Flowers of Bitumen

Flowers of Bitumen (Fleurs du Bitume in French) is the first volume of poetry, published in 1878, by Émile Goudeau, who is best known as the founder the Hydropaths Club, a widely-successful literary club in Paris from 1878-1880, and subsequently as the influential editor-in-chief of the world-famous Chat Noir journal.Léon Bloy, his cousin, says this of him: he 'is the lover, at first happy and successively distraught with each passing minute of his own existence, which makes him, at thirty-four years old, madly adored by fifteen million mistresses. When... Flowers of Bitumen [first appeared], I didnʼt understand anything in it... I noticed nothing at all of the extreme nascent superiority of that poetʼs rough outline that was teased out of his marble like Michelangeloʼs unfinished Slave. I called him Mohammad-Goudeau and I made him enter into Byzantium. I cried plaintively that that was decidedly the end of ends, and that the bitumen was going to gobble up the literary Pentapolis of the Occident. That bitumen has become the asphalt of Glory and we are certain to have a great poet hiding amongst us in the nineteenth century....' ('The Fifteenth Child of Niobe,' Chat Noir journal, November 3, 1883).