Comte de Lautréamont () was the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (4 April 1846 – 24 November 1870), a French poet born in Uruguay. His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on modern arts and literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. Ducasse died at the age of 24.
Biography
Youth
Ducasse was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, to François Ducasse, a French consular officer, and his wife Jacquette-Célestine Davezac. Very little is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November 1847 in the Montevideo Metropolitan Cathedral and that his mother died soon afterwards, possibly due to an epidemic. Jean-Jacques Lefrère suggests she may have committed suicide, although concludes there is no way to know for certain. In 1851, as a five-year-old, he experienced the end of the eight-year Siege of Montevideo in the Argentine–Uruguayan War. He was brought up speaking three languages: French, Spanish, and English.
In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to high school in France by his father. He was trained in French education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes. In 1863 he enrolled in the Lycée Louis-Barthou in Pau, where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy. He excelled at arithmetic and drawing and showed extravagance in his thinking and style. Isidore was a reader of Edgar Allan Poe and particularly favored Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron, as well as Adam Mickiewicz, Milton, Robert Southey, Alfred de Musset, and Baudelaire (see the letter of 23 October 1869 cited extensively below). At school he was fascinated by Racine and Corneille, and by the scene of the blinding in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. According to his schoolmate Paul Lespès, he displayed obvious folly "by self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible death images" in an essay. After graduation he lived in Tarbes, where he started a friendship with Georges Dazet, the son of his guardian, and decided to become a writer.
Years in Paris
After a brief stay with his father in Montevideo, Ducasse settled in Paris at the end of 1867. He began studies in view of entering the École Polytechnique, only to abandon them one year later. Continuous allowances from his father made it possible for Ducasse to dedicate himself completely to his writing. He lived in the "Intellectual Quarter", in a hotel in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, where he worked intensely on the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror. It is possible that he started this work before his passage to Montevideo, and also continued the work during his ocean journey.
Ducasse was a frequent visitor to nearby libraries, where he read Romantic literature, as well as scientific works and encyclopaedias. The publisher Léon Genonceaux described him as a "large, dark, young man, beardless, mercurial, neat and industrious", and reported that Ducasse wrote "only at night, sitting at his piano, declaiming wildly while striking the keys, and hammering out ever new verses to the sounds". However, this account has no corroborating evidence, and is considered unreliable.
In late 1868, Ducasse published (anonymously and at his own expense) the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror (Chant premier, par ***), a booklet of thirty-two pages.
On 10 November 1868, Ducasse sent a letter to the writer Victor Hugo, in which he included two copies of the first canto, and asked for a recommendation for further publication. A new edition of the first canto appeared at the end of January 1869, in the anthology Parfums de l'Âme in Bordeaux. Here Ducasse used his pseudonym "Comte de Lautréamont" for the first time. His chosen name may have been based on the title character of Eugène Sue's popular 1837 gothic novel , a haughty and blasphemous antihero similar in some ways to Isidore's Maldoror. The pseudonym was possibly paraphrasing , although it can also be interpreted as l'autre Amon (the other Amon) or "l'autre Amont" (the other side of the river: 'En amont' = French for: 'Upstream') or, finally, from The Count of Monte Cristo, "L'autre Mond" (the other world's count). Lefrère considers another possibility: le Comte de Lautréamont = le compte de l'autre à Mont (the account of the other at Montevideo); this could be interpreted as a joke at his father's expense, who supported Ducasse with a generous allowance.