Portrait en costume de scène

Published in 1864, Les Fourberies de Nérine, a parody by Théodore de Banville, was conceived as a sequel to Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin. Banville, a master of poetic irony, extended the comic vein by pushing the Molièresque plot to absurd extremes: with Géronte dead, Scapin flees, but the cunning Nérine intends to catch him. To heighten the effect of mockery, the role of the nurse was given to Albert Glatigny, a wandering poet and actor by necessity, who did not hesitate to cross-dress to embody the female figure, and whose burlesque verve made the production a success.

This photograph shows Glatigny in that very costume of Nérine, enriched with a whimsical inscription to Geneviève Mallarmé, then four years old: a poetic joke in which Glatigny declares himself her “future husband.” Geneviève, Stéphane Mallarmé’s only daughter, would later become the guardian of her father’s memory with her book Mallarmé par sa fille (1926).

This play, born in Banville’s circle, illustrates the bridges between poetry and theater in literary Paris of the 1860s. Banville, Glatigny and Mallarmé belonged to the same circle of friends and artists, cultivating lightness and formal invention, sometimes against academic convention. Glatigny, the eternal bohemian, found in this cross-dressed role a chance to shine; Banville deployed his gift for pastiche; and Mallarmé received a domestic echo of it through this gift intended for his daughter.

A document of rare fancy, at once a theatrical relic and a touching trace of the intimate bond between the poet Glatigny and Mallarmé’s family circle.

Provenance: Bibliothèque Stéphane Mallarmé, Sotheby’s, Paris, 2015, lot 49.