The Invention of Paris (61 page)

‘It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not, and
this question of removal is one which I discuss incessantly with my soul.'
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Rue de l'Estrapade, Quai de Béthune, Rue Vaneau, Hôtel Pimodan on the Quai d'Anjou, Hôtel Corneille on Rue Corneille, Hôtel de Dunkerque et Folkestone on Rue Lafitte, Rue de Provence, Rue Coquenard (now Lamartine), Rue de Tournon, Rue de Babylone, Rue Pigalle, Rue des Marais-du-Temple (now Yves-Toudic), Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle, Hôtel d'York (now Hôtel Baudelaire) on Rue Saint-Anne, Hôtel du Maroc on Rue de Seine, Hôtel de Normandie on Rue des Bons-Enfants, Rue d'Angoulême (now Jean-Pierre-Timbaud), Hôtel Voltaire on Quai Voltaire, Rue Beautreillis, Hôtel de Dieppe on Rue d'Amsterdam, Hôtel du Chemin de Fer du Nord on the Place du Nord – from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand to Dr Duval's hydrotherapy establishment on Rue du Dôme, Baudelaire's last staging post before the Montparnasse cemetery, his Paris dwellings map an archipelago whose main two islands are the Latin Quarter and Nouveau Paris between the Boulevards and the northern
barrières
. Its geography would certainly not be very different it we actually knew all the places where Baudelaire slept. On 5 April 1855 he wrote to his mother: ‘In just ONE MONTH I have been forced to move SIX times, living in wet plaster, sleeping with fleas – my letters (the most important ones) returned, or forwarded from one hotel to the next; I took a big decision, lived and worked at the printer's,
²³
as I could no longer work where I lived.' In ‘My Heart Laid Bare', he noted: ‘Study of the great Disease of horror of being Settled. Reasons for the Disease. Steady increase of the Disease.'

Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘was forced to claim the dignity of a poet in a society that no longer had any kind of dignity to offer. Hence the buffoonery of his attitude.'
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Baudelaire belongs to that line of artists who, from Byron on, worked at their physical character to the point of making this an integral part of their work – a part that would later become preponderant, with Duchamp, Warhol, or Beuys. As so often, the ideal that he seeks to attain he describes in someone else: ‘His manners, a singular mixture of hauteur with an exquisite gentleness, were full of certainty. Physiognomy, approach, gestures, movements of the head, everything designated him as a chosen creature, above all on his good days.'
²⁵
Here it is
Edgar Allan Poe, whom he made into a kind of complete double of himself. Undoubtedly too great an importance has been placed on Baudelaire's judgements on photography, and not enough on the number and quality of the photographic portraits we have of him, so poignant that even the talent of Nadar or Carjat is not sufficient explanation. First of all, in very studied poses, we see a handsome young man with an insolent look – like Rembrandt in his first self-portraits. Twenty years later, the series ends with a photograph taken in Brussels and inscribed to Poulet-Malassis, ‘the only being whose laughter relieved my sadness in Belgium', an image in which the long greying hair and tired eyes express ‘the mortal fatigue that precedes death' which Proust speaks about, precisely apropos Baudelaire.
²⁶

At Levêque and Bailly's
pension
on Rue de l'Estrapade, where Baudelaire was supposedly preparing for the École des Chartes, his friend Prarond describes him descending the stairs, ‘thin, his collar open, a very long waistcoat, full cuffs, a light gold cane in his hand, with a supple, slow and almost rhythmic step'.
²⁷
Later, Nadar tells of meeting him near the Hôtel Pimodan on the Île Saint-Louis: ‘Black trousers drawn well above his polished boots; a blue workman's blouse, stiff in its new folds; his black hair, naturally curly, worn long his only coiffure; bright linen, strictly without starch . . . rose-coloured gloves, quite new . . . Baudelaire walked about his
quartier
of the city at an uneven pace, both nervous and languid, like a cat, choosing each stone of the pavement as if he had to avoid crushing an egg.'
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Baudelaire entering the editorial office of
Le Corsaire-Satan
: ‘You then saw his fantastic black suit appear on the boulevard, the cut that he had imposed on the tailor insolently going against the prevailing fashion – long and buttoned, opening at the top like a horn and ending in two narrow pointed lapels, like a whistle, as Petrus Borel supposedly said.'
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In 1848, ‘you would see him . . . on the outer boulevards, dressed either in a loose jacket or a blouse; but as irreproachable, as correct in this democratic outfit as in
the black suit of more prosperous times'.
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Two months after the trial over
Les Fleurs du mal
, in October 1857, the Goncourts, never short on low comments, were dining at the Café Riché on Rue Le Peletier: ‘Baudelaire was having his supper alongside us, tieless, bare neck, shaved head, as if dressed for the guillotine. Just one refinement: little washed hands, cleaned and manicured. The head of a madman, a voice sharp as a blade. A pedantic manner of speech: the look of Saint-Just or a practical joker. He defends himself, quite stubbornly and with a certain rough passion, against the charge that his verses caused outrage to good manners.'

Baudelaire described himself on several occasions as a ‘dandy' or ‘flâneur', and these terms have since been constantly applied to him. This is clearly not without good reason, and yet they should be used only with a double filter, as it were, made necessary both by Baudelaire's own taste for mystification, and by the shift in the meaning of these words in the century and a half that divides us from
Les Fleurs du mal
. Baudelaire certainly was a Parisian
dandy
in the sense of refinement of dress, cool insolence, the affectation of impassibility. In
My Heart Laid Bare
, provocations proliferate: ‘Woman is “natural” – that is to say, abominable. Moreover, she is always vulgar – that is to say, the opposite of the dandy.' Or again: ‘The dandy should aspire to be sublime, continually. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.' Or more ambiguously: ‘The eternal superiority of the dandy. What is a dandy?' Finally, almost revealing himself: ‘A dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a dandy speaking to the people, unless to scoff at them?'
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And yet to grasp the root of his thinking, there is in his portrait of Monsieur G., ‘The Painter of Modern Life', this passage in which it is impossible that Baudelaire did not have himself in mind:

I might perhaps call him a dandy, and I should have several good reasons for that; for the word ‘dandy' implies a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world; with another part of his nature, however, the dandy aspires to insensitivity, and it is in this that Monsieur G., dominated as he is by an insatiable passion – for seeing and feeling – parts company decisively with dandyism . . . The dandy is blasé, or pretends to be so, for reasons of policy and caste. Monsieur G. has a horror of blasé people.
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And when Baudelaire wrote to his mother: ‘How often I've told myself, “Despite my nerves, despite my terrors, despite the creditors, despite the horrors of solitude, I must pull myself together . . .!”' (1 January 1865), or again: ‘I'm attacked by a frightful illness, which has never played such havoc with me as in this year – I mean my reveries, my depression, my discouragement, my indecision' (31 December 1863). This was far indeed from the elegant display on the steps of Tortoni's.

The term ‘flâneur' today is inseparable from the notion of idleness; flânerie is perceived as an unproductive way of spending time. But what Baudelaire feared more than anything was precisely his tendency to idleness. On 4 December 1847 he wrote to his mother: ‘The absolute idleness of my apparent life, in contrast with the perpetual activity of my ideas, throws me into unheard-of fits of rage.' When he let himself go, this was not in the street but at home when there was nothing to be done: ‘On occasion I've had to spend up to three days in bed, sometimes because I had no clean linen, sometimes because there was no wood . . . To be honest, laudanum and wine are of little help against sorrow. They make the time pass but they don't change one's life.'
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For Baudelaire, therefore, there was nothing passive about flânerie. He reflects on its function in poetic work in relation to a major figure of his day, and even if his feelings towards the man are ambivalent, to say the least, this is still impressive:

For many years now Victor Hugo has no longer been in our midst. I remember the time when his figure was one of those most frequently encountered among the crowds, and many times I wondered, seeing him appear so often amid holiday excitement or in the silence of some lonely spot, how he could reconcile the needs of his incessant work with the sublime but dangerous taste for strolling and for reverie. This apparent contradiction is evidently the result of a well-ordered life and of a strong spiritual constitution which permits him to work while walking, or rather to be able to walk while he is working.
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And in ‘The Painter of Modern Life', Baudelaire focuses and develops his theory of flânerie:

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to choose to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb
and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures . . . the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.
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It was not just reasons of a poetic order that drove Baudelaire into the streets of Paris. His removals were conducted in a handcart, and he never had with him what he needed for his work. ‘At the Hôtel Pimodan,' Banville recalls, ‘when I went there for the first time, there were no dictionaries, no desk, no table with what he needed for writing, let alone cupboards and dining room, nor anything that recalled the compartmentalized arrangement of a bourgeois apartment.'
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It was worse when he lived with Jeanne, who made life quite impossible. On 27 March 1852, at two in the afternoon, he wrote to his mother: ‘I am writing this in a café opposite the long-distance post office, in the midst of noise, card games and billiards, so as to be calmer and be able to think more clearly . . . Sometimes I escape from my rooms in order to write and I go to the library or to a lending library, or a wine shop or a café, as I'm doing today. The result of all this is that I live in a state of constant rage.'
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The Paris street, for Baudelaire, had two distinct functions. The first of these was something like a search. It was not a question of accumulating documentary material, like Zola later on walking through the Goutte d'Or or along the Rue de Seine with notebook and pencil: Baudelaire was never short of sarcasm towards ‘a certain literary procedure known as “realism” – a disgusting insult thrown in the face of all analysts, a vague and elastic word that for the vulgar means not a new method of creation but a meticulous description of accessories'. Nor does he set great store by what he calls ‘observation'. When he evokes ‘Honoré de Balzac, that prodigious meteor who would cover our country with a cloud of glory', he is amazed ‘that his great glory was to pass for an observer; it has always seemed to me that his chief merit was to be a visionary, and a passionate one at that'.
³⁸
What
Baudelaire sought in the crowds was the shock of encounter, the sudden vision that kindled his imagination, creating the ‘mysterious and complex enchantment' that was the essence of poetry.

There are certain texts in which he reveals his manner of keeping abreast of ‘this marvellous world that envelops and drenches us like the atmosphere':

One day on a pavement I saw a large gathering; I managed to lift my eyes above the shoulders of the gawpers, and this is what I saw: a man lying on his back on the ground, his eyes open and fixed on the sky, another man standing in front of him and speaking only in gestures, the man on the ground responding only with his eyes, both with the animated air of remarkable goodwill. The gestures of the standing man said to the understanding of the man lying down: ‘Come on then, happiness is just two steps away, on the corner of the street. We have not completely lost sight of the shore of dejection, we have not yet reached the high sea of dreams; so courage, my friend, tell your legs to satisfy your thought.'

The other, who clearly had already ‘reached the high sea', did not want to listen, and his friend,

still full of indulgence went off to the tavern by himself, then returned with a rope in his hand. He certainly could not suffer the idea of sailing and running after happiness alone; and so he came to collect his friend in a carriage. The carriage was this rope, and he passed the carriage around his friend's waist. The friend, still lying down, smiled; he certainly understood this motherly thought. The other made a knot; then he started walking, like a gentle and well-behaved horse, and pulled his friend to the rendezvous of happiness.
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The other reason why Baudelaire was to be found more often outdoors than at home is that the slow elaboration of his poems was made while walking. ‘For my part, I saw him composing verses on the hoof while he was out in the streets; I never saw him seated before a ream of paper', wrote Prarond. And for Asselineau: ‘Baudelaire worked slowly and unevenly, going twenty times over the same passage, spending hours in conflict with himself over a word, and stopping in the middle of a page to go and “cook” his thought in the oven of flânerie and conversation . . . In sum, flânerie (slowness, unevenness) was for him a condition of perfection and a necessity of his nature.'
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The first verse of ‘The Sun' is reminiscent in this respect of Descartes' preface to
The Discourse of Method
: