Adolphe Retté

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Adolphe Retté (25 July 1863 – 8 December 1930), was a French symbolist poet. He was for a time a follower of anarchism before returning to Catholicism.

Biography

Adolphe Retté was born at the 9th arrondissement of Paris into a Protestant family from Montbéliard on his father's side and a Catholic family from the Ardennes on his mother's side. He was brought up, from 1867, in a climate of freedom 8 km from Liège in a villa in Cheret, by his maternal grandfather, Adolphe Borgnet, a former rector of the University of Liège, who was rather anticlerical and died in 1875.

From 1874 to 1880, he was a boarder at the Cuvier School in Montbéliard. From 1881 to 1886, he volunteered in the army. In January 1887, he moved to Paris and devoted himself to literature.

He married his cousin Marie Renoz in September 1888. She died in January 1890. He published his first collection Cloches en la nuit in 1889, then Thulé des Brumes in 1891, which was a success. In the meantime, he was a collaborator of La Cravache and secretary of the review La Vogue, second period. He attacks the Romanesque School gathering around Moréas and Maurras a group of poets who advocate the return to the poetry of La Pléiade and close to the Félibrige.

At the end of 1893, he challenged moral authority by becoming an anarchist and aesthetic authority by attacking Mallarmé in L'Ermitage (in which he actively participated at the beginning) and La Plume.

In 1894, he moved to Guermantes with Louise Rachel Fautras whom he had just married.

His poetic art begins profoundly to evolve: one can consider it as the precursor of the "naturism" movement which privileges a return to nature and the celebration of the everyday life, to which Saint-Georges de Bouhélier and Maurice Le Blond are attached.

In 1906, Retté returned to Catholicism, following a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (Arbonne), as he tells in Du Diable à Dieu. He disavows his previous works, except for his work Le Symbolisme and some poems. He ended his life in Beaune in poverty, not far from the convent of the Little Dominican Sisters, his protectors. He is buried in the Beaune cemetery.

Works

  • Cloches en la nuit (1889)
  • Thulé des Brumes (1891)
  • Une belle dame passa (1893)
  • L'Archipel en fleurs (1895)
  • Trois dialogues nocturnes (1895)
  • La Forêt bruissante (1896)
  • Aspects (1897)
  • XIII Idylles diaboliques (1898)
  • Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque artistique et littéraire (1898; 2 volumes)
  • Arabesques (1899)
  • La Seule Nuit (1899; novel)
  • Dans la Forêt (1903)
  • Mémoires de Diogène (1903)
  • Le Symbolisme, anecdotes et souvenirs (1903)
  • Du Diable à Dieu, histoire d'une conversion (1907)
  • Au pays des lys noirs, souvenirs de jeunesse et d'âge mûr (1913)
  • Une privilégiée de la Sainte Vierge (1922)
  • Léon Bloy, essai de critique préalable (1923)
  • La Maison en ordre, comment un révolutionnaire devint royaliste (1923)
  • Le Règne de la bête (1924)
  • La Basse-cour d'Apollon, mœurs littéraires (1926)
  • Jusqu'à la fin du monde (1926)
  • Un séjour à Lourdes, journal d'un pèlerinage à pied (1926)
  • Le Voyageur étonné, souvenirs de guerre, de littérature et de vie intérieure (1928)
  • Oraisons du Silence, Petit essai de vie intérieure offert aux malades du corps et aux éprouvés de l'âme (1930)
  • Réflexion sur l'anarchie, Promenades subversives (1932)
  • En attendant la fin (1933)
  • Sainte Marguerite-Marie (1936)

References

  • Boucher-Cugnasse, Annie (2020). Adolphe Retté: L'Enfant Terrible du Symbolisme (1863-1930). Paris: Editions Maïa.
  • Hoornaert, Rodolphe (1945). Les Expériences Mystiques d’Adolphe Retté, 1863-1930. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
  • Théoller, Louis (1931). "Adolphe Retté (1863-1930)," Études, Vol. CCVI, pp. 316–19.

External links