Raphaël Barquissau (Professor, Poet & Historian)

  

A Dedication at the Closerie: When Raphaël Barquissau Met Fernand Divoire

In the front pages of a book, sometimes a few handwritten lines can open a door to a forgotten world. One such inscription, found in a copy of Les Isles by Raphaël Barquissau published in 1935, reads:

“À Fernand Divoire  En souvenir de la Closerie des Lilas Souvenir – février et avec toute mon amicale admiration - Raphaël Barquissau Professeur au lycée Carnot 165 Bd Malesherbes”

(To Fernand Divoire, In memory of the Closerie des Lilas A February remembrance — and with all my friendly admiration - Raphaël Barquissau Professor at Lycée Carnot 165 Boulevard Malesherbes)

This quiet dedication, dated February and referencing the famed Closerie des Lilas, offers a glimpse into a literary friendship between two men whose lives and works spanned continents, ideologies, and artistic movements. It’s a moment of poetic camaraderie captured in ink—one that invites us to explore the lives behind the names.

 

The Closerie des Lilas: Paris’s Literary Crucible

The Closerie des Lilas was more than a café it was a sanctuary for poets, painters, and provocateurs. From the late 19th century through the roaring 1920s, it hosted the likes of Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Ernest Hemingway. It was here that Tristan Tzara and André Breton clashed in 1922, marking the end of Dadaism and the rise of Surrealism. The Closerie was a place where ideas were born, movements collided, and friendships, like that of Barquissau and Divoire, were forged.

Within its elegant interior, brass plaques adorn the tables, each etched with the name of a literary or artistic giant who once called the café their haunt: Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, Théophile Gautier, Honoré de Balzac, and of course, Hemingway himself.

La Closerie des Lilas owes much of its literary fame to Ernest Hemingway, who frequented the café to craft his short stories and dispatches for the Toronto Star. “The only decent café in our neighborhood,” Hemingway once wrote, “was La Closerie des Lilas, and it was one of the best cafés in Paris.” It became his unofficial headquarters; a place where inspiration flowed as freely as the coffee.

Over the decades, its magnetic charm continued to draw an extraordinary cast of cultural icons, including Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, André Gide, Louis Aragon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett. La Closerie wasn’t just a café, it was a crucible of creativity.

 

Raphaël Barquissau: The Island Humanist

Born in Saint-Pierre, Réunion in 1888, Raphaël Barquissau was a poet, historian, and professor whose life was shaped by the rhythms of the tropics and the intellectual rigor of the Sorbonne. After earning his agrégation in Letters in 1920, he taught across the colonial world Egypt, Madagascar, Mauritius, Indochina and eventually settled in Paris, teaching at Lycée Carnot.

His literary work, including Les Isles, Poèmes d’Asie et des Îles, and Le Poète Lacaussade et l’exotisme tropical, earned him multiple awards from the Académie Française. His poetry is lush, romantic, and steeped in creole nostalgia, often evoking the languor of island life and the philosophical depth of cultural memory.

Barquissau’s influence extended beyond literature. He was elected to the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer in 1945 and became its president in 1960. He founded the Académie de la Paix and mentored future leaders, including Edgar Faure, who credited Barquissau as the professor who most shaped his intellectual development. In Hanoi, one of his students was reportedly Võ Nguyên Giáp, who would later become a legendary general in the Vietnam War.

Yet his legacy is not without complexity. While he celebrated indigenous cultures, he also held prestigious roles within colonial institutions, an ambivalence that modern readers may scrutinize.

Fernand Divoire: The Avant-Garde Enigma

Fernand Divoire, born in Brussels in 1883 and naturalized French in 1912, was a poet, critic, and editor who thrived in the intellectual ferment of early 20th-century Paris. He was a literary shapeshifter equally at home in poetry, journalism, and esoteric philosophy.

Divoire collaborated with Ricciotto Canudo on Montjoie!, a radical art gazette that featured contributors like Apollinaire, Erik Satie, and Marc Chagall. He coined the term isadorables for Isadora Duncan’s protégées and wrote poetic tributes that exalted her as a divine muse. His style embraced synesthesia, anacoluthon, and poetic improvisation hallmarks of experimental prose.

His fascination with mysticism and modern dance set him apart from more conventional literary figures. But Divoire’s legacy is complicated by his wartime affiliations. During World War II, he served as an editorialist for Paris-Midi, a collaborationist newspaper aligned with Vichy France. He worked alongside Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose antisemitic writings and Nazi sympathies remain deeply controversial. While Divoire’s own views are less documented, his association with this circle casts a shadow over his wartime activities.

 

A Friendship in Ink

The dedication in Les Isles is more than a polite gesture it’s a snapshot of literary respect and shared memory. Barquissau’s “amicale admiration” suggests genuine esteem for Divoire’s intellect and artistry. The reference to the Closerie des Lilas evokes a specific moment, perhaps a conversation over coffee, where two minds from vastly different worlds found common ground in poetry.

Their meeting at the Closerie would have been a convergence of contrasts: Barquissau, shaped by the warmth of the Indian Ocean and the complexities of colonial life; Divoire, immersed in the cerebral avant-garde of Paris and the mysticism of modern art. One celebrated by the Académie Française, the other remembered for his stylistic daring and controversial affiliations.

 

Echoes of a Literary Encounter

Today, that inscription stands as a quiet testament to the power of shared ideas. In a time when literary salons were fading and the world was shifting under the weight of war and colonial change, Barquissau and Divoire met, perhaps briefly, perhaps often, at the Closerie des Lilas. And in that meeting, they left behind a trace: a few lines in ink, a book passed from one poet to another, and the memory of a café where art once bloomed.

Their story reminds us that literature is not just written it’s lived, exchanged, and remembered. Sometimes, all it takes is a dedication to bring it back to life.