Published quietly in 1897, Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup des dès ("One Toss of the Dice")—a 20-page poem about a shipwreck that can be read up and down, backward and forward—launched modernism and anticipated our digital age. To decode this notoriously ambiguous masterpiece, R. Howard Bloch profiles Mallarmé, a teacher whose weekly gatherings drew such figures as Victor Hugo, Claude Monet, Oscar Wilde, and future French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. Illustrated with photographs, this fascinating study of a watershed era also includes J.D. McClatchy's authoritative translation of the poem.