ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:
A ROMANTIC OF 1830
ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:
A ROMANTIC OF 1830
In the preface to Petits Poèmes en Prose, Baudelaire makes respectful reference to a little-known book: “J’ai une petite confession à vous faire. C’est en feuilletant pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameux Gaspard de la Nuit, d’Aloysius Bertrand (un livre connu de vous, de moi et de quelques-uns de nos amis, n’a-t-il pas tous les droits à être appelé fameux?), que l’idée m’est venue de tenter quelque chose d’analogue, et d’appliquer à la description de la vie moderne, ou plutot d’une vie moderne et plus abstraite, le procédé qu’il avait appliqué à la peinture de la vie ancienne, si étrangement pittoresque.” He speaks of Bertrand as “mon mystérieux et brillant modèle,” though, remembering the teaching of Poe, he adds that he is ashamed to have made something so different from Gaspard de la Nuit, since he holds that the highest honour of a poet is to accomplish exactly what he set out to perform. A writer who wrote prose poems good enough to be read “twenty times at least” by Baudelaire, good enough to suggest an imitation, a writer but for whom the Petits Poèmes en Prose would not have been written, or would have been written differently, is more than a literary curiosity. I was led to examine his book, and, presently, to find an interest in the man himself as well as in his accomplishment. M. Anatole France was good enough to direct me in my search for information. My friend, M. Champion, of the Quai Malaquais, generously put his bibliographical knowledge at my disposal. The files of forgotten magazines and newspapers and essays by Sainte-Beuve, Charles Asselineau, and M. Leon Séché combined to build in my mind a portrait of this picturesque and luckless Romantic, a portrait blistered here and there, obliterated in patches, but not without vitality.
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Louis-Jacques-Napoleon Bertrand, who took the name of Ludovic and later preferred that of Aloysius, was born on April 20, 1807, at Céva, in Piedmont. Hugo was born in 1802, and Gautier in 1811. He was a child of that old grey-haired army of which Musset speaks in the Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle. His mother was an Italian, his father a Frenchman of Lorraine, an old soldier described by his son, in a fiery letter to a newspaper which had insulted him, as “only a patriot of 1789, only an officer of fortune, who at eighteen rushed to pour out his blood on the banks of the Rhine, and, at fifty, counted thirty years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds.” At the age of seven the young Bertrand was brought to France. He grew up at Dijon, learned in youth of the great things that were being done in Paris, and read Hugo, Nodier, Hoffmann, and Scott, all of whom helped him to turn the modern Dijon into a mediæval city of dreams.
Early in 1828, a few young men of Dijon founded a newspaper, Le Provincial, to be a mouthpiece for their enlightened generation. It endured for a few months, and Bertrand contributed prose and verse to it, including a first draft of a prose poem that, in a much altered form, was printed in Gaspard de la Nuit. The paper was not unnoticed in Paris, and when it died and Bertrand left Dijon for the capital, he found some doors already open to him. He was twenty-one, penniless, with rolls of manuscript in his pocket, and a shy eagerness to read aloud from them.
Two portraits of him remain, one by Sainte-Beuve and the other by Victor Pavie. Sainte-Beuve describes him as “... a tall, thin young man of twenty-one, with a yellow and brown complexion, very lively little black eyes, a face mocking and sharp without doubt, rather wretched perhaps, and a long, silent laugh. He seemed timid, or rather uncivilised....”
Victor Pavie says: “His awkward walk, his incorrect and unsophisticated costume, his lack of balance and of aplomb, betrayed that he had newly escaped from the provinces. One divined the poet in the ill-restrained fire of his timid and wandering eyes. As for the expression of his face, a lofty taste for beauty was combined in it with a somewhat uncivilised taciturnity....”
Beside these pictures let me print Bertrand’s portrait of the imaginary Gaspard de la Nuit: “A poor devil whose exterior announced nothing but poverty and suffering. I had already noticed in the garden his frayed overcoat, buttoned to the chin, his shapeless hat that never brush had brushed, his hair long as a weeping-willow, combed like a thicket, his fleshless hands like ossuaries, his mocking, wretched, and sickly face; and my conjectures had charitably placed him among those itinerant artists, violin-players and portrait-painters, whom an insatiable hunger and an unquenchable thirst condemn to travel the world in the footsteps of the Wandering Jew....” It is different from the portraits of himself, but not more different than would be such a Germanicised caricature as might have been made by Hoffmann.