SOURCE: "Théophile Gautier's 'Albertus' and the Thematics of Nailing," in Nineteenth Century French Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 & 4, Spring-Summer, 1992, pp. 317-28.

[In the following essay, Vest explores Gautier's use of images of nailing in "Albertus."]

To dismiss "Albertus" as a gratuitous, puerile fantasy or as a frenetic exercise in poetic license is to deny Gautier his due. Although the young writer's penchant for l'emphase and for heterogeneous subjects and styles is evident in "Albertus," yet it is also true that this poem was carefully reworked prior to publication in 1832 and that, for all its posturing and rambling, it exhibits considerable thematic and organizational coherence. Contributing to that cohesiveness is Gautier's insistence on images of nailing, images that directly counter its apparent predilection for chaotic movement. It is no accident that "Albertus" begins and ends with references to clous and that allusions to nailing recur at important points in this and others of Gautier's writings. The present study will not attempt to reassess the psychosexual implications of the clou, but will instead concentrate on the intellectual and symbolic importance of this recurrent image that constitutes a unifying metaphor in "Albertus" and that provides a useful reference point for understanding Gautier's outlook on literature and on life.

The first stanza of "Albertus" offers what seems to be one of the "transpositions d'art" for which Gautier is justly famous, a painterly verbal tableau that in this case ends with a disconcerting reference to a nail. The landscape is carefully drawn in six 12-syllable lines:

Sur le bord d'un canal profond dont les eaux vertes
Dorment, de nénuphars et de bateaux couvertes,
Avec ses toits aigus, ses immenses greniers,
Ses tours au front d'ardoise où nichent les cigognes,
Ses cabarets bruyants qui regorgent d'ivrognes,
Est un vieux bourg flamand tel que le peint Teniers.

But Gautier does not content himself with word-painting, sinuously wrought. After presenting additional details of the romantic paysage and an aside to the assumed reader, the second half of his first stanza, another six-line unit, concludes:

—Il ne manque vraiment au tableau que le cadre
Avec le clou pour l'accrocher—

These trimmings effectively delimit the scene, framing it, cutting it off, thus purposefully distancing the actual reader from its contents and thereby leading that reader to consider it as a creation, as a work of art. Yet, although the detail of the "clou" completes the image of landscape qua objet, the authorial comment in which it occurs interjects a potentially unsettling element of subjectivity and judgment, while the curt octosyllabic line by which it is conveyed suggests incompleteness. In fact, like the frame, the nail is, and remains, lacking. This initial reference to nailing—or, more accurately, to not nailing—establishes the keen sense of incongruity that will be essential to Gautier's ironic goals throughout "Albertus," where to nail or not to nail ultimately becomes a question of life and death.

In this first stanza the comment about missing frame and nail establishes a perspective of critical distance while laying the groundwork for the conflict between fixity and metamorphosis that will characterize this poem. The theme of mutability is evident at every stage in the narrative, as a sorceress named Véronique magically turns herself into a lovely temptress who seduces Albertus and gives him over to Satan. Still the vigorous activities of this poem's main scenes—physical transformations, temptation and seduction episodes, witches' sabbath—are all counter-balanced by concrete details that tend to immobilize the action until, in the end, Albertus lands with a thud, a broken mass, motionless on the Appian Way. These details have often been dismissed as romantic bric-a-brac. Yet they have the effect of sealing in time the scenes of frenetic movement that they describe. They serve like the frozen frames in a film to fix a scene in the viewer's mind. Naillike, they pin the action down, make it stick.

The image of the nail also suggests finality. If the picture is ready to hang it should be complete. Similarly the decorative "clous d'acier" covering the "coffre" mentioned in stanza LXXXVIII indicate that it is, artistically speaking, a finished, polished product. The received idea that Gautier frequently had trouble completing his poems is based in part on a candid assertion by the autobiographical narrator of this poem, who heaves a gargantuan sigh of relief when his tale is finally done (stanza CXXI). The picture of the first stanza, ready to frame and hang, and the nail-studded box are recalled by the narrator's admission at the end of "Albertus" that conclusions are hard to come by and should be appreciated when found. Thus, in the context of hyperactive, digressive storytelling, the nail comes to represent not only fixity, but also that hard, definitive finishing touch of the artisan that attests the completeness and, by extension, the permanence that, throughout his life, intrigued the author of Emaux et camées.

The interplay between disintegration and permanence is a leitmotif in Gautier's work. The vital struggle against decomposition informs his poems, stories, and plays. The absorbing quest for permanence amid mutability gives meaning to the detail of the frame and nail that would finish off the picture at the beginning of "Albertus" and of the "coffre à clous d'acier" that resembles a coffin in Véronique's boudoir. That association with death is reinforced by Gautier's use of the verb clouer in stanza LXXI, where the sense of finality is directly linked to thoughts of mortality, and in stanza CXXII, where hints of extinction extend to communication and to creation itself. Motifs of deathlike immobilization, as evident in these images of nailing as they are in the lava imprint of Arria Marcella or in a mummy's foot, are reflections of Gautier's life-long struggle with the idea of death.

The interplay of life and death, of freedom and judgment, of nailing and of refraining from nailing, is highly pertinent to Gautier's ironic stance in "Albertus" where a syncopated verse form supports the ideas of playfulness and freedom within a narrative structure that is primarily associational rather than logical. Hence the importance of the teasing banter in the first stanza where, from the outset, the assumed reader is addressed and manipulated, with humor based on deflation of expected norms:

—Vous reconnaissez-vous?—Tenez, voilà le saule,
De ses cheveux blafards inondant son épaule
Comme une fille au bain, l'église et son clocher,
L'étang où des canards se pavane l'escadre.

The aside to the assumed reader sets the tone for subsequent familiarity and for caustic, occasionally cynical comments addressed to that reader in which deflation or demystification is the goal. Similarly the inverted syntax of lines 8 and 10 creates a setting where the actual reader's linguistic and semantic expectations are brought into question, crossed, diverted. The trenchant, unsettling irony that Gautier had encountered and admired in the works of Scarron and Rabelais recurs throughout "Albertus," focused by poetic devices such as chiasmus (e.g., stanzas XCIII and CXXII) and reinforced by the alternating rime plate and rime embrassée as well as by the short, pithy final line in each stanza. Nail-like, that irony functions both to pique curiosity and to puncture it.

Right through its final image of the missing, affixing nail, the opening stanza of "Albertus" sets the ironic tone of "what you see is not what you get" that pervades the entirety of this work. Here as elsewhere, Gautier was preoccupied with questions of hiddenness and mutability, to which nailing may be seen as a definitive response. It is in this larger thematic context that the initial comment about frame and nail as well as the detail of the "coffre à clous d'acier" take on emblematic significance, particularly as we look back at them, as is prudent when considering a work whose internal development is largely associational, from the all-inclusive perspective of the end.

The concept of mystification lies at the heart of the concluding stanzas of "Albertus," which in their rollicking way summarize all that has gone before. In a sardonic epilogue (stanzas CXXI-CXXII) Gautier's narrator, swept away by the furor poeticus, judges his job masterfully done. Declaring his work "sans égal au monde," he claims that it is an "allégorie admirable et profonde." This "allégorie" has a quintessentially Rabelaisian character that gives Gautier's poem its final ironic series of connecting punches, each efficacious, each evocative of earlier jabs and hooks. "Albertus" ends with a reference to Pantagruel preceded by an allusion to bone marrow recalling Rabelais's "substantifique moelle."

… pour sucer la moelle il faut qu'on brise l'os,
Pour savourer l'odeur il faut ouvrir le vase,
Du tableau que l'on cache il faut tirer la gaze,
Lever, le bal fini, le masque aux dominos.
—J'aurais pu clairement expliquer chaque chose,
Clouer à chaque mot une savante glose.—
Je vous crois, cher lecteur, assez spirituel
Pour me comprendre.—Ainsi, bonsoir.—Fermez la porte,
Donnez-moi la pincette, et dites qu'on m'apporte
Un tome de Pantagruel.

The narrator's concluding remarks are coupled with a reference to a "tableau" reminiscent of that which began the poem and culminate, like that initial reference, in an allusion to nailing, or rather to the absence of nailing. The resounding "J'aurais pu … clouer" is heralded by a reiterative sequence of paired images—marrow/bone, odor/container, painting/cover, masqueraders/mask—that are all variations on a single antiphonal theme: things are not always as they appear and active undoing is required to reveal the truth. While dramatically setting up the poem's final statement on nailing, these "il faut" assertions also recapitulate earlier references in "Albertus" related to the theme of hiddenness, including this poem's most frequently cited passage:

—Jouissons, faisons-nous un bonheur de surface:
Un beau masque vaut mieux qu'une villaine face.
—Pourquoi l'arracher, pauvres fous?

The truth is masked, and properly so. Before Ibsen, Gautier advanced the idea of a life-lie, a cover-up that allows one to continue living: "déception sublime, admirable imposture." A similar meaning is suggested by the covered "tableau," recalling that of the first stanza, which at the poem's end is shown in its true hiddenness. Its mystery, like that of the Rabelaisian "moelle," can be savored only if one can "tirer la gaze" or break into a bone or release odors from a closed container. Yet, as Albertus learns the hard way, such disclosing may prove fatal.

The conjunction between mask, bone, "tableau," and "gaze," made explicit in the vivid revelations of the seduction scene is recalled here, mixed with the odor of death. Attractive smells are conspicuously lacking from Gautier's description of Véronique. Instead the odor emanating from the vase at the end of "Albertus" calls to mind one of the most memorable and grotesque details of Véronique's hovel: the smell of rotting fetuses in bottles (stanza IX, 1: 131). Urnlike vase and bottle both evoke death. For Gautier, enclosed, hidden, sealed spaces betoken the tomb. Thus the "coffre à clous d'acier" in the seductress's chamber is a coffin-like chest complete with nails that recalls the casket mentioned in a pivotal stanza describing the Weltschmerz of "notre héros" Albertus (stanza LXXI), where the verb clouer designates the ultimate seal of death:

—A vingt ans l'on pouvait le clouer dans sa bière,
Cadavre sans illusions.

This statement, from an author recently turned twenty, leads directly to the reflections on masks in stanza LXXII, quoted above. That striking use of clouer reverberates in the reader's mind as "Albertus" draws to a close with its final reference to nailing, reminding the wary reader that nailing can be deadly.

In his concluding remarks (stanza CXXII), just after the interconnected references to marrow, vase, picture, and mask, Gautier makes a leap to the back of one of his favorite hobbyhorses, thereby connecting two ranges of meaning associated with nailing. The phrase "savante glose" recalls Gautier's numerous invectives against Boileau and other seventeenth century "grammarians" who, he claimed (particularly in Les Grotesques and in Daniel Jovard, ou la conversion d'un classique), effectively retarded the course of French poetry for two centuries. The idea of affixing a specific interpretation to each word recalls not only Gautier's railings against the academicians (cf. "messieurs les rigoristes," 1: 176) but also his impatience with the romans à clef of the "soi-disant grand siècle" in his essay on Scudéry and elsewhere. Such an action would limit the freedom of the word, immobilize it, imprison it, bury it.

Thus for Gautier the phrase "clouer à chaque mot une savante glose" evokes a Rabelaisian reaction to the idea of pinning down words by limiting them to specific meanings while it connects through Gautier's own expansive usage of clou and clouer to the idea of imprisonment and entombment. Connotations associated with nailing in "Albertus"—suggestions of limiting, restraining, finishing off—also underlie Gautier's descriptions of the unfortunate imprisonments of Villon and Viau in Les Grotesques. His resentment against that sort of immobilizing sequestration is clear. To him, the judgment that produced those incarcerations seems profoundly unjust. A Rabelaisian love of linguistic and personal freedom energizes Gautier's artistic expression. Verbal fixity and artistic restraint are linked for him with a troubling sense of injustice.

The ideas of the unfairness of judgment and the inappropriateness of imprisonment are inextricably linked in Gautier's œuvre with a notion of sin and retribution. Young Théophile Gautier heard the judgment passed against his "homonyme" Théophile de Viau as if it were meant for him personally:

Maudit sois-tu Théophile! [italics Gautier's] Maudit soit l'esprit qui t'a dicté tes pensées, maudite soit la main qui les a écrites, malheureux le libraire qui les a imprimées…. (Les Grotesques)

"Le bon Théo" could never forget the irony implicit in his Christian name, just as he could never forgive God for allowing death. René Jasinski insists that the subtitles associated with "Albertus"—"L'Ame et le péché" and "Légende théologique"—are not entirely facetious. He points out that Albertus resists Véronique's temptation better than other mortals and concludes that Albertus yields "par lassitude et apathie plus que par désir, et il ne succombe que dans l'ivresse" (Années, [1929] 116). What might be considered a peccadillo in another context here leads to death. That seems harsh punishment indeed, especially since the character named Albertus is described as being very much like the narrator (stanzas L - LVIII and LXVIII) who in turn resembles the author whose nickname in the Petit Cénacle was Albert or Albertus.

…. .

In addition to its immediate applications within the story and structure of "Albertus," the nail has broad implications for Gautier's work as a whole, because of its peculiar association, for him, with death and decomposition. It is a truism that Gautier was preoccupied with death. That subject informs much of his poetry as well as his prose and theater. When the noun clou or the verb clouer is involved, the result is often an image of entombment in a claustrophobic, impotent world, an inescapable "gouffre" not unlike the horrid pit of Poe's premature burials. That connection is the subject of another of Gautier's poems from the mid-1830s:

Ce fer que le mineur cherche au fond de la terre
Aux brumeuses clartés de son pâle fanal,
Hélas! le forgeron quelque jour en doit faire
Le clou qui fermera le couvercle fatal!
A cette même place où mille fois peut être
J'allai m'asseoir, le cœur plein de rêves charmants,
S'entr'ouvrira le gouffre où je dois disparaître,
Pour descendre au séjour des épouvantements!
("Stances")

Comparable images appear elsewhere in Gautier's poetry, occasionally in humorous contexts (e.g., "Coquetterie posthume"). Although often ironic, these images are, in general, deadly serious. In one striking example from Emaux et camées a prison cell is substituted for the tomb and the nail becomes the prisoner-writer's stylus:

Ainsi dans les puits de Venise,
Un prisonnier à demi fou,
Pendant sa nuit qui s'éternise,
Grave des mots avec un clou.
("L'Aveugle")

The phrase "à demi fou" recalls the "pauvres fous" of the most celebrated lines from "Albertus" (stanza LXXII; quoted above). When one is "fou" or "à demi fou," nothing is as it appears. Even the fixity and stability symbolized by a nail are suspect. The nail-bedecked "coffre" in "Albertus" is openable. Its mysterious contents may be revealed. A picture can be taken down. A mask can be lifted, a curtain parted.

Imprisonment, writing, words, cells represent so many "coffres," so many masks, so many calls for revelation and transformation, In "Albertus" Véronique's disguise is, like the "coffre à clous d'acier," representative of humanity's penchant for concealing and masking. That idea is developed in "Nostalgies d'obélisques," where Gautier avers that beneath the most attractive civilized exterior lurks a skeleton:

Oh! dans cent ans quels laids squelettes
Fera ce peuple impie et fou,
Qui se couche sans bandelettes
Dans des cercueils que ferme un clou…!

Here "clou" is again rhymingly connected to "fou" in a statement, poetically attributed to an Egyptian obelisk, which comes close to unveiling the mystery of Gautier's fascination with nails. The subject is interment, as opposed to mummification. Burial, particularly Christian burial, is intimately linked in Gautier's mind with a profound fear of death—and nailing.

Gautier's condemnation of the Christian attitude toward death and burial is thematically connected, through the verb clouer, to the crucifixion of Jesus. This connection becomes clearer in the title poem from the collection La Comédie de la mort where a crucifix in the narrator's dimly-lit, sepulcher-like room is presented in the context of both cadre and clou:

Dans son cadre terni, le pâle Christ d'ivoire,
Cloué les bras en croix sur son étoffe noire,
Redoublait de pâleur.
("La Comédie de la mort")

Here, presented in relief, nailed limbs constitute an arresting part of the artistic vision, which, although "finished," still retains the power to communicate life-sapping pallor.

The image of "le Christ cloué" is recast in an even more personalized way in a series of reflections on a painting in a poem called "Magdalena":

Je regardais le Christ sur son infâme bois,
Pour embrasser le monde ouvrant les bras en croix.
Ses pieds meurtris et bleus et ses deux mains clouées
Ses chairs par les bourreaux à coups de fouet trouées.
("Magdalena")

In "Magdalena" the crucifixion event itself becomes increasingly internalized as the motif of the penetrating and rending of flesh is developed and prompts an extended meditation that merits quoting in full:

Et je me dis: "O Christ! tes douleurs sont trop
vives;
Après ton agonie au jardin des Olives,
Il fallait remonter près de ton Père, au ciel,
Et nous laisser, à nous, l'éponge avec le fiel;
Les clous percent ta chair, et les fleurons d'épines
Entrent profondément dans tes tempes divines.
Tu vas mourir, toi, Dieu! comme un homme. La mort
Recule épouvantée à ce sublime effort;
Elle a peur de sa proie, elle hésite à la prendre,
Sachant qu'après trois jours il la lui faudra rendre,
Et qu'un ange viendra, qui radieux et beau
Lèvera de ses mains la pierre du tombeau;
Mais tu n'en as pas moins souffert ton agonie,
Adorable victime entre toutes bénie;
Mais tu n'en as pas moins, avec les deux voleurs,
Etendu tes deux bras sur l'arbre de douleurs.
("Magdalena")

Here is the shocking, immobilizing, deflating experience par excellence. This nailing transcends one life. It transcends life itself, as it transcends time. For Gautier it has profound negative overtones, which are echoed in many of his works. In Arria Marcelin, for example, the crucifixion is linked to that cosmic dislocation of time that dethroned the old gods and made sensual love sinful. The entire complex of Gautier's anger and guilt is wrapped up, and pinned, in this symbol.

It remained a symbol to Gautier, a mystery that he recognized with great personal pain and that he tried to accommodate through the sculptural, impassive art of Emaux et camées, but never completely understood: "Les dieux euxmêmes meurent…" ("L'Art"). The mystery of mortality and the concomitant question of afterlife remained for Gautier a covered "tableau," a nail-studded "coffre," a mask scented with haunting perfume suggestive of love and death.

…. .

Perpetually confronted by the piquant irony of decomposition, as well as composition, the inventive poet's only recourse was humor. Here was a hard bone to crack, and one solution was to fight irony with irony. Thus Gautier resorted in "Albertus" to Rabelaisian language and tactics. Just before his caustic epilogue, there is a passage which recalls the riveting scene of the crucifixion. It is the denouement of Albertus's story, which has perplexed commentators. Most critics state simply that Albertus dies after his ordeal with Satan. Jasinski notes, more accurately, that Albertus lies broken ("brisé") on the Appian Way (Années 102). Gautier put it this way:

Et les contadini le matin, près de Rome,
Sur la voie Appia trouvèrent un corps d'homme
Les reins cassés, le col tordu.

The significant details of the "reins cassés" and the "col tordu" are reminiscent of Villon's double-edged reflections on love-making, drinking, aging, hanging, and decomposing, which Gautier echoed in his early poetry (e.g., "Cauchemar," "Frisson," "Débauche") and to which he would return in Les Grotesques. The precipitous ending of Albertus's story recalls that of Scarron's Roman comique, which inspired both the last essay in Les Grotesques and Gautier's novel Le Capitaine Fracasse.

Even in the truncated denouement of "Albertus" there is room to evoke certain aspects of the gnawing problem of thanatos. Thrown down like Lucifer, Albertus crashes on a site associated with both Christianity and pagan antiquity. Associations with damnation and diabolical destruction are clear. But is there not also in this description something of a perverted image of Christ on the cross? Albertus's last memory is of hard, pointed objects—claws and teeth—tearing at his flesh. "Ses chairs lacérées" (stanza CXX) echo the imagery of crucifixion in "Magdalena." Albertus expires with a cry like that of Vigny's Christ in the garden: "II cria; mais son cri ne fut point entendu …" (stanza CXX, ellipsis Gautier's).

Gautier's resentment of death finds expression both in the imagery and in the organization of "Albertus." From beginning to end, images of nailing suggest attempts at solidity or fixity, limitation or finality in a work whose structure, tone, and thrust tend toward experimentation and freedom. In the context of the author's preoccupation with life characterized by movement and mutability, nailing represents an unwarranted act of pinning down, deflating, incarcerating, or entombing. Immobility betokens brokenness, or worse. Applied to words, thoughts, and creativity, nailing signals death. It is the death suggested by academic labels, by frames and closures, by coffins and crucifixes: death associated with the finality of judgment. Poets or poetry judged to be "finished," words authoritatively "glossed," and traditional notions of sin and religion all represent for the author of "Albertus" forms of imprisonment to be resisted. The incongruity fostered by traditional appeals for permanence and completeness in a disintegrating world where a finishing touch seems unwelcome if not impossible helps create the dramatic tension at the heart of this poem about creativity and culpability, about the limitations of living and communicating.

Like the prisoner with only a nail for a stylus, the writer carves and scratches with a nail-like pen. In "Albertus" it is an implement for joining and for splitting that at once unites and sunders on diverse planes. Through his references to ill-fated nailing, Gautier satirizes all that is mutable, including his readers and himself, as well as all human attempts at immutability. Like love, freedom and creativity are forever fleeting, changing, transient:

Toujours! songes-y bien, d'un éternel amour
Il n'est dans l'univers qu'un seul être capable,
Et cet être, c'est Dieu,—car il est immuable;
L'homme d'un jour n'aime qu'un jour.

In this eternal paradox Gautier sees the essential irony of human existence.

That vital incongruity renders attempts to pin down what "Albertus" means particularly difficult, and that difficulty is part of Gautier's plan. In the text itself the issue of the poem's meaning is purposefully sidestepped by the narrator's tongue-in-cheek invitation in the final stanza to continue looking for clues. Nor was that to be the disingenuous enchanter's final word on the subject. Albertus was revived many times in other works in which Gautier attempted to pursue the meaning of his story—as Albert in Celle-ci et celle-là and in Le Bol de punch, as d'Albert in Mademoiselle de Maupin, as Duke Albert in Giselle, and in the other masks through which Gautier projected his fragile psyche and which, as he maintained, make us true.