SOURCE: "Albertus: Narrating Poetic Allegory," in French Literature Series, Vol. XVII, 1990, pp. 60-68.

In the following essay, Schick explores the ironic and seductive effects of Albertus's intratextual weaving.

Theophile Gautier's talent as a storyteller is much more readily appreciated today than his talent as a poet. Paradoxically, the recognition of his narrative abilities generally focuses on the poeticity of his prose fictions, a poeticity itself attributed in large measure to the fantastic thematics of his narratives, their self-conscious écriture, the plasticity of this writing, and their expansive, gratuitous delight in verbal pyrotechnics—all factors which, when applied to his poems, usually serve to dimmish their "poeticity."

Interestingly, Gautier's first narrative was a poem. Composed in 1831-1832, "Albertus" is made up of 122 stanzas, each one consisting of eleven alexandrines and one concluding octosyllabic verse. It is generally categorized as a "long narrative poem" although, in fact, the narrative of...