If the call of the Elsewhere, old as all the dreams of Arcadia or Eldorado, did not await the coming of Romanticism before manifesting itself, it is true that a radical change in the state of the world coincided with its great moment in history. A page of the final section of Mémoires d’outre-tombe notes (with nostalgia) that “there is not one corner of our dwelling place that is at present unknown”. That situation excludes the possibility that we can still explore it (even though the colonization of the whole of the Earth had not yet been technically completed), but it makes it inevitable that on a completely different level – metaphysical and metapsychic – a desire for Elsewhere unfurls. I would like to make perceptible the sorrows accompanying this process in a body of work that is not usually looked on from this angle: that of Mallarmé, which to me seems literally haunted by this. If the poetic works of Mallarmé as a whole undergo the profound reorientation of a dual discovery, of “Nothingness”, then of “Beauty” in the spring and summer of 1866 or, in other words, if Mallarmé makes the discovery of the collapse of the Suprasensory sphere on which poetic value can metaphysically be founded, it is still the obscurely neoplatonic (and hence easily Christianized) belief in an ascension back to an original Elsewhere – that would, once returned to, allow the subject to reincorporate the divine part of his being – which collapses.