Abstract: Turning the pages of Verlaine’s Poëmes saturniens, French literary critic Sainte-Beuve would quickly have spotted the scatological humor of “Sérénade.” For the author of the introduction to the first edition of Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit, and in the context of this (qualified) encyclopedic connivance in schoolboyish culture, did Verlaine’s poem bring to mind Bertrand’s no less risqué “La Sérénade”? The romantico-Shakespearean topos is once again transformed into a raucous nocturnal cacophony.
