Ed. 300

"it is not for me, save by a special pagination or volume of my own, in a Periodical so courageous, gracious and accommodating as it shows itself to be to real freedom, to act too contrary to custom." wrote Mallarmé in the Preface to the Cosmopolis edition. The Preface is reproduced in full in the monographic 1914 nrf edition:

"this seemed to us to be of such comprehensive interest and significant enough for the author's thinking that it should be reproduced here, in front of the final edition, which he prepared with care, as it should have appeared at the moment when Death surprised him. The main innovation introduced by him in this last part of his work, to take up the expression he uses, seems to us to be that there are no longer two sides of a page, but that the reading is about both sides together done, just following the usual fall of the lines."

(Editor's note, 1914 NRF edition)