Paris, Monday, November 25, 1885 My dear Verlaine, Tam late for you, because I was trying to find the unpub- lished works of Villiers de M'isle-Adam, which I lent hither and yon.t Enelosed please find the almost-nothing T located. But precise information about that dear old fugitive I don’t have: even his address. Our two hands simply find each other, as if they had last clasped each other the night before, at the bend in a road, every year, because God exists. Besides, that, though, he’s always right on time at meetings, so if you ‘want him for your Poites Maudits [Poets of the Damned] oF Hommes d’Aujourd’hui [Contemporary Men}, look for him at ‘Vanier’s, where he’s sure to have a lot to do, with the publica tion of Axel. He'll be there at the appointed hour, I guarantee. Literarily, no one is more punctual than he is; it’s up to Vanier to get his address, or Darzens, who has recently represented, hhim with that gracious publisher. If all else fails, you'll walk with me some Wednesday at dusk, and suddenly he'll join us, and all those details about his civil status, which I've forgotten, will be available, since they concern the man himself. Now I'll turn to me ‘Nallarmé was responding to Verlsine's request for information for his latest series of sketches of contemporary ports. Vllirs was the bourgeois Mallarmé’ favorite outsider. [Trans] AydesBorqgomyAutobiography Yes, I was born in Paris on March 18, 1842, on the street that is today called the Passage Laferriére. My paternal and ‘maternal families present, ever since the Revolution, an uni terrupted series of functionaries in the Administration and the Registry; and even though they were almost always atthe top of their profession, I escaped a career that was planned for me from birth. In several of my ancestors, I find traces of a taste for holding a pen for something other than recording Acts: fone, no doubt before the creation of the Registry, was in change of bookstores under Louis XVI—I saw his name at the bottom of the King’s Privilege in the original French edie tion of Beckford’s Vathek, which I had republished. Another ‘wrote mocking verses for women’s Confirmations and Alma- nacs of Muses. As a child, I knew, deep in the interior of a family Parisian bourgeoisie, Monsieur Magnien, a second cousin several times removed, who had published a rabid Ro- ‘mantic volume called Ange [Angel] or Démon or something, which I occasionally come across now, listed at a very high price, in the catalogues booksellers send me. 1 call my family “Parisian” because we've always lived in Paris, but our origins go back to Bourguignon, Lorraine, and even Holland, 1 lost, while stil a small child of seven, my mother; then ‘was adored and cared for by my grandmother; then I went through numerous boarding schools and high schools, a La- ‘martinian soul with the secret ambition of one day replacing. Béranger, whom I had met at a friend’s house, It seems that this plan was too complicated to be put into execution, but I kept trying to fill hundreds of notebooks with verse, which ‘were always confiscated from me, if I remember correctly. When T entered into life, it was impossible, as you very well, know, for a poet to live from his art, even by lowering it sev- eral degrees, and T have never regretted it. Having learned English simply to be a better reader of Poe, I left for England at the age of twenty, mainly 10 get aways but also to speak thelanguage and teach it, to settle down in a quiet spot and need no other living: I was marsied and it was urgent. ‘Today, more than twenty years later, and despite all the ‘wasted hours, I believe, with sadness, that I made the right de- cision, It’s that, besides the verse and prose pieces I wrote in ‘my youth and those that followed and echoed them, pieces, ‘which have been published all over the place every time a new Literary Review started up, I have always dreamed and at- tempted something else, with the patience of an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all satisfaction, the way they. used to burn their furniture and the beams from their ceilings, to stoke the fires of the Great Work. What would it be? It’s hard to say: a book, quite simply, in several volumes, a book that would be a real book, architectural and premeditated, and nota collection of chance inspirations, however wonderful would even go further and say the Book, eonvineed as I am that in the final analysis there's only one, unwittingly at tempted by anyone who writes, even Geniuses. The orphic ex- planation of the Earth, which isthe poet's only duty and the literary mechanism par excellence: for the shythm of the book, then impersonal and alive, right down to its pagination, would line up with the equations of that dream, or Ode. ‘There, now, is the admission of my vice, laid bare, dear friend, which 1 have many times rejected, my spirit bruised and tired; but I am possessed by it and I will succeed, per- hhaps—not in drafting the whole of it one would have to be 1 don’t know who for that!) but in showing a fully executed fragment, making its glorious authenticity glow from the cor- nt, and indicating the rest, for which a single lifetime would not suffice. To prove, by means of these finished pieces, that this book exists, that I knew what it was I couldn’t accomplish. Nothing, however, is so simple, and I made haste to collect the known pieces, which have, from time to time, attracted the attention of charming and excellent minds—you first and fore- ‘most! All this had no immediate value for me other than keep- fydesdoxqounyAutobiography \: however successful these pieces may be, as a ‘whole [word missing], they barely make an album, not a book. ‘The publisher Vanier may well rip those shreds away from ‘me, but I'll merely stick them on pages as one collects pieces of eloth to commemorate an oceasion, immemorial and pre- cious only to oneself. With that damning epithet “album” in the title, the Album de vers er de prose could yo on indefinitely (next 10 my personal work, which, 1 think, will be anon mous—the Text there speaking on its own, without the voice of an author). ‘Those verse and prose poems can be found, or not, besides iews, in out in the opening volumes of certain Literary Ri ofprint Luxury Editions of Vathek, the Raven, the Faun, ve had t0 grab whatever offered itself as a lifeboat in hhard-up moments, but apast from those potboilers (Les Dew Anuiquess Les Mois Anglais (Antique Gods; English Words]) about which the less said the better, concessions to needs oF even to pleasures have not been frequent. Nevertheless, de- spairing of the recalcitrant book of myself, and having unsue- cessfully dragged proposals and sample chapters all over, L un- destook to write—covering dress designs, jewelry, furniture, theater programs, even dinner menus—my own fashion mag- azine, La Dernire Mode [The Latest Fashion], whose eight oF ten published issues, when I divest them of their dust, sufice to plunge me into a reverie fora long time. {In the final analysis, I consider the contemporary era to be a kind of interregnum for the poet, who has nothing to do with it it is t00 fallen or too full of preparatory effervescence for him to do anything but keep working, with mystery, so that later, or never, and from time to time sending. the liv- ing his calling card—some stanza or sonnet—so as not 0 be stoned by them, if they knew he suspected that they didn't exist. Loneliness necessarily accompanies that type of attitude: and beyond my path from home (now No. 89, rue de Rome) to the various establishments to which I have owed an accountof my time—the lyeées Condorcet, Janson de Sailly, and Rollin Collége—t travel litle; preferring above all, in an apart- ‘ment defended by the family, a stay with a few old cherished pieces of furniture and a page that is often blank. My great friendships have been with Villiers and Mendés, and for ten years I saw dear Manet every day—his absence now seems to ime unbelievable! Your Poézes Mauaits (Poets of Damnation], dear Verlaine, and Huysmans’ Rebours [Against Nature] ine terested young poets in my Tuesdays, which had long been cempty—poets who adore us old folks (besides the Mallar- :méans), and people even speak of my influence, where in fact there were only coincidences. Very much attuned, I went ten years ago where similar talented young minds go today. Well, there you have my whole life—lacking in anecdote, {n contrast to those that fil the newspapers, where I've always, been seen as very strange: I've looked ard and found noth- ing, except for private troubles, joys, or losses. 've put in an appearance wherever they perform a ballet or play the or- gan—my two almost contradictory artistic passions, whose ‘meaning will nevertheless burst out—and that’s all. L forgot t0 ‘mention my wanderings, which I pursue whenever my mind gets dead tired, on the edge of the Seine and the forest of Fontainebleau, where I've gone for ten years. There, I seem to myself quite different, thinking only of riverboating. 1 honor the river, which swallows up in its waters whole days—yet, days that don’t seem wasted or lost, or surrounded by any aura of guilt. I'm a simple passer-by in my little mahogany boat; I'm a furious sailor, proud of his feet. Good-bye, dear friend. You will read this over, written in pencil to try to approximate a good chat between friends, in the shadows and without raised voices; you will glance at this, and sce the couple of biographical details you know to be tru tism! I know all about that. Use salicylate only rarely, and un- der the care of a good doctor, since the dosage is very impor- tant, Once I suffered from fatigue or even a mental absence Tam very upset to hear that you're ill, and with rheuma- fydesdoxqounyAutobiography after using that drug, and I blame it for my insomnia, But I'll visit you and tell you all this in person and bring along. a son- net and a page of prose, which I'll compose for the occasion and which will go wherever you put them. But you can begin without those two baubles. Good-bye, dear Verlaine. Give me your hand.