Since its origin French verse has allied text and image through the way words look as well as how they sound. For example, how each poetic verse scans depends at times on a visible but silent feminine ‘e’ that completes the requisite syllable count and rhyme scheme, a letter that must be seen to be understood. Only in the mid-nineteenth century with his sonnet ‘Correspondances’ from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) did Charles Baudelaire make this blending of seeing and hearing clear with his invocation of synaesthesia as a peak experience, emphasising the importance of the ways in which all the senses blend and bleed into one another. Yet it was not until the turn of the century that Stéphane Mallarmé created a poem that explicitly linked seeing with reading, image with text: the metaphors within it are underscored by the visual arrangement of words on the page. In ‘Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard’ (‘A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance’, 1897) words on the page mirror the poem's narrative of shipwreck under a constellated sky, allowing the reader to visualise mentally the images conjured by the poetic verses. Furthermore, Mallarmé's poem closely followed the coinage of the noun visualisation (1892), preceded by the verb visualiser (1887), to render visible something that is not, to put an idea into images. As the century turned, France was ready for the separate domains of words and images to cross over into the other's territory.