Comte de Lautréamont

French · 1846 to 1870

Born Isidore Lucien Ducasse on April 4, 1846, in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father François was a clerk at the French consulate, he lost his mother before he was two, possibly to suicide, and grew up speaking French, Spanish, and English in a city under siege. He was a five-year-old when the eight-year Siege of Montevideo ended in 1851. At thirteen his father sent him to lycée in southern France, first at Tarbes and then at Pau, where his teachers remembered an extravagant boy obsessed with Racine, Sophocles, Shelley, Byron, and Baudelaire, and given to what one schoolmate called self-indulgent imagery of terror and death. He settled in Paris at the end of 1867, abandoned his preparation for the École Polytechnique, and worked at night in a hotel room on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, reportedly composing at a piano while striking the keys. In late 1868 he published, anonymously and at his own expense, the first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror, and in 1869 he adopted the name Comte de Lautréamont and printed all six cantos in Brussels, only for the publisher to withhold the book for fear of prosecution. He sent it to Victor Hugo. In 1870 he published two thin pamphlets of Poésies under his real name. Then the Franco-Prussian War broke out, Paris was besieged, and he fell ill with a fever. He died on November 24, 1870, at eight in the morning in his hotel, aged twenty-four. His death certificate gave no further information; he was buried the next day in a provisional grave. Fifty years later the Surrealists recognised him as their forefather.