Nine O'Clock

I die at a time when the people have lost their reason; you will die on the day when they recover it.

Since earliest childhood I have heard plenty about the event that would change all events, the first wave of tyrants destroyed (to be replaced by an even greater despot, a dull subject permanently banished from these pages), the first mass uprising that would have made Spartacus proud. If my tone smacks of irreverence, it is because I have never been an admirer of revolution, bloodhot or otherwise; changes in my universe occur slowly and precisely without recourse to upheaval or war chants. But for the more callow among those of Romantic bent, the last eleven years of eighteenth-century French history represent a watershed in our view of the world and its dividends. Gone are the remorseless monarchs, the meddling clergy, the fiefdoms frozen in eternal hardscrabble stasis; in their stead have come happy, peaceful democracies whose main aim has been to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number. Alas, while a narrow handful of such nations do exist, the majority are still mired in that grim morass of greed and power that has plagued every community since scribes and their cuneiform contrived a record of human drama. The French Revolution has come and gone, but we may still detect our proclivity for its success, our wish to see the rich choke on the cakes they so preferred to plainest rye. Which brings us to a quiet tale of injustice.

Our heroes are none; instead, we will have twenty-one martyrs for a cause that remains unestablished, the removal of one government unstinting in its waste for another government unstinting in its vengeance. The year and month, you see, are 1793 and June, and the time has come for something more than theoretical freedoms. The victims will be damned because "they were not, as a party, true to their own convictions"; and they will fall "before worse men, because those men were in earnest." Of course, when your solution to four out of every five problems are mayhem and murder, it becomes quite easy to be earnest about them. Much more difficult is the nuanced detection of human or national desires, which incites one of the condemned men to the magnificent pronouncement that begins this review. As the twenty-one face their last terrestrial night with the conviviality of the plague-ridden in this film, one pale soul withdraws from the commotion, a Girondist by the name of Duprat:

He was a younger man than the majority of his brethren, and was personally remarkable by his pale, handsome, melancholy face, and his reserved yet gentle manners. Throughout the evening, he had spoken but rarely; there was something of the silence and serenity of a martyr in his demeanour. That he feared death as little as any of his companions was plainly visible in his bright, steady eye; in his unchanging complexion; in his firm, calm voice, when he occasionally addressed those who happened to be near him. But he was evidently out of place at the banquet; his temperament was reflective, his disposition serious; feasts were at no time a sphere in which he was calculated to shine.

Soon Duprat finds a willing interlocutor, one of the partisans who will endure the most unfortunate punishment of witnessing his friends' demise on the mill of silence, and answers the only lingering question among the carousers: the exact time of their deaths. Duprat makes the incredible claim that he knows precisely when his time will come (he does not speak for others), and bases that prognosis on an odd family history which cannot be provided at length. It involves his widower father and a gentle youth, his younger brother Alfred, both of whom no longer walk among the living.  

Unlike Duprat, Alfred had not seen much success in school and had accordingly diminished his father's expectations. When, in his teenage years, Alfred finally exhibited an interest in a subject, his father was more than a little disappointed to learn the object of his scholarship: astrology, "the most obsolete of obsolete sciences, the old, abandoned delusion of divination by stars!" Content at least that his younger son would not be utterly idle, the father had left him to his own devices. Until one day when Duprat came upon his sibling in their father's den:

One day – my brother being then sixteen years of age – I happened to go into my father's study, during his absence, and found Alfred there, standing close to a window, which looked into the garden. I walked up to him, and observed a curious expression of vacancy and rigidity in his face, especially in his eyes. Although I knew him to be subject to what are called fits of absence, I still thought it rather extraordinary that he never moved, and never noticed me when I was close to him. I took his hand, and asked if he was unwell. His flesh felt quite cold; neither my touch nor my voice produced the smallest sensation in him. Almost at the same moment when I noticed this, I happened to be looking accidentally towards the garden. There was my father walking along one of the paths, and there, by his side, walking with him, was another Alfred! – Another, yet exactly the same as the Alfred by whose side I was standing, whose hand I still held in mine!

Bilocation not ranking among the virtues of human existence, we may wonder long and hard at this scene, disordered in mind as it may appear, and retreat to logic's dark little corner and swinging overhead bulb. Then again, we may consider the apparition of one and another Alfred as some index of calamity. That this end shall come at a certain hour should surprise us as much as it now surprises the condemned Duprat.     

Those of us who still patronize this author's works know something good when we've found it. I am no Collins completist, yet his books resemble the finest of gourmet dishes: one only needs a few bites to determine their succulence. Beneath lesser hands, the structure and inevitability of Nine O'Clock might feel contrived and unsuspenseful, although as we know from many a thriller, great tension need not lie in the outcome, but in the choices that spell a tragic character's doom. Collins has a talent that cannot be learned or inherited: the gift of atmosphere, of so empathizing with a reader's whims as to predict his turns before the reader himself has pathed them. Even if the reader may not want to know the very last page he will enjoy.

Verlaine, "J'allais par des chemins perfides"

A work ("Unfaithful paths led me astray")  by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

Unfaithful paths led me astray,           
So sad and so uncertain, they;              
And your dear hands became my guide.  

Upon horizon's distant wane,            
Dawn's faintest hope began to gain,          
And your dear eyes were morning come. 

No noise, not even footfall's crack,               
Could foil the traveler turning back,                             
And your dear voice said, "Keep your stride!"         

Sweet love has conquered whole and part –         
And frightened was my somber heart,                 
That cried alone on its sad rhumb –                  

Sweet joy will join two paths as one.

Montaigne, "Du parler prompt ou tardif"

An essay ("On speaking promptly or tardily") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Never yet have all the graces been given to a single soul. 

Thus we see with regard to the gift of eloquence that some possess facility and promptitude and such, as they say, ease of expression, that they are ready at every instance. Those more tardy never say anything that is not elaborate and premeditated. Similar to how we provide ladies with rules for them to take part in games and physical exercise, in other words, those things in which they most excel, so then if I had to advise this same bunch in these two diverse advantages of eloquence – of which, at least in our century, it seems that preachers and lawyers make the most use professionally – the tardy would be better off as a preacher, it seems to me; the other skill is better for a lawyer. For the former gives the preacher as much leisure as he would like in order to prepare himself; what is more, his career passes uninterruptedly in one thread and towards one consequence. On the other hand, the commodities of a lawyer force him at all times to be in court. And the responses refuted by his opponents simply jostle him and oblige him to take up a new argument.       

At the meeting between Pope Clement and King François in Marseille quite the opposite appeared to happen.  Mr. Poyet, a man of great reputation whose entire life had been nourished on the bail-dock, had been tasked with addressing the Pope. Having a mature and experienced touch, Poyet, it is truly claimed, arrived from Paris with the very speech ready made with which he was to address His Holiness. The very day it was to be pronounced, the Pope, fearing that Poyet could say something that might offend the emissaries of the other Princes who would be present, sent a proposal to the King which seemed to be the most correct at that time and place, but, as luck would have it, very different from that which Mr. Poyet had been working on.  The result was that his argument proved to be useless and he had to come up with another very promptly. As Poyet did not feel capable of doing so, the Cardinal of Bellay was obliged to assume the task. 

The part of the lawyer is more difficult than that of the preacher. Nevertheless, we find a greater number of passable lawyers than of passable preachers, at least in France.

It seems that it is more natural or right for the mind to engage in prompt and sudden operation and more natural or right for judgment to undertake slow and well-considered acts. With someone who remains silent because he does not have the luxury of preparing himself and someone else for whom this luxury would not allow him to improve his words, there persists the same degree of estrangement. One often hears of Cassius Severus, who always spoke best when he never reflected at all upon the subject matter. Such skill he owed less to diligence than to luck. Yet it served him well when his words happened to meet with disagreement because his adversaries did not dare nettle him for fear of redoubling his eloquence. Through my own experience I recognize that condition in nature which cannot sustain vehement and laborious premeditation: if it doesn't proceed happily and freely, it doesn't proceed at all. Of certain works we say that they reek of oil and lamp owing to a certain asperity or roughness which the labor roundly imprints upon them. But apart from this, the concern about doing well – and the struggle of that soul too bound to and too stretched by its enterprise – shall break and impede itself like water, which, owing to its being pressed by violence and abundance could not exit from an open bottleneck.

Within that condition of nature of which I speak there is, at the same time, also that sentiment which should not be agitated by strong passions, like Cassius's anger (because this movement would be too harsh); it asks not to be shaken but to be sought after; it asks to be heated and roused by strange, in-the-moment and fortuitous occasions. If it ventures out by itself, it will do nothing more than drag its heels and languish; agitation is its life and its grace.   

I do not consistently adhere to my self-possession and disposition; here chance has right of way – the moment, the company, the very timbre of my voice – it affects my mind much more. And I find myself testing and using chance. 

In this way spoken words are worth more than their written counterparts, provided they may be chosen without cost or price.

It also occurs to me that I do not find myself where I look for myself: I find myself more often by chance encounter than by the inquisition of my judgment. And in so writing I will have launched some subtlety of thought and I understand full well, as dull as it may seem to another, so sharp may it appear to me. Let us leave behind all these honesties.  These will be pronounced by each of us according to his ability. I have lost my ability so utterly that I do not know what I wanted to say and a stranger often discovers the truth before I do. If I were to erase all that happened to me, I would remove the sheen and ore from everything. Chance encounter sooner or later will give me a day more apparent than noontime; and will surprise me with my hesitation.  

Onc ne furent à tous toutes graces données.

La Môme (La Vie en Rose)

For a number of reasons the English-speaking world has been unable to rid itself of what it has been in love with since the beginning of the nineteenth century: a French goddess, fair and free. It has ruminated in drunken bewilderment on this obsession, and has gone so far as to take lovers from all ends of the earth, the more exotic the better; it has whiled away the hours in disavowal of France's strengths, its virtues, its breath, its scent; but it has returned to it again and again as the one woman it cannot deny. France has much of what we have come to admire about Northern Europe – science, philosophy, aestheticism, a precise sense of justice, and a taste for danger tempered with a greater taste for truth. If Germany is indeed the epicenter of all modern thought and disciplines, France is a muse lingering astride the battlements, a waifish reminder of a life less structured or, I should say, less ordinarily structured. It is still remarkable that France, awash in hedonism, art, and beauty, is still a Catholic country that has no qualms about praising something greater that it cannot understand. The average Frenchman may no longer be a churchgoer, but a sense of order – greater order – allows him to live his life with the knowledge that it is not all in vain (Russians adhere to a similar philosophy, which would explain the long and fertile relationship that intellectuals from those countries have enjoyed). Perhaps a better description of the feeling one gets patrolling the streets of Paris or Lyon or Marseilles is one of cultural gentility, of a confidence wrought through centuries of apprenticeship and mastery, a knowledge of the world based on principles, beliefs, and institutions. And for all of France's history and achievement, this feeling is refreshing. It is refreshing because our world today is still being assaulted by nihilists in the guise of cultural theoreticians who wish to posit relativism, contradiction, taboo, and irony as the lonely breakwaters in an ocean of nothingness and insignificance. Yet if these same theoretical men were to descend the ghat to the water they hope will flood everything civilized, proper, and beatific, they will espy in this blueness only their own loathsome specters. France, a resting place of many of these dullards, will always be the beacon of culture amidst the pagan hordes. And the songs it will sing in joyous abandon may very well resemble the soundtrack to this recent film.    

The story of Édith Piaf, née Gassion (Marion Cotillard) has the familiar ring of tragedy. Born in an immigrant-laden district of Paris to parents with Italian and Algerian blood, Gassion struggled repeatedly against hunger, destitution, and lack of respect – the plague of the poor – only to struggle later in life with alcoholism, drug abuse, embezzlement, and exhaustion – the plague of the wealthy. Along the way she would meet the usual passel of pimps, criminals, prostitutes, and other underworld surlies; some of her most tender moments are shared with a woman of ill repute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) in the brothel run by her grandmother, a very convenient place for her father to abandon her. Once he finally returns and takes her away kicking and screaming (how a child can emerge with a semblance of security from such a setup is beyond conventional mores to guess) the waif Gassion (la môme of the original French title) has been sufficiently exposed to violence, cruelty, and lives without the possibility of change and improvement to know that she may not have much time on this earth and she'd best make good use of it. 

Thereupon, and at the behest of her father, a professional contortionist, Gassion begins to sing. She drifts away from family (her mother, whose alcoholism would be passed on to her daughter, makes a brief and jarring appearance) and into circles of people who care about her even less but are enamored with her potential. In time and for stage purposes, she is dubbed "Piaf," "sparrow" in the local argot and representative of her diminutive size and powerful voice. There is the usual assortment of backstabbings, blowups, organized criminals, and one passionate affair with the polar opposite of Piaf – a famous boxer who was world champion until he lost to this American prizefighter and subject of another well-known film. The last years slip by in a wicked haze of ill-advised cocktails, iller health, and failed concerts, none of which did much to diminish her fame in the eyes of the general public – the sign of a true icon. When Piaf cannot perform, there are always her records, passed around like some inexorable drug, and the masses stay satisfied. When she dies and is denied Catholic rites for, among other things, having had an affair with a married man, thousands gather at this famous cemetery to hum her songs until their notes turn to tears.

I have not detailed many of the film's twists and turns because they are all predictable yet, to the best of our knowledge, quite accurate. Given filmmakers' tendencies to romanticize and re-imagine their subjects' existence, one shudders to think of the misery and suffering that Piaf actually endured in her brief years, addled as she was by both fame and the contents of its barroom. That said, the real reason to see the film, apart from the music that may or may not have been part of your youth (it was certainly part of mine), is Cotillard. Thanks to skill, a constellation of genetic similarities, and clever cinematography, she transforms her very pretty self into the miniature cannonball that was Piaf with nary a seam or thread showing. The performance is extraordinary and utterly unexpected by us ignorant cinéastes who had only seen her work in some rather mediocre French films – the less said about them the better – and this adaptation of a book about southern France, its vineyards, and what can happen to people who actually take time to smell the roses. That's why "life through rose-colored glasses" (the English title and trademark song by Piaf) had as little to do with Piaf's life as the sentimental sweetness of her tunes has to do with many facets of our modern existence. But for a while, and perhaps longer, we can be convinced otherwise. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Prefaces to The Flowers of Evil

Four introductions to this magnificent collection of poems. You can read the original here. 

I. PREFACE

France is passing through a phase of vulgarity. Paris, center and appeal of universal stupidity. In spite of Molière and Béranger, we would never have believed France to be marching on the path of progress. Questions of art, terra incognita. Great men are fools.

My book could have done some good; I’m not grieved by this possibility. It could have been harmful; this does not fill me with joy.

The aim of poetry. This book was not made for my wives, my daughters, or my sisters.

All the crimes I have recounted have been imputed to me. The base entertainment of hate and contempt. The elegiacs are blackguards. And the word became flesh. For the poet is of no faction. Otherwise, he would be a simple mortal.

The Devil. Original sin. Good man. You may be the Tyrant’s favorite if you so wish. It is more difficult to love God than to believe in Him; on the other hand, it is more difficult for people of this century to believe in the Devil than to love him. Everyone makes use of him and no one thinks him real. The sublime subtlety of that Devil.

A soul of my choosing. The decor. Hence novelty. An epigraph. Barbey D’Aurevilly. The Renaissance. Gérard de Nerval. We are all hanged or hangable.

I had incorporated some garbage to please the journalists. They turned out to be a bunch of ingrates.

II. PREFACE TO THE FLOWERS

It is not for my wives, my daughters, or my sisters that this book was written; nor for the wives, daughters, or sisters of my neighbor. I will leave this analysis to those who mistake good actions for beautiful language.

I know well that the lover fascinated by a rich, beautiful style exposes his body to the hate of the masses. But no human respect, no false prudishness, no coalition, no universal suffrage will restrain me from speaking the incomparable dialect of this century, nor from confounding ink with virtue.

Since time immemorial the best poets have shared the most flowered spaces of the poetic realm. To me it seemed pleasing, and more agreeable than difficult, to extract the beauty of Evil. This book, fundamentally useless and absolutely innocent, was made with no other goal than to provide me with some light entertainment and indulge my taste for obstacles.

Some have told me that poetry can do wrong; this does not fill me with joy. Others – good souls all of them – that it may do good; and I’m not grieved by this possibility. The fear of some and the hope of others surprised me in equal measure, and did nothing but prove yet again that this century has unlearned the classical concepts of literature.

Despite the assistance provided by some celebrated oafs to man’s innate predilection for humbug, I would never have thought it possible that our country could march on the path of progress with such speed. This world of ours has acquired a thick film of vulgarity that imbues a spiritual man with all the violence of passion. But happy are the shells which the poison has not and cannot enter.

Initially I had the intention of answering several critics and explaining at the same time some very simple questions totally obscured by modernity’s glare. What is poetry? What is its aim? What is the distinction between the Beautiful and the Good? What could be the Beautiful in Evil? I could have averred that rhythm and rhyme fulfill man’s immortal need for monotony, symmetry, and surprise. I could have spoken at length on the adaptation of style to the subject, of the vanity and danger of inspiration, and so forth and so on. But I suffered from the imprudence of reading this morning several papers. Suddenly an indolence not unlike the weight of twenty atmospheres came over me, and my actions ceased in the face of the horrific inutility of explaining anything to anyone. Those who knew me were able to guess why. And for those who cannot or do not want to understand, any explanations would accumulate in vain into a heap of misconceptions.

III.

How can an artist, through a sustained series of efforts, attain originality commensurate with his talent?

How can poetry become music through prosody whose roots dig farther into the human soul than any classical theory might claim?

How does French poetry possess a little–known and mysterious system of prosody like that of Latin or English?

Why are all poets ignorant of how words rightly incorporate rhyme unable to express any ideas?

How is it that poetry (in this way akin to music and mathematics) can imitate a horizontal line, a straight line ascending, or a descending straight line? How can it rise in steep path to the sky without shortness of breath, or fall perpendicularly towards hell with the velocity of all gravity? How can it follow a spiral, trace a parabola, or the zigzag of superimposed angles?

How does poetry relate to the art of painting, of cooking, of cosmetics by expressing every sensation of sweetness or bitterness, of beatitude or horror by the coupling of a certain noun with a certain adjective, analogue, or opposite?

How is it that every man, reliant on my principles and availing himself of the knowledge which I plan to teach him in twenty lessons, can compose a tragedy no more lustily booed than any other or structure a poem of sufficient length to be as dull and tedious as all other epic poems?

Quite a task, rising up against all this divine insensitivity! More so owing to the fact that I, despite numerous laudable attempts, could not resist the desire to please my contemporaries, as shown in various places highlighted like rouge, certain base flatteries addressed to her, Democracy, and even some other twaddle excusing the despondency of my subject matter. But my dearest gentlemen of the press were ungrateful of such caresses, and I omitted in this new edition the traces of this ingratitude as much as could be possible.

To verify once more the excellence of my method, I have suggested devoting myself in the future to a celebration of the joys of the dedication and intoxication of military glory, even if they are not known to me.

Notes on my plagiary: Thomas Gray; Edgar Allan Poe (2 passages); Longfellow (2 passages); Statius; Virgil (the whole part of Andromache); Aeschylus; Victor Hugo.

IV. PROJECT ON A PREFACE FOR THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
(perhaps to be incorporated with previous notes)

If there is some glory in not being understood or in being understood just a little, I can say unboastfully that with this slender tome I have obtained and deserved such fame in one fell swoop. Offered numerous times to a series of publishers, all of whom shoved it away in horror; harassed and mutilated, in 1857, following a rather bizarre misunderstanding, slowly rejuvenated, sharpened, and strengthened in the course of many years of silence; having disappeared yet again owing to my insouciance, this discordant product of the Muse of the last days, revived again by a few new violent strokes, dares today to confront the sun a third time with its inanity.

This is not any fault of mine. The person to blame is the publisher insisting that he thought himself strong enough to brave the public’s distaste. “This book will remain forever like a blemish on your life,” one of my friends, an important poet, said to me from the very beginning. As it were, all my misadventures up to that point had affirmed the correctness of his observation. But I possess one of those happy personalities which derive a certain pleasure from hate, and which are glorified in their contempt. My taste so wickedly bent towards stupidity coerced me into finding particular pleasure in the travesties of calumny. As chaste as a sheet of white paper, as sober as water, as devoted to devotion as a communicant, as inoffensive as a victim, I do not mind passing for a debauched drunk, an impious lout, or an assassin.

My publisher continues to pretend that I, like he, would gain some benefit from explaining why and how I created this book, what my means and ends were, and from detailing my design and method. A critical work in that vein would surely amuse those minds enamored with profound rhetoric. For those dear souls I will write something later, perhaps, and have it printed in about ten copies. But, upon further scrutiny, doesn’t this all seem superfluous and wasteful since some will know or guess its essence and others will never understand it? I am too afraid of ridicule to insufflate to the masses the intelligence of a work of art. And I fear that I too greatly accommodated those Utopians who want by some immediate and magical decree to render all Frenchmen rich and virtuous.

And then, my most important reason, that most important reason of all: such acts bore and displease me. Should one then lead the rabble into the dresser’s and decorator’s studio, or the actor’s box? Should one reveal the tricks and levers of our gadgetry to the crowd so impassioned today and so indifferent tomorrow? Should one explain to them the edits and daubs and the variants improvised at rehearsals, or to what extent sincerity and instinct combine under the banner of indispensable charlatanism? Should they know of all the wrecks, makeup, pulleys, chains, regrets, and smears – in short, all the horrors that compose the sanctuary of art?

Besides, I’m not in the mood for all this today. I have no desire to demonstrate, surprise, amuse, or persuade. I have my nerves and my erratic whims. My goal is absolute rest and endless night. Bard of the mad pleasures of wine and opium, I thirst for nothing but a liqueur unknown on earth which even the celestial pharmacy could not provide me. A liqueur containing neither vitality, nor death, nor excitation, nor nothingness. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep, and then sleep more, this is today my one and only pledge. An infamous and disgusting pledge, but a sincere one.

Nevertheless, as superior taste instructs us not to be afraid of contradicting ourselves a bit, I have gathered at the end of this abominable book testimonies of sympathy on the part of certain men whom I value most. In this way, the impartial reader may see that I am not absolutely deserving of excommunication and that, having learned to make myself loved by some, my heart, although I no longer know on what printed cloth, does not perhaps have the “horrific ugliness of my face.”

Finally, by unmatched generosity, whereby my dear critics ...

As ignorance, more and more so ...

I myself denounce all imitations ...