Isidore-Lucien Ducasse
Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, also known by his pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, was a French poet born on April 4, 1846, in Montevideo, Uruguay. He was the only child of a French immigrant father and a mother who died shortly after his birth. Ducasse's early life was marked by hardship, including a cholera epidemic and military conflicts in his hometown. At the age of thirteen, he moved to France for his education, where he developed a reputation as a gifted yet aloof student. In Paris, he began his literary career, ultimately publishing his most famous work, "Les Chants de Maldoror," which stirred significant controversy due to its themes of violence and eroticism. Although his work gained recognition, it was considered too provocative for mainstream distribution. Ducasse published one more major work, "Poésies I, II," but produced no further writings before his untimely death at the age of twenty-four in a Paris hotel. Despite his brief career, he is regarded as a significant forerunner to the French Surrealist movement.
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Isidore-Lucien Ducasse
Poet
- Born: April 4, 1846
- Birthplace: Montevideo, Uruguay
- Died: November 24, 1870
Biography
Isidore-Lucien Ducasse was born on April 4, 1846, in Montevideo, Uruguay, the only child of his French immigrant father, François Ducasse (working as adjunct chancellor to the French Consulate), and mother, Jacquette-Célestine Davezac. His mother died within the first year-and-a-half after he was born, presumably a suicide. Little is known of Ducasse’s early years between 1846 and 1859, which he spent in a town infiltrated by the Argentinean army, famine, and a devastating cholera epidemic, but it is recorded that at thirteen, the boy was sent to study in Tarbes, France, and later to Pau, where the young Ducasse earned a reputation as a gifted but distant, haughty boy with a sharp voice.
He would take this reputation into adolescence, when he would move to Paris on a pension from his father and begin his career as a poet. After eight years away from his father, Ducasse moved to Montevideo to persuade the elder to fund the publishing of his first (and best-known) work, Les Chants de Maldoror (the songs of Maldoror), the first stanza of which was published anonymously in 1868. By 1869, Ducasse had completed six chants, all successfully published. However, Albert Lacroix (editor to mile Zola, Victor Hugo, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) refused to distribute the prose poem, as he considered the content “too risqué.”
During these years, when Ducasse’s work had stirred up controversy (with characters ensconced in “murder, eroticism, sadomasochism, violence, blasphemy, obscenity, putrefaction, and dehumanization,” as one biographer sums it up), the young eccentric, who had disappointed teachers with his dislike for mathematics and Latin, took the pen name Comte de Lautréamont. The name is suspected to have come from the novel by Eugène Sue, Lautréamont (1837), a work with a “blasphemous and arrogant” hero similar to his own central characters. After Ducasse published his second major work, Poésies I, II (1870), he would write no more. The poet considered a pioneer and trailblazer for the French Surrealists was found dead in a hotel room in Paris on November 24, 1870. As with his mother’s death, the details surrounding the twenty-four year-old’s death are unknown.