Narcissistic Fiction: Music Theater of the Everyday in Édouard Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887)

As a notoriously nebulous artistic school, Symbolism eludes most attempts at definition.²⁰ While its current prestige relies on the great poetic works of Mallarmé and Verlaine, neither of them identified as Symbolists during their lifetime. Rather, it was their less well-known disciples who defined the aesthetics of the movement and who invented the two forms that secured Symbolism’s spot in literary history: free verse and the interior monologue. While the innovation of free verse is now justly attributed to the Polish-born poet and cabaret musician Marie Krysińska—who published vers libre in Le Chat noir magazine in 1882—literary connoisseurs of the 1880s ascribed the form to Gustave Kahn, whose collection Les Palais nomades (1887) cemented the Symbolists’ reputation for iconoclasm.²¹ As for the interior monologue, it was pioneered by Dujardin in Les Lauriers sont coupés but not regarded as a worthwhile innovation until Valery Larbaud lobbied for a new edition of the novel in 1924. Larbaud himself pushed Dujardin’s form further with Amants, heureux amants (1923) and saw his narrative experiment in psychological accuracy reprised and enhanced by the generation of writers forming the Nouveau Roman collective in the 1950s.

Many commentators have observed a causal relationship between the growing popularity of Wagner in the French literary avant-garde of the 1880s and the emergence of Symbolism as a literary school.²² The Symbolists’ interest in Wagner’s life, personality, music, and aesthetic theories was indeed the product of an age during which the composer—after the setback his reputation suffered due to his anti-French writings during the Franco-Prussian War—had once again become a fixture of French cultural life.²³ Just as Charles Baudelaire and Champfleury had championed Wagner in the 1860s (both before and after the Tannhäuser fiasco at the Paris Opéra), young progressive writers of the 1880s felt the duty to defend an artist whom they believed to have fallen for the cause of artistic modernity at the hands of a public stuck in the past. While the 1870s had represented a time of relative neglect for Wagner’s music in France, the situation had improved dramatically in the 1880s—despite the lack of fully staged performances—as Wagnerian excerpts began to be programmed frequently at the Concerts Populaires (until 1884), the Concerts Colonne, and Concerts Lamoureux. There were also private concerts hosted on a regular basis across the capital, most notably by the “Petit-Bayreuth” group, which was founded by the judge Antoine Lascoux and the painter Charles Toché. Among its attendees were Vincent d’Indy, Emmanuel Chabrier, André Messager, Gabriel Fauré, and Ernest Chausson, all of whom participated in chamber arrangements of the Ring or Parsifal.²⁴ Many Symbolist poets regularly sought out Wagnerian performances—whether big or small—in the capital. Dujardin and his collaborator Teodor de Wyzewa even travelled to Munich and Bayreuth on multiple occasions. And through their written accounts, it is possible to discern a common interest among the Symbolists in putting words on the strong emotional—and, at times, intensely physical—reaction that Wagner’s music elicited from them.²⁵

It was precisely because they had been so affected by his music—or perhaps because some of them had managed to spread their enthusiasm to the less musically inclined—that the Symbolists decided to write about Wagner in the Revue wagnérienne and outside of its confines. In doing so, they conducted an autopsy on the state of French poetry past the glory days of Romanticism and the Parnasse. Convinced that contemporary literature was in a state of crisis and that “everything ha[d] already been said and only viewpoints are subject to change,” they strove to avoid clichés by means of neologisms and new word assemblages.²⁶ Time and time again, their discussions designated Wagner and his vision of the total work of art as an antidote. But rather than following Wagner’s example and creating a French poetic or novelistic equivalent to his music dramas, these reflections became the prelude to a creative act of reappropriation. This was what Paul Valéry understood when he marked off the Symbolists’ desire to compete with music, and more specifically with Wagner’s music, as the key that could unlock the secrets of their infamously difficult works to modern readers: “What was baptized Symbolism can be very simply described as the common intention of several groups of poets (otherwise mutually inimical) to ‘reclaim their own from Music.’”²⁷ With their competitive spirit set alight, the Symbolists proposed a coherent collective interpretation of Wagner’s works based on their predilection for mental theater.²⁸

By adopting such a subjective approach vis-à-vis Wagner, the Symbolists were able to surmount the dual obstacle posed by the partial and reduced performances of Wagner available in Paris in the 1880s and the uneven quality of French translations of Wagner’s libretti.²⁹ This strategy lies in plain sight in the eight sonnets making up the Hommage à Wagner, a collection published in the Revue wagnérienne in January 1886 where Wagner takes a backseat to Symbolist reveries prompted by his characters, his music or even his artistic persona. These poems—among which stand Mallarmé’s “Hommage,” Verlaine’s “Parsifal” and two rather forgettable sonnets by Dujardin and Wyzewa—have since been recognized by specialists of Symbolism as the event that birthed the movement in earnest a few months before the publication of the more well-known “Symbolist Manifesto” by Jean Moréas in Le Figaro (September 1886).³⁰ Alongside Mallarmé’s poetic essay “Richard Wagner: Rêverie d’un poète français” (1885) and Wyzewa’s trilogy of articles on “l’art wagnérien” in painting, literature, and music released in the Revue wagnérienne between 1885 and 1886, the Symbolists also referenced Wagner in their fiction. The list includes Jules Laforgue’s parodic short story “Lohengrin, fils de Parsifal” (1887), Édouard Dujardin’s Pour la Vierge du roc ardent (1888), La Légende d’Antonia (1891–93), as well as Teodor de Wyzewa’s novel Valbert (1893). But while most of these texts have fallen into oblivion, their linguistic inventiveness and open disdain for conventional plot, coupled with their genre-bending character, were ideals that were already explored and theorized in the Revue wagnérienne a few years prior.

According to Dujardin, the Revue’s editorial line could be encapsulated in one neat expression: “to pour Wagnerians sweet and bitter beverages in succession,” a characterization redolent of Lucretius’s image of the honeyed cup that conceals a dose of bitter medicine.³¹ In other words, Dujardin aimed to alternately show reverence toward the Wagnerian cause (the honeyed beverage) and take liberties with the art he admired for the sake of the advancement of French art (the bitter medicine).

Dujardin’s trajectory as a Symbolist poet and novelist, pro-Wagner music critic, and avant-garde editor was typical of the tendencies highlighted above in that he outwardly showed great devotion toward the Wagnerian cause while periodically exhibiting a concurrent desire to challenge some of Wagner’s ideas. The latter he often did out of the belief that Wagnerian music drama still relied on a degree of realism and had not gone far enough in freeing the powers of the human imagination, which he thought capable of a much greater degree of abstraction. With that logic, Dujardin consistently criticized the visual aspects of the Wagnerian performances he saw between the 1880s and the early 1890s, arguing they should not have to rely on such artifices as costumes, props, and painted backdrops in addition to singers who looked nothing like the heroic ideals they were supposed to embody.³²

Born in 1861 in the Loire Valley to a bourgeois family, Dujardin moved to Paris for his studies. After failing to pass the entrance examination to the École normale supérieure, he took classes in history at the Sorbonne and in composition at the Conservatoire. There, he made the acquaintance of Paul Dukas—with whom he shared an extensive correspondence later in life—and Claude Debussy. By 1882, probably disillusioned with the meager extent of his compositional talents, he began a career as a music critic and was hired by Edmond Hippeau to be a reviewer for the up-and-coming weekly music journal La Renaissance musicale. In May 1882, Dujardin got his first big break: an assignment to cover the London premiere of the Ring cycle in full alongside Hippeau. Part of a tour orchestrated by the impresario Angelo Neumann in order to spread the Wagnerian gospel across Europe, these performances of the Ring had already been met with success in Bayreuth and reportedly bore Wagner and Ludwig II’s stamp of approval, with the advertising posters promising “gorgeous scenery, magnificent costumes, armours, etc. which have been so much admired at the Bayreuth Festival-plays.”³³ Needless to say, the London event would be excellent preparation for the neophyte Dujardin’s next task as a musical correspondent: a summer trip to Bayreuth, where he was to attend the world premiere of Parsifal in 1882.

What ensued was a classic case of love at first hearing. It is reminiscent of the experience of Dujardin’s great predecessors, chief among them Baudelaire, who was so transfixed by the music he had listened to at the Salle Ventadour in 1860 that he confessed in a letter to Wagner his inability to determine how he had been “vanquished from the very beginning” by his music.³⁴ But Dujardin differed from other French poets in that he had been trained in musical composition and was therefore better equipped to understand Wagner’s harmonic innovations. However, Dujardin kept strangely mum on the music itself in his review dated 14 May 1882: “We do not have to analyze and appreciate the towering work we travelled to hear: we shall only say a few words about the interpretation and the impression it made.”³⁵ Such reticence is telling, hinting at the baffling nature of the Ring cycle for someone who did not know German and grew up listening to French opera and operetta. Moreover, from Dujardin’s silence, it is possible to envisage he was so overwhelmed by what he had heard as to be unable to think critically.

Like Baudelaire, Dujardin confessed his admiration for Wagner in a personal letter to the composer, the copy of which has—to my knowledge—been lost. But Wagner’s response to Dujardin was published with great fracas in La Renaissance musicale of 21 May 1882 and dealt with the question of whether any of his dramatic works would see the light of day in France in the wake of the failure of the Paris Tannhäuser and the more successful Rienzi from 1869.³⁶ Wagner’s reply was brutal. It denied any future possibilities for fully staged performances on French soil out of the conviction that his works were essentially German and would thereby be misunderstood by a hostile French public. Nevertheless, the fact that such an obscure twenty-two-year-old critic as Dujardin was able to secure an answer from Wagner was a feat in itself, and a good indication of the young writer’s flair for publicity.

By 1884, having learned a bit of German and acquainted himself with important French Wagnerians—like the “Petit-Bayreuth” founder Antoine Lascoux—Dujardin set on a journey to Bayreuth where he caught the revival of Parsifal. There, he crossed paths with an Englishman he had met through Lascoux: the racialist thinker and Wagner’s future son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927). From Bayreuth, they traveled to Munich where they heard the Ring cycle. In a retrospective account entitled Rencontres avec Houston Stewart Chamberlain—which, it should be noted, was published in 1943 while France was under occupation by the Nazis and concludes with an indirect homage to Hitler—Dujardin recounts their 1884 Munich stay and the beginnings of his close friendship with Chamberlain:

In trying to come to a better understanding of Wagner and his music, Dujardin and Chamberlain sought to learn more by reading Wagner’s theoretical writings. While Chamberlain already had an excellent command of German, Dujardin struggled, a situation that led him to ponder the unavailability of Wagner’s writings in French.³⁸ If the situation was problematic vis-à-vis the music dramas—with none of the post-Tristan works having been translated into French as of 1884—it was especially abysmal when it came to Wagner’s essays.³⁹ Chamberlain and Dujardin thus saw a gap they had to remedy, and little by little, they began the project of getting a pro-Wagner petite revue off the ground in order to make these texts available in translation to a French audience and thereby fix what they saw as a series of misunderstandings between Wagner and the French.⁴⁰

But why write a review instead of a book of prose translations of Wagner’s late music dramas—à la Challemel-Lacour with his 1861 translation of four of Wagner’s music dramas—or even a book that would connect Wagner’s aesthetic thought with other European theatrical traditions, like Édouard Schuré’s Histoire du Drame musical (1876)? The answer lies in Dujardin’s determination to make a splash, a desire that compelled him to follow a nineteenth-century convention for ambitious avant-garde writers: that of editing his own magazine. As Pamela Genova explains, “it is often the case in France of the 1800s that the literary schools tend to choose the framework of the aesthetic review as a primary structure to lend coherence to the group, perceived as a collective standard around which to rally.”⁴¹ The Symbolists’ predecessors had given them a roadmap on how to proceed: the Romantics had assembled around Le Conservateur littéraire and La Muse française in the late 1810s and 1820s, while the Parnassians collaborated on Le Parnasse contemporain and La Revue fantaisiste in the early 1860s. But none of these magazines consistently dealt with an art form other than literature. The project of the future Revue wagnérienne was thus bold and unique, its interdisciplinary status only rivaled by later Modernist publications like the Vorticists’ BLAST (1914–15).

At once combative and informative, staunchly faithful to the word of Wagner and inventive in its interpretations, the Revue wagnérienne is a paradoxical object, so paradoxical in fact that it was more often than not misunderstood and turned into an object of ridicule during its time.⁴² In this regard, it very much resembles its creator’s complex position toward Wagner. Within a few months of its publication, the Revue’s reputation evolved rapidly, going from Wagnerian propaganda tool approved by the old guard to experimental literary venue geared toward a younger and more progressive audience. It is the latter aspect of the Revue that has stuck and given it notoriety as a site where so-called Decadent prose could flourish.⁴³ This shift in priorities quickly became a source of disappointment for the various factions that had supported the Revue during its beginnings. If, for the conservative Wagnerians who helped finance the Revue, the avant-garde poems and prose works it featured were self-indulgent fluff that detracted from the more serious enterprise of Wagnerian pedagogy, for Dujardin, the Revue was not doing enough to support the emerging literary avant-garde to which he belonged. This was a position he made clear once he took over the Revue indépendante in late 1886 and neglected the Revue wagnérienne as a result.⁴⁴ Without its editor at the helm, the Revue wagnérienne ceased publication after three short years, having proved unable to please its diverse group of readers and defend a coherent editorial line.

But Dujardin’s faith in the Revue’s potential to be a laboratory of ideas for his generation lived on. Beyond the seminal texts of French Wagnerism the Revue published, it was Wyzewa’s definition of the Wagnerian novel in his trilogy of articles on “l’art wagnérien” that had the most lasting impact, with some of their core principles reverberating across the Symbolist landscape.⁴⁵

In the 1886 article “Notes sur la littérature wagnérienne,” Wyzewa explained that French literature had long suffered from the legacy of rationalism. There, he turned Descartes into a straw man of French literary history and declared that his overwhelming influence had pushed French writers to sever literature from the world of the senses.⁴⁶ Wyzewa then issued a highly ambitious call for contemporary writers to restore the balance between what he called the three domains of human experience (in Symbolist parlance, “the soul”): “notions” (rationality), “sensations” (multisensory experiences) and “emotions” (psychology).⁴⁷ To each of these areas of human experience corresponds a specific art form: sensations are awakened by the visual arts, notions are reflected in literature while emotion, the more elusive domain of consciousness, is stimulated by music. By bringing them and their associated art forms together, the “Wagnerian” writer would perform a work of synthesis akin to what Wagner accomplished with the new form of music drama.

Where the work of Symbolist writers differs greatly from the method of Wagnerian synthesis, however, is that it does not rely on music performance in order to supplement its message. Rather, the poetic word is meant to be self-sufficient and capable of achieving similar effects as music with color, rhythm, and emotional immediacy. This helps explain why most Symbolists, in spite of their professed affinity for music, largely refrained from collaborating with musicians in order to push forward musical adaptations of their poems.⁴⁸ Rather, they showed enthusiasm for borrowing musical terms in their own poems like thème et variations in Kahn’s Les Palais Nomades, or gammes (scales) in Stuart Merrill’s Les Gammes (1887), or, like René Ghil, went as far as to claim a systematized network of correspondences connecting vowels and consonants to specific instruments and colors.⁴⁹ But as the example of Ghil would show—he who was regularly mocked by his contemporaries for his arrogance in inventing a standardized musico-poetic system of strict color-vowel-sound equivalence—the Symbolists usually demonstrated a form of humility in their experiments with musicalized prose and poetry. For all of their ambitions in regenerating French literature and revealing its true metaphysical potential, the Symbolists were fully aware that they could only fall short of their ideal: that of reflecting the world of Ideas in the work of art.⁵⁰

This awareness of literature’s limits was exemplified by Dujardin himself, who—like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam before him—fancied himself a Dichterkomponist and even composed a song cycle entitled Les Litanies (1888).⁵¹ He also did have a go at drafting a Wagner-inspired music drama, although it is impossible to tell if he did this before or after writing Les Lauriers. Called Thusnelda, its plot revolves around a Germanic princess who was captured by the Romans during the invasion of her native land and the manuscript makes clear Dujardin did not intend to compose the music.⁵² But Thusnelda, as is the case with other would-be Symbolist masterpieces like Mallarmé’s Le Livre, was never completed. And by the late-1890s, Dujardin gave up on his career as a fiction writer for several decades, publishing only sporadically and reinventing himself as a scholar of early Christianity. He only took up literary writing again from the 1920s until his death in 1949 and refashioned himself as a playwright and historian of Symbolism.

Wyzewa’s career also bears testimony to Symbolism’s lofty ideals and its subsequent tacit admission of defeat when confronted with the realities of literary production. Like Dujardin, he only published two novels, Valbert and Le Cahier rouge (1917), with the bulk of his writing career being in literary criticism and translation. Even his passionate calls for the establishment of “art wagnérien” in the Revue wagnérienne demonstrate his understanding of the impossible task he set for himself and other writers with its tentative language and its cautious abundance of future tenses.⁵³

But Wyzewa could also be more practically minded. In his 1886 “art wagnérien” trilogy of articles for the Revue wagnérienne, he proposed to avoid tediousness and prevent dispersion by prescribing strict limits to fellow writers. In the Wagnerian novel, there was to be only one main character and the plot was to unfold over a short duration in order to avoid “isolated and unexplained perceptions,” conveying instead “the very origins of mental states in their continuity.”⁵⁴ What becomes apparent here is just how much of an interest Wyzewa had in the literary representation of inner life. This was a subject of particular concern to Wyzewa since he believed that the Naturalists—as the dominant literary school of the 1880s—had sinned for having given too much attention to society’s ills. In other words, the Naturalists had cared too much about the external world, to the detriment of character psychology.⁵⁵

The Wagnerian novel, Wyzewa surmised, would remedy this situation by giving as complete a portrayal of a fictional character’s interiority as possible, with the added constraint that the contents of its fictional characters’ interiority had to be directly inspired by the author’s own experiences. According to him, the more autobiographical the narrative, the more successfully it could deliver emotional immediacy and thought intimacy. The question now becomes: since Dujardin was a close collaborator of Wyzewa and applied many of the rules delineated by his friend in Les Lauriers sont coupés, how much does the final product conform to Wyzewa’s vision? Part of the answer to that question lies in Dujardin’s earlier attempts at writing fiction with Les Hantises (1886), a collection of short stories that already demonstrates his interest for highly flawed characters and everyday mediocrity, an interest that seemingly contradicts Wyzewa’s injunction for literature to reflect the sum of the poet’s existence.

As he busied himself with promoting the Revue wagnérienne and attending Wagnerian concerts in Paris and abroad, Dujardin also began writing his own fiction and released a couple of works before Les Lauriers sont coupés.⁵⁶ The first was a collection of thirteen short stories in the fantastic genre entitled Les Hantises (1885), and the second was the prose poem À la gloire d’Antonia (1886). In dedicating twelve tales from Les Hantises to prominent Wagnerians—such as Lascoux and Boissier—and to writers who had contributed to the Revue wagnérienne—like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Catulle Mendès, Mallarmé, and Huysmans—Dujardin appeared to be trying to appeal to the two groups that had come to define his career thus far.

The themes explored in the book show a similar willingness to draw from various sources and synthesize them into a coherent final product. Les Hantises bears the mark of a wide array of influences, from a predilection for the macabre and the occult derived from Edgar Allan Poe and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, to a sensationalized investigation of disturbed psyches similar to Guy de Maupassant or Paul Bourget, and an occasional foray into middle-class inanity à la Gustave Flaubert and Maupassant. The result, if uneven in quality, holds the promise of greater things to come. As Huysmans told Dujardin, “Les Hantises are a pretty labyrinth of the soul . . . the most important thing after Poë [sic] was to describe exacerbated states of mind, to recreate a non-American rationalizing fantastic, which is what I have found in this all-too-short book—suggestive in its ideas and weak in certain areas, stylistically so, I think.”⁵⁷

In recent studies of Les Lauriers sont coupés and its connection to Wagnerism, it has become de bon ton to briefly mention two stories from Les Hantises—“Le Kabbaliste” and “Histoire d’une journée” (Story of a given day)—and argue for their status as preliminary sketches.⁵⁸ Certainly, there seem to be two important aspects of the novel that are present in these earlier texts: “Le Kabbaliste” contains Wagnerian allusions—with a gender-bending passage that paraphrases the final scene of Die Walküre and has the male protagonist imagine himself as a supine Brünnhilde protected by a ring of fire—while “Histoire d’une journée” scrupulously details an average man’s routine. Moreover, these two texts already display elements that foreshadow Dujardin’s pursuit of an aesthetic of contrasts in Les Lauriers—the dreamlike atmosphere of Symbolist poetry clashing with the ironic realism usually seen in Maupassant, or the temptation to emulate Wagner’s grandiosity contrasting with more quotidian concerns.

Beyond the parallels I just mentioned, “Le Kabbaliste” and “Histoire d’une journée” also refer to French theater and musical entertainment. Like the ones in Les Lauriers, these references have gone unnoticed by critics. For instance, shortly before staging a vision of himself as Brünnhilde, the titular protagonist of “Le Kabbaliste” invokes another mental image. This passage, which is more obviously humorous than the allusion to Die Walküre, is stylistically redolent of Laforgue’s trademark juxtaposition of slang and lyricism, a juxtaposition that was deeply influential to Dujardin and reappears in Les Lauriers: “The other night, I met up with good old Trilby—he was a sylph—in an aerial park covered with diamonds made of ether.”⁵⁹ This “good old” Trilby is in fact a character from what was then a French literary classic: Charles Nodier’s novella, Trilby ou le lutin d’Argail (1822) (Trilby, or the Imp of Argyll). Inspired by Walter Scott and Scottish folklore, Nodier created the half-angel half-demon imp Trilby, a character that became so popular as to appear in numerous stage adaptations. These included a one-act vaudeville by Eugène Scribe and Pierre Carmouche—Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argail (1823)—and a ballet entitled Trilby, ou le lutin des chaumières (1840) (Trilby or the Imp of Humble Dwellings) by the Cogniard brothers, who contributed to the success of the operetta and féerie genres during the Second Empire at the Théâtre des Variétés. However, Scribe’s version of Trilby was the most successful of these adaptations. It premiered in 1823 at the Théâtre du Gymnase Dramatique, which had only opened three years prior with the purpose of hosting Scribe’s newest comédies-vaudeville.⁶⁰ Typical of the genre is the inclusion of various songs from other vaudevilles—like Scribe’s own La Somnambule (1819), which was later adapted by Felice Romani as La Sonnambula (1831) for Vincenzo Bellini—and original songs by the Austrian poet Ignaz Franz Castelli, all of which punctuate the flow of the play and highlight its most emotional moments. Though Scribe’s creation had lost its luster by the second half of the nineteenth century, it had stayed on as part of the Gymnase repertoire years after its premiere.⁶¹ It is thus possible that Dujardin may have caught it there himself or heard about it from friends. At any rate, the reference to Trilby in “Le Kabbaliste” can be understood to convey not just the high-end Romantic drama of the Nodier original, but also, as its use of slang (“good old Trilby”) would suggest, its more popular by-products: the vaudeville and ballet it inspired.

Parisian theaters, big and small, also make subtle appearances in “Histoire d’une journée.” The story details one ordinary day in the life of Maurice Dupont, a young man in his twenties, who moved from Normandy to Paris in order to study law.⁶² Acutely aware of his provincial roots and his common last name—Dupont was and remains the equivalent of Smith in France—he seeks to control the image he projects onto the people who surround him and makes considerable efforts to be perceived as a dandy. This he does through his sophisticated choice of clothing and by showing himself at various conspicuous spots of the capital like the café Tortoni, a location that comes back in Les Lauriers.

But Dupont’s incessant curating of his dress and demeanor is not just a symptom of his narcissism; it is above all else indebted to the theater and the habits of its most elegant attendees: “little by little, through theater during his first years, he got to know what Parisian life was like . . . he had been initiated into chic.”⁶³ Unfortunately, he has yet to be invited to the soirées hosted by the distinguished men and women who occupy the orchestra seats. Hoping for their approval, Dupont becomes a fixture of the most fashionable performance venues of the capital, like the Paris Opéra, as well as its more popular counterparts, the Théâtre du Vaudeville and the Théâtre des Nouveautés, where he pretends to be slumming.⁶⁴ Like Dujardin, Dupont is short-sighted and treasures his monocle, which he leaves hanging on his vest. This is no mistake since its purely ornamental function keeps him from engaging too deeply with what happens on the stage.⁶⁵ Between his attitude as a detached spectator and his aspirational purchases from a shoemaker with at least “three customers at the Jockey-Club”—an exclusive men’s club that was instrumental in causing the failure of Tannhäuser back in 1861—it becomes clear that Dupont only attends the theater in hopes of climbing the Parisian social ladder.⁶⁶

In sum, this short examination of Les Hantises foreshadows how Dujardin was to handle his references to French music theater in Les Lauriers. It does so in two respects. First, in Les Hantises, Dujardin showed a willingness to dilute high art—in this case, Die Walküre—with more popular forms of entertainment. Second, he turned his protagonist in “Histoire d’une journée” into a reverse alter ego who, although he shares some traits with Dujardin himself, is in fact a vacuous if driven young man. This form of characterization—the young ambitious provincial man who tries to “make it” in Paris—has many precedents in nineteenth-century French literature, from Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac, to Maupassant’s Georges Duroy in Bel-Ami (1885). But in Les Lauriers, Dujardin transforms a trope into an impersonal “Type,” going as far as to create a solipsistic, and ultimately empty, discourse. And, as I am going to show now, the mechanism that reinforces the impression of emptiness on the reader is Daniel Prince’s frequent use of musical references. In fact, he consistently uses them as a crutch with which to maintain a state of denial over the reality of his romantic and artistic failures.

To begin with, there is the matter of the novel’s title, which draws from the French folk-song repertoire and heralds the novel’s Laforgue-like tactic of bringing together popular references and a poetic style for the happy few. A quotation from the second line of an eighteenth-century children’s song—or ronde—called Nous n’irons plus au bois, the text was allegedly composed by Louis XV’s most prominent mistress, Madame de Pompadour, shortly after the King gifted her the Hôtel d’Évreux, now the Palais de l’Élysée and the current residence of French presidents.⁶⁷ According to popular belief, Madame de Pompadour wanted to amuse children from the neighboring area by having them dance in circles and sing along. Here is a sampling of the text—first verse and chorus:

From George Sand to Gustav Mahler to Claude Debussy, the song has come to represent childhood innocence in literature and in music.⁶⁹ But upon closer examination of the lyrics and the symbolism they contain, “Nous n’irons plus au bois” includes much more adult content (ex. 1). Indeed, the song’s references to walking into the woods—where one may presumably find a wolf—coupled with the laurels can take on new meaning in light of the cultural context of the era during which the song was written. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Versailles, laurels were in effect shorthand for prostitution, with braids signaling the entrance of a brothel to potential customers.⁷⁰ Thus, by virtue of association, the title of the novel can also be considered to be just as ambiguous, pointing to the dual mindset of Daniel Prince vis-à-vis his sexuality, which he either indulges in or denies.

But Dujardin was not the first writer of the nineteenth century to be interested in “Nous n’irons plus au bois” and its wealth of contradictory images. In a poem written in 1846, the poet Théodore de Banville—revered by Mallarmé and the Symbolists—successfully merged the original song’s dual modes of interpretation into a dark poetic universe where the vestiges of an aristocratic castle—presumably Versailles—are shown in an abandoned state:

In Banville’s version, the once awe-inspiring Cupids and Naiads of ornate pools are captured in a state of decay, the water that used to flow from their fountains having congealed into crystals—presumably made of limescale. An ongoing hunt marks the end of a stag’s life with the sound of the horn while the gardens in the vicinity have become eerily quiet because the children who used them as their playground have since disappeared. Consequently, in Banville’s hands, “Nous n’irons plus au bois” has evolved from childhood rhyme into a meditation on loss, with the poem’s ruins seemingly alluding to the tectonic shifts undergone by French society in the wake of the Revolution. Similar to Verlaine’s most famous poems from Fêtes galantes (1869), it is filled with nostalgia for the ancien régime and displays some anxiety vis-à-vis the present.

It is only possible to speculate as to whether or not Dujardin had read this specific poem by Banville, but it is likely he knew the song “Nous n’irons plus au bois” from childhood. Dujardin’s decision to focus on the second line of the song for his title suggests he may also have been interested in the laurels’ usual symbolism beyond their connection to sex work: that of academic accomplishment and military victory. When attached to the aristocratic name of Daniel Prince, the title Les Lauriers sont coupés would thus appear not just to harken back to the ancien régime like Banville, but also to bear the promise of a particular achievement worthy of laurels. And yet, the combination of the Prince last name with the laurel symbolism cannot be taken seriously once the reader is presented with the basic facts of the plot. Prince, it turns out, is a dreamer who attends law school half-heartedly and dabbles in writing in his free time. His romantic life is not much more successful, seeing as Léa—the woman with whom he believes to be in love and whom he fantasizes about day and night—does not in fact want any sort of intimacy with him, whether physical or emotional.

Beyond the title’s symbolic content, what matters most here is that Dujardin’s choice of a popular song for his novelistic début highlights a conflict at the heart of his creative process. I see it as representative of the same clash of high Wagner-inspired ambition and more modest artistic means I described earlier in regards to Symbolism. From a thematic perspective, the contrast between the folksy title and the novel’s highly experimental style also echoes another one of Prince’s inner contradictions, namely his struggle over having to choose between the life of the aesthete and that of the fashionable gentleman.

This irresolution is just as apparent in his relationship with music, with Prince often unable to determine where some of his musical reminiscences come from and feeling confused about what he truly thinks of them. The very first appearance of music in the novel is emblematic of this state of affairs. It takes place in a non-diegetic and even roundabout way, embedded as it is in a stream of thoughts and involuntary memories. In chapter 2, as Daniel Prince is dining at the fictitious Café Oriental—itself inspired by the Café d’Orient where Dujardin used to meet fellow Symbolists—he draws an association between an attractive woman he has spotted having a meal with a male companion, the wine he is consuming, and a famous line he has trouble attributing to a specific operatic source:

Here Prince spontaneously transitions from citing the male chorus line from act I, sc. 1, of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831), “Wine, gambling, women” (Le vin, le jeu, les belles) into the all-too-similar trio “Wine, love and tobacco” (Le vin, l’amour et le tabac) from the militaristic “refrain du bivouac” in scene 9 of Adolphe Adam’s Le Chalet (1834), as sung by the braggadocio Swiss soldier Max. Scribe’s ubiquitous presence in nineteenth-century French music theater may help explain such confusion. Does the line come from one of his five-act grand opéras or a more modest one-act opéra comique? Such hesitancy also seems to hint at the fact that Scribe’s longevity was partly due to a very special ability, that of crafting memorable rhymes that would lodge their way into the French collective consciousness, like earworms of sorts. This was in fact Théophile Gautier’s assessment of Scribe’s legacy as a poetaster beloved by the masses. In 1859 Gautier wrote that “Mr. Scribe is agreeable to the masses and communes with them: he does not get ahead of them, rather he follows their lead. . . . He writes the way the bourgeois would like to speak.”⁷³ Like Gautier’s hypothetical bourgeois, it could be said here that Prince is only too happy to quote Scribe because he wishes he could speak—and behave—like one of his more manly stage characters. But this is a desire he understands as somewhat shameful, a sentiment he shows by poking fun at the predictability of Scribe’s characters’ “passion for the same three things.”

This connection of musical references with personal desires is, in effect, the beginning of a pattern at play with the novel’s musical allusions in that they are always tied to the protagonist’s subjectivity. This is a fact that should be of little surprise, given that the novel was written as an interior monologue. It should also be noted that none of the musical references in the novel are ever part of an actual performance at the theater or in the concert hall. Rather, most of them are the fruit of the protagonist’s imagination. And in the one instance where Prince actually hears music being played from a barrel organ in chapter 6—a scene to which I will return—he strays from the reality of the performance as fast as he can in order to indulge in trite romantic fantasies that are very loosely inspired by said music.

But why did Dujardin have all of his musical references in Les Lauriers contained in the protagonist’s inner monologue instead of having recourse to music performance? And why did he give them a prominent position in his novel? Their importance, I posit, harkens back to Dujardin’s definition of music as the language that best represents human interiority. This much he explained in “Interior Monologue,” where he wrote of the Symbolists’ desire to craft a musical literary style that would help them convey the workings of the mind beyond rational thinking: “the life consciousness taken over as the subject of poetry, the musical conception—namely the de-intellectualization of poetry.”⁷⁴ In the Rousseauist tradition, Dujardin sought to make his written language more musical because he believed music to be the language of unbridled emotion.⁷⁵ In Les Lauriers, he strove to achieve the impression of emotional immediacy via recourse to a staccato style made of frequent ellipses punctuated by spontaneous jaillissements (outburst or gush of feeling), which he argued was “a single-breath unit that is at the source of poetry as much as music.”⁷⁶ In doing so, he delivered a text that is as stylistically poetic as it can be prosaic in character.

In the 1936 memoir, Mallarmé par un des siens, Dujardin expounded on his desire to write lyrical prose: “I have always thought it possible to find a form that would go without transition or accident from verse to prose according to one’s current lyrical state.”⁷⁷ This balancing act was, according to Dujardin, best exemplified in music. But not just in any music; he believed it to be most evident in music theater. This much he made clear in his positive assessment of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Périchole (1868) in which he observed a seamless transition from spoken dialogue to melody. There, he characterized melody as a primal language, or “nothing other than the exact notation of the human cry” and found that most of La Périchole’s success as a work of music theater stemmed from its effective use of melody to propel the plot forward emotionally.⁷⁸

However, in Les Lauriers, the musical moments never lead to any sort of emotional epiphany. In fact, they bring the plot to a standstill. Furthermore, the music is part of the text’s narcissism in that it is fundamentally focused on itself and only pretends to engage with the external world. The novel’s musical references thereby help the author give form to the inner life of a typical Symbolist antihero: a daydreamer incapable of confronting himself with reality and forming meaningful relationships with others, whether men or women.⁷⁹

Indeed, Prince is particularly skilled at distracting himself and pretending he has actual connections with those around him, as the next couple of musical references in chapter 2 would tend to prove. Following his confusion over Robert le Diable or Le Chalet, he spontaneously transitions into an unexpected meditation on operatic pronunciation and traditional rules of French versification, mixing up Scribe’s older crowd-pleasing rhymes with the French poetic avant-garde of the 1880s:

The proper rhyming scheme for bivouac/tabac is indeed ambiguous and lends itself to debate: in standard French, the final c is pronounced in the first (bivouac) but not in the second (tabac). However, operatic diction does not abide by typical pronunciation rules and neither, sometimes, does poetry, as Prince seems to conclude in his recollection of Catulle Mendès’s teachings.⁸¹ Although Prince considers himself a writer of sorts—even informing the reader in chapter 5 that he has contemplated recording the details of his (non)-relationship with Léa d’Arsay in a notebook—he remains unproductive, unlike his creator. This likely means he never dared to mix with other poets at the Café Napolitain where Mendès held court with his younger admirers. Rather, like his predecessor Maurice Dupont in “Histoire d’une journée,” Prince may have only been sitting alone in the sidelines.

The final musical reference in chapter 2 comes at the end of the meal and springs from a free association between older French opéra comique—François Adrien Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche (1825)—and ice cream:

The connection appears to be ludicrous, as if Dujardin were hinting that old-fashioned French operatic works like La Dame blanche—what could be characterized in French as opéra à papa (daddy’s opera, i.e., opera that was once popular but is now charmingly obsolete)—have become as inoffensive as dessert. But what could trigger the mental leap between the famed Tortoni café and La Dame blanche? Perhaps the primary reason has something to do with Tortoni’s close geographical proximity to the Opéra-Comique, where La Dame blanche was still a staple of the repertoire in the late 1880s.⁸³ Coincidentally, Dujardin may have anticipated the fact that a number of “Dame blanche” ice-cream desserts would in fact appear at the turn of the century: the first appears in Escoffier’s Le Guide culinaire (1903) as an iced dessert made of vanilla ice cream and filled with almond milk.⁸⁴

By contrast with the previous operatic nods of the chapter, there is no exact quote to latch on to here; nor is there any indication of the melody Prince hears in his mind’s ear. This is pure conjecture but the three syllables making up the “ça vous manque” line would fit well into the famed refrain “Prenez garde” (Beware) from act I, sc. 5, of La Dame blanche, which is repeated several times by the character of Jenny to warn her guest George Brown about the ghost—the titular White Lady—in her castle. In this light, Prince’s regret over not having had ice cream at Tortoni’s takes on new meaning, with the melody carrying the original message of “prenez garde” alluding to the more trivial issue of potentially gaining weight after indulging. But the joke, however amusing it might be, does not reach its full potential because it remains self-contained. The same cannot be said of the next—and most ambitious—of all the musical references in the novel, which Prince attempts to share with Léa with disastrous results.

The next French music theater reference in Les Lauriers concerns Edmond Audran’s La Mascotte (1880). It is less playful in nature than the Scribe nods and rather more sarcastic. Knowing that both Dujardin and Wyzewa expressed great contempt toward Audran’s operettas on multiple occasions, a parodic reading of the passages alluding to the Mascotte in Les Lauriers would seem amply justified. In a letter dating from September 1886, for instance, Wyzewa lamented his provincial hosts’ propensity to play selections from Audran’s hit operetta on the piano: “but here I can only hear La Mascotte and Delibes’s ballets being played. That’s shit, in sum.”⁸⁵ In 1887 Wyzewa also went as far as to publicly exclaim in the Revue indépendante that the delightful simplicity of opéra comique from the earlier part of the century had descended into “the vile operetta of Mr. Lecocq and Mr. Audran.”⁸⁶ As for Dujardin, he made his opinion on La Mascotte abundantly clear when he contrasted Offenbach’s operetta with several by Audran, to the latter’s detriment: “[Offenbach’s La Périchole] is nothing like the waltzes and romances from La Mascotte or Miss Helyett. . . . The aesthetic of contemporary operetta [i.e., Audran’s] is quite simple: it involves, under the pretext of some vaudeville, a series of waltzes and sentimental romances, some naughty verses and a few occurrences of galop: it is café-concert, plain and simple.”⁸⁷ It should also be added just how little love Dujardin had for operetta in general, beyond the exception he made for Offenbach. In his second novel, the much more conventional L’Initiation au péché et à l’amour (1898), he made operetta a marker of vulgarity within a well-off bourgeois family who have invited the protagonist over for dinner. An impromptu piano performance of a meretricious quadrille from Hervé’s opéra bouffe L’Oeil crevé (1867) makes the protagonist—a well-educated man of refined aspirations—so uncomfortable that he nearly weeps.⁸⁸

Allusions to the recent hit operetta La Mascotte in Les Lauriers warrants more scrutiny. The excerpt Dujardin utilized and recycled repeatedly in the second half of Les Lauriers is taken from “le duo des dindons” (the turkey duet), a mezzo-soprano and baritone duet between Bettina the farm girl, the eponymous “good-luck charm,” or mascotte, and her love interest the shepherd Pippo in act I of La Mascotte (plate 1). Both singers imitate the sounds made by the animals they are minding—Bettina’s turkeys and Pippo’s sheep—with onomatopoeic exclamations of “glou, glou” (gobble, gobble) and “bêêê” (baah). The result is puerile but charming, a great representation of Richard Traubner’s characterization of La Mascotte as “a pure crowd-pleaser, demanding neither intense concentration on the audience’s part nor elaborate orchestration on Audran’s.”⁸⁹ At once mawkish and naïve, La Mascotte mirrors Daniel Prince’s inner world in more ways than one. Yet the importance given to the “turkey duet” by Dujardin seems odd for a ground-breaking work of fiction like Les Lauriers and recalls the choice he made with a title alluding to a children’s song. Simply put, the bad taste of the Mascotte turkey duet makes good fodder for a virtuosic reimagining, one that would elevate it to the sublime in the vein of a Laforgue poem.

Repeatedly, Prince attempts to improve the duet in order to turn it into a more respectable love scene that would shun its original animalistic content. This going back and forth between the prosaic and the lyrical evokes the aesthetic project Dujardin had in mind with Les Lauriers, a project he articulated to his friend the journalist Vittorio Pica shortly after the novel’s publication: “the life of the soul is a continuous intertwinement of lyricism and prose; the novel that seeks to convey the life of the soul will incessantly sway between poetic exaltation and the mundane of everyday life.”⁹⁰ From a formal perspective, Dujardin did not simply cite the lyrics of the Mascotte or allude to the work obliquely, as he did with other works of music theater in Les Lauriers. Instead, he inscribed musical quotations from the score in chapter 6—albeit in an approximate manner—and had Prince and Léa evoke some of the duet’s key motifs—pastoral love, turkeys and shepherds—later in the novel, in chapters 7 and 9. This is, therefore, a much more extended musical reference than first meets the eye.

Furthermore, the Mascotte references accomplished a wider formal purpose for Dujardin: that of trying his hand at creating an equivalent to the Wagnerian leitmotif in literature. In the revisionist essay “Interior monologue” (1931), Dujardin alleged he had mostly taken inspiration from Wagner by secretly planting leitmotifs throughout Les Lauriers, saying “if however one looks closely at Les Lauriers sont coupés, one will see the book is full of leitmotifs. . . .”⁹¹ But, rather surprisingly for someone who cares to remind the reader he possesses a musical background, he locates his leitmotifs in improbable places and forgets to mention the Mascotte altogether.⁹² While it is impossible to know why Dujardin obscured his own experimentation with Wagnerian leitmotif in conjunction with the Mascotte in Les Lauriers, his neglect helps explain why this incongruous rapprochement has been left unexplored in scholarship thus far. My conviction is that the Mascotte references in Les Lauriers constitute a bona fide yet flawed case of Wagnerian influence, which merges lowbrow and highbrow in a daring but unfinished new product. In doing so, its Janus-like nature creates a compelling mirror of 1880s French Wagnerism, a movement torn between its deep reverence for Wagner and its desire to challenge his works with a healthy dose of irreverence.

The first potential leitmotif Dujardin mentions in “Interior Monologue” is located “at the beginning of the eighth chapter, with the recapitulation of motifs from the prelude.”⁹³ Yet this claim cannot be taken as fact for two reasons: first, the beginning of chapter 8 is a mere rehashing of the novel’s incipit, with a few variations. Second, the repeated motif is too extended and too loose an association for it to constitute a coherent leitmotif. Consider the following excerpts:

The only element these two passages have in common with the Wagnerian device is the fact that the reiterated words evolve in their form, straying from strict repetition and changing slightly in order to better fit the present mood. In music, leitmotifs can be transposed, reharmonized, displaced in register, and nested in different textures. Their rhythms can be elongated or shortened. Likewise, in this excerpt, certain words are reintroduced in an order reminiscent of the original, including the series “aujourd’hui/ici/heure/vie,” but with new interjections that muddy the waters of familiarity. They do, however, share more ground on a thematic level: while Daniel Prince emerges ex nihilo as a lone flâneur in the first chapter, in chapter 8 a mysterious “songe féminin” has replaced Paris as his main companion. In both instances, he is shown to be a victim of an idée fixe, which is his fixation on Léa and the theme underpinning the repetition in the first place.

In the “Interior Monologue” essay, while Dujardin assured his reader that the influence of Wagnerian leitmotif was crucial in shaping his own form of interior monologue, he also provided an idiosyncratic definition of the leitmotif that helps shed light on his intentions and may explain his approximative—not to say, faulty—usage of the term:

While there is a lot to take issue with vis-à-vis Dujardin’s understanding of the Wagnerian leitmotif as “underdeveloped,” what I would rather retain from such a definition is the notion of rational vs. emotional order.

Having already underlined how the same scene evolves between chapter 1 and 8 thanks to Prince’s changing circumstances, I believe that the Mascotte motif in Les Lauriers is indeed an adaptation of the Wagnerian device. But, in its tentative aspects, it seems to interrogate the pertinence of the leitmotif outside of the Wagnerian framework. Such questioning fits perfectly within the wider aesthetic project of a narcissistic novel such as Les Lauriers sont coupés, where the foundations of novelistic writing are repeatedly questioned. Moreover, each repetition of the themes of the “turkey duet” is consistently connected to Prince’s subjectivity and mirrors his lack of consideration for the other person in the room. This proves to be the case when Léa alludes to the Mascotte herself by saying she would “be happier looking after turkeys in Brittany.”⁹⁷ Her reference is so subtle as not to be understood as such by Prince. And his failure to catch her meaning is emblematic of Prince’s refusal to understand her intentions, highlighting their lack of proper communication.

After a chapter taking place entirely indoors, chapter 6 presents the reader with a picture of Prince as flâneur, walking across the streets of Paris in order to meet with Léa.⁹⁸ Instead of picking up on everyday street noises as he did in previous chapters, he becomes captivated by a disembodied tune coming from an invisible barrel organ, a ubiquitous presence in Parisian streets of the late nineteenth century. Feeling intrigued by what he hears, Prince has just as much trouble locating the origin of the familiar tune as he does remembering the source of the melody played by the barrel organ:

There are three voices woven together in this passage: the first one is the barrel organ’s re-creation of the melody from La Mascotte; the second is Dujardin’s musical notation of the Mascotte; and the third is Prince’s interior monologue in which he pictures himself as Pippo, and Léa as Bettina. As will be shown below, the score itself is not transcribed accurately, nor are the lines given in their actual order. If anything, they suggest that Dujardin recalled them only vaguely and that his aversion for the music led to some flippancy in his notational citation.¹⁰⁰

The first melody, which Prince correctly identifies as the line “j’t’aim’ mieux qu’mes dindons” (I love you more than my turkey-cocks) (ex. 3), is in fact preceded in the original score by “comme un tremblement qui m’agite” (like a shiver that shakes me), which comes up much earlier as the second musical sentence sung by the character of Bettina (ex. 4). Prince’s selection of these two musical phrases is not incidental, since both are tenderly addressed by the female lead of La Mascotte to her lover. They suggest the crude but true romantic attachment that Prince craves, but cannot obtain, from Léa.

As he passes by, the street singer’s voice gently fades away and Prince’s highly subjective reinterpretation of the tune takes over—only this time, the guileless countryside of La Mascotte is replaced by a nobler seventeenth-century pastoral scene. The clash of aesthetics in this superimposition creates the right conditions for Dujardin to poke fun at his protagonist’s embrace of Audran’s music:

The mention of the “tranquil landscape” and “simple hearts” is easily understood in light of the Mascotte’s rural setting. But Prince is quick to reconfigure this framework for his own more grandiose purposes. This he does by replacing Bettina and Pippo’s animal noises within the wider tapestry of Platonic love he has crafted for himself and Léa.

Adding to the overall impression of ridicule comes Dujardin’s not-so-innocent choice of having Audran’s music be played by a street instrument that demands no technical skill—the fully mechanical barrel organ—over a piano rendition or a performance of La Mascotte at an actual theater. In French, the barrel organ is called “orgue de Barbarie,” the origins of which designation remain mysterious. Evidently, “Barbarie” echoes the adjective barbare (barbarian), a fact that was not lost on commentators from earlier in the century like Berlioz, who were quick to mock the instrument’s lower-class appeal and its urban origins: “The same orgue de Barbarie would come just as it did before at the same time in order to play the same barbaric tune [air de Barbarie] for me, I hear the same barbaric opinions being ventured and asserted, and I hear the same works and the same men of Barbaria being praised.”¹⁰² In the French poetic tradition, the barrel organ was used by poets with a popular bent, like Jean Richepin in his Chanson des gueux (1876), but also by the master of fin-de-siècle poetic parody, Jules Laforgue, in his Complaintes (1885). Incidentally, Laforgue was friendly with Dujardin, who admired him very much and coaxed him into becoming part of his lineup for the Revue indépendante. When Laforgue died unexpectedly in 1887—at age twenty-seven—Dujardin was the recipient of his last poems and proceeded to edit them in collaboration with Félix Fénéon as Les derniers vers in 1890. In Les Complaintes, only two poems are explicitly named after the instrument, “Complainte de l’orgue de Barbarie” and “Autre complainte de l’orgue de Barbarie,” but the barrel organ seemingly permeates the entire collection, as a modern anti-lyre. As Laurence Tibi has suggested, this street instrument was the perfect embodiment of Laforgue’s peculiar poetic voice: at once creaking and elegant, crude and sublime.¹⁰³

Similar to Laforgue’s poetics of contrast, Audran’s La Mascotte appears to have served a dual thematic and formal purpose in the novel, with morsels from the “turkey duet” emerging in multiple instances, all of which are reminders of the comedic gap between Prince’s lofty aspirations and his banal reality. After chapter 6, the next allusion to La Mascotte occurs when Prince finally gains entry to Léa’s apartment in chapter 7. Expecting sexual gratification after a long one-sided courtship, he is disarmed when she exclaims: “What a life! What a life! I’m tempted to give everything up!” before adding “I’d be happier looking after turkeys in Brittany.”¹⁰⁴ It is also worth noting that Léa pronounces these words while leaning against the piano, as if Dujardin wanted to underline the reference he was making to La Mascotte’s Bettina. The contrast between Léa’s scheming exterior and her momentary envy of rustic peasant life suggests that she may be a more complex character than she first appeared. But Prince fails to catch the hidden message she sends him through this musical allusion.

A little later in the chapter, as Léa falls asleep in Prince’s arms, the latter summons a bucolic vision related to the previous pastoral fantasy he entertained in chapter 6 with the help of the music from La Mascotte:

In this passage, the substitution of the I for the thou—from “I love you” to “you love me”—is wishful thinking and another piece of evidence showing Prince’s romantic imagination running amok. But suddenly, as Prince fixes his gaze on Léa’s vulnerable sleeping body, the mock rural dialect of the Mascotte’s turkey duet—“love y’ more than m’ sheep”—seems to taunt him as a reminder of his baser animal instincts, like a Freudian slip of sorts. However unconscious his sexual attraction toward Léa may be, Audran’s music strikes a bathetic tone in which Prince’s romantic reverie takes a carnal turn while his Platonic relationship dreams take a backseat. From Léa as his single object of desire, Prince shifts over to an unknown woman he encountered on the streets earlier in the novel and becomes consumed by lust for all womankind. Once again, his true nature comes in full view and the contents of his mind are revealed to be just as oriented toward easy pleasures as an Audran operetta, although he might be telling himself otherwise.

At the end of the novel in chapter 9, Dujardin has Prince engage in a recapitulation of his eventless day to a bored Léa. Yet this retelling of the novel’s plot—which is a narrative transgression in and of itself—is deflated even further by the incongruous presence of musical references from previous chapters, a presence that further solidifies their central importance in the novel. On this occasion, Prince proudly repeats the Scribe line about “wine, gambling and women” to Léa without context before sheepishly admitting that he was “pursued by a barrel-organ and its wailing noises,” thereby alluding to the Mascotte once more.¹⁰⁶ With Léa’s matter-of-fact retort, “but you usually like music,” the Mascotte’s sentimental promise of perfect harmony between the sexes is overturned.¹⁰⁷ This impasse is later confirmed by Léa’s dismissal of Prince and his departure in frustration from her apartment. With their final goodbyes—two “au revoirs” meaning “see you again” in French—Dujardin seems to imply that this charade is supposed to repeat itself indefinitely in a cycle that emphasizes the magnitude of Prince’s delusions about life and love.

In conclusion, Prince is shown to be a very human figure, with his private dreams of grandeur and public failings, an imperfect man who, time and time again, reveals himself to be lacking in courage, preferring instead to seek refuge in the world of dreams. Although he fancies himself an aesthete, his preference for popular works of music theater and his attraction to the “turkey duet” melody reveal just how much of an everyman he is. It is in this regard that Les Lauriers succeeds in parrying the crippling ideal of the Wagnerian novel as theorized by Wyzewa. Indeed, Prince’s trajectory of romantic failure and artistic sterility symbolizes the gap between the artist’s fevered imagination and the moment where its contents have to come crashing against the surface of the paper on which he/she is writing.

Like his creator before him, Prince is a man who prefers to avoid making the unsettling discovery of his ordinary nature. This is a fate he shares with other Symbolist (anti-)heroes like des Esseintes, who believed he could live divorced from human society in the company of books and other artworks, only to renounce such foolishness at the end of the novel. Coincidentally, this very human capacity for self-deception was the version of the character that Marie Dujardin—Dujardin’s wife from 1924 until his death in 1949 and a novelist herself—chose to emphasize in her 1949 sequel to her husband’s novel, La Belle que voici. Her text provides a natural conclusion to Les Lauriers by showing Prince as a bitter middle-aged man who seeks to avenge himself on Léa. He does so by seducing and mistreating her daughter Géraldine.¹⁰⁸ By choosing a title like “La belle que voici,” which is in fact the next line after “Les lauriers sont coupés” in the song “Nous n’irons plus au bois,” Marie Dujardin also solidified the connection between her husband’s text, popular French music, and the depiction of everyday small-mindedness.

Ultimately, Dujardin’s decision to have Les Lauriers sont coupés’s musical references confined to Prince’s mind serves to underline his disconnect from others. They are, in truth, revealed to be a crucial element that alienates him from those around him, whether it be Léa or the male acquaintances who cross his path periodically. And, in turn, they help fashion Prince as an impersonal Mallarmean “Type” in order to propose an alternative response to Wyzewa’s impossible dream of psychological exhaustiveness. By providing the reader with a picture of a flawed man, Dujardin circumvented the thorny question of writing an authentic autobiography and went against the grain of canonical self-aggrandizing efforts à la Rousseau in his Confessions (1782), or Chateaubriand with his Mémoires d’outre-Tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave) (1849–50), with a text that frequently verges on the comedic, not to say the absurd.

And yet, despite Dujardin’s efforts to take Les Lauriers toward the banal, his first novel does partake in a wider mystical purpose shared by all of Symbolist poetry. That goal was articulated by the Wagner specialist, Revue wagnérienne contributor, and well-known esoteric thinker Édouard Schuré in the following terms:

If Les Lauriers represents a macrocosm (an average Parisian life) turned microcosm (Daniel Prince’s every aspiration and dream), it does so by setting up a narcissistic hall of mirrors between novel, protagonist, and external world, thus birthing a new form of mimetic illusion.¹¹⁰ With the mirror now turned inward, the reader is free to contemplate not just him/herself but also Les Lauriers’s success in addressing the metaliterary questions it sets itself to examine with respect to literary mimesis, realism, and the transparency of language. Whether it is a successful reflection of an average young French bourgeois man’s interiority, or a mere parody of that interiority, is still up for debate.