At the end of Debussy's 1883 setting of Verlaine's ‘Pantomime’ we hear the ‘voices’ in Colombine's heart, a swooping, soaring passage of wordless vocalise. Verlaine doesn't tell us what they say, and Debussy adds no syllabification: Colombine's voices are literally indicibles—a word to which we will return—and all that remains is song.

‘Pantomime’ opens what has become known as the Recueil Vasnier, or ‘Vasnier Songbook’: a manuscript collection of thirteen songs Debussy composed between 1882 and 1884, and presented to his muse and mistress Marie-Blanche Vasnier before his departure for Rome in 1885. His dedication offers Mme Vasnier ‘These songs that have lived only through her’ (Ces chansons qui n’ont jamais vécues que par elle): they were, most literally, embodied by this single performer. And yet our focus in this chapter is not a singer, but rather a more abstracted and contested figure: that of the singer, through whom the fusion of the musical and poetic imagination is realised. Picking up the narrative of ‘Correspondances’ first explored in chapter 1, we confront the more troubled, and troubling, ramifications of that intersection, with which Verlaine grappled in his Fêtes galantes of 1869.

In the Recueil Vasnier, ‘Pantomime’ is followed by four more settings of Verlaine's Fêtes galantes, ‘En sourdine’, ‘Mandoline’, ‘Clair de lune’, and ‘Fantoches’ (all composed in 1882), the five songs grouped under the heading Fetes galantes (sic). In 1891–92 Debussy returned to those early songs, re-composing ‘Clair de lune’ and ‘En sourdine’ and substantially revising ‘Fantoches’ (see p. 123 above). This completed triptych was published by Fromont more than a decade later, in 1903, as Fêtes galantes. A year after that Debussy chose three more poems from Verlaine's collection, ‘Les ingénus’, ‘Le faune’, and ‘Colloque sentimental’; Durand issued them as ‘Fêtes galantes / 2e Recueil’ in September 1904.

The two mature Fêtes galantes triptychs were thus composed a decade apart, and ‘Fantoches’ appeared in print more than twenty years after it was first conceived. In his probing study of Debussy's song triptychs David Code emphasises this disjunction, observing that between the 1891–92 and 1904 Fêtes galantes came Proses lyriques, Trois chansons de Bilitis, and Trois chansons de France (as well as Pelléas et Mélisande).