Gustave Roud. The New Blue of the Supplicants

In his Langage des fleurs, Gustave Roud evokes a stroll. He comes across a bellflower suffering from thirst and suffocated forget-me-nots. Roud perceives the prayer for compassion of these flowers but he confesses his helplessness. On that occasion he deplores the lost communication between flowers and humanity since the exile out of paradise. To reconnect with this original link, Roud rejects a poetics that relies on the easy symbolism of colours. He appeals to the "precious correspondences" and the romantic theme of the blue flower. He chooses then to conceal the word blue. As the colour of the Ideal that cannot be locked up in one single word, blue must be said through the network of "correspondences" that it weaves. Roud thus hopes to access this Garden where death, that of the suppliant blue flowers and that of loved humans, is abolished, and where universal communication is possible again.