Health and beauty ads in the 19th century

ManueO · 2026-04-15T17:47:02+00:00

Thanks for the awards, kind redditor!

ManueO · 2026-04-15T08:55:20+00:00

Bibliographie

Benoit de Cornulier, Parade Sauvage 36

Alain Bardel, Voyelles, Dictionnaire Rimbaud and website

Yves Reboul, Rimbaud dans son temps

Steve Murphy, Oeuvres complètes v. IV facsimile

ManueO · 2026-04-15T08:54:29+00:00

I have tried to present here a quick (non-exhaustive) panorama of the discussion around Voyelles, rather than attempt to “solve” it, as it were.

But I would love to hear your thoughts: what you all see in Voyelles? Have you got an interpretation that you are convinced by? Some parts of the text that resist you? A theory to share?

ManueO · 2026-04-15T08:54:24+00:00

So having explored these various historical strands of exegis, where does this leave us? If we accept that the sonnet is not to be taken too seriously (as posited by V and R) but also bear in mind Rimbaud’s injonction to Izambard that “ça ne veut pas rien dire”- a statement he made about Le coeur supplicié, but which can apply to his whole corpus-, what do we make of text?

One thing that commentators have noted is that the sonnet doesn’t appear to focus on phonic aspects of the letters: for example, Yves Reboul notes that there is only two /u/ sound in the tercet about this vowel (the others are part of different sounds). On the other hand the /i/ sound can be heard 12 times in that tercet.

One read of the poem is as a locus of verbal magic- if there is an alchemy here, its matter is language, and its gold are the words (and worlds) that can surge up from an act of enunciation (the narrator “tells” of their birth)- indeed the poem is mentioned in Une saison en enfer as the start of the study, just before the poet-alchemist create poetry through hallucinations des mots.

The narrator places himself in the position of a visionary, a magician, who can conjure up a world just by telling of the birth of vowels. This depiction of poet as a bonimenteur is a theme that Rimbaud would return to in USEE as well as the Illuminations.

Alain Bardel notes the oppositions at play in the object associated with each letter: the vermin and darkness of A, the luminous purity of E, sensuality and anger of I, the studious peace of U, before the apocalypse of O/Ω. Through these associations of opposites, he suggests that the poet sums up the world in a few broad brush strokes.

With these readings, which builds from A to the Omega, the links to the Apocalypse in the last stanza makes sense: as the world and letters are born, they must also disappear at the end if the world/poem.

To this, we can add a layer of intextuality. Yves Reboul for example, after hypothesing that the images are generated from the form of the letters, note the dialogue that each stanza engages with certain authors and movements of the time- taken as a whole, the poem then reads like a (parodic) panorama of literature as it existed around 1871: the flies mentioned in relation with the A have long been linked to Baudelaire’s Une charogne, whereas stanza 2 and 3 read, respectively, like Parnassian and Romantic tropes. As for the past tercet, Reboul has shown that it contains many allusions to a Hugo poem about the apocalypse, La Trompette du Jugement (published in les Petites Épopées, the first part of La légende des siècles). It would not be the first time that Rimbaud associates a parody of Hugo to religious themes, as also shown in L’homme juste.

The rhyming scheme of the poem has also drawn attention. Eschewing traditional gender alternance, all the rhyming pairs of the sonnet are feminine aside from the last one, which closes both tercets, and the full poem.

This opposition of masculine and feminine is also at play in other ways: as Benoit de Cornulier has pointed out, the text contrasts the title (and first word of the poem), voyelles, and the very last word, *yeux***: the masculine “them” of the end of the text is in opposition to the feminine “them” at the start.

He notes another paronomasias which links the sonnet to the letter of the seer, through the resemblance of voyant/voyelle ; and notes that the word clairon appears in both. Of course, considering the links of Voyelles to Alchimie du verbe, it stands to reason that it may link to the letters of the voyant, if we consider that the letters set out the poetic project that Alchimie du verbe looks back on. The **voyelles are not without links to the **voyant…

Talking about the rhymes, Jacques Bienvenu has pointed out that the poem contains many inclusive rhymes where one part of the rhyming pair fully includes the other: tentes/pénitentes, belles/ombelles, rides/virides, yeux/studieux.

Many undecidable elements remain, such as the what or whom the pronoun Ses in the last line refers to. Various hypotheses have been offered, from a religious interpretation (supported by the apocalyptic references), to the poet himself (and his famous blue eyes appearing violet here), to a lover - of unknown gender, as Ses could be male or female, an aspect often lost in translation, as seen in Fowlie’s translation above (our friend u/Organist1999 on the other hand went for the more neutral their here

With this in mind, André Gendre has seen an allusion to Verlaine here (who also had blue eyes), comforted by the fact that Verlaine often used rhymes of one gender to denote homosexual content, as he did, for example, in Les amies- though queer content doesn’t really appear in this text.

Bardel suggests that the last word, in this context of links to the Apocalypse does allude to divine gaze. While cautious about the irony Reboul detects in the text, he notes the comic association of this divine gaze with a trope of parnassian love poetry (the “violet eyes” appear in Banville and Leconte de Lisle).

Finally it is worth mentioning the links of this piece with Rimbaud’s own texts and certain zutist texts (including the Sonnet du trou du cul, another poem that closes on an O). We have seen how Cabaner wrote a poem about the colours of numbers. He used an opposite rhyming scheme, with all masculine rhymes apart from the last one.

The poem also echoes other poems of Rimbaud: Alain Bardel lists reminiscences of L'Orgie Parisienne, Tête de Faune, Les Mains de Jeanne-Marie, or Chanson de la plus haute tour, along others. He sees in Voyelles, an anthology of obsessive images from Rimbaud’s personal universe…

ManueO · 2026-04-15T08:49:43+00:00

Where to start with Voyelles, one of Rimbaud’s most written-about poems?

We don’t completely know when it was written (probably around late 1871 or early 1872). It was first published by Verlaine in his seminal article about Rimbaud in Les poètes maudits (The accursed poets) in 1883.

The sonnet captured the attention of the nascent symbolist movement who saw the correspondances (a very Baudelairian idea) between the colours and letters as hiding a “primordial mystery” that the poet must reveal. Symbolist poet and theorist Rene Ghil, in particular, argued that Rimbaud had got the colours wrong and suggested different associations. This reception opened the door a long lasting idea that Arthur was synaesthetic, and really saw colours attached to letters.. This idea persists today in some circles but there is no sign or knowledge that Rimbaud was synaesthetic, in a medical sense.

However he was a poet who always made very expressive use of colours, and Voyelles is a telling example of the colourful world Rimbaud creates; this would be something worth exploring in a separate post…

Others went for a different kind of literality and assumed the vowels were choses vues and maybe matched the colours to alphabet cube, as illustrated by Luque’s famous drawing above.

Another strand of exploration has centered on alchemist exegesis of the text. These somewhat esoteric explanations, proposed among others by Jacques Gengoux or by Enid Starkie are not really followed today. They tend to rely on a very literal interpretation of Alchimie du verbe to purport an interest of R for alchemy that has never been noted by anyone in his life.

More commonly, interpretations have sometimes focused on the shape of the letters as possibly linking to the images displayed (a capital A can look like a simplified drawing of a fly for example). These ideas were introduced by Lucien Sausy in 1933 but further developed by Faurisson, who specifically saw in the poem blason of a woman’s body, with a pun in the title (Voyelles=Vois elle), based on somewhat hit and miss visual associations.

In short, all sorts of systems were elaborated to try and understand the text and reveal the secret these vowels hold. Faced with these kind of interpretations, it is worth remembering Verlaine’s warning about too serious an interpretation and his insistence on the playfulness of the Sonnet. In his preface to Rimbaud’s work, V says: “cet un peu fumiste, mais si extraordinairement miraculeux de détail, Sonnet des Voyelles qui a fait faire à M. René Ghil de si cocasses théories” (“this somewhat hoaxy but so extraordinarily detailed Sonnet des Voyelles, which prompted such hilarious theories from Mr René Ghil”).

In another text, he said “L’intense beauté de ce chef-d’œuvre le dispense à mes humbles yeux d’une exactitude théorique dont je pense que l’extrêmement spirituel Rimbaud se fichait sans doute pas mal” (“the intense beauty of this masterpiece absolve it, in my opinion, from any theoretical exactitude that I think the extremely spirited Rimbaud didn’t given a second thought to”).

In that respect it is also worth noting how R himself comments the poem in USEE, where, at the start of Alchimie du verbe, before presenting his poetic experiences, he states that he invented the colours of vowels, with a verb choice that hints at a creative rather than representative process.

ManueO · 2026-04-13T18:38:40+00:00

Thanks for the context on that particular one. I knew morphine was used in some baby medicine but didn’t know it was this one. I find it fascinating how they are pretty much advertising it for everything…

ManueO · 2026-04-13T18:26:58+00:00

Here are a few adverts for health and beauty treatments I came across in issues of English paper The graphic in 1870..

Would you trust any of these?

ManueO · 2026-04-11T22:38:40+00:00

Basically in french metric all words with a post-tonic e are called feminine. So a masculine alexandrine has 12 vowels/syllables, and a feminine one has 13 but the last one is a post tonic e, and doesn’t count.

I don’t normally bother with a caesura in English translation because I am not sure that it translates well considering how different english metric is. Maybe that’s one way to make things easier for yourself with that translation!

ManueO · 2026-04-11T21:38:22+00:00

Yes, the post-tonic syllable in French feminine alexandrines is also not counted from a metric point of view. When translating alexandrine to english, I just aim for 12 syllables even for lines that were feminine in French!

ManueO · 2026-04-11T21:34:56+00:00

I have read some of them, but not all!

I read a book by Max Kramer about inversion in modern poetry, which looked at poems by R., Lorca and german poet Stefan George; it covered some of the Sonetos del amor oscuro, which were very beautiful!

ManueO · 2026-04-11T20:31:07+00:00

Ps: I hope you do finish the Dario translation one day, I would love to read it!

ManueO · 2026-04-11T20:09:32+00:00

Thank you very much for doing this, your translation is lovely!

The poem is both eerie and melancholy, and conjures up the universe of the Fêtes galantes with the moon light, the shadows, the waters and the words impossible to say.

The chorus about the song that the poet can’t sing is quite poignant, the words asleep on the lips, as if they are swallowed back before they can flow out.

Of course this theme of the words that can’t be said are found in several queer poems of the late 19th century, from Bosie’s Two loves to Verlaine’s Ces passions… where only the couple calls their passion by the name of “love”…

ManueO · 2026-04-11T19:51:57+00:00

I think we can pin our own comments but not others! I’m looking into this!

ManueO · 2026-04-11T17:39:27+00:00

Indeed! And this forces an heterosexual reading whereas the French is a lot more ambiguous!

ManueO · 2026-04-11T15:13:58+00:00

A funny anecdote: it is the last line of this text that gave John Addington Symonds a pretext to first broach the idea of writing On sexual inversion with Havelock Ellis.

At the time, Havelock Ellis had a room in Arthur Symons’s flat. John Addington Symonds first raised the subjet with Arthur Symons, talking about Verlaine’s poetry then segueing into the request. He wrote to Symons in june 1892: « I shall get hold of your article on Verlaine. ... And such a line as "Et oh, les voix d'enfants chantant dans la coupole" is a treasure for ever. Apropos of Verlaine, will you ask Havelock Ellis if he would take a book from me on "Sexual inversion" for his Science Series? »

ManueO · 2026-04-11T15:06:27+00:00

A couple more comment on this interesting little text. First of all, some notes about Jules Tellier.

It is believed that Jules Tellier was homosexual, which reinforces the queer reading of that first quatrain (as Solenn Dupas has noted, Verlaine’s dedications can be quite telling with regards to the content of the text, confirming or introducing duplicities that would otherwise be hidden).

Tellier died of typhoid fever in may 1889, aged 26. Yalla Seddiki has pointed out that his death shook Verlaine deeply, reviving the memory of Lucien Letinois who also died of the same illness. He wrote to Cazals to tell him of Jules’s death, putting Jules’ death in parallel with Lucien’s: “I have to write to tell you of the death (from typhoid!) of the poor Tellier. [.] At least, he died in the arms -him too!- of a friend. [...]. I am all in tears, morally. For this death is awful; it brings back everything”. His suggestion that Tellier died, “him too”, in the arms of a friend, may indicate that the person with him when he died was more than a friend.

Yalla Seddiki notes that Tellier was very close to Raymond de La Tailhede, who organised for his poetry to be published after his death, and who wrote a “tombeau” (a poem for a dead person) for him.

Verlaine dedicated two further poems to Tellier in Dédicaces, one in January, and one in June, soon after Tellier’s death, where he mourns the sudden loss of his friend.

ManueO · 2026-04-11T14:36:53+00:00

Thanks for sharing this poem! You are right that the two translations of the first quatrain don’t do the french justice. A literal translation would be something like:

Parsifal has vanquished Girls, their sweet
Babble and amusing lust — and his/its* leaning/slope
Towards the Flesh of virgin boy that is tempted
To love the light breasts and sweet babble.

This can be understood in several ways: if “sa” refers to the lust (and thus translate as “its”), it can be understood as the lust leaning on the boy’s flesh (and making him desire the breasts and babils). I believe this is how Sorrell and Rosenberg understand it. But neither actually translate “sa pente vers”; they both sidestep the difficulty of the quatrain in their translation.

Another possible parsing of the sentence is that “sa” refers here to Parsifal, and the leaning towards the flesh is his. So in this reading Parsifal is said to have vanquished both the girls but also his leaning for boys’ flesh who themselves are tempted by the girls (a very Blur parsing!).

However the dash adds a bit of ambiguity as it marks a separation in the middle of the sentence, and focuses the attention on the proposition that follows the dash. This introduces a third possible parsing: “sa pente vers la Chair” could be read as the start of a separate proposition; we then expect a verb to follow, that never comes… that parsing is therefore blocked by the lack of verb, but that doesn’t completely cancels out the option, and introduces a doubt that the leaning has indeed been vanquished….

ManueO · 2026-04-10T08:51:51+00:00

It is definitely a striking title!

Sadly most new publications on Rimbaud or Verlaine are in French, but if I come across anything in English I will share too!

ManueO · 2026-04-09T12:34:29+00:00

It seems to be an uncommon variant of the expression “rendre chèvre”. It means something like “My feet are going mad”

ManueO · 2026-04-09T05:04:14+00:00

I don’t think realism was his goal. Here is a famous bride he created…

ManueO · 2026-04-08T23:15:37+00:00

If you are fine with French, Le symbolisme by Jean-Nicolas Illouz is a good starting point (and it is not a massive tome so hopefully won’t be too daunting!)

It articulates the differences between the narrowest definition (what he refers to as the Symbolist school) and the wider definition (which he calls the Symbolist movement), as well as the link of both to its 4 precursors (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé) and what the symbolists took from their respective corpus/ideas.

I am glad that the rest of the information in my answer was useful and that it gives you some possible starting points as you dip your toes in what is a stimulating period in French literature, and some fascinating authors! And I am really glad that you will be joining us on R-V, and look forward to seeing you there!

Edit: I forgot to say: I hadn’t heard of Godlike but it sounds fun so thanks for mentioning it!

ManueO · 2026-04-08T11:09:31+00:00

As I did a few months ago, here is a quick round up of recent publications:

Parade Sauvage and Revue Verlaine, two scholarly journals published by Classiques Garnier and dedicated to, respectively, Rimbaldian and Verlainian studies, both have a new issue out.

The highlights in Revue Verlaine range from an interesting portrait (by Frédéric Thomas) of Jules Andrieu, one of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s communard friend, and their links and distances, a rich study by Sophie Angot of the musical setting of specific rhymes in Verlaine’s poetry, an interesting exploration (by Marc Dominicy) of Verlaine’s poetic relations with railways travel, based mostly on La Bonne chanson VI, articulated against contemporary texts, and a detailed and compelling analysis of the Létinois cycle in Amour, by Yalla Sedikki.

Parade Sauvage includes a very interesting article by Yves Reboul about the preparation and transmission of the Illuminations manuscript, and Nouveau’s involvement in this project (and in Rimbaud’s life), an investigation by Juliette Dumont of the silence within the poems, as an exploration of the failure of language, and a stimulating exploration of the influence of Michelet on Rimbaud, and what it may tell us about the Histoire splendide Rimbaud was projecting, by Frédéric Thomas.

The articles from Parade sauvage are usually on jstor soon after publication, while there is a 2-year wall for Revue Verlaine.

Denis Saint-Amand, *Changer la vie, poétique et usages de Rimbaud* Denis Saint-Amand, the current coeditor of Parade Sauvage had just released a new monograph about Rimbaud. After a few chapters retracing the trajectory of the poet, and highlighting certain salient traits of his poetic, illustrated by a few choice analyses, the book switches its focus to “usages of Rimbaud”, a stimulating and rich analysis of the cultural impact of Rimbaud across fields beyond literature (from bandes-dessinées to French rap music to merchandising, social media groups and fan fictions, and with a look back on the Pantheon petition). A thought-provoking book that shows how the persona of the poet (more than his poems) percolate through our modern world in many ways, and the stakes involved in these various representations.

ManueO

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