Disenchantment by Moonlight – by Charles Rosières

Charles Rosières was one of many underground poets who made up the fabric of the French Romanticist movement without leaving more than faint traces for posterity. The formal and thematic aspects of his work and the few venues which it appears show that he was connected with the avant-garde current of the movement, particularly the work of Philothée O’Neddy, Théophile Gautier, and the Bouzingo group, though less extreme. An adherent to the Christian Liberalism of the Romanticist poet-politician Lamartine, Rosières served in the army and apparently spent most of his career in provincial military posts. Though supported by the Romanticist editor Charles Malo and a few literary journals in the provinces, most of his work never saw print, it was never collected in a book, and what little did appear in magazines and anthologies remained scattered and forgotten. These are his first poems published in any language for 185 years.