I’ve always been fascinated by Isidore Ducasse’s Poesies–especially this entry:

“Yes, good folk, it is I who direct you to roast upon a red-hot shovel, with a little brown sugar, the duck of doubt with lips of vermouth, which, in a melancholy struggle between good and evil, shedding crocodile tears, without an air-pump everywhere brings about the universal vacuum. That is the best thing for you to do.”

Alexis Lykiyard glosses this by saying that the commentator Caradec suggests that this bizarre apercu might be a sly allusion to journalistic gatherings during the hours of aperitifs. These gatherings were commonly held on the terraces of cafes at the time, and Ducasse probably witnessed them. I would like to add that the form of Ducasse’s insight is prescriptive and is taken, I believe, from collections of folk medicine of the 19th century, excerpts of which sometimes appeared in the newspapers. I say this because, years ago, while going through the early numbers of the American Folklore Society’s journal, I ran across a folk remedy (for a cold, If I recall correctly) that did indeed require the ingredients to be roasted, with a little brown sugar, on a red-hot shovel. I remember that it appeared in a version of John George Hohman’s “Long Lost Friend” which the society published and annotated at the turn of last century, and it should be there still.

I also think, regarding some of the circumstances of Mervyn’s death in Maldoror, that there are echoes of the death of Kasper Hauser–one of the great mysteries of the time that Ducasse was probably aware of through the popular press