[Kaplan is an American poet and critic. In the following excerpt, he finds that Le spleen de Paris addresses the conflict between "compassion and a fervent aestheticism. " According to Kaplan, compassion entails community, while fervent aestheticism leads to isolation. ]

Baudelaire's 1855 experiments with lyrical prose quickly faded into the background as he developed autonomous subgenres—"fables of modern life," as I call them. The formalistic problem of the "prose poem" is far less valuable in interpreting them than a focus on their narrator, a Second Empire Parisian poet—a flâneur, or urban stroller—who struggles with his conflicting drives. It is remarkable that Baudelaire's early critical essays anticipate, by many years, his new prose genre and the revised second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (1861) which they parallel. In fact, his overall development confirms his conversion from "poetic" idealism to a literature of daily experience.

Questions of form are of course essential and we need an appropriate interpretive model: "These texts include in perfect but minimal form the Märchen or wonder-tale, the Sage or anecdote, the fable, the allegory, the cautionary tale, the tale-telling contest, the short story, the dialogue, the novella, the narrated dream" (Marie Maclean, Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment, 1988). Editors have accepted—inappropriately, in my view—Baudelaire's dedication "To Arsène Houssaye," which introduces the twenty-six prose poems serialized in 1862 for La Presse, as a preface to the completed collection. "The Thyrsus" ("Le Thyrse," first published in 1863) is a more sophisticated model, one which surpasses the binary opposition of prose and poetry which has seduced interpreters. These two prominently analyzed texts grope toward a theory of genre but do not encompass the modern fable. "The Stranger" and "The Old Woman's Despair" ("L'Etranger," "Le Désespoir de la vieille"), which open the collection, define The Parisian Prowler's dynamics more precisely.

Baudelaire's early essays demonstrate the generative tension of his entire work: his personal struggle to maintain both compassion and a fervent estheticism. In 1851, his first reflections on imagination, "Du Vin et du hachisch" (On wine and hashish), warn firmly against intemperate reverie by distinguishing the "good" intoxication of wine, which makes one sociable, from the "bad" ecstasies of hashish, which alienate and enfeeble the dreamer. He concludes by quoting a "musical theoretician," Barbereau, a proxy of his implicit ethic: "I do not understand why rational and spiritual man uses artificial means to achieve poetic beatitude, since enthusiasm and free will suffice to raise him to a supernatural existence." Baudelaire's defense of the will remains uncompromised.

The following year, in "L'Ecole païenne" (The pagan school of poetry), Baudelaire locates the problem in literature. He censures the fastidious, polished poetry of "art for art's sake," notably that of Théodore de Banville. The final paragraphs denounce an obsession with esthetic idealism: "The excessive appetite for form induces monstrous and unknown disorders. Absorbed by the ferocious passion for the beautiful, the notions of the just and the true disappear. The feverish passion for art is an ulcer which devours what remains; and, as the clear absence of the just and the true in art amounts to the absence of art, the entire person vanishes; excessive specialization of one faculty produces nothingness."

The most radical solution is to destroy all art. He goes on to cite the famous incident in Augustine's Confessions when the neophyte Christian accompanies his friend Alypius to a brutal Roman circus; they refuse to watch, until the crowd's shouts rouse their curiosity. Baudelaire, as moralist, embraces the convert's asceticism: "I understand the fits of rage of iconoclasts and Moslems against images. I accept entirely Saint Augustine's remorse for his excessive pleasure of the eyes. The danger is so great that I forgive the abolition of the object. The madness of art is the equivalent of the abuse of mind." The shattering of a peddler's windowpanes, at the end of "The Bad Glazier" ("Le Mauvais Vitrier"), confronts us with a comparable idolatry.

Art—the voluntary creation of significant form—should not be confused with self-titillation. Contradicting his reputation as a dandy, Baudelaire admonishes the overly refined "mind" which denies ethics. A perverse "artist" may relish the idea of beauty and yet ignore its intrinsic rectitude:

[The madness of art] engenders stupidity, hardness of heart and a boundless pride and self-centeredness. I remember having heard about a joker artist who had received a counterfeit coin: I will keep it for a poor man. The wretch took an infernal pleasure in robbing the poor and at the same time enjoying the benefits of a charitable reputation. I heard another one: Why don't the poor put on gloves to beg? They would make a fortune. And another: He is badly draped; his tatters do not become him.

We should not consider those things as childishness. What the mouth gets used to saying, the heart gets used to believing.

In fact, anecdotes cited in this essay became, fourteen years later, full-fledged fables that demonstrate how an exaggerated estheticism can abolish elemental decency. The narrator of "A Joker" ("Un Plaisant," first published in La Presse, 1862) clamors against a gloved dandy who violates the dignity of a beast; the stroller of "Widows" ("Les Veuves," first published in the Revue Fantaisiste, 1861) analyzes "in the mourning clothes of the poor, an absence of harmony that makes them more heartbreaking"; and the narrator of "The Counterfeit Coin" ("La Fausse Monnaie," first published in L'Artiste, 1864), speculates about his friend's false gift.

The critic's moral indignation, in 1852, contrasts sharply with the perceived obscenity of his poetic masterpiece, censored a scant fortnight after publication. Perhaps the author subverted his didacticism even more vehemently after Les Fleurs du Mal had been so utterly misunderstood, for the magistrates did not fathom the author's ethical irony: "One must depict vice as seductive, for it is seductive" ("Les Drames et les romans honnêtes"). By 1861, when he consolidated his practice of the modern fable, Baudelaire abandoned good conscience as his narrator responds to beggars and other outcasts with cruelty, outrage, or cynicism. His anger (an ironic disguise and often hard to interpret) appears to outweigh his compassion.

There is no deeper tension in Baudelaire's mature work than the conflict of ethics and esthetics, and he grapples with a temperament driven by a powerful animus: "To glorify the worship of images (my great, my only, my primitive passion)" (Mon cœur mis à nu). The poet feared that his enthrallment with formal grace would numb his humane concern. Despite his neurotic, self-destructive relationships, he cherished the possibility of ordinary love, while at the same time remaining driven by absolute values. A too "perfect idealization" (the phrase appears in "A Heroic Death" ["Une Mort héroïque"] ) might deaden the artist's sympathy with others.

Baudelaire's "second revolution" integrates ethics and art. The thirty-two new poems—and especially the "Tableaux parisiens" (Parisian pictures)—added to the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal undermine the first edition's idealist thrust and depict a conversion to the world as it exists. Briefly stated, the first edition storms the gates of a transcendent kingdom, while the second sanctifies the finite. The three sonnets that conclude the 1857 edition—"La Mort des amants," "La Mort des pauvres," and "La Mort des artistes" (The death of lovers, The death of paupers, The death of artists)—recapitulate the journey toward immortality. The expanded 1861 closure introduces a crucial irony; "La Fin de la journée," "Le Rêve d'un curieux," and "Le Voyage" (The day's end, A curious man's dream, The voyage) reject dreams of afterdeath survival.

The initial and longest section, "Spleen et Idéal" (Spleen and Ideal), defines this conversion. The "Beauty Cycle" (poems numbered 17-21) can be read as a single experience which revises the philosophy of the whole. The 1857 sequence consisted of three allegorical sonnets, "La Beauté," "L'Idéal," and "La Géante" (Beauty, The Ideal, The Giantess). The 1861 sequence is transformed by two major poems, "Le Masque" and "Hymne à la Beauté" (The mask, Hymn to Beauty), which denounce the idolatry enounced by the previous three. The artist becomes a self-aware critic who replaces the transcendent with temporality.

"La Beauté" barricades the frontier and promotes the idealist standard. The Idol herself exclaims: "Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre" (I am beautiful, O mortals! like a dream of stone). Beauty is a concept of which the artist can produce only a facsimile, "a dream of stone," while reenacting a tragic drama:

Les poètes, devant mes grandes attitudes,
Consumeront leurs jours en d'austères études

(Poets, confronting my grandiose poses, . . . will consume their days in austere studies).

Artists can justify their sacrifice, since imagination can transform our perception of daily existence. Refracting the Ideal, Beauty's eyes are "De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles" (Pure mirrors which make all things more beautiful). As "The Bad Glazier" insists with devastating irony, art should "make life [look] beautiful," faire voir la vie en beau, as it were, through rose-colored glass.

Then a momentous change occurs. "Le Masque," added in 1861, explodes the romantic heroism of "La Beauté," as the poet recovers reality. The poem interprets an exuberant and seductive sculpture by Ernest Christophe (to whom it is dedicated), which itself allegorizes the relationship between artifice and life. The female statue's body represents "the esthetic":

Vois quel charme excitant la gentillesse donne!
Approchons, et tournons autour de sa beauté

(See what stimulating magic her loveliness bestows!
Let's go closer, and walk around her beauty.)

As he deliberately anatomizes his own adoration, the "critic" discovers "the mask" and translates the allegory. The drama pivots on lines 17-19, which compose one brief, but all the more striking stanza:

O blasphème de l'art! ô surprise fatale!
La femme au corps divin, promettant le bonheur,
Par le haut se termine en monstre bicéphale!

(O blasphemy of art! O fateful surprise! The woman of body divine, promising happiness, at the top becomes a two-headed monster!)

The woman's superhuman body renders even more grotesque the contradictory heads that become exposed. These two faces represent truth and falsehood. They have denied nature and its temporality, not simply embellished it. The shocked esthete recognizes the inevitable triumph of the finite.

The final section (lines 20-36) elaborates his conversion in three stages. The poet will denounce—and seemingly reject—the "lying mask" that conceals the suffering mortal. First, the woman's real self stands unveiled:

La véritable tête et la sincère face
Renversée à l'abri de la face qui ment.

(the true head and the sincere face tipped back and sheltered by the lying face)

He then identifies with her as a person, again repeating the word "beauty":

Pauvre grande beauté! Le magnifique fleuve
De tes pleurs aboutit dans mon coeur soucieux;
Ton mensonge m'enivre, et mon âme s'abreuve
Aux flots que la Douleur fait jaillir de tes yeux!

(Great pitiful beauty! The magnificent river of your tears flows out into my anxious heart; your lie intoxicates me, and my soul slakes its thirst in the waves that Pain makes gush from your eyes!)

At the obvious thematic level—and it is of fundamental importance—the poet is roused by the woman's authentic grief. But a subtler problem arises when we try to interpret "Ton mensonge m'enivre." He is enivré—intoxicated or inspired—but by what? By her real inner struggle, by her pathetic attempt to mask her mortality? or by the mensonge itself, the "lie" of her exterior loveliness? Her "beauty" manifests her need to deny, or transcend, physical frailty. Does his imagination respond to her contradiction, her impotent denial which intensifies her suffering—in brief, from compassion? Or does his inspiration flow from a purely imaginative, and illusory, act of empathy—from poetry? This ambiguous ivresse will energize The Parisian Prowler from beginning to end.

"Le Masque" might have ended here, but a third movement, comprising two stanzas of dialogue, completes his consent to the real. Unmasking the person does not suffice; we must understand her, as he asks: "—Mais pourquoi pleure-t-elle?" (But why does she weep?). The answer asserts a simple truth, the banality of which signals the poet's sincerity:

—Elle pleure, insensé, parce qu'elle a vécu!
Et parce qu'elle vit!

(She weeps, mad one, because she has lived! and because she lives!)

Without any irony of qualification, the poet-critic celebrates the pathos of temporality. Disillusioned, and through a dialectical awareness of artistic illusion itself, the esthete embraces his human solidarity. The woman behind the mask is his "hypocrite lecteur," and of course "son semblable, son frère." This mature, reflective woman remains free of the ambivalence typical of his representations of idealized or frivolous females.

The famous "Hymne à la Beauté" which follows—also added in 1861—answers the "Beauty" sonnet more directly. It dwells upon art's ethical consequences as it reiterates the question:

Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l'abîme,
O Beauté

(Do you come from the deep sky or do you emerge from the abyss, O Beauty?)

The final two stanzas recapitulate the struggle. The penultimate one abandons the question of human justice and, provisionally, reaffirms the transcendent:

Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l'enfer, qu'importe,
O Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu!
Si ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied, m'ouvrent la porte
D'un Infini que j'aime et n'ai jamais connu?

(What does it matter whether you come from the heavens or from hell, O Beauty! monster enormous, frightening, innocent! if your eyes, your smile, your feet, open for me the door of an Infinite I love and have never known?)

This closure would typify the idealist 1857 edition, were it not for the final stanza which weds the esthetic quest to a moral imperative. Baudelaire's mature poetics subordinates the artist's anguished, unfulfilled desire to his solidarity with ordinary people:

De Satan ou de Dieu, qu'importe! Ange ou Sirène,
Qu'importe, si tu rends,—fée aux yeux de velours,
Rhythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine!—
L'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?

(From Satan or from God, what does it matter! Angel or Siren, what does it matter, if you—velvet-eyed fairy, rhythm, perfume, light, O my only queen!—make the universe less hideous and time less oppressive?)

This presymbolist poetry, enriched with synesthesia—a confluence of music, odor, sight, and touch—preserves the Ideal within the world and renders mortality bearable. A nuanced ethics must surpass the simplistic dualism of good and evil, for these opposites are normally mixed, sometimes confused. The "modern" artist still strives to redeem humanity, but his goal is modest, almost practical. Realistically speaking, Beauty can only alleviate anxiety or ennui—not cure it—as it sanctifies the possible.

Baudelaire's poems are far more subtle than his aphorisms, which retain the all-too-familiar dualistic formulas: "There are, in every person, all the time, two simultaneous postulations, one toward God, the other toward Satan." His concepts strained toward the notion of simultaneity without reaching it. His terminology, despite its affinity with Joseph de Maistre's theology of violence, remains more emotive than logical. Wrestling with his experience in a necessarily imprecise vocabulary, in life as in writing, Baudelaire attempted, again and again, to mend these rifts, to become one: "Even as a child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life." His Platonic, Catholic, and romantic polarities were unequal to the task.

Baudelaire's 1862 dedication "To Arsène Houssaye," artistic editor of La Presse, which is normally reprinted as a guide to the subsequent collection, appears to refute my interpretive principle of unity. But the author did not include that deceptive proclamation in his handwritten table of contents, and a close analysis reveals the dedication itself to be a disguised parody of the genre: its message can be easily understood as a canny, ironic challenge addressed to a colleague whom he did not respect but needed to please. Subversive self-contradictions emerge from the very beginning:

My dear friend, I send you this little work of which it cannot be said, without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both tail and head, alternatively and reciprocally. Consider, I beg you, what admirable convenience that combination offers us all, you, me, and the reader. We can cut wherever we want, I my reverie, you the manuscript, the reader his reading; for I do not bind the latter's recalcitrant will to the endless thread of a superfluous plot.

Baudelaire highlights the incompleteness of this inaugural series. How, at that point, could he predict their definitive conception? This "petit ouvrage .. . n'a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue." The chiasmus queue/tête / tête/queue connotes totality while the image itself opposes fragmentation to unity and suggests that each piece can be appreciated separately. Since each one is both tail and head, we must accept the collection as coherent. There is no "intrigue superflue," but there may be separate plots, or a unifying one. Whatever the case, readers should interpret them flexibly.

The imagery of segmentation derives from a traditional organic metaphor: the serpent. The author's jovial permission to "cut" cannot be completely in earnest: "Remove one vertebra, and the two pieces of that tortuous fantasy will reunite without difficulty. Chop it up into many fragments, and you will find that each one can exist separately. In the hope that some of those segments will be lively enough to please and to divert you, I dare dedicate to you the entire serpent." What author would encourage his editor to mutilate, or even surgically to excise portions of his manuscript? This was in fact the author's frustrating battle with Houssaye. Baudelaire waggishly elaborates conflicting metaphors, for his guiding idea is not one of disorder and irreconcilable separation but that of relative autonomy. Sparring with an authority he knew to be literal-minded, Baudelaire rejects a "superfluous plot" while maintaining the possibility of a sustained development (the hierarchical entity of head and tail).

An astute reader (unlike Houssaye) could restore these parts, if severed, to their rightful place within a larger, though serpentine, construction. In the last analysis, however, this discussion is trite. Just as single poems in a collection—such as Scève's Délie, Ronsard's Les Amours, Hugo's Les Contemplations, and Les Fleurs du Mal—can be read individually or as stages of a spiritual itinerary, so The Parisian Prowler can mark a journey of initiation or comprise discrete experiences which readers might synthesize or not according to their concerns.

The remaining four paragraphs stress, with a playful irony, the author's originality. Baudelaire's rhetorical modesty, unanswered questions, self-deprecatory comparisons, and italics all express his pride. First he "confesses" that his project was inspired by a model: "the famous Gaspard de la nuit of Aloysius Bertrand (a book known to you, to me and to some of our friends, does it not have every right to be called famous!)" He overpraises Bertrand's commercially unsuccessful book, while the italicized "fameux" (which also implies "infamous") implicitly carves out the differences. Bertrand claimed to be inspired by engravings by Callot and Rembrandt, whereas Baudelaire evokes "modern life, or rather one modern and abstract life" in Second Empire Paris. The systematically self-aware critic exercises a far bolder ambition.

Formalistic notions of genre have only recently confirmed Baudelaire's true innovation. His oft-cited definition of "poetic prose" plays only a minor role in the dedication and simply adapts conventional views of romantic lyricism: "Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and choppy enough to fit the soul's lyrical movements, the undulations of reverie, the jolts of consciousness?" It is not this "miracle of a poetic prose" that constitutes an "absolute beginning." Could not Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Michelet, for example, better serve as models? More significantly, Baudelaire transported the lyrical narrative from nature to the city: "This obsessive ideal [of the prose poem] came to life above all in frequenting enormous cities, in the intersection of their countless relationships." The urban poet is both exemplar and theoretician of the modern self.

The two final paragraphs (surreptitiously) take aim at the main target, Houssaye himself. Baudelaire contrasts his malicious fable "The Bad Glazier" with his editor's crudely didactic anecdote, "The Glazier's Song" ("La Chanson du vitrier"), which illustrates a "democratic" reconciliation of a poor man and a poet. Baudelaire pretends to admire Houssaye's effort to compose verbal music, a "poetic" idealization, from the humble artisan's "strident cry," its "prosaic" reality. He does not state that Houssaye's text only reproduces sentimental commonplaces and democratic propaganda. Nor would his postutopian prowler ever replace poetry with une chanson, popular ditties. Read in Erasmian tradition as "paradoxical praise," Baudelaire's compliments translate into a mockery of mediocre writing unredeemed by its lofty intentions.

Baudelaire repudiates both didacticism and imitation, obliquely asserting his pride at not "executing exactly [his italics] what he planned to do." He had deliberately "remained quite far from his mysterious and brilliant model," Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit. The final line of "Le Voyage" (The voyage), the final poem of the 1861 Fleurs du Mal, dramatizes his commitment to innovation above all: "Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!") Into the depths of the Unknown to find the new!). Quite earlier, in "Exposition universelle" (1855), Baudelaire had associated himself with Delacroix's "quality sui generis, indefinable and defining this century's melancholy and fervent aspect, something completely new, which makes him a unique artist, wihout progenitor, without precedent, probably without a successor." Without knowing it, Baudelaire had announced his modern fables.

"The Thyrsus" states a theory of the Baudelairean "prose poem" more appropriately than his "dedication" to Houssaye. Commentators have differed on their interpretation of this "theoretical fable," which reflects on its own status as literature. The text begins as a meditation on a caduseus (a wand or baton) entwined with flowers, which then generates an extended metaphor of multiple polarities: "What is a thyrsus? According to its social and poetic meaning, it is a sacerdotal emblem to be held by priests and priestesses celebrating the divinity whose interpreters and servants they are. But physically it is only a staff, a mere staff, a vine pole for hops, a vine support, dry, hard, and straight" [Robert Kopp, in his editor of Petits poèmes en prose.] These ideas are not extraordinary, for any work can both mimetically represent experience and translate the story into a message, "le sens moral et poétique." But Baudelaire stresses the combination of "prosaic" and "poetic" elements, the interweaving of shapes, colors, and scents, which exercises a mysterious seduction—like "a mystical fandango executed around the hieratic staff."

Baudelaire further tangles the web of dualistic categories as he formulates a confluence of opposites. Interpreters should preserve the genre's integrity by applying the chemist's notion of "amalgam." Baudelaire's dedication of this piece to Franz Liszt, whom he truly admired, announces his most advanced conception:

The thyrsus is the representation of your astonishing duality, powerful and venerable master, dear Bacchant of mysterious and impassioned Beauty. . . .

The staff, it is your will, straight, firm, and unshakable; the flowers, the rambling of your fancy around your will; the feminine element executing around the male its prodigious pirouettes. Straight line and arabesque line, intention and expression, tautness of the will, sinuosity of the word, unity of goal, variety of means, all-powerful and indivisible amalgam of genius, what analyst would have the hateful courage to divide and to separate you?

The rhetorical question leaves in suspense the possibility—or advisability—of destroying his prose poems' organic unity. A critic must possess a "détestable courage" in order to disintegrate their "amalgame tout-puissant de génie" and abstract its bisexual vitality. Form is not separable from content nor can concepts replace their concrete (or allegorical) representations. Interpreters must respect the opposing elements without immobilizing their productive tensions.

Binary oppositions can distract us from the strict, condensed structure of the whole which prepares a "total effect." Baudelaire's "amalgam theory" justifies our label "fables of modern life," a plausible model of which appears in his 1857 "New Notes on Edgar Poe". The jolts and shocks which had so impressed Walter Benjamin fit into a rigorous plan: "If the first sentence is not written in order to prepare that final impression, the work fails from the very beginning"[ Oeuvres complètes.] The narrator gains in his ability to wear many masks: "the author of a short story has a multitude of tones at his disposal, nuances of language, a reasonable tone, sarcasm, humor, repudiated by poetry, and which are like dissonances, attacks against the idea of pure beauty"[ Oeuvres complètes.] Both Baudelaire and Poe capture the complex dynamics of consciousness.

The Parisian Prowler in fact opens, not with lyrical excursions, but with two brief, prosaic fables—"The Stranger" and "The Old Woman's Despair" ("L'Etranger," "Le Désespoir de la vieille")—which form a "diptych." It is highly significant that the definitive collection of fifty retains, with their original numbering, the four series of prose poems printed in 1862 for La Presse. Their central characters—two outsiders, a man and a woman—establish the conflict between fantasy and reality which will consistently direct the narrator's adventures. Both seek to alleviate their anguish, the one through daydreaming, the other through affectionate gestures. The "enigmatic man" of the first and the "good decrepit woman" of the second speak through the flâneur who begins his journey through them.

The stranger who lends the first fable its name is a sort of nineteenth-century Meursault, Camus's model of alienation. The narrator asks him basic questions, as might a psychotherapist who probes a patient's life history. The Odyssey opens by defining a normal person's sources of being:

"Tell me, whom do you love the most, you enigmatic man? your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?"

"I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother."

"Your friends?"

"There you use a word whose meaning until now has remained to me unknown."

"Your fatherland?"

"I am unaware in what latitude it lies."

"Beauty?"

"I would willingly love her, goddess and immortal."

"Gold?"

"I hate it as you hate God."

"So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?"

"I love clouds . . . drifting clouds . . . there . . . over there . . . marvelous clouds!"

The interviewer wants to discuss love, but the stranger refuses to concede any common ground to him. He addresses him with the familiar tu while the other, denying any middle-class values, will not reciprocate. The stranger is indeed estranged from God, family, and country—the conventional treasures of bourgeois society. They do not really speak, just swap words.

The stranger mirrors the narrator who, in future guises, longs to participate in a community as a citizen or as an artist. He is the prototypical victim of ennui, a pathological deadening of emotion and will, the "delicate monster" leading us to despair, which threatens the narrator from beginning to end. The stranger appears as an orphan who has renounced his yearning for companionship and repressed all memories, traces of the past with which he might construct a solid identity, while his apathy anesthetizes the pain of unsatisfied yearnings. This unknowable person dreams, not to foster desire, but crudely to evade reality. As he "spaces out," constantly mobile reveries waft him away from others—and from himself.

But the stranger's bleak refusals cannot bury his attachment to love. Other things being equal, he would pursue Beauty: "Je l'aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle." His use of the conditional tense does not deny a commitment to esthetic perfection. Then why does he separate this spiritual search from community values? Understandably, he repudiates the tainted (and elusive!) security of money as he equates cupidity with official religion, echoing the prophetic warning against identifying God and Mammon. His uncompromising standard of truth and beauty renders all prevailing institutions untenable.

How do we understand the stranger's final response, launching his mind into the emptiness of suspension points . . . ? The narrator had first perceived him as "enigmatic"; he now becomes "extraordinary"—the epithet shifting from bafflement to (an ironic?) admiration. At the end, the stranger's self becomes, in Baudelaire's terms, "vaporized"; as Kierkegaard explains: "So when feeling becomes fantastic, the self is simply volatilized more and more, at last becoming a sort of abstract sentimentality which is so inhuman that it does not apply to any person"( The Sickness Unto Death.) Reverie relishes its narcissistic plunge into the mind's inner spaces. Nevertheless, the esthetic stranger (for that is what he represents) has only temporarily eluded the Other, who summons love's absence. He still dwells with ennui.

The female outsider of "The Old Woman's Despair," quite the contrary, attempts to make tender contact; she is the collection's ethical stranger. She too is thwarted—not by her own, voluntary aloofness but by her body. Contradicting the fierce misogyny of later fables, the narrator displays his sympathy for this female victim of time, another little old lady of "Tableaux parisiens." Sweet and lonely, she seeks reciprocal affection and symmetrically contradicts the male outsider's disclaimer, in the first fable, of companionship.

The shriveled little old woman felt quite delighted when she saw the pretty baby whom everyone was entertaining, and whom everyone was trying to please; a pretty creature, as fragile as she, the little old woman, and, like her as well, toothless and without hair.

And she went up to him, trying to make little smiles and pleasant faces at him.

But the terrified child struggled under the kind decrepit woman's caresses, and filled the house with his yelpings.

Then the kind old woman withdrew into her eternal solitude, and she wept alone in a corner, saying to herself, "Ah, for us, unfortunate old females that we are, the age of pleasing has passed, even innocent creatures; and we disgust little children we try to love!"

The kinship of these vulnerable persons, aged and infant, at the beginning and the decline of life, is ironic, and the narrator repeatedly associates her tenderness with her age. She is "la petite vieille ratatinée," "la petite vieille," "la bonne femme décrépite," and "la bonne vieille." Baby and hag are both toothless and bald, but what is attractive in one renders the other repulsive. Beauty is relative, and the "innocent" baby has not yet learned that he has no reason to fear the old woman's smiles.

The narrator states his compassion for her "solitude éternelle"; the adjective labels her estrangement as absolute, essential to her being. And so she views herself as a puppet of biological destiny, one of a multitude of pariahs: "malheureuses vieilles femelles." Aged women, discarded by the young who perceive only exterior and transient loveliness, enter a subhuman category. Woman's superficial "gift of pleasing" is all too fragile.

This tension between ethical pathos versus a compelling passion for ideal Beauty energizes the entire collection: conflicts between fantasy and reality, mental versus social space, innocence versus evil. The rigorously dialectical organization of "The Old Woman's Despair" anticipates many other pieces, and its "pivotal sentence" [Robert Kopp, in his edition of Petits poèmes en prose]—"But the terrified child . . ."—is the first of several brutal proxies for "the world," which will burst into a dream. Usually the narrator hides his compassion under rude poses. The male "stranger" might represent a positive model of the dandy—were it not for the journalist-narrator's deliberate probing of his intimate aspirations. This diptych, which draws the lines of battle, defines the two strands of "esthetic" and "ethical" fables interwoven throughout The Parisian Prowler.