Originally published in May 1897 in the magazine Cosmopolis, Un Coup de dés did not appear in book form until 1914, under the imprint of the Nouvelle Revue Française. In the summer of 1897, Mallarmé commissioned Odilon Redon to create a series of ten lithographs for a deluxe edition of his poem, planned by publisher Ambroise Vollard for the following year. However, Mallarmé died in September 1898, without seeing the project come to fruition. Redon barely managed to complete four drawings, all of them unfinished. Vollard insisted on publishing the book until 1901, but abandoned the idea after receiving a letter in which Redon confessed his frustration: “There is not a single word that is not abstract! If only he had referred to a chair or a demon!”
On Tuesday evenings, in his apartment on the Rue de Rome, Mallarmé welcomed a small entourage of poets, musicians, painters, and intellectuals: Valéry, Gide, Debussy, sometimes Verlaine… There, over cups of tea and rare editions, they discussed not so much what poetry said, but what it prevented from being said. Un Coup de dés, still in the making, floated in the air saturated with theory and smoke. These seemingly mundane gatherings were in fact spiritualist sessions of symbolism: each word summoned was an echo of the silence that Mallarmé defended with almost clinical passion. Redon appeared once or twice, like a discreet vision among the shadows of the salon. He didn’t quite fit in; his world was one of appearances, not omissions. What he couldn’t draw was perhaps already there, suspended between unspoken phrases, like a fifth lithograph made of absences.
Geneviève Mallarmé, the poet’s only daughter, vetoed the inclusion of Redon’s incomplete lithographs in the first edition. She did so with the conviction that only the heirs of the unintelligible possess, as if she knew that the blank space was part of the poem. She was not defending the work, but its aura: that ambiguous glow that survives even those who never fully understand what they are guarding.
The truncated collaboration between Mallarmé and Redon is not an accident, but a metaphor: Mallarmé’s poetry, made up of silences, margins, and suspensions, could not fully coexist with the drawn line, with Redon’s visual material. Where the poet made the page a field of typographical forces, the painter sought forms in the fog. The volume imagined by both never took editorial form, and yet it exists—like Leonardo’s bridges or Calvino’s invisible cities—in that perfect space where intention and failure come together. That Redon wanted a chair or a demon says less about the poem than about the hunger of the image to find a body: Un Coup de dés, in its refusal to embody the concrete, also refuses to die completely.
