Tormented with forbidden longing, he shoots Mervyn and ties his limp body to the Paris Panthéon. Brutality’s nadir, however, occurs when Maldoror encounters Mervyn, a young English rose who enjoys fencing. In pristine waters, he pursues a ‘hideous coupling’ with a shark. Parodying bourgeois contentment, Maldoror cuts his cheeks to create a permanent, satyr-like smile. Across six cantos of grotesquerie, the eponymous misanthrope ( mal d’aurore translates as ‘dawn’s evil’) flees a policeman’s platinum torch beam and spirals through dream-like realms. In letters to his publisher, dated 1869, Ducasse explains: ‘I have written of evil as Milton and Baudelaire, etc. A strange soul, he wrote only at night, seated at a piano, reciting draft sentences interspersed with chords.Ĭritics contend that Ducasse adopted his pen name due to Les Chants de Maldoror’s obscenity. Ducasse left a single complete work in his wake: a prose poem titled Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), published pseudonymously in 1869. As Prussian forces besieged the city following the capture of Napoleon III, a concierge discovered the poet in his Montmartre hotel room, white as a ghost. Born in Montevideo, Ducasse moved to Paris in 1867, where he died three years later at the age of just 24. Isidore Ducasse, better known as le Comte de Lautreámont, was a French poet with a literary corpus as slight as a will o’the wisp.
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