As Verlaine receives favourable treatment in critical articles, verse appearing in magazines reveals his influence on younger poets. The earliest instance we have been able to find is Guy-Valvor's (Georges André Vayssière) ‘Raquettes et volants’, which appeared in Lutèce on 7–14 September 1883. Guy-Valvor describes two girls playing badminton: oblivious to love, they are unaware that one day they will be the rackets and their lovers, ‘les pauvres coeurs torturés’, the shuttlecocks they hit back and forth. It is obvious that his poem copies Verlaine's ‘La Chanson des ingénues’:¹ both contrast the frivolity of young girls with their amorous maturity when they have grown into women, both use similar language and identical form. While in Verlaine's poem it is the girls who feel their hearts beat harder, ‘… / A des pensers clandestins, / En nous sachant les amantes / Futures des libertins’, in Guy-Valvor's it is the poet-observer who is so moved: ‘Sous l'enfant trouvant la femme, / Mon coeur se sentait frémir / A voir ces jeunes coquettes, / … / Se renvoyer le volant.’ One stanza of ‘Raquettes et volants’ could serve as a summary of Verlaine's poem, as well:

Mais elles, insouciantes,
De l'amour encor lointain,
Avec leurs grâces riantes
Eblouissaient le jardin.

In both the girls wear white, airy dresses and shepherdess hats, in both they have blue eyes. The stanza

Quand les blanches mousselines
S'envolaient en plis bouffants,
Les brises semblaient câlines
Ravir les belles enfants!

recalls Verlaine's lines ‘Et nos robes—si légères— / Sont d'une extrême blancheur’, and the third line, with câlines seemingly out of place (‘Les brises câlines semblaient …’) recalls the difficult vont charmant construction which opens ‘Clair de lune’ (p. 107). Turns of a phrase suggest Verlaine's very language: ‘[le volant] … / Par leurs prodiges d'adresse / Contrarié sans pitié’, to choose from many possible examples, echoes the préciosité of much of the language of Fêtes galantes.² Guy-Valvor need not have gone to Verlaine for the eighteenth century theme (although his equating an historical period with a subject for erotic revery is Verlainean), which was popular during the 1880's quite independently of Fêtes galantes. As for the heptasyllabic line, Guy-Valvor's other poems are in alexandrines or other vers pair rhythms, and vers impairs in fact begin to appear only as such imitations of Verlaine become prevalent. Apparently ‘Art poétique’ introduced a metre which Verlaine himself probably took from Baudelaire.

A year later Georges Khnopff has a dozen poems entitled ‘XVIIIe siècle’ in La Jeune Belgique,³ a magazine which otherwise did not usually reflect decadent trends. In one (‘III’, pp. 436–7) Pierrot, with his flask of claret and his pâté, the word group ce faquin d'Arlequin, and the presence of Cassandre suggest Verlaine's ‘Pantomime’; the line ‘La brise ride les bassins’ recalls ‘Et le vent doux ride l'humble bassin’ of ‘A la promenade’ (p. 109). Another poem (‘IX’, p. 439) has numerous verbal similarities of this order, most of which echo ‘Clair de lune’—a further indication that Khnopff probably imitated Verlaine is the mingling of gaiety with melancholy, and the sad hearts hidden by carnival masks, which characterise Fêtes galantes:

La belle Colombine …
… songe
Que toute joie, au loin, n'est que mensonge
Et que tous ces railleurs élégants et fantasques
Déguisant leur ennui sous le blanc de leurs masques
Et le satin brodé de leurs basquines roses
Raffinent la tristesse adorable des choses.

[p. 439]

It should be borne in mind that devices which remind us of Verlaine's verse were often in fact clichés of the period which he himself got from Victor Hugo, the Parnassians, or Baudelaire. This is true of the verbal music and the metric variations which became more and more common in poetry during the season 1883–84. The increasing popularity of the impressionist style must have been due to the Goncourts' prose rather than to Verlaine. Traits which are peculiar to Verlaine, and thus exclude his predecessors as possible sources, are echoes of his diction, his distinctive mood of dream and melancholy, his vagueness, and his taste for pale, muted colours. Such distinctions can be made in Emile Michelet's ‘In votis’:

Ce serait par un soir doux et calme d’été,
A l'heure où les lueurs et les rumeurs dernières
S’éteignaient mollement dans la sérénité.
Elle aurait dix-huit ans et des mines câlines,
Et me raconterait des riens, niaise un peu,
D'une voix douce comme un choeur de mandolines,
Blonde et blanche dans son peignoir de satin bleu.

[Lutèce, 15–22 March 1884]

Although the opening line is an obvious echo of ‘Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d’été’ in La Bonne Chanson (p. 153), the various assonances and alliterations of the second line were in common use before Verlaine's poems began appearing in La Nouvelle Rive Gauche. In the last stanza, to the contrary, the conditional tense, the inversion of niaise and un peu, the simile based on aural correspondances, and the pairing of colours which are close to each other in hue or value (‘Blonde et blanche’) are most likely derived from Verlaine. Equally reminiscent of him is Charles Vignier's ‘Dans le [sic] rose’:

Errants au pays falots
Mes rêves, berceuses yoles,
Ont arboré pour falots
Deux yeux bleus, deux lucioles.

[Lutèce, 27 April–4 May 1884]

As with Guy-Valvor's poem, the vers impair of seven syllables can be attributed only to Verlaine, and the vocables falots and berceuses are also typical of his verse. Additional poems by Vignier (‘Paysage’ and ‘Vision’, Lutèce, 18–25 May 1884; ‘Retour de Cythère’ and ‘Tristesses’, 1–7 September 1884) bear out the judgement of reviewers who commented on the Verlainean tenor of his collection of verse Le Centon in 1887.

A facetious, but revealing, commentary on the extent of Verlaine's influence is made by a parody which appeared in Lutèce in the fall of 1884:

Las! la fleur qui fleure, effleure
L'ultime heure, la meilleure,
Et pleure;—oh! combien subtils
Les sanglots en les pistils.(4)

Jean Laurent's poem does not seem too different from some of Vignier’s serious verse; apparently, in the year since Guy-Valvor's poem appearred, ceratin of Verlaine's mannerisms had become platitudes of minor decadent verse! An accompanying letter has an epigraph from Verlaine consisting simply of two lines of suspension points, thus suggesting that a few poems were so honoured ad nauseam, and perhaps poking fun at the ineffableness of Verlaine's verse:

Monsieur le Directeur,

La très niaise humanitairerie musagète se meurt. D'aucuns pionniers, humbles mais fiers, installent audacieusement la poésie enfin vraie, celle du transcendantalement intime vertige (Obliquitas somnorum). Il faut les suivre, sinon les imiter. (Interroga virtutem tuam.) J'ai travaillé dans ce sens. Je vous envoie une de mes meilleures oeuvres. Son insertion dans Lutèce sera l'irréfragable sanction de mon enrôlement définitif. J'ose attendre.

Salut dans l'art,

Jean-Charles Laurent

As in this letter, the decadents' sometimes pompous literary theories and their Latinate prose style were common targets for parody. More interesting is the reference to d'aucuns pionniers, which implies that Verlaine and others had been accepted as guides.

At the end of 1884 and the beginning of 1885 the Belgian periodical La Basoche published two poems showing Verlaine's influence: ‘Lune d'avril’, by Adolphe Ribaux:

La lune de printemps, sur les amandiers roses,
Sur le vert chèvrefeuille et les pruniers en fleur,
Glisse, comme un baiser, sa laiteuse pâleur,
Et dans l'air musical flotte l’âme des choses.

[1, 2 December 1884, p. 82]

and ‘Sur la plage’, by Jacques Madeleine:

Blanches ailes des barques frêles,
Vois ces taches d'un ton plus clair
Sur le vert sombre de la mer:
Sont-ce des voiles ou des ailes?

[11, 3 January 1885, p. 120]

This highly impressionistic first stanza (dated, appropriately enough, at Etretat on the Channel coast) could have been imitated from Verlaine, or it could be cognate with Verlaine's landscapes. The date of the poem, the polish of its impressionism, and perhaps the interrogation in the fourth line, argue for Verlaine as the source. Almost certainly derived from Verlaine are the dream-like quality of the tercets and their apostrophe to an unreal, inaccessible woman. They duplicate the tone of love poems like ‘En Sourdine’ (p. 120) and ‘Circonspection’ (p. 329):

Rêveuse qui les suit des yeux,
Veux-tu regarder tous les deux
La même voile, au loin qui tremble?
La seule extase sans rancoeurs,
Le plus délicat des bonheurs,
C'est encor, de rêver ensemble.

Verlaine's influence is also apparent in the verse of his friend Jean Moréas, some of whose poems appeared in Lutèce (‘Rythme boîteux’ and ‘Les Bonnes Souvenances’, 29 June–6 July 1884; ‘Remembrances’, 10–17 August 1884), and whose first collection, Les Syrtes, came out at the end of the year. Reviewing the volume in La Revue Contemporaine, Gabriel Sarrazin praised it (‘Ceci est un exquis volume de vers, et qui nous a complètement séduit’),⁵ but with major reservations. Some poems, he says, are resonant and meaningless, others repeat, perhaps unintentionally, some of Baudelaire's mystic poems: ‘Bref, Les Syrtes ne dégagent pas une pensée poétique vraiment originale, et en outre, l'art—si remarquable—de l'auteur va se perdre et s'enliser parfois dans le byzantisme [synonym for decadence].’ Then—at least, implicitly—he compares Moréas to Verlaine: ‘Son vers est le plus musical de l'heure actuelle et la suavité de sa mélodie métrique dépasse celle de M. Verlaine lui-même. … Puis la plastique de M. Moréas rivalise sa musique; en lui, comme en M. Verlaine, fusionnent avec science un peintre et un lyrique. …’ In La Basoche a reviewer states bluntly: ‘Jean Moréas est de ceux qui prennent pour devise les vers de Paul Verlaine: “Car nous voulons la nuance encore, / Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance”,’⁶ thus indicating not only Moréas' debt to Verlaine but also the importance which ‘Art poétique’ was beginning to have for the younger generation.

At the end of 1884 Léon Vanier published Jadis et naguère in an edition of 500 copies printed by Léo Trézenik, presumably on the same hand press he used for Lutèce. This was Verlaine's first collection of verse since his return to Paris, and it contained poems from all stages of his career, as well as ‘Art poétique’; it could therefore serve as an anthology for those who were just now beginning to read his poetry. In his review for La Revue Contemporaine Sarrazin is distinctly uncharitable; while granting ‘l'adorable et musicale suavité’ of some poems he states ‘… peut-être l'oeuvre entière de M. Verlaine relèverait-elle plus de la psychologe que de l'esthétique. … Pour le moment’ nous nous contenterons de recommander à ceux qui se croient obligés d'aimer qu'on dépasse les limites permises de l’énervement et de la déliquescence de la pensée certaines pièces à cet égard très réussies, dans Jadis et naguère, et de vrais modèles du genre: ‘Sonnet boîteux’, ‘A Albert Mérat’, ‘Langueur’, ‘Madrigal’, etc.’⁷ It is significant that Sarrazin devotes most of his remarks to the decadence of Verlaine's poems.

What distinguishes the year 1885 from the preceding one is a growing awareness, both in little magazines and in the grande presse, of the existence of a decadent school of poetry, with Verlaine and Mallarmé at its head. Thus in an article by Paul Grandet in Le Cri du Peuple (quoted in Lutèce) we notice the matter-of-fact way in which Grandet describes Verlaine as the leader of the new poetry:

De la poésie! mais cela n'est pas de la poésie, s’écrieront ceux pour qui M. Paul Verlaine est un grand homme et aux yeux desquels M. Laurent Tailhade (???!) est assez près d’égaler Victor Hugo. Sans doute, ce n'est pas de la poésie telle qu'ils la comprennent; assemblage de mots sans signification précise; petit jeu de patience à l'usage des fils de famille; idées: néant; rimes riches. …⁸

Writing in Les Débats, Paul Bourget observes that French literature is becoming increasingly like that of northern Europe, and that the place to look for the works of promising new poets is in the newspapers and magazines where they publish. Neither realism, nor pictorial verse, nor even Victor Hugo influence these young writers any longer; the only modern writer whom they revere as a master is Baudelaire, and then it is not the etcher of Tableaux parisiens but the mystic poet whom they esteem. He goes on to describe the influence of Verlaine:

De tous les poètes de talent qui firent partie du groupe du Parnasse, un seul paraît avoir fait école parmi cette jeunesse, M. Paul Verlaine. Cet écrivain étrange, et dont le grand public ignore jusqu'au nom, a essayé de réproduire avec ses vers les naunces qui font le domaine propre de la musique, tout l'indéterminé de la sensation et du sentiment. Parfois il a échoué dans cette tentative presque impossible, parfois il a réussi à composer des poèmes d'une originalité délicieuse, comme celui-ci tiré de ses Fêtes galantes, et qui fait tenir en deux strophes tout un infini de rêveries: [quotes ‘Le Faune’, p. 115].

Inégal et heurté, parfois exquis et parfois insaisissable, M. Paul Verlaine a une popularité de cénacle qui est un des signes les plus particuliers de cette époque. Il est aimé les par mêmes jeunes gens qui, du premier jour se sont reconnus dans les romans traduits de ce douleureux Dostoïewski! … de ces jeunes gens qui se passionnent pour la peinture de M. Gustave Moreau, pour les dessins de M. Odilon Redon, pour tout ce qui est suggestion, demiteinte, recherche de l'au-delà, clair-obscur d’âme. Après la débauche de réalisme à laquelle se sont livrés les écrivains de 1870, voici venir l'inévitable réaction; après l'idolâtrie de la vie, le culte du rêve. A Rebours, ce roman de M. Huysmans, où se trouvaient analysées les sensations d'un homme uniquement épris d'artifice, n'est pas loin d’être un livre de stricte exactitude …⁹

Bourget states Verlaine's ascendancy over younger writers in stronger terms than ‘Jean Mario’ did two years previously; for Bourget, Verlaine has ‘fait école parmi cette jeunesse’ and he enjoys ‘une popularité de cénacle’. While heretofore decadence was seen as characterising a few obscure but worthy authors, for Bourget, as for subsequent observers, it is a widespread style among the young generation. Finally Bourget describes decadence not as a curious literary style but in aesthetic terms: dark introspection, Dostoievskian intricacy, and highly imaginative paintings. Although Bourget acknowledges the public's ignorance of Verlaine, he gives the impression of Verlaine presiding over substantial numbers of literate youth, a youth imbued with a coherent esthétique. The picture is not yet that of a school of poets, but it is closer to it than previous treatments of Verlaine as an unjustly neglected author only now beginning to receive his due.

Beside an edited version of Bourget's article in the 19–26 April issue of Lutèce appeared Trézenik's regular ‘Chronique lutécienne’ column, devoted to ‘Les Décadents de l'allitérature’: ‘Ils ont longtemps porté les cheveux longs “à la Musset”. Aujourd'hui les ciseaux de la décadence ont passé par là. Ils s'enorgueillissent d'une tête rase et se vantent d'un menton glabre “à la Baudelaire”.’¹⁰ After indicating Verlaine's influence on the decadents, he predicts that they will go on to new excesses: already Verlaine is insufficiently obscure, and the day is not far off when Mallarmé will be too clear and Poictevin too bourgeois. Trézenik's article is a practical, facetious counterpart of Bourget's; with the good-humoured mockery which was his trademark, he shows what decadent literature will be like when Bourget's aesthetics have been put into practice by the minor writers who, by and large, composed the decadent movement.

The publication in Lutèce of two of Jules Laforgue's Complaintes in March (8–15 March) and in June the first instalment of the second series of Verlaine's ‘Poètes maudits’, on Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (7–14 June), was illustrative of a new tone. Laforgue, who was to die prematurely of tuberculosis after composing a few slim volumes of ironic, pungently moribund verse, was an epitome of decadence; thanks to T. S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's adoption in English of his techniques, he is also a principal link between decadence and contemporary poetry. When we see four of Verlaine's ‘Limbes’ literally beside Laforgue's ‘Complainte de mon Sacré-Coeur’, as we do in the issue of 19–26 July 1885, we can appreciate how much poetic sensibility had changed in less than three years.

During the spring of 1885 Lutèce published facetious comments under the rubric ‘Lettre d'un bourgeois’, which purported to show the reactions of the typical conservative bourgeois to the new poetry, although, in a double-edged sort of way, the letters also indicated weakness of decadent verse. With reference to Mallarmé's ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’, recently published in La Revue Indépendante, one such letter complains that the writer is sick of ‘Des Esseintisme’ and its quest for the unusual at any cost (1–8 March 1885), and another observes, ‘Et bien, en vérité, toute cette école actuelle, tous ces bons petits jeunes qui ne font qu’éclore à la littérature, sont des—oh! je vous en prie, M. Mostrailles, accordez-moi d'imprimer ce mot, qui rend si bien ma pensée—sont des emmerdeurs.’¹¹ The same writer protests that the decadents' philosophical pessimism is a German import unworthy of young Frenchmen.

The outstanding event of 1885, which brought the various confused notions of the new poetry into sharp focus, was the publication in May and June of Les Déliquescences of Adoré Floupette.¹² This was simply a collection of silly poems parodying the decadent manner, but even parody illustrated the decadent style, and, as with A Rebours the previous year, the furor attracted the attention of the general public and of the grande presse. Of course, it also brought fame to Etienne Arsenal and Bleucoton, as Mallarmé and Verlaine were dubbed in the book.

Like several other documents the importance of which in the history of decadence outweighs their intrinsic literary worth, Les Déliquescences appeared first in Lutèce. On 1–8 February there were two poems, obvious parodies of Mallarmé's style, over the signature of Etienne Arsenal: ‘Le Petunia sauveur’ and ‘Cantique avant de se coucher’. The issue of 19–26 published under the title of ‘Les Déliquescences’ three ‘Fragments d'une symphonie en vert mineur’: ‘Andante’, ‘Scherzo’, and ‘Pizzicati’. The issue of 3–10 May carried four more poems: ‘Platonisme’, ‘Pour être conspué’, ‘Madrigal’, and ‘Rhythme claudicant”. On 2 May these poems, and ten more, were published in a small brochure on luxury paper, one of Vanier's limited editions for bibliophiles.¹³ In keeping with the parody, the title page gave ‘Lion Vanné’ as the publisher and Byzantium as the place of publication. This edition was so promptly bought up that a second one of 1,500 copies, augmented with a preface by Marius Tapora, pharmacist second-class, was published the following month. (The preface appeared in Lutèce for 14–12 June.) Even this edition was sold out in a fortnight, and copies soon became collector's items. ‘Adoré Floupette’ was the pseudonym of two Lutece contributors, Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire, both very minor poets who continued to publish conventional verse long after the Déliquescences affair. Ironically, the poems of Les Déliquescences are their best-known work, and, just as ironically, what began as another joke for the amusement of staff and readers mushroomed into the publication which brought more notoriety to the decadents than their serious literary efforts.

The ‘Préface’ describes the life of Adoré Floupette, his literary evolution from romantic to decadent, and how Tapora finds him in Paris. The two men go to a café, the Panier fleuri, where a decadent meeting is taking place, and where Floupette gets wonderfully drunk. In the course of the evening Bleucoton-Verlaine is positively identified by an allusion to one of his poems. The next day Floupette and Tapora visit Floupette's mentor, M. Poulard des Roses; Floupette recites Mallarmé's ‘La Mort de la pénultième’, and Tapora, too, decides to become a decadent. With much effort and goodwill he succeeds in understanding some of the decadent poets, but not all: if Bleucoton is comprehensible, Arsenal continues to elude him.

After the introduction, or ‘Liminaire’, which continues the satirical tone of the ‘Préface’, there follow the eighteen poems, some of them nonsense, others parodies of individual styles, and all of them exaggerations of decadent vocabulary and versification: ‘Les Enervées de Jumiège’, ‘Platonisme’, ‘Pour etre conspué’, ‘Suavitas’, ‘Avant d'entrer’, ‘Idylle symbolique’; four poems comprising the movements of ‘Symphonie en vert mineur: variations sur un thème vert pomme’, ‘Madrigal’, ‘Rhythme claudicant’, ‘Pour avoir péché’, ‘Le Sonnet libertin’, ‘Catique avant de se coucher’, ‘Remords’, ‘Bal décadent’, and ‘Décadent’.

The response from the philistine press was so prompt and voluminous that suddenly articles on Verlaine and the new poets were no longer a rarity. We shall, therefore, comment only on a few of the more representative ones. Gabriel Mermeix, writing in Le XIXe Siecle on 17 May, seems, to the merriment of the decadents, to have taken the whole thing seriously. In Gil Blas (‘Le Décadent’, 17 May 1885), Paul Arène merely questions the decadents' originality, pointing out that young poets have always sought novel effects. The Revue Contemporaine describes the decadent school, recognises the Déliquescences as a timely parody, and suggests that the parody hurts the minor followers more than it does the two leaders, Verlaine and Mallarmé.¹⁴ Before undertaking to discuss ‘Les Poètes impressionnistes et Adoré Floupette’ the Bibliothèque Universelle et Revue Suisse felt obliged to explain, ‘La langue des vers change si vite en France, à notre époque, qu'il suffit de la délaisser pendant quelques mois pour n'y plus rien comprendre du tout.’¹⁵ It then approaches Les Déliquescences by way of Banville, Maurice Vaucaire (Arc-en-ciel, Lemerre 1885, in verse; prolific author of comedies and novels), and Mallarmé, after whom ‘il n'y a plus qu’à tirer l’échelle’ (p. 389). Sutter Laumann (‘Les Déliquescences’, La Justice 19 July 1885) ridicules the Déliquescences, and he seems to have originated the theory that decadent poetry could be composed simply by choosing words at random, in a dictionary or a hat, and arranging them according to the number of syllables. In Le Figaro (22 September 1885) Labruyère draws a humorous portrait of the typical decadent. Paul Armon, after some delay, discusses ‘Les Poètes maudits’, or decadents, in La France Libre for 3 October 1885.

In June appeared two articles which addressed themselves to the general question of philosophical pessimism among the youth of the country, rather than specifically to Les Déliquescences. Both seek to determine the causes and to describe the effects of the mood which prevailed among the young generation.

In La Revue Bleue for 6 June 1885 Dionys Ordinaire treats the question in a light, sarcastic, and mocking tone; while correctly identifying the phenomenon of pessimism, he refuses to take it seriously: ‘Il souffle d'Allemagne, depuis quelques années, sur notre jeunesse française, un vent aigre et malsain qui nous apporte une épidémie nouvelle, inconnue à notre vieille Gaule: celle du pessimisme.’¹⁶ He proceeds to describe, always in bantering terms, the effects of this malady and to discuss its Teutonic origin. The disease is all the more redoubtable in that the French, outranciers by nature, tend to overdo new ideas. Thus Teutonic pessimism has taken root in France, even among young men who have not read the German philosophers. These youths reject all the gifts of Mother Nature and long for death and even for complete annihilation of being. Such is the case of a few young writers who act like wits and wish to shock the bourgeoisie. Every school has its antecedents, and those of the pessimists are ‘… les moroses comme Stendhal, comme Mérimée, comme Flaubert, l’écrivain le plus surfait de notre siécle’ (p. 707), and the ‘… poètes désespérés: Musset, le chantre de l'hystérisme; Baudelaire, l'esprit le plus gâté, le plus méchamment raffiné de notre temps, un solide écrivain toutefois; Richepin, l'auteur des Blasphèmes’ (p. 708). Their psychologist is Bourget, and although Ordinaire dislikes him, he correctly describes his style: ‘Ce style est métaphorique, plaqué de couleurs, précieux jusqu’à l'obscurité, plein de soleils couchants et de clairs de lune, imité, assez habilement d'ailleurs, de Taine, de Flaubert, des Goncourt, de ceux qu'on appelle coloristes parce qu'ils confondent la plume et le pinceau’ (p. 708). Ordinaire compares Bourget's L'Irréparable to Les Liaisons dangereuses for its crass immorality, a comparison which he feels Bourget and his followers would welcome, since they are the decadents (and here is Ordinaire's first use of the term) of their century, as Crébillon fils and Laclos were of theirs. Expanding on this notion, he states:

Ce mot de décadent sonne dans les pages de M. Bourget avec une fanfare si éclatante qu'il a piqué ma curiosité. Je me suis informé, et c'est ainsi que j'ai appris, non sans stupeur, que la maladie du pessimisme n'a pas atteint seulement quelques excentriques, mais qu'elle fait rage et infecte une notable partie de notre jeunesse.

[p. 709]

Ordinaire ridicules the decadents for their unwarranted despair and contrasts them with the generous youth of previous times. As for himself, he sees cause only for optimism in the challenges that lie ahead, concluding:

Pour moi, quand tous les autres motifs d'exister me manqueraient, quand je me sentirais menacé de choir en désespérance, je regarderais, si j’étais jeune comme vous, du côté de l'Allemagne, par la trouée des Vosges, et ce n'est pas Shopenhauer [sic] que je verrais.

[p. 710]

(This patriotic note is less gratuitous than might be supposed: it was common to trace the pessimism of the younger generation to the defeat of 1870 and profess astonishment that such a Teutonic philosophy should have taken root in France. Fifteen and seventeen years after the defeat, anti-Prussian sentiment was again rising. Articles and cartoons in Le Chat Noir were so virulently anti-Prussian that French authorities seized the 13 January 1883 issue at the request of the German ambassador.)

The following week the same magazine published an article by the distinguished critic, Jules Lemaitre: ‘La Jeunesse sous le Second Empire et sous la Troisième République’. A propos of a new edition of Poésies de Jacques Richard, a minor poet who flaunted his hostility to the Second Empire, Lemaitre dwells at length on the enthusiasm and generosity of the generation which was finishing its studies around 1860. At the same time, however, another literature was growing up, ‘… celle de la seconde moitié du siècle, une littérature d'observation morose et de recherche plastique … qui est devenue l'expression la plus exacte de notre tristesse et de notre détraquement. Flaubert écrivait son premier roman et Taine ses premiers livres de critique. Les Goncourt suivaient. …’¹⁷ In contrast to that enthusiastic generation, today's youth is profoundly pessimistic, at least that portion of it which is engaged in creative writing. Perhaps this pessimism is justifiable, considering both the defeat of 1870 and recent political events: both the empire and the republic have failed them. Lemaitre now examines the literary expression of this pessimism, developing a point he first made in his article on J.-K. Huysmans a few months before: as literature shifts its emphasis from content to style it inevitably becomes sordid and amoral. His thesis is of real interest to us, because he does go to the heart of the decadent aesthetic:

Et à mesure que, par une philosophie superbe et courte, les romanciers s'enfermaient dans la réalité fatale et brutale, ils attribuaient au style plus d'importance qu'on n'avait jamais fait. D'ordinaire, ce qui intéresse dans l'oeuvre d'art, c'est à la fois l'object exprimé et l'expression de cet object; mais, quand l'objet est vil, on est bien sûr que ce qu'on aime dans l'oeuvre d'art, c'est l'art tout seul. Voilà pourquoi le ‘naturalisme,’ loin d’être, comme quelques-uns le croient, un art grossier, est un art aristocratique, un art de mandarins égoistes, le comble de l'art. Et l'on voit aussi comment le naturalisme, et la poésie parnassienne, et l'impressionnisme s'appellent et s'engendrent. Quand on renonce à ce qui avait été presque le tout de la littérature classique et de la littérature romanesque, à la peinture de la vie morale et à l'idéalisation de l'homme, que reste-t-il que la sensation, l'impression pittoresque et sensuelle? L'art nouveau se réduit peut-être à cette recherche inventive de la sensation rare. Mais cette recherche implique ou amène une indifférence absolue à l’égard de tout, morale, raison, science. De plus, la sensation toute seule est un abîme de tristesse; le désir qui l'appelle et qu’à son tour elle provoque est de sa nature inassouvissable.

[pp. 742–3]

The decadents themselves would have agreed with his characterisation of them: ‘Ils sont ravis de se sentir décadents; ils se complaisent dans leur névrose et savourent leur déliquescence; et leur âme jouit profondément d’être pareille à un cadavre aux nuances changeantes et très fines qui se vide lentement’ (p. 743). In conclusion he asks whether, in the final analysis, pessimism is an organic sickness of society or simply a literary style, and he replies that only time will tell.

Finally we come to Paul Bourde's article in Le Temps for 6 August 1885, in which he surveys the decadent phenomenon with stinging sarcasm:

D'après les oeuvres de l’école, et Floupette nous venant en aide, voici comment nous nous représentons le parfait décadent. Le trait caractéristique de sa physionomie morale est une aversion déclarée pour la foule considérée comme souverainement stupide et plate. Le poète s'isole pour chercher le précieux, le rare, l'exquis, Sitôt qu'un sentiment est à la veille d’être partagé par un certain nombre de ses semblables, il s'empresse de s'en défaire, à la façon des jolies femmes qui abandonnent une toilette dès qu'on la copie.

He mentions the decadents' Parnassian origins, he calls Verlaine and Mallarmé the two columns of the school, and he lists Moréas, Laurent Tailhade, Charles Vignier, and Charles Morice as members. He discusses their aversion to the natural, their religious attitudes, metric innovations, vocabulary, use of correspondances and analogy, and so on. In conclusion Bourde points out that decadence offers nothing new, since it is just a continuation and exaggeration of ideas already put forth by the Jeunes-France of Romanticism: ‘Le romantisme épuisé a donné cette dernière petite fleur, une fleur de fin de saison, maladive et bizarre. C'est sûrement une décadence, mais seulement celle d'une école qui se meurt.’

Jean Moréas' rebuttal in Le XIXe Siècle for II August was ‘Les Décadents', the first of his manifestoes defining the successive goals of current poetry.¹⁸ He begins by quoting Vigny to the effect that ‘les esprits paresseux et routiniers’ find anything new ridiculous and barbarous, and he counters with his own sarcasm Bourde's attacks on the personal life of the decadents. He adduces the examples of Baudelaire and Poe to justify the decadent cult of art for art's sake and their use of symbolism and suggestion, Littré in defence of their neologisms. He concludes with another quotation from Vigny, urging the poet to remain well ahead of his public.

To the glee of the decadents, Bourde's name lent itself to a pun, since bourde in French means lie, ‘poor excuse; frivolous tale’. L.-G. Mostrailles (Léo Trézenik) in Lutèce replies in an article entitled ‘Bourde's bourdes’.¹⁹ using the English possessive to emphasise the double meaning. With delightful wit Trézenik merely contests the passage in which Bourde ‘… accuse la rédaction de Lutèce … de se “pâmer” sur les élucubrations de M. Mallarmé’, citing several articles in Lutèce which had criticised Mallarmé's obscurity, and he demands a retraction from the editor of Le Temps; Bourde's reply was to quote Verlaine's laudatory remarks on Mallarmé in his ‘Poètes maudits’ article.²⁰

In his regular ‘Chronique lutécienne’ Trézenik congratulates himself on having obtained from the grande presse more publicity than it would ever have deigned to bestow on a more serious literary effort, confesses that the whole thing was not a parody but a joke made up by Beauclair and Vicaire, and accuses the whole press, particularly Mermeix and Bourde, of having fallen for it. Finally, he explains that décadent is a misnomer:

Il n'y a pas plus décadence aujourd'hui qu'il n'y eut décadence alors qu’à l'Art classique s'essaya à succéder le romantisme, alors qu'Hugo détrona Ponsard, alors qu'on acclama, en 1830, les Burgraves [sic] au détriment de Lucrèce. Il y a une simple transformation. Il y a tendance de la jeune littérature à faire neuf, et pour cela à faire autre. Les étiquettes ne signifient si bien rien que les prétendus décadents ont déjà été affublés de l’épithète de néoromantiques, parce que ‘romantisme,’ au fond, au temps de sa gloire et de son audace, ne voulait que dire changement. Et c'est encore faire du romantisme, aujourd'hui, mais du néo-romantisme que de s'essayer à sortir, littérairement, de la routine et de l'ornière.²¹

In basing their appeal on the examples of established writers of the past and on the naturalness of constant, evolutionary change in literature, Moréas and Trézenik display good common sense and reduce the polemic to its just proportions; indeed, most decadent criticism is more sensible and down-to-earth than either the attacks of conservative critics or the practices of decadent writing which stirred up controversy in the first place!

The last article we shall consider was published outside France. From May to November Vittorio Pica published a series of articles in La Gazzetta Letteraria of Turin, entitled ‘I moderni bizantini’—Francis Poictevin, Huysmans, and Verlaine.²² The first article, on Poictevin, observes the flowering in France of opere bizantine, whose roots are to be found in the strange and pessimistic works of Edgar Poe and of Arthur Schopenhauer, and which, too refined for the general public, are intended for ‘un pubblico ristretto di artisti et di iniziati, capaci d'intenderne et gustarne le squisite bellezze’ (2 May 1885, p. 137). The essay on Huysmans is devoted largely to A Rebours and its analysis of Des Esseintes' literary and ecclesiastical tastes. The Verlaine article is remarkable: consisting of twenty newspaper-size columns, it made an unusually complete and intelligent study of his verse. A résumé would simply repeat what is now generally known, but we should mention Pica's detailed history of the Parnasse, his mention of Amour and Les Poetes maudits, and his references to the articles of ‘Jean Mario’ and Desprez. Pica emphasises decadence in Verlaine's poetry (‘Langueur’ is quoted in its entirety) and discusses the liberating influence of his metrics on French versification. Three years later Félix Fénéon translated the article for La Cravache.²³ Even in France Pica's insights would have been precocious for the period; his familiarity with current French literature must have been due to his contacts with Paris, for in the spring of 1885 he was foreign correspondent for La Revue Contemporaine. Otherwise, ‘I moderni bizantini’ anticipates by five years or more the spread of Verlaine's fame and that of decadence beyond the borders of France and Belgium.

Léo Trézenik came closer to the truth than anyone else when he observed that their joke had obtained for the decadents more publicity from large-circulation periodicals than their serious writing ever had. The decadents did not childishly seek publicity for its own sake; rather, reviewers in the grande presse had consistently overlooked their verse, so that when the clamour surrounding. A Rebours and Les Déliquescences brought their names and discussions of their verse—even hostile ones!—before the literate public, they made the most of the opportunity. Obviously people can only buy books that they have heard about, and now they were hearing about Verlaine, Mallarmé, Moréas, and the others. If the poetry esteemed by des Esseintes and parodied by Beauclair and Vicaire had really been inconsequential or a hoax, it would have gone no further; but because some poetry of real worth did exist behind the façade parodied by Les Déliquescences and ridiculed by a Bourde, sensitive readers who had first looked at it out of curiosity came to appreciate it for its real value. In this way, the nonsense and buffoonery of Les Déliquescences served a worthy purpose.

Les Déliquescences did not create a school of poetry where none had existed before, any more than Les Poètes maudits transformed minor poetasters into major poets; what the parody did achieve was to indicate the existence of a group of poets with common ideals and to name specific individuals among them. In their café discussions and social gatherings the decadents were probably more aware of comprising a ‘school’ than they had been two or three years previously. Lethève states that the press campaign against Les Déliquescences obliged the poets to group together and to define their goals.²⁴ Perhaps the fact that Jean Moréas was moved to compose his first manifesto by press treatments of Les Déliquescences, and not by those of A Rebours the previous spring, indicates that their sense of community had increased during the intervening year.

As for Verlaine, his position after Les Déliquescences can be appreciated in terms of his publications. Although he would never succeed in living from his pen, by the end of 1885 his poems were appearing frequently in magazines, and, what is more, henceforth Vanier would publish his earlier works, as well as his current ones, at his own expense, not Verlaine's! In 1886 Fêtes galantes was reissued in an edition of 600 copies, in 1887 Romances sans paroles; the new volumes Amour (1888, 651 copies) and Parallèlement (1889, 600 copies) were followed in 1889 by a second edition of Sagesse in 1,100 copies; in 1891 Vanier brought out the first Choix de poésies in an edition of 1,500 copies. During the 1890's Verlain published at least one new volume of verse each year, in addition to placing poems in magazines.

Notes

1. Oeuvres poétiques complètes, Y.-G. Le Dantec and Jacques Borel, eds. (Gallimard, 1962), p. 75. Further references to poems by Verlaine will be identified in the text by title and page number in this edition.

2. For the text of the poem and additional information on Guy-Valvor, see our article ‘Paul Verlaine and Guy-Valvor’, Romance Notes, XI, 1 (autumn, 1969), 41–5.

3. III (1883–84), 435–40.

4. Jean-Charles Laurent, ‘Les Fleurs blêmes’, 28 September–5 October 1884. Laurent was actually Louis Marsolleau, a contributor to Le Chat Noir. See Noël Richard, A L'Aube du symbolisme (Nizet, 1961), pp. 171–2.

5. ‘Poésie: Les Syrtes’, I, 2 (25 February 1885), 290.

6. ‘Chronique de l'art et du livre: les nouveaux-nés’, I, 4 (February 1885), 169–70.

7. ‘Poésie: Jadis et naguère’, I, 1 (25 January 1885), 131–2.

8. ‘Paul Verlaine et J.-B. Clément’, 15–22 March 1885.

9. Quoted in ‘La Poésie contemporaine’, Lutèce, 19–26 April 1885.

10. Ibid.

11. 5–12 July 1885. See also ‘Lettre d'un bourgeois’ in the issue of 10–17 May.

12. Since few copies of the Déliquescences are available, it is useful to note where, besides Lutèce, extracts can be found. André Barre, Le Symbolisme (Jouve, 1912), gives the ‘Liminaire’ (pp. 149–50), followed by a description of all eighteen poems, with a few brief quotations (pp. 150–54). Richard, A l'Aube du symbolisme, quotes the ‘Préface’ in toto (pp. 281–315). G. L. van Roosbroeck, The Legend of the Decadents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), gives the complete texts of ‘Les Décadents’, ‘Platonisme’, ‘Scherzo’, and ‘Remords’, as well as brief passages from other poems. Adolphe Van Bever and Paul Léautaud, Poétes d'aujourd'hui (Mercure de France, 1947), III, pp. 396–9, give the texts of ‘Les Enervés de Jumiège’, ‘Platonisme’, ‘Suavitas’, and ‘Idylle symbolique’. Finally, Albert Schinz, Nineteenth Century French Readings (New York: Holt, 1939), II, pp. 777–9, gives the texts of ‘Cantique avant de se coucher’, ‘Décadents’, and ‘Scherzo’.

13. Here are the two original editions of Les Déliquescences: (a) 2 May 1885, 110 copies. This contains only the ‘Liminaire’ and the eighteen poems, and was printed by Trézenik on the press of Lutèce. Ten copies only carried the names of Vicaire and Beauclair on the cover. (b) 20 June, 1,500 copies. ‘La Vie d'Adoré Floupette’ by Marius Tapora is found on pages v-xlvii, ‘Liminaire’ and ‘Déliquescences’ occupy pages 49–80. This edition is incorrectly listed in Journal de la librairie (1885, second series, p. 492) as having appeared on 1 August; the first edition is not listed at all. In this edition Léon Vanier is correctly identified in the achevé d'imprimer, although elsewhere (i.e. on the title and first pages) he is still called Lion Vanné.

    There have been two reprints: (c) Crès edition, 15 May 1911, 635 copies. No. 1 of the collection ‘Les Maîtres du livre’, (d) Jonquières edition, 20 April 1923, 825 copies. See Richard, A L'Aube du symbolisme, pp. 174, 188 and 281.

14. ‘Poésie: Les Déliquescences’, II, 2 (25 June 1885), 266–7.

15. ‘Chronique parisienne’: ‘Les Poètes impressionnistes et Adoré Floupette’, XXVII, 80 (August 1885), 388.

16. ‘La Jeune Génération’, Revue Politique et Littéraire (Revue Bleue), XXXV, 23 (6 June 1885), 706. Further references to this article will be given in the text by page number.

17. Ibid., XXXV, 24 (13 June 1885), 740. Further references to this article will be given in the text by page number.

18. Also in Les Premières Armes du symbolisme (Vanier, 1889), pp. 25–30.

19. Lutèce, 16–23 August 1885.

20. Bourde's confusion is understandable. Even today Guy Michaud lists Lutèce for November 1883 as the first publication of ‘Don du poème’ and ‘Sainte’, without indicating that they appeared as quotations in Verlaine's ‘Poètes maudits’ article (Mallarmé, Hâtier-Boivin, 1953, p. 187). These were, as a matter of fact, the only poems of Mallarmé to appear in Lutèce. Trézenik's hostility to Mallarmé's verse seems all the more incongruous in view of his efforts to promote Verlaine's, Corbière's, and Laforgue's.

21. 16–23 August 1885.

22. Gazzetta Letteraria, Artistica e Scientifica, IX, 18, 30, 46, 47, 48 (2 May, 25 July, 14, 21 and 28 November 1885), 137–9, 233–5, 361–2, 369–71, 378–9.

23. La Cravache Parisienne, 3 November 1888. See Jacques Lethève, Impressionnistes et symbolistes devant la presse (Colin, 1959), p. 282, n. 38.

24. See ibid., p. 179.