What calm within you then, what power, what a glorious future: but you are not Arthur Rimbaud.)
4. THAT POET, WHO NO LONGER CASTS A SHADOW
That poet, who no longer casts a shadow, thus received two letters from the very young Rimbaud, who casts upon us as great a shadow as Dante’s little bonnet casts upon the Italian language and Virgil’s laurels cast upon Dante — because men of letters are futile, timid, devout. Reading them, Banville sensed his Julien Sorel of the Ardennes at fifty leagues; and in that he was not mistaken: letters are little traps for others, just one other, whom one wants to put in one’s pocket; and Rimbaud excelled in this discipline of bird-catching. Verses are greater traps for more ineffable prey. And in the verses that went with those letters, that were the basis and justification for them, Banville surely heard something altogether different, different from Rastignac or Sorel, because for all that Banville was, that is to say nightingale and nightcap, the uninterrupted attention required by the Dome yonder, he knew how to make two verses hold together, and, which is something else again, how, in the pincer of two verses, to hold a little of the world; he had done that all his life. Under the gifted, clever, Hugoesque young versifier, under the flagrant rhymes, Banville heard the other, darker rhyme, unknown to the rhymer, that could not care less about the one in whom it sings, or squeaks; which is born of the very ancient way each of us knots together June, language, and ourselves — and in some that makes music: a thin stave of three or four notes, but tyrannical, tyrannically reiterated and combined, the variety of its combinations making great poets, as they are called; and that stave, that song, that tyranny muddles the rhymer’s plans and decides from start to finish for him: perhaps that is what decides that you wake up as Julien Sorel, that midway through your life you compose a small thing as unassailable and laughable as Dante’s bonnet (meanwhile that small thing is published, you call it Les Fleurs du mal, it is only a tiny milestone in the conquest of Paris), that all afternoon you spend waiting in vain for that small thing to make you king, and, without knowing how it happened, that you mutter a single terrifying crénom one evening in a cheap joint in Brussels; and when finally you go to bed you still believe that you are Julien Sorel, but at the end of the line; until you are a corpse you believe it, even though you have written Les Fleurs du mal. And at least once Banville had encountered in flesh and blood that aberrant ambition that makes great poets, from it he had even stolen the fat Marie Daubrun, for it he had petitioned the minister for a pauper’s pension; and he knew how to recognize it. Thus he recognized it in Rimbaud’s verses. That is what we want to believe, since we are devout; but sometimes we have doubts; and when we have doubts we tell ourselves that its music is not so obvious, that perhaps by dint of paternosters we are the ones who put it there, not God, not all the muses assembled at Charleville, not genius; that a century of devotion to these staves is solely responsible for the notes. No matter, that is how things stand: perhaps it is only a little ditty, but it resounds fantastically in us like the great organ swells of a Te Deum.
Devoutly we want to believe that Banville heard the Te Deum; that perhaps he heard in the schoolboy’s verse a very distant echo of the leap that Carabosse made into the inner closet; her marriage with the Captain renewed there; the perfect nuptials of bugle and paternosters; the ridiculous little domestic drama magnified into a high mass, set forth in clear language, but draped, unrecognizable. Or if you prefer quainter images, borrowed from the catechism of that time, which Banville read, and not from those family histories which are our own meager catechism, the obscure rhyme that he heard was the one that strikes charity and anger against one another, infinite rancor and mercy, holds them in each hand, each of them distinct, intact, irreconcilable, sworn enemies, and releases one against the other like fighting cocks, unleashes them, recaptures them, and punctuates that explosion with a great confrontation of drums. And if your personal devotion offers you other metaphors (which you take for thought and which are thought), you call the two terms of this little tom-tom by different names: you say that it is revolt and pure love, or nothingness and salvation, or the endless fall and within the fall the inexhaustible presence of what is no longer called God; you say that it is in mourning God and in pretending God is restored; and if you do not like God you say that it is the free joy of being alive and the darker joy of being slave to death, whatever: what matters is having the great cymbals well in hand, knowing how to make them clash and that they make that noise one hears in Rimbaud. And lending an ear to that music, Banville, who was not dishonest, who had long ago lost that inner rhyme but knew how to recognize it in others, Banville picked up a pen thoughtfully and prepared to reply; in silk skullcap at his poet’s desk, with the peonies and no doubt some Doric knick-knack close at hand that served as paperweight, pensively stirring the tea with rum that Verlaine tells us one drank at his house, reflecting, weighing the pros and the cons, this man who resembled the Gilles replied. He paid the young man from the Ardennes the courtesy of augury, and sent by post the little cutting in letters that are no longer in our possession.
Perhaps I am wasting my time with Banville. I am wasting my time with this poor old man who yesterday came from Moulins with all the poetry of the earth in his heart and who is being destroyed in Paris by schemes, success, power and the approach of death; Banville, whose only function is to be interim leading poet — because Hugo on his island is unavailable, bent over he listens to the beat of Shakespeare’s foot in the four feet of his table — that is to say, to deliver the little cutting to the greenhorns of Douai or Charleville; Banville who is nothing, hardly the shadow that returning down rue de Rome lifts his head toward the pigeons on the dome. Nevertheless, I still want to repeat how precious it is to me that this poor man resembles, to the point of being mistaken for, Watteau’s Gilles.