Text: Edith Philips, “The French of Edgar Allan Poe,” American Speech (Baltimore, MD), vol. II, no. 6, March 1927, pp. 270-274

[page 270:]

EDGAR ALLAN POE has become the object of a remarkable revival of interest if one can judge by the number of recent publications about him. After reading some of these, and particularly Mr. Krutch's biographical study in which he psycho-analyses Poe according to the most fashionable modern ideas of sex, I took down the volumes of Poe beloved in my youth when I little suspected what depths of morbidity my innocent shudders betrayed. Since those days of carefree thrills, long absorption in French literature and residence in France have given me in respect to Poe a morbid sensitiveness of quite another kind. I am now less horrified at the mysterious adventures of his strange characters than at the even more mysterious quality of the French with which he loved to besprinkle his pages. Thinking that perhaps I might be over sensitive to my fellow countryman's liberties with my adopted language, I turned to Baudelaire's translations to see what a Frenchman would do when confronted with some of the strange expressions which in Poe's works pass for French. Baudelaire does exactly as I suspected he would — changes them into good French currency, and the results of the comparative study thus begun may have some interest not only to students of Poe or of French but to all who speak the English language.

Unfortunately Baudelaire does not carry us as far as we should like in the compari son of Poe's Anglicized French with genuine French. The tales which Baude laire selected for translation are not those in which Poe indulged to the full his love [column 2:] for French phrases. French is not used by Poe with the careless inconsequence of one who can find a stereotyped foreign phrase more quickly than the exact word in his own language. There seems to be a definite purpose in Poe's choice of French words. There is no French in the Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeia, Eleonora, Morella or The Oval Portrait. There is only a quotation from Pascal in Monos and Una and one finds only two or three French expressions in all the length of Eureka. When Poe went off into the marvelous mystical world of his imagina tion, his French did not follow him, and this is the Poe preferred by Baudelaire. Very few of the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque were translated by Baudelaire, and in them there is a great deal of French. We quite naturally expect French when the stories are laid in France or when a French title proves that Poe wished to create a French atmosphere, or as is more frequently the case, an atmosphere of nowhere. One language is not sufficient to produce this illusion. Indeed three or four are sometimes called upon to add to the unreality, but French is always in the ascendency. In the Tales of Ratiocination French phrases are very common, and are used to give what Poe himself would call a recherchée air to the story. But the volumes in which we find Poe's French in all its éclat and naïveté are those of Literary Criticism. The disdainful critic can think of no English words (or French either) to describe the mal à proposisms (Thou art the Man) and the false bel espritisms of his hated rivals.

But I will leave to Poe's biographers the [page 271:] discussion of the psychology of his French. My purpose here is only to make a few comments on its quality. What is the nature of this vocabulary which in cludes over two hundred words? More than half of them are stereotyped phrases. Most of these had become current in English before Poe's time, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. As is the way with transplanted words many have wandered away from their original mean ings and are used by Poe in their generally accepted English sense, though at times Poe likes to make a show of erudition by pointing out that he knows real French, as when on one occasion he uses the more unusual spelling denoûment for dénouement. The latter is the only spelling which Mur ray recognizes as ever having been current in English. This show of erudition is especially noticeable in the attempts which Poe occasionally makes at observ ing grammatical agreement between French adjectives and their English nouns. He does not always trouble himself about such agreements, and it would be better if he had never done so, for the result is usually more ridiculous than accurate. A few phrases will illustrate:

The proportion of error to accuracy in these phrases is about equal. There is at least some consistency, for manners are always masculine, although the French have it differently. In this matter of [column 2:] gender Poe takes pains to use the form parvenue when speaking of a lady (Barnaby Rudge) and I am sure that if he had known that Murray would one day admit the form littératrice he would not have called Emma C. Embury a female littérateur. Also, by a grammatical rule of his own, literati is the plural of littérateur, as in this surprising sentence: “Dr. Francis, although by no means a littérateur, cannot be omitted in an account of the New York literati.” (John W. Francis.). After all, are we not much too narrow in our use of languages?

There are a few words for which Poe had an apparently irresistible penchant (penchant, by the way, he uses only once). One of the favorites is recherché. We should need a deductive method as infallible as Dupin's to discover exactly what recherché meant to Poe. Recherché is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: “Carefully sought out, extremely choice or rare (common in the nineteenth century especially of meals, articles of food or drink and dress). The first literary use is quoted from Richardson (722.). The word in French according to Littré means affected or uncommon, and always has a derogatory sense. Whenever Baudelaire meets Poe's word, and I say “Poe's word” advisedly because he seems to have a private meaning for it, he substitutes something entirely different. A few parallels will illustrate:

There are other examples of this subtle word where there is no Baudelaire to help elucidate:

We can by a careful selection among all the French and all the English meanings of the word, find one applicable to each phrase but never with great assurance. The airs and manners are probably affected, though I suspect that the ultra recherche air is intended to convey an idea of “studied effect.” The library is, of course, extremely choice and rare, the facts and points are probably carefully sought out. I have no doubt that Poe himself would have been at a loss if he had suddenly been asked to define recherché.

Outré is another word which appealed to Poe's imagination, and it is not sur prising, for even with no precise definition in mind does it not evoke a sensation of inexplicable horror? An examination of the word as Poe uses it does little to clear away the vagueness of our idea of it. Baudelaire invariably avoids it.

In this last example I think that even Baudelaire's remarkable imagination has failed him, for I doubt if Poe's house was meant to have any characteristic of outrance but was merely slightly eccentric. Then Bauldelaire deserts us again and we must depend on our own imaginations plus the dictionaries. Murray gives outré as occurring in English as early as 1722 in Richardson. It means “Beyond the limits of what is usual or considered correct and proper; unusual, eccentric, exaggerated.” What then, does Poe mean when he says “The Euphuists lisp their outré phrases?” (Marginalia). Certainly they did not knowingly go beyond the limits of the proper, but they were at times eccentric. Is it not requiring a great deal of a word to make it describe murders such as those in the Rue Morgue and also the phrases of the Euphuists? In French the word popularly means filled with indignation, although it has a literary meaning of exaggerated. I think that Poe himself gave it the connotation of horror which I am sure it has for most of US.

If you will open your Poe and read the volumes of Literary Criticism with your attention alert for French words you will get the impression that the United States in Poe's time was peopled with a race of littérateurs whose manners and tone are dégagé and whose character and “address” are almost universally characterized by bonhomie. If we can depend on Murray, littérateur was a comparatively new word in English, occurring first in the Edinburgh Review in 1806. So Poe is using great restraint when he calls only ten of his “literati” littérateurs. As to the meaning [page 273:] of bonhomie the English and French dictionaries differ and there is no Baude laire to appeal to. Bonhomie in French means kind-heartedness, joined to simple manners, and by a natural analogy exces sive simplicity, even credulity. InEnglish it means first good nature which is akin to kind-hearteness, but it has gone in the direction of jollity instead of simplicity. This seems to be Poe's understanding of it and yet some of his uses are puzzling, for example:

Are we to suppose that Halleck's character and poetry are excessively simple, or very jolly, or merely kind-hearted, and how can Charles Anthon's distingué air be associated with any of the meanings of bonhomie? Poe's use of dégagé is more closely in keeping with French definitions of the word: free, easy, unembarrassed, for he applies it usually to airs and manners. A dégagé tone of writing is a little more difficult to imagine but is neverthe less comprehensible.

In addition to these frequently used expressions there are almost innumerable curiosities of French in Poe's works, and I would soon be beyond the bounds of this article if I tried to follow them all. I shall limit myself to passing mention of a few particularly curious ones. We English-speaking people always have great difficulty in describing boredom without recourse to French. Nevertheless sentences such as these are rather rare: “The ennuyé travels in the hope of dissipating his ennui.” (Anastatic Printing) and . . . . “he seemed ennuyé to the very death” Masque of the Red Death) William Ellery Channing is commended [column 2:] for “the charming négligé of his rhythm” and Frances Osgood for the “warm abandonnement of her style.” Négligeance might do for either if a French word were required, but abandon has the advantage of being one of the few words which are synonymous as well as homonymous in French and English. But Poe was afraid of being merely English, and as a result he puts a complete end to Miss Osgood's style. In “How to Write a Black wood Article” there is a lady of ton. I judge from the context that the tone was good, and that the lady was distinguished, though there is a possibility that Poe took his word from the expression “se donner un ton” in which case the lady was affected.

One word which Poe italicizes and evidently takes to be a bona-fide French word is papier maché. It is true that both elements of the compound are French, but the result as we understand it in English is not French at all. Poe has accepted the meaning familiar to us all, but it must have given Baudelaire some trouble to translate the following sentence from Some Words with a Mummy: “Upon cutting into it (the outer covering) we found it to be pasteboard, or, more properly, papier maché composed of papyrus.” The sentence as rendered by Baudelaire reads: “En 1’entamant, nous recon nlimes que c’était du carton, ou, plus proprement, une pâte dure faite de papyrus.” Papier maché, meaning a sort of cardboard made of hard paste, is not to be found in any French dictionary, but any French schoolboy would instantly define it as a useful missile made of chewed paper. The difficulty which people of different languages have in understanding each other is not greatly helped by the borrowing of words from one language to the other!

A whole chapter could be written on [page 274:] the French foods and wines which are mentioned by Poe. One could construct from them the most delightfully outré menus. Many of the dishes, such as ragoût and soufflée, are well known to all of us, though soufflée in Poe has two e's as is usual in English cook-books. The French word has but one. Here again, Poe makes odd errors, such as calling a well known preparation like pâté de foie gras, pâtés à la fois. Poe in his student days probably learned à la fois in a list of idioms and thought that the commonly accepted spelling of the food in question was erroneous. Or possibly since pâté de foie gras is good, one could eat many pâtés à la fois. From these better known dishes we go on to marinade à la St. Florentin and other fancy concoctions accompanied by a tantalizing array of wines which are intended to give evidence of the taste of a great connoisseur.

One might be tempted to dismiss the question of Poe's French with the remark that French phrases were the fashion then, that the fashion has passed and that we should not call attention to the bad taste, according to our modern view, of so great a writer. But the fashion has not passed without leaving its impression. Many phrases which we notice in Poe because he italicized them have crept into our unconscious speech so that we almost forget that parvenu, boudoir, élite, nonchalant, [column 2:] and bizarre were once conscious affectations. In so far as it was bad taste to fill one's style with foreign phrases, Poe knew it as well as we. As I have already pointed out, Poe does not use French indiscriminately. He is always getting an effect, and usually with success. He did not hesitate to criticise his con temporaries for the same vice of which we are accusing him, speaking scornfully in the Blackwood Article of the use of “bizarreries (whatever that may mean).” In his criticism of Lever's Charles O’Malley Poe says haughtily, “Can anybody tell us what is meant by the affectation of the word L’Envoy which is made the heading of two prefaces?” Whatever may have been Poe's purposes, or his shortcomings in the use of French, many of these phrases are now firmly fixed in our language, and are more frequent in pres ent day English than we perhaps imagine. No less a littérateur than the editor of the Saturday Review recently referred to the “outré fact” in van Vechten's Nigger Heaven. Therefore a really complete study of these expressions as used by Poe and others at a time when they were used with extreme self consciousness, would, it seems to me, be very interesting and valuable.

EDITH PHILIPS.

Goucher College.