Perhaps after all Izambard had an inkling of that, though it was beyond him. Perhaps when, a year later, Rimbaud mocked and disposed of him in his turn, sold off the good master’s books and put him in the closet, he discerned that poetry was bad; that the old witch whom he believed he was doing in was, in the end, the one who made poetry and would do him in; he could not not perceive all that, anymore than he could admit that he had perceived it: and that is undoubtedly why, knowing but not wanting to know, the poet Izambard forever pissed into the wind. And that is not our concern. We can leave that classroom; put on your top hat, there are boys watching you: they raise their little shakos when you pass them in the shade of the chestnut trees, they take you for the inspector, perhaps one of them is scowling, sticks up his nose conspicuously and keeps his kepi firmly on. Nothing is more beautiful than those May chestnut trees above him. Remaining at his doorway, the rhetoric classroom already dark behind him, Izambard regards the evening shadow and you, leaving, within it, you become that shadow. He is talking to himself in Latin. You did not turn around; what you are seeking is not within Izambard’s domain.
3. NEITHER WAS IT WITHIN BANVILLE’S DOMAIN
Neither was it within Banville’s domain.
He too appears in this story, not long after Izambard, because we know that the adolescent sent him verses, care of the publisher Lemerre, into which he had put his whole heart; and the first, no doubt, that he considered presentable to an established poet. The triumphs of Awards Day were no longer enough for him; they had served their purpose; they had nurtured in that angry heart a brutal ambition at the same time as was born there that uncertain faculty, pose or task or revelation from On High, or a bit of all three, that was called genius in those times, that almost supernatural attribute that never appears itself, overhead or in the living visible body, as halo, vigor, beauty, or youth, but that nevertheless appears in minute effects and which is confirmed in the perfection of bits of coded language more or less lengthy written in black and white. We know that these bits are generally infinitesimal. We who read them never know if they are perfect or if it was whispered to us in childhood that they were perfect, and we in turn whisper it to others, ad infinitum; and the one who writes them does not know any more than we do, if anything less, he knows it only at the moment when he joins the rods, when fitting together flawlessly like mortise and tenon they briefly exult, closing with the triumphant sound of jaws, and it is over; and when it is over once again he trembles, that is him, the poet, in those jaws, the rod has deserted him there and he no longer knows how to write, even if he, like Field Marshal Hugo, had laid out rod upon rod until he died, even if he himself were the jubilant jaws of the shark and verse in person. Thus he trembles at his desk like a rat; but when he goes out he wants some kind of halo to appear over his head, and he wants to be told so: for he cannot see it himself. And to return to Rimbaud’s genius, to that most precise and furious ambition in the heart of the Ardennes in the scrap of a sulky man who was also and at the same time pure love — because all that is mixed together, byzantine and multiple as the old theology — to return to the one who is like the emblem for that conflict, that byzantine knot, we do not know if ambition precedes or foments genius, engenders it by strength of toil, or if, on the contrary, by pure miracle unfurling its wings, genius only afterward becomes aware of the shadow they cast and the men who rush into this mirage, and from then on, he who is the plaything of that phantom attribute and projects that shadow becomes infatuated with it, wants ever more of it, damns himself.
No, we do not know if it is pure or impure. We do not know if at the beginning there is the Word or the stack of ribboned books that, with little ceremonies, a subprefect in full uniform on a raised platform delivers into your hands. But, born of the Word, which since the beginning whispers where it will and has no residence, not Charleville, Patmos, or Guernsey, or born very locally of awards in excellence acclaimed in a local school auditorium in July with potted plants and flags, there is genius, since the word is in the language; since we use this abuse of language; and no doubt it does not exist, but the poets of that time wanted to be rewarded with that which did not exist: the older ones wanted to be reassured continually by honorary chairs under the dome of the Academy, by crowds taking off their hats to them, and when through misfortune they were without an audience in Guernsey, they summoned out of the air Shakespeare, Mozart, Virgil, who in fatherly fashion rushed over the sea to reassure them, with all the little hands of the sea clapping — and in heavy weather the big hands: and the Old Man on his gray island leaning over his séance table was at the opening night of Hernani with the red waistcoat, exiled he heard the audience of Hernani. And the young ones waited for the old ones out of courtesy and reciprocity, perhaps belief mitigated by augury between them, a great fear of augury suspended between men and gods, who are both fearsome, the young ones waited for the recognized poets, that is, the ones whose names had at least once in some context brushed up against the word genius, for those poets to grant them a small ray from that invisible halo that they were reputed to have over their heads; and which is transmitted as if by cuttings, from the oldest to the youngest, but that the young can never quite steal, not even Rimbaud or Saint John, the old must proffer it: and it was of Banville that Rimbaud asked that immense small favor.