life? A bearskin and a few substances. If I’ve dreamed of a life it isn’t this one, Father! If I’ve dreamed of a life, it’s that of a camel-driver in the desert, an Andalusian muleteer, a Tahitian!
* * * * *
It is probable that the man with whom he served his apprenticeship was an architect, for someone recalls having seen him, a few years later, working in the architecture studio of Antoine Garnaud; otherwise, we not been able to discover anything about this phase of his life; doubtless he was engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with poverty, and in the intervals left to him by his stupid labors and hunger, he abandoned himself to study. Architectural designs and poems have been found among his papers bearing the same dates. His assiduity at the Antoine Garnaud studio gradually became less frequent, and he disappeared entirely therefrom. His aversion for ancient architecture, whose exclusion is well-known, was surely caused by that withdrawal.
He retreated into the shadows in order to devote himself to the studies of which he was fond; he was only seen to reappear at rare intervals, directing a few constructions, or in the studio of some skillful painter whose amity he had obtained.8 It was also about this time, approximately two years before his death—toward the end of 1829—that he associated himself with a few young and timid artists, in order to be stronger as a bundle, in order not to be broken and knocked down on entering into society. He was even regarded by many as the high priest of that rough-hewn camaraderie, which was considered very scandalous, and whose intentions and title were perverted by ignorance and malice. But let us not anticipate; Champavert, in a collective work that will be published shortly, has reestablished the veracity of the facts and enlightened the public that the newspapers have deceived.
His last companions, whose names are cited in the Rhapsodies, and who knew him very intimately, would have been able to provide exact and positive information about him; but, as he did not approve this publication, they have closed their doors to us.
It was toward the end of 1831 that Champavert’s poetic essays appeared, under the title Rhapsodies, par Pétrus Borel. No little book ever caused such a great scandal—a scandal, moreover, such as is always caused by every book written with heart and soul, without politeness for an era, in which art and passion are forged with the head and the hand, beating the breast on every page. We are too favorably disposed to pass judgment on those poems; no one would believe us to be impartial—so we shall only say that they seem to us to be abrupt, suffered, felt, full of fire, and, if we may be forgiven the expression, sometimes “flowery” but more often “cast-iron.” It is a book impregnated with venom and pain; it is the prelude to the drama that followed it, and which the most naïve had foreseen. A work of that sort has no second volume; its epilogue is death.
We shall, for the benefit of our readers who are unfamiliar with them, present a few extracts, in support of what I have just said.
This is the piece that opens the collection; we are giving preference to its citation because it is full of dolor of a rare frankness, and contains a few circumstances of his life about which we have been unable to speak; it is addressed to a friend who had given him hospitality, it seems, in a time when, like Metastasio,9 he had no shelter but the sky and the roadway.
When your Pétrus or your Pierre10
Had not even a stone
On which to rest, dry-eyed,
Or a nail in a miserly wall
On which to hang his guitar,
You gave me a shelter.
You said: Come, my Rhapsodist,
Come finish your ode in my home,
For your sky is not azure
Like the skies of Homer
Or the Provençal troubadour;
The air is cold, the ground is hard.
Paris has no boscage;
Come then, I’ll open the cage,
In which I live, cheerfully poor;
Come, amity unites us,
Together shall share
A few seeds of hemp.
Quietly, my shameful soul
Blessed your soothing voice
Which caressed its misery;
For you alone, at the austere fate
That overwhelmed my solitude,
Shed a tear, Léon.
What! My frankness wounds you?
Would you wish, out of weakness,
One’s poverty to be veiled?
No, no, new Malfilâtre,11
I want, in the visible century,
To display my nudity!
I want everyone to know
That I am not a coward,
For I had two portions of dolor
At that banquet of the earth,
For while still young, poverty
Could not break my vigor.
I want everyone to know
That I have only my moustache,
My guitar and my heart
Which laughs at distress;
And that my masterful soul
Always emerges victorious.
I want everyone to know
That, without toga or shield,
Neither chancellor nor baron,
I am no gentleman
Nor a cheap hireling
Parodying Lord Byron.12
At the court, in its orgies,
I have made no elegies,
No hymn to the deity;
On the side of some duchess,
Wallowing in wealth
No lay on my poverty.
Here are a few other verses and a few fragments chosen, so to speak, at random, all similarly full of chagrin and venom, and of the thought mutedly underlying them, and which was to doom him a short while later.
