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A Fire at the Marketplace Patriots On the Wounds of the Institute To the Court that Proposed the Abolition of the Death Penalty Reveille Song Afterword Epilogue 76 78 83 84 88 91 92
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ntroduction Petrus Borel (1809–59) was born in Lyons, the twelfth of fourteen children. His early education rendered him atheistic and anti-clerical, solitary, erudite, pedantic and self-dramatizing, with a passion for things Mediaeval. He abandoned his Architectural profession and entered the Romantic Movement, and Le Petit Cénacle, a Parisian, antiClassicist, revolutionary and Republican band of bizarristes who dressed, spoke, partied, wrote and posed in Freedom. The group included Théophile Gautier, Jehan de Seigneur, Eugène Devéria, Joseph Bouchardy and Gérard de Nerval. Disappointed by the July Revolution of 1830 (‘I do need a vast amount of Liberty’), Borel and his friends buried themselves for a time in grotesqueries, the macabre, carnivals, Dandyism, and considered outlandish behaviour (‘Les Bouzingos’). Petrus Borel published Rhapsodies, here presented in its entirety, in 1831. He thought it a book that ‘wrote itself ’, filled with suffering, bitterness, revolution, and what Borel called the ‘slag of hot-metal refining’. Enid Starkie, however, the author of the only relatively modern biography of Borel (1954) considers the poems ‘mostly gentle and sentimental’. ‘There are in Rhapsodies however poems which give Borel the right to an individual and permanent place in French poetry.’ The book was an intense influence on Baudelaire. But its publication created no stir. Borel went on to write ‘gothicky’short stories, the scandalous ‘Madame Putiphar’ (1838), became a journalist and magazinewriter, and, declining in belief and remuneration, went to Algeria as a Civil Servant, where he (according to sources) did, or decidedly did not, do the administration work that was expected of him. He died in Algeria after being removed from his post and digging too long in his garden without a 7

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ntroduction

Petrus Borel (1809–59) was born in Lyons, the twelfth of fourteen children. His early education rendered him atheistic and anti-clerical, solitary, erudite, pedantic and self-dramatizing, with a passion for things Mediaeval. He abandoned his Architectural profession and entered the Romantic Movement, and Le Petit Cénacle, a Parisian, antiClassicist, revolutionary and Republican band of bizarristes who dressed, spoke, partied, wrote and posed in Freedom. The group included Théophile Gautier, Jehan de Seigneur, Eugène Devéria, Joseph Bouchardy and Gérard de Nerval. Disappointed by the July Revolution of 1830 (‘I do need a vast amount of Liberty’), Borel and his friends buried themselves for a time in grotesqueries, the macabre, carnivals, Dandyism, and considered outlandish behaviour (‘Les Bouzingos’).

Petrus Borel published Rhapsodies, here presented in its entirety, in 1831. He thought it a book that ‘wrote itself ’, filled with suffering, bitterness, revolution, and what Borel called the ‘slag of hot-metal refining’. Enid Starkie, however, the author of the only relatively modern biography of Borel (1954) considers the poems ‘mostly gentle and sentimental’. ‘There are in Rhapsodies however poems which give Borel the right to an individual and permanent place in French poetry.’ The book was an intense influence on Baudelaire. But its publication created no stir.

Borel went on to write ‘gothicky’short stories, the scandalous ‘Madame Putiphar’ (1838), became a journalist and magazinewriter, and, declining in belief and remuneration, went to Algeria as a Civil Servant, where he (according to sources) did, or decidedly did not, do the administration work that was expected of him. He died in Algeria after being removed from his post and digging too long in his garden without a

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