You come across an isolated verse, copied in a notebook or pasted in a school exercise, and the prompt asks to identify the author. The phrase “on this detached page” often circulates without context, without a title, without a name. Finding out who wrote it requires mobilizing some precise research reflexes, far from simply copying and pasting into a search engine.
Cécile Sauvage and the poem “I wrote to you by moonlight”: the correct attribution
The text that ends with “on this detached page” is a poem by Cécile Sauvage, titled “I wrote to you by moonlight.” It appears in the collection Le Vallon, published in 1913 by Mercure de France.
This poem was written in honor of Alain Messiaen, the poetess’s second son. Knowing this biographical information helps to confirm the attribution: when you find an orphaned text, checking the dedicatee or the author’s family context provides a solid clue.
The most widespread confusion is to believe that “on this detached page” is the title of the poem. It is the last line. Many searches fail because people enter this line as a title, whereas the poem should be searched by its true title or by its first line: “I wrote to you by moonlight.” Identifying the author on this detached page first requires this distinction between title and last line.
Last line or title of the text: a common search error
When searching for an author based on an excerpt, the natural reflex is to type the exact phrase in quotes into Google. For this specific poem, this method mainly leads to homework help forums (Reddit, Quora) where the question is asked but rarely well documented.
The problem arises from the fact that “on this detached page” is not an indexed entry in literary databases. Library catalogs and online anthologies classify poems by title, by author, or by first line. A last line, even a famous one, does not appear in these indexes.
What works better than a raw search
- Type the first line of the poem in quotes: “I wrote to you by moonlight” directly leads to French poetry sites that attribute the text to Cécile Sauvage
- Add the name of the collection or the publisher to the query: “Le Vallon Mercure de France 1913” filters results to reliable editorial sources
- Use a specialized database in Francophone poetry rather than a general search engine, where homework forums saturate the top positions
You save time by reformulating the query around the editorial context rather than copying the line as is.
Tracing an author through the collection and the publisher: a concrete method
Suppose you know neither the title nor the author. You only have the final line. The approach that yields results relies on three distinct steps.
First, isolate the most specific words from the line. “Detached page” is more discriminating than “this” or “on.” By combining “detached page” with “poem” or “line,” you reduce the noise in the results.
Next, cross-referencing the excerpt with a publisher’s name or a literary period significantly refines the search. Cécile Sauvage published with Mercure de France, a publishing house active in the early twentieth century. This type of information can be found in the bibliographic notices of the BnF catalogs (Gallica) or Sudoc.
Finally, once the collection is identified (Le Vallon, 1913), you can verify the attribution by consulting the table of contents of the digitized collection. This verification takes a few minutes and avoids relying on a forum where the answer may be approximate.
The trap of erroneous attributions on forums
On Quora and Reddit, the question “Which author wrote a text that ends with on this detached page?” has generated dozens of responses. Some cite the correct name, while others confuse it with Alfred de Musset or other nineteenth-century poets.
A forum is not a reliable source for attributing a literary text. The best practice is to systematically trace back to an edition or an institutional catalog. Responses vary on this point depending on the level of academic or university rigor, but for a graded assignment, only the editorial source is authoritative.
Tools and reflexes for identifying the author of an unknown literary excerpt
Beyond this specific poem, the situation often repeats: you find a phrase, a verse, a paragraph without attribution. A few systematic reflexes allow you to trace back to the author without wasting an hour.
- Use quotes in the search bar to force an exact match, then reformulate with the first line if the last yields nothing
- Consult Gallica (the digital library of the BnF) which indexes collections by author, title, and publisher, often with the full texts digitized
- Check the publication date and the publisher to distinguish between homonyms or apocryphal texts
- Search for the dedicatee of the text: in the case of Cécile Sauvage, the biographical link with Alain Messiaen independently confirms the attribution
These methods apply to both poetry and prose. The principle remains the same: you are not searching for an excerpt, you are searching for the book that contains it.
Identifying an author relies less on the technology of the search engine than on the quality of the query. Reformulating, cross-referencing editorial sources, checking in an institutional catalog: these three actions suffice in the vast majority of cases. For “on this detached page,” the answer can be summed up in a few words: Cécile Sauvage, Le Vallon, 1913, Mercure de France.