Digression in Mallarme

A traveler leaves Paris by train for the countryside. Along the track, posters glow, golden in the autumnal sunshine, and the traveler contemplates the rare beauty of a forest in October. Suddenly interrupting his silent exaltation, a railroad employee announces the destination. The traveler silently offers his ticket. To his surprise, no one else descends, and as the train disappears in the horizon, he waits at the threshold of the forest.

Such is the anecdote in Mallarmé’s short prose text “La Gloire”—or, as he writes in the early version of another prose text, “Tels sont les faits.” ¹ And yet, “facts”—the stuff of the anecdotal—are difficult to uncover in the labyrinth of Mallarmé’s prose. To be sure, the narrator in “La Gloire” appears to leave the city by rail, and he appears to contemplate the posters in the sunshine along the way. However, something else is obviously at stake in Mallarmé’s rendition of this occasion:

Cent affiches s’assimilant l’or incompris des jours, trahison de la lettre, ont fui, comme à tous confins de la ville, mes yeux au ras de l’horizon par un départ sur le rail traînés avant de se recueillir dans l’abstruse fierté que donne une approche de forêt en son temps d’apothéose

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