Poets are proverbially poor and usually consigned to garrets but the French poet Jules Laforgue (1860–87) was the exception. He was not rich, but he lived like a prince in a royal palace and there produced in his short life work that left its mark on the literature of his own country and an even greater mark on later generations of writers in England and America. Through the intervention of his friends, the writer Paul Bourget and the art collector and critic Charles Ephrussi (who may have served as one of the models for Proust’s Charles Swann), Laforgue went in 1881 to Berlin as French reader to the Empress Augusta. The Empress, a descendant of Catherine the Great of Russia, having grown up in Goethe’s Weimar, despised most things German and spoke only French. It was Laforgue’s duty to read to her twice a day from French books and newspapers. He occupied a large high-ceilinged, elaborately furnished apartment, with olive-green walls, ebony woodwork, and dark wall hangings, on the ground floor of the Palace of the Princesses on the Unter den Linden, where he had fires in every room and was looked after by his own servant. “Opposite me is the Royal Guard House,” he wrote to a friend, “all military bands and pointing cannon. On my left, the Opera and the Palace. On my right, a mass of columns and statues. I have five windows looking out in all directions. I can see nothing but monuments. And