On my former teaching shelves, I found a battered french book with no back and a detached front cover, frayed & browning pages, soft as an animal. The plays of Corneille. I'll never read that again. I threw it in the stove basket and, a day or two later, thought I'd put it in the fire, looked at the opening pages, it wasn't Corneille at all, it was Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, friend of Mallarmé, his NOUVEAUX CONTES CRUELS et PROPOS D'AU DELA, and a few fragments inédits. Soft chalky pages are seductive. French publishing a hundred years ago followed the aesthete, the effete, as now the pronoun sensitive. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam — I don't know what his friends called him — was a creature of his own decline. La vieille France, la France profonde, has a network, a spider's web, of decaying aristocracy, and he was one such, working his way out of reality as much as he could. Vivre, les serviteurs le feront pour nous.
Sara said the other night that she liked to pack an adventure bag when she was young, which would have included a pair of binoculars and a book with soft pages she took from her grandmother's shelves. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam would garnish an adventure bag, no trouble. You could stop and read it under an apple tree somewhere.
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