Among the manuscripts on show at the Mallarme centenary exhibition, held at the Musee d'Orsay in 1998, was a bundle of 202 little squares of notepaper, scrawled over in barely legible pencil. The startlingly small size of the paper, and the almost furtive nature of the scrawl - so unlike Mallarme's usual impeccable script - was instantly arresting. For this was the manuscript of his projected poem (or prose piece, or drama, it is never entirely clear) for his son Anatole, who died of rheumatic fever in 1879 at the age of eight. As if in keeping with the secretive look of the manuscript, the poet never mentioned these notes in his correspondence. The public Mallarme was engaged upon his mysterious oeuvre, his impossibly ambitious attempt to render in words the "orphic explanation of the earth". But in private, for many months after his boy's death, he was engaged on a project closer to home, the "Tombeau d'Anatole", which was never completed, or even given an official title. In fact, the manuscript only came to the notice of the general public in 1961, with the publication of Jean-Pierre Richard's magisterial edition from Le Seuil.