[In the following essay, Wettlaufer contends that Le Poème du haschisch serves as an outline of Baudelaire's aesthetic philosophy as well as his statement about the tenuous benefits of drug experimentation.]

Les Paradis artificiels is generally acknowledged to be the only published work that Baudelaire himself considered complete and definitive; in a letter to editor Julien Lemer he maintained, "je trouve le livre bon comme il est, je n'y ajouterai rien, je n'en retrancherai rien" (Correspondance 2: 442).¹ Yet the two essays that constitute Les Paradis artificiels are too often dismissed as a peculiar hybrid of self-referential moralizing (Le Poème du haschisch) and idiosyncratic translation (Un Mangeur d'opium). While the volume shares some thematic similarities and possibly even a structural affinity with Baudelaire's poems, Les Paradis artificiels also provides significant insights into the author's formal and aesthetic concerns vis-à-vis the relationship between author, reader and text.² On the most obvious level, Les Paradis artificiels sets forth the poet's condemnation of the facile and fleeting paradise of drug consumption. However this pair of essays that appeared in 1860, during the juncture between the first and second editions of Les Fleur s du mal, is as much about art as it is about drugs, and represents an important embodiment of Baudelaire's aesthetic theories of the production and the reception of meaning in a work of art. This second, but still fundamental level of meaning will be manifested in the thematic and formal tensions between the explicit and the implicit, between the "dit" and the "non-dit," and between the "lisible" and the "scriptible" within the text.

In many ways Les Paradis artificiels appears to be a text in conflict with itself. While ostensibly preaching the evils of opium and hashish, the author presents and even reproduces these states of intoxication in vivid and evocative detail, and while adamantly denying any points of intersection between the supernatural experiences of drugs and of art, his text creates a striking set of parallels between the two states. Nor is this implied similitude limited to the drug-related essays, for in Exposition universelle de 1855, in Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres and in Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris, to name only a few examples, Baudelaire also compares the experience of viewing a painting, reading a work of literature, and hearing an opera to "les vertigineuses conceptions de l'opium."³ Nevertheless, the two essays of the Paradis artificiels will explicitly deny this resemblance, enunciating instead a stark contrast between the toxicomane and the artist. Baudelaire opposes the temporary transcendence engendered by the consumption of drugs to the more legitimate paradise of art: where the artificial, narcotic nirvana is achieved through the repression of self and the reality principle, the true, artistic paradise is achieved conversely through suffering and the active expression of self. Implicit, however, within the text, is the contrast and intersection between the experience of drugs and the experience of art: between the effect of narcotics and the effect of art on the perceiving consciousness. For if the haschischin or opium eater as producer of hallucinations is compared (unfavorably) to the poet, as perceiver of these hallucinations he is tacitly compared to the reader. In other words, the "creation" of the hallucination is in fact separable from the perception of the hallucination and the two processes function as separate metaphors for artist and audience.

In both Le Poème du haschisch and Un Mangeur d'opium Baudelaire presents an implicit theory of reader response based on a visual paradigm that shares much with the narcotic experience. Hallucination and reading are equally described in terms of viewing: the drug-induced reverie, as well as the text at hand, are consistently referred to as "tableaux," while the hallucinator and the reader are "spectateurs," observers of a series of mental scenes synthesized in the mind and unfolding before the mind's eye. Baudelaire's use of the tableau metaphor at the beginning of the Poème du haschisch is especially telling, for here he sets up a parallel not only between hallucinating, reading and viewing, but between his own critical text and a work of visual art as well. In the brief introduction to the volume, a "dédicace" in letter form offered "A. J. G. F." (also the recipient of "L'Héautontimorouménos"), he explains that what will follow will be "un tableau de voluptés artificielles"—visual, dramatic, evocative, and as implied by both "tableau" and "volupté," undeniably artistic (1: 399).⁴ He repeats the painterly metaphor a page later, asserting, "tu verras dans ce tableau un promeneur sombre et solitaire, plongé dans le flot mouvant des multitudes" (1:400), implicitly positing a modem aesthetic of flânerie. The reader is led to believe that in the pages to follow she will see a contemporary Jean-Jacques, documenting in these updated reveries the state of the artist's soul in the modern city. However, in the first of many paradoxes that will characterize these essays, although Baudelaire claims that he will paint the portrait of a solitary stroller plunged into the surging stream of the Parisian populace, neither the street nor the multitudes are evident in either essay, and the flânerie will be entirely psychological in nature.

Indeed the flâneur—the Parisian idler, first cousin of the dandy and denizen of the teeming boulevards and arcades of the modern metropolis—would seem at first to have little in common with the solitary and self-contained hashish smoker and opium eater of Baudelaire's Paradis artificiels. Where the flâneur's activity takes place outdoors and in the public domain, the drogués in Baudelaire's essays most often remain comfortably ensconced indoors and at home; if the flâneur by definition strolls (however slowly), the addict sits or reclines; if the flâneur is a man of the crowds, the hallucinator is decidedly not. Yet the defining experiences of these two apparently dissimilar characters—the urban spectacle and the narcotic hallucination—both turn on the crucial issue of seeing, and are equally characterized by "a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear" (Benjamin 38). Baudelaire's flâneur, as distinct from the disinterested dandy, is an "observateur passionné" who fuses detachment with a search for knowledge and an assertion of a creative intelligence to shape the otherwise ungraspable urban experience. In keeping with Balzac's definition of the "flâneur artiste" in Physiologie du manage (1826), Baudelaire's own quintessential flâneur is Constantin Guys, the "peintre de la vie moderne" who is able to transform the chaotic and the arbitrary into the aesthetic and meaningful: "harnachements, scintillements, musique, regards décidés, moustaches lourdes et sérieuses, tout cela entre pêle-mêle en lui; et dans quelques minutes, le poème qui en résulte sera virtuellement composé" (2: 693).⁵ Balzac's "flâneur artiste" is an active rather than a passive consumer of the urban landscape ("se promener, c'est végéter; flâner, c'est vivre" [11: 930]), who is "a writer as well as a reader of the urban text" (Ferguson 47). In a similar vein, Baudelaire's "M.G." is a man of the crowds who translates and interprets the visual signifiers into more universal truths. Whereas the dandy is "l'homme riche, oisif, et qui, même blasé, n'as pas d'autre occupation que de courir à la piste du bonheur" (2: 709), Guys, as the painter of modern life, espouses

un but plus élevé que celui d'un pur flâneur, un but plus général, autre que le plaisir fugitif de la circonstance. Il cherche ce quelque chose qu'on nous permettra d'appeler la modernité; car il ne se présente pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer l'idée en question. Il s'agit, pour lui, de dégager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de poétique dans l'historique, de tirer l'éternel du transitoire. (2: 694)

This distinction between active and passive consumption of the visual spectacle, between the idle and the artistic observer will resonate in the Paradis artificiels as Baudelaire posits his own flânerie of the landscape of the hallucinating mind. Indeed if, as Benjamin would assert, the domain of the flâneur is the modern no-man's land where "the street had become an intérieur for him, [and] now this intérieur turned into a street" (Benjamin 54), Baudelaire's metaphysical flâneur (that is, the opium eater or haschischin) experiences a similar porosity of boundaries. Here, however, the spatial interpenetration occurs not simply between the public sphere of the street and the private sphere of the living room, but rather between the exterior world of physical reality and the psychological "intérieur" of the perceiving consciousness.⁶ The consumer of opium or hashish will become the observer of his own mental scenes and tableaux that share much with the saccadic, disjointed and ungraspable experience of the city both in form and in content. Just as Paris "entered [the] memory as a disconnected sequence of optical displays (Buck-Morss 186),"⁷ the drug-induced reveries will unfold as a series of dislocated and fragmented images arising both from the memory and from the eidetic imagination. In each case, any possible "meaning" extracted from this visual experience will be the product of the shaping, creative imagination of the passionate observer.

Following the brief dedication there will be no further explicit reference to the flâneur, but the aesthetics of viewing, observing and consuming the spectacle unrolling before one's very eyes will dominate both Le Poème du haschisch and Un Mangeur d'opium. Accordingly, the image of the flâneur artiste as embodied by Guys will be a crucial model for the ultimate translation of Baudelaire's aesthetic message. And although the flâneur disappears, the image of painting introduced in the opening lines ("tu verras dans ce tableau un promeneur . . .") remains as a multifaceted metaphor for hallucination, memory, imagination and reading—indeed almost all mental functions here take on a visual form. Baudelaire describes his own experience of De Quincey's literary memoirs in terms of the author's "tableaux émouvants," characterized by "une richesse précieuse pour les yeux" (1: 515) that he hopes to translate for his own reader in a form that will retain its original, visual flavor. Thus he offers a text that "je déroulerai comme une tapisserie fantastique sous les yeux du lecteur" (1: 444). As the author transcribes his mental tableaux into verbal ones, reading perforce becomes an act of viewing in these drug-related essays.

As the best account of a tableau, according to Baudelaire, may be a sonnet or an elegy (2: 418), it is not coincidental that the first of the two essays is entitled "Le Poème du haschisch," and it is on the tensions between the poetic and the narcotic in this particular essay that I will focus.⁸ For intrinsic to the ultimate sense of Les Paradis artificiels is not only the explicit contrast between the artist's creations and the drogué's, but also the implicit contrast between the haschischin's reception of the visual scenes as evoked by drugs, and the reader's reception of the visual scenes as evoked by drugs via the artist. Why this aspect of signification must perforce remain in the realm of the "non-dit" is intimately tied to Baudelaire's ultimate "Morale"; only by interpreting the repressed level of meaning will Baudelaire's full expression come to light.

As in many of his Salons, Baudelaire exploits the form of the interpolated prose poem within Le Poème du haschisch to create a linguistic equivalent to visual experience.⁹ Here, as in the Salons, the prose poem enacts a narrative of performance through its suggestive, evocative form where meaning can only be reached by the active assertion of the reader's eidetic imagination.¹⁰ In other words, signification will be the product of the reader's synthesis of words into images, which in turn will lead to a meaning inscribed by the author but achieved by the reader in a dialectic movement between text and imagination. In the central section of Le Poème du haschisch Baudelaire incorporates a prose poem that evokes first-hand the experience of drug-induced reverie while simultaneously serving as a negative and a positive paradigm for the reception of a work of art. As he presents the haschischin's hallucinations, Baudelaire shifts from the neutral "il" to the personal, almost accusatory "vous," transforming the reader into a direct participant in the trip. As readers we become the hallucinator, as Baudelaire tells us what we see and feel, his poetic prose providing an evocative experiential equivalent. The passage begins with an initial illustration of the fusion of observing subject with the object of contemplation:

Votre oeil se fixe sur un arbre harmonieux courbé par le vent; dans quelques seconds, ce qui ne serait dans le cerveau d'un poète qu'une comparaison fort naturelle deviendra dans le vôtre une réalité. Vous prêtez d'abord à l'arbre vos passions, votre désir ou votre mélancolie; ses gémissements et ses oscillations deviennent les vôtres, et bientôt vous êtes l'arbre. (1: 419-20)

From the outset this prose poem functions as a "mise en abyme" for the entire Poème du haschisch, for it simultaneously presents Baudelaire's observations on drugs and on art through a series of contrasts in the creation and the reception of visual images. Thus, what would normally be a poetic metaphor (the tree as symbol for the individual), chosen and controlled by the artist, becomes a hallucinated reality in the mind of the haschischin, as he fuses with the object of his gaze.

Next, the prose poem expands on the two themes with an upward movement from tree to bird: "de même, l'oiseau qui plane au fond de l'azur représente d'abord l'immortelle envie de planer au-dessus des choses humaines; mais déjà vous êtes l'oiseau lui-même" (1: 420; original emphasis). Once again there is a movement from metaphor—the bird representing the desire to transcend human limitation—to literal identification where the tripper and the bird become (imaginatively) one. Through the poet's use of metaphor, however, the reader is able to experience the successive loss of control that drug consumption entails, while the final expansion renders the sense of the passage eminently clear. In the most striking of the three images of verticality and celestial transcendence, Baudelaire pictures the reader-cum-hallucinator smoking a pipe, watching the clouds of smoke waft upward:

Votre attention se reposera un peu trop longtemps sur les nuages bleuâtres qui s'exhalent de votre pipe. L'idée d'une évaporation, lente, successive, éternelle, s'emparera de votre esprit, et vous appliquerez bientôt cette idée à vos propres pensées, à votre matière pensante. Par une équivoque singulière, par une espèce de transposition ou de quiproquo intellectuel, vous vous sentirez vous évaporant, et vous attribuerez à votre pipe (dans laquelle vous vous sentez accroupi et ramassé comme le tabac) l'étrange sensation de vous fumer. (1: 420)

The consumer of hashish is consumed by the hashish. As an observing subject, he not once but three times disappears within the world of narcotic fantasy, absorbed into the object of his contemplation. Through this series of increasingly ethereal images Baudelaire illustrates the fatal loss of liberty and control that he will later identify as the primary difference between the poet and the addict. But here, and throughout Le Poème du haschisch, the reader's relationship to the addict is an equally significant subtext. For while openly comparing the tripper to a poet, the passage enacts an implicit comparison between the tripper and the reader as they textually merge into a single "vous." In order for the reader to come to the poet's intended conclusion, she must experience the haschischin's passive loss of control through active participation in the text. She must simultaneously enact the "transpositions d'idées" while recognizing their metaphoric nature, and a second level of meaning is revealed only through this active synthesis of signification. If Baudelaire's prose poetic description is able to represent the experience of a hash trip, it is only because the poet and his audience assert their imaginative powers while recognizing the difference between fantasy and reality. It is through the reader's position at once inside the text, as the hallucinating "vous," and outside of the text, recognizing the metaphoric value of the identification, that the difference between the perception of hallucinated and artistic tableaux becomes apparent.

Thus Le Poème du haschisch implicitly presents Baudelaire's theories of artistic response in the guise of negative example of the drug tripper. As I have indicated, the essay is filled with direct references to both painting and poetry, while Baudelaire's poetic descriptions of the experience of hashish employ highly visual terms, insisting on the intensified sensations of form and color in terms that sound remarkably close to his own theory of the artistic "surnaturel." In a second prose poem that similarly encodes the reader's role while ostensibly simply positing the artist's, Baudelaire describes the haschischin's experience of different forms of artistic expression.

Following his famous profile of "l'homme sensible moderne" which includes "un tempérament moitié nerveux, moitié bilieux . . . un esprit cultivé, exercé aux études de la forme et la couleur . . . une grande finesse de sens" (1: 429), thus a sensibility which shares much not only with Baudelaire's own temperament, but with his characterizations of Poe, Delacroix and Guys as well, he then demonstrates what might happen to this sensitive, implicitly artistic type, under the influence of hashish. Once again the reader is immediately implicated in the scene as Baudelaire shifts to the "vous" of direct address. Beginning with the visual arts, Baudelaire demonstrates how everything—good, bad, or indifferent paintings, murals, wallpaper, indeed any painted surface—takes on an intense and energetic life in the eye of the hallucinator, and the even the most trivial object "devient symbole parlant." Hashish spreads its "vernis magique" over the entire visual world, revealing "profondeur de l'espace, allégorie de la profondeur du temps" (1: 430-1)." The universal analogies and correspondences, normally revealed by art, are incarnate in anything the eye might fall upon, as new allegorical depths of meaning proliferate everywhere. The world itself takes on the aspect of a painting.

Similarly, if the intoxicated eye should fall upon a book, the words will take on a life of their own, becoming vivid images and solid form, while even "l'aride grammaire elle-même, devient quelque chose comme une sorcellerie évocatoire." The grounds of intersection between an artistic and a narcotic experience are striking here, as Baudelaire even endows the hallucinated reality with "sorcellerie évocatoire"—an important element of the artwork of genius that Baudelaire linked directly with synaesthetic expression in his essay on Théophile Gautier.¹² In each case, there is indeed a synaesthetic expansion from the realm of words to the realm of visual images: concrete, physical and chromatic. Yet here, through the agency of hashish, any sentence can be transformed into a visually evocative experience, just as any scene becomes an allegorical spectacle revealing the very depths of life itself.

In the final expansion of this section, Baudelaire introduces the now familiar image of the drogué being consumed by the hallucination. As in the previous examples of aesthetic experience under the influence of drugs, there is an imbrication of sensation, and where visual experience became a language, reading became visual, music is perceived as poetry. But ultimately, the fundamental difference between the perception of art and the perception of hallucination becomes evident. For here, "la musique, autre langue chère . . . vous parle de vousmême et vous raconte le poème de votre vie: elle s'incorpore à vous et vous fondez en elle" (1: 431). The fusion of the self with the music entails a passivity and a self-referentiality that highlights the negative aspects of narcotic perception while enacting once again the positive paradigm of artistic reception. The person consuming the drugs absorbs the music but gives nothing of himself, and literally melts away. The haschischin experiences perfect, but illusory, fusion: the gap between perceiver and perceived, between language and ideas, between signified and signifier is miraculously overcome and meaning is offered up on a silver platter. The aestheticized perceptions of drug-induced reverie, where anything becomes endowed with allegorical signification, which is in turn presented to the hallucinator to consume, as it were, ready made, can have no real value or meaning in a Baudelairean universe. For the precise sense of the allegorical production of meaning lies in the process of translation, and in the recognition of the fundamental alienation between subject and object, perceiver and perceived.

Thus, as before, within the negative example of the haschischin, we find a positive paradigm present both at the level of the "dit" and of the "non-dit." Once again the arbitrary images of hallucination have been given artistic form and substance by the poet, who demonstrates his active control of production, in opposition to the hallucinator who is merely a passive spectator of his own "creations." Implicit, however, but crucial to a full understanding of the essay, is the contrast between the perception of art and hallucination. The reader, who presumably has not consumed hashish before experiencing the passage, is able through the active participation of the imagination and intelligence to envision and experience these same sensations and thus to reach a meaning that a passive perceiver of true hallucination could not. The active, participatory role of the artist and of the skillful reader in interpreting, translating, creating meaning out of the fragments and symbols of modern experience draws attention to the schism between them. Following the image of the flâneur as man of the crowd, at once part of the scene and irrevocably other, Baudelaire's artist and his ideal reader, as posited by the paradigmatic prose poems, enter into the scene via the imagination, yet never lose themselves in the fantasy of perfect harmony. Instead, the metaphysical observer synthesizes meaning as a product of a dialectic between the physical images of the scene or art work and her own personally significant images and associations, while this emblematic language makes palpable or experiential the process of allegory or fragmentation and alienation. The drug user, on the other hand, does not so much "read" as he is "read to"—meaning is presented and accepted, but not actually achieved.

Thus Baudelaire must necessarily repress direct commentary on this level of the essay, for its signification must be experienced and not merely dictated in order for it to reach its full expression. Only through the process of reading, interpreting and actively synthesizing meaning, can the reader come to a full understanding of the difference between the production and the perception of art and hallucination. If this second level of meaning had been spelled out, the reader would have been reduced to the single role of the haschischin as passive perceiver, without the redeeming possibility of active participation in the creation of signification.

Baudelaire highlights the dialectic nature of art and perception in the modern world, where meaning is the product of process, and even aesthetic expression is incomplete without an active perceiving intelligence to synthesize it into signification. By transforming the meaningless hallucinations into meaningful artistic expression, Baudelaire illustrates the complementary roles of artist and audience in the production of meaning out of pure aesthetic experience. The surnaturel, the correspondences and the analogies of the drug trip are devoid of any true meaning because they are neither shaped and controlled by an artist nor interpreted by an audience; instead they are passively produced and passively perceived. His repression of commentary on the role of the reader in the synthesis of artistic meaning allows the reader to take an active, creative role in the text. Accordingly, in Baudelaire's aesthetics of the "non-dit," authorial repression becomes a means to readerly expression, allowing her fleeting access perhaps to the heroic realms of the flâneur and the artist in the assertion of individual sensibility and consciousness when faced with the annihilating spectacle of modernity.

In Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris, Victor Fournel, a contemporary of Baudelaire's, offered the following distinction:

N'allons pas toutefois confondre le flâneur avec le badaud: il y a une nuance que sentiront les adeptes. Le simple flâneur observe et réfléchit; il peut le faire du moins. Il est toujours en pleine possession de son individualité. Celle du badaud disparaît, au contraire, absorbé par le monde extérieur qui le ravit à lui-même, qui le frappe jusqu'à l'enivrement et l'extase. Le badaud, sous l'influence du spectacle devient en être impersonnel, ce n'est plus un homme: il est public, il est foule. (263)

The haschischin, as passive, intoxicated observer, mirrors the hapless badaud of the Parisian boulevard, absorbed by the spectacle to the point of losing his very individuality. The artist, the flâneur and the active reader observe and reflect, bringing a personal vision to the increasingly impersonal and depersonalizing scene of modern experience. Ultimately then, Les Paradis artificiels reflects Baudelaire's commentary not merely on drugs, but on the creation and reception of artistic meaning in the modern metropolis. The consumption of art must be as active and expressive as the production of art, inversely mirroring the passive and repressive nature of the consumption and the production of hallucination. Clearly, although the immediate experience of hashish entails an artificial paradise, the artistic experience of the paradisiac can lead to possible redemption not only for the artist, but also for his audience.

¹ All subsequent reference to Baudelaire will be to the Pléiade œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois.

² "Poison," "La Vie antérieure," "Rêve parisien," "L'Invitation au voyage" and the five "Vin" poems are most often cited as being thematically related to the Paradis artificiels in that they either address or imply states of intoxication. In a more general sense, the motifs of temptation, suffering and escape may be seen as common to both Les Fleurs du mal and Les Paradis artificiels. See Emanuel Mickel's The Artificial Paradises in French Literature. The Influence of Opium and Hashish on French Romanticism and "Les Fleurs du mal" for an interpretation of the entire volume of Les Fleurs du mal as a reflection of the poet's struggle with the purgatorial paradises of intoxication. Mickel, who presents a poem by poem analysis of possible drug allusions, sees the title as a reference both to the opium poppy and the flowering cannabis plant; the dedication to Gautier as a reference to his role in introducing opium and hashish to the French literati of the 1840s; and "Spleen et idéal" as representative of the dual facets of drug consumption. In "Some Remarks on Baudelaire's Poème du haschisch" Alison Fairlie compares the architecture of Les Fleurs du mal to that of Le Poème du haschisch, which she interprets as an allegory for the sequence of human experience treated in Baudelaire's poems. See Fairlie in The French Mind. Studies in Honor of Gustave Rudler 291-317.

³ In Exposition universelle de 1855 Baudelaire describes the experience of Delacroix's paintings in terms of opium, synaesthetic sensation, the "surnaturel": "Edgar Poe dit, je ne sais pas où, que le résultat de l'opium pour les sens est de revêtir la nature entière d'un intérêt surnaturel qui donne à chaque objet un sens plus profond, plus volontaire, plus despotique. Sans avoir recours à l'opium, qui n'a connu ces admirables heures, véritables fêtes du cerveau, où les sens les plus attentifs perçoivent des sensations plus retentissantes, où le ciel d'un azur plus transparent s'enfonce comme un abîme plus infini, où les sons tintent musicalement, où les couleurs parlent, où les parfums racontent des mondes d'idées? Eh bien, la peinture de Delacroix me paraît la traduction de ces beaux jours d'esprit" (2: 596). Poe's own writings are compared to the experience of opium and the supernatural in Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres (1856): "Comme notre Eugène Delacroix, qui a élevé son art à la hauteur de la grande poésie, Edgar Poe aime à agiter ses figures sur des fonds violâtres et verdâtres . . . La nature dite inanimée participe de la nature des êtres vivants, et, comme eux, frissonne d'un frisson surnaturel et galvanique. L'espace est approfondi par l'opium; l'opium y donne un sens magique à toutes les teintes, et fait vibrer tous les bruits avec une plus significative sonorité" (2: 317-18). With a similar emphasis on the experience of the work of art, Baudelaire observes, apropos of Wagner, "il semble parfois, en écoutant cette musique ardente et despotique, qu'on retrouve peintes sur le fond des ténèbres, déchiré par la rêverie, les vertigineuses conceptions de l'opium" in Richard Wagner (1863) (2: 785).

⁴ While I refer here to the aesthetic connotations of "volupté" as it is used within Baudelaire's lexicon to refer to pleasure in sensuous or artistic experience, the sensual implications of the word cannot be ignored. In Le Sadisme de Baudelaire, Georges Blin posits the poet's "dialectique d'agonie" where "volupté" and "cruauté," "jouissance et douleur" are inextricably linked and the sexual act becomes one of sadistic torture where "au couple de l'amant et l'aimée se substitue naturellement pour Baudelaire celui du 'bourreau' et de la 'victime'" (15). Hence the ruinous temptation of drugs, which provide momentary pleasure and transcendence, only to be followed by pain and regret, has a direct correlation to the poet's attitudes toward women, sex and suffering. Mickel has persuasively linked these two "voluptés" both through the probability that Baudelaire's introduction to opium some time around 1852 was in response to a bout of syphilis, and through recurrent images of impotence and Satan, downfall and consolation, which he associates at once with women and drugs (137-8 and passim). I shall focus however on the "volupté"/narcotics/art association as it pertains to the poet's aesthetics.

⁵Le Peintre de la vie moderne presents Baudelaire's most extensive discussion of the flâneur and the dandy. Although the essay did not appear in Le Figaro until 1863, J. Crépet has dated its composition to late 1859-early 1860, which precisely corresponds to the period in which the Paradis artificiels were completed and published. On the cover of the 1860 edition of Les Paradis artificiels Baudelaire announced several upcoming studies, under the rubric "Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains." One such projected study was "La Famille des Dandies."

⁶ It is interesting to note that Benjamin exploited the narcotic metaphor in his own study of Baudelaire's flâneur. Without making specific reference to the Paradis artificiels or to Baudelaire's own implicit comparison of the flâneur and the drogué, he speaks of the crowd as "the latest narcotic for those abandoned. The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd . . . The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers" (55).

Gérald Froidevaux has also linked Baudelaire's theories of intoxication and modernity in "L'Ivresse comme 'chose moderne' chez Baudelaire" (335-342). Froidevaux likens Baudelaire's definition of modernity ("I"oxymoron pléonastique de la représentation du présent") to the effect of intoxicants, both of which induce a negation of time and a "présence-absence": "il y a donc entre la drogue et le moi le même rapport, à la fois de mise en valeur et de négation, qu'entre la représentation et le présent dans ce que Baudelaire conçoit comme la modernité" (340).

⁷ This is in fact Susan Buck-Morss' gloss of Benjamin's analysis of Baudelaire's relationship to the city, the street and the commodity and his comparison of the experience of reading Baudelaire's poetry to that of strolling through the arcades.

⁸ The second section of Les Paradis artificiels, Un Mangeur d'opium, presents a complementary enactment both of Baudelaire's theory of reader response and of how a work of art (specifically, a work of art about drugs) is experienced by a reader. As both a reader (of De Quincey) and author (of the translation), Baudelaire emphasizes the points of intersection between reading and hallucinating, while highlighting the crucial differences between active creation and passive consumption. Here, as in Poème du haschisch, the interpolated prose poem becomes the critical paradigm for the visual experience of the druginduced reverie as it relies on the active participation of the reader in the text for the synthesis of meaning.

⁹ See, for example, the section "De la couleur" in the Salon de 1846, a passage that Roger Shattuck considers not only Baudelaire's first prose poem but also the first Impressionist painting (165-181).

¹⁰ While the concept of a "narrative of/as performance" has been developed in depth by Shoshana Felman, Ross Chambers and Marie Maclean, among others, I posit the term here specifically to denote the textual postulation of active readerly participation within the fiction of the text, often in terms of imaginative visualization. Thus I focus upon the inscribed performance of the reader (i.e., the reader as performer on/in the text in an Iserian sense of the dialectics of response), rather than upon the text as performance or performative. Although, like Maclean, I envisage the reader as a kind of spectator, I do not draw here on the theatrical model which she applies to Spleen de Paris in Narrative as Performance.

¹¹ Baudelaire posits a strikingly similar definition of the supernatural in "Fusées"; "dans certains états de l'âme presque surnaturels, la profondeur de la vie se révèle tout entière dans le spectacle, si ordinaire qu'il soit, qu'on a sous les yeux. Il en devient le symbole" (1: 659).

¹² See "Théophile Gautier," where Baudelaire observes "manier savamment une langue c'est pratiquer une espèce de sorcellerie évocatoire. C'est alors que la couleur parle, comme une voix profonde et vibrante; et que les monuments se dressent et font saillie sur l'espace profond . . . que le parfum provoque la pensée et le souvenir correspondants; que la passion murmure ou rugit son langage éternellement semblable" (2: 118). These same ideas, expressed with an almost identical vocabulary, are connected to the "surnaturel" in Fusées XI (1: 658-9).

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