Autumn Complaint first appeared on July 2, 1864, in la Semaine de Cusser
et de Vichy; then October 27, 1867, in la Revue des Lettres et des Arts;
February 1, 1872, in l'Art Libre; December 20, 1875; in la République des
Lettres; April 11, 1886, in la Vogue; June 26, 1886, in le Chat Noir; in
l'Album de Vers et de Prose ( 1887); Pages ( 1891); Vers et Prose ( 1893); and
Divagations ( 1896).

This prose-poem (originally entitled The Street-Organ) was composed
in 1864. Having completed his aggressive Art for All two years before,
Mallarmé now assumed more meditative and reminiscent attitudes. Despite
its originality, Autumn Complaint makes no attempt to hide its author's
acquaintance with Baudelaire's poetry and prose-poetry. In 1862, Mallarmé
had undoubtedly read the well-known preface to those prose-poems, in
which the author of Flowers of Evil had written: "Who of us, in his most
ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetical prose, a
musical prose without rhythm or rhyme, yet flexible enough, abrupt enough
to adapt itself to the lyrical motions of our soul, to the undulations of our
revery, to the sudden fits of our consciousness?" ( Oeuvres Complètes, ed.
de la Pléiade [ Paris, 1951], p. 273). Mallarmé took up the challenge; and in
Autumn Complaint he seems most carefully to have recalled Baudelaire's
closing words; for into the midst of this atmosphere of revery steals, indeed,
a "sudden fit of consciousness" and of reminiscence--a fit particularly dear
to the twenty-two-year-old Mallarmé because it was occasioned by remem-
brance of his sister Maria, whose death in 1857 had overwhelmed this sensi-
tive and melancholic poet.

Around Maria, restored through memory and forming the autobiographi-

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