Leaving Paris

By1910, Paul-Jean Toulet was already in poor physical condition. Drugs, alcohol, and a rudderless existence had taken their toll. By some means or other Jacques Dyssord became aware of a former lover from his heyday in Béarn, Marie Vergon, daughter of a hotelier from Guéthary. According to Martinez, he wrote to her about his sad state, having learned of the feelings she still had for Toulet. Was she the Faustine of whom Toulet often sings in his verse, of whom Curnonsky said she was the only love of his life? Be that as it may, when Marie answered the call and came to Paris, she got a rude reception: Toulet informed her he didn’t want a woman in his apartment; but she stayed, and took on the thankless burden of nursing, cleaning, cooking, and in the evenings, she slept in a rented room. Toulet had her eat in the kitchen and whenever he had a visitor, he introduced her as his maid - although Dyssord recounts that on the last occasion he saw Toulet in Paris, “a guardian angel” was watching by his bedside, and she was introduced simply as “Mlle Marie.” She spoke to Dyssord of Béarn and the Basque country - the country Toulet had loved so much was being restored in some fashion to him at the very moment when all his courage was perhaps about to desert him as his condition progressively deteriorated. Marie's willpower and determination bore fruit six years later, on June 12, 1916, when she married her husband.

 At this period of his life, he was hardly more amiable with his friends, constantly putting their friendship to the test. While he defended them fiercely in their absence, in their presence he could be acidic, sarcastic, insufferable. His friend from his schooldays in Pau, Henri Dartiguenave, was made the object of fierce sarcasm him during a dinner party in Dr. Petre’s house, and nearly broke completely with him. Toulet relented, took him off to the Weber bar, and sent him a dedicated copy of le Grand Dieu Pan the following day in recompense. His friends tolerated it because, as Henri de Regnier explained: “His jokes and even his insolence were overlooked, because they were merely a facade for hidden qualities of the heart.”

When Toulet’s poor health, and the parlous state of his finances, propelled his departure from Paris in July 1912, his friends were taken by surprise. Émile Henriot wrote in October asking when he planned to return, and exclaimed that the bar de la Paix was being quarantined by his friends as punishment for his absence. When Jean-Louis Forain learned that his friend was permanently holed up in the countryside, the famous caricaturist remarked: "Too bad for us. But so much better for him."

Debussy wrote in January 1913:

“You must believe me if I say, standing before the holly bushes that melancholically border my window, that I am not yet used to this departure of yours, which resembled a flight from everything, and more! I never told you what I thought the hurt feelings and wounded sensitivity appeared to be hiding, because these are private moments when advice, as well as consolations, are of little use; they can even seem indiscreet or hypocritical!

To have the right to tell someone they are not on the right path, you must be able to offer them, immediately, the means to get out of it, with the conviction that you are not deceiving yourself…It’s quite delicate! Especially for you, in that it is further complicated by a health condition that you have managed with difficulty, often imposing contradictory regimens.

Through a disconcerting dualism, you have a taste for the world, while your mind secretly retains a more delicate taste for solitude…one could be embarrassed, at least! I'm afraid that voluntary exile in Saint-Loubès only satisfies one side of the question.”

(Debussy had in fact offered some advice in a note dated March 1911: “Dear Friend, very sincerely, I am pained to see you so often ill. And despite my loathing of all advice, allow my friendship to beg you pay a little more attention to the barbaric and fanciful way in which you treat your miserable body. Don’t hold it against me and believe in the friendship of your Claude Debussy.” And again in July 1912: “Contempt for one's poor, perishable body is a heroic and beautiful thing. However, don't you think you've taken this double virtue to extremes?”

So Toulet moved to La Rafette, home of his cousins and his sister, where he stayed for four years. The house entered the family through his aunt Amélie. Toulet’s mother Marie-Emma Loustau-Lalanne was the 13th child of Pierre Loustau-Lalanne. There was a 14th, a daughter called Amélie. She married a Mauritian, Aristide Chaline. They left Mauritius to settle in France, and after a brief stay in Pau bought le chateau La Rafette at Saint-Loubès.

La Rafette is a fine house, with a pepper-pot tower. There are a ground floor and a first floor, and a spacious mansard roof space. This gentleman’s dwelling, built in 1840 on the site of the old Barbezières chateau, was sold to Aristide Chaline by the inheritors of the last marquis.

This is where the Chaline family lived with their three children, and a niece, Jeanne Toulet, Toulet’s sister.

Jeanne Toulet and one of her first cousins, Anne-Marie Chaline, married 2 brothers, Maurice-Henri and Gaston-Henri de la Blanchetai respectively. Anne-Marie had no children. Jeanne had 6, who inherited the chateau. The eldest of the 5 surviving children (Marc died while still in his infancy) was Pierre, who as P. de Luz became a historian. His works include biographies of Henry V of France, and of Isabelle II of Spain, and a multi-volume History of the Popes. When Toulet sold Haget, La Rafette became for him the family homestead. He was henceforth considered, like his sister, a child of the house.

Saint-Loubès itself, as described by La Vie Parisienne in March 1906,  was “a rather mediocre small town; and what it has best are its wines and its cemetery. The latter forms a charming landscape, situated as it is among the vineyards, on a slope, at the foot of a tall, pointed steeple, which seems to be thrust toward the sky.”  At Saint-Loubès Toulet worked when his health permitted. He had his room in the attic, facing north. He was happy enough here, although irritated by the squeak of the weathervane and the squawk of the peacock beneath his windows. From the depths of his Chinese bed he read novels, exhibition  catalogues, reviews, argued with cousin Mauricia, who looked after him, along with his sister Jeanne.  They looked after him and fed him while he wrote and polished his Contrerimes, relieved of the need to earn a living. (There seems to be no record of Marie Vergon being part of the establishment just then, despite her Paris sojourn - perhaps she returned to Guéthary.)  Even though he complained about the indifference of his friends, of Curnonsky who no longer writes to him, he is not forgotten. (He revealed in a 1910 will that he owed Curnonsky 200,000 francs, around 700,00 euros today. There is no record of Curnonsky being reimbursed, so it’s understandable that he might have felt somewhat aggrieved!) The young writers that surrounded him in Paris make him their rôle model. It was only after his departure from Paris that his fame began to grow. He unwittingly became the leader of the Parisian school of Fantaisistes, which included Carco, Vérane, Pellerin, Derème… People were talking about him. Not loudly, but they were talking about him. Meanwhile, Toulet was sorting through his papers, organizing his texts.

 COPLES

Tant de travail, docteur, pour découvrir enfin
Que l’Être se nourrit, et meurt de pourriture ?
Ah ! cesse, à tes fourneaux, d’avilir la nature :
Ce n’est que songe et fleurs dont nos âmes ont faim.

Contrerime VIII

 Dans le silencieux automne
D' un jour mol et soyeux,
Je t' écoute en fermant les yeux,
Voisine monotone.

Ces gammes de tes doigts hardis,
C' était déjà des gammes
Quand n' étaient pas encor des dames
Mes cousines,  jadis ;

Et qu' aux toits noirs de la Rafette,
Où grince un fer changeant,
Les abeilles d' or et d' argent
Mettaient l' aurore en fête.

In the silent autumn
Of a soft and silky day,
Eyes closed, I hear you play
A monotonous run.

You rehearse with quick fingers
The scales that my cousins
Would perform by the dozen -
The memory lingers.

On the black roofs of La Rafette
Where the weathervane squeals
The gold and silver bees
Put the dawn en fête.

 Contrerime XIV
Le coucou chante au bois qui dort.
L' aurore est rouge encore,
Et le vieux paon qu' Iris décore
Jette au loin son cri d' or.

Les colombes de ma cousine
Pleurent comme une enfant.
Le dindon roue en s' esclaffant :
Il court à la cuisine.

The cuckoo sings in the sleeping brake
Dawn red are still the skies,
The old peacock whom Iris dyes
Shouts far his golden crake.

My cousin's flock of pigeons
Moan like children sobbing
The turkey flaps about gobbling,
Running to the kitchen.

From La Rafette he sent some short poems to Auguste Pujolle, director and founder of the monthly review Burdigala (Roman name for Bordeaux, it lasted from 1912 to July1914).

Ces frissons dont Zephir a moiré la prairie,
Ou si quelque déesse invisible a passé,
Ainsi passa Camille, ainsi courait Marie:
Cherches-tu sur les fleurs leur méandre effacé?

Aurélien Coulanges was a Marseilles pawnbroker. He was also the editor of a revue, Les Marches de Provence. Francis Carco was responsible for arranging that he publish a series of collections of poetry under the general title of “Collection des Cinq”, the five putative authors being Carco, Tristan Derème, Jean Pellerin, Jean-Marc Bernard, and Toulet, who had been using the repose of La Rafette to assemble from diverse sources, whether published or scribbled in notebooks, his contrerimes, dixains, and sundry verse, and put them in order. He was acquiring a coterie of admirers, and imitators. So he collected material from Les Marges, Le Divan, La Grande-Revue, and decided on the title Contrerimes, a collection that will eventually do more for Toulet’s literary reputation than all his works in prose. But there was a hiccup.

Coulanges ceased to publish the volumes after those of Carco and Derème appeared. He declined to return Toulet’s manuscript, despite the best efforts of Carco, Derème and Martineau. Weak sales halted further publication and Coulanges retired to his pawnshop. Toulet’s manuscript was never recovered – perhaps it will turn up someday.

Meanwhile, Henri Martineau was putting together an edition of the Divan, the literary magazine he founded in 1909, entirely devoted to Toulet, with contributions from, among others, Toulet himself, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, Edmond Jaloux, Henry de Bruchard, Henri Clouard, Eugène Marsan, Jacques Boulenger, Émile Henriot, Jean-Marc Bernard, François Fosca, Jean Pellerin, Martineau, and Pierre de la Blanchetai, Toulet’s nephew. Toulet anticipated the edition with pleasure, writing to Henriot, “Thank you for the delicate things and other lies you've heaped upon me. I suppose flattery is the poetics of the genre, but at first I had the feeling that you were all playing a "high-class joke" on me.” The issue was published in July-August 1914. And on August 3rd, Germany declared war. An attempt by Martineau to get up a subscription for the publication of the Contrerimes fell victim to more urgent concerns.

On August ^3rd, 1914, two days after declaring war on Russia, Germany declared war on France. Toulet, at La Rafette, was deeply shaken, having as he did a profound, almost chauvinistic love for France – hence his sympathy for Action Francaise. He made some futile attempts to enlist with the military administration of Bordeaux, or at least to be useful, but would never have been accepted on grounds of poor health. He asked Émile Henriot, who had volunteered for the 31^st Dragoons, if he knew anyone in the war ministry. He importuned Jacques Boulenger,  who wrote that Toulet had little insight into the impotence of a mere corporal or sub-lieutenant. And again, to Henriot, in September 1914, “We must need paperpushers who are a bit multilingual, even at the borders. And I’d like to be sent there, as long as I did not have to walk a lot.” He fantasised of being engaged in some HQ, in the kitchens, even as a pianist, writing to a friend: “For me, who dreamed of enlisting, unless they give me a seated post, or a carriage like Marshal Saxe, I am reduced to watching the trains go by. …If I were certain of the Dardanelles or Syria, I would enlist immediately. Perhaps there are some romantic and witty generals who would stoop to anything to have me under their command. How I would love them if only I knew their names. Mind you, although I'm quite well, I'm not suited to cold countries.”

He wrote in jest in November to his nephew, Pierre de la Blanchetai, who was at the depot in Niort, and never saw action: “When you take prisoners, you must cut off all the buttons on their trousers. They'll be forced to hold them with one hand, and it will become impossible for them to run! You only have to try it.” (Louis Pergaud’s La Guerre des boutons had been published in 1912.)

Martinez takes this as evidence of Toulet’s lack of appreciation of the reality of war. But in fact many of Toulet’s letters to his nephew take on a facetious aspect, such as his advice to avoid fighting with Spanish chairs - Pierre had got his fingers pinched in one - and what was far more dangerous, Spanish doctors. Boulenger makes the point that non-combatants, sheltered from the reality of trench warfare, simply lacked the ability to imagine the horror of a soldier’s lot. If indeed Toulet had been more of a novelist, if he had had a more vivid insight into human beings, he would not have believed for a second the accounts in the newspapers of that time, and he would not have spoken of joining the General Staff.

But there is no doubt that the deaths of friends such as Jean-Marc Bernard, and Henry de Bruchard profoundly affected him. Henry de Bruchard had enlisted as a volunteer in the 126th Infantry Regiment in Brive but was soon discharged due to a heart condition. On February 6, 1915, while walking along the Rue Linois in Paris, he collapsed and died. His body was transported to his hometown, where he was buried in the Sainte-Eulalie cemetery on February 11. Toulet wrote this epitaph :

Ici repose Henry de Bruchard ; si la cendre
Dormait, d’un si beau feu. Trahi dans son propos,
France, il tomba, le jour qu’il ne te put défendre ;
Comme un fer suspendu, qu’outrage le repos.

Jean-Marc Bernard, after three attempts, and despite his poor eyesight, enlisted in the infantry at the beginning of the conflict; he was killed by a mortar shell at the front, near Carency in Artois, in July 1915. His poem, De Profundis, is often taken up in commemorative events.

After the war, In February 1920, Toulet wrote to Francis Éon: “One finds there, especially in your war memoirs, a moving clarity. How I envy you for having gone, and - not for having saved your skin, but for having enriched your memory - for having returned; I, who returned, despite my dreams, before I had even been there, and, as my front line, was condemned to bed; where I continue to spend half a life tormented by poor health.” But it’s a rare letter from La Rafette in which he does not refer to his poor health. He was frequently confined to bed, where he tried to work. Opium was now difficult to find; laudanum and ether filled the gaps. Sometimes instead of the laudanum, that he took on a sugar lump, to recover a little of the euphoria that his dear opium gave him, he was brought a solution of water and tincture of saffron.

In autumn 1915 an improvement in his health allowed him a final trip to Avignon, where he spent two months in a friend’s house, Toulouse and Pau. He was in Avignon to prepare an article on the museum. In his notes on art he emphasized local colour and wished to see more examples of the School of Avignon which attained its apogee under the Popes. Martinez believes he went to Arles in November, and was inspired to write En Arles. It was certainly possible to reach Arles from Avignon, whether by road or by riverboat. The cemetery inspired both Gauguin and Van Gogh to paint it, and if Toulet did indeed visit Les Alyscamps, in late 1915, it would have been the most significant visit he had ever made, given the importance of those most quoted lines for which he is most remembered.

Dans Arles, où sont les Aliscams,
Quand l’ombre est rouge, sous les roses,
Et clair le temps,

Prends garde à la douceur des choses.
Lorsque tu sens battre sans cause
Ton cœur trop lourd ;

Et que se taisent les colombes :
Parle tout bas, si c’est d’amour,
Au bord des tombes.

Toulet wrote from Hyères to Tristan Derème, while the latter was kicking his heels in an artillery barracks in Toulouse, asking him to act as guide for him and his carer, (who wasn’t named – was it Marie Vergon?) having written previously on 3^rd January. He says that he would be happy to meet him – and to bring him a copy of Quichotte.

Travelling by train, Toulet arrived late one evening, towards midnight. It was February, 1916. Derème described him as being extremely tired, tall, thin and bony. He described his is gaze as being deep and kind – the gaze a faithful hound has when being caressed, and has trust.

Derème accompanied Toulet, who said he was exhausted, to his hotel. But once he lay down, he was transformed – no longer the same man. His eyes sparkled – they were witty, mocking, sometimes fierce, and he, who had barely spoken a moment before, now launched into a thousand speeches and a thousand epigrams, and played with a small Chinese porcelain bell, while tugging at his beard.

Toulet spent three or four days in Toulouse. He stayed in bed until six in the evening. Derème would visit him in the morning, and in late afternoon. He goes on to describe the situation: “He was cheerful and pleasant, one minute binding bouquets of memories, then suddenly shooting barbs. Then he would dress, but once up his energy dissipated.  When we sortied out, I would give him my arm. He mocked his frailty, braving and scorning his misfortune.

At times he would have a laugh. One evening in the rue Lafayette he spotted some anchovies in a window display. He wanted to buy one – just one. The fishmonger said it wasn’t customary. Toulet began to get irritated, claiming that he had but a small appetite. He got his way and bought one anchovy for two pennies. It was presented to him on a cardboard plate which he refused to have wrapped, and he carried it with him like a waiter carries a plate. The little fish shone whenever we passed under a Gaslamp, and in this wise we entered a restaurant. Toulet ate nothing – not even his anchovy!

It was on this evening, smiling still despite his melancholy, he inscribed on a copy of Nane that he gave me, ‘To Tristan Derème, my nourishing father, his grateful and replete Toulet.’”

One afternoon he went out alone, took a cab, and in a couple of hours had explored all the antique shops, where he took great pleasure in viewing the paintings and trinkets.

Toulet left Toulouse, and a few days later wrote to Derème from Baigts (par Montfort-en-Chalosse), Landes, on the route back home, where he had relations, and where he had spent some time in 2015. He must have stayed there a while, because he wrote again from Baigts, letters dated March 9^th and April 7^th. He wrote later from La Rafette, and in October 1916 from Guéthary.

1916 found him sicker than ever. His family married him to Marie Vergon in the La Rafette chapel, on June 12, 1916.  Her patience has finally paid off. She wanted to mind Toulet; she got her wish, although she knew she was simply taking on the thankless role of caregiver. The broken man she married bore little resemblance to the dashing young man she used to know. And who considered that to be married was to have a halter round the neck.

Pour une dame imaginaire
Aux yeux couleur du temps,
J'ai rimé longtemps, bien longtemps :
J'en étais poitrinaire.

Quand vint un jour où, tout à coup,
Nous rimâmes ensemble.
Rien que d'y penser, il me semble
Que j'ai la corde au cou.

And Paul-Jean wrote this extraordinary letter to Madame Debussy …

“…I suppose Claude reads the Communiqués, and I hope your health has improved. Mine, not at all. I was very ill for two more years, so ill I couldn’t write: I was sick. Then I felt better and wanted to get involved (in a bourgeois way, in the Secretariats). But it didn’t take off—as frivolous people used to say before the war—and I relapsed. At which point, my family, tired of caring for me, married me off: there just happened to be a sort of chapel or oratory at La Rafette that had never been used for that purpose, and an unoccupied Jesuit priest. Everyone seemed pleased; the weather was very pleasant for June; and the ladies wept quite decently at the little sermon given for the occasion. Even I, despite my horror of ceremonies, wouldn't have said much, if I hadn't been so directly involved, and if I hadn't been made to get up at one of those hours one wouldn't even want to die at..."

After which he decided to settle in Guéthary.  Toulet: “a small village in the heart of the Basque Country, which I chose because it’s by the sea: you can even see a little bit of it from my balcony… My cottage is called Etcheberria, which means New House, a name full of originality, especially when you know that it’s almost as dilapidated by age as the Emperor of Austria.”

This is Martineau:

“He lived in Guéthary, that charming seaside village, clean and white, set in full light on its cliff like, as some have said, a scattered laundry….All those who visited him in his final resting place will never forget Etcheberria, the small house in the center of the village, jealously guarded behind green shutters, half-hidden amidst thickets of trees, their only protrusion its light-colored tiled roof. On the ground floor, an office opened to the left of the front door. Among a few old pieces of furniture, one could see the large, unusual armchair "du bailli de Suffren," made of teak, and a dark display case crammed with precious volumes. …Above the study, on the first floor, was his bedroom, where one was certain to find him at any hour, obliged as he was by illness to spend most of his days in bed. It was there that Toulet received his close friends in a familiar manner. A great clutter. Books, pamphlets, newspapers, papers everywhere. The colourful curtains were almost always drawn, and, in the dim light, whoever entered could at first make out only the bronze mounts of a massive antique chest of drawers, a gleaming Japanese bowl, the red and gold flash of the three round lacquer boxes that adorned the mantelpiece, or the phosphorescent eyes of the black cat Ubu Reine, curled up as usual at her master's feet, or the luminous circle of a cigarette.”

When he can go out it is to the café de Madrid to drink a port. His great pleasure was to receive some old and faithful friends: Paul Valéry, Charles Derenne, Maurice Rostand, Frantz Toussaint, Alphonse Métérié, Henri Martineau. The Polish-born sculptor Swiecinski came over to chat often to his neighbour. He had built a villa overlooking the ocean in an incomparable site.

 Toulet worked as much as his health allowed, though there were also long periods when he was unable to write a single word. He had collected three short stories, previously published in periodicals, which made up Comme une Fantaisie (1918). He completely rewrote La Jeune Fille Verte, which was published in 1920. He had had time to finalize the Contes de Béhanzigue, which appeared only a few days after his death, and worked on Les Trois Impostures. He gave the go-ahead for printing the Contrerimes, which in no way prevented him from revising them further.

In the spring of 1918 Debussy died after a long battle with colorectal cancer, nine years after diagnosis. That put paid to any possibility of the long-mooted collaboration on setting As You Like It to music.  Toulet wrote to René Philippon bemoaning his poverty. He was bored, invented unlikely enterprises. Marie was little mentioned in his correspondence. She was more - or less - than a partner; she was his nurse. Paul Valéry paid him a visit -Toulet remarked on La Jeune Parque: “It’s very beautiful, a little pointlessly obscure.” (When, in 1917, he finally broke his 'great silence' with the publication of La Jeune Parque, Valéry was forty-six years of age, only four years younger than Toulet. His poem Le Cimetière Marin, was published in 1922. The first two lines are reminiscent of Toulet:
Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;

Confined to bed, Toulet read a great deal, especially art books, specialized journals, and museum and auction catalogues. He owned a substantial collection of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, but for a long time he had wanted to complete it. He entrusted this task, one after another, to all his friends. A few weeks before his death, these much-desired volumes finally arrived, procured by his publishers, Emile-Paul Frères. It was a very keen pleasure for him, one of his last. He pored over collections of engravings and reproductions of paintings. He annotated much of this and remembered the rest. To amuse himself, he translated from Greek, Latin, and Italian. He had undertaken a French translation, with annotations, of Horace's Voyage to Brindisi (Satires V, Book I). When he was too tired, or to combat insomnia, he was fond of works as diverse as English adventure novels and the works of Paul Féval.

 In 1920, ill as he was, he still was making plans. On 15^th August – feast of the Assumption – he wrote to René Philippon: Je pense toujours, avec l’aide de la Providence, être à Paris vers le 15 septembre. Jacques Dyssord commented wryly that the one time he trusted his affairs to providence, she let him down.

At mid-day on September 6^th 1920, Toulet suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. Martineau was recalled in haste – he had left the previous evening for Coulonges-sur-l’Autize. In a book by his bedside that he was reading the night before, a draft of a new poem was discovered scribbled on a piece of paper he was using as a bookmark.

Ce n’est pas drôle de mourir
Et d’aimer tant de choses
La nuit bleue et les matins roses
Le verger plein de glaïeuls roses
(L’amour prompt)
Les fruits lents à mûrir.

Ni que tourne en fumée
Mainte chose jadis aimée
Tant de sources tarir
Voir tant d’amour tarir…

Gave aux ondes trop fraîches
Au retoure cuellait des pêches
Enfance, cœur léger.

 Toulet, ever the pragmatist, distrusted eulogies. He had warned his survivors: "Death is like photographers: it always flatters you a little.". The religious service took place on the 8^th September in Guéthary church which stands, grey and white, outside and above the village, in order to be seen from afar, from the sea, by the fishermen that use it as a landmark and enrich it with their ex-votos. The obsequies took place without great ceremony, although Henry Martineau and Francis de Miomandre were moved to silence, unable to speak. The mortal remains of Paul-Jean Toulet were confided to the little cemetery whose circled tombs huddle against the church’s shade like chicks under the mother’s wings. Swiecinski’s medallion adorns his tomb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toulet in Algiers, Part 4 – the Marguerite Affair

We have already remarked, in the chapter on Mauritius, on Toulet’s precocious interest in the fair sex. With his gifts and his money, girls were easy prey, and he was always in control. When in Algiers he fell for, and was cheated on by Marguerite, he took it very badly indeed, so much so that it may well have coloured his relationships with women from then on. It has been suggested (by Guitard) that it is to this Marguerite that we owe, in part (because it was already in him), the melancholic and disillusioned irony that bathes his work.
« En plus des travaux accumulés, les aventures charnelles suivent les aventures charnelles, comme toujours avec Paul-Jean… Mais vient le jour où il tombe sur un bec…. Le conquérant est conquis. »


The best – the only account – we have of this doomed affair is that of Louis Martin, fellow student, and later judge in Philippeville, Algeria. This account is taken from a longer reminiscence that appeared in the Mercure de France, in February 1927. It should however be noted that in his Journal, dated 8th February, 1889, Toulet writes that he has already broken up with S*, who had slept with a friend, and appeared ready to take up with another, and he regrets to admit that he had already replaced her on the 7th. This can scarcely have been Marguerite, since his grand passion for her only became apparent in March. Not only that, but Casanova avers that Toulet accompanied a troupe of strolling players to Algiers, and that his “Ophelia” had left him for a wealthy merchant in the rue de la Lyre before joined the company of friends in the restaurant Fautrier.

*Casanova refers fondly to “Suzanne with the golden laugh” – was this the mysterious “S”?

This is Martin:
“Attracted, as were we all, to easy pleasures, he was a libertine, but not debauched. And it was especially as a dilettante, in thrall to novelty, that he sometimes lingered in our company in some lost house in the old Casbah, whose tiny courtyards, anaemic fountains, and shady corners held his surprised gaze, while our greedy attention, like foals set loose, went straight to this Zohrad or to that Meriem, over-painted, sumptuous and degenerate, who made us quiver with our first longings.

One afternoon in March - it was four months since Toulet was in Algiers - I went to inform him of a lightweight piece which I intended for a city revue. Wearing the Basque beret which he had made his work-dress, he opened the door, and straight away, in the half-light of the enclosed room where my short sight had not noticed anything, he introduced me to Marguerite. I knew her well, of course! The tall, pretty girl with the dark complexion who frequented, not far away, a sewing shop whose lively chatter could be heard from the street, where at the turn of the rue Dupuch one turned into the ladder-like steps of the rue Levacher ... I knew her well, Marguerite ... and her blue-green eyes, almond-shaped, shadowy with thick eyelashes, and her chignon heavy with dark braids, and her queenly walk, a little feline under the finery of a maid in her Sunday best.
But to find her there, suddenly, this March evening, timidly snuggled up in that old-fashioned pouf, the crumpled veil, her cheap if pretty hat visibly askew, like a frail skiff laden with flowers on a dark stream... no, it seemed bewildering, fantastic, that left my eyes wide and my brain empty. Toulet, however, had pulled out a chair with some ceremony, and very distinctly uttered these peremptory words: "My friend." She said nothing, nor contradicted him. I could only bow, risk an obsequious "Mademoiselle ..." and confirm inwardly that I wasn’t dreaming.

It was a long and tortuous affair. In many of the Contrerimes, Toulet speaks with a bitterness tinged at times with cruelty of the disenchantments of love and inconstancy of women who, be it for an hour, a week or a season, left their mark on his life. Indeed, as it happens to all men, he was often deceived, scoffed at, bruised. But it is also that he left himself exposed, more perhaps than others, to these bruises. Sensitive souls, precisely because they "feel" keenly, almost always have a moody side. Like a rope stretched taut, they vibrate at the slightest pinch, at the slightest shock, and this vibration, far from being attenuated according to physiological law, is on the contrary amplified in them, becomes exaggerated to the point of discomfort, in some even to suffering. Toulet, who was also cerebra and who had taken early to self-analysis, of "taking his morale pulse", as he liked to say, suffered doubly from this excess of sensitivity; and he wanted, I believe, to suffer from it, or at least he did nothing to cure his ailment; "What a splitter of hairs you make!,” I often said to him to tease him, “and how you remind me of these people of whom Chamfort speaks, who by dint of carding their mattresses are left with nothing to sleep on"

After three weeks of an intense love affair, during which time he was seen neither by the guests of the pension Fautrier nor, at the Café du Ballon, his usual partners at manille or pamphile, he returned one morning in April, haggard and broken, with drawn features and weary legs, sitting before the mid-day meal at the large oval table where we used to meet twice a day. His presence was greeted with cries of joy. He was unmoved. To a question that Casanova asked him, perhaps indiscreetly, he replied between clenched teeth: "I was ill", and nose in plate, obstinately dumb, he began to eat. Lunch was dull and quick….
He didn't touch the dessert, nodded to us all, and left the table. Before he left, however, he passed near me, leaned over my shoulder, and in a voice that sounded distant and cold, he said simply: "Martin! I'll see you tonight."

He came to see me about four o'clock, in fact, in my room where I waited patiently, having preferred to cut lectures than to miss my friend.
As I expected, Toulet was ill with jealousy. Later, grown wise with the years, he would mock this sentiment with an aphorism: 'Jealousy is a test of the heart, as gout is of the limbs.' But at that point in his life he was fiercely jealous. For an instant he seemed to reflect, collect his thoughts, then, at a stroke, as though he had thrown off a heavy burden: 'Marguerite has deceived me,' he said." 'Impossible,' I exclaimed.
He must have taken my astonishment for an demurral, for, calmly and gravely, with his nervous and staccato elocution, he confided to me the secret of his heart Opening the flood-gates, he spared no detail. Little by little he grew more animated, his own words stoking the fire. Then it was a new and pathetic Nuit d'Octobre in tumultuous prose—because, that evening, he strangely resembled Musset—he who, for a full hour, shook and trembled with indignation before me!

"She cheated on me, I tell you ... Again, last Thursday, at nightfall, I surprised her chatting with a young brown man, poorly dressed, at the corner of rue Randon. I could hardly stifle my laughter. He noticed it and got up suddenly, like a spring released. "So, you don't believe me and you make fun of me! You take me for a moron, it's obvious! ... And me who thought you were my friend! .. But no! I was wrong ... I am always wrong, me ... and I am wronged too, just say the word, I am the fall-guy! Exhausted by his sudden explosion, he sank into a creaking chair, and, his head in his left hand, resumed the usual curled up position he adopted when thoughtful or annoyed. His chest barely moved with his breathing, and I thought I could hear his heart beating. He was suffering, really suffering. Touched by his deep hurt I leaned towards him like a brother and spent long minutes calming him down.
That unexpected scene, a genuine twist, was a revelation to me. The everyday Toulet, ironic, blasé, he who coldly and cruelly behind his mask of impassibility toyed with everything and everyone, I saw him, that day, unmasked, almost broken under the moral pain which tortured him and I could not but feel pity for him. I noticed, however, that he shed not one tear and he did not avert his gaze. He felt ashamed of his suffering, and when he had calmed down, I understood how much he had steeled himself by sheer willpower in order that I should bear witness to an even greater weakness and disorder…
Thrice in less than two years, [in fact it was less than one] Toulet broke with Marguerite who, ever submissive, returned to the fold and, from the threshold, fell into the arms of her lover. And the love affair started again, like from the first. There was something singular, almost abnormal in their attachment that confounded the most penetrating psychology. While, in general, one lover does not take long clearly to dominate the other - and it is not always the male - our two lovers seemed to alternate the roles of master and slave in a manner plain to a careful observer.

Certainly Marguerite had been, from the first, drawn by the strange charm which emanated from Toulet and which, even on us, his friends or companions, acted infallibly from the first meeting; and this charm came from everything about him, from his eyes, deep and clear, in which gold dust seemed to shine, from his warm and engaging voice, a little curt, which could become harsh and domineering, from the languid nobility of his movements, but especially from the integrity of his character and the delicate grace of his wit. How could a modest working girl have resisted such prestige?
But if Marguerite was without culture, she lacked neither intelligence nor finesse, and she quickly realized that the hold she had on her "great friend" came from an eminent sensuality, and that it was particularly by the seductions of her body that she had conquered this refined artist whose first romantic conquests had not yet made blasé, whatever he may have claimed. And she knew very well that she was holding him there, that she had only to offer him, at the right moment, the caress of her fresh, brown skin, and that more disturbing caress of her changing eyes, whose long, thick lashes enhanced the mystery, to make him fall at her feet, stricken and repentant, forgetful of everything. She had also noticed, almost immediately, that she had the power to suddenly give her look such a cold expression that her friend, even in a fit of anger, calmed down, admitted defeat in seconds and begged forgiveness. This icy look of his mistress really frightened him, less by what he saw as indifference or disdain than by the idea of the ​​irreparable and of death that his restless mind took pleasure, even in the times of passion, in seeking and finding there.
Toulet never did confess this vulnerability to his mistress - he would have been too humiliated ; but one day I guessed it and he himself indirectly confessed it to me, shortly before his departure from Algeria, by sending this sonnet, which had no title, but which for me was clearly full of the girl he had loved whom he was leaving for good this time.

Ne cueillez point le myrte: aucun épithalame
Pour chanter les amours joyeux, demi-moquers, 

Mais un psaume plutôt, funebre et qui proclame
L'amertume sans fin qu’elle met dans les coeurs.

Pâle et hautaine, avec des prunelles sans flamme,
Elle a le geste las et grave des vainqueurs ;
Et dans ses longs baisers qui coulent jusqu'à l'âme
Réside le pouvoir des pesantes liqueurs.

Elle inspire la peur comme d'autres la joie :
Plaine glacée ou nul Helios ne rougeoie,
Marbre hystérieux, impassible décor !

Et je révère en vous, ô sinistre amoureuse,
L'image de la mort, qui, mieux que vous encor,
Me sera bienfaisante, et fraiche, et langoureuse.
And there is no doubt that he had Marguerite in mind when he wrote these lines:

J'admire qu'un regard ait ce pouvoir en lui
Qu'un homme en fait sa joie ou sa désespérance
Sur qui l'œil souverain de sa maîtresse a lui.

And perhaps these too, both outdoors:

J’évoque sur tes bords heureux,
O Méditerranée,
D’une amoureuse après-dînée
L’ombre, le rocher creux.

Ou ce vestige périssable
Et trop vite effacé
Qu’en témoignage avaient tracé
Ses hanches dans le sable.
and indoors:

Derrière les rideaux des fenêtres closes
Tes yeux rient et la nacre de ta pâleur
Et l’or de la chambre où naguère est éclose
Notre amour ainsi qu’une fleur.

Nous oublierons la rue aux voix étrangères
La blanche cité vide excepté de nous ;
L’heure est pleine de rêve et d’ailes légères,
J’ai mis mon front sur tes genoux.

Toulet’s Algerian poems comprise the pre-typical verses he wrote while there, and those written in his prime, but inspired by his sojourn. He already has a taste for the constraints of structure, of form. The best has been gathered by Martineau in Vers Inedits. The sonnets are not quite juvenile, and already the vocabulary is a foretaste of what is to come – myrte, amertume, dévasté – even the bees get a look in!

Fatigué de m'étendre en des couches banales,
De couvrir de baisers un front inhabité,
D’inscrire quelques noms en mes sèches annales
Avec ce qu'ils couvraient de vice ou de beauté ;

Avant que le cadran des heures automnales
Sonne le couvre-feu dans mon cœur dévasté,
J'arracherai ma vie aux vaines saturnales
Pour rentrer dans la paix et la simplicité.

Dans un bourg verdoyant de la vieille province,
Celle qui doit m'aimer a grandi, blonde et mince ;
Elle a l'éclat des fleurs et le pas des oiseaux.

Je la vis, par un soir doré, cueillant aux treilles
Le raisin transparent avec de grands ciseaux
Dont le bruit argentin effrayait les abeilles.
The sonnet appeared in La Revue Algérienne which encouraged young colonial writers. Collin calls it one of the most perfect poems Toulet wrote, and very personal, an adieu to the Old Casbah, to Marguerite, to hectic voluptuousness and vice and beauty. A vain aspiration, for one so addicted to wine, women, and opium.

Indo-China, Part 2, April - May 1903

On April 1st Toulet left Hué by sampan during the night, most probably on the An Cựu tributary of the Perfumed River (Sông Hương ) so as to reach Cauailles (nowadays Cầu Hai) by early morning. Dawn found them in the middle of the Cầu Hai lagoon, from whose south bank they entered the meandering and pretty little river that brought them to the town. In Cầu Hai they hired the chairs that were to carry them over the Hải Vân Quan (Pass) – the Col de Nuages*. They spent the day ascending, the it was nightfall when they started the final ascent of the col. Then darkness, fireflies, and the coolies huddling close to one another. Toulet kept an ear out for the cry of a tiger. (“Quelquefois Hubert est arraché de son sommeil par un cri. Il se réveille en sursaut, les yeux grand ouverts. De toute son âme il interroge la nuit : il écoute l’ombre. Et il n’entend que le noir silence, implacable.” - from the episode in Béhanzigue titled “le cri dans la nuit”).

Nothing was heard that night, but the following evening one took a pig not far from the lighthouse that illuminated the outskirts of Tourane. This experience was to inspire not only Béhanzigue, but also Contrerime XLIII:

Ainsi, ce chemin de nuage,
Vous ne le prendrez point,
D'où j'ai vu me sourire au loin
Votre brillant mirage ?

Le soir d'or sur les étangs bleus
D'une étrange savane,
Où pleut la fleur de frangipane,
N'éblouira vos yeux ;

Ni les feux de la luciole
Dans cette épaisse nuit
Que tout à coup perce l'ennui
D'un tigre qui miaule.


*From Hué to Tourane (modern Da Nang) by the Col de Nuages – this is the Hải Vân Pass, which crosses over a spur of the Trường Sơn (Annamite) Range that runs from east to east west and juts into the South China Sea, forming the Hải Vân Peninsula. The pass, which once formed the boundary between the kingdoms of Đại Việt and Champa, also forms a boundary between the climates of northern and southern Vietnam, sheltering the city of Da Nang from the "Chinese winds" that blow in from the northwest. During the winter months of November–March weather on the north side of the pass may be wet and cold, while the south side may be warm and dry.

Tourane was the last link with China. They left on April 5th on la Tamise for Saïgon, where they arrived on the 8th. On Friday 10th they boarded the Sydney at 11.00 p.m. and celebrated Easter on board on Sunday 12th April.

The experience Toulet described later, in February 1905, on a postcard of Hué: "We set sail for the island of Taprobane. The mountainous coasts of Cathay sank slowly behind the horizon. It was only the beginning of summer in Annam; the long-stemmed lotus had not yet begun to blossom on the sacred waters which reflect the tombs of the Emperors. But, on the ponds at Candy, we saw them smile; some were white as the lingerie that, in her eagerness to love, my friend strews about her room in the twilight. There were also some as rosy as her finger tips.”

But first there was a stopover in Singapore. On April 13th Toulet wrote that he had been employed by a wealthy Parsee family to teach French and translate contemporary French authors into their tongue, which may have been Gujerati – can Toulet really have known this? In his next Journal entry, dated Colombo, April 20th, he laments his ignorance of foreign languages!

Curnonsky records an instance of Toulet’s wicked wit in a memoire written fifty years after. “ As we were returning to France, as we had anchored in Ceylon and stretched out on deckchairs trying to digest this incendiary Indian cuisine based on curry which is a promise of scurvy, a colossal foreigner who spoke Pidgin (that's to say the gibberish of the Oceanian islands), tapped on the shoulder of Toulet and asked him the way to the lavatory. Toulet. who lived in Mauritius and knew all these cosmopolitan jargons, replied: - You follow the corridor on the right. You arrive in front of a door where you can read this legend: ‘Gentlemen’. But you may enter anyway.”

They arrived in Colombo on April 18th, where they stayed at the Galle Face Hotel, which Toulet described as a typical vast, dark, expensive English hotel. He continues his diatribe on April 22nd, repeating his first decription and adding that the bathrooms lack water, the cellars wine, the sea breeze replaced by mosquitoes, and good breeding by bad cooking. An escape by train to Kandy on the 21st April brought some relief, fresh air, a lake, temples, silence. Kandy is some seventy-five miles from Colombo by rail at an altitude of five hundred metres or sixteen hundred feet above the sea. The high altitude makes the climate congenial. The Queen's Hotel, said Toulet, is so comfortable that it might have for its sign "coolness". Half in banter, he wrote: "I have marked with a cross the alcove of the room you occupied, henceforth illustrious. But what one cannot see, what only the mastery of your pen can render, is the lake in front, shimmering between the drooping, trees and the balustrades; and the shade where Cakya-Mouni meditated; and the flowery walk perfumed with red jasmin, where a black serpent is erect and whistling, until a handsome bonze, dressed in yellow like a beetle, tenderly puts it to one side with his naked foot."

Kandy, Toulet remarked, is like England of fifty years previously, large simple houses with verandas, nothing Victorian about ther style. The people he met at the hotel were old-fashioned gentlemen, completely unlike (Joseph) Chamberlain, which made him reflect on the distance that separated Dickens and Thackeray from Kipling and Rider Haggard!

The stay in Kandy was brief. They were back in Colombo on April 22nd, to embark on the Dupleix for Calcutta. The pair arrived in Pondichery, on the east coast of India, on April 25th – a Pondichery miserable, degraded, teeming, redeemed only by a porcelain blue sky at sunset. 

After Pondicherry, the two travellers made a quick excursion through India by the Coromandel coast to Calcutta, then Benares (Vārānasi), Agra and Delhi by Ahmadabad to Bombay.

They arrived in Calcutta on April 28th. The heat was oppressive – 58oC. Despite that they visited th Botanic Gardens and admired the snakes and the tigers. On the 29th they arrived in Benares at 11.00 p.m. The Indian landscape, what they saw of it at Benares, was "a sky the colour of tin, a kind of metallic dust which eats up the colour of everything, which settles far and wide on a confusion of temples and mosques with rickety steps and domes in ruin, and amongst all that, thousands of emaciated Hindoos bathing or praying. . . two or three dead bodies nearly burned away over a slow fire at the foot of some marble steps." 

Benares smelled of death. There were monkeys in the white marble temples, cows in the golden temples, and all around the white and gold domes in the shape of closed umbrellas.
The heat was so intense that Toulet was prostrated with sunstroke, and when he came too found that he was “deaf as a Pole.” Sailland went so far as to stick his fingers in his ears, to no avail. With Toulet unable to hear, and Sailland unable to speak English, the pair paid over their money to be conducted to the French consulate. Instead of this, their guides brought them to the Ganges and had them strip off and bathe in the sacred but unhealthy water!

On Saturday, May 2nd, the pair visited the Taj Mahal, both during the day and by moonlight. On Sunday they journeyed from Agra to Delhi, where next day they visited the Red Fort and Great Mosque (the Dewan-e-khas and Jama Musjid) before taking the evening train for Bombay.

Nearing Ahmadabad, Toulet, on the advice of Sailland, ordered lunch by telegram. "We were gloriously received," he says, "by people who were waving fans made of feathers. And the eggs were fresh but a little dear, so that we hardly had any money left and we had to live after that on a pot of jam which came from Hué and a bottle of cognac which we had bought at Hanoï. That lasted two days and we were sizzling in a train so hot that even the black leather of the seats and the pig-skin of our valises were crying out for rain; but Curnonsky simply because he was hungry. Whilst I was stirring up his memory by talking to him about marrow patties and Rhône wine, India, with its dry mud and crumbling temples, was flying past the windows. Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he brought his fist down on the hinged table and cried: 'For G..'s sake ! I'm in the habit of eating beefsteak, I am.' "

On Thursday May 7th they finally arrived in Bombay after a train journey of 58 hours. On Sunday they embarked on the Tonkin of the Messageries Maritimes. Some difficulties with their baggage were followed by a visit to the doctor because of concerns about the plague, but at last the intrepid voyagers were on their way home.

Lettres à Madame Bulteau, p. 1209, En vue de Marseille, 25th May 1903.
“When we embarked at Bombay, Sailland and I, we had between us 5fr. 50. Since I had broken a window in the hotel, I was extremely anxious that it would be added to the bill, as perhaps window glass is very expensive in Bombay… As for Kurne, he is well. The idea that he will have to return to work is making him melancholy, which he calls “missing Indochina”. I believe that he especially misses the 18 hours a day that he slept at Hanoï. India was less kind, he had to get up, take trains, pack his baggage, everything to be done in a temperature that a lobster, even after cooking, would have thought excessive.”

What Toulet failed to relate to Madame Bulteau was a further reason for Kurne missing Indochina, a tale that emerged in the Commentaires du Night Cap:

« Vous pouvez même dire, Whynot, que, moyennant le versement d'une dot fabuleuse de cinq cents piastres, vous fûtes pendant cinq lunes l'heureux seigneur et locataire, de Mme Ti Nam, qui passait, non sans raison pour la plus jolie congaï d'Haïphong. »

Indo-China, Part 1, November 1902 - March 1903

In November 1902 Toulet and Curnonsky embarked on a six-month tour of Indochina. A report on the Hanoï exhibition and World Fair¹ was the excuse. Henri Dartiguenave (Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 23, ii, 1929) claimed that “Toulet, with Curnonsky, undertook the trip to Indo-China in connexion with a Parisian newspaper on the occasion of the Exhibition in 1900”. Jacques Dyssord claimed that there was an expectation of riches (wasn’t Montpezat, there since 1894, and working on his own behalf from 1898, already rolling in gold!) or at least a good quality “bénares”.

Notes on the voyage appeared in Le Damier, May 1905 (Aller et retour) and L’Ermitage in March 1906 (Carnets de voyage) Chroniques parisiennes appeared in 1904 in L’Echo du Tonkin. Curnonsky relates some of their adventures in Commentaires du Night Cap, published in Le Journal in 1911, calling  himself “Whynot” and Toulet, “Corzébien”.

¹Organised by Paul Doumer, the Hanoï exhibition was open from November 1902 to January 1903. It proclaimed the great progress made in Indochina in the previous 4 years, since Doumer’s appointment as Governor-General of French Indochina. Upon his arrival the colonies were losing millions of francs each year so Doumer introduced taxes on opium, wine and the salt. He established Indochina as a market for French products and a source of investment by French businessmen. Doumer set about creating the infrastructure appropriate to a French colony in. Indochina, especially in Hanoï, the capital. The Long Bien Bridge linking Hanoï and Haiphong was among large-scale projects built during his term. It was built in 1899-1902 by the architects Daydé & Pillé of Paris, and opened in 1903. Before North Vietnam's independence in 1954, it was called the Paul-Doumer Bridge.

(On 6 May 1932, Paul Doumer was in Paris at the opening of a book fair at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, talking to the author Claude Farrère. Suddenly several shots were fired by Paul Gorguloff, a mentally unstable Russian émigré. Two of the shots hit Doumer, at the base of the skull and in the right armpit. Farrère wrestled with the assassin before the police arrived. Doumer is the only French president to die of a gunshot wound.
Andre Maurois was an eyewitness to the assassination, having come to the book fair to autograph copies of his book, and later described the scene in his autobiography, "Call No Man Happy". As Maurois notes, because the President was assassinated at a meeting of writers, it was decided that writers - Maurois himself among them - should stand guard over his body while he lay in state at the Elysée.)

In Toulet’s notes on the expedition, he refers in the very first paragraphs to a Hayashi kakemono and to the fashion for bonsai trees that hailed from that exasperating Lilliput that was Japan – almost the sole reference to that country despite the fact that he must have visited it. Be that as it may, on November 2nd the pair left Marseilles on board the Ville de La Ciotat of the Messageries Maritimes, whereupon Curnonsky lost no time in getting on familiar terms with both passengers and crew. Apart from some brief notes on the antics of the passengers, Toulet’s first notes were written from Port-Said on November 7^th and then off Aden, remarking again on the passengers, and also on the porpoises and flying-fish. Columbo followed, as much a disappointment as Singapore was later to prove. Toulet’s disapprobation was more for the British colonial architecture than for the countryside, the horror of the Victorian style, gothic terraces and Ionic columns of reinforced concrete. The overwhelming heat, and the overcharging as he saw it at the post office, by the rickshaw drivers, the barmen, the currency changers all left a sour taste.

Although he doesn’t mention Malacca, neither in his correspondence nor in his Journal,  it is likely that Toulet stopped off there. The evidence is in Giraudoux’s novel, Suzanne and the Pacific, in which Toulet features and Curnonsky as his right hand man. Toulet, Giraudoux claims, spent a thousand piastres on lobsters so that he could drop them into the aquarium at Malacca just to see the octopus snap them up in their suckers and return the carapace empty. It sounds a likely anecdote, probably retailed on their return by Curnonsky.

By 23rd November they were off Singapore, comical and ugly, built by the British. (The following September he was dreaming again of Singapore, a Singapore more acceptable, he says, than the burning and glaring horror he experienced with its waters like metal). It seems to have been a brief landfall, because on 24th November he is writing of Saigon and his first impressions on Indochina, a green land of flat rice-paddies, and violet bougainvillea to enliven the shadows.
The pair were now on the Gironde, and not having a cabin, Toulet stayed in the bathroom, leaving the shower running to alleviate the heat. He describes with evident approval the local architecture, visible via the porthole, built of fired brick, and red as girls’ chignons.
After Da Nang (Tourane in French colonial terms), the next entry in the Journal is merely dated 1903. But in 1903 they were in the bay of Ha Long, a landscape so Chinese in character it reminded him of a garden constructed by a giant mandarin, half-submerged in the sea, reminding Toulet of a marine version of Karnak, and just a few hours from Haiphong. 

It may have been there, or more likely in Saigon, that the voyagers spent Christmas. There is no mention of it as such, just a reference to the Asiatic winters spent by the fire reading old copies of the Revue des Deux Mondes, or English adventure stories, far from the “glaring oppressiveness of this port of Cochinchina …and the pewter sky that hangs over the teeming ant-heap of Cholon” – in Toulet’s time an independent town, now a district of Saigon and considered the largest Chinatown in the world by area.

In commenting on the Tonkin landscape, (the name used since 1883 for the French colonial Tonkin protectorate, a constituent territory of French Indochina) Toulet recalls the fields of home, the reapers lying under the shade of a plane trees, and Toulet waiting in ambush behind a hedge to kiss the the harvesters returning from the well - the subject matter of Contrerime XXXI.

A Chinese parade at Haiphong caught his eye, with dancers, children riding miniature horses,  floats, firecrackers, and fakirs with cheeks pierced by enormous needles, for the most part stoical except for one misfortunate who looked as if her had been to the dentist, with a cloth held to his mouth to muffle his cries. The final figure was a toothless crone, her cheeks pierced through and through, waxen in her bloody shroud as if taking part in her own funeral procession.

In February Toulet was in north-east Tonkin, where he visited the Ky-Lua caves, near Lạng Sơn. He does not describe them, only relating with ill-concealed glee that the most serious member of his group split the top of his head on a stalactite.  (The two caves, well illuminated, with Buddhist altars, are the Tam Thanh Cave and the Nhi Thanh Cave.)  He claims to have travelled from Sơn Tây, 35 km west of Hanoï,  to Đồng Đăng by rickshaw, a distance of some 200 kilometres. Perhaps he took a rickshaw only to Hanoï, as the Hanoï - Đồng Đăng rail link was inaugurated on 1900.  Đồng Đăng is within a few kilometres of the Friendship Pass border crossing, one of three main border crossings with China. It was built in the early Ming dynasty with the name of "South Suppressing Pass" or Zhennan Pass (Zhennanguan). Toulet knew it as the China Gate - Porte de Chine. He found the place full of sacks of rice, presented by the Governor of Indochina to the Chinese Marshal Sou, military chief of Guangxi province, a regular payment for keeping Chinese bandits under control and on his side of the frontier.

The scene shows the arrival at the “Porte de Chine” of the military commander of Guangxi, Marshal Su Yuan Chuan [Su Yuanchun] and his official entourage on 16 July 1900. The large main gate, located behind the small outer gatehouse, survives today as a heritage building near today’s Friendship Pass.

Toulet was back in Hanoï for Mardi Gras, (Tuesday February 24th ) as he diverts into a longish narrative of a night spent in an opium den.

Hoan Kiem (Returned Sword) Lake, covering 12 hectares (30 acres), is possibly the most popular place in Hanoï.  There is a small, four-tier pagoda on a small island at the south end – Thap Rua, the Turtle Tower.  One of Hanoï’s most iconic attractions, it was constructed in 1886 to commemorate a local folk hero, Le Loi, who had freed the Vietnamese from Chinese forces back in 1425.
One evening Toulet and Curnonsky, in a schoolboy prank (Toulet was 35, Curnonsky 30!) and out of sheer boredom, decided to paint it. Here is Toulet’s account of the adventure, in one of his Letters to himself, on a postcard  from Tourane (Da Nang) depicting Hanoï lake, and dated 2 April 1903; and repeated in his Journal with just “Hanoï, 1903” as date and location:

TOULET, Hanoï, 1903

To oneself. Dear Mr. Toulet, let me tell you the travails of a pagoda. Formerly a daring scholar had it "adorned" with a cast-iron reduction of Bartholdi's statue of Liberty. Another city councilor, better informed, removed La Liberté (a rather ordinary phenomenon) and replaced it with a Chinese gable. It was then that someone painted the whole a delicate chamois shade (buff, camel, ecru) that you could have admired if you had come with us in Indochina. But, one night, in our boredom, Sailland and I took a boat and a pot of indigo, and painted the unfortunate monument blue.

The city were quite surprised the next day; and, numbering 102,000 inhabitants (plus the floating population), assembled on the edge of the lake. Came a shower: everyone went home. But the indigo took advantage of the moisture to mix with the red layer of buff, and when the populace returned the pagoda had become purple like an amethyst. After night fell the indigo, continuing its unspeakable manoeuvres, reached the lowest yellow layer; after which the pagoda became green and the town Hanoï insane.

The pair were in Manilla in early March. Toulet’s brief Journal entry for February 28^th is labelled “Près Manille”; and his  March 3rd Journal entry states that he had arrived (“me voici à Manille”). Francis Carco mentions, in Memoires d’une autre vie, that Léon Barthou gave him a little diary of Toulet’s in which he had noted brief impressions, including this: “1903, debarked at Manila, a Spanish town with Yankee signs. Extraordinary fuss with the customs. Promenade round the “Luneta” and the sea beneath a fading violet sky.”
The next entry in his Journal is labelled “Near Hong-Kong,  March 9^th”, in which Toulet recounts his visit to the Philippines, and wonders what on earth Sailland and himself were doing there. In this note he refers to being there on a Sunday, which was most probably March 1^st,  and heading back to Hong-Kong on the Hoïhao – a boat he describes as suspect, having been refloated after sinking in China. But he doesn’t state in this entry that he was on the Hoïhao  - could he have been on the Rosetta Maru ? (See March 11^th entry). 
Of Hong-Kong he had little to say, taking up most of the entry with an anecdote about a Japanese colonel, and prefacing his tale with “On reproche aux Japonais de ne point nous aimer”; which may indicate that he had already visited Japan.

In the 11th March entry in his Journal, aboard the San-Cheun off Canton (Guangzhou), Toulet lists the various departures made since leaving Hanoï; the lack of organisation is evident - at Haïphong, there were no rooms available; the pair spent four hours in a sampan, under the influence of opium, searching for their boat which they were unable to recognise. Manilla, detained by customs, and dragging themselves from pillar to post looking for a hotel. Arrival at Hong-Kong to find the hotels full and obliged to sleep on board the Rosetta Maru, whose purser would not accept the local currency. Arrival at Canton – once again the hotels were full up,  the pair were obliged to sleep in an ambulance. They left Canton with the intention of going to Macao but the boat was fully booked so they ended up back in Hong-Kong! 

(Not all of their experiences in Canton were disorganised. Fifty years later, Curnonsky reminisced: “…the great Chinese Ignace Bou, who we knew from Canton, and who spoke very pure French, was able to tell me at the end of an excellent dinner, aboard a flowery boat…: Your friend Toulet has a very bad temper, but so even! ... As we had proclaimed, Toulet and I, our enthusiasm for Chinese cuisine, justified by an admirable swallows nest soup with and a delicious lacquered duckling: Yes! said Ignace Bou, I raise this glass of champagne in a toast to the only two peoples who have created the two most beautiful things in the world, cuisine and etiquette!”)

It would seem therefore that Toulet was in Japan either between 11^th and 21^st March; or between March 3^rd and March 9^th, which seems too brief a timescale, unless he sailed directly from the Philippines. But that is unlikely as he states in a letter to Mme Bulteau dated 28 March that he sailed from Manilla to China, with no mention of Japan. (The Rosetta Maru was a Japanese boat, of the Toyo Kaisen Kabushiki Kaisha, which certainly had routine sailings between Japan and Hong Kong.)

In his Letters to Himself, dated Hoïhao, 22 March 1903,  when off the island of Haïnan, he wrote on a post-card of the Bronze Horse Temple Nagasaki, so he must have been there by then. He starts off with “Que n’ai-je, très honoré monsieur, ce cheval de bronze à ma portée.” He had left Quantchéou-Wan (now Guangzhouwan), a territory on the Luichow Peninsula in southern Canton (Guangdong) province the previous day, finding the French military installations praisworthy while wondering if there were more dug-outs than inhabitants  – were it not for “the multitude of fishing boats where the innumerable Chinese live out a fishy existence.” Japan was on his mind even before he set sail from France. Travelling by train among the vineyards of Guienne, a siren from the port brought to mind a kakemono in the Hayashi sale* where “perched on a rock, a species of vulture with a blue plumage on his belly, hungry watcher of the sea, seemed with his golden eye to  weep that he too could not eat nor love his fill. But the ladies preferred to buy  these tortuous little trees, Dodone or Libane, of that exasperating Lilliput that is Japan….”

*Hayashi, Tadamasa. Objets d'art du Japon et de la Chine; peintures, livres. Don't la vente aura lieu du lundi 27 janvier au samedi ler février 1902 inclus, dans les galeries de MM. Durand-Ruel. 1902.

His dissatisfaction is also expressed in this ironic Letter, dated Canton, March 1903:

“How right you were, unlike me, my dear friend, of not going to Japan. Your systematic mind, the depth of which is not equalled, if I dare to write thus, but by the very breadth that it presents, would have been blunted, in a way, by the restless frivolity of this edgy race that is dying to imitate Europe before understanding it ...”.

In Comme une fantaisie, published in 1918, Toulet has M. l'Églantin, the sentimental professor of geography, refers to some quaint Japanese habits :

“Japan is a rainy country, where you can admire a mountain like a cocked hat (Fujiyama). The inhabitants are brave, and they like the patent leather boots that usually, going barefoot, they carry at the end of a stick. An American named Loefcadio who, during his lifetime, taught English at a Pomeranian elementary school, has told about them a thousand cheeky stories taken for the most part from the Jesuits of the 18^th century. Thus he claims that the women bathe without any clothes, in front of their door, in blue-flowered porcelain bowls. But for a long time they have, thanks to the Protestant missions, turned to modesty, without, however, becoming lascivious; which is a hateful contradiction.”

LE JAPON

La Jap’, qui raffole, dit-on,

De chaussure vernie,
Les porte – chacun sa manie –

Au bout de son bâton.

Ainsi l’éclat les en décore

Sans blesser leurs pieds nus.

Aimsi, sans doute, eût fait Vénus :

J’en sais d’autres encore….

Lafcadio Hearne wrote a number of books about Japan from 1894 up to 1904, the year of his death. They garnered great popularity and were much translated. It is certain Toulet came across them before he set out. About Hearn he seems to have been somewhat ambivalent, as Contrerime XLIX (first published in 1910 in La Grande Revue, under the title “Le Foujiyama”) and its earlier variant express.

J'ai beau trouver bien sympathique

       Feu Loufoquadio,

Ses Japs en sucre candiot,

       Son Bouddha de boutique ;

J'aime mieux le subtil schéma,

       Sur l'hiver d' un ciel morne,

De ton aérien bicorne,

       Noble Foujiyama,

Et tes cèdres noirs, et la source

       Du temple délaissé,

Qui pleurait comme un coeur blessé,

       Qui pleurait sans ressource.

In 1913, the early variant was published in Vers et Prose, octobre-decembre. In it these lines occur:

Je n’aime pas – je m’en explique –

Ce Japon idiot

Qu’a peint  feu Loufcadio

Du sein de l’Amerique.

The last line is quite untrue, as Hearn moved to Japan in 1890, and remained there for the rest of his life, married the daughter of a Samurai family, had four children with her, and wrote all his Japanese books there. He may have become more popular in France due to his enthusiasm for French authors, translating into English Gérard de Nerval, Anatole France, and most remarkably Pierre Loti, who was casually racist about the Japanese in some of his writings. One wonders if Toulet picked up on that, as not only does he not chronicle his Japanese visit, he is less than flattering about the Japanese he encounters elsewhere on his trip.

Japan bookends the Indo-China section of Toulet’s Journal. He began with the “exasperating Lilliput”, and concluded, in October 1910, with a Loti-like memory of Tokyo:  “One evening while in Japan, the moths were banging against the coloured paper lantern. It was that of my three neighbours, one of whom was always dressed in blue and and another nude. But the third, in pink, was watching  through the bars of her window the moon play in the bay of Shinagawa.”

The 22 March note written aboard the Hoïhao on the Japanese postcard was followed by another where he views the town of Hoïhao (Haikou) on the northern shore of Hainan while aboard the eponymous steamer.

They sailed west, at Pakhoï (now Beihai), sweaty and smelly,  on March 23^rd, to reach Haïphong on March 26^th, when they left by the night ferry for Tourane, arriving on the 28^th. He left for Hué  on Sunday, March 29th by the steam boat Thuan-an.

In the letter to Mme Bulteau dated 28^th March, within view of Haïphong, Toulet says: « Tous ces paquebots, où je passe mes jours, et hélas, mes nuits, depuis cinq semaines, sont fort abominables… Il y a eu un mois et demi à Hanoï de pluie, de brouillard et de moisissure qui aurait rendu un officier anglais neurasthénique. Vous jugez si j’y ai échappé ; et malgré un beau feu de bois qui brûlait sans cesse à côté de mon lit, j’ai passé là quelques-unes des plus horribles heures de ma vie.»

At six a.m. on March 31^st  Toulet took a steam sampan from Hué to tour various sites, including the tombs of Gia Long – where he was received by an elderly grand-daughter of the Emperor -  and Tự Đức . 

The tomb of Gia Long (officially Thien Tho Tomb) is a royal tomb of the Nguyễn Dynasty which is located in the Hương Thọ commune of Hương Trà district, some 20 kilometres south of the city of Huế. Gia Long ( 1762 –1820), was the first Emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam. Unifying what is now modern Vietnam in 1802, he founded the Nguyễn dynasty, the last of the Vietnamese dynasties. The tomb of Tự Đức, officially Khiêm Tomb,  is located in Huế, Vietnam. It was built for the Nguyễn Emperor Tự Đức and took three years to build from 1864–1867. It is divided into a Temple Area and a Tomb Area.

Contrerime LXVI

Sur l'océan couleur de fer
      Pleurait un choeur immense
Et ces longs cris dont la démence
      Semble percer l'enfer.

Et puis la mort, et le silence
      Montant comme un mur noir.
... Parfois au loin se laissait voir
      Un feu qui se balance.


Translation

On the ocean’s steely swell
      an immense chorus wailed
and the frenzied cries exhaled
      seem to transfix hell.

And then death, and the deathly pall
      building like a black wall.
... meantime a swaying light
      shone afar in the night.

Notes: (Published in Les Marges, december 1912) : this is about the Titanic, that went down in April 15, 1912. The “feu qui se balance" probably refers to the Californian, the nearest ship to the Titanic, that did not at first hear the alarm (it was the Carpathia that arrived sooner).