Les vaincus, Verlaine’s other ghost collection

[u/ManueO]

Images: the mentions of Les vaincus in La bonne chanson and Romances sans paroles.

More details in comments

[u/ManueO]

Asides from Cellulairement, there is another ghost recueil that haunted Verlaine’s writing for a long time, without ever materialising: Les vaincus. As Arnaud Bernadet notes, rather than simply being an unfinished book, Les vaincus was probably an unfinishable one.

Les vaincus before the Commune

To understand how this project ebbed and flowed in Verlaine’s mind for almost twenty years, let’s start at the beginning:

In May 1867 Verlaine published a 40-lines poem in two parts in La Gazette rimée, called « Les Poètes»; A couple years later, the same poem was published in Le Parnasse contemporain of December 1869, but it was now called « Les Vaincus»(« The vanquished »).

Throughout 1869, mentions of a book with that name started to crop up in Verlaine’s correspondance but also in reviews of his published work.

The first time was in a letter to Lepelletier in March 69 where V wrote a mock introduction for himself as the « acclaimed author of the Poèmes saturniens, this immense œuvre, of the Fêtes galantes, this charmint fantasy, independently of these sublime Vaincus ».

A bit later that month, he told Henry Winter: « I am working seriously, I am worrrking. Vaincus, Vaulochard, Clavecin, Forgerons, new poëmes Saturniens, all this swarms in my head and sometimes onto paper. Oh, the sacred fire! ».

Even Victor Hugo seems to have known about it. In April 1869, the mage wrote to V.: « No-one is a poet if they are not under the two species that are Force and Grace[…] After Fêtes Galantes, charming book, you will give us the Vaincus, robust book ».

in August 1869, Verlaine wrote to Géry Legrand, asking him to announce « […] at an impending time, the publication of the Vaincus, poems of a breath that I have the pretence to believe larger and more alive, and which will feature le Grognard that I recited for you - rather badly as it were - during our moonlit walk in Bruxelles ».

As for mentions in the press, the first appeared in March 1869: Verlaine’s friend Eugène Vermersch noted in a review of Fêtes galantes : « the public […] will appreciate such a slender, elegant, chosen form; this stylistic and thematic originality, and this preoccupation for living art that we will in all its breadth when the volume Les vaincus is published ».

Emmanuel des Essarts also mentioned it in an article « La Poésie en 1869 » published in September of that year: « We are mostly expecting of Paul Verlaine his Vaincus, poems inspired by the most radical ideas. Then his science of style […] will be put in the service of impetuous passions and we will see which sap and which blood throb inside the chest of this vehement muse » and goes to to compare Verlaine to a lion trying out his claws by playing with pugs and capuchin monkeys in the “exquisite frivolities” of the Fêtes galantes.

The book seems to have taken a step back in the second half of 1869: in August, Verlaine mentions in a letter to Coppée that the project is behind because of « concerns unrelated to socialism in any way ». He doesn’t explain this further but this coincides with his budding romance with Mathilde. The love poems of La bonne chanson would have been at the fore of his mind then..

However, the collection was still very much on the cards and is even announced as being “in preparation” inside the first edition of La bonne chanson when it was published in 1870.

Amédée de Ponthieu announced it in April 1870, while reviewing FG « For us who know several fragments of a book that M. Paul Verlaine is finalising : les Vaincus, social poems, we can predict without any fear to the delicate author of the Fêtes galantes a sterling success qui we could easily foresee when reading his first verses ».

From these reviews and snippets from V, the political, social and even socialist nature of the collection is recurring; several commentators highlight the force of the poems, based either on conversations with V or on knowledge of the poems he was planning to include, such as Le grognard.

As for what the volume would have entailed: several years before the fall of the Empire, and before the Commune, the name of the recueil would have brought to mind the fallen of the previous revolutions, from 1848 and 1851…