Collected Prose

The dear boy eats and sleep a little; breathes. Everything his organs could do to fight the heart problem they have done; after another enormous attack, that is the benefit he draws from the country. But the disease, the terrible disease, seems to have set in irremediably. If you lift the blanket, you see a belly so swollen you can’t look at it!
    “There it is. I do not speak to you of my pain; no matter where my thought tries to lead it, this pain recoils from seeing itself worsen! But what does suffering matter, even suffering like that: the horrible thing is … the misfortune in itself that this little being might vanish…. I confess that it is too much for me; I cannot bring myself to face this idea.
    “When my wife looks at the darling, she seems to see a serious illness and nothing more; I must not rob her of the courage she has found to care for the child in this quietude. I am alone here then with the hatchet blow of the doctor’s verdict.”
    A letter from Mallarmé to Montesquiou on September 9 offers further details: “Unfortunately, after several days [in the country], everything … grew dark: we have been through the cruelest hours our darling invalid has caused us, for the symptoms we thought had disappeared forever have returned; they are taking hold now. The old improvements were a sham…. I am too tormented and too taken up with our poor little boy to do anything literary, except to jot down a few rapid notes…. Tole speaks of you, and even amuses himself in the morning by fondly imitating your voice. The parrot, whose auroral belly seems to catch fire with a whole orient of spices, is looking right now at the forest with one eye and at the bed with the other, like a thwarted desire for an excursion by her little master.”
    By late September there had been no improvement, and Mallarmé now centered his hopes on a return to Paris. On the twenty-fifth, he wrote to his oldest friend, Henri Cazalis: “The evening before your beautiful present came, the poor darling, for the second time since his illness began, was nearly taken from us. Three successive fainting fits in the afternoon did not, thank heaven, carry him off…. The belly disturbs us, as filled with water as ever…. The country has given us everything we could ask of it, assuming it could give us anything, milk, air, and peaceful surroundings for the invalid. We have only one idea now, to leave for a consultation with Doctor Peter…. I tell myself it is impossible that a great medical specialist cannot take advantage of the forces nature opposes so generously to a terrible disease….”
    After the return to Paris, there are two further letters about Anatole — both dated October 6. The first was to the English writer John Payne: “This is the reason for my long silence…. At Easter, already six hideous months ago, my son was attacked by rheumatism, which after a false convalescence has thrown itself on his poor heart with incredible violence, and holds him between life and death. The poor friend has twice almost been taken from us…. You can judge of our pain, knowing how much I live inside my family; then this child, so charming and exquisite, had captivated me to the point that I still include him in all my future projects and in my dearest dreams….”
    The other letter was to Montesquiou. “Thanks to immense precautions, everything went well [on the return to Paris] … but the darling paid for it with several bad days that drained his tiny energy. He is prey to a horrible and inexplicable nervous cough … it shakes him for a whole day and a whole night…. — Yes, I am quite beside myself, like someone on whom a terrible and endless wind is blowing. All-night vigils, contradictory emotions of hope and sudden fear, have supplanted all thought of repose…. My sick little boy smiles at you from his bed, like a white flower remembering the vanished sun.”
    After writing these two letters, Mallarmé went to the post office to mail them. Anatole died before his father managed to return home.
    *

    The 202 fragments that follow belonged to Mme E. Bonniot, the Mallarmé heir, and were deciphered, edited, and published in a scrupulously prepared volume by the literary scholar and critic Jean-Pierre Richard in 1961. In the preface to his book — which includes a lengthy study of the fragments — he describes his feelings on being handed the soft red box that contained Mallarmé’s notes. On the one hand: exaltation. On