BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF CHAMPAVERT
It is always a difficult task to puncture illusions, always a painful duty to relieve the public of its comforting errors, the lies to which it is devoted and has pledged its faith. Nothing is more dangerous than to create a void in the human heart. I would never risk such a scabrous mission. Believe, believe! Abuse yourselves and be abused! Error is almost always pleasant and consoling.
In spite of that reluctance, my religious sincerity gives me the duty today to unmask a deception, fortunately unimportant: a pseudonymy. Please, do not get upset, as you usually do, when you are told that “Clotilde de Surville” does not exist, that her book is apocryphal; that the correspondence of “Ganganelli” and “Carlino” is apocryphal; that “Joseph Delorme” is a pseudograph and his biography a myth.1 Please, please, I beg you, don’t get upset!
Pétrus Borel killed himself last spring. Pray for him, in order that his soul, in which he no longer believed, might find mercy before the God that he denied, in order that God will not strike error with the same arm as crime.
Pétrus Borel, the rhapsodist, the lycanthrope—or, to tell the truth, as we have promised, the poor young man who concealed himself under that soubriquet, which he adopted when scarcely emerged from childhood—has killed himself. Thus, few of his comrades knew his real name; none ever knew the cause of that disguise. Did he do it out of necessity or eccentricity? No one knows for sure. The same name was once made illustrious in literature and science by Pétrus Borel de Castres, a learned doctor and antiquary, physician to Louis XIV, the son of the poet Jacques Borel.2 Was he descended from that family maternally, did he want to resume the name of one of his ancestors? No one knows, and doubtless no one ever will know.
So, as we have reestablished in the title of his book, his real name was Champavert.
There is no sweeter pleasure than that of being accepted into the intimacy of a sensitive—which is to say, superior—individual who is dead; it is a very praiseworthy indiscretion to want to initiated into the secret of the life of a great artist or an unhappy man. One loves the writer who consents to display like tapestries the often-hidden lives of people who are dear to us. Although that of the young and fatal poet with whom we are concerned will not excite any great interest in you, I nevertheless think that you will not find it unwelcome that I have been able to unearth a few details and circumstances of that anomalous life—of which, regrettably, little is known. Champavert rarely talked about himself; he generally came into society like an apparition, without any known antecedents or any presumed future.
There is some reason to believe that he was originally from the Hautes-Alpes, born in ancient Segusia,3 often having been heard to curse his father for coming down from the Mountains, and proudly to name as his compatriots Philibert-Delorme, Martel-Ange, Servadoni, Audran, Stella, Coisevox, Coustou and Ballanche.4 He had, however, left his fatherland at a young age.
He represented himself to those who knew him as no older than twenty or twenty-two, but his features, grave at first sight, aged him considerably.
He was rather tall and slim, perhaps even thin; he had a dark complexion, a characteristic profile, large eyes, black and white, and something in his gaze that was exhausting when it was fixed, like the covetous eye of a snake attracting a prey.
Contrary to the habit of our epoch, like Leonardo da Vinci in contrast to his own, he wore his beard long after the age of seventeen; the most insistent pleas could never persuade him to cut it. In that eccentricity, he was four years in advance of the apostles of Henri Saint-Simon.5 The most accurate way to convey an idea of him is to say that he bore a strong resemblance to Saint Bruno.6
His voice and his mannerisms were soft, to the great surprise of anyone seeing him for the first time and who had imagined him, on the basis of his poetic writings, to be an ogre or a devil. He was kind, gentle, affable, proud, steadfast, obliging and benevolent; his loving heart—amoroso con los suyos, to use the divine Spanish expression—had not yet been spoiled by egotism and gold. When he was deeply wounded, however, his hatred, like his love, became implacable.
When he was dragged into society he brought into it an impression of painful melancholy, like a deer expelled from its thicket.
With regard to details of his childhood, almost none are known; even those he confided to his intimates are unknown. Willfulness was always developed in him to the highest degree; he was bold, headstrong and imperious; scorn for habits and customs was innate in him; he never gave in, even at a very young age. He had a horror of clothes and spent his early years entirely naked; it was only later that anyone succeeded in making him put on the most necessary garments.
There is also a vague suspicion that his education was confided to priests—an opinion to which his irreligion lends adequate support. There is no a hero to a valet, no God to those who live in a temple.
He often took a kind of delight in relating that he had always been exasperating for his masters, always feared by them, without their exactly knowing why; perhaps he often put them in a quandary by his questions à La Condamine,7 and, scenting their crass ignorance, treated them with scorn and disgust! He also said, with pride, that he had been expelled from every school he had attended.
As study was his only passion, and Latin alone did not slake his thirst for knowledge, he was always surrounded by five or six dictionaries of ancient and modern languages, and scholarly works that he obtained with difficulty, which his ashamed masters burned in succession.
Already, in those days, he was afflicted by a sadness, and an indefinite, vague and profound chagrin; melancholy was already his “idiosyncrasy.” Some of his former schoolfellows recalled having seen him spend entire days weeping bitter tears, without any known or apparent cause; later, he was never able to define these desolations himself. Assuredly, life in forced community had thrown him into that chronic state of suffering, and that suffering, that ennui, excited his sensitive organism and tormented his grievous irritability.
The course of his brief career was similar to that of one of those torrents whose source is unknown, which sometimes flood valleys and sometimes run underground.
That first epoch of his life was followed by a number of years about which we have not been able to obtain the slightest information—except that we have found the following two brief notes among his papers, which give rise to the presumption that his father had placed him, against his will, in apprenticeship to some artist or artisan.
November 1823
Yesterday my father said to me: “You’re grown up now, and one needs a profession in this world. Come with me; I’m going to offer you to a master who will treat you well; you’ll learn a trade that ought to please you, you who draw on walls, who make poplars, hussars and parrots so well; you’ll have a good position.” I didn’t know what all that meant; I followed my father, and he sold me for two years.
January 1824
So this is what a position is, a master and an apprentice. I don’t know whether I really understand, but I’m sad and I think about life; it seems to me to be very short! On this transitory earth, then, why so many cares, so many painful cares—what’s the point? Now, I laugh when I see a man who is settled, or in the process of settling. What
