not Lamartine's primary attitude and “la pauvre glaneuse” was not the only victim of his hauteur. See Musset's “Lettre à M. de Lamartine” (La Revue des Deux Mondes 1 March 1836) and Lamartine's rejoinder, “À M. de Musset, en réponse à ses vers, Fragment de Méditation” (1840).

9. An important technical issue also analyzed by Danahy (“The Engendered Canon,” 136-38) is the poet's switching the gender identity of her narrative voice, or its projections. Here are the titles in two groups of poems: 1) Animal dialogues: “Le Pélican ou les deux mères,” “Deux chiens,” “Deux Ramiers,” “Les Deux Peupliers”—female friends and personal bonding independent of gender and social role; 2) human speakers: “Point d'adieux,” “Nocturne II,” “L'Impossible,” “La Vallée de la Scarpe.” Danahy summarizes: “Engendering the female poet as male or embodying herself in male speakers and projections did not threaten the identity and unity of her self-concept. On the other hand, she does not accept the male as paradigm of the self-image for the universal or the poet in particular. Rather, because the projection of the self-image is not consistently or automatically embodied, the reader is put on the alert not to take gender for granted; it is problematic and careful attention that is required to determine how the pronouns ‘le’ and ‘la’ affect meaning, because the text will engender itself in different ways” (138).

10. Tracy Forrest Cooke, “Poetic Voice Lost and Regained: Cycle in the Poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore” (Diss. Brandeis U, 1989), microfilm.

11. Laurence M. Porter, “Gender Stereotypes and the Elegies of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” French Forum 18 (1993): 185-94.

12. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace (Paris: PUF, 1961) 209; cf. Eliane Jasenas, Le Poétique: Desbordes-Valmore et Nerval (Paris: Jean-Pierre Delarge, 1975) 85-88.

13. Compare with “Le Mal du Pays,” Les Pleurs (1833) (Bertrand 217, 350-51).

14. The following poem, omitted from the Bonnefoy anthology, “Elle allait s'embarquer encore” (Bertrand 534-35), supplements the fear of independence; a series of poems related to “La Mère qui pleure” completes the second section.

15. This single political poem of FOI, “Les Prières et les prisons,” is followed by only three others, ending with “Renoncement,” as the poet throws herself at God's feet with humility: “Pour attendre à ses fruits protégés de mystère / Que la pudique mort a seule osé cueillir” (ll. 15-16).

16. See Edward K. Kaplan, Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in “The Parisian Prowler” (Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1990), and “Baudelaire and the Vicissitudes of Venus: Ethical Irony in Fleurs du Mal,” in The Shaping of Text: Style, Imagery, and Structure in French Literature: Essays in Honor of John Porter Houston, ed. Emanuel Mickel (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1993): 113-30.

17. Bonnefoy 239n265: “Peut-être [ces vers] furent-ils écrits en 1853, à la mort d'Ondine. Quelque chose y brille pourtant qui pourrait en faire, à un autre plan, l'épitaphe aussi de Marceline.”

18. The original version of this paper was presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, April 1994. My thanks to Adrianna Paliyenko for her invitation and to Jane Hale for reading an earlier stage of the article.