Louis Boulanger, "To my Friend Saint-Beuve" (1836

Though Louis Boulanger was known as one of the standard-bearers for visual Romanticism – considered within the community as equal to his comrade Delacroix for a number of years – he also had a strong literary bent. Here is one of his few surviving poems, dedicated to the Romanticist literary critic Saint-Beuve and originally published in an anthology published by the female Romanticist poet Marie Mennessier-Nodier, whose father Charles Nodier was one of the movement's chief strategists and thinkers:
  
To My Friend Sainte-Beuve, (1836)

No, I have not received that highest gift of grace
That makes the work, when all else dies and is effaced
Stand yet, immortal, so that at some distant date       
The glory of the author scintillates as bright
As on those grand days where the town, with solemn rites,
Parades his compositions brought to consecrate.
But nonetheless these Florentines, Genius' elect,
That true to life your Muse before my view projects,
Come often with their light that drowns and leaves me stunned,
And then at times, alas! My spirit has aspired
To believe, poor fool, that one ray of that fire
Piercing through its shade, would render it fecund.

 

  

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from Aristide Marie, Le Peintre Poète: Louis Boulanger. 1925. La Vie et l’Art Romantiques, Floury, Éditeur: Paris. p. 45.

Newly Translated Note from Gautier to Boulanger

Here is a very fun & poetically playful little note from the Jeunes-Freance co-founder and poet Théophile Gautier to his fellow co-founder, the painter Louis Boulanger, written about 2-3 years (timelines are hazy) after the group stopped functioning as a defined unit – though as we see here the members remained dedicated to the networks of interdisciplinary collaboration that they had established through it and had already become a defining element of the avant-garde or otherstream community. I've tried to be as playful with my translation as Théo was in the original:

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14 Jan., 1836 

 

My dear Louis,

 

I’m exceedingly vexed at having made you wait like this; but here’s how it all went down; I was horribly stuffed up with a cold and forced to fold myself up in a domain of sweetsoftness, at the gushing fountain of herbal tea and marshmallow. The lovely child[1] has come twice to my place in Paris, I was in Passy,

 

With my disgruntled lungs in huge surges immersed

In those smooth creamy syrups Charlard thought up first.[2]

 

Upon returning I discover your letter, moreover an epistle of more of the unfortunate’s elegiacs,[3] which breaks my heart two times for the two of us missing one session here. I’ll sneak up on you from behind with the aforementioned beauty Friday or Saturday. We’ll get to work lighting the studio with our gaze if daylight doesn’t do it, and I think that the model’s eyes shall model passing well[4]. Incidentally should it have gone dark as in an oven,[5] your canvas is so dazzling and luminous that you’ll see everything else by it. 

 

I yearn for you to have cash, women, street cred (you’ve got that), fitness, inheritances out of the blue, all the wonders of the world, could you only take to heart each day twenty cartloads of enviers all frozen flat with rage.

 

Théophile Gautier.

 

 

NOTES

 

[1] A model who they seem to have been employing jointly, thus implying that Théo (trained as a painter but kicked out of art school for distributing Romanticist propaganda) was still painting a bit on the side, at least; or, if he was finding her for Boulanger alone, we are glimpsing another often-overlooked form of communal and interdisciplinary collaboration.

 

[2] The chemist and pharmacist Antione François Boutron Charlard, an early proponent of hydrotherapy. As far as I can tell this is an off-the-cuff improvisation by Théo.

 

[3] plus une épitre des plus élégiaques de l’infortunée

 

[4] sufficans, an archaic orthographical distortion used only in verse, resurrected by Gautier and other ultra-Romantics.

 

[5] The french for oven, four, may be an anglophone pun extending his french wordplay upon one (une) and two (deux) in this passage.

  

   

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from Aristide Marie, Le Peintre Poète: Louis Boulanger. 1925. La Vie et l’Art Romantiques, Floury, Éditeur: Paris. p. 63.

Auguste Bouzenot, "The Durga" – 1834 Avant-Romanrticist Comparative Theology

This description of a Hindu religious festival was published in the seminal anthology Annales Romantiques in 1833, and bears witness to the early avant-garde’s attempts to engage meaningfully with Eastern religion. Like most such attempts, it fails to fully escape a Eurocentric perspective. Its author Bouzenot [pronounce: Booze-e-know] was a young Romanticist philosopher, Liberal social theorist, and historian of thought whose experimental essay veers into list-poetry recalling Rabelais’ medieval satirical lists and looks forward to those of the Surrealists and otherstream poets. Here he compares a Hindu festival to the local traditional festivals (often with Pagan roots) familiar to French readers. The exercise in comparative religion manages to make a nod, both in content and style, to each of the main strains within ultra-Romanticism at the time: the Orientalist, Medievalist, and Frenetic tendencies. The autumn festival being described is Durga Puja, dedicated to the benevolent maternal war-deity Durga. Local versions of the festival are celebrated across Eastern and north-eastern India. The broad outlines of the festival as described here seem fairly accurate. 

The Durga (1834)
by Auguste Bouzenot

translated by Olchar E. Lindsann


It’s safe to say there are few families so negligent of time-honoured customs and paternal festivals, as not to elect in the chapel of Notre-Dame, on December 26, the day of St. Stephen, ancient patron of that chapel, a bishop of fools from among the sub-deacons, or rather as uncouth tongues would say, the drunk deacons of the cathedral.
Not to appropriately celebrate on the first of January the festival of fools, by causing old shoes to be burned in a censer and forcing the bishop to inhale this noxious odour;
Not to chow down on the cake of kings at the epiphany,
Not to march on Fat Thursday alongside the veiled, violated, violed ox,
Not to go watch the giant set aflame in the Rue aux Ours,
The wicker dragon of Notre-Dame, the day of Rogation,
The gaping maw of the good St. Vermin in Poitiers,
The growlie at Metz,
The gargoyle in Rouen,
The tarasque in Tarascon,
The salted chair in Troyes,
A Goliath or a Ferrand made of straw on Ash Wednesday and so many other dragons, that of the Rock of Turpin, that of St. André, that of St. Bernard de Comminges;
Not to lend a hand at the University’s festival of fools.
At the bonfire of St. Jean [Cathedral] and at that of St. Pierre,
At the festival of the ass,
At the festival of the abbot of cuckolds,
At the festival of kalends,
At the festival of idiots,
At the festival of the abbot of the peanut gallery,
At the festival of the innocents,
And other revelries said to be barbarities;
Not to crack walnuts in St. Michel,
Send love-knots in St. Valentin,
Not to… not to…
Not to hurl one’s durga into the Ganges in the great festival of August 25.
The Hindus have in general religiously preserved the dogmas and rites of Brahma. Nor is he truly faithful who does not piously preserve his domestic gods, gods of the mat where he finds his repose, gods of the weapons which serve to repel his enemies, god of his hearth always welcoming to the stranger. Everybody has his idol in the most appropriate part of the house, everybody has his great gods uncannily decked out with the head of a crocodile, serpent or cow, with the stout plug on the chief, elegantly multicoloured, blues, yellows, reds, whites or greens, silent emblems, fantastic, insistent, who grimace marvelously with all of the human emotions, gods of the cradle and the tomb, gods of the young spouse and the old man, of water and fire, faithful friends whom everybody approaches each evening to confide their most secret thoughts quietly in the ear, gods of harvests, who cause to blossom the roses of cashmere and sonebac with which you perfume your hair; splendid gods! indeed.
The festivities begin at the new moon in the month of August and last three days. As soon as the sun on the first day leaps radiantly upon the Ganges’ current, you intone, face against the earth:
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Brahma, Brahma, Brahma, the god of evil is powerful, and I myself am small!
Thus you purify the house, you render it white and clean;
You chase off the evil spirit who blows upon the harvest, who casts curses in passing and who the night visits in the gardens to rip away the leaves of magatelli leaves which make the serpents die;
Then the family assembles, you take council, you make prayers together;
Then you don the Durga in rich clothing, in long veils of garlands; your great sword is in its left hand, in the other is the head of the malicious angel. Next commence the lamentations and wailings; you prostrate yourself at the feet of the god, you strike the earth with your brow, you shed many tears; the offerings and prayers rival those of the first two days. The god’s going to have to be abandoned, divine mercy! And you continue to produce a profusion of sobs and of gifts; it’s then that you must set yourself to drying that depthless reservoir of woes that we retain at the root of the soul in order to find nothing but joy from now on. The third day arises.
Ring out, you clarions, trumpets, fanfares, cymbals, bells, tambourines, with forceful clamour, to bear witness to my joy; everything’s mad with pleasure, drunk with ecstasy, everything’s upset, stirred up, thrashed about, twisted. And the orchestra spreads its great flood of music and its uproar of tom-tom tumbling like cataracts, oh! how beautiful it is then, the Ganges, my river of wide banks, of majestic blue waters so transparent! It would be difficult to perceive them overlain as they are by thousands of barges bedecked and mantled in rich array. One would call it an immense robe strewn with clusters of blooms; my variegated barges must be seen, going two by two naught but two, and joined by a moveable plank in the middle of which is the god.
Someone is about to give the signal, listen: it is the high priest in person!
Baren, zamet, fouchi.
And suddenly the boats part from each other, and with the god who vanishes into the waves, with a thousand peals of trumpets, a thousand cries of joy, it’s up to anybody who shall catch some shred of the Dourgha’s garments, some flowers from his garland in order to offer them to it next year.
 

from Les Annales romantiques: Recueil de morceaux chosis de littérature contemporain, ed. Charles Malo. 1834. Janet: Paris, pp. 30-35.                                     

from the collection of the Revenant Archive.