—Le Bonheur a marché côte à côte avec moi.

Nevermore

Come, my poor heart, come, old friend true and tried,
Repaint your triumph’s arches, raised anew;
Smoke tinsel altars with stale incense; strew
Flowers before the chasm, gaping wide;
Come, my poor heart, come, old friend true and tried.

Cantor revivified, sing God your hymn;
Hoarse organ-pipes, intone Te Deums proud;
Make up your aging face, youth wrinkle-browed;
Bedeck yourself in gold, wall yellow-dim;
Cantor revivified, sing God your hymn.

Ring, bells; peal, chimes; peal, ring, bells large and small!
My hopeless dream takes shape: for Happiness—
Here, now—lies clutched, embraced in my caress;
Winged Voyager, who shuns Man’s every call;
—Ring, bells; peal, chimes; peal, ring, bells large and small!

Happiness once walked side by side with me;
But DOOM knows no reprieve, there’s no mistaking:
The worm is in the fruit; in dreaming, waking;
In loving, mourning. And so must it be.
—Happiness once walked side by side with me.

from Fêtes galantes (1869)

Although they created little critical stir upon publication, the twenty-two generally brief poems of Fêtes galantes —only three are over twenty lines long, and most hover between twelve and twenty—are “pure Verlaine.” That is, it is their delicacy of touch, their metrical fluidity within formal constraints, and their evocative musicality of tone that one thinks of, rather than their superficially Parnassian descriptiveness, when one would typify his art. These “gallant revels” were inspired, clearly, by the dreamlike scenes

and traditional commedia dell’arte characters borrowed from the canvases of the painter Watteau. It is no mere coincidence that Verlaine was a frequent visitor to the Salle Lacaze, in the Louvre, where an exhibition of Watteau, Lancret, the equally elegant Fragonard, and other eighteenth-century French masters had opened in 1867, two years before publication of this collection.

Fêtes galantes appeared in 1869, published, like the Poèmes saturniens, by Lemerre. It was actually Verlaine’s third collection if one counts a clandestine volume, Les Amies, scènes d’amour sapphique, pornographic by the period’s standards, brought out in Brussels in December of 1867 under the fanciful and transparent pseudonym Pablo-María de Herlagnèz (or Herlañes) by Baudelaire’s erstwhile publisher Poulet-Malassis. Six months later the work was seized and destroyed by the French government, and the publisher, no stranger to moral controversy, was obliged to pay a fine.

In striking contrast to the carnality of Les Amies, whose sonnets, somewhat revised, would appear later in the collection Parallèlement, the vaporous, moonlit atmosphere of the scenarios depicted in the lapidary Fêtes galantes is only innocently erotic, and almost chastely suggestive in its mannered gaiety and précieux melancholy, shaded in the most delicate of mezzotints.

Clair de lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,
Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

Moonlight

Your soul is like a landscape fantasy,
Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise,
Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be
Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.

Singing in minor mode of life’s largesse
And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite
Reluctant to believe their happiness,
And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,

The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming,
Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,
And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming—
Slender jet-fountains—sob their ecstasies.

Pantomime

Pierrot, qui n’a rien d’un Clitandre,
Vide un flacon sans plus attendre,
Et, pratique, entame un pâté.

Cassandre, au fond de l’avenue,
Verse une larme méconnue
Sur son neveu déshérité.

Ce faquin d’Arlequin combine
L’enlèvement de Colombine
Et pirouette quatre fois.

Colombine rêve, surprise
De sentir un cœur dans la brise
Et d’entendre en son cœur des voix.

Pantomime

Pierrot—no swain Clitander, he—
Swills from a flagon gluttonously,
Cuts into a pâté. (Why wait?)

Off in the distance, old compeer
Cassander sheds a furtive tear
Over his disowned nephew’s fate.

Harlequin, roguish varlet, yearns
To kidnap Colombine, then turns
Four pirouettes with flawless art.

Colombine dreams, stands musing there,
Awed to hear heartbeats in the air
And voices whispering in her heart.

Sur l’herbe

L’abbé divague.—Et toi, marquis,
Tu mets de travers ta perruque.
—Ce vieux vin de Chypre est exquis
Moins, Camargo, que votre nuque.

—Ma flamme...—Do, mi, sol, la, si.
L’abbé, ta noirceur se dévoile!
—Que je meure, Mesdames, si
Je ne vous décroche une étoile!

—Je voudrais être petit chien!
—Embrassons nos bergères l’une
Après l’autre.—Messieurs, eh bien?
—Do, mi, sol.—Hé! bonsoir, la Lune!

On the Grass

"Marquis, your wig is crooked." "Mine?"
"Your shoulders, Camargo... Exquisite..."
Drones the abbé... "More than this fine
Old wine, my dear... From Cyprus, is it?...

"My love..." "Do, mi, sol, la, si, do..."
"My heart..." "Is full of guile, abbé!"
"Upon my soul, mesdames, I'll go
Pluck you all stars..." "Sol, fa, mi, re..."

"Let's kiss, each one, our shepherdesses..."
"Would I were but a puppy..." "Oh?..."
"Ah so, messieurs? And those caresses?..."
"Good evening, Moon!..." "Fa, mi, re, do..."

L’Allée

Fardée et peinte comme au temps des bergeries,
Frêle parmi les nœuds énormes de rubans,
Elle passe, sous les ramures assombries,
Dans l’allée où verdit la mousse des vieux bancs,
Avec mille façons et mille afféteries
Qu’on garde d’ordinaire aux perruches chéries.