Pierrot Narcisse Theodore de Banville

PIERROT "NARCISSE": THÉODORE DE BANVILLE AND THE PANTOMIME
Author(s): Robert Storey

Source: Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2/3 (Winter—Spring 1985), pp. 1-21
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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PIERROT NARCISSE: THEODORE DE BANVILLE
AND THE PANTOMIME
Robert Storey
"L'ancien Spectacle des Funambules du boulevard du Temple,"

wrote Banville towards the end of his life, "[...] était certainement ce
qu'il y avait de plus charmant et de plus amusant à Paris, et si j'excepte les
incomparables joies de la poésie et de l'amour, les heures que j'ai passées

dans cette petite salle enfumée ont été certainement les meilleures de
mon existence.'1 Nostalgia for his wonderful youth is in that remark, a
youth of magical nights passed in rapt attendance before the mime whom
Théophile Gautier called "[le] plus parfait acteur qui ait jamais existé."2
Pierrot par excellence, an actor whose purity of art would both elevate and
condemn him (as in Carné s Les Enfants du Paradis) to the stereotypes of
romantic myth, Jean-Gaspard Deburau translated the puerile fantasies of
the pantomime into a language through which the wishful reveries of his
audience could find witless (though often witty) expression. Deburau's
rivals and successors — the Madame the mime

rope-dancer Saqui, great
Paul Legrand (for whose theater, Les Folies-Nouvelles, Banville would
several — could benefit from his enormous

compose playlets) only success,
their gestures gaining symbolic significance in the measure that Deburau
seemed to confer it on his own silent world.
Banville's remark expresses more than nostalgia: it betrays his thirst for
a charmed interior space. For "cette petite salle enfumée" was clearly, for
the poet, the stage for plays of the secret mind. Of the mind's dimensions,
his Funambules was "extrêmement petit," small enough to be held "dans
la main" (AP, 21). Nestled in an "Eden," a "jardin enchanté," it attracted

"tout le Paris de Balzac ivre d'amour, de folie, de volupté, d'esprit, de joie"
(AP, 24, 25) — passions unbridled by the fastidious claims of what Freud
called the "higher systems," for "Là, les travailleurs, et aussi les gamins,
les voyous, les titis venaient comme ils étaient, avec des loques, des tricots
sales, des mains non lavées, des pieds sales, sans chaussettes" (AP, 25).
Insouciant children of the id, oblivious to dirt and dress, confounding the

2 Nineteenth-Century French Studies
pleasurably real with the imagined, they saw there, "non pas à peu près,
mais dans leur réalité absolue, les palais de rubis et de lapis, les cieux de
turquoise, les cascades laissant ruisseler des flots de diamants, dans un
ravissement de perles et d'opales et de métaux en fusion" (AP, 26).

The world outside was by no means excluded; indeed, "monstrueux et
abominable,"3 it appeared infused with what Banville called in his preface

to the Odes "le caractère de notre —
funambulesques grand âge complèxe"
with "un degré extrême d'intensité," with "le Paroxysme" (III, 11). La vie
réelle, c'était la pantomime même:
On le sait quand on est devenu vieux, entrer par la fenêtre ou tomber par la
cheminée, recevoirpassants des sur la tête, emplir son verre pour qu'un autre le
vide, se livrer à un barbier qui vous coupe le nez, subir la pluie, l'orage, la guerre;
suivre, fendre, déchirer, affronter une foule, être foule soi-même, ne pas savoir où
on va et hurler de n'y pas aller, écouter un musicien effréné qui tiraillé, battu,
brisé, mis en pièces, continue à jouer son air sans s'apercevoir de rien; rouler,
dégringoler, se montrer, se cacher, s'endormir et être réveillé en sursaut, verser
en voiture, sauter en chemin de fer, vider et emplir des malles, faire des sauts
périlleux pour retomber sur une chaise, et finalement n'avoir pas le temps de s'y
asseoir, être frappé de plaies inattendues, orné de bosses inexplicables, pris entre
les portes, empilé, écrasé, pillé, battu, embrassé, baisé, écartelé, secoué comme
un pantin dont une main ironique agite les invisibles fils, voilà précisément la vie
comme elle est.4
And yet the pantomimes of the Funambules "réalisaient [un] double
but de faire oublier la Vie et de la représenter cependant" (S, 216), for
through this farcically terrible spectacle, deprived of humanity and sense,

"le chatoyant Arlequin et la svelte Colombine, égoïstes comme l'amour, se
sauvaient, s'en allaient, s'enfuyaient, extasiés, heureux, se tenant les
mains, ivres de printemps, de jeunesse et de rêves [...]" (S, 217). Like

all emanations of the wish-expressive mind, they enjoy magic sympathy
with an obliging object world. So the Sprite suggests in describing their
flight in Les Folies-Nouvelles (1854), Banville's prologue for the opening of

that little theater:
Le feuillage s'éclaire au bruit de leurs chansons;

Un repas sort pour eux du milieu des buissons;
Sur leurs pas, que dans l'air suivent des harmonies,
Des barques et des chars, poussés par les génies,
Leur offrent un abri sous des voiles flottants,
Et tout leur réussit, parce qu'ils ont vingt ans!
(III, 88)

Robert Storey 3
Neither Cassandre nor Pierrot can part them: the first, "sot comme la
raison" (III, 87), a comic figuration of "l'autorité" (AP, 19), the superego
incarnate, is impotent before the naked eminence of their desire; the
second, for reasons that will require later elaboration, pursues them "avec
une indifference complète, avec un dédain profond, avec le dandysme le
plus sceptique, sachant la prodigieuse inutilité de tous les efforts humains,

et n'ayant d'autre point de vue que d'avoir lieu à travers la nature, en
gardant sur son vêtement sans tache et sur son visage exsangue comme
celui des Dieux la blancheur et la glorieuse inutilité du lys" (S, 218). For
the meaning of the two lovers' courtship, Banville offers an allegory that is
both banal and provocative:
Voyez! c'est Arlequin avec sa Colombine,

Ce joli couple en qui le poète combine
L'âme avec le bonheur se cherchant tour à tour,
Et l'idéal avide, en quête de l'amour!
(Les Folies-Nouvelles, III, 87)
The provocation is to accept their drama, as the quatrain literally suggests,

as a play of interior forces — to see the object of lithe Arlequin s love not as
a creature outside the desiring mind but as a symbol of the omnipotent,

illimitable demand for love on the part of the mind itself.
But to understand fully their wordless passion, we must first under
stand the figure who makes the demand. Of whom or what is Arlequin a
symbol? Here, as elsewhere, Banville is explicit: he is "Un don Juan de

'
hasard" (III, 87), "autre don Juan (LM, 136), a character whose signifi
cance the poet unfolded in a number of intriguing articles in the press:
[ . . . ] aujourd'hui [he wrote of Molière's libertine], si Sganarelle demandait à don
Juan: —A quoi croyez-vous? Don Juan aurait quelque chose de mieux à répondre
que ceci:
—Je crois que deux et deux font quatre.

Il répondrait:
—Je crois à la matière vivante et pensante toujours renouvelée, éternellement
jeune, éclose, lumineuse et fleurie;

je crois qu'en aimant dans mon coeur toutes les
créatures humaines, c'est moi-même et Dieu même que j'aime en elles, car j'aspire
sans cesse et sans crime à me confondre avec toute cette nature vivante qui est
Dieu même, et dans laquelle je vivrai et penserai éternellement sous toutes les
formes de l'être.5
The legendary rake is "comme l'Eros des Grecs, un symbole du Désir, de
l'expansion universelle."6

Here we encounter the Banville about whom Baudelaire and Mallarmé
wrote with such admiration: the poet whose whole "être intérieur [ . . . ]
s'élance en l'air par trop de légèreté et de dilatation, comme pour atteindre
une région plus haute."7 His own "apotheosizing" (the word is Baude
laire's) of men, landscapes, palaces, expresses precisely Don Juan's wish,

"
to dissolve the self in their light: "tout confondre, as Mallarmé observed,
"dans un baiser!' 8 In is at one with Banville's clowns
poétique this, Juan
and — with Madame whose head is "perdue dans
saltimbanques Saqui,
l'azur et dans les étoiles ";9 with the Pierrot-waif of the cartoonist Willette,
who is said to take wing "jusqu'aux/Astres" (DF, 127); and with the acrobat
"
ic clown of "Le Saut du Tremplin, whose desperate cries seem the most
movingly passionate in all of Banville's poetry:
t"]Plus haut encor, jusqu'au ciel pur!

Jusqu'à ce lapis dont l'azur
Couvre notre prison mouvante!
Jusqu'à ces rouges Orients

Où marchent des Dieux flamboyants,
Fous de colère et d'épouvante.
Plus haut! plus loin! de l'air! du bleu!

Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes!"
(III, 177)
What Baudelaire and Mallarmé found to praise, however, has charmed
few modern readers. Today Banville is hardly read at all. And at least one
of the reasons for this neglect lies precisely in the purity of his aspiration:
"L'envol vers les régions de la pure idéalité," Jean Starobinski complains,
"se dans une abstraction sans contenu. "10 But that abstraction I
perd is,
think, only apparently without content. Banville's "idéalité" is more prob

lematical than his few commentators have realized,11 and to analyze it with
precision will allow us to understand not only the love of his "don Juan de
hasard" for svelte Colombine but also the dynamics of Banville's whole
enterprise as a writer.
We should begin by noting that his aspiration partakes exactly of that
quality that Baudelaire saw in it, of "obsession":12 "Dans ce poème final,"

wrote Banville of "Le Saut du Tremplin," "j'ai essayé d'exprimer ce queje
sens le mieux: l'attrait du gouffre d'en haut" (III, 225, my italics). The
attraction appears in poem after poem, and yet it often has a disturbing
resonance that the cries of his ecstatic trampolinist have obscured. Ma
dame Saqui is also drawn by "les voluptueux appels de l'abîme," but le

Robert Storey 5
gouffre is clearly death, not "idéalité": "[...] si les pieds s'arrêtaient,

s'ils s'endormaient pendant la centième partie d'une minute sous les
baisers de la tarentule invisible, le gouffre est en bas, et la ballerine serait
entraînée par les voluptueux appels de l'abîme!"13 In one of the Odelettes,

addressed to Joseph Banville — rather —
Méry, compares predictably
Saqui's performances on the rope to the poet's before his audience:
Dans les nuages vermeils,

Au beau milieu des soleils
Qu'elle touchait de la tête

Et parmi léther bravé,
Elle songeait au pavé.
Tel est le sort du poète.
(II, 176)
The theme anticipates that of the better-known "Saut du Tremplin,"

written two years later, but here l'attrait du gouffre holds out no possibil
ity of apotheosis:
Dans l'azur aérien
Qui le sollicite, ou bien

Sur la terre nue et froide
Qu'il aperçoit par lambeau,

Il voit partout son tombeau
Du haut de la corde roide.
(II, 177)
Finally, "L'Attrait du Gouffre" in Les Exilés, composed after the saltim
all these associations — the thirst for the

banque poems, gathers up Ideal,
the lure of the azure the imminence of self-extinction — and
firmament,
fuses them with the oceanic imagery to which the romantics turned in
stinctively to express one of their most familiar and obsessive nostalgias:
Ces yeux où les chansons des sirènes soupirent,

Océans éperdus, gouffres inapaisés,
Bleus firmaments où rien ne doit vivre, m'inspirent
La haine de la joie et l'oubli des baisers.
Les yeux pensifs, les yeux de cette charmeresse

Sont faits d'un pur aimant dont le pouvoir fatal
Communique une chaste et merveilleuse ivresse

Et ce mal effréné, la soif de l'Idéal.
(II, 115)

The "oceanic feeling" (Romain Rolland gave it its name) that is evoked
here with such reluctant intensity was analyzed at length by Freud in
Civilization and Its Discontents, as a recovery of the primordial and
paradisiacal ego state of earliest infancy, when the world and the self are
one. "An infant at the breast," Freud writes, "does not as yet distinguish
his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in
upon him. He gradually learns to do so, in response to various prompt
ings."14 Those "promptings" are occasioned by losses of his sources of

— them what he desires most of all, his mother's
pleasure "among
breast'15— losses which effect, gradually, a "detachment" of his ego from
the world.
If we may assume [Freud continues] that there are many people in whose mental
life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist
in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of
maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents
appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the

universe -— the same ideas with which
my friend [Rolland] elucidated the "ocean
ic" feeling.16
"
"a bond with the universe" — and the annihilation of the
"Limitlessness,
personal self: all are concomitants of Banville's attrait du gouffre. Holding

out the promise of both death and ecstasy, it is the lure of the great sweet
mother: "Comme une lèvre humide, il m'attire et m'embrasse,/Et ma
lâche raison frémit de s'y noyer" (II, 116). Hers is clearly not the lip of a
lover, at least to a mind preconsciously vigilant against the "folie" of an
oedipal transgression: "[...] je ne peux pas, sans trouver la folie,/

Chercher ta perle, Amour! dans cette immensité" (II, 116). It is, rather,
the lip of his "nourrice," who "ne me fus avare/Ni de lait ni de baisers" ("A
ma Mère" [II, 85]), just as "les yeux de cette charmeresse" derive from
those eyes described in the Roses de Noël:
Mère, tes yeux aussi réfléchissent l'azur,

C'est pourquoi tu seras pareille à ce flot pur
Qui reflète le ciel et qui n'a pas de rides!
(I, 415)
Banville ("ton fils, non, ton enfant" [I, 419]) is drawn by these eyes and lips
to dissolve his being in their caress, to relinquish selfhood and allow his
heart, like his clown's of "Le Saut du Tremplin," to be "dévoré" (III, 178)
by a suprapersonal love.

Robert Storey 7
m Seen in this light the much-ridiculed verses beginning "Coupe!

Sein! Lyre!" of the early "Songe d'hiver" lose all their air of obscurity.17
Visionary outbursts by Don Juans "Affamés d'idéal" (I, 101), they celebrate
the "ls of the the
instinctively "synthétisme/Originel inebriating cup, apo
theosizing lyre, and the death-nourishing breast. "Sein" is probably to be
understood in all of its senses here — as "breast," "bosom," "heart,"
"womb," "gulf"; it is described in lines veiled in ambiguity and evasion,

associating, cryptically, both le gouffre and the featureless obliteration of a
lava flow with the transfiguration of a suckling dreamer. A "marbre es
clave," it serves "Le vieux titan Désir, tyran de l'univers" (I, 102):
Sein! marbre esclave!

Gouffre que lave
Le flot de lave!
Spasme auguré!
Le corps qui rêve
Par toi s'achève
Et se relève
Transfiguré!19
To lie at the breast in a perfecting, transfiguring dream, and there to
enjoy a satisfaction of desire possible only to the unbounded self: such is
Banville's fearsome wish. It is the wish that underlies the project he
outlines for "l'homme moderne" in the preface to Les Stalactites ("Recon
quérir la joie perdue [ . . . ] telle est l'aspiration incessante de l'homme
moderne [I, 213]), and that to which Baudelaire is unconsciously alluding

when he calls his poetry "un retour très-volontaire vers l'état paradisia
"20 It is the wish that drives Don to a conquest of the azure — and
que. Juan
that unites Arlequin with Colombine. A late poem from Dans la Fournaise
— the "Variations" of its title must be in full — illustrates the
quoted
implications of this nostalgia with touching naïveté:
Colombine, mon coeur, viens, au clair de la lune
Qui brille dans l'azur céleste, comme l'une

Des tes soeurs! Viens errer tous deux, au clair de la
Lune. Allons-nous-en, seuls et charmés, par delà
Ces jardins frémissants où la lumière argente
L'étang poli, glacé d'une moire changeante.
Allons-nous-en bien loin, mon amoureuse, au clair
De la lune. L'éclair divin, le doux éclair
De tes yeux d'or, qui fait ma joie et mon désastre,
Brillera dans la nuit sereine, comme un astre,

Et je me pencherai pour baiser tes bras, au

Clair de la lune! Ainsi qu'un flexible roseau,
Quand les parfums du soir empliront ta narine,

Ton corps svelte et charmant ploiera sur ma poitrine.
Une haleine de rose est éparse dans l'air,
Et le délicieux rossignol chante, au clair
De la lune. Ote un peu ton masque de théâtre:
Sous les rayons pensifs de la lune folâtre
Laisse-moi voir ton front de lys, que modela
Pour moi le fol Amour, et viens, au clair de la
Lune. Allons vers Cythère ou bien vers Pampelune,
A travers la forêt bleue, au clair de la lune!
(DE, 72)
Maximilien Fuchs has analyzed this poem in detail, noting the "rigor
ous" symmetry of these variations (the opening and closing lines end with
"
the theme "Au clair de la lune, framing couplets of alternating masculine
and feminine rhymes, the former of which ring changes upon "au clair de
"
la," "au clair, and "au" before repeating the process in inverse order) and
commenting, with some perplexity, upon the "disposition assez étrange"

of this "simple" but complex "jeu":
Ces perpétuels enjambements effacent et estompent en quelque sorte le rythme,

donnant de la sorte une impression analogue à celle que causerait un paysage
vaguement éclairé par cette "obscure clarté"; enfin, [ . . . ] l'élément logique est
absolument sacrifié à l'émotion: ce chant, avec son leit-motiv opiniâtre, ne présente
pas à l'esprit un raisonnement suivi, mais il évoque certaines images, par des
rappels de sonorités. Il a une valeur expressive, propre, indépendante du sens des

mots qu'il renferme.21
Evoking both a charmed landscape and an état d'âme, enclosing a suprahu
man world of moonlight within the fugal symmetry of a canonical mind, yet
preserving the formless fluidity of that world by its sonorities and perpet
ual enjambments, the poem is a fascinating experiment in Banville's
œuvre, and a perfectly oxymoronic expression of l'attrait du gouffre. It
describes a dissolution of the line of demarcation, a gathering of this
magical world into the self, a complete dispersion of the self through that
world. That the immersion is both beatific and self-destructive is suggest
ed by the motive of Banville-Arlequin for calling up this chant. Wandering

"tristement, poursuivi par les yeux/De la brillante lune à la face pâlie" (DF,
71), he has mounted, death-haunted, the stairs "Chez Raoul," from whom
he begs the variations on his violin: he wishes to "savourer jusqu'au bout la

Robert Storey 9
folie/Et l'ivresse du clair de la lune" (DF, 71). The union with Colombine
("ma joie et mon désastre") marks a return to the pure pleasure-ego, a
miraculous satiation of desire, a fulfillment of the self 's illimitable demand
for love — and a confusion of the dreamer with the dream.
"Primary narcissism" is the phrase often used, perhaps erroneously, to
describe the ideal of this union.22 Its wished-for and sometimes courted
recovery seems an accompaniment (if not a cause) of "secondary" narcissis
tic disorders, those in which the confirmation of selfhood is an endless,
albeit unconscious, pursuit.23 The mind's movement, in such disorders, is
often double — towards the loss of

apparently instinctively l'abîme,
boundary and demarcation, and willfully towards all that would confer
identity, differentiation, and integrity upon the self. Banville's attrait du
gouffre, in its various associations, manifests, as I have shown, his ambiva
lence towards the former attraction. His ambivalence towards the latter is
suggested by a word that he uses almost synonymously with le gouffre or
l'abîme: l'indifférence. "Ils m'ont appris, ces flots aux cruelles pâleurs," he
writes in "L'Attrait du Gouffre," "Les voluptés du calme et de l'indiffér
ence" (II, 116). But l'indifférence does not always intoxicate. Defending,
"
under the guise of Monsieur "Figaro Barbier, the apotheosizing tenden
cies of Balzac, Banville betrays an intense fear of losing the self, like Don
Juan in the trap, through a loss of faith in his vision:
Les esprits superficiels ont fait à Balzac une critique spécieuse. Chez lui, disent-ils,
tous les personnages ont du génie. Il nous montre un clerc d'avoué; ce clerc
d'avoué a du génie. S'agit-il C'est d'un
un portier de génie.
portier?
O jugeurs frivoles, c'est
précisément en cela
que Balzac, peignant la vie pari
sienne, a manifesté son suprême bon sens. A Paris, dans cette prodigieuse Babel
Athènes en quête de l'absolu grandiose et de la perfection idéale, quiconque n'a
pas de génie n'a pas sa raison d'être.
Que celui-là disparaisse! Une trappe est ouverte sous ses pas, mille fois plus
terrible que celle où Don Juan s'abîme au cinquième acte, et cette trappe se
nomme: l'indifférence.24
And l'indifférence outside the self is as frightening as l'indifférence

within. The Funambules was an ideal "theater" for Banville — I think the
word's dual are — as he insists

meanings applicable because, there, again
and again, the spectacle and public shared a mutual regard. The conven
tional theater offers no such bond, and it inspires in Banville a loathing
close to terror: "[...] une solitude, un désert, un abîme, un espace
effrayant que rien ne peut remplir, voilà le théâtre tel qu'il est" (S, 216).
His terms are so strong, I think, because he feels acutely the relevance of

the spectacle he is describing to his own self-authenticating project: "Que

ces gens-là me soient étrangers," he writes of the characters in convention
al drama, of those "bourgeois nés dans une boîte,"
cela ne serait encore rien; ce qu'il y a de pis, c'est que je leur suis, moi, profondé
ment étranger. Ils ne savent rien de moi, ils ne m'aiment pas, ils ne me plaignent
pas quand je suis désolé, ils ne me consolent pas quand je pleure, ils ne souriraient
guère de ce qui me fait rire aux éclats. (III, 9)
Relevant of course, is Banville's own for his —

here, explanation disgust
that the modern theater in general has lost the communal spirit of Aris
tophanes' stage. But equally relevant are the facts that belie his own
republican sentiments. Le peuple, if not le public, was always more symbol

than reality for the poet; as John Charpentier has pointed out, Banville was
"au fond très aristocrate."25This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than
in his comedies inspired by Molière and the commedia dell'arte, in which

Scapin and Léandre, scélérats both, permit him an uninhibited play of
personae. Amoral, sensual, narcissistic ("Je m'aime" [C, 224], Scapin
engagingly declares), they are, like Arlequin and Colombine, "égoïstes

comme l'amour," true aristocrats of the unconscious.2*'In fact, in describ
ing the elegant stuffs of their costumes, Banville ignores one of his own
fundamental beliefs — that the theater should sartorial

suggest largesse,
never show it (AP, — and like in their
31-32) revels, Gautier, ornament,
textures, and hues (C, 468-70). Splendidly colored and peopled with
rogues, these comedies solicit the regard of the people for no communal
aim: they, rather, confer upon their creator the glory of the gaze.
Apparently all that Banville sought from both his work and his public
— the délices du the the sanction of aristo
gouffre, self-confirming gaze,
cratic aloofness that the narcissist craves — all seem to have been enjoyed
by a single figure whom he never tired of celebrating: the Pierrot of the
Funambules. "Le beau, le gracieux, le svelte, l'ironique Jean-Gaspard

Deburau" (S, 218) had the authority of an alter-ego for the writer, and he
did so because he appeared to contain and express the ambivalences of
Banville's own psyche. On the one hand, he seemed dispassionately (and
defensively) aloof, "comme le chat, n'ayant d'autre souci que de rester
propre, net, sans tache, immaculé comme la neige des cimes" (AP, 17);27
he moved through the pantomime with exclusively oral decision, "man
geant et buvant du meilleur,/Et ne s'intéressant à rien, comme les sages"
(III, 90). His pursuit of the lovers was disdainfully half-hearted because
their drama of desire was an allegory, for Banville, of Pierrot's own coiné

Robert Storey 11
die narcissiste. Always separate yet united by a mysterious and lyrical
bond, both Pierrot and the lovers were instruments of an interior chanson
d'amour: "Les décors changeaient, Arlequin et Colombine passaient,

tremblants d'amour dans la lumière, et au milieu des foules turbulentes et
affairées, lui, le Pierrot au vêtement de neige et à la face pâle, lui, le grand
Jean-Gaspard Deburau, il égrenait en scènes muettes, délicieusement
lyriques et bouffonnes, les innombrables rhapsodies de son poème" (S,
221).
But however distant from les foules or the lovers and however impreg
nably aloof, Pierrot never ceased to bask in the gaze of an admiring public.
Not only was there an instinctive kinship between the clown and le peuple,
but between them was

an identity of reciprocal regard, enviable in its self
— a that a mother
authenticating mutuality regard very like between and
infant: "[...] tous les deux muets, attentifs, se comprenant toujours,
sentant, rêvant, s'émouvant ensemble, Pierrot et le Peuple, unis comme
deux âmes jumelles, mêlaient leurs idées, leurs espoirs, leurs railleries,
leur gaieté idéale et subtile, comme deux Lyres jouant à l'unisson, ou
comme deux Rimes savourant le délice d'être des sons pareils et d'exhaler
une même voix, mélodieuse et sonore" (AP, 29). This unequivocal confir
mation and amplification of self was accompanied by a control that ap
proached the omnipotent. No easy dupe of Cassandre, Pierrot was equal to
the wiles of all authority: he could vanquish both sickness and death. In his
Souvenirs Banville describes with revealing particularity two scenes that
summed up for him Deburau's art: in the first, Pierrot-baker takes pity on a
of old women who come to him with their flour — "deux
pair vieilles,
vieilles femmes, chauves, échevelées, caduques, aux mentons branlants,
courbées vers le sol, appuyées sur des bâtons noueux, et montrant dans
leurs yeux profonds les ombres des années enfuies, plus nombreuses que
les feuilles dans les bois."
— "Vraiment! cela n'a le sens commun! s'écriait le sage

pas (en langage muet)
boulanger Pierrot; on n'a pas idée de laisser des femmes en venir à cet état-là.
Comment n'a-t-on donc pas vu qu'elles ont besoin d'être refondues, refaites,
recuites à nouveau!" Et aussitôt, en dépit de leurs protestations, il les saisissait, les
couchait toutes les deux sur sa pelle, les enfournait bel et bien, puis ensuite
surveillait la cuisson avec un soin fidèle. Au bout du nombre de minutes voulu, il
les retirait du four jeunes, belles, métamorphosées par de brillantes chevelures,
avec la neige au sein, les diamants noirs dans les yeux, les sanglantes roses sur les
lèvres, vêtues de soie, de satin, de toile d'or, brodés de paillettes et de passe
et modestement disait alors à ses amis du public: — "Eh bien! vous
quilles, voyez,
ce n'est pas plus difficile que ça!" (S, 221-22)

In the second scene, Pierrot is a doctor who administers to a "jeune
seigneur parisien ennuyé, anémique, blême, n'ayant pas la force de vivre,

et dégoûté même de l'ennui" (S, 222). He slices open the sufferer's skull to
flush from it a terrified mouse.28
A master of the marvelous, vanquishing misery and ennui, manipulat
ing the responses of the Paradise by his irony and extraordinary finesse,
strolling with "une indifférence complète" through "une intrigue toujours

intéressante parce qu'elle était toujours la même" (S, 218, 217), Pierrot
was for the poet a reassuring symbol of self-possession and self-contain
ment, and of grandiose self-sufficiency and control.29 But, predictably, this
symbol served Banville's tendencies towards regression as well as his
techniques of defense. While praising the skill of the Hanlon-Lees, a

troupe of English mimes schooled precisely in Deburau's art, Banville
describes a scene from Le Voyage en Suisse, a pantomime in which a flask
is sent flying "sous l'oeil même de son propriétaire avec tant d'agilité et de
précision qu'il est physiquement impossible qu'il voie [le] mouvement
[des jongleurs]."30 The finesse of the jugglers inspires a vision of oceanic
bliss:
Ces gestes, qui si harmonieusement et si nettement se répondent, vous com

muniquent le même bien-être voluptueux que vous donnent les rappels de couleur
de Delacroix; un bleu qui, d'un bout à l'autre du tableau, se reproduit, quand 1 âme
en a soif!31
Le l'azur — and le blanc: are for Banville, as his

bleu, they synonymous
next two sentences, betraying the proximity of his obsessions, suggest: "Et
qu'ils sont jolis, ces Hanlon Lees, les pierrots surtout! Leurs têtes blanches
sont douces, ingénieusement spirituelles, débordées d'amour, car aucun
artiste ne saurait me faire plaisir si je ne sens pas qu'il m'aime!"32 Like the
precision of his geste, the whiteness of Pierrot's blouse appeals to the
subtleties of the poet's ambivalence. On the one hand, it is a visible symbol

of self-definition, an image of what psychoanalysts call an "ego-ideal,"
usually the "introject" of an idealized parent. For Banville, the ideal is of
purity, innocence, spiritual naïveté ("Lys sans tache" is the title of a poem
addressed to Madame de Banville in Roses de Noël).33"Ma fonction est
d etre/Blanc" (B, 11), the Pierrot of Le Baiser confides to Urgèle, and in his
"nouveaux souvenirs" the aging (and resignedly disappointed) poet34 de
scribes the full range of this function:

Robert Storey 13
[ . . . ] ceux qui ne l'ont pas vu de leurs yeux ne sauront jamais combien Deburau
fut blanc! Plus blanc que le marbre du Pentélique réservé aux images des Dieux,
plus blanc que le Lys dont Hugo dit si bien: Le lys à Dieu pareil! plus blanc que la
neige des cimes, vierge de pas humains, plus blanc que le plumage des cygnes,
glissant sur les eaux calmes, en attendant l'heure suprême où ils savoureront la joie
de chanter et de mourir.'55 [ . . . ] Mais ce qui [ . . . ] donnait [à son habit] son
idéale pureté, sa candeur angélique et liliale, c'était 1 âme de celui qui l'habitait,
exempte de toute pensée hypocrite ou cruelle. Car en ce grand mime vivait l'âme,
blanche aussi, du Peuple, vaillant et résigné [...]. (AP, 35)
But, as those ecstatically singing swans suggest, the white-frocked Pierrot
is obviously, like Banville's Delacroix, also a chercheur du gouffre. His

whiteness is that of primordial innocence, of unbounded and limitless ego,
of the self lost to the world. Paradoxically, the self-defining ideal invokes a
nostalgia for undifferentiated origins: "Votre seule vue," Banville laments

"
of the vanished Pierrot in a late "lettre chimérique, "me consolait de tout
ce qui n'est pas blanc, c'est-à-dire, monsieur, de tout [...]" (LC, 107).
That "tout" includes, of course, art. "La représentation narcissique
primaire mérite bien son nom d'infans [L. "not speaking," whence Fr.
enfant]," writes Serge Leclaire: "Elle ne parle ni ne parlera jamais. C'est
dans l'exacte mesure où l'on commence à la tuer qu'on commence à parler
[ . . . ]."36 For those in whom the infant will not die, the mammarial blank
page speaks more satisfyingly than any words upon it — and Pierrot was for
Banville "blanc comme le papier blanc, hélas! sur lequel je vous écris
[...]" (LC, 107). When, in "Ancien Pierrot," the clown is transformed

into un homme en habit noir,37 he is conscious of suffering, as from a
crippling burden, "cette infirmité stupide, la parole" (III, 166). It is stupid

because superfluous: "Amour est là," observes Banville of Paul Legrand's
silent jeu, "pour remplacer/Toute vaine littérature" (DF, 248). The emer
gence of literature marks the death of the infant; it arouses in Banville
(though screened, typically, with irony) an obviously anal disgust:
[ . . . ] sans cesse occupé à noircir, à empiler des feuillets de copie, à recommencer
quand il a fini, et à finir quand il a recommencé, [l'homme de lettres] est toujours
dans une chambre, en compagnie d'une main de papier écolier, et d'un

prisonnier
encrier plein d'un liquide noir comme le flot du Cocyte.
Or, monsieur, votre visage de neige, vos candides habits, vos mains plus blanches
que celles de Cidalise, les voyez-vous souillés et maculés par cette horrible chose
appelée: encre? Non, vous n'êtes pas homme de lettres [ . . . ]. (LC, 109-10, 111)

And yet "le Verbe" is, as Banville repeatedly insists, "l'outil divin"
(LC, 109) — apparently because it is attached to origins, both of his body
and of his sustaining conceptions of self: "Le MOT qui, pour commencer, a
créé le monde et l'infini et les univers, et qui ensuite a produit les humbles
chefs-d'oeuvre de l'homme, a cela de particulier qu'il garde toujours
l'ineffaçable marque de son origine divine" (LC, 244). Like his very self
conceptions, both distressingly and gratifyingly ambiguous, the word tee
ters on the line that divides the grandiose from the meaningless, the
divinely ample from the empty, the writer from the infans. To speak more
precisely, it professes the essential and insuperable ambiguity of le gouffre

— to be both All and Nothing. Thus Jean Starobinski can describe the
Banvillian saut, "sa fuite verticale hors du réel décevant," as "l'un des
meilleurs emblèmes possibles de la griserie propre à l'ironie romantique
[ . . . ]."3S Irony is in fact the only authentic manner for a poet of Ban villes
obsessions. Between a conception of the word as expressing "Tous les
frissons de la Lyre" (DF, 101) and that which regards it as an "infirmité

stupide" must mediate the word as saltimbanque, incessantly aspiring to
recover — and its own to recover — "l'état

yet acknowledging inability
paradisiaque." Such a conception informs, for example, a late poem,

"Lecture": "Les mots qui font la parade/Sont tous des comédiens" (DF,
102). "Comédiens"39 because their ultimate reference both comprises and
rests on le gouffre: "S'élancer avec agilité et avec certitude à travers
l'espace, au-dessus du vide, d'un point à un autre," wrote Banville towards
the end of his career, "telle est la suprême science du clown, et j'imagine
que c'est aussi la seule science du poète."40
So, in the Odes Banville's most admired collection,

funambulesques,
the reader is made to see, in Maximilien Fuchs' words, "qu'on lui donne
des vers et en même est absurde de mettre en

irréprochables temps qu'il
vers ce lui raconte."41 The central fantasy tended to imprison

qu'on poet's
as it were, in la manière Thus we may explain the

him, funambulesque.
rather bizarre with which the types invade his

frequency pantomimic
work. the Camées portraits of Pierrot and Polichinelle

Among parisiens,
stand beside those of Corot and Baudelaire; Scapin is identified with the
vicious Bismarck in the Idylles prussiennes ("Scapin tout seul" [III, 406]);
and Polichinelle serves as symbol for the most detestable of the poet's foes
— the académicien ("Polichinelle Vampire" [III, 137]), the bellicose gen

eral ("Madame Polichinelle" [III, 319]), the gullible citizen ("Chez Guig
nol" [III, 314]), the self-righteous bourgeois ("Deux Polichinelles" [LM,
the ("Les Huit Sous de Pierrot [CF,
71-72]), unscrupulous entrepreneur

Robert Storey 15
173-81], "Un Auteur chez les marionnettes"42). These identifications
seem to be more than merely tropes; there is the persistent feeling, in
reading Banville, that the types are as real to him as the figures they
more that all at bottom, are are — as
signify: precisely, persons, types,
— these In the in
lovers, poets, rogues types.43 pantomime (as, relatedly,
Watteau) Banville encountered a drama that encouraged the constellation
of his own psychic forces, a constellation that was in turn projected upon
the world. The privateness of his obsessions reveals itself in small but
significant ways. A late poem, "La Lune," in Dans la Fournaise, presents a
parade of masks that is, for Fuchs, "bien terne":
Voilà Pulcinelle
Avec Arlequin!
Voilà Scaramouche
Et don Spavento,
Et Scapin farouche
Dans son vert manteau.
(DF, 115)
He concludes that "Cette sèche énumération de noms propre," as well as
the poet's cryptic response to it, creates an effect that "n'est pas heur
eux."44 He is right, it is both dull and dry. But for Banville the names
themselves, rich in signification, were, 1 think, enough.45

It was not as a funambule that he wanted to be remembered. Les Exilés
is in fact the collection in which Banville professed to put "le plus de moi
même et de mon âme" (II, 3), the book he hoped would live after him. But
in rereading these always predictable tales of gods and heroes, these
tributes to contemporaries in which the abstract and the conventional
seem to vie tediously for precedence ("La Matière, céleste encor même en
sa chute,/ [ . . . ]/Pâture du désir, jouet du noir Remord [ . . . ]" ["Baude

laire," II, 134]), we are impressed not with amplitude, which the rhetoric
is striving ceaselessly to invoke, but with emptiness. It is, rather, in his
ironically playful verse, which often seems about nothing, that the ampli
tude to emerge — as in this little from the
begins "caprice," "Sérénade,"
Cariatides:
Las! Colombine a fermé le volet,

Et vainement le chasseur tend ses toiles,
Car la fillette au doux esprit follet,
De ses rideaux laissant tomber les voiles,
S'est dérobée, ainsi que les étoiles.

Bien qu elle cache à l'amant indigent

Son casaquin pareil au ciel changeant,
C'est pour charmer cette beauté barbare
Que remuant comme du vif-argent.
Arlequin chante et gratte sa guitare,
(I, 182)
At least part of the charm of this piece, its intimations of Verlaine's moonlit
Fêtes galantes, arises from the veiled psychic comedy beneath it: that of a
mind whose chaste libido is courted by the importunate ego itself. Vaguely
onanistic {vide the "vif-argent" and that guitar), the poem depicts a spiri
tuel foreplay to which still greater delights will accrue. To enjoy those
delights, to know "les [ . . . ] joies de la poésie et de l'amour" (they were

the same), was a wish that the pantomimic world, in fantasy, always
to Banville: won his Colombine — and Pierrot
granted Arlequin invariably
kneeled to join them, as if assuaging his own psychic hunger, with an
embrace. "C'est un plaisir adorable/D'être un Pierrot de calicot" (SC,

"
229), wrote the poet in "Carnaval. He had reason to think so: when he was
most a poet (if not most a lover), he was most a charming Pierrot.
Department of English
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
1 Théodore de Banville, Mes Souvenirs (Paris: Charpentier, 1883), p. 215,

hereafter cited as S. Unless otherwise indicated, the standard Charpentier-Fas
quelle edition is that to whichall future parenthetical citations refer. The Poésies
complètes (1883-88), comprising the following titles, will be cited, conventionally,
by Roman numerals (dates in parentheses are those of the first edition): I: Les
Cariatides (1842), Le Stalactites (1846), Le Sang de la Coupe (1857), Roses de Noël
(1878); II: Les Exilés (1867), Odelettes (1856), Améthystes (1862), Rimes dorées
(1869), Rondels (1874), Les Princesses (1874), Trente-six Ballades joyeuses (1873);
III: Odes funambulesques (1857), Les Occidentales (1869), Idylles prussiennes
(1871). Among the remaining volumes, the following (1882-1902) will be cited by
abbreviations of title: L'Ame nouveaux souvenirs
de Paris: (1890) as AP, Le Baiser
(1887) as B, Comédies (1852-77) as C, Contes féeriques (1882) as CF, Dans la
Fournaise (1892) as DF, Lettres chimériques (1885) as LC, La Lanterne magique
(1883) as LM, Marcelle Rabe (1891) as MR, Sonnailles et Clochettes (1890) as SC.
2 In a review of Champfleury's Pierrot pendu at the Funambules: La Presse,
January 25, 1847.

Robert Storey 17
3 So Banville described "le drame de la vie tel qu'il est" in a review of Molière's
Georges Dandin at the Théâtre-Français: Le National, February 16, 1874.

4 Théodore de Banville, "Préface" to [Richard Mémoires et panto
Lesclide],
mimes des frères Hanlon Lees
(Paris: Reverchon et Vollet, [1880]), pp. 12-13.
Although Banville here to specific pieces
is alluding of business in the Hanlons'
pantomimes, his description is applicable to many pantomimes oí the Funambules,

which, as he remarked in his Souvenirs, invoked such "soucis" to dispell them (S,
217).
5 Article of ed. Victor
September 3, 1849, in Théodore de Banville, Critiques,
Barrucand (Paris: Charpentier-Fasquelle, 1917), p. 186.
6 Article of
February 21, 1870: T. de Banville, Critiques, p. 191.
7 Charles "Théodore de Banville," Revue fantaisiste, 1,
Baudelaire, August
1861; rpt. in the Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, II (Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade; Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 164.
8 "Théodore de The National De
Stéphane Mallarmé, Banville," Observer,
cember 17, 1892; rpt. as part of Quelques Médaillons et portraits en pied in the
Oeuvres complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry
(Bibliothèque de la Pléiade; Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 520. (Mallarmé is quoting

from his earlier Symphonie littéraire, 1865.)
9 Théodore de Banville, "Théâtres" in part to the "représentation
[devoted
donnée à lHippodrome au bénéfice de madame Saqui, âgée de quatre-vingt-trois
ans"], in Revue fantaisiste (October 1, 1861), III (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971),
248.
10 Portrait de l'artiste en saltimbanque Editions d'Art Albert Skira,
(Geneva:
1970), p. 40.
11 Russell S. "The Poet as Clown: Variations on a Theme in
See, e.g., King, "
Nineteenth-Century French Poetry," Orbis Litterarum, XXXIII (1978), 240: Le
—
Saut du tremplin' is a sustained elaboration of [a] comparatively simple theme"
of aspiration "from reality to ideality, from the physical to the spiritual."
12
Baudelaire, "Theodore de Banville," OC, II, 164.
13
Banville, "Théâtres," p. 250.
14 Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of
Sigmund Freud,
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey,
XXI (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), 66-67.
15
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 67.
is
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 68.
17 Maximilien Fuchs cites the verses as exemplifying the obscurities of Ban
ville's youthful style, Théodore de Banville (1823-1891) (1912; Geneva; Slatkine
Reprints, 1972), p. 65.

18 Théodore de Banville, Les Cariatides (Paris: Pilout, 1842), p. 193. I cite the
original edition for both this phrase and the fragment of the song that follows:
Banville completely revised the section in which these passages appear for subse
quent editions.
19 T. de Les Cariatides, 194; cf. Banville's "Sachons adorer! Sa
Banville, p.
chons lire!" (I, 143).
211 "Theodore de Banville," OC, II, 168.
Baudelaire,
21
Fuchs, Théodore de Banville, pp. 477, 479.
22 Ben Bursten
objects that, during the (very early) developmental stage at
which this union is literally experienced, the infant can not be called "narcissistic"
since he "has no locus (inner or outer) of [the] experiences" he undergoes: "In the

mind of the infant, these are experiences, if you will, but not his' experiences"
("The Narcissistic Course," in Marie Coleman Nelson, ed. The Narcissistic Condi
tion [New York: Human Sciences Press, 1977], p. 109). But such an argument
ignores the important point: that there is an obvious connection, as Bursten himself
assumes, between the early "boundaryless state" (to adopt his own terminology)
and later, "secondary," narcissistic disorders. "Primary narcissism" is a phrase so
often used to describe this state — see, e.g., Esther Menaker's discussion of "The
— that I do not hesitate
Ego Ideal" in the same collection (p. 251) to retain it.
23 "Narcissistic have a very intense interest in their selves — so
personalities
much so that they often can see others only as extensions of themselves, or existing
for the purpose of serving themselves. With this definition in mind, we can [ . . . ]
ask, 'Why do these people need to have so high an interest in themselves?' Perhaps
the answer is that they cannot take themselves — their selves — for
granted; they
constantly need to confirm their selves ": Bursten, op. cit., p. 110.
24 Théodore de Banville, ed., A Figaro, Salons de coiffure, Figaro Barbier à ses
clients et à tout le monde, Boulevard Montmartre, 12, Entrée par le Bazar Euro
péen (Alençon: Poulet Malassis et de Broise, n.d.): this pamphlet, "à peu près
introuvable aujourd'hui," is quoted in Fuchs, Théodore de Banville, p. 447.
25 Théodore de Banville: et son oeuvre
l'homme (Paris: Perrin, 1925), p. 141.
26 Léandre is of course the title-character of Le Beau Léandre and
(1856),
Scapin appears as the victim of his own famous lazzi of the sack in Les Fourberies de
Nérine (1864). In an unpublished "farce italienne," Le Petit Mezzetin, produced at
the Folies-Nouvelles in 1855, and for which a censor's copy survives in the Ar
chives Nationales de France in Paris (as Mezzetin: F18 1023, MS 3420), Banville
created who rivals even the former rogues in unmitigated
a Pascariel egoism. "Bête
et vicieux" (p. 1), but easily the most interesting character in the play, he is a
gourmet and gourmand of enviably solitary pleasures: "Quel plaisir de manger
solitairement comme un goinfre sans rien donner à personne," he muses aloud, "de
se bourrer à faire éclater sa peau, et de boire comme un trou, jusqu'à se rendre le
nez violet et le front écarlate!" (p. 20).
27 Cf. Freud's remark: "The charm of a child lies to a great extent in his
narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of
certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and
the large beasts of prey" ("On Narcissism: An Introduction," in the Standard
Edition, XIV, 89).
28 Banville is remembering at least one of these scenes with characteristic
imprecision: here, as elsewhere, he makes little of the malice that motivated almost
all of Deburau's stage business. The first scene is from Pierrot partout (1839), and
Pierrot is neither a baker nor the compassionate cavalier of Banville's recollection.
He has just abducted Colombine from Arlequin, and he, Cassandre, and Léandre
have come upon a fabulous oven that rejuvenates old women. Léandre and Cas
sandre hope to restore their fiancées, Isabelle and Angélique, through its powers:
Arlequin's magic bat has reduced them to ugly decrepitude. I quote from the
censor's manuscript in the Archives Nationales, Paris (F1S 1085, MS 2692), retain
ing its punctuation and capitalization:

Léandre & Cassandre se réjouissent et vont chercher Isabelle et Angélique pour les brûler et
les rajeunir; mais elles refusent, se trouvant bien comme elles sont. Pierrot amène Colom
bine, et veut aussi la brûler vive si elle lui résiste encore elle se débat, les deux autres
parviennent à enfourner Isabelle & Angélique, Pierrot les aide. Pendant ce tems, Arlequin

Robert 19
Storey
passe sa tête par 1 etouffoir, et lait des signes à Colombine pour qu elle s'y sauve avec lui.
Pierrot le voit, Léandre appuie fortement le couvercle, et s assied dessus. Mais, à peine y est
il, que l'étouffoir s'enfonce en terre et l'engloutit.
Pierrot veut enfourner Colombine. Il ouvre la porte du four, Isabelle et Angélique en
sortent, jeunes et fraîches, et sont enchantées. Isabelle cherche Léandre. On entend gémir
dans le four. C'est lui qui y est renfermé, et en sort à moitié rôti et furieux. On le débar
bouille. Pendant ce tems, Arlequin est rentré, il fait descendre Colombine qui était déjà sur
la pelle, et saisit Pierrot. Le mauvais Génie parait, et aide Arlequin. Ils garottent le pauvre
Pierrot, et vont le lancer dans le four, quand un coup de tam-tam annonce la fée [Diaman
tóle]. (pp. 1.5-16)
Pierrot disguises as a doctor in several pantomimes, and I have been unable to
identify with certainty the source of Banville's second scene. Perhaps it is La

Naissance de Pierrot (1843), in which Pierrot's (doubtlessly malicious) ministra
tions are concluded by a typically hair-raising rout. Again, I quote the manuscript
(Archives Nationales, Paris, FIH 1087, MS 4844):

Plusieurs malades arrivent auxquels Pierrot donne des consultations. —On aperçoit pendant
cette scène les têtes d'Arlequin & de Lisa se dessiner dans la glace; Pierrot furieux saisit un
fusil & brise la glace; un diable en sort; pierrot qui a pris une hallebarde l'embroche; deux
autres diablotins arrivent & se jettent sur Pierrot pour venger la mort de leur camarade; —
cascades; les diables entraînent Pierrot, (scene 4, unpaginated)
29 "Grandiose" has a somewhat technical here; I am using it in the
meaning
sense intended by Heinz Kohut in his description of the "narcissistic course": "The
equilibrium of primary narcissism is disturbed by the unavoidable shortcomings of

maternal care, but the child replaces the previous perfection (a) by establishing a
grandiose and exhibitionistic image of the self: the grandiose self ; and (b) by giving
over the previous perfection to an admired, omnipotent (transitional) self-object:
the idealized parent imago" (The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the
Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders, The Psychoanaly

tic Study of the Child, Monograph No. 4 [New York: International Universities
Press, Inc., 1971], p. 25). For the "idealized parent imago" in Banville's work, see
p. 12 below, especially note 33.
30 Article of September 8, 1879: in Banville, Critiques, p. 389.
31 Article in Banville,
of September 8, 1879: Critiques, p. 389.
32 Article of
September 8, 1879: in Banville, Critiques, p. 389.
33 The role of Banville's father in the poet's adoption of an ideal was probably as
significant as that of the mother. Maximilien Fuchs' researches have revealed that,
much like his son (and the circumspect Pierrot), Claude-Théodore de Banville
"appartenait, dit un préfet de l Allier, à l'opinion extrême de gauche,' mais, sans

cacher nullement ses opinions républicaines, il évitait les manifestations inutiles et
bruyantes, et le même préfet est obligé de reconnaître qu'il avait 'la prudence de
"
ne point propager ouvertement ses dangereux principes' (op. cit., p. 17). Ban
ville characterized his father in his Souvenirs as "un vieillard doux, résigné, aux
beaux traits virils, au fin sourire ami" (S, 95); a poem in Les Stalactites
(which is
dedicated as a whole to his father) addresses him as a "soldat
obscure, âme
angélique," with a "coeur fier que rien de bas ne peut séduire" ("A mon Père" [I,
272]). It is not inconceivable, however, that infantile resentment of his authority
survived to color the poet's contemptuous pictures of académiciens and militar
istes; and it may very well have been both fear and a wished-for intimidation of the
father-imago that led Banville to characterize the Gods of the azure, in "Le Saut du
Tremplin," as, curiously, "Fous de colère et d'épouvante." The extreme devotion

to his mother attested throughout Banville's work — invariably as the devotion of

an infant for his source of nourishment and love — could

easily have occasioned a
powerful rivalry, in the child's fertile mind, between father and son. It certainly
contributed to the mature poet's apparent indifference to (probably fear of) sexual
ity: Fuehs observed that Banville "n est pas sensuel: il admire la beauté féminine
comme un artiste qui contemple un modèle dans son atelier; elle ne lui inspire pas
d'autre désir que celui de trouver des épithètes sonores et des rimes éclatantes
pour en célébrer les ors et les blancheurs" (op. cit., pp. 455-56). Charpentier
echoes this judgment (op. cit., p. 85), adding that Banville's late marriage to the
widowed Madame Rochegrosse, in 1866, marked "la meilleure époque, peut-être,
de sa vie, après celle de son enfance — et n'a-t-il
pas lui-même constaté qu'il y a
quelque chose de maternel dans les sentiments qu'il inspire à sa femme?" (op. cit.,
p. 87). Finally, the fear of engulfment by the things and crowds of the world (see
the long quotation at the beginning of this essay, p. 2) is the price that Banville
always had to pay for his obsessive oral fantasies: it is a translation and projection of
the consuming — and — Mère.
power of an all-giving all-devouring See also notes
37 and 43 below.
34 Banville's
personal discouragement, implicit in the final line of the quotation
that follows, was revealed to the fatherly Hugo in a series of letters published by
Gustave Simon in 1923. In the first (November 11, 1864), he laments "que j'évoque
chaque jour quelle est l'amertume du martyre inutile auquel se vouent ceux qui
n'ont pas trahi la cause de la vraie poésie, et combien les obstacles contre lesquels
ils ont à lutter sont invincible" (La Revue de France, 3rd year, II [March-April
1923], 517).
55 His of course
costume was only as white as simple cotton can be. It has been
— now, and disfigured with blotches of rust — in
preserved alas, very dingy indeed
the Musée du Théâtre de la Maison des Artistes de Pont aux Dames (Fondation
Constant Coquelin), Paris.
3,1 On tue un enfant: un essai sur le narcissisme et la pulsion de mort
primaire
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), p. 22.
37 It
may be of some significance that Pierrot undergoes his degenerative
change as punishment for the sexual advances he makes to a sleeping fairy. (The
"advances" are, characteristically, regressive: he kisses her breasts.) The Pierrot of
Le Baiser is also implicitly punished for (or rescued from) his sexual ache by the
return of Urgèle to the clouds — even his intentions are, honorably,
though
marriage.
33
Starobinski, Portrait de l'artiste en saltimbanque, p. 40.
39 The word's context that it means more than "actors" here:
suggests
Tel, qui parmi nous émigré,
Nous vient du pays latin,
Et tel autre est, comme un tigre,
Plus lavé que Mezzetin.
(DP, 103)
30 Article of
May 12, 1879: in Banville, Critiques, p. 422.
31
Fuehs, Théodore de Banville, p. 191.
32 In Théodore de Banville, Les Pauvres Saltimbanques (Paris: Lévy, 1853).
43 This is illustrated in Banville's late (and only) novel, Marcelle
interestingly
Rahe, whose physician-hero, Daniel Mathis, falls in love with a woman of Pre
Raphaelite ethereality and of secret, insatiable appetites. Early in their affair,

Daniel is entertained by a pantomime at one of his mistress's soirées, a play in
which Colombine is tirelessly unfaithful to a distraught Pierrot. "Quoi! est-ce donc

Robert Storey 21
ainsi, 1 amour?" (MR, 239), asks the lady of her guests. Several minutes later,
Daniel finds her in an embrace with a mustachioed Latin. (And although he
returns, shamed, to the woman for whose arms he seems novelistically destined,
the latter turns him away with a chaste adieu: they must no longer indulge [she
declares] "les hideurs et les saletés de la passion, bavant de rage comme des
chiennes affamées" [p. 287]. The response of the Pierrot banvillien to Colombines
of an indisputable sexual allure is, both consciously and unconsciously, flight.)
44
Fuchs, Théodore de Banville, p. 477.
45 In a review of Le Petit Gautier remarked that Banville
Mezzetin, Théophile
was "énamouré jusqu'à la manie de tout ce monde bigarré de la vieille comédie
italienne [...]" (Le Moniteur universel, October 15, 1855). And that mania
extended even to proprietorship. Towards the end of the century, when Félix
Larcher was soliciting support for a "Cercle Funambulesque" to revive interest in
the pantomime, he reported to Paul Hugounet that Banville "n'aimait pas qu'on
touchât la pantomime: c'était son domaine il faut croire, et il voulait qu'elle mourût
avec lui" ("Comment fut fondé le Cercle Funambulesque," La Plume, No. 82
[September 15, 1892], 407).


Pierrot Narcisse Theodore de Banville

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Pierrot Narcisse Theodore de Banville

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PIERROT "NARCISSE": THÉODORE DE BANVILLE AND THE PANTOMIME

Author(s): Robert Storey

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.96 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 01:37:10 AM

"L'ancien Spectacle des Funambules du boulevard du Temple,"

qu'il y avait de plus charmant et de plus amusant à Paris, et si j'excepte les

incomparables joies de la poésie et de l'amour, les heures que j'ai passées

mon existence.'1 Nostalgia for his wonderful youth is in that remark, a

condemn him (as in Carné s Les Enfants du Paradis) to the stereotypes of

romantic myth, Jean-Gaspard Deburau translated the puerile fantasies of

audience could find witless (though often witty) expression. Deburau's

rivals and successors — the Madame the mime

several — could benefit from his enormous

seemed to confer it on his own silent world.

la main" (AP, 21). Nestled in an "Eden," a "jardin enchanté," it attracted

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turquoise, les cascades laissant ruisseler des flots de diamants, dans un

ravissement de perles et d'opales et de métaux en fusion" (AP, 26).

abominable,"3 it appeared infused with what Banville called in his preface

réelle, c'était la pantomime même:

And yet the pantomimes of the Funambules "réalisaient [un] double

but de faire oublier la Vie et de la représenter cependant" (S, 216), for

through this farcically terrible spectacle, deprived of humanity and sense,

sauvaient, s'en allaient, s'enfuyaient, extasiés, heureux, se tenant les

mains, ivres de printemps, de jeunesse et de rêves [...]" (S, 217). Like

flight in Les Folies-Nouvelles (1854), Banville's prologue for the opening of

Le feuillage s'éclaire au bruit de leurs chansons;

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une indifference complète, avec un dédain profond, avec le dandysme le

plus sceptique, sachant la prodigieuse inutilité de tous les efforts humains,

both banal and provocative:

Voyez! c'est Arlequin avec sa Colombine,

(Les Folies-Nouvelles, III, 87)

The provocation is to accept their drama, as the quatrain literally suggests,

a creature outside the desiring mind but as a symbol of the omnipotent,

symbol? Here, as elsewhere, Banville is explicit: he is "Un don Juan de

[ . . . ] aujourd'hui [he wrote of Molière's libertine], si Sganarelle demandait à don

—Je crois que deux et deux font quatre.

—Je crois à la matière vivante et pensante toujours renouvelée, éternellement

jeune, éclose, lumineuse et fleurie;

The legendary rake is "comme l'Eros des Grecs, un symbole du Désir, de

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Here we encounter the Banville about whom Baudelaire and Mallarmé

laire's) of men, landscapes, palaces, expresses precisely Don Juan's wish,

movingly passionate in all of Banville's poetry:

t"]Plus haut encor, jusqu'au ciel pur!

Jusqu'à ces rouges Orients

Plus haut! plus loin! de l'air! du bleu!

What Baudelaire and Mallarmé found to praise, however, has charmed

think, only apparently without content. Banville's "idéalité" is more prob

We should begin by noting that his aspiration partakes exactly of that

quality that Baudelaire saw in it, of "obsession":12 "Dans ce poème final,"

resonance that the cries of his ecstatic trampolinist have obscured. Ma

dame Saqui is also drawn by "les voluptueux appels de l'abîme," but le

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gouffre is clearly death, not "idéalité": "[...] si les pieds s'arrêtaient,

baisers de la tarentule invisible, le gouffre est en bas, et la ballerine serait

entraînée par les voluptueux appels de l'abîme!"13 In one of the Odelettes,

Saqui's performances on the rope to the poet's before his audience:

Dans les nuages vermeils,

Qu'elle touchait de la tête

The theme anticipates that of the better-known "Saut du Tremplin,"

Dans l'azur aérien