The Invention of Paris (62 page)

When the cruel sun strikes with increased blows

The city, the country, the roofs, and the wheat fields,

I go alone to try my fanciful fencing,

Scenting in every corner the chance of a rhyme,

Stumbling over words as over paving stones,

Colliding at times with lines dreamed of long ago.

One may well ask whether Proust – who knew
Les Fleurs du mal
by heart
⁴¹
– was not remembering these paving-stone words over which Baudelaire stumbles when, at the end of
Time Regained
, the narrator stumbles over a cobble in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes, and collides, not with ‘lines dreamed of long ago', but rather with something that is not so distant, a ‘dazzling and indistinct vision' of Venice, that ‘a chance happening had caused . . . to emerge, in the series of forgotten days'.
⁴²
And a few seconds before finding himself plunged into the final party, it is again Baudelaire who comes to the Narrator's mind:

Above all in Baudelaire, where they are more numerous still, reminiscences of this kind are clearly less fortuitous [than in Nerval] and therefore, to my mind, unmistakable in their significance. Here the poet himself, with something of a slow and indolent choice, deliberately seeks, in the perfume of a woman, for instance, of her hair and her breast, the analogies which will inspire him and evoke for him ‘
l'azur du ciel immense et rond
' and ‘
un port rempli de flammes et de mâts
'. I was about to search in my memory for the passages of Baudelaire at the heart of which one may find this kind of transposed sensation, in order once and for all to establish my place in so noble a line of descent and thus to give myself the assurance that the work which I no longer had any hesitation in undertaking was worthy of the pains which I should have to bestow upon it.
⁴³

These simple words, ‘something of a slow and indolent choice', could serve as an epigraph for any reflection on Baudelairean flânerie.

Apart from the Louvre and the Carrousel in ‘The Swan', Baudelaire does not name or describe any place, but this does not prevent each one of his Paris poems, in verse or in prose, from being very precisely located. He either moves in the elegant quarters where women have the lightness of the women of Constantin Guys, or else, in the bustle of the Boulevards, he meets the ‘Passerby', the ‘Mendicant Redhead', and also – ‘in the explosion of the New Year: chaos of mud and snow, crossed by a thousand carriages' – the ‘Pleasant', that idiot ‘who seemed to me to concentrate the entire spirit of France'. (Baudelaire speaks of France as Nietzsche would do of Germany, which is not their only point in common.)

But often – and this is the Paris of his ‘fanciful fencing', of his favourite walk along the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin – he spent hours in the faubourgs. The word often recurs in
Les Fleurs du mal
and
Paris Spleen
, sometimes in its strict sense (‘Along the old street [
faubourg
] on whose cottages are hung/The slatted shutters which hide secret lecheries'), where ‘along' conjures up a street like Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, which Baudelaire certainly strolled when he lived on Rue des Marais-du-Temple and Rue d'Angoulême), and sometimes in its more general sense of the urban periphery: ‘January, irritated with the whole city,/Pours from his urn great waves of gloomy cold/On the pale occupants of the nearby grave-yard/And death upon the foggy slums [
faubourgs
]'). In ‘The Rag-Pickers' Wine' (‘In the heart of some old suburb [
faubourg
], muddy labyrinth,/Where humanity crawls in a seething ferment'), in ‘The Seven Old Men' (‘I was following, steeling my nerves like a hero,/Arid arguing with my already weary soul/A squalid street [
faubourg
] shaken by the heavy dumpcarts'), in the strange ‘Miss Bistouri' (‘As I came to the end of the suburb [
faubourg
] under the gaslight I felt an arm slipped gently under mine'), or in the marvellous projected epilogue to the 1861 edition: (‘Your bombs, your daggers, your victories, your feasts,/Your melancholy faubourgs/Your boarding-houses'), the Paris faubourgs are always for Baudelaire a place of misery and death. The colours here no longer have anything of the reds and greens that he admired in Delacroix, or of what enchanted Proust there – the wide doorways, marine suns, gold and shimmering antique cities, ‘and the scarlet colour that they bring here and there into his work', as he writes in the letter to Rivière. Baudelaire's faubourgs, for their part, are unrelieved grey. They are rainy as they should be in autumn, and, despite the enormous body of images accumulated since Hesiod on this season of the year, Baudelaire's verses on ‘the ends of seasons charged with
enervating splendours' read as if no one had spoken of them before him. The first lines of ‘Mists and Rains': ‘O ends of autumn, winters, springtimes drenched with mud,/Seasons that lull to sleep . . .'; or of ‘Autumn Song': ‘Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness;/Farewell vivid brightness of our short-lived summers!/Already I hear the dismal sound of firewood/Falling with a clatter on the courtyard pavements'; or the opening of ‘The Confiteor of the Artist': ‘How penetrating is the end of an autumn day! Ah, yes, penetrating enough to be painful even; for there are certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does not prevent them from being intense; and none more keen than the perception of the Infinite.'

This ‘melancholy faubourg' is the Paris of the poor. This is where you meet ‘The Good Dogs' (‘the filthy dog, the poor dog, the dog without a home, the loafing dog, the mountebank dog'), and their masters, the ‘Rag-Pickers': ‘Yes, these people harassed by domestic worries,/Ground down by their work, distorted by age,/Worn-out, and bending beneath a load of debris,/The commingled vomit of enormous Paris'. The two ‘crepuscule' poems are populated by the poor: ‘Twilight' (‘It is now that the pains of the sick grow sharper!/Sombre Night grabs them by the throat; they reach the end/Of their destinies and go to the common pit'); and ‘Dawn' (‘It was the hour when amid poverty and cold/The pains of women in labour grow more cruel;/The cock's crow in the distance tore the foggy air/Like a sob stifled by a bloody froth'). Towards the sick, the lame and the dying who people
Les Fleurs du mal
and
Paris Spleen
, towards the beggars, old men in rags, wrinkled old women, ragpickers, prostitutes wandering ‘past the lights shaken in the wind', the frightful blind, ‘the poor women, dragging their thin cold breasts', Baudelaire never shows pity, nor – still worse – charitable tenderness, sentiments so widespread at the time, and that drive him into a rage (from ‘The Devil and George Sand': ‘If I met her, I would be unable to refrain from throwing a stoup of holy-water at her head.')
⁴⁴
He is saved from this by his Satano-dandyism, but above all, what he experiences towards these down-and-outs is fraternity. When all is said and done, he feels himself one of them. At the end of ‘Little Old Women', after ‘My anxious eyes are fixed on your uncertain steps,/As if I were your own father; how wonderful!', he utters this amazing cry: ‘Ruins! My family! O kindred minds!'
⁴⁵
On another day, in the midst of a travelling fair, he sees

a pitiful acrobat, stooped, obsolete, decrepit, a human ruin, backed against one of the posts of his shack . . . He was not laughing, the wretched man! He was not crying, he was not dancing, he was not gesturing, he was not shouting; he was singing no song, neither jolly nor woeful, he was not beseeching. He was mute and motionless. He had given up, he had abdicated. His destiny was done . . . And, turning around, obsessed by that vision, I tried to analyse my sudden sorrow, and I told myself: I have just seen the image of the old writer who has survived the generation whose brilliant entertainer he was; of the old poet without friends, without family, without children, debased by his wretchedness and the public's ingratitude, and whose booth the forgetful world no longer wants to enter!
⁴⁶

It is this identification with the oppressed that defined Baudelaire's political position throughout his life, and not his provocative and contradictory declarations, on which subject we should never forget what he wrote of his ideal model: ‘Poe was always great, not only in his noble conceptions, but even as a jester.'
⁴⁷
Those who have spread the legend of a Baudelaire who retracted his revolutionary errors of February and June 1848, the good Catholic seriously won over to the doctrines of Joseph de Maistre, are the heirs of those who despised and persecuted him all his life. It was a mask he put on when he wrote in
My Heart Laid Bare
: ‘I have no convictions, as such things are understood by my contemporaries, because I have no ambition.'
⁴⁸
A few lines further on, this mask is raised a little. Walter Benjamin, in the parallel that we have seen him make between Baudelaire and Blanqui, shows the extent to which the former's position after June 1848 was one of camouflage:

Behind the masks which he used up, the poet in Baudelaire preserved his incognito. He was as circumspect in his work as he was capable of seeming provocative in his personal associations . . . His prosody is comparable to the map of a big city in which it is possible to move around inconspicuously, shielded by blocks of houses, gateways, courtyards. On this map the places for the words are clearly indicated, as the places are indicated for conspirators before the outbreak of a revolt . . . His images are original by virtue of the inferiority of the objects of comparison . . .
Les Fleurs du mal
is the first book that used in poetry not only words of ordinary
provenance but words of urban origin as well. . . He uses
quinquet
,
wagon
or
omnibus
, and does not shrink from
bilan
,
réverbère
, or
voirie
. This is the nature of the lyric vocabulary in which an allegory appears suddenly and without prior preparation. . . Where
la Mort
or
le Souvenir
,
le Repentir
or
le Mal
appear, centres of poetic strategy are indicated. The flash-light appearance of these figures, recognizable by their majuscule, in a text which does not disdain the most banal word betrays Baudelaire's hand. His technique is the technique of the
putsch
.
⁴⁹

1
Of Walter Benjamin's two exposés of his project, that of 1935 was titled ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century', and that of 1939, written in French, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century'.

2
In
La Vérité sur le cas Champfleury
(Paris, 1857). Cited by Walter Benjamin in ‘Charles Baudelaire, a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism',
The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006).

3
I use ‘modernity' here in Baudelaire's sense: ‘Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent – half of art, the other half being the eternal and unchanging' (
The Painter of Modern Life
, ‘Modernity'). For an analysis of present-day fluctuations in the use of the word, see Jacques Rancière,
The Politics of Aesthetics
(London: Continuum, 2004). An editorial in the 18 May 2000 issue of
Libération
began with the words: ‘The first alarm aroused by mobile phones was almost contemporary with the appearance of this symbolic object of modernity.'

4
Arlette Farge,
Le Cours ordinaire des choses dans la cité du XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1994).

5
The parallel between Rousseau and Restif (also known as Rétif de la Bretonne) was taken up by Maurice Blanchot: ‘To write without care, without awkwardness or effort, is not so easy, as Rousseau shows by his own example. It could only be expected that, by the law of historical duplication, the tragic Jean-Jacques would be followed by a comic one, for lack of care or awkwardness, as well as chatting, finally took its place in literature with Restif, and the result was not very convincing' (
Le Livre à venir
[Paris: Gallimard, 1959]).

6
Gérard de Nerval, ‘Les Confidences de Nicolas', first published in
La Revue des Deux Mondes
(15 August, 1 and 15 September 1850), and later included in
Les Illuminés
. Restif's typographic eccentricities would have enchanted Perec: ‘Sometimes he liked to try a new system of spelling; he suddenly warned the reader by a parenthesis, then continued his chapter, either suppressing some of the vowels in the Arab style, or throwing the consonants into disorder by replacing “c” by “l”, “l” by “t”, “t” by “ç”, etc. – always following rules that he explained at length in notes' (ibid).

7
For the Haute-Borne, see above, p. 213; an
échaudé
was a triangular cake (p. 100).

8
G. de Nerval,
Les Confidences de Nicolas
.

9
‘Alongside him [de Sade], and yet offering a higher literary interest, it is correct to rank Restif de la Bretonne, whose books
Le Paysan et la Paysanne pervertis
and
Monsieur Nicolas
appear today as more important works than Rousseau's
Confessions
, already in your library catalogue' (‘Projet pour la bibliothèque de Jacques Doucet', in
Oeuvres complètes
, vol. 1 [Paris: Gallimard]). And on Nerval, ‘we could no doubt have seized on the word SUPERNATURALISM, which Gérard de Nerval used in the dedication to
Les Filles du Feu
. It seems in fact that Nerval possessed to a remarkable degree the spirit that we ourselves claim . . .' This term, used by Nerval in the dedication of his work to Alexandre Dumas (‘this state of super-naturalist reverie, as the Germans call it'), is a reference to his friend Heine, who on many occasions defined himself as a ‘super-naturalist' – for example in ‘Le Salon de 1831'.