SOURCE: "The Interpretation of the Fleurs du Mal" in Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry, New Directions Books, 1953, pp. 175-99.

I have already suggested that the 'Tableaux Parisiens' are not incidental glimpses of the city, but an attempt by the poet to re-establish contact with the world of common experience, to escape from the self. The attempt naturally fails, but it produces some of his finest and most original poetry.

The chapter contains eighteen poems. They record a 'circular tour' of the city lasting twenty-four hours, and three of them—Le Soleil, Le Crépuscule du soir, and Le Crépuscule du matin—mark the changes from morning to night, from night to dawn.

The first poem is a panorama of the city. The poet imagines himself in the traditional garret and adopts, ironically, the pastoral tone:

Je veux, pour composer chastement mes églogues,
Coucher auprès du ciel, comme des astrologues,
Et, voisin des clochers, écouter en rêvant
Leurs hymnes solennels emportés par le vent.

He looks down across

Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mâts de la cité,

but decides to shut out the world and write. The storms may thunder outside, but he will not care:

Car je serai plongé dans cette volupté
D'évoquer le Printemps avec ma volonté,
De tirer un soleil de mon coeur, et de faire
De mes pensers brûlants une tiède atmosphère.

I think we can take it that the seventeen poems which follow are in fact the vision that he sets to work to 'evoke' in the fastness of his garret, but his picture of Paris turns out to be very different from the one that he suggests in these lines. It will be an autumn and not a spring landscape, nor will it be sunlight—we note the recurrence of the image—that he draws from his 'heart'.

Le Soleil—originally the second poem of 'Spleen et Idéal'—describes his aims very neatly:

Je vais m'exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

He goes on to compare the sun and the poet:

il descend dans les villes,
Il ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles,
Et s'introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets,
Dans tous les hôpitaux et dans tous les palais.

It is, indeed, the relation between 'words' and 'paving-stones', 'dream' and 'reality' which gives the 'Tableaux' their special fascination. The poet imagines himself leaving his attic, going down into the city and recording his impressions of it, finding his way into palaces, poor-houses, and hospitals, and transforming what he sees into something unique. For he has succeeded better than any other modern poet in conveying the atmosphere of the great city—the mists rising over the Seine at dawn, the sun beating remorselessly down on the dry dusty pavements at noon, and the winter fogs blotting out the city at dusk; the sinister procession of beggars, murderers, drunkards, prostitutes, and rag-pickers slinking through the twilight. His verse catches the sounds as well as the sights. We hear the bugle in the barracks at dawn, the rattle of the traffic in the 'rue assourdissante', the medley of sounds as night-life begins:

les cuisines siffler,
Les théâtres glapir, les orchestres ronfler . . .
the music of a military band:
ces concerts, riches de cuivre,
Dont les soldats parfois inondent nos jardins . . . 

or the haunting melody of a street song:

Que des noeuds mal attachés
Dévoilent pour nos péchés

Tes deux beaux seins, radieux
Comme des yeux;

Que pour te déshabiller
Tes bras se fassent prier
Et chassent à coups mutins
Les doigts lutins . . .

Tu compterais dans tes lits
Plus de baisers que de lis
Et rangerais sous tes lois
Plus d'un Valois! . . . 

Tu vas lorgnant en dessous
Des bijoux de vingt-neuf sous
Dont je ne puis, oh! pardon!
Te faire don.

A une Mendiante rousse is based on a combination of two traditional metres, and the use of the word lois is a charming archaism. The careful blending of tradition and innovation that we find in the poem is a good indication of Baudelaire's approach to his material and of the way in which he achieves his effects in this part of his work.

'Impressionism,' writes Arnold Hauser, 'is an urban art, and not only because it discovers the landscape quality of the city and brings painting back from the country to the town, but because it sees the world through the eyes of the townsman and reacts to external impressions with the overstrained nerves of modern technical man. It is an urban style, because it describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden sharp but always ephemeral impressions of the city.'

This passage throws considerable light on the 'Tableaux Parisiens'. It seems to me to be misleading to suggest, as Vivier does [in The Social History of Art, 1952], that the poems are in some way 'objective'. Baudelaire's pictures are traditional in the sense that they are carefully composed and contain a pronounced formal element which we shall not find in Laforgue's much more impressionistic pictures of Paris life; but his main concern is to give a personal 'impression' and not a realistic study of the city and its inhabitants. Nor can it be denied that he brings out to the full 'the overstrained nerves of modern technical man .. . the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden sharp but always ephemeral impressions of the city'. The poems are highly stylized, their imagery a mixture of exact observation and impressionism of the kind that we find in:

Le long du vieux faubourg, où pendent aux masures
Les persiennes, abri des secrètes luxures . . .
La Prostitution s'allume dans les rues;
Comme une fourmilière elle ouvre ses issues;
Partout elle se fraye un occulte chemin,
Ainsi que l'ennemi qui tente un coup de main;
Elle remue au sein de la cité de fange . . .

In these lines there is not simply a mixture of exact observation and impression; the impression takes the form of comment or criticism such as we find in 'secrètes luxures', 'Comme une fourmilière' and 'cité de fange'.

When he writes:

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
  Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!

we see that the city of swarming multitudes is also the city of dreams where the apparition clutches us by the arm in broad daylight. 'Tout pour moi devient allégorie', he said in Le Cygne. 'Rêve', 'cauchemar', 'mythe', and 'allégorie' are among the words to which Baudelaire has given a special resonance and they are key-words for an appreciation of the 'Tableaux Parisiens'. For these 'pictures' have the sharpness and the intensity of a dream. The dream is a dédoublement which enables us to contemplate life simultaneously under two aspects, giving us the sensation of the dream world with its strange shapes continually breaking in on the 'real' world. 'Il aime le mot charmant appliqué aux choses équivoques', said Laforgue. He did so because the use of this and similar words enabled him to render perfectly 'the ecstasy of life and the horror of life':

Dans les plis sinueux des vieilles capitales,
Où tout, même l'horreur, tourne aux enchantements,
Je guette, obéissant à mes humeurs fatales,
Des êtres singuliers, décrépits et charmants.
Aurais-je, sans mourir, contemplé le huitième,
Sosie inexorable, ironique et fatal . . .

I have said sufficient to give some idea of 'the landscape quality of the city', but we can only grasp the significance of the landscape when it is provided with figures, and this leads to a consideration of the general meaning of the chapter. The centre of the 'Tableaux Parisiens' is a group of four poems which follows A ne Mendiante rousse. The theme of all four is exile. Le Cygne, which forms the prologue, deals both with the general idea of exile and with the poet's personal sense of exile. The three remaining poems—Les Sept vieillards, Les Petites vieilles, and Les Aveugles—are concerned with specific examples of those modern exiles and outcasts, old men, old women, and the blind.

Le Cygne begins with an example of exile taken from classical times, with the image of the widowed Andromache weeping beside the river:

Andromaque, je pense à vous! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit
L'immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,

A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile,
Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.
Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d'un mortel);
Je ne vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques,
Ces tas de chapiteaux ébauchés et de fûts,
Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des flaques,
Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-à-brac confus.

It seems probable that the memory of Andromache—'memory' is a crucial word in this poem—was recalled by the sight of the 'classical' buildings in the centre of Paris. When the poem was first published it had an epigraph from the Third Book of Virgil's Æneid: 'Falsi Simonentis ad undam'. For Baudelaire evokes the image of Andromache at the time when she was an exile in Pyrrhus's capital and had made a river there 'in imitation of the river Simois of Troy to remind her of her native land'.

The image of Andromache stirs the poet's personal memories. In the last two lines of the second verse the 'classical' tone, which was admirably suited to the opening of the poem, changes to a more colloquial tone; but though the reference to the changing face of Paris seems almost an aside, we shall find that the contrast between change and the unchanging is one of the central themes of the poem. The poet remembers the swan that he himself had seen many years before when passing through the same part of Paris:

Là s'étalait jadis une ménagerie;
Là je vis, un matin, à l'heure où sous les cieux
Froids et clairs le Travail s'éveille, où la voirie
Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l'air silencieux,

Un cygne qui s'était évadé de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec,
Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage.

Près d'un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec
Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,
Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal:
'Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonnerastu, foudre?'
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal,
Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide,
Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide,
Comme s'il adressait des reproches à Dieu!

I shall discuss Baudelaire's syntax in some detail later on and need only remark here on the effectiveness with which he builds up the confused and sordid background and delays the appearance of the swan, who is the object of 'je vis' in line 2, until the beginning of the next verse. What are mainly interesting, however, are the similarities and contrasts between the images of Andromache and the swan. The word 'mythe' applies to both of them. Andromache belongs to a classical myth, the swan to a new myth which the poet is creating. He is a 'symbol' in the same sense as Baudelaire's albatross, but in this poem the symbol is worked out with consummate skill.

Andromache has been taken from her native land and brought as a captive to Pyrrhus's capital where she stands weeping beside an imitation river. The swan, too, has been taken from his 'beau lac natal' and imprisoned in a 'ménagerie' where he becomes like the weeping Andromache a spectacle for strangers to gaze on. He escaped from his cage, but it was an escape into a fresh 'exile', and he remains an incongruous figure with his white plumage set against the dim background of the city amid the clatter of the refuse bins. The skies, which are 'froids et clairs', remind him tantalizingly of his native lake as the false river reminds Andromache of the real river in her native land. Her tears swell the imitation river, but they cannot make it anything but 'ce petit fleuve'. The swan is deprived of water altogether. The sight of him scratching the dry stones, and dipping his wings into the dust near the 'ruisseau sans eau', appears to be an ironical allusion to 'ce Simoïs menteur' because the swan is lamenting beside a stream which is a caricature of the 'beau lac natal' in the same way that Andromache's river is a caricature of the real Simois.

An American critic [Joseph D. Bennett, in Baudelaire: A Criticism, 1946] suggests that there is a parallel between these verses and the fifth section of The Waste Land. Baudelaire certainly uses absence of water as a symbol not merely of frustration, but of stagnation, in the same way that Mr. Eliot does in What the Thunder Said and Gerontion. This explains the appeal:

'Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonnerastu, foudre?'

It is an appeal for water to provide him with another, lake, but it is more than that. It is an appeal for a convulsion of nature which will bring water that is literally and metaphorically life-giving to a stagnant civilization.

I have said that the description of the changing face of Paris in the second verse is one of the main themes of the poem. Andromache is a symbol of the unchanging sense of exile which remains in the human heart in spite of the changes that take place in the 'form' of life. 'Le coeur d'un mortel', therefore, stands for something permanent, for something that belongs to the human condition; 'la forme d'une ville' stands for the impermanent, the transitory. In other words, the changes in the face of Paris mark the change from the classical to the modern symbols of exile. The futile, ineffectual movements of the swan scratching 'feverishly', bathing his wings 'nervously', and darting his neck 'convulsively' are contrasted with

L'immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve.

Andromache's grief is classical, restrained, majestic. The swan is the symbol of the unrest of the modern exile—the unrest which torments the poet himself.

This brings us to the end of the first part of the poem. The opening verse of the second part reintroduces the theme of the changing face of Paris and the unchanging 'melancholy' of the human heart:

Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie,
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.

The sight of the new 'palaces', the scaffolding, and the blocks of stone in the midst of the 'vieux faubourgs' brings home to us the confusion and the shapeless indifference of the modern city. The rocks to which he compares his memories are another symbol of sterility and frustration.

The images of the swan and Andromache reappear and are women together:

Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime:
Je pense á mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous,
Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime,
Et rongé d'un désir sans trêve! et puis á vous,

Andromaque, des bras d'un grand époux tombée,
Vil bétail, sous la main du superbe Pyrrhus,
Auprès d'un tombeau vide en extase courbée;
Veuve d'Hector, hélas! et femme d'Hélénus!

The comparison between the classical and the modern exile is maintained, but the sequence of the images is reversed which has the effect of stressing the peculiar position of the modern exile with his frayed nerves and his 'gestes fous'. 'Rongé d'un désir sans trêve' seems to refer to the longing to find a way home. It leads back to the spectacle of Andromache. The words vil bétail' introduce a fresh motif. Andromache is an exile and a captive, but 'vil bétail' turns her into a chattel, a commodity to be bought and sold as the swan was bought and sold and put into a cage. She is bent 'in ecstasy' over an empty tomb—the tomb that she had built beside the imitation Simois in honour of the dead Hector—which apparently stands for the impossibility of any return. 'Ridicule et sublime' seems to identify the poet unmistakably with the swan and recalls that other poem of exile—L'Albatros—where we leave the poet

Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

In the last three verses we have a brief glimpse of other exiles and outcasts: the consumptive negress lost in the jostling throng of the modern city, the orphans, the weepers, the shipwrecked mariners. There are continual references back to the two main images. The negress thinking longingly of the coconut trees of her native Africa is Andromache longing for the Simois of her native Troy; the weepers are Andromache weeping into the imitation Simois; the orphans 'séchant comme des fleurs' the swan beside the dried-up stream; and the shipwrecked sailors remind us that the sea, though so often a symbol of liberation, is the greatest barrier between the exile and home.

In the closing verses the poet's own role undergoes a change. We find that he has taken the place of the mourning Andromache, as he stands watching the anonymous procession of the lesser exiles which passes rapidly across the stage and fades away in the 'bien d'autres encor' of the last line. His tone changes to a tone of lamentation and each type of exile is introduced by the words, 'Je pense à . . .' It strikes a note of despair in

Je pense . .
A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve
Jamais, jamais!

In the final moving verse he identifies himself with exiles everywhere:

Ainsi dans la forêt où mon esprit s'exile
Un vieux Souvenir sonne à plein souffle du cor!
Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île,
Aux captifs, aux vaincus! .. . à bien d'autres encor!

'Souvenir' recalls the 'mémoire fertile' of the second verse, and the poem reminds us even more strongly than La Chevelure of the close connection between Baudelaire's memory and Proust's mémoire involontaire. The sight of an object in the external world sets the machinery in motion, stirring 'forgotten' memories. Emotions buried in the depths of the unconscious float to the surface of the conscious mind, attach themselves to visual images, and crystallize in a fresh experience. The whole poem, in fact, is a reverie constructed out of memories, and the word 'Souvenir' completes the familiar 'circle'.

The 'symphonic' construction of this superb poem has been highly praised. It is probable that music did suggest the method of introducing the main images, but the source does not perhaps greatly matter. What does matter is that Baudelaire is using with complete mastery one of the most important and influential poetic devices of the century. The recurring image, which was later used with extreme brilliance by Laforgue in his Derniers vers, has added enormously to the subtlety and complexity of modern poetry. It was the outcome of that other discovery—the 'analogical' method or the method of 'emotional equivalences'. For once the poet used an image to symbolize an emotion instead of describing emotion or using the image as a mere illustration, he found himself in possession of a sort of poetic shorthand. When this is extended to the recurring image, themes and emotions can be made to weave in and out of one another, sometimes blending and sometimes clashing, in a way that gives the pattern of the poem its new complexity, and is particularly effective in the dream atmosphere of this poem. In Le Cygne it does not stop at the main images. It is applied to individual words so that they reinforce and add to the cohesion not merely of the main images, but of the whole poem. When we look back we find that there is in fact a series of words or subsidiary images suggesting fecudity, water, drought, and nervousness—'grandit', 'féconde', 'fertile', 'eau', 'ruisseau', 'sec', 'séchant', 'nerveusement', 'convulsif, 'fous'—which elaborate and prolong the principal themes. Baudelaire 'works' these words so that they all become symbols of frustration in a manner that looks forward to Mallarmé. Andromache's tears 'swell' the river, but it is an imitation river which stands for her frustration at being exiled from Troy. The recollection of her 'fertilizes' the poet's memory, but it leads to the other great image of frustration—the swan and the dried-up stream. The image of drought leads, finally, by way of the 'orphelins séchant comme des fleurs', to the sea which cuts the shipwrecked sailors off from their homes.

The poem possesses an impressive variety of tone which ranges not only from the grand manner to the colloquial style, but includes the ironic-heroic tone in which the swan is described:

Comme s'il adressait des reproches á Dieu!

and the sorrowful tone of the close with its repeated 'Je pense'.

We find a similar variety in the continually changing décors seen through the poet's unchanging 'melancholy'. The scene moves to and fro between the classical landscape of Greece and the rubble of Louis-Philippe's Paris, passes on to a fleeting glimpse of an exotic Africa and the islands lost in the middle of the ocean. The figures sometimes harmonize with their background and sometimes clash with it. Andromache is in harmony with hers; the swan clashes with his, but one of the most vivid moments in the poem is the silhouette of the shattered negress caught, as it were, between 'les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique' and 'la muraille immense du brouillard'.

The editors of the critical edition point out that we are not prevented from seeking a symbolical interpretation of Les Sept vieillards and suggest, tentatively, that this number may be allusion to the seven deadly sins. Their observation is equally applicable to Les Petites vieilles and Les Aveugles. The symbolism of all three poems appears to be twofold. The old men, the old women, and the blind are, as we know, specific examples of the modern exile and they proceed logically from the exiles described in the closing verses of Le Cygne. I think that the seven old men, who are described significantly as 'ces sept monstres hideux', stand for the seven deadly sins and that there is a parallel between them and the seven kinds of animal and reptile mentioned in Au Lecteur. I suspect that there is a further parallel between the allegorical figure of 'Ennui' in that poem and the eighth old man. For the poet is so appalled at the idea that 'the eighth' may appear that he turns tail, goes back to his lodging, and shuts himself in. The introduction of names from classical legend in Les Petites vieilles suggests another contrast between classical and modern times in the manner of Andromache and the swan, while the spectacle of the blind men in Les Aveugles turning their sightless eyes to heaven is probably an allusion to contemporary unbelief—the exiles have no faith to sustain them—and to the poet's own religious doubts.

Although the poet had gone down into the city in the hope of re-establishing contact with other people he remains imprisoned in his own loneliness, an exile among exiles. The sense of distance between himself and the other exiles—the sympathetic desire to enter into their lives and the impossibility of doing so—is accentuated by his irony. He proceeds to give an account of their plight in a tone in which pity and irony are blended and which gives the poems their distinctive quality.

Whether or not the seven old men represent the seven deadly sins, they are essentially sinister figures. The poet treats them as examples of the exile who has turned sour, and in order to convey the impression that they make on him he uses the words 'méchanceté', 'fiel', 'hostile', 'infâme', 'infernal', 'sinistre'. The poem begins with a general description of the frightening impression caused by the apparition which suddenly clutches the arm of the pedestrian in broad daylight. This creates a tense, uneasy atmosphere which prepares us for the entry of the procession, and the 'spectre' in line 2 looks forward to 'ces spectres baroques' in the eighth verse. The scene is set and the poet goes on to give an account of a personal experience:

Un matin, cependant que dans la triste rue
Les maisons, dont la brume allongeait la hauteur,
Simulaient les deux quais d'une rivière accrue,
Et que, décor semblable à l'âme de l'acteur,
Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l'espace,
Je suivais, raidissant mes nerfs comme un héros
Et discutant avec mon âme déjà lasse,
Le faubourg secoué par les lourds tombereaux.

There is a deliberate lowering of the tension in these two verses. The poet puts the 'spectre' out of his mind, fixes our attention on the physical details of the scene—the street, the houses, the fog, and the vibration of the dust-carts. The sight of the changing shapes of the houses introduces the element of distortion which is of capital importance in this and the poems that follow. For the physical distortion, or the illusion of physical distortion, caused by the fog is the prelude to the psychological distortion which belongs to the machinery of the nightmare. In spite of the emphasis on physical details, the atmosphere remains equivocal. We are not sure—the poet does not mean us to feel sure—whether we are awake and a supernatural apparition is about to arrive or whether we are in the middle of a 'bad dream'. The fourth line seems to me to be obscure. The word 'décor' must mean stage scenery—theatres always suggest a mixture of tawdriness and glamour in Baudelaire's poetry—but it is not certain whether the poet is speaking of the way in which the actor's life is divided between the real world and the world of illusion, or whether he himself is for the time being an actor whose mood reflects the confused foggy scene. I think that logically 'l'âme de l'acteur' must mean actors in general, though Baudelaire was probably conscious of the two possible interpretations. In any case 'actor' looks forward to 'a hero' which is clearly an ironical reference to the poet. He is about to relate the 'part' that he played in the comedy of the old men, but we shall see from the close of the poem that his conduct turns out to be very unheroic.

The procession is introduced in the next verse:

Tout à coup, un vieillard dont les guenilles jaunes
Imitaient la couleur de ce ciel pluvieux,
Et dont l'aspect aurait fait pleuvoir les aumônes,
Sans la méchanceté qui luisait dans ses yeux, M'apparut.

His appearance is a careful blending of the matter of fact and the sinister. The comparison between the colour of his rags and the colour of the rainy skies marks a very adroit transition from physical to psychological distortion, and we ramain uncertain whether we are sleeping or waking. 'Imitaient' is the crucial word. It refers back to 'simulaient' and reinforces the image of the actor and of the poet himself suspended between the real world and the world of make-believe. The poem goes on:

On eût dit sa prunelle trempée
Dans le fiel; son regard aiguisait les frimas,
Et sa barbe á longs poils, roide comme une
épée,
Se projetait, pareille à celle de Judas.
Il n'était pas voûté, mais cassé, son échine
Faisant avec sa jambe un parfait angle droit,
Si bien que son bâton, parachevant sa mine,
Lui donnait la tournure et le pas maladroit

D'un quadrupède infirme ou d'un juif à trois pattes.
Dans la neige et la boue il allait s'empêtrant,
Comme s'il écrasait des morts sous ses savates,
Hostile à l'univers plutôt qu'indifférent.

Son pareil le suivait: barbe, oeil, dos, bâton, loques,
Nul trait ne distinguait, du même enfer venu,
Ce jumeau centenaire, et ces spectres baroques
Marchaient du même pas vers un but inconnu.

A quel complot infâme étais-je donc en butte,
Ou quel méchant hasard ainsi m'humiliait?
Car je comptai sept fois, de minute en minute,
Ce sinistre vieillard qui se multipliait!

The sober, prosaic tone is brilliantly successful in maintaining our doubts about the nature of the old men and in preventing the scene from becoming sensational or melodramatic. The sense of distortion is produced by the contrast between the inhuman geometrical images and the images of the shattered human beings:

Il n'était pas voûté, mais cassé, son échine

Faisant avec sa jambe un parfait angle droit . . .
son bâton, parachevant sa mine,
Lui donnait la tournure et le pas maladroit
D'un quadrupède infirme ou d'un juif á trois pattes.

The impression is heightened by words and images with intangible or disturbing associations. The old man's beard,

roide comme une épée,
Se projetait, pareille á celle de Judas.

He is 'hostile', 'sinistre'; his fellows are 'spectres baroques'. The impression is completed by the inexplicable sight of seven identical old men coming relentlessly forward as though the image of the first were 'multiplied', making the poet wonder whether he is seeing double. He appeals to the reader for sympathy:

Que celui-là qui rit de mon inquiétude,
Et qui n'est pas saisi d'un frisson fraternel,
Songe bien que malgré tant de décrépitude
Ces sept monstres hideux avaient l'air éternel!

The poem is moving towards its climax. 'Monstres hideux' is stronger than any of the previous expressions that he has used of the old men and is a sign of fear. There is a contrast between 'décrépitude' and 'éternel', between their battered appearance and the violence of its impact on the poet. The word 'éternel' also looks back to 'simulaient' and 'imitaient'. The poet is really beginning to believe that he is faced with a supernatural apparition. The impression is driven home in the next verse by the words 'sosie inexorable, ironique et fatal'. For the last three verses describe the poet very unheroically 'going to pieces':

Exaspéré comme un ivrogne qui voit double,
Je rentrai, je fermai ma porte, épouvanté,
Malade et morfondu, l'esprit fiévreux et trouble,
Blessé par le mystère et par l'absurdité!

The words 'épouvanté', 'malade', 'fiévreux', and 'trouble' reflect the poet's growing panic. They are helped by the jerky movement of the versification and the double caesura in lines 1 and 2 which isolates the word 'épouvanté':

Exaspéré—comme un ivrogne—qui voit double,
Je rentrai,—je fermai ma porte,—épouvanté.

Although the poet has left the scene, the impression of horror not only remains; it becomes more intense and he thinks that he must be 'ill'. 'Ivrogne' like 'malade' refers to a psychological impression; 'porte' to the physical action of banging the door in the vain attempt to blot out the spectacle. His doubts about the nature of the apparition also remain:

Blessé par le mystère et par l'absurdité!

It is horrible, mysterious, but also absurd. 'Mystère' refers back to 'Les mystères partout coulent commes des sèves' in the first verse; 'l'absurdité' to the images drawn from acting in verses 2 and 3 and to 'ironique et fatal' in verse 12. The final verse beginning

Vainement ma raison voulait prendre la barre,

describes a state of complete nervous collapse.

Baudelaire displays more sympathy for the old women in Les Petites vieilles; but though they are not intrinsically evil like the old men, they too have been turned by their environment into 'monsters' who are repugnant to the poet:

Ces monstres disloqués furent jadis des femmes,
Eponine ou Laïs! Monstres brisés, bossus
Ou tordus, aimons-les! ce sont encor des âmes.
Sous des jupons troués et sous de froids tissus

Ils rampent, flagellés par les bises iniques,
Frémissant au fracas roulant des omnibus,
Et serrant sur leur flanc, ainsi que des reliques,
Un petit sac brodé de fleurs ou de rébus;

Ils trottent, tout pareils à des marionnettes;
Se traînent, comme font les animaux blessés,
Ou dansent, sans vouloir danser, pauvres sonnettes
Où se pend un Démon sans pitié! Tout cassés . . .

The distortion provides a comment on the civilization which had produced such creatures. Baudelaire was specially concerned with the destructive nature of contemporary life, and the accent falls on the words 'brisés', 'bossus', 'tordus', 'disloqués', 'cassés'. The drama is not so much described as enacted. We hear the snap of breaking bone in 'brisés' and 'cassés', and the queer shuffling tread of the down-and-outs in 'disloqués'. Civilization has reduced these exiles to mindless, inhuman robots moving jerkily across the stage 'towards an unknown goal'.

Baudelaire's use of theological terms is not always free from ambiguity, but words like 'âme', 'ange', 'péché', and 'mal' are often used in a strictly orthodox sense. When he says:

. . . aimons-les! ce sont encor des âmes,

or in another poem:

Dans la brute assoupie un ange se réveille,

'ame' and 'ange' represent positive values. It was Baudelaire's consciousness of the worth of the individual soul which was being destroyed that makes his view of the modern world a tragic one, and the tragedy is heightened by the ironical 'Eponine ou Lai's!' Yet the total effect of the three poems is one of macabre comedy which is peculiarly Baudelaire's own. It is apparent in the assumed naïveté of:

—Avez-vous observé que maints cercueils de vieilles
Sont presque aussi petits que celui d'un enfant?

A few lines later he enlarges on the idea:

Il me semble toujours que cet être fragile
S'en va tout doucement vers un nouveau berceau;

A moins que, méditant sur la géométrie,
Je ne cherche, á l'aspect de ces membres discords,
Combien de fois il faut que l'ouvrier varie
La forme de la boîte où l'on met tous ces corps.

In Les Aveugles the irony becomes still more cruel:

Contemple-les, mon âme, ils sont vraiment affreux!
Pareils aux mannequins; vaguement ridicules;
Terribles, singuliers comme des somnambules;
Dardant on ne sait où leurs globes ténébreux.

Baudelaire was sometimes decidedly slapdash in his use of adjectives, but in these poems almost every adjective—even the most commonplace—fits its noun exactly and conveys the impression that he is trying to render. The blind are pitiful, but their mechanical gestures irritate the poet. The mixture of pity and irritation is expressed in the colloquial phrase, 'ils sont vraiment affreux', and by the combination of 'ridicules', 'terribles', 'singuliers'. 'Pareils aux mannequins' significantly recalls 'tout pareils à des marionnettes' in Les Petites vieilles. It is reinforced by the wicked 'comme des somnambules' and 'leurs globes ténébreux'. In the next verse:

Leurs yeux, d'où la divine étincelle est partie,
Comme s'ils regardaient au loin, restent levés
Au ciel; on ne les voit jamais vers les pavés
Pencher rêveusement leur tête appesantie

the effect depends on a mingling of the mock-heroic—'la divine étincelle'—exact observation:

Leurs yeux . . .
Comme s'ils regardaient au loin, restent levés
Au ciel . . .

and assumed surprise. But the final shot is the studied casualness of the question in the last line:

Je dis: Que cherchent-ils au Ciel, tous ces aveugles?

What is most striking in all these poems is the absence of any sense of community. It is a world of stagnation and confusion, a world of 'memories', 'dreams', 'shadows', and 'ghosts'. The inhabitants are completely rootless. They stumble blindly through the mud and fog and confusion of the 'ant-like' modern city:

Traversant de Paris le fourmillant tableau.
Telles vous cheminez, stoïques et sans plaintes,
A travers le chaos des vivantes cités.

The poet has completed his daylight tour of the city and goes on to explore its night-life. Le Crépuscule du soir describes nightfall. The restaurants are full; the theatres open; the man who has worked well looks back with satisfaction on his day; the exhausted workman—'l'ouvrier courbé'—goes home to bed. But it is not this that interests the poet most. For Baudelaire night is primarily the time of sin and crime when thieves and prostitutes emerge from their lairs. A stealthy, furtive note is apparent in the play of the hissing c's and s's and the liquid l's of the opening lines, giving the impression of whispered confidences:

Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel;
Il vient comme un complice, à pas de loup; le ciel
Se ferme lentement comme une grande alcôve,
Et l'homme impatient se change en bête fauve.

He employs the same device to give us a glimpse of the criminals in action:

Les tables d'hôte, dont le jeu fait les délices,
S'emplissent de catins et d'escrocs, leurs complices,
Et les voleurs, qui n'ont ni trêve ni merci,
Vont bientôt commencer leur travail, eux aussi,

Et forcer document les portes et les caisses
Pour vivre quelques jours et vêtir leurs maîtresses.

He pauses for a moment to reflect on the condition of the sick and dying in the hospitals:

C'est l'heure où les douleurs des malades s'aigrissent!
La sombre Nuit les prend à la gorge; ils finissent
Leur destinée et vont vers le gouffre commun . . .

But here the hissing sibilants are a sign of life slipping away.

Le Jeu and Danse macabre are both pictures of night-life. The subject is inevitably a temptation rather than an opportunity for Baudelaire, but Le Jeu contains some effective vignettes of the gamblers. These are the ageing courtesans:

Autour des verts tapis des visages sans lèvre,
Des lèvres sans couleur, des mâchoires sans dent,
Et des doigts convulsés d'une infernale fièvre,
Fouillant la poche vide ou le sein palpitant . . .

The 'doigts convulsés' and the 'sein palpitant' convey, a little melodramatically no doubt, the feverish futile passion of the players and the poet feels himself

Enviant de ces gens la passion tenace,
De ces vieilles putains la funèbre gaieté . . .

In the same poem he comments:

Voilà le noir tableau qu'en un rêve nocturne
Je vis se dérouler sous mon oeil clairvoyant.

These poems are followed by a group of five pieces containing personal memories and reflexions. He has described prostitution in the city. In L'Amour du mensonge, which is thought by Crépet and Blin to have been addressed to Marie Daubrun, he describes a personal relationship with a courtesan. The theme is similar to that of Semper eadem. In the middle of his tour the poet is overcome by the horror of his situation. He knows that there is no way out, but he is prepared to try make-believe again and expresses it in the splendid final verse:

Mais ne suffit-il pas que tu sois l'apparence,
Pour réjouir un coeur qui fuit la vérité?
Qu'importe ta bêtise ou ton indifférence?
Masque ou décor, salut! J'adore ta beauté.

'Je n'ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville' and 'La servante au grand coeur dont vous étiez jalouse' are both addressed to his mother and recall, nostalgically, his childhood days with her. The desire to escape is also the subject of Brumes et pluies with its lovely opening:

O fins d'automne, hivers, printemps trempés de boue,
Endormeuses saisons! je vous aime et vous loue . . .

This time the choice seems to lie between insensibility and the prospect of lulling himself by a chance encounter:

par un soir sans lune, deux à deux,
D'endormir la douleur sur un lit hasardeux.

Rêve parisien, the final poem of this group, is an outstanding success. He is back in his attic and the poem purports to describe a real dream as compared with the 'rêveries' and 'allégories' of the earlier poems in the chapter. Superficially, it may sound like a prophetic vision of the future, but what Baudelaire is really doing is to give expression by a highly original use of language, which was to have a decisive influence on the Rimbaud of the Illuminations, to his sense of being trapped in a hostile universe:

. . . peintre fier de mon génie,
Je savourais dans mon tableau
L'enivrante monotonie Du métal,
du marbre et de l'eau. Babel d'escaliers et d'arcades,
C'était un palais infini,
Plein de bassins et de cascades
Tombant dans l'or mat ou bruni;

Et des cataractes pesantes,
Comme des rideaux de cristal,
Se suspendaient, éblouissantes,
A des murailles de métal.

The natural propensity of water is to flow, but in this world it loses its natural properties and is suspended, motionless, 'comme des rideaux de cristal'.

We know that Baudelaire detested nature—wild, untamed nature—and that one of his aims was to banish what he calls contemptuously 'le végétal irrégulier'; but in doing so he starved his own senses of the scents, sounds, and colours for which they craved. The laconic, sober style of this poem describes wonderfully the desolation of a soundless world:

Nul astre d'ailleurs, nuls vestiges De soleil,
même au bas du ciel,

Pour illuminer ces prodiges,
Qui brillaient d'un feu personnel!

Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles
Planait (terrible nouveauté!
Tout pour l'oeil, rien pour les oreilles!)
Un silence d'éternité.

The poem expresses an element of capital importance in Baudelaire's experience and it cannot be treated in isolation. We have seen that in the first chapter he came to feel that he was the prisoner of his own mood and tried to break out of the emotional circle. Rêve parisien is really the answer to this attempt. For the prison is a twofold one. He escapes from himself simply to find that he has become a prisoner in an inhuman world which can only drive him back into the self from which he has escaped with the realization that all the exits are blocked and that there is no way out. For this reason Rêve parisien is the reply to L'Héautontimorouménos and L'Irrémédiable. When we look at the last two verses of part one of the second of these poems:

Un navire pris dans le pôle,
Comme en un piège de cristal,
Cherchant par quel détroit fatal
Il est tombé dans cette geôle;

—Emblèmes nets, tableau parfait
D'une fortune irrémédiable,
Qui donne à penser que le Diable
Fait toujours bien ce qu'il fait!

we cannot fail to be struck by the similarity of the imagery and that of Rêve parisien, particularly the 'piège de cristal', the 'rideaux de cristal', and the 'geôle'.

The final poem marks the end of the journey and the awakening from dreams:

La diane chantait dans les cours des casernes,
Et le vent du matin soufflait sur les lanternes.

C'était l'heure où l'essaim des rêves malfaisants
Tord sur leurs oreillers les bruns adolescents;
Où, comme un oeil sanglant qui palpite et qui bouge,
La lampe sur le jour fait une tache rouge;
Où l'âme, sous le poids du corps revêche et lourd,
Imite les combats de la lampe et du jour.
Comme un visage en pleurs que les brises essuient,
L'air est plein du frisson des choses qui s'enfuient,
Et l'homme est las d'écrire et la femme d'aimer.
Les maisons çà et là commençaient à fumer.
Les femmes de plaisir, la paupière livide,
Bouche ouverte, dormaient de leur sommeil stupide;
Les pauvresses, traînant leurs seins maigres et froids,
Soufflaient sur leurs tisons et soufflaient sur leurs doigts.
C'était l'heure où parmi le froid et la lésine
S'aggravent les douleurs des femmes en gésine;
Comme un sanglot coupé par un sang écumeux
Le chant du coq au loin déchirait l'air brumeux;
Une mer de brouillards baignait les édifices,
Et les agonisants dans le fond des hospices
Poussaient leur dernier râle en hoquets inégaux.
Les débauchés rentraient, brisés par leurs travaux.
L'aurore grelottante en robe rose et verte
S'avançait lentement sur la Seine déserte,
Et le sombre Paris, en se frottant les yeux,
Empoignait ses outils, vieillard laborieux.

Although Le Crépuscule du matin is an early work, it is a brilliant performance which is greatly superior to its companion piece and a superb illustration of the skill with which Baudelaire uses his verbs. It is a panorama of the ravages of the night which began in Le Crépuscule du soir. We see the tormented adolescents tossing on their beds, the weary poet—this seems a backward glance at Paysage—throwing down his pen, women exhausted by love, prostitutes sprawling in their dens, the poor in their hovels trying to light the fire, the dying in the hospitals, and debauchees, ironically, 'brisés par leurs travaux'. The verbs give the poem its movement and life, but the cumulative effect depends very largely on the alternation of sound and visual images. There are two main sounds—the bugle which is answered from afar by the strident crowing of the cock presented in one masterly line:

Le chant du coq au loin déchirait l'air brumeux.

They are thrown into relief by the undertones: the sighing of the breeze in one of Baudelaire's loveliest couplets:

Comme un visage en pleurs que les brises essuient,
L'air est plein du frisson des choses qui s'enfuient.

It is followed by the snores of the sleeping prostitutes, the sound of the poor blowing on their fires and their frozen fingers—repeating the image of the wind 'blowing' on the lamps—and the 'hoquets inégaux' of the death-rattle in the hospitals.

The moment between sleeping and waking is caught by the sound of the bugle blending into the trembling of the street lamp. The movement of the fading light battling with the growing day reflects the flickering consciousness of the 'bruns adolescents':

Où l'âme, sous le poids du corps revêche et lourd,
Imite les combats de la lampe et du jour.

The movement of the lamp melts into the smoke drifting from the chimneys. At this point there is a pause. We are given a static picture of the sleeping prostitutes which is contrasted with the uneasy sleep of the adolescents. Movement begins again with the women going about their houses. The 'douleurs des femmes en gésine' is emphasized by 'un sanglot coupé par un sang écumeux'. The smoke from the chimneys disappears into the fog which leads naturally to the choking of the dying whom we saw in the first Crépuscule and whose agonies look back to

Tord sur leurs oreillers les bruns adolescents,
and forward to
Les débauchés rentraient, brisés par leurs travaux.

The final image is a careful piece of stylization. The disorders of the night are over; the city is going back to work. 'L'ouvrier courbé qui regagne son lit' of Le Crépuscule du soir, who has spent a restful night, shoulders his tools and sets out. The 'vieillard laborieux' stands for honest toil—the sound element in a corrupt civilization—in contrast to the 'travaux' of the prosperous debauchees.