This is the central site for a long-term project to research, examine, and respond to the radical collective of writers, theorists, architects, and visual artists who operated in Paris between 1829 and 1835 under the names of the Jeunes France & the Bouzingo, and through them to build a critical understanding of French Romanticist subculture through the historical lens of a continuing politically vigilant Anglophone avant-garde.

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Just Released: Poems by PHILOTHEE O'NEDDY!

I recently released the Bouzingos' first ever anthology (albeit only a slim 50 pages), in English translation; and awhile before that, a big zine of poems by Bouzingo co-founder Pétrus Borel. They are now joined by a chapbook by co-founder Philothée O'Neddy!!

 In the next month or two, be on the lookout for yet another Bouzingo zine: "Cervantes in Madrid" and Other Texts!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Phalanxes of Babel: Selected Texts From an Outlaw of Thought, 1828-46 – by Philothée O’Neddy

 Translated by Olchar E. Lindsann & Jonah Durning Hammond, with a bio-critical introduction by Lindsann.

 


The poet Philothée O’Neddy (1811-75) was a cultural radical sidelined by mainstream culture in his day, and has yet to garner the posthumous recognition granted to many later poètes maudits. A founding member of the seminal Bouzingo group, O’Neddy’s radical Romanticism melded Byronic dandyism, progressive politics, intellectual play, and linguistic experimentation, all with a deeply earnest irony that speaks to our contemporary cultural moment.

His work presents a finely-crafted phantasmagoria of radical politics, countercultural lifestyle, and gothic-horror tropes, all embroidered with archaic vocabulary and startling neologisms set in a tortured syntax, and twisted in order to achieve bewildering effects. His intense idealism shot through with a corrosive irony would later inspire the oeuvres of Baudelaire and Lautréamont.

But O’Neddy’s praxis encompassed far more than “literature” narrowly considered. He was among the first and most outspoken countercultural theorists to agitate overtly for the radical convergence of art and life, and to put these ideas into concrete action. He was one of the most active organisers in the burgeoning underground Romanticist movement in Paris, and led the collective push to explore its most experientially radical fringes.

This is the most extensive collection yet presented in English of O’Neddy’s poetry, along with selections of his theoretical statements, a bio-critical introduction by editor and translator Olchar Lindsann, and a bibliography of O’Neddy’s few works in English.

48 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. July, 2024/A.Da. 108/A.H. 194
$4.00 + s/h – PURCHASE HERE

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A reminder that I'm horribly behind on keeping this site updated – until I manage to rectify that, keep abreast of mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press & the Revenant Archive for my ongoing Bouzingo & French-Romanticist related publications & research.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

The Bouzingo Sampler – Now in Print!

I'm woefully behind on keeping this site updated (until I manage to rectify that, keep abreast of mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press & the Revenant Archive for my ongoing Bouzingo & French-Romanticist related publications & research). But at long last, the Bouzingo group has an English-language collection focusing on them as a group!

This is still just a sampler – a 50-page chapbook with samplings from most of the members; but it's an appetizer for a full-sized anthology that I hope to complete in the next few years.

Choice Morsels from the Bouzingos: An Avant-Romanticist Sampler of Horror, Transgression, & Cultural Anarchy.

edited by Olchar E. Lindsann, translated by Lindsann, Jonah Durning-Hammond & pilferingapples.

A thick chapbook representing the first English-language collection of the seminal avant-garde collective (c.1830-35) that inspired Lautréamont, Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationists. Including poetry and art by fifteen members, biographies of nearly twenty, and more. This is an appetizer for a larger, perfect-bound anthology to be published several years farther on.

With samplings of writing and art by Pétrus Borel, Philothée O’Neddy, Gérard de Nerval,  Jehan Du Seigneur, Théophile Gautier, Louis Boulanger, Augustus Mac-Keat, Célestin Nanteuil, Joseph Bouchardy, Alphonse Brot, Achille & Eugène Devéria, Alphonse Esquiros, Napoleon Thom, and Pierre-Roche Vigneron. 

47 pp. w/cardstock cover
$6.00 + s/h

ORDER HERE!

 


Wednesday, September 2, 2020

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.

 

  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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:

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

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

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.


Saturday, June 13, 2020

Rêvenance #8 – NOW AVAILABLE!

Rêvenance: A  Zine of Hauntings From Underground Histories, No. 8

  
This magazine is the main printed venue for new research and translations concerning the Bouzingo, and the flagship journal of the Revenant Editions series, dedicated to the forgotten or untold histories of 19th Century avant-garde and other countercultures. It includes essays, translations, and many experimental forms of historical writing and research that connect those traditions to continuing radical communities today.
  
Jeunes-France/French Romanticist stuff in the new number includes a spread about Gérard de Nerval in prison (letter and poem), a Boulanger print of Paganini in prison, a frenetiuc poem by the female Romanticist Anaïs Ségalas, and an avant-Romanticist essay comparing a Hindu ceremony to local French peasant festivals.

This issue contains more recent and more early work than any yet, with a Dada review by Louis Aragon & Dada poetry by Tristan Tzara & Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes; Russian Futurist poetry by Aleksei Kruchyonykh and Vasilisk Gnedov, an anti-survey of mid-20th Century underground poetry by Jim Leftwich, and contemporary “revenant collaborations” between living and dead poets including Michael Dec, Volodymyr Bilyk, Dirk Vekemans, Retorico Unentesi, Olchar Lindsann, Nina de Callias, & more, an essay by John Wilkins on Con-Lang from 1668, texts by Gérard de Nerval on his stay in prison and his Louis Bouanger's lithograph of Paganini in prison, skeletal drawings & texts by Moloch and the feminist romantic Anaïs Ségalas, and an 1834 avant-garde attempt at comparative religion.

Featuring
The Dead: Gérard de Nerval / John Wilkins / Tristan Tzara / Anaïs Ségalas / Vasilisk Gnedov / Louis Boulanger / Alecksei Kruchyonich / Nina de Callias / Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes / Niccolò Paganini / Moloch / Louis Aragon / Auguste Bouzenot

& The Living: Jim Leftwich / Michael Dec / Gleb Kolomiets / Olchar E. Lindsann / Dirk Vekemans / Volodymyr Bilyk / Retorico Unentesi
   

add to cart   
25 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. May, A.Da. 104/A.H. 189 (2020)
$4.50 + $2.00 s/h
   
Soft deadline for contributions to the next issue: Aug. 15.
send to monoclelash@gmail.com

Saturday, June 6, 2020

Philothée O'Neddy, Preface & Epilogue to "The Enchanted Ring"

Here's the verse preface and afterward to Philothée O'Neddy's 1842 novel "The Enchanted Ring", which I reviewed in Rain Taxi awhile back.

One of my few reservations about the translation (which didn't make it into the published article) is that it does not include his long preface in verse, which is a key document in understanding O'Neddy's theory and practice as well as an odd and tongue-in-cheek text like the rest of the book, and includes the verse afterward only in a bare transliteration (a much lesser sin).
  
So here are both of those at last – if you take MY advice, you'll order the book and read these in the appropriate places – down the line I'll likely publish them as a chapbook with just that in mind. (It's like translation fanfic for another publisher – fantrans?):

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PREFACE

At the unwonted birth of a preface in verse,
kind reader, I wager, here you’ll sit quite morose:
–“Ha!” say ye, “if thus far these prefaces in prose,
in abusing their right to sedate the universe,
Fear not to join to their one thousand quirks
that of donning a tone lyric and grandiose,
to mount up to the heights to prognosticate,
to create, to explain the arcana, the lore,
to delimit[1] both man and god, both to abrade
in pointless eloquence, in limitless ardours,
What say now, what do now, what will this one dare!
Why, what will be the verse if the prose begins there!
Verse! . . . innate dialect of symbol and of dream,
whose most devoted goal, exclusive mission’s
to outrage, to exhaust, doubling hyperbole,
exaggerate the tip of exaggeration! . . .”

Hold on, dear reader, settle down, let me plead!
Your fear foundation lacks; on my alexandrines
deign to bind your eyes less sternly and less maudlin;
They act bourgeoisly, no aristocracy,
no formal chariots to drive some theory,
no triumphant tambourines, no noble clarions;
Abdicating at will their right to be rhapsodes,
naught in them imitates the lofty pomp of odes;
no resplendent robes burdeneth their kidneys.

Elsewise, wanting just to arm this peristyle
with a brief overview of the opus at hand,
I don’t think I could find here however I scan
motif of puffed-up noise in the data or style,
matter for monument; for all in question’s
just a fable, alas! quite flippant and futile,
just a humble novel whose whole narration
here in folly disputes its whole conception.

Ah! if this were, reader, a book puritanical,
one of those knights of justice and of verity,
whose eloquence files away tenaciously
cast-iron prejudice, the ancient manacle
which garrottes the corpus of society,
such great books as we call humanitarian
thinkers,[2] neo-christian, moral, utilitarian;
Were this one of those tomes where the gnostic cult[3],
within gothic tombs the slabs’ carved words consults,
resurrects the doctrine of feudal ways,
the blazon, the dagger, the sandals, tomes of praise,
the monk, the noble, the convent, and the rook;
Were this one of those tomes which, with a kindly look,
endeavouring to read in th’enigmatic book
of two sphinxes we call both the head and the heart,
construct for bourgeois taste the genre intimate,[4]
(that maudlin genre which the reviews in choral parts
refused the gift of their respect not long ago;)
Then indeed might you fear the prefacer arrogant,
I’d fashion myself a princely portico!

But no; let not your thought be so stupefied there;
Neither can I nor would I burst into fanfare,
for my tale boasts of no other pretension,
in its absurdity than common sense condemned,
than that of seeming, on the mould of Donkeyskin,[5]
A frivolous thing here spun from fiction.[6]
Yep, my goal, my intent, my oath, ’tis to amuse;
for no other concern did I pester my muse:
Modest, I wished quite simply to augment
the Thousand and One Nights with scraps of supplement.
Thus, ’tis a fanciful and off-the-wall saga,
’tis, this candid stunt, in full chimera[7],
an unrealistic work, a flight ebullient,
’tis a steeple-chase, no guide-line, no baluster . . .
May at least some small bit of vigour and talent
on the style and form have projected some luster!

Yet, if my pronouncement were made law, – I’d assert
when one shapes epic systems and uncanny art,
you’ll find that a hundred, a thousand more charms
does the steeplechase hold than the olympic course;
That it calls for a truer arm and surefire hocks,
that it must be graced with more impregnable heart
into arcane[8] of forests to hurl its horse,
over rocks girded round by an anemic fog,
all athwart the rough shrubs, all athwart fallow balks,[9]
along cramped gorges, aslide from a greedy scarp,
and amidst all the perils, the pitfalls of bogs,
– Than in tracks to make a chariot hurtle,
on the smooth arena, secure between the hurdles.
– And I think the audacity that spurs my speech
will leave all my contemporaries really pleased;
especially the sons you find by myriads
spoofing Alcibiades’ mood rash-spirited.

[The following sections were cut from the published version]

I should wrap this thing up: these remarks are drawn out.
But grant me one last word, if I may? I’ve avowed
nothing to you that’s true, dear reader, my master.
The things I’ve claimed to you may have been more than patter
when noising it abroad, while standing here smugly,
that the volume you hold holds nothing relevant.
Strewn across all its chatter of frivolous study,
Under its irreverence, scarcely malevolent,
a few tricks, I’ll admit, edify for brief moments
with altruistic thought and noble sentiments.
You’ll sense dwelling therein a bit of melancholy;
bits of reason mixed with the foundations its folly.

Among its teasing trifles there fain would gleam through it
unaffected amour that speaks its language sacred.
The volatile creases of its moorish tunic
conceal there a chivalric heartbeat’s palpitations.
At least (for I should here be a tiny bit shyer),
to keep it there concealed has been my utmost aim.
I desired, I aspired that an Ideal flame
should penetrate this tale and shape it like a soul.

[The published version resumes here:]

Little tome,[10] now what good’s all this clamour and fire?[11]
Why haggle with your life like this, ô little tome?
When I know well, alas! your life shall stay so low!
When I don’t even know that you merit your life!
The prelates, our elite criticism’s doctors,
Shall they admit you to their baptism benign?
Where are, to guide you there, your godparents, your sponsors?
If you must go without, you shall soon be a pariah!
suffocated to hush . . . or by abuse assailed!
O my wretched canoe[12], without your guiding stars
rely upon my reason’s upsetting prognosis
that never shall you last, with your so-feeble sail,
to reach publicity’s high seas you see afar.
It scarcely can descry one modicum of hope
that the port governors, relinquishing their bias,
might license you, so frail, to cruise a couple days
without the fear of feuds with covetous pursuers,
among the titanic competition of canooers
that ever check and block the harbour from your eyes.

~~~~~~~

NOTES TO PREFACE:
[1] réglementer. Modern dictionaries suggest “regulate,” but that sense of the term seems to have developed after Dondey’s time; not only does it seem contextually discordant, but the 1828 Boniface French-English dictionary available to me does not even include the word, suggesting that 14 years later when these lines were written, it was still new and in flux (thus seductive to Dondey’s Romanticist sensibilities). My rendering is based on the 1828 definitions of Règlement, règlementaire, and regler.
[2] The use of the noun penseur as an adjective seems to have been something of a Romanticist key-word; one of the few online dictionaries who list its adjectival sense gives as its examples, three Romanticist texts from the 1830s (two by Dondey’s acquaintance Balzac and one by his close friend Borel) and one by the proto-Romantic Chenier, a major influence on them all, plus one by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau, who later engaged in research into avant-garde Romanticism: http://www.cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/penseur
[3] A rather daring rendering of culte savant.
[4] A term kicked around a fair bit in the early 19th Century, whose precise definition seems to have been evasive even at the time, based on contemporary references. Likely novels based on the analysis of individual psychology, such as those of Stendhal and Balzac–the characteristic that has gone on to define the modern Bourgeois novel.
[5] A fairy tale first written down by Perrault in the seventeenth century, combining a Cinderella motif with that of threatened incest.
[6] or, “in fact of fiction” Une chose amusante en fait de fiction.
[7] O’Neddy employs the noun as an adjective, as he often does.
[8] O’Neddy employs the adjective profond as a noun.
[9] guérets, “balks”, the unplowed ridge between the furrows in a field.
[10] In O’Neddy’s manuscript revised post-publication; the published version reads: “O my tome”
[11] Line 107 ends with flamme / flame, this line with feu / fire, evoking the title of O’Neddy’s seminal collection of avant-garde poetry, Feu et flamme / Fire and Flame.
[12] canot, here and below in the neologism canotins (canooers). Though in contemporary french the word has a broader connotation of small boats in general, both the 1835 Dictionnaire de l’Academie (and all earlier editions to 1694) and the 1828 Boniface French-English Dictionary refer specifically and exclusively to the canoes of Native American tribes – rendering this extended nautical analogy considerably more odd (particularly as this canoe sports a sail!).

  
~~~~~~
  
EPILOGUE
  
There’s a golden-hued dream by which oft I’m consoled
for the void you’re to meet, ô my frivolous trifle!
for the void without waking you’ll live in tomorrow. –
– ’Tis on a summer’s eve, beneath a roman sky.
I conjure, within a marble villa’s Eden,
a Lady and her page beside some tree’s foot seated.
The page, thanks to the final fires of the day,
to his fay is now reading, to the Dame he loves,
my tale where is portrayed love and the land of fays.
Now they both, roused in soul and with voices be-hushed,
are rushed in their keen haste to lavish me with praise.
Such pampering is found in spheres fortuitous!
When they’ve lauded him well, well exalted the poet,
they are caught up by bliss – tis mute and luminous –
wherefore the lady-love – grips the finger of her lover
who exults on his knees – with magic ring bestows it.
Then between them hovers a flame, a mystery:
flame which must remain veiled, a mystery untold…
as one veils the gods, keeps their grace under cover,
for the Muse and the Priest share a like modesty.
  
Then, the cloud descends, – and the pair arise…
  
While respiring the vast forest’s balsamic sap,
at random through the shadowy paths they ramble.
All across the network of tenebrous brambles,
upon horizon’s edge the moon, who reclines,
looks down and smiles on them like a Lady in White.
Each with other enlaced, they’re blithely wandering…
Just like two seraphim who, – while briefly they deign
to tread our lowly soil – even yet feel their wings.
Unceasingly their eyes are interweaving beams.
On a whim – in her voice of azure – now the Dame
stitches a tune by Cimarosa or of Weber …
anon she falls quiet, quite delighted to hear
The page who then declaims this sonnet fond and grave:
   
“I’m owner of a ring whose gold, a mirror sacred,
assimilates my thought and heart and soul entire.
Tis a charming talisman of sympathetic fire
that’s mine by way of love from a dark-eyed fay.
“I’m owner of a ring whose jurisdiction chaste
makes any but my Lady strike my eyes as vile
while making her for me the only maid alive,
who only may be stirred by dint of my embrace.
“I’m owner of a ring whose sacred fairie keeper,
from all my reveries of love and chivalry,
has made it manifest the whole ideal proud.
“I’m owner of a ring! . . . – should it be snatched away then,
when in the coffin’s midnight I shall be laid out,
to make them give it back to me shall I awaken!!”
   
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This version based mainly on Philothée O’Neddy, Poésies posthumes, 1878, Charpentier: Paris, pp. 216-218, but retaining some elements from Théophile Dondey de Santeny, Histoire d’un anneau enchanté: Roman de chevalerie, Undated [1841], Boulé: Paris, pp. 45-46.