Les Mémoires d'un Veuf

[Ebook reader of 'The Memoirs of a Widower']

the memoirs of a widower, the chosen title clearly indicates the autobiographical intention.

Verlaine did not wait for Mathilde's remarriage, which took place on October 30, 1886, at the very time, precisely, when the work appeared, to consider herself, by a pathetic paradox which nonetheless reflects a strange fidelity , to oneself, to the other, as a “widower”. “I am the one who left,” said the letter of October 4, 1872 to Victor Hugo. gone, indeed, but not detached. detached, it will never be.

and it was enough for him, to feel rejected, abandoned, "widowed", not to be immediately forgiven and reproved; it was enough, even, that his supplication was not heard. the widower, too, the inconsolable one, this is what he believes himself to be, what he feels or wants to be. one of the beautiful love poems: a widower speaks, is dated 1878. the litany will never end. but, a widower, it is not only Mathilde that he is: it is everything he has known and loved, and from which, until the end, he will not be able to free himself: he is of lucien viotti, the friend or lover of his youth, he is of himself perhaps and of his own life.

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