Toulet in Béarn

At the end of 1889 Paul-Jean was back in Béarn. He had planned his return for some time, having written to Jane in August of that year, asking her if she really intended to come home from Mauritius, and with Papa too. He departed Algiers on the 19^th of November, 1889, spending three days in Marseille before getting home. His father had in fact just brought Jane back. Jane settled down in la Rafette, chez Aristide Chaline, who had married Amélie, Paul-Jean’s aunt, and who had raised her until her departure for Mauritius eight years previously. Toulet père only stayed a few weeks in France, with his relations, returning to Mauritius in early January 1890. Paul-Jean met them at times at Carresse, or at Pau, or at la Rafette,

He was to stay nine years in Béarn. Apart from brief trips to Spain and Paris, Navarre was to be his constant playground.

J’ai trouvé mon Béarn le même,

Le morne Béarn des jours froids,

Et trouvé tous ceux que j’aime

Les mêmes qu’autrefois.

J’écoute à travers l’air sonore

Croasser les corbeaux, leur cris

Dans mon cœur éveillent encore

Les battements de jadis.

Je revois le vieux mur d’où elle

Que j’aimais, souvent, m’a parlé

Et rien ne me manque, rien qu’elle,

Et l’amour, comme elle envolé.

(Vers inédits, date Carresse 1889.)

In the beginning he didn’t seem to be very serious about becoming a man of letters, but he read much, nourishing and maturing his ideas. Now effectively left to his own devices, Paul-Jean decided to abandon his studies entirely and to live the high life. His port d'attache was officially Le Haget at Carresse, that he had inherited from his mother. The painter Labrouche has left us a description.

« Une tranquille maison d’autrefois, enfouie dans la verdure. Un vieux mur, une grille en fer, la séparent du chemin qui tourne à cet endroit et descend vers le gave. Devant le perron, un très joli jardin très feuillu, plein d’arbres, des ormeaux, des magnolias. Un grand silence. » 

But he was more frequently to be found at Pau, at the Café Champagne (now the Brasserie Royale) or the Petit Casino in the Place Royal. His favourite was the Champagne, where one could make out beyond the statue of the Vert-Galant, (Henri IV) the picturesque scenery of the Pyrenees.  He could be found there almost every day, in late afternoon, a port or an armagnac before him, flashing his ironic wit at his friends and acquaintances, many of whom he had known since childhood – Henri Dartiguenave, Léopold Bauby, or Henry de Monpezat, idle son of the mayor, whom he would later stake for a business venture in the Far East. He became a night-owl, never rising before 3 p.m., arriving at the café at 4 p.m., and dining at the Casino, where he spent the night dancing, gaming and drinking. He only went to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning. Then he started over next day, establishing over a period of nine years a pattern that he took with him to Paris. In the afternoon he explored the environs, Salies-de-Béarn, Biarritz, Bayonne, Saint-Jean-de-Luz - the towns most frequently mentioned in his notebooks. Often he would go surprise his sister at la Rafette, at Saint-Loubès.

He was belligerent in the fashion of the time. Ichas mentions that Paul-Jean duelled with Émile Thore on the steps of the Loustau dwelling in 1896, when he was 28. Jean Thore witnessed the duel.  It is said that at the first sight of blood the young man “manqua de défaillir”. (In 1889 already, Paul-Jean had provoked a duel with Alfred Coste (Chapter on Mauritius). The bone of contention was a girl. His friend Henry de Monpezat was another machismo of privilege. Dyssord relates an imbroglio with some army officers. Having forbidden a local regiment, whose barracks were near, the use of a private road, he noticed one day that the officers were paying no attention to his ban. Montpezat, furious, seized the regimental standard and broke his flagpole across his knee. Four lieutenants provoke him to a duel, there was a fight and two of them were put out of action. There was a scandal, and popular thought consigned to obloquy the hothead and his entourage. (See Note of Monpezat for more on his propensity for duelling).

Echoes of Toulet’s leisure activities are later to be found in his verse – the Foires Saint-Martin, promenades in the Carresse woods, the sleepy banks of the Saleys, a walk beneath the arcades of Bayonne to the detriment of both his heart and his purse, Spanish chocolate chez Guillot, a ride in a calèche, Jurançon.

The contrerimes XXXI, XXXII, XXXIV, XXXV, XLI are evidence of these excursions, although he published nothing between 1889 and 1898. In January1890 he visited Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Guéthary, where he ended his days:

“A Guéthary, la mer par une fenêtre, un carré bleu tendre et des oiseaux qui passent, continuellement dans le même sens.”

When he wasn’t taking trips or meeting his pals in the Casino, he might go for a promenade with his petites amies “sur les routes de son pays” in the Carresse woods or on the banks of the Saleys.

XXX                                                                                                                la cigale.

Quand nous fûmes hors des chemins

     Où la poussière est rose,

Aline, qui riait sans cause

     En me touchant les mains ; -

L' écho du bois riait. La terre

     Sonna creux au talon.

Aline se tut : le vallon

     Était plein de mystère...

Mais toi, sans lymphe ni sommeil,

     Cigale en haut posée,

Tu jetais, ivre de rosée,

     Ton cri triste et vermeil.

Some evenings he brought them to the carousel at the Saint-Martin fair:

XXXII                                                                                                 Chevaux de bois.

À Pau, les foires saint-Martin,

     C' est à la Haute Plante.

Des poulains, crinière volante,

     Virent dans le crottin.

Là-bas, c' est une autre entreprise.

     Les chevaux sont en bois,

L' orgue enrhumé comme un hautbois,

     Zo' sur un bai cerise.

Le soir tombe. Elle dit : " merci,

     " pour la bonne journée !

" mais j' ai la tête bien tournée... "

     -ah, Zo' : la jambe aussi.

 or to drink a glass of jurançon “couleur de maïs” chez M. Lesquerré, the innkeeper.

XXXIV

Ce fut par un soir de l'automne

     A sa dernière fleur

Que l'on nous prit pour Mgr

     L'Evêque de Bayonne,

Sur la route de Jurançon.

     J'étais en poste, avecque

Faustine, et l'émoi d'être évêque

     Lui sécha sa chanson.

Cependant cloches, patenôtres,

     Volaient autour de nous.

Tout un peuple était à genoux :

     Nous mêlions les nôtres,

Ô Vénus, et ton char doré,

     Glissant parmi la nue,

Nous annonçait la bienvenue

     Chez Monsieur Lesquerré.

XXXV

Un Jurançon 93

     Aux couleurs du maïs,

Et ma mie, et l'air du pays :

     Que mon coeur était aise.

Ah, les vignes de Jurançon,

     Se sont-elles fanées,

Comme ont fait mes belles années,

     Et mon bel échanson ?

Dessous les tonnelles fleuries

     Ne reviendrez-vous point

A l'heure où Pau blanchit au loin

     Par-delà les prairies ?

Other times he would go as far as Bayonne, where, chez Guillot, under the arcades, he had the happy band share scented chocolate.

XLI

-" Bayonne ! Un pas sous les arceaux,

     que faut-il davantage

pour y mettre son héritage

     ou son coeur en morceaux ?

Où sont-ils, tout remplis d' alarmes,

     vos yeux dans la noirceur,

et votre insupportable soeur,

     hélas ; et puis vos larmes ? "

tel s' enivrait, à son phébus,

     d' un chocolat d' Espagne,

chez Guillot, le feutre en campagne,

     Monsieur Bordaguibus.

As for literature, there was no question of it. Walzer remarks that during this period he only wrote 18 lines in his journal and composed about 15 pieces that are found in his Vers Inédits.

But he read prodigiously, became familiar with Greek, quoted by heart great Latin speeches, and read fluently in English, Spanish, Italian.

And much was inspired: the contrerimes included in the text, and those appended.

The character Jean-Prudence Michon-de-Cérizolles in La Jeune Fille Verte talks not just of love, but of baccarat, tyrant of men and gods. Paul-Jean must have sacrificed more than a little to his “caprice” if we are to believe these words a croupier said to him: “Ah! Monsieur, tant que vous vous obstinerez à prendre le baccara pour un jeu de hasard, vous êtes un homme perdu…”  “Ah! Monsieur, as long as you continue to think baccarat is a game of chance, you are a lost man.”

While in Les Tendre Ménages, Antoine de Mariolles Sainte-Mary claims that the auberges of the Pyrennées, be it in the mountains or by the sea, it suffices to satisfy the three instincts of drinking, gambling and loving that are the triple nobility of man, putting him so far above the beasts.

Paul-Jean would abscond as often as he could, often under some false pretext, to Salies-de-Béarn, or to Pau, where he would enjoy the company of friends, many of whom he had known since childhood – Henri Dartiguenave, Léopold Bauby, or Henry de Monpezat. There were others too – d’Astis, John de Bienville Grant, 9th Baron de Longueuil,  Antoine Riquoir, Henri de Montebello.

Dartiguenave recalled: “When he arrived from Carresse, it was with the declared intention of staying twenty-four hours at Pau, but he was still there two weeks later. He never brought any baggage, no case or overnight bag.  As he prolonged his stay, he would call at the Chemiserie Blanc in rue Saint-Louis to buy a shirt, a collar or socks.  He did that every two or three days. As he did the same in the bookshops (especially Ribaud and Lafon); he had an ample supply of books and magazines, a corner of his room became nothing but a pile of linen and papers.”

Bauby recalled: “How often have I gone to pull him out of bed at three in the afternoon. I always found him under the covers, the curtains always drawn, and the room in perfect disarray with such a pile of books that we used to wonder what he could do with them, because, paradoxically, we never thought, any of us, that Toulet did any work, and we were astonished to hear of the publication of Monsieur de Paur in 1898.”

He was not the only one to express disbelief. While waiting for the sale of Le Haget and settle the details of his move to Paris, Toulet rented a room in Pau from 1897, while perhaps M du Paur was ripening. Jean de Longueil, while visiting Mme de la Salette, a neighbour of Toulet at Carresse, asked if she had read his book. “What book,” she asked. “PJ Toulet has written a book?”

“Well, yes.”

“Ah, my dear friend, he is my neighbour, and that is not possible. Had he written a book, I would know about it.”

When he returned to Carresse he left everything behind in his hotel, solely occupied with the many gold louis left at the Casino. The proprietor might send after him to Carresse, if he remembered. As he returned home the porters hurried through the lanes that led from the Place to the Gare. Beret pulled down over his eyes, an eight-day beard, stinking of garlic and white wine, the wanderer returned home. His friends meanwhile might have set out for Jurançon, Chez Lesquerré, having waited in vain for him at the Café Champagne.

He had his choice of hotels at which to stay- le Gassion, Hôtel du Parc, Hôtel du France, Hôtel Beauséjour, or the Hôtel de la Paix.  Later, when he decided to stay in the city, he took a room in the rue Sully. He also lived at 4, rue Bordenave d’Abère; then from 1897 to 1898 he lived at 5 rue Montpensier. By this time he had gambled away the greater part of his fortune, and it was not long before he made the move to Paris.

At this epoch people from Béarn identified themselves as Béarnais first, then French. In the great houses and private palaces, it wasn’t long since Béarnais was the language of formal discourse. Servants were usually addressed in this tongue. Paul-Jean spoke it, especially when in amorous pursuit of the shop-girls and laundresses who constituted his usual prey, and who were themselves more at home in Béarnais than in French. In a letter to himself  dated 25 May 1903 he reminisces about an evening in a little apartment in rue Sully when he was 22  and his companion 18, and the warm breath of the autumn entered through the blinds together with “la rumeur des petites gens, en bas, qui causaient sur le pas des boutiques, en béarnais.”

XXXVIII

Quel pas sur le pavé boueux

     Sonne à travers la brume ?

Deux boutiquiers, crachant le rhume,

     S'en retournent chez eux.

- " C'est ce cocu de Lagnabère.

          - Oui, Faustine.

                                - Ah, mon Dieu,

     En çà de Cogomble, quel feu !

-          Oui, c'est le réverbère.

- Comme c'est gai, le mauvais temps...

     Et recevoir des gifles.

- Oui, Faustine. "

                           A présent, tu siffles

      L'air d'Amour et Printemps.  

Querelles, pleurs tendres à boire -

     Et toi qu'en tes détours

J'écoute, ô vent, contre les tours

     Meurtrir ta plume noire.

Hostelleries were not yet common. But one could find some auberges or tables d’hôte such as La Belle Hôtesse at Orthez; the Panier Fleuri at Bayonne, the Hôtel Loustalot and the Cor d’Henric at Oloron. But nothing compared to the Lesquerré, whose kitchen glowed with copper pots, its spit was polished like a Toledo blade, under the spread of the wide mantel, over a fire of oak logs, would not have displeased the Abbé Jérôme Coignard in La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque.

Dressed in a beret, the flat horn handle of a makila in his grasp, he would set out for Salies-de-Béarn, a stifling spa popular at the time, and with the advantage of being only six kilometres from Carresse. It was at Salies, Dyssord relates, that Toulet was annoyed by a verbose commercial traveller, who asked him if it were true that his father was in Mauritius. “Indeed”, said Toulet. “And what is he doing there?”, continued the salesman. Toulet took out his pocket watch, consulted it, and replied, “He’s dining.” (Toulet recounts the same incident in one of his letters to himself.)

Dyssord also tells an anecdote about a confrontation between Paul-Jean and a sandal maker who threatened him with a knife for seducing his daughter; the story goes that Paul-Jean so disarmed him with an off-colour joke that he accepted several drinks from him and ended by offering him his wife, and when Paul-Jean seemed reluctant, he launched into a panegyric on his better half, claiming that she was a “goer” (franche du collier) unlike any other.

In a letter to himself, dated March 3^rd, 1903, Manila, he remembers the occasion when he came to watch a bullfight but instead he lost ten gold louis at the card table - “manille aux enchères” – money that his wily opponents treated as fleeting as snowflakes in a child’s fist. He writes of the loss and his excessive bad humour – anguished cries, and even more threatening silences, that made of him “one of the least tolerable players”. The Petit Casino of Pau remembered only a player of excellent temperament, imperturbable and disdainful of his bad luck.

He liked the chocolate of chez Guillot, scented, in Spanish style, under the arcades of melancholy Bayonne, or outside the ramparts, some Basque cottages, and the Café Farnier. Then there were random encounters - at Saint-Jean-de-Luz he met a Spaniard who spoke disrespectfully of St Thomas Aquinas. A bather distracted him at dusk as she skinny-dipped from a beach frequented by fishwives.

On the 24^th March 1891, Toulet left Saint-Loubès for Bordeaux-Bastide, and he was in Madrid on the 25^th, passing through San Sebastian, Vitoria, Burgos and Avila, each of them garnering a comment. The following day, Holy Thursday, he was in Seville, where he witnessed the Holy Week processions. He scribbled in his notebook this poem about the Madonna. 

O Madone à la lourde traîne

Délice et décor de Séville

Qu’aux jours de la Sainte Semaine

On promène à travers la ville,

Pitoyable dame aux sept glaives,

Par le doux Jésus, je vous prie,

Exaucez mon rêve (un rêve)

Et faites, ô Vierge Marie,

Qu’un cœur pour moi seul fleurisse

Castillan, français ou mauresque

Mais qui n’oublie ou trahisse

Jamais, Vierge sainte – ou presque.

An ultimate reservation worthy of Saint Augustine himself!

He waxes most lyrical about the Alcazar, even if it was, he says, a great confection. However, he continues, it is the product of a very particular artistic formula which values voluptuousness in the place of grandeur, and there are corners that belong to paradise, if not to heaven. Arcade follows arcade, the sun shines through and there are delicious blue and white arabesques. And in the Alcazar gardens, a golden hour spent sitting on the grass under the orange trees, backs to the ramparts, and nightingales singing overhead.

He left Seville on Easter Monday, and was back in Madrid on Tuesday when he re-visited  the Prado. Wednesday April 1^st was spent at the Escorial, which he found deserted, vast, quiet, boring. The Panthéon redeemed it somewhat, grand and macabre and rich with its royal tombs and long, white row of children’s coffins.

He was back in Salies on April 3^rd after spending a day at Biarritz as he passed through.

“After Andalusia, it is old Castille, and La Mancha where Don Quixote has left so many windmills.” For the moment it was Seville that left the most lively souvenir, and later he started one of his poems with these lines:

Comme un papillon du Brésil,

Bleue et noire, ô Séville…

Pour un barbier la belle ville

Et pour moi quel exil !

A verse not found in his collected works. His Journal has more to say on the charms of the flamenco and malagueña, the dancers’ costumes, and drinking manzanilla. What impressed him most were his evenings in the Alcazar, its murmuring fountains and the song of the nightingales.

XLII

À l' Alcazar neuf, où don Jayme

     Gratte un air maugrabin,

Carmen dansant dans son lubin :

     Ce n' est pas ce que j' aime.

Mais, à Triana, la liqueur

     D' une grappe1 où l' aurore

Laissa des pleurs si froids encore

     Qu' ils m' ont glacé le coeur.

The return to Béarn served only to emphasise the solitude of Carresse. To add to his loneliness, his grandfather Pierre died on May 8^th. Carresse was too quiet, too tranquil – too much for a 24-year-old who had lived the high life in Mauritius and Algiers. In September 1891 he wrote in his journal: “De retour à la maison si triste et solitaire déjà je maudis la campagne et le pesant silence de la nuit qui m’oppresse à peine troublé par la pluie monotone. Que ne puis-je encore entendre les clameurs citadines, le tintement des hautes horloges et le bruit aussi des fiacres ébranlant le pavé !

Il me semble qu’un lourd couvercle s’est refermé sur moi, et que je suis seul, implacablement. J’ai trouvé des lettres amies mais on dirait qu’elles ont été ecrites il y a cent ans. Ne suis-je pas un fantôme égaré parmi des lieux qu’il croit reconnaître ; et tous ceux que j’aime, morts ?

Ô choses, êtes-vous hostiles ? Écrasez-moi si je ne puis vous aimer.

But Pau remained his base and while Joe Guillemin was working through his fortune, Toulet was trying to keep up. He liked Pau because, as he wrote to Tristan Derème in April 1913, from La Rafette, “les horizons en sont tels qu’on voit bien que le Bon Dieu s’en est mêlé Soi-même, au lieu de les faire faire par ses domestiques, comme la Campine, Zanzibar, l’île de Haïnan et quelques autres lieux où je fus sans doute que pour avoir la joie de rentrer en France.”

But what he liked most about Pau was that the girls were compliant, complaisant, accommodating, easy: “C’est que les filles y ont de la politesse et de la vassalité.”

Toulet did not scorn the professionals either. He confided to Francis Jammes his feelings about them:

“C’est curieux, on tient pour des oies toutes ces filles de Pau. Quant à moi, je leur trouve un cru délicieux; un cru qu’il faut savoir dégager.”

“It’s odd, people think of all these Pau girls as so many geese. For my part, I find them a delicious vintage; a vintage that one has to know how to bring out.”

He got to know Jammes during this period, and formed a lasting friendship with him. There was only a year between them – Jammes was born in Tournay in 1868. In the foreword to La Jeune Fille Verte he mentions “this bucolic poet that Béarn is so proud to have given to France.”  He showed some early verse to Jammes, who suggested that they were not ready for publication -  a sentiment that was echoed by Louis de la Salle in Paris. As Toulet admired both of these poets, he had confidence in their criticism. He concentrated on his work in prose, and not until he had discovered the form of the Contrerimes did he begin to write and publish rare examples of his verse.

His friendship with Jammes did not prevent him from playing tricks on him. On one occasion when both were seated on the terrace of the Café Champagne, Paul-Jean called Charlie, the porter, and offered him a hundred sous to bring over a donkey that was tethered across from them at the Hôtel de France. Charlie duly obliged, and when the donkey was before them Toulet turned to Jammes and said, “My dear poet, since you know how to talk to donkeys, say something to him.” Jammes got up and stroked the donkey’s nose. The donkey baulked and tried to bite Jammes’ hand, to the great amusement of Toulet.

Jammes has left his own reminiscences of Toulet, the “young, honey-coloured god”:

“Toulet maigre et long est assis, les pieds dans des sandales blanches, et les mains jointes enserrant son genou droit. Il est tellement replié sur lui-même qu’il a l’air bossu et que son estomac s’appuie sur le genou que j’ai dit…Ses gros yeux bleus de jeune fille vous fixent de sous l’étroit béret basque rabattu sur le front. La lèvre, d’une minceur extrême, se crispe. Il sourit, m’invite à m’asseoir devant son absinthe.  Il sort du lit. Il est cinq heures après midi. C’est être, pour lui, matinal.

Il est gentil. Il me parle de mes vers. In n’en écrit pas, ou, du moins, il ne les produit pas encore. Nous avons quelque vingt-six ans chacun.”

In July1892, he made a brief trip to Paris where his school pal Léon Barthou, (brother of the future minister Louis Barthou, assassinated in Marseilles in 1934) presented him to Charles Maurras and Toulouse-Lautrec in his Montmartre studio, of whom he wrote, then or later, « Toulouse-Lautrec est contrefait, trop court de jambes et s’exprime avec haine, entrecoupant son discours d’une espèce de « hein ? » plaintif et sauvage. »

In 1895 his father wrote to him, offering him a  position managing a tea plantation. Toulet wrote to Jane about this, saying that his father had argued strongly for his taking the job, and that he could not refuse, expecting to travel towards the end of the year; but he remarks, tellingly, that to say that he was excited by the prospect of knowing all there was to know about tea production would be an exaggeration. Needless to say, he never returned to Mauritius. Gaston died on 16 March 1922, at his son Guy’s house at Mon-Loisir-Rouillard.  Paul-Jean later accused him of ruining him - something he was well able to do of his own accord.

 « Je ne sais trop de quoi il mourut… Mon enfance le connut peu, mon adolescence à peine d’avantage. Il était constamment hors de chez lui, occupé d’agriculture, de politique, d’affaire, de mille choses inutiles et coûteuses. »

On the 30 October 1897 Toulet settled in Paris. He was now 30. Having used up the bulk of his inheritance he thought that literature might make up the loss, and decided to write adventures or thrillers for money. But of course he is not cut out for this and fails miserably.

« Je regretterai toute ma vie les terres de famille qu’il m’a fallu vendre. Il y avait des bouquets d’arbres et des familles de serviteurs qui nous appartenaient depuis des siècles. On ne s’en détache pas sans un peu de mélancolie. »

When he arrived he almost immediately met Maurice Sailland, Curnonsky or Curne, who became later the “prince of gourmets.” They became inseparable over the years, and someone remarked they were like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They were entirely the opposite. Toulet was long and lean as Curnonsky was short and round. As much as Toulet had a bad character, complaining incessantly about everybody and everything, Curne was indefatigably good-humoured; but both of them were epicuriens, loving above all “les belles filles, la bonne chère, et le bon vin”.

XXXI

Tandis qu' à l' argile au flanc vert,

     Dessus ton front haussée,

Perlait le pleur d' une eau glacée,

     Les dailleurs, à couvert :

" Enfant, riait leur voix lointaine,

     Voilà temps que tu bois.

Si Monsieur Paul est dans le bois,

     Avise à la fontaine.

" Mais avise aussi de briser

     Ta cruche en tournant vite.

Ah, que dirait ta mère. Évite

     Son bras. Prends le baiser. "

... Le temps était couleur de pêche.

     Sur le Saleys qui dort

Un oiseau d' émeraude et d' or

     Fila comme une flèche.

XXXIII

l' ingénue.

D' une amitié passionnée

     Vous me parlez encor,

Azur, aérien décor,

     Montagne pyrénée,

Où me trompa si tendrement

     Cette ardente ingénue

Qui mentait, fût-ce toute nue,

     Sans rougir seulement.

Au lieu que toi, sublime enceinte,

     Tu es couleur du temps :

Neige en mars ; roses du printemps.

     Août, sombre hyacinthe.

XXXVII

De tout ce gala de province

     Où l'on donnait Manon,

Je ne revois plus rien sinon

     Ta forme étrange, et mince ;

Et lorsqu'à ce duo troublant

     Tes yeux me firent signe,

Frissonner le frimas d'un cygne

     Sur ton bel habit blanc ;

Sinon ton frère sur le siège

     Du fiacre vingt-et-huit

Où tu avais l'air, dans la nuit

     D'une image de neige.

XL

L'immortelle, et l'oeillet de mer

     Qui pousse dans le sable,

La pervenche trop périssable,

     Ou ce fenouil amer

Qui craquait sous la dent des chèvres

     Ne vous en souvient-il,

Ni de la brise au sel subtil

     Qui nous brûlait aux lèvres ?

 

 

 

XI

C' était longtemps avant la guerre.

Sur la banquette en moleskine

Du sombre corridor,

Aux flonflons d' Offenbach s' endort

Une blanche Arlequine.

... Zo' qui saute entre deux  MMrs,

Nul falzar ne dérobe

Le double trésor sous sa robe

Qu' ont mûri d' autres cieux.

On soupe... on sort... Bauby pérore...

Dans ton regard couvert,

Faustine, rit un matin vert...

... Amour, divine aurore.

LVIII

C' était sur un chemin crayeux

     Trois châtes de Provence

Qui s' en allaient d' un pas qui danse

     Le soleil dans les yeux.

Une enseigne, au bord de la route,

     -Azur et jaune d' oeuf, -

Annonçait : vin de Chateauneuf,

     Tonnelles, casse-croute.

Et, tandis que les suit trois fois

     Leur ombre violette,

Noir pastou, sous la gloriette,

     Toi, tu t' en fous : tu bois...

C' était trois châtes de Provence,

     Des oliviers poudreux,

Et le mistral brûlant aux yeux

     Dans un azur immense.

NOTES:

Henri de LABORDE DE MONPEZAT (1868-1929)

In the Dépêche du Midi of 16 October1966, Mme Claire Verne, niece-in-law of Henri de Laborde de Monpezat’s first wife, said of him : « C'était un homme extraordinaire. Quelqu'un genre Léon Daudet. Il y avait en lui du pamphlétaire, du tribun, de l'orateur, avec un rien de condottiere. Il savait démolir quelqu'un d'un coup de patte. Il se battait fréquemment en duel. » (My italics).  

In 1894, aged 26,  after some years of an existence devoted to love and gambling, Montpezat decided to buy a position; Toulet generously provided him with the means. He lent him some money and Monpezat set out for a life of adventure in Indochina, at first joining the civil service in AnnamTonkin in April of that year. He resigned in Novembre 1897, thinking that he hadn’t come so far, to such an exotic location, full of attractions and mysteries, rich with promise and possibilies, to become a mere pen-pusher. He hunted and trapped, cleared land, farmed and raised horses. He also invested in coal-mining. By the time of his death, in 1929, Monpezat was a wealthy man. His landholdings alone, paddy fields and coffee plantations, amounted to some15,000 hectares. He built a vast mansion on Boulevard Carnot, Hanoï.

Having become a delegate of Annam-Tonkin, Monpezat became accustomed to regular trips to France. In Paris, Henri de Monpezat rediscovered Paul-Jean Toulet, almost famous already, who introduced him to the world of writers and artists. Daudet in his memoirs (Salons et journaux (Paris 1920) speaks of Montpezat immersed in his colonial considerations ... and of Toulet filled with glimpses and acid axioms, like La Rochefoucauld.

In 1914 Monpezat was very tempted by a candidacy in some French metropolitan area, in Béarn for example, but finally decided to present himself in Cochin China which had a representation in the Chamber of Deputies, like some old colonies such as Reunion, Senegal, Algeria, etc. His adversary was Ernest Outrey, the battle bitter and dirty. Outrey won by 1,107 votes to 984. The very next day  the opponents met on the field, swords drawn. Monpezat, this time, was the victor: Outrey was wounded on the arm and stomach. However, in September 1918, another  encounter determined his fate for the next while. Divorced from his first in 1916, he had remarried in Tonkin in 1917. It happened that that he met his wife’s seducer, a captain named Joseph Domenach, a member of an economic commission sent to Indochina three or four months before. A discussion ensued, and  rapidly became heated. Monpezat took out his pistol, which he always carrried, and fired at Domenach. Hit in the stomach, Domenach died of his injuries some hours later. Monpezat is arrested and imprisoned. He is given a five years suspended sentence.

Monpezat defended himself. In his closing, he said: "I am determined to live in silence

and in the shadows ... My springs are broken. A lonely old age awaits me ... I had a position, a certain popularity. In the shipwreck of my life, I am just than a wreck. "

His signature, little by little, reappeared in the Indochinese press. In 1924, he returned to his seat on the Higher Council of Colonies. The same year, he created his own daily newspaper, the Volonté Indochinoise. At the beginning of the summer of 1929, he was forced to undergo surgery. He died a few weeks later. « Un homme échappé des romans d'Alexandre Dumas», exclaimed one of the numerous articles published by the Indochinese press on his death. Yet another gushed : « C'était le d’Artagnan de nos assemblées. »

John Charles Moore de Bienville Grant, 9th Baron de Longueuil

was born in 1861 at Bath, Somerset. He was the son of Charles James Irwin Grant and Anne Marie Catherine Trapman. He succeeded to the title of Baron de Longueuil on 3 August 1931. He died on 17 October 1935 at Pau, France.

Louis Barthou
Deputy for Oloron-Sainte-Marie, President of the Council and several times Minister for the Third Republic, including Prime Minister for eight months in 1913. As Foreign Minister, Louis Barthou met King Alexander I of Yugoslavia during his state visit to Marseille in October 1934. On 9 October, the King and Barthou were assassinated by Velicko Kerin, a Bulgarian revolutionary wielding a handgun. A bullet struck Barthou in the arm, passing though and fatally severing an artery. He died of excessive blood loss less than an hour later.

A ballistic report on the bullets found in the car was made in 1935, but the results were not made available to the public until 1974. They revealed that Barthou was hit by an 8mm Modèle 1892 revolver round commonly used in weapons carried by French police. Thus it appears that he was killed by police response rather than by the assassin.

Contrerime XXXVI

Comme à ce roi laconien
     Près de sa dernière heure,
D'une source à l'ombre, et qui pleure,
     Fauste, il me souvient ;

De la nymphe limpide et noire
     Qui frémissait tout bas
- Avec mon coeur - quand tu courbas
     Tes hanches, pour y boire.


Like that Laconian king
     On his death bed
Fauste, I am minded
     Of a shady, sobbing spring;

Of a nymph limpid and black
     That quivered, silent
- As my heart - when you bent
     Your thirst to slake.

Notes: Agesipolis III was the 31st and last of the kings of the Agiad dynasty in ancient Sparta.

He was elected king while still a minor, but was soon deposed by his colleague Lycurgus. While Toulet might have read about him in Plutarch, Peter Cogman believes it more likely that he found the anecdote in the Dictionnaire historique et critique of Pierre Bayle, his bedside reader:- “Se souvenant du temple de Bacchus qu’il avait vu à Aphite, il souhaita de jouir de l’ombre, & de la fraicheur des eaux claires de cet endroit-là. Il y fut porté en vie, mais il mourut hors du tempe le 7 jour de sa fièvre.”

Contrerime XXXIII

                                      l' ingénue.

D’une amitié passionnée
     Vous me parlez encor,
Azur, aérien décor,
     Montagne pyrénée,

Où me trompa si tendrement
     Cette ardente ingénue
Qui mentait, fût-ce toute nue,
     Sans rougir seulement.

Au lieu que toi, sublime enceinte,
     Tu es couleur du temps :
Neige en mars ; roses du printemps.
     Août, sombre hyacinthe.


In the high Pyrénées
     I am constantly told
By the azure scenery
     Of a passion that's old.

Where l was cheated and crushed
     By an innocent lass
Who could lie - while bare-assed -
     With no hint of a blush.

While you, noble surrounding,
     Wear the seasonal gown:
Snow in march; roses in spring...
     In August, dark brown.

Note: hyacinthe in this instance is the mineral, not the flower; also known as Zircon. It is a more appropriate colour for late summer foliage in the mountains.

Parents, childhood, schooldays.

23 Rue Tran, Pau

Gaston and his brothers

The Toulet family were descended from the 16th c. seigneurs of Buros, in the department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Aquitaine region. The village of Buros is located in the commune of Morlaàs, part of the district of Pau and a fountain in the village, now destroyed, once bore their name. But some of the family had long since emigrated, in particular to Mauritius, where they became planters.

Son of Pierre, advocate, and of Marie-Emeline Catalogne, Bernard-Gaston, Paul-John's father, was born at Pau 20 July 1840. His ancestors were farmers and gentlemen. Pierre Toulet had 3 sons - Gaston, Paul and Adrien, and 2 daughters, Louise and Amanda.

Paul, born 18 October 1838, was the eldest, and after a brief sojourn in Mauritius, headed for Madagascar. Family history puts him in intimate relations with queen Ranavalo, but a cursory glance at the history of that dynasty puts paid to that rumour. Not that Paul-Jean was in any way deterred from adopting the legend, (as he did the story of the Bailli de Suffren armchair) – boasting to his school friend Henri Dartiguenave, (and shamelessly conflating father and uncle): “Ce n’est pas pour rien que mon père a été amant de la reine de Madagascar”

Although the family maintained that Uncle Paul at least had married a pretty Malagasy princess, by whom he had 4 children, the reality is more prosaic. Before he settled in Mauritius, sometime after 1864 (he did not attend Gaston’s wedding) Paul made two trips to Mexico. When he returned to Mauritius he re-joined his brother in La Savanne, where he married Marie Jolivet in October 1869. He was a witness at Gaston’s second wedding in 1877, to Rosette, daughter of Isidore Loustau-Lalanne, older brother of Marie-Emma. Paul’s wife died in 1890 and Paul himself in 1898, aged 59. His death notice states that he had been overseer on the Belle-Vue-Maurel estate, in the Rivière du Rempart District to the north. Before that he had run his own sugar plantation, the Mont d’Or, near Ruisseau Rose, Pamplemousses, at the same time as an aloes spinning mill.

Adrien or Edouard, was born 30 March 1842. He ran a ferry service at Tamatave, Madagascar, before marrying Antoinette Agnès of Chazal, Mauritius, and shared his life between France and Mauritius. He was in Pau around 1879 where he looked after Paul-Jean as he attended the lycée. He stopped travelling to settle as a planter at Chemin Grenier, in the south of the island, where he died childless, in 1891 aged 49.

Gaston emigrated around 1861-2, still in his early 20s to join his exotic relations. He initially found employment in a small property called La Louisa, attached to Belle-Vue-Harel. Impressed by the fecundity of the land, he decided on becoming a planter on his own account and settled in the south at La Savanne, where he found acquaintances of his father, émigrés from Béarn, already well-established. There he met Marie-Emma Loustau-Lalanne at a dinner and married her 26 September 1864, in La Savanne, and became a planter like his father-in-law. When his wife became pregnant, the Toulets voyaged to France, where Jane was born. They returned with the baby and a nurse they found in Lescar, a small village 5 km from Pau.

Marie-Emma

Marie-Emma Loustau-Lalanne was 13th child of Pierre Loustau-Lalanne, also a planter, also from Béarn stock. She was born at La Savanne, Mauritius, 31 March 1841.

Jean Loustau, grandfather of Emma, was born 1742. He made his career in the navy, joining the fleet of the Bailli de Suffren, Comte Pierre André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez, in India, then retiring, glorious and triumphant, to Mauritius, where he became secretary of the island council, with the title “greffier notaire”; this function and title he kept until the island passed into British possession in 1810. He died in 1827. He married Jeanne de Corday, a grand-daughter of the dramatist Corneille, and possibly a close relative of Charlotte Corday, Marat’s assassin. Paul-Jean was not slow in adopting this ancestor either. Jeanne and Jean had many children, of whom Jean-Charles (called Jeanny) married Elisabeth de Laborde. Their eldest daughter Auguste-Félicité married Pierre Loustau-Lalanne (1794-1862) whose family originated in Salies-de-Béarn. Pierre had land on the Rivière des Anguilles, where he exploited the plantations. (Pierre’s father had been jailed for embezzlement, and his wife travelled from Ile de France to Versailles to plead his case. She was successful to the extent that not only was he cleared, but he was granted in compensation the lands on the Rivière des Anguilles by the King.)

Of their fourteen children Emma was second to last.

Although Paul was conceived in Mauritius, his parents wanted him born in France so they came back to Pau to la maison Lapleine, 16 Rue d’Orleans, to his paternal grandparent and former advocate Pierre Toulet. The house was rented by a M. Dabadie, most likely Eugène who married Louise, Gaston’s sister. He was an artillery officer, scion of a military family whose tradition went back to Louis XV.
Paul was born June 5th 1867, his birth registered at the Mairie the following day and he was baptised the same day in the parish church of Saint-Jacques.

Some of Toulet’s biographers assert that Toulet’s parents were anxious to have him born in Béarn, for sentimental reasons – Béarn being his ancestral home on his father’s side. Solange de la Blanchetai, Toulet’s niece, is of this opinion. (She pointed out that Bernard-Gaston made the return voyage at least seventeen times, as he wished the children of his second marriage to become familiar with their native land.) However, there may have been more pragmatic reasons for undertaking the voyage. Alex Ichas points out that there was an inheritance issue of eighteen years standing, to be resolved, since the death in 1849 at Haget of Pierre-Isidore Loustau, uncle of Emma, Toulet’s mother. Pierre-Isidore Loustau was a bachelor at fifty, himself the recipient of three large bequests, and at his death the inventory of his vast fortune took three months to complete.

What’s more, in 1866-1867, a violent malaria epidemic occurred in Mauritius, resulting in 40,000 deaths in a population of 330,000, with 6,000 deaths occurring during just one month in urban Port Louis. After the epidemic, Mauritius was notorious throughout the world for its intense malaria transmission.

So clearly there were multifactorial and pressing reasons for Gaston and Emma Toulet to quit the island for Béarn, even with Emma three months pregnant. They embarked at Mauritius on the Emirne, belonging to the Messageries Impériales, 18 January 1867, bringing with them the ten-month-old Jane, together with her French nursemaid.

The spring voyage was testing. The Suez Canal had not been built at the time, so passengers on the Messageries Impériales, which served the Indian Ocean, debarked their passengers for Europe at Suez, where they took a train to Alexandria where another ship of the same line was waiting to take them on to Marseilles. The total duration of a voyage from Port Louis to Marseilles took between 26 and 31 days. The passengers who embarked at Port Louis on the Emirne on January 18th arrived at Marseilles on board the Péluz on 15th February. The Toulets took the train to Pau, where they arrived 16th February, some three and a half months before Paul’s birth. Emma’s mother Félicité embarked with them, and died at sea. (Apparently she had been born at sea too.)

When his mother died 2 weeks later on June 19, aged 26, Paul-Jean’s father seemed to take little further interest in the children. He entrusted the baby to his sisters, Louise and Amanda, who was only 19 at the time, and his daughter Jane to his sister-in-law Amélie Chaline, née Loustau-Lalanne, before returning to Mauritius to further his interests in the sugar industry. Amanda was soon to marry an officer at the Pau garrison called Jacques Terlé. (Aristide Chaline bought La Rafette ten years later.)

Gaston remarried in May 1878, to Rose Loustau-Lalanne, eldest daughter of his brother-in-law Isidore. She was considerably younger than he, born in 1859, and gave birth to seven boys: Adrien, Francis, Stephane, (who died aged four while Paul-Jean was in Mauritius, in April 1886), Guy, Marc, Georges and Philippe. Rose died in 1897 and Gaston remained a widower for the rest of his life. He sold his estate, Surinam, when business was poor, and passed the remainder of his days living in familiar surroundings with one or other of his sons. He died on 16 March 1922, at Guy’s house at Mon-Loisir-Rouillard. Paul-Jean later accused him of ruining him - something he was well able to do of his own accord.

So Paul-Jean was brought up by his grandfather Pierre, aunt Amanda and uncle Jacques Terlé, who lived at Billères in a suburb of Pau in the villa Mauricia built by grandfather Pierre some years previously and so-called in memory of Mauritius. (When Pierre sold the house it was re-named Inisfail; census records list the Wright family from America as living there in 1906; they apparently purchased the house from an Irish family named Gillis! Though badly damaged in a 2012 fire it has since been restored.) 
His grandmother, Marie-Émeline Catalogne, gets a sole mention in a quote from Paul, in a memory that is Proustian in its sentiment:
“C’est dans le passé qu’est tout notre bonheur; et le mien me torture de sa grâce évanouie. Parfois au moment que le sommeil vient enfin, on s’imagine être encore l’enfant d’autrefois, avec un cœur d’enfant parmi les fleurs…Mais les fleurs de jadis étaient belles et pliantes et parfumées; il en est qu’on revoit avec une netteté surprenante. Ainsi à Bilhère, contre une des fenêtres de ma grand’mère, et presque sous le dallet, il y avait une giroflée, de celles qu’on appelle je crois violier, je l’aimais beaucoup.”
(“It is in the past where all our happiness resides; mine torments me with its faded grace. Sometimes, at the moment of dozing off, I imagine I am still that child of long ago, with a child’s heart among the flowers… But the flowers of yesteryear were beautiful and pliant and scented; I can still see them with amazing clarity. At Bilhère, against one of my grandmother’s window, almost under the sill, there was a gillyflower, one of those called wallflowers I think, that I really liked.”)

In one of those curious post-cards that he wrote to himself years later, in April 1904, Paul-Jean remembers further : "At about six years of age, my dear friend, I was living in a small villa at Bilhère, and from there every morning during the fine season I went to the Dominican school in Pau, brought by my uncle as he was reporting to Headquarters. It was still early in the morning, a mist hung between us and the mountains. On the wallflowers in the hollow of the walls, on the red flowers by the side of the lawns, the dew had left beautiful teardrops; and my uncle plucked for me, among the large leaves, a bunch of chill grapes. Sometimes a trumpet call rose from the barracks. Sensuous even then, already nostalgic, with the cold grapes in my mouth and all round me that intoxicating metallic voice which spoke of distant things, and the wet grass which I stroked as I stroke a fur today; and the incomparable purple of the peonies – was I happy? I don’t know. But that was living, even then. What an organ is the soul of a child, until the first woman plays on it and puts it out of tune! But remember the light blue of the Pyrenees and the morning that kissed your pale cheeks.”

Paul started his schooling with the Dominicans at 23 rue Tran, Pau. A large courtyard was set between the school and the house of the state executioner, Jean-Baptiste Ferrou, “dernier executeur des hautes oeuvres de la ville”. Ferrou was a wealthy property-owner, and something of an idealist who created a homeless shelter in his house in rue du Hédas – he owned most of the rather insalubrious area. He died without issue, aged 85, in 1886 or 1895 depending on your source, bequeathing his properties to the municipality.”
At the Dominicans, a nun taught Paul-Jean the rudiments of German. He made some lasting friendships there too, notably with Léopold Bauby, seven days his junior, who features in the Contrerimes, and who remembered 50 years later “a child with fair hair crossing the Haute-Plante, a servant bringing him to school”. Paul-Jean would traverse the public park where the shadows were so green that he later remarked that “one had the impression of entering an emerald.”
A statue of Diana in the courtyard made a lasting impression on him. And not only on Paul-Jean. For the poet Francis Jammes, the Diana of rue Tran was “the longest, the most graceful that he knew”. In point of fact, this Diana was one of several copies made of a fourth-century marble in the Louvre. The Pau copy was cast in the 1840s by the Fonderie du Val d’Osne. Toulet used his poetic licence to transform her from cast-iron into plaster, and to amputate a limb:

Au détour de la rue étroite
     S’ouvre l’ombre et la cour
Où Diane en plâtre, et qui court
     N’a que la jambe droite.

The portion of his childhood not spent at Billères or Pau, was spent at Carresse, which he inherited from his mother. Carresse had belonged to his grand-uncle Pierre-Isidore Loustau, one of the sons of Jean-Charles (Jeanny) Loustau. He had lived there until his death in 1849 when it passed to his sister Auguste-Félicité, who left it in turn to her daughter Emma.

At Carresse the property was called Le Haget, a little outside the village, itself six kilometres from Salies-de-Béarn. The painter Labrouche, who was a friend of Paul-Jean, described it as a “quiet old-style house buried in greenery…an old wall, iron railings separate it from the road that turns at that point and descends towards the Gave. In front of the steps, a pretty little leafy garden, filled with trees, elms, magnolias. And silence.” Toulet remarked on the beautiful, pendant magnolia blossoms, so white in the evening shade, “les belles et pendantes fleurs du magnolier si blanches dans l’ombre du soir”. When he eventually had to sell the property, he expressed his regret :
« Je regretterai toute ma vie les terres de famille qu’il m’a fallu vendre…Il y avait là des bouquets d’arbes et des familles de serviteurs qui nous appartenaient depuis des siècles. On ne s’en détache pas sans un peu de mélancolie. »

Memories of Carresse inform some of his novels. A description by a character in Les Tendres Ménages can only be of Le Haget: "C’est ici que j’ai eu le premier sens de la vie un peu profound pour la gourmandise avec les plats sucrés qu’on nous servait dans la vaiselle Emoire où il y avait des vues de places bien pavées, ou d ‘Agrigente, sur ses assiettes jaunes."

Especially when one reads in Coples LXLI:

Je songe aux plats sucrés de ma vieille Detzine
Et du service Empire en son jaune marli…
If Paul-Jean remembers Detzine, the other servants remembered him, too. Toulet’s biographer, Martineau, recall interviewing the family’s old retainer Louise, years after the death of Paul-Jean:
“She was very young at the time, but she can see like it was yesterday - the lovely blond child, so delicate, that she often had to mind, look after, and to whose chest she applied mustard poultices. All around the place, on the walls or on pieces of paper, he would write in pencil: Ici repose Emma Toulet, morte peu de jours après la naissance du petit Paul. And while I would chat to her about the child she knew, she would wring her hands and keep repeating “the poor child, the poor child!”
Léontine, the laundress, remarked on the sadness and the sort of haunted air that would possess the child whenever he remembered his mother.

Paul-Jean spent almost all his holidays at Carresse with the Adrien Toulets, the Dabadies and the Terlés in turn. His grandfather Pierre died there in 1892. He followed a course of education there as irregular and spasmodic as at Pau. His aunt Louise Dabadie would teach him, and Jane, and her own children, some current affairs when she came on holidays. Even the principles of algebra! The Abbé Puyoo, curé of Carresse, started him off in Latin. At age 11 he wrote to his father complaining of the spasmodic nature of his education, which he blamed on his health, or on his teachers, one or the other of whom being frequently absent. He also complained of his eyes, often red and sore.

Paul-Jean’s fragile health delayed sending him to college. In the autumn 1878 he entered the lycée at Pau in fifth class, not as a boarder but as a “demi-pensionaire”. His uncle and aunt Adrien Toulet took him in their apartment at the Arrieu building, rue de la Préfecture, nowadays rue du Maréchal Foch. After some months Adrien and wife left for Mauritius and Paul-Jean became a full-time boarder. (French college classes are numbered in inverse order, in contrast to most other education systems. Pupils begin their secondary education in the sixième - sixth class, aged 11-12, continuing through grades cinquième, quatrième, troisième, and seconde to terminale. Until 1959 the term lycée designated a secondary school with a full curriculum - the present collége, plus lycée. Older lycées may till include a collége section, so a pupil attending a lycée may actually be a collégien. At the final year of schooling. Most students take the baccalaurét diploma, or bac.)

Once uncle Adrien had departed, Paul-Jean was to sample the delights of boarding school. At eleven years of age, cosseted and cherished, he was in for a rude awakening. Henri Dartiguenave relates an incident that occurred shortly after Paul-Jean had started, when a group of boys were attracted to a pedlar selling pocket knives in the market square. Paul wished to buy one but had no money. He asked to borrow a franc from Dartiguenave, who was likewise penniless. Paul-Jean noticed that a fellow pupil, an English lad, who had just made a purchase, still had change in his hand, and asked him for the money. He received a curt and insulting refusal, to Paul-Jean’s astonished hurt. He turned to Dartiguenave, saying, “Did you see that? Can you believe it? He refused me a franc. Why would he refuse me twenty sous?” He was incredulous and disappointed, so much so Dartiguenave had difficulty in dragging him back to school. Well before Sartre, it was realised that hell is other people. And for sensitive souls, boarding school is one of its seven circles. At Pau, Paul-Jean stood out from his fellow students, different, individual. So of course they tormented him. Catala tells the story that they called him “mulâtre” and when, furious, he charged into battle, they made the excuse that “créole ou mulâtre, c’est la même chose.” It is certain that these experiences inspired the passage in Monsieur du Paur, in which the title character describes boarding school:
"Imagine, sir, a child brought up by women, neat and clean, sincere, politeness itself. Imagine a horrible college, comrades who don’t wash, who lie to avoid punishment, who swear out of bravado and make a virtue out of being scruffy and rude. Imagine the supervisors who they deserve, or rather whom they don’t deserve, failures who have done well, who wouldn’t find work as a bailiff’s clerk or a dishwasher in a greasy spoon, to whom one entrusts the souls of children, I believe to wipe their feet on. Add to that the unctuous principal, food that would turn your stomach, the airless dormitory, etc., etc., etc., Isn’t that enough to turn a good lad into something else entirely, a ruffian, for example?”

It is also unquestionable that his experiences inspired Contrerime XIX:

Rêves d' enfant, voix de la neige,
    Et vous, murs où la nuit
Tournait avec mon jeune ennui...
    Collège, noir manège.

Paul-Jean only returned to being a “demi-pensionaire” during third class.

As a scholar, his fellow students recall him as being very bright, taking first place in French composition but also obtaining distinctions in Greek and Latin. He enjoyed his lessons, and he was already a voracious, if omnivorous, reader. At the end of the 1879-1880 school year he only came second in classical recitation and in German, but he had been ill in the beginning of that year.

In October 1880 he entered fourth. His father was still in France but had to return to Mauritius in the early summer of 1881, together with his new wife, two children, and Jane, now fifteen. At the end of the fourth, Paul-Jean obtained firsts in French composition, history, geography and German; second prizes in Latin and Natural History, grammar and distinctions in maths, religion and Greek. He read fluently in German and English. Years after his bac, before quitting Paris for Béarn, he would amuse himself translating Greek verse into French – something he returned to later again.

Dartiguenave, whose father was an art teacher at the lycée, recalls a composition by Paul-Jean on the subject of fox-hunting being read aloud by his teacher, M. Artaud, as a model composition, certain passages being favourably compared to Daudet!
It seems an unlikely subject matter for a class of French teenagers. But fox-hunting had been established as a country pursuit in the region since 1847. In 1875 the Pau Foxhunting Society consisted of nine members, seven of them British, meeting every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday from mid-November to mid-March. Distinguished guests included the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Westminster. The hunt frequently departed from Billère, affording Paul-Jean many opportunities to observe the riders in red coats and white pants, with their horses and hounds. The essay was no chore, as he revelled in the descriptions of the landscape of Pont-Long, the autumn dew, the dark green ferns and the broom, trampled by a troop of horsemen red-jacketed like giant poppies. And thus it continued, each week during the school year – at least until his abrupt departure at the end of January 1882.

After the fourth, at about 15 years of age, Paul-Jean had changed, mutating into an unruly rascal, to the extent that he was eventually expelled for having played “un tour pendable” on a teacher. Dartiguenave describes a certain invigilator, a M. Pujo, bald, solemn, with the profile of a bird, who revelled in doling out detentions. Pujo affected to speak Latin to both pupils and masters. Only his favourites might address him freely. Words were often exchanged between him and Paul-Jean in a Latin and French together. Harassed beyond endurance, Paul-Jean concealed an ink-pot in his hatband, which doused him when he turned it over to put it on. Pujo had him thrown out.
Another version had him expelled for an incident involving insolence at morning prayers. But whatever the reason, Paul-Jean was soon looking for another school.

Before he left, he wrote in a letter to Jane that the only teacher he found to his liking was he who taught French, Latin and Greek. The history teacher had started to be a cross-patch, the German teacher was already there, and the PT instructor was refining the art of boring him. Paul-Jean’s enthusiasm, so evident in the fourth, had started to wane. And M. Artaud had been given the transfer he had requested.

After his expulsion from Pau, his uncle, commandant Eugène Dabadie, who had recently been transferred to Bayonne, decided the simplest solution would be to have him finish his year there. Paul-Jean arrived without delay, but he had adopted such habits of indiscipline that they could not be concealed. Bayonne consulted Pau as to the reasons for his expulsion. The answer came - insubordination – “but nothing in his moral conduct would prevent his admission to another establishment.”
The letter was dated 7.2 1882. Only a couple of days elapsed from this date to that on which the Principal of Bayonne addressed to Eugène Dabadie: “Sir, first impressions of your pupil the young Toulet are so bad, in just a few days he showed himself so rebellious to all advice and gave such example of insubordination that I cannot accept him as a student in the lycée of Bayonne. Please come and fetch him immediately…”

On May 1st he entered the Institut Charlemagne, still in Bayonne, and run by a M. Burguières. He entered as a boarder, although he got out regularly. At M. Burguières he made the acquaintance of a Basque lad from Labourd, robust and wealthy – sufficiently so for Paul-Jean to see him later on whenever he returned to Bayonne. He is transmogrified into M. Bordaguibus in his verse, and the character Etchepalao in La Jeune Fille Verte. –and he turned up in the chapter on his friends in les Impostures.

It might be the case that at the Institut Charlemagne the regime was less strict, the pupils fewer in number, and Paul-Jean, though he hadn’t completed his third, was admitted straight away to follow the bac course. He applied himself to such an extent that M. Burguières sought a dispensation to have him take the first part at the end of that year - a request that was denied. So he had to wait another year. He wrote to his sister from Carresse in August that he had almost gone down in Greek and Latin – his French and German got him through.
He was in Bordeaux in December 1883 in the Institution Courdurier, effectively a crammer, to prepare for the second part of the bac. In a letter to Jane dated 10 March 1884 he announced that he had been yet again sent home, apparently for scorning a college dinner and choosing to dine elsewhere. Courdurier was incensed. Mme Courdurier, the other students, and Uncle Eugène all appealed Courdurier until he agreed to accept Paul-Jean back after Lent. He was still there in November - he should have passed the bac in July. In was not until 26 July 1885 that he finally graduated. He had quit the Institution Courdurier, and come to live with Uncle Terlé in Saintes, where he was stationed after Pau. Toulet recalled his time in Saintes with affection more than thirty years later, referring to the college at Saintes as the only one from which he was not expelled. Mind you, he admits he only turned up five or six times.

His approaching exams did not prevent him from holidaying in the Basque country at Easter, a region that was new to him. He visited Saint-Palais, Ostabat, Larceveau, Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Arnéguy, Valcarlos and Arradoy. Apart for some brief comments on the landscape, he notices the “très jolis filles” of Saint-Palais, and also at Valcarlos, one especially, “gracile, à un lavoir.” At the end of July he returned to Pau, and explored the valley of Ossau, land of his forefathers (“une Espagnole très blanche et très belle” was noted at Eaux-Bonnes). He spent three weeks at Cauterets, dividing his time between the theatre and the casino. He notes in his diary that he had lost some money at roulette - it seems he hadn’t yet discovered the siren call of baccarat. He left there on September 6^th, returning briefly to Carresse  before spending a month a La Rafette.  He records a day of Perpetual Adoration at Carresse, the children of Mary, white in their muslin veils, the black dress of the  old folk, black kerchiefs, peasants dressed also in black  – and like flowers among the buckwheat, the  kerchiefs of the girls, whom he names – Marion, Cadette, Jeanneton. He spend one afternoon reading the complete 4^th volume of Houssiaux’s edition of Balzac.
He was now 18 years of age, and not long from quitting Carresse for the scented shores of Mauritius, where he had been summoned by his father. Haget was becoming too much of a strait jacket. A clue to his activities might be gleaned from those with which he endows M. de Paur, in the substituted place name Bressuire, where “you kissed the servants in the corridors and the harvesters in the hayloft, or where you chased after Aline among the hazels, while her red stockings laughed in the long grass.” Contrerime XXXI records these summer days: 

Si Monsieur Paul est dans le bois
     Avise à la fontaine.

Mais avise aussi the briser
     Ta cruche en tournant vite.
Ah, que dirait ta mère. Évite
     Son bras. Prends le baiser.

Paul-Jean was gaining a reputation as a bit of a rake. Many years later Jacques Dyssord notes that he was remembered in the locality as a young man who was too knowing and forward to leave a young lady alone in his company. Dyssord heard it at the château de Cassaber, birthplace of his grand-aunt.
Paul-Jean’s family knew it was not in his best interests to let him to his own devices in Carresse.

Secondary school over, Paul-Jean dreamed of studying law in order to enter the diplomatic service and become an ambassador – or just a consul on Mauritius. But the old family doctor, Doctor Foix, of Salies, thought his health too delicate for Paris or the Pyrenées. Paul-Jean had written to Jane about the possibility of visiting Mauritius the following year. While waiting for a decision from his father, he was sent to stay with his Aunt Amélie, his mother’s younger sister, and her husband Aristide Chaline, in Saint-Loubès in the Gironde, where they had bought the château of La Rafette in 1877. La Rafette continued to be an important refuge for Paul-Jean for the remainder of his life, and for Jane, who eventually inherited it.

So “petit Paul” as the family knew him, had to leave behind the shady plane trees of Carresse and the accommodating benches of Beaumont park in Pau for the balmy sands of Savanne and the plaintive song of the casuarina trees, like silk rubbing on silk.

Urruty investigated the why and the when Paul became Paul-Jean. Both his birth and baptismal certificate record only the single name Paul, and during his childhood he was always called either Paul or Petit-Paul (sometimes Monsieur Paul) - never Paul-Jean. In her unpublished memoirs, Paul’s niece Solange (Jane’s daughter) traces the metamorphosis to the period 1884-1885, when Paul would have been 17 or 18. Solange found the earliest letter that was signed Paul-Jean was dated 4.5.1885. But he signed variously Paul or Paul-Jean even after 1885. However, it was certainly before he set out for Mauritius that he introduced the change.
The reason for the change hinges on the French pronunciation of his initials P. T. Solange de Fougiéres wrote: Pour l’euphonie de ses initiales il n’a pas voulu s’appeler Paul Toulet car cela le choquait fort de voir broder ses mouchoirs ou marquer son linge de ses deux lettres fort incongrues qui lui donnaient des nausées – P.T.
So, the bawds of euphony were cheated by the simple expedient of adding Jean. Paul-Jean no longer had to suffer the coincidence – or co-assonance – of having his initials sound like the verb peter. Clearly a sensitive teenager with aspirations to make a noise in the world, be it in law or in literature, might not care to be known to his contemporaries, or indeed to posterity, by the nickname “Fart.”

NOTE: Léopold Bauby, 1867-1933, was one of Toulet’s best friends (and of Jammes, who wrote of him: “un délicieux vieux garçon, aimable autant que savant et artiste”) and curator of the museum at Pau. He was the nephew of the provençal writer Adrien Planté, mayor of Orthez, and possessed a library famous for its size and quality. His memoire of Toulet is on p.1377, note 10. He is mentioned in CR XI

Tel s’enivrait, a son phébus,
     D’un chocolat d’Espagne,
Chez Guillot, le feutre en campage,
     Monsieur Bordaguibus

Poems from or inspired by Mauritius

Toulet wrote little while in Mauritius. Martineau remarked that the young man “is too lucid not to see the void of his existence.” Toulet admits as much - the halo slipped into the mud. With even a note of rancour which says much about his dissatisfaction, he complains about not working, and adds:
"Je me rappelle à moi-même ce poète des Petits Poèmes en prose qui avait perdu son auréole dans la boue. Voilà près de cinq ans que la mienne a glissé, et il me semble que je n’ai qu’à étendre la main pour la ramasser. N’était-ce pas hier ? Le temps passe si vite en mauvaise compagnie, et pour moi la crapule est toujours nouvelle."
(This is a reference to Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris, or Petits Poèmes en prose, Poème XLVI, Perte d’Auréole.)

He wasn’t too lazy however to neglect his reading. He maintained an assiduous account of books read. Over a period of some month this encompassed Port-Royal by Saint-Beuve; Taine’s la Philosophie de l’art, among others of his works; Pascal; Spinoza; Froissart; Villon; Jean Bodin; l’Entretien sur les sciences occultes by Bayle, which no doubt predisposed him to his future frequenting of Bayle’s Dictionnaire; Renan; Chamfort; Albert Sorel; Maupassant; Huysmans; Baudelaire of course; Leconte de Lisle; Shakespeare; Schiller. He read de Sade with a sort of horrified fascination, and in particular the cynical Dolmancé* who inspired in him pity and sympathy for “la manière douloureuse dont il parle de l’amour”.

Note: *Character in Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, a 36 year old atheist and bisexual. Sade urges his readers to study the cynical Dolmancé and follow his example of selfishness and consideration for nothing but his own enjoyment.

Three Sonnets Exotiques date from Ile Maurice, 1888 and were published in an Algiers review, so Toulet can’t have been too unhappy with them; but the long-term effect of Mauritius was the inspiration it provided for poems and contrerimes long after the poet had departed for good.
The Sonnets Exotiques are found in Vers Inédits, as is this fragment, dating from about 1887:

Au pays du sucre et des mangues
Les pâles dames créoles
S’éventent sous les varangues
Au pays du sucre et des mangues
Et zézaient de lentes paroles.

Dans les grands fauteuils balançoires
En sombre bois des îles
Elles content de vaines histoires,
Dans les grands fauteuils balançoires
Qui bercent leurs têtes futiles.

Ainsi qu’une odeur de parterre
Lointaine et paresseuse,
Dans le cœur s’infiltre en mystère
Ainsi qu’une odeur de parterre
Leur grâce volupteuse.

Sonnets Exotiques

1.
Aimes-tu les jours d’or dénués de mystère,
Les rayons alourdis desséchant les rameaux,
Et sous un morne ciel que jamais rien n’altère
La campagne immobile en sa robe d’émaux ?

Viens, la sombre varangue embaume et fera taire
Dans mon cœur anxieux la voix des anciens maux,
Viens, ta bouche est la source où je me désaltère
Et tes seins sont pour moi comme deux fruits gémeaux.

Aimes-tu mieux la nuit ? Sous les filaos grêles,
Où l’ombre a fait tarir le chant des tourterelles,
Des rayons filtreraient sur nous comme des pleurs.

J’aime à t’entendre dire une vieille berceuse,
Et l’heure coulerait comme une eau paresseuse
Au parfum des prochains gérofliers en fleurs.

2.
De l’impassible ciel, toujours, toujours pareil,
Les brises, comme les oiseaux, sont envolées ;
Et d’inutiles fleurs, d’aucune aile frôlées,
Dorment dans l’air pesant leur lumineux sommeil.

Il faut avoir connu tes splendeurs désolées,
O monotone ciel, ô voûte de vermeil,
Et le spleen que déverse un éternel soleil,
Pour savoir tout le prix qu’ont les terres voilées.

Là-bas où les coteaux ont des formes de seins
Et se couvrent au soir de robes transparentes,
Des cygnes noirs et blancs nagent dans les bassins.

Un ciel pâle s’y mire, et les vapeurs errantes,
Et les peupliers longs que septembre a rouillés ;
La nuit prochaine endort l’odeur des foins mouillés.

3.
En vain brillent les eaux, pour qu’il s’y désaltère,
Moloch féroce boit les larmes des forêts.
L’île chaude sous lui fume comme un cratère,
Les oiseaux se sont tus dans les arbres retraits.

Mais loin du ciel grisâtre et de la morne terre
Les murs gardent encor des repaires discrets
Où le sommeil pour l’homme évoque avec mystère
L’essaim silencieux des rêves aux doigts frais.

Et déjà vient le soir parmi les aromates.
Arrachant sa chair brune à la fraîcheur des nattes,
Dans son voile éclatant, comme une longue fleur.

Djalia s’est dressée et fait tinter ses bagues,
Tandis que les rayons du soleil qui se meurt
Allument une flamme à ses prunelles vagues.

Mahé, in the Seychelles, inspired a poem printed in Nouvelles Contrerimes

Nouvelles Contrerimes, XVII

Mahé des Seychelles, le soir :
  Zette est sur son dimanche.
Et sous la mousseline blanches
  Brille son mollet noir.

Les cases aux fraîches varangues
  Bâillent le long des quais ;
Dans les branches d’un noir bosquet
  Étincellent les mangues,

Tandis qu’en ses jardins fleuris,
  Mystérieuse et belle,
Rêve une pâle demoiselle
  Aux chapeaux de Paris.

There are a number of Baudelairean echos in this poem – Baudelaire makes use of the word ‘varangues’ (verandas) in Les Projets, from Spleen de Paris, and from the same collection La Belle Dorothée the young lady, who is black, dreams about Paris fashions.

Then there was Mauritius:
Jardin qu’un dieu sans doute a posé sur les eaux,
Maurice, où la mer chante, et dorment les oiseaux.
(Coples, XLIV)

And here is an attempt at a Contrerime quoted by Martineau that is possibly a lubricious memory of the island:

Ils ne sont plus les noirs tilleuls
  Ni la profonde allée
Où mon père menait…
  Ses pas graves et seuls.

Ni la balançoire glissante
  Où pas dessus tes bas
J’ai vu parfois de haut en bas
  Ta cuisse éblouissante.

Ten years after Mauritius, Toulet wrote the following in a notebook, the counterpart of a poem in Coples :
Je sais un homme qui ne devrait jamais voyager. Il n’est place où il est passé qui ne lui serre le cœur de ne pas revoir, depuis ce flamboyant violet de Maurice, et la jupe jaune clair de Jeanne Saint-R… 

Urruty represents her as a friend of his sister Jane, the initials identifiable as that of a family now extinct in the male line in Mauritius,

There is a quatrain that Martineau presents in its original state :

Dessous le flamboyant qui couvrait l’herbe nue
D’un dôme violet, je t’évoque. Soudain
Une source murmure à travers le jardin,
Jeanne aux yeux ténébreux qu’êtes-vous devenue ?

This was published as Coples LXIII:

Dessous le flamboyant qui couvre l’herbe nue
D’un dôme violet , où je vous vois encor
Fraîche comme l’eau vive en un brûlant décor,
Jeanne aux yeux ténébreux, qu’êtes-vous devenue ?

Coples LXIX:

Des bordes du canal noir où tu quittas ton linge,
Le noir tchocra te guette avec des yeux luisants,
Floryse. Au loin blanchit la mer sur les brisants,
Parfois sur Chamerel on voit passer un singe.

(There is a mention in the Journal of a picnic with black servants (tchocras) dressed in white and red.)

The influence of Mauritius is to be felt in Toulet's prose too. Floryse, whoever she might have been, attracts the following apostrophe:

   Vous ne connaissez pas, Floryse, le pays de vos pères, ni cette même île dont on dirait une fleur oubliée aux limites du fleuve Océan. Vous ne connaissez pas la terre de muse, où, sous des rocs qui scellent le mystère de leur nom, confusément, leur sommeil s’enchante à la voix des filaos et de la mer.
   Vos pieds jamais n’ont foulé le verger de lumière où mûrissent la mangue et le mangoustan, ni les bords, étroitement, de ce cirque qui fait voir encore les ruines d’un ergastule : c’est là que vos ancêtres, la nuit, enfermaient leurs noirs.
   Mais à franchir ce pont, balancé sur les profondeurs d’un courant d’écume, peut-être, comme dans un songe, vous souviendrait-il.
   Vous pensierez, Floryse, en amont des âges, reconnaître ce flamboyant, là-bas, dont la fleur violette ressemble à la pourpre de Phénicie.

Urruty suggests that Floryse is an amalgam of different ladies, variously described throughout Toulet, but her main purpose is to provide an excuse for the author to wax lyrical on the subject of Mauritius.

Note: Ergastule, from the Latin ergastulum, was an enclosure for slaves who worked in the fields. Toulet once again indulges his taste for a rare and exotic vocabulary,

The remainder of the Mauritius-inspired poems are from the Contrerimes. Some are evocations of the exotic within a different subject matter; others are frankly descriptive from beginning to end.

Contrerime II
Toi qu' empourprait l' âtre d' hiver
   Comme une rouge nue
Où déjà te dessinait nue
   L' arome de ta chair ;

Ni vous, dont l' image ancienne
   Captive encor mon coeur,
Île voilée, ombres en fleurs,
   Nuit océanienne ;

Non plus ton parfum, violier
   Sous la main qui t' arrose,
Ne valent la brûlante rose
   Que midi fait plier.

Contrerime IX Nocturne
Ô mer, toi qui je sens frémir
   À travers la nuit creuse,
Comme le sein d’une amoureuse
   Qui ne peut pas dormir ;

Le vent lourde frappe la falaise…
   Quoi ! si le chant moqueur
D’une sirène est dans mon cœur –
   Ô cœur, divin malaise.

Quoi, plus de larmes, ni d’avoir
   Personne qui vous plaigne…
Tout bas, comme d’un flanc qui saigne,
   Il s’est mis à pleuvoir.

Contrerime XIX Rêves d’enfant
Circé des bois et d' un rivage
   Qu' il me semblait revoir,
Dont je me rappelle d' avoir
   Bu l' ombre et le breuvage ;

Les tambours du Morne Maudit
   Battant sous les étoiles
Et la flamme où pendaient nos toiles
   D' un éternel midi ;

Rêves d' enfant, voix de la neige,
   Et vous, murs où la nuit
Tournait avec mon jeune ennui...
   Collège, noir manège.


This is perhaps a stretch but Urruty identifies Les tambours du Morne Maudit with Morne Brabant on the island of Mauritius.

Contrerime XLV
Molle rive dont le dessin
   Est d’un bras qui se plie,
Colline de brume embellie
   Comme se voile un sein,

Filaos au chantant ramage –
   Que je meure et, demain,
Vous ne serez plus, si ma main
   N’a fixé votre image.

(Shades of Ronsard in this poem, and later, Yeats).

Contrerime XLVI
Douce plage où naquit mon âme ;
   Et toi, savane en fleurs
Que l’Océan trempe de pleurs
   Et le soleil de flamme ;

Douce aux ramiers, douce aux amants,
   Toi de qui la ramure
Nous charmait d’ombre, et de murmure,
   Et de roucoulements ;

Où j’écoute frémir encore
   Un aveu tendre et fier –
Tandis qu’au loin riait la mer
   Sur le corail sonore.


Contrerime XLVII
Nous jetâmes l’ancre, Madame,
   Devant l’île Bourbon
À l’heure où la nuit sent si bon
   Qu’elle vous troublait l’âme.

(Ô monts, ô barques balancées
   Sur la lueur des eaux,
Lointains appels, plaintes d’oiseaux
   Étrangement lancées.)

… Au retour, je vous vis descendre
   L’écumeux barachois,
Dans les bras d’un négre de choix :
   Virgile, ou Alexandre.

Contrerime LVI

Au détour de la rue étroite
     S' ouvre l' ombre et la cour
Ou Diane en plâtre, et qui court
     N' a que la jambe droite.

Là-bas sur sa flûte de Pan,
     Un Ossalois nous lance
Ces airs aigus comme une lance
     Qui percent le tympan,

Ô Faustine, et je vois se tendre
     L' arc pur de ton sourcil ;
Telle une autre Diane, si
     Le trait n' était si tendre.



Translation

Just off the narrow lane
     Is the shady cloister
Where a plaster Diana, poised,
     Her one leg trains.

Close at hand on his flute
     Airs sharp as a spear
That rinse and wring the ear
     Hear an Ossalois toot,

Faustine, as I see defined
     The pure arc of your brow;
Another Diane, were the bow’s
     Barb not so kind.

Notes

Ossalois: Inhabitant of the valley of Ossau.
"plaster Diana": Toulet's whimsical memory of a statue that stood in the courtyard of the Dominicans, rue de Tran, Pau. In his  Journal et voyages,  Toulet appears to describe a statue still intact : "Je suivais cette étroite rue tout de guingois, qui porte le nom d'un jurisconsulte oublié.....C’est là  que jadis j’avais appris à lire chez les sœurs Dominicaines, dans une grande maison…dont l’abord herbeux est encore orné, comme aux jours de mon enfance, d’une Diane aux jambes nobles et nues. C’est près de là que Faustine avait élu sa nouvelle demeure."
Francis Jammes described this statue as "la plus longue, la plus gracieuse que je connaisse."

Henri Martieau wryly comments *:  "Tandis que Toulet assure, par un caprice singulier, à moins que ce ne soit celui de la rime, qu’il lui reste pour courir sa seule jambe droite."

P.J. Cogman suggests that it is perhaps a tradition in litterature that in poems of nostalgia statues are broken. Cf. Verlaine «"Après trois ans" (Poèmes saturniens) : "La Velléda, / Dont le plâtre s’écaille" ; Jammes, "Élégie seconde" (Le Deuil des primevères), la Vierge "aux deux mains brisées", et dans l’Élégie quatrième, "Du parc gazonné, au froid soleil mort d’Octobre, / une Diane cassée montait comme un jet d’eau".

*La Famille, l’Enfance, Les Collèges de P.-J. Toulet. Le Divan, 1957
.