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The commercial success of the Mercure galant and the financial support of the Dauphin enabled Jean Donneau de Visé to invest in the production of engravings as early as 1678. In addition to musical pieces, enigmas and other fashion plates, the royalist periodical collection includes five engravings illustrating battles in the Caribbean colonies. From this limited corpus, this article examines how the image works to ensure the continued existence of the reign and reflects on the place of engravings in the Mercure galant and on the Parisian print market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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410.More information
Banville wrote in Odes funambulesques: “it is not impossible to imagine a new versified comic language adapted to our mores and to the poetry of the day, a language which would derive from the true genius of French versification, the rhyme itself being the source of its main comic devices.” By examining Watteau's paintings and the comments of art critics, my goal is to show how, for Verlaine, to compose a fête galante in the Nineteenth Century—an anachronistic and therefore ironic enterprise—is consistent with an art identified as specifically French and witty, but also with a humorous genre in decorative arts. What indeed inspired Verlaine in Watteau's works and in the Eighteenth Century more generally may not have been the fête galante but the singerie, that grotesque, rococo painting genre staging monkeys dressed up as musicians, painters and funambulists. By focusing my study on the lascivious monkey in “Cortège,” which is a part of Fêtes galantes, I try to analyze how Verlaine envisioned the practice of French versification as the comic, equivocal and sensuous style of a monkey walking on a tightrope. I attempt to define the secret stakes of practices to be found in the work of a poet whose “baboon-like” appearance was underlined by his friend and biographier Lepelletier—rhymes but also self-parody, a way of aping one's own self. I examine the rococo dimension of Fêtes galantes in the context of a historical debate against the Hugolian, romantic model of the heirs to 1793. As a consequence, I consider Verlaine's monkey the symbol of the founding principle of “art for art's sake,” what Edgar Poe termed “the poetic principle.”