Table Of ContentA Note on Lautréamont
Although Les Chants de Maldoror has won acceptance
as a classic of French literature—there have been at least
three new editions with different Paris publishers since
the War—little information has been unearthed by
scholars about its author, Isidore Ducasse, who took the
mellifluous pen-name of Comte de Lautreamont. The
best summary of the verifiable facts is, I believe, in the
introduction by Maurice Saillet to the Livre de Poche
edition of the Oeuvres published in 1963. 1 have drawn
heavily on Saillet in correcting the foreword to Mal
doror which I wrote in 1943 when New Directions
first published the Guv Wernham translation.
Ducasse’s birth and death certificates have been
found, and the texts of six short letters written between
1868 and 1870, the year of his death. Copies of the first
printings of Maldoror (1868-9) and Poésies (1870)
survive, but no manuscripts or other literary papers.
There are some verbal accounts transmitted from
schoolmates and others who knew him casually . . . but
apart from these—almost nothing—we have the mystery
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A oNte on
of an unconventional young man who died early (at
24) and who was not, apparently, accounted of much
importance while he lived.
The name of Lautreamont begins to appear in French
letters only toward the turn of the century; at that time
a second edition of Maldoror, published by Genonceaux
in 1890, caught the attention of such writers as Huys-
mans, Léon Bloy, Maeterlinck. Jarry, Fargue, Larbaud,
and Remy de Gourmont. Real fame came only much
later when the Surrealists and Dadaists hailed Maldoror
as a masterpiece and canonized Lautreamont as an an
cestor of Surrealism. The Surrealists attempted to cre
ate a personality and a biography for their hero, but it
seems to be largely fictitious; the identification with a
Ducasse who was a radical orator done away with by
the secret police of Napoleon III has been disproved.
Isidore Lucien Ducasse was born April 4, 1846, in
Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father, Francois Du-
casse, was first a clerk and later Chancellor in the French
Consulate. Francois Ducasse had emigrated from a small
town near Tarbes, just north of the Pyrenees, and mar
ried a girl from the same region, Jacquette Celestine
Davezac, who died, some think by suicide, eighteen
months after the birth of Isidore. Nothing is known of
the poet’s boyhood in Uruguay beyond the reference
to its civil wars at the end of the first canto of Maldoror.
Francois Ducasse may have had business outside the
Consulate for he seems to have been well off in later
life. In 1859 he returned to Tarbes on a visit, taking
Isidore with him. He left the boy there, presumably
in the care of relatives, who placed him from 1859 to
1862 at the lyceé of Tarbes, and then from 1863 to 1865
at the Lyceé Imperial in nearby Pau.
Lautreamont
Thanks to the research of Francois Alicot, who
tracked down a surviving schoolmate, Paul Lespès, we
do have a picture of Lautreamont in adolescence.
Lespès remembers “a tall, thin young fellow, a bit
round-shouldered, pale, with hair falling over his fore
head and a sharp, high voice.’' His appearance was “not
attractive" and he had a “distant manner" of “haughty
gravity." Isidore’s health was frail; he was plagued with
migraine headaches. “Most of the time he was rather sad
and silent, as if turned in on himself."
Lespès recalls that Ducasse was a fair student but
hated Latin verse and showed little interest in mathe
matics, although later, in Maldoror, he would write:
O austere mathematics! 1 have not forgotten you since
your learned teachings, sweeter than honey, distilled
themselves through my heart like refreshing waves.
“He liked Racine and Corneille and above all Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex . . . particularly the scene in which
Oedipus, knowing the truth at last and having torn out
his eyes, cries in pain and curses his fate. He felt that
Jocasta, to complete the tragic horror, should have
killed herself on the stage." Lespès reports that the “ex
cesses (outrances) of thought and style" in Ducasse’s
compositions so dismayed the professor of rhetoric that
on one occasion he punished the boy by keeping him
in after school.
Ducasse left the lycée at Pau in 1865. There is no
trace of his raking entrance examinations or attending
any university. In fact, the record is blank until 1868,
when we know he was living in Paris. Saillet deduces
that he may have returned to Montevideo, spending as
much as two years there with his father. He may also
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A Note on
have spent some time in Bordeaux and made literary
contacts there, since later he was to enter the first canto
of Maldoror in a poetry contest conducted by Evariste
Carrance, a Bordelais editor.
The publisher Genonceaux reported that Ducasse
“came to Paris intending to study at the Polytechnique
or the School of Mines,” but no enrollment records
have been traced at cither institution. From the letters
to his father's Paris banker, Darasse, it seems clear that
the elder Ducasse provided a regular allowance, suffi
cient to enable Isidore to live in comfortable lodgings
(Saillet infers this from their street addresses), and,
from time to time, extra amounts to finance the print
ing of his work.
The first canto of Maldoror was published in August,
1868, privately printed by Balitout, Questroy et Cie,
and with no author's name on the title page. A few
months later, Ducasse arranged with Albert Lacroix of
the Librairie Internationale, Boulevard Montmartre, for
the publication of the complete work, making a deposit
of 400 francs. Lacroix has left us this description of the
author: “He was a tall young man, dark-complexioned,
clean-shaven, nervous, but orderly (rangé) and hard
working. He wrote only at night, seated at his piano.
He would declaim his sentences as he forged them,
punctuating his harangues (prosopopées) with chords
on the piano." It is in this edition that the pseudonym
Lautreamont first appears, based, no doubt, on Eugene
Sue’s historical novel, Latréaumont.
Lacroix sent the manuscript to his partner, a printer
in Brussels named Verbocckhoven, and in the summer
of ’69 the author received twenty copies. Then some
one got cold feet; none of the books were put on sale.
[ viii ]
a completely different conception.
The dedication to Poésies speaks of further install
ments to follow, but if more were written, they have
never come to light. A death certificate tells us that
Isidore Lucien Ducasse, “bachelor, no further informa
tion, ” died in his lodgings at 7 rue du Faubourg-Mont
martre early on the morning of November 24, 1870.
His body was interred the next day in the cimetière du
Nord; about twenty years later, the City of Paris con
demned the site for housing and the remains of those
buried there were deposited in the Pantin Ossuary.
The critical literature on Lautréamont is now ex
tensive; an excellent bibliography of it will be found
in the revised edition of the Oeuvres published by José
Corti, Paris, 1961. That edition also contains the valu
able essays on Lautréamont by Genonceaux, Gourmont,
Jaloux, Breton, Soupault, Gracq, Caillois, and Blanchot.
Read in sequence, these essays are fascinating literary
history, the record of how a reputation is made and
changes. But the Corti edition should be supplemented
with Maurice Saillet’s “Notes pour une vie d’Isidore
Ducasse et de ses écrits" in the Livre de Poche paper
back. Saillct, a thorough scholar, has researched every
possible source of information, published and unpub
lished, ou Lautréamont, including those in Uruguay, and
I find his synthesis judicious and convincing. A copy of
the superb Skira edition of Maldoror with illustrations
by Salvador Dali may be seen in the library of the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
J. Laughlin
June, 1965
[ * ]
May it please Heaven that the reader, emboldened
and become of a sudden momentarily ferocious
like what he is reading, may trace in safety his
pathway through the desolate morass of these
gloomy and poisonous pages. For unless he is able to
bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a spiritual
tension equal at least to his distrust, the deadly
emanations of this book will imbibe his soul as
sugar absorbs water.
It would not be well that all men should read
the pages that are to follow; a few only may savor
their bitter fruit without danger. So, timid soul,
before penetrating further into such uncharted
lands, set your feet the other way. Listen well to
what I tell you: set your feet the other way like
the eyes of a son who lowers his gaze respectfully
before the august countenance of his mother; or
rather, like a wedge of flying, cold-trembling
cranes which in the winter time, with much medi
tation, fly powerfully through the silence, full sail,
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