Dedicated to a friend

Louis Boulanger  
The Witches' Sabbath (Souvenir of Victor Hugo) 1828

The first poem in Gaspard de la Nuit by Louis Bertrand that is dedicated to someone appears in the second book (of six), Vieux Paris. "Les Gueux de la Nuit" is dedicated to Louis Boulanger, a successful painter of the period whom Bertrand would have known from his time in Paris, having escaped the small town irritations of Dijon.

Boulanger illustrated many of Hugo's books including the very famous Notre Dame de Paris. This painting illustrates a poem from Hugo's collection of Romanticist Verse, Odes and Ballads, published two years earlier. A lithograph of the piece also exists, Ronde du Sabat, from which it is guessed that Bertrand did get the inspiration for his poem "La Ronde Sous La Cloche" (The Circle Beneath the Bell). Oddly, Bertrand does not dedicate his poem on "Départ pour le Sabat", but chooses to address Boulanger in the context of a poem of soldier's conversations regarding their gun escapades.

Callot

The 'gueux' of Paris were a group of mendicants during the Middle Ages. Bertrand writes about them in one of the poems in the second book, Vieux Paris, "Les Gueux de Nuit". A good image of such are the ones by Callot above, who was an aesthetic inspiration for the poem series as well. The war of the 'gueux' refers to a battle of 1566 in which the Netherlands opposed Spanish rule while also defending their rising Protestantism. The poem conversation has one man mention their having killed two night thiefs, where the previous poem has a band of houligans kill two Jews, including a rabbi, who are out at night, past curfew, with a few coins. The poem "Les Gueux de la Nuit" then suggests night beggars, but ones who are nonetheless respectable, in complete contrast to Bertrand's portrayal of them.

The lithograph, however, seems likely to have inspired his poem about the bell at the church of Saint Joan. This is particularly humorous since he knew that the better part of the church had been destroyed in 1810 to enlarge the Place of Saint Joan. Additionally, he has the devil worshipers faint to their death and a fire rage. The flames of hell cast shadows back onto the church walls, while shadows from the enormous statue of Saint Joan, which never existed, are cast on the neighboring buildings.

The poems focus on the medieval period. The wars, anti-semitism, gallows, mercenary soldiers of the time are all alluded to through literary and geographic references. The witch-hunts and convictions that fairies, gnomes and elves were ever-present tricksters allow the narrator's voice to appear uncertain of time, place and sanity. The poems play with the possibility of all that might be more than this world while laughing at such lunacy.

Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantaisies à la mannière de Rembrandt et Callot par Louis Bertrand

Felicien Rops, frontispiece 1868 edition

Art has always two antithetical sides, as if of a medal where one side would show the likeness of Paul Rembrandt, and the reverse, that of Jacques Callot. - Rembrandt is the philosopher with a white beard which spirals as it ends, his mind absorbed in meditation and prayer, who closes his eyes to gather himself, talking to the spirits of beauty, science, wisdom and love, and burning to penetrate the mysterious symbols of nature. - Callot, however, is the lancer and saucy braggart strutting about the place who makes noise in the tavern, who caresses the daughters of gypsies, who swears by his sword and his gun, whose only concern is to wax his mustache. The author of this book has considered art under this double personification.

In 1842 Bertrand's book of poems was released, after the efforts of several faithful friends, including the rather famous Sainte-Beuve who wrote the introduction to this first edition, but especially the concentrated efforts of David D'Angers. His book would become a cornerstone for Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the symbolists, Breton and the surrealists. Baudelaire acknowledges his influence on his prose poem text Le Spleen de Paris because Bertrand is largely considered the founder of the form, even if unknown and ignored. 
 

The strange text folds over and over on itself so that the voice of the narrator becomes confused among characters and authorial presences.

Bertrand's strange prose poems embrace the pictorial as the Romantics generally did, but all the more so for claiming to be inspired by two great artists and opening with a discussion of art. After a quote from Sainte Beuve and a poem, the next page presents a shaggy dog story in which the narrator recounts being told that art is not many things by a man who starts off seeming friendly, becomes increasingly strange, and then thrusts a book on him. The man, he discovers the next day, who had offered his name as he was leaving, Gaspard de la Nuit, is the devil. The narrator, unable to return the book, wishes him to burn in hell and decides to publish the book. We get the next Preface from which the above quote is excerpted, followed by a dedication to Victor Hugo dated 1836, then finally the title page of the 'devil' book simply titled Les Fantaisies de Gaspard de la Nuit.

Beyond the issue of art within the contained text of the poems, he also imagined the art of the published book. He specified directions not only for the layout of the text, but the illustrations he desired and where they might be placed. Three pages of notes included with the manuscript to the editor were ignored. He was not a great artist but he did produce some drawings that give a sense of what he imagined the artist could do better. Unfortunately, despite his interest in ensuring the role of the visual in his work, it would not be there, except for the occasional frontplate, or page ornamentation.

Tower of Nesle

Israel the younger Sylvestre, Tour de Nesle

A poem in Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit is about the Tower of Nesle, a popular subject at the time he was writing, in part thanks to a scandalous play written in 1832 by Dumas and Gailladet.

According to the play, the "Tour de Nesle" would have been the scene of the orgies of a queen of France, obese ogress who attracted students for her pleasure. After having enjoyed them,  she had them thrown into the river during the night. The philosopher Buridan would have failed in his youth, a victim of the ogress. The queens? Jeanne de Navarre, wife of Philip the Handsome and Margaret of Burgundy, wife of Louis X. 

 

The play chose to ignore the other woman Blanche, wife of Charles, the youngest son of Philip IV. The scandal, started in 1313 during the visit of Philip's only daughter Isabelle with her husband, Edward II of England. It permanently altered the attitudes and manners French royal society after the 14th century. The accusations apparently started by Isabella after seeing her small woven purses, gifts to her two sisters-in-law, in the hands of men who were not their husbands. The Tour de Nesle was the name of the tower in Paris where much of the adultery was said to have occurred. The story, as stories do, developed once Philip placed the couples under investigation. Eventually, the two men were arrested and the story made public. The scandal led to the torture (including castration) of the two accused male lovers, their subsequent executions (either drawn and quartered, flayed, or broken on a wheel and then hung), and lifetime imprisonment of the two young women. Jeanne of Burgundy, the third sister-in-law who was accused of potentially being present and perhaps having participated in the festive orgies of her two sisters, was saved from such a punishment by her husband Philip V. Their marriage seems to have been the only happy one; he wrote her love letters, if uninteresting ones, throughout their life together. His will shows her interest in the school, but nothing except the legend suggests that there was more to it.

More info on this can be gathered in the book by the excellent writer Alison Weir.

Weir, Alison. (2006) Isabella: She-Wolf of France, Queen of England. London: Pimlico.

Description, not Painting

In the foreword "À Arsène Houssaye" of Baudelaire's Petits Poème en Prose: Le Spleen de Paris, he says that the idea came to him to "apply to the description of modern life, or rather to a life that is modern and more abstract, the procedure that [Bertrand] had applied to the painting of an ancient life, so strangely pictorial". Aloysius Bertrand's posthumously published book of prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit, Fantaisies dans la manière de Rembrandt et Callot, is considered by many poets to be the father of the genre–disputes about whether it is a genre to be here ignored.

Why is modern life to be described in words, whereas the life that once was permitted painting with words? Baudelaire wanted illustrations to his work, which makes this statement even more intriguing because he is clearly distinguishing himself from Bertrand, his short descriptions to Bertrand's small pictures, his life to a past lifestyle. Something about this ancient life allowed picture making that is no longer there. Perhaps it is the abstractions?

Baudelaire claims this modern life is more abstract but he does not make clear what the comparison is based upon. The abstraction of modern life seems particularly odd given his emphasis on the modern. Modern is the current and only if we are at a remove can we abstract, that is generalize by presenting an overview. On the other hand, to abstract is also to condense to the essence of the thing. But an abstract is a condensation of something that has happened, simply because we can not reduce the immediate. So if we believe that Baudelaire is going to present a life that is more abstract than we have to believe that it is a life that is always a second behind the current. That indeed would be the very issue of the modern, that is always reviewing what is happening from a self-conscious distance that uses the present to think about the moment happening rather than engaging in it, a self-conscious review of the steps and techniques that permitted the moment or work to occur.

So how do descriptions permit this place where abstractions describe without representing in any figurative space? If it is answered in the poems, it is not done clearly–of course how could it be clear composed in a genre, poème en prose, without distinct boundaries or definition. That is another issue of the modern: a multiplicity of viewpoints, explanations, relations that alter the perception of some objective thing.

The objective thing is not there anymore, so there is nothing to paint in words. At best, we can provide a list, a vertical axis of description, and climbing ever higher build a tower of Babel but one that has no hope of reaching an end. Perhaps only because of painting's just beginning to venture into impressionism did Baudelaire not conceive that painting could be equally abstract, as proven sometimes painfully over the course of the 20th century...or how painting would incorporate words and flip the comparison...but that conversation waits for another day.