Champavert. Petrus Borel the Lycanthrope

whose supposed exchange of letters with the contemporary Pope, surnamed Ganganelli, was fraudulent. Joseph Delorme was the subject of Vie, Poésie et Pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) by Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve; no serious pretence was ever mounted that he was a real person.

2. The reference is to Pierre Borel (c1620-1671), an early microscopist, who might have been blurring the truth slightly when he referred to his father Jacques as a “mathematician and poet,” as it seems more likely that he was an astrologer, and no examples of his poetry survive.

3. Julius Caesar’s account of his wars in Gaul includes mention of a people called the Segusiani, living in the region where the city of Lyon was eventually founded. The name was further popularized by a thirteenth-century religious writer who signed himself Henricus de Segusia.

4. Philibert Delorme, Étienne de Martelange, Jean-Nicolas Servan, alias Servandoni, various members of the Audran family of artists, Jacques Stella, Antoine Coysevox, and Pierre-Simon Ballanche were all born in Lyon, Borel’s birthplace.

5. The reference is probably to the Comte de Saint-Simon’s sometime secretary Léon Halévy, who wore his beard uncultivated for a while during the period when Borel knew him in Paris; it was not typical of Saint-Simonians in general.

6. The reference is presumably to the cycle of paintings of St. Bruno painted by Eustache Le Sueur and displayed in the Louvre, although only one of them represents the saint with an unkempt beard.

7. Charles Marie de La Condamine (1701-1774) was a geographer and mathematician who became famous when he supported Isaac Newton’s suggestion that the Earth was not a perfect sphere, continually making scrupulous measurements that proved his case, but to which the orthodox supporters of imaginary sphericity steadfastly refused to pay any heed.

8. Théophile Gautier was a student in an artist’s studio when Borel met him, and when they organized the Hernani claque, the other students in the studio were recruited along with other friends of the members of the petit cénacle.

9. The pseudonym of the Italian poet and librettist Pietro Trapassi (1698-1782)

10. I have translated all the poems in the volume literally, without making any attempt to reproduce their rhyme-scheme of scansion.

11. The poet Jacques Clinchamps de Malfilâtre (1732-1767) was poorly born and unsuited to the salon society that was the principal broker of literary fame in his day, but his reputation grew even if his income remained meager.

12. Byron had established a stereotypical stance of irreducible world-weary gloom that attracted many imitators, most of whom were faking it. Borel wasn’t.

13. An adaptation, for rhyming purposes of quémando [burning—i.e., of heretics]

14. A tax levied on landowners in Medieval France

15. The poet André Chenier (1762-1794) was one of the precursors of the Romantic Movement; he was exceedingly unlucky to be arrested by mistake, and then sent to the guillotine by Robespierre, whom he had once criticized in a poem, a mere three days before the end of the Terror.

16. Gérard Labrunie, better known as Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855), also cited simply as “Gérard” when his verses are quoted in the headpieces to two of the stories in the collection.

17. The lyric poet Pierre-Jean Béranger (1780-1857) became enormously popular as a popular songwriter.

18. The French carrière [quarry] also means “career,” so there is an untranslatable double meaning here, related to the previous reference to granit [granite]. Borel echoes the double meaning in one of his own stories.

19. In the pseudo-Classical medical theory of the humors a lymphatic temperament is one that lacks energy.

20. From Francesco Petrarca’s Triumphus Temporis [The Triumph of Time] Approximately: What more is mortal life than a single day/Cloudy, cold, short and filled with grief/That has no value, fair though it might seem?

21. Dei delitti e delle pene (1764; tr. as On Crimes and Punishments) by Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) was the Classic Enlightenment text arguing against the death penalty.