Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives 9780754651116, 9781315096520

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B A U D E L A IR E ’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS

To my parents, Sheila and Eddie

Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris Shifting Perspectives

Maria C. Scott

Studies in European Cultural Transition Volume Twenty-Nine General Editors: Martin Stannard and Greg Walker

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Maria C. Scott 2005 The author has asserted her moral rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Scott, Maria C., 1972Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris : shifting perspectives. (Studies in European cultural transition) 1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867. Spleen de Paris I. Title 841.8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scott, Maria C., 1972Baudelaire’s Le spleen de paris : shifting perspectives / Maria C. Scott. p. cm. - (Studies in European cultural transition) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-511 -8 (alk. paper) 1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867. Spleen de Paris. I. Title. II. Series. PQ2191.S63S35 2005 841’.8-dc22 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-5111-6 (hbk)

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Contents

List o f Illustrations

VI

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1

1

Caricature

17

2

Prostitution

52

3

Morality

81

4

Allegory

119

5

Aesthetics

156

Conclusion

203

Title Key

209

Select Bibliography

214

Index

227

List o f Illustrations

Cover Ernest Christophe, La Comédie humaine, or Le Masque (middle) Photo RMN / © Jean Schormans. Figure 1.1 Ernest Christophe, La Comédie humaine, or Le Masque (1876) (front). Photo RMN / © Jean Schormans.

15

Figure 1.2 Ernest Christophe, La Comédie humaine, or Le Masque (1876) (side). Photo RMN / © Jean Schormans.

16

Figure 1.1 Honoré Daumier, 9 heures du soir (1839). Trustman Daumier Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Special Collections Department.

49

Figure 1. 2 Honoré Daumier, from Les Philanthropes du jour (1844). Trustman Daumier Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Special Collections Department.

50

Figure 1.3 Honoré Daumier, Robert Macaire, Architecte (1837). Trustman Daumier Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Special Collections Department.

51

Figure 4.1 Honoré Daumier, Gargantua (1831). Trustman Daumier Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Special Collections Department.

154

Figure 4.2 Honoré Daumier, 10 heures du matin (1839). Trustman Daumier Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Special Collections Department.

155

Acknowledgem ents

This book has its origins in a section of my doctoral thesis, Anamorphic Texts: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Lacan, Derrida (Trinity College Dublin, 1999). As such, my greatest and longest-standing debt is to David Scott, the unstintingly supportive director of that study, who inspired my initial interest in Baudelaire’s prose poetry and who also read and commented on an early draft of this book. I am extremely grateful too to Simon Potter, Sonya Stephens, and Catherine Toal for the invaluable feedback they offered on drafts of the book. This work has also benefited, at different points in its development, from the advice, encouragement, and support of Malcolm Bowie Mairead Byrne, Jane Conroy, Deirdre Daly, Catherine Emerson, Jim Gosling, Neil Hegarty, Tom Greene, Marion Schmid, Sheila Scott, Douglas Smith, and Barbara Wright. Any remaining faults and shortcomings are, of course, my own. I am grateful to the editors of French Studies, the Australian Journal o f French Studies, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies for granting me permission to draw on material already published in their journals. I would also like to express my gratitude to Ann Donahue at Ashgate, and Susan C. Pyzynski of the Special Collections Department, Brandeis University Libraries, for their helpfulness, efficiency, and (above all) patience. I would also like to thank the National University of Ireland, Galway for the award of a subsidy to fund the illustrations and index contained in this book.

‘Samuel s’arrêta avec respect, — ou feignit de s’arrêter avec respect; car, avec ce diable d’homme, le grand problème est toujours de savoir où le comédien commence.’ (Samuel stopped respectfully, — or pretended to stop respectfully; because, with this extraordinary man, the great problem always is knowing where the actor begins.) Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo.

Introduction

While critics of Le Spleen de Paris have long insisted on its profound irony, few have been consistently sceptical regarding the degree to which the narrative voice can be identified with that of the implied poet. This may suggest either that the usually personal narrators of the prose poems are at least partially trustworthy or, more disturbingly, that the texts function actively to deceive us. In ‘Au lecteur’, the prefatory poem of Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire presents a very forceful warning about the dangers of inattentiveness: Sur l’oreiller du mal c’est Satan Trismégiste Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté, Et le riche métal de notre volonté Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste. C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent! Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas; Chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas, Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent.1 (On the pillow of evil it is Satan Trismegist / Who is slowly rocking our enchanted spirit, / And the rich metal of our will / Is entirely vaporized by this learned alchemist. It is the Devil who holds the strings that move us! / In repugnant objects we find charms; / Every day towards Hell we move down a step, / Without horror, through the stinking darkness.)

The figure of Satan, in the above stanzas, embodies subtle evil, the kind that Baudelaire associated with the cult of material progress. The poet was convinced that nineteenth-century society had surrendered its will to this bogus ideal. The link between the notion of progress, on the one hand, and the Satan of ‘Au lecteur’, on the other, is made clear by the following passage, drawn from his article on the 1855 Exposition universelle, published contemporaneously with the poem: Je veux parler de l’idée du progrès. Ce fanal obscur, invention du philosophisme actuel, breveté sans garantie de la Nature ou de la Divinité, cette lanterne moderne jette des ténèbres sur tous les objets de la connaissance; la liberté s’évanouit, le châtiment disparaît. Qui veut y voir clair dans l’histoire doit avant tout éteindre ce fanal perfide. 1 OC I 6. The abbreviations ‘OC’ and ‘C’ refer to the Pléiade editions of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes and Correspondance respectively, and will be accompanied, as here, by volume and page numbers. For the translated titles of all Baudelaire’s works referred to by title in this book, please consult the Title Key at the back of this book.

2

BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS Cette idée grotesque, qui a fleuri sur le terrain pourri de la fatuité moderne, a déchargé chacun de son devoir, délivré toute âme de sa responsabilité, dégagé la volonté de tous les liens que lui imposait l’amour du beau: et les races amoindries, si cette navrante folie dure longtemps, s’endormiront sur l’oreiller de la fatalité dans le sommeil radoteur de la décrépitude.2 (I want to talk about the idea of progress. This dark beacon, an invention of modern-day pseudo-philosophy, patented without the guarantee of Nature or the Divinity, this modem lantern throws darkness on all objects of knowledge; freedom fades, punishment disappears. Whoever wants a clear vision of the workings of history needs first of all to extinguish this treacherous beacon. This grotesque idea, which has bloomed on the rotten ground of modem self-conceit, has let everyone off his duty, released every soul from its responsibility, and freed human will of all the binds that the love of beauty placed on it: and the diminished races, if this distressing madness endures for long, will fall asleep on the pillow of fatalism in the drivelling slumber of decrepitude.)

Despite being the most modem of poets, Baudelaire was also one of the most caustic critics of modernity: like the Devil of ‘Au lecteur’, the idea of progress is presented, in the above passage, as encouraging an abandonment of individual will. It is because of its inducement to passivity that progress is described, in Mon cœur mis à nu, as ‘une doctrine de paresseux’ (a doctrine for the lazy).3 Baudelaire himself refused to be seduced by the dominant dogma, and was scathing about those of his contemporaries who, according to him, had allowed their critical faculties to be lulled to sleep: ‘Il est si doux de s’endormir sur l’oreiller de l ’opinion toute faiteV (It is so sweet to fall asleep on the pillow of ready-made opinion!)4 It is unsurprising, then, that a great many of Baudelaire’s prose poems, written in the latter part of his career, openly attack the insensibility of the characters they feature. The woman in ‘Le Galant Tireur’, the slave master in ‘La Belle Dorothée’, the dog/public in ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, and the glazier in ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ are all berated for their blindness to aesthetics, while in other texts (‘La Corde’, ‘La Fausse Monnaie’, ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’) it is the myopie morality of key characters that is criticized. In many instances, the reader is implicitly invited to join with the authorial spokesperson in pouring scorn on the object of his contempt; not to accept the invitation would be to align oneself with the benighted. It may be for precisely this reason that the prose poems tend to set up what one critic has described as ‘an inescapable complicity between author and reader’.5 Like the ‘nous’ depicted in ‘Au lecteur’ or the ‘races amoindries’ (diminished races) referred to in the Exposition universelle article, the reader of the prose poems is encouraged to comply passively with the desire of an Other.

2 OC II 580. 3 OC I 681. 4 OC II 232. 5 J. Monroe, A Poverty o f Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics o f Genre (Ithaca, 1987), p. 115.

INTRODUCTION

3

The reader’s complicity would be severely undermined, however, if the prose poems were to be suspected of deliberately enacting and, in turn, inviting the obliviousness that they so often thematize. In other words, to the extent that a prose poem invites the reader’s connivance with an authorial spokesperson who is himself the butt of an authorial joke, because himself ‘victime de l’illusion’ (a victim of the illusion),6 the texts would exploit our susceptibility as readers to being manipulated. According to this hypothesis, the texts would operate as snares, covertly mocking our blindness as readers.78To the extent that we remain inattentive to the authorial figure’s misreadings, we would ourselves be indirectly accused by the prose poems of misreading. While criticism of the prose poetry continues, quite often, to identify the author with his textual alter ego, it is nonetheless true that, as Steve Murphy observed in 1993, ‘De récentes recherches ont eu tendance à mettre en évidence le caractère erroné de l’identification entre auteur et narrateur, dans Le Spleen de P aris' (Recent studies have tended to reveal the erroneous character of the identification between author and narrator in Paris Spleen.)* Some recent criticism has, moreover, raised doubts about the good faith of the collection’s author; Rosemary Lloyd and Sonya Stephens, for example, maintain in an article also published in 1993 that the prose poems seduce readers into a false sense of security by allowing them to feel complicit with the narrator, when in fact the texts may covertly victimize them by way of their sub-texts: Baudelaire’s prose poetry [...] owes much of its tensile strength to contradictions between what the narrators say and what the text reveals, between speech and gesture, and between the interpretation of gesture offered within a particular prose poem, and the 6 P. Labarthe, Petits Poèmes en prose de Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 2000), p. 155. According to Patrick Labarthe, the reader must take care to distinguish the author of the prose poems from an often deluded narrator. Paul Lamont Mathews also refers, in the context of the prose poetry, to ‘the use of “je” as a fictional character, an imperceptive narrator’. P. L. Mathews, ‘The Role of the “Je” in Baudelaire’, 4 vols (unpublished Univ. of Toronto, PhD thesis, 1966), IV, p. 996. As will become clear, however, from my frequent references to his work, Steve Murphy is the commentator who has, to date, been the most systematically sceptical of the author-narrator identification in the prose poems. 7 See R. Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power o f Fiction (Manchester, 1984), for a study of situational self-reflexivity and duplicity in literary narratives. 8 S. Murphy, ‘L’Hiéroglyphe et son interprétation: L’Association d’idées dans Le Tir et le cimetière\ Bulletin Baudelairien, 30.2 (1993), 61-84 (pp. 66). For examples of recent publications that repeatedly identify author and narrator of Le Spleen de Paris, see PierreLouis Rey’s preface to Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) ([Paris], 1995); J. Lawler, ‘The Prose Poem as Art of Anticlimax: Baudelaire’s “Kaléidoscope”’, Australian Journal o f French Studies, 36.3 (1999), 327-38; J. Dubosclard, M. Carlier, 20 poèmes expliqués: ‘Les Fleurs du M al’. ‘Le Spleen de Paris’: Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 2000); M. Narvaez, F. Ricard, Etudes sur Baudelaire: ‘Le Spleen de Paris’ ( ‘Petits Poèmes en prose’) (Paris, 2000); M. Viegnes, A. Landes, ‘Petits Poèmes en prose ’: Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 2000).

4

BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS meanings the reader may infer from imagery, sound patterning, irony, or intertextual references.9

As well as extending distrust of the authorial spokesperson (narrator or proxy) to a large number of the prose poems, this book will make this suspicion a primary stimulus of its reading. The dynamic whereby fiction, in the prose poems, is mistaken for autobiography has not yet been given the attention it deserves. What is it about Baudelaire’s prose poems that encourages this misrecognition? Is it the recurrence in the texts of certain recognizably Baudelairean tones, themes, and situations? Is it the predominance of first-person narration? Is it the assumption that poems, even in prose, are fundamentally sincere self-expressions?10 Whatever the reason, some of the most sophisticated readers of Le Spleen de Paris have argued that the voices in the prose poems are essentially those of Baudelaire himself. James A. Hiddleston remarks, for example, that the author of the prose poems ‘gives life to personae who represent whole aspects of his artistic personality and who often are incompatible with one another, so that he is the old mountebank, each one of the dandies in “Portraits de maîtresses’” , and so on.11 Stephens, similarly, claims that ‘there is a unifying identity between the different [narratorial] voices’, even while acknowledging that some of these voices are grotesque and parodie.12 While the postulation of a unified authorial identity linking diverse narratorial personae seems appropriate, for many, in the context of Baudelaire’s prose poetry, a similar argument is not usually made for Edgar Allan Poe’s first-person narrators, despite the influence of the latter’s short stories on the prose poems.13 Nevertheless, Baudelaire himself writes that Poe’s characters are their author, or at least ‘participent fortement de la nature de leur créateur’ (partake strongly of the nature

9 R. Lloyd and S. Stephens, ‘Promises, Promises: The Language of Gesture in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose\ Modern Language Review, 88.1 (1993), 74-83. Lloyd also explores the blindness characteristic of the ‘inept narrator-heroes’ of the prose poems in R. Lloyd, ‘Dwelling in Possibility: Encounters with the Other in Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris', Australian Journal o f French Studies, 29.1 (1992), 68-77 (p. 70). 10 Various critics have warned, however, against any simple identification of the author of Les Fleurs du Mal with his lyric persona. For probing discussions of this problem, see the introduction to D. J. Mossop, Baudelaire’s Tragic Hero: A Study o f the Architecture o f ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ (Oxford, 1961) and Mathews, The Role o f the ‘J e ’ in Baudelaire. Mathews refers to ‘the shifting perspectives in Les Fleurs du Mal created by the use of the multiple “je”’ (p. 776). See also P. Laforgue, ‘Sur la rhétorique du lyrisme dans les années 1850’, Poétique, 126 (2001), 245-52, which argues of French poetry in general that, after June 1848 and December 1851, the lyric je lost its anchoring in the authorial subject and became instead a purely rhetorical — and ironical — effect. 11 J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and ‘Le Spleen de Paris ’ (Oxford, 1987), p. 20. 12 S. Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics o f Irony (Oxford, 1999), p. 62. 13 See for example the parallels between ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ and The Imp o f the Perverse and between ‘Une mort héroïque’ and Hop-Frog.

INTRODUCTION

5

of their creator).14 Gérard Gasarian cites this view in support of the argument that the various characters that feature in both the verse and prose poetry of Baudelaire present doubles or alter egos of the poet. Jean Starobinski, in a similar vein, refers to the ‘répondants allégoriques du poète’ (allegorical agents of the poet) in the prose poetry.15 The notion of self-doubling (or self-tripling, self-quadrupling...) does not contradict my own argument, and in fact complements it, once it is agreed that a poet who was acutely aware (as his comment on Poe demonstrates) of the lures and allures of self-projection may also have presented certain of his characters, at least in his prose poetry, as ironic pseudo-selves rather than as straightforward doubles. It could be argued that if the apparent poet-figures presented in the prose poetry differ from the lyric subjects represented in the verse, this is not because of their respective mix of irony and sincerity but rather because they tend to represent different versions of Baudelaire’s character. According to Charles Mauron, for example, the ‘moi social’ (social self) is dominant in the prose poems, whereas the verse generally privileges instead the poet’s ‘moi créateur’ (creative self). While I would agree that the selves that feature in the verse are broadly different from the more cynical selves represented in the prose poetry, I would also argue that Baudelaire preserves a significantly greater distance from the latter ‘Porte-parole[s] avoué[s]’ (avowed spokesperson[s]) than from his lyric selves.16 This contention is, in itself, no more or less naïve than any other attempt to define the poet’s relationship with his represented alter egos or narrative voices in prose or verse. However, the argument for a dissociation of the poet from his apparent proxies in Le Spleen de Paris does have the advantage of being deliberate in its naivety. While commentators generally do not hesitate to dissociate poet from speaker in those texts where the identification of the two would be problematic on biographical or commonsense grounds, many let their critical guard down when discussing prose poems in which the illusion of authenticity is more complete. Indeed, Margery Evans makes a distinction between true and false Baudelairean narrators when she contrasts the self-satisfied ‘stooge narrators’ of certain prose poems, such as ‘Les Veuves’ and ‘Une mort héroïque’, with ‘the disabused and cynical protagonists of such poems as “Les Yeux des pauvres” and “Les Fenêtres’” .17 However, that the narrators of the latter poems are any less ‘stooge narrators’ than the narrators of others is highly debatable, as this book will endeavour to demonstrate.

14 OC II 318. 15 G. Gasarian, De loin tendrement: Étude sur Baudelaire (Paris, 1996); J. Starobinski, ‘Sur quelques répondants allégoriques du poète’, Revue d ’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 67 (1967), 178-88. 16 C. Mauron, Le Dernier Baudelaire ([Paris], 1966), pp. 46-47. 17 M. Evans, Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads (Cambridge, 1993), p. 50.

6

BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS

The problem of how to interpret is a core preoccupation of the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris: sometimes the texts actually thematize reading or (mis)interpretation (‘Assommons les pauvres!’, ‘La Fausse Monnaie’, ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’, ‘Les Fenêtres’, ‘Les Foules’, ‘La Corde’, ‘Le Tir et le cimetière’, ‘Un plaisant’, ‘Le Chien et le flacon’); sometimes they present interpretations of people or situations (‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’, ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, ‘Les Veuves’, ‘Une mort héroïque’, ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’, ‘Les Dons des fées’); and sometimes they address themselves explicitly to a reader or interlocutor (‘Enivrez-vous’, ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’, ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, ‘Les Bons Chiens’, ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’, ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’, ‘L’Étranger’, ‘Les Fenêtres’). Given the evident importance that the prose poems attribute to reading, it may be that what they say or imply on the subject can guide us in our own reading of the collection. Naomi Schor proposes that ‘through the interprétant’, her term for the interpreting character in a text, ‘the author is often trying to tell the interpreter something about interpretation, and the interpreter would do well to listen and take note’.18 Schor points out that the presence of a reader-figure in the text tends to invite a narcissistic identification that has the effect of reducing the interpreter’s critical distance from the text. It might consequently be argued that such an identification would result in the interpreter unconsciously reproducing the interprétant’s style of reading. Given that imaginative identification was at the core of Baudelaire’s own critical practice, it is likely that he was sensitive to mimetic reading practices. His prose poems often feature an interpreting character whose readings of the world around him are themselves narcissistic, and consequently prone to significant blind spots. It is possible that, through such interprétants, the author of the prose poems offers the reader a tacit warning about the dangers of narcissistic readings, that is, the dangers of allowing oneself to enter too unreflectively into superficially flattering fraternal relations. If interpretations of the prose poems can be understood to be partially prefigured by the readings performed by their interprétants, they are also inseparable from past readings of the texts. As a result of the sedimentation of meaning in the prose poems over the years, no commentator can read the texts ‘innocently’. This is one of the reasons why this book will refer constantly to the critical discourse surrounding Baudelaire’s prose poetry; the other is that attention to this discourse has the advantage of furnishing illustrations of the mechanisms of suppression. Without claiming to be in any way exempt from blindness, this book’s interpretation of Le Spleen de Paris arises in no small part from a meditation on some of the interesting contradictions and inconsistencies that occur in criticism of the collection. For example, the usually faultlessly perspicacious critic Marie Maclean makes the following remark about the prose poems: ‘The name “poems” attached to them seems to have blinded critics to their most obvious feature, that they are in the first instance a dazzling display of many varieties of narrative’; she goes on later in her 18 N. Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York, 1987), p. 122.

INTRODUCTION

7

study, in the context o f a discussion o f ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’, to prove her own point by making exactly this mistake: The poQt-entreteneur [poet-keeper] inflicts on the petite-maîtresse [affected woman] the spectacle of the fairground obscenity, so that she may recognize both her own animality and her own importance in the ‘wild woman’. But by his very act of coercion, by the parallel he himself establishes, the poet is forced at the same time to recognize himself in the husband who chains his wife, clothes her in fake pelt, and treats her like an animal.19 The initial reference to a ‘poet -entreteneur' seems at least partially to acknowledge the problematic status o f any straightforward identification o f poet with narrator; but in the following sentence any distinction between the poet and the narratorial speaker is very unambiguously collapsed. While Maclean is extremely sensitive to the operation o f Baudelaire’s prose poems as textual snares, in this case the critic herself would seem to have fallen into a possible trap; she ‘forgets’ that the texts are narratives at least as much as they are poems, and thus that any automatic identification o f speaker with implied author is (even) less appropriate than in poetry. This kind o f oversight is so characteristic o f criticism o f Le Spleen de Paris that it can be conjectured that the prose poetry actually invites such suppressions, and that it invites them for a reason. Far from being peripheral to interpretations o f the prose poems, assumptions or hypotheses about Baudelaire’s attitude towards his apparent spokespersons are absolutely central to the way in which the texts have been received, and have given rise, inevitably, to a wide variety o f critical perspectives. While some readings give the appearance o f sidestepping the issue o f intentions altogether, intentionalist assumptions are latent even in these. For example, Barbara Johnson’s Défigurations du langage poétique seems at first to avoid the muddy waters o f authorial intention; but a closer look indicates that its argument for the prose poems as an ethical deflation o f the aesthetic o f Les Fleurs du Mal is far from neutral, even leading to the following suggestive, though qualified, speculation: Or, si les valeurs prônées par L ’Invitation au voyage sont [...] celles de l’économie bourgeoise, devons-nous en conclure que Baudelaire, vieillissant, se soit finalement rangé sans le savoir du côté des Ancelle et des Augier? A cette question, il est, bien entendu, impossible de répondre. Et de toute façon, la réponse ne nous aiderait pas à lire le poème.20

19 M. Maclean, Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment (London, 1988), pp. 45, 107. Maclean suggestively remarks of the prose poems that ‘The display of a virtual self as a performer produces a sense of intimacy which is totally illusory’ and also refers to the ‘ironical stance’ maintained by Baudelaire in his life ‘which deceived even his friends’ (pp. 182, 66). 20 B. Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique: La Seconde Révolution baudelairienne (Paris, 1979), pp. 131-32. Martine Bercot also argues that Baudelaire denounces, in the prose poems, the idealism of Les Fleurs du Mal. M. Bercot, ‘Miroirs baudelairiens’, in Dix études sur Baudelaire, ed. M. Bercot and A. Guyaux (Paris, 1993), pp. 113-36.

8

BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS (Now, if the values advocated by Invitation to Travel are [...] those of bourgeois economics, must we conclude that the ageing Baudelaire finally went over, unwittingly, to the side of the Ancelles and the Augiers? This question is, of course, impossible to answer. And anyway, the answer would not help us to read the poem.)

If speculation about a shift in the author’s values does not help us to read the prose poetry, as Johnson states, her own argument is nevertheless contingent on the assumption of such a shift. This is suggested, for example, by the following quotation, which refers to the prosaic thematic of cooking in the prose poem ‘L ’Invitation au voyage’: La cuisine, en effet ‘étrangère’ à une certaine poésie lyrique [...], dérange la cohésion du code poétique... mais c’est précisément pour mettre en évidence le fait que le ‘poétique’ n ’est rien d ’autre q u ’un code. C’est ce fonctionnement de la poésie en tant que code qu’interroge Baudelaire dans L ’Invitation au voyage en prose.21 (Cooking, effectively ‘foreign’ to a certain lyrical poetry [...], disrupts the cohesion of the poetic code... but it does so precisely in order to make it obvious that the ‘poetic’ is nothing other than a code. It is this functioning of poetry as a code that Baudelaire interrogates in the prose ‘Invitation to Travel’.)

Consistent with this suggestion that Baudelaire adopts, in his prose poetry, a certain critical attitude towards his verse, is the fact that Johnson’s readings o f ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’ and ‘Laquelle est la vraie?’ identify the narrator with the poet. What these traces of intentionalism suggest is the prose poetry’s tendency to draw even the most exact and exacting of readers into making uncritical assumptions about the poet’s stance in relation to his text. If Johnson’s analysis had considered the possibility that the irony of the prose poems is directed not against lyric poetry per se but rather against the bland tastes of the poet’s contemporaries, her study would undoubtedly have been inflected differently.22 In other words, a differently nuanced reading would have been produced by an approach to ‘Un Hémisphère dans une chevelure’ and ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ that allowed for the possibility that, rather than deconstructing the aesthetic governing Les Fleurs du Mal, the texts actually parody a certain confusion of the pragmatic and the aesthetic on the part of Baudelaire’s contemporaries.23

21 Défigurations, p. 106. 22 This possibility is, in fact, suggested by her own remark that present-day readers would be well advised not to draw any conclusions about ‘la supériorité de notre sensibilité poétique’ (the superiority of our poetic sensitivity) from the contrast between the nineteenth century’s incomprehension of Baudelaire’s prose poetry and our appreciation of it. Défigurations, p. 39. 23 Richard D. E. Burton and Candace D. Lang also draw attention to the assumptions implicit in Johnson’s very influential deconstructive reading of the prose poems. R. D. E. Burton, Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources o f Poetic Creativity (Cambridge, 1988), p. 92; C. D. Lang, Irony / Humor: Critical Paradigms (Baltimore, 1988), p. 129.

INTRODUCTION

9

If assumptions about authorial intentions are only implicit in Johnson’s study, others have tackled quite openly the question of the poet’s motivations in Le Spleen de Paris. Some critics have suspected the poet of great guile. Dolf Oehler, for example, argues that Baudelaire adopts the persona of an aberrant bourgeois narrator in order to provoke his public to reflect on and protest against social inequalities.24 Scott Carpenter presents a case for a more extreme degree of covertness, contending that the texts invite a split-perspective reading: the seemingly anodyne and anecdotal prose poems can often be shown to include corrosive attacks on the dominant culture. However, these attacks only become apparent with a second glance, one from a different perspective; the anecdotal components of the poems actually deflect the reader’s attention from the attacks that they mask. Unlike traditional allegory, which aims for harmony between levels, in the prose poems Baudelaire frequently makes poetry operate on multiple, often incompatible registers, so that one reading appears to invalidate another. In so doing, he refines his esthetics of allegory, capitalizing on the dual nature he had earlier ascribed to all beauty.25

This book combines Oehler’s argument for the poet’s adoption of bourgeois personae in the prose poems with Carpenter’s insistence on duplicity and deflection. However, Oehler’s hypothesis of a strategy of politically motivated provocation will be replaced by the notion that Baudelaire’s primary interest in the prose poems was personal rather than political. In view of his claim to have been ‘physiquement dépolitiqué’ (physically depoliticized) in the wake of the coup d'état of 1851, and of his disillusionment with human beings — ‘je me fous du genre humain’ (I don’t give a damn about the human race), ‘volontiers je n’écrirais que pour les morts’ (I would gladly write only for the dead) — , it is possible that the poet may simply have wished to indulge himself in a peculiarly private form of laughter.26 The book, furthermore, departs from Carpenter’s argument that the ‘narrative straw man’ of texts such as ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ and ‘Une mort héroïque’ allegorically represents the poet, arguing instead that the texts of Le Spleen de Paris dramatize and allegorize, often in the person of the narratorial figure or poetic alter ego, the blindness involved in reading.27 For Maclean, the poetic aspect of the prose poems obscures their narrative component; reciprocally, though, the strong narrative dimension of these texts tends to blind readers to the fact that these stories are also tightly organized poetic structures wherein no apparent digression can be presumed to be superfluous. The end-oriented, narrative thrust of the texts often operates to subdue their potential

24 D. Oehler, Le Spleen contre Voubli: Juin 1848: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Herzen, trans. G. Petitdemange (Paris, 1996), pp. 309-34. 25 S. Carpenter, Acts o f Fiction: Resistance and Revolution from Sade to Baudelaire (Pennsylvania, 1996), p. 128. 26 C I 188, C II 539, OC I 400. 27 Acts o f Fiction, p. 146.

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lateral or poetic dimension.28 Suppression of this dimension might also be elicited by the sententious style and peremptory tone with which the central persona’s point of view is often expressed. Any elements of a given prose poem that threaten to undermine the persuasiveness of its speaker’s voice are effectively sidelined by the commanding nature of that voice. This book will treat any such latent resistance to narrative coherence as heuristic, focusing on details that might be regarded as marginal to the representation. It will, in other words, attempt to draw out the potential significance of those elements of Le Spleen de Paris that Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry might categorize as ‘ungrammaticalities’: The ungrammaticalities spotted at the mimetic level are eventually integrated into another system. As the reader perceives what they have in common, as he becomes aware that this common trait forms them into a paradigm, and that this paradigm alters the meaning of the poem, the new function of the ungrammaticalities changes their nature, and now they signify as components of a different network of relationships.29

A resistance to the powerful mimetic illusion produced by Baudelaire’s prose poetry permits new readings, originating in inconsistencies, contradictions, and submerged analogies, to suggest themselves. The visual arts offer an interesting parallel in relation to texts that manipulate the receiver’s blind-spots. Anamorphosis exploits the limitations of vision in much the same way as I am suggesting that Baudelaire’s prose poetry takes advantage of the mental blind-spots of readers. Anamorphic works of art may be totally, partially, or not at all legible to a frontal gaze, but what they have in common with one another is their inscription of an image that reveals itself only to an angled gaze. At the moment that this angled image is perceived, the initial (frontal) image or impression fades in clarity, such that a simultaneous and clear perception of both images is impossible. The preservation of a tension between two viewpoints is essential to an anamorphic work; neither perspective ever entirely does away with the other. This book will attempt to show that part of the fascination exercised by Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris is its accommodation of even the most radically opposed of readings. In both the Salon de 1859 and his verse poem ‘Le Masque’, first published in 1859, Baudelaire writes about La Comédie humaine, an anamorphic statuette by Ernest Christophe. This statuette was the model for a later marble statue by Christophe, now displayed in the Musée d’Orsay (figs. 1.1,1.2). The piece admired by Baudelaire takes the form of a woman hiding her sorrow behind a grinning mask; it is only when the speaker glimpses the statuette from the side that s/he realizes that the smiling face is actually a mask:

28 This tension between poetic and narrative structures might be aligned with David Scott’s contention that nineteenth-century prose poets attempted to bring the spatial bias of the visual arts to bear on the narrative impetus of discourse. See D. Scott, ‘La Structure spatiale du poème en prose: D’Aloysius Bertrand à Rimbaud’, Poétique, 59 (1984), 295-308. 29 M. Riffaterre, Semiotics o f Poetry (Bloomington, IN, 1978), p. 4.

INTRODUCTION

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— Mais non! ce n’est qu’un masque, un décor Ce visage éclairé d’une exquise grimace, Et, regarde, voici, crispée atrocement, La véritable tête, et la sincère face Renversée à l’abri de la face qui ment.30 (— But no! it is only a mask, a décor / This face lit up with an exquisite grimace, / And, look, there, horribly strained, / The veritable head, and the sincere face / Thrown back behind the shelter of the face that lies.)

This poem, which belongs to broadly the same phase of Baudelaire’s career as the prose poems, dramatizes the act of viewing the statuette; it describes the movement from comfortable self-delusion to confusion to recognition of the artist’s ruse. Richard Stamelman refers to ‘Le Masque’ as a paradigm of that gesture of unmasking that characterizes a number of Baudelaire’s prose poems.31 However, this book will hold that a more subtle kind of anamorphic disillusionment may also be in play in the texts of Le Spleen de Paris, one that is consistent with the ferocious transformation that is suggested by a title used by the poet in referring to a selection of his prose poems: Petits Poèmes lycanthropes?2 The contention will be that the explicit meanings of the prose poems conceal different and altogether incompatible ones.33 The reading strategy adopted here could thus be described as deconstructive were it not for the fact that interpretation rather than observation is the aim here, and the fact that the author is suspected of being at least as sensitive as the reader to the ways in which linear readings can be undermined by seemingly peripheral details. That Baudelaire should have been extraordinarily alert to the ‘lateral’ potentials of textuality is to be expected, given that, according to one critic, ‘The creation of correspondences, dynamic patterns, and the implicit understanding of what they represent, for literature, are Baudelaire’s finest achievement and insight.’34

30 OC I 24. See also OC II 678-79. 31 R. Stamelman, ‘L’Anamorphose baudelairienne: L’Allégorie du “Masque”’, Cahiers de VAssociation Internationale des Etudes Françaises, 41 (1989), 251-67 (p. 259). 32 This title, used in 1866 to accompany two prose poems in the Revue du XIXe siècle, is generally understood to indicate an affinity between the prose poems and the extravagant Romanticism of Pétrus Borel, otherwise known as Te Lycanthrope’ (the Lycanthrope). 33 Carpenter also takes ‘Le Masque’ to be paradigmatic of a certain dual perspective in Baudelaire’s prose poems. Acts o f Fiction, pp. 147-48. Eugene W. Holland, who also refers to ‘Le Masque’, contends that in the wake of his physical depoliticization of 1851 Baudelaire builds a ‘double-reading’ into his poetry, allowing it to offer itself on the one hand to a ‘rather conventional “communicative” reading’ and, on the other, to an ‘ironized “textual” reading’. E. W. Holland, Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics o f Modernism (Cambridge, 1993), p. 184. 34 N. Babuts, Baudelaire: At the Limits and Beyond (Newark, 1997), p. 146. In Baudelaire and Intertextuality, Evans studies the prose poems as an interlinking and intertextual network of correspondences. On the particular centrality of internal correspondences to

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It is of course very possible that the prose poetry has, unlike Christophe’s statuette, no identifiable ‘sincère face’ (sincere face). We may, in other words, be dealing with a far less binary structure than the one I have been proposing. According to Candace D. Lang, our efforts to distinguish between irony and sincerity in Baudelaire’s writing are thwarted by a multiplicity of voices, a ‘generalized citationality’, that undermine ‘traditional romantic-ironic interpretations founded on the “double postulation” m otif.35 However, the hypothesis that the prose poems find their unity in duplicity has not yet been explored in a systematic way, despite the recognized centrality of duality to Baudelaire’s creative vision, and despite an increasingly strong tendency, in recent years, to view the poet’s supposed proxies with suspicion. My argument relies, moreover, less on the notion of a unified self lurking behind a narratorial mask in the prose poetry than on the suspicion that the poet’s self-representation in Le Spleen de Paris is, crucially, not to be trusted. This book’s discussion of the collection takes its structure from five perspectives that are recurrent in criticism of Baudelaire’s work and, more particularly, in criticism of the prose poems: caricature, prostitution, morality, allegory, and aesthetics. These perspectives or frameworks are frequently invoked by critics as means of explaining the logic of the texts. The latter are sometimes interpreted as caricatures, for example, and/or as illustrations of Baudelaire’s theory of humour; they are occasionally considered to constitute prostituted versions of the poet’s lyric voice, in the sense that they bring poetry into the street, making it accessible and hopefully desirable to the newspaper readers of the Second Empire; sometimes the prose poems are related by commentators to a moralistic turn or tendency in Baudelaire’s work, a turn or tendency that seems more compatible with prose than poetry; they are frequently interpreted as allegories of political or aesthetic problems; and at times they are read as illustrative of aesthetic theories contained in the poet’s critical essays. The five frameworks have not been chosen at random from among those that loom large in criticism of Le Spleen de Paris. The reason for their selection is that each, in its own way or ways, lends itself to a reading of duplicity in the prose poems (a genre that is itself defined by its duality36). According to Yves Florenne, ‘Dans l’œuvre baudelairienne, rien plus que Le Spleen de Paris, peut-être, n’est soumis à la double “postulation” Dieu-Diable.’ (Among Baudelaire’s works, none is more subject than Paris Spleen to the double ‘postulation’ of God and Devil.)37 It may not be a coincidence, then, that each of my five chosen perspectives can be related to Baudelaire’s fascination with duality. Humour is associated by the poet prose poetry, see R. Pensom, ‘Le Poème en prose: De Baudelaire à Rimbaud’, French Studies, 56.1 (2002), 15-28 (p. 26). 35 Irony/Humor, pp. 114-15. 36 See S. Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1959), pp. 434-65; T. Todorov, Les Genres du discours (Paris, 1978), pp. 116-24. 37 Y. Florenne, ed., Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose (Paris, 1998 [1972]), p. 15. See OC 1683.

INTRODUCTION

13

both with human superiority to nature and inferiority to the divine; prostitution is linked, in his writings, both to the carnal and the sacred, the natural and the artificial/artistic, and as a social type the prostitute operates on the borderline between visibility and invisibility; Baudelaire differentiates repeatedly between two kinds of morality, one characterized by a lack of reflection and the other involving, on the contrary, a high degree of self-consciousness; by definition, allegories combine the material and the ideal, the literal and the abstract; and one of the constants of Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory is the notion of the duality of beauty, its division into relative and absolute, the fleeting and the permanent. In Le Spleen de Paris, I argue, the poet turns his consciousness of duality to the construction of duplicitous texts: covert or double-edged caricatures (chapter 1), fictions about potential prostitutes, wherein covert meanings actively contradict overt messages (chapter 2), moralizing fables that deconstruct their own moral authority (chapter 3), narratives that are covertly self-reflexive, their allegorical meanings commenting obliquely on their literal ones (chapter 4), and texts that present corruptions of Baudelaire’s aesthetic views even while seeming to exemplify them (chapter 5). The question remains as to why this study examines certain texts from one perspective, and certain others from a different angle. As a general rule, the prose poems that feature in the first chapter are those whose potentially covert dynamic might best be explained by reference to Baudelaire’s theory of humour; those that appear in the second chapter feature eponymous heroines who may or may not be prostitutes; the prose poems studied from the perspective of morality are those in which moral messages or enigmas are explicitly presented; those that I have chosen to interpret as self-reflexive allegories generally (though not always) flag their allegorical status by way of their resistance to literal readings; and the texts submitted to an intertextual ‘aesthetic’ reading are those that, to my mind at least, pervert Baudelaire’s stated views on the processes and functions of literature and, particularly, art. As may be clear even from this very brief outline, these five perspectives frequently overlap; in fact, they do so to such a degree that their interconnected­ ness exerts a considerable pressure on my structure. ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ could easily have been treated as a self-reflexive allegory instead of as a perversion of Baudelaire’s aesthetic ideas, and my comments on ‘Chacun sa chimère’ and ‘Le Miroir’ could have been placed in the chapter on humour rather than in the section on allegory. Such substitutions could be made without producing any great change to the argument. It would be disingenuous, however, to claim that the choice of framework is an innocent one. If, for example, ‘Une mort héroïque’ had been exam­ ined in the light of the poet’s aesthetic theory rather than as a self-reflexive allegory the difference in outcome would have been pronounced. In defence of the porosity of my system, however, I do not pretend to present ‘correct’ readings of the prose poems. Instead, what I aim to do is test a new hypothesis by applying a number of familiar frames to it — this is not so much a reframing of existing ideas as an attempt to find an appropriate frame or frames for a new one or, more accurately, one that I believe has been slowly emerging in criticism over the past few years.

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Furthermore, my hope is that a study of the prose poems from five (albeit interwoven) perspectives will militate against an excessively systematic approach to a collection whose most signal trait is its defiance of systemization. This book will work on the assumption that, despite a reputation for selfcontradiction,38 certain constants are discernible in much of Baudelaire’s writing — that is, in his art criticism, literary criticism, writings about caricature, private writings, verse, and correspondence. Without wishing in any way to deny the shifts and fissures in Baudelaire’s thinking that have been explored very skilfully by commentators such as Felix W. Leakey, Richard D. E. Burton, and Rosemary Lloyd, this book will tend to focus on what is most continuous in that thinking.39 Although it may be theoretically problematic to cite other writings by Baudelaire as if they were intrinsically more representative of the poet’s views than the prose poetry, my argument cannot entirely dispense with this approach, given the prominent place it gives to the contestation of a too often assumed identity or near­ identity between the poet and his apparent spokesperson in the prose poems. Not all of the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris are discussed in this book. This is partly due to the limitations of the framework adopted, partly due to my own limitations, and possibly also due in part to the limitations of the hypothesis of textual ruse. This hypothesis, by dint of being a hypothesis, presupposes a limited or partial approach to the prose poems. Inevitably, in attempting to persuade, my study may occasionally forget its own partial character and push towards a totalizing explanation. Nevertheless, my aim is not to do away with the sense of disorientation that an awareness of multiple vantage points produces, but rather to perpetuate the sense of uncertainty. Although it may often seem otherwise, therefore, my hope is not ultimately that the reader will be persuaded by a possibly self-deluding argument for mystification, but simply that the notion will have served as a useful interpretive device.

38 OC I 709, OC II 306. 39 See F. W. Leakey, ‘Les Esthétiques de Baudelaire: Le Système des années 1844-1847’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 127 (1967), 481-96; R. D. E. Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution (Oxford, 1991); R. Lloyd, Baudelaire’s Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 1981).

INTRODUCTION

Figure 1.1 Ernest Christophe, La Comédie humaine, or Le Masque (1876) (front). Photo RMN / © Jean Schormans.

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Figure 1.2 Ernest Christophe, La Comédie humaine, or Le Masque (1876) (side). Photo RMN / © Jean Schormans.

Chapter 1

Caricature

The July Monarchy and the Second Empire witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of the art of caricature. Varying levels of press censorship during this period encouraged cartoonists to take everyday life rather than political figures and events as the principal target of their satire. As a result, the caricature de mœurs enjoyed a particular peak during this period, the aspirations and delusions of the ever-rising bourgeoisie offering graphic artists such as Honoré Daumier and Henry Monnier a safe, popular, and ubiquitous target. In an article of December 1861, Charles Asselineau, Baudelaire’s close friend, goes so far as to suggest a causal link between the innately grotesque character of the bourgeoisie and the production of caricatures: Nous voulons rire de ce qui est risible, nous moquer de ce qui est sot, caricaturer ce qui est laid et battre ce qui est méchant. Ce sera notre manière d’être sérieux, dans un temps où le ridicule, la sottise, la laideur et l’hypocrisie portent de si dignes cravates et de si majestueux gilets ruisselants de chaînes d’or. (We want to laugh at what is laughable, mock what is idiotic, caricature what is ugly and fight what is nasty. It will be our way of being serious, at a time when ridicule, idiocy, ugliness, and hypocrisy wear such dignified ties and such majestic waistcoats dripping with gold chains.)

If imbecility and hypocrisy were fair game for caricaturists, however, so was eccentricity. Asselineau’s comment appears in the first issue of the literary review Le Boulevard. The same issue features a reprinted caricature by Emile Durandeau. It depicts two legs sticking up out of a broken bed, a black cat who casts a devilish shadow on the wall, a skeleton, a rat, a broomstick, and other instruments of sorcery. Entitled Les Nuits de M. Baudelaire (The Nights of Mr Baudeliare), this is only one of several caricatures that appeared in the wake of the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire did not restrict himself to being a simple object of caricature, however. He claimed that reflections on the subject were, for him, ‘une espèce d’obsession’ (a sort of obsession). As well as his major articles on graphic caricature, begun as early as 1846 and published in 1855 and 1857, he collaborated in 1846 in the production of a satirical collection of verse and captions to accompany caricatural images of the annual art Salons. While Baudelaire did not sketch the particular images included in the Salon caricatural, he was also a gifted graphic caricaturist in his own right. Auguste Poulet-Malassis writes of the poet that Tl était caricaturiste dans le sens précis du mot, avec les deux facultés

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maîtresses de la pénétration et de l’imagination, et un don d ’expression vivante et sommaire.’ (He was a caricaturist in the precise sense of the word, with the two key faculties of penetration and imagination, and a gift for lively and summary expression.)1 In De l 'essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques, Baudelaire outlines his theory of the comical. What he describes as ‘le comique significatif or ‘le comique ordinaire’ (the significant or ordinary comical) would seem to uphold the prestige of the ego, depending as it does on a sense of personal superiority with regard to the other: moi, je ne tombe pas; moi, je marche droit; moi, mon pied est ferme et assuré. Ce n’est pas moi qui commettrais la sottise de ne pas voir un trottoir interrompu ou un pavé qui barre le chemin.2 (me, I do not fall; me, I walk straight; me, my stride is firm and confident. It is not / who would make the stupid mistake of not seeing a broken footpath or a paving stone blocking the way.)

By contrast with this consolidation of the seifs prestige, ‘le comique absolu’ (the absolute comical), identified by Baudelaire with the grotesque, springs from a kind o f fragmentation of the ego even while being related to man’s sense of his superiority to nature. This is a kind of laughter that overwhelms the self-controlled, rational subject, exciting in him ‘une hilarité folle, excessive, et qui se traduit en des déchirements et des pâmoisons interminables’ (a mad, excessive hilarity that expresses itself in interminable wrenches and swoons). This form of humour is defined by the poet as creative rather than imitative, inexplicable by reason or common sense, and accessible only to intuition. More natural and innocent than the ordinary comical, the grotesque is resistant to analysis and recognizable only by the sudden laughter it produces: ‘Il n’y a qu’une vérification du grotesque, c’est le rire, et le rire subit.’ (There is only one verification of the grotesque; it is laughter, and sudden laughter.)3 In a passage from the beginning of the same essay, it is suggested that the relationship between the ego and laughter is at the very core of Baudelaire’s interest in caricature:

1 OC II 525. On the dating of the essays on caricature, see OC II 1342 and C. Pichois, ‘La Date de l’essai de Baudelaire sur le rire et les caricaturistes’, in his Baudelaire: Études et témoignages (Neuchâtel, 1967), pp. 80-94. A. Poulet-Malassis et al., Sept dessins de gens de lettres: Mm. Victor Hugo, Prosper Mérimée, Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Charles Asselineau (Paris, 1874), p. 7. 2 OC II 535, 531. On the Hobbesian echoes of Baudelaire’s view of the role of superiority in laughter, see M. Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art o f Modernity (Pennsylvania, 1992), pp. 26-28 and J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and the Art o f Memory (Oxford, 1999), pp. 108-109. 3 OC II 535-36.

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Chose curieuse et vraiment digne d’attention que l’introduction de cet élément insaisissable du beau jusque dans les œuvres destinées à représenter à l’homme sa propre laideur morale et physique! Et, chose non moins mystérieuse, ce spectacle lamentable excite en lui une hilarité immortelle et incorrigible. Voilà donc le véritable sujet de cet article.4 (Curious, and truly worthy of attention, is the way in which that elusive element of beauty is introduced even into works destined to represent to man his own moral and physical ugliness! And a no less mysterious thing is the fact that this pitiful spectacle excites in him an immortal and incorrigible hilarity. That is then the true subject of this article.)

While it is true that the viewer or reader of a caricatural representation is far more likely to laugh at the expense of his or her fellow (wo)man than to recognize himself or herself as the figure of fun,5 the above passage suggests that there is another kind of laughter, presumably that of the absolute comical, which is actually compatible with attacks on one’s self-image. Something similar is implied by Baudelaire’s reference a little later in the essay to the case of a man who laughs at his own fall, this so-called ‘philosophe’ (philosopher) having ‘acquis, par habitude, la force de se dédoubler rapidement et d’assister comme spectateur désintéressé aux phénomènes de son moV (acquired, by force of habit, the strength to split in two quickly and observe, as a disinterested spectator, the phenomena of his self).6 Central, then, to the poet’s theory of humour is the notion of self-transformation. According to Baudelaire, artists, like the philosophical man, are capable of being ‘à la fois soi et un autre’ (at the same time self and other), combining an appearance of unawareness of one’s own ridiculousness with extreme selfawareness so as to provoke in their audience a pleasurable sense of personal superiority (associated with the ordinary comical) as well as a pleasurable sense of man’s superiority to nature (as in the absolute comical): Et pour en revenir à mes primitives définitions et m’exprimer plus clairement, je dis que quand Hoffmann engendre le comique absolu, il est bien vrai qu’il le sait; mais il sait aussi que l’essence de ce comique est de paraître s’ignorer lui-même et de développer chez le spectateur, ou plutôt chez le lecteur, la joie de sa propre supériorité et la joie de la supériorité de l’homme sur la nature. Les artistes créent le comique; ayant étudié et rassemblé les éléments du comique, ils savent que tel être est comique, et qu’il ne l’est qu’à condition d’ignorer sa nature; de même que, par une loi inverse, l’artiste n’est artiste qu’à la condition d’être double et de n’ignorer aucun phénomène de sa double nature.7

4 OC II 526. 5 See P. Allard, ‘Satire des mœurs et critique sociale dans la caricature française de 1835 à 1848’, in La Caricature entre République et Censure: L ’Imagerie satirique en France de 1830 à 1880: Un discours de résistance, ed. R. Rütten, R. Jung, G. Schneider (Lyons, 1996), pp. 171-81. 6 OC II 532. 7 OC II 543.

20

BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS (And to get back to my original definitions and express myself more clearly, I maintain that when Hoffmann engenders the absolute comical, it is certainly true that he knows it; but he knows also that the essence of this comicality is to seem to be oblivious to oneself and to develop in the spectator, or rather in the reader, the joy of his own superiority and the joy of man’s superiority over nature. Artists create the comical; having studied and brought together the elements of the comical, they know that such and such a creature is comical, and that he is so only on condition of being oblivious to his own nature; just as, by an inverse law, the artist is an artist only on condition of being dual and of not being oblivious to any phenomenon of his dual nature.)

The capacity for self-doubling or splitting is presented in this passage as, in the words of Michele Hannoosh, ‘The necessary feature of the comic artist.’8 To the extent that Le Spleen de Paris is related to the absolute comical, a particular kind of self-doubling would be likely to play a central role in it: one that presents the reader with a portrait of a highly self-aware author pretending to be self-ignorant.9 According to Pierre Jean Jouve, Baudelaire ‘est toujours double, multiple, il contient Vautre en même temps que lui-même’ (is always dual, multiple; he contains at once both the other and himself).10 One aspect of this duality is the poet’s apparent mastery of ironic dissimulation. On one level, his pretences seem to have been designed purely as a means of experiencing ‘la joie de sa propre supériorité’ (the joy of his own superiority); however, it would seem that the poet also sought an audience for his ruses. For example, in 1866 Baudelaire informed his mother of his planned response to an academic who had given a lecture on Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘Je me propose, quand je reverrai M. Deschanel, de le remercier. Je 8 Baudelaire and Caricature, p. 252. Paul de Man also insists on the centrality of the idea of dédoublement to Baudelaire’s essay. P. De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric o f Contemporary Criticism (New York, 1971), pp. 211 ff. 9 Le Spleen de Paris has, in the past, been discussed in the context of Baudelaire’s interest in caricature. Ainslie Armstrong McLees refers to the collection in arguing that the poet adapted the distortion and disjunction characteristic of graphic caricature for use in his verse and prose writing. A. A. McLees, Baudelaire’s ‘Argot Plastique’: Poetic Caricature and Modernism (Athens, GA, 1989). More focused on Baudelaire’s prose poetry are: J. A. Hiddleston, ‘Les Poèmes en prose de Baudelaire et la caricature’, Romantisme, 74 (1991), 57-64; S. Stephens, ‘Argot littéraire, argot plastique: Caricature in Baudelaire’s Prose Poetry’, Australian Journal o f French Studies, 30.2 (1993), 197-206; S. Stephens, ‘The Prose Poem and the Dualities of Comic Art’, in her Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, pp. 108-59. D. Scott points towards a caricatural dimension in the prose poems when he notes that ‘there is even about [Baudelaire’s] most forceful gestures (“Le Mauvais Vitrier”, “Assommons les pauvres!”) more than a smack of the boutade’. See D. H. T. Scott and B. Wright, La Fanfarlo’ and Le Spleen de Paris’ (London, 1984), p. 88. Hannoosh’s Baudelaire and Caricature examines a number of the prose poems in the light of Baudelaire’s concept of comic self-doubling, without going so far as to make an explicit argument for authorial duplicity in the collection. See also Y. Bargues-Rollins, Baudelaire et le grotesque (Washington, 1978). 10 P. J. Jouve, Tombeau de Baudelaire (Neuchâtel, 1942), p. 102. Barbara Wright presents an interesting analysis of Baudelairean duality in the particular context of La Fanfarlo. B. Wright, D. H. T. Scott, La Fanfarlo ’ and Le Spleen de Paris ’ (London, 1984), pp. 9-33.

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parie qu’il ne verra pas que je me moque de lui.’ (I intend, when next I see Mr Deschanel, to thank him. I bet he will not see that I am mocking him.)11 Similarly, if in Choix de maximes consolantes sur Vamour (1846) the young poet addresses dubious flattery to his half-brother’s wife, the text is implicitly addressed to the ironic sensibility of other readers. Hiddleston, accordingly, describes the Choix as ‘a rather cruel joke’ and as ‘a kind of “spoof’ designed to amuse, and possibly to mystify, the reader by a display of literary pyrotechnics’.12 A similar dynamic is observable in the following passage from Pauvre Belgique/, wherein the poet’s exasperation at the gullibility of others serves as a very thin veil over the pleasure he takes in his own ironic superiority, a pleasure that he clearly wishes to share with the projected readers of a text he intended for publication: Quand je me suis senti calomnier, j ’ai voulu mettre un terme à cette passion nationale, en ce qui me concernait et, pauvre niais que je suis! je me suis servi de l’ironie. A tous ceux qui me demandaient pourquoi je restais si longtemps en Belgique (car ils n’aiment pas que les étrangers restent trop longtemps) je répondais confidentiellement que j ’étais mouchard. Et on me croyait! A d’autres que je m’étais exilé de France parce que j ’y avais commis des délits d’une nature inexprimable, mais que, j ’espérais bien que grâce à l’épouvantable corruption du régime français, je serais bientôt amnistié. Et on me croyait! Exaspéré, j ’ai déclaré maintenant que j ’étais non seulement meurtrier, mais pédéraste. Cette révélation a amené un résultat tout a fait inattendu. Les musiciens belges en ont conclu que M. Richard Wagner était pédéraste.13 (When I felt myself to be slandered, I tried to put an end to this national passion in my regard, and poor fool that I am, I availed myself of irony. To all those who asked me why I was staying so long in Belgium (because they don’t like foreigners to stay too long), 1 answered confidentially that I was an informer. And I was believed! To others I said that I had left France because I had committed crimes of an inexpressible nature there, but that I fondly hoped that thanks to the appalling corruption of the French government, I would soon be granted an amnesty. And I was believed! Exasperated, I now declared that I was not only a murderer, but a pederast. This revelation brought about a completely unexpected result. Belgian musicians concluded from it that Mr Richard Wagner was a pederast.)

The apparent failure of the Belgians to recognize Baudelaire’s ironic intent is offered up here for the amusement of the reader. However, in the absence of such clear indicators of irony as appear in this passage — the statement that ‘je me suis servi de l’ironie’ (I availed myself of irony) or the repetition of ‘Et on me croyait!’ 11 C II 621. 12 Baudelaire et ‘Le Spleen de Paris ', pp. 46-47. 13 OC II 854. See also C II 437.

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(And I was believed!) — how certain can any reader be that s/he does not occupy the place of the dupe? As regards Le Spleen de Paris in particular, the fact that one of the projected prose poems is entitled ‘La Lettre d’un fat’ and is summarized by Baudelaire as ‘Mélange d ’emphase sincère et d’emphase ironique’ (A mixture of sincere bombast and ironic bombast) — a description that could be applied to a number of the prose poems — would suggest that the adoption of intentionally ridiculous narratorial guises, in this case that of the conceited man, was a conscious strategy in the prose poems.14 Another planned text, entitled ‘Élégie des Chapeaux’, exists only in note form, as an inventory of hat types and characteristics; significantly, Baudelaire makes a mocking reference in Pauvre Belgique! to the ‘Culte des Belges pour leurs chapeaux.’ (Belgian worship of their hats.)15 That Baudelaire should, in his notes for this prose poem, compare hats to ‘têtes coupées’ (severed heads) is suggestive of a potential plot against the reader. Lloyd points out that this focus on hats may have been inspired by the description of Charles Bovary’s cap in the opening section of Madame Bovary; if so, then the idea may also have been inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s parodie verve in this piece.16 That cruelty should be so prevalent a feature of Baudelaire’s humour is consistent with his view that humour was ‘un des plus clairs signes sataniques de l’homme’ (one of the clearest marks of Satan in man).17 Nevertheless, Baudelaire ascribed a certain ethical potential to humour. For example, Poe’s satirical hoaxes1819 were admired by him both for their moral dimension as well as for their subtlety. It was, he believed, in order to protest against Ta démocratie, le progrès et la civilisation’ (democracy, progress, and civilization) that Poe skilfully fabricated Tes canards les plus flatteurs pour l’orgueil de l ’homme moderne’ {hoaxes most flattering for the pride of modern man)}9 These hoaxes mocked their readers even while seeming to flatter them. Given that Baudelaire considered Poe to be a kindred spirit, it would not be surprising if he, sharing what he defined in Poe as ‘presque une pensée anti-américaine’ (almost an anti-American thinking), were to have 14 OC I 372. 15 OC I 372-73, OC II 861. Baudelaire was endeavouring to finish the prose poetry collection at the same time as he was working on Pauvre Belgique/, that is, between 1864 and 1866. Indeed, titles of projected prose poems appear among the notes for the latter. 16 R. Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World (Ithaca, 2002), p. 230; J. Culler, Flaubert: The Uses o f Uncertainty (Ithaca, 1985 [1974]), pp. 91-93. 17 OC II 530. On the link between humour and hostility in Baudelaire, see W. Hofmann, ‘Baudelaire et la caricature’, Preuves, 207 (1968), 38-43. 18 See, for example, The Unparalleled Adventure o f One Hans Pfaal (1835), The Balloon Hoax (1844), Von Kempelen and His Discovery (1849). 19 OC II 321. Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française defines the ‘canard’ as ‘Populairement, conte absurde et par lequel on veut se moquer de la crédulité des auditeurs.’ (Popularly, an absurd tale by which one attempts to mock the gullibility of one’s listeners.) According to John Tresch, this interpretation of Poe’s attitude towards progress is a falsifying and ultimately self-serving one. J. Tresch, ‘The Uses of a Mistranslated Manifesto: Baudelaire’s “La Genèse d’un poème’” , L ’Esprit Créateur, 43.2 (2003), 23-35 (p. 29).

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considered producing hoaxes with a similar purpose for ‘notre continent déjà trop américain’ (our already too American continent). Certainly, the interjection in the following sentence suggests Baudelaire’s understanding of the reasons why Poe might have felt compelled to produce such textual traps: ‘De quel mensonge pouvait-il être dupe, celui qui parfois, — douloureuse nécessité des milieux, — les ajustait si bien?’ (Of what lie could he be dupe, he who sometimes — painful necessity of social environments — arranged them so well?)20 Baudelaire’s own penchant for hoaxes is attested by abundant anecdotal evidence. He is said, for example, to have entered a chemist’s one day and politely requested an enema (and to have made the same request of Asselineau’s female companion), to have dyed his hair green to produce an effect on his peers, and to have posed as a Jesuit for much the same reason; he is reported to have claimed to have eaten the brains of a child, to have been in love with numerous female giants and dwarves, to have had a book bound in human skin, and riding breeches made out of his own father’s skin.21 The stories, however absurd, paint a very clear picture of a person who took pleasure in mystifying others. This aspect of Baudelaire’s personality is present also in his writing; as Murphy notes, ‘la lecture de l’œuvre du poète atteste que la mystification a été l’un de ses plaisirs les plus constants’ (reading the poet’s work testifies to the fact that mystification was one of his most constant pleasures).22 Indeed, two of Baudelaire’s prose poems, ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ and ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, actually make a theme of the hoax, while processes of delusion and demystification also feature prominently in the texts (particularly in ‘La Corde’ and ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’). If mystification is, for the sake of argument, taken to be the governing principle of Le Spleen de Paris, then the collection comprises an ironic dimension that was intended to go unperceived by most readers of the time and whose objective was the amusement firstly of an author who felt misunderstood by his contemporaries, and secondly of imagined or anticipated readers who would detect his irony. The mystifying impulse would be related, in other words, both to ordinary humour and absolute humour, both to a desire to feel superior to contemporaries and an effort to provoke in the reader a sense of man’s ironic superiority.

Arsène Houssaye, editor of the popular daily La Presse from 1861 to 1862, can certainly not be counted among Baudelaire’s initiated readers, even if twenty prose

20 C I 345, OC II 293, OC II 323. 21 These examples are drawn from the section entitled ‘Le Flamboiement de la Légende’ in W. T. Bandy, C. Pichois, Baudelaire devant ses contemporains, 3rd edition (Paris, 1995 [Monaco, 1957]), pp. 131-73. 22 S. Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire: Lectures du 'Spleen de Paris ’ (Paris, 2003), p. 18. The introduction to this important book discusses Baudelaire’s reputation as a producer of mystifications.

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poems were dedicated to him in August 1862.23 Given that it has traditionally been accorded prefatory status in Le Spleen de Paris, if the dedication to Houssaye is caricatural, as various critics have suggested,24 then the implications of this for our understanding of Baudelaire’s prose poetry are significant. To the extent that the letter is interpreted as exemplary, ‘a prose-poem about prose-poems’ as Ross Chambers puts it, its indirect mockery of its explicit addressee must call into question the status of the relationship between author and reader in Le Spleen de Paris as a whole.25 If the dedication is insincere, then it is entirely possible that the entire collection is two-faced. In the course of an astute analysis of certain aspects of the dedication’s irony, Francis Collet writes that ‘ce texte relève de la mystification, mystification chère au dandy Baudelaire’ (this text partakes of mystification, that mystification that was dear to the dandy Baudelaire).26 One indication of insincerity is the declared aspiration, in the dedicatory letter, to achieve in the collection Te miracle d ’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime’ (the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme). If the poet really intended to produce such a prose, his failure to do so, in Le Spleen de Paris at least, was nothing short of spectacular.27 Just three years earlier, Baudelaire had written that the rules of prosody, far from being arbitrarily imposed tyrannies, actually encourage originality. As commentators have not failed to point out, the apparent ambition to write a musical prose without rhythm or rhyme might therefore be interpreted as a pastiche of Houssaye’s published admiration for a poetry free of i a vétusté des rimes’ (the decrepitude of rhymes).28

23 ‘À Arsène Houssaye’, OC I 275-76. The Title Key at the back of this book lists the publication dates of the various prose poems prior to their first appearance as a complete collection in 1869. The versions of the texts published in the 1869 edition will be the ones quoted in this study, unless otherwise indicated. 24 Edward K. Kaplan, for example, describes the dedication as ‘a disguised parody of the [prose poetry] genre’. E. K. Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in 'The Parisian Prowler’ (London, 1990), p. 10. 25 R. Chambers, ‘Baudelaire’s Dedicatory Practice’, Substance, 17.2 (1988), pp. 5-17 (p. 9). 26 F. Collet, ‘Le poème en prose de Baudelaire à travers sa dédicace à Arsène Houssaye’, L ’École des Lettres, 75.6 (1983), 3-10 (p. 5). 27 Claude Pichois writes of Baudelaire’s use of the word ‘musicale’ in connection with the prose poems that ‘sans doute entendait-il lui conférer un sens différent de l’acception courante’ (no doubt he meant to give it a different meaning from its usual acceptation) (OC 1 1303). Daniel-Rops writes that ‘il est très évident que Baudelaire, dans les poèmes en prose, a soigneusement cherché les cadences impaires et les harmonies rompues’ (it is very obvious that Baudelaire, in the prose poems, carefully sought out irregular rhythms and broken harmonies). Daniel-Rops, ed., Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris, 1952), p. xx. On a reading of the ‘open-ended irony’ of the prose poems as equivalent to the ‘unresolved dissonances’ of Wagner’s music, see M. Evans, ‘Soubresaut or Dissonance? An Aspect of the Musicality of Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose’, Modern Language Review, 82.2 (1988), 314-21 (p. 316). 28 OC II 627 (see also OC II 329), OC I 1308.

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The suggestion of insincerity is reinforced when the dedication to the prose collection is contrasted with Baudelaire’s attitude towards the verse collection. While the poet writes, in his notes for his solicitor, of his verse collection as ‘ce parfait ensemble’ (this perfect whole), and in a letter to Alfred de Vigny of 1861 states that ‘Le seul éloge que je sollicite pour ce livre est qu’on reconnaisse qu’il n ’est pas un pur album et qu’il a un commencement et une fin’ (the only praise I seek for this book is that it be recognized not to be a pure album and to have a beginning and an end), the dedication to the prose collection boasts precisely of its disunity:29 Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. (My dear friend, I am sending you a modest work of which nobody could say, without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, because everything in it, on the contrary, is simultaneously head and tail, alternately and reciprocally.)

In addition, where the dedication to Théophile Gautier at the beginning of Les Fleurs du Mal is unambiguous in its sincerity, the dedication to Houssaye strikes a false note, the praise of the latter’s ‘prose lyrique’ (lyrical prose), and even of the prose poetry of Aloysius Bertrand, being highly suspect. Claude Pichois, underlining the difference between Houssaye’s prose poem, ‘La Chanson du vitrier’ (The Glazier’s Song) and Baudelaire’s prose poem, ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, points out that the letter’s praise of the editor’s effort may be ironic. Robert Kopp states that the dedication to Houssaye ‘n’est pas dénuée d’ironie’ (is not devoid of irony). Stephens goes further, asserting that the obsequious acknowledgement of a debt to Houssaye is ‘clearly ironic’, as signalled by the ambiguous formulations used in complimenting his dedicatee and in deprecating himself.30 Stephens also maintains, with Kopp, Henri Lemaitre, and Pichois, that the sincerity of Baudelaire’s claim to have emulated the prose poetry of Bertrand must be regarded as insincere.31 A supposed desire to imitate Bertrand forms the substance of what the dedication describes as a ‘petite confession’ (little confession): the narrator admits that it was in reading Gaspard de la Nuit that he had the idea of trying ‘quelque 29 OC I 194, C II 196. Pichois refers to the collection as follows: ‘Inachèvement, fragmentation et absence d’architecture, liberté dans la conception, renouvellements dans la définition, par son ouverture et sa modernité contrastant avec la forme close et traditionnelle des Fleurs du Mal.’ (Incompletion, fragmentation and absence of architecture, freedom in the conception, renewals in the definition, by its openness and its modernity contrasting with the closed and traditional form of The Flowers o f Evil.) (OC I 1304). 30 OC I 1311; R. Kopp, ed., Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris, 1973), p. xxv; S. Stephens, ‘Boundaries, Limits and Limitations: Baudelaire’s poèmes-boutades\ French Studies, 52.1 (1998), 28-41 and Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, pp. 8-16. 31 Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, pp. 10-11. See Kopp, ed. (1969), Petits Poèmes en prose, p. xxvi; H. Lemaitre, ed., Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris, 1962), p. xlii; and Pichois, OC I 1308.

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chose d’analogue’ (something similar). He also confesses, in the final paragraph, to having failed to remain faithful to his mysterious and brilliant model, and to having suffered the humiliation of producing something 6de singulièrement différent’ (singularly different) instead. By evoking the fine line between imitation and originality in this manner, Baudelaire may be alluding covertly to an episode in Houssaye’s own life. The latter’s Histoire de la peinture flamande et hollandaise was accused, upon its publication in 1846, of being a patchwork of previously published texts and images masquerading as new. This led to Houssaye being listed as a plagiarist in J.-M. Quérard’s survey of literary hoaxes.32 Alfred Michiels (one of the allegedly plagiarized authors) wrote a strongly worded letter to Le Charivari on 8 August 1847 wherein he made the following statement: Lorsque le livre de M. Houssaye parut, à la fin de décembre 1846, j ’avais déjà publié trois volumes sur cette matière. L’auteur [...] le savait si bien qu’il s’est emparé non seulement de mon titre, mais d’une partie de mes idées, du résultat de mes recherches, de faits que j ’avais découverts et a même copié textuellement plusieurs passages. (When Monsieur Houssaye’s book appeared, at the end of December 1846, I had already published three volumes on the subject. The author [...] was so well aware of this that he appropriated not only my title, but also a portion of my ideas, the results of my research, facts that I had discovered, and even copied several passages word-forword.)

To support the argument for plagiarism, a pamphlet by Michiels (‘Jules Perrier’) presented blocks of text in parallel columns. The clear aim was to prove the uncanny proximity of Houssaye’s text to anterior works. However, what the strategy of comparison demonstrates is that while the editor would seem to have borrowed copiously from previous texts, he did not, in fact, copy entire ‘passages’ word for word, unless the term ‘passages’ is understood in its most truly diminutive sense; Houssaye’s strategy was more subtle than straightforward duplication. Indeed, in a pamphlet written in response to his detractors, one of Michiels/Perrier’s examples of plagiarism is reproduced precisely in order to prove the editor’s originality.33 In having his narrator claim to have achieved originality despite his best efforts to remain faithful to his model, therefore, Baudelaire may have been simultaneously offering a knowing nudge to informed readers and massaging his addressee’s ego.34

32 J.-M. Quérard, Les Supercheries littéraires dévoilées, 5 vols (Paris, 1847-53), I, p. cxxii; II, pp. 254-55. 33 A. Michiels (J. Perrier), Un entrepreneur de littérature (Paris, 1847); A. Houssaye, Un martyr littéraire: Touchantes Révélations (Paris, 1847), p. 6. 34 For a discussion of Houssaye’s poor reputation among writers of the time, see R. Burton, ‘Destruction as Creation: “Le Mauvais Vitrier” and the Poetics and Politics of Violence’, Romanic Review, 83.3 (1992), 297-322. However, Burton does not refer to Houssaye’s reputation as a plagiarist.

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Thickening the plot still further is the potential for punning that lies in the dedication’s reference to the collection as ‘cette combinaison’ (this arrangement/ scheme); while ostensibly this is an allusion to the combinatory possibilities offered by the presentation of the prose poetry as a disparate set of texts, it could also point to hidden machinations. Further puns are discernible in the narrator’s statement of his refusal to suspend the ‘volonté rétive’ (mulish wilfulness) of the reader ‘au fil interminable d ’une intrigue superflue’ (from the interminable thread of a superfluous plot), where the word ‘intrigue’ can be interpreted, like its English translation, in two ways. Additional traces of a plot are detectable in the statement in Baudelaire’s notes that ‘cet ouvrage tenant de la vis et du kaléidoscope [pourrait] bien être poussé jusqu’au cabalistique 666 et même 6666...’ (this work resembling the screw and the kaleidoscope [could] indeed be taken as far as the cabbalistic 666 and even 6666...) The image of the screw recalls an instrument of sadistic torture, that of the kaleidoscope the possibility of adjusting the lens of our reading, while the reference to the cabbala and satanic numbers reinforces the suggestion of hidden, and possibly malevolent, intentions.35 The allusion to the number of the devil also reminds us of the poet’s association of humour with the satanic. A further allusion to sadism is perceptible in the narrator’s claim that the collection can be cut anywhere the reader pleases: ‘Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine.’ (Take out a vertebra, and the two parts of this tortuous fantasy will join up again without difficulty.)36 The word ‘tortueuse’ is nothing if not equivocal, while Baudelaire’s attitude toward the fantasy genre, associated by him with prose poetry, was ambivalent to say the least.37 This statement is followed by the intriguingly ambiguous act of dedication: ‘j ’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier’ (I venture to dedicate the whole snake to you). As Jacques Derrida asks in connection with Baudelaire’s gesture, ‘Que fait-on quand on dédie un serpent — tout entier ou en 35 OC I 738. Evans remarks that ‘The allusion to a cabalistic multiple of 6 clearly signals to us that meaning is being proffered but at the same time withheld, and we are immediately encouraged to cast ourselves in the role of déchiffreurs/euses [decipherers], striving to resolve an enigma.’ Baudelaire and Intertextuality, p. 1. See also the reference in the prose poem ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’, OC I 311-12, to the offence that can be caused by the decryption of hieroglyphic messages. On Baudelaire’s interest in magic see G. Blin, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire (Paris, 1948), pp. 73-100; on parallels between his writings and hermetic doctrine, see P. Arnold, Ésotérisme de Baudelaire (Paris, 1972). 36 The reference to cutting here might be aligned with the reference to severed heads in the notes for ‘Élégie des Chapeaux’, and with the decapitation of the Pierrot in De Vessence du rire, as of the wife-reader in ‘Le Galant Tireur’. It might also recall the dream evoked in the final stanza of ‘Au lecteur’. On Baudelaire’s alleged sadism, see Blin, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire, and on the trope of cutting in Baudelaire’s writing, see E. Dalmolin, Cutting the Body: Representing Woman in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (Ann Arbor, 2000). Burton finds in disjunction or ‘breaking’ both a structural characteristic and key motif of Le Spleen de Paris. R. Burton, ‘Bonding and Breaking in Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose\ Modern Language Review, 88 (1993), 58-73. 37 See pp. 175-76 of this study.

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morceaux?’ (What does it mean to dedicate a snake — whole or in pieces?)38 The poet’s notes for a letter to Jules Janin suggest, indeed, that the intention behind the offer of a snake as a gift might be far from generous: Pourquoi le poète ne serait-il pas un broyeur de poisons aussi bien qu’un confiseur, un éleveur de serpents pour miracles et spectacles, un psylle amoureux de ses reptiles, et jouissant des caresses glacées de leurs anneaux en même temps que des terreurs de la foule?39 (Why should the poet not be a grinder of poisons as well as a candy-maker, not raise snakes for miracles and spectacles, not be a snake charmer in love with his reptiles, taking pleasure from the icy caresses of their coils at the same time as from the terrors of the crowd?)

Baudelaire’s prose poetry collection could be as venomous and as stealthy as the snake his narrator here proclaims it to be. Marcel Ruff, after all, writes that Tes poèmes en prose s’insinuent en nous, nous pénètrent comme une voix familière, et, par un prestige plus subtil encore que celui des vers, s’emparent d ’un lecteur désarmé. Entre lui et le poète, plus d’intermédiaire.’ (the prose poems worm their way into us, penetrating us like a familiar voice, and, by a prestige even more subtle than that of the verse, take possession of the disarmed reader. Between him and the poet, there is no longer any intermediary.)40 Alternatively, or in addition, if Jacques Crépet is correct in his suggestion that the reference to the snake in the dedication alludes to Henri de Latouche’s acerbic use, in a book published in 1844, of the image of the decimated serpent to describe the writer who ‘sans dignité ni estime de son œuvre, consent à couper son âme en tronçons de serpent, impossibles à rallier, pour arriver plus vite au salaire’ (without dignity or respect for his work, agrees to cut his soul into sections of snake, impossible to unite, to get to his salary faster), then the application of the snake image to the prose poems might ironically suggest the inauthenticity of the narratorial voice in these texts.41 It is worth noting that Houssaye himself was damningly associated with an industrialization of literature by Michiels/Perrier, in the aforementioned 1847 pamphlet, appropriately entitled Un entrepreneur de littérature. The description of the snake that can be cut up and rejoined recalls the image used by Baudelaire in De Vessence du rire to illustrate his theory of the grotesque: in the essay, the poet describes an English Pierrot who, after he is guillotined, gathers himself together and puts his head in his pocket.42 The dedication may obliquely, therefore, set up a link between Le Spleen de Paris and the kind of 38 J. Derrida, Donner le temps: 1. La fausse monnaie (Paris, 1991), p. 116. 39 OC II 238. 40 M. Ruff, ed., Charles Baudelaire: Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris, 1967), p. 23. 41 Cited by Kopp in his 1969 edition of the prose poems, p. 176. 42 See OC II 539. See also the references to molluscs in Pauvre Belgique/, OC I I 953, 954.

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laughter that Baudelaire associated with his notion of the grotesque, or the absolute comical: the author of the prose poems will distort and travesty his own voice for the enjoyment of a reader who, if s/he is to avoid being gulled like Houssaye, must try not to allow critical vigilance to be supplanted by the dangerous pleasure that comes from a sense of personal superiority.

Another prose poem in the collection that tends to be accorded manifesto status is ‘Le Thyrse’.43 In its praise of hybridity, it seems indirectly to celebrate the status of prose poetry as a genre. However, the fact that Baudelaire’s critical writing expressly rejects the aesthetic value of hybrid art and literature suggests that ‘Le Thyrse’, to the extent that it is read as programmatic, may be interpreted, like the dedication, as a statement of caricatural intent.44 The first few lines of the prose poem prioritize the physical appearance of the thyrsus over its traditional hieratic symbolism, to which only a cursory sentence is devoted: Qu’est-ce qu’un thyrse? Selon le sens moral et poétique, c’est un emblème sacerdotal dans la main des prêtres et des prêtresses célébrant la divinité dont ils sont les interprètes et les serviteurs. Mais physiquement ce n’est qu’un bâton, un pur bâton, perche à houblon, tuteur de vigne, sec, dur et droit. Autour de ce bâton, dans des méandres capricieux, se jouent et folâtrent des tiges et des fleurs, celles-ci sinueuses et fuyardes, celles-là penchées comme des cloches ou des coupes renversées. Et une gloire étonnante jaillit de cette complexité de lignes et de couleurs, tendres ou éclatantes. Ne dirait-on pas que la ligne courbe et la spirale font leur cour à la ligne droite et dansent autour dans une muette adoration? Ne dirait-on pas que toutes ces corolles délicates, tous ces calices, explosions de senteurs et de couleurs, exécutent un mystique fandango autour du bâton hiératique? (What is a thyrsus? In the moral and poetic sense, it is a sacerdotal emblem in the hands of priests and priestesses celebrating the divinity whose interpreters and servants they are. But physically it is just a stick, a simple stick, a vine pole for hops, a vine support, dry, hard, and straight. Around this stick, in capricious meanders, stems and flowers trick and frolic, the latter sinuous and runaway, the former tilted over like bells or inverted cups. And an astonishing glory springs from this complexity of lines and colours, tender or dazzling. Does it not seem as though the curved and the spiral line are wooing the straight one and dancing around it in mute adoration? Does it not seem as though all of these delicate corollas, all of these calices, explosions of scent and colour, are performing a mystical fandango around the hieratic stick?) 43 ‘Le Thyrse’, OC I 335-36. On ‘Le Thyrse’ as a model of prose poetry, see for example Lemaitre’s edition of the prose poems, pp. xlvii-li and Kaplan, Baudelaire's Prose Poems, pp. 1, 13-14. 44 On Baudelaire’s rejection of hybridity in art, see Hiddleston, Baudelaire and the Art o f Memory, pp. 32-35. See also OC II 473-74, 598-99, 604, 611, 647, 674. On the crucial distinction made by the poet between poetry and prose, see OC II 330, and on the relation between poetic impurity and Baudelaire’s writing about caricature, see J. W. Maclnnes, ‘Essential Laughter: Baudelaire’s De Vessence du rire\ French Forum, 12.1 (1987), 55-64.

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The self-consciously poetic style of the prose in this passage almost disguises the fact that the text actually gives priority to materiality over spirituality in its description of the thyrsus. The possibility of ironic intent is suggested by the fact that in L ’École païenne Baudelaire accuses neoclassical poets of idealizing the visible and the concrete at the expense of Ta passion et la raison’ (passion and reason).45 Indeed, the prose poem’s later references to mythical characters suggest that the so-called pagan school is indirectly being parodied here. Edward Kaplan’s comment that the prose poem Ts quite enthusiastically dedicated’ to Franz Liszt is as understated as Baudelaire’s dedication is hyperbolic. The narrator’s enthusiasm is such that he crosses genders with as much zeal as the text itself crosses genres:46 Jamais nymphe exaspérée par l’invincible Bacchus ne secoua son thyrse sur les têtes de ses compagnes affolées avec autant d’énergie et de caprice que vous agitez votre génie sur les cœurs de vos frères. (Never did a nymph aggravated by the invincible Bacchus shake her thyrsus over the heads of her crazed sisters with as much energy and caprice as you wave your genius over the hearts of your brothers.)

The strangeness of the comparison of Liszt to an agitated nymph, and the absurdity of the image of the musician shaking his genius over hearts like a thyrsus over heads, together anticipate the bizarre concluding paragraph: Cher Liszt, à travers les brumes, par-delà les fleuves, par-dessus les villes où les pianos chantent votre gloire, où l’imprimerie traduit votre sagesse, en quelque lieu que vous soyez, dans les splendeurs de la ville étemelle ou dans les brumes des pays rêveurs que console Cambrinus, improvisant des chants de délectation ou d’ineffable douleur, ou confiant au papier vos méditations abstruses, chantre de la Volupté et de l’Angoisse étemelles, philosophe, poète et artiste, je vous salue en l’immortalité! (Dear Liszt, through the mists, beyond the rivers, above the towns where pianos sing your glory, where printing presses translate your wisdom, in whatever place you may be, in the splendours of the eternal city or in the mists of dreamy countries that are consoled by Cambrinus, improvising songs of delight or of ineffable sorrow, or trusting to paper your abstruse meditations, bard of eternal Voluptuousness and Anguish, philosopher, poet, and artist, I salute you in immortality!)

45 OC II 47. 46 Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, p. 117. See Nathaniel Wing on the destabilizing interplay of genders in ‘Le Thyrse’. N. Wing, The Limits o f Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 33-34. On the centrality of genre-crossing to ‘Le Thyrse’, see for example Stephens’s interpretation of the phrase Te sens moral et poétique’ (the moral and poetic sense). Baudelaire's Prose Poems, p. 37. Stephens does not argue for a reading of the text as entirely parodie, although she does acknowledge that it contains ironic elements.

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Pianos and printing presses seem to act autonomously in the goal of disseminating the musician’s work; Liszt himself seems to be dispersed in the mist; a music produced by abstruse meditations wafts around aimlessly while beer (invented, according to myth, by Cambrinus) does the real job of consoling people. The grotesque nature of the images in this passage renders it strangely comical. While Baudelaire’s admiration for Liszt would not seem to be in doubt,47 the hyperbolic tone — ‘une gloire étonnante’ (an astonishing glory), ‘votre étonnante dualité’ (your astonishing duality), ‘explosions de senteurs et de couleurs’ (explosions of scent and colour) — and confused imagery of the text seem consistent with the various allusions to alcohol in the prose poem, namely the references to Cambrinus and Bacchus and to the thyrsus as a hops pole and vine support. Reinforcing the subtext of intoxication is the fact that the thyrsus is also evoked in Baudelaire’s study of Confessions o f an English Opium-Eater, in the context of Thomas De Quincey’s self-mocking comparison of his digressive style of thinking to a thyrsus. That Baudelaire considered this digressive style to be related to the state of mind induced by opium is implied by the following sentence from the introduction to his analysis of the Confessions: Pour que le lecteur ne perde rien des tableaux émouvants qui composent la substance de son volume, l’espace dont je dispose étant restreint, je serai obligé, à mon grand regret, de supprimer bien des hors-d’œuvre très amusants, bien des dissertations exquises, qui n’ont pas directement trait à l’opium, mais ont simplement pour but d'illustrer le caractère du mangeur d’opium.48 (So that the reader loses nothing of the moving scenes that compose the substance of his volume, the space I have at my disposal being restricted, I will be obliged, to my great regret, to suppress many very amusing asides, many exquisite discourses, that are not directly related to opium, but that aim simply to illustrate the character of the opium eater.)

If the endlessly deviating, thyrsus-like form of De Quincey’s writing is presented here by Baudelaire as illustrative of the character of an opium eater, then the prose poem ‘Le Thyrse’ might be read as a mocking hymn to intoxication.49 While Suzanne Guerlac associates allusions to intemperance in ‘Le Thyrsus’ with the enthusiasm produced in Baudelaire by the music of Liszt and Richard Wagner,50 it is also possible that these references are designed comically to undercut the exalted tone of the text. In one of his articles of literary criticism, indeed, Baudelaire writes that ‘La disproportion du ton avec le sujet [...] est un moyen de comique dont la puissance saute à l’œil; je suis même étonné qu’il ne soit

47 On Baudelaire’s admiration for Liszt, see Pichois’s note, C II 728, n. 2. 48 OC 1444. See also OC I 515. 49 The apparent contusion of ‘celles-ci’ and ‘celles-là’ in the text’s description of the stems and flowers may also gesture towards this subtext. 50 See S. Guerlac, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont (Stanford, 1990), pp. 68-122.

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pas employé plus souvent par les peintres de mœurs et les écrivains satiriques...’ (The disproportion of tone and subject [...] is a comic means whose power is quite evident; I am even amazed that it is not used more often by painters of manners and satirical writers...)51 An equally comical undercutting of the eulogistic tone of the piece is effected by way of the reference in ‘Le Thyrse’ to printing presses. In Mon cœur mis à nu, Baudelaire refers to ‘l’infamie de l’imprimerie, grand obstacle au développement du Beau’ (the infamy of the printing press, a great obstacle to the development of Beauty), while in an article on Auguste Barbier, he mocks his subject as follows: Sous prétexte de faire des sonnets en l’honneur des grands hommes, le poète a chanté le paratonnerre et la machine à tisser. On devine jusqu’à quel prodigieux ridicule cette confusion d’idées et de fonctions pourrait nous entraîner. (On the pretext of writing sonnets in honour of great men, the poet has sung the praise of the lightning conductor and the spinning machine. We can guess to what prodigious absurdity this confusion of ideas and functions could lead us.)52

The comical potential of discursive confusion would seem to have been exploited by Baudelaire in texts other than ‘Le Thyrse’. For example, the Choix de maximes consolantes sur l ’amour, a piece that was almost certainly conceived as a joke at the expense of the poet’s prim sister-in-law, crosses lyricism with a scientific idiom in a manner that explicitly pastiches Stendhal’s quasi-scientific analysis of love in De l ’amour (1822) and, slightly less overtly, Charles Fourier’s study of passion in his Théorie des quatre mouvements (1808). Further adding to the suspicion of authorial disingenuousness in ‘Le Thyrse’ is the fact that at the end of a sentence and a paragraph that has done nothing but analyse the component parts of the thyrsus, the narrator asks: ‘quel analyste aura le détestable courage de vous diviser et de vous séparer?’ (what analyst will have the contemptible courage to divide you and separate you?) The question itself, by distinguishing between division and separation, analyses the very act of analysis that it condemns.53 The tendency to analyse was, in fact, one of the characteristics of the French public that provoked Baudelaire’s spleen:

51 OC II 185. 52 OC I 706, OC II 145. 53 Marc Eigeldinger writes of the ‘volonté d’explication’ (the explanatory desire) that pervades the text. M. Eigeldinger, ‘Le Thyrse, Lecture thématique’, in Etudes Baudelairiennes VIII (Neuchâtel, 1976), pp. 172-83. Johnson discusses the self-defeating character of the description of the thyrsus, which she interprets as a metaphor of the relationship between the literal and the metaphorical, the prosaic and the poetic. For Johnson, ‘Le Thyrse’ presents ‘une mise en abyme infinie de sa propre incapacité à servir de modèle’ (an infinite mise en abyme of its own inability to serve as a model). Défigurations, p. 65. See Jean-Claude Susini’s interesting exploration of the implications of a possible pun on the word ‘analyste’ (‘ana-liszt’) in the text. J.-C. Susini, ‘Liszt/Analyste: Dimension rhétorique du jeu de mot dans “Le Thyrse’” , Bulletin Baudelairien, 32.2 (1997), 53-62.

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la France, le public français, veux-je dire (si nous en exceptons quelques artistes et quelques écrivains), n’est pas artiste, naturellement artiste; ce public-là est philosophe, moraliste, ingénieur, amateur de récits et d’anecdotes, tout ce qu’on voudra, mais jamais spontanément artiste. Il sent ou plutôt il juge successivement, analytiquement. D’autres peuples, plus favorisés, sentent tout de suite, tout à la fois, synthétiquement. Où il ne faut voir que le beau, notre public ne cherche que le vrai.54 (France, the French public, I mean (if we except a few artists and a few writers), is not artistic, naturally artistic; that public is philosophical, moralistic, engineering, keen on stories and anecdotes, whatever you like, but never spontaneously artistic. It perceives or rather it judges successively, analytically. Other populations, more advantaged, perceive everything at once, synthetically. Where only beauty must be seen, our public seeks only truth.)

It seems possible that ‘Le Thyrse’ obliquely mocks a public that Baudelaire considered to be overly analytical and positivist in its responses to literature.55 By caricaturing his own admiration for Liszt, the poet travesties himself in a way that may or may not be visible to the reader, who may or may not respond with the un­ analysable kind of laughter produced by the grotesque.

By contrast with ‘Le Thyrse’, ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’ is one of the most stylistically prosaic of the prose poems included in Le Spleen de Paris.56 It begins by establishing a very explicit symmetry between a little old woman and a baby who is the object of everyone’s attention: La petite vieille ratatinée se sentit toute réjouie en voyant ce joli enfant à qui chacun faisait fête, à qui tout le monde voulait plaire; ce joli être, si fragile comme elle, la petite vieille, et, comme elle aussi, sans dents et sans cheveux. (The wizened little old woman felt overjoyed at the sight of that pretty child that everyone was fawning over, that everyone wanted to please; such a pretty creature, so fragile, like herself, the little old woman, and, like herself too, toothless and hairless.)

When the old woman approaches the child and smiles, he rebels loudly, leaving her to sob in a comer and lament the disappearance of her charms: ‘Ah! pour nous, malheureuses vieilles femelles, l’âge est passé de plaire, même aux innocents; et nous faisons horreur aux petits enfants que nous voulons aimer!’ (Ah, for us unfortunate old crones, the age of pleasing — even the innocent — has passed; and we repel the little children we want to love!) The emotional punch of the text lies in 54 OC II 124. 55 This interpretation is not compatible with that of Hiddleston, who writes that ‘in “Le Thyrse” there is no trace of the disagreeable moral message which Baudelaire saw as one of the fundamental aims of his prose poetry, no trace of the aesthetic of dissonance’. Baudelaire and ‘Le Spleen de Paris ', p. 31. 56 ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’, OC I 277-78.

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the simultaneous resemblance and difference it establishes between the old lady and the baby: the woman seems as vulnerable as the baby without being as alluring. The author of this sentimental prose poem held sentimental literature in great contempt. In an article on Gautier, Baudelaire observes that ‘La sensibilité de coeur n’est pas absolument favorable au travail poétique. Une extrême sensibilité de cœur peut même nuire en ce cas.’ (The sensitivity of the heart is not absolutely favourable to poetic work. An extreme sensitivity of the heart can even do damage in this case.)57 Similarly, in criticizing George Sand’s ‘style coulant, cher aux bourgeois’ (fluid style, dear to the bourgeoisie), he was not only attacking the fluency and prolixity of her prose, but also, implicitly, what he perceived as the lachrymose nature of her writing.58 The overt sentimentality of the prose poem’s ending might operate to blind readers to the possibility of hidden acid in the text. The prose poem’s insistence on the similarity between the child and old woman, by the repetition of ‘comme elle’ (like herself) in the first paragraph, lends the piece a certain ambiguity; the implication is that the woman sees in the baby a flattering mirror-image of herself: ‘ce joli être, si fragile comme elle, la petite vieille, et, comme elle aussi, sans dents et sans cheveux’ (such a pretty creature, so fragile, like herself, the little old woman, and, like herself too, toothless and hairless) (my italics). If the old woman’s joy stems, thus, from her narcissism, the ‘solitude étemelle’ (eternal solitude) to which she supposedly retreats after her rejection by the baby may serve to emblematize her solipsism.59 In the anterior verse poem ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, too, a comparison is established between old women and young children. However, by contrast with ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’, there is little room for sentiment in the verse. Marcel Proust, indeed, took this piece as illustrative of the cruelty of Baudelaire’s poetry, ‘cruel avec infiniment de sensibilité’ (cruel with infinite feeling).60 Ainslee Armstrong McLees argues for the superior empathy displayed by the prose treatment of the theme, contrasting the ‘amused pose’ and ‘detachment’ of the verse with the ‘affective vocabulary’ of the prose speaker.61 Certainly, the verse poem’s 57 OC I I 116. 58 OC I 686. On this point, see G. Gasarian, ‘Baudelaire et ses sœurs’, Littérature, 117 (2000), 53-69 (p. 55). Melvin Zimmerman contends that Baudelaire was interested in tears as a form of erotic rather than psychological or spiritual communication, as in ‘Le Masque’. M. Zimmerman, ‘Visions du monde’: Baudelaire et Cie (Paris, 1991), p. 92. 59 Starobinski, noting certain parallels between ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’ and episodes recounted in Rousseau’s ninth reverie in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, states that there is none of the emotional self-absorption of Rousseau’s narrator in the impersonal narrator of the prose poem. Starobinski does not consider the possibility that the old woman herself occupies the place of the narcissist. J. Starobinski, ‘Rousseau et Baudelaire (Les enfants effrayés)’, Nouvelle Revue Française, 338 (1981), 37-50 (pp. 47-49). 60 M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve ([Paris], 1954), p. 170. 61 Baudelaire’s ‘Argot Plastique \ p. 100. However, McLees implicitly problematizes this empathetic reading by stating that prose poetry, in itself, ‘caricatures and subverts formal poetic conventions’, such that ‘The result is poetic caricature squared’, (p. 102).

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likening of old women to dislocated monsters and puppets is suggestive of a mocking attitude on the part of the lyric subject. However, the non-sentimentality of the poetry might also be understood to be precisely what distinguishes it from prose. Just as, in the verse poem ‘Danse macabre’, the female skeleton is declared to be only superficially caricatural, what seems caricatural in Les Fleurs du Mal more generally may be viewed differently by the poet.62 Conversely, what initially presents itself as pathos in the prose poems may be reinscribed as caricature; Patrick Labarthe, for example, draws attention to the clichéd character of the parallel established in the prose poem between childhood and old age.63 In the verse poem, this analogy is evoked in an altogether more original and more gruesome way: the coffins of old women are observed therein to be nearly as small as those of children. The potentially hackneyed quality of the adjective ‘petite’, applied to the old women of the verse poem, is subverted by the shocking manner in which their physical smallness is conveyed; by contrast, the same adjective, appearing twice in the opening paragraph of the prose poem to qualify the noun ‘vieille’ (old woman), does little except reinforce a cliché. The sentimental façade of ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’ may conceal a mordant caricature. If the old lady is one target of its cruel ridicule, the sentimental reader of the prose poem may be another.

The prose poem ‘Un plaisant’ might also be understood to involve the reader in its caricatural dynamic.64 It describes, against the chaotic backdrop of New Year celebrations, a self-satisfied man addressing a mocking salute at a donkey that is being whipped and driven by a boor. The text concludes with the narrator’s expression of rage against this magnificent idiot, who seems to him to embody the soul of French wit. The apparent object of the narrator’s ire is the complacent man (rather than the ass or the driver), the prose poem nicely illustrating the idea, outlined in De Vessence du rire, that laughter is closely related to pride. It would certainly seem, on the evidence of the text, that the conceited man thinks his joke a proof of personal superiority: Comme l’âne allait tourner Tangle d’un trottoir, un beau monsieur ganté, verni, cruellement cravaté et emprisonné dans des habits tout neufs, s’inclina cérémonieusement devant l’humble bête, et lui dit, en ôtant son chapeau: ‘Je vous la souhaite bonne et heureuse!’ puis se retourna vers je ne sais quels camarades avec un air de fatuité, comme pour les prier d’ajouter leur approbation à son contentement. (Just as the ass was turning the comer of a pavement, a handsome man, gloved and polished, cruelly cravated and imprisoned in brand-new clothes, bowed ceremoniously before the humble beast, and said, removing his hat, T wish you a good and happy new 62 For a conflicting interpretation of the poem’s reference to caricature, see S. Blood, Baudelaire and the Aesthetics o f Bad Faith (Stanford, 1977), pp. 123 ff. 63 Petits Poèmes en prose, p. 67. 64 ‘Un plaisant’, OC I 279.

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The narrator’s contempt for the handsome man implicitly encourages the reader, in turn, to feel personally superior to this character, such that his or her own amusement would be of a piece with the kind that s/he derides. In other words, the narrator and reader, to the extent that they mock the mocking man, would become potential objects of mockery for a third party (who would, by assuming his or her own superiority, become the potential butt of ridicule for a fourth, and so on).65 Adding further to the ironic complexity of the piece is the possibility of interpreting the words ‘magnifique imbécile’ (magnificent imbecile), appearing in the final paragraph, as obliquely referring to the oblivious donkey instead of to the man who salutes him: L’âne ne vit pas ce beau plaisant, et continua de courir avec zèle où l’appelait son devoir. Pour moi, je fus pris subitement d’une incommensurable rage contre ce magnifique imbécile, qui me parut concentrer en lui tout l’esprit de la France. (The ass did not see that fine joker, and continued running zealously to wherever his duty called him. As for me, I was suddenly overtaken by an immeasurable rage against that magnificent imbecile, who seemed to me to epitomize all the wit of France.)

The repetition of the demonstrative adjective ‘ce’ (that), as well as the fact that the word ‘esprit’ in the final line of the text is often understood as ‘wit’ or ‘wittiness’, generally leads us to understand the wise-cracking man to be the magnificent imbecile in question; however, as Stephens points out, the word ‘esprit’ can also be understood to mean ‘spirit’.66 The impervious donkey, running wherever his duty calls him, might also, then, embody the spirit of France. Like the ‘nous’ of ‘Au lecteur’, unquestioningly submissive to Satan Trismegist, the donkey blindly obeys his tyrannical driver. To give the text a particularly cruel reading, the unquestioning obedience of the donkey might reflect that of the readers, French or otherwise, that 65 The abyssal structure of the text is explored very insightfully by Murphy, who also relates ‘Un plaisant’ to Baudelaire’s theory of laughter. See S. Murphy, ‘Le Complexe de supériorité et la contagion du rire: Un plaisant de Baudelaire’, Travaux de littérature, 7 (1994), 257-85 (a later version of this article is included in Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, pp. 615-51). Georges Formentelli draws attention to analogies between donkey, joker, and narrator; despite this awareness of internal parallels between the narrator and the alleged imbecile, however, Formentelli continues to identify the narrator’s voice with that of the poet. G. Formentelli, ‘f/w Plaisanf, in Dix Etudes sur Baudelaire, ed. M. Bercot and A. Guyaux (Paris, 1993), pp. 137-55 (p. 148). 66 ‘Argot littéraire, argot plastique’, p. 206, n. 15. Stephens points out in the same article that the man’s punchline, ‘Je vous la souhaite bonne et heureuse’, appears as part of a caption for a caricature by Daumier which takes hypocrisy as its subject (p. 202). Hiddleston too draws attention to the influence of Daumier on the piece. ‘Les Poèmes en prose’.

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Baudelaire anticipated for his prose poems. Indeed, the reference to the reader’s ‘volonté rétive’ (mulish wilfulness) in the dedication to Houssaye would seem indirectly to invite an analogy between reader and ass (even if the donkey represented in the prose poem is far from wilful).67 Lending strength to this hypothesis is the fact that ‘Un plaisant’ was one of the prose poems that accompanied the dedication to Houssaye upon its publication on 26 August 1862. Whether the narrator’s contempt is directed primarily at the imbecilic man or, alternatively, at the imbecilic donkey, the prose poem would seem to invite the reader to fall into a textual trap: by pouring scorn, with the narrator, on the fatuous man, the mocking reader tacitly identifies him or herself with that man; and to the extent that s/he remains oblivious to this self-accusation, the reader might be understood to resemble the obedient donkey, tormented by its cruel master. If the author of ‘Un plaisant’ constructed the text so as to ensnare readers in a self-inculpating interpretation, then he too would effectively be mimicking the mocking stance of the facetious man, thus becoming entangled in his own ironic trap. However, to the extent that the poet was aware of the self-condemning character of his text and sensitive to its multiple interpretive possibilities, then he would, by assuming the condescending attitude of the narrator, resemble comic artists who pretend to be less self-aware than they really are ‘pour le divertissement de leurs semblables’ (for the amusement of their fellows).68 Indeed, the wisecracker himself, if his gesture is interpreted as self-mocking, might resemble such an artist; after all, as Louis Nicholas Raphael points out, the narrator’s attack on the monsieur is founded only on his particular interpretation of the latter’s gesture.69 Ultimately, it is by distinguishing the author of ‘Un plaisant’ from its narrator that the interpretive authority of the latter is diminished, allowing the text itself to become as grotesquely disorientating as an English pantomime.

The denigration of an other by a superior narrator in many of the prose poems has sometimes been taken to exemplify Baudelaire’s notion of the ordinary comical.70 In view of the dynamic set in place by ‘Un plaisant’, however, it may be that the 67 OC I 275. The word ‘rétif, in its most literal sense, describes horses or donkeys that refuse to move. See Evans’s association of the dedication’s use of the adjective ‘rétif with the reference to Laurence Sterne’s donkey in ‘Les Bons Chiens’, as well as her compelling argument that Baudelaire, via his allusion to Steme, associates the reader of his prose poems with asses. M. Evans, ‘Laurence Steme and Le Spleen de Paris', French Studies, 42.2 (1988), 165-76. 68 OC II 543. 69 L. N. Raphael, ‘Semiotics, Nihilism, Mimesis: Baudelaire’s “Un plaisant’” , Romanic Review, 75.4 (1984), 453-68. 70 See for example J. A. Flieger, ‘Baudelaire and Freud: The Poet as Joker’, in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, ed. M. Chamey and J. Reppen (London, 1987), pp. 266-81 (p. 277). Jerry Aline Flieger also suggests a link to the absolute comical, arguing that the poet undermines his own superior position by exposing himself to the whims of his readership.

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ordinary comical, in Le Spleen de Paris, is indivisible from the absolute kind, associated with self-mockery rather than other-mockery. It is not the narrators who are self-mocking, I argue, but rather the author who, while covertly mocking these figures, also invites his own confusion with them. Despite the relative self-consciousness of the narrator of ‘À une heure du matin’, even he may be a figure of ridicule from the author’s point of view.71 The narrator of this prose poem is unusual in Le Spleen de Paris in that he actually reflects on his own corruption as well as on the inauthenticity of the people with whom he has come into contact in the course of the day. The text culminates in an impassioned prayer, on the part of the narrator, for the return of his self-respect through the production of verse: Âmes de ceux que j ’ai aimés, âmes de ceux que j ’ai chantés, fortifiez-moi, soutenezmoi, éloignez de moi le mensonge et les vapeurs corruptrices du monde, et vous, Seigneur mon Dieu! Accordez-moi la grâce de produire quelques beaux vers qui me prouvent à moi-même que je ne suis pas le dernier des hommes, que je ne suis pas inférieur à ceux que je méprise! (Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have celebrated, strengthen me, support me, take me away from deceit and the corrupting fumes of the world, and you, Lord my God, grant me the grace to produce a few fine lines of poetry that will prove to me that I am not the least of men, and that I am not inferior to those whom I despise!)

The terms in which the concluding plea is framed suggest the narrator’s belief in his own personal superiority: his poetry, when it comes, will suffice to prove his non­ inferiority with regard to other men. That this non-inferiority should be interpreted by the reader as superiority is indicated by the manner in which the prayer is introduced: ‘Mécontent de tous et mécontent de moi, je voudrais bien me racheter et m ’enorgueillir un peu dans le silence et la solitude de la nuit.’ (Dissatisfied with everyone and dissatisfied with myself, I long to redeem myself and take pride in myself in the silence and solitude of the night.) The narrator’s wish is not to feel equal to others, but to take pride in himself, to feel worthy of distinction. As such, his prayer resembles very strongly the Pharisee’s prayer in the Gospel of Saint Luke, to which Baudelaire makes repeated reference in his writings.72 It is precisely the narrator’s fear of being equal to others, his sense of being indistinguishable from them, that prompts him to retreat behind the ‘barricades’ that separate him from the world — and to regret not having worn gloves when shaking hands with the people he met during the day. In fact, the narrator’s desire to prove his own essential difference from those he meets in the course of the day is itself a proof that he is no different from them: the journal editor whom he meets thinks his paper the only respectable one, while the female ‘sauteuse’ (acrobat or woman of loose morals) he visits wants the narrator to 71 ‘A une heure du matin’, OC I 287-88. 72 On the significance of the Pharisee’s prayer in Baudelaire’s work see J. Thélot, La Poésie précaire (Paris, 1997), pp. 37-44.

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design her a ‘Venustra’ costume, presumably to flatter her vanity. In addition, the poet-persona’s final prayer is driven by a disdain for others that parallels the contemptuousness displayed towards him by a theatre boss whom he courts. The artificial ‘barricades’ he attempts to erect between himself and the outside world, by locking his room at the beginning of the text, are consequently as illusory as the natural barriers that a literary acquaintance of his imagines to exist around Russia: ‘[il] m’a demandé si l’on pouvait aller en Russie par voie de terre (il prenait sans doute la Russie pour une île)’ ([he] asked me if one could travel to Russia overland (it would seem he took Russia to be an island)). Unlike the narrator of ‘À une heure du matin’, the narrator of the verse poem ‘L ’Examen de minuit’ (which strongly resembles the prose poem published just a few months before it) makes no visible effort at the beginning of the piece to barricade himself off from the world. Furthermore, unlike the conclusion of ‘A une heure du matin’, the closing words of the verse poem make no bid for redemption: — Vite soufflons la lampe, afin De nous cacher dans les ténèbres!73 (— Quick, let us snuff out the lamp, so as / To hide ourselves in the darkness!) The recognition of irremediable personal shame in the above lines might be taken as proof of the lyric subject’s moral superiority over the narrator of the prose poem, whose efforts to redeem himself are themselves self-incriminating. Pierre-Louis Rey remarks that the appeal for salvation through verse at the heart of a volume of prose poetry is disconcerting, ‘comme si le vers demeurait en fin de compte l’instrument privilégié d’une inspiration élevé’ (as if verse remained at the end of the day the privileged instrument of lofty inspiration).74 Prose remains, by implication, the debased language of everyday social interactions, interactions that are represented in this prose poem as inherently hypocritical. What the privileging of verse in the final sentence of the prose poem suggests is that the text is itself a symptom of a failed effort to achieve authenticity. It is deeply immersed in the duplicitous, inauthentic system that it describes. The title of ‘À une heure du matin’ may insinuate a resemblance between the narrator of this text and Daumier’s Monsieur Coquelet, a caricatural figure who features in La Journée du célibataire (1839), a series of drawings whose titles all resemble that of the prose poem ‘A une heure du matin’. M. Coquelet is an egotistical bachelor who, for example, wakes at ‘7 heures du matin’, feeds his dog at ‘2 heures’, cheats at cards at ‘5 heures du soir’, shakes hands with an acquaintance at ‘Sept heures’, and goes to bed at ‘9 heures du soir’, with his dog and his cat and apparently without a care in the world (fig. 1.1). Baudelaire refers derisively to the character in an article on Théophile Gautier, wherein he states that the latter’s muse has no interest in how Monsieur Coquelet or Monsieur Tout-le73 OC I 144. 74 Charles Baudelaire: Petits Poèmes en prose, pp. 17-18.

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monde (Mr Everyman) spends his day.75 By embedding, in ‘A une heure du matin’, the suggestion of a resemblance between his own narratorial alter ego and the platitudinous M. Coquelet, Baudelaire participates in the self-deprecation of the absolute comical.

Other texts contained in Le Spleen de Paris also lend themselves to interpretation as grotesque or ‘absolute’ caricatures beyond their apparent mockery of others. In ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’, a male speaker loses patience with his supposedly affected mistress, and decides to reveal to her, apparently at a zoo or a fairground, her resemblance to a wild woman kept in a cage by her husband.76 The text seems to mock both the caged, wild woman and the over-civilized précieuse, treating them as two sides of the same coin, just as elsewhere the poet claims that hyper-civilized man is ‘toujours à l’état sauvage’ (still in a primitive state).77 As both Maclean and Evans have argued, various details in ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’ allow the male speaker to be interpreted as the ironic target of the text’s attack: for example, the narrator’s self-comparison to the ‘soliveau’ (log) king of La Fontaine’s fable; the symmetry between himself and the wild woman’s brutal keeper; and the apparent intertextual reference to Marivaux’s Le Petit-maître corrigé, in which it is a ridiculously affected man who is taught a lesson.78 If the placement of the text of the prose poem within quotation marks sets up a parallel between the author’s strategy of expository framing and that of the narrator, and if the narrator explicitly refers to himself as a poet, it must not be assumed (as neither Maclean nor Evans do) that the author is unaware of the selfinculpating components of the narrator’s misogynistic discourse.79 Certainly, the artful juxtaposition, in the following sentence, of the narrator’s invocation of verisimilitude and the mistress’s appeal to the ideal suggests that the narrator’s values may be held up for ridicule at least as much as those of his mistress:

75 OC II 121. 76 ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’, OC I 289-90. 77 OC 1663. 78 See Maclean, Narrative as Performance, pp. 89-109 and Evans, Baudelaire and Intertextuality, pp. 62-65. Both Maclean and Evans draw attention to the rich intertextual fabric of the piece and to the ambiguous direction of its irony. 79 This is not to say that Baudelaire himself was not capable of profound misogyny. Indeed, the figure of the ‘petite-maîtresse’ is referred to pejoratively in the 1855 Exposition universelle article (OC II 586), stupid bourgeois women are derided in Les Drames et les romans honnêtes (OC II 39), and in a letter to Champfleury the poet states his hatred for ies femmes philosophantes’ (philosophizing women) (C II 292). However, see M. Butor, Histoire extraordinaire: Essai sur un rêve de Baudelaire (Paris, 1961), pp. 73-95 for an alternative reading of such statements.

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‘A vous voir ainsi, ma belle délicate, les pieds dans la fange et les yeux tournés vaporeusement vers le ciel, comme pour lui demander un roi, on dirait vraisemblablement une jeune grenouille qui invoquerait l’idéal.’ (‘To see you like this, my delicate beauty, with your feet in the mud and your eyes turned vaporously towards the sky, as though asking it for a king, you could plausibly be compared to a young frog invoking the ideal.’)

The husband who attempts to degrade his mistress’s ideals, her ‘affectations apprises dans les livres’ (affectations learned from books), may be implicitly condemned here by Baudelaire, who elsewhere states of the dreamy, affected Emma Bovary that, though she might seem ridiculous, her pursuit of i ’Idéal’ (the Ideal) amidst the banal raises her to the ranks of the ‘vraiment grande’ (truly great): ‘Cette femme, en réalité, est très sublime dans son espèce, dans son petit milieu et en face de son petit horizon.’ (This woman, in reality, is truly sublime for her sort, for her narrow world and for her very limited horizons.) The poet also remarks that intellectual women everywhere will be grateful to Flaubert for having ‘élevé la femelle à une si haute puissance, si loin de l’animal pur et si près de l’homme idéal’ (raised the female to so great a power, so far from the pure animal and so close to the ideal man).80 While the narrator of ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’ brutally reminds his mistress of her base animality, the poet himself placed a high premium on man’s ability to transcend his depraved nature — Ta fange’ (the mud) — and aspire to the ideal — Te ciel’ (the sky): Passez en revue, analysez tout ce qui est naturel, toutes les actions et les désirs du pur homme naturel, vous ne trouverez rien que d’affreux. Tout ce qui est beau et noble est le résultat de la raison et du calcul. Le crime, dont l’animal humain a puisé le goût dans le ventre de sa mère, est originellement naturel. La vertu, au contraire, est artificielle, surnaturelle...81 (Inspect, analyse all that is natural, all the actions and desires of pure, natural man, and you will find nothing that is not hideous. All that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime, the taste for which the human animal drew from his mother’s womb, is originally natural. Virtue, on the contrary, is artificial, supernatural...)

That the male narrator of ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’ should remind his mistress of her bestiality suggests that he is himself an embodiment of natural man as portrayed in the above lines. As such, he would resemble the man described in Pauvre Belgique/, who knows how to use a knife and fork ‘quoique sa gaucherie témoigne qu’il aimerait mieux déchirer sa proie avec ses dents et ses sales griffes’ (even though his awkwardness reveals that he would rather tear his prey apart with his teeth and his dirty claws).82 80 OC II 84, 83. 81 OC II 715. 82 OC II 845. See also OC I 663.

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The text of the ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’ lends itself to a double-reading, just as one of its phrases, Tl a enchaîné sa femme légitime comme une bête’ (He has chained his wife up like a beast), might be interpreted either as a statement about the wild woman’s enforced animality or as a comparison of the woman’s husband to a beast or a fool. Significantly, the term petit-maître, which actually pre-dates its feminine form, describes a man who, as Marivaux’s play testifies, feels obliged to refrain from expressing affection or sensitivity towards his female partner;83 the petite-maîtresse in Baudelaire’s prose poem is threatened with defenestration — she will be thrown out the window ‘comme une bouteille vide’ (like an empty bottle) — precisely because she asks her partner for affection. The primary object of the prose poem’s irony may thus not be the mistress, as a first reading would suggest, but rather the male speaker and, by extension, the readers who sympathize with him.84 As in ‘Un plaisant’, and indeed ‘À une heure du matin’, it may be that the reader’s initial complicity with the apparent authorial alter ego actually leaves him or her vulnerable to the text’s ridicule. Of course, the poet’s implied accusation of the reader’s blindness is arguably as cruel as the narrator’s revelation to his mistress of her animal nature, and as the husband-keeper’s physical assault on the wild woman. The self-reflexivity of Baudelaire’s text opens up an abyss into which all certainty as to the direction of its irony must necessarily sink.

A similarly covert caricatural dynamic may be at work in ‘Portraits de maîtresses’, whose overt misogyny is at least as brutal as that of ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’. The prose poem recounts an informal meeting between a group of men, in which each attempts to outdo the other by telling a story about why he tired with and eventually rid himself of a mistress. Four stories are told in total, the final one being so horrific — the suggestion being that the man murdered his too-perfect mistress — that it effectively puts an end to the conversation: Les trois autres compagnons regardèrent celui-ci avec un regard vague et légèrement hébété, comme feignant de ne pas comprendre et comme avouant implicitement qu’ils ne se sentaient pas, quant à eux, capables d’une action aussi rigoureuse, quoique suffisamment expliquée d’ailleurs. (The three other companions looked at him with glazed and slightly stupefied eyes, as if pretending not to understand and as if implicitly admitting that they did not feel, for their part, capable of such a rigorous action, although the latter was sufficiently explained for all that.)

83 See Frédéric Delofffe’s introduction to P. C. de Chamblain de Marivaux, Le Petit-maître corngé (Geneva, 1955). 84 Maclean too, as evidenced by the passage cited in the introduction to this book, proposes a reading of the text as a snare for the reader; for Maclean, the poet is himself a victim of the textual trap. Narrative as Performance, pp. 106-109.

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Sufficiently explained? The acquiescence of the listeners is startling. Maclean highlights various parodie elements in this prose poem, including its deflation of machismo by way of the feminizing description, in the opening line, of the men’s smoking room as ‘un boudoir d’hommes’ (a men’s boudoir) and the ‘almost caricatured misogyny’ of the first story that is recounted.85 There are further elements of caricature in the manner in which ‘Portraits de maîtresses’, as Maclean also points out, turns the tables on the represented listeners, making them complicit in the final speaker’s crime by their implicit approval of the sentiments expressed in his story as in the preceding ones. The listeners’ apparent admiration for the speaker’s ability to murder recalls an 1844 caricature by Daumier (fig. 1.2) that presents an image of a well-dressed philanthropist effectively congratulating a convict for having killed three men by the age of twenty-two; in Quelques caricaturistes français, Baudelaire paraphrases the well-dressed man’s words: ‘Ah! mon ami, quelle riche organisation vous possédiez!’ (Ah! My friend, what a rich constitution you possess!)86 Hannoosh points out that the paragraph devoted by Baudelaire to this caricature, wherein he describes the philanthropist as a ‘savant extasié’ (an enraptured scholar), highlights ‘bourgeois self-delusion, the self­ ignorance that marks the object of laughter’;87 ‘Portraits de maîtresses’ may well place its readers, like the fictive listeners, in the position of the deluded bourgeois. The sympathy of the represented listeners with the final storyteller’s rationale reflects and anticipates the (at least partial) complicity on the part of the reader of Le Spleen de Paris with the logic of the dominant speaker in this and other prose poems. The listeners’ apparent belief that the final storyteller’s action has been explained adequately might, furthermore, present a caricatural portrait of the projected reader’s tacit approval of the narrator’s cruelty in texts such as ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’, ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, and ‘Assommons les pauvres!’ In ‘Portraits de maîtresses’, as in other texts of Le Spleen de Paris, it may be both the values of imagined readers and their susceptibility to narrative manipulation that are held up to ridicule.

André Breton devotes a section of his Anthologie de Vhumour noir to Baudelaire, taking the prose poem ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ as exemplary of the poet’s brand of acid humour. Arguably, however, the comical dimension of the prose poems is more complex and profound than the notion of black humour would ordinarily

85 Narrative as Performance, pp. 133-34. Ryszard Engelking shares Maclean’s view of the beginning of the prose poem, remarking that ‘L’intention parodique est évidente.’ (The parodie intention is obvious.) Engelking also highlights the text’s allusions to the work of Gautier. R. Engelking, ‘Une hottée de plâtras: Notes sur “Le Spleen de Paris’” , Bulletin Baudelairien, 23.2 (1988), 70-87. 86 OC II 554. 87 Baudelaire and Caricature, pp. 141, 144.

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suggest.88 This is because the dynamic of the texts would seem to be one of selftransformation, a key theme in Baudelaire’s theory and practice of humour: while the sentiments expressed in texts such as the dedication to Houssaye, ‘Le Thyrse’, and ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’ seem sincere, they also offer themselves to a covertly ironic reading; by contrast, ‘Un plaisant’, ‘À une heure du matin’, ‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’, and ‘Portraits de maîtresses’ are explicitly caustic in their tone but may implicitly ridicule both the mockers and their readeraccomplices. Like Flaubert’s reader, uncertain ‘si on se fout de lui, oui ou non’ (whether he is being laughed at, yes or no),89 the reader of the prose poems can never be entirely sure as to the direction of Baudelaire’s irony. In Pauvre Belgique! Baudelaire notes that ‘La fin d’un écrit satirique, c’est d’abattre deux oiseaux avec une seule pierre. A faire un croquis de la Belgique, il y a, par surcroît, cet avantage qu’on fait une caricature de la France.’ (The purpose of a satirical writing is to kill two birds with the one stone. In sketching Belgium, there is the added advantage of caricaturing France.) The suggestion here is that the object of satire is unstable, the joke always having the potential to backfire on the person who joins in the laughter. Significantly, in the context of this argument, the Salon caricatural of 1846 on which Baudelaire collaborated was sub-titled ‘Critique en vers et contre tous illustrée de soixante caricatures dessinées sur bois’ (Criticism in verse and against everyone, illustrated with sixty caricatures drawn on wood) (my emphasis). The reader of Le Spleen de Paris would consequently be well advised to keep in mind the maxim which introduces the argument of De Vessence du rire: ‘Le Sage ne rit qu’en tremblant.’ (The wise man never laughs without trembling.)90 The inescapability of ridicule is nicely dramatized in the following quotation from De Vessence du rire, in which Baudelaire derides what he calls the ‘physiologistes du rire’ (physiologists of laughter): leur découverte n’est pas très profonde et ne va guère loin. Le rire, disent-ils, vient de la supériorité. Je ne serais pas étonné que devant cette découverte le physiologiste se lut mis à rire en pensant à sa propre supériorité.91

88 A. Breton, Anthologie de l ’humour noir (Paris, 1972), pp. 127-32. D. Scott too underlines the black humour of the prose poems. La Fanfarlo’ and Le Spleen de Paris’, p. 79. Hiddleston suggests a connection between the prose poems and Baudelaire’s ideas about the grotesque, but observes a difference between the pessimistic humour of Le Spleen de Paris and the upward aspiration of the Baudelairean grotesque. Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris’, pp. 94-97. On the distinction between the black humour that Hiddleston associates with Baudelaire’s poetic practice and the latter’s theory of the grotesque see also Hiddleston, ‘Baudelaire et le rire’, in Etudes Baudelairiennes XII (Boudry-Neuchâtel, 1987), pp. 85-98 and Hiddleston, ‘Les Poèmes en prose’. 89 G. Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. J. Brumeau, 5 vols (Paris, 1973), I, p. 679. 90 OC II 821, 526. See Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature, pp. 15 ff. and Hiddleston, Baudelaire and the Art o f Memory, pp. 102 ff. for a discussion of the ironie potential of this maxim as it functions within De l ’essence du rire. 91 OC II 530.

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(their discovery is not very profound and does not really go very far. Laughter, they say, comes from superiority. I would not be surprised if, upon making this discovery, the physiologist burst out laughing at the thought of his own superiority.)

Baudelaire here implicitly holds himself up to ridicule, both because he is himself a theorist of laughter and because he adopts a superior, mocking stance with regard to other laughter-physiologists.92 While explicitly referring to a kind of humour that is produced by a sense of personal superiority, then, the self-reflexiveness of the above passage implicitly demonstrates the workings of an alternative form of humour, closely related to self-mockery. This alternative kind of laughter, the grotesque, would be Te rire de l’homme, mais rire vrai, rire violent, à l’aspect d’objets qui ne sont pas un signe de faiblesse ou de malheur chez ses semblables’ (the laughter of man, true laughter, violent laughter, at the sight of objects that are not a sign of weakness or misfortune in his fellow men).93 While Baudelaire insisted that the grotesque was accessible only to unmediated intuition, he did not believe that this kind of intuition was customary. For example, Daumier’s avoidance of ‘tout ce qui ne serait pas pour un public français l’objet d’une perception claire et immédiate’ (all that would not be the object of a clear and immediate perception for a French public) meant that his work did not conform to Baudelaire’s notion of the grotesque.94 The poet’s theory of the absolute comical might, indeed, have some affinity with the ideas of the Spanish writer, Baltasar Graciân (1601-58), who insisted on the importance of indirection in humour. Graciân rated jokes more highly when the analogy upon which they depended was not immediately apparent: ‘Lorsque la correspondance est cachée profondément et qu’il faut réfléchir pour la découvrir, elle est d’autant plus grande qu’elle coûte plus...’ (When the correspondence is deeply hidden and its discovery requires reflection, it is all the greater because it costs m ore...)95 If this is true, then the grotesque punch of Baudelaire’s prose poems might actually be strengthened by the time spent looking for it. If the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris need to be deciphered before their humour reveals itself, they are no different from much graphic caricature of the nineteenth century. In order to elude censorship under the July monarchy and the Second Empire, French caricaturists had recourse to the art of allusion, employing devices such as puns, allegories, and emblems. The most famous example of evasion through allusion is Charles Philipon’s pear, a caricatural shorthand for

92 This point plays a part in Hannoosh’s larger argument about the essays on humour, namely that ‘they enact the very comic structures that they expose’. Baudelaire and Caricature, p. 311. See also P. Pachet, Le Premier Venu: Essai sur la politique baudelairienne (Paris, 1976), pp. 89-90. 93 OC II 535. 94 OC II 557. 95 B. Graciân, Art et figures de l'esprit, translated from Agudeza y arte del ingenio (1647) by Benito Pelegrin (Paris, 1983), p. 118.

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King Louis-Philippe. Baudelaire makes the following observation about the emblematic pear: Le symbole avait été trouvé par une analogie complaisante. Le symbole dès lors suffisait. Avec cette espèce d’argot plastique, on était le maître de dire et de faire comprendre au peuple tout ce qu’on voulait.96 (The symbol had been found thanks to an obliging analogy. The symbol sufficed from then on. With this type of visual slang, one had the power to say and communicate to the people whatever one wanted.)

As befits an art form that has its historical origins in private jokes between artists, for a considerable part of the nineteenth century in France caricature takes the form of a more or less coded language, a kind of slang.97 Baudelaire’s prose poems, to the extent that they can be interpreted as caricatures, may invite a similar process of decryption. To the extent that Le Spleen de Paris parodies its readers, it might be understood to resemble Daumier’s Robert Macaire sketches (fig. 1.3) which, in the 1830s, initiated a new kind of caricature, one that, by legal necessity, ‘ne fut pas spécialement politique’ (was not especially political), taking instead the form of Ta satire générale des citoyens’ (the general satire of citizens). It is possible that, like Daumier, Baudelaire chose in his prose poems to apply his satiric wit to ‘toutes les sottises, tous les orgueils, tous les enthousiasmes, tous les désespoirs du bourgeois’ (all the stupidities, vanities, enthusiasms, despairs of the bourgeois).98 That Baudelaire was at least as accomplished a connoisseur of Ta sottise’ (stupidity) as Daumier is suggested by his taste for the newspaper Le Siècle: ‘en général l’erreur me cause des crises nerveuses, excepté quand je cultive volontairement la sottise, 96 OC II 550. 97 McLees points out of Baudelaire’s description of caricature as an ‘argot plastique’ that ‘By its very nature argot involves a private joke, a hidden message.’ Baudelaire’s Argot plastique’, p. 41. On the peculiarly allusive quality of caricature under Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III, see J. Wechsler, A Human Comedy. Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (London, 1982). Wechsler points out that, in the wake of the censorship laws of September 1835, ‘Legitimist and Republican journalists informed their readers that cunning and hypocrisy would be needed, and that readers should become accustomed to looking for innuendos.’ (p. 82) 98 OC II 555. According to Richard Terdiman, Robert Macaire waged a veritable ‘campaign against the middle class’ by parodying the avarice and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and of their symbolic representative, Louis-Philippe. R. Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice o f Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca. 1985), p. 168. On the anti-bourgeois sentiment at the origin of the theatrical and graphic versions of Robert Macaire, see S. Osiakovski, ‘History of Robert Macaire and Daumier’s Place in It’, The Burlington Magazine, 100.668 (1958), 388-92. On Baudelaire’s admiration for Daumier, see for example Hiddleston, Baudelaire and the Art o f Memory, pp. 139-51, and on Daumier’s influence on Baudelaire see T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (London, 1973), pp. 142-63.

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comme j ’ai fait pendant vingt ans pour Le Siècle, pour en extraire la quintessence’ (in general, error produces nervous attacks in me, except when I voluntarily cultivate stupidity, as I’ve been doing for twenty years in the case of Le Siècle, in order to extract its quintessence).99 It may be that, just as Daumier’s swindler moves, in various guises, among the unsuspecting crowd, Baudelaire aimed to deceive the reader who feels sure of the ground s/he walks on. This malevolent sort of humour may be indivisible from a kind that stems from a sense of shared ridiculousness rather than from a sense of personal superiority. In so far as the author of Le Spleen de Paris mystified his readers purely in order to enjoy a sense of his own personal superiority, and in so far as the reader of the prose poems laughs at the weaknesses of others, the humour of the collection is of the kind associated with the ordinary comical. However, to the extent that Baudelaire mocks himself via a bogus authorial voice in the prose poems, and to the extent that the reader is genuinely amused by the texts’ caricatural reflections of his or her own flaws, then Le Spleen de Paris would partake of the absolute comical or grotesque. In this latter case, Baudelairean laughter would, as Hannoosh puts it, work ‘against mystification, the belief in our own superiority, the illusion of self-sufficiency, and signals instead our own implication in the structure from which we feel exempt’.100 The ordinary/absolute alternative is too neat, however, given that the absolute comical can never be truly absolute; as Baudelaire puts it in his essay on laughter, ‘Le comique ne peut être absolu que relativement à l’humanité déchue, et c’est ainsi que je l’entends.’ (The comical can only be absolute relative to a fallen humanity, and that’s how I understand it.)101 In Le Poème du hachisch, the poet discusses, in terms closely resembling those associated with the absolute comical, ‘une certaine hilarité, saugrenue, irrésistible’ (a certain hilarity, ludicrous, irresistible) that can overwhelm the consumer of hashish: Des ressemblances et des rapprochements incongrus, impossibles à prévoir, des jeux de mots interminables, des ébauches de comique, jaillissent continuellement de votre cerveau. Le démon vous a envahi; il est inutile de regimber contre cette hilarité, douloureuse comme un chatouillement. De temps en temps vous riez de vous-même, de votre niaiserie et de votre folie, et vos camarades, si vous en avez, rient également de votre état et du leur; mais, comme ils sont sans malice, vous êtes sans rancune.102 (Resemblances and incongruous parallels, impossible to foresee, interminable plays on words, the outlines of comicality, spring continually from your brain. The demon has invaded you; it is useless to rebel against this hilarity, painful as a tickle. From time to time you laugh at yourself, at your silliness and madness, and your companions, if you have any, also laugh at your state and at theirs; but, as they are without malice, you are without rancour.)

99 C II 611. See also OC I 781. 100 Baudelaire and Caricature, p. 31. 101 OC II 536. 102 OC I 411.

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If the hilarity evoked in this passage is drug-induced, it is nevertheless also associated with the sudden discovery of unexpected correspondences as well as with an awareness and acceptance of one’s own foolishness. These are among the features that this chapter has associated with the caricatural dimension of Le Spleen de Paris. It may be that it is as a collection of grotesque caricatures that exploit the reader’s credulity and narcissism that Le Spleen de Pahs, an otherwise intensely disparate work, finds its unity.103 Baudelaire writes of the art of Théodore de Banville that Ta satire, par un miracle résultant de la nature même du poète, se déchargera de toute sa haine dans une explosion de gaieté, innocente à force d’être camavelesque’ (satire, by a miracle resulting from the very nature of the poet, releases itself of all its hatred in an explosion of gaiety, innocent by dint of being camivalesque). A similar reversibility between the diabolical and the innocent is suggested by Baudelaire’s prologue to the Salon caricatural of 1846: Je veux que les pendards, pendus à ma ceinture, Dénués de tout fiel comme de tout rancœur, En rires éclatants désopilent leur cœur.104 (I want the scoundrels, hanging from my belt, / Stripped of all venom as of all rancour, / To cheer their hearts with explosive laughter.)

It would be a truly ironic reversal if the collection that Baudelaire had supposedly considered entitling ‘666’, in apparent homage to the devil, turned out to be the most innocent of works.

103 Writing of Le Spleen de Paris, Stephens refers to The disparate nature of the constituent pieces (the shifts in genre from one piece to the next as well as the generic shifts within poems)’. ‘Boundaries, Limits and Limitations’, p. 31. Hiddleston, similarly, writes that ‘Fragmentation, discontinuity, external and internal chaos are the essential elements of this work.’ Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris \ p. 3. 104 OC II 500,167.

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M. Coquelet éteignant sa lumière termine une journée qui semblable à la veille et semblable au lendemain retrace la peinture exacte de la vie du célibataire! (Mr Coquelet, as he puts out his lamp, ends a day that, like the day before and like the next one, paints a perfect portrait of the bachelor’s life!) Figure 1.1 Honoré Daumier, 9 heures du soir (1839). Trustman Daumier Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Spécial Collections Department.

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— Ainsi donc, mon ami, à vingt deux ans vous aviez déjà tué trois hommes... quelle puissante organisation, et combien la société est coupable de ne l’avoir pas mieux dirigée!... — Ah! voui, monsieur !... la gendarmerie a eu bien des torts à mon égard... sans elle je ne serais pas ici!... (‘So, my friend, at twenty-two years of age you had already killed three men... what a rich constitution, and how guilty society is for not having directed it better!’... ‘Ah, yes sir!... the police did very wrong by me... without them I wouldn’t be here!’) Figure 1.2 Honoré Daumier, from Les Philanthropes du jour (1844). Trustman Daumier Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Special Collections Department.

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Comment, M. Macaire, cette maison qui ne devait me coûter, d’après votre devis, que 70.000F va me revenir à plus de trois cent mille!...— Que voulez-vous, ce n’est pas ma faute, vous faites percer au midi une croisée au midi que nous devrions ouvrir au nord; vous ne voulez plus que quatre étages au lieu de cinq; nous devrions couvrir en zinc, nous ne couvrons plus qu’en ardoise. Je ne puis répondre que de mon projet; vous le changez, ça vous regarde. (‘How’s that, Mr Macaire? This house, which according to your estimates should only have cost me 70,000F, will now cost me more than three hundred thousand!’... ‘What can I say? It’s not my fault! You had a casement window which we should have opened in the north wall cut through the south wall, you only want four floors instead of five and what is more, whereas we should have roofed in zinc you now want us to roof in slate! I can only reply that you have changed my project and that’s your affair.’) Figure 1.3 Honoré Daumier, Robert Macaire, Architecte (1837). Trustman Daumier Collection, Brandeis University Libraries, Special Collections Department.

Chapter 2

Prostitution

À travers les lueurs que tourmente le vent La Prostitution s’allume dans les rues; Comme une fourmilière elle ouvre ses issues; Partout elle se fraye un occulte chemin, Ainsi que l’ennemi qui tente un coup de main.1 (Through the lamps tormented by the wind / Prostitution flares up in the streets; / Like an anthill she opens her doors / And everywhere makes a secret pathway through, / Like an enemy planning a surprise strike.)

As suggested by the above extract from Baudelaire’s verse poem, ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’, whose first manuscript version dates from the beginning of the Second Empire, prostitution was both ubiquitous and covert in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. From the beginning of the century, with the establishment in France of the system of tolérance, or regulated prostitution, until the beginning of the twentieth century, prostitutes formed a very large, more or less clandestine group, considered by the authorities to pose a major threat to the well-being of society unless subjected to rigorous controls. Under the regulatory system, wherein sexual commerce was tolerated without actually being made legal, prostitutes were required to remain visible to the authorities but as invisible as possible on the streets. Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, the leading French authority on prostitution during the July Monarchy, noted that ‘[donner] aux prostituées une marque distinctive, ce serait infecter les lieux publics d’enseignes ambulantes du vice’ ([to give] prostitutes a distinctive mark would be to contaminate public places with the itinerant signs of vice).2 The difficulty of ‘reading’ prostitutes, of distinguishing them from other women on the streets of Paris, was a significant social and political issue during the reign of Louis-Philippe. Parent-Duchâtelet puts the problem as follows: On arrivera au terme de la perfection et du possible en ce genre, en obtenant que les hommes, et en particulier ceux qui les [les prostituées] recherchent, puissent les distinguer des femmes honnêtes; mais que celles-ci, et surtout leurs filles, ne puissent pas faire cette distinction, ou ne la fassent du moins qu’avec difficulté.3 1 ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’, OC I 94-95 (p. 95). 2 A. Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, 2 vols, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1837), I, p. 362. 3 De la prostitution, I, p. 363.

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(We will achieve the best possible solution if men, and particularly those looking for them [prostitutes], can distinguish them from honest women, and if the latter, and especially their daughters, cannot make the same distinction, or at least can only do so with difficulty.)

The problematic legibility of the prostitute was still an issue under the Second Empire and the Third Republic, when working-class women in public places were often mistaken for unregistered prostitutes, or ‘insoumises’ (insubordinate prostitutes). The prostitute, in short, was required by French law to be at once visible and invisible to passers-by, legible to some and illegible to others. From her own point of view, she was confronted with the question of how to give herself to be read in two different ways, depending on whether her interpreter was a potential customer or not. The two female characters who are given title roles in the collection are sometimes identified as prostitutes by critics and sometimes not. In the case of ‘La Belle Dorothée’, the meaning of the text will be shown to have the potential to change dramatically once the character is understood to be a prostitute. ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ also undergoes a radical transformation of meaning if the reader does not turn a blind eye to certain hidden-but-visible elements in it, elements that are related to the implied profession of the eponymous character. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire describes the courtesan as follows: Type de bohème errant sur les confins d’une société régulière, la trivialité de sa vie, qui est une vie de ruse et de combat, se fait fatalement jour à travers son enveloppe d’apparat. On peut lui appliquer justement ces paroles du maître inimitable, de La Bruyère: Tl y a dans quelques femmes une grandeur artificielle attachée au mouvement des yeux, à un air de tête, aux façons de marcher, et qui ne va pas plus loin.’4 (A sort of bohemian wandering on the limits of a regular society, the triviality of her life, which is a life of ruse and combat, appears inevitably from behind her outward pomp. We can justly apply to her the words of the inimitable master, La Bruyère: ‘There is in some women an artificial grandeur attached to the movement of the eyes, a way of the head, a manner of walking, a grandeur that goes no further than that.’)

While the profession of the courtesan, as evoked here, is only too easily recognizable, she is nevertheless defined by her duality. Indeed, Baudelaire compares her, later in the same passage, to the figure of the actress. A similar emphasis on duality is apparent in the verse poem ‘L ’Amour du mensonge’, in which the lyric subject addresses a probable courtesan: Je sais qu’il est des yeux, des plus mélancoliques, Qui ne recèlent point de secrets précieux; Beaux écrins sans joyaux, médaillons sans reliques, Plus vides, plus profonds que vous-mêmes, ô Cieux!

4 OC II 720.

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BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS Mais ne suffit-il pas que tu sois l’apparence, Pour réjouir un cœur qui fuit la vérité? Qu’importe ta bêtise ou ton indifférence? Masque ou décor, salut! J’adore ta beauté.5 (I know that there are eyes, among the most melancholic, / That do not conceal precious secrets; / Beautiful caskets without jewels, medals without relics, / More empty, more deep than yourselves, Heavens! But is it not enough that you are the appearance, / To delight a heart that flees the truth? / What matter your stupidity or your indifference? Mask or décor, I salute you! I adore your beauty.)

The courtesan would seem to be a virtual incarnation, for Baudelaire, of all that is artificial and misleading. According to Baudelaire, ‘La gloire, c’est rester un, et se prostituer d’une manière particulière.’ (Glory is to remain one, and to prostitute oneself in a particular way.)6 His somewhat elliptical theorization of prostitution will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. However, even in the most literal sense of the term, the one that concerns us in this chapter, Baudelaire might be understood, in his prose poetry, to have prostituted himself, or gone public, in a particular way. The prose poems were designed to appeal to a wide public, tending to be published in newspapers whereas the verse poems were often published, prior to their appearance as a collection, in literary reviews.7 They often resemble newspaper faits clivers by virtue of their brevity and pithiness, and the sensationalism of some of the prose poems, such as ‘La Corde’ and ‘Assommons les pauvres!’, recalls the shock tactics of the canard or modern-day tabloid.8 Significantly, in a letter of 1863 to the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Baudelaire describes Le Spleen de Paris as ‘un livre singulier et facile à vendre’ (a singular book, and easy to sell).9 Given that Baudelaire’s literary criticism insists on the distinctions between prose and poetry and outlines a strong belief in the centrality to poetry of rhyme and metre,10 it seems very possible that his decision to produce prose poetry was at least partially motivated by financial necessity. While Baudelaire believed that prose could certainly benefit by being made more poetic, it is not certain that poetry was

5 OC I 99. On the profession of the poem’s addressee, see Pichois, OC I 1034. 6 OC I 700. 7 On this point, see R. Kopp, ‘À propos des “Poèmes en prose” ou Baudelaire entre Racine et le journalisme du Second Empire’, Bérénice, 1 (1983), 15-24 (p. 19). 8 On Baudelaire’s loathing for newspapers, see OC I 705-6; on the prose poetry’s newspaper mimicry and subversion, see G. M. Robb, ‘Les Origines journalistiques de la prose poétique de Baudelaire’, Lettres Romanes, 44.1-2 (1990), 15-25; and on Baudelaire’s attempt to market his prose poems through the medium of newspapers, see Monroe, A Poverty o f Objects, pp. 93-98. 9 C II 295. 10 See for example OC II 329-30, C I 676.

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ever, for him, improved by moving closer to prose: ‘la France n ’est pas poète, elle éprouve même, pour tout dire, une horreur congéniale de la poésie. Parmi les écrivains qui se servent du vers, ceux qu’elle préférera toujours sont les plus prosaïques.’ (France is not poetic, it even feels, to be frank, a congenial hatred of poetry. Of the writers who use verse, she will always prefer the most prosaic.) Suggestive, perhaps, of venal intent is the fact the poet had a peculiarly pejorative way of referring to his collection, even if it is clear that he took great care over its production. He refers, for example, to the texts as ‘Rêvasseries en prose’ {Idle fancies in prose), as ‘bagatelles’ (knick-knacks), and as ‘ces petites babioles’ (these little knick-knacks).11 By writing a prose poetry that was more accessible and therefore potentially more commercially profitable than his verse, Baudelaire might be considered to have prostituted his art. However, it may be that this apparent prostitution is only one side of the story, the texts’ potentially hidden poetry of correspondences being the other. If the heroines of ‘La Belle Dorothée’ and ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ are ambiguous prostitutes, the duality constitutive of prostitution even invading their textual inscription, they may consequently serve as appropriate emblems or allegories of the potential duality of Baudelaire’s prose poetry.

Despite having been announced for publication three times in 1867, it was only in 1869 that the scandalous ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ was finally posthumously published in the Revue Nationale et Étrangère} 2 Like Le Spleen de Paris in general, the prose poem exercises a certain fascination over readers, probably because of the questions it leaves unanswered.13 The text begins with the narrator’s meeting with a handsome, middle-aged woman, possibly a prostitute, on the outskirts of Paris. She accosts him by asking if he is a doctor. The man states that he is not, but his quick mental evaluation of the woman’s physical appearance suggests a clinical dimension to his attitude; she is ‘une grande fille, robuste, aux yeux très ouverts, légèrement fardée, les cheveux flottant au vent avec les brides de son bonnet’ (a tall girl, robust and wide-eyed, lightly made-up, her hair waving in the wind with the straps of her cap). The narrator, who finds mysteries difficult to resist, follows the woman home. 11 OC II 124, C II 229, 583 (and 493), 473. As Ruff points out, ‘jamais il n’a parlé ainsi des Fleurs du MaV (he never spoke this way of the Flowers o f Evil). M. A. Ruff, L Esprit du Mal et VEsthétique baudelairienne (Paris, 1955; repr. Geneva, 1972), p. 360. Interestingly, Charles Nodier’s study of literary hoaxes refers to them as amusing ‘bagatelles’. C. Nodier, Questions de literature légale: Du plagiat, de la supposition d'auteurs, des supercheries qui ont rapport aux livres (Paris, 1812), p. v. 12 ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, OC I 353-56. An earlier version of this reading was published as M. Scott, ‘Reading Monstrosity in Baudelaire’s “Mademoiselle Bistouri’” , Australian Journal o f French Studies, 38.2 (2001), 228-40. 13 Donald Aynesworth states that the ‘poem has the form of a riddle; like a parable, it conceals what it reveals’. D. Aynesworth, ‘Humanity and Monstrosity in Le Spleen de Paris: A Reading of “Mademoiselle Bistouri’” , Romanic Review, 73 (1982), 209-221 (p. 220).

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The woman soon begins reminiscing about the gory five-minute operations in which she claims to have seen the narrator participate in his youth. The text leaves it uncertain at this point as to whether sexual intercourse subsequently takes place, but ‘Quelques instants plus tard’ (A few moments later), the two are addressing each other using the informal ‘tu’ (you); it would seem that the narrator has cut out an important plot detail, the kind a Second Empire readership might have considered indecent or unsavoury. The woman persists in her conviction that the narrator is a doctor, going on to show him her neatly ordered packages of lithographs and photographs, and commenting on the characters of the doctors they depict. She admits to her practice of visiting doctors for the sheer pleasure of seeing them, and states that she has fallen for one young intern whom she longs to see visiting her with his instrument bag and bloodied apron. The story proper ends with the narrator seeming to adopt the previously refuted role of doctor by asking the woman if she can remember when her strange passion for doctors began. Averting her eyes sadly, she answers that she cannot remember: ‘Je ne sais pas... je ne me souviens pas.’ (I don’t know... I don’t remember.) This, then, is the most obvious question that is left unanswered in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’: what is at the origin of the woman’s fascination with doctors? There are other questions, too, however. The final section of the text takes the form of the narrator’s analysis of the event. It is clear to him that the woman is one of the many ‘monstres innocents’ (innocent monsters) that roam the streets of Paris. In the prayer that concludes the prose poem, the narrator speculates that God gave him a taste for horror in order, like a divine, scalpel-wielding surgeon, to convert his heart: — Seigneur, mon Dieu! vous, le Créateur, vous, le Maître; vous qui avez fait la Loi et la Liberté; vous, le souverain qui laissez faire, vous, le juge qui pardonnez; vous qui êtes plein de motifs et de causes, et qui avez peut-être mis dans mon esprit le goût de l’horreur pour convertir mon cœur, comme la guérison au bout d’une lame; Seigneur, ayez pitié, ayez pitié des fous et des folles! Ô Créateur! peut-il exister des monstres aux yeux de Celui-là seul qui sait pourquoi ils existent, comment ils se sont faits et comment ils auraient pu ne pas se fairel (— Lord, my God! You, the Creator, you, the Master; you who made Law and Liberty; you, the sovereign who permits, you, the judge who pardons; you who are full of motives and causes, and who perhaps put the taste for horror in my mind in order to convert my heart, like healing at the end of a blade; Lord, have pity, have pity on madmen and madwomen! O Creator! can monsters exist in the eyes of He alone who knows why they exist, how they made themselves and how they could have not made themselves?)

The speaker here maintains a distinction between himself and those whom he describes as monsters: his own taste for horror has the result of curing him, while monsters would seem to be those for whom an attachment to horror does not result in cure. The narrator would seem thus to place himself on the side of the normal, while Mlle Bistouri is consigned by him to the ranks of the monstrous. As Stephens

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puts it, the narrator’s ‘appeal to God asserts recognition of the monstrous as a human condition, but seeks to ensure differentiation in that recognition’.14 A certain doubt is cast on the narrator’s status as the poet’s spokesperson by the fact that Baudelaire was more inclined to align himself with rather than distance himself from what the dominant discourse classed as monstrous.15 Nevertheless, many critics have had no hesitation in identifying the narrator’s voice with that of the poet.16 Internal textual details, however, conspire to undermine the apparent candidness of the final prayer. There is a striking symmetry between the text’s invocation of the Lord of Law and Liberty, on the one hand, and its concluding, italicized allusion to self-creation (‘se sont faits') and self-restraint (‘ne pas se faire’), on the other. In each case, a certain tension between licence and prohibition is evoked. This tension between opposites is lent further stress by the strange equivocation in the narrator’s concluding question, which begins by asking if monsters can exist in the eyes of the Creator and transforms into a statement that the Creator alone knows why monsters do exist. It would seem that something is covertly being suggested in this final passage, something that might throw light on unexplained elements in the preceding text, and that is closely linked to the creation of so-called monsters and the prevention of their creation. It is easy enough to imagine the kind of discourse from which the italicized words in the prose poem — ‘après le médecin’ (after the doctor), ‘inutilement’ (uselessly), ‘se faire’ (to make oneself), ‘ne pas se faire’ (not to make oneself) and, in the manuscript, ‘monstres’ (monsters) — could be borrowed. Monstrosity and the degeneration of the race were increasingly common themes in France after 1850. Many believed that strong social medicine was required to heal a morbidity that seemed increasingly deep-rooted and with which prostitution, described by Maxime du Camp as ‘une plaie sociale constamment ouverte’ (a constantly open social wound), was intimately related.17 Accompanying this anxiety about 14 Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, p. 146. 15 See for example the poet’s comment in a letter of 1865 to Poulet-Malassis that ‘Le sieur Baudelaire a assez de génie pour étudier le crime dans son propre cœur’ (Mr Baudelaire has enough genius to study crime in his own heart), by contrast with an acquaintance (SainteBeuve, according to Pichois’s notes) ‘qui croit ne pouvoir l’étudier que chez les autres’ (who believes he can only study it in others) (C II 532). In addition, Baudelaire was aware that he was perceived by many as monstrous after the controversy surrounding Les Fleurs du Mal; see for example C I 598, C II 409. On Baudelaire’s close identification with the monstrous, see M. Maclean, ‘Baudelaire and the Paradox of Procreation’, Studi Francesi, 76 (1982), 87-98. 16 See for example J. Prévost, Baudelaire: Essai sur Finspiration et la création poétiques (Paris, 1964), p. 100; M. Ruff, ‘Regards sur l’homme Baudelaire’, in Regards sur Baudelaire: Actes du colloque de London (Canada), 1970 (Paris, 1974), pp. 173-93; N. Babuts, Baudelaire: At the Limits and Beyond, p. 58. Jérôme Thélot maintains that the closing prayer is ‘au-delà de toute ironie’ (beyond all irony). La Poésie précaire, p. 60. 17 M. Du Camp, Paris: Ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie jusqu’en 1870 (Monaco, 1993), p. 339. See also D. Pick, Faces o f Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918

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degeneration were the eugenic arguments of the neo-Malthusians, who claimed that abortion offered a solution to incurable hereditary disorders.18 The offspring of the syphilitic or of the insane, the kind of offspring that Mlle Bistouri (like Baudelaire himself) might have had, would have fallen into a category that many at the time would have liked to prevent from being bom, if only out of fear that such people would elude recognition and bring disorder to bear on well-ordered bourgeois family lines.19 If abortion is a hidden theme of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, it is also an intrinsic feature of its structure, in that Baudelaire’s text contains a number of glaring omissions. For example, upon entering Mile Bistouri’s boudoir, the narrator declines to describe his surroundings: J’omets la description du taudis; on peut la trouver dans plusieurs vieux poètes français bien connus. Seulement, détail non aperçu par Régnier, deux ou trois portraits de docteurs célèbres étaient suspendus aux murs. (I omit the description of the hovel; it can be found in several well-known old French poets. However, a detail not noticed by Régnier is that two or three portraits of famous doctors were hanging on the walls.)

Donald Aynesworth states that, in omitting to describe the room in which he finds himself, ‘the “flâneur” [stroller] has cut up the text’; he goes on to discuss the text by Mathurin Régnier to which Baudelaire explicitly refers us, showing how the satirist’s detailing of ‘a collection of grotesquely disparate objects suggestive of fragmentation and decomposition’ prefigures the prose poem’s ‘esthetics of truncation and fragmentation’.20 However, this ‘Satyre’ by Régnier, dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century, draws attention to another form of excision also. Here is the description to which Baudelaire’s text refers us: J’entre dans ce beau lieu, plus digne de remarque Que le riche palais d’un superbe monarque. Estant là je furette aux recoins plus cachez Où le bon Dieu voulut que pour mes vieux pechez Je sceusse le despit dont l’ame est forcenee Lorsque trop curieuse ou trop endemenee, Rodant de tous costez et tournant haut et bas (Cambridge, 1989). On the threatening omnipresence of prostitution during the Second Empire, see A. Compagnon, Baudelaire devant Vinnombrable (Paris, 2003), pp. 118-26. 18 Baudelaire refers to Malthus and, indirectly, to the abortion solution, in Les Drames et les romans honnêtes, OC II 39. 19 See J. Matlock, Scenes o f Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 1994), pp. 114-15. 20 Aynesworth, ‘Humanity and Monstrosity’, p. 211. Jean Pommier was the first to locate the source of the allusion to Régnier in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’. J. Pommier, Dans les Chemins de Baudelaire (Paris, 1945), pp. 115-16.

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Elle nous fait trouver ce qu’on ne cherche pas. Or en premier item, souz mes pieds je rencontre Un chaudron ebreché, la bourse d’une monstre, Quatre boëtes d’unguents, une d’alun bruslé, Deux gands dépariez, un manchon tout pelé, Trois fiolles d’eau bleue,21 autrement d’eau seconde, La petite seringue, une esponge, une sonde, Du blanc, un peu de rouge, un chifon de rabat, Un balet pour brusler en allant au sabat, Une vieille lanterne, un tabouret de paille, Qui s’estoit sur trois pieds sauvé de la bataille, Un baril défoncé, deux bouteilles sur eu, Qui disoient sans goulet: Nous avons trop vescu.22 (I enter this grand place, more worthy of remark / Than the rich palace of a superb monarch. / Being there I ferret about in the hidden nooks / Where the good Lord wished that for my old sins / I should discover the vexation by which the soul is deranged / When too curious or too agitated, / Wandering all over the place and turning high and low / It makes us find what we are not looking for. / Now as a first item, under my feet I meet / A chipped cauldron, a display purse, / Four boxes of unction, one of burnt alum, / Two mismatched gloves, a threadbare muff, / Three phials of blue water, otherwise second water / The little syringe, a sponge, a probe, / White powder, some rouge, a beating rag, / A broom to bum when going to the sabbath, / An old lantern, a straw stool, / Which had on three legs escaped from the battle, / A broken barrel, two upturned bottles, / That said without their necks, ‘We have lived too long’.)

Historians tend to treat the above passage as significant for its allusions to contraception — ‘La petite seringue’ (The little syringe), ‘une esponge’ (a sponge) — and abortion — ‘une sonde’ (a probe). Angus McLaren, for example, alludes to the above text as testimony to the fact that ‘Prostitutes were a special class that was always credited with knowledge of abortive techniques.’23 The ‘sonde’ has in common with the ‘bistouri’ the fact that both are penetrative surgical instruments. If the curious reader penetrates further into the allusion to Régnier, s/he discovers an entire network of parallels between ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ and the seventeenth-century text. In both, the meeting of the homodiegetic narrator with a prostitute figure is presented as accidental rather than contrived. In both, a woman flatters and pressures a reluctant narrator, makes ungrounded assumptions about his character and occupation, asks if he knows a certain other 21 A nitric acid used in treating venereal diseases. 22 M. Régnier, ‘Satyre XII’, Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Raibaud, 2nd edn (Paris, 1982), pp. 152-168,11. 173-200. This text is more usually anthologized as part o f ‘Satyre XI’. 23 A. McLaren, Sexuality and Social Order: The Debate over the Fertility o f Women and Workers in France, 1770-1920 (New York, 1983), p. 208. Alain Corbin, similarly, refers to the passage as evidence that prostitutes used ‘mystérieuses injections, amulettes magiques, herbes abortives, éponges vaginales’ (mysterious injections, magical amulets, abortive herbs, vaginal sponges) for purposes of birth control. A. Corbin, Le Temps, le désir et l ’horreur: Essais sur le dix-neuvième siècle (Paris, 1991), p. 117.

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man or men, and proceeds to give a commentary. In both, the narrator is pampered beside a fireplace and subsequently reacts angrily to a woman’s babble. In both, there is a thematization of disease and cure, in both the narrator states that vice is its own cure, and in both there is a case of mistaken identity involving a doctor. This last parallel is particularly interesting. In Régnier’s text the narrator overhears the following words addressed by one hurrying man to another: — Comment, diet le valet, estes-vous medecin? Monsieur, pardonnez moy, le curé je demande.’24 (— What, said the servant, are you a doctor? / Sir, excuse me, it is the priest I need.)

It is unlikely to be coincidental that Mile Bistouri’s first words to the narrator are “‘Vous êtes médecin, monsieur?”’ (‘Are you a doctor, sir?’) Indeed, in view of the prayer that concludes Baudelaire’s text, it is conceivable that Mlle Bistouri mistakes a priest for a doctor. The close parallels between Régnier’s text and Baudelaire’s prose poem point to the strong possibility of a connection between the two most explicit cuts in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ — namely, the omission of the description of the woman’s rooms and the omission of the origins of her medical fantasy: Baudelaire’s abortive allusion to Régnier’s allusion to abortion might, in other words, ‘explain’ the blank in Mile Bistouri’s memory. The warnings about the unpleasant results of excessive curiosity, which precede Régnier’s list above and also conclude his satire, are particularly interesting in view of the fact that curiosity about Baudelaire’s own text may lead, as here, to a more disturbing interpretation than an initial reading suggests. Despite the fact that abortion was, even among the bourgeoisie, quite a widespread practice in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, the subject was taboo. The Académie de Médecine refused, for example, to give official recognition to the practice of therapeutic abortion, or induced miscarriage, that was common in hospitals at the time. The fact that abortions were being carried out could effectively be ignored, because as well as leaving few visible traces, those who had personal experience of abortion were unlikely or unable to talk about it. As a contributor to a medical journal of 1838 writes, ‘Il n’est pas de crime qui soit si facile à dissimuler, lorsque la femme n ’en a pas été victime, et dont les preuves matérielles, quand on vient à le soupçonner, soient plus difficiles à obtenir.’ (There is no crime so easy to conceal, when the woman has not been a victim of it, and of which the material evidence, when suspicions are raised, is so difficult to obtain.) This is doubly true of prostitutes who, as Alain Corbin remarks, constituted for abortionists ‘la fraction la plus sûre et la plus discrète de la clientèle’ (the most

24 ‘Satyre XII’, p. 166,11. 344-45.

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reliable and discreet fraction of the clientele), but also left virtually no first-hand accounts of their lives.25 Baudelaire’s awareness of the close relationship between prostitution and abortion is intimated by his letter of 1856 to Asselineau which recounts a dream about entering a brothel on a pretext. Too shy to approach one of the ‘filles’ (girls/ prostitutes), he looks at the framed drawings on the vast walls of the house and discovers ‘une série très singulière’ (a very singular series): Dans une foule de petits cadres, je vois des dessins, des miniatures, des épreuves photographiques. Cela représente des oiseaux coloriés avec des plumages très brillants, dont l’œil est vivant. Quelquefois, il n ’y a que des moitiés d ’oiseaux. — Cela représente quelquefois des images d’êtres bizarres, monstrueux, presque amorphes, comme des aérolithes. Dans un coin de chaque dessin, il y a une note. — La fille une telle, âgée de..., a donné le jour à ce fœtus en telle année; — et d’autres notes de ce genre.26 (In a mass of small frames, I see drawings, miniatures, photographic prints. These represent coloured birds with very bright plumage, and whose eyes are living. Sometimes, there are only halves o f birds. — These sometimes represent images of bizarre beings, monstrous, almost amorphous, like aeroliths. In a comer of each drawing, there is a note. — Such a girl, aged..., gave birth to this foetus in such a year, — and other notes of this type.)

After contemplating this ‘musée médical’ (medical museum), each item of which represents a foetus bom to a prostitute, the dreamer enters into friendly conversation with ‘un monstre né dans la maison, et qui se tient éternellement sur un piédestal’ (a monster bom in the house, and who stands eternally on a pedestal); the fact that this ‘monstre’ was bom in the brothel and has a long rubbery appendage stemming from his head suggests that he, like the other items on display, is himself a kind of foetus.27 What Baudelaire’s account implies is that the poet associated prostitutes with abortion, and the abortions of prostitutes with medical display. Mlle Bistouri’s fantasy about an angelic young doctor visiting her with bloodied apron and surgical kit-bag might suggest an ‘acting out’ of the trauma produced by a criminal abortion performed by a visiting doctor. According to Sigmund Freud, in the ‘acting out’ of a trauma, ‘the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an 25 T. Hélie, ‘De l’action vénéneuse de la rue, et de son influence sur la grossesse’, Annales d ’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 20 (1838), 180-219 (p. 218). Corbin, Le Temps, le désir et l ’horreur, pp. 132, 91. 26 C I 339. 27 C I 340. Other commentators have underlined the resemblance between the little monster and a fœtus. See for example R. Laforgue, L ’Échec de Baudelaire (Paris, 1931), p. 127. On Baudelaire’s fascination with the idea of abortion, see Maclean, ‘Baudelaire and the Paradox of Procreation’, p. 91. Fabrice Wilhelm relates the dream of foetuses to Baudelaire’s memory of a miscarriage suffered by his mother. F. Wilhelm, Baudelaire: L Écriture du narcissisme (Paris, 1999), pp. 215 ff.

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action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.’28 If Mile Bistouri’s fantasy were to be interpreted as a form of ‘acting out’, then her claim to have witnessed gruesome five-minute operations could be interpreted as a displaced memory of her own past abortion(s). The same recollection also suggests the complex network of relations existing between prostitutes and doctors in the nineteenth century: under the regulatory system, prostitutes were checked regularly by surgeons for syphilis; student medics would have frequented brothels; and the corpses of jailed prostitutes would seem to have been used for dissection by the Faculté de médecine.29 Furthermore, if ParentDuchâtelet is to be believed, living prostitutes were used as models for demonstration in medical lessons at the beginning of the nineteenth century: J’ai suivi les cours que faisait Cullerier oncle il y a plus de vingt ans, et je n’ai pas oublié l’impression profonde que faisaient sur les prostituées l’examen et la démonstration de leurs maladies devant un nombreux auditoire. Toutes sans exception, et jusqu’au plus éhontées, devenaient cramoisies; elles se cachaient et regardaient comme un supplice l’épreuve à laquelle on les soumettait.30 (I followed the classes that Michel Cullerier gave over twenty years ago, and I have not forgotten the deep impression made on the prostitutes by the examination and demonstration of their ailments in front of a large audience. All, without exception, including the most brazen, went scarlet; they hid themselves and thought of as a torture the ordeal to which they were being subjected.)

As this quotation suggests, prostitutes became a privileged site of medical and scientific study in the nineteenth century. Not only were they interesting clinical subjects in their own right, their assumed immodesty offered a pragmatic means of studying the female sexual anatomy in its pre-posthumous state. Parent-Duchâtelet himself, whose study of prostitutes investigated everything from their hair-colour to the occupations of their fathers, used the prison hospital as a virtual laboratory. The above citation bears witness to the fact that the dignity accorded to medical scrutiny of the so-called fille de joie was not accompanied by any proportionate level of respect for the fille herself. The treatment meted out to prostitutes by the medical profession, even within the sphere of legal practice, would seem to have been contemptuous in the extreme. In the nineteenth century, prostitutes were frequently encoded as monstrous by the dominant discourse, despite the fact that they were considered to provide a useful libidinal drainage system. Parent-Duchâtelet, whose other great field of expertise was sewage, described prostitutes as ‘un cloaque d’une autre espèce 28 S. Freud, The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works o f Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. J. Strachey, 24 vols (London, 1953-74), XII, p. 150. 29 On dissection, see A. Parent-Duchâtelet, ‘De l’influence et de l’assainissement des salles de dissection’, Annales d ’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 5 (1831), 243-328 (p. 281). 30 De la prostitution, I, p. 114.

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(cloaque plus immonde, je l’avoue, que tous les autres)’ (a cesspit of another type, a cesspit fouler, I admit, than all the others); he also claimed that the dominant opinion was ‘que les prostituées [étaient] nécessaires, et qu’elles contribuai]ent au maintien de l’ordre et de la tranquillité dans la société’ (that prostitutes [were] necessary, and that they contribute [d] to the preservation of order and tranquillity in society).31 In the words of Jann Matlock, ‘Proponents of tolerated prostitution — as the Parisian system was called — justified their methods by insisting that the physical needs of men might overload social circuits if prostitution were outlawed entirely.’ Prostitutes were needed, therefore, to maintain public hygiene, even if the fille publique (prostitute) herself was, as Corbin puts it, ‘associée à l’ordure, à la puanteur, à la maladie, au cadavre’ (associated with filth, stink, sickness, death). Such was the stigma attached to prostitutes that any doctor who had frequent professional contact with them was careful, according to Corbin, to maintain a strong moral divide between himself and his patients: Bref, de par son attitude, il devra bien souligner la différence qui existe entre l’administration qu’il représente et l’abjection de ses clientes; il évitera ainsi toute communication contraire au dessein global de marginalisation.32 (In short, by his attitude, he must accentuate the difference that exists between the administration he represents and the abjection of his female customers; in this way he will avoid any communication that does not serve the overall design of marginalization.)

According to Matlock, the prostitute was seen, in a sense, ‘as even more marginal than the most heinous criminal because she could be neither suppressed nor reformed’.33 That the narrator of Baudelaire’s text stigmatizes Mlle Bistouri is evident from his initial ‘joke’: no, he is not a doctor, he tells her, and what is more, he will visit her only after she has seen a doctor. The allusion here is to the obligatory medical examinations for prostitutes, designed to protect their male clientele from venereal disease (rather than to protect the women from pregnancy or disease). That Mile Bistouri can laugh heartily at the narrator’s taunt is surprising, given the shaming character of the sanitary visits. Corbin describes the latter as follows: La visite sanitaire est au centre des préoccupations et des conversations des filles; pour le bien comprendre, il faut tenir compte des préjugés du temps qui contribuaient à faire de l’examen médical des organes sexuels féminins une atteinte à la pudeur, voire un véritable viol.34

31 Ibid. I, p. 7; II, p. 525. 32 Matlock, Scenes o f Seduction, p. 4; Corbin, Le Temps, le désir et l ’horreur, p. 95; A. Corbin, Les Filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et prostitution aux 19e et 20e siècles (Paris, 1978), p. 29. 33 Scenes o f Seduction, p. 33. 34 Les Filles de noce, p. 134.

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In the light of this degrading ritual, Mile Bistouri’s terrible fear of humiliating the young doctor she has fallen for is poignant. Under the regulatory system, those ‘filles soumises’ (registered prostitutes) who worked on the street rather than in a brothel were known as filles en carte because of the system of cataloguing which involved the distribution to each prostitute of a yearly identification card with boxes to be stamped and dated at each fortnightly medical visit. The administration, in turn, kept a folio on each prostitute which contained the same information over a two-year period and which was classed in alphabetical order.35 Mile Bistouri’s ordered packets of lithographs and photographs, at least some of which bear the name of the doctor they portray, suggest an inversion of this ultra-rational system of cataloguing; in the manuscript, indeed, Baudelaire had initially referred to the photographs as ‘une masse de cartes’ (a heap of cards).36 Similarly, the woman’s ironic commentary about each doctor, as well as the initials that appear in the text wherever she refers to a particular doctor, seem to echo (however innocently on her part) the derisive and impersonal tone of much nineteenth-century medical discourse about prostitutes. Despite Mile Bistouri’s attraction to and indulgence towards doctors, it is the malice of doctors that is suggested throughout her discourse: she evokes Z’s public accusation of X ’s monstrosity and comments on the pettiness of their initial disagreement, and she points to the discrepancy between doctor K’s pleasing features and the heartlessness that led him to denounce the injured 1848 rebels he was tending. Furthermore, Mile Bistouri’s statement, shortly after the irritated narrator threatens to chop off her head, that she knows he is a doctor because he is ‘si gentil et si bon pour les femmes’ (so kind and so good to women) suggests that her idea of the kindness of doctors is somewhat distorted. A certain medical malevolence is also implied by the fact that the narrator’s fascination with Mile Bistouri, ‘cette énigme inespérée’ (this unhoped-for enigma), recalls the morbid sexual curiosity of some of the proponents of the réglementariste system. Corbin writes of Parent-Duchâtelet, for example, that he was ‘fasciné par le sexe’ (fascinated by sex) and had an ‘obsession du clandestin’ (obsession with the clandestine) that was ‘encore plus intense chez Béraud et chez les autres réglementaristes’ (even more intense in Béraud and the other regulationists).37 The various hints, in Baudelaire’s text, at a certain medical degeneracy support the hypothesis that something is being said therein about dubious practices in relation to abortions for prostitutes. While abortions performed outside the remit of

35 Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution, I, p. 178; II, pp. 103-104. 36 Noted in Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, p. 479, n. 18. 37 A. Corbin, Introduction to A. Parent-Duchâtelet, La Prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1981), pp. 9-55 (pp. 46, 42).

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the hospital were considered criminal, not least because so often lethal for the women concerned, doctors in search of extra income were often to be found among the ranks of illegal abortionists. McLaren states that off-duty doctors, operating as abortionists, were known by names such as ‘L’homme à l’aiguille’ (The man with the needle) and ‘Le dégringoleur’ (The tumbler), and also cites the names of some famous female abortionists, for example ‘Madame Tiremonde’ (Mrs Pullpeople) and ‘La Plieuse de Mort’ (The Death-Bender). While I am not suggesting that Mile Bistouri (Miss Scalpel) is an abortionist, her appellation certainly does seem to provide one link in a chain of submerged allusions to abortion in the prose poem.38 Jean Bellemin-Noël refers to Mlle Bistouri’s amnesia as indicative of ‘un événement déclencheur dans le passé, la résistance du traumatisme à remonter au jour, la prescience d’un désir ancien qu’il est angoissant de révéler, et d’abord de regarder en face’ (a triggering event in the past, the resistance to resurfacing of the traumatic experience, the prescience of an old desire that is agonizing to reveal and, first, to look in the face). Bellemin-Noël suggests, as a possible origin, ‘quelque viol subi ou halluciné par la fillette, mal aimée ou trop désirée par un père, un oncle, un frère aîné’ (some rape endured or hallucinated by the young girl, not loved enough or too much desired by a father, an uncle, an older brother).39 However, various textual clues, further to those already adduced, suggest that abortion rather than rape is at the origin of Mlle Bistouri’s trauma. Firstly, the prostitute’s comparison of the doctor to an angel calls to mind a typical nineteenthcentury term for abortionists: ‘faiseuses d’anges’ (angel-makers). Indeed, Mile Bistouri’s description of the medical student she admires as ‘joli comme un ange’ (pretty as an angel) and as ‘ce cher enfant’ (that dear child) suggests a confusion of the agent and object of an abortion. Secondly, the maternal treatment the woman accords the narrator, and the care she takes with the various packets of portraits, bundled, tied with string, and divided into ‘les internes’ (the interns) and ie s externes’ (the extems), take on a new dimension of significance when viewed from the perspective of traumatic abortion(s) and ‘acting out’. Thirdly, the narrator’s concluding reference to Ta guérison au bout d ’une lame’ (healing at the tip of a blade) might evoke the abortion instrument described in a medical journal of 1834 as ‘une sonde en argent, percée à son extrémité inférieure, et renfermant un stylet effilé dont la pointe était recouverte d’une boule en cire’ (a silver probe, pierced at its lower extremity, and containing a sharpened stylet whose tip was covered in a wax ball).40 Fourthly, the narrator’s exclamation, ‘Sacré Saint Ciboire de Sainte

38 McLaren, Sexuality and Social Order, p. 143. However, Kopp points to an 1866 verbal portrait by Adrien Marx of an old woman, neither abortionist nor prostitute but rather a surgeon’s assistant, whose name was ‘La Mère Bistouri’. Kopp suggests that this living character was at the origin of Baudelaire’s text. Kopp, ed., Petits Poèmes en prose (1969, p. 347; 1973, p. 235). 39 J. Bellemin-Noël, ‘Baudelaire et la chirurgie des âmes’, in Territoires de l ’Imaginaire: Pour Jean-Pierre Richard, ed. J.-C. Mathieu (Paris, 1986), pp. 201-212 (pp. 206-207). 40 Dr Tâcheron, ‘Suspicion d’avortement’, Annales d ’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 11.22 (1834), 191-204 (p. 193).

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Maquerelle’ (Blessed Holy Ciborium of Saint Brothel Madam), raises the question of what might be hidden in the ciborium of a brothel madam. Fifthly, the abbreviation of the various doctors’ names enacts excision typographically. Striking also is the fact that the narrator asks Mlle Bistouri when her passion ‘est née en [elle]’ (was bom in [her]); the metaphor of birth may be unwittingly applied, here, to the prevention of birth. Furthermore, Mile Bistouri’s practice of visiting doctors just for the sake of seeing them and simpering at them might suggest a practice described by a Viennese practitioner in 1922 as follows: Very often the abortionist [i.e. ‘the doctor’] and the patient meet each other halfway. The woman only alludes to her distressed condition and the co-operative doctor or midwife avoids hearing a full confession, perhaps half-consciously prepared to assume that she is pregnant. The doctor immediately thereupon undertakes some instrumental manipulation, without explaining to her the purpose, dilating, manipulating a sound, poking, scraping, wiping out, et cetera.41

Like Poe’s purloined letter, like prostitutes on the streets of nineteenth-century Paris, and recalling the ‘invisible visibilité’ (visible invisibility) that Michel Foucault claims characterized medical knowledge in the nineteenth century, the pointers to abortion in Baudelaire’s text remain hidden even while they are revealed.42 The text of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ seems to be governed by a logic of displacement, a logic of elsewhere: the reader is pointed towards Régnier’s satire; Mlle Bistouri directs her desire towards the apparel of doctors as much as towards the men themselves;43 lithographs, photographs, and initials stand in for doctors; surgical characteristics float ambiguously between doctors, the narrator, Mile Bistouri and God; and sexual intercourse between the narrator and the prostitute is suggested only by the latter’s reference to a five-minute surgical operation and by her subsequent tutoiement (informal address) of the narrator. The metonymic or indexical quality of the text reinforces the possibility that Mile Bistouri’s passion for doctors is the result of a displacement of detail from the scene of trauma to the scene of desire.44 Furthermore, the prose poem’s network of signs that point elsewhere might be understood to mimic the psychological defences that traumatic surgical interventions might leave in their wake, while also mimicking the clandestine character of the interventions themselves. Finally, if, as Jacques Lacan suggests, desire is metonymic in its operation, then the textual strategies of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ would seem to be designed to provoke a desire for 41 Cited in E. Shorter, A History o f Women’s Bodies (London, 1982), p. 206. The insertion is Shorter’s. 42 M. Foucault, Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical (Paris, 1963), p. 169. 43 See also La Fanfarlo, OC I 576-77. 44 Maclean too relates the emphasis on ellipsis, detail, and metonymy in the text to the structure of desire and the fetish. Narrative as Performance, pp. 141-60. See OC I 651, 659 for Baudelaire’s comparison of (the act of) love to a surgical operation.

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knowledge in the reader; in other words, if the narrator’s conversation with the prostitute is ‘abortive’, as Kaplan (with unintentional irony) puts it, this may be because the reader is implicitly invited to read between the lines of the text, to seek meaning in what has been cut out.45 Such a double-edged text, hovering between what is said and what is left blank, between the visible and the spectral, must fall into the category of the monstrous. Like the anamorphic tapestried figures described in Poe’s Ligeia (a story admired by Baudelaire), which transform from arabesques to monsters when viewed from the side, an angled view of the text of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ might alter our view of the narrator: his cruel and bemused attitude towards the woman as well as his implicit self-elevation above those he designates as monstrous might themselves be perceived henceforth as monstrous.46 As already mentioned in the introduction, in both the poem ‘Le Masque’ and the article on the 1859 Salon, Baudelaire writes about an anamorphic statuette which takes the form of a happy, laughing woman before a step to the side reveals first of all a ‘monstre bicéphale’ (two-headed monster) and then the terrible sadness of the sincere face. The prose poem ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ might be understood to effect a similar transformation when read in the light of abortion trauma; a glance to the side of this text’s ‘bouffonne créature’ (farcical creature) reveals a figure of profound misfortune. In the concluding paragraph of the prose poem, the narrator has no hesitation in labelling Mlle Bistouri a madwoman.47 However, if, as Freud maintains, the fetish ‘remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it’, then Mlle Bistouri’s fetishization of the surgical scene may constitute her best defence against insanity rather than a symptom of her derangement. Murphy draws attention to the repeated allusions to memory in the following passage: Moi, m’obstinant, je repris: ‘Peux-tu te souvenir de l’époque et de l’occasion où est née en toi cette passion si particulière?’ Difficilement, je me fis comprendre; enfin j ’y parvins. Mais alors elle me répondit d’un air très-triste, et même, autant que je peux m ’en souvenir, en détournant les yeux: ‘Je ne sais pas.. je ne m ’en souviens pas.’48 (Persistently, I went on: ‘Can you remember the time and the occasion when this so peculiar passion was bom in you?’

45 See J. Lacan, Le Séminaire: Livre XX (1972-1973): Encore (Paris, 1975), p. 114. Kaplan, Baudelaire ’s Prose Poems, p. 145. 46 In his analysis of the prose poem, Michael Sheringham notes that it is impossible to read it without making some kind of judgement about the narrator. M. Sheringham, ‘Nouvelle et poème en prose: “Mademoiselle Bistouri” de Baudelaire’, in La Nouvelle hier et aujourd’hui: Actes du colloque de University College Dublin, 14-16 septembre 1995, ed. J. Gratton, J.-P. Imbert (Paris, 1997), pp. 85-93 (p. 88). 47 On the conventional linkage of prostitution, insanity, and degeneration, see Corbin, Les Filles de noce, pp. 436-52. 48 My emphasis.

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BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS I had difficulty in making myself understood; at last I succeeded. But then she answered me very sadly, and even, as far I can remember, averting her eyes: ‘I don’t know... I don’t remember.')

Murphy concludes from the narrator’s apparently inadvertent parallel between his own (in)ability to remember and that of Mlle Bistouri that Baudelaire is here contesting the boundary between normal and abnormal psychologies.49 However, the repetition also suggests that the female character’s amnesia is related less to an inability to remember than to a decision not to remember. Instead of directly answering the narrator’s question about whether she can remember the origin of her passion, Mlle Bistouri averts her gaze and states that she does not remember. Her defensive strategy of indirection is manifested both verbally and physically in these lines. The very fact that Mlle Bistouri keeps photographs of doctors whom she has supposedly known may suggest her efforts to forget even through remembering, at least to the extent that Roland Barthes’ intuition is correct: ‘Non seulement la Photo n’est jamais, en essence, un souvenir [...], mais encore elle le bloque, devient très vite un contre-souvenir.’ (Not only is the Photo never, essentially, a memory [...], it also blocks it, and very quickly becomes an anti-memory.)50 Even the character’s humorous attitude, as shown by her hearty laughter at the narrator’s cruel jokes, can be taken as indicative of an ability to elude suffering. Freud says the following about humour: humour possesses a dignity which is wholly lacking, for instance, in jokes, for jokes either serve simply to obtain a yield of pleasure or place the yield of pleasure that has been obtained in the service of aggression. In what, then, does the humorous attitude consist, an attitude by means of which a person refuses to suffer, emphasizes the invincibility of his ego — and all this, in contrast to other methods having the same purposes, without overstepping the bounds of mental health?

Humour may be one of the mechanisms by which Mlle Bistouri protects herself, providing an alternative to the kind of cure practised by surgeons and hallucinated by the narrator in his concluding prayer. If this is so, her character may be far saner than it appears to the narrator. This reading seems consistent with the definition of anamorphosis given in the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean d ’Alembert: ‘Une projection monstrueuse, ou une représentation défigurée de quelque image qui est faite sur un plan ou sur une surface courbe et qui néanmoins à un certain point de vue, paraît régulière et faite avec de justes proportions.’ (A monstrous projection, or a distorted representation of some image which is produced on a plane or a curved surface and which nevertheless from a certain point of view, appears regular and of accurate proportions.)51 49 Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, p. 539. 50 R. Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris, 1980), p. 142. 51 See Freud, Standard Edition, XXI, pp. 163, 154, 152. D. Diderot and J. d’Alembert, Encyclopédie: ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des arts et des métiers, 17 vols (Paris, 1751-80; repr. Stuttgart, 1966), I.

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Both Régnier’s and Baudelaire’s texts take the form of satirical portraits. However, it may be that the latter’s prose poem only poses as a satire of prostitutes — the textual portrait of Mlle Bistouri, after all, alludes repeatedly to the woman’s own collection of portraits. Indeed, the transformation of the figure that seems to represent the author of the satire into the implicit object of the satire is suggested by the prostitute’s request for his portrait, which she would like to add to her collection.52 If ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ attacks the complacency of doctors, it might also target a society that availed itself of prostitutes while failing to confront the consequences of its actions. The narrator, after all, never reflects on the possibly negative consequences for Mlle Bistouri of his intervention in her life, whether through verbal interrogation or sexual intercourse. He treats her as an object of observation and amusement rather than as a subject with whom he could empathize.53 The narrator himself, therefore, might be the more ‘monstrous’ of the two characters who feature in this prose poem. It is worth noting that Baudelaire refers elsewhere to the ‘monstrueuse hypocrisie’ (monstrous hypocrisy) so typical of his century, and even at one point describes the bourgeois souls he meets on the street as ‘des monstres grotesques’ (grotesque monsters).54 In ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, the prostitute claims to remember having seen the narrator and his colleagues ‘couper, tailler et rogner’ (cut, prune, and whittle). In an apologia by Régnier, the satirist accuses his critics of doing something similar: Cecy pourroit suffire à refroidir une ame Qui n’ose rien tenter pour la crainte du blasme, A qui la peur de perdre enterre le talent; Non pas moy qui me ri d’un esprit nonchalant, Qui pour ne faillir point retarde de bien faire: C’est pourquoy maintenant je m’expose au vulgaire Et me donne pour bute aux jugemens divers. Qu ’un chacun taille, roigne et glose sur mes vers, Qu’un resveur insolent d’ignorance m’accuse, Que je ne suis pas net, que trop simple est ma muse, Que j ’ay l’humeur bizarre, inégual le cerveau, Et s’il luy plaist encor qu’il me relie en veau.55 52 Evans makes a similar point, but limits the scope of the text’s irony by referring to the narrator as ‘the poet’. Baudelaire andIntertextuality, p. 48. 53 By contrast, in ‘Je n’ai pas pour maîtresse une lionne illustre...’, an early poem which bears the mark of Régnier’s influence, Baudelaire destroys any illusions of his own moral superiority with regard to prostitutes by comparing himself to one. Reinforcing the possibility that Baudelaire would have been likely to identify with the overt object of the prose poem’s satire are his references to what he called his hysteria (OC I 668, C II 583, 587, 594). See also G. Gasarian, ‘La Figure du poète hystérique ou l’allégorie chez Baudelaire’, Poétique, 86 (1991), 177-91; Y. Chamet, ‘Hystéries de l’homme nerveux: A propos du “Mauvais Vitrier’” , Europe, 70.760-61 (1992), 106-10. 54 OC I I 225, 654. 55 M. Régnier, ‘Satyre X: A Monsieur Freminet’, Oeuvres complètes, 2nd edn (Paris, 1982), pp. 109-114 (p. 109,11. 21-32). My emphasis.

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BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS (This could suffice to dampen a soul / That dares not try anything for fear of blame, / In whom the fear of losing buries talent; / Not I, who take it nonchalantly in my stride, / 1 do not put off doing well so as not to fail: / That’s why now I expose myself to the vulgar / And set myself up as a target for diverse judgements. / Let anyone prune, whittle, and comment on my verse, / Let any insolent dreamer out of ignorance accuse me, / Say I am strange, that my muse is too simple, / That I have a bizarre temperament, an erratic mind, / And, if he still wishes, let him mock me.)

The possible intertextual allusion in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ to the above passage suggests that the prose poem addresses itself acerbically, if far more obliquely than Régnier’s text, to critics. Given that the poet referred to the legal action taken against Les Fleurs du Mal as a surgical operation or mutilation,56 ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ might be read as a satirical comment on the effects of censorship, for which abortion could serve as a metaphor. In the context of this reading, it would surely be significant that Baudelaire’s defence lawyer in 1857 compared Les Fleurs du Mal to a foetus: ‘Son oeuvre, il [Baudelaire] l’a longuement méditée...elle est le fruit de plus de huit années de travail; il l’a portée, il l’a mûrie dans son cerveau, avec amour, comme la femme porte dans ses entrailles l’enfant de sa tendresse.’ (His work was a long time pondered by him [Baudelaire]...it is the fruit of more than eight years of work; he carried it, he brought it to maturity in his mind, with love, like a woman carrying in her womb the child of her tenderness.)57 The prose poem may also satirize, in a more general sense, the public’s will to preserve a sham decorum. By remaining incurious as to the cause of Mlle Bistouri’s ‘passion si particulière’ (so peculiar passion), the reader could be accused of colluding in that cause, that is, in a certain culture of selective blindness to unpleasant realities. The choice of blindness is one against which Baudelaire railed repeatedly throughout his career. Alternatively, by allowing his or her curiosity to be piqued by the various enigmatic elements in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, by refusing to be satisfied with blindness, the reader would resemble those nineteenth-century medical scientists who, like the narrator in his encounter with Mlle Bistouri, were fascinated by opacity and driven by a desire to convert it into transparency.58 As Foucault 56 See OC I 184 and C I 429. On the significance of the thematic of surgery in Le Spleen de Paris, and in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ in particular, see C. Krueger, ‘Surgical Imprecision and the Baudelaireanpoème en prose\ French Forum, 27.3 (2002), 55-72. 57 OC I 1210. See also Pichois, Baudelaire: Études et témoignages, p. 249 on Baudelaire’s tendency to use obstetric imagery in connection with his own creative difficulties. 58 As Kaplan remarks of the narrator of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, ‘he seeks surgically to open her mind and probe her wound, as might a relentless theoretician who ignores the emotional results of a systematic skepticism’ (my emphasis). Baudelaire ’s Prose Poems, p. 148. Evans discusses the motif of penetration in Baudelaire’s prose poetry (Baudelaire and Intertextuality, pp. 44-50), while Anne Jamison argues that penetration is at the very core of Baudelaire’s transgressive aesthetics. A. Jamison, ‘Any Where Out of this Verse: Baudelaire’s Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 29.3-4 (2001), 256-86. Yves Bonnefoy notes, with regard to another text, that Baudelaire, as a good Latinist, would have been aware of the etymological links between

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remarks of nineteenth-century medicine, i a clinique n’a plus simplement à lire le visible; elle a à découvrir des secrets’ (the clinic no longer has to simply read the visible; it has to discover its secrets).59 The curious reader would also be recognizable in Honoré de Balzac’s metaphor of Tavide scalpel du Dix-Neuvième’ (the avid scalpel of the Nineteenth Century), which forages in ‘les coins les plus obscurs du cœur, ou, si vous voulez, ceux que la pudeur des siècles précédents avait respectés’ (the most obscure corners of the heart or, if you like, those that the modesty of previous centuries had respected).60 Interestingly, Gustave Le Vavasseur, a friend of Baudelaire, claimed that the poet himself had ‘[des] curiosités malsaines, et, plus malheureusement encore, il les prenait au sérieux’ (unwholesome curiosities and, more unfortunately still, he took them seriously).61 It may be that the prose poems in general require a morbid sort of reading. After all, Baudelaire described his prose poems as ‘des horreurs et des monstruosités qui feraient avorter vos lectrices enceintes’ (horrors and monstrosities that would make your pregnant readers abort).62 Maclean points out that ‘One must remember that Baudelaire, always aware of the full semic range of his key words, uses monstre in its true sense, the result of a joining of opposites which may be god and man, animal and man, or even god and animal.’ ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ might be monstrous, in Baudelaire’s sense, not only to the extent that it combines two opposite genres, but also to the extent that it fuses divergent perspectives.63 ‘curiosité’ and the notion of cure. Y. Bonnefoy, Baudelaire: La Tentation de Voubli ([Paris], 2000), p. 15. 59 Naissance de la clinique, p. 121. Maclean refers to the narrator’s obsessive ‘passion for analysis’. Narrative as Performance, p. 149. 60 H. de Balzac, La Muse du département, in La Comédie humaine, ed. P.-G. Castex, 12 vols (Paris, 1976-81), IV (1976), p. 649. Evans claims that Balzac’s idea is parodied in various prose poems, including ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ and ‘Les Veuves’. Baudelaire and Intertextuality, p. 57. 61 Cited in E. Crépet, Charles Baudelaire (Geneva, 1993), p. 66. 62 This description occurs in a letter of February 1865 which announces a selection of prose poems, including ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, destined for the editor Julien Lemer (C II 465). It may be significant that Gustave Bourdin, in the key Figaro article of 5 July 1857 that may have drawn the attention of the censors to Les Fleurs du Mal, described the poems as ‘[des] monstruosités’ (monstrosities). Even in a sympathetic article on Baudelaire’s verse by Armand Fraisse, the book is described as a quasi-medical collection of monstrosities. A. Fraisse, Armand Fraisse sur Baudelaire: 1857-1869, ed. C. Pichois and V. Pichois (Gembloux, 1973), pp. 27-28. 63 Maclean, ‘Baudelaire and the Paradox of Procreation’, p. 90. Evans describes Le Spleen de Paris as ‘a self-consciously “monstrous” or hybrid work’. Baudelaire andIntertextuality, p. xii. Y.-G. Le Dantec describes the category of the poème en prose as ‘un monstre hybride’ (a hybrid monster). Y.-G. Le Dantec, ‘Sur le poème en prose’, La Revue, 15 October 1948, p. 760 (cited in B. Johnson, ‘Quelques conséquences de la différence anatomique des textes: Pour une théorie du poème en prose’, Poétique, 28 (1976), 450-65). Michel Beaujour refers to ‘this oxymoronic monster, the prose poem’. M. Beaujour, ‘Short Epiphanies: Two Contextual Approaches to the French Prose Poem’, in The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice, ed. M. A. Caws and H. Riffaterre (New York, 1983), pp. 39-

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If an alternative perspective may be glimpsed in the text of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, beyond the narrator’s interpretation of events, this does not, of course, mean that textual lack is effaced, missing answers restored. Maclean writes of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ that ‘Any solution to the enigma would be hypothetical, representing an intellectual satisfaction, a symbolic filling of a lack, which ipso facto remains unsatisfiable.’64 At the same time, however, not to raise questions about the enigmatic elements of the prose poem would be to ignore the trauma (etymologically, the ‘wound’) in the text. The ‘solution’ or diagnosis proposed here is, undoubtedly, a hypothetical one, because it lacks all material proof beyond a catalogue of symptoms. However, rather than filling out a lack, this diagnosis, because unprovable, insists on the perpetuity of lack. It emphasizes, in other words, the necessarily abortive, incomplete nature of our knowledge of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ and of its author’s intentions.

Another poem which places a prostitute figure at its centre and which lends itself to a split-perspective reading is ‘La Belle Dorothée’, first published in La Presse in 1862.65 Commentaries of the prose poem tend to pair it with the verse poem ‘Bien loin d’ici’, because both texts have their origins in the poet’s memory of his 1841 stay in Réunion and both describe a female character named Dorothée. However, while there is general agreement among editors and commentators that the subject of the verse poem is a prostitute, some ambiguity has surrounded the question of the prose character’s occupation. Even now that it has been widely accepted that all the signs in the text point to the fact that Dorothée is a prostitute,66 there has been no real consideration of how this fact problematizes the narrator’s position. It may be that the text itself is designed in such a way as to encourage the reader to overlook both the female character’s profession and the implications, once this profession is recognized, for the person of the narrator. In other words, it may be that the text operates somehow to dull our critical senses. The prose poem begins with an evocation of the voluptuous and deathly slothfulness induced by the terrible heat of a vertical sun. Dorothée alone is out walking on the deserted road. The text describes in languorous detail the physical appearance of this beautiful black woman: she is wearing a clinging pink silk dress and heavy earrings and is carrying a red parasol. The narrator explains Dorothée’s inappropriate attire and the fact that she is out walking at midday by repeated

59 (p. 50). On Baudelaire’s ‘obsession’ with monstrosity, see J. L. Steinmetz, Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal’: L ’Intériorité de la forme ([np], 1989), pp. 161-76. 64 Narrative as Performance, p. 154. 65 ‘La Belle Dorothée’, OC I 316-17. An earlier version of this reading was published in M. Scott, ‘Superfluous Intrigues in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems’, French Studies, 55.3 (2001), 351-62. 66 Pommier deduced in 1945 that Dorothée is a prostitute. Dans les Chemins de Baudelaire, p. 348. Kopp does the same in his 1969 edition of the prose poems (p. 282).

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reference to her prodigious vanity. It is claimed, for example, that she is ‘heureuse de vivre et souriant d’un blanc sourire, comme si elle apercevait au loin dans l’espace un miroir reflétant sa démarche et sa beauté’ (happy to be alive and smiling a white/vacant smile, as if she glimpsed far in the distance a mirror reflecting her bearing and her beauty). The narrator goes on to propose that the reason the woman is out in the cruel heat is that she has a meeting with ‘quelque jeune officier qui, sur des plages lointaines, a entendu parler par ses camarades de la célèbre Dorothée’ (some young officer who, on distant beaches, has heard tell from his comrades of the famous Dorothy). At the end of the text, we learn that she is saving her ‘piastres’ desperately so as to buy her eleven-year old sister back from a slave master. In conclusion, the narrator exclaims virulently that the man will, no doubt, release the sister, because Te maître de l’enfant est si avare, trop avare pour comprendre une autre beauté que celle des écus!’ (the child’s master is so miserly, too miserly to understand any beauty other than that of money!) There is an oblique suggestion here that the narrator would know better than to release the young girl, whom he describes, perhaps lasciviously, as ‘déjà mûre, et si belle!’ (already ripe, and so beautiful!) The narrator never actually states that Dorothée is a prostitute. Indeed, he does not acknowledge her penury and her suffering at all until the moment when this acknowledgement can be framed as an attack on the anti-aesthetic slave owner. The overt nature of the text’s attack on materialism at its conclusion, combined with the sensuousness of the poem’s form and content, seem to operate to blind us to the narrator’s suppression of the reality of Dorothée’s pain which, like her person, forms ‘sur la lumière une tache éclatante et noire’ (a brilliant black spot against the light). If (some) commentators have deduced from the evidence of the text that the woman’s excruciating midday walk in pink silk dress and bare feet is driven by something other than pure vanity, then this necessarily poses problems for our relation, as readers, to a narrator who repeatedly trivializes her motivations. ‘La Belle Dorothée’ would appear, like ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, to play upon our blind spot to the suffering that goes on behind appearances. As Michel Schneider tellingly remarks, Dorothée has ‘Une beauté qui aveugle.’ (A beauty that blinds.)67 If Dorothée’s sister is a slave, and if the text derives from Baudelaire’s memory of his 1841 visit to Réunion, then it is probable that Dorothée, described as a freed slave in the prose poem, represents one of the ‘quelques centaines d’affranchis’ (few hundred emancipated slaves) who existed prior to the general emancipation of 20 December 1848.68 By insisting on Dorothée’s laziness — Ta paresseuse Dorothée’ (lazy Dorothy) — and vanity — ‘Dorothée est si prodigieusement coquette’ (Dorothy is so fantastically appearance-conscious) — , the narrator simply recycles clichés about emancipated slaves, repeatedly described in the newspaper and official reports of Réunion as lazy and vain. These clichés were doubly applicable to ex-slaves who became prostitutes; the director of Réunion’s bureau des mœurs, for example, said the following in 1864: ‘La paresse, le libertinage, 67 M. Schneider, Baudelaire: Les Années profondes ([Paris], 1994), p. 53. 68 S. Fuma, L'Esclavagisme à la Réunion, 1794-1848 (Paris, 1992), p. 17.

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l’intempérance précoce font un grand nombre de prostituées et surtout le goût de la toilette et de la parure.’ (Laziness, dissoluteness, and youthful excesses create a large number of prostitutes and especially the taste for clothes and finery.)69 The role of penury in a woman’s decision to become a prostitute is strangely occluded. In the opening paragraph of the prose poem, the sun is described as inducing a paralysing sleep in the townspeople. The densely alliterative texture of the paragraph might be understood to produce a similar effect in the reader: Le soleil accable la ville de sa lumière droite et terrible; le sable est éblouissant et la mer miroite. Le monde stupéfié s’affaisse lâchement et fait la sieste, une sieste qui est une espèce de mort savoureuse où le dormeur, à demi éveillé, goûte les voluptés de son anéantissement. (The sun beats down on the town with its straight and terrible light; the sand is dazzling and the sea shimmers. The stupefied world slumps slackly into a siesta, a siesta that is a kind of flavoursome death where the sleeper, half awake, tastes the sensual pleasures of his annihilation.)

The centrality of the sun in the sky anticipates the centrality, in the text, of the analogy between enslavement and aesthetics, the symmetry between slave master and aesthetically sensitive narrator being most clearly established in the central paragraph of ‘La Belle Dorothée’. However, just as the sun is most blinding when it is in the centre of the sky, the analogy between narrator and slave master would seem to be least visible when it is most glaring: De temps en temps la brise de mer soulève par le coin sa jupe flottante et montre sa jambe luisante et superbe; et son pied, pareil aux pieds des déesses de marbre que l’Europe enferme dans ses musées, imprime fidèlement sa forme sur le sable fin. Car Dorothée est si prodigieusement coquette, que le plaisir d’être admirée l’emporte chez elle sur l’orgueil de l’affranchie, et, bien qu’elle soit libre, elle marche sans souliers. (From time to time the sea breeze lifts the comer of her fluttering skirt and reveals her superb and gleaming leg; and her foot, like the feet of the marble goddesses that Europe shuts up in its art galleries, faithfully prints its form on the fine sand. For Dorothy is so fantastically appearance-conscious that the pleasure of being admired prevails, for her, over the pride of being a freed slave, and, although she is free, she walks without shoes.)

69 Cited in Fuma, L Esclavagisme, p. 67. As Sudel Fuma points out, a reluctance to work and a taste for frivolity were understandable reactions to years of oppression (p. 39). See Parent-Duchâtelet’s claim that ‘La vanité et le désir de briller sous des habits somptueux sont, avec la paresse, une des causes les plus actives de la prostitution, particulièrement à Paris.’ (Vanity and the desire to stand out in sumptuous clothes are, with laziness, among the most active causes of prostitution, particularly in Paris.) De la prostitution, I, p. 91. Admittedly, Baudelaire too seems to have associated indolence, or at least its appearance, with prostitution. See OC I 98, OC II 720-21.

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Kaplan writes that this passage, with its revelation that Dorothée is a former slave, shocks the reader out of his or her pleasurable absorption in her beauty: ‘Beauty now becomes a person.’70 However, it is not sure that the narrator, or the reader for that matter, sees beauty as a person. Yves Bonnefoy, accordingly, writes that ‘La Belle Dorothée’ is a purely visual text, ‘a painting simply of perception and its joys’, the only indication of narratorial/authorial reflectiveness being the anxiety expressed about Dorothée’s fate if she were to go to Paris.71 Returning to the passage just quoted, and leaving aside the fact that it is debatable whether Dorothée is freer as a prostitute than as a slave, the aesthetic gaze of the narrator is implicitly aligned, here, with the attitude of the slave master. By referring twice to Dorothée’s emancipation from slavery in the very paragraph in which the appropriation of exotic artefacts by European museums is evoked, the text insinuates a parallel between art and enslavement. Furthermore, the narrator’s concentration on Dorothée’s physical beauty is framed in terms suggestive of the franking of coins and bank notes: her skirt peels off her body to reveal a leg that is ‘luisante et superbe’ (gleaming and superb), while her foot accurately prints its mark in the sand. Two paragraphs later in the text, Dorothée, whose very name contains the French word for gold,72 is described as ‘belle et froide comme le bronze’ (beautiful and cold as bronze). The fact that ‘affranchir’ can mean ‘to frank’ as well as ‘to set free’ further insinuates the analogy between the narrator’s aesthetic gaze and the slave master’s avarice. Finally, the narrator’s exclusion of the possibility that Dorothée’s feet are bare as a result of penury, market demand, or a refusal to forget her former state participates in the logic of blindness to the other that governs the slave master’s treatment of her sister.73 If, in ‘La Belle Dorothée’, the sister’s master is blind to beauty, seeing only commerce, the narrator is blind to work, seeing only beauty. Each type of vision might be understood to be as cruelly reductive as the other. Indeed, the cruelty of the narrator is suggested by a number of details in the text. In the first paragraph, he refers to ‘[une] mort savoureuse’ ([a] flavoursome death) and to ‘les voluptés de [F]anéantissement’ (the sensual pleasures of [...] annihilation), thereby associating death with a particularly intense form of pleasure. Then, after referring to how Dorothée’s pink dress ‘tranche vivement sur les ténèbres de sa peau’ (forms a vivid 70 Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, p. 100. 71 Y. Bonnefoy, “‘La Belle Dorothée”, or Poetry and Painting’, trans. J. Plug, in Baudelaire and the Poetics o f Modernity, ed. P. A. Ward (Nashville, 2001), pp. 85-97. 72 On this point, see Evans, Baudelaire and Intertextuality, p. 113, and J.-C. Susini, ‘Pour une lecture excentrique du Spleen de Paris de Baudelaire’, Bulletin Baudelairien, 33.2 (1999), 62-74 (p. 69). On the significance of gold in the prose poems as a whole, see A.-M. Brinsmead, ‘A Trading of Souls: Commerce as Poetic Practice in the Petits poèmes en prose\ Romanic Review, 79.3 (1988), 452-65. Anne-Marie Brinsmead also discusses the relationship between the poet and the figure of the prostitute in the prose poems. 73 Christopher L. Miller remarks that shoes would be ‘the sign of freedom’ for Dorothée. According to him, the latter’s barefoot state ‘represents vanity overpowering the semiotics of emancipation’. C. L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, 1985), p. 120.

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contrast with the darkness of her skin), a description that contains an oblique allusion to violence (‘trancher vivement’ as ‘to cut sharply’), he continues the suggestion of butchery by stating that her red parasol ‘projette sur son visage sombre le fard sanglant de ses reflets’ (casts onto her dark face the bloodlike rouge of its reflections). It seems fitting that in this text, where the suffering of the principal character is hidden from view by the sensual spell cast by the text, eroticism should be so closely associated with pain. Anticipating, perhaps, the ambiguity of the barmaid’s expression in Edouard Manet’s Un bar aux Folies-Bergères (1882), Dorothée’s smile (‘blanc sourire’) is white or vacant depending broadly on whether one chooses to read her as a tropical beauty or as a prostitute.74 Like her smile, the feather fan in Dorothée’s hut may serve as a mise en abyme of the dual perspective presented by the text: as a static mirror, it offers a woman’s beautiful reflection for our delectation; as something that the reader must unsettle a little, however, it suggests the extent to which that woman must suffer in the terrible heat: Pourquoi a-t-elle quitté sa petite case si coquettement arrangée, dont les fleurs et les nattes font à si peu de frais un parfait boudoir; où elle prend tant de plaisir à se peigner, à fumer, à se faire éventer ou à se regarder dans le miroir de ses grands éventails de plumes, pendant que la mer, qui bat la plage à cent pas de là, fait à ses rêveries indécises un puissant et monotone accompagnement, et que la marmite de fer, où cuit un ragoût de crabes au riz et au safran, lui envoie, du fond de la cour, ses parfums excitants? (Why has she left her little hut, so coquettishly arranged, whose flowers and mats so inexpensively make it a perfect boudoir; where she takes so much pleasure in combing her hair, smoking, being fanned or looking at herself in the mirror of her large feather fans, while the sea, which pounds the shore a hundred feet from there, provides her vague day-dreams with a powerful and monotonous accompaniment, and while the iron pot, cooking a crab stew with rice and saffron, sends her, from the bottom of the yard, its exciting fragrances?)

The discreet placement of ‘à si peu de frais’ (so inexpensively) implies a suppression of Dorothée’s hardship by the narrator, while the syntactic sidelining of ‘se faire éventer’ (being fanned) by the subsequent clause hints at the narrator’s occlusion of the functional by the frivolous. This eclipsing of the prosaic is figured stylistically too: ‘se faire éventer’ is a far more pedestrian construction than the richly suggestive ‘se regarder dans le miroir de ses grands éventails de plumes’ (looking at herself in the mirror of her large feather fans).75 The fan can point either

74 I am indebted to Sonya Stephens for drawing my attention to the links between my argument and T. J. Clark’s analysis of Manet’s painting. T. J. Clark, The Painting o f Modern Life: Paris in the Art o f Manet and His Followers (London, 1990 [1985]), pp. 23958. 75 See the exchange in French Studies Bulletin on the nature of the mirror in Dorothée’s fan: R. Lloyd, ‘Some Reflections on “La Belle Dorothée’” , French Studies Bulletin, 41 (199192), 8-10; M. McAllester Jones, “‘La Belle Dorothée”: Further Reflections’, French Studies

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towards uncomfortable heat or coquettishness (variants of the word ‘coquette’ featuring twice in the text): the narrator evidently prefers to focus on the latter possibility. Similarly, the narrator’s presentation of Dorothée’s cooking ignores the mundane reality of an ex-slave’s life, as presented by Sudel Fuma: Leur ancienne condition d’esclave les avait habitués aux privations alimentaires qu’ils supportaient maintenant avec la plus grande facilité. L’affranchi mangeait ce qu’il pouvait avoir, substituant la qualité par la quantité, se contentant d’un peu de riz ou de légumes et quelquefois d’un peu de poisson salé.76 (Their formerly enslaved condition accustomed them to nutritional deprivations that they tolerated now with the greatest ease. The emancipated slave ate what he could get, substituting quantity for quality, contenting himself with a small portion of rice or vegetables and sometimes with a little salted fish.)

A crab and rice dish that seems exciting to the narrator may translate into nothing more than subsistence for an ex-slave who lives only a few steps away from the sea. Similarly, just as fragrances that are ‘excitants’ (exciting/arousing) for the narrator may not be perceived as such by Dorothée, the powerful and monotonous sound of the sea pounding the beach close to her hut may not be interpreted by her as an entirely benign accompaniment to her supposedly obscure day-dreams.77 Turning a blind eye to Dorothée’s profession and to the functionality of the objects in her hut permits the impersonal narrator of the prose poem to present the object of his admiration as utterly frivolous and narcissistic. For Baudelaire’s narrator, it would seem that Dorothée is beautiful only to the extent that she can be distanced from the use to which she puts her body. According to Freud, scotomization, or the refusal to recognize an unpalatable reality (namely, that the female has no penis), is characteristic of fetishism.78 Freud’s repeated references to the fetishistic appeal of the foot, in particular, are interesting in view of the narrator’s concentration on Dorothée’s foot in the numerically central paragraph of the prose poem.79 Another aspect of the text that points to a fetishistic investment of Bulletin, 42 (1992), 20-21; E. Souffrin-Le Breton, ‘More on the Mirror of “La Belle Dorothée’” , French Studies Bulletin, 50 (1994), 16-18. 76 S. Fuma, Esclaves et citoyens, le destin de 62.000 Réunionnais: Histoire de l ’insertion des affranchis de 1848 dans la société réunionnaise (Saint Denis, 1979), p. 91. 77 This monotony is intensified by the assonances and alliteration of the text, highlighted by Lloyd: ‘La mer, qui bat la plage à cent pas de là.’ Baudelaire’s World, p. 171. 78 Standard Edition, XXIII, p. 202. See also ‘Fetishism’, Standard Edition, XXI, pp. 15257, on scotomization. 79 On foot fetishism, see Freud, Standard Edition, VII, p. 155; IX, pp. 45-46; XXI, pp. 155. Mario Praz, citing an episode from Baudelaire’s biography by way of illustration, underlines the link between foot fetishism and sadism. M. Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. A. Davidson, 2nd edn. (London, 1970), p. 290. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting refers to the fetishization of Dorothée’s foot by the narrator, in the context of a reading of ‘La Belle Dorothée’ as a dramatization of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. According to this critic, the text shows that prostitution, far from being a form of sexual

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the prostitute is its repeated association of Dorothée with mirrors and reflections, fetish objects often having reflective properties ascribed to them by their admirers: she is described as ‘une tache éclatante’ (a brilliant spot); her red parasol casts ‘ses reflets’ (its reflections) onto her dark face; her leg is ‘luisante’ (gleaming); Dorothée allegedly fixes an imaginary mirror in the distance as she walks; she is compared to bronze; and she admires her image in a feather mirror. The dazzling qualities of the fetishized female object would seem to disable any recognition by Baudelaire’s narrator of her trade, even if he must also be assumed to be privy to this knowledge, given his familiarity with other details of her life, including her activities inside her hut.80 In connection with the apparent romanticization of the tropics in texts such as ‘La Belle Dorothée’, Jean Prévost points out that a poet as gifted as Baudelaire ‘aurait pu, même à vingt et un ans, apercevoir les maladies tropicales, le fléau de l’esclavage’ (could, even at the age of twenty-one, have seen the tropical illnesses, the scourge of slavery), and laments the fact that ‘l’idée qu’il garde de son voyage aux Iles semble recommencer les rêves de pureté et d’innocence du XVIIIe siècle et de Jean-Jacques’ (the idea that he kept of his trip to the Isles seems to continue the dreams of purity and innocence of the eighteenth century and Jean-Jacques [Rousseau]).81 However, Baudelaire’s seeming oversight is thrown into doubt by a verse written about ten years after his trip and about ten years before the writing of the prose poem: Mais pour que rien ne soit jeté Qui serve à payer l’esclavage, Elles [les fleurs de l’art et de l’amour] grossiront l’apanage De la commune liberté.82 (But so that nothing is sown / That serves to fund slavery, / They [the flowers of art and love] will swell the privilege / Of collective freedom.)

Furthermore, Ernest Prarond notes that while the poet recounted very little about his trip to the islands of Mauritius and Réunion, he did tell his friends about two incidents: the first forms the basis of the poem ‘L’Albatros’; the second was his witnessing of the flogging of a negress. Baudelaire may thus have been more

oppression or ‘mere means of subsistence’ in Baudelaire’s eyes, is ‘an equitable and fulfilling exchange’. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, in La Belle Dorothé, in Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC, 1999), p. 70. 80 On the apparent brilliance of the fetish object, see G. Rosolato, ‘Le Fétichisme dont se dérobe l’objet’, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, 2 (1970), 31-39. Schor writes that ‘it is in the nature of the fetish to be, like the purloined letter, both perfectly visible and totally ignored’. See N. Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (New York, 1985), p. 120. 81 Baudelaire, p. 25. 82 Manuscript version o f ‘La Rançon’, OC I 1159.

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affected by his brush with slavery than is suggested by its indulgent treatment in the poems ‘A une Malabaraise’, whose date of composition may have been prior to the trip, and ‘La Vie antérieure’.83 In L ’École païenne, published ten years before ‘La Belle Dorothée’, Baudelaire writes scathingly about the misogyny of the artist who values physical beauty too highly: L’utile, le vrai, le bon, le vraiment aimable, toutes ces choses lui seront inconnues. Infatué de son rêve fatigant, il voudra en infatuer et en fatiguer les autres. Il ne pensera pas à sa mère, à sa nourrice; il déchirera ses amis, ou ne les aimera que pour leur forme; sa femme, s’il en a une, il la méprisera et l’avilira.84 (The useful, the true, the good, the truly loveable, all of these things will be unknown to him. Infatuated with his tiresome dream, he will want others to be infatuated and tired by it. He will not think of his mother, of his nanny; he will tear his friends apart, or will love them only for their form ; his wife, if he has one, he will hold in contempt and demean.)

Gautier might be considered such an artist. Indeed, Souffrin-Le Breton points to possible intertextual references, in ‘La Belle Dorothée’, to the work of Gautier, noting the fact that a fixed feathered fan with a mirror in its centre also features in Mademoiselle de Maupin,85 Infact, a resemblance between Gautier’s male narrator and the narrator of ‘La Belle Dorothée’ is suggested by statements such as the following by the former: ‘je donnerais cinquante âmes pour un pied mignon’ (I would give fifty souls for a dainty foot); ‘Je considère la femme, à la manière antique, comme une belle esclave destinée à nos plaisirs’ (In the manner of the ancients, I consider woman to be a beautiful slave intended for our pleasures); and ‘Votre maîtresse sculptée ne diffère de la véritable qu’en ce qu’elle est un peu plus dure et ne parle pas, deux défauts très légers!’ (Your mistress, sculpted, only differs from the real one in that she is a little harder and does not talk, two very slight faults!)86 Given that Baudelaire states in his literary criticism that ‘La puérile utopie 83 See Prarond’s testimony in Pichois, Baudelaire: Études et témoignages, p. 25. Blin attributes the vividness of Baudelaire’s memory of the flogging to his supposed erotic pleasure in sadism. Le Sadisme de Baudelaire, p. 27; however, there is nothing in Prarond’s account to suggest that the memory was a pleasurable one. On the dating of ‘A une Malabaraise’, see Pichois’s note, OC I 1159-60. 84 OC I I 48. 85 ‘More on the Mirror’, pp. 16-17. Labarthe writes that ‘“La Belle Dorothée” semble se résumer en une célébration toute gautiérienne de la forme.’ (‘Beautiful Dorothy’ seems to amount to a wholly Gautierian celebration of form.) P. Labarthe, Baudelaire et la tradition de l ’allégorie (Geneva, 1999), p. 384. 86 See T. Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (Paris, 1966), pp. 133, 194, 257. Gautier’s wellknown anti-utilitarian argument in the preface to his novel (1835) may be evoked obliquely in at least two other prose poems: Gautier’s statement that ‘malheureusement, on ne saurait se plaquer sur le ventre quelques rimes bariolées en manière de gilet’ (unfortunately it is impossible to throw a few colourful rhymes like a waistcoat over one’s belly) (p. 20)

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de l’école de Part pour Part, en excluant la morale, et souvent même la passion, était nécessairement stérile’ (The puerile utopia of the art fo r art's sake school, by excluding morality, and often even passion, was necessarily sterile), and describes as ‘poètes marmoréens et anti-humains’ (marmoreal and anti-human poets) those for whom ‘toute chose belle est essentiellement inutile’ (every beautiful thing is essentially useless), it is possible that ‘La Belle Dorothée’ parodies Gautier’s view, expressed in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, that ‘Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien.’ (The only truly beautiful thing is the one that cannot serve a purpose.)87 However, the fact that Baudelaire was also a great admirer of Gautier does not allow the reader any certainty as to whether the aesthetically inclined narrator is the target of the prose poem’s covert irony. The more obvious object of scorn is, after all, the anti-aesthetic slave master. As in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’, then, Baudelaire’s text allows for no absolute certainty as to the direction of its irony.

What Chambers writes in connection with ‘Au lecteur’ might also be said of ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ and ‘La Belle Dorothée’: according to him, the prefatory poem of Les Fleurs du Mal conceals ‘une attaque dénonciatrice dirigée contre F “hypocrisie” bourgeoise, que personnifie le lecteur’ (a denunciatory attack directed against bourgeois ‘hypocrisy’, personified by the reader); the duplicity of the poem, which mirrors the hypocrisy of the public, needs to be recognized before the reader can realize that s/he has been covertly attacked.88 Similarly, readers may arrive at the end of the two prose poems discussed in this chapter without any suspicion of having been covertly lambasted for acquiescing in dubious narratorial readings of the female characters. In the case of both ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ and ‘La Belle Dorothée’, the reader’s understanding undergoes a radical shift if s/he no longer accepts at face value the narrator’s version of events, choosing instead to seek out discreetly placed analogies or patterns in the text. Whether or not Baudelaire designed the prose poems so as to offer this self-transforming possibility is, ultimately, undecidable; the texts elude our grasp as deftly as prostitutes, in the nineteenth century, slipped through the nets of medicine and the law.89 anticipates the reference in ‘Les Bons Chiens’ to the waistcoat in exchange for which the prose poem was apparently offered, while the passage comparing the tastes of the public to those of fish attracted by repugnant bait rather than a rose would seem to be echoed by ‘Le Chien et le flacon’. 87 OC II 26, 263. Mademoiselle de Maupin, p. 23. 88 R. Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition: Les Débuts du modernisme en France (Paris, 1987), p. 146. 89 Charles Bemheimer’s study of the phantasmatic forces at work in a number of literary and historical nineteenth-century representations of prostitution discusses failed attempts on the part of literature, science, and the law to enclose prostitutes within a formal structure. C. Bemheimer, Figures o f III Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Durham, NC, 1997).

Chapter 3

Morality

Baudelaire was highly critical of what he considered to be the moral degradation of society in his time. Like Joseph de Maistre, whom he greatly admired, the poet associated this prevailing immorality with Enlightenment progressivism: n’est-ce pas une chose véritablement stupéfiante de voir une nation, plusieurs nations, toute l’humanité bientôt, dire à ses sages, à ses sorciers: Je vous aimerai et je vous ferai grands, si vous me persuadez que nous progressons sans le vouloir, inévitablement, — en dormant; débarrassez-nous de la responsabilité, voilez pour nous l’humiliation des comparaisons, sophistiquez l’histoire, et vous pourrez vous appeler les sages des sages? [...] L’homme civilisé invente la philosophie du progrès pour se consoler de son abdication et de sa déchéance; cependant que l’homme sauvage, époux redouté et respecté, guerrier contraint à la bravoure personnelle, poète aux heures mélancoliques où le soleil déclinant invite à chanter le passé et les ancêtres, rase de plus près la lisière de l’idéal. [...] Comparerons-nous nos yeux paresseux et nos oreilles assourdies à ces yeux qui percent la brume, à ces oreilles qui entendraient Vherbe qui pousse?x (is it not a truly stunning thing to see a nation, several nations, soon all of humanity, say to its wise men, its wizards: I will love you and I will make you great, if you convince me that we are progressing without willing it, inevitably, — while sleeping; discharge us of responsibility, hide for us the humiliation of comparisons, adulterate the story, and you can be known as the wisest of the wise?

[...]

Civilized man invents the philosophy of progress to console himself for his abdication and his decline; while savage man, a feared and respected husband, a warrior compelled to personal bravery, a poet in the melancholic hours when the fading sun invites a song of the past and of ancestors, more closely approaches the edge of the ideal. [...] Shall we compare our lazy eyes and our deafened ears to those eyes that pierce the mist, those ears that would hear the grass growing?)

It is significant that Baudelaire figures the transformation of ‘barbarian’ man into ‘civilized’ man in terms of a dulling of the senses. For the poet, as for Maistre before him, the immorality of civilized man was linked to his unawareness. The poet repeatedly criticizes, in his writings, the suppression of the notion of original sin, a suppression that he associated with the influence of Rousseau:1

1OC II 325-6.

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BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS La plupart des erreurs relatives au beau naissent de la fausse conception du XVIIIe siècle relative à la morale. La nature fut prise dans ce temps-là comme base, source et type de tout bien et de tout beau possibles. La négation du péché originel ne fut pas pour peu de chose dans l’aveuglement général de cette époque.2 (The majority of errors with regard to beauty come from the eighteenth century’s misconception with regard to morality. Nature was taken at that time as the basis, source, and model of all possible good and beauty. The negation of original sin played no small part in the general blindness of the period.)

According to Baudelaire, nineteenth-century morality was a direct consequence of this Rousseauean blindness to innate evil: Il est agréable que quelques explosions de vieille vérité sautent [...] au visage de tous les complimenteurs de l’humanité, de tous ces dorloteurs et endormeurs qui répètent sur toutes les variations possibles de ton: ‘Je suis né bon, et vous aussi, et nous tous, nous sommes nés bons!’ oubliant, non! feignant d’oublier, ces égalitaires à contresens, que nous sommes tous nés marquis pour le mal!3 (It is pleasing that a few home truths should explode [...] in the faces of all the flatterers of humanity, all those pamperers and beguilers who repeat in every possible tone of voice: T was bom good, and you too, and all of us, we were all bom good!’, forgetting, no, feigning to forget, these back-to-front egalitarians, that we were all bom with the mark of evil!)

In his notes on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, Baudelaire establishes an unfavourable contrast between the moral unawareness of the nineteenth century and the self-awareness of eighteenth-century libertinism: En réalité, le satanisme a gagné. Satan s’est fait ingénu. Le mal se connaissant était moins affreux et plus près de la guérison que le mal s’ignorant. G. Sand inférieure à de Sade.

[...] C’était toujours le mensonge, mais on n’adorait pas son semblable. On le trompait, mais on se trompait moins soi-même.4 (In reality, Satanism has won. Satan has made an innocent of himself. Evil knowing itself was less horrible and closer to cure than evil oblivious to itself. G. Sand inferior to de Sade.

[...] It was still lies, but they didn’t worship their fellow man. They deceived him, but they deceived themselves less.)

2OC II 715. 3 OC II 323. 4 OC U 68-69

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Baudelaire himself aspired to moral awareness, or what the poet describes in the verse poem ‘L’Irrémédiable’ as ‘La conscience dans le Mal.’ (Consciousness in evil.) Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom such self-consciousness stemmed from a particularly reprehensible form of narcissism, remarks that Baudelaire is ‘l’homme qui ne s’oublie jamais. Il se regarde voir; il regarde pour se voir regarder.’ (The man who never forgets himself. He looks at himself seeing; he looks to see himself seeing.)5 Suffice it to say that the Baudelairean self-awareness that Sartre associated with bad faith was considered by the poet to be something more akin to good faith in badness. How, then, did this ethic of self-awareness translate itself into Baudelaire’s poetic project? Even apart from the fact that the trial of 1857 was centrally concerned with scrutinizing the moral significance of Les Fleurs du Mal, it is virtually impossible, in discussions of Baudelaire’s poetry, to separate aesthetics from questions of morality. This is suggested by the very title of the collection, which associates flowers, emblems of the beautiful, with evil. The prefatory poem, ‘Au lecteur’, furthermore, takes the form of an account of the moral shortcomings of a humanity that is ultimately particularized in the figures of reader and poet. As Leakey points out, a number of the poems included in Les Fleurs du Mal are strongly didactic in flavour; however, Leakey also notes that Baudelaire’s overtly didactic poems tend to stem from the 1848-52 period, during which the poet also wrote two articles that attribute a moral dimension to art: the article on Pierre Dupont (1851) and L'École païenne (1852).6 At other times in his life, Baudelaire was more likely to express the opinion that great art is never intentionally or explicitly moralizing: ‘il y a beaucoup à parier que si vous voulez, vous poète, vous imposer à l’avance un but moral, vous diminuerez considérablement votre puissance poétique’ (the odds are that if you want, as a poet, to impose a moral aim on yourself in advance, you will reduce your poetic power considerably).7 Art that was made to serve moral ends was guilty, according to the poet, of what Poe called the heresy of the didactic.8 Accordingly, Baudelaire rejects as monstrous, in 1861, the belief that ‘le but de la poésie est de répandre les lumières parmi le peuple’ (the goal of poetry is to spread enlightenment among the people).9 In his 1861 essay on Victor Hugo, Baudelaire opposes two types of morality discernible in literature: on the one hand ‘cette morale prêcheuse qui, par son air de pédanterie, par son ton didactique, peut gâter les plus beaux morceaux de poésie’ (that preaching morality that, by its air of pedantry and by its didactic tone, can spoil the most beautiful pieces of poetry), and on the other ‘une morale inspirée qui se glisse, invisible, dans la matière poétique, comme les fluides impondérables dans 5 J.-P. Sartre, Baudelaire ([Paris], 1963), p. 26. 6 F. W. Leakey, ‘Baudelaire: The Poet as Moralist’, in Studies in Modem French Literature: Presented to P. Mansell Jones, ed. L. J. Austin, G. Rees, E. Vinaver (Manchester, 1961), pp. 196-291. 7OC II 143 (1861). 8 See OC II 112,333,337. 9 OC II 145.

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toute la machine du monde’ (an inspired morality that invisibly slips into poetic material, like imponderable fluids into the machine of the world).10 In a similar vein, the poet elsewhere opposes ‘la morale officielle’ (official morality) and ‘la vraie morale’ (true morality), the former detracting from T art vrai’ (true art), and the latter complementing it.11 If poetry was not (usually), for him, a means of disseminating moral lessons, it was nevertheless itself a moral practice in the sense that it took the form of selfanalysis: Une foule de gens se figurent que le but de la poésie est un enseignement quelconque, qu’elle doit tantôt fortifier la conscience, tantôt perfectionner les mœurs, tantôt enfin démontrer quoi que ce soit d’utile. [...] La poésie, pour peu qu’on veuille descendre en soi-même, interroger son âme, rappeler ses souvenirs d’enthousiasme, n’a pas d’autre but qu’elle-même.12 (Many people imagine that the aim of poetry is some kind of lesson, that it must fortify the conscience, or improve popular morals, or, finally, demonstrate anything whatsoever that is useful. [...] Poetry, as long as one is willing to go down inside oneself, interrogate one’s soul, recall one’s memories of enthusiasm, has no other aim but itself.)

The production of poetry was thus, for Baudelaire, inseparable from a kind of interrogation of one’s soul. It can be surmised that what the poet called official morality involved, then, a lack of critical self-reflection, while ‘true’ morality would be the product of a hard-won lucidity, a continual struggle against one’s own complacency and hypocrisy. This self-questioning attitude was not the sole responsibility of the author, however. Baudelaire expected a continuous critical vigilance on the part of the reader of literature: il faut peindre les vices tels qu’ils sont, ou ne pas les voir. Et si le lecteur ne porte pas en lui un guide philosophique et religieux qui l’accompagne dans la lecture du livre, tant pis pour lui.13 (vices must be painted as they are, or not seen. And if the reader does not carry within him a philosophical and religious guide that accompanies him in the reading of the book, too bad for him.)

In his piece on Louis Ménard’s Prométhée délivré, the poet indicates that the philosophy of a poem must be produced by the reader; similarly, he writes of Madame Bovary that ‘La logique de l’oeuvre suffit à toutes les postulations de la morale, et c’est au lecteur à tirer les conclusions de la conclusion’ (The logic of the work satisfies all the postulates of morality, and it is up to the reader to draw the 10 OC II 137. See also OC II 142-43, 333-34. 11 OC II 186. 12 OC II 333. 13 OC I I 42.

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conclusions from the conclusion); and in his article on Léon Cladel’s Les Martyrs ridicules the poet states that the author should have remained more invisible under his mask, leaving the task of moral judgement to the reader.14 Despite the importance attributed by Baudelaire to the reader’s moral autonomy, however, many of the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris are explicitly didactic. In other words, the moral deductions of Baudelaire’s narrators or poetfigures are far more easily identifiable as the kind imposed on poetry from without than with the kind that inhabit it from within. The extrinsic character of the texts’ morality is underlined by Hiddleston, who observes that, in some of the prose poems, there exists ‘a gap which is difficult to overcome’ between the description and the moral significance explicitly attributed to it.15 The overtly moralizing thrust of the prose poems is emphasized in Baudelaire’s letter of 1866 to CharlesAugustin Sainte-Beuve, in which the collection is said to involve ‘un nouveau Joseph Delorme accrochant sa pensée rapsodique à chaque accident de sa flânerie et tirant de chaque objet une morale désagréable’ (a new Joseph Delorme hanging his rhapsodical thought on every accident of his wandering and drawing from every object an unpleasant moral).16 While this statement might superficially resemble the poet’s assertions elsewhere that the aim of art was to find poetic beauty in the banal and the ugly,17 the shift of focus here from aesthetics to morality is unmistakeable. It is possible that, rather than being the products of an alteration in the poet’s views about the relationship between art and morality, the prose poems parody the didactic literature that Baudelaire held in such contempt. After all, as already mentioned, it was on grounds of immorality that Les Fleurs du Mal had been condemned in 1857: the collection was deemed guilty of i e délit d’offense à la morale religieuse’ (the crime of offending religious morality) and of Te délit d ’outrage à la morale publique et aux bonnes mœurs’ (the crime of offending public morality and good manners) by way of ‘un réalisme grossier et offensant pour la pudeur’ (a vulgar realism, offensive to decency).18 This verdict was only to confirm Baudelaire in his attitude towards bourgeois moral values, as expressed in a letter of 1853: ‘la morale de la Bourgeoisie me fait horreur’ (the morality of the Bourgeoisie disgusts me).19

14 OC II 9, 82, 186. 15 Hiddleston, Baudelaire and ‘Le Spleen de Paris’, p. 34. D. Scott notes an increased explicitness in the moral interpretations offered by Baudelaire’s narrators in the prose poems published from 1862 onwards. ‘La Fanfarlo ’ and ‘Le Spleen de Paris ’ (London, 1984), pp. 58-62. On the poet-moralist divide in the prose poems see also the introduction by D. Scott and B. Wright to La Fanfarlo: Le Spleen de Paris (Petits Poèmes en prose) (Paris, 1987). 16 C II 583. Interestingly, Sainte-Beuve’s Vie, poésie et pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829) was itself a hoax, masquerading as the autobiographical work of an imaginary writer. On this subject, see ‘Joseph Delorme’, in J.-F. Jeandillou, Supercheries littéraires: La Vie et l ’œuvre des auteurs supposés ([np], 1989), pp. 116-39. 17 See for example OC I 181, OC II 152, 176. 18 OC I 1181-82. 19 C I 216.

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While many critics have argued that the prose poems parody bourgeois morality, they have often been reluctant to dissociate Baudelaire from the narrators of the texts, tending to maintain that the latter launch their attacks on behalf of the poet.20 Accordingly, many readers subscribe to the didactic messages pronounced by the apparent authorial spokespersons. However, even apart from the fact that, as David Scott points out, ‘there does not always seem to be, on Baudelaire’s part, profound commitment to the lesson he administers’,21 the explicit moral interpretations presented by the speakers in these texts tend to be undermined by internal details. Indeed, alternative moral perspectives may be insinuated in the prose poems above and beyond their explicit lessons. In other words, the prose poems may present themselves occasionally in the guise of the kind of moralizing literature that functions to short-circuit critical reflection on the part of their readers, while also discreetly inviting the work of critical transformation. The texts would therefore indirectly satirize the readiness of Baudelaire’s contemporaries to accept or reject ready-made moral judgements without actually engaging with difficult moral questions. This blindness is often, I submit, anticipated and reflected by the peremptory moral judgements of the supposed authorial spokesperson.

The prose poem ‘Le Gâteau’ articulates a typically strong moral message at its conclusion.22 The text tells the story, narrated in the first person, of a mountain traveller who is enjoying the beauty of his surroundings until two young boys arrive on the scene and fight violently over a morsel of his bread, described by one of them as ‘gâteau’ (cake). The narrator’s pleasure in the landscape is ruined, and he finishes by lamenting the fact that a piece of bread can engender fratricidal war. The text’s ironic attack on Rousseauean ideals is more or less explicit; put very briefly, ‘Le Gâteau’ parodies the notion of the noble savage by showing the savagery to which natural innocence can be reduced; unlike Rousseau, Baudelaire held that ‘La nature ne fait que des monstres.’ (Nature makes only monsters.)23 The 20 An interesting variant of this argument is presented in Oehler’s chapter on three prose poems in Le Spleen contre Voubli, which claims that the pseudo-bourgeois poet-narrator aims to provoke the masses to reflection and action. Maclean, in a similar vein, maintains that Baudelaire’s prose poems present ‘mutant forms of bourgeois morality’, distorting dominant moral and ideological values in such a way as to encourage reader resistance. Narrative as Performance, pp. 59-60. 21 ‘La Fanfarlo ’ and ‘Le Spleen de Paris \ p. 88. 22 ‘Le Gâteau’, OC I 297-99. 23 OC II 325. On the Rousseauean intertext(s) of ‘Le Gâteau’, see M. Zimmerman, ‘Trois études sur Baudelaire et Rousseau’, in Études Baudelairiennes DC (Neuchâtel, 1981), pp. 31-71; J. Starobinski, ‘Rousseau, Baudelaire, Huysmans (les pains d’épices, le gâteau, et l’immonde tartine)’, in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry: New Essays in Honour o f Lloyd Austin, ed. M. Bowie, A. Fairlie, A. Finch (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 128-41; J. Starobinski, ‘Sur Rousseau et Baudelaire: Le Dédommagement et l’irréparable’, in Le Lieu et la formule, Hommage à Marc Eigeldinger, ed. Y. Bonnefoy et al. (Neuchâtel, 1978), pp. 47-59; M. Gutwirth, ‘A propos du Gâteau: Baudelaire, Rousseau et le recours à l’enfance’, Romanic

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narrator initially falls prey to the Rousseauean illusion that nature’s beauty offers a proof of natural human goodness: Bref, je me sentais, grâce à l’enthousiasmante beauté dont j ’étais environné, en parfaite paix avec moi-même et avec l’univers; je crois même que, dans ma parfaite béatitude et dans mon total oubli de tout le mal terrestre, j ’en étais venu à ne plus trouver si ridicules les journaux qui prétendent que l’homme est né bon. (In short, thanks to the enthusiasm-inspiring beauty by which I was surrounded, I was perfectly in peace with myself and with the universe. I even believe that, in my perfect bliss and total forgetfulness of all earthly evil, I had come to a point where I no longer found so ridiculous those newspapers that claim that man is bom good.)

The reference in the above lines to contemporary newspapers suggests that in attacking Rousseauean beliefs, the text also takes as its target nineteenth-century mores and, more specifically, the blindness of the poet’s society to natural evil. What is less obvious is that it may, in addition, target the blindness of the narrator to his own innate guiltiness. The narrator’s initial impression of inner purity — ‘mon âme me semblait aussi vaste et aussi pure que la coupole du ciel dont j ’étais enveloppé’ (my soul seemed to me to be as vast and as pure as the dome of the sky that encompassed me) — is never explicitly rejected by him. His sense of moral elevation is overtly symbolized by his mountain-top position: ie s passions vulgaires, telles que la haine et l’amour profane, m’apparaissaient maintenant aussi éloignées que les nuées qui défilaient au fond des abîmes sous mes pieds’ (vulgar passions, such as hatred and profane love, appeared to me now as remote as the clouds that filed past in the abysses beneath my feet). The narrator retains this sense of moral distance from vulgar passions even after witnessing the boys’ fight beside him, and therefore even after he has lost his symbolic physical distance from such passions: Ce spectacle m’avait embrumé le paysage, et la joie calme où s’ébaudissait mon âme avant d’avoir vu ces petits hommes avait totalement disparu; j ’en restai triste assez longtemps, me répétant sans cesse: Tl y a donc un pays superbe où le pain s’appelle du gâteau, friandise si rare qu’elle suffit pour engendrer une guerre parfaitement fratricide!’ (This sight had cast clouds over the landscape for me, and the calm joy in which my soul had been rejoicing, before seeing those little fellows, had totally disappeared; I remained saddened by it for quite a long time, constantly repeating to myself: ‘So there is a superb country where bread is called cake, a delicacy so rare that it is enough to cause a perfectly fratricidal war!’) Review, 80.1 (1989), 75-88. For a more general appraisal of Baudelaire’s ironic rewriting of Rousseau in Le Spleen de Paris, see C. Leroy, ‘Les Petits Poèmes en prose: “Palimpsestes” ou Baudelaire et Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire de Rousseau’, in Baudelaire: Nouveaux Chantiers, ed. J. Delabroy and Y. Chamet (Lille, 1995), pp. 59-70. Hiddleston focuses instead on the prose poem’s parody of Lamartine’s poetry. Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris \ pp. 75-77.

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The parodie intention of the author, as distinct from the narrator, is suggested by the ambiguity of this concluding passage. It is not at all clear, for example, whether the narrator is saddened by the spectacle of the boys’ savagery, by the recognition of social inequality, or by the disappearance of his own pleasurable tranquillity. The third possibility is underlined by Stephens, who observes that what is intimated in the final passage is ‘a loss of personal idealism, or worse, an egocentric desire for the troubles of the world to disappear so that tranquillity can reign’.24 The egocentrism of the narrator is certainly suggested by the cluster of first-person references in the passage: ‘m ’avait embrumé’ (had clouded for me), ‘mon âme’ (my soul), ‘j ’en restais triste’ (I remained sad about it), ‘me répétant’ (repeating to myself). In addition, his claim to feel sad for quite (‘assez’) a long time, when read in the context of the earlier hyperbolic tone, fails to convince us of the depth of his emotion. Furthermore, the narrator’s evocation of a superb country where bread is known as cake, by its inscription of the story in a fairytale register (an inscription that is repeated like a mantra, as if to ward off reality), has the effect of mitigating the immediacy of the horrible scene, in a gesture of de-realization that is entirely continuous with his earlier fantasy of innocence. In this regard, the narrator’s description of the event as a ‘spectacle’, a term that can denote ‘performance’ as well as ‘sight’, is significant: the narrator watches the dispute with as much detachment as if the boys were two actors fighting on a stage. After observing the two children fight over a scrap of his bread for a prolonged period of time, the narrator fails to reflect on his own complicity in the violence. Firstly, he turns a blind eye to his own responsibility in the immediate situation by neither intervening in the fight, even when it becomes bloody, nor offering a second piece of bread to resolve the conflict.25 Secondly, the narrator seems not to recognize his share of guilt as a member of a society in which children can be hungry enough to beg for and fight over a morsel of bread. Indeed, the narrator’s sense of detachment is such that he cannot refrain from laughing when he hears the first young boy, ‘d’une voix basse et rauque’ (in a low, hoarse voice), soliciting him for a piece of his so-called cake.26 Beyond the text’s more or less overt attack on Rousseauean illusions of innocence, therefore, it covertly reveals the narrator’s misplaced confidence in his

24 Baudelaire's Prose Poems, p. 101. 25 The non-intervention of the narrator is underlined by Lloyd and Stephens. R. Lloyd, ‘Taking the Cake: Some Aspects of Children’s Food in Nineteenth-Century Literature’, Romance Studies, 13 (1988), 81-88 (p. 82); Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, pp. 100101. In a similar vein, Starobinski remarks that the narrator’s charity is ‘si incomplète qu’elle équivaut à un don pervers’ (so incomplete that it amounts to a perverse gift), suggesting ‘le désir satanique de faire se déchaîner le mal en face de lui’ (the satanic desire to have evil unleashed before him). ‘Rousseau, Baudelaire, Huysmans’, p. 140. 26 Murphy, who also insists on the non-identification of narrator and author of ‘Le Gâteau’, points out that in view of the argument of Baudelaire’s essay on laughter, the narrator’s mirth here indicates his sense of personal superiority. Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, p. 323.

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own blamelessness. While the narrator of ‘Le Gâteau’ recognizes corruption in others, he would not seem to be aware of his own guiltiness. The prose poem may thus dramatize a certain blindness to personal guilt on the part of the narrator. Furthermore, to the extent that readers remain oblivious to this character’s culpability, the text may operate to highlight an analogical blindness on the part of readers. Blindness, in other words, may form part of the text’s formal dynamic. Many critics have credited the narrator of ‘Le Gâteau’, after his move from complacency to disillusionment, with a Baudelairean lucidity. Labarthe, for example, refers to ‘[un] mouvement d ’auto-dérision’ (a movement of self-mockery) on the part of the narrator.27 However, the hypothesis of self-parody effectively limits the potential scope of authorial irony in the prose poem. While the narrator of ‘Le Gâteau’ would seem to have arrived, by the end of the text, at an ironic awareness of essential human depravity, he also remains blind, ultimately, to his own blameworthiness.

‘La Solitude’ also takes the form of an explicit attack on contemporary mores that inscribes between its lines what may be an even more caustic critique of those mores.28 The text takes the form of a biting response to a philanthropic journalist who claims that ‘la solitude est mauvaise pour l’homme’ (solitude is bad for man). The narrator is proud to count himself among ‘les amoureux de la solitude et du mystère’ (the lovers of solitude and mystery), and resents the journalist’s questioning of his pleasurable state of isolation. Quite apart from the fact that Baudelaire’s own feelings about solitude were more ambivalent than this defence implies — on the one hand he considered isolation to be essential for his work, while on the other he seems to have dreaded the loneliness that retreat brought with it29 — a study of the text itself suggests an ironization of the poet’s apparent spokesman. ‘La Solitude’ begins, then, with the narrator’s mockery of a ‘gazetier philanthrope’ (philanthropic journalist) who, ‘comme tous les incrédules’ (like all non-believers), has recourse to the words of the Church Fathers in defence of his

27 P. Labarthe, ‘Le Spleen de Paris ou le livre des pauvres’, in L ’Année Baudelaire 5: Hommage à Claude Pichois ([Paris], 1999), p. 114. 28‘La Solitude’, OC 1313-14. 29 Contrast for example his complaint to Mme Aupick about ‘une sensation d’isolement insupportable’ (a sensation of intolerable loneliness) (C I 438) and his stated determination, less than two months later, to stay ‘dans [m]a cellule’ (in my cell) (C I 458). Contrast also the poet’s statements that ‘la conversation de presque tous m’est insupportable’ (the conversation of almost everyone is intolerable to me) (C I 669), that ‘j ’ai la rage de la solitude’ (I have a mania for solitude) (C I 92), and that ‘je ne m’ennuie jamais dans la solitude’ (I am never bored when in solitude) (C II 156), with his claims not to have T’âme assez forte pour supporter une solitude perpétuelle’ (a strong enough soul to tolerate a perpetual solitude) (C I 147) and that ‘Il y a des jours où la solitude m’exaspère.’ (There are days when solitude exasperates me.) (C l 191).

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argument against solitude. The text renders hypocritical the narrator’s criticism of the journalist’s strategy by concluding with his own appeal to moral authorities:30 ‘Ce grand malheur de ne pouvoir être seul!...’ dit quelque part La Bruyère, comme pour faire honte à tous ceux qui courent s’oublier dans la foule, craignant sans doute de ne pouvoir se supporter eux-mêmes. ‘Presque tous nos malheurs nous viennent de n’avoir pas su rester dans notre chambre’, dit un autre sage, Pascal, je crois, rappelant ainsi dans la cellule du recueillement tous ces affolés qui cherchent le bonheur dans le mouvement et dans une prostitution que je pourrais appeler fraternitaire, si je voulais parler la belle langue de mon siècle. (‘That great misfortune of not being able to be alone!...’ La Bruyère says somewhere, as if to shame those who rush into crowds to forget themselves, doubtless fearing their inability to tolerate themselves. ‘Almost all our misfortunes come from not being able to stay in our bedrooms’, says another thinker, Pascal, I think, thereby calling back into the meditation chamber all those panic-stricken people who seek happiness in movement and in a prostitution that I could call fratemitary, if I wanted to speak the fine language of my century.)

Apart from the fact that, as Christopher Prendergast comments, there is ‘something odd’ about the text’s recourse to seventeenth-century moralists,31 the fact that this (mis)quotation of Pascal is taken out of context suggests that something is amiss in the narrator’s logic. The original quotation reads as follows: ‘tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre’ (all the misfortune of men comes from just one thing, which is not being able to remain at rest, in a bedroom).32 ‘Le Divertissement’ (Diversion), the well-known section of the Pensées to which the narrator refers, treats of the difficulty of achieving calm; human beings are constantly in search of diversion because they need to distract themselves from thinking too deeply about their lives. The narrator of ‘La Solitude’ is correct in claiming that Pascal supports a return to contemplation on the part of those who disperse themselves in trivial amusements. However, Pascal places the emphasis on the achievement of inner calm through the renunciation of external distractions, whereas the narrator of Baudelaire’s prose poem allows himself to be irritated by the words of a journalist rather than choosing simply to retreat from distractions and interruptions. The narrator of ‘La Solitude’ is thus far from being a model of Pascalian self-containment. Indeed, he conforms strikingly to Pascal’s description of men who are perpetually caught between a desire for distraction and a desire for rest: de ces deux instincts contraires, il se forme en eux un projet confus, qui se cache à leur vue dans le fond de leur âme, qui les porte à tendre au repos par l’agitation, et à se 30 Stephens reads this appeal to these authorities as the poet-narrator’s parody of the gazetier. Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, p. 87. 31 C. Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1992), pp. 148-49. 32 B. Pascal, Œuvres complètes, ed. J. Chevalier (Paris, 1954), pp. 1138-39.

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figurer toujours que la satisfaction qu’ils n’ont point leur arrivera, si, en surmontant quelques difficultés qu’ils envisagent, ils peuvent s’ouvrir par là la porte au repos.33 (from these two opposed instincts, a confused plan forms within them, which hides itself from their view, deep inside their soul, and leads them to tend towards rest through agitation, and to imagine always that the satisfaction which they do not have will come to them if, by surmounting a few difficulties ahead of them, they can thereby open the doorway to rest.)

In his notes for a piece of literary criticism, Baudelaire accuses the academician Abel-François Villemain of being a ‘Citateur automate qui a appris pour le plaisir de citer, mais ne comprend pas ce qu’il récite.’ (Mechanical quoter who has learned for the pleasure of quoting, but who does not understand what he is reciting.)34 The same could be said of the narrator of ‘La Solitude’, whose practice of citation functions ironically to expose his ignorance about the texts he quotes. Despite the fact that Pascal’s section on ‘Le Divertissement’ argues for the value of an ascetic way of life, Baudelaire’s narrator consistently describes his solitude in terms suggestive of pleasure. He notes, for example, that isolation and social interaction can bring ‘des voluptés égales’ (equal pleasures). The following passage illustrates with particular force the narrator’s sensual enjoyment of his solitude: Je désire surtout que mon maudit gazetier me laisse m’amuser à ma guise. ‘Vous n’éprouvez donc jamais, — me dit-il, avec un ton de nez très-apostolique, — le besoin de partager vos jouissances?’ Voyez-vous le subtil envieux! Il sait que je dédaigne les siennes, et il vient s’insinuer dans les miennes, le hideux trouble-fête! (I especially wish that my accursed journalist would let me enjoy myself in my own way. ‘So do you never feel, — he says to me in a nasal, apostolic tone of voice, — the need to share your pleasures?’ Do you see the subtle envier! He knows that I scorn his, yet he tries to worm his way into mine, the hideous killjoy!)

Any qualitative difference that the narrator implies, by his mocking tone, between the gratification that he himself derives from solitude and the pleasure produced in others by social interaction is covertly undermined by the symmetry, here, between the pronouns that distinguish one set of ‘jouissances’ (pleasures) from the other. In the first version of the prose poem, published in 1855, the ‘jouissance’ of the solitary man is described in terms suggestive of what Baudelaire criticizes elsewhere as Te goût de la propriété’ (the taste for ownership): Quant à la jouissance, — les plus belles agapes fraternelles, les plus magnifiques réunions d’hommes électrisés par un plaisir commun n’en donneront jamais de comparable à celle qu’éprouve le Solitaire, qui, d’un coup d’œil, a embrassé et compris

33 Ibid. p. 1141. 34 OC II 193.

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BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS toute la sublimité d’un paysage. Ce coup d’œil lui a conquis une propriété individuelle inaliénable.35 (As for pleasure, — the finest fraternal banquets, the most magnificent meetings of men electrified by a common pleasure will never give anything comparable to the pleasure felt by the Solitary man, who in one glance has taken in and understood all the sublimity of a landscape. This glance has conquered for him inalienable individual ownership rights.)

This passage, found only in the earliest version of the text, and which could just as easily have been pronounced by the egotistical narrator of ‘Le Gâteau’, throws ironic light on the phrase ‘Voyez-vous le subtil égoïste?’ (Do you see the subtle egotist?), which appears in the versions of ‘La Solitude’ published in 1862 and 1864. Reading the deleted passage in the context of the subsequently added (and eventually deleted) question, the suggestion is that the narrator fails to recognize his own mirror image in the journalist he despises. The quotation in ‘La Solitude’ of Les Caractères seems as ironic as the citation of Pascal. Firstly, it too is a misquotation: the narrator paraphrases La Bruyère’s ‘Tout notre mal vient de ne pouvoir être seuls’ (Ail our trouble comes from not being able to be alone) as ‘Ce grand malheur de ne pouvoir être seul!’ (That great misfortune of not being able to be alone!)36 Secondly, La Bruyère’s words were themselves actually a misquotation of the quotation from Pascal already evoked, despite being cited by the narrator before the Pascal quotation. These implied gaps in the speaker’s erudition, reinforced by his failure adequately to name his sources — ‘dit quelque part La Bruyère’ (La Bruyère says somewhere), ‘dit un autre sage, Pascal, je crois’ (says another wise man, Pascal, I think) — suggest that his learning is the kind associated with immersion in, rather than retreat from, society; as Stephens puts it, it is precisely ‘the widespread peddling of acquired culture’ that is reflected in the narrator’s misquotations.37 The misquotation of La Bruyère is interesting in that it is actually a precise quotation of the epigraph to Poe’s The Man o f the Crowd,38 Given that Baudelaire follows the citation with a reference to ‘ceux qui courent s’oublier dans la foule’ (those who rush into crowds to forget themselves), the allusion to Poe’s tale would seem to be a motivated one, functioning to suggest again the mediated nature of the narrator’s erudition. Similarly, as Robert Vivier points out, the reference in ‘La 35 OC I 649, 1329. 36 J. de La Bruyère, frag. 99 of ‘De l’homme’, Les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle (Paris, 1962), p. 329. 37 Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, p. 88. Evans makes a related point when she states that the intertextual density of poems such as ‘La Solitude’ ‘might be read on one level as themselves paradoxically illustrating the fact that the apparently solitary activity of the poet is in fact itself a form of “universelle communion’” . Baudelaire and Intertextuality, p. 77. On the narrator’s misquotations in ‘La Solitude’, see also Hiddleston, Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris’, p. 50 and Hiddleston, ‘Fusée, Maxim and Commonplace in Baudelaire’, Modern Language Review, 80.3 (1985), 565-66. 38 Hiddleston makes the same observation. Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris \ p. 50.

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Solitude’ to Pascal resembles very closely the following lines from Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté: ‘le malheur de beaucoup est de ne pas savoir passer les soirs dans sa chambre. Pascal a dit quelque chose d’approchant’ (the misfortune of many people is not knowing how to spend evenings in their bedroom. Pascal said something similar).39 If the narrator is disparaging about ‘la belle langue de mon siècle’ (the fine language of my century), it would seem that his knowledge of the wisdom of previous centuries is nevertheless conditioned by his reading of the literature of his own century. At every turn, then, the narrator of ‘La Solitude’ undermines his own position.

‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ retrospectively recounts the shattering of the narrator’s illusion of unity with his mistress after she fails to echo his own thoughts in relation to a poor family that stands staring into a café, outside which the two are sitting.40 The stated moral of the story is that communication is impossible, even between people who love each other. The vehement tone of this conclusion is established by the text’s opening address to the mistress: Ah! vous voulez savoir pourquoi je vous hais aujourd’hui. Il vous sera sans doute moins facile de le comprendre qu’à moi de vous l’expliquer; car vous êtes, je crois, le plus bel exemple d’imperméabilité féminine qui se puisse rencontrer. (Ah! You want to know why I hate you today. It will no doubt be harder for you to understand than for me to explain; for you are, I believe, the finest example of female impermeability to be found anywhere.)

In view of the fact that the word ‘imperméabilité’ connotes both emotional insensitivity and impercipience, and that the mistress is addressed here as ‘vous’, thus standing alongside the reader in the position of addressee, it seems advisable to reread the text to see if there is any aspect of its communication to which we, as readers, might need to be more sensitive.41 The text’s title refers not to the insensible gaze of the mistress, upon which it eventually concentrates, but to the eyes of the poor. Indeed, the text dwells at some length on the eyes gazing into the new café: Ces trois visages étaient extraordinairement sérieux, et ces six yeux contemplaient fixement le café nouveau avec une admiration égale, mais nuancée diversement par l’âge.

39 R. Vivier, L ’Originalité de Baudelaire (Paris, 1926), p. 245. 40 ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’, OC I 317-19. An earlier version of this reading of the text is contained in M. Scott, ‘Superfluous Intrigues in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems’, French Studies, 55.3 (2001), 351-62. 41 Maclean, Evans, and Stephens make related points about the reader’s implication by the use of the second-person pronoun. Maclean, Narrative as Performance, p. 114; Evans, Baudelaire and Intertextuality, p. 53; Stephens, Baudelaire 's Prose Poems, p. 94.

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BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS Les yeux du père disaient: ‘Que c’est beau! que c’est beau! on dirait que tout l’or du pauvre monde est venu se porter sur ces murs.’ — Les yeux du petit garçon: ‘Que c’est beau! que c’est beau! mais c’est une maison où peuvent seuls entrer les gens qui ne sont pas comme nous.’ — Quant aux yeux du plus petit, ils étaient trop fascinés pour exprimer autre chose qu’une joie stupide et profonde. (The three faces were extraordinarily serious, and the six eyes fixedly contemplated the new café with equal admiration, nuanced differently according to their age. The eyes of the father said: ‘How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is! You would think all the gold of the poor world had carried itself onto those walls.’ — The eyes of the small boy: ‘How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is! But it is a house that is only open to people who are not like us.’ — As for the eyes of the smallest one, they were too fascinated to express anything other than a profound and stupid joy.)

After reflecting on how he was moved by this vision of the poor family’s admiration for the café’s splendour, and on how he was slightly shamed by the size of the glasses and decanters in front of him, ‘plus grands que notre soif (larger than our thirst), the narrator states that he turned to his mistress: Je tournais mes regards vers les vôtres, cher amour, pour y lire ma pensée; je plongeais dans vos yeux si beaux et si bizarrement doux, dans vos yeux verts, habités par le Caprice et inspirés par la Lune, quand vous me dites: ‘Ces gens-là me sont insupportables avec leurs yeux ouverts comme des portes cochères! Ne pourriez-vous pas prier le maître du café de les éloigner d’ici?’ Tant il est difficile de s’entendre, mon cher ange, et tant la pensée est incommunicable, même entre gens qui s’aiment! (I turned my eyes towards yours, dear love, so as to read my thought there; I was plunging into your eyes, so beautiful and so bizarrely soft, into your green eyes, inhabited by Caprice and inspired by the Moon, when you said: T can’t bear the sight of those people with their eyes wide open like entrance gates! Couldn’t you ask the manager of the café to see them off?’ How difficult it is to understand one another, my dear angel, and how incommunicable thought is, even between people who love each other!)

It would seem to be the mistress’s failure to read her partner’s eyes, and those of the poor family, that is responsible for the narrator’s ire. As Geraldine Friedman points out, ‘the man’s condemnation of the woman’s callousness ultimately charges her with being a bad reader’.42 The temptation here is to assume that the narrator is justified in his attack on the woman. What undermines the legitimacy of his attack is, firstly, that he is as guilty of misreading her thoughts as she is guilty of failing to intercept his. Indeed, the narrator’s guilt is aggravated by the fact that he is interested only in reading his own thoughts in his partner’s eyes; the text even italicizes the possessive adjective:

42 G. Friedman, The Insistence o f History: Revolution in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire (Stanford, 1996), p. 147.

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‘ma pensée’ {my thought). Secondly, the narrator’s superior sensitivity to the suffering of the poor family is belied by several details in the text. After his initial description of the family’s obvious penury and physical frailty, the narrator incongruously remarks, in a move suggestive of his own ‘imperméabilité’ (insensitivity), that the father ‘remplissait l’office de bonne et faisait prendre à ses enfants l’air du soir’ (was playing the nursemaid’s role and taking his children out for a stroll in the evening air). In addition, the narrator accounts for his slight sense of shame at the sight of the poor family’s gazes by reference to a songster’s cliché, thus placing the sentiment firmly in the realm of programmed, superficial response: ‘Les chansonniers disent que le plaisir rend l’âme bonne et amollit le cœur.’ (Singers say that pleasure makes the soul kind and softens the heart.) Furthermore, the speaker averts his gaze from the poor family as soon as they begin to make him feel even a little uncomfortable, and seems easily to forget their eyes as soon as he loses himself in those of his mistress. All of the above points have been made before. However, the narrator’s obtuseness tends to be underlined even while the perspicacity of his judgement against the mistress is accepted. For example, Maurice Delcroix’s excellent study of the text insists on the narrator’s egotism while also crediting him with a capacity for self-directed irony. This attributes a moral superiority to the narratorial figure that is nowhere warranted by the text and that seems dependent instead on the assumption that he speaks for the author. In other words, if, as Stephens points out, ‘There is, at the very least, an ironizing of the narrator of “Les Yeux des pauvres’” , there is nothing to suggest that this irony is self-directed.43 Despite the often-noted fallibility of the narrator’s reading strategy, the accuracy of his optical reading of the poor family has tended to go unquestioned until recently.44 Nevertheless, all the signs point to the possibility that the speaker is 43 Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, p. 96. Stephens does not suggest that the narrator’s irony is self-directed but neither does she make an explicit argument for the dissociation of poet and narrator. 44 Delcroix remarks on Ta présomption de cette lecture du regard d’autrui’ (the presumptuousness of this reading of the other’s gaze) but goes no further than this in challenging the narrator’s reading of the eyes of the poor family. M. Delcroix, ‘Un poème en prose de Charles Baudelaire: Les Yeux des pauvres’, Cahiers d ’Analyse Textuelle, 19 (1977), 47-65 (p. 60). Evans remarks on the reader’s ‘ironie awareness that the poet’s interpretation of “les yeux des pauvres” may have been as unfounded as his analysis of his mistress’ but, as her wording here suggests, does not give Baudelaire himself the benefit of the doubt. Baudelaire and Intertextuality, p. 52. Wing writes of the narrator’s ‘very significant misreading’ of his mistress’s eyes, but opposes it to the ‘penetrable (readable)’ meanings he sees in the family’s eyes. The Limits of Narrative, pp. 30-33. Friedman notes that the narrator’s misreading of the mistress’s eyes retrospectively challenges his reading of those of the poor family, which assumes ‘that they crave beauty rather than, what seems more likely, food’. The Insistence of History, pp. 147-48. However, where Friedman argues that the text expressly undermines Baudelaire’s own aesthetics of correspondence via the flaws in the narrator’s aestheticizing vision, I contend, here as in my article, ‘Superfluous Intrigues’, that the prose poem ridicules the narrator’s solipsism precisely by way of its latent correspondences. The text’s irony, in other words, would be complicit with its covert

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mistaken in his assumption that the eyes of the poor express admiration for the café’s aesthetics.45 After all, what the three outside the café are staring at is described earlier in the text as ‘toute l’histoire et toute la mythologie mises au service de la goinfrerie’ (all of history and mythology placed in the service of gluttony). What the hungry family is witnessing is a tantalizing display of food. The speaker’s shame at the size of his drinking vessels recalls the text of Houssaye’s ‘Chanson du vitrier’, heavily ironized by Baudelaire in ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’. In Houssaye’s text, an unconsciously ridiculous first-person narrator offers a drink to a hungry man. Obviously unused to feeling hungry himself, the narrator seems unaware of the potentially disastrous effects of pouring alcohol into an empty stomach (particularly when valuable glass assets are in close proximity to that stomach). For presumably similar reasons, the narrator of Baudelaire’s prose poem has no sense that food is a need more primary than wine.46 It may be that the mistress, not as successful as the narrator in putting the poor family out of her mind, reads their eyes more accurately than he; the expression Teurs yeux ouverts comme des portes cochéres’ (their eyes wide open like entrance gates) is far more descriptive of physical hunger than the narrator’s pretty ‘Que c ’est beau!’ (How beautiful it is!) speech bubbles. In his (mis)readings of the poor family and of his mistress, the narrator projects his own aestheticizing vision onto the eyes he regards. The crucial difference between his two egotistical projections is that the second is more explicitly exposed as an illusion by the text than the first. Unlike the mistress, the three members of the poor family are not in a position to make their real thoughts directly heard by the narrator. However, that the poet ‘hears’ those thoughts is suggested by way of correspondences that seem too artful to be accidental. Firstly, there is the correspondence between the two scenes of (mis)reading within the text. Secondly, if the narrator does indeed misread the eyes of the poor, then the text named after those eyes might be understood to invite an analogous misreading. The selfreferential dimension of the text might then extend to the narrator’s description of the new café: the café’s artificial brightness would mirror the fake transparency of the prose, its mirrors would reflect the text’s own intricate reflexivity, its trompe-

poetics of correspondence. More recently, Michael Tilby states that the narrator’s reading of the poor family’s eyes is at least partially false. M. Tilby, ‘Le Café-théâtre baudelairien: Une lecture des “Yeux des pauvres’” , Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 39.1 (2002), 60-71. Murphy, unambiguously dissociating narrator from author, describes the former’s reading of the eyes of the poor as an act of ideological ventriloquism. Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, p. 266. 45 This is despite Baudelaire’s assertion, in his Dupont article, of the superior poetic interest of the poor’s appreciation of beauty to the poor’s gaze on wealth (OC II 171). 46 Murphy makes a similar point in S. Murphy, ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier ou la crise du verre’, Romanic Review, 81 (1990), 339-49 (p. 340), and develops it in Logiques du dernier Baudelaire (pp. 339-43).

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l’œil mural would present an image of the textual trickery in play,47 and the images of picturesque pages dragged by dogs on leashes could be understood to echo the simultaneous sentimentality and brutality of Baudelaire’s text, as well as the strange reversals of reading direction that it organizes. This unfolding of the text against ‘naive’ readings is only one of the modes of its irony. The ‘sceptical’ reader might also be targeted by the prose poem. Recalling the first-person narrator of Houssaye’s ‘Chanson du vitrier’, the suspicious reader could be lured into making the inane assumption that s/he alone, ‘seul au milieu de tous ces passants’ (alone among all these passers-by), has the percipience to see beyond the evidence to the other’s hunger.48 Furthermore, to the extent that his or her reading of irony in the poet’s textual gaze relies on an analogical deduction rather than on anything that is explicitly stated in the text, there can be no certainty that s/he is not merely repeating the narrator’s egotistical gesture of self-projection. Noting the references in the prose poem to the newness of the café and of the boulevard (still covered in rubble), Marshall Berman reads Baudelaire’s text in the context of the modernization of Paris, which involved a previously well-hidden poorer class being suddenly brought out into the open spaces of the boulevards, to see and be seen: ‘Haussmann’s boulevards transform the exotic into the immediate; the misery that was once a mystery is now a fact.’49 It might consequently be argued that this prose poem, as well Le Spleen de Paris as a whole, illustrates and implicitly censures the violence of the drive towards ease of legibility that was exemplified so dramatically by Haussmann’s urban project. Within the superficially transparent prose texts of Baudelaire’s collection, hidden traps may lurk, just as within the Paris that was being opened up and flattened during the 1850s and 1860s, resistance was seething. ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ both thematizes and dramatizes the problem of interpretation. It makes a mockery of distinctions between naïve and sceptical interpretations. To a reading that treats the text as a more or less transparent communication on the part of a poet-narrator, it states that misreading is inevitable, ‘même entre gens qui s’aiment’ (even between people who love each other). To a reading that assumes the impossibility of correct readings and that consequently distrusts the narrator’s interpretation of the eyes of the poor, the text offers what might seem like a more ‘correct’, if ironic, reading. Both naïve and sceptical readings arrive, therefore, at conclusions that undo their own premises. The irreducible poverty of the reader’s eyes may be at the centre of a text that demonstrates that all readings, even the most apparently impartial, necessarily make assumptions about authorial intentions. The prose poem does not suggest, however, that attempts at deciphering the other should be avoided: indeed, its narrator overtly 47 Without proposing the existence of a possible mise en abyme, Delcroix observes that the text’s description of the café’s mural might initially mislead the reader into thinking that its nymphs and goddesses are moving around the café itself. ‘Un poème en prose’, p. 54. 48 OC I 1309. 49 M. Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience o f Modernity (London, 1983), p. 153.

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attacks the mistress precisely for her evasion. It may be that what the text suggests is that the only ‘correct’ reading of the other is one that admits that there can be no definitive reading of the other, including the other that is Baudelaire’s text.

‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ also dramatizes a morally dubious narratorial reading of an other.50 The first two paragraphs of the text describe and reflect on the carefree behaviour of Te peuple en vacances’ (the people on holiday). The first-person narrator implicitly sets himself apart from an amnesiac, jubilatory crowd: ‘En ces jours-là il me semble que le peuple oublie tout, la douleur et le travail; il devient pareil aux enfants.’ (On those days, it seems to me that the people forget everything, suffering and work; they become like children.) In the third paragraph, however, the narrator’s assertion of personal difference is problematized by what amounts to a statement of the impossibility of maintaining any distinction between self and crowd: L’homme du monde lui-même et l’homme occupé de travaux spirituels échappent difficilement à l’influence de ce jubilé populaire. Ils absorbent, sans le vouloir, leur part de cette atmosphère d’insouciance. Pour moi, je ne manque jamais, en vrai Parisien, de passer la revue de toutes les baraques qui se pavanent à ces époques solennelles. (Even the man of the world, and the man engaged in spiritual work, have difficulty escaping the influence of this popular jubilee. They absorb, unintentionally, their part of that carefree atmosphere. For my part, as a true Parisian, I never fail to inspect all the stalls that proudly display themselves on these ceremonious occasions.)

Despite the narrator’s insinuation, in this passage, of his superiority to the crowd,51 these lines would seem also to constitute an admission that he himself has absorbed at least some of the child-like unconcern of the crowd; and, as Jérôme Thélot points out, the phrase ‘en vrai Parisien’ (as a true Parisian) abolishes any illusion of the narrator’s apartness from those around him.52 After a further two paragraphs evoking the tumult of a carnival, the narrator glimpses a poor acrobat whose physical decrepitude, comic rags, and pathetic shack render him an incongruous figure in the joyful scene that stops just a few steps away from where he stands. The narrator’s reaction is melodramatic: he feels ‘la main terrible de l’hystérie’ (the terrible hand of hysteria) tightening around his throat, and has tears in his eyes. Pleading shyness and a fear of humiliating the old 50 ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’, OC I 295-97. 51 See Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, p. 225. 52 J. Thélot, Baudelaire: Violence et poésie (Paris, 1993), pp. 48-49. Despite the fact that Thélot remarks later that the speaker is no different from those around him in that he too avoids the acrobat (p. 63), he also insists on the speaker’s essential difference from the crowd by virtue of the fact that he is the only one to see and reflect upon the situation of the old man. Significantly, Thélot refers to the narrator of this prose poem (and others) as ‘le poète’ (the poet).

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man, the narrator decides not to ask him to perform in return for payment, resolving instead to leave some money beside the man in passing, ‘espérant qu’il devinerait mon intention’ (hoping he would guess my intention). It is unclear why the narrator thinks that the old man would be humiliated by the exercise of his art. Neither is it certain why he imagines that the acrobat would be any less humiliated by a donation motivated by charity rather than by any appreciation of that art. In any case, the movement of the crowd suddenly carries the narrator away from the man, such that the supposedly philanthropic gesture is never accomplished. As Lloyd and Stephens succinctly put it, this is ‘a lame excuse if ever there were one’.53 Given that the narrator is close enough to the man’s hut to describe it and its dweller in detail, and given also that the crowd does not actually stretch as far as the acrobat’s hut, the throng’s ineluctable movement would seem to be more a deus ex machina than an obstacle for the narrator. If the latter were truly moved by the man’s penury, he would surely have extricated himself from the mass of people. A more plausible explanation for the narrator’s failure to approach the old man would be fear of his own embarrassment or humiliation; this is much the same reason for avoidance as might be attributed to the rest of the crowd. It is significant that the narrator himself fails to associate his own inability to approach the old acrobat with the motives of the crowd around him. In the final paragraph, the narrator analyses his ‘soudaine douleur’ (sudden sorrow) at the sight of the poor man: Je viens de voir l’image du vieil homme de lettres qui a survécu à la génération dont il fut le brillant amuseur; du vieux poète sans amis, sans famille, sans enfants, dégradé par sa misère et par l’ingratitude publique, et dans la baraque de qui le monde oublieux ne veut plus entrer!’ (I have just seen the image of the old man of letters who has outlived the generation he so brilliantly entertained; the image of the old poet without friends, family or children, degraded by poverty and public ingratitude, and whose stall the forgetful world no longer wants to enter!)

If the reader identifies the narrator with the poet, then the logical deduction to draw from this passage is that the narrator sees in the figure of the acrobat an image of his own future self. Starobinski, for example, claims of the old man that ‘Son silence, d’une façon prophétique, annonce et préfigure l’aphasie de Baudelaire.’ (His silence prophetically foretells and prefigures Baudelaire’s aphasia.)54 The self­ centredness of the narrator is implied whether or not the reader identifies him with the poet: on an emotional level as well as a purely physical one, the narrator avoids any real contact with the acrobat, choosing instead to focus on the feelings

53 ‘Promises, Promises’, p. 80. See also Lloyd’s commentary on the prose poem in ‘Dwelling in Possibility’. 54 J. Starobinski, Portrait de l ’artiste en saltimbanque (Paris, 1970), p. 91.

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produced in him by the old man’s presence.55 Indeed, the narrator effectively erases the clown’s individuality by transforming him into an emblem. The virtual disappearing act performed by the speaker on the acrobat is nicely illustrated by his statement that ‘il me sembla que mes regards étaient offusqués par ces larmes rebelles qui ne veulent pas tomber’ (it seemed to me that my vision was blocked by those rebellious tears that refuse to fall). The narrator’s vision is, quite literally, blinded by narcissistic sentiment. A further layer of irony is the suggestion of insincerity contained in the speaker’s frustration at the refusal of his tears to fall. If the forgetfulness of the crowd is underlined twice in the text — Te peuple oublie tout’ (the people forget everything), Te monde oublieux’ (the forgetful world) — , it is the narrator who effectively forgets the acrobat, despite the ‘regard inoubliable’ (unforgettable gaze) he attributes to the man. As Virginia Swain puts it, ‘The narrator’s “authority” and his exemplary “morality” are credible only if we in turn forget the forgetting of the “saltimbanque”.’5657 Hannoosh, and subsequently Murphy, have both proposed a link between ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ and a drawing by Joseph-Louis Trimolet entitled Le Vieux Mendiant, a link that is licensed by Baudelaire’s comment on the latter work in Quelques caricaturistes français.51 Murphy underlines the melodramatic and ultimately falsifying character of Trimolet’s picture of a homeless old man, and goes on to demonstrate that Baudelaire’s critical study, in turn, forgets this aspect of the image, either wilfully or otherwise, distorting it by interpreting it as a mordant caricature of ‘la race des optimistes’ (the race of optimists).58 It may not be a coincidence that ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’, recalling both Trimolet’s forgetful drawing of an old beggar and Baudelaire’s forgetful analysis of the same work, dramatizes the narrator’s effective forgetting of the old clown.

55 Hannoosh argues that the narrator sees in the clown ‘a sentimental image of his own selfpity and vanity’; she also writes that the speaker misinterprets his own suppressed hysterical response ‘as an affirmation of his own superiority’. Hannoosh argues of the self-ignorant narrator’s concluding remarks that ‘This cliché-ridden analysis and the self-justification it expresses make the speaker, too, an object of laughter.’ Baudelaire and Caricature, p. 186. Hiddleston argues that the narrator is the target of Baudelaire’s irony, stating that ‘the inadequacies of the narrator and his inability to contemplate the parallel with himself are integral elements in the enigma of the work’. Baudelaire and the Art o f Memory, p. 161. Chambers notes the superficial and hypocritical reaction of the narrator to the acrobat. R. Chambers, ‘Qui perd gagne ou comment je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres sur Baudelaire’, in L'Année Baudelaire 6: De la Belle Dorothée aux Bons Chiens (Paris, 2002), pp. 55-68 (p. 67). For an alternative reading, see Vivien Rubin’s insistence on the narrator’s decisive refusal to identify with the acrobat. V. L. Rubin, ‘Two Prose Poems by Baudelaire: “Le Vieux Saltimbanque” and “Une mort héroïque’” , Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 14.12 (1985-86), 51-60. 56 V. E. Swain, ‘The Legitimation Crisis: Event and Meaning in Baudelaire’s “Le Vieux Saltimbanque” and “Une mort héroïque’” , Romanic Review, 73.4 (1982), 452-62 (p. 455). 57 See Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature, pp. 183-86; Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, pp. 228-36; OC II 560-61. 58 OC II 561.

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If ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ enacts an evasion, and invites the reader to participate in its amnesiac dynamic, it also thematizes escape on a number of levels: the children have escaped school; the crowd has escaped work; one of the fairground performers is an ‘escamoteur’ (a conjuror, but literally a person who makes things disappear; the word can also denote an artful dodger); the acrobat seems to have exiled himself from a crowd that in fact evades him, and that does so in better faith than an evasive narrator who claims not to have the choice. In the third paragraph of the prose poem, the narrator states that the worldly man and the spiritual man ‘échappent difficilement à l’influence de ce jubilé populaire’ (have difficulty escaping the influence of this popular jubilee) (my emphasis). While Pierre Moreau maintains that the need to escape from oneself into the outside world and from the outside world into oneself is a constant theme in Baudelaire’s writing,59 it is equally true that the desire for evasion is sharply criticized in his work to the extent that it involves either the dissolution of individual will or self­ infatuation. The latter are two sides of the same coin, as ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’, like ‘Au lecteur’, demonstrates: escape, for the narrator of the prose poem, involves a self-surrender to the movement of the crowd as well as a concentration on self at the expense of another.

‘Le Joujou du pauvre’, like ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’, makes of diversion not only a theme but also a structuring principle.60 The narrator of ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ begins by informing the reader that he wants to describe a pastime that is remarkable for its innocence. This diversion, which the narrator urges the reader to try, involves filling one’s pockets with cheap little toys before going for a stroll, so that they can be distributed to penniless children met along the road: Vous verrez leurs yeux s’agrandir démesurément. D’abord ils n’oseront pas prendre; ils douteront de leur bonheur. Puis leurs mains agripperont vivement le cadeau, et ils s’enfuiront comme font les chats qui vont manger loin de vous le morceau que vous leur avez donné, ayant appris à se défier de l’homme. (You will see their eyes grow inordinately large. At first they won’t dare take them; they won’t be able to believe their good luck. Then their hands will briskly clutch the gift, and they will run away like cats that go far away from you to eat the titbit you have given them, having learned to distrust men.)

If we might be tempted at this point to question the innocence of a game that treats children as though they were hungry cats, particularly in view of the reference to the perfidy of adults, we are distracted by the text’s sudden switch of focus: behind the gate of a pretty château, a rich child has abandoned his ‘joujou splendide’ 59 P. Moreau, ‘Baudelaire et l’évasion’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 127 (1967), 381-95. 60 ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’, OC I 304-5. An earlier version of my reading of this text was presented at the 42nd Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies (University College Dublin, July 2001).

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(splendid toy), a gleaming, crimson-clad doll, to admire the caged rat of a poor boy standing on the road just outside. The narrator comments that the poor boy’s parents, ‘par économie sans doute, avaient tiré le joujou de la vie elle-même’ (for reasons of thrift, no doubt, had drawn the toy from life itself), before finishing on a statement that seems to serve as the moral of the story: ‘Et les deux enfants se riaient l’un à l’autre fraternellement, avec des dents d’une égale blancheur.’ (And the two children laughed at each other fraternally, with teeth of an equal whiteness.) The reference to teeth, along with the italicization of the word ‘égale’, insinuates the shared bestiality of human beings, their equal pleasure in evil, regardless of class; while the words ‘fraternellement’ (fraternally) and ‘égale’ (equal) point to the presence of a political subtext. ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’, first published in 1862, is based on an extract from an apparently autobiographical essay by Baudelaire, Morale du joujou (1853).61 The prose poem differs from the extract in that the latter, when read in context, is designed to illustrate the equivalent imaginative interest of the simple toys of the poor and the luxurious toys of the rich, while the prose poem places its focus instead on the innate evil and bestiality of children. This switch of emphasis is orchestrated largely by the addition, in the prose poem, of the two introductory sentences in which the narrator invokes the difference between innocent and guilty pastimes: ‘Je veux donner l’idée d’un divertissement innocent. Il y a si peu d’amusements qui ne soient pas coupables!’ (I want to offer an idea for an innocent diversion. There are so few pastimes that are not culpable!) This addition, which, as Johnson remarks, seems to have little connection with the rest of the text, inflects the entire piece with a sense of moral judgement that is virtually absent from the essay extract.62 Another significant difference between the prose poem and the essay extract is the fact that the link between the activity of distributing toys to poor children and the account of the meeting between the rich child and the poor child is not explicated in ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’, whereas in Morale du joujou the connection is made clear: A propos du joujou du pauvre, j ’ai vu quelque chose de plus simple encore, mais encore plus triste que le joujou à un sou, — c’est le joujou vivant.63

61 For the relevant extract from Morale du joujou, see OC I 584-85. Franck Bauer offers a detailed analysis of the modifications wrought on the extract. F. Bauer, ‘Le Poème en prose, un joujou de pauvre? Sur la genèse et la signification d’un Spleen de Paris', Poétique, 109 (1997), 17-37. Bauer also draws attention to the metaphorical transformations that take place in the text between children, animals, toys, and works of art (including the prose poem itself). 62 Défigurations, p. 71. 63 OC I 584. Murphy draws attention to the omission, in the prose poem, of this sentence, arguing that Baudelaire may have intended to ‘créer une discontinuité troublante’ («create a troubling discontinuity). Murphy also questions the narrator’s motivations in the prose poem. Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, p. 281.

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(On the subject of the poor boy’s toy, I have seen something even simpler, but even sadder than the penny toy, — it is the living toy.)

In the essay, thus, the poor boy’s toy constitutes the shared thematic focus of the account of toy distribution and the description of the confrontation between the rich and the poor child. While the title of the prose poem implies the same internal linking logic, the sudden and unexplained switch of focus within ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ leaves it open to the reader to make his or her own connection between the text’s two parts; and, importantly, this link may be related as much to their shared thematic of innocence and guilt as to their common focus on the toys of poor children. The excision of the connecting sentence also means that the essay’s attribution of the adjective ‘triste’ (sad) to the poor boy’s caged rat is missing in the prose poem; the absence of this word is indicative of the absolute absence of pathos in the prose poem. The narrator of the latter preserves as much psychological distance from the boy as he does from the poor children in the first part of the text.64 The difference between the essay’s description of the poor boy, in the first extract to follow and that of the prose poem, in the second, is flagrant: il y avait un autre enfant, sale, assez chétif, un de ces marmots sur lesquels la morve se fraye lentement un chemin dans la crasse et la poussière.65 (there was another child, dirty, and quite puny, one of those kids on whose faces snot slowly makes its way through grime and dust.) il y avait un autre enfant, sale, chétif, fuligineux, un de ces marmots-parias dont un œil impartial découvrirait la beauté, si, comme l’œil du connaisseur devine une peinture idéale sous un vernis de carrossier, il le nettoyait de la répugnante patine de la misère. (there was another child, dirty, puny, and grimy, one of those pariah-kids in whom an impartial eye would discover beauty if, as the eye of the connoisseur detects an ideal painting beneath a coachmaker’s varnish, he were to clean it of the revolting patina of poverty.)

The tendency of the prose poem towards greater emotional detachment is reinforced not only by the addition of the words ‘parias’ and ‘répugnante’, but also by the aesthetic tone and periphrastic style of the description of the poor boy. The prose poem supplements the essay’s emphasis on the child’s dirtiness with the language of the dilettante art connoisseur. Like the narrator of ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’, the narrator of ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ is guilty of trivializing poverty by

64 In my reading of ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’ in chapter one, I argued that the clinical tone of ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ could suggest a more authentic form of empathy than that thematized in and invited by the prose poem. Clearly, however, the apparent absence of pathos is not a sufficient condition of empathy. 65 OC I 584-85.

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interpreting it in aesthetic terms. As Jonathan Monroe points out, the narrator of both texts presents poverty ‘as an object of contemplation, even delectation’.66 Another distancing mechanism, present in ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ but not in the essay extract, can be found in the two concluding lines, which seem to invite an allegorical reading of the text. In appearing to offer the moral of the prose poem (‘La Morale du Joujou du pauvre’?), this conclusion may also function to divert attention away from the narrator’s own guilt. Nowhere in the text does the narrator acknowledge that his own game may be a culpable one; in fact, he assumes its innocence, in implicit contradistinction to the guilty pleasures enjoyed by children. Nevertheless, the narrator’s treatment of children as if they were cats is at least as blameworthy as the poor child’s adoption of a caged rat as a toy. As Franck Bauer puts it, ‘quoi de plus “pervers” en effet, de plus “coupable”, que de jouir du spectacle d’enfants ravalés au rang d’animaux?’ (what is more ‘perverse’, indeed, more ‘guilty’, than to delight in the sight of children reduced to the rank of animals?)67 Both the poor boy’s parents and the narrator draw playthings ‘de la vie elle-même’ (from life itself), but if the former give their son a caged rat for reasons of economy, the latter’s reduction of children to animals or toys is motivated purely by his own desire for ‘divertissement’ (diversion). The analogy between the boy’s rat and the narrator’s cat-like playthings is latent in both Morale du joujou and ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’, but only in the latter text is the analogy rendered ironic by the narrator’s insistence on the innocence of his own diversion and on the guiltiness of children’s amusements: the two opening sentences of the prose poem may not, in other words, be as marginal to the text’s meaning (or as innocent) as they initially seem. The parallel between the narrator’s game and the rich boy’s toy is also striking. If the latter is a thing that resembles a person, the narrator effectively transforms people into things, reifying the poor boy through his aesthetic description of him, and objectifying the other poor children by treating them as cats. The end of the text associates the caged rat with malevolent pleasures, but the narrator’s own game is far more sinister. His reification of poor children is of a piece with ‘ces barreaux symboliques séparant deux mondes, la grande route et le château’ (those symbolic bars separating two worlds, the open road and the castle). While this aspect of the prose poem’s irony remains strangely obscured by its emphatic closing lines, the conclusion might also, by its reference to fundamental 66 A Poverty o f Objects, p. 112. Monroe, along with commentators such as Prendergast {Paris and the Nineteenth Century, pp. 150-51) and Murphy {Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, pp. 295-96), throws a certain amount of doubt on the innocence of the narrator’s game. Hiddleston, who suspects ‘more than a little pulling of the reader’s leg’ in this text, highlights the dubious character of the narrator’s allegedly innocent pastime. Baudelaire and ‘Le Spleen de Paris \ p. 39. 67 F. Bauer, ‘Le Rat et l’oublie. Baudelaire et l’interdit de la Neuvième Rêverie\ in Littérature et interdits, ed. J. Dugast and F. Mouret (Rennes, 1998), pp. 325-35 (p. 330). In this piece, Bauer reads the prose poem as a parody of the ninth of Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Cynthia Chase interprets Morale du joujou and ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ as ‘abusive’ rewritings of the same intertext. C. Chase, ‘Paragon, Parergon. Baudelaire translates Rousseau’, Diacritics, 11.2 (1981), 42-51.

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equality beyond social differences, obliquely underline the analogy between the narrator’s guiltiness and that of the children. As a final ironic twist, the fact that the reader is drawn into a self-inculpating identification with the narrator by way of the latter’s repeated use of the secondperson pronoun in his description of the supposedly innocent pastime suggests that the poet too is guilty of transforming human beings into playthings.68

‘Assommons les pauvres!’, which dates from 1864 or 1865, presents a first-person narrator’s account of an event that took place sixteen or seventeen years prior.69 As commentators have noted, this suggestively situates the action of the text around 1848, at least to the extent that the narrator is considered to occupy the same historical space as Baudelaire. After having spent fifteen days in his bedroom reading fashionable books on social improvement to the point of ‘le vertige ou la stupidité’ (dizziness or idiocy), the narrator goes out to get some fresh air and refreshment. On the point of entering a bar, he is solicited by a beggar, at which point he is apparently prompted by either ‘un bon Ange’ (a good Angel) or ‘un bon Démon’ (a good Demon) to assault the man viciously. To the apparent approval of the narrator, the beggar retaliates. The narrator is clearly very proud of his dynamizing intervention in the other man’s life: ‘Par mon énergique médication, je lui avais donc rendu l’orgueil et la vie.’ (With my energetic medication, I had thus given him back his pride and his life.) Kaplan claims that the text ‘grotesquely caricatures egalitarian propaganda’, while Lemaitre, more tentatively, reads the prose poem as exemplary of ‘un certain humour noir’ (a certain black humour) on the part of Baudelaire, and as a reaction against ‘un certain humanitarisme’ (a certain humanitarianism).70 However, there is some disagreement among critics as to whether it is the narrator’s philanthropic reading material that is caricatured by the text or his brutal misinterpretation of it. If it is the narrator’s reading material that is targeted, then ‘Assommons les pauvres’ could be understood to be an ironic retaliation against bourgeois humanitarianism.71 If, alternatively or in addition, it is the narrator’s dubious form of altruism that is targeted by the prose poem’s irony, the text might be understood to parody not only the bourgeoisie’s self-righteous barbarity, but also its gullibility; the narrator admits to having swallowed whole the theses of others: ‘J ’avais donc digéré, — avalé,

68 Yannick Viers aligns the narrator’s distribution of toys with the poet’s offering of ‘un discours ludique’ (a ludic discourse) to, and at the expense of, the reader. However, Viers does not explain why this offering should be at the reader’s expense, focusing instead on the relationship between the ludic and the polysémie in Baudelaire’s writing. Y. A. Viers, ‘Jeu et discours baudelairien: Le Joujou du pauvre’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 16.1-2 (1987-88), 344-50. 69 ‘Assommons les pauvres!’, OC I 357-59. 70 Kaplan, Baudelaire \s Prose Poems, p. 158; Lemaitre, ed., Petits Poèmes en prose, p. 214. 71 See Maclean, Narrative as Performance, pp. 161-76.

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veux-je dire.. . ’ (I had thus digested, — or swallowed, I should say.. .)72 Taking this latter hypothesis to its self-reflexive conclusion, the text might then operate as a mise en abyme by implicitly mocking the gullibility of the reader who accepts the narrator’s logic and/or identifies him with the poet. This reading is entirely compatible with Oehler’s insightful comparison of this prose poem to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, a double-edged text exposing a barbaric but highly rational solution to poverty in Ireland.73 Indicative of a certain distance between author and narrator is the speaker’s declaration that, unlike the good demon of Socrates, his own demon is one of action rather than prohibition. While Baudelaire notes, in a letter of 1860 to Flaubert, that he can account for certain sudden acts on the part of men only by recourse to ‘l’hypothèse de l’intervention d’une force méchante extérieure à lui’ (the hypothesis of the intervention of a wicked force outside of him), the poet would have been unlikely to boast, like the narrator, of his own lack of selfrestraint, given his views about the importance of containing one’s instincts, as expressed for example in Le Peintre de la vie moderne: C’est la philosophie (je parle de la bonne), c’est la religion qui nous ordonne de nourrir des parents pauvres et infirmes. La nature (qui n’est pas autre chose que la voix de notre intérêt) nous commande de les assommer.74 (It is philosophy, I mean the good kind, it is religion that orders us to feed old and infirm relatives. Nature, which is nothing other than the voice of our self-interest, commands us to knock them out / kill them.)

The use of the word ‘assommer’ in this passage is significant in view of the title of the prose poem. Pichois notes that Baudelaire did not agree with the theory of Lélut and Baillarger regarding Socrates’s madness, a theory that is cited approvingly by the narrator.75 Pichois also notes that the poem has its origins in a letter to Nadar of 1864, in which Baudelaire expresses shame and remorse at having assaulted a Belgian:

72 Wolfgang Drost writes that Baudelaire, in this text, ‘takes as his target the folly of the credulous bourgeois’ and argues that the narrator is included in the prose poem’s ironic attack. Drost does not refer, however, to the possibility that the reader who aligns narrator with poet is also targeted by the text’s irony. W. Drost, ‘Baudelaire between Marx, Sade and Satan’, in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry: New Essays in Honour o f Lloyd Austin, ed. M. Bowie, A. Fairlie, A. Finch (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 38-57 (p. 40). 73 D. Oehler, ‘Le Poids de l’histoire chez Baudelaire et Flaubert: Modernité et massacres’, in Baudelaire: Une alchimie de la douleur: Etudes sur *Les Fleurs du M al\ ed. P. Labarthe (Paris, 2003), pp. 299-325 (p. 301). See Baudelaire’s reference to Swift’s text, OC II 237. 74CII 53, OC II 715. 75 For a detailed exploration of this subject, see F. Vatan, ‘The “Poet-Philosopher” and the “Physician-Philosopher”: A Reading of Baudelaire’s Prose Poem “Assommons les pauvres!”’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 33.1-2 (2004-2005), 89-106.

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Croirais-tu que moi, j ’aie pu battre un Belge? C’est incroyable, n’est-ce pas? Que je puisse battre quelqu’un, c’est absurde. Et ce qu’il y avait de plus monstrueux encore, c’est que j ’étais complètement dans mon tort. Aussi, l’esprit de justice reprenant le dessus, j ’ai couru après l’homme pour lui faire des excuses. Mais je n’ai pas pu le retrouver.76 (Would you believe that 1, I could have beaten up a Belgian? Incredible, isn’t it? That I could beat anyone up is absurd. And what is even more monstrous is that I was completely in the wrong. Consequently, the spirit of justice taking over again, I ran after the man to apologize to him. But I couldn’t find him.)

The difference between the jubilant attitude of the prose poem’s narrator after his moment of madness and Baudelaire’s own reaction to a similar event is very evident here. Even in the absence of the evidence of this letter, it is difficult not to treat the self-righteous narrator as a butt of the poet’s irony. As Hiddleston points out in connection with the narrator’s retrospective justification of his actions, ‘One would need to subscribe to the social and economic views of the self-made man or to believe that Baudelaire was some kind of precursor of Nietzche not to suspect some trace of irony.’77 Apart from those indications of irony that depend upon our knowledge of Baudelaire’s personality, internal evidence of duplicity is also present in ‘Assommons les pauvres!’, notably as a function of internal contradictions. To begin with, the speaker justifies his brutal attack on the beggar as a confirmation of his ‘théorie’ (theory) — rather a grand name for what was referred to before this apparent proof as Te germe obscur d’une idée’ (the obscure seed of an idea), ‘l’idée d’une idée, quelque chose d’infiniment vague’ (the idea of an idea, something infinitely vague). The speaker thus confirms the wisdom of his actions by retroactively devising a specious theory of equality,78 such that the text seems to dramatize what Baudelaire writes of elsewhere as Ta férocité de l’hypocrisie bourgeoise’ (the ferocity of bourgeois hypocrisy).79 The hypocrisy of the narrator’s claim that the beggar has proven himself to be his equal is emphasized by the imperious tone of the final line of the prose poem, which presents the disagreeable moral of the piece: ‘Il m’a bien juré qu’il avait compris ma théorie, et qu’il obéirait à mes conseils.’ (He swore that he had understood my theory, and that he would obey my advice.) As Jeffrey Mehlman points out in connection with this text, ‘the 76 OC I 1350, C II 401. Another possibly related autobiographical incident is reported by Judith Gautier, who from her window saw the poet deliberately tread on the tail of a dog; his action provoked the animal to retaliate by knocking him into the mud (much to Baudelaire’s humiliation). Bandy, Pichois, Baudelaire devant ses contemporains, pp. 147-49. 77 Baudelaire and ‘Le Spleen de Paris', p. 39. 78 In this connection, see Burton’s interesting exploration of the irony implicit in the fact that the narrator addresses the beggar as ‘vous’ despite, in the version of the prose poem which contains the address to Proudhon, addressing the latter as ‘tu’. R. Burton, ‘“Assommons les pauvres!”: Entre le tu et le vous\ Bulletin Baudelairien, 28.2 (1993), 7480. 79 OC II 298.

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violence initiated by the poet-dandy is above all an affirmation of difference (of forces) between the two’.80 It is not known whether the words ‘Qu’en dis-tu, Citoyen Proudhon?’ (What say you, Citizen Proudhon?) with which the manuscript version of the prose poem ends, but which do not appear in the posthumously published version of the text, were omitted upon Baudelaire’s instructions or not. The concluding appeal to the famous socialist is sometimes treated as proof of the poet’s rejection of an erstwhile allegiance to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whether because, in his latter years, he had come to consider the latter to be too radical or, alternatively, too conservative.81 However, it may not be Baudelaire’s own political affiliations that are dramatized in ‘Assommons les pauvres!’ so much as the difficulty of distinguishing political categories subsequent to the events of June 1848 and the coming to power of a pseudo-socialist Emperor. The very ambiguity of the address to ‘Citoyen Proudhon’, which has been interpreted both as derisive and as deferential, and as indicative of both socialist and conservative leanings, may therefore participate in the text’s logic. Supporting this argument is the fact that the narrator emerges from his intensive course of reading in a state of mental confusion, after having swallowed whole the ideas of those who urge passivity on the part of the poor as well as the ideas of those who incite the latter to revolution: J’avais donc digéré, — avalé, veux-je dire, — toutes les élucubrations de tous ces entrepreneurs de bonheur public, — de ceux qui conseillent à tous les pauvres de se faire esclaves, et de ceux qui leur persuadent qu’ils sont tous des rois détrônés. — On ne trouvera pas surprenant que je fusse alors dans un état d’esprit avoisinant le vertige ou la stupidité. (I had thus digested, — or swallowed, I should say, — all the pedantic ramblings of all those servants of public happiness, — of those who advise all poor people to become slaves, and those who persuade them that they are all dethroned kings. — It will not

80 J. Mehlman, ‘Baudelaire with Freud: Theory and Pain’, Diacritics, 4.1 (1974), 7-13 (p. 10). (I would substitute ‘narrator’ for ‘poet’.) According to Leo Bersani, similarly, the ‘pedantic’ and ‘sadistic’ narrator of ‘Assommons les pauvres!’ effects a ‘narcissistic appropriation’ of the beggar he meets along his path. L. Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley, 1977), p. 143. Stephens notes: ‘The narrator takes the credit for the moral lesson; he closes the discussion; he expects to be obeyed [...]. The equality is, in other words, a sham.’ Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, p. 98. 81 See Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic, pp. 327-28 for a brief summary of these polarized interpretations of the narrator’s address to Proudhon. Burton himself avoids committing himself to either alternative, preferring to preserve ‘the irreducible ambiguity of the text’ (p. 328). This ambiguity is diminished slightly by Burton’s implicit identification of the narrator with Baudelaire himself. However, his analysis of the prose poem offers excellent insights into the evolution of Baudelaire’s relationship with Proudhon. Murphy also examines this relationship in the context of his analysis of the prose poem in Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, pp. 397-432. Murphy underscores the impossibility of identifying the narrator’s ideology with that of the poet.

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surprise anyone that I was at that moment in a state of mind close to dizziness or stupidity.)

As well as suggesting the inextricability of radicalism and reaction after the events of 1848 in France, ‘Assommons les pauvres!’ insinuates a close link between rationality and violence. The narrator’s act of aggression is portrayed as an effect of fifteen days of exposure to a range of different arguments and, later, he uses these arguments in defence of this act. The text therefore illustrates that proximity between enlightenment and cruelty to which Baudelaire was very sensitive. In Fusées, for example, the poet claims that material progress does not change the fact that T’homme, comme cela est prouvé par le fait journalier, est toujours semblable et égal à l’homme, c’est-à-dire toujours à l’état sauvage’ (man, as is evidenced by everyday events, is still similar and equal to man, that is to say, still in a state of savagery).82 The thematic of misunderstanding and misquotation is deeply embedded in the prose poem. This thematic is suggested even by the text’s title; Richard Terdiman, for example, refers to the parody, contained in the text’s title, of the ‘quasiFlaubertian re/cited discourse’ of the bourgeoisie.83 The title might also offer a crudely literal re-visioning of the title of Napoleon Ill’s Extinction du paupérisme ( 1844) (The Suppression of Poverty), a pseudo-philanthropic tract that resembles the prose poem in its strange mixture of socialist and capitalist ideas.84 The title may, similarly, offer an ironically literalizing misinterpretation of the final line of the tract: Te triomphe des idées démocratiques a détruit le paupérisme’ (the triumph of democratic ideas has destroyed pauperism).85 Consistent with this textual enactment of misinterpretation is the prose poem’s parodie dramatization — by way of the beggar’s blackening of the narrator’s two eyes and the breaking of his four teeth in return for the blackened eye and two broken teeth dealt him by the narrator — of Proudhon’s theory of mutualism, which the latter had compared to T’antique talion, œil pour œil, dent pour dent, vie pour vie’ (the ancient law of an eye fo r an eye, a tooth fo r a tooth, a life fo r a life).86 Another textual deformation has been brought to light by Melvin Zimmerman, who draws attention to the narrator’s distortion, in the following phrase, of two lines from a French translation 82 OC I 663. 83 Discourse/Counter-Discourse, p. 315. 84 Burton proposes that ‘Assommons les pauvres!’ denounces the discourse of Napoleon Ill’s work. Baudelaire and the Second Republic, p. 328. 85 L. N. Bonaparte, Extinction du paupérisme (Paris, 1844), p. 53. Friedman identifies a more general thematic of literalization at work in ‘Assommons les pauvres!’, and argues that it contributes to the text’s parodie treatment of the idealism-materialism relationship in the context of the 1848 Revolution. The Insistence o f History, pp. 161-82. Jonathan Culler refers to Baudelaire’s ‘perverse literalization’ of the relation between violence and theory in this prose poem. J. Culler, ‘Violence and Justice: Baudelaire’s Assommons les pauvresV, Cardozo Law Review, 13.4(1991), 1229-36 (p. 1235). 86 See Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic, p. 348, which cites Proudhon’s De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (Paris, 1924), p. 125.

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of Faust:81 ‘Celui-là seul est l’égal d’un autre qui le prouve, et celui-là seul est digne de la liberté, qui sait la conquérir.’ (He alone is the equal of an other who proves it, and he alone is deserving of freedom, who conquers it.) In the narrator’s version, by contrast with the original, it is not only freedom that must be won, but equality itself. The narrator’s excessively literal readings of humanitarian texts, such as those by Louis Napoleon and Proudhon, would thus seem to be supplemented by equally insufficiently digested reading of literary texts. Literalism, associated in this text with brutality, would seem to be one of the targets of this prose poem’s irony: consequently, readers of this and other prose poems might be well advised to read between its lines. Instead of acting as Baudelaire’s proxy, the narrator may exemplify what the poet considered to be the self-serving obtuseness as well as the thinly-veiled barbarity of the bourgeoisie.

‘La Fausse Monnaie’ begins with a first-person narrator and his friend walking away from a tobacconist’s.8788 The narrator notices that his friend divides his change carefully into separate pockets. The two pass a beggar, to whom the friend gives a substantially greater donation than does the narrator. The latter then tells the friend that he is right to have wanted to surprise the beggar: “ ‘Vous avez raison; après le plaisir d’être étonné, il n’en est pas de plus grand que celui de causer une surprise.’” (‘You’re right; after the pleasure of being surprised, there is none greater than that of causing a surprise.’) The friend, however, states, ‘comme pour se justifier de sa prodigalité’ (as if to justify his extravagance), that his offering was counterfeit. The narrator reasons as follows: dans mon misérable cerveau, toujours occupé à chercher midi à quatorze heures (de quelle fatigante faculté la nature m’a fait cadeau!), entra soudainement cette idée qu’une pareille conduite, de la part de mon ami, n’était excusable que par le désir de créer un événement dans la vie de ce pauvre diable, peut-être même de connaître les conséquences diverses, funestes ou autres, que peut engendrer une pièce fausse dans la main d’un mendiant. Ne pouvait-elle pas se multiplier en pièces vraies? ne pouvait-elle pas aussi le conduire en prison? Un cabaretier, un boulanger, par exemple, allait peutêtre le faire arrêter comme faux monnayeur ou comme propagateur de fausse monnaie. Tout aussi bien la pièce fausse serait peut-être, pour un pauvre petit spéculateur, le germe d’une richesse de quelques jours. Et ainsi ma fantaisie allait son train, prêtant des ailes à l’esprit de mon ami et tirant toutes les déductions possibles de toutes les hypothèses possibles.

87 Zimmerman takes Nerval’s Faust translation as the basis of his remark, but Jean Guillaume argues for the greater proximity to the line in Baudelaire’s prose poem of Blaze de Bury’s translation of the same passage. See M. Zimmerman, ‘Quelques allusions dans Assommons les pauvres ou du nouveau sur Baudelaire et Nerval’, Bulletin Baudelairien, 14, supp. (1980), 1-2; J. Guillaume, ‘Baudelaire et Nerval ou Baudelaire et Blaze de Bury?’, Bulletin Baudelairien, 15.1-2 (1980), p. 13. 88 ‘La Fausse Monnaie’, OC I 323-24.

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(into my wretched brain, always busy looking for noon at two o’clock — what an exhausting faculty is nature’s gift to me! —, there suddenly came the idea that such behaviour on my friend’s part was excusable only by the desire to create an event in this poor devil’s life, perhaps even to learn the various consequences, grievous or otherwise, that a counterfeit coin in a beggar’s hand might engender. Might it not multiply into real coins? Might it not also lead him to prison? A tavern keeper, a baker, for example, was perhaps going to have him arrested as a counterfeiter or for passing counterfeit money. The counterfeit coin could just as well, perhaps, be the seed of several days’ wealth for a poor little speculator. And so my fancy went its way, lending wings to my friend’s mind and drawing all possible deductions from all possible hypotheses.)

These fantasies, on the part of the narrator, are interrupted by the friend, who reiterates, almost word for word, the narrator’s own comment: ‘“Oui, vous avez raison; il n ’est pas de plaisir plus doux que de surprendre un homme en lui donnant plus qu’il n’espère.’” (‘Yes, you’re right; there is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.’) Horrified, the narrator reads ‘une incontestable candeur’ (an indisputable candour) in the eyes of his friend and surmises that the latter’s gesture was motivated by foolish, self-ignorant hypocrisy rather than by Te désir de la criminelle jouissance’ (the desire for criminal enjoyment) which, the narrator claims, he could almost have forgiven: Je vis alors clairement qu’il avait voulu faire à la fois la charité et une bonne affaire; gagner quarante sols et le cœur de Dieu; emporter le paradis économiquement; enfin attraper gratis un brevet d’homme charitable. (I then saw clearly that he had wanted to do a good deed and at the same time make a good deal; to earn forty cents and the heart of God; to win paradise economically; in short, to pick up gratis the certificate of a charitable man.)

The narrator concludes with the statement that ‘On n’est jamais excusable d’être méchant, mais il y a quelque mérite à savoir qu’on l’est; et le plus irréparable des vices est de faire le mal par bêtise.’ (It is never excusable to be nasty, but there is some merit in knowing that one is; and the most irreparable of vices is to do evil out of stupidity.) As Derrida points out, the narrator of ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ reproaches his friend for his self-deception rather than for his deception of the pauvre. It is the friend’s stupidity that offends him rather than his malevolence: ‘je ne lui pardonnerai jamais l’ineptie de son calcul’ (I shall never forgive him the ineptitude of his plan). This intellectually superior attitude on the part of the narrator is consistent with his emphasis elsewhere in the text on his own mental acuity: Je ne connais rien de plus inquiétant que l’éloquence muette de ces yeux suppliants, qui contiennent à la fois, pour l’homme sensible qui sait y lire, tant d’humilité, tant de reproches. (I know nothing more disturbing than the mute eloquence of those imploring eyes, containing at once, for the sensitive man who knows how to read them, so much humility and so much reproach.)

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The apparent intellectual authority of the narrator encourages the reader to take sides with him against his friend. Understandably, commentators have tended to collude with the narrator in making of the duplicitous friend the villain or idiot of the piece. Some, however, have highlighted the lack of generosity inherent in the narrator’s refusal to pardon his friend, as well as in his assumption that a gift must bring back a reward of some kind. Derrida, for example, suggests that the friend’s donation is actually a more authentic gift than any conceived of by the narrator because of its corruption of the circuit of exchange, the principle of exchange being antithetical to that of the gift.89 Derrida asks if the narrator might thus be mistaken in his reading of his friend’s intentions. Indeed, throughout his study of ‘La Fausse Monnaie’, Derrida indirectly suggests that the text invites a misreading: he does this by claiming that the text is itself a counterfeit coin, to the extent that it is a literary fiction masquerading as prosaic anecdote, Ta fiction d’une naturalisation de la littérature’ (the fiction of a naturalization of literature).90 The hypothesis of a calculated mise en abyme is strengthened by the fact that the word ‘pièce’, used in Baudelaire’s text to refer to the coin, could easily be applied to the prose poem itself. A contemporary of Baudelaire’s, Xavier Fomeret, had published a collection of prose poems entitled Pièces de pièces (1840), reinforcing the possibility that the text’s title refers to itself as much as to its theme.91 Also consistent with a reading of the prose poem as a mise en abyme is the narrator’s comparison of the beggar’s eyes to those of dogs being beaten; when considered in the light of the analogy between reading public and dog constructed in another prose poem, ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, this image might indicate that the reader here occupies the place of the duped beggar.92 If, as Derrida states, the prose poem is a counterfeit coin to the extent that it pretends to be a simple anecdote whereas in fact it is a work of literature, then it

89 See Donner le temps. See also Jacques Derrida, ‘TITLE (to be specified)’, Substance, 31 (1981), 5-22 for a prior study by Derrida of Baudelaire’s ‘La Fausse Monnaie’, which anticipates the argument of Donner le temps. 90 Donner le temps, p. 214. 91 This collection is discussed in N. Vincent-Munnia, Les Premiers Poèmes en prose: Généalogie d ’un genre dans la première moitié du dix-neuvième siècle français (Paris, 1996). 92 Franc Schuerewegen draws attention to certain similarities between ‘Le Chien et le flacon’ and ‘La Fausse Monnaie’, such as a shared motif of ingestion/inhalation and a shared manipulation of the reader. F. Schuerewegen, ‘Faux amis: Sur Baudelaire et Derrida’, Poétique, 96 (1993), 371-78.

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makes sense to deduce that it is by confusing the first-person narrator with the author that the reader mistakes false coin for legal tender. Derrida seems to negate this interpretation, though, by noting that ‘nous savons, Baudelaire et nous, les lecteurs, que cette fiction est une fiction, il n’y a là aucun phénomène de “fausse monnaie”, c’est-à-dire d’abus de confiance faisant passer le faux pour vrai’ (we know, Baudelaire and we, the readers, that this fiction is a fiction; there is no phenomenon here of ‘counterfeit money’, that is, of an abuse of trust that passes off the false for the true).93 This statement is scandalous in its misrepresentation of the textual dynamic of ‘La Fausse Monnaie’, suggesting that Derrida is as interested as Baudelaire in the circulation of disingenuous texts (or counterfeit coins). Readers of the prose poem are often far from convinced of its fictive status. As Guerlac puts it, the prose poem is so convincingly artless that it encourages readers to mistake a fiction or ‘joke’ for ‘something real’.94 Even the fact that a great many commentators have acquiesced in the narrator’s judgement against his friend suggests, at the very least, a subconscious identification of the narrator with the poet. For example, Evans identifies the narrator of the prose poem with the poet and describes the friend as a hypocritical ‘rich man’ who acts out of ‘perverse curiosity’ (despite the fact that it is the narrator rather than the friend who offers evidence, in his narration, of a perverse curiosity); Maclean describes the narrator as an ‘expert reader’ and the friend as ‘stupid’; Stephens describes the friend as ‘the archetypal hypocrite’.95 What these interpretations have in common is an assumption that the narrator speaks for Baudelaire and a faith in the prestige of that narrator’s judgement. The potentially booby-trapped text is received as a firstperson account, just as a counterfeit coin might continue to circulate incognito.96 The assumption of autobiography that characterizes interpretations of this prose poem (among others in the collection) is invited not only by the use of the first person and the presence of a certain recognizably Baudelairean tone — the narrator’s concluding statement resembling remarks such as ‘Le mal se connaissant était moins affreux et plus près de la guérison que le mal s’ignorant’ (Evil knowing itself was less horrible and closer to cure than evil oblivious to itself) — but also by the fact that the story seems verifiable against the facts of the author’s life; in L ’Ecole païenne, Baudelaire criticizes an ‘artiste farceur’ (joker artist) whom he claims to have overheard saying that he would give a false coin to a poor person: ‘Le misérable prenait un infernal plaisir à voler le pauvre et à jouir en même temps des bénéfices d’une réputation de charité.’ (The scoundrel derived a devilish

93 Donner le temps, p. 122. 94 The Impersonal Sublime, p. 112. 95 Evans, Baudelaire and Intertextuality, pp. 26-28; Maclean, Narrative as Performance, pp. 86-87; S. Stephens, ‘Argot littéraire, argot plastique: Caricature in Baudelaire’s Prose Poetry’, Australian Journal o f French Studies, 30.2 (1993), 197-206 (p. 201). See also Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, p. 24. 96 On Baudelaire’s counterfeit coin as a model of the subversive potential of literary fiction, see N. Wing, ‘Poets, Mimes and Counterfeit Coins: On Power and Discourse in Baudelaire’s Prose Poetry’, Paragraph, 13.1 (1990), 1-18.

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pleasure from stealing from the poor man and, at the same time, enjoying the profits of a charitable reputation.)97 A crucial difference between Baudelaire’s supposedly autobiographical account (first published in 1852) and the version presented in the prose poem (first published in 1864) is that the author of L 'Ecole païenne expresses indignation at the artist’s treatment of the poor man, whereas the narrator of the prose poem seems absolutely unperturbed at the idea of the wrong done to the beggar, and even participates in this abuse by way of his pleasurable speculations about the trouble in which the coin will land its recipient (a pleasure that the narrator designates as criminal and hypocritically attributes to his friend). In any case, various elements of the text connive to produce something similar to what Philippe Lejeune describes as i e pacte autobiographique’ (the autobiographical pact)98 so that if the text is not actually autobiographical, a breaking of the contract of trust between author and reader might be understood to have occurred, even if, technically, no lie has been told. In a similar way, the counterfeit coin breaches the tacit contract of charity and the narrator’s friend breaches the unspoken contract of friendship. The fact that Derrida actually suggests that the counterfeit coin constitutes an embedded mise en abyme of the narrative situation without going so far as to contend that the text breaks any autobiographical pact is strange in view of his insistence on a separation of narrator and author of the prose poem, and given his suggestion that Baudelaire disguises himself, in the prose poem, as the narrator’s friend. The latter hypothesis allows Derrida to conjecture that the narrator is effectively speculating about the author’s intentions when he wonders about his friend’s motivations: [C’est] un peu comme si le narrateur parlait des ‘intentions de l’auteur’, à savoir Baudelaire, comme si Baudelaire était l’ami du narrateur, comme s’il ‘se’ présentait en somme, sans se montrer, déguisé sous les traits de l’ami du narrateur qu’il fait parler, comme s’il laissait le narrateur (à la place du lecteur ou du critique) analyser les motifs et les effets possibles de la fausse monnaie qu’est le texte...99 ([It is] a little as if the narrator were speaking of the ‘author’s intentions’, namely Baudelaire’s, as if Baudelaire were the narrator’s friend, as if he were presenting ‘himself, all in all, without revealing himself, disguised in the features of the narrator’s friend whom he makes speak, as if he were letting the narrator (in the place of the reader or critic) analyse the possible motives and effects of the counterfeit coin that is the text...)

97 OC II 68, 49. 98 See P. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris, 1975). Writing of the prose poems in general, Franck Evrard claims that no such pact is broken in the prose poems because none is (explicitly) proposed by the author. Nevertheless, he does state that the texts break ‘le contrat de confiance’ (the contract of trust) between poet and reader by presenting fictions as lived reality. F. Evrard, Le Spleen de Paris’: Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 2002), pp. 54, 117. 99 Donner le temps, pp. 124-25.

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To speculate, then, with the narrator, why might Baudelaire have wished to offer posterity the gift of a counterfeit coin? Assuming the existence of a mise en abyme, our only clue as to the author’s intention would be what the narrator’s friend says about his own motivations: ‘“il n’est pas de plaisir plus doux que de surprendre un homme en lui donnant plus qu’il n’espère’” (‘there is no pleasure sweeter than that of surprising a man by giving him more than he hopes for’). It is possible to interpret this as a hypocritical statement, as the narrator does; by this logic, Baudelaire would have offered his duplicitous text to his audience in order to have it misrecognized as sincere, thereby earning a false reputation for himself Alternatively, the statement might be understood to mean that the friend/poet derives a certain pleasure from giving the kind of surprise or shock that the discovery of duplicitous intentions would produce. An analogous pleasure is described as follows by Lacan, in his discussion of visual trompe-l’œil and anamorphosis: Qu’est-ce qui nous séduit et nous satisfait dans le trompe-l’œil? Quand est-ce qu’il nous captive et nous met en jubilation? Au moment où, par un simple déplacement de notre regard, nous pouvons nous apercevoir que la représentation ne bouge pas avec lui et qu’il n ’y a là qu’un trompe-l’œil. Car il apparaît à ce moment là comme autre chose que ce qu’il se donnait, ou plutôt il se donne maintenant comme étant cet autre chose.100 (What seduces and satisfies us in the trompe-l’œil? When does it captivate and thrill us? At the moment that, with a simple shift of our gaze, we realize that the representation does not move with it and that it is only a trompe-l’œil. Because it appears at that moment as something other than what it gave itself to be, or rather it gives itself now as being that other thing.)

The satisfaction one feels at the recognition of a trompe-l’œil is related, for Lacan, to the instantaneous restoration of one’s sense of mastery. A reader’s reaction to a duplicitous text, likewise, might be one of indignation, but it might also be one of jubilation, to the extent that the recipient/reader imagines him or herself to be privy to the donor/author’s joke. Indeed, the pleasure of finding oneself on the side of the trickster is indirectly evoked in the prose poem itself; the friend’s statement, after giving the coin to the beggar, that “‘C’était la pièce fausse’” (‘It was the counterfeit coin’), by its use of the definite article, seems initially to include the narrator in a joke against the poor man. The friend therefore flatters the narrator by crediting him with greater powers of observation than he would seem to possess; as Franc Schuerewegen points out, there is nothing to suggest that the narrator had correctly interpreted the initial gesture or ‘parade’ of coin-separation by which his friend had given it to be understood that he was in possession of a counterfeit coin.101 It is no doubt by 100 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire: Livre XI (1964): Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1973), pp. 102-103. 101 Taux amis’. Murphy too highlights the narrator’s unreliability as a reader. Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, pp. 443-44.

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confirming the narrator’s self-perception as an expert reader (he, like the narrators of ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ and ‘Assommons les pauvres!’, believes himself to be an able reader of the eyes of the other) that the friend provokes in him a pleasurable sense of complicity. However, this pleasure lasts only until the moment that the narrator decides that his impression of connivance is ill-founded. With ordinary gifts, according to Derrida, the recipient’s sense of surprise lasts only for a moment before the gift is re-inscribed in a logic of debt and exchange. By contrast, the ‘pure’ gift would elude this logic: pour n’avoir pas prise sur l’autre, la surprise du don pur devrait avoir la générosité de ne rien donner qui surprenne et apparaisse comme don, rien qui se présente comme présent, rien qui soit; elle devrait donc être assez surprenante et faite, de part en part, d’une surprise dont il n’est même pas question de revenir, donc d’une surprise assez surprenante pour se laisser oublier sans retard.102 (in order not to have a hold over the other, the surprise of the pure gift should have the generosity to give nothing that surprises and appears as gift, nothing that presents itself as present, nothing that is; it should therefore be surprising enough and made up entirely of a surprise that there is no way of getting over, thus of a surprise surprising enough to let itself be forgotten without delay.)

Following this logic, Baudelaire’s gift of complicity to the reader, like the friend’s gift of complicity to the narrator, would be a pure gift, as there would be no concrete evidence that it had been given. Furthermore, if a gift can produce a surprise in its recipient only in so far as the latter senses that that gift was intended, the gift ceases to be a gift and becomes a debt to be repaid as soon as the recipient’s intuition becomes sure knowledge. Therefore, it would be precisely the impossibility of knowing whether or not Baudelaire intended to present the reader with a fake that would make of the text a pure gift. A gift, for Derrida, lies not in what is given but rather in ‘l’acte de l’adresse à l’intention de l’autre, par exemple l’œuvre comme performance textuelle et poétique’ (the act of address directed at the other, for example the work as textual or poetic performance). Its inviolability derives from the possibility of falseness or ‘non-vérité’ (non-truth) that permeates any dialogue between two people. In order to deduce the intention-to-give of one’s interlocutor it is necessary to make T’acte de foi, de crédit, de créance, voire de crédulité qui s’inscrit dans l’intuition la plus immédiate du regard croisé’ (the act of faith, of credit, of credibility, even of credulity that is inscribed in the most immediate intuition of the meeting of glances).103 Baudelaire himself actively dissociated poetry from any kind of positivism: for him ‘la grande poésie est essentiellement bête, elle croit, et c’est ce qui fait sa gloire et sa force’ (great poetry is essentially stupid, it believes, and this is what constitutes its glory and its strength), and ‘[le] mot conjecture [...] sert à définir, passablement, le caractère extra-scientifique de toute poésie’ ([the] word 102 Donner le temps, p. 187. 103 Ibid. pp. 79,194,207.

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conjecture [...] serves to define, reasonably well, the extra-scientific character of all poetry).104 The reader who recognizes the potential for textual trickery in the prose poem 6La Fausse Monnaie’ may or may not choose to believe that Baudelaire actually intended a ruse. If deconstruction tends to show how structural constraints can ‘both limit and subvert authorial meaning’, as David Wood puts it,105 it is possible that authorial conniving might, occasionally, turn such constraints to its advantage. Baudelaire’s ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ leaves this reader with a strong suspicion that the explicit moral message is a decoy and that the meaning suggested by a deconstructive or slanted reading is closer to the intentions of the author. While the narrator of the prose poem interprets the friend’s statement that he likes to give ‘plus’ (more) than is hoped for to mean that the friend likes to give ‘more money’, the hypothesis of mise en abyme opens up the possibility that this text intentionally says more, ‘plus’, than what it seems to say — this surplus would be the prose poem’s gift to the reader.

In Le Poème du hachisch, Baudelaire daim s that ‘le premier germe de l’esprit satanique’ (the first seed of the satanic mind) reveals itself in ‘une espèce de philanthropie plutôt faite de pitié que d’amour’ (a type of philanthropy made up of pity rather than love), a kind of benevolence that manifests itself under the influence of drugs. This type of charitable feeling is inseparable from narcissistic pleasure, according to the poet: Le goût de la protection, un sentiment de paternité ardente et dévouée peuvent se mêler à une sensualité coupable que le hachisch saura toujours excuser et absoudre. [...] Le remords, singulier ingrédient du plaisir, est bientôt noyé dans la délicieuse contemplation du remords, dans une espèce d’analyse voluptueuse.106 (The taste for protection, a feeling of fervent and devoted paternity, can mingle with a guilty sensuality that hashish will always excuse and absolve. [...] Remorse, a singular ingredient of pleasure, is soon drowned in the delicious contemplation of remorse, in a kind of voluptuous analysis.)

If Baudelaire’s essay overtly discusses a sensual feeling of benevolence inspired by hashish, it also highlights the often self-serving motivations of the philanthropist: Une voix parle en lui (hélas! c’est la sienne) qui lui dit: ‘Tu as maintenant le droit de te considérer comme supérieur à tous les hommes; nul ne connaît et ne pourrait comprendre tout ce que tu penses et tout ce que tu sens; ils seraient même incapables d’apprécier la bienveillance qu’ils t’inspirent. Tu es un roi que les passants

104 OC II 11, 139. 105 D. Wood, ‘Reading Derrida: An Introduction’, in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. D. Wood (Oxford, 1992), pp. 1-4 (p. 2). 106 OC I 433-34.

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méconnaissent, et qui vit dans la solitude de sa conviction; mais que t’importe? Ne possèdes-tu pas ce mépris souverain qui rend l’âme si bonne?’107 (A voice speaks in him — alas, it is his own — and says to him: ‘You now have the right to consider yourself as superior to all men; no-one knows you or could understand all that you think and all that you feel; they would be unable even to appreciate the benevolence that they inspire in you. You are a king that passers-by fail to recognize, and who lives in the solitude of his conviction; but what do you care? Do you not possess that sovereign disdain that makes the soul so good?’)

The sense of personal superiority associated here with the consumer of hashish recalls the attitude expressed by the belles âmes (beautiful souls) who narrate the prose poems discussed in this chapter. The narrators of ‘Le Gâteau’, ‘La Solitude’, ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’, ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’, ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’, ‘Assommons les pauvres!’, and ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ all seem blithely unaware of the planks in their eyes. Each narrator either implicitly or explicitly passes moral judgement on others: on young boys who fight over a scrap of bread, on those who seek pleasure in social interaction, on a mistress who fails to show sensitivity, on the amnesia of a fairground crowd, on the innate guiltiness of children, on conventional philanthropy, on a friend’s meanness; at the same time, each narrator omits to acknowledge his own moral imperfections. The consistency with which these self-elevating narrators implicitly undermine their own positions leads one to suspect that the task of the reader of Baudelaire’s prose poems is to contest rather than acquiesce in the emphatically stated conclusions expressed by these speakers.

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OC 1434-35.

Chapter 4

A llegory

In the case of some of the prose poems discussed in the previous chapters, it was suggested that their dynamic presented a kind of illustration in miniature of the workings of the collection as a whole. This emblematic role will be given more sustained attention in this chapter, the prose poems examined here being interpreted primarily as allegories of the production and reception of Le Spleen de Paris. The term ‘allegory’ is invested with a number of different meanings in Baudelaire’s writings. Viewed from one perspective, it refers to a particular type of poetry or art. In Le Poème du hachisch, for example, Baudelaire describes allegory as ‘vraiment l’une des formes primitives et les plus naturelles de la poésie’ (truly one of the primitive and most natural forms of poetry), and in the Salon de 1845 he calls it ‘un des plus beaux genres de l’art’ (one of the finest branches of art).1Allegories were also, for Baudelaire, latent in the surrounding world: L ’homme raisonnable n’a pas attendu que Fourier vînt sur la terre pour comprendre que la Nature est un verbe, une allégorie, un moule, un repoussé, si vous voulez. Nous savons cela, et ce n’est pas par Fourier que nous le savons; — nous le savons par nousmêmes, et par les poètes.2 (The sane man did not await Fourier’s arrival on earth to understand that Nature is a verb, an allegory, a mould, a repoussé, if you like. We know that, and it’s not through Fourier that we know it — we know it through ourselves, and through poets.)

Furthermore, allegory was, for Baudelaire, ‘une “méthode” d ’appréhension du reel’ (a ‘method’ of apprehending the real), leading Walter Benjamin to claim that the poet’s genius ‘was an allegorical one’.3 At least two of these three versions of the notion of allegory converge in the following passage about landscape painting from the Salon de 1859, which suggests that allegories are as much a function of the human mind as of the external world:

1 OC I 430, OC II 368. 2 C I 337. 3 Labarthe, Baudelaire et la tradition de l ’allégorie, p. 12; W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era o f High Capitalism, trans. H. Zohn (London, 1983), p. 170. See also N. Wing, The Limits o f Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarmé (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 8-18 and P. Dufour, Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal’: L ’Intériorité de la forme ([np], 1989), pp. 135-47.

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BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS Je sais bien que l’imagination humaine peut, par un effort singulier, concevoir un instant la nature sans l’homme, et toute la masse suggestive éparpillée dans l’espace, sans un contemplateur pour en extraire la comparaison, la métaphore et l’allégorie. Il est certain que tout cet ordre et toute cette harmonie n’en gardent pas moins la qualité inspiratrice qui y est providentiellement déposée; mais, dans ce cas, faute d’une intelligence qu’elle pût inspirer, cette qualité serait comme si elle n’était pas.4 (I know very well that the human imagination can, with a great effort, conceive momentarily of nature without man, with all the suggestive mass scattered in space, without a contemplator to extract simile, metaphor, and allegory from it. Without a doubt, all that order and harmony would still retain the inspirational quality providentially deposited there; but, in that case, without an intelligence to inspire, this quality is as good as absent.)

Allegories are latent in nature but only become apparent to the extent that a human consciousness is present to extract them and be inspired by them. The particular role of the poet or artist is thus, for Baudelaire, to be ‘un traducteur, un déchiffreur’ (a translator, a decipherer) of the symbols and metaphors concealed in the outside world.5 It may be that the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris require the reader to perform an analogous work of imaginative decipherment. A number of commentators have presented fascinating readings of certain prose poems as esoteric political allegories.6 This chapter will follow these writers by arguing for the secretive, hieroglyphic quality of the allegories contained in Le Spleen de Paris, but instead of placing the emphasis on the political context of the collection, it will explore the ways in which the texts might be read as self-reflexive allegories. The self-reflexivity of the prose poems may in fact be one of the elements that permits them to transcend historical circumstance, lending them what Baudelaire describes in his discussion of caricature as ‘un élément mystérieux, durable, étemel’ (a mysterious, durable, eternal element).7 In Baudelaire’s prose description of Christophe’s anamorphic statuette in his article on the 1859 Salon, he describes the work as ‘gracieusement allégorique’ (graciously allegorical) and goes on to refer to the discovery that the woman’s smiling face is actually a mask as Te secret de l’allégorie, la morale de la fable’ (the secret of the allegory, the moral of the fable).8 Anamorphic works resemble allegorical texts because, in both, more than one angle of reading is prescribed, such that, as Jean-Claude Margolin writes, interpretation is destabilized: Cette vision oblique, perspectiviste, déstructurante et restructurante de l’anamorphose, comme le discours indirect et les symboles allusifs de l’allégorie, opèrent une véritable 4 OC II 660. 5OC II 133. 6 See for example Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic; Carpenter, Acts o f Fiction, pp. 125-48. 7 OC II 526. 8 OC II 678.

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dérive du sens, une désharmonie ou un désaccord profond entre la perception naïve (ou prétendue telle), une réflexion au premier degré, et les chaînes d’associations miconscientes, mi-inconscientes d’idées, de sentiments, d’images.9 (This oblique, perspectival, destructuring, and restructuring vision of anamorphosis, along with indirect speech and the allusive symbols of allegory, bring about a veritable drift in meaning, a disharmony or a profound discrepancy between (supposedly) naïve perception, a literal reflection, and the half-conscious, half-unconscious chains of association of ideas, feelings, and images.) This chapter will argue that, much as anamorphosis undermines the spectator’s certainties, allegorical interpretations of the prose poems can operate to destabilize the reader by problematizing the process of interpretation. To the extent that this is the case, the prose poems might be described as ironic allegories. In this way, Baudelaire’s ‘Deux qualités fondamentales: surnaturalisme et ironie’ (Two fundamental qualities: supematuralism and irony) would find themselves bizarrely conjoined.10

‘Le Chien et le flacon’ presents itself as a transparent allegory of literary reception: a dog is repelled by the smell of an ‘excellent parfum’ (excellent perfume) and is consequently compared by the narrator to the public, ‘à qui il ne faut jamais présenter des parfums délicats qui l’exaspèrent’ (to which one must never offer delicate perfumes, which exasperate it) but rather ‘des ordures soigneusement choisies’ (carefully selected rubbish).11 The message here, consistent with Baudelaire’s claim in Mon cœur mis à nu that the literary predilections of the average French man prove that ‘Il raffole des excréments’ (He delights in excrement), seems so transparent in its symbolism that Hiddleston ranks the prose

9 J.-C. Margolin, ‘Aspects du surréalisme au XVIe siècle: Fonction allégorique et vision anamorphotique’, Bibliothèque d ’Humanisme et Renaissance, 39.3 (1977), 503-30 (p. 519). According to Fernand Hallyn, similarly, ‘Le point de départ des rapprochements entre l’anamorphose et l’allégorie réside évidemment dans le fait que les deux posent au destinataire des problèmes de lecture polyisotope.’ (The basis for parallels between anamorphosis and allegory obviously lies in the fact that the two present the addressee with the problems of a polyisotopic reading.) F. Hallyn, ‘Anamorphose et allégorie’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 3 (1982), 319-30 (p. 322). Stamelman also compares anamorphosis to allegory, as in both cases Te signifiant lui-même est attaqué, se renversant sous nos yeux’ (the signifier itself is attacked, overturned before our eyes). ‘L’Anamorphose baudelairienne’, p. 263. 10 OC I 658. 11 ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, OC I 284. An earlier version of my reading of both this text and ‘Les Bons Chiens’ was presented at the 42nd Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies (University College Dublin, July 2001), and another appeared in M. Scott, ‘Baudelaire’s Canine Allegories: “Le Chien et le flacon” and “Les Bons Chiens’”, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 33.1-2 (2004-2005), 107-19.

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poem ‘among the least interesting in the collection’.1213Despite the fact that the text explicitly presents itself as an allegory of poetic reception, the poetic quality that Baudelaire associated with allegory seems, at least initially, to be entirely absent from it. That the prose poem should itself be of a low poetic calibre is particularly strange given that the text rails against the popularity of bad poetry; as Murphy puts it, ‘Le poète aurait-il oublié de donner une forme poétique à son message portant sur la poésie — et sur la forme de la poésie?’ (Could the poet have forgotten to give a poetic form to his message on the subject of poetry — and on the subject of poetic fo rm l)u The prose poem may, however, be more complex and suggestive than it seems,14 and may thus more closely resemble a bottle of fíne perfume than the parcel of excrement with which it is more often analogically associated. This artfulness is suggested by the fact that the text’s title indirectly recalls François Rabelais’s famous discussion of allegorical readings: the prologue to Gargantua explicitly compares the diligent reader to a dog and the text itself it to a container of precious substances.15 Rabelais’s prologue uses the twin images of the dog and the man-made container to illustrate the process of deciphering allegorical texts. Baudelaire’s covert allusion to the ‘Prologe’ by way of the comparison, in ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, of readers to dogs, and the text itself to a perfume bottle, might thus offer a clue as to how one should approach the texts of Le Spleen de Paris. If, in ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, the dog comparison is overtly insulting to the reader, the dog of Rabelais’s ‘Prologe’ is offered as a model of the ideal reader: veistes vous oncques chien rencontrant quelque os medulare? C’est comme diet Platon... lib. IL de rep. la beste du monde plus philosophe. Si veu l’avez: vous avez peu noter de quelle devotion il le guette: de quel soing il le guarde: de quel ferveur il le tient, de quelle prudence il l’entomme: de quelle affection il le brise: et de quelle diligence il le sugee. Qui le induict à ce faire? Quel est l’espoir de son estude? Quel bien pretend il? Rien plus qu’un peu de mouelle. Vray est que ce peu, plus est délicieux que le beaucoup de toutes aultres: pource que la mouelle est aliment elabouré à perfection de nature, comme diet Galen. III. facu. natural, et. XI. de usu. parti. A l’exemple d’icelluy vous convient estre saiges pour fleurer, sentir, et estimer ces beaulx livres de haulte gresse, legiers au prochaz: et hardiz à la rencontre. Puis par 12 OC I 698. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and ‘Le Spleen de Paris \ p. 88. 13 Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, p. 69. 14 The straightforwardness of the text’s meaning has been contested by a number of critics. Thélot, for example, reads it as ‘l’accusation baudelairienne de l’artiste, la critique du poète par lui-même’ (the Baudelairean accusation of the artist, the poet’s criticism of himself) and even as an address to Jeanne Duval. Baudelaire: Violence et poésie, pp. 27-31. 15 Michel Charles and Stephens have drawn attention to the intertextual echoing of the ‘Prologe’ in ‘Le Chien et le flacon’. Charles, noting the parallel motifs in the two texts, concludes that both must be read as unstable or unreadable allegories, while Stephens deduces from Baudelaire’s allusion to the dog of Rabelais’s prologue that the ‘generic playfulness’ of the prose poem ‘is here the substantial marrow in the bone’. M. Charles, Rhétorique de la lecture (Paris, 1977), p. 254. Stephens, ‘Boundaries, Limits and Limitations’, p. 35. On Baudelaire’s admiration for Rabelais, see OC II 526, 537, OC I 554.

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curieuse leçon, et meditation frequente rompre Los, et sugcer la sustantificque mouelle...16 (have you ever seen a dog coming across a marrow bone? The dog is, as Plato says in book two of the Republic, the most philosophical creature in the world. If you have, you’ll have noted with what devotion he watches over it, with what care he guards it, with what passion he holds it, with what caution he takes the first bite, with what fondness he breaks it open: and with what diligence he sucks it. What impels him to do this? What does he hope to gain by his application? What advantage does he expect? No more than a little marrow. It is true that this little is more delicious than a lot of anything else, because marrow is a food that is refined to perfection by nature, as Galen says in the third part of his Natural Faculties and in the eleventh part of the Functions o f the Various Parts o f the Human Body.

Following the example of the dog, you should be wise to sniff out, sound out, and assess these fine, flavoursome volumes. You should be light-footed in the pursuit and bold in the confrontation. Then, by a curious reading and frequent meditation, you should break open the bone and suck out the substantial marrow...) In the light of this passage from the Gargantua prologue, the reader of ‘Le Chien et le flacon’ might deduce from its intertextual allusion to Rabelais’s philosophical dog that s/he could do worse than tackle Baudelaire’s prose poetry as a dog would approach a bone. Rabelais also compares his own text to sileni, usually defined either as satyrs or as satyr figurines containing hidden divinities, but which his prologue describes as follows: Silenes estoient jadis petites boites telles que voyons de present es bouticques des apothecaires pinctes au dessus de figures joyeuses et frivoles, comme de Harpies, Satyres, oysons bridez, lievres comuz, canes bastées, boucqs volans, cerfz limonniers, et aultres telles pinctures contrefaictes à plaisir pour exciter le monde à rire. Quel fut Silene maistre du bon Bacchus: mais au dedans Ton reservoit les fines drogues, comme Baulme, Ambre gris, Amomon, Musc, zivette, pierreries: et aultres choses précieuses.17 (Sileni were, formerly, small boxes like those that we see today in the shops of apothecaries, painted on the outside with joyful and frivolous figures, like harpies, satyrs, goslings on leashes, homed hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, harnessed stags, and other such images invented for fun to excite people to laughter. This is what Silenus, master of the good Bacchus, used to do. But on the inside, they held fine medicines, like balsam, ambergris, amomum, musk, civet, gemstones, and other precious things.)

16 F. Rabelais, ‘Prologe de l’auteur’, Œuvres complètes, ed. M. Huchon (Paris, 1994), pp. 58 (pp. 6-7). 17 ‘Prologe de l’auteur’, p. 5. The satyr Silenus, referred to in this passage, is described by Pierre Bmnel as ‘une figure du secret’ (a figure of the secret). L'Imaginaire du secret (Grenoble, 1998), p. 21.

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Rabelais’s sileni, containers of ‘une celeste et impreciable drogue’ (a heavenly, invaluable medicine),1819may be ancestors of the bottle evoked in Baudelaire’s text, a recipient for ‘un excellent parfum acheté chez le meilleur parfumeur de la ville’ (an excellent perfume bought in the best perfume shop in town). Rabelais uses the image of the sileni as a warning against the deceptiveness of appearances, including the appearances presented by the literal meanings of his own text (though he goes on to deny any hidden allegorical intentions in Gargantua and to mock the gullibility of the reader who seeks them): C’est pourquoy fault ouvrir le livre: et soigneusement peser ce que y est deduict. Lors congnoistrez que la drogue dedans contenue est bien d’aultre valeur, que ne promettoit la boite. C’est à dire que les matières icy traictées ne sont tant folastres, comme le tiltre au dessus pretendoit. Et posé le cas, qu’au sens literal vous trouvez matières assez joyeuses et bien correspondentes au nom, toutesfois pas demourer là ne fault, comme au chant des Sirenes: ains à plus hault sens interpreter ce que par adventure cuidiez diet en gayeté de cueur. 19 (This is why you need to open the book: and carefully weigh what is set out there. Then you’ll know that the medicine contained inside is of a very different value from that promised by the box. In other words, the subjects treated of here are not as mad as is suggested by the title on the cover. And supposing that, reading the text literally, you find subject matter that’s quite pleasing and true to the title, you must nevertheless not stop there, as if caught by the song of the Sirens. You must interpret in a higher sense what at first you imagined to be written with a light heart.) Interestingly, the adverb ‘soigneusement’ (carefully), in the first line above, also appears in ‘Le Chien et le flacon’, where it refers to the activity of the writer rather than the reader: ‘des ordures soigneusement choisies’ (oo£...What a comical confusion between the author and the subject! This accursed book (of which I am very proud) must then be deeply obscure and deeply unintelligible! I will long bear the burden of having dared to paint evil with some talent.) Asselineau too remarks on the tendency of the public to confuse Baudelaire with his works and on the poet’s distress at this misattribution: Ce qui lui tenait le plus au cœur, c’était le ‘malentendu’ qui lui avait fait attribuer par bon nombre de gens les vices et les crimes qu’il avait dépeints ou analysés. Autant vaudrait accuser de régicide un peintre qui aurait représenté la mort de César.17 (What he felt most strongly about was the ‘misunderstanding’ that had led a good number of people to impute to him the vices and crimes that he had depicted or analysed. One may as well accuse of regicide a painter who depicted the death of Caesar.)

15 C II 232, 466, 254. 16 OCI 182; C II409. 17 Crépet, Pichois, Baudelaire et Asselineau, p. 124.

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Nevertheless, as Fraisse observes in an article of 1869, the poet’s use of firstperson reference in his poems actively encourages an identification of the poet with his lyrical alter egos: ‘il devient très-difficile pour le lecteur de faire la séparation exacte de l’œuvre et de l’homme; de savoir où s’arrête la confidence et où commence la fiction’ (it becomes very difficult for the reader to make the exact separation between the work and the man; to know where the confiding stops and the fiction begins). Furthermore, in one of the projected prefaces for Les Fleurs du Mal, the poet seems to welcome, however sardonically, the public’s misprision: Mon goût diaboliquement passionné de la bêtise me fait trouver des plaisirs particuliers dans les travestissements de la calomnie. Chaste comme le papier, sobre comme l’eau, porté à la dévotion comme une communiante, inoffensif comme une victime, il ne me déplairait pas de passer pour un débauché, un ivrogne, un impie et un assassin.18 (My diabolically passionate love of stupidity makes me derive particular pleasures from the travesties of slander. Chaste as paper, sober as water, devout as a communicant, inoffensive as a victim, it would not displease me to be taken for a rogue, a drunkard, a heathen, and an assassin.) It is possible that Baudelaire’s resentment at the public’s confusion of his own person with the subject matter of the verse collection gave rise to an ironic response in the form of prose poems that actually invite a similar misrecognition. Certainly, the author of Le Spleen de Paris seems at times to caricature his own public persona, texts such as ‘Enivrez-vous’, ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’, and ‘Assommons les pauvres!’ serving to reinforce the mythologization of Baudelaire as a hedonistic and profoundly amoral individual. By parodying his own public persona, the poet would have ensured that the real target of the caricature would go unperceived by his audience. Another strategy of avoiding detection is suggested by Wayne Booth: Every reader will have greatest difficulty detecting irony that mocks his own beliefs or characteristics. If an author invents a speaker whose stupidities strike me as gems of wisdom, how am I to know that he is not a prophet? If his mock style seems like good writing to me, what am I to do? And if his incongruities of fact and logic are such as I might commit, I am doomed. None of us can tell how many ironies we have missed in our lives because we share ignorance, stylistic naïveté, or outlandish beliefs with the ridiculed mask. [...] No complex piece of irony can be read merely with tests or devices or rules, and it would be a foolish man who felt sure that he could never mistake irony for straight talk.19

18ArmandFraisse sur Baudelaire, pp. 78-79; OC I 185. 19 W. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, 1974), p. 81. Booth cites William H. Whyte’s ‘Case for the Universal Card’ in the April 1954 issue of Fortune Magazine as an example of a text that actively exploits this particular style of irony. He also refers to Leonard C. Lewin’s Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (1967), a famous hoax and political satire.

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By ironically adopting the views, values, and tastes of his audience, the poet’s attack on that audience would remain invisible to it.20 In his article on Madame Bovary, Baudelaire claims that Flaubert, finding himself ‘en face d’une société absolument, — pire qu’usée, — abrutie et goulue, n’ayant horreur que de la fiction, et d ’amour que pour la possession’ (faced with an absolutely wasted society, — worse than wasted, — stupefied and gluttonous, having contempt only for fiction, and love only for possession), decided to write a novel whose subject was sufficiently vulgar and whose style was sufficiently objective and impersonal to satisfy the popular taste for realism. According to Baudelaire, the figure of Emma Bovary operates simultaneously as a figure of ridicule in the eyes of readers and as a discreet incarnation of the personality of the artist. Thus, Flaubert accomplished the ‘tour de force’ of writing a superior novel that was, on the surface at least, mediocre enough to appeal to a nineteenth-century audience: ‘M. Gustave Flaubert a volontairement voilé dans Madame Bovary les hautes facultés lyriques et ironiques manifestées sans réserve dans La Tentation.’ (Monsieur Gustave Flaubert intentionally veiled, in Madame Bovary, the lofty lyrical and ironic powers manifested unreservedly in The Temptation o f Saint Anthony.) Given that Baudelaire recognized the possibility of such a ruse, he may have been capable of constructing a similar one himself.21 The strongest argument against the hypothesis of ruse is, perhaps, the fact that Baudelaire’s prose poems have served as inspiration for many outstanding writers. However, the impressive posterity of Le Spleen de Paris does not preclude the possibility of duplicitous intentions at their origin. Likewise, the possibility that my own analysis is a product of a kind of critical paranoia does not invalidate it; as Schor points out in relation to Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method, truth and delusion are not necessarily incompatible.22 In writing of literary irony, Booth writes that ‘we have here discovered a form of interpretation that gives us knowledge of a firm (and neglected) kind, a kind quite unrelated both to ordinary empirical observation and to standard deductive or logical proofs’. He goes on to say that ‘It is no doubt true that according to some criteria of proof such knowledge is not knowledge at all, but rather only belief, or hunch, or intuition.’23 As a result, the final test of irony, according to Booth, is whether it actually enhances our reading of a text. Whether or not the argument for the potentially duplicitous character of Le Spleen de Paris actually enriches our reading of the collection is open to question. With luck, however, it might add to our sense of unease.

20 On Baudelaire’s penchant for pastiche in his literary criticism, see Lloyd, Baudelaire’s Literary Criticism, pp. 133-34, 144-45, 278. 21 OC II 80, OC II 81, OC II 86. 22 Reading in Detail, p. 102. 23A Rhetoric o f Irony, p. 14.

Title Key

Baudelaire’s prose poems (selection)

1862

Petits Poèmes en prose

Little Prose Poems

Petits Poèmes lycanthropes

Lycanthropic Little Poems

Le Spleen de Paris

Paris Spleen

‘À Arsène Houssaye’

To Arsène Houssaye

1862

I

‘L’Étranger’

The Stranger

1862

II

‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’

The Old Woman’s Despair

1862

III

‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’

The Artist’s Confiteor

1862

IV

‘Un plaisant’

A Funny Guy

1862

V

‘La Chambre double’

The Double Room

1862

VI

‘Chacun sa chimère’

To Each his Chimera

1862

VIII

‘Le Chien et le flacon’

The Dog and the ScentBottle

1862

IX

‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’

The Bad Glazier

1862

X

‘À une heure du matin’

At One O ’Clock in the Morning

1862

X

‘La Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse’

The Wild Woman and the Affected Little Lady

1861 1862

XII

‘Les Foules’

Crowds

1861 1862

XIII

‘Les Veuves’

Widows

210

BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPEEN DE PARIS

1861 1862

XIV

‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’

The Old Acrobat

1862

XV

‘Le Gâteau’

The Cake

1857 1861 1862

XVII

‘Un hémisphère dans une chevelure’

A Hemisphere in Hair

1857 1861 1862

XVIII

‘L’Invitation au voyage’

Invitation to Travel

1862

XIX

‘Le Joujou du pauvre’

The Poor Boy’s Toy

1862

XX

‘Les Dons des Fées’

The Fairies’ Gifts

1862 1863

XXI

‘Les Tentations ou Eros, Plutus et la Gloire’

The Temptations, or Eros, Plutus, and Fame

1855 1857 1861 1862 1864

XXII

‘Le Crépuscule du soir’

The Twilight of the Evening

1855 1857 1861 1862 1864

XXIII

‘La Solitude’

Solitude

1862 1863

XXV

‘La Belle Dorothée’

Beautiful Dorothy

1862 1864 1864

XXVI

‘Les Yeux des pauvres’

The Eyes of the Poor

1863 1864

XXVII

‘Une mort héroïque’

A Heroic Death

1864 1864 1866

XXVIII

‘La Fausse Monnaie’

The Counterfeit Coin

211

TITLE KEY 1864 1866

XXIX

Le Joueur généreux’

The Generous Gambler

1864 1864 1866

XXX

‘La Corde’

The Rope

1863

XXXII

‘Le Thyrse’

The Thyrsus

1864

XXXIII

‘Enivrez-vous’

Get drunk

1863

XXXV

‘Les Fenêtres’

Windows

1863 1867

XXXVIII

‘Laquelle est la vraie?’

Which is the True One?

1864

XL

‘Le Miroir’

The Mirror

1867

XLII

‘Portraits de maîtresses’

Portraits of Mistresses

1865*

XLIII

‘Le Galant Tireur’

The Gallant Marksman

1865*

XLIV

‘La Soupe et les nuages’

The Soup and the Cloud

1867

XLV

‘Le Tir et le cimetière’

The Shooting Range anc the Graveyard

1867*

XLVII

‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’

Miss Scalpel

1865*

XLIX

‘Assommons les pauvres!’

Let’s Beat Up the Poor!

1865 1866 1866 1867

L

‘Les Bons Chiens’

The Good Dogs

* Dates on which these prose poems were refused for publication.

212

BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPEENDE PARIS

Baudelaire’s verse (selection)

Les Fleurs du Mal ‘L’Albatros’ ‘L’Amour du mensonge’ ‘Au Lecteur’ ‘A une Malabaraise’ ‘A une passante’ ‘Les Aveugles’ ‘Bénédiction’ ‘Bien loin d’ici’ ‘La Chevelure’ ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ ‘Danse macabre’ ‘Don Juan aux enfers’ ‘Épigraphe pour un livre condamné’ ‘L’Examen de minuit’ ‘L’Irrémédiable’ ‘Je n’ai pas pour maîtresse une lionne illustre...’ ‘Le Masque’ ‘La Musique’ ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ ‘La Rançon’ ‘La Vie antérieure’ ‘La Voix’

The Flowers of Evil The Albatross Love of the Lie To the Reader To a Malabar Girl To a Woman Passing By The Blind Blessing Far Away from Here Tresses Twilight Macabre Dance Don Juan in Hell Epigraph for a Condemned Book Midnight Self-Examination The Incurable My mistress is not a lioness of fam e... The Mask Music The Little Old Women The Ransom The Previous Life The Voice

TITLE KEY Other texts by Baudelaire (selection)

‘Aux bourgeois’ Choix de maximes consolantes sur l 'amour Conseils aux jeunes littéraires De l 'essence du rire et et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques Les Drames et les romans honnêtes Du vin et du hachisch L ’Ecole païenne ‘Élégie des Chapeaux’ Exposition universelle Fusées La Genèse d u n poème Hygiène ‘La Lettre d’un fat’ Mon cœur mis à nu Morale du joujou Les Paradis artificiels Pauvre Belgique! Le Peintre de la vie moderne Le Poème du hachisch Quelques caricaturistes français Quelques caricaturistes étrangers Le Salon caricatural Le Salon de 1845 Le Salon de 1846 Le Salon de 1855 Le Salon de 1859

To the Bourgeoisie Selection of Consoling Love Maxims Advice to Young Writers Of the Essence of Laughter and Generally of the Comical in the Visual Arts Honest Dramas and Novels Of Wine and Hashish The Pagan School Elegy for Hats Universal Exhibition Rockets Genesis of a Poem Hygiene Letter from a Conceited Man My Heart Laid Bare Morality of Toys Artificial Paradises Poor Belgium! The Painter of Modem Life The Poem of Hashish Some French Caricaturists Some Foreign Caricaturists The Caricatural Salon The Salon of 1845 The Salon of 1846 The Salon of 1855 The Salon of 1859

213

Select Bibliography

Works by Baudelaire Charles Baudelaire: Petits Poèmes en prose (le Spleen de Paris), ed. Marcel Ruff (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967). Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). La Fanfarlo: Le Spleen de Paris (Petits Poèmes en prose), ed. David H. T. Scott, Barbara Wright (Paris: Flammarion, 1987). Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-76). Petits Poèmes en prose, ed. Robert Kopp (Paris: Corti, 1969). Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris), ed. Daniel-Rops (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1952). Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris), ed. Robert Kopp (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris), ed. Henri Lemaitre (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962). Petits Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris), ed. Pierre-Louis Rey ([Paris]: Pocket, 1995). Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose, ed. Yves Florenne (Paris: Livre de poche, 1998 [1972]). Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose, ed. Max Milner (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1979).

Other Works Adatte, Emmanuel, Les Fleurs du mal ’ et Le Spleen de Paris ’: Essai sur le dépassement du réel (Paris: Corti, 1986). Allard, Paul, ‘Satire des mœurs et critique sociale dans la caricature française de 1835 à 1848’, in La Caricature entre République et Censure: L ’Imagerie satirique en France de 1830 à 1880: Un discours de résistance, ed. Raimund Rütten, Ruth Jung, Gerhard Schneider (Lyons: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1996), pp. 17181. Anderson, Mary R., Art in a Desacralized World: Nineteenth-Century France and England (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984). Arnold, Paul, Ésotérisme de Baudelaire (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1972). Ashbee, Charles Robert, Caricature (London: Chapman and Hall, 1928). Aynesworth, Donald, ‘Humanity and Monstrosity in Le Spleen de Paris: A Reading of “Mademoiselle Bistouri’”, Romanic Review, 73 (1982), 209-21. Babuts, Nicolae, Baudelaire: At the Limits and Beyond (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997). Balzac, Honoré de, La Muse du département, in La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976-1981), IV (1976).

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215

Bandy, W. T., Baudelaire Judged by his Contemporaries (1845-1867) (New York: Institute of French Studies, 1933). -------- , and Claude Pichois, Baudelaire devant ses contemporains, 3rd edn (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995 [Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1957]). Bargues-Rollins, Yvonne, Baudelaire et le grotesque (Washington: University Press of America, 1978). Barthes, Roland, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, Gallimard, 1980). Bauer, Franck, ‘Le Poème en prose, un joujou de pauvre? Sur la genèse et la signification d’un Spleen de Paris', Poétique, 109 (1997), 17-37. -------- ‘Le Rat et l’oublie: Baudelaire et l’interdit de la Neuvième Rêverie’, in Littérature et interdits, ed. Jacques Dugast, François Mouret (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1998), pp. 325-35. Beaujour, Michel, ‘Short Epiphanies: Two Contextual Approaches to the French Prose Poem’, in The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice, ed. Mary Ann Caws, Hermine Riffaterre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 39-59. Bellemin-Noël, Jean, ‘Baudelaire et la chirurgie des âmes’, in Territoires de l ’Imaginaire: Pour Jean-Pierre Richard, ed. Jean-Claude Mathieu (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 201212.

Bellet, Roger, Presse et journalisme sous le Second Empire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967). Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983). Bercot, Martine, ‘Miroirs baudelairiens’, in Dix Études sur Baudelaire, ed. Martine Bercot, André Guyaux (Paris: Champion, 1993), pp. 113-36. Berman, Marshall, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983). Bernard, Suzanne, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu ’à nos jours (Paris: Nizet, 1959). Bemheimer, Charles, Figures of III Repute: Representing Prostitution in NineteenthCentury France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Bersani, Leo, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Blin, Georges, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire (Paris: Corti, 1948). Blood, Susan, Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Bonaparte, Louis Napoléon, Extinction du paupérisme (Paris: Pagnerre, 1844). Bonnefis, Philippe, Mesures de l ’ombre (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1987). Bonnefoy, Yves, Baudelaire: La Tentation de l ’oubli ([Paris]: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2000). -------- “‘La Belle Dorothée”, or Poetry and Painting’, trans. J. Plug, in Baudelaire and the Poetics o f Modernity, ed. Patricia A. Ward (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001), pp. 85-97. Booth, Wayne C., A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Breton, André, Anthologie de l ’humour noir (Paris: Pauvert, 1972). Brinsmead, Anne-Marie, ‘A Trading of Souls: Commerce as Poetic Practice in the Petits poèmes en prose', Romanic Review, 79.3 (1988), 452-65. Brunei, Pierre, L ’.Imaginaire du secret (Grenoble: Ellug, 1998). -------- Baudelaire et le ‘puits des magies ’: Six essais sur Baudelaire et la poésie moderne (Paris: Corti, 2003). Bruss, Elizabeth, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

216

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Burton, Richard D. E., Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). -------- ‘The Unseen Seer, or Proteus in the City: Aspects of a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Myth’, French Studies, 42.1 (1988), 50-68. -------- Baudelaire and the Second Republic: Writing and Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). -------- ‘Destruction as Creation: “Le Mauvais Vitrier” and the Poetics and Politics of Violence’, Romanic Review, 83.3 (1992), 297-322. -------- “‘Assommons les pauvres!”: Entre le tu et le vous\ Bulletin Baudelairien, 28.2 (1993), 74-80. -------- ‘Bonding and Breaking in Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose\ Modem Language Review, 88 (1993), 58-73. -------- ‘Baudelaire’s Indian Summer: A Reading of “Les Bons Chiens’”, NineteenthCentury French Studies, 22.3-4 (1994), 466-86. Carpenter, Scott, Acts of Fiction: Resistance and Revolution from Sade to Baudelaire (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Chambers, Ross, “‘L’Art sublime du comédien”, ou le regardant et le regardé: Autour d’un mythe baudelairien’, Saggi e ricerche di letteratura francese, 11 (1971), 189-260. -------- Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction, Theory and History of Literature 12 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). -------- Mélancolie et opposition: Les Débuts du modernisme en France (Paris: Corti, 1987). -------- ‘Baudelaire’s Dedicatory Practice’, Substance, 17.2 (1988), 5-17. -------- ‘The flâneur as hero (on Baudelaire)’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 28.2 (1991), 142-53. -------- ‘Qui perd gagne ou comment je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres sur Baudelaire’, in L \Année Baudelaire 6: De la Belle Dorothée aux Bons Chiens (Paris: Champion, 2002), pp. 55-68. Charles, Michel, Rhétorique de la lecture (Paris: Seuil, 1977). Chamet, Yves, ‘Hystéries de l’homme nerveux: A propos du “Mauvais Vitrier’”, Europe, 70.760-61 (1992), 106-10. -------- ‘Portrait de l’artiste en chien: Image et fiction dans le texte-Baudelaire’, La Licorne, 35 (1995), 51-61. Chase, Cynthia, ‘Paragon, Parergon: Baudelaire translates Rousseau’, Diacritics, 11.2 (1981), 42-51. Clark, Timothy J., The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848-1851 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). -------- The Painting of Modem Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999 [1985]). Campario, Jean-François, ‘Baudelaire aux ciels de Bourdin’, in L 'Année Baudelaire 6: De la Belle Dorothée aux Bons Chiens (Paris: Champion, 2002), pp. 25-53. Collet, Francis, ‘Le poème en prose de Baudelaire à travers sa dédicace à Arsène Houssaye’, L École des Lettres, 75.6 (1983), 3-10. Compagnon, Antoine, Baudelaire devant Tinnombrable (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003). Cooke, Peter, ‘The Dantesque and other intertexts in Baudelaire’s “Chacun sa chimère’”, French Studies, 53.1 (1999), 16-21. Corbin, Alain, Les Filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et prostitution aux 19e et 20e siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978).

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-------- Le Temps, le désir et l ’horreur: Essais sur le dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1991). Crépet, Eugène, Charles Baudelaire (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1993). Crépet, Jacques, and Claude Pichois, Baudelaire et Asselineau (Paris: Nizet, 1953). Culler, Jonathan, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 [1974]). -------- ‘Violence and Justice: Baudelaire’s Assommons les pauvresV, Cardozo Law Review, 13.4(1991), 1229-36. -------- “‘C’est le diable qui tient les fils’”, in Baudelaire: Une alchimie de la douleur: Études sur ‘Les Fleurs du mal’, ed. P. Labarthe (Paris: J & S éditeur, 2003), pp. 45-59. Dalmolin, Eliane, Cutting the Body: Representing Woman in Baudelaire ’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Daniel-Rops, ‘Baudelaire, poète en prose’, La Grande Revue, 35.10 (1931), 534-55. De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). Delcroix, Maurice, ‘Un poème en prose de Charles Baudelaire: Les Yeux des pauvres’, Cahiers d ’Analyse Textuelle, 19 (1977), 47-65. Denby, David, ‘Baudelaire et les lumières : Vers une définition de l’enjeu’, in Le Travail des Lumières: Pour Georges Benrekassa, ed. Caroline Jacot Grapa et al. (Paris: Champion, 2002). Derrida, Jacques, Donner le temps: 1. La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991). -------- ‘TITLE (to be specified)’, Substance, 31 (1981), 5-22. Diderot, Denis and Jean d’Alembert, Encyclopédie: ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des arts et des métiers, 17 vols (Paris, 1751-80; repr. Stuttgart: Verlag, 1966). Drost, Wolfgang, ‘Baudelaire between Marx, Sade and Satan’, in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry: New Essays in Honour of Lloyd Austin, ed. Malcolm Bowie, Alison Fairlie, Alison Finch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 38-57. Dubosclard, Joël and Marie Carlier, 20 poèmes expliqués: ‘Les Fleurs du Mal ’. ‘Le Spleen de Paris ’: Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Hatier, 2000). Du Camp, Maxime, Paris: Ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie jusqu’en 1870 (Monaco: Rondeau, 1993). Dufour, Pierre, Baudelaire: ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’: L ’Intériorité de la forme ([np]: SEDES, 1989). Eigeldinger, Marc, ‘Le Thyrse, Lecture thématique’, in Études Baudelairiennes VIII (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1976), pp. 172-83. Engelking, Ryszard, ‘Une hottée de plâtras: Notes sur “Le Spleen de Paris’”, Bulletin Baudelairien, 23.1 (1988), 70-87. Evans, Margery A., ‘Laurence Sterne and Le Spleen de Paris’, French Studies, 42.2 (1988), 165-76. -------- ‘Soubresaut or Dissonance? An Aspect of the Musicality of Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose', Modem Language Review, 83.2 (1988), 314-21. -------- Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads, Cambridge Studies in French 38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Évrard, Franck, ‘Le Spleen de Paris’: Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Bertrand-Lacoste, 2002). Flaubert, Gustave, Correspondance, ed. Jean Brumeau, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973—), I (1973).

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Flieger, Jerry Aline, ‘Baudelaire and Freud: The Poet as Joker’, in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, ed. Maurice Chamey, Joseph Reppen (London: Associated University Presses, 1987), pp. 266-81. Fondane, Benjamin, Baudelaire et l ’expérience du gouffre (Paris: Seghers, 1947). Formentelli, Georges, ‘Un Plaisant’, in Dix Etudes sur Baudelaire, ed. Martine Bercot. André Guyaux (Paris: Champion, 1993), pp. 137-55. Foucault, Michel, Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). Fraisse, Armand, Armand Fraisse sur Baudelaire: 1857-1869, ed. Claude Pichois, Vincenette Pichois (Gembloux: Duculot, 1973). Fredrickson, Hélène, ‘Échos de la mère dans la perception du temps chez Baudelaire’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 9 (1980-81), 69-79. Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74). Friedman, Geraldine, The Insistence of History: Revolution in Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Froidevaux, Gérald, Baudelaire: Représentation et modernité (Paris: Corti, 1989). Fuma, Sudel, Esclaves et citoyens, le destin de 62.000 Réunionnais: Histoire de l ’insertion des affranchis de 1848 dans la société réunionnaise, Documents et recherches 6 (Saint Denis: Fondation pour la recherche et le développement dans l’océan indien, 1979). -------- L ’Esclavagisme à la Réunion, 1794-1848 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992). Galand, René, Baudelaire: Poétiques et poésie (Paris: Nizet, 1969). Gasarian, Gérard, ‘La Figure du poète hystérique ou l’allégorie chez Baudelaire’, Poétique, 86(1991), 177-91. -------- De loin tendrement: Etude sur Baudelaire, Romantisme et Modernités 3 (Paris: Champion, 1996). -------- ‘Baudelaire et ses sœurs’, Littérature, 117 (2000), 53-69. Gautier, Théophile, Mademoiselle de Maupin (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1966). George, Ferdinand M. de, ‘The Structure of Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose', L ’Esprit Créateur, 13.2 (1973), 144-53. Godfrey, Sima, ‘Baudelaire’s Windows’, Esprit Créateur, 22.4 (1982), 83-100. Graciân, Baltasar, Art et figures de l ’esprit, trans. from Agudeza y arte del ingenio (1647) by Benito Pelegrin (Paris: Seuil, 1983). Guerlac, Suzanne, The Impersonal Sublime: Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Guillaume, Jean, ‘Baudelaire et Nerval ou Baudelaire et Blaze de Bury?’, Bulletin Baudelairien, 15.1-2 (1980), 13. Gutwirth, Marcel, ‘A propos du Gâteau: Baudelaire, Rousseau et le recours à l’enfance’, Romanic Review, 80.1 (1989), 75-88. Hallyn, Fernand, ‘Anamorphose et allégorie’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 3 (1982), 319-30. Hannoosh, Michele, Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). Heck, Francis S., ‘Baudelaire’s “Chacun sa chimère”: The Force of Habit’, Romance Notes, 22.2(1981), 167-70. -------- ‘Baudelaire’s Prose Poem “Which is the Real One?”: Irony and Supematuralism’, Concerning Poetry, 19 (1986), 43-53.

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Index

Note: Page numbers for illustrations are shown in italics, e.g. Daumier, Honoré, Gargantua 125, 154. Footnotes are indicated by ‘n.’ after a page number, e.g. Formentelli, Georges 36n.65. The titles of works by authors and artists other than Baudelaire are followed by the name of the author or artist in brackets, and for visual works by the medium also in brackets, e.g. Un bar aux Folies-Bergères (Manet) (painting). The verse poems are indicated thus: ‘A une Malabaraise’ (verse poem) 79. Titles beginning with numbers are filed as words, e.g. 9 heures du soir can be located under ‘n’ as neuf heures. ‘À une heure du matin’ 38-40, 44 ‘À une Malabaraise’ (verse poem) 79 abortion 58, 59-62, 64-66 as metaphor for censorship 70 absolute comical {le comique absolu) 18, 20, 45, 47 acrobat (le saltimbanque) 98-101, 128 Adatte, Emmanuel 150n.91 aesthetics 13, 79-80, 156-57 as allegory 138 artistic acceptance, in ‘Les Dons des Fées’ 198-200,201 callousness, in ‘La Corde’ 181-88, 189, 201 intoxication and creativity, in Du vin et du hachisch 193,196 intoxication, time and creativity, in ‘Enivrez-vous’ 195-98,201 nature and the artist in ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’ 157-61,201 in ‘La Soupe et les nuages’ 161-63,201 nature and the imagination, in ‘Les Fenêtres’ 166-68,201 of pagan school, in ‘Laquelle est la

vraie?’ 163-65 of poetry 151 self-delusion of the artist, in ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ 188-95, 196, 200, 201

self-other dichotomy, in ‘Les Foules’ 169-78, 201 and slavery 73, 74-75 ‘L’Albatros’ (verse poem) 78 Allard, Paul 19n.5 allegory 119-21 of attack on the reader, in ‘Le Galant Tireur’ 134-36 of caricature in ‘Chacun sa chimère’ 140-41 in ‘Le Miroir’ 136-40 of ennui and creativity, in ‘Le Joueur généreux’ 129-34 of literary reception, in ‘Le Chien et le flacon’ 121-25 of poetic persona in ‘Le Miroir’ 138-40 in ‘Une mort héroïque’ 141-48 of poetic resistance, in ‘Le Tir et le cimetière’ 148-53 alter ego: as allegory 142 as caricature 40, 42 of poet/author 3,5,9, 206 see also author amnesia 65, 68 and morality 100-101 and ‘the crowd’ 98, 99, 171-72 ‘L’Amour du mensonge’ (verse poem) 53-54 anamorphosis 10-11 and allegory 120-21 definition of 68 and monstrosity 67, 68 and trompe-l’oeil 115 Ancelle, Narcisse 206 Anderson, Mary R. 133n.40 Anthologie de I ’humour noir (Breton)

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43-44, 189 Aretino, Pietro 129 Arnold, Paul 27n.35 art: allegories of 145-46 see also aesthetics; literature; visual arts art for art’s sake 165 artist, as subject of allegory 138-40, 141-48 Ashbee, Charles Robert 141 Asselineau, Charles 17, 23, 61, 191-92, 193,206 ‘Assommons les pauvres’ 105-10 ‘Au lecteur’ (verse poem) 1, 2, 83, 101, 132 audience see readers Aupick, Mme (mother of Baudelaire) 89n.29, 130-31, 150, 151, 175,205, 206 author: public acceptance of 199-200 as subject of allegory 138-40, 141-48 authorial identity 3-9, 37, 40, 42, 204-08 as narrator 57, 86, 142-43, 178, 201, 203-04 as ‘translator’ of allegory 120, 159-60 autobiographical pact 114 awareness see blindness; self-awareness Aynesworth, Donald 55n.l3, 58 Babuts, Nicolae lln.34, 57n.l6 badaud 111 Balzac, Honoré de 71 Bandy, Walter T. 23n.21, 107n.76, 134n.43, 177n.65, 194n.l20 Banville, Théodore de 48 Un bar aux Folies-Bergères (Manet) (painting) 76 Barbier, Auguste 32 Bargues-Rollins, Yvonne 20n.9 Barthes, Roland 68 Baudelaire, Charles: antipathy to public 204-08 on creative work 130-31, 175, 192-94, 196-98 as critic 156-57,178-79 as graphie caricaturist 17-18 as hoaxer 191, 203-08

letters to Ancelle 206 Asselineau 61 Aupick, Mme (mother) 89n.29, 13031, 150, 151, 175, 205,206 Flaubert 106 Fraisse 196 Hetzel 54 Janin 127 Meurice, Mme Paul 205-06 Nadar 106-07 Poulet-Malassis 57n.l5 Sainte-Beuve 85, 138 Vigny, de 25 on solitude 89n.29 suicide attempt 150-51 violent actions of 106-07 writings on Boudin 161-62 Cladel 85 Dupont 179 Flaubert 84-85,208 Gautier 39-40, 139, 151 Guys 166, 169, 170-71, 173-74, 176 Hugo 83-84 Laclos 82 Ménard 84 Poe 151, 176 Villemain 91 Wagner 153,203 Bauer, Franck 102n.61, 104 Le Beau Narcisse (Daumier) (caricature) 138 Beaujour, Michel 71n.63 beauty: physical 75, 79 poetry as 151 public indifference to 180 and ugliness in allegory 138 see also aesthetics Belgium 21-22 ‘La Belle Dorothée’ 53, 72-80, 137 Bellemin-Noël, Jean 65 Bellet, Roger 136n.51 Benjamin, Walter 119, 150, 161n.l8, 177 Bercot, Martine 7n.20, 36n.65 Berman, Marshal 97 Bernard, Suzanne 12n.36, 160 Bemheimer, Charles 80n.89

INDEX Bersani, Leo 108n.80, 178 Bertrand, Aloysius 25 ‘Bien loin d’ici’ (verse poem) 72 black humour 43-44, 189-90 Blin, Georges 27n.35, 27n.36, 79n.83, 127n.26 blindness: and decorum in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ 70 of literal readings 191-92 moral and narcissistic 82, 86-89, 100 and suffering in ‘La Belle Dorothée’ 73 see also self-awareness Blood, Susan 35n.62 Bonaparte, see Napoléon III Bonnefis, Philippe 184n.84 Bonnefoy, Yves 75, 86n.23 ‘Les Bons Chiens’ 125-29 Booth, Wayne C. 207, 208 Boudin, Eugène 161-62 Le Boulevard (literary review) 17, 206 bourgeoisie: the bourgeois-artist 193 caricatured 17, 46-47 hypocrisy 80 moral values of 85-86, 105-06, 110 narrator as bourgeois 9, 193 passivity and indifference of 152-53, 180 Breton, André, Anthologie de l ’humour noir 43-44, 189 Brinsmead, Anne-Marie 75n.72, 129n.32 Brunei, Pierre 123n.l7, 147-48 Bruss, Elizabeth 160 Burton, Richard D. E. 8n.23, 14, 26n.34, 27n.36, 107n.78, 108n.81,p. 109n.84, p. 109n.86, 120n.6, 129n.32, 177n.68, 191n.l09, 197n.l29 Butor, Michael 40n.79, 189 cabbalism 27 Campario, Jean-François 162n.22 Les Caractères (La Bruyère) 92 caricature 17-48 in ‘À une heure du matin’ 38-39, 3940, 44 allegories of 136-41

229 the dedication to Houssaye 23-27, 37, 44 ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’ 33-34, 44, 167 ‘La Femme sauvage et la petitemaîtresse’ 40-42, 44 graphie caricature 17-18,45-46,125 hoaxes 22-23 irony 20-23 in ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ 23, 25, 43-44 in ‘Le Miroir’ 140 origin and meaning of ‘caricature ’ 141 in ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ 34-35 in ‘Un plaisant’ 35-36, 44 in ‘Portraits de maîtresses’ 42-43, 44 punning 27-28 of the reader 36-37, 44 self-caricature of Baudelaire 207 theory of the comical 18-20 in ‘Le Thyrse’ 29-30, 31-33, 44 caricature de moeurs 17 Carpenter, Scott 9, lln.33, 120n.6, 192n.lll censorship: abortion as metaphor for 70 allegorical criticism of 145 of Les Fleurs du Mal 70, 83, 85, 142 ‘Chacun sa chimère ’ 140-41 Chambers, Ross 3n.7, 24, 80, 100n.55, 142n.74, 146-47, 171n.49 ‘La Chambre double’ 197 ‘La Chanson du vitrier’ (Houssaye) (prose poem) 25, 96, 97, 191 Le Charivari (newspaper) 26 Charles, Michel 122n.l5 Chamet, Yves 69n.53, 87n.23, 125n.22 Charpentier, Gervais 137 Chase, Cynthia 104n.67 ‘Le Chien et le flacon’ 112, 121-25 children: innate nature of 102, 103 as material object, in ‘La Corde’ 18187 Choix de maximes consolantes sur l ’amour 21,32 Christophe, Ernst, La Comédie humaine, or Le Masque (sculpture) 10-11,7516, 67, 120, 201 Cladel, Léon, Les Martyrs ridicules 85 Clark, Timothy J. 46n.98, 76n.74

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cloud studies 161-62 clown (Fancioulle), as allegory of the artist 141, 142, 143-44, 145-46, 147, 148 Collet, Francis 24 La Comédie humaine, or Le Masque (Christophe) (sculpture) 10-11, 15-16, 67, 120, 201 comical, theory of 18-20 see also humour; laughter le comique absolu see absolute comical le comique ordinaire see ordinary comical communication, poverty and morality 93-98 Compagnon, Antoine 58n.l7, 156, 196n.l25 composition: aesthetics of 156-57 Baudelaire’s passion for 193-94 design of prose poems 126n.24, 128, 201,204 of landscape paintings 162-63 literary and artistic 145-46 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Quincey) 31 ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’ 157-61, 201 Conseils aux jeunes littéraires 198 contraception 59 Cooke, Peter 141n.71 Corbin, Alain 59n.23, 60-61, 63, 64 ‘La Corde’ 181-88,189,201 correspondences, notion of 11, 45, 159-60 counterfeit coin 110-11, 112-13, 114, 115 creativity: and discipline 175,192-94 and inactivity 130-33 and intoxication 196-98 and self-awareness 171-72,173, 180 Crépet, Eugène 71n.61 Crépet, Jacques 28, 19In. 110, 193n. 117, 206n.l7 ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ (verse poem) 52 the crowd 98, 99, 101, 169-73, 176-77 crucifixion 184 Culler, Jonathan 22n.l6, 109n.85, 133n.40

Dalmolin, Eliane 27n.36 Daniel-Rops 24n.27, 128n.29, 19In. 109 ‘Danse macabre’ (verse poem) 35 danse macabre theme 149-50 Daumier, Honoré, graphic work: Le Beau Narcisse (from Histoire ancienne) 138 10 heures du matin 138, 155 Gargantua 125,154 La Journée du célibataire 39-40 9 heures du soir 49 Les Philanthropes du jour 43, 50 Robert Macaire, Architecte 46, 51 De Vessence du rire 18, 28-29, 35, 4445,47, 125 death: personified as ‘la Mort’ 148-49, 151, 152 as spiritual renewal 152 dedications: of L'École païenne to Liszt 30-31 of Les Fleurs du Mal to Gautier 25 of prose poems to Houssaye 23-27, 37, 44 Delacroix, Eugène 156 Delcroix, Maurice 95, 97n.47 De Man, Paul 20n.8 Denby, David 133n.40 Derrida, Jacques 27-28, 111, 112-13, 114-15, 116, 117n.l05 ‘Le Désespoir de la vieille’ 33-34, 44, 103n.64, 167 desire 66-67 devil: in ‘Au lecteur’ 1,2 in ‘Le Joueur généreux’ 130-33 dictionary, nature as 156,162-63 Diderot, Denis and Jean d’Alembert, éncyclopédie 68 dissimulation 20, 205 diversion: intoxication as 195-97 and pastimes 98, 101-05 ‘Le Divertissement’ (Pascal) 90, 91, 92, 93 10 heures du matin (Daumier) (caricature) 138, 755 doctors: as abortionists 65-66 in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ 56, 60, 64,

INDEX 65, 68, 69 and prostitution 62, 63 dogs: as allegorical figures 112 in allegorical prose poems 112, 121-29 ‘Les Dons des Fées’ 198-200,201 Les Drames et les romans honnêtes 165 Drost, Wolfgang 106n.72 drug-taking: and creativity 196-98 and philanthropy 117-18 drunkenness 31-32, 195-98 Du vin et du hachisch 193, 196 duality 12-13,20,53-54 Dubosclard, Joël and Marie Carlier 3n.8 Du Camp, Maxime 57 Dufour, Pierre 119n.3 duplicity 12, 107, 204 Dupont, Pierre 83, 179 Durandeau, Emile, Les Nuits de M. Baudelaire 17 L ’École païenne (the pagan school) 30, 83, 113-14, 163-65 Eigeldinger, Marc 32n.53 ego, and laughter 18-19 see also, first-person narratives; self­ centredness Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert) 68

Engelking, Ryszard 43n.85 enigma, and allegory 147-48, 152 Enlightenment, and morality 81-82, 109 ennui (boredom) 129-30, 134, 147 ‘Enivrez-vous’ 195-98,201 Un entrepreneur de littérature (Michiels/Perrier) 26, 28 escape and evasion 101 Evans, Margery 5, 1ln.34, 24n.27, 27n.35, 37n.67, 40, 69n.52, 70n.58, 71n.60, 71n.63, 75n.72, 92n.37, 93n.41, 95n.44, 113, 127n.26, 128, 129n.32, 150, 205n.l2 Évrard, Franck 114n.98 ‘L’Examen de minuit’ (verse poem) 39 Exposition universelle 1-2, 131, 158, 178 Extinction du paupérisme (Napoleon III) 109

231 ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ 23,110-17, 148 Faust (Gœthe, translated by Nerval and Blaze de Bury) 109-110 ‘La Femme sauvage et la petitemaîtresse’ 7, 40-42, 44 ‘Les Fenêtres’ 166-68,201 fetishism 67, 77-78 first-person narratives 4-5, 113, 114, 207 see also narrator; self-centredness flâneur 177 Flaubert, Gustave: Baudelaire’s correspondence to 106 irony 44 Madame Bovary 22, 41, 84-85, 208 Les Fleurs du Mat allegory of creativity in 130 compared with Le Spleen de Paris 25, 153,156 dedication to Gautier 25 legal action against 70, 83, 85, 142 post-publication caricatures 17 prefaces to 80, 199,207 public reception of 134, 140, 192, 199, 200

and Baudelaire’s attitude to readers 203, 205, 206, 206-07 Flieger, J. A. 37n.70 Florenne, Yves 12 Fondane, Benjamin 146n.80 Formentelli, Georges 36n.65 Fomeret, Xavier, Pièces de pièces 112 Foucault, Michel 66,70-71 ‘Les Foules’ 169-78, 201 Fourier, Charles, Théorie des quatre mouvements 32 Foumel, Victor 177 Fraisse, Armand 70n.62, 140, 196, 203, 207 Fredrickson, Hélène 134n.42, 151n.96 Freud, Sigmund 61, 62n.28, 67, 68, 77 Friedman, Geraldine 94, 95n.44, 109n.85 Froidevaux, Gérald 173n.56 Fuma, Sudel 73n.68, 74n.69, 77 Fusées 109, 172 Galand, René 133 ‘Le Galant Tireur’ 134-36,150 Gargantua (Daumier) (caricature) 125,

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154 Gargantua, ‘Prologe’ (Rabelais) 122-24, 124-25 Gasarian, Gérard 5, 34n.58, 69n.53 ‘Le Gâteau’ 86-89,181 Gautier, Judith 107n.76 Gautier, Théophile: 18n.l, 25, 34, 3940, 43n.85, 79-80, 139, 151, 167n.38, 173n.56, 199n.l36 George, Ferdinand M. de 126n.24 gifts 28, 88n.25, 116-17 Godfrey, Sima 167 Goudall, Louis 194 Goya, Francisco de, ‘Tü que no puedes’, from Caprichos (graphie caricature) 141 Graciân, Baltasar 45 graphie caricature 17-18,45-46 grotesque, theory of 18, 28-29, 45, 47 Guerlac, Suzanne 31, 113 Guillaume, Jean de 110n.87 Gutwirth, Marcel 86n.23 Guys, Constantin 166,169,170-71, 173-74, 176 Hallyn, Fernand 121n.9, 142n.74 Hannoosh, Michele 18n.2, 20, 43, 47, 44n.90, 45n.92, 100, 140n.66 hashish, and philanthropy 117-18 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 97 Heck, Francis 141n.71, 161n.l8, 164n.29, 192n. 111 Hélie, Théodore 60-61 Hetzel, Pierre-Jules 54 Hiddleston, James A. 4, 21, 29n.44, 33n.55, 36n.66, 44n.88, 44n.90, 46n.98, 48n.l03, 85, 87n.23, 92n.37, 92n.38, 100n.55, 104n.66, 107, 12122, 187, 194n.l 18 Histoire ancienne series (Daumier) (caricatures) 138 Histoire de la peintureflamande et hollandaise (Houssaye) 26 hoaxes 22-23,26, 189-91, 192, 194-95, 203-04 Hofmann, Werner 22n.l7 Holland, Eugène 204 Houssaye, Arsène: ‘La Chanson du vitrier’ 25, 96, 97, 191

dedication of prose poems to 23-29, 37, 44 Histoire de la peinture flamande et hollandaise 26 Howells, Bernard 173 Hugo, Victor 83-84 ‘Le Mendiant’ 189 Les Misérables 206 humour 12-13 black humour 43-44, 189-90 and suffering 68 theory of 19 see also comical; laughter hybridity 29 Hyslop, Lois Boe and Francis E. Hyslop 186n.89 idealism, and material world 153, 15758, 160, 164 illusion 187-88, 189 imagery see metaphors Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 158 innocence: and the diabolical 48 and guilt 103, 104 insanity, and memory 67-68 interpretation 6 and allegory in ‘Une mort héroïque’ 145-48 and art criticism 179-80 artistic, of nature 156-58, 160, 161-63, 166-68 author’s role as ‘translator’ 120, 15960 of humanitarian texts in ‘Assommons les pauvres’ 110 and misreadings in ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ 97 of Le Spleen de Paris 207-08 intoxication 31-32, 177, 195-98 ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ 8 ironie dissimulation 20, 205 irony 12, 20-25, 44, 107, 201, 207-08 ‘L’Irrémédiable’ (verse poem) 83 Jackson, John E. 150n.90, 151n.96, 152n.98, 204 Jamison, Anne 70n.58, 201n.l38 Janin, Jules 127 Jasinski, René 190-91,192

INDEX Jeandillou, Jean-François 85n.l6, 136, 190n.l07 Johnson, Barbara 7-9, 32n.53, 71n.63, 102, 134-35, 106n.36, 171n.49 jokes see hoaxes; humour ‘Le Joueur généreux’ 129-34 ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ 101 -05, 181 La Journée du célibataire (Daumier) (caricature) 39-40 Jouve, Jean Pierre 20 Kaplan, Edward K. 24n.24, 29n.43, 30, 67, 70n.58, 75, 105, 150n.91, 164, 187, 189, 197 Kaufmann, Vincent 135n.46 King, Russell 158 Klein, Richard 188n.99 Kopp, Robert 25, 29n.41, 54n.7, 65n.38, 72n.66, 126n.24, 128n.29, 187n.94 Krueger, Cheryl 70n.56, 187n.93 Labarthe, Patrick 3n.6, 35, 79n.85, 89, 106n.73, 119n.3, 133n.40, 142, 145n.78, 148, 152, 163, 175n.60, 204 La Bruyère, Jean de, Les Caractères 90, 92 Lacan, Jacques 66-67, 115 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, ‘Les Liaisons dangereuses’ 82 Laforgue, Pierre 186n.89 Laforgue, René 61n.27 landscape painting 119-20,162-63 Lang, Candace D. 8n.23, 12 ‘Laquelle est la vraie?’ 163-65, 201 Latouche, Henri de 28 laughter, theory of 18-20, 44-45, 47, 88 see also comical; humour Lawler, James 3n.8 laziness: and creativity 130-33,175,193 and prostitution 73-74 Leakey, Felix W. 14, 83 legal action see censorship Lejeune, Philippe 114 Lemaitre, Henri 25n.31, 29n.43, 105, 175, 189 Leroy, Christian 87n.23 ‘La Lettre d’un fat’ 22 Le Vavasseur, Gustave 71

233 ‘Les Liaisons dangereuses’ (Laclos) 82 Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 125 Ligeia (Poe) 67 Liszt, Franz 30-31 literature: allegories of literary reception 121 -29 morality in 83-85 see also composition Lloyd, Rosemary 3-4, 14, 22, 76n.75, 77n.77, 88n.25, 99, 139n.59, 163, 182n.82, 208 Locke, Nancy 186n.90 Louis Napoléon see Napoleon III Louis-Philippe, King 45-46, 125 Luke, Gospel of 38 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 128-29 Maclnnes, J. W. 29n.44, 140n.66 Maclean, Marie 6-7, 9-10, 40, 42n.84, 43, 57n.l5, 61n.27, 66n.44, 71, 86n.20, 93n.41, 105n.71, 113, 184n.84 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 22, 41, 8485, 208 ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ 53, 55-72 and abortion 58, 59-62, 64-66 and contraception 59 and monstrosity 56-57, 61, 62-63, 67, 68,71 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier) 79, 80 Maistre, Joseph de 81 The Man of the Crowd (Poe) 92, 176 Manet, Edouard 181, 186n.89 Un bar aux Folies-Bergères (painting) 76 Margolin, Jean-Claude 120-21 Marivaux, Pierre, Le Petit-maître corrigé (play) 40, 42 Les Martyrs ridicules (Cladel) 85 ‘Le Masque’ (verse poem) 10, 67 Le Masque, or La Comédie humaine (Christophe) (sculpture) 10-11, 7516, 67, 120, 201 materiality: and emotional indifference 181 -82, 184-87 and the ideal 153, 157-58, 160, 163, 164

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and the spiritual 180 Mathews, Paul L. 3n.6, 4n.l0 Matlock, Jann 58n.l9, 63 Mauron, Charles 5, 130, 143 ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ 23, 25, 43-44, 96, 188-95, 196, 200, 201 McAllester Jones, Mary 76n.75 McGinnis, Reginald 173n.55 McLaren, Angus 59, 65 McLees, Ainslee Armstrong 34, 46n.97 medical practice: contraception and abortion 58-62 doctors in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ 56, 60, 64, 65, 68, 69 treatment of prostitutes 62-65, 71 Mehlman, Jeffrey 107-08 memory 61-62 and amnesia 65, 68 and art criticism 179-80 and insanity 67-68 Ménard, Louis, Prométhée délivré 84 ‘Le Mendiant’ (Hugo) 189 Menippean satire 125 Metzidakis, Stamos 140n.67 Meurice, Mme Paul 205-06 Michiels, Alfred (‘Jules Perrier’), Un entrepreneur de littérature 26, 28 Miller, Christopher L. 75n.73 Milner, Max 171n.49, 193n.l 15, 196n.l26 ‘Le Miroir’ 136-40 mirrors, and reflections 78, 136, 137-40 mise en abyme: in ‘Assommons les pauvres’ 106 in ‘La Belle Dorothée’ 76 in ‘La Corde’ 187 in ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ 112, 114-15, 117 in ‘Une mort héroïque’ 146, 147 in ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ 96-97 Les Misérables (Hugo) 206 A Modest Proposal (Swift) 106 Mon coeur mis à nu 2, 32, 121, 136-37, 140, 172, 176-77 Monroe, Jonathan 2n.5, 54n.8, 104 Monsieur Coquelet series (Daumier) (caricatures) 39-40 10 heures du matin 138, 155 9 heures du soir 49 monsters and monstrosity 56-57, 61, 62-

63,71 and anamorphosis 67, 68 and natural innocence 86 poet as producer of 139 Morale du joujou (essay) 102-03, 104 morality 13, 81-86 and communication in ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ 93-98 contemporary mores attacked in ‘La Solitude’ 89-93 deception in ‘La Fausse Monnaie’ 110-17 diversion in ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ 101-05 the noble savage parodied, in ‘Le Gateau’ 86-89 the ‘other’, in ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ 98-101 philanthropie interpretation in ‘Assommons les pauvres’ 105-10 philanthropie motivation in Le Poème du hachisch 117-18 Moreau, Pierre 101 ‘Une mort héroïque’ 141-48 Mortelette, Yves 129n.31 Mossop, Deryk J. 4n.l0 Murphy, Steve 3, 23, 64n.36, 67-68, 88n.26, 96n.44, 96n.46, 98n.51, 100, 102n.63, 104n.66, 108n.81, 115n. 101, 122, 143n.77, 148, 150n.91, 152, 167-68, 184, 186, 187, 191n.l09 Mystification (Poe) 135-36 mystification 23,24, 190-91,203-204 Nadar 106-07 Napoléon III (Louis Napoléon Bonaparte) 108, 136, 143, 145 Extinction du paupérisme 109 Narvaez, Michèle and Florence Ricard 3n.8 nature: allegory in 120 as artist/poet’s material 156-58,160, 161-63, 166-68 and morality 86-89, 106 nature, human 86, 102, 103 9 heures du soir (Daumier) (caricature) 49 noble savage 86-87

INDEX Nodier, Charles 55n.ll Les Nuits de M. Baudelaire (Durandeau)(caricature) 17 Oehler, Dolf 9, 86n.20, 106, 191n.l09, 193n.ll6 opium 31-32 ordinary comical {le comique ordinaire) 18,37-38,45,47 original sin 81 -82 Osiakovski, Stanislav 46n.98 otherness, and the self 168-69, 171-73, 176-77, 178-79 Pachet, Pierre 45n.92, 146n.83, 182n.81, 184n.84, 187n.94 painting and painters 156-57, 158, 16163, 165-66, 181-88 and the ‘crowd’ 169-73 painter’s role as ‘translator’ 166-68 public acceptance of 199 see also visual arts Parent-Duchâtelet, Alexandre 52-53, 62-63, 64, 74n.69 Pascal, Blaise, ‘Le Divertissement’ 90, 91,92, 93 pastimes, and diversion 98,101-05 Pauvre Belgique 21 -22, 41, 44, 138 pear, Louis-Philippe caricatured as 4546 Le Peintre de la vie moderne 53, 106, 165-66, 169-71, 173, 176, 192 Pellegrin, Jean 168n.43 Pensom, Roger, lin .34 penetration, motif of 70n.58, 158 ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ (verse poem) 3435, 103n.64 Petits Poèmes lycanthropes 11 Pharisee’s prayer 38 Les Philanthropes du jour (Daumier) (caricature) 43, 50 philanthropy: misinterpretation of 105-10 motivations for 117-18 Philipon, Charles 45-46 The Philosophy of Composition (Poe) 145 photography 180 Pichois, Claude 18n.l, 23n.21, 24n.27, 25, 31n.47, 54n.5, 57n.l5, 89n.27,

235 106-07, 150n.90, 151n.96, 152n.98, 195-96, 203n.3,206n.l7 Pick, Daniel 57n.l7 Pièces de pièces (Fomeret) 112 pièta scene 184 Pizzorusso, Amoldo 190 plagiarism 26 ‘Un plaisant’ 35-36, 44 pleasing, art of 198-200 pleasure 98, 101-05 ‘jouissance’ 91-92 Poe, Edgar Allan 4, 22-23, 66, 67, 83, 92, 135-36, 145, 151, 176, 197-98 Le Poème du hachisch 47-48, 117-18, 119 poet/author see author; authorial identity poetic structures, and narrative 9-10 poetry: aesthetic of 54-55, 151 creativity and intoxication 198 as moral practice 84 see also prose poetry; verse poems political allegory 108-09, 120, 137, 143, 145 political motivation 9 Pommier, Jean 58n.20, 72n.66 ‘Portraits de maîtresses’ 42-43, 44 Poulet, Georges 179n. 76 Poulet-Malassis, Auguste 17-18, 57n. 15 poverty, and morality 93-99, 101-05, 181 Prarond, Ernest 78 prayers: in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ 56-57 the Pharisee’s prayer 38 Praz, Mario 77n.79 Prendergast, Christopher 90, 104n.66, 177n.67, 182n.82, 183n.83, 187, 188, 204 La Presse (daily newspaper) 23, 72, 157 Prévost, Jean 57n.l6, 78, 141 progress: concept of 2, 131 and moral degradation 81-82 ‘Prologe’ to Gargantua (Rabelais) 12225 prose poetry: aesthetic of 175-76, 199-202 commercial value of 54-55 compared with verse poems 25, 153,

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156 design and ordering of 126n.24, 128, 201,204 as narrative 6-7, 9-10 see also poetry; verse poems prostitutes, identity and descriptions of 53-55, 72-75, 76-77 prostitution 13, 52-55 in ‘La Belle Dorothée’ 72-80 identity and descriptions of prostitutes 72-75, 76-77 and laziness 73-74 in ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ 55-72 and abortion 58, 59-62, 64-66, 70 attitudes to and treatment of prostitutes 52, 62-65, 69 and contraception 59 and monstrosity 56-57, 61, 62-63, 67, 68,71 and fantasy genre 175-76 as metaphor 170-71,172-73 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 108,109 Proust, Marcel 34 publication: of prose poems 54-55,72, 134, 137 and reception of Les Fleurs du Mal 134, 140, 192, 199, 200 of verse poems 54, 194 see also readers punning 27-28, 128, 150, 194 Quelques caricaturistes français 43, 100, 124-25 Quérard, Jean-Marie 26 Quincey, Thomas de, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 31 Rabelais, François, ‘Prologe’ to Gargantua 122-25, 126, 127-28 Raitt, Alan W. 126n.24 Raphael, Louis Nicholas 37 Raser, Timothy 158n.l0, 178 readers: allegories of 121-29 Baudelaire’s attitude to 204-09 caricatured 36-37, 44 ‘gifts’ to 116,117 interpretations by 145 literal readings by 191-92,194-95 moral self-awareness of 84-85, 97-98,

106 parodied 202 targeted in ‘Le Galant Tireur’ 134, 135 see also publication réglementariste system 52, 64 Régnier, Mathurin, ‘Satyre’ 58-60, 66, 69-70 resistance 147, 153 Réunion 73-74, 78 revolutions: of 1789 136-37 of 1848 108-09 Revue Nationale et Etrangère (literary review) 55, 137 Rey, Pierre-Louis 3n.8, 39 Riffaterre, Michael 10 Robb, Graham M. 54n.8, 142n.74 Robbins, Ruth and Julian Wolffeys 176n.63 Robert Macaire, Architecte (Dammier) (caricature) 46, 51 Rosolato, Guy 78n.80 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 81-82, 86-87, 197 Rubin, Vivien L. 100n.55 Ruff, Marcel 28, 55n.ll, 57n.l6, 16061, 205n.l2 sadism 9n.25, 27, 75-76, 77n.79, 79n.83, 82, 106n.72, 108n.80, 127n.26 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 85, 138, 139 Volupté 93 Salon caricatural 17,44,48 Salon de 1845 119 Salon de 1846 157, 166 Salon de 1859 10, 119-20, 152, 161-62, 178-79, 180, 188 Sand, George 34, 82 Sandras, Michel 148n.86 sanitary visits 63-64 Sanyal, Debarati 143n.77, 144-45, 146n.82, 184n.88 Sartre, Jean-Paul 83 Satan Trismegist 1,132 satanism 27 and innocence 48 satire 125, 129 ‘Satyre’ (Régnier) 58-60, 66, 69-70

INDEX savagery, and morality 86-89 Schneider, Michael 73 Schofer, Peter 143n.77, 145n.78, 146n.81, 163n.64 Schor, Naomi 6, 208 Schuerewegen, Franc 112n.92, 115 Scott, David 10n.28, 20n.9, 20n.l0, 44n.88, 85n.l5, 86, 153, 194n.ll9 Scott, Maria 55n.l2, 72n.65, 93n.40, 121n.ll self-other dichotomy 168-69, 171-73, 176-77, 178-79 self-awareness: and caricature 37 and creativity 171-72,173,180 and emotional indifference 181 -87 and morality 81-83, 84-85, 93-98 see also blindness self-centredness 86-89, 93-98, 99-100, 101, 110, 117-18 self-obsession 137-38 self-transformation, and humour 19, 44 sentimentality 34, 35, 100 sexual imagery 70n.58, 158, 169-70 Shakespeare, William, Macbeth 128-29 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean 77n.79 Sheringham, Michael 67n.46 Le Siècle (newspaper) 46-47 sileni and silenus 123-24 slavery: and aesthetics 73, 74-75 emancipated slaves 73-74, 75, 77 and prostitution 73 and suffering in ‘La Belle Dorothée’ 78-79 social inequality, and morality 88, 9497, 105-10, 184 Socrates 106, 124 ‘La Solitude’ 89-93 solitude: and artistic activity 174 and the crowd 169-70,172 Soucy, Anne-Marie 159n. 12 Souffrin-Le Breton, Eileen 76n.75, 79 soul, and progress 131-32 ‘La Soupe et les nuages’ 161-63,200 spirituality, and the material 180 Le Spleen de Paris'. choice of title 205 compared with Les Fleurs du Mal 25,

237 153,156 see also prose poetry Stamelman, Richard 11 Starobinski, Jean 5, 34n.59, 86n.23, 88n.25, 99, 143, 146n.83, 166n.36 Steinmetz, Jean-Luc 72n.63 Stendhal: De l ’amour 32 Lucien Leuwen 137 Stephens, Sonya 3-4, 25, 30n.46, 36, 48n.l03, 56-57, 76n.74, 88, 90n.30, 92, 93n.41, 95, 99, 108n.80, 113, 122n.l5, 172n.53, 177n.68, 189n.l05, 191n.l09, 194, 204 Sterne, Laurence, Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy 125, 127n.26 Stevens, Joseph 129 suffering: and blindness 73 and humour 68 and slavery 78-79 suicide, attempted by Baudelaire 150-51 Susini, Jean-Claude 32n.53, 75n.72 Swain, Virginia E. 100, 146n.83 Swift, Jonathan, A Modest Proposal 106 taboo, abortion as 60, 70 ‘Les Tentations ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire’ 174 Terdiman, Richard 46n.98, 109 Thélot, Jérôme 38n.72, 57n.l6, 98, 122n.l4, 128-29, 199n.l37 ‘LeThyrse’ 29-30,31-33,44 Tilby, Michael 96n.44 time 134, 195-97 ‘Le Tir et le cimetière’ 148-53 Todorov, Tzvetan 12n.36 Toumayan, Alain 193n. 113 trauma, ‘acting out’ of 61-62, 65, 66, 67-68 Tresch, John 22n.l9 Trimolet, Joseph-Louis, Le Vieux Mendiant (drawing) 100 trompe-l’oeil 115 ‘Tü que no puedes’, from Caprichos (Goya) (graphie caricature) 141 ‘ungrammaticalities’ 10 vanitas theme 149-50

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Vatan, Florence 106n. 75 Vemet, Horace 199 verse poems 25, 54, 178, 194, 199 compared with prose poetry 25, 153, 156 see also Les Fleurs du Mal; poetry; prose poetry Vibe Skagen, Margery 149-50,152 ‘La Vie anterieure’ (verse poem) 79 Viegnes, Michel and Agnes Landes 3n.8 Viers, Yannick 105n.68 Le Vieux Mendiant (Trimolet) (drawing) 100

‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’ 98-101,172 Vigny, Alfred de 25 Villemain, Abel-François 91 Vincent-Munnia, Nathalie 112n.91, 148n.86, 194n.l 19 violence, themes of: cutting and breaking 27n.36 and eroticism 76 flogging of a negress 78-79 imagery of and aesthetics 157 killing and shooting 134,150 and savagery 86-89 and social improvement 105,106-07 visual arts: allegory in landscape painting 119-20 anamorphosis 10-11, 120-21 see also aesthetics; painting and painters

Vivier, Robert 92-93 ‘La Voix’ (verse poem) 130, J39 Volupté (Sainte-Beuve) 93 Vouga, Daniel 173n.55 Wagner, Richard 153,203 Wechsler, Judith 46n.97 Wettlaufer, Alexandra K. 156n. 1 Wieser, Dagmar 151n.96 Wing, Nathaniel 30n.46, 95n.44, 113n.96, 119n.3, 143n.77, 169n.45, 204 women: as abortionists 65 caricatured 33-35,40-43, 167 identity and descriptions of prostitutes 53-55, 72-75, 76-77 and maternal love in ‘La Corde’ 181, 183, 184, 186, 187 as personification of ideal beauty 16364 Wood, David 117 work, creative see creativity Wright, Barbara 20n.9, 20n.l0, 85n.l5 writer see author ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’ 93-98, 135 Zimmerman, Melvin 34n.58, 86n.23, 109-10