Queer Places:
Cimetière du Grand Jas, 205 avenue de Grasse in Cannes on the French Riviera

Emmanuel Signoret (March 14, 1872 - December 20, 1900) was is a French poet and art critic. In Le Livre de l’amitié (1891), his lover’s soul was as fragrant as a daffodil, he wanted their blood to mingle and their ‘loins’ to ‘quiver’, and their ‘burning mouths remained pressed together for a long time’.

Emmanuel Signoret was born in Lançon-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône) on March 14, 1872. He studied in Aix-en-Provence, before travelling to Italy for a few years. He then settled in Paris, where he frequented most literary circles and participated in magazines. Deeply idealistic, firmly convinced of his genius, he can hardly stand criticism. In January 1890 he founded the magazine Le Saint-Grail, which he wrote alone until his death. He published several collections of poetry. The Suffering of the Waters was crowned by the French Academy in 1899. Suffering from tuberculosis, he went to Puget-Théniers in 1896 where he met Eugenie Toesca. He married her in 1897 and they settled in Cannes where they had three children. He died in destitution in 1900, at the age of twenty-eight. In Cannes a street bears his name. André Gide is one of his defenders and prefaced the complete posthumous collection of his works; he devoted fourteen pages of his Anthology of French Poetry (1949) to a dozen of his poems, the longest of which was La Fontaine des Muses. His son, Emmanuel Signoret Jr.,was also a poet.

Signoret died on December 20, 1900 in Cannes, and was buried in the Cemetery of the Grand Jas (Cannes).


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