Collected Prose

personality. In the first, a stranger saw Anatole attending to his father’s boat and asked him, “What is your boat called?” Anatole answered with great conviction, “My boat isn’t called anything. Do you give a name to a carriage?” On another occasion, Anatole was taking a walk through the Fountainebleau forest with Mallarmé. “He loved the Fountainebleau forest and would often go there with Stéphane…. [One day], running down a path, he came upon a very pretty woman, politely stepped to the side, looked her over from top to bottom and, out of admiration, winked his eye at her, clicked his tongue, and then, this homage to beauty having been made, continued on his child’s promenade.” Finally, Lefèvre-Roujon reports the following: One day Mme Mallarmé boarded a Paris bus with Anatole and put the child on her lap in order to economize on the extra fare. As the bus jolted along, Anatole fell into a kind of trance, watching a gray-haired priest beside him who was reading his breviary. He asked him sweetly: “Monsieur l’abbée, would you allow me to kiss you?” The priest, surprised and touched, answered: “But of course, my little friend.” Anatole leaned over and kissed him. Then, in the suavest voice possible, he commanded: “And now, kiss mama!”
    In the spring of 1879, several months before his eighth birthday, Anatole became seriously ill. The disease, diagnosed as child’s rheumatism, was further complicated by an enlarged heart. The illness first attacked his feet and knees, and then, when the symptoms had apparently cleared up, his ankles, wrists, and shoulders. Mallarmé considered himself largely responsible for the child’s suffering, feeling that he had given the boy “bad blood” through a hereditary weakness. At the age of seventeen, he had suffered terribly from rheumatic pain, with high fevers and violent headaches, and throughout his life rheumatism would remain a chronic problem.
    In April, Mallarmé went off to the country for a few days with Geneviève. His wife wrote: “He’s been a good boy, the poor little martyr, and from time to time asks me to dry his tears. He asks me often to tell little papa that he would like to write to him, but he can’t move his little wrists.” Three days later, the pain had shifted from Anatole’s hand to his legs, and he was able to write a few words: “I think of you always. If you knew, my dear Little Father, how my knees hurt.”
    Over the following months, things took a turn for the better. By August, the improvement had been considerable. On the tenth, Mallarmé wrote to Robert de Montesquiou, a recently made friend who had formed a special attachment to Anatole, to thank him for sending the child a parrot. “I believe that your delicious little animal … has distracted the illness of our patient, who is now allowed to go to the country…. Have you heard from where you are … all the cries of joy from our invalid, who never takes his eyes … away from the marvelous princess held captive in her marvelous palace, who is called Sémiramas because of the stone gardens she seems to reflect? I like to think that this satisfaction of an old and improbable desire has had something to do with the struggle of the boy’s health to come back; to say nothing … of the secret influence of the precious stone that darts out continually from the cage’s inhabitant on the child…. How charming and friendly you have been, you who are so busy with so much, during this recent time; and it is more than a pleasure for me to announce to you, before anyone else, that I feel all our worries will soon be over.”
    In this state of optimism, Anatole was taken by the family to Valvins in the country. After several days, however, his condition deteriorated drastically, and he nearly died. On August 22, Mallarmé wrote to his close friend Henry Roujon:
    “I hardly dare to give any news because there are moments in this war between life and death that our poor little adored one is waging when I allow myself to hope, and repent of a too sad letter written the moment before, as of some messenger of bad tidings I myself have dispatched. I know nothing anymore and see nothing anymore … so much have I observed with conflicting emotions. The doctor, while continuing the Paris treatment, seems to act as though he were dealing with a condemned person who can only be comforted; and persists, when I follow him to the door, in not giving a glimmer of hope.