Adventures, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
from Adventures of the Mind, Natalie Barney
Seeing clearly is more flattering than seeing dimly. And after all, does one see quite clearly only when one needs eyeglasses?
Returned from her Arabian Nights, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus no longer had to maintain "discreet silence,” but had to relate to innumerable tyrants, her readers, her marvelous stories, and her poems which comprise the intimate epic of her life. A life which, in adolescence, left Normandy for the desert, and which at present remains alone on the banks of the Seine, both in Paris and along the estuary. It has put rhythm into all the bends which carry it to the open sea, where it embarks like a “figurehead.”
I desired the fate of figureheads
Which leave port early and return late.
I am jealous of the return and the departure
And of the wet corals tied about their throats.I will brave the bleak grays, the fiery blues
Of seas figurative and real,
Since, from the depths of danger, one returns more beautiful,
Returning with a face burning and fabled.I shall be that one, followed by her ship,
Which raises aloft a brow christened with swells
And whose heart, until the moment of unquiet death,
Bravely traverses the voyage and life.?
As certain women shine only in intimacy, and can talk only to one ear at a time (I am one of these), others find their ease, and are at their best, in a crowded room.
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus belongs to the public, she is a born president, and a state of love almost always results from her tête-à-tête with the masses. A state of love in which she envelopes those she introduces with a divination that, among women of letters and for women of letters, she alone has possessed. With a sure tact she takes the pulse of the public, makes it feverish or calms it as she will. Her riding whip reaching to the last row, she senses a bad thought and interrupts it in order to change it. She is the medium and the tamer of a divergence of opinion, with a single inflection of her eyebrows:
Her delicate eyebrows which are
Two migratory birds moving freely on her forehead.
Her beauty ranges far, and her intimate voice encloses the circle and whips it to a frenzy over the miracle of group excitement. Many novels have been written, too many of them about the tête-à-tête of body to body.
We still do not have the true-to-life novel, the Dangerous Liaisons of the public spirit.’ Following the Psychologie des foules (Psychology of People), Lucie Delarue-Mardrus owes it to us, because, as certain beings become blurred before a single
spectator, she knows how to remain unique and the quintessence of herself in front of her audience, however scattered it is, and she restores it to homogeneity.
Thus it is that perhaps the most representative poetess of France (who has already translated five poems by Edgar Poe in perfectly analogous verse) introduced the poetess Anna Wickham, whom she calls "the English Verlaine." Seized by an increasingly lively taste for her works, she has translated enough of these rough poems to collect them into a volume.
This presentation has already been published in the Grande Revue.
But here is an unpublished sketch which I myself shall offer on Anna Wickham, after Lucie Delarue-Mardrus.
Source: Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind. Trans. John Spalding Gatton. NYU Press, 1992.