We no longer hear of Banville, he too pissed into the wind; and he did not even enjoy the combined benefits of mystery and failure, of the loss of being, that Izambard’s shade enjoyed. If we go by the anthology pieces (since no one bothers to read the complete versions anymore, except perhaps some old auto-didact, a Léautaud from Douai or Confolens who, leaving the library, curses the Walkmen and the motorbikes, or more optimistically, a very young country girl who climbed up to the attic in June, when school is closed and the heart wide open to the infinite freedom of objectless loves, and in the attic she found among old dresses Les Cariatides by Théodore de Banville, an old book of poems that she reads alone under the linden tree until dark), if we can go by those pieces, always the same ones, which must indeed be the best of them but which seem so poor, Banville was not a brilliant poet — at least he no longer seems so to us — and yet in his lifetime he seemed so: someone is mistaken in this matter, Baudelaire or you, me or Sainte-Beuve, Rimbaud or the descendants of Rimbaud, who knows? men of letters are futile. We have not read his verses, except for those eternal trifles from selected pieces with their Bacchuses that in the corner of the woods our grandmothers might take for slightly tipsy grandsons, and their violet-eyed erect young Athenian girls, pretty in their way, but with so little ass under their tunics. We have not read him. But we know, because we have read about him, that he too was prodigiously precocious, from his infancy possessed great ambition and pure love, the seven-league boots, came from Moulins as Bonaparte from Ajaccio and Rimbaud from Charleville with a strong will to be done with old-fashioned poetry, and proudly launched those Cariatides in Paris, which, says Baudelaire, no one would believe a young fellow of eighteen to have written. Yes, we know that Baudelaire held him in high esteem and was his friend, that he set him apart as he did Chateaubriand and Flaubert, above the modern riffraff as he put it, which perhaps distinguishes him, unless it was polite augury; we know that for a long time he slept with the fat Marie Daubrun, whom Baudelaire so desired; that they had a falling out over her and that much later the munificent Banville, a decent man, sent a petition to the minister so that the poor human wreck of Brussels could draw a pension, have his clothes brushed, his old man’s food brought to his imbecile mouth by an almost friendly hand, perhaps glimpse a skirt, chant his crénom without a thought for tomorrow. And that distinguishes him. Furthermore, from Gide’s slander we know that the affability of his criticism was such that, reading it, one would think one was eating jam; from Doctor Mondor we know that he highly prized and revived the little forms fallen into female hands: the rondeau, double rondeau, lay, virelay, villanelle, chant royal; from Mallarmé that he was not somebody special, but the very sound of the lyre; and that this somebody who was in the end nobody, as a good bourgeois, as a good poet, loved to walk in the Luxembourg Gardens dear to the passerby, and from there under the leaves certainly eyed the dome of the Pantheon close by, believing, not believing, that he had laid enough rods two by two to be laid himself in return one day there below in the shade of the vault that is to the great dead what the June leaves are to the passersby; and of course that is also why, because of that finally modest ambition, he was not Rimbaud; but that is not the only reason. We also know about his voice, from Antonin Proust, who heard it, from the time when it rang forth into the day: it was musical, lilting, a bit high and fluty, like Mallarmé’s; in that high-perched voice he liked to proclaim: I am a lyric poet and make my living from it—and we can well imagine all of that together, the fluty voice, the bland affirmation, half sincere, half silly, and beneath it all a bit of specious ferocity, the Louis-Philippardian stroll to the Luxembourg, gaze drawn toward the dome: Banville is a type that we have all encountered a hundred times. Finally, from Verlaine we have the precious knowledge that he strikingly resembled Watteau’s Gilles, so that he could have been taken for him had this Gilles happened to be strolling in Paris — that he thus resembled Charles Carreau, parish priest of Nogent-sur-Marne and Watteau’s model, and there was no danger of mistaking them for one another because, since 1721, the model no longer set foot in the Luxembourg or anywhere else, and was under the marly earth of the Marne. Banville had the Gilles’s reddened nose and his dazed look of a boy about to cry, perhaps his very old soul; and the silver chlorides, obediently reproducing as is their custom, photo after photo perfectly identical in the way of amoebas, in my case perfectly reproduced on page 39 of the Rimbaud iconography that lies open before me, the silver chlorides are in agreement with Verlaine on this point.
Watteau’s Gilles wrote neoclassical nonsense; at least that is what is said of him today. But if in those times you had been a poet, a young poet, not quite Rimbaud of course but almost, if you too were tired of old-fashioned poetics, you would have turned the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain, heart pounding, into rue de Buci, where Banville lived; with his letter of encouragement in your pocket, which you had received in Douai or Confolens, affable as jam. You would have seen your hand tremble as it pushed open the carriage entrance of 10, rue de Buci; and in the depths of the cool, dark inner courtyard, filled with the sounds of the city though they seemed distant, like phantoms, you would have hesitated for a long time. You hesitate; you look up into the air, the mute windows of a great poet, and above the windows the month of June; because it is June, the four feet of that blue throne resting on the roofs. And at the same time as June, it is the evidence of poetic inanity that hits you; that is sitting on you, under which you are gasping for breath: because of course compared to June your pieces regarding June are pitiful; and without even considering June, which is very high and rebellious like Meaning, just considering language, the little corrupted code, the meager but inexhaustible hand with which meaning is made, not even meaning, the game of meaning, which has the air of a meaning, even compared to that, your poems hardly measure up; and your verses are far from true, powerless to translate what you are, the suffering void that you are, into pure prayer without waste. Into the language of June. No, nothing triumphs disproportionately in the poem, not June, not language, not you. So you flee, you are already at the gare d’Austerlitz, the evening trains are so beautiful when one is rid of the burden of having to speak about them.
But perhaps in that courtyard you do not flee: in June above a sparrow passes; you murmur for yourself alone one of those verses that are called perfect because they note the impossibility of recording all at once June, one’s own distress, and the whole of language, but which stand their ground in that impossibility, and standing, play the trumpet; this is Baudelaire; one or the other, the sparrow or Baudelaire, whispers to you that the imposture, poetic inanity, is also a kind of courage. You forgive yourself. And you also forgive Banville, who is only a man, for having definitively opted for language for want of June, for having buried himself within it, and there within having become the very sound of the lyre, that is to say, nobody. The lyre is no cause for fear, only men are: you climb the stairs with all the strength of your young legs, and you ring Théodore de Banville’s doorbell.
(And of course there I could see you both, on either side of the large bouquet, peonies or hydrangeas, there on the poet’s desk: the floured one, who is at the same time the ineffable sound, and you. You would not have said that you have come for the little cutting, the one that is transmitted from the oldest to the youngest, the little cutting of genius, that is to say, permission to eat at the poetic trough or to spit in it, the entrance pass to the domes, Guernsey or Harar, it is up to you; and he would not have said that he was on the point of giving it to you: because that is done without saying so, while speaking of something else. You speak of those things, I hear you; and Banville’s perched voice perches higher as he extols the form, the truth that inheres in syntax more than in our desires, in rhyme more than in our hearts — the thousand inanities of the hedonism of literature, the Enlightenment pose, the pose of the mind — and you, half hidden behind that large bouquet of peonies, I could see you turn red as the flowers, gritting your teeth, keeping to yourself and chewing over the fable of Meaning, of salvation through language, of God who wants to appear in it and who cannot because of Banville and his kind — the thousand inanities of the idealism of literature, the red waistcoat pose, the pose of the heart; or, on the contrary, to please Banville, to conform to what he expects of your eighteen years, there you are getting up on your high horse, letting loose on him a whole tirade, you take the pose of the heart one step farther; and there is so much of youth in your insolence that you feel the Confolens suit ripping across your shoulders from the pressure of wings; and the munificent Banville pretends to see those wings. He smiles. He tells you that you remind him of Boyer or Baudelaire when they were twenty; and at those words you know that over the bouquet of peonies he has just invisibly offered you the little cutting, and without even getting up you have taken it, it is in your pocket.