15 - Mallarmé's Gardens of Culinary Delights

Summary

Je m’aperçois que je prends du ventre terriblement.

Je marcherai, petit paon; car je deviens énorme.

Mallarmé, Lettres à Méry Laurent

I have taken my epigraph from two letters written to Méry Laurent in 1893 by her almost daily correspondent, Stéphane Mallarmé. Like the Goncourts, who had described the poet only six years earlier as ‘fin, délicat, spirituel,’ I had always thought of Mallarmé as evanescent, volatilized into non-physicality, for whom the name of a rose metamorphosed that richly hued flower into platonic ideality, ‘l’absente de tous bouquets,’ or the ‘incarnat léger.’ I had seen only the ‘raffiné, byzantin du mot et de la syntaxe […] le nébuleux Mallarmé’—the Goncourt brothers again—for whom the sacramental eucharistic offering to the dead Gautier was bloodless, ‘[une] coupe vide ou souffre un monstre d’or.’

Thanks to the prodigious eleven-volume edition of the Mallarmé Correspondance by my dear friend, the much-missed Lloyd Austin, now complemented by the Lettres à Méry Laurent brilliantly edited by Bertrand Marchal, I am able to serve as your guide as we exit ‘l’inquiete merveille’ of Eden to find earthier nourishment. To rephrase Jean-Pierre Richard's now famous opening sentence (on Flaubert), ‘[O]n mange beaucoup dans la Correspondance de Mallarmé.’

The epistolary art implies a separation; and many weeks a year, the poet, either at Valvins, his country home, or in his rue de Rome Parisian apartment, enjoyed the absence of his older and frequently ailing German wife, née Maria Gerhard, and of his daughter Genevieve.

Mallarmé was a faithful correspondent, if an unfaithful husband (unfaithful, at least in fantasy and on the page). To reassure his ‘Dames,’ he documents extensively his daily regimen, and it is a hearty one:

Les provisions ne s’épuisent pas, je vois encore du corned beef, lequel n’était que graisse et tendons, des sardines et différents fromages, ainsi que des biscuits, dans le garde manger. Les oeufs, les asperges et l’ordinaire parfait de Juliette me sustentent, au reste. Seul le vin manque …

When the young Paul Valéry visits: ‘Déjeuner, oeufs a la coque, jambonneau et fromage a la creme. Dîner: soupe maigre, beefsteak aux pommes, asperges, gruyere, et confitures; ce n’est pas mal, dites. L’ami avait apporté un certain Nougatin, gâteau exquis et des cigares fins, le pauvre garçon.’