Bertrand’s life in Paris was hidden from the celebrated men whom he met at Nodier’s evening receptions and in Sainte-Beuve’s study. He showed himself for a moment, recited some of his verses “d’une voix sautillante,” and disappeared. He had no money, and probably suffered from that lack of confidence which can only be removed by a banking account. Sainte-Beuve, who saw him two or three times and gave him a copy of the Consolations, with the inscription “Mon ami Bertrand,” speaks of him threading lonely streets with the air of Pierre Gringoire, the out-at-elbows poet of Notre Dame de Paris. He paints what must be an imaginary portrait of the young and penniless genius leaning on the window-sill of his garret, “talking for long hours with the pale gilliflowers of the roof.”
Unable to earn a living in Paris, he went back to Dijon in 1830, where he contributed to a Liberal newspaper, Le Patriote de la Côte-d’Or. In spite of his poverty, his blood was young and proud, and as he walked the streets of Dijon he must have felt himself a representative of that exuberant young Parisian manhood that was putting Hernani on the stage and sending Mademoiselle de Maupin to the press. A rival paper jeered at him, and he was able to reply: “Je préfère vos dédains à vos suffrages,” and to quote a letter from Victor Hugo to explain his independence. Hugo had written: “Je lis vos vers en cercle d’amis, comme je lis André Chenier, Lamartine et Alfred de Vigny: il est impossible de posséder à un plus haut point les secrets de la facture.” With such a testimonial in his pocket he need not care for the scorn or the approval of a provincial journalist.
At this time his Liberalism was as ardent as his youth. Asselineau quotes a fiery article praying for war, bloody war, against the Holy Alliance: “It is time to throw the dice on a drum; and, should we all perish, the honour of France and of liberty shall perish not.” But, as was not unnatural, he presently left France and liberty to take care of themselves, and, full of new plans for literary achievement, returned hopefully to Paris, where he was joined by his mother and sister. He was again unable to earn a living. The last lines of a piteous letter written to Antoine de Latour in September 1833, show how miserable was his condition:
“Si je te disais que je suis au point de n’avoir bientôt plus de chaussures, que ma redingote est usée, je t’apprendrais là le dernier de mes soucis: ma mère et ma sœur manquent de tout dans une mansarde de l’hôtel des Etats-Unis qui n’est pas payée. Qu’est ce pour toi qu’une soixantaine de francs (mon Dieu, à quelle humiliation le malheur me contraint!). Quelques pièces d’argent dans une bourse, pour nous c’est un mois de loger, c’est du pain!
“Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage.
Mon camarade de collège!!!
“Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.”
It is not known whether the money was sent him, nor whether he found employment as a proof-reader.
In such poverty, in such dejection, he put together the book that preserves his memory, dreaming, when he could forget his empty stomach and the holes in his shoes, of the prose that Baudelaire was to imagine after him, “une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience.” He would not, perhaps, have thought of sudden starts of conscience, for his was a simpler soul than Baudelaire’s, and he never felt that the portrait he was drawing might be only the portrait of a portrait. He was born in 1807 and not in 1821, and, with the Romantic joy in colour and local colour, he had more than the Romantic simplicity. His fantasies are prefaced by quotations, and these are taken from Scott, Hugo, Byron, folk-song, the Fathers of the Church, Scottish ballads, Charles Nodier, old chronicles, Lope de Vega, Fenimore Cooper, the cries of the night watchmen, Lamartine, Coleridge, Chateaubriand, a medley of the Romantics and the writers and things that they admired. They sometimes mistook the picturesque for the beautiful, and so did Bertrand. He was a man who thought with his eyes. He was not an analyst.
So far indeed did his visual conception of life carry him that he represents, better than any other French writer, the tendency, new at that time, to identify literature with painting. Hoffmann, in Germany, had written Fantasy-pieces after the manner of Callot. Leigh Hunt, in England, amused himself, in Imagination and Fancy, by cutting little bits out of Spenser and proposing them as subjects to the ghosts of Titian and Rubens. Bertrand used words like oil-colours, and in Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, wrote what, if he had had a palette and brush, he might very well have painted. If he thought through his eyes, his eyes had been trained by the painters, and he was proud to offer his book as a series of engravings after imaginary pictures, or etchings from plates that had never been bitten.