A Throw of the Dice

On a Tuesday evening in 1897, the apartment at 89 rue de Rome was more crowded than usual. Word had spread through literary Paris that Stéphane Mallarmé would be reading something extraordinary at his famous "Mardis"—the Tuesday gatherings where the master received disciples. Young poets squeezed onto sofas and perched on chair arms. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and anticipation.

Mallarmé, at fifty-five, cut an elegant figure despite his modest circumstances. His carefully groomed beard had gone gray, but his eyes retained the intensity that mesmerized listeners. He had spent thirty years as an English teacher in various lycées, thirty years of what he called "the daily suicide" of teaching grammar to indifferent students. But here, in his small salon decorated with paintings by Manet and Whistler, he was the acknowledged prince of French poetry.

"My friends," he began, his voice soft but carrying absolute authority, "what I will share tonight represents my final throw of the dice. It is a poem that has occupied me for years, a poem that attempts the impossible—to capture the absolute through pure constellation of words on a page."

He held up the manuscript. Even from a distance, the young poets could see it looked strange—words scattered across pages like stars, vast white spaces between phrases, different typefaces creating visual rhythms. This was "Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira le Hasard" (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance).

As Mallarmé read, or rather performed—his voice rising and falling with the typography, pausing for the white spaces—the room fell under a spell. The poem seemed to be about a shipwreck, or perhaps the universe's creation, or maybe poetry itself. Lines appeared and disappeared like foam on waves: "NOTHING / WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE / BUT THE PLACE / EXCEPT / PERHAPS / A CONSTELLATION."

When he finished, silence filled the room. The young symbolists looked at each other, bewildered and exhilarated. They had witnessed something unprecedented—poetry that had broken free from the tyranny of linear reading, that used the entire page as a unit of composition, that suggested rather than stated, that made absence as eloquent as presence.

"Poetry," Mallarmé said into the silence, "is the expression of the mysterious meaning of existence. It endows our sojourn with authenticity and constitutes the only spiritual task." He had spent his life pursuing this task with monk-like dedication. Now, near the end, he had created something that pushed language to its limits. The dice had been thrown. Whether they would abolish chance or confirm it, only the future would tell.