“Avant l'aube si tu m'en crois, écris à ta maman S.M.”
A touching personal object belonging to Stéphane Mallarmé’s daughter, born in 1864: it contains several pink blotting sheets, with a few ink offsets of her careful handwriting. A few fragments can be made out: “… envoie mes bons souvenirs. G. Bonniot,” “suis installée dans ce…,” “Monsieur Delachaise, Avon,” as well as a date on the lining: “24 juin.”
These two lines by Stéphane Mallarmé remained unpublished for a long time, appearing only in Vers de circonstance, assembled in 1920 by Geneviève Mallarmé herself and Edmond Bonniot (the poet’s son-in-law): this collection gathers all the small everyday nothings that punctuated Mallarmé’s daily life without ever having been published — quatrains, distichs, rondelets, triolets and scattered sonnets that bear witness to the poet’s tenderness and good humor.
They were composed between 1880 and 1898, and this one is probably among the earliest. His daughter was then sixteen years old. Our two lines can be compared to two others, likewise collected in the same Vers de circonstance:
“Je souhaite que ce buvard
Sous tes doigts devienne bavard.”
This object was featured in the Mallarmé exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in 1998 (no. 186 of the catalogue).