The wide country is quite full of poets who walk, no longer in troops as in Ronsard's time, but alone and with a slightly sullen air; they greet each other from afar with brief gestures. Not all have names and several of them never will have any. How shall we call them? Let them play on while this person overtakes us and tells us something of his dream.
He is Adolphe Retté.
He is recognizable among them all by his dissolute and almost wild appearance. He crushes the flowers, if he does not gather them, and with reeds he makes rafts, throwing them to the tide, towards peril, towards the morrow. But he smiles and grows languid when young girls pass. Une belle dame passa ... and he spoke:
Dame des lys amoureux et pâmés,
Dames des lys languissants et fanés,
Triste aux yeux de belladone—
Dame d'un rêve de roses royales,
Dame des sombres roses nuptiales,
Frêle comme une madone—
Dame de ciel et de ravissement,
Dame d'extase et de renoncement,
Chaste étoile très lointaine—
Dame d'enfer, ton sourire farouche,
Dame du diable, un baiser de ta bouche,
C'est le feu des mauvaises fontaines
Et je brûle si je te touche.
[(Tr. 32)]
The fair lady passed, but without being affected by the final imprecation, which she doubtless attributed to excess of love. She passed, giving the poet smile for smile.
This idyll had an admirable plaint for its first epilogue,
Mon âme, il me semble que vous êtes un jardin ...
[(Tr. 33)]
a garden where one sees, hanging on the hedges, in the evening mist, shreds of the veil
De la Dame qui est passée.
[(Tr. 34)]
Sometime after this adventure, we learned that Retté, returned from a voyage to the Archipel en fleurs, had enriched himself with a new collection of dreams. He will yet again enrich himself. His talent is a living shoot grafted on a stout wild stock of glorious viridity. A poet, Adolphe Retté has only the sense of rhythm and the passion for words. He loves ideas and he loves them when they are new and even excessive. He wishes to be freed of all the old prejudices and he would equally like to free his brothers in social bondage. His last books, la Forêt bruissante and Similitudes, affirm this tendency. The one is a lyrical poem; the other, a dramatic poem in prose, very simple, very curious and very extraordinary by the mixture there seen of the sweet dreams of a tender poet and the somewhat rigid and naive fancies of the Utopian anarchist. But without naivete, that is to say, without freshness of soul, would poets exist?