AN ANACREONTIC CYCLE
In Les chants du crépuscule, as in the preceding Feuilles d’automne, Hugo grappled with the new energies unleashed by the July Revolution of 1830. His title plays on the twin meanings of crépuscule, both dawn and dusk, to express the uncertainty of the times. As he mused in the preface, “Society waits to see if what lies on the horizon will be fully illuminated or whether it will be absolutely extinguished.”10 The cluster of texts set by Fauré begins midway through the thirty-nine poems of Hugo’s collection (see the list of poems). An envoi to the Feuilles d’automne (no. 18) closes the first half, which consists of political odes and meditations. “L’aurore s’allume” (no. 20) heralds a new dawn, lit not by human events but by the eternal truths of nature:
| Livre salutaire | Salutary book |
| Où le cœur s’emplit! | Where the heart is replenished! |
| Où tout sage austère | Where every austere sage |
| Travaille et pâlit! | Labors and grows pale! |
| Dont le sens rebelle | Whose recalcitrant meaning |
| Parfois se révèle! | Sometimes reveals itself! |
| Pythagore épèle | Pythagoras deciphers |
| Et Moïse lit! | And Moses reads! |
The short five-syllable lines signal a shift to the lighter chanson genre. Indeed, the succeeding poems, from which Fauré drew his song texts, abandon politics for pastoral verse and meditations inspired by nature. Fauré set nos. 22, 23, 25, 27, and 31, and later “L’aurore s’allume” itself.
Between the two halves of the volume, preceding “L’aurore s’allume,” comes a short ode to Anacreon (no. 19), the ancient Ionian poet of wine, love, and song:
Anacréon, poète aux ondes érotiques
Qui filtres du sommet des sagesses antiques,
Et qu’on trouve à mi-côte alors qu’on y gravit,
Clair, à l’ombre, épandu sur l’herbe qui revit,
Tu me plais, doux poète au flot calme et limpide!
Quand le sentier qui monte aux cimes est rapide,
Bien souvent, fatigués du soleil, nous aimons
Boire au petit ruisseau tamisé par les monts!
Anacreon, poet of the erotic waters,
You who filter ancient wisdom from the summit,
Which we find midway up the mountain as we climb,
Bright in the shade, diffused over the reviving grass,
You please me, sweet poet of the calm and limpid stream!
When the path that ascends to the heights is steep,
How often, weary from the sun, we love
To drink from the little brook filtered by the mountains!
Anacreon’s modern reception had peaked during the eighteenth century. A handful of surviving odes (now known to be wrongly attributed) were translated and imitated and gained currency in France through Pierre de Ronsard’s sixteenth-century versions. Most recently, Charles-Marie René Leconte de Lisle had translated nine Anacreontic odes in his Poèmes antiques (1852), the last of which Fauré would set in 1890 (“La rose”). The author and critic Léo Joubert reviewed Leconte de Lisle’s translations in 1863, giving an intriguing description of the Anacreontic genre:
| Contents of Victor Hugo, Les chants du crépuscule (1835), with dates of Fauré’s settings |
| Préface |
| Prélude |
| 1. Dicté après juillet 1830 |
| 2. À la colonne |
| 3. Hymne |
| 4. Noces et festins |
| 5. Napoléon II |
| 6. Sur le bal de l’Hotel-de-Ville |
| 7. O Dieu! Si vous avez la France sous vos ailes |
| 8. À Canaris |
| 9. Seule au pied de la tour d’où sort la voix du maître |
| 10. À l’homme qui a livré une femme |
| 11. A M. le D. d’O. |
| 12. À Canaris |
| 13. Il n’avait pas vingt ans. Il avait abusé |
| 14. Oh! N’insultez jamais une femme qui tombe! |
| 15. Conseil |
| 16. Le grand homme vaincu peut perdre en un instant |
| 17. À Alphonse Rabbe |
| 18. Envoi des Feuilles d’automne à Madame *** |
| 19. Anacréon, poète aux ondes érotiques |
| 20. L’aurore s’allume (c. 1868–70) |
| 21. Hier, la nuit d’été, qui nous prêtait ses voiles |
| 22. Nouvelle chanson sur un vieil air (1864) |
| 23. Autre chanson (c. 1862–64) |
| 24. Oh! pour remplir de moi ta rêveuse pensée |
| 25. Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre à ta coupe encore pleine (1862) |
| 26. À mademoiselle J. |
| 27. La pauvre fleur disait au papillon céleste (c. 1861–62) |
| 28. Au bord de la mer |
| 29. Puisque nos heures sont remplies |
| 30. Espoir en Dieu |
| 31. Puisque mai tout en fleurs dans les prés nous réclame (c. 1862–64) |
| 32. À Louis B. |
| 33. Dans l’église de *** |
| 34. Écrit sur la première page d’un Pétrarque |
| 35. Les autres en tous sens laissent aller leur vie |
| 36. Toi! sois bénie à jamais! |
| 37. À mademoiselle Louise B. |
| 38. Que nous avons le doute en nous |
| 39. Date lilia |
The gaze effortlessly embraces a bounded field that displays familiar and alluring objects; the hyacinth blooms there; the rose spreads its purple robe beside the green ivy; the swallow babbles from break of dawn; the dew-drunk cicada sings on the high branches; reclining on the fresh myrtle and green lotus, an old man with white temples but a youthful heart drains his cup and watches the young girls dance to the sound of the zither. This little landscape, invented for the express pleasure of the eyes, is so lively, so brilliant, that we never think to count the artificial flowers in the decorative garlands; the little scenes of this mascarade galante succeed one another too quickly to weary us.11
Joubert’s vignette summons all the Anacreontic commonplaces—idyllic nature, wine, revelry, erotic desire, old age. Yet it also evokes the pleasure parks of the fêtes galantes, the fantastic eighteenth-century landscapes of Antoine Watteau that were enjoying a vogue in French poetry.12 Joubert fashioned his Arcadia as a theater, adorned with silk roses, where maskers play their stock roles. His essay celebrates the deliberate artifice of the Anacreontic genre, its play between surface convention and lyric depth.13
No poem in Les chants du crépuscule better demonstrates this equivocation than the lyric subtitled “S’il est un charmant gazon.” The poem bears the title “Nouvelle chanson sur un vieil air”—roughly, new words to an old tune. Hugo wove pastoral imagery into an intimate romantic confession, using a complex rhyme scheme and tortuous syntax. Yet his artful poem is haunted by the specter of the lost air. The anonymous folk relic hides beneath the modern poet’s verses, mutely reminding us that Hugo’s jasmine, lily, and honeysuckle are but painted copies of nature. Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Franck, and many other composers set “S’il est un charmant gazon,” but as we shall see, only Fauré found the irony in Hugo’s title.
The poems that Fauré chose from Les chants du crépuscule exemplify both the erotic tone of the Anacreontic genre and its delicate artifice. “La pauvre fleur disait au papillon céleste,” in which a flower chides her unfaithful butterfly, is a sly allegory by the priapic Hugo with an envoi dedicated to his mistress Juliette Drouet. Notably, Fauré chose the only two chansons in Hugo’s collection, songs in which lyric expression is distanced as performance. “Autre chanson” (subtitled “L’aube naît”) even originated as a stage song in Hugo’s play Angelo, tyran de Padoue. While we can only guess at Fauré’s treatment of “L’aube naît,” the autograph score of “S’il est un charmant gazon” imitates a serenader’s mandolin with an accompaniment in broken staccato chords. Fauré used a similar piano figuration in “Puisque j’ai mis ma lèvre,” despite the poem’s more elevated register (he was perhaps tempted by Hugo’s racy opening line, “Since I placed