It is a touching illusion. The poor youth who was not yet completely master of his own language, whose odes were often broken-winded, whose verses, artistically polished as they were, lacked life—dreamt of being able in a couple of years to write a foreign language brilliantly. He soon lost confidence in his powers and judged his own poetry much more harshly than it was judged by others, and much more harshly than it deserved. He withdrew into himself; would see no one, and take no interest in what was going on in the outside world. He had come from Geneva interested in everything and every one, and full of enthusiastic self-confidence. In Paris he squandered his talent in talk and argument (always a dangerous thing to do) until there was not a virgin, not an untampered-with, idea left in his head. Then he became a publisher's hack, and wrote notices of books and biographies until he was completely nauseated. By the time he died, which he did at the age of twenty-two, he had long been utterly indifferent to all general interests and devoid of belief in his own ability. He simply allowed himself to die.[1]
I pass on to men of more remarkable and sterling talent, and of them I choose three—Louis Bertrand, Petrus Borel, and Théophile Dondey. These are names which, while their owners were alive, were almost unknown, but which are now familiar to many a lover of literature in France and beyond its borders. In their lifetime the poor young authors, in the course of a very few years, found it impossible to get their works published; now (especially since the revival of interest in them due to Charles Asselineau) they are published in éditions de luxe; and even the frontispieces and title-pages of their first books are carefully imitated, and the books themselves are marked in sale catalogues, "valuable and rare."
Louis Bertrand, born in 1807 in that town of Dijon the praises of which he has so charmingly sung, is better known by his pseudonym of Gaspard de la Nuit. He represents more perfectly than any other Romanticist one of the main aims of the Romantic endeavour—namely, the renovation of prose style. Whilst his contemporaries were trying to take the world by storm and passionate violence, he was developing in his native town the sculptor's and the goldsmith's artistic qualities in his treatment of language. No one had such an antipathy as he to the conventional phrase, the trite expression. Before he wrote he, as it were, passed the language through a sieve, which cleansed it of all the dull, faded, worn-out words, leaving to be employed in the service of his art only those possessed of picturesque and musical value. In a poem there must always be some words which are really only there for the sake of the rhyme or rhythm; the essence of Bertrand's art is that every parasitic word, every scrap of padding, is rigidly excluded. His work belongs to a branch of literature which he himself originated and which others (Baudelaire, for example) cultivated afterwards; he wrote short descriptions, never occupying more than a page or two, now in Rembrandt's, now in Callot's, now in Velvet-Breughel's, now in Gerard Dow's, now in Salvator Rosa's manner; the best of them are as perfect as pictures by these masters.
In 1828, during the first, entirely unpolitical period of the Romantic movement, Bertrand assisted in founding a literary organ of its ideas in his native town. His contributions to Le Provincial attracted the attention of the famous Parisians, Chateaubriand, Nodier, and Victor Hugo; and ere long the capital had such an attraction for the young author that he was constantly finding his way there. He made his début in its literary society one Sunday evening at Charles Nodier's, where he was permitted to read a ballad aloud. In Nodier's house he made acquaintance with the whole circle. He threw himself specially on the protection of Sainte-Beuve, who became his mentor, showed him hospitality during his short stays in Paris, and was entrusted with his manuscripts. Bertrand had all the awkwardness of the provincial and the extravagances of the dilettante; but to see the fire of the small, shyly restless, black eyes was to divine the poet.
Immediately after the Revolution of July he threw himself ardently into politics, attaching himself to the extreme Opposition party. The true son of an old soldier of the Republic and the Empire, he gave vent to the warlike instinct which had hitherto slumbered in his breast in attacks upon the citizen rulers. He was only twenty-three, and a newspaper of the opposite party had treated him with peculiar contempt because of his youth. He compelled the editor of the paper to insert a reply to the offensive article, in which he writes: "I prefer your disdain to your praise. And your approbation would in any case be of little consequence after that with which Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Ferdinand Denis, and others have encouraged my literary talent. Your insults oblige me to quote the encomiums with which genius itself has deigned to honour me. Monsieur Victor Hugo writes to me: 'I read your verses aloud to my friends as I read André Chénier's, Lamartine's, or Alfred de Vigny's; it is impossible to be possessed in a higher degree than you are of the secrets of form, &c., &c.' This is how Victor Hugo writes to the man you call a clerk. It is true that I have not the honour of being descended from any noble toad-eater, and that I cannot present myself as a candidate at the elections (i.e. am not on the list of the most heavily assessed citizens). My father was only a captain of gendarmerie, only a patriot of 1789, a soldier of fortune who at the age of eighteen hastened to the Rhine to shed his blood there, and at the age of fifty could count thirty years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds. It is true that he left me nothing but honour and his sword, which you, sir, would shrink from seeing drawn."
This is French journalistic style of 1832—not modest, certainly, but also not spiritless. Bertrand was one of the company of young men sympathetically alluded to by George Sand in Horace, who looked on Godfrey Cavaignac as their political leader, and went by the name of les bousingots (sailor-hats). In Bertrand himself, republican bluntness was curiously combined with the artistic ultra-refinement of the Romanticist. He never won fame. He put too much ardour into his first efforts, did not husband his strength. He overworked himself to support his mother and sister, and died in poverty in 1841 in a Paris hospital. David d'Angers, the great Romantic sculptor, who had faithfully watched by the bedside of the dying man, sent to Bertrand's home for a fine white sheet to wrap the body in, and was the solitary mourner who followed him to his grave. (See David d'Angers' touching letter on the subject of Bertrand's death in Charles Asselineau's Mélanges tirés d'une petite bibliothèque romantique, p. 18l, &c. -Author's footnote.) He erected a monument to him; and Sainte-Beuve and Victor Pavie published his Gaspard de la Nuit. In 1842 twenty copies of this book were sold with difficulty, but in 1868 the Romanticist bibliophile, Charles Asselineau, brought out an édition de luxe.
As an example of Bertrand's manner I give in the original the sketch entitled Madame de Montbazon, with its motto, taken from Saint-Simon's Memoirs:
Madame de Montbazon était une fort belle
créature qui mourut d'amour, cela pris à la
lettre, l'autre siècle, pour le chevalier de la
Rue qui ne l'aimait point.
—Mémoires de Saint-Simon.
La suivante rangea sur la table de laque un vase de fleurs et les flambeaux de cire, dont les reflets moiraient de rouge et de jaune les rideaux de soie bleue au chevet du lit de la malade.
"Crois-tu, Mariette, qu'il viendra?—Oh! dormez, dormez un peu, madame!—Oui, je dormirai bientôt, pour rêver à lui toute l'éternité!"
"On entendit quelqu'un monter l'escalier: "Ah! si c'était lui!" murmura la mourante, en souriant, le papillon du tombeau déjà sur les lèvres.
C'était un petit page qui apportait de la part de la reine, à madame la duchesse, des confitures, des biscuits et des elixirs, sur un plateau d'argent.
"Ah! il ne vient pas," dit-elle d'une voix défaillante; "il ne viendra pas! Mariette, donne-moi une de ces fleurs, que je la respire et la baise pour l'amour de lui!"
Alors Madame de Montbazon, fermant les yeux, demeura immobile. Elle était morte d'amour, rendant son âme dans le parfum d'une jacinthe.
It often seems as if the place of those who disappear too early from the field of literature were, a little sooner or a little later, filled by others. But, strictly speaking, no individual ever exactly fills another's place. The pen which fell from Louis Bertrand's hand was, undoubtedly, seized by Théophile Gautier; and Gautier's far more comprehensive talent caused Bertrand's to be forgotten; but no connoisseur can fail to see that in Bertrand's writing there is an exquisite, a marvellously touching quality, to the possession of which Gautier with his colder plastic gift never attained.