Louis Jacques Napoléon Bertrand, better known by his pen name Aloysius Bertrand (20 April 1807 — 29 April 1841), was a French Romantic poet, playwright and journalist. He is famous for having introduced prose poetry in French literature, and is considered a forerunner of the Symbolist movement. His masterpiece is the collection of prose poems Gaspard de la Nuit published posthumously in 1842; three of its poems were adapted to an eponymous piano suite by Maurice Ravel in 1908.
Biography
Background
Born in Ceva on 20 April 1807, Louis Jacques Napoléon Bertrand was the son of Georges and Laure (or Laurine-Marie) Bertrand, née Davico. Georges Bertrand was born on 22 July 1768 at Sorcy-Saint-Martin (or Saulieu, according to other sources) into a family of soldiers. A gendarmerie lieutenant, his parents wanted him to become a priest but he ran away from the seminary and enlisted in the 16e régiment de dragons of Orléans on 7 May 1785. His first marriage with Marie-Jeanne Rémond (born in Montbard on 23 February 1779) gave birth to a daughter, Denise, on 9 March 1800 but his wife died three months later. He married his second wife during his stay in the Department of Montenotte (now the Province of Cuneo), Laure Davico (born 2 August 1782), on 3 June 1806 in Ceva. After the birth of Louis, the eldest, in 1807, a second son, Jean Balthazar, was born on 17 July 1808.
On 15 March 1812 Georges was appointed as gendarmerie captain in Spoleto, whose mayor was at the time Pierre-Louis Roederer. There, on 23 December, the poet's sister Isabella-Caroline (or Elizabeth) was born. On 3 September 1814 he was assigned to Mont-de-Marsan, where he made the acquaintance of Charles Jean Harel, then-prefect of the Department of Landes. Retiring at the end of August 1815, he left Landes and moved to Dijon, where on 19 March 1816 his fourth child was born, Charles Frédéric (who later became a journalist), and where his daughter Denise from his first marriage got married on 11 January 1818.
A young romantic
Louis Bertrand studied from 1818 to 1826 at the collège royal of Dijon, where he spent most of his life. Among his classmates were Lacordaire and Antoine Tenant de Latour, who would help him later. While in Dijon, Louis Bertrand developed an interest in the Burgundian capital. His father died on 27 February 1828 and he had to sustain the home on his own, receiving financial help from his aunt François-Marguerite also known as “Lolotte”. In the local literary paper “Le Provincial”, which had published the first verses of poet Alfred de Musset, he promoted his avant-garde aesthetic views and published around twenty works in prose and in verse. Still in 1828, it seems he loved an anonymous young girl who might have died; traces of her existence can be found throughout Bertrand's entire works.
First trip to Paris and return to Dijon
Encouraged by a laudatory letter from Hugo following a poem published in the journal that he had dedicated to him and by recognition from Sainte-Beuve, he moved to Paris at the beginning of November 1828. He met Sainte-Beuve at the salon of Émile Deschamps and read some of his prose to him. But he felt ashamed of his social status and could not find a place among the Parisian romantics. He got sick in January 1829 and during Spring found a publisher, Sautelet, to publish his poems, but he went bankrupt in August. He then got interested in the theater and offered a play to the Vaudeville without success. After that, he decided to return to Dijon on 4 April 1830 and collaborated to the “Spectateur”, a newly-founded liberal newspaper. On 15 February 1831, under the name “Ludovic Bertrand”, he became chief editor of the newspaper “Patriote de la Côte-d’Or” until December 1832, in which he displayed his republican opinions with virulence