By its fecundity in poets, the day we live in and which has already
lasted ten years, can hardly be compared with any of the vanished days,
even those richest in sunshine and flowers. There were fair morning
excursions in the dew, following the footsteps of Ronsard; there was
a lovely afternoon when Theophile's weary viol sighed, heard between
the oboes and the bass-trombones; there was the stormy romantic day,
sombre and royal, interrupted towards evening by the cry of a woman
whom Baudelaire was strangling; there was the Parnassian moonlight, and
the Verlainian sun rose--and we are there in full noon, in the midst
of a wide country provided with everything necessary for the making of
verse: plants, flowers, streams, rivulets, woods, caves and young women
so fresh that one would say their thoughts were newly hatched from an
ingenuous brain.
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?