The New Criterion

Léon-Paul Fargue (1876–1947) was born in Paris near Les Halles, the illegitimate son of a chemical engineer and a dressmaker. In school, he had some extraordinary teachers: Stéphane Mallarmé at Condorcet and, in the Ecole Normale Henri IV, the philosopher Henri Bergson. (Bergson advised him to drop out of school.) Alfred Jarry, the future author of Ubu Roi, was a schoolmate.

In 1894 Fargue collaborated with Jarry in publishing l’Art littéraire. Henri Régnier brought him to one of Mallarmé’s Tuesday gatherings, and Fargue was accepted by this inmost circle of the avant-garde. He began publishing at an early age with Tancrède (1895), a small collection of narratives in prose followed by poems. The next year, the Mercure de France published most of the poems he would gather in 1914 under the title Pour l ...