Tuesday, June 26, 2012
The Comte and the Chartier
"Qui ouvre la porte de ma chambre funéraire ? J'avais dit que personne n'entrât.
Qui que vous soyez, éloignez-vous".
"Qui ouvre la porte de ma chambre funéraire ? J'avais dit que personne n'entrât.
Qui que vous soyez, éloignez-vous".
"Who opens the door of my funerary chamber? I said that no one should enter.Whoever you are, remove yourself".
When I was living in Paris in the early 1970s, one of the cheap restaurants I went to was the Chartier on the Rue Faubourg Montmartre. The Chartier is a bouillon, built in the last years of the 19th century and meant to provide cheap meals to the Parisian working class. I have often returned there in visits over the next few decades. However, it was only fairly recently that I realised that Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the pseudonym of the Comte de Lautreamont, had met his death in the building that abuts upon the courtyard outside the Chartier.
Ducasse's life was murky and obscure as was his death which took place on 24th November 1870. This would have been during the Prussian siege of Paris. No details of the circumstances of his death are available, hardly surprising when many were dying of privation in this period. Did he starve to death, take his own life, perhaps die of TB or less likely, was he murdered? He was scraping for a living at this point in his life, so the first two scenarios seem the most likely.
The quote above is from Maldoror, the staggering book penned by Ducasse and hailed by Breton and his fellow Surrealists.
Labels: Chartier restaurant, Isidor Ducasse, Lautreamont
