What Jean Berque and his publisher colleague Philippe Gonin assembled in this volume are the first two sections of Paul Verlaine’s Parallèlement, each of which had its own rather different route into print. The first six poems – Sur le balcon, Pensionnaires, Per amica silentia, Printemps, Été and Sappho – are the sonnet cycle Les amies, written in 1867 when Verlaine was twenty-three and still very much under the spell of Baudelaire’s condemned ‘femmes damnées’ pieces. The remaining six – À la princesse Roukine, Séguedille, Casta Piana, Auburn, À Mademoiselle ..., and À Madame ... – form the complete Filles section that follows immediately afterwards in Parallèlement, celebrating prostitutes and mistresses of the 1880s. Unlike Les amies these had no separate clandestine existence; they belonged to Parallèlement from the start.
Thus this volume’s title, Les amies – Filles, is simply the two sections run together, a pairing the illustrated erotica trade found congenial because it contains a dozen poems with a very definite erotic theme, without the more philosophical and religious poems of the rest of Parallèlement.
Les amies – Filles uses pure lithography, drawn directly on the stone in greasy crayon and printed in a single sanguine ink – the warm reddish-brown that has been associated with figure study since the renaissance. The thirty-five plates read like a portfolio of academy drawings – some are tightly finished, others almost sketches, all of them suggesting the immediacy of drawings made directly from the model. Edmond Desjobert, the foremost Paris lithographer of the period, pulled the prints from the lithographic stones.
While most Verlaine illustrators settled on a vaguely period setting – fin-de-siècle interiors, hourglass corsetry, gas-lit bedrooms – Berque puts his women firmly in the Paris of 1932. The bobbed hair, the kiss-curls, the wide-brimmed hats, the dressing gowns and silk stockings half-rolled, the tea things on small lacquer tables – these are the women of Parallèlement re-encountered in the boudoirs of contemporary Montparnasse.
The book belongs to what was the defining partnership of Berque’s career as an illustrator. Éditions Gonin had been founded in 1926 by the brothers Philippe and André Gonin, sons of a Lausanne bookseller and operating between Paris and Lausanne, and between 1930 and 1939 Berque illustrated a book for them every year except for 1931. Of those years 1932 was the busiest, with three titles appearing under their joint names: alongside Les amies – Filles, a Goethe Prologue dans le ciel and a Verlaine Poètes maudits.
Here is one of the twelve poems – Séguedilla (a Spanish dance rhythm) – to provide a flavour of the collection. We give the original French first, then the English translation.
Séguedille
Brune encore non eue,
Je te veux presque nue
Sur un canapé noir
Dans un jaune boudoir,
Comme en mil huit cent trente.
Presque nue et non nue
À travers une nue
De dentelles montrant
Ta chair où va courant
Ma bouche délirante.
Je te veux trop rieuse
Et très impérieuse,
Méchante et mauvaise et
Pire s’il te plaisait,
Mais si luxurieuse !
Ah ! ton corps noir et rose
Et clair de lune ! Ah ! pose
Ton coude sur mon cœur,
Et tout ton corps vainqueur,
Tout ton corps que j'adore !
Ah ! ton corps, qu'il repose
Sur mon âme morose
Et l'étouffe s'il peut,
Si ton caprice veut !
Encore, encore, encore !
Splendides, glorieuses,
Bellement furieuses
Dans leurs jeunes ébats,
Fous mon orgueil en bas
Sous tes fesses joyeuses !
Séguedilla
Brown-haired girl not yet possessed,
I want you almost undressed
On a black divan reclining
In a yellow boudoir shining,
As though it were eighteen-thirty.
Almost naked, yet not naked,
Through a cloud of lace half-veiling,
Showing flesh beneath it gleaming,
Where my frenzied mouth goes streaming,
Wild with its delirious yearning.
I want you laughing too much,
Then imperious afterwards,
Wicked, and very bad,
Worse still, if it pleased you –
But oh, so full of lust!
Ah! your body, dark and rosy,
Moonlit-clear! Ah! gently press
Your elbow on my heart’s deep core,
And all your conquering body, all
That body which I so adore!
Ah! your body – let it settle
On my melancholy soul
And stifle it, if it be able,
If such be your caprice’s will!
Again, again, again!
Splendid, glorious,
Beautifully furious
In their young games of love,
Throw my pride beneath
Your happy bottom!
Les amies – Filles was published by Éditions Gonin in a limited, numbered and boxed edition of 99 copies.
