Seth Whidden - Reading Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and The Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem-Oxford University Press (2022)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/04/22, SPi
Reading Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris

and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem
Reading Baudelaire’s
Le Spleen de Paris and
the Nineteenth-Century
Prose Poem
By
SE T H W H I D D E N
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Acknowledgments
At its core, this book is about confronting and fashioning new ways of being and
doing: new forms and means for expressing them. I hope to shed some light on
what transfers over, what gets adapted and reshaped, and what is left behind. It so
happens that my journey through the poetry I discuss in this book ran parallel to
another one that made me confront similar questions about who we are and what
we do, how it’s all organized and the language that is used to convey it. I should
like to thank those who accompanied me on either of those journeys, or both.
Generous feedback from a great number of interlocutors turned what would
otherwise have been a staid, solitary activity into a noisy and exciting adventure.
Peter Dayan, David Evans, and Robert St. Clair invited me to share early thoughts
with students and colleagues. Ellen Burt, Elissa Marder, Kevin Newmark, and
Catherine Witt responded to conference presentations with timely, generous
comments. Scott Carpenter, Ross Chambers†, Yann Frémy†, Rachel Mesch, Steve
Murphy, Adrianna Paliyenko, and, again, Robert St. Clair offered a combination
of constructive feedback and personal warmth that made the physical distance
between us melt away. More locally, an impromptu chat with Charlie Louth was
singularly responsible for helping me see how to unravel an early theoretical knot.
Nikolaj Lübecker, Emily McLaughlin, Christopher Metcalf, Ève Morisi, Roger
Pearson, Maria Scott, Macs Smith, and Jessica Stacey let me try out my ideas
on them, and some read early drafts of chapters. That these kind, insightful
colleagues would willingly give of their time has been a tremendous privilege. In
the manuscript’s final stages, Florence Darwen’s eyes and ears have been invaluable.
The resulting book is stronger for all these exchanges; the weaknesses and errors
that persist are mine alone.
At OUP, Jacqueline Norton expressed interest in this project from its earliest
days. I hope that her patience in seeing it come to fruition is sufficiently rewarded
in what follows. The process of turning it into an actual book was remarkably
smooth thanks to everyone at the press, in particular Aimee Wright, Swetapadma
Sahoo, and Joy Mellor.
My two academic homes, the French sub-faculty in Oxford and The Queen’s
College, provide ideal working conditions and communities of supportive and
warm colleagues, too numerous to list in full here. Their presence—whether
regular or infrequent, at set times or in passing—lifted my spirits as I was
finishing this book during a pandemic and its periods of forced isolation.
vi Acknowledgments
And whether I want to enjoy neighbors’ company or be alone with my own thoughts,
Cliff Island never disappoints.
I share my life with readers always willing to turn the page and discover
whatever ways of being or doing are there to be explored. This book is for them:
for Carter and Posey, and, especially, for R. Reed.
Contents
List of Figures ix
Introduction: The Miracle of Prose Poetry 1
The Miracle of Poetic Prose 25
The Look of Modern Poetry 34
Situation of the Prose Poem: Seeing and Hearing 38
Between Verse and Prose 47
1. Seeing Things in Poetry 65
The Eyes Have It 73
Seeing Time, Telling Time 86
2. Speech Interrupting Poetic Prose 117
When the Eyes Don’t Have It 117
Saying and Doing 130
Repeating (One’s) Self 143
Final Words 163
3. The Dialect of Modernity 170
What Else is Heard 172
Stealing Signs 207
4. Inebriations and Irritations 219
Going Beyond 220
Distractions 251
Epilogue: The Prose Poem after Le Spleen de Paris 278
“Inspecter l’invisible et entendre l’inouï” 292
Coda: “où la prose décolle” 297
Bibliography 301
Index 315
General Index 317
List of Figures
1. Auguste Rodin, La Main de Dieu (modeled ca. 1896–1902,

carved ca. 1907, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 78
2. Charles Baudelaire, “ANY WHERE OUT OF THE WORLD”
(Revue nationale et étrangère, September 28, 1867, Hathi Trust) 230
3. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of “Jeunesse II” alias “Sonnet”
(Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Genève)) 280
4. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of “Guerre”
(Bibliothèque nationale de France) 282
5. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of “Phrases,” feuillet 11
6. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of “Phrases,” feuillet 12
Introduction
The Miracle of Prose Poetry
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
(Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ”)
Il n’existe pas deux genres de poésies; il n’en est qu’une.
(Lautréamont, Poésies I)
Sois toujours poète, même en prose.
(Baudelaire, Hygiène (OC 1: 670))
Qu’est-ce que la Poésie? qu’est-ce que la Prose?
(Baudelaire, biographical note (OC 1: 785))
Prose poetry existed before Charles Baudelaire. So, too, did its uneasy marriage
of poetry and prose: an unresolvable contradiction, a coexistence of seemingly
incompatible literary modes. Such is Michael Riffaterre’s oft-quoted opening
gambit in his discussion of what Joshua Clover has called “that official exception,
verse’s loyal opposition,”1 prose poetry: “The prose poem has the distinction of
being the literary genre with an oxymoron for a name. The two components
of the name seem to contradict each other.”2
What makes Baudelaire’s prose poems unique is their modernity: their ability
to express their inherent tensions in a formal setting that mirrors them and thus
seems uniquely qualified to enable their full display. Baudelaire reflected on this
internal contradiction in his 1863 essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne”: “La
modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre
moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable” (Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the
1 Joshua Clover, “Value and Temporality in Poetics,” Representations, 126.1 (Spring 2014),
9–30 (19).
2 Michael Riffaterre, “On the Prose Poem’s Formal Features,” in The Prose Poem in France: Theory
and Practice, eds. Mary Ann Caws and Hermione Riffaterre (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 117–32 (117). For Edward Kaplan, Baudelaire “formulates a confluence of opposites”;
Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, The Ethical, and the Religious in the Parisian Prowler (Athens,
GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 13.
Reading Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem. Seth Whidden, Oxford University Press.
© Seth Whidden 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849908.003.0001
2 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris
contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable).3 As
this seemingly simple yet entirely provocative formulation suggests, his notion of
modernity is built of elements that had previously been thought of as incompat
ible. And yet, in a manner that had not been seen before, Baudelaire creates a new
space—in language, and in poetry—for the expression of the human experience
that itself is being born anew at the moment of the creation of the modern city as
we recognize it today.
Such is the grand critical arc that commonly accompanies the study of
Baudelaire’s modernity. In addition to the commentary that he develops in essays
of art criticism (including “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” and the reviews of the
Salons of 1846 and 1859), the corpus of poetry to which most scholars turn is the
verse poems from the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857,
with subsequent editions in 1861 and 1868) and the prose poems commonly
entitled Le Spleen de Paris (1869).4 That same scholarly tradition is right to point
to the veritable laboratory of writing that Baudelaire had created for himself
throughout the 1850s and the early 1860s,5 including but certainly not limited to
the journalistic style that grew increasingly prevalent as literacy rates in the mid-
century exploded.6 In a number of publications, as Baudelaire was translating
Edgar Allan Poe’s poems and prose,7 and writing French both in prose and in
3 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (2 vols, Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade], 1975–6), vol. 2, 695. The present study relies heavily on and is greatly indebted to the
two major critical editions of Le Spleen de Paris: by Robert Kopp (for José Corti in 1969) and by
Claude Pichois (for Gallimard’s “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” series, 1975–6). Unless indicated other-
wise, all references to Baudelaire’s work refer to the Pléiade edition with the abbreviation “OC” with
volume and page numbers in parentheses in the text, e.g. “(OC 2: 695).” References to Kopp’s edition
will be indicated in the text by the author’s name followed by page number, e.g. “(Kopp, 24).”
Translations of Baudelaire’s prose poems indicated “PP” followed by page number come from The
Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward K. Kaplan, 2nd edition (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press,
1997). Others, and all unattributed translations, are the author’s.
4 Of particular note, and beyond the scope of the present study, are studies that engage with
Baudelaire’s art criticism and his poetry; see for example Alexandra Wettlaufer, In the Mind’s Eye: The
Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), especially her introduc-
tion, “The Visual Impulse in Prose: Border Crossings and the Anxieties of Interdisciplinarity,” 9–22.
5 Claude Pichois refers to Le Spleen de Paris as “Un laboratoire d’expériences dont les précipités
diffèrent notablement” (A laboratory of experiments whose results vary widely) (OC 1: 1301).
6 See Kathryn Oliver Mills’s insightful discussion on this topic, which leads her to ask “did the poet
deliberately evoke the techniques of journalism in his prose poetry, or did his work unwittingly bear
the imprint of historical factors? Did Baudelaire exploit newspapers, or did they exploit him?”
(Kathryn Oliver Mills, Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert (Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press, 2012), 73). See also Catherine Nesci’s important consideration of
Baudelaire and the popular press in “The Poet as Journalist: Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems with
the History of the Press,” in Cheryl Krueger (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems
(New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2017), 166–75.
7 In his pursuit of the Baudelaire-Poe connection, which leads him to ask “how did Poe influence
Baudelaire, and what did Baudelaire see in him, how did he read Poe?” (64), Jonathan Culler contends
that the influence is most acute in Poe’s “aesthetics of compression”: “the example of prose writings
exploring the mysterious, the uncanny, the exceptions of human life, was important, I suggest, in lead-
ing Baudelaire to undertake the prose poems” (66). Jonathan Culler, “Baudelaire and Poe,” Zeitschrift
für französische Sprache und Literatur, 100 (1990), 61–73. Also see Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire’s
World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Michel Brix, “Baudelaire, ‘Disciple’ d’Edgar Poe?,”
Introduction 3
verse, his prose poetry grew not out of a departure from verse (as Arthur Rimbaud
would pursue a decade later), but out of a keen and conscious awareness of the
limits between verse and prose, and an open (and sometimes irreverent) willing-
ness to see where poetry might fit.8 The list of ongoing projects that he sent to
Mario Uchard in January 1863 reflects this approach to writing in a number of
languages and genres (while nevertheless drawing clear vertical lines to keep
them separate):
Nouvelles de Poe. Fantaisies. Variétés

Le Mystère de Marie Poëmes en prose Le peintre de la vie
Roget (presque faits) moderne (fait)
Le Cottage de M. Landor L’esprit et le style de
et le Domaine d’Arnheim M. Villemain
Le dandysme littéraire
La peinture didactique,
écoles allemande et
Lyonnaise.9
With such wide-ranging interests, he would not be overly limited to formal

restrictions: as he stated in an early essay, “Le goût immodéré de la forme pousse
à des désordres monstrueux et inconnus” (Excessive taste for form leads to
monstruous and unknown disorders) (OC 2: 48). Such, is, too, part of what
makes his poetic gesture of Le Spleen de Paris modern: taking the seeming
incompatible elements of prose and poetry and fashioning them—in a manner
defying rules governing poetics as if it were defying gravity itself—into a kind of
poetry that would openly revel in its modern moment with all its contradictions:
reflecting and brandishing both “transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent” and “l’éternel
et l’immuable.”10
Romantisme: revue du dix-neuvième siècle, 122 (2003), 55–69; and Anne Jamison, “Any Where Out of
this Verse: Baudelaire’s Prose Poetics and the Aesthetics of Transgression,” Nineteenth-Century French
Studies, 29.3–4 (Spring–Summer 2001), 256–86.
8 In a similar register some thirty years later, Stéphane Mallarmé would characterize his own study
of Richard Wagner as “moitié article, moitié poëme en prose” (Mallarmé, letter to Edouard Dujardin,
July 5, 1885, Correspondance (1854–1898), ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2019), 561). Citing
the potential for “new narrative possibilities” that is announced at the opening of Le Spleen de Paris,
Marie Maclean says that the poems “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 (London: Routledge, 1988), 45, original emphasis).
9 Charles Baudelaire, letter to Mario Uchard, January 2, 1863. Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois
(2 vols, Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1977–8), vol. 2, 282–3. Unless indicated other-
wise, all references to Baudelaire’s correspondence will henceforth refer to this edition with the abbre-
viation “C,” with volume and page numbers in parentheses in the text, e.g. (C 2: 282–3).
10 For Maria Scott, the lack of cohesion that readers perceive in Le Spleen de Paris serves to obscure
the central operations of duplicity on which many of the poem are built (Maria Scott, “Intertextes et
mystifications dans les poèmes en prose de Baudelaire,” Romantisme, 156.2 (2012), 63–73). Even
Baudelaire’s decision to dedicate his poems to fellow poet Arsène Houssaye is related to this central
Baudelaire was aided by the fact that, writing poetry in prose, he was working
in a medium that was a contra-diction, a speaking against: a discourse that runs
counter to the norm. As Richard Terdiman explains in his groundbreaking work
on the discourses that inhabit the prose poem,
by turning the language of dominant discourse against itself, the prose poem
devised a strategy for counter-discourse which could begin to situate the oppres-
sive character of the dominant itself [. . .] the locus and the means of critique are
to be found within the realm of the dominant [. . .]. The dialectical force of the
prose poem’s practice, and the intensity of its engagement with its antagonist,
proceed from this turning of prose, of its self- evidence and its solidity,
inside out.11
Aware of prose poetry’s inside-outness while he pursued his varied experiments

in both verse and prose, Baudelaire saw Le Spleen de Paris as a prose companion
to the verse of Les Fleurs du Mal, liberated and more self-aware in a way that only
a counter-discourse can be. As he wrote to fellow writer Jules Troubat on February
19, 1866, “Je suis assez content de mon Spleen. En somme, c’est encore Les Fleurs
du Mal, mais avec beaucoup plus de liberté, et de détail, et de raillerie.” (I’m pretty
happy with my Spleen. In short, it’s still Les Fleurs du Mal, but with much more
freedom, detail, and mockery.)12 Liberated and with the winds of irreverence at
his back, Baudelaire was thus able to push on the fundamental contradiction of
the prose poem nearly to the point of its impossibility. By examining the
tension; when he wrote to share some of what he called a few specimens of his prose poems, and to
inform Houssaye of his dedicatory intention, he asked for his reader’s indulgence, and thus justified
his choice of dedicatee, specifically in light of the difficulty of writing poetry not in verse:
Je fais une longue tentative de cette espèce, et j’ai l’intention de vous la dédier. À la fin du
mois je vous remettrai tout ce qu’il y aura de fait [. . .] Vous serez indulgent, car vous avez
fait aussi quelques tentatives de ce genre, et vous savez combien c’est difficile, particulière-
ment pour éviter d’avoir l’air de montrer le plan d’une chose à mettre en vers
(I am making a sustained attempt of this kind, and I intend to dedicate it to you. At the end
of the month I will give you everything that is done [. . .] You will be indulgent, because you
have also made some similar attempts and you know how difficult it is, especially to avoid
seeming to show the plans of a thing to set in verse). (C 2: 207)
It is worth noting that Houssaye was not merely an editor, though; he had attempted his own poetic
prose in the section “Fresques et bas-reliefs” in his Poésies complètes (Paris: Charpentier, 1850), 105–60.
11 Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance
in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 270 (original emphasis).
Scott Carpenter’s compelling analysis of “Le Mauvais Vitrier” is an example of how “The alienation of
common usage is one of the aesthetic devices standard to [Baudelaire’s] prose poems” (Acts of Fiction:
Resistance and Resolution from Sade to Baudelaire (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1996), 140). Whereas Carpenter relies on Terdiman’s discussion of counter-discourse as a means
to engage with the use of clichés as an example of how Baudelaire “confers strangeness and opacity
upon what had formerly been reduced to seemingly transparent usage” (140), the present study argues
posits that the slang to which “Le Galant tireur” alludes (see infra, Chapter 3) is another example of the
kind of counter-discourse that the prose poem enables.
12 Charles Baudelaire, letter to Jules Troubat, February 19, 1866 (C 2: 615).
Introduction 5
complexity of those tensions, we can better understand some of the subtle

dimensions of the poetic modernity lurking within. Specifically, the temporal
nature of Baudelaire’s modernity—fleeting and eternal both—is one of the inherent
contradictions that attract the attention of scholars: in some respects, a new take
on the fleeting time that had long been fertile terrain for poets. Considerations of
the individual’s place in the surrounding world persisted, too; instead of human-
kind’s relationship with Nature and its provision of a safe haven for reflection,
Baudelaire’s poems capture the modern cityscape as it was changing before his
very eyes, with a menacing and alienating isolation.13
Drawing on the numerous considerations of perceptions of the exterior world
that have proven particularly useful in gauging the modernity of his prose poetry,
the present study aligns itself with those that have brought some of the same
questions to bear on linguistic and formal elements of the poems themselves. In
this respect the present study follows David Scott, who stresses the basic notion
“that ‘spatial’ implies the apprehension of space, that is, the perception of the page
itself as a site on which textual elements are arranged or juxtaposed,”14 as well as
Cheryl Krueger, for whom
The paradigmatic and timeless space of poetry offers a more predictable literary
antidote to time’s tyranny than does narrative prose, the dominant modality of
Le Spleen de Paris. Thus the very term poème en prose inscribes at once timeless-
ness and temporality. What lies beneath the genre’s obvious evocation of formal
13 That urban alienation is of course fodder for Baudelaire’s flâneur, as he explains in the first two
paragraphs of “Les Foules”:

Il n’est pas donné à chacun de prendre un bain de multitude: jouir de la foule est un art; et
celui-là seul peut faire, aux dépens du genre humain, une ribote de vitalité, à qui une fée a
insufflé dans son berceau le goût du travestissement et du masque, la haine du domicile et
la passion du voyage.
Multitude, solitude: termes égaux et convertibles pour le poète actif et fécond. Qui ne sait
pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule affairée. (OC 2: 291)
(Not everyone is capable of taking a bath of multitude: enjoying crowds is an art. And the
only one who can go on a binge of vitality, at the expense of the human species, is the one
into whose cradle a fairy breathed a taste for disguises and masks, a hatred of home, and a
passion for traveling.
Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and fertile poet.
Whoever doesn’t know how to populate solitude also does not know how to be alone in a
busy crowd). (PP, 21; modified)
He returns to this theme in his letter to Sainte-Beuve (May 4, 1865), “J’ai besoin de ce fameux bain de
multitude dont l’incorrection vous avait justement choqué” (I need this famous bath of multitude
whose incorrectness shocked you) (C 2: 493, original emphasis).
14 David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 116. While Scott does consider prose poetry in his
very thoughtful approach to the spatial and the poetic, he does not include Le Spleen de Paris because
“the visual arts were to have much less impact on Baudelaire’s prose poetry than that of Bertrand or
Rimbaud or than on his own verse” (188 n. 2).
and literary tension (between verse and prose, between the lyric and the narrative),
are larger, ontological questions of immortality and death.15
As Krueger explains while framing her study about time in the prose poems, the
contradictions that Terdiman is right to identify at the level of discourse are simi-
larly perceptible in other aspects of Baudelaire’s poetic language beyond the dis-
cursive: in the poems’ formal considerations, which retain recognizable traces of
verse despite their prose presentation; and, in both language and form, in the
sights and sounds that give rise to their poeticity.16 In her landmark study
Défigurations du langage poétique, Barbara Johnson considers “non pas la diffé-
rence entre poésie et prose, mais la nature d’un besoin de différence à l’intérieur
de la langue, besoin qui persiste au-delà de toutes ses manifestations particulières”
(not the difference between poetry and prose, but the nature of a need for difference
within language, a need which persists beyond all of its individual manifestations).17
15 Cheryl Krueger, The Art of Procrastination: Baudelaire’s Poetry in Prose (Newark, DE: University
of Delaware Press, 2007), 12.

16 J. A. Hiddleston identifies “a different kind of structure, which, though less rhythmically uniform,
remains tightly knit, and shows evidence of that rigorous ‘Pythagorean’ structure of the sonnet”
(Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 80).
17 Barbara Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique: la seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris:
Flammarion, 1979), 10. In another study, Barbara Wright and David H. T. Scott address Baudelaire’s
experimentation and formal amorphousness by seeking clarity through categorization—“a system of
classification which [. . .] will enable individual texts to be placed in plausible formal categories”
(76)—, labeling only seventeen of the poems as actual poems, with the others falling under sub-categories
with titles such as “Poétique,” “Poème-boutade,” “Moralité,” “Essai,” and “Conte” (Barbara Wright
and David H. T. Scott, Charles Baudelaire: La Fanfarlo and Le Spleen de Paris (London, Grant and
Cutler, 1984), 73–80; see in particular their “Fig. 1: Towards a Formal Classification of Le Spleen de
Paris,” a pull-out insert between pages 76 and 77). Their classification seems to run counter to the
poems themselves, since, as Georges Blin explains:
Le livre n’est pas davantage subdivisé en rubriques. Rien n’eût été plus facile pourtant que
de reproduire la structure même des Fleurs du Mal. [. . .] Le classement par genres littéraires
(fables, “moralités légendaires,” narrations, contes ou poèmes proprement dits) n’eût pas
comporté moins d’arbitraire. [. . .] Mais il semble justement que, par une application
inverse, le poète n’ait recherché dans la succession de ces textes que la plus grande variété
possible. De l’apologie à l’article de journal, en passant par l’ode ou le portrait ou la prière,
tous les Petits Poèmes en prose ne présentent d’autre point commun que d’être écrits en
digression délibérée et de fournir matière à des considérations gnomiques.
(Georges Blin, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire (Paris: José
Corti, 1948), 165–6; original emphasis)
(The book is not further subdivided into sections. However, nothing would have been eas-
ier than to reproduce the very structure of Les Fleurs du Mal. [. . .] The classification by lit-
erary genre (fables, “tales of morality,” narratives, stories or actual poems) would not have
been any less arbitrary. [. . .] But it seems accurate to say, going in the opposition direction,
that in these texts’ order the poet only sought the greatest possible variety. From apology to
newspaper article, via ode or portrait or prayer, the Petits Poèmes en prose have nothing in
common with each other except for being written in deliberate digression and for provid-
ing material for gnomic considerations.)
Agreeing with Blin, I argue that clarity regarding Baudelaire’s prose poems comes not from further
categorization (Hiddleston wonders “Why call them poems at all?” (Baudelaire and Le Spleen de
Paris, 86)), but from a broader appreciation of the impulse that informs their great formal variability—
which Blin refers to as “la discontinuité la plus libre” (164)—and the acknowledgement that they stem
from the same experimentation, guided by enhanced freedom in time and space and a heightened
consciousness of—and willingness to run counter to—their present moment.
Introduction 7
Forty years after Johnson’s important work, the present study similarly considers
how the temporal and spatial dimensions in Baudelaire’s prose poetry are not
limited to the outside world of which he was such a keen observer; they inhabit
the interior spaces he describes and, crucially, pervade the interior time and space
of the poems themselves. As he famously asked about the possibility of a poetic
prose, “Quel est celui de nous qui n’a pas, dans ses jours d’ambition, rêvé le mir
acle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et
assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations
de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?” (Who among us has not, in
ambitious days, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose that is 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?)18 With
this question, Baudelaire suggests that, to capture such a rich series of compli-
cated relationships, the most suitable form of poetry would itself share many of
the same traits. An earlier version of this phrase made no mention, however, of
the ambitious miracle built of music but lacking rhythm and rhyme: “Quel est
celui de nous qui n’a pas rêvé une prose particulière et poétique pour traduire les
mouvements lyriques de l’esprit, les ondulations de la rêverie, et les soubresauts de
la conscience?” (Who among us has not dreamed of a unique and poetic prose to
translate the mind’s lyrical movements, the undulations of reverie, and the jolts of
consciousness?) (OC 1: 365). With the important additions in his final version, he
invites us to consider a poetic language that has a musical quality built of some-
thing other than the first elements one would think of when considering a poetic
language: rhythm and rhyme. As the tension between the fleeting and the eternal
shows, Baudelaire sits his new poetics on the fault line between elements that
would seem to oppose one another, in a manner that satisfies his call, in a differ-
ent essay, for what a phrase requires: “toute phrase doit être en soi un monument
bien coordonné” (every phrase must be a well-coordinated monument in itself)
(OC 2: 197). His poems’ successes are evidence of his ability to create a new poetic
space that tolerates the coexistence of opposites.19
The purpose of this book is to investigate the contradiction which Baudelaire
places at the heart of his definition for his poetic prose. Taking its cue from
Baudelaire, it considers some questions that are fundamental to his proposed
“miracle d’une prose poétique.” It also echoes Johnson’s warning to her readers:
“notre lecture [. . .] ne sera en un sens que le parcours d’une incertitude, la
recherche d’une porte d’entrée par où il serait possible de commencer à les lire”
(our reading will in a sense only be the journey of uncertainty, the search for a
gateway through which it would be possible to begin reading them).20 How can
18 OC 1: 275–6; PP 129; translation modified.

19 For Krueger, “the genre may be described as prose penetrating poetry and poetry penetrating
prose” (The Art of Procrastination, 90).
20 Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique, 29.
prose be poetic, and how can a poem exist in prose? The very notion of prose
poetry—malleable in Baudelaire’s hands as he shaped it into the modern gesture
that we still recognize today—relies on the coexistence of the incompatibilities of
poetry (long defined via the lyric) and prose (decidedly un-lyric).21 As Ross
Chambers astutely notes, Le Spleen de Paris “bears witness to the power of entropy
in its own inability to take definitive shape or to conclude”;22 how might such
obstacles to form and message influence our ability to read Baudelaire’s poems, an
act that for Chambers is “less an occasion of comprehension than [. . .] a frus-
trated engagement with a text that proves inscrutable”?23 What might that poetry
sound like, and what might it look like? How might such prose poems reflect our
perception of the world—what we see, what we hear24—in a manner that retains
(and sometimes even puts on display) their inherent contradiction? In what ways
might seeing and hearing be doubled inside the thematics of, or even activate, the
poems?25 How are those perceptions made manifest, what roles do they play, and
in what ways do they interact? What other layers and formal elements of
Baudelaire’s modern poetics can we uncover? How much of Baudelaire’s prose
remains hidden to the eye or silent to the ear? All prose can harbor hidden or
silent elements; what makes his prose poetic is its ability to capture, in a new liter-
ary idiom, multiple layers of sights and sounds that simultaneously permeate the
poems and shape our reading of them. The more we read—the more we see and
hear—the more we learn about Baudelaire’s modern moment and, by extension,
our own.
For poetry to exist, there is a text: written or spoken, read or heard.26 The same
is true of all linguistic expression, and all literature; but the impulse that animates
21 For this juxtaposition, I am indebted to Ross Chambers, who suggested “the coexistence of
incompatibilities” as a title for this project (personal communication). I also have in mind Alain
Badiou’s use of the Leibnizian term “compossibilité”; see infra, note 114.
22 Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2015), xii.

23 Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City, 128.
24 Noting that “the second half of the nineteenth century in France saw a renewed focus on the
notion of ‘voice’ as an important aesthetic principle for poetry,” Helen Abbott asks, “what is the differ-
ence, if any, between reading poetry out loud and reading it internally?” (Between Baudelaire and
Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation, and Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 3, 4). Furthermore, in her
reevaluation of the rhetorical principles of “actio” and “memoria,” she argues that the former activates
and helps sustain the latter; in this respect her approach runs counter to the commonly held belief in
criticism (via Barthes and Genette) that they “were no longer relevant once the printed text began to
take over from spoken discourse” (Abbott, Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé, 21); see especially 20–3.
25 Chambers takes a similar step when he who distinguishes “between rhetorical practices that sig-
nify noise, and formal practices that embody it, as a textual characteristic”; Chambers, An Atmospherics
of the City, 148; original emphasis.
26 For Derek Attridge,
What is distinctive about poetry is its exploitation of the fact that spoken language moves,
and that its movements—which are always movements of meaning and emotion at the
same time as movements of sound—achieve a varied onward momentum by setting up
expectations that are fulfilled, disappointed, or deferred.
(Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1)
Introduction 9
the creative act called poiesis can be traced along the axes of its visual and audible
weight: what it looks like and what it sounds like. In a delicate balance between
potential pulls from both directions, the creative impulse that results in a poem is
an appeal to both sight and sound: part of a combination that Jacques Roubaud
has melded into what he calls “un œil-oreille.”27 These interrelated elements are
not the sole purview of poetry, and a broader consideration of poiesis such as that
which Pierre Boulez described in his essay on Paul Klee can be instructive.28
What poetry sounds like would at first blush seem to be the dominant force of the
two, if not the only one that truly matters; from its very beginnings, poetry was an
oral expression, with metrical and acoustic elements contributing to its artistry
and meaning. Even before its impact on a poem’s overall effect, a poem’s initial
sounds can set the stage for a reader; a phrase such as “Mignonne, allons voir si la
rose” or “C’est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière” or, in an altogether dif-
ferent context, “There once was a man from Nantucket,” suffices in triggering a set
of assumptions about the text’s rhythm, its formal rules, and the qualities that
underpin them, among many other aspects.29 However, there is still more; and
while Boulez initially derived his thoughts from comparing music to painting,
his comments on the tension between visual and acoustic elements of artistic pro-
duction are similarly relevant to poetry:
Pour le musicien, il y a un rapport très dangereux, sinon subtil, entre l’œil

et l’oreille. Je ne parle pas de l’œil en tant qu’inspiration, mais de l’œil qui regarde
la partition en train de se réaliser. Une partition est faite aussi pour être lue et le
compositeur lui-même quand il l’écrit l’entend intérieurement et la lit en même
temps et, parfois, il a tendance à se laisser happer par des problèmes graphiques,
il pourra être attiré par une très belle disposition de la transcription visuelle, par
son intérêt esthétique. Et on a vu beaucoup de compositeurs se laisser séduire
par cet aspect extérieur de la partition. On peut, même chez Bach, rencontrer
certains dispositifs qui sont autant optiques qu’auditifs et je dirais que, dans cer-
tains canons, il y a presque plus de nourriture pour l’œil que pour l’oreille. Non
27 “[. . .] le vers, qu’il soit déclamé ou lu, s’adresse toujours à un œil-oreille, même quand la page n’est
pas visible dans certains de ses emplois, comme la récitation; même si la voix semble muette dans
d’autres (lecture)” (verse, whether read out loud or quietly, always caters to an eye-ear, even when the
page is not visible in some of its uses, such as in recitation; and even if voice seems mute in other uses
(such as reading)). Jacques Roubaud, “DYNASTIE: études sur le vers français, sur l’alexandrin clas-
sique,” Cahiers de poétique comparée, 13 (November 1986), 47–109 (50). See also Jacques Roubaud,
Poésie et cetera: ménage (Paris: Stock, 1995), 126–8.
28 Pierre Boulez, Le Pays fertile: Paul Klee, ed. Paule Thévenin (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). I am grate-
ful to Nikolaj Lübecker for bringing this study to my attention.

29 Jorge Luis Borges asserts as much: “I have sometimes suspected that the radical distinction
between poetry and prose lies in the very different expectations of readers: poetry presupposes an
intensity that is not tolerated in prose.” Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of the Thousand and One
Nights,” Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot
Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 1999), 98.
pas que la musique ne soit pas belle, mais les symétries sont beaucoup plus
directement perçues par l’œil que par l’oreille.
(For the musician, there is a very dangerous, if not subtle, relationship between
the eye and the ear. I am not talking about the eye as an inspiration, but about the
eye which looks at the score in the making. A score is also made to be read and
the composer, while writing it, hears it internally and reads it at the same time
and, sometimes, has a tendency to get caught up in graphical problems, and be
attracted to a very nice arrangement of the visual transcription: to its aesthetic
interest. And we have seen many composers let themselves be seduced by this
external aspect of the score. It is possible, even with Bach, to see certain devices
which are as much optical as auditory and I would say that, in certain canons,
there is almost more food for the eye than for the ear. Not that the music is not
beautiful, but the symmetries are much more directly perceived by the eye than
by the ear.)30
In light of this claim that some aspects of a sonorous work can almost be the
exclusive purview of the eyes, it is worth considering further the extent to which a
creative work can engage multiple senses, beyond preconceived notions about the
composition and reception of a given work, form, or genre, whether in the visual
arts, music, or in language. Later saying that “De toutes les œuvres où Klee
s’inspire de l’écriture musicale, il ne fait rien d’autre que de donner une transcrip-
tion purement visuelle de l’apparence de cette écriture” (Of all the works in which
Klee draws his inspiration from musical writing, he does nothing more than give
a purely visual transcription of the appearance of this writing),31 the notion of
musical, acoustic momentum spilling over into and informing its transcription is
indeed compelling: not only for its entrancing potential (“il pourra être attiré par
une très belle disposition de la transcription visuelle, par son intérêt esthétique”),
which would presumably be similarly seductive for the work’s recipient, but also
for its fusing into an inseparable bond the acoustic and the visual, a language’s
rhythms and the way they are written down.32
Tracing musical compositions’ visual effects back to the Middle Ages, Boulez
reassures us that they enjoy a history as long as music and writing themselves:
30 Boulez, Le Pays fertile, 97–8. 31 Boulez, Le Pays fertile, 101.

32 In L’Écriture et la différence, Jacques Derrida identifies this tension in terms of the angustia asso-
ciated with writing (and the impossibility of language to translate reality): “Et si la nécessité de devenir
souffle ou parole étreint le sens—et notre responsabilité du sens—, l’écriture étreint et contraint davan-
tage la parole. [. . .] C’est le moment où il faut décider si nous graverons ce que nous entendons. Et si
graver sauve ou perd la parole” (And if the necessity of becoming breath or speech restricts meaning—
and our responsibility for meaning—writing further restraints and constricts speech. [. . .] It is the
moment when we must decide whether we will engrave what we hear. And whether engraving
preserves or betrays speech) (Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 18–19;
original emphasis).
Introduction 11
Le problème n’est pas nouveau, nous venons de le dire, du compositeur en train

d’écrire, à la lettre, sa partition, qui peut être séduit par des constructions, des
combinaisons qui sont heureuses sur le papier. Même dans un système haute-
ment contrôlé, comme l’écriture canonique très stricte, l’œil, semble-t-il, apprécie
une symétrie que l’oreille ne peut réellement saisir. Et, dans le passé comme
aujourd’hui, c’est toujours devant le même dilemme que le musicien se trouve
placé: celui de la confusion de l’espace et du temps.33
(The problem is not a new one, as we have just said: the problem of the
composer in the process of writing, literally, his score, as he can be seduced by
constructions, combinations which are happy on paper. Even in a highly con-
trolled system like very strict canonical writing, the eye, it seems, appreciates
a symmetry that the ear cannot truly grasp. And, in the past as today, the
musician is always faced with the same dilemma: that of the confusion of
space and time.)
From such an emphatic insistence on the composer as writer, one needs only to
take a small step to consider the extent to which the rules apply to the poet, who
also works with a raw material typically thought of as sonorous but to which some
visual elements have, unwittingly and somewhere along the way, become fused.
Like the composer, the poet is always confronted with the same old dilemma: the
confusion—within a poetic text, on a page of poetry—of time and space. The first
half of the nineteenth century would be no exception in this regard; as Michel
Brix explains, the longstanding tradition of translating foreign verse into French
prose—including Chateaubriand’s landmark 1836 prose translation of Milton’s
Paradise Lost—raised fundamental questions about the very nature of poetry,
including
la confusion qui s’est installée entre deux sens différents du mot poésie. Le prem
ier sens renvoie à des textes rédigés en vers; le second évoque les caractères que
l’on retrouve habituellement dans ces textes en vers et qui—n’étant pas indissolu-
blement liés à la versification et à la métrique—participent néanmoins de ce que
Jakobson a appelé la “fonction poétique” (ainsi la récurrence des images, ou tout
ce qui attire l’attention du lecteur sur la matérialité des mots, ou encore tout ce
qui concerne les effets de circularité dans le texte). Il est évident que lorsque l’on
traduit en prose française des poèmes étrangers, on propose des textes d’arrivée
qui, bien qu’en prose, contiennent, si le traducteur est fidèle à son original, des
refrains, des images voire des jeux sur les signifiants dont sa version en prose
donnera des équivalents: d’une certaine façon, le poème de départ paraîtra encore
“visible,” souvent au premier coup d’œil, dans la mesure—par exemple—où le
33 Boulez, Le Pays fertile, 101–2; original emphasis.

texte d’arrivée, même en prose, sera généralement divisé en courts paragraphes

qui évoquent les strophes de l’œuvre d’origine.34
(the confusion that has arisen between two different meanings of the word
poésie. The first meaning refers to texts written in verse; the second evokes the
characteristics that are usually found in these verse texts and which—while not
34 Michel Brix, Poème en prose, vers libre et modernité (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2014), 20; original
emphasis. Similarly, in 1835, the Revue poétique du XIXe siècle stated that it would only consider
French prose translation of foreign verse: “C’est donc à la prose que la Revue demandera la reproduc-
tion des poèmes étrangers; elle n’accueillera qu’avec réserve les traductions en vers” (The Journal
requires that foreign poems be translated into prose; translations into verse will only be accepted
warily) (quoted in Nichola Anne Haxell, “The Naming of the Prose: A Semiotic Study of Titling in the
Pre-Baudelairian Prose Poem,” French Studies xliv.2 (April 1990), 156–69 (165 n. 7)). In her important
study of the origins of the French prose poem, Nathalie Vincent-Munnia presents the rich history of
foreign verse texts, translated into French prose, that act as a bridge from the classical period into the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century:
Les divers phénomènes de réécriture (traductions, transpositions, pseudo-traductions,
imitations) qui marquent l’activité littéraire de la deuxième moitié du dix-huitième siècle
et du début du dix-neuvième participent du mouvement d’élargissement qui caractérise
l’évolution de la poétique Classique et néo-classique: le glissement qui permet à la prose de
devenir instrument poétique, parallèlement—et parfois supérieurement—au vers, est à
l’origine d’une nouvelle représentation de la poésie [. . .] Cette élaboration d’une poésie sans
vers est amplifiée par les nouveautés (formelles, stylistiques, thématiques…) qu’apportent
les littératures étrangères alors introduites massivement en France.
(Various phenomena of rewriting (translations, transpositions, pseudo-translations, imita-
tions) which mark the literary activity of the second half of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth, participate in the movement of growth which characterizes
the evolution of classical and neo-classical poetics: the shift which allows prose to become
a poetic instrument, parallel—and sometimes superior—to verse, is at the origin of a new
representation of poetry [. . .] This elaboration of a poetry without verse is amplified by the
novelties (formal, stylistic, thematic, etc.) from foreign literatures which had arrived in
France in droves). (Les Premiers Poèmes en prose. Généalogie d’un genre dans la première
moitié du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996), 83)
Particularly interesting in the sub-genre of “pseudo-traductions” is this 1830 prose sonnet by Gérard
de Nerval, which appeared in his section “Bürger,” even though it was an original poem of Nerval’s:
SONNET.
–
Mes amis, il vous est arrivé peut-être de fixer sur le soleil un regard, soudain abaissé:
mais il restait dans votre œil comme une tache livide, qui long-temps vous suivait partout.
C’est ce que j’ai éprouvé: j’ai vu briller la gloire, et je l’ai contemplée d’un regard trop
avide…. . une tache noire m’est restée depuis dans les yeux.
Et elle ne me quitte plus, et sur quelque objet que je fixe ma vue, je la vois s’y poser sou-
dain, comme un oiseau de deuil.
Elle voltigera donc sans cesse entre le bonheur et moi!…. . .—O mes amis, c’est qu’il faut
être un aigle pour contempler impunément le soleil et la gloire! (Gérard de Nerval, Poésies
allemandes. Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller, Burger. Morceaux choisis et traduits par M. Gérard
[de Nerval] (Paris: Bureau de la Bibliothèque choisie, 1830), 239)
(My friends, perhaps it has happened that you fixed a suddenly lowered gaze on the sun,
but it remained in your eye like a livid spot that followed you everywhere and for a long
time. / This is how I felt: I saw glory shine and I gazed at it too eagerly. . . I’ve seen a black
spot ever since. / And it never leaves me, and on whatever object I set my sight, I see it
suddenly land there, like a mourning bird. / It will forever flit between happiness and
me!…. . .—Oh my friends, one must be an eagle to contemplate the sun and glory with
impunity!)
The poem would lose its title “Sonnet” in subsequent appearances.
Introduction 13
being indissolubly linked to versification and metrical rhythm—nevertheless

participate in what Jakobson called the “poetic function” (thus the recurrence of
images, or anything that draws the reader’s attention to the words’ materiality, or
anything that concerns effects of circularity in the text). It is obvious that when
we translate foreign poems into French prose, we produce resulting texts which,
while in prose, contain, if the translator is faithful to the original, refrains,
images, or even games on the signifiers for which the prose version will offer
equivalents: in a way, the starting poem will still appear “visible,” often at first
glance, to the extent—for example—that the resulting text, even in prose,
will generally be divided into short paragraphs that evoke the stanzas of the
original work.)
That Brix would refer to Roman Jakobson’s discussion of the poetic function—
which the latter defines as “the setting or attitude (Einstellung) toward the mes-
sage as such, the focus on the message for its own sake”35—is worth noting, for it
underpins the present study of prose poetry, and poetry more generally. “The
poetic function,” he explained, “is not the sole function of verbal art but only its
dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a
subsidiary, accessory constituent.”36 Prefiguring Terdiman’s reflections specific to
prose poetry as a counter-discourse, Jakobson argued in broader terms that “the
linguistic study of the poetic function must overstep the limits of poetry, and, on
the other hand, the linguistic scrutiny of poetry cannot limit itself to the poetic
function,”37 and that a text’s poeticity resides in and occasions its wholesale
reconsideration of language:
Briefly, poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical

adornment but a total reevaluation of the discourse and of all its components
whatsoever.
A missionary blamed his African flock for walking around with no clothes
on. “And what about yourself?” they pointed to his visage, “are not you, too,
somewhere naked?” “Well, but that is my face.” “Yet in us,” retorted the natives,
“everywhere it is face.” So in poetry any verbal element is converted into a figure
of poetic speech.38
Jakobson’s anecdote about nakedness also brings into play the extent to which
each text bears degrees of being visible and/or bare, and concealed and/or
35 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press / Belknap, 1987), 69; translation modified. Chambers echoes this
definition when he refers to Baudelaire’s “poetics of modernity that might be defined as poetry’s rec-
ognition of that which is most inimical to the poetic urge” (An Atmospherics of the City, xii).
36 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 69. 37 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 70.
38 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 93. I am indebted to Kevin Newmark for discussing this
productive (if not in itself poetic) moment at the center of Jakobson’s analysis.
revealed, as well as how those aspects are perceived (or not). Those, too, are
productive in thinking about language and poeticity; in a manner similar to Brix’s
earlier insistence on the importance of what a poem might look like, Victor Hugo
wondered about the connections between letters’ sounds and their visual poten-
tial (some thirty years before Rimbaud thought about attributing colors to letters
in his poem “Voyelles”):
Ne penserait-on pas que les voyelles existent pour le regard presque autant que
pour l’oreille et qu’elles peignent des couleurs? On le voit. A et I sont des voyelles
blanches et brillantes. O est une voyelle rouge. E et EU sont des voyelles bleues.
U est la voyelle noire.
Il est remarquable que presque tous les mots qui expriment l’idée de lumière
contiennent des A et des I et quelquefois les deux lettres. [Suivent des exemples].
Feu n’exprime nécessairement l’idée d’éclat que dès qu’il s’allume. Alors il
devient flamme [sic].
Aucune de ces deux voyelles ne se trouve dans la lune qui ne brille que dans
les ténèbres. Le nuage est blanc, la nuée est sombre. On voit le soleil à travers le
brouillard; on ne le voit pas à travers la brume.
Les mots où se trouvent mêlées l’idée d’obscurité et l’idée de lumière contien-
nent en général l’U et l’I. Ainsi Sirius, nuage, nuit. La nuit a les étoiles.
Il ne serait pas impossible que ces deux lettres, par cette puissance mysté-
rieuse qui est donnée aux lignes, entrassent pour quelque chose dans l’effet
lumineux que produisent certains mots qui pourtant n’appartiennent pas à
l’ordre physique [des exemples suivent].39
(Wouldn’t one think that vowels exist for the eye almost as much as for the ear
and that they paint colors? We see it. A and I are bright, white vowels. O is a red
vowel. E and EU are blue vowels. U is the black vowel.
It is remarkable that almost every word that expresses the idea of light con-
tains A’s and I’s, and sometimes both letters. [Examples follow].
Fire does not necessarily express the idea of brightness
until it is ignited. Then
it becomes flame.
Neither of these two vowels is in the moon, which only shines in darkness.
The cloud is white, the swarm is dark. We see the sun through the fog, but not
through the mist.
The words where the idea of darkness
and the idea of light
are mixed gener-
ally contain the U and the I. So Sirius, cloud, night. Night has stars.
39 Victor Hugo, “Note sur la couleur des voyelles” [1836–8]. Océan prose. Tas de pierres, manuscript,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrits, NAF 13423, fol. 81, expositions.bnf.fr/hugo/grand/347.htm

It is worth recalling that a decade earlier, Hugo had written in the preface to his play Cromwell that “Le
vers est la forme optique de la pensée” quoted in Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 16. For a fascinating account of
the association of colors to vowels from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth, see Liesl Yamaguchi,
“Sensuous Linguistics: On Saussure’s Synesthesia,” New Literary History, 50.1 (Winter 2019), 23–42.
Introduction 15
It would not be impossible for these two letters, through this mysterious
power which is given to the lines, to enter somehow into the effect of light pro-
duced by certain words which do not, however, belong to the physical order
[examples follow].)
Comparing two poems published in 1829—Victor Hugo’s “Sara la baigneuse” (Les

Orientales) and Sainte-Beuve’s “À la rime” (Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph
Delorme)—David Scott is right to point to “a spatialization of the text, a presenta-
tion of its various features in such a way that they will have maximum visual as
well as aural impact.”40 Scott further asserts that “Texts such as these are import
ant [. . .] because they provide a coordinated strategy for mobilizing the spatial
and plastic potentialities of prosody.”41
Between the two poles of attraction that shape our engagement with a poem,
then, what it looks like can seem more paradoxical, since the written text should
reflect some sort of transcription, or version, of the poem’s oral nature (“il ne fait
rien d’autre que de donner une transcription purement visuelle de l’apparence de
cette écriture”). And yet, even if a text is held at a distance so that its words are too
far to be read clearly, its disposition on a page (e.g. division into stanzas with
white spaces between them) can be enough to suggest its existence as a poem, if
not a specific poetic form. Again, Boulez’s comments on visual arts are apposite:
Quand on regarde un tableau, l’espace n’est pas le seul paramètre, le temps aussi
joue un rôle très important. On peut saisir presque dans l’instant, surtout chez
Klee—les dimensions ne sont pas très grandes, la plupart des œuvres sont même
de format assez réduit—, une peinture ou un dessin dans sa totalité. On pense en
tout cas l’avoir fait. On peut n’avoir pas vu les détails, mais la structure globale
est saisie rapidement. Puis on commence à analyser ce tableau, et cela dans un
ordre qui vous est propre, selon un choix personnel. Le centre d’intérêt va d’un
point à un autre; quand la perception s’est enrichie de quelques détails, on
revient en arrière pour avoir une perspective plus générale.42
(When looking at a painting, space is not the only parameter; time also plays a
very important role. It is possible to see almost in the instant, especially with
Klee—the dimensions are not very large, most of the works are even quite
small—a painting or a drawing in its entirety. You think that you have done so in
any case. You may not have seen the details, but its overall structure is captured
quickly. Then you start to analyse the painting, in an order that is specific to you,
according to personal choice. Focus moves from one point to another; when
your perception is enhanced by a few details, you take a step back to have a more
general perspective.)
40 Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 17; original emphasis. 41 Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 19.
42 Boulez, Le Pays fertile, 102–3.
Such comments on the nature of perception of language and a text recall some of
Jean-Luc Nancy’s important work at the confluence of philosophy and poetry. On
the very notion of rhythm, for example, Nancy’s assertion echoes Boulez:
le “Rythme” n’a son moment propre que dans l’écart du battement qui le fait
rythme. [. . .] le rythme n’“apparaît” pas, il est le battement de l’apparaître en tant
que celui-ci consiste simultanément et indissociablement dans le mouvement de
venir et de partir des formes ou des présences en général, et dans l’hétérogénéité
qui espace la pluralité sensitive ou sensuelle. De surcroit, cette hétérogénéité est
elle-même au moins double: elle divise des qualités bien distinctes, incommuni-
cables (visuelles, sonores, etc.)43
(“Rhythm” only has its own moment in the gap of the beat that makes it rhythm
[. . .] Rhythm does not “appear,” it is the beating of appearing insofar as appearing
consists simultaneously and inseparably of the movement of coming and going
from forms or presences in general, and of the heterogeneity which spatially
organises the sensory or sensual plurality. In addition, this heterogeneity is itself
at least twofold: it divides qualities that are very distinct, even incommunicable
(visual, sonorous, etc.))
It is telling that Nancy should choose to cite the visual and the aural as potential
sites of incommunicability, for they remain central to his considerations of the
perception and reception of art and, under the umbrella of its intelligibility, the
ability to generate meaning and stimulate the senses: “deux questions indéfini-
ment croisées ou plus, incrustées l’une dans l’autre: quelle est l’αἴσθησις de la sig-
nifiance, quel est son organe récepteur et quelle est sa sensation, quel goût a le
sens et pour quelle langue? quelle est la signification du sensible, par quelle voie
mène- t-il vers son intelligibilité? [. . .]” (two or more questions indefinitely
crossed, incrusted in each other: what is the aisthesis of significance, what is its
receiving organ, and what is its feeling, what taste does sense have and on which
tongue? what is the meaning of the sensuous, by what path does it lead toward its
intelligibility?)44
Nancy returns even more specifically to the specific senses evoked by Boulez
(among others) in the corresponding footnote: “Ce qui se multiplie aussitôt: quel
aspect pour quel œil, quel parfum pour quel nez, quel son pour quelle oreille,
quelle consistance pour quel tact, quel mouvement pour quel kinorécepteur, etc.
La tradition philosophique et poétique aura épuisé toutes ces possibilités” (The
question is multiplied immediately: which aspect for which eye, which smell for
which nose, which sound for which ear, which consistency for which touch,
43 Jean-Luc Nancy, Les Muses (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994), 46.

44 Nancy, Les Muses, 54–5; original emphasis. I am grateful to Christopher Metcalf for his assist
ance with “αἴσθησις”/“aisthesis”: sensation, perception, or receiving an impression via the senses.
Introduction 17
which movement for which kinoreceptor, etc. The philosophical and poetic
tradition will have exhausted all of these possibilities).45
In light of their seeming omnipresence in reflections on perception, music, art,
and philosophy, it comes as little surprise that seeing and hearing have long been
at the heart of an essential tension in French literature, and poetry is no exception.
To better understand the stakes of Baudelaire’s prose poems, it is worth taking a
moment to consider the standard perception of poetry that held sway, and from
which his modern poetic idiom marked a departure.
Even without considering aspects of a poetic text’s layout on a printed page,
one of the earliest debates in French poetry concerned different qualities of
rhymes, including the distinction between la rime pour l’œil (what it looks like)
and la rime pour l’oreille (what it sounds like). Printed poetry preceded the stand-
ardization of French spelling, and talented poets exploited that malleability in
order to create a range of visual effects. As Louis Becq de Fouquières noted while
explaining the decisions that informed his edition of Ronsard’s Œuvres complètes,
Quant à l’orthographie, nous avons gardé celle de Ronsard ou, pour parler plus
exactement, celle des éditions publiées de son vivant. À cet égard, rien n’était fixe
encore dans cette seconde moitié du seizième siècle, agitée par des tentatives de
réformes en tout genre. Ronsard, comme tous les poètes de son temps, en agit
fort librement avec l’orthographe et la modifie à chaque instant, parfois sans
nécessité, écrivant un mot de trois ou quatre façons différentes, mais le plus sou-
vent pour la mesure ou pour la rime, ajoutant ou rejetant des lettres, faisant
permuter les unes avec les autres, modifiant les sons et ne faisant aucune distinc-
tion entre les nasales.
(For the spelling, we kept Ronsard’s or, to be more precise, that of editions pub-
lished during his lifetime. In this regard, nothing was fixed yet, in the second half
of the sixteenth century, with attempts at reforms of all kinds. Ronsard, like all the
poets of his era, freely takes liberties with spelling and modifies it often, sometimes
without needing to do so, writing a word in three or four different ways, but most
often for rhythm or rhyme, adding or tossing out letters, swapping some with
others, modifying sounds and not distinguishing between nasals.)46
The debate would return in the nineteenth century: no longer a precondition for
uniformity in spelling, it was reframed for its ability to impart value on the degree
of elegance in a given rhyme. Rather than being based on mere homophony
(e.g. “bière”/“pierre,” “maître”/“mettre”), rhymes were richer if the word
endings were homographs in addition to homophones (e.g. “bière”/“prière,”
45 Nancy, Les Muses, 54–5 note 3.

46 Louis Becq de Fouquières, “Avertissement,” Poésies choisies de P. de Ronsard publiées avec notes et
index concernant la langue et la versification de Ronsard (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1885), vii.
“maître”/“disparaître”).47 A few years after coediting the first edition of Baudelaire’s

prose poems, Théodore de Banville reaffirmed this preference for the heightened
elegance of richer rhymes in his influential 1872 treatise, Petit Traité de poésie
française: “Dans tout poème, la bonne construction de la phrase est en raison
directe de la richesse de la rime” (In every poem, good sentence structure is in
47 Poets would take la rime pour l’œil to extremes, including the holorime, a form of identical rhyme
in which the rhyme encompasses an entire line or phrase. One particularly famous example is from
Victor Hugo:
Et ma blême araignée, ogre illogique et las
Aimable, aime à régner, au gris logis qu’elle a.
(And my pale spider, illogical and weary ogre / Friendly, loves to reign, in the gray house she has.)
In a brief yet important commentary entitled “Rimes que pour l’œil,” Benoît de Cornulier points out
that the following from Alphonse Allais:
Les oiseaux de Jupin, les aigles
Assurément ne sont pas bigles;
Car on m’a parfois dit qu’ils aiment
À regarder bien fixement…
(Jupin’s birds, eagles / Assuredly they are not beagles; / Because I have sometimes been told that
they like / To stare fixedly)
are a simple joke, rather than verses; and that they show that visual similarities can complement—but
never replace—a rhyme’s sonorous weight (Benoît de Cornulier, Art poëtique: notions et problèmes de
métrique (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1995), 227). Pushing limits in a less light-hearted fash-
ion (about which Cornulier wonders, “recherches esthétiques ou parodie d’un système?,” (227 n. 66)),
in 1872, Rimbaud would exploit this tension even further in the opening quatrains of his poem
“Larme,” with “villageoises,” “bruyère,” “noisetiers,” “vert” ending the verses in the first stanza and
“Oise,” “couvert,” “colocase,” and “suer” in the second. One can of course dig further; Henri Morier
discussed Romantic poets’ use of the césure pour l’œil, which splits an alexandrine visually but neither
semantically nor rhythmically. Morier cites lines from Hugo’s “La Conscience” (La Légende des siècles)
and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac as examples:
“L’ombre des tours / faisait (//) la nuit / dans les campagnes”
En revanche, la césure pour l’œil a disparu de ce vers d’E. Rostand:
C’est maintenant / que j’aime mieux / que j’aime bien. (Cyrano.)
(“The shadow of the towers / was (//) at night / in the countryside” / On the other hand, the
caesura for the eye has disappeared from this verse by E. Rostand: / It’s now / that I like it
better / than I like it.)
To make his point Morier put “césure pour l’œil” with an arrow pointing to two dotted-line slashes, and
above the word “j’aime” he put two dotted-line slashes in parentheses, followed by an exclamation
point that pointed both to their impossibility and to their inherent tension. (Dictionnaire de poétique
et de rhétorique (Paris: PUF, 1961), 76–7.) Finally, another interesting example is the rhyme in the last
quatrain of the first part of Baudelaire’s “Les Petites vieilles”
Ces yeux sont des puits faits d’un million de larmes,
Des creusets qu’un métal refroidi pailleta…
Ces yeux mystérieux ont d’invincibles charmes
Pour celui que l’austère Infortune allaita! (OC 1: 90)
(Those eyes are wells filled with a million tears, / Crucibles which a cooling metal spangled. . . /
Those mysterious eyes have invincible charms / For one whom austere Misfortune suckled!)
The rhyme “pailleta”/“allaita” looks to be richer than it actually is: the common phonemes in [pajta]
and [alεta] yield the modest “rime suffisante” of [ta], while the visual appearance of the structure in
which, before the letter “t,” two L’s are followed by a vowel, offers visual similarity but no sounds that
contribute to richer rhymes ([j] vs [lε]). Since it is alternated with the rich rhyme “larmes”/“charmes,”
the contrast between the visual illusion of richness masking a more modest, mundane sonorous pres-
ence makes it even more notable.
Introduction 19
direct proportion to the richness of the rhyme).48 Rather than pushing versification
toward new liberties, Banville was largely restating—and problematizing49—rules
that had been in place for centuries; as Peter Edwards noted in his study of the
Petit Traité, “L’originalité n’est pas le fort des traités de versification, et cela depuis
le XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles” (Originality is not the strength of versification manuals,
and it has been that way since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).50
Banville’s codification of centuries-old rules would hardly put an end to the mat-
ter; after Rimbaud dismantled rhyme—filling verses with so much sonorous repe
tition that the rhymes themselves lost their importance—the arrival of free-verse
poetry in France in the 1880s brought new questions about what a poem might
look and sound like.51 It led early verslibriste Gustave Kahn to mark a departure
from the traditional prosody that Banville had spelled out, as Kahn rejected
attributing any importance to a poem’s appearance:
Le poète parle et écrit pour l’oreille et non pour les yeux, de là une des modifica-
tions que nous faisons subir à la rime, et un de nos principaux désaccords d’avec
Banville, car notre conception du vers logiquement mais mobilement vertébré
nous écarte tout de suite et sans discussion de cet axiome “qu’on n’entend dans le
vers que le mot qui est la rime.”
(The poet speaks and writes for the ear and not for the eyes, hence one of the
modifications that we make to rhyme and one of our main disagreements with
Banville, because our conception of the logically but movably vertebrate verse
sets us aside immediately and without discussion of this axiom “that one hears
in a verse only the word which rhymes.”)52
If the discussion thus far has covered some commonly held beliefs about poetry, it
is because typical assumptions about poetry lead inevitably to thinking about
verse poetry, with its baked-in rules and formalities. However commonplace
those assumptions were, there was no essential aspect of poetry that required
such restrictions for reasons of poetic form. In the preface to his 1822 collection
Odes et ballades, Victor Hugo wrote that poetry was a question not of form but of
ideas, and as such it could exist either in verse or in prose:
48 Théodore de Banville, Petit Traité de poésie française (Paris: Éditions Ressouvenances, 1998), 68.
49 See David Evans, who shows convincingly that “Banville positively delights in the reader’s confu-
sion throughout the Petit Traité, teasing us as we try to extract something approaching a workable
poetic formula [. . .] The Petit Traité, therefore, is most emphatically not a guide to writing poetry.”
(David Evans, Theodore de Banville: Constructing Poetic Value in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford:
Legenda, 2014), 75).
50 Peter J. Edwards, “Le Petit Traité de poésie française de Théodore de Banville: Bible parnassienne
ou invitation à l’expérimentation libre?” Romantisme, 163.1 (2014), 91–100 (94).

51 See, for example, Édouard Dujardin’s criticism of Marie Krysinska’s first publications and their
reprints in her 1890 volume Rythmes pittoresques (ed. Seth Whidden (Exeter: University of Exeter
Press, 2003), 14–17).
52 Gustave Kahn, Premiers Poèmes, avec une préface sur le vers libre (Paris: Mercure de France,
1897), 31–2.
Les beaux ouvrages de poésie en tout genre, soit en vers, soit en prose, qui ont
honoré notre siècle, ont révélé cette vérité, à peine soupçonnée auparavant, que
la poésie n’est pas dans la forme des idées, mais dans les idées elles-mêmes. La
poésie, c’est tout ce qu’il y a d’intime dans tout.
(Fine works of poetry of all genres, whether in verse or prose, which have
honoured our century, have revealed this truth, hardly suspected before: that
poetry is not in the form of ideas, but in the ideas themselves. Poetry is all that is
intimate in everything.)53
This passage would hardly be Hugo’s last word on the matter. His “Réponse à un
acte d’accusation” (dated January 1834 but actually written in 1854 and published
in 1856, in Les Contemplations)54 is best known for the poet’s bragging about hav-
ing revolutionized verse, summarized in the oft cited line “Je mis un bonnet rouge
au vieux dictionnaire”55 (I put the red revolutionary bonnet on the old diction-
ary) and his liberation from the prison of verse in “J’ai pris et démoli la bastille
des rimes” (I took and demolished the stronghold of rhymes). He also refers to
his disrespectful treatment of poetry as throwing it to the dogs of prose, itself
further sullied through its rhyme with “morose”:
J’ai dit aux mots: Soyez république! soyez

La fourmilière immense, et travaillez! croyez,
Aimez, vivez!—J’ai mis tout en branle, et, morose,
J’ai jeté le vers noble aux chiens noirs de la prose.
(Œuvres poétiques 2: 499)
(I told the words: Be a republic! Be / The huge anthill, and work! believe, / Love,
live!—I set everything in motion, and, morose, / I threw noble verse to the black
dogs of prose.)
At the end of the poem, he returns to his general disregard for formal categories
and his insistence on ideas; instead, he says, the Revolution courses through
everything:
53 Victor Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre Albouy (3 vols, Paris: Gallimard, [Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade], 1964–74), 1: 266. Rimbaud would return to this refrain with his lettre du Voyant from May
15, 1871: “Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu. Il est chargé de l’humanité, des animaux même; il
devra faire sentir, palper, écouter ses inventions; si ce qu’il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne forme:
si c’est informe, il donne de l’informe. Trouver une langue” (Therefore the poet is truly the thief of fire.
He is responsible for humanity, even for animals; he will have to have his inventions smelled, felt, and
heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives form; if it is formless, he gives form-
lessness. A language must be found.) (Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. André Guyaux and
Aurélia Cervoni (Paris: Gallimard, [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 2009), 346; original emphasis; and
Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie, revised edition by Seth Whidden (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 379.)
54 Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, 2: 494–500. 55 Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, 2: 496.
Introduction 21
Les préjugés, formés, comme les madrépores,

Du sombre entassement des abus sous les temps,
Se dissolvent au choc de tous les mots flottants
Pleins de sa volonté, de son but, de son âme.
Elle est la prose, elle est le vers, elle est le drame;
Elle est l’expression, elle est le sentiment,
Lanterne dans la rue, étoile au firmament.
Elle entre aux profondeurs du langage insondable;
Elle souffle dans l’art, porte-voix formidable;
Et, c’est Dieu qui le veut, après avoir rempli
De ses fiertés le peuple, effacé le vieux pli
Des fronts, et relevé la foule dégradée,
Et s’être faite droit, elle se fait idée!
(Œuvres poétiques 2: 500)
(Prejudices, formed, like madrepores, / From the dark accumulation of abuses
over time, / Are dissolved by the impact of all the floating words / Full of her
[Liberty’s] will, her goal, her soul. / She is prose, she is verse, she is drama; / She
is expression, she is feeling, / Lantern in the street, star in the sky. / She enters
the bottomless depths of language; / She blows into the formidable megaphone
of art; / And, God willing, after having filled / People with pride, and having
erased the old furrows / Of their brows, and having lifted up the weakened
crowd, / And having made herself law, she becomes idea!)
Hugo goes well out of his way to place “prose,” “vers,” and “drame” on equal
footing in this line, squeezing every bit of support from the formal elements
underpinning the verse. For they are set up in the lines that precede them: all the
words floating around (“tous les mots flottants”) are full of not only Revolution’s
desire, aims, and soul but also, through the 6-6 alexandrine line that is emphasized by
the 3-3 of the second hemistich, its quest for order. The repetitive “de sa/son” which
sets up the anaphora “elle est” of the next line is so basic and unremarkable that it sets
the rhythm for the line and then all but evaporates. The remaining “mots flottants”
are the keys—“prose,” “vers,” and “drame,” meaning the whole of literature—and so
Hugo’s suggestion that the Revolution is genre-blind seems to hold. Or does it?
Backing up to the start of this passage, one could argue that Hugo is claiming one
thing and doing another; for the line that stands out for so many reasons also does so
for a quality only possible because it is a line of verse poetry.
Les préjugés, formés, comme les madrépores, (6-6)

Du sombre entassement des abus sous les temps, (6-6)
Se dissolvent au choc de tous les mots flottants (6-6)
Pleins de sa volonté, de son but, de son âme. (6-6)
Elle est la prose, elle est le vers, elle est le drame; (4-4-4)
Elle est l’expression, elle est le sentiment, (6-6)

Lanterne dans la rue, étoile au firmament. (6-6)
Here, Hugo’s punctuation provides the reader with a rhythmic roadmap, control-
ling both how the poem is seen and sounds. After moving through a long series of
traditional 6-6 alexandrines he lays down an alexandrin trimètre and announces
equality between the genres by replacing classical rhythm with a new poetic order.
The upheaval in verse is momentarily suspended with the semi-colon at the end of
the line: will the Revolution hold and endure? The next two lines’ extreme sym-
metry suggests that it would be short-lived, as they prolong the “elle est” anaphora
at the start of each hemistich and thus lead into a return to the 6-6 structure built
of underwhelming if not downright tired tropes: on the one hand “l’expression”
and “le sentiment,” on the other the comparison of a street lamp to a star. In poetry
at least, the Revolution has left as quickly as it arrived, leaving platitudes in its
wake. Are prose, verse, and drama really meant to stay on equal footing, or was
that merely a brief moment of poetic swagger now long gone, disruptive but only
for a fleeting instant like the alexandrin trimètre in this poem? The fact that Hugo
poured so much into this passage suggests that verse has the upper hand.
Despite Hugo’s assertion that poetry can exist in prose as well as in verse,
Banville saw it differently:
Ceci tranche une question bien souvent controversée: Peut-il y avoir des poèmes
en prose? Non, il ne peut pas y en avoir, malgré le Télémaque de Fénelon, les
admirables Poëmes en prose de Charles Baudelaire et le Gaspard de la Nuit de
Louis Bertrand; car il est impossible d’imaginer une prose, si parfaite qu’elle soit,
à laquelle on ne puisse, avec un effort surhumain, rien ajouter ou rien retrancher;
elle est donc toujours à faire, et par conséquent n’est jamais la chose faite.
(This resolves an often controversial question: Can there be prose poems? No,
there cannot, despite Fénelon’s Télémaque, Charles Baudelaire’s admirable
Poëmes en prose and Louis Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit; for it is impossible to
imagine a prose, however perfect it may be, to which no changes can be made,
even with superhuman effort. It therefore still remains to be done, it is never a
finished thing.)56
By the time the nineteenth century drew to a close, Stéphane Mallarmé would
also argue in favor of doing away with an absolute distinction between verse and
56 Banville, Petit Traité, 6–7. David Evans cites two review articles that Banville would write after
the Petit Traité and argues that the work, like prose poetry of Bertrand, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, and
like the early verslibristes, “dissociat[es] poeticity from metrical forms and locat[es] it elsewhere, while
maintaining all the while that there is such a quality as poeticity, despite its elusive, unanalysable qual-
ity” (Evans, Théodore de Banville, 79). In fact, Banville would write his own volume of prose poetry a
decade later (La Lanterne magique (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1883)).
Introduction 23
prose; rather, they were one and the same, and prose poetry was simply verse
dancing to a slightly different drum:
Le vers est partout dans la langue où il y a rythme, partout, excepté dans les
affiches et à la quatrième page des journaux. Dans le genre appelé prose, il y a
des vers, quelquefois admirables, de tous rythmes. Mais en vérité, il n’y a pas de
prose: il y a l’alphabet et puis des vers plus ou moins serrés: plus ou moins diffus.
Toutes les fois qu’il y a effort au style, il y a versification.57
(Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm: everywhere except on
posters and on the fourth page of newspapers. In the genre called prose, there
are verses: sometimes admirable ones, of all rhythms. But in truth, there is no
such thing as prose: there is the alphabet and then there are lines that are more
or less tight, more or less diffuse. Whenever there is effort in style, there is
versification.)
As the Lautréamont and Baudelaire quotations that serve as epigraphs to this

introduction suggest, for some poets, verse and prose are different modulations of
the poetic mode; for others, they are different things altogether.58 In what ways do
verse and prose influence how readers see, feel, and hear poetry? When a poem is
written in prose, how does its poeticity make itself known?59 How many elements
57 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Entretien avec Jules Huret” (1891). Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal
(2 vols, Paris: Gallimard, [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1998–2003), 2: 698. This is a theme to which he
would return, later asserting that the rhythms of verse poetry are in all writing and that elaborate
prose is worthy of broken verses:
le vers est tout, dès qu’on écrit. Style, versification s’il y a cadence et c’est pourquoi toute
prose d’écrivain fastueux, soustraite à ce laisser-aller en usage, ornementale, vaut en tant
qu’un vers rompu, jouant avec ses timbres et encore les rimes dissimulées; selon un thyrse
plus complexe. Bien l’épanouissement de ce qui naguères obtint le titre de poème en prose.
(verse is everything, as soon as one writes. Style, versification, if there is cadence, and that is
why all prose by a sumptuous writer, using language withdrawn from its habitual haphaz-
ardness and ornamental, is worth as much as a broken verse, playing with its sounds and
hidden rhymes: according to a more complex thyrsus. The culmination of what used to be
called the prose poem). (“La Musique et les Lettres,” [1894], Œuvres complètes 2: 64)
58 James Longenbach unwittingly repeats this dichotomy while praising prose poetry for the
departure it represents:
Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme,
more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our
experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some kind of writing. Great prose might be
filled with metaphors. The rhythmic vitality of prose might be so intense that it rises to
moments of regularity we can scan. Its diction may be more sensuous, more evocative,
than that of many poems. We wouldn’t be attracted to the notion of prose poetry if it didn’t
feel exciting to abandon the decorum of lines.
(The Art of the Poetic Line (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2008), xi)
59 What Michel Brix defines as “les caractères de la ‘poéticité,’ c’est-à-dire les jeux sur la sonorité des
mots, les allitérations, les assonances, les homophonies, les rimes internes, les répétitions, bref tout ce
qui pouvait distraire l’attention du lecteur, et donc était susceptible d’altérer la compréhension immé-
diate du discours” (the characteristics of “poeticity,” that is to say playing with words’ sonority,
of verse still hold? What is lost, and what is gained? To help answer these questions,
it is worth recalling the etymological roots underpinning verse and prose:
verse: from the Latin verto, “to turn”; the participle versus, “turned, changed,
having been turned”
prose: from the Latin prosa, “straightforward discourse,” feminine of prosus, earlier
prorsus, “direct.”60
As the standard of poetry, verse suggests the text’s ongoing movement—turning

and changing, from one verse to the next, from one stanza to the next, sometimes
from the end of the poem back to the beginning to start all over again—as well as
its fluidity and rhythm. Prose, on the other hand, implies a stripping away of all
the bells and whistles that commonly adorn poetry, which have little to do with
straightforward discourse (and in fact are more a distraction from the straightfor-
ward than anything else).61 It is for these reasons that Alexandra Wettlaufer sees
the prose poem “as an antidote to straight-forward prose, and as a renovating,
energizing solution to prosaic stagnation.”62
As Gérard Genette stated at the beginning of his essay “Langage poétique, poé-
tique du langage,” “Il n’est probablement pas, en littérature, de catégorie plus anci-
enne ou plus universelle que l’opposition entre prose et poésie” (In literature,
there is probably no category more ancient or more universal than the opposition
between prose and poetry).63 Genette goes on to remind readers of the criterion
that was the decisive and dominant one in literature:
on a vu, pendant des siècles, et même des millénaires, correspondre une relative
stabilité du critère distinctif fondamental. On sait que jusqu’au début du XXe
alliterations, assonances, homophonies, internal rhymes, repetitions, in short everything that could
distract the reader’s attention, and thus was likely to hinder the immediate comprehension of lan-
guage) he also says are not perceptible in Le Spleen de Paris (“pour la majorité des textes du recueil
baudelairien, proses aux ‘teintes grises’ ou l’on chercherait en vain la trace de ces ‘marqueurs de poé-
ticité’” (for the majority of the texts in Baudelaire’s collection, prose with “gray tints” where one could
look in vain for traces of these “markers of poeticity”) (Brix, Poème en prose, 22 and 24). In this study,
I hope to show that some elements of poeticity are indeed apparent. For more on poeticity’s distractive
potential, see infra, Chapter 4.
60 As Thomas Connolly explains, “prorsus” is “a contracted form of ‘proversus,’ meaning ‘turned
forward.’ Prose is not simply straightforward. It is repeatedly ‘turned’ forward (as in ‘vertere’) through
an interminable series of phrasal, lexical, verbal, grammatical, and semantic manipulations.”
Thomas C. Connolly and Liesl Yamaguchi, “Incipit: On Poetry and Crisis,” Nineteenth-Century French
Studies, 50.1–2 (Fall–Winter 2021–2), 1–49 (11). While the present discussion will retain the distinc-
tion between the turning of verse and the forward-looking (although not necessarily straightforward)
prose, at the heart of this study is a desire to explore, if not altogether celebrate, the ways in which
such interminable manipulations are perceptible in the French prose poetry of the nineteenth century.
61 Or, as Michael Riffaterre’s view, “In a versified poem the formal unity is assured [. . .] by an estab-
lished conventional system, existing before and outside the poem itself. In a prose poem, on the contrary,
the unifying factor will have to be generated by the text itself ” (“On the Prose Poem’s Formal
Features,” 118).
62 Wettlaufer, In the Mind’s Eye, 124.
63 Gérard Genette, Figures II (Seuil [Tel Quel], 1969), 123.
Introduction 25
siècle ce critère fut essentiellement d’ordre phonique: il s’agissait bien sûr, de cet
ensemble de contraintes réservées à (et par là même constitutives de) l’expression
poétique, que l’on peut grossièrement ramener à la notion de mètre [. . .].
(for centuries, and even millennia, we have seen a relative stability of the funda-
mental, distinctive criterion. We know that until the beginning of the twentieth
century this criterion was essentially phonic: it was, of course, the set of con-
straints reserved for (and thus constitutive of) poetic expression, which we can
roughly reduce to the concept of meter.)64
While this phonic, metrical aspect was always fundamental in determining so

much of how a literary text functioned—that is to say, how readers engaged with
it—all the other criteria were variable, be they dialectical, grammatical, or stylistic.
Prose poetry thus offers an opportunity to consider how a poet marries seem-
ingly incompatible elements: the creative impulse in a poetic tone and yet without
the trappings traditionally associated with poetry. Recalling la rime pour l’œil and
la rime pour l’oreille, the inherent tension in the prose poem’s seeming incompati
bility between poetry and prose can be followed in terms of seeing and hearing.
Baudelaire anticipates these in his prose poems; as meter loses its fundamental
role, he experiments with poetry in which other attributes dominate. Such is part
of “le miracle d’une prose poétique.”
The Miracle of Poetic Prose
Thinking of Baudelaire’s modern prose poem as miraculous can be useful not

only because it seems to exist beyond the natural laws that govern our (poetic)
universe, but also because, coming from the Latin mirari, to see,65 it comes into
existence when we observe it, when we see it: literally and metaphorically. That is,
the literal is not enough: as Michel de Certeau reminds us, “La vision coïncide
avec l’évanouissement des choses vues” (vision coincides with the disappearance
of things seen).66 Such visual underpinning returns us to the tension central to
poetry in prose, and it comes as little surprise that Baudelaire refers often to the
visual miracle of and in the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris. Of the many telling
examples in the collection—the noun that appears most frequently is “yeux”67—is
this passage from “La Chambre double”: “Voilà bien ces yeux dont la flamme
64 Genette, Figures II, 123; original emphasis.

65 Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (4 vols, Paris: L. Hachette, 1873–4), 3: 574. While
the first edition of Littré’s dictionary is dated 1863, the present study refers to the four-volume 1873–84
edition, which still adequately reflects the language used by writers of the 1860s and which is readily
available via gallica.bnf.fr. All subsequent references to Littré’s dictionary will include volume and
page numbers.
66 Michel de Certeau, “Extase blanche,” Traverses, 29 (October 1983), 16.
67 Robert T. Cargo, Concordance to Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose (University, AL: University
of Alabama Press, 1971), 343. The next most frequent noun is “vie,” and the most frequent verb is
traverse le crépuscule; ces subtiles et terribles mirettes, que je reconnais à leur

effrayante malice! Elles attirent, elles subjuguent, elles dévorent le regard de
l’imprudent qui les contemple. Je les ai souvent étudiées, ces étoiles noires qui
commandent la curiosité et l’admiration.” (These are indeed the eyes whose flame
pierces the twilight; those subtle and terrifying peepers, which I recognize by their
frightful malice! They attract, they subjugate, they devour the gaze of anyone
reckless enough to contemplate them. I have often studied them, those black stars
summoning curiosity and admiration.)68 Placing admirari, or wonder about what
is seen, at the center of a poetic project is yet another way in which Baudelaire’s
poems mark the beginning of modern poetry in France. In addition to training
the readers’ attentive eyes on what can (or cannot) be seen, he also prefigures and
enables Rimbaud’s poetic project based on “le Voyant,” in which enhanced ways of
seeing the world provide access to heretofore unknown truths:
Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les
sens. Toutes les formes d’amour, de souffrance, de folie; il cherche lui-même, il
épuise en lui tous les poisons, pour n’en garder que les quintessences. [. . .] Car il
arrive à l’inconnu! Puisqu’il a cultivé son âme, déjà riche, plus qu’aucun! Il arrive
à l’inconnu, et quand, affolé, il finirait par perdre l’intelligence de ses visions, il
les a vues!
(The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of
all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He
exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. [. . .] Because
he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than
any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the
intelligence of his visions, he has seen them.)69
Long before Rimbaud, writers of prose poetry were preoccupied with the form’s
visual appearance from its earliest moments in the modern period, which com-
monly begins with Aloysius Bertrand’s volume Gaspard de la Nuit (manuscript
completed in 1836, published in 1842).70 In his famous dedicatory letter to Arsène
Houssaye that has served as the preface to Le Spleen de Paris from their first pub-
lication, Baudelaire acknowledged his debt to Bertrand:
“dit”; it is thus not an exaggeration to say that seeing and saying are central to questions of existence in
Le Spleen de Paris.
68 OC 1: 280; PP, 6–7. Other examples abound, and can be found in “La Belle Dorothée,” “Les Yeux
des pauvres,” “Une mort héroïque,” “Le Désir de peindre,” “Laquelle est la vraie?,” “Assommons les pau-
vres,” “Portraits de maîtresses,” “Any Where Out of this World,” and “Les Bons chiens.”
69 Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871. Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 344; emphasis added; and
Complete Works, Selected Letters, 377.

70 For an exhaustive inventory of prose poetry of the first half of the century, see Vincent-Munnia,
Les Premiers Poèmes en prose. Christian Leroy considers the precursors to the modern prose poem in
his La Poésie en prose française du XVIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001).
Introduction 27
C’est en feuillant, pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameux Gaspard de la Nuit,

d’Aloysius Bertrand [. . .] que l’idée m’est venue de tenter quelque chose
d’analogue, et d’appliquer à la description de la vie moderne, ou plutôt d’une vie
moderne et plus abstraite, le procédé qu’il avait appliqué à la peinture de la vie
ancienne, si étrangement pittoresque.
(It is while perusing, for at least the twentieth time, Aloysius Bertrand’s famous
Gaspard de la Nuit [. . .] that the idea came to me to try something similar, and to
apply to the description of modern life, or rather of one modern and more
abstract life, the procedure he had applied to the depiction of ancient life, so
strangely picturesque.)71
Bertrand himself had referred similarly to his novelty as creating a new generic
space: “Gaspard de la Nuit, ce livre de mes douces prédilections, où j’ai essayé de
créer un nouveau genre de prose” (Gaspard de la Nuit, this book of my sweet pre-
dilections, where I tried to create a new kind of prose).72 Such is what Baudelaire
had initially set out to do, anyway; about his attempt to produce an updated ver-
sion of Bertrand’s work, Baudelaire would explain that “j’ai bien vite senti que je
ne pouvais pas persévérer dans ce pastiche que l’œuvre était inimitable. Je me suis
résigné à être moi-même” (I quickly felt that I could not persevere with a pastiche,
that the work was inimitable. I resigned myself to being myself) (C 2: 208). And it
would seem that the departure was clear: calling it a “forme hybride, flottant entre
le vers et la prose” (hybrid form, floating between verse and prose),73 Théophile
Gautier wrote in the preface to the first publication of Baudelaire’s prose poems
that “Il n’est pas besoin de dire que rien ne ressemble moins à Gaspard de la Nuit
que les Petits Poèmes en prose” (Needless to say, nothing is less like Gaspard de la
Nuit than Petits Poèmes en prose).74 The manner in which Baudelaire evokes
Bertrand would make for an odd homage indeed: after referring to his predeces-
sor in prose he points out his own failure to imitate him:
Mais, pour dire le vrai, je crains que ma jalousie ne m’ait pas porté bonheur. Sitôt
que j’eus commence le travail, je m’aperçus que non-seulement je restais bien
loin de mon mystérieux et brillant modèle, mais encore que je faisais quelque
71 OC 1: 275; PP, 129; translation modified. Dominique Combe is right to concur: “c’est bien à
Baudelaire que Gaspard de la Nuit doit de figurer en bonne place dans l’histoire de la poésie française”
(it is to Baudelaire that Gaspard de la Nuit owes a prominent place in the history of French poetry)
(Dominique Combe, “Le Cercle herméneutique du genre,” in Steve Murphy (ed.), Lectures de Gaspard
de la Nuit (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 229–38 (230). About Baudelaire’s letter to
Houssaye, Johnson asks, “Ne pourrait-t-on pas la considérer elle-même comme un poème en prose?”
(Could we not consider the letter itself as a prose poem?) (Défigurations du langage poétique, 28).
72 Aloysius Bertrand, Œuvres complètes, ed. Helen Hart Poggenburg (Paris: Honoré Champion,
2000), 900.
73 Théophile Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Charles
Asselineau and Théodore de Banville (4 vols, Paris: Michel Lévy, 1868–9), 1: 71.
74 Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” in Baudelaire, Œuvres completes, ed. Asselineau and Banville, 1: 72.
chose (si cela peut s’appeler quelque chose) de singulièrement différent, accident
dont tout autre que moi s’enorgueillirait sans doute, mais qui ne peut qu’humilier
profondément un esprit qui regarde comme le plus grand honneur du poëte
d’accomplir juste ce qu’il a projeté de faire.
(But, to tell the truth, I fear that my jealousy has not brought me luck. As soon as
I had begun the work, I noticed that not only did I remain quite far from my
mysterious and brilliant model, but more so that I was making something (if that
can be called some thing) peculiarly different, an accident of which anyone other
than I would probably be proud, but which can only deeply humiliate a mind that
considers that the poet’s greatest honor is to execute exactly what was planned.)75
Despite the supposed debt that Baudelaire initially claims in his letter to Houssaye,
his own prose poetry goes beyond Bertrand’s, and is all the better for his inability
to produce something close to his “mystérieux et brillant modèle.” It is no doubt
for this reason that, in her landmark study, Suzanne Bernard concludes that the
modern prose poem was created not by Bertrand, but after him: “Après lui le
genre est créé.”76 A brief consideration of one of Bertrand’s poems will be instruct
ive, and help see the extent to which Baudelaire’s prose poetry inaugurated some-
thing new and modern:
Le Maçon
Le maître Maçon. Regardez ces bastions, ces contreforts;
on les dirait construits pour l’éternité.
Schiller.—Guillaume Tell.
Le maçon Abraham Knupfer chante, la truelle à la main, dans les airs
échafaudé,—si haut que, lisant les vers gothiques du bourdon, il nivelle de ses
pieds et l’église aux trente arcs-boutants, et la ville aux trente églises.
Il voit les tarasques de pierre vomir l’eau des ardoises dans l’abîme confus
des galeries, des fenêtres, des pendentifs, des clochetons, des tourelles, des
toits et des charpentes, que tache d’un point gris l’aile échancrée et immobile
du tiercelet.
Il voit les fortifications qui se découpent en étoile, la citadelle qui se rengorge
comme une géline dans un tourteau, les cours des palais où le soleil tarit les fon-
taines, et les cloîtres des monastères où l’ombre tourne autour des piliers.
75 OC 1: 276, original emphasis; PP 130, translation modified.

76 Such is the subtitle to her conclusion (Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris:
Nizet, 1959), 71–3), the full version of which reads: “Conclusion: Limites et mérites de Bertrand.
Après lui le genre est créé.”
Introduction 29
Les troupes impériales se sont logées dans le faubourg. Voilà qu’un cavalier tam-
bourine là-bas. Abraham Knupfer distingue son chapeau à trois cornes, ses
aiguillettes de laine rouge, sa cocarde traversée d’une gance [sic], et sa queue
nouée d’un ruban.
Ce qu’il voit encore, ce sont des soudards qui, dans le parc empanaché de gigan-
tesques ramées, sur de larges pelouses d’émeraude, criblent de coups d’arquebuse
un oiseau de bois fiché à la pointe d’un mai.
Et le soir, quand la nef harmonieuse de la cathédrale s’endormit couchée les bras
en croix, il aperçut, de l’échelle, à l’horizon, un village incendié par des gens de
guerre, qui flamboyait comme une comète dans l’azur.77
(The master mason: Look at these ramparts and buttresses;
they’re built to last an eternity.
Schiller.—William Tell.
The mason Abraham Knupfer sings, trowel in hand, on scaffolding way up in the
air: so high that, while reading the Gothic verses on the church bell, his feet even
out the church’s thirty flying buttresses, and the city’s thirty churches.
He sees the stone gargoyles spew water from the slate roof tiles down below
onto the confusion of galleries, windows, pendants, pinnacles, turrets, roofs and
frames, which the falcon’s curved, motionless wing stains with grey spots.
He sees the fortification’s star shape, the citadel that sticks its head out like a hen
in a pie, palace courtyards with fountains dried up by the sun, and monastery
cloisters where shadows turn around pillars.
The imperial troops have set up camp outside the city walls. A horseman is
drumming over there. Abraham Knupfer makes out his hat with its three horns,
its red woollen aiguillettes, his cockade with a braid around it, and his pigtail
tied with a ribbon.
He also sees soldiers who, under the park’s gigantic boughs and on its wide
emerald lawns, pelt a wooden bird nailed to the top of a maypole with shots
from their arquebuses.
And in the evening, while the cathedral’s harmonious nave slept, lying down and
with arms crossed, from the ladder he saw a village on the horizon which sol-
diers had set on fire, blazing like a comet in the sky.)
As Valentina Gosetti suggests, this poem’s visual field is made of “a constellation

of architectural elements”; through images of ruins, they recall “the blurred
Moyen Âge.”78 Their lack of historical precision notwithstanding, “Le Maçon”
77 Bertrand, Œuvres complètes, 117–18.

78 Valentina Gosetti, Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit: Beyond the Prose Poem (Oxford:
Legenda, 2016), 47, 48; original emphasis. Gosetti’s study offers a rich survey of the historical, cultural,
considers what it means to be set in stone, as well as the lasting or ephemeral

nature of that which is built up or burned down, all of it seen. The mason-poet79
leans on the structure of the scaffold that holds him up while he works “dans les
airs”: in a setting as lofty as it is musical. He is high up enough to read the verses
inscribed on church-tower bells, to which he reacts by using his feet—his “pieds,”
which also designate poetic beats—to flatten out the exponentially rippling
effects: the thirty church buttresses quickly multiply and encompass a much larger
view, of thirty churches (and, presumably, all of their buttresses). This kind of
accumulation—already present in the first poem of the collection, “Harlem,” with
its anaphora “Et” that opens the final five of the six paragraphs, as well as all the
parts of the city upon which the cathedral in “Le Maçon” spews water (“des galeries,
des fenêtres, des pendentifs, des clochetons, des tourelles, des toits et des
charpentes”)—contributes meaningfully to all that is seen, but without offering any
significant change to it: “Il voit,” “Il voit,” “Voilà [. . .] Abraham Knupfer distingue,”
“Ce qu’il voit encore,” “Et le soir [. . .] il aperçut.” No change, that is, until the last
paragraph, in which a warring people burn a village to the ground.
The light on the horizon, “comme une comète dans l’azur” is far-off, but not
longed-for: instead, the mason-poet takes comfort in the well-built cathedral
nave. Specifically, its music: the nave is harmonious, and he perceives the fire
from his ladder, “l’échelle,” which is also the term for a musical scale. The mason-
poet naturally prefers that which is built to last: “pour l’éternité,” as the epigraph
says, and Bertrand’s referring to Schiller’s 1804 version of a tale that dated back to
the thirteenth century only underscores this look toward the past. To drive the
point home further, Bertrand reaches into the lexicon of the “vers gothiques” to
include words with a Middle Age resonance such as “tarasques,” “tiercelet,” and
“tourteau.”80 As a result, the airs, the harmony, and the scale that surround and
comfort the mason-poet and provide access to the cathedral-poem are all pre-
sented in the hopes that they will endure through past, present, and future with a
permanence that the far-off village did not enjoy.
Such an approach does not offer a shift in thinking about how to see or per-
ceive time or space, nor how to capture the ephemeral present; in Bertrand’s
return to “the blurred Moyen Âge” there is, to the contrary, an anti-modernity, an
attempt to retain the past in the present and to keep it going for as long as pos
sible: in this respect keeping it out of the hands of the warring people who will
burn it down, not appreciating it until it’s gone.
and literary contexts—that is to say, French romanticism of the 1820s and 1830s—that inform Gaspard
de la Nuit. See also Marvin Richards, Without Rhyme or Reason: Gaspard de la Nuit and the Dialectic
of the Prose Poem (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998), and, for a reading of Bertrand’s
prose poetry and its spatial import, Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 123–31.
79 See Nicolas Wanlin, Aloysius Bertrand, le sens du pittoresque (Rennes: Presses universitaires de
Rennes, 2010), especially his third chapter, “Le Portrait du poète en maçon,” 234–83.
80 Littré 4: 2148, 2221, and 2284, respectively.
Introduction 31
Similar disdain for the reading public was reiterated in the last poem in the
collection, “À M. Charles Nodier”; in it, the poetic subject states his case for his
texts having the same permanence as a minted coin and being read as they’re
meant to be read (that is, without commentators adding the confusion of their
supposed clarity):
À M. Charles Nodier
Je prierai les lecteurs de ce mien labeur qu’ils veuillent prendre en
bonne part tout ce que j’y ai escrit.
Mémoires du Sire de Joinville.
L’homme est un balancier qui frappe une monnaie à son coin. Le quadruple
porte l’empreinte de l’empereur, la médaille, du pape, le jeton, du fou.
Je marque mon jeton à ce jeu de la vie où nous perdons coup sur coup et où le
diable, pour en finir, rafle joueurs, dés et tapis vert.
L’empereur dicte ses ordres à ses capitaines, le pape adresse des bulles à la chré-
tienté, et le fou écrit un livre.
Mon livre, le voilà tel que je l’ai fait et tel qu’on doit le lire, avant que les com-
mentateurs ne l’obscurcissent de leurs éclaircissements.
Mais ce ne sont point ces pages souffreteuses, humble labeur ignoré des jours
présents, qui ajouteront quelque lustre à la renommée poétique des jours passés.
Et l’églantine du ménestrel sera fanée, que fleurira toujours la giroflée, chaque
printemps, aux gothiques fenêtres des châteaux et des monastères.
Paris, 20 septembre 1836.81
(To Mr Charles Nodier
May the readers of my labour find agreeable all that I have written
herein.
Memoirs of Sire Jean de Joinville.
Man is a coining press that stamps his own coins. The quadruple bears the face
of the emperor; the medal, the pope; the token, the madman.
I mark my token in this game of life where we lose with each stamp
and where the devil, to put an end to it, rounds up all the players, dice, and
green felt.
The emperor dictates his orders to his captains, the pope sends bulls to
Christendom, and the madman writes a book.
Here is my book as I made it and as it should be read, before the commentators
obscure it with their clarifications.
81 Bertrand, Œuvres complètes, 251–2.

But it is not these sickly pages, the humble toil ignored by the present, which will
add some luster to the poetic fame of bygone days.
And the minstrel’s eglantine will be withered, and the wallflower will always
bloom, every spring, in the Gothic windows of castles and monasteries.)
Despite its attempts to establish permanence—emphasized by the numerous

statements in the present tense with active verbs in the first three paragraphs: “Le
quadruple porte l’empreinte,” “Je marque mon jeton,” “L’empereur dicte ses
ordres,” “le pape adresse des bulles,” “le fou écrit un livre”—the poem is leading
right into its own failure. Such is what comes out of the anxiety in the fourth par-
agraph’s contrast between the poet’s intention and his ironic comment about the
obscurity of readers’ elucidations. Despite beginning with a “Mais” that could
suggest a change of perspective in the poem, however, the fifth paragraph opens
an emotional tone of resignation, built of the doomed-to-fail attempts of the
first part of the poem. Specifically, the moment of reckoning comes in the penul-
timate paragraph with the arrival of the “humble labeur ignoré des jours présents,”
as the present poetic activity shuts down the musicality, and poeticity, that had
previously inhabited the prose.
For the beginning of the poem is indeed musical, if not cacophonous: the
“quadruple” of the first paragraph makes itself felt in two ways: via the coin meta-
phor of the opening phrase (“L’homme est un balancier qui frappe une monnaie à
son coin”) and also because the archaism refers both to a four-louis coin that was
already long out of circulation and, unsurprisingly, the term used in the Middle
Ages for the quartet, long since replaced with the term “quatuor” (Littré 4: 1398).
The theme of four is a thread that leads out of “le quadruple” to entwine four words
in the alliterations in “quadruple porte l’empreinte de l’empereur,” underscored
by the homophonous “l’empreinte de l’empereur.” Without explicit mentions of
numbers, similar pitter-patters continue to rhythm the prose of the next few
paragraphs: “Je marque mon jeton à ce jeu,” “coup sur coup,” in the second, and
in the parallel structures in the third, in which the subject-verb-object pattern
takes us through the steps of language, from spoken to sent to written (“L’empereur
dicte ses ordres à ses capitaines, le pape adresse des bulles à la chrétienté,
et le fou écrit un livre”). That the recipient is left off the third example in this
series—following “à ses capitaines” and “à la chrétienté”—leads naturally to the
poet’s readers, the source of anxiety in the next paragraph that begins by
repeating “livre” but by making it personal, as the general “le fou écrit un livre”
turns quickly into intimate reflections that stem from the vulnerability related
to the creative process: “Mon livre, le voilà tel que je l’ai fait et tel qu’on doit
le lire.” More echoes persist: in “l’obscurcissent de leurs éclaircissements,”
in which the subject’s fears nearly evoke Narcissus (Narcisse), and in the lead
Introduction 33
up to the mention of the present: “point ces pages” and the “humble labeur
ignoré des jours présents.”
And then, as if it can’t continue in these “jours présents,” the prose’s music
dissipates and the poem arrives at an end that, moving resolutely away from (if
not giving up on) the present, is fluid and direct: nostalgic for the past and won-
dering about the future. Here in Bertrand’s collection, the subject fears that the
“pages souffreteuses” of the present will do little to contribute to the poetic
glory of the past. The “églantine du ménestrel” on which this poem and
Bertrand’s collection close once again harkens back to the past: it evokes the
prize given to a recipient at Toulouse’s “Jeux floraux,” the literary prizes awarded
each year in a tradition dating back to the fourteenth century. Specifically, the
“églantine d’or,” or gold sweet briar, had been awarded for the best sonnet,
before the prize was discontinued in 1806 (it was reestablished, in silver, in
1886). Instead, the past will become a memory, much as the prize of the sweet
briar disappeared from practice, and all that will remain will be the wallflower
adorning the heavily constructed works (of architecture, of poetry) that will
stand the test of time.
The present pages don’t contribute to the present, since they will fade; but they
hope to hang around as a wallflower does, and long enough to be a part of the
legacy of poetry. In his use of the wallflower Bertrand returns to a theme estab-
lished earlier in the collection; the poem “Sur les rochers de Chèvremorte” from
Gaspard de la Nuit ends with the paragraphs
Le poète est comme la giroflée qui s’attache frêle et odorante, au granit, et

demande moins de terre que de soleil.
Mais hélas! je n’ai plus de soleil depuis que se sont fermés les yeux si charmants
qui réchauffaient mon génie!82
(The poet is like the frail and fragrant wallflower which attaches itself to granite
and requires less soil than sun.
But, unfortunately!, I have not had any sun since the charming eyes that warmed
my genius closed!)
Such is perhaps what Bertrand does: contributing less to the lustre of the past—
which his collection is focused on celebrating—but to endure long enough to be
around when a new poetics—possibly a new kind of poetic cathedral—would
come to be.
What might that kind of poetic architecture look like?
82 Bertrand, Œuvres complètes, 244.

The Look of Modern Poetry
In a letter that Bertrand wrote to “M. le Metteur en pages” about his forthcoming
publication, he insisted on its organization and division: not only into multiple
volumes but, notably, with white space between each poem’s paragraphs:
Règle générale—Blanchir comme si le texte était de la poésie. L’ouvrage est divisé

en six livres, et chaque livre contient un plus ou moins grand nombre de pièces.
M. le Metteur en pages remarquera que chaque pièce est divisée en quatre, cinq,
six et sept alinéas ou couplets. Il jettera de larges blancs entre ces couplets comme
si c’était des strophes en vers.83
(General rule: Whiten the text as if it were poetry. The work is divided into six
books, and each book contains a certain number of parts. The Editor will notice
that each part is divided into four, five, six and seven paragraphs or couplets,
and he will kindly add blank space between the couplets as if they were verse
stanzas.)
Gaspard de la Nuit arrives at a moment of catachresis, as Bertrand makes no dis-

tinction between “alinéa”—indentation marking a new line, typically reserved for
prose—and couplet, in French as in English designating a pair of verses either in
song or poetry. (The present study uses the English word “paragraph” in its place.)
And yet, despite this lack of clarity in nomenclature, Bertrand remained attentive
to his texts’ visual appearance. As Barbara Wright and David Scott explain,
Bertrand, like the artist, organize[d] the various aspects of his text into a primar-
ily aesthetic pattern within the given limits of the page, the blank margins of
which will “frame” the various elements of the composition.
83 Aloysius Bertrand, “Instructions à M. le Metteur en pages,” Œuvres complètes, 373. Aurélia
Cervoni and Andrea Schellino note that Baudelaire followed the same layout for the 1855 publication
of his prose poems “Le Crépuscule du soir” and “La Solitude”; see Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de
Paris, ed. Aurélia Cervoni and Andrea Schellino (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 2017), 4–5 and 250–1.
Michel Murat approaches Rimbaud’s prose poems along similar lines of inquiry, saying that “Le travail
de Rimbaud sur la disposition du poème doit par conséquent être apprécié par comparaison avec les
formes attestées vers 1870” (Rimbaud’s work on the poem’s layout should therefore be considered in
comparison with the fixed forms attested around 1870) and dividing the poems into four different
forms of prose poems (categories that rely heavily on their visual appearance): “le morceau de prose,”
“le poème alinéaire,” “la ballade en prose” and “La transcription [. . .] de poème versifié ou de chanson”
(the prose piece, the poem in paragraphs, the ballad in prose, and the transcription of verse poem or
of song) (Michel Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud (revised edition, Paris: José Corti, 2013), 244–5). See also
David Scott, “La Structure spatiale du poème en prose d’Aloysius Bertrand à Rimbaud,” Poétique, 59
(September 1984), 295–308; Michel Sandras, Lire le poème en prose (Paris: Dunod, 1995); Michel
Murat, “ ‘Le dernier livre de la bibliothèque’: une histoire du poème en prose,” in Raphaël Baroni et
Marielle Macé (eds.), Le Savoir des genres, La Licorne, vol. 79 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de
Rennes, 2007), 281–95; and Brix, Poème en prose.
Introduction 35
Bertrand was able to achieve this transposition of graphic techniques into lin-
guistic expression by inventing or adapting formal units the chief function of
which would be the “squaring” or immobilizing of the text. [. . .] The spaces
between the couplets decelerate syntactical as well as rhythmic energies and
contrive to impose upon each couplet a stanza-like unity.84
For Françoise Meltzer, the preoccupation with the visual goes well beyond the limits
of the printed page, for it is the hallmark of modernity writ large: “The visual is what
seems constantly privileged in explaining the crisis of modernity.”85 Gérard Genette
describes a chiasmus in which the breakdown of the metrical system of verse in the
second half of the nineteenth century coincided with a growing reading public and
a move away from the practice of reading texts out loud, which in turn ushered in
the importance of the visual.86 Paul Valéry details this process which ends, as he
insists, with the freedoms that the visual brings to the text:
Longtemps, longtemps, la voix humaine fut base et condition de la littérature. La

présence de la voix explique la littérature première, d’où la classique prit forme et
cet admirable tempérament. Tout le corps humain présent sous la voix, et sup-
port, condition d’équilibre de l’idée…
Un jour vint où l’on sut lire des yeux sans épeler, sans entendre, et la littérature en
fut tout altérée.
Évolution de l’articulé à l’effleuré,—du rythmé et enchaîné à l’instantané,—de ce
que supporte et exige un auditoire à ce que supporte et emporte un œil rapide,
avide, libre sur la page.
(For a long, long time, human voice was the basis and condition of literature. The
presence of voice explains early literature, from which classical literature took its
shape and its admirable temperament. The entire human body present under-
neath voice: medium and condition for balance of the idea…
A day came when we could read with our eyes without spelling, without hearing,
and literature was completely changed.
Evolution from the articulate to the touched—from rhythmic and sequential to
instantaneous—from tolerating and demanding an audience to tolerating and
carrying away a quick, eager, free eye on the page.)87
84 Wright and Scott, Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo and Le Spleen de Paris, 42.

85 Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2011), 2.
86 Genette, Figures II, 124–5. Paradoxically, Suzanne Bernard heads in the opposite direction:
“Passer de Bertrand à Baudelaire, et du Parnasse au Symbolisme, c’est passer du pictural au musical”

(Going from Bertrand to Baudelaire, and from Parnassian poetry to Symbolist poetry, is going from
the pictorial to the musical) (Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire à nos jours, 348 n. 67).
87 Paul Valéry, “Littérature,” Tel Quel. Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (2 vols, Paris: Gallimard,
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1957–60), 2: 549; original emphasis. For Genette,

As Philippe Ortel argues, both the prose poem and early attempts at photography
such as the daguerreotype—first presented in 1839, thus contemporaneous with
Gaspard de la Nuit—offered near-immediate response to dreams and aspirations
of the modern moment, the kind of which had previously been impossible in
poetry or the visual arts.88 Connections between these early attempts at prose
poems and photography are not the sole purview of recent scholarship, however;
in his introduction to Bertrand’s poems, Sainte-Beuve wrote:
On aura remarqué la précision presque géométrique des termes et l’exquise curi-

osité pittoresque du vocabulaire. Tout cela est vu et saisi à la loupe. De telles
imagettes sont comme le produit du daguerréotype en littérature, avec la couleur
en sus. Vers la fin de sa vie, l’ingénieux Bertrand s’occupait beaucoup, en effet,
du daguerréotype et de le perfectionner. Il avait reconnu là un procédé analogue
au sien, et il s’était mis à courir après.
([The reader] will have noticed the terms’ almost geometric precision and the
vocabulary’s exquisite, picturesque curiosity. All of this is seen and grasped
with a magnifying glass. Such thumbnails are like the product of the
daguerreotype in literature, with the color added. Toward the end of his life,
the ingenious Bertrand was in fact very interested in the daguerreotype, and
in perfecting it. He had recognized in it a process analogous to his own, and
had begun chasing it.)89
Ce changement de critère ne signifie pas, cependant, que la réalité phonique, rythmique,

métrique, de la poésie ancienne se soit effacée (ce qui serait un grand dommage): elle s’est
plutôt transposée dans le visuel et, à cette occasion, en quelque sorte idéalisée; il y a une
façon muette de percevoir les effets “sonores,” une sorte de diction silencieuse, comparable
à ce qu’est pour un musicien exercé la lecture d’une partition.
(This change of criterion does not mean, however, that the phonic, rhythmic, and metric reality of
older poetry has been erased (which would be a great pity): rather, it has been transposed into the
visual and, on this occasion, somewhat idealized; there is a silent way of perceiving “sound” effects, a
sort of silent diction, comparable to how an experienced musician reads a score.) (Genette, Figures II,
125–6 n. 2)
88 Philippe Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie: enquête sur une révolution invisible
(Nîmes: Chambon, 2002), 143. As Krueger notes,

the changing experience of time in mid-nineteenth-century Paris must have contributed
to Baudelaire’s experiment with the prose poem genre as well. Important studies have
revealed the ways in which the shock experience created by an excess of external stimuli,
the rise of new technologies for measuring time, a “culture of speed,” and related pressure
of the capitalist marketplace gave rise to literary innovations now considered “modernist.”
(The Art of Procrastination, 15)
89 Sainte-Beuve, “Aloïsius Bertrand,” in Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la
manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, par Louis Bertrand; précédé d’une notice par M. Sainte-Beuve
(Angers: V. Pavie; Paris: chez Labitte, 1842), xiv. In her important survey, Nathalie Vincent-Munnia
discusses further the connections between daguerreotype and early prose poems, including “Chambre
noire” and “Le Daguerréotype” from little-known poet Jules Lefèvre-Deumier, published in the 1854
volume Livre du promeneur (Vincent-Munnia, Les Premiers Poèmes en prose, 101). Baudelaire himself
was not enthusiastic about the daguerreotype, which he described as having a “charme cruel et surpre-
nant” (OC 2: 558).
Introduction 37
Similarly, David Scott includes lithography and wood- block printing in his
iscussion of “an increasing interpenetration of verbal and visual elements,” which
d
led in the 1820s and 1830s to “new models of spatial organization of the text and for
the absorption of the visual into the linguistic, or vice versa.”90 For Scott, “it was this
arresting, graphic quality of the etched image or vignette—especially if heightened
by the ironic, the erotic or the macabre—that was to appeal to nineteenth-century
French poets.”91 The insistence on the significance in poetry of the visual—whether
literal or metaphorical—via such comparisons between prose poetry and photog
raphy would persist throughout the century; in 1853, Baudelaire’s contemporary
Gustave Flaubert complained to Louise Colet about the “Admirable époque
(curieux symbolisme!, comme dirait le père Michelet) que celle où l’on décore les
photographes et où l’on exile les poètes” (Admirable times (curious symbolism!, as
Father Michelet would say) where photographers are celebrated and poets are
exiled), and in 1877 Stéphane Mallarmé wrote to Nadar and referred to him as
“l’auteur des plus beaux poëmes en prose écrits depuis Baudelaire” (the author of
the most beautiful prose poems written since Baudelaire).92
New means to capture images in mid-century Paris were instigated by the need
to account for and come to grips with the birth of the modern city. In
“Mademoiselle Bistouri,” Baudelaire famously asks, “Quelles bizarreries ne trouve-
t-on pas dans une grande ville, quand on sait se promener et regarder? La vie four-
mille de monstres innocents” (What weird things you find in big cities, when you
know how to walk around and look! Life swarms with innocent monsters).93
A survey of the studies that consider the evolving Parisian cityscape, Baudelaire’s
urban poetry (including the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du Mal) and
his prose poems94 is well beyond the scope of the present study, which instead
focuses on how prose poetry, by capturing and expressing different aspects of what
is seen and heard, exposes certain elements of Baudelaire’s poetic modernity.
90 Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 61. 91 Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 60–1.

92 Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet [January 15, 1853], Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau and Yvan
Leclerc (5 vols, Paris: Gallimard, [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1973–2007) 2: 239; Mallarmé, letter to
Nadar from February 3, 1877. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance (1854–1898), ed. Bertrand
Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2019), 404. For more on Mallarmé’s interest in photography, and technol-
ogy of his era more generally, see Gayle Zachmann, Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the
Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008).
93 OC 1: 355; PP 118; translation modified. Sima Godfrey describes Baudelaire’s confrontation with
and translation of Paris as moving “from the ‘visible’ to the ‘lisible’ to and finally the ‘dicible.’ ” (Sima
Godfrey, “Baudelaire’s Windows.” L’Esprit créateur, 22.4 (1982), 83–100 (88)).
94 They would include Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City; Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World; Elissa
Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Meltzer, Seeing Double; William Olmsted, Baudelaire, Flaubert,
and the Formation of French Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Christopher
Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Debarati Sanyal, The
Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006); and Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
Blank spaces cannot alone make a text poetic. But they offer interruptions in
the flow of a text, ruptures to fluidity, pauses that break up—and thus organize
and rhythm—the noise of language.95 Having discussed how prose might (or
might not) differ from verse and what visual aspects of prose poetry might be
consistent with what we think of poetry, perhaps it is time to consider what prose
poetry could look like and sound like. Jean-Michel Maulpoix encourages us to
do so in his thoughts on poetic language’s potential for resistance, saying that
“Concevoir la poésie comme un espace de langue résistant ne signifie nullement
la constituer en refuge (contre ‘le tunnel de l’époque’), mais plutôt en corde sens
ible, en aiguille de sismographe, en chambre d’échos et en poste d’observation”
(Conceiving poetry as a resistant language space in no way means constituting it
as a refuge (against “the tunnel of the moment”), but rather as a sensitive string,
as a seismograph needle, as an echo chamber and an observation post).96
Activated by a pluck of the lyre’s sensitive string, buzzing with the nervous energy
of a seismograph needle, in what way could prose poetry be thought of as a com-
bination of echo chamber and observation post?
Situation of the Prose Poem: Seeing and Hearing
In the introduction to her recent study Hearing Things, Angela Leighton considers
a valuable passage from a letter by Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he writes:
I opened and read some lines, reading, as one commonly reads whether prose or
verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw naked-
ness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it
with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.97
For Leighton, “The passage is a reminder that reading, even reading one’s own
poem, might be a surprising and variable activity, violently challenging, on the one
hand, or else ‘all right’ on the other.” Echoing Boulez, she continues: “For reading is
never just one activity, a matter of simply recording the words on the page.”98
95 For a compelling study of urban noise and Baudelaire’s poetry, see Prendergast, Paris and the
Nineteenth Century, 127–63.

96 Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Le Poète perplexe (Paris: José Corti, 2002), 37.
97 Angela Leighton, Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2018), 1.

98 Leighton, Hearing Things, 1. In his recent anthology of prose poetry, Jeremy Noel-Tod concurs:
“Without the visual architecture of verse, the prose poem is not immediately identifiable on the page.
When read aloud, however, it is often characterized by the kind of echoic patterning that we associate
with verse, arriving at its conclusion with a resonant neatness”; Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Penguin Book of
the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (London: Penguin, 2018), xxviii (note: even though
Noel-Tod names Baudelaire in his title, his survey goes back to. . . Bertrand).
Introduction 39
However, she lets Hopkins’s slippage go silently: reading with the eyes is common
to all reading, “whether prose or verse”; but reading with the ears is presented as
specific to the kinds of poetry that Hopkins happens to be reading: it is his verse
that “becomes all right.” Had he been reading his prose with the ears, perhaps
Hopkins might have concluded “and my prose becomes all right”; instead, his
example illustrates this righting of his poetry for verse. Verse is certainly not the
only kind of text read commonly with the ears: in the French nineteenth century
alone one immediately thinks of Flaubert’s gueuloir and his practice of shouting
passages of his novels so he could hear his own prose.99 As Gaston Bachelard
asked, “Alors, comment voir sans entendre? Il est des formes compliquées qui,
dans le repos même, font du bruit. Ce qui est tordu continue en grinçant à se
contorsionner” (So how can we see without hearing? There are some complicated
forms that make noise even when at rest. What is twisted continues to contort
itself by squeaking).100
A dozen years before Hopkins’s letter, Baudelaire died on August 31, 1867, after
having suffered a stroke a little over a year earlier. While he had published his
prose poems in small batches in journals such as La Presse, and he had sketched
out the rough order of the fifty or so poems,101 he would never see their publica-
tion as a completed set. They first appeared in 1869, as Petits Poèmes en prose, in
part of the fourth volume of the posthumous Œuvres complètes compiled by
Charles Asselineau and Théodore de Banville and published by Michel Lévy
frères.102 In his letter to Houssaye (editor of La Presse)—which had appeared earl
ier in La Presse, on August 26, 1862, alongside nine of the poems—Baudelaire
poses his famous question about “le miracle d’une prose poétique” (see supra).
The answer resides in the prorsus, the directness at the heart of prose that Gustave
Flaubert tells Louise Colet in 1853 is part of his aim for Madame Bovary:
Vouloir donner à la prose le rythme du vers (en la laissant prose et très prose) et
écrire la vie ordinaire comme on écrit l’histoire ou l’épopée (sans dénaturer le
sujet) est peut-être une absurdité. Voilà ce que je me demande parfois. Mais c’est
peut-être aussi une grande tentative et très originale!
(Wanting to give prose the rhythm of verse (leaving it prose, and very prose) and
to write ordinary life as one writes history or the epic (without distorting the
99 See Michael Fried, Flaubert’s Gueuloir: On Madame Bovary and Salammbô (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2012).

100 Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace, 3rd edition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1961), 205.
101 Charles Baudelaire, Sommaire autographe de cinquante poèmes. Manuscript, reference 9022,
Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris. See OC 1: 366–8 and 1: 1354–7. As Robert Kopp
explains, it is probable that this document was used for the 1869 edition since it includes the mention
“chaque poème en page” in a hand other than Baudelaire’s (Kopp ix, n. 21).
102 The fluid, heterogeneous nature of Baudelaire’s prose poems is reflected in this collection’s many
titles, from the first two poems’ publications in 1855 to their appearance as a volume in 1869. As
subject) is perhaps an absurdity. This is what I sometimes wonder. But the

attempt may also be great and very original!)103
The seeming contradiction in the very idea of a directness that is within, and not
opposed to, the musicality of poetic language is no small matter.104 Even the most
basic thoughts of music often include matters related to rhythms and sounds that
would seem to betray the notion of prorsus; in a linguistic context they certainly
suggest, if not altogether generate, meter. In fact, Émile Littré opens his definition
of music by evoking the rhythms of verse poetry: “Il nous reste de saint Augustin
un traité de la Musique où il n’est question que des principes et des conditions des
vers” (There is a treatise on music by Saint Augustine which deals only with the
principles and conditions of verses) (3: 675). If music and rhythm are as inextric
ably linked as are verses and rhyme, then how can a prose be musical while break-
ing these bonds, in favor of the lyric, the soul, reverie, and consciousness?
One complicated (and ultimately unsatisfying) answer to this question can be
found in this passage from “Les Tentations ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire”:
Elle avait l’air à la fois impérieux et dégingandé, et ses yeux, quoique battus, con-
tenaient une force fascinatrice. Ce qui me frappa le plus, ce fut le mystère de sa
voix, dans laquelle je retrouvais le souvenir des contralti les plus délicieux et
aussi un peu de l’enrouement des gosiers incessamment lavés par l’eau-de-vie.
Claude Pichois notes, the expression “petits poèmes en prose” “désigne dans ses lettres non pas un
titre, mais un genre littéraire. Le Spleen de Paris est le seul titre attesté avec certitude durant les dern-
ières années de la vie de Baudelaire” (designates in his letters not a title, but a literary genre. Le Spleen
de Paris is the only title attested with certainty during the last years of Baudelaire’s life) (OC 1: 1299).
Consistent with nearly all other recent studies of the collection, the present study prefers Le Spleen de
Paris. For more on these titles, see the notes in OC 1: 1298–301.
103 Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet [March 27, 1853], Correspondance, 2: 287.
104 Claude Pichois concurs, calling Baudelaire’s phrase a “formule paradoxale, puisque la musicalité
doit se passer du secours de deux des éléments qui semblent la définir: mesure et sonorité” (paradox
ical formula, since musicality must do without the help of two of the elements that seem to define it:
measure and sound) (OC 1: 1303). As the authors of a recent study of sound archives of poetry remind
us, the earliest moments of recorded voice in French are inextricably linked to poetry and, in that
connection, the uneasy relationship between the permanence of the written word and that of
spoken voice:
Parmi ces traces sonores ou audiovisuelles de la littérature, les enregistrements de poètes
occupent une place à part. C’est d’ailleurs un poète, Charles Cros, qui le premier, parallèle-
ment aux travaux d’Edison, mit au point une technique d’enregistrement des sons: une
invention qui dès ses débuts, voire dès ses prémisses imaginaires, interfère donc avec
l’histoire de la poésie. C’est que le poème, malgré son inscription sur la page, n’a jamais cessé
d’être dit, véhiculé oralement, de bouche à oreille.
(Among these sonorous or audiovisual traces of literature, the recordings of poets occupy
a special place. After all, it was a poet, Charles Cros, who was the first, working at the same
time as Edison, to develop a technique for recording sounds: an invention which from its
beginnings, even from its imaginary premises, is enmeshed with the history of poetry. It is
because the poem, despite its inscription on the page, has never ceased to be said, conveyed
orally, by from mouths to ears.) (Céline Pardo, Abigail Lang, and Michel Murat (eds.),
Archives sonores de la poésie (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2020), 9; emphasis added)
Introduction 41
(Her manner was at once haughty and awkward and her eyes, although wearied,
possessed hypnotic power. The greatest impression on me was made by the mystery
in her voice, which evoked memories of the most delectable contralti and the
slight huskiness of throats constantly washed by brandy.)105
A contrātenor altus is a countermelody, reserved for female signers, and sung

against the main melody: the musical equivalent of a counter-discourse (see
supra); in his poem “Contralto” (Émaux et camées), Théophile Gautier—to whom
Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du Mal—wrote:
Que tu me plais, ô timbre étrange!

Son double, homme et femme à la fois,
Contralto, bizarre mélange,
Hermaphrodite de la voix!
(Oh how I like you, you strange sound! / Your own double, man and woman at
the same time, / Contralto, weird mixture, / Hermaphrodite of voice!)106
No doubt, it must be easier to write poetry that acts like verse, or prose that acts
like prose. For not all writers felt up to the task; in the Promenades et souvenirs part
of La Bohème galante (1855), Gérard de Nerval reflects on the connection between
the crisis in the notion of the poet and the choice to write prose poetry: “Il y avait
là de quoi faire un poète, et je ne suis qu’un rêveur en prose” (There was enough
there to make one a poet, but I am merely a dreamer in prose).107 In Joris-Karl
Huysmans’s À rebours, des Esseintes revered the prose poem, concluding that it
was the fundamental taste that gives literature its meaty flavor: “En un mot, le
poème en prose représentait, pour des Esseintes, le suc concret, l’osmazôme de la
littérature, l’huile essentielle de l’art” (In a word, the prose poem represented, for
des Esseintes, the concrete pith of literature, its osmazome, art’s essential oil).108
With more contradictions than clarity, the prose poem resists easy categoriza-
tion.109 Surely it draws its strength from the paradox that comes from the difficulty
in reconciling its seemingly incompatible referents—poetry, verse, prose—and
105 OC 1: 309–10; PP 48, translation modified.

106 Théophile Gautier, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Michel Brix (Paris: Bartillat, 2013), 471.
107 Gérard de Nerval, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Guillaume et Claude Pichois (3 vols, Paris:
Gallimard, [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1989–93), 3: 680.

108 Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris: Gallimard, [Folio], 1977), 319–20.
The term “l’osmazôme” refers to the essential odor from bouillon and, as Marc Fumaroli states in his
notes, it “suppose une littérature ‘au second degré,’ qui extrait l’arôme de la littérature ‘au premier degré,’
supposée ‘morte’ ou pourrissante charogne” (assumes a “figurative” literature, which extracts the aroma
of the “literal” literature, supposedly “dead” or rotting carcass) (Huysmans, À rebours, 430 note).
109 “Il faut s’y résoudre: aucune frontière nette, aucun critère irrécusable ne permettent de classer
sans discussion possible ce qui est et ce qui n’est pas du poème en prose” (We simply have to accept it:
no clear border, no indisputable criterion allows us to classify without possible discussion what is and
what is not a prose poem) (Yves Vadé, Le Poème en prose et ses territoires (Paris: Belin, 1996), 9).
the way that readers typically engage with each of them, including the senses
and beginning with what we see and what we hear.110 Indeed, in his study of
Baudelaire’s entire œuvre, Roger Pearson situates polyphony at the center of a
number of the prose poems: to “a range of different voices, opinions, attitudes,
and personas [. . .] could be added examples of polyphony within individual
poems, where the poet’s own voice is also the mouthpiece—variously approving,
disapproving, or neutral—for the voices of others.”111
One way to consider what makes Baudelaire’s prose poems poetic is to trace
elements fundamental to verse poetry (and typically thought of as the unique
purview of verse), and the extent to which they are perceptible. While Voltaire
once wrote that “On confond toutes les idées, on transpose les limites des arts,
quand on donne le nom de poème à la prose” (we confuse all ideas, we transpose
of the limits of arts, when we give the name of poem to prose),112 it is precisely
this confounding transposition that Baudelaire’s prose poems attain as they pre-
sent a space for the coexistence of incompatibilities.113 The present discussion is
also aided by the notion of compossibility,
a term that indicates the quality of being compossible; a classic philosophical

concept that refers to one thing’s possibility of existing alongside others at the
same time. In Leibniz, the term expresses a relation in which two possible terms
or events can coexist without the opposition of one of the terms entailing the
suppression of the other.114
110 Such was a capital preoccupation for Baudelaire, in the essay “Du vin et du haschisch, comparés
comme moyens de multiplication de l’individualité” from Les Paradis artificiels, in which he follows
the statement of enhanced perception with comments on seeing and hearing that themselves suggest
poetry: “Les sens deviennent d’une finesse et d’une acuité extraordinaires. Les yeux percent l’infini.
L’oreille perçoit les sons les plus insaisissables au milieu des bruits les plus aigus” (The senses all mani-
fest extraordinary finesse and acuity. Eyes aim at infinity. The ear perceives sounds that are impercept
ible amid even the sharpest noises) (“Du vin et du haschisch, comparés comme moyens de
multiplication de l’individualité,” Les Paradis artificiels (OC 1: 392)). For an important and perceptive
study of how the senses underpin Baudelaire’s flâneur, see Aimée Boutin, “Rethinking the Flâneur:
Flânerie and the Senses,” Dix-neuf, 16.2 (July 2012), 124–32. Boutin’s work on the city has been par-
ticularly important in illuminating the soundscapes of nineteenth-century Paris: the noisy context
into which considerations of the senses, and poetry in the city, naturally situate themselves; see City of
Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
111 Roger Pearson, The Beauty of Baudelaire: The Poet as Alternative Lawgiver (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2021), 505; original emphasis.

112 Voltaire, “Essai sur la poésie épique,” The English Essays of 1727 (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire,
vol. 3B), ed. David Williams and Richard Waller (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1996), 493. At the
end of the same century, Friedrich Schlegel developed the formulation that defined his notion of “pro-
gressive Universalpoesie”: “Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie”
(poetry and prose, genius and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature) (Friedrich Schlegel,
“Athenäums-Fragment no. 116,” Athenäums-Fragmente und andere Schriften (Berlin: Holzinger,
2016), 37).
113 “en effet le poème en prose, non seulement dans sa forme, mais dans son essence, est fondé sur
l’union des contraires” (indeed the prose poem—not only in its form, but in its essence—is based on
the union of opposites) (Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours, 434).
114 Gabriel Riera (ed.), Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), 69.
Introduction 43
Jacques Rancière’s formulation of the compossibility of multiple layers of speech

seems to echo what is at play in Baudelaire’s prose poem: “non la voix d’un mou-
vement mais des paroles singulières qui essaient de penser la puissance commune
incluse dans des moments singuliers, de les maintenir dans l’actuel et de mainte-
nir ouvert l’espace de leur compossibilité” (not the voice of a movement but sin-
gular instances of speech that try to think of communal power included in
singular moments, to keep them in the present day and to keep open the space of
their compossibility).115
Critics are right to focus on Baudelaire’s remarkable ability to conjoin these
incompatibilities so seamlessly.116 While J. A. Hiddleston reads the tension as
reflecting a similar chaos within humankind—“Fragmentation, discontinuity,
external and internal chaos are the essential elements of this work, itself only a
fragment, which is meant to depict the disharmony of modern man both by its
content and it form”117—for Suzanne Bernard the coexistence of opposing forces
yields an undeniable energy that is dynamic and productive: “il y a dans tout
poème en prose à la fois une force d’anarchie destructrice, et une force
d’organisation artistique, et c’est de cette union de contraires que vient son ‘dyna-
misme’ particulier” (in any prose poem there is both a force of destructive
anarchy, and a force of artistic organization, and its particular “dynamism”
comes from this union of opposites).118 Specifically, Baudelaire’s use of what she
refers to as a “genre bifide” (split genre) provides the freedom to express, in ways
not possible in verse, the tensions inherent in overlapping, dissonant, and some-
times contradictory forces: “il voit dans le poème en prose une forme beaucoup
plus libre, plus ‘ouverte’ que le poème en vers, admettant les dissonances, les rup-
tures de ton” (he sees in the prose poem a much freer form, more “open” than
the verse poem, admitting dissonances and breaks in tone).119 This is, of course,
the same liberty to which he referred when he referred to Le Spleen de Paris as
being “encore Les Fleurs du Mal, mais avec beaucoup plus de liberté, et de détail,
et de raillerie.”120
115 Jacques Rancière, En quel temps vivons-nous? Conversation avec Eric Hazan (Paris: La Fabrique,
2017), 42. In her reevaluation of the rhetorical principles of “actio” and “memoria,” Abbott argues that
the former activates and helps sustain the latter; her approach runs counter to the commonly held
belief in criticism (via Barthes and Genette) that they “were no longer relevant once the printed text
began to take over from spoken discourse” (Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé, 21; see especially 20–3).
116 In addition to the ones mentioned here, see Julien Roumette, Les Poèmes en prose (Paris:
Ellipses, 2001); and Vadé, Le Poème en prose et ses territoires.

117 Hiddleston, Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris, 3.
118 Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours, 763; original emphasis.
119 Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours, 112, 109.
120 Letter to Jules Troubat, see supra, 12. It is this passage that allows Blin to connect the dots
between duplicity, prose poetry, and sadism: “Du persiflage au sarcasme, du trait de raillerie au para-
doxe narquois, Baudelaire prétend épuiser dans ses proses tout le sadisme de l’humour” (From banter
to sarcasm, from the line of mockery to the paradox of contempt, Baudelaire claims to use up all of the
sadism of humor in his prose) (quoted in Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours,
Not limited to the tensions within prose poetry, the coexistence of incompati-
bilities reflects the broader presence of the multiple genres in which Baudelaire
was writing throughout the mid-century. Rather than follow a neat evolution
from traditional verse to the more modern prose, Baudelaire kept both modes of
poetry in play, side by side: “The dating of Baudelaire’s individual texts is notori-
ously unclear, and abundant evidence suggests that Baudelaire continued to alter-
nate between [verse and prose poetry] throughout the late 1850s and early 1860s,
pointing to a more heterogenous and reciprocal compositional practice—a fre-
quent changing of beds.”121 Baudelaire was not alone in his attempts to forge a
new mode of poetry that, engaging with the modernity of the moment, looked
not toward the past as Bertrand had done but rather toward the future; in 1859
Élise Gagne (née Élise Moreau, 1813–83) drafted a curious dramatic rendering of
the end of the world in what she termed a “proso-poésie.” Each of the twelve
“chants” opened with a “prélude poétique”—that is to say, in verse—followed by
dramatic scenes written in prose. Instead of blurring the lines between verse and
prose or attempting to envisage an altogether new kind of poetry, the text alter-
nates between them, unwittingly reinforcing each one. At the time, though,
Gagne’s representation of the end of days needed to be set in a text that was, itself,
out of the ordinary: specifically for its ability to draw on multiple genres, as if
echoing Hugo’s verse “Elle est la prose, elle est le vers, elle est le drame” discussed
earlier. As Gagne explains in her preface:
Voici un livre complètement en dehors des voies ordinaires, par la forme et par
le fond, en ce sens qu’au risque de plus mal faire, il sort du cercle où tournent
depuis vingt ans les poètes et les romanciers. La foi, la saine morale et la vérité
font, dans cet ouvrage, une guerre acharnée au scandale, à l’impiété, au men-
songe; le merveilleux y joue un rôle très-actif, et il tient en même temps du
123–4). This increased freedom is what led Tzvetan Todorov, echoing Bernard, to focus on Baudelaire’s
manipulation of the poetic, saying that the prose poems are
des textes qui, dans leur principe même, exploitent la rencontre des contraires [. . .] Tout se
passe comme si Baudelaire [. . .] n’avait été attiré par le genre que dans la mesure où celui-ci
lui permettait de trouver une forme adéquate (une “correspondance”) pour une théma-
tique de la dualité, du contraste, de l’opposition
(texts which, in their very essence, exploit the confrontation of opposites [. . .] It all hap-
pens as if Baudelaire [. . .] had only been attracted to the genre to the extent that it allowed
him to find an adequate form (a “correspondance”) for a thematics of duality, of contrast,
and of opposition). (Tzvetan Todorov, Les Genres du discours (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 120)
While Claude Pichois identifies this same opposition, for him the opposing forces are engaged in rec-
onciliation within the prose poem: “les poèmes en prose, lieu de la conciliation des contraires: de la
vérité et de la beauté, de la poésie et du réalisme, de l’éternel et du quotidien, de l’effrayant et du bouf-
fon, de la tendresse et de la haine” (the prose poems, site of the reconciliation of opposites: of truth
and beauty, of poetry and realism, of the eternal and the everyday, of the frightening and the buffoon,
of tenderness and hatred) (OC 1: 1303).
121 Jamison, “Any Where Out of this Verse,” 257. For Baudelaire’s distinction between the short story
and poetry, and particular the role that rhythm plays therein, see 266.
Introduction 45
poëme, du drame, du roman et de la comédie. Il nous a semblé que ce mélange

de plusieurs genres littéraires, si différents les uns des autres, avait un cachet
d’originalité qui plairait aux lecteurs: l’avenir nous apprendra si nous avons eu
tort ou raison de l’adopter. Par suite de cette pensée, qui nous entraînait à quitter
les routes battues dans le plan comme dans l’exécution de notre ouvrage, nous
l’avons écrit tantôt en dialogue, tantôt en récit; et nous avons fait précéder
chacun des douze chants dont il est composé d’un prélude en vers, sorte de som-
maire poétique de ce qui va suivre, afin de justifier son titre de Proso-Poésie,
c’est-à-dire: prose et poésie.
(Here is a book completely outside the ordinary, in form and in substance, in the
sense that, at the risk of doing more harm, it leaves the circle in which poets and
novelists have spinning for twenty years. In this work, faith, sound morals and
truth make for a bitter war against scandal, impiety, and lies; the marvellous
plays a very active part, and at the same time it draws from poetry, drama, the
novel, and comedy. It seemed to us that this blend of several literary genres, so
different from each other, had a seal of originality that would make it appeal to
readers; the future will say whether we were right or wrong. As a result of this
thought, which led us to leave the beaten roads in both the general idea and the
execution of this work, we wrote it sometimes in dialogue, at other times as a
story; and each of the twelve songs of which it is composed is preceded with a
prelude in verse, a sort of poetic summary of what will follow, in order to justify
its title of Proso-Poetry, that is to say: prose and poetry.)122
Gagne’s oscillation between verse and prose belies an unease that Baudelaire
shared; in a letter to Pierre-Jules Hetzel on March 9, 1863, he expressed his con-
cerns about what he viewed as the weaknesses of his planned collection of prose
poems and, yet, its marketability:
j’attribue une grande importance au Spleen de Paris. La vérité est que je ne suis
pas content du livre, que je remanie et que je le repétris [. . .] Je crois que, grâce à
mes nerfs, je ne serai pas prêt avant le 10 ou le 15 avril. Mais je puis vous garantir
un livre singulier et facile à vendre.
(Le Spleen de Paris is of great importance to me. The truth is that I am not happy
with the book, which I am reworking and reshaping [. . .] I believe that, thanks to
my temper, I will not be ready before April 10 or 15. But I can guarantee you a
unique and easy-to-sell book.)123
122 Élise Gagne, Omégar, ou le dernier homme: proso-poésie dramatique de la fin des temps en douze
chants (Paris: Didier, 1859), i–ii.

123 C 2: 295; original emphasis. Maria Scott is right to point out that “By writing a prose poetry that
was more accessible and therefore potentially more commercially profitable than his verse, Baudelaire
might be considered to have prostituted his art” (Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, 55).
While poets have expressed in divergent fashion the fine line between verse and
prose, it is not the case that all aspects of traditional versification can be applied to
prose poetry: by Baudelaire or anyone else. As Steve Murphy has stated, the rhythms
of verse and prose are fundamentally different—the former’s importance attributed
to the mute e and the consonne d’appui being the most obvious examples. By insisting
on the idea of a poetic prose “musicale sans rythme et sans rime,” Baudelaire removes
any remaining vestiges of metre in this new poetics, “puisqu’en interprétant dans son
acception la plus habituelle le mot rhythme, on produit un énoncé absurde, aucun
texte ne pouvant être dénué de rythmes dans ce sens non périodique” (since by
interpreting the word rhythm in its most usual sense, we produce an absurd
utterance; no text could be devoid of rhythms in this non-periodic sense).124
At the same time, this broad and already heavily studied context of Le Spleen de
Paris is one area in which the present study distinguishes itself from other studies
of prose poetry; for formal elements of poetry—rather than being the sole pur-
view of verse—persist, they are identifiable, and they play a non-negligible role in
Baudelaire’s prose poems. There are simple examples such as the repetition of
“Laisse-moi” or “Dans l’” at the start of five of the seven paragraphs that make up
“Un hémisphère dans une chevelure” (OC 1: 300–1); the abundance of alliteration
and assonance in “L’Invitation au voyage,” particularly in the phrase “Ces énor-
mes navires qu’ils charrient, tout chargés de richesses, et d’où montent les chants
monotones de la manœuvre, ce sont mes pensées qui dorment ou qui roulent sur
ton sein” (These enormous ships that sweep along, loaded full with riches, and
from which the crew’s monotonous songs rise up, these are my thoughts sleeping
or rolling on your breast).125 In this series of overlapping repetition, each group
begins before the previous one ends, for example:
Such considerations of the commercial potential of poetic texts not in verse prefigure what Rimbaud
announced in April 1874, when he wrote to Jules Andrieu about his project provisionally entitled
L’Histoire splendide:
une série indéfinie de morceaux de bravoure historique, commençant à n’importe quels
annales ou fables ou souvenirs très anciens. [. . .] Puis une archéologie ultra-romanesque
suivant le drame de l’histoire; du mysticisme de chic, roulant toutes controverses; du poème
en prose à la mode d’ici; des habiletés de nouvelliste aux points obscurs [. . .] Je veux faire
une affaire ici.
(an indefinite series of pieces of historical bravery, starting from any old annals or fables or
very old memories. [. . .] Then an ultra-romanesque archaeology following the drama of
history; the mysticism of chic, covering all controversies; the prose poem in fashion here;
the skills of the journalist on obscure points [. . .] I want to make money here). (quoted in
Frédéric Thomas, “‘Je serai libre d’aller mystiquement, ou vulgairement, ou savamment’:
découverte d’une lettre d’Arthur Rimbaud,” Parade sauvage, 29 (2018), 320–45 (328–9))
See this study’s Epilogue, infra.
124 Steve Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire: lectures du Spleen de Paris (Paris: Honoré
Champion [Champion classiques], 2007), 351; original emphasis. Murphy also recognizes Baudelaire’s
simultaneous rejection of Houssaye’s own poems: initially entitled “Poèmes antiques” when they first
appeared in early 1848, they were rebaptised “Rhythmes primitifs” when they were collected in his
Poésies complètes in 1850.
125 OC 1: 303; PP 39, translation modified.
Introduction 47
[n], [r], [i], [n], [r], [i]

Ces énormes navires qu’ils
[i], [i], [char], [i], [char], [rich], [mont], [cha]
Navires qu’ils charrient, tout chargés de richesses, et d’où montent les chants
[mont], [cha], [monot], [manœ]
montent les chants monotones de la manœuvre
before the final “simple” alliteration [s], [s], “sur ton sein.”
Like the prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, the present study pursues lines of
inquiry that resonate with both verse and prose alike, examining how prose
poems engage different levels of perception, including visual and aural stimuli.
Let us now turn to examples that illustrate the fluidity between verse forms and
prose, in which the authors force us to consider precisely what, and how, verse
and prose mean and do.
Between Verse and Prose
A little more than midway through his collection Forty Sonnets, Don Paterson
includes a prose poem entitled “The Version,” subtitled “after Nicanor Parra.”
While the specific reference to the work of the Chilean poet, mathematician, and
physicist (1914–2018) is unclear, the poem’s formal missive is unequivocal. In this
collection that—from its very title—focuses so much on one form,126 every step
toward or away from the sonnet stands out. “The Version,” then, is presented as a
sonnet—one of the forty—despite the fact that it is made up of two prose para-
graphs separated by one blank line. Furthermore, the poem’s self-awareness is
even more apparent as it is literally a poem about writing a poem. Charged with
writing a new poem not to be read as such but to be translated into a different
version, the poetic subject in “The Version” digs in and goes one further:
So I conceived of a brilliant plan. I would write a poem about translation,

designed to lose precisely everything in translation—such would be the density
of its idiom, the baroque recursion of its argument, the depth of its lyric intrigue.
(Its subject, or at least such part of it as could be paraphrased, was the creation of
126 While Paterson may have had in mind examples such as Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems
and a Song of Despair or John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, numerous examples from the nineteenth
century exist, including collections by Théodore de Banville: Odelettes (1856), Trente-six Ballades
joyeuses (1873), and Rondels composés à la manière de Charles d’Orléans et Les Princesses, sonnets
(1874); Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles (1874); and the collective Dixains réalistes (Charles Cros
et al., 1876).
a poem so volatile it would burst spontaneously into flames before it could be

read.) “The Version” would consist of my biographical note and photograph,
opposite a blank recto carrying only an apology from the editor. My notoriety
would be instantaneous. I daydreamed. . . From that day, I would be known in
their land as “The Silent Poet”. . . My blank books would be set texts at their uni-
versities, and I would be flown to their stadia to not read to thousands.127
Versions are funny things, and Paterson’s is no exception. Here we have a version
of Parra that is not clearly Parra, a poem entitled “The Version” that is about (not)
writing a poem entitled “The Version,” all in a sonnet that is clearly not a sonnet.
Or is it? For the points that Paterson’s version raises are at one with some of the
questions that inform this study: what referential role does the label of poetic
form play in a given text? Is a version still a version when an earlier source-text is
unavailable? Is a poem entitled “The Version” still a poem if it ends up not being
written? Is a sonnet still a sonnet if it is written in two prose paragraphs?
Perhaps the answer to the last of these questions will help elucidate the earlier
ones. For while Paterson’s poem—Paterson’s sonnet, since he labels it as such—is
written in prose, it retains one notable trace of the verse form to which it refers
since it is one of these Forty Sonnets. The blank space between the two paragraphs
very much serves as a volta, or turn—in a traditional sonnet the pivot point
between the two quatrains and the two tercets—which marks the shift in perspec-
tive. In the first paragraph, the poet conjures up an empty version that he
endeavors not to fill, or rather to fill with a lack of poetic language, and in the
second he receives the version of his “Version,” only to learn that others had sub-
mitted a text entitled “The Version” in his name to a number of journals. This
turn at the volta whirls around another one, since the word “version” comes from
vertere, “to turn”: it shares this root with the word “verse,” itself a turning from
one line into the next.128
For Paterson, the joke is on the narrator who chose not to play, who thought
himself too clever for versions and translations, twists and turns. The text meant to
be an un-text becomes an ur-text, growing exponentially and going viral, leaving
the poet whose name is on it despite not having written it to buckle under the pres-
sure, practically disappearing under the weight of the poem as it draws to a close:
While I dwindle, “The Version” proliferates. I am writing this in the cupboard

below the stairs, and the banging on the front door has stopped; I think they are
127 Don Paterson, Forty Sonnets (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 24.
128 Perhaps nowhere does the sonnet’s volta represent more of a break than in Paul Verlaine’s Les
Amies, the collection of six sonnets published clandestinely (“sous le manteau”) by Poulet-Malassis in
Brussels in 1868 (fear of the censors was so great that the title page lists Segovia as the place of publica-
tion, and the fear was apparently justified as copies were seized at the Belgian border and destroyed
when imported into France (Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, 1202)). Each sonnet’s quatrains
appear at the bottom of the page, and the reader has to turn the page to discover the poem’s tercets.
Introduction 49
in the house now. A yard away, a man with a voice I half know has just spoken
my name. I cannot let him hear me breathe.129
From the blank book in which no poetry is written to the held breath on which it
ends, “The Version” is very much a poem about the limits of poetry: in writing, in
orality, and in the poetic form that it claims for itself. The sonnet is, like a version,
a function of turning from one thing to the next. By turning it over and over
again in prose, Paterson pushes the limits of poetic form and situates the prose
poem at the very place where opposites meet: nothingness and fullness, language
and silence, orality and breath, prose and verse. It is on this place where opposites
not only meet but also collide with an ineluctable friction that the present study
focuses, to consider the beginning of the coexistence of seeming incompatible
elements of poetry as Baudelaire fashioned them into a new kind of poetry that
would mark, in the middle of the nineteenth century as it still does today,130 the
birth of a new poetic form. The present study seeks to trace Baudelaire’s poetry to
consider what about it is truly poetic. For it is not merely for his having forged a
“universally legible poetic idiom”131 in which he captured his moment that his
texts endure, although that is certainly true. Instead, it is in his prose texts’ poetic
nature that we can see what distinguishes them from other prose, from other
poems, from all other literature.
Contemporaneous with Bertrand’s 1836 manuscript of Gaspard de la Nuit is
this passage from George Sand’s novel Lélia (1833), in which a broken bracelet
inspires Sténio to write a prose text which the narrator labels a sonnet:
Sténio jeta les yeux sur le bracelet; il s’était brisé dans un mouvement impétueux
de Lélia, la nuit qu’elle avait passée à discuter ardemment avec Trenmor sur une
des cimes de la montagne. Cette fracture fit quelque impression sur Sténio. Lélia
pouvait, dans une de ses courses capricieuses à travers le désert, avoir été assas-
sinée. [. . .] Des conjectures sinistres s’emparèrent de l’esprit de Sténio, et, par une
de ces réactions inattendues auxquelles sont sujettes les organisations troublées,
il tomba dans une profonde tristesse, et passa machinalement à son bras l’anneau
d’or rompu. Puis il se promena dans les jardins d’un air sombre, et revint au bout
d’un quart d’heure réciter à Pulchérie le sonnet suivant qu’il venait de composer:
129 Paterson, Forty Sonnets, 26.

130 As I write this Introduction, the Guardian Books podcast wonders “whether the prose poem
could be the next big thing” in its December 11, 2018, episode (Claire Armitstead et al., Guardian
Books podcast, December 11, 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2018/dec/11/our-favourite-
books-of-the-year-and-prose-poetry-with-claudia-rankine-books-podcast). In other words, “La poésie
est l’urgence de la prose” (Poetry is the urgency of prose). Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Domaine public
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1998), 93.
131 Catherine Witt, Tokens of Discontent: The Emergence of the Modern Prose Poem (1822–1869),
dissertation (2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2008), 10.

À un bracelet rompu
“Restons unis, ne nous quittons pas, nous deux qui avons partagé le même sort;
toi, cercle d’or, qui fus l’emblème de l’éternité; moi, cœur de poëte, qui fus un
reflet de l’infini.
“Nous avons subi le même sort, et tous deux nous demeurons brisés. Te voilà
devenu l’emblème de la fidélité de la femme; me voici devenu un exemple du
bonheur de l’homme.
“Nous n’étions tous deux que des jouets pour celle qui mettait l’anneau d’or à son
bras, le cœur du poète sous ses pieds.
“Ta pureté est ternie, ma jeunesse a fui loin de moi. Restons unis, débris que
nous sommes; nous avons été brisés le même jour!”
Zinzolina donna au sonnet des éloges exagérés. Elle savait que c’était le vrai
moyen de consoler Sténio; et cette fille légère, qui s’attristait toujours la première,
et qui toujours aussi se lassait la première de voir régner la tristesse, commençait
à trouver que Sténio s’était affligé assez longtemps.
(Sténio cast his eyes on the bracelet; it had been broken in one of Lélia’s
impetuous movements, the night she spent arguing ardently with Trenmor on
one of the mountain peaks. This fracture made a considerable impression on
Sténio. In one of her capricious travels through the desert, Lélia could, have
been killed. [. . .] Sténio’s mind was filled with sinister thoughts, and, by one of
those unexpected reactions to which troubled minds fall prey, he fell into a
deep sadness, and without thinking put the broken golden ring around his
arm. He then strolled gloomily through the gardens and returned after a
quarter of an hour to recite to Pulchérie the following sonnet he had just
composed:
To a Broken Bracelet
“Let us remain united, let us not leave each other, we two who have shared the
same fate; you, golden circle, who was the emblem of eternity; I, the poet’s heart,
who was a reflection of infinity.
“We suffered the same fate, and we both remain broken. You have become the
emblem of woman’s fidelity; I have become an example of man’s happiness.
“We were both merely toys for the one who put the golden ring on her arm, the
poet’s heart under her feet.
“Your purity is tarnished, my youth has fled far from me. Let us remain united,
debris that we are; we were broken on the same day!”
Zinzolina gave the sonnet exaggerated praise. She knew that it was the real way
to console Sténio; and this light girl, who was always the first to be sad, and who
Introduction 51
was always the first to tire of seeing sadness linger, began to feel that Sténio had
grieved long enough.)132
In terms of a crude measurement like word count, the paragraphs seem to follow
the top-heavy structure of a sonnet: thirty-two and thirty-one words in the first
two paragraphs, and twenty-three and twenty-four words in the final two. The
reduction of twenty-five per cent between the two halves of “À un bracelet
rompu” is identical to the change between the two halves of a traditional verse
sonnet, from quatrains (four lines) to tercets (three). If we were to break Sand’s
prose into verses by following her punctuation and semantic segmentation, we
would indeed find that the resulting quatrains follow patterns recognizable in
verse poetry:
Restons unis, ne nous quittons pas,

nous deux qui avons partagé le même sort;
toi, cercle d’or, qui fus l’emblème de l’éternité;
moi, cœur de poëte, qui fus un reflet de l’infini.
5 Nous avons subi le même sort,
et tous deux nous demeurons brisés.
Te voilà devenu l’emblème de la fidélité de la femme;
me voici devenu un exemple du bonheur de l’homme.
Nous n’étions tous deux que des jouets
10 pour celle qui mettait l’anneau d’or à son bras,
le cœur du poète sous ses pieds.
Ta pureté est ternie, ma jeunesse a fui loin de moi.
Restons unis, débris que nous sommes;
nous avons été brisés le même jour!
Naturally these rejigged verses lack end-line rhyme, but their repeated structural
elements are unmistakable, especially in the second halves of the first two stanzas.
(If they lack a traditional aspect of poeticity such as rhyme, it could well be
because, while the novel presents him as a poet, Sténio is—literally, in name—
merely a writer.) First, there is the parallelism in which the disjunctive pronouns
“moi” and “toi” for the subject and object (in this case the poet’s heart and his
lover’s bracelet) create balance between round objects suggesting fullness (“cercle
132 George Sand, Lélia (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1867), 96–7. I first learned of these prose sonnets
in Antoine Fongaro’s work, published initially in articles and then reprinted in his De la lettre à l’esprit:
pour lire Illuminations (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 31–2 and 313–15.
d’or” and “cœur de poète”), followed by the nostalgic reminiscence of what once
was (“qui fus”) and the visual imagery in which an object symbolizes the endless
reaches of time or space (“l’emblème de l’éternité,” “un reflet de l’infini”). These
elements echo what is already established in the poem’s title: the full-circle form
of the ornamental bracelet, symbolizing the sonnet, is broken, its own undoing
sounded out in the hiatus—two adjacent vowels creating a sound that marks the
absence of the kind of fluidity typically sought in poetry—of the first two words,
“À un.” By writing to this broken form, Sténio is eulogizing it and, recognizing its
passing, he is moving beyond it, leaving it behind.
Then, after additional emphasis of their shared commiseration (“Nous avons
subi le même sort, et tous deux nous demeurons brisés”), the parallels (which
appear as anaphora in this versified version) offer the uninspired repetition of
“emblème”: what was first “l’emblème de l’éternité” becomes “l’emblème de la
fidélité de la femme,” suggesting a much more personal description of eternity.
They are also part of a repeated structure in which a nominal predicate (“Te,”
“me”) introduces a presentative (“voilà,” “voici”) and the past is brought into the
present (“devenu”). From there, the poem reveals further repetitions in the sestet:
“tous deux” (v. 6 and 9), “Restons unis” (v. 1 and 13), and “brisés” (v. 6, 14).
Poetry cannot truly be measured by something as crude as word count; these
brief remarks about “À un bracelet rompu” hopefully suffice in showing the dan-
gers of such interpretative sleights of hand. And yet, by breaking down some of
the poem’s integral parts we are perhaps able to see what makes it tick, and what
still makes it poetic. Regardless of their layout, the anaphoric phrases “toi, cercle
d’or, qui fus l’emblème de l’éternité; moi, cœur de poëte, qui fus un reflet de
l’infini” are undeniable examples of repetition. They carry more weight in Sand’s
prose sonnet precisely because of the lack of versified rhythm supporting the
poem. Perhaps the most telling phrase of “À un bracelet rompu” is “le cœur du
poète sous ses pieds”: rather than receiving elevation and transcendence, the
poet’s heart has fallen to the lowest of lows, not only under his feet but below his
very beats—his “pieds”133—and they—this poem’s rhythms—in turn, do nothing
to lift his heart up.
Is this sonnet truly a sonnet? It offers no movement from octet (or quatrains)
to sestet (or tercets) other than in length of phrase, and its rhythms come from
repeated words, phrases, and structures, rather than sonorous or syllabic elem
ents such as those that inform a reading of a traditional verse text. And while the
courtesan Zinzolina is effusive with her praise for this sonnet—the reaction in
“Zinzolina donna au sonnet des éloges exagérés” invites us to consider whether
133 “Terme de versification française. Un pied, deux syllabes; ainsi notre alexandrin qui a douze syl-
labes, est un vers de six pieds, et le vers de sept syllabes est un vers de trois pieds et demi” (Term of
French versification. One foot, two syllables; so our alexandrine, which has twelve syllables, is a verse
of six feet, and the seven-syllable verse is a three-and-a-half-foot verse) (Littré 3: 1112).
Introduction 53
she is a good reader who is ironically mocking this sonnet qui n’en est pas un, or
rather a bad reader who wouldn’t know a sonnet if it walked up and bit her—the
more important questions are: why does Sand’s narrator call this poem a sonnet?,
and what does calling this a sonnet mean for prose, and for poetry?
Sand’s contemporary Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly also had thoughts about the rela-
tionship between prose and poetry;134 as he explained in a letter to Guillaume-
Stanislas Trebutien in March 1853:
Si vous demandez plus que mon opinion sur cette production hermaphrodite qui
répond au mot de M. Jourdain: Tout ce qui n’est pas vers est prose et tout ce qui
n’est pas prose est vers, je n’ai jamais cru à cet aphorisme souverain. Dans l’ordre
des créations de l’esprit, comme dans les créations de la nature, il y a des créa-
tions intermédiaires entre les créations contrastantes. Le monde ne se rompt pas
en deux, mais se relie toujours en trois. La nature procède par nuances, l’esprit
aussi. Ma Niobé n’est pas de la poésie, car il n’y a pas de poésie sans rhythme et
sans cette langue à part que les sots croient un mécanisme et que j’appelle un
organisme, moi! Ce n’est point de la poésie, mais c’est quelque chose de poétique
et d’exalté qui tient le milieu entre la prose et la poésie, mais qui penche surtout
de ce côté. On dirait,—si je ne me trompe—ce morceau-là traduit de quelque
poète inconnu. Et de fait, il y a dans le diable de fouillis qui est ma nature, dans
ce buisson ardent de facultés entrecroisées, il y a, couché quelque part, un poète
inconnu, et c’est des œuvres cachées de ce poète que ceci a été traduit dans la
furie ou la rêverie d’un moment. Voilà la meilleure explication à donner peut-
être de cette strange thing qu’un académicien ne saurait classer.
(If you are asking for more than my opinion on this hermaphroditic production
which responds to M. Jourdain’s statement, “All that is not verse is prose and all
that is not prose is verse,” I have never believed in that sovereign aphorism. For
creations of the mind, as for creations of nature, there are intermediary creations
between contrasting ones. The world does not split into two, but is always tripar-
tite. Nature proceeds by nuance; so does the mind. My Niobé is not poetry,
because there is no poetry without rhythm and without this exceptional lan-
guage that fools consider to be a mechanism and that I for one consider an
organism! It’s not at all poetry, but there is something poetic and exalted about
it, holding the middle ground between prose and poetry, although it is leaning
134 Barbey was also Baudelaire’s contemporary, and a frequent interlocutor about matters pertain-
ing to poetry; on July 9, 1860, Baudelaire opened a letter to Barbey that offers a summary of the verse
poem “L’Horloge” (see Chapter 1, supra):
Cher Vieux Mauvais Sujet
Pensez à moi! Remember, Esto memor!
Mon gosier de métal parle toutes les langues;
c’est-à-dire que, quand j’ai un désir, je suis semblable à une horloge.—Il me semble que
mon tic-tac parle toutes les langues. (C 2: 61; original emphasis)
more in the direction of the latter. If I’m not mistaken, it looks like some piece
translated by some unknown poet. And in fact, there is in the devil of hodge-
podge which is my nature, in this burning bush of intersecting faculties, an
unknown poet is lying somewhere, and of this poet’s hidden works one has been
translated into the fury or the reverie of a moment. This is perhaps the best
explanation to give for this strange thing that a scholar could not classify.)135
Barbey had written the above about “Niobé,” an 1844 text divided into ten num-
bered paragraphs; it would later appear in his 1854 collection Rhythmes oubliés.136
He clearly rejects the very idea that “Niobé” could be considered a poem and pre-
fers to situate it in a middle ground, in the same way that a translation (note his
use of the English words “strange thing” to describe an unclassifiable object) can
be freed from whatever formal rules governed an original version. As Baudelaire
explained in his essay that accompanies his translation of Poe’s “The Raven,” he
had chosen to translate the English verse text into French prose while acknow
ledging its (and its translation’s) inherent imperfections, and instead inviting the
reader to imagine what the rhymes must sound like:
Dans le moulage de la prose appliqué à la poésie, il y a nécessairement une

affreuse imperfection; mais le mal serait encore plus grand dans une singerie
rimée. Le lecteur comprendra qu’il m’est impossible de lui donner une idée
exacte de la sonorité profonde et lugubre, de la puissante monotonie de ces vers,
dont les rimes larges et triplées sonnent comme un glas de mélancolie. C’est bien
135 Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Lettres de J. Barbey d’Aurevilly à Trebutien (2 vols, Paris: A. Blaizot,
1908), 2: 30–1; original emphasis. Referring to forms that defy easy categorization as hermaphroditic
was certainly not of Barbey’s invention; consider this description from Théophile Gautier—whose
“Hermaphrodite de la voix” was discussed earlier (see supra)—specifically from his Mademoiselle de
Maupin (1835) and its celebration of uncertainty:
C’est en effet une des plus suaves créations du génie païen que ce fils d’Hermès et
d’Aphrodite. Il ne se peut rien imaginer de plus ravissant au monde que ces deux corps
tous deux parfaits, harmonieusement fondus ensemble, que ces deux beautés si égales et si
différentes qui n’en forment plus qu’une supérieure à toutes deux, parce qu’elles se
tempèrent et se font valoir réciproquement: pour un adorateur exclusif de la forme, y a-t-il
une incertitude plus aimable que celle où vous jette la vue de ce dos, de ces reins douteux, et
de ces jambes si fines et si fortes, que l’on ne sait si l’on doit les attribuer à Mercure prêt à
s’envoler ou à Diane sortant du bain?
(This son of Hermes and Aphrodite is, in fact, one of the sweetest creations of Pagan
genius. Nothing more ravishing in the world can be imagined than these two bodies, both
perfect and harmoniously blended together, these two beauties so equal and so different
who form but one superior to both of them, because they are reciprocally tempered and
improved. To an exclusive worshipper of form, can there be a more delightful uncertainty
than that which offers you a sight of the back, of the ambiguous loins, and of the legs so
strong and delicate, such that you don’t know whether to attribute them to Mercury ready
to take his flight or to Diana rising from her bath?). (Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de
Maupin (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1878 [1835]), 224; emphasis added)
136 Published posthumously by Alphonse Lemerre in 1897. For more on “Niobé,” see Jules Barbey
d’Aurevilly, Œuvres romanesques complètes, vol. 2, ed. Jacques Petit (2 vols, Paris: Gallimard,
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1964–6), 1203–6 and 1610–13.
Introduction 55
là le poëme de l’insomnie, du désespoir; rien n’y manque: ni la fièvre des idées,

ni la violence des couleurs, ni le raisonnement maladif, ni la terreur radoteuse,
ni même cette gaieté bizarre de la douleur qui la rend plus terrible. Écoutez
chanter dans votre mémoire les strophes les plus plaintives de Lamartine, les
rhythmes les plus magnifiques et les plus compliqués de Victor Hugo; mêlez-y le
souvenir des tercets les plus subtils et les plus compréhensifs de Théophile
Gautier,—de Ténèbres, par exemple, ce chapelet de redoutables concetti sur la
mort et le néant, où la rime triplée s’adapte si bien à la mélancolie obsédante,—et
vous obtiendrez peut-être une idée approximative des talents de Poe en tant que
versificateur; je dis: en tant que versificateur, car il est superflu, je pense, de
parler de son imagination.
(In the casting of prose applied to poetry, there is inevitably a certain imperfec-
tion; but the harm would be even greater in a rhymed mimicry. The reader will
understand that it is impossible for me to provide an exact idea of the profound
and lugubrious sonority, of the powerful monotony of these verses, whose broad
and tripled rhymes sound like the tolling bell of melancholy. It is indeed the
poem of the sleeplessness of despair. It lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas,
nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor driveling terror, nor even
the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it even more terrible. Listen to
Lamartine’s most plaintive stanzas singing in your memory, the most compli-
cated and the most magnificent rhythms of Victor Hugo; mingle with them the
recollection of Théophile Gautier’s subtlest and most comprehensive tercets:
from Gautier’s Ténèbres, for example, that series of formidable concetti on death
and nothingness, in which the tripled rhyme adapts itself so well to the obsessive
melancholy, and you will perhaps have an approximate idea of Poe’s talents
as a versifier. I say “versifier,” for it is superfluous, I believe, to speak of his
imagination.)137
In a manner similar to Baudelaire’s insistence on Poe as a “versificateur,” Barbey,

too, uses the term “poésie” in the strictest of terms, to refer to verse poetry. At the
same time, he makes a clear distinction between poetry and being poetic: “Niobé”
has poetic qualities but is not truly a poem. One might be tempted to consider the
137 OC 2: 344. I am grateful to Peter Dayan for bringing this passage to my attention: for additional
context with respect not only to Baudelaire’s thoughts on translation and prose poetry, but also to the
much longer history of translating foreign verse texts into French prose. While too long to enumerate
here, the list includes such stalwarts as Fénelon’s translations of Virgil and Homer, as well as the
numerous French prose translations of Milton’s Paradise Lost, culminating in Chateaubriand’s 1836
rendering. Or Nerval’s translation of Heine’s Buch der Lieder, published in July 15, 1848, in the Revue
des deux mondes. According to Georges Rodenbach, it was this translation that inspired Marie
Krysinska’s free-verse poems in the early 1880’s. Georges Rodenbach, “La Poésie nouvelle: à propos des
décadents et des symbolistes,” La Revue bleue (April 4, 1891), 422–30 (427). See also Pierre Moreau, La
Tradition du poème en prose avant Baudelaire suivi de Anti-roman et poème en prose (Paris: Lettres
modernes, 1959), and Efim Etkind, Un art en crise: essai de poétique de la traduction poétique, trans.
Wladimir Troubetzkoy (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1982), 17–18.
extent to which Barbey’s approach can be applied to Sténio’s “À un bracelet

rompu”: namely, that the text retains some qualities that mirror those of the trad
itional sonnet, but that those poetic qualities do not suffice to make it a sonnet.
Barbey would not express the same reservations about a different poem that
would find its way into Rhythmes oubliés; dated a decade after “Niobé” (July 18,
1854), it was apparently poetic enough that he—and not a narrator or character
who might or might not understand poetry well—labeled it as such:
Sonnet
Dans cette fuite du Temps qui tombe en poussière derrière nous quand il est
passé, il est un jour, il est une heure que Dieu marque du plus pourpré de ses
rayons sur le front des femmes qui sont belles, et dont la lumière reste, fixe et
brillante, dans notre pensée, comme l’astre polaire des plus chers souvenirs
de nos cœurs.
Heure solennelle dans la Vie! Quand la Beauté, comme un arbre divin, montant
toujours dans la splendeur de son feuillage, touche enfin son zénith et semble
entr’ouvrir le ciel même,—heure solennelle et sacrée! Le nom que vous portez
est pourtant bien terrible dans la langue de celles qui n’ont pas le calme olympien
de la Beauté consciente et suprême:
Vous vous appelez Trente-Six Ans, heure magnifique de la Vie! Orbe fulgurant de
la roue, un instant arrêtée! Minute d’immortalité! Plein de la mer pour la Beauté,
mais seulement quand la Beauté, comme l’Océan, est immense!
Ah! laissez-moi vous contempler sur un front digne de vous porter, heure si
longtemps attendue! heure de gloire de la Beauté accomplie! Laissez- moi
ramasser, pour les jours où vous ne serez plus, les rayons fulminants de votre
auréole, astre de Beauté au zénith, mais sans zénith dans mon âme, inextinguible
soleil qui monterez toujours!
(Sonnet
In this flight of Time which turns to dust behind us when it has passed,
there is a day, there is an time that God marks with his purplest rays on
the foreheads of beautiful women, and with a light that remains fixed and
shining, in our thoughts, like the polar star of our hearts’ most cherished
memories.
Solemn moment in Life! When Beauty, like a divine tree, with the splendor of its
foliage ever rising, finally reaches its zenith and seems to make an opening in
the sky itself, —what a solemn and sacred moment! Your name is nevertheless
terrible in the language of those who do not have the Olympian calm of conscious
and supreme Beauty:
Your name is Thirty-Six Years, magnificent moment of Life! Dazzling orb of the
wheel of time, stopped for a moment: a moment of immortality! Full of the sea
for Beauty, but only when Beauty, like the Ocean, is immense!
Introduction 57
Oh! let me contemplate you on a face worthy of carrying you, moment so long
awaited! Glorious, completed hour of Beauty! Let me pick up, for when you will
no longer be, the fulminating rays of your halo, star of Beauty at its zenith, but
without zenith in my soul, inextinguishable sun which will always rise!)138
Like Sand’s poem, Barbey’s “Sonnet” respects the quadripartite appearance of the
traditional verse sonnet. As N. A. Haxell notes:
Within the four short stanzas, the traditional rupture between octet and sestet is
signalled typographically by a colon at the end of the second stanza where a full-
stop or exclamation mark would be expected. [. . .] Tension and expectation are
built up in the “octet” by means of long, elaborated phrases [. . . whereas] the
tone of the sestet shows a marked contrast with the stately pomp and majesty of
the first two stanzas; the dominant tone here is immediacy, with short staccato
phrases, exclamations, and the use of address [. . .].139
The poem’s rhythm is enhanced by internal repetitions such as the [t] in “cette
fuite du Temps qui tombe,” the ends of the consecutive words “poussière der-
rière,” the anaphora of expressions of time in “il est passé, il est un jour, il est une
heure” and the [p] and the neighboring sounds [ɛ] and [e] of “plus pourpré de ses
rayons.”140 As if turning to dust like Time itself, such repetitions disappear from
Barbey’s “Sonnet” as we move through it, giving way to more sporadic elements:
“Heure solennelle” twice in the second paragraph just like the beseeching “laissez-
moi” of the last one. Indeed, as the first plea “Ah! laissez-moi vous contempler”
falls on deaf ears, it is repeated in a revised version that bears a much humbler
request: “Laissez-moi ramasser [. . .] les rayons fulminants de votre auréole”; the
poetic subject would even be content with the slightest glimmers of the hour of
Beauty (“rayons” are also a repetition, from the first paragraph). As we learn in
Baudelaire’s “Perte d’auréole,” the poet is ultimately better off without such mark-
ers since, as the subject in that poem explains, “Je puis maintenant me promener
incognito, faire des actions basses, et me livrer à la crapule, comme les simples
mortels” (Now I can walk around incognito, commit foul acts, and indulge in
debauchery the way simple mortals do).141 And yet, between these iterations, the
138 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Œuvres romanesques complètes 2: 1212–13. The paragraphs appear as they
do in the Pléiade edition, with spaces between them.

139 N. A. Haxell, “Structure in the Early Prose Poem: Barbey d’Aurevilly’s ‘Trente-Six ans,’” The
Modern Language Review, 81.3 (July 1986), 612–20 (616–17).

140 To modern ears this could sound like a perfect echo, in part because “ses” can be pronounced
with either [ɛ] or [e]. However, in the nineteenth century it was pronounced with [ɛ] (Littré 4: 1925),
like the vowel sound “ay” in “rayon” ([ɛ]); on the other hand, “pourpré” ends with the sound [e].
141 OC 1: 352; PP 113, translation modified. While beyond the scope of the present discussion,
Beryl Schlossman provides an excellent close reading of “Perte d’auréole,” in particular in comparison
with the related passage on Fusées XI, and shows how it is central to Walter Benjamin’s understanding
very act of naming time makes it fall like a house of cards—“Vous vous appelez
Trente-Six Ans”—and, from there, each attempt to capture it seems to be met with
failure as it is immediately corrected, with an exclamation: the thirty-six years
become an “heure magnifique de la Vie!,” shrunken to “la roue, un instant arrê-
tée!,” and then “Minute d’immortalité!.” Time collapses even as the pleas of the
final paragraph ask it to persist, as the poem ends on a note of not ending (“inex-
tinguible”) and of going on forever (“toujours”). Furthermore, it even activates its
own eternal poetic loop by returning to words from the second paragraph
(“montant toujours”) and closing with the final ascent that is cyclical and thus
truly eternal: “inextinguible soleil qui monterez toujours!.”
The “Trente-Six Ans” are a reference to the last poem that Lord Byron would
write, in 1824; he had arrived in Missolonghi, Greece, on January 5 and would die
there on April 19. Byron wrote his ten-stanza poem and its opening call for a
reprieve from the impassive and persistent passing of time some thirty years
before Barbey’s “Sonnet”:
“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”

‘Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!142
The poem ends with a call for a peaceful death to be memorialized via the verses
“Then look around, and choose thy ground, / And take thy Rest” (v. 37–40). For
his part, Barbey was forty-five years old, and not thirty-six, when he wrote his
poem “Sonnet”; in it, he seeks to carve out a poetic time in the time of the “inex-
tinguible soleil qui monterez toujours,” in this eternity crafted and rhythmed dif-
ferently. Collapsed so as to be out of reach of “cette fuite du Temps qui tombe en
poussière derrière nous,” it is beyond measurement, as the imprecision and
inability to capture it suggest: “il est un jour, il est une heure.” Barbey is thus try-
ing to forge an in-between time that is neither one nor the other—a temporal
manifestation of what he calls a “production hermaphrodite”—as his title forges
the in-between poetic form of a sonnet in prose.
Such was the precise subtitle of a poem later in the century: Marie Krysinska’s
poem “Jeanne d’Arc,” from her collection Joies errantes (1894):
of Baudelaire’s modernity (Beryl Schlossman, “The Poet’s Lost Halo—Reading Paris Spleen with
Walter Benjamin in Baudelaire-Ville,” in Cheryl Krueger (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s
Prose Poems, 73–87).
142 George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7: Poetry, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge
(London, John Murray, 1905), 86, v. 1–4.

Introduction 59
JEANNE D’ARC
À Paul Hugonnet.
SONNET EN PROSE
Le bûcher est dressé, le triomphal bûcher,
Où Jeanne montera, ainsi que l’on s’exhausse
Sur un trône d’immortalité.
Court-voyants soudards qui appelez
5 Supplice—l’apothéose de sa gloire!
Plus cléments, vous eussiez volé
Sa belle part
Au patrimoine de l’Histoire.
La voici, tel un joyeux Archange planant haut
10 Au milieu des flammes vermeilles,
Qui chantent sa beauté de vierge sans pareille.
Et sa cendre sera
La semence précieuse qui fera
Lever une moisson de héros.
(The pyre is set, the triumphal pyre, / Where Joan will go up, as one is lifted up /
On a throne of immortality. / Short-sighted soldiers who call it / Torture — the
apotheosis of her glory! / More lenient, you would have robbed her of / Her
beautiful share / Of the heritage of History. // Here she is, like a happy Archangel
soaring high / In the midst of ruby flames, / Which sing of her unparalleled
virgin beauty. // And her ashes will be / The precious seed that will give / Rise to
a harvest of heroes.)143
If Barbey relies on repeated words to drive the rhythm of his prose poem “Sonnet,”
in “Jeanne d’Arc” Krysinska takes a more radical departure. For she occasions
more than a consideration of the definition of the sonnet; she ties both the sonnet
and prose to the stake, sets them ablaze, and lets her poetics emerge from the
smoldering ashes.144
143 Marie Krysinska, Œuvres complètes, ed. Florence Goulesque and Seth Whidden (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2022–). Section I: Poésie, vol. 1: Rythmes pittoresques, ed. Seth Whidden; Joies errantes, ed.
Yann Frémy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2022), 259.
144 Applying Krysinska’s imagery of burning at the stake to poetry itself is neither hyperbole
nor an interpretive invention that benefits from more than a century of hindsight; after “Jeanne
d’Arc” appeared in Le Chat noir on February 4, 1893, a month later she published two poems with
evocative titles in the March 15 edition of La Plume: “Reprise (sonnet renversé)” and “La Chanson
des cendres.”
Such is what she sets up in the very first lines: the triple repetition of [e] in
“bûcher” and “dressé” (and its neighbor [ɛ], from “est”) underscores the pyre that
bookends this line. The verse’s symmetry that comes from the two appearances of
the “bûcher” is reinforced by the median comma; the resulting effect is that the
alexandrine’s 6-6 split is all the more palpable, and it flows gracefully and imperi-
ally into the second verse’s similar 6-6 rhythm and Jeanne’s ascension (Où Jeanne
montera, + ainsi que l’on s’exhausse). But it does not end there, and it persists on
a number of levels: the enjambment “ainsi que l’on s’exhausse / Sur un trône
d’immortalité” suggests that once burned, her martyrdom will surpass temporal
limits (of life as well as of verse). Visually, Krysinska indents the third line to mark
a clear break from the poem’s first two verses. This separation is perceptible not
only in the poem’s layout, but also in its rhythm, where the departure from the
alexandrine is no less important: after two opening 6-6 lines that could very well
suggest a stately alexandrine sonnet befitting a martyr, the very suggestion of a
possible consecration brings its disruption. The line offers a 4-5 split (Sur un
trône + d’immortalité), its nine syllables breaking with any tradition associated
with the sonnet.145 The weak rhyme [e] between “bûcher” and “immortalité” is an
afterthought, and of no consolation for the sonnet that, once buttressed by a pyre
so sturdy its solidity is reiterated, is now tied to the stake and ready to go up
in flames.
It doesn’t get any more stable from there. The disruption from the staid, sym-
metrical alexandrines of the first two lines leads to a rhythmic randomness that
eludes any attempt at identifying a pattern, and mirrors the inability to make
sense to those who cannot see or hear reason (“Court-voyants soudards”):
Le bûcher est dressé, le triomphal bûcher, 6-6

Où Jeanne montera, ainsi que l’on s’exhausse 6-6
Sur un trône d’immortalité. 4-5
Court-voyants soudards qui appelez 5-4
5 Supplice—l’apothéose de sa gloire! 11 (3-5-3)
Plus cléments, vous eussiez volé 8 (3-5)
Sa belle part 4
Au patrimoine de l’Histoire. 8 (5-3)
La voici, tel un joyeux Archange planant haut 13 (3-7-3)
10 Au milieu des flammes vermeilles, 8 (3-5)
Qui chantent sa beauté de vierge sans pareille. 6-6
145 Whereas the verse lengths of a sonnet can vary—for example, Rimbaud’s sonnet “Rêvé pour
l’hiver” alternates between alexandrines and verses of six or eight syllables—it most often does so in
subsequent lines, and rarely after two initial alexandrines.
Introduction 61
Et sa cendre sera 6
La semence précieuse qui fera 10 (7-3)
Lever une moisson de héros. 9 (6-3)
The volta between the octet and the sestet offers a shift in perspective: no longer
addressing the “Court-voyants soudards” directly, the poetic subject speaks more
universally, although the song suggested in line 11 is seemingly an unpleasant
one: the fluidity of the enjambment from lines 2–3 (“que l’on s’exhausse / Sur un
trône d’immortalité”) is replaced with the plaintive hiatus of the repeated [o] [o]
in lines 9–10: “planant haut / Au milieu.” Can only a song or poem lacking fluidity
sing the praises of a “beauté de vierge sans pareille”? This poem’s sights and
sounds have left the known and the typical far behind.
The rhyme scheme—already undermined from the internal echo of “bûcher”
in the first line, which places more emphasis on internal sounds than on the line
ends—is similarly disrupted. If the typical sonnet follows the scheme
ABBA ABBA CCD EED or EDE
or
ABBA CDDC EEF GGF or GFG
Here the charred remains of Krysinska’s prose sonnet are disorganized as
ABAA CACC DEE FFD
with final hiatus-induced rhyme of [o] (“haut”/“héros”) serving as bookends for

the sestet in a way that recalls the repeated “bûcher” of the opening line.
Given Krysinska’s attempts to leave a lasting mark through her poetry—she
would be far less successful than Byron on this score146—it is not surprising that
something would come out of this mess. The connection between Jeanne d’Arc
and poetry’s creative force had already been well-established in the nineteenth
century, notably by Jules Michelet:
Elle fut une légende vivante. . . Mais la force de vie, exaltée et concentrée, n’en
devint pas moins créatrice. La jeune fille, à son insu, créait, pour ainsi parler, et
réalisait ses propres idées, elle en faisait des êtres, elle leur communiquait, du
146 See Seth Whidden, “Introduction. Marie Krysinska: vie libre, vers libre,” in Krysinska, Rythmes
pittoresques, 1–20.
trésor de sa vie virginale, une splendide et toute-puissante existence, à faire pâlir

les misérables réalités de ce monde.
Si poésie veut dire création c’est là sans doute la poésie suprême. Il faut savoir
par quels degrés elle en vint jusque-là, de quel humble point de départ.
Humble à la vérité, mais déjà poétique.
(She was a living legend. . . But her life force, exalted and focused, became no less
creative. The young girl unwittingly created, so to speak, and realized her own
ideas; she made beings of them, she communicated to them from the treasure of
her virginal life: a splendid and all-powerful existence, to make the miserable
realities of this world fade.
If poetry means creation, then this is undoubtedly supreme poetry. It is
important to know how she came to this point, from what humble point of
departure.
Humble indeed, but already poetic.)147
In Krysinska’s version of this “poésie suprême,” the final tercet offers a new kind
of poetics: not one that follows a particularly rich rhyme—there’s nothing special
about “sera”/“fera,” nor about the rime pauvre on which the poem ends—but
rather the sound of the hissing embers, as Krysinska packs into these three final
verses a profusion of the sound [s]:
Et sa cendre sera
Given the female martyr of the poem and the lack of recognition that Krysinska
and other women poets received, it hardly seems innocent that so many of the
final tercet’s words are feminine:
Et sa cendre sera
The silence of the poem’s final letter is a function of the word itself; we could also
consider the extent to which the poem follows this groundswell of feminine
words and [s] with the epic, masculine word “héros” (already lofty due to its
rhyme with “haut”) and its letter “s” that remains silent.148 Krysinska circum-
scribes a poetic space in which the feminine words rhythm the language and
147 Jules Michelet, Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: Hachette, 1888), 10.

148 While it wouldn’t have rhymed with “haut,” Krysinska could have found a way to use the word
“héroïne,” attested in the nineteenth century (Littré 2: 2013).
Introduction 63
silence the traditional source of male agency. Despite bearing an inherent marker
that would visually make the “héros” participate with the other words, in the
break between what we see and what we hear, he is kept out of the poetic sound-
scape that she creates, during the moment of reading the poem and in the future
poetics to rise out of the feminine poet-martyr’s ashes. Marina Warner’s import
ant study of Joan of Arc offers a useful reminder of Joan’s unique, un-categorizable
nature that Krysinska would like to borrow for her poetry and for her own legacy
as poet:
[Joan] eludes the categories in which women have normally achieved a higher
status that gives them immortality, and yet she gained it. [. . .] Only by paying
attention to her unique experience, and by acknowledging that it is at the same
time universal, since the experience of every individual is unique, can the mould
of received ideas be broken, and only when that mould is shattered can Joan of
Arc escape from the confinement of order handed down from generation to
generation into the splendour of the unaccountable, the particular and the
anarchical.149
The end of Krysinska’s poem, just like the very notion of the “sonnet en prose,”
brings to the fore the differences between what we see and what we hear when we
read poetry. Between the quatrains and tercets of the sonnet and the discursive
prorsus inherent to prose; in the sound [s] that leads a dominant, sonorous charge
through the end of a poem while, in a different instance and yet during the same
poetic moment, being accessible to sight but not to sound; in “Jeanne d’Arc”
Krysinska offers a final resting place for the tensions in nineteenth-century poetry
between seeing and hearing poetry. The trajectory through Bertrand, Sand,
Barbey, and Krysinska150 actually offers a corrective to Hopkins’s letter, as this
study’s discussions of Baudelaire’s prose poems intend to show: reading “with the
eyes” does indeed involve “a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence [. . .]
but take breath and read it with the ears,” and the poetry becomes more compli-
cated still.
By now the reader will have noticed that this study of Baudelaire’s giving rise to
the modern prose poetry in French extends beyond poems by Baudelaire himself;
out of the broader context of other liminal nineteenth-century texts—as poems
by Gagne, Sand, Barbey, and Krysinska show—emerge some of the questions
149 Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Knopf, 1981), 6, 274–5.
150 To which one could of course add other poems; Pierre Louÿs used the expression “sonnet en
prose” to describe his poems in a letter to Alfred Vallette in 1897 (in which Louÿs insisted that the new
edition of his 1894 collection Les Chansons de Bilitis print one poem per page): “Comprenez: il faut
que le public se dise en chœur: ‘Ce sont des sonnets en prose.’ Il ne se le dira jamais si on les coupe en
deux” (Understand: the public has to say in unison, “These are prose sonnets.” They will never say that
if you cut them in half) (Chansons de Bilitis, ed. Jean-Paul Goujon (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 323–4).
See also Vadé, Le Poème en prose et ses territoires, 84.
fundamental not only to Baudelaire’s work, but more broadly to prose poetry, and
to all poetry in fact. The present study considers some of the basic qualities of
poetry in the hopes of seeing how they play out, manifest themselves, or are
altered, convoluted, or effaced from, or in, prose poetry. In other words, I hope to
raise questions more broadly about how prose poetry is read, and how it enables
itself to be perceived. What is seen and heard in and through prose poetry? How
is the poem itself perceived by visual, auditory, and formal elements? What can be
heard in prose poetry (speech acts, registers of language, repetitions that rhythm
the unlikely or even seemingly impossible musicality of prose despite what pror-
sus actually means)? To what are any of these questions doubled inside the the-
matics of the texts themselves?
Such are the avenues of inquiry that the present study will pursue. The first
chapter considers the visual elements of prose poetry, both in some formal qual
ities and in how visual aspects are portrayed and perceived in the time and space
of Baudelaire’s poetic prose. At the limits of what can be seen, as Chapter 2 exam-
ines, is the point at which speech enters into the poetic landscape. Baudelaire’s
poetic moment is punctuated with boisterous moments of shock and interrup-
tion, and his prose poems’ modernity—felt through speech acts that upend the
visual scene—stakes its claims, loud and clear, amid the age-old tension between
sights and sounds in poetry. The language of prose includes more than speech,
however; Chapter 3 considers additional layers of the modern lexicon that course
through some of Baudelaire’s prose poems. By listening to elements that had here-
tofore remained inaudible and by situating visual cues within the broader context
of the tension between sights and sounds, we gain access to additional layers and
dimensions that contribute to the coexistence that is inherent to his poetic prose.
Chapter 4 focuses on some of the ways in which Baudelaire’s prose poem sur-
passes the traditional limits of poetry, simultaneously capturing and generating
new perceptions of the world. It has lost none of its modernity from when
Baudelaire first formulated his prose poems in the mid-nineteenth century, and
the need to engage with our present moment remains just as urgent. Forged from
its own contradictions, prose poetry remains fundamental in our attempts to
express the complexities of our own modernity.
1
Seeing Things in Poetry
You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear [. . .]
(Bram Stoker, Dracula, chapter 14)
La poésie, comme le soleil, met de l’or sur le fumier. Tant pis pour
ceux qui ne le voient pas.
(Poetry, like sunlight, coats manure in gold. Too bad for those who
don’t see it.)
(Gustave Flaubert, letter to Guy de Maupassant, February 1880)
A well-known passage from Baudelaire’s essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne”

includes one of the poet’s more concise commentaries on poetry: “peu d’hommes
sont doués de la faculté de voir; il y en a moins encore qui possèdent la puissance
d’exprimer” (few men are endowed with the gift of sight, and even fewer possess the
power to express) (OC 2: 693). On both ends of the transmission between poet and
reader, poetry engages, to varying degrees, with visual aspects and their expression:
when the poet captures what is seen and conveys it in language, and when the
reader, confronted with a text organized in a certain way on a page, attempts to
extract some meaning from it. How do these forces contribute to the act of reading
prose poetry, and how they do manifest themselves in poems from Le Spleen de
Paris, both in the poem’s form and in themes related to degrees of visibility?
In his series of jotted thoughts entitled “Analecta”—the word itself refers to a
collection of excerpts or quotations, and it also evokes the slave who is charged
with gathering scraps and crumbs after a meal: the uneaten remains, the leftovers,
the unwanted morsels as well as those that fell from an already full mouth—Paul
Valéry considered what it means, in language, to see:
Lorsque je dis: je vois telle chose, ce n’est pas une équation entre je et la chose, que
je note ainsi; c’est une égalité.
Mais dans le rêve il y a équation. Les choses que je vois me voient autant que je
les vois. Ce que je vois alors m’explique en quelque manière, m’exprime [. . .].1
(When I say that I see something, it is not an equation between I and the
thing, that I am writing in that way; they are equal.
1 Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade],
1957–60), 2: 729; original emphasis.
But in the dream there is an equation. The things that I see see me as much as
I see them. What I see then explains me, in some way, expresses me.)
And, in a related footnote, he added: “C’est que le JE et ce qu’il voit sont de même
espèce dans les rêves.” (It is because the I and what it sees are of the same species
in dreams.)2
Seeing, speaking, and thinking—“je dis,” “je vois,” “je note”—exist on the same
plane in which there is transparency and balance, and thus the equality that
comes from direct relations between elements in the same realm. Just as assuredly,
it is the dream-state in which the relationship is not one of simple equality, but
rather “équation,” suggesting a respectful, egalitarian relationship with calcula-
tions at its core: taking sufficient account of the other to see how the two interact.
Poetry is that part of the linguistic that brings us closest to dreams, and thus it is
in poetry—as opposed, for example, to the direct discourse announced by the
prose of the opening words “Lorsque je dis: je vois telle chose”—that we can think
about what it means to go about expressing things outside of ourselves.
The connection between such analectae and reflections on the role of the poet
as scrap-collector is itself a variation on a theme already present in Baudelaire’s
corpus; in “Le Vin des chiffonniers,” as both ragpicker and poet he is doubly
engaged with analectae. We see further evidence in “Du vin et du hachisch” (Les
Paradis artificiels):
Descendons un peu plus bas. Contemplons un de ces êtres mystérieux, vivant,

pour ainsi dire, des déjections des grandes villes; car il y a de singuliers métiers,
le nombre en est immense. J’ai quelquefois pensé avec terreur qu’il y avait des
métiers qui ne comportaient aucune joie, des métiers sans plaisir, des fatigues
sans soulagement, des douleurs sans compensation, je me trompais. Voici un
homme chargé de ramasser les débris d’une journée de la capitale. Tout ce que la
grande cité a rejeté, tout ce qu’elle a perdu, tout ce qu’elle a dédaigné, tout ce
qu’elle a brisé, il le catalogue, il le collectionne. Il compulse les archives de la
débauche, le capharnaüm des rebuts. Il fait un triage, un choix intelligent; il
ramasse, comme un avare un trésor, les ordures qui, remâchées par la divinité de
l’Industrie, deviendront des objets d’utilité ou de jouissance. Le voici qui, à la
clarté sombre des réverbères tourmentés par le vent de la nuit, remonte une des
longues rues tortueuses et peuplées de petits ménages de la montagne Sainte-
Geneviève. Il est revêtu de son châle d’osier avec son numéro sept. Il arrive
hochant la tête et butant sur les pavés, comme les jeunes poètes qui passent
toutes leurs journées à errer et chercher des rimes. Il parle tout seul; il verse son
âme dans l’air froid et ténébreux de la nuit. C’est un monologue splendide à faire
prendre en pitié les tragédies les plus lyriques. (OC 1: 381; original emphasis)
2 Valéry, Œuvres, 2: 729.

Seeing Things in Poetry 67
(Let us descend further. Let us contemplate one of these mysterious beings,

living, in a manner of speaking, on the dejections of the big cities; for there are
singular jobs, immense in number. I have sometimes thought in terror that there
are jobs that held no joy, pleasureless occupations, fatigues without relief, pain
without recompense, I was mistaken. Here is a man charged with tidying away
the debris of a day in the capital. All that the great city has rejected, all that she
has lost, all she disdained, all she has broken, he catalogs it, he collects it. He
searches the archives of debauchery, the cacophony of waste. He sorts, makes
intelligent choices; he collects, like a man hungry for treasure, the rubbish which,
chewed up once again by the deity of Industry, will become objects of usefulness
or pleasure. Here he is, in the clear darkness of street lamps tormented by the
night wind, coming up the long crowded and winding streets of small families of
the St. Geneviève mountain. He wears his woven shawl with his number seven. He
arrives, nodding and tripping on cobblestones, like the young poets who spend
their whole days wandering and searching for rhymes. He speaks to himself; he
pours his soul into the cold dark night air. It is a splendid monologue which
would put the most lyrical of tragedies to shame.)
The poetic subject expresses this “monologue splendide” in poetry, the kind of
language not useful for communication (“il parle tout seul”), in the mirroring
that Valéry maps out when he suggests that objects in the poetic realm see,
explain, and express the poetic subject. Baudelaire reformulates this theme later
in the same essay, when he describes the influence of hashish and its ability to
blur subject and object, transitive and intransitive: “Vous êtes assis et vous fumez;
vous croyez être dans votre pipe, et c’est vous que votre pipe fume; c’est vous qui
vous exhalez sous la forme de nuages bleuâtres” (You sit and smoke; you think
you are in your pipe, and it is you that your pipe smokes; it is you that exhales you
in the form of bluish clouds) (OC 1: 392). Very similar to the equation of subject
and object that Valéry discusses, this central function afforded poetic reflection is
not far removed from Rimbaud’s project: as with wood turned to a violin or brass
into a horn, the poet recognizes his potential and sees the poetic “je” as a work in
progress: “Je veux être poète, et je travaille à me rendre Voyant [. . .] Les souf-
frances sont énormes, mais il faut être fort, être né poète, et je me suis reconnu
poète” (I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a Seer [. . .] The suf-
ferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and
I know I am a poet).3
3 Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. André Guyaux and Aurélia Cervoni (Paris: Gallimard
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 2009), 340; original emphasis; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans.
Wallace Fowlie, revised edition by Seth Whidden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 371.
In a manner that recalls the Romantic reaching for the heavens as well as the
Rimbaldian subject’s Promethean claim of stealing fire and returning from
down below, Valéry inscribes the poetic enterprise in a language of verticality
and depth:
Profond est (par définition) ce qui est éloigné de la connaissance.

Superficiel, ce qui est conforme à la connaissance aisée et rapide.
—L’obscurité est profonde, dit l’Œil.
—Profond est le silence, dit l’Oreille.
Ce qui n’est pas—est le profond de ce qui est. . .4
(Depth is (by definition) that which is distanced from knowledge. / Superficial,
that which conforms to easy and fast knowledge. / —Darkness is profound, says
the Eye. / —Deep is the silence, says the Ear. / That which is not—is the depth of
what is.)
The chiasmic sequence that Valéry sets up could hardly be more important for
considering the stakes of perception fully. Far from our conscious understanding
of the world—call it “le rêve,” call it poetry—is the depth that surpasses our
senses: it is that which is obscure to the eyes and silent to the ears. And yet, both
senses are engaged in this profondeur, both acknowledge it, are conscious of it,
and speak of it: “dit” in both cases. What could it possibly mean for the Eye to be
able to speak of that which is beyond the limits of what it can see, and for the Ear
to speak similarly of silence? Might poetry be the arena in which this kind of
aequatio allows for this relationship, in language, and in which language brings us
beyond where our senses cease to perceive? Elsewhere Valéry seems to answer
these questions in the affirmative, for it is out of the gaps, just beyond the limits of
perception, where the creative force of poiesis emerges:
Dans le poète:
L’oreille parle,
La bouche écoute;
C’est l’intelligence, l’éveil, qui enfante et rêve;
C’est le sommeil qui voit clair;
C’est l’image et le phantasme qui regardent,
C’est le manque et la lacune qui créent.5
(In the poet: / The ear speaks, / The mouth listens; / It is intelligence, vigilance,
which births and dreams; / It is sleep which sees clearly; / It is the image and the
illusion which look, / It is the lack and the lacuna which create.)
4 Valéry, Œuvres, 2: 735; original emphasis.

The turn to poetry in search of the answer is not arbitrary; rather, it comes from
the tension that Valéry establishes: not merely between Profond and Superficiel
but, tellingly, between l’Œil and l’Oreille. These receptors have long been the site
of tension in verse, as the distinction between la rime pour l’œil and la rime pour
l’oreille suggests. If initially the former was considered more elegant for adding
visual weight to aural repetition, poets could just as easily manipulate the contin-
gent nature of seeing and hearing, and as these verses from “Les Bijoux” show,
Baudelaire was no exception in this regard:
Elle était donc couchée et se laissait aimer,

Et du haut du divan elle souriait d’aise
À mon amour profond et doux comme la mer,
Qui vers elle montait comme vers sa falaise. (OC 1: 158)
(She had lain down; and let herself be loved / From the top of the couch she
smiled contentedly / Upon my love, deep and gentle as the sea, / Which rose
toward her as toward a cliff.)
In this stanza’s first rhyme that gives primacy to the visual over the oral—called a
“rime normande” because it is said to be based on rural Normand pronunci
ation—Baudelaire plays “aimer” and “mer” off of each other so that we have to ask
ourselves how to read the words: do we pronounce “aimer” like “mer” (both end-
ing [mèr]) or vice versa (both ending [mé])?6 More importantly, how do we nego-
tiate the aequatio—which we are forced to define while we engage with the
poem—specifically, in the tension between the equality of what we see and the
discrepancy that we hear? In a much more playful mode this tension is precisely
what Alphonse Allais was exploiting in his aptly titled poem “Rimes riches à l’œil
ou question d’oreille,” in which the lines do not end in rhymes even though they
look like they should:
L’homme insulté‚ qui se retient

Est, à coup sûr, doux et patient.
Par contre, l’homme à l’humeur aigre
6 “Il est à remarquer d’ailleurs que cette règle est continuellement violée par les classiques, aussi
bien que par les poètes du XIXe siècle. (Racine fit rimer Antiochus et vaincus; V. Hugo, Paphos et faux,
lys et pâlis, . . . etc.)” (Furthermore it is to be remarked that this rule is continually broken by the clas-
sics, as well as by the poets of the nineteenth century. (Racine made Antiochus and vaincus rhyme;
V. Hugo, Paphos and faux, lys and pâlis, . . . etc.)) Albert Cassagne, Versification et métrique de Charles
Baudelaire (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1982 [1902]), 9. Indeed, Cassagne explains that such liberties
were rather rare: “Même si l’on s’en tient à l’exigence classique de la rime satisfaisant à la fois l’œil et
l’oreille, il rime encore de façon à contenter les plus difficiles, et le nombre des infractions aux règles
que l’on rencontre chez lui est tout à fait minime” (Even if one sticks to the classical expectations of
satisfactory rhyme with regards to the eye and the ear, it rhymes in such a way to gratify even the most
difficult listeners, and the number of infractions to the rules in his work is very minimal) (9).
Gifle celui qui le dénigre.

Moi, je n’agis qu’à bon escient:
Mais, gare aux fâcheux qui me scient!
Qu’ils soient de Château-l’Abbaye
Ou nés à Saint-Germain-en-Laye,
Je les rejoins d’où qu’ils émanent,
Car mon courroux est permanent.
Ces gens qui se croient des Shakespeares!
Ou rois des îles Baléares!
Qui, tels des condors, se soulèvent!
Mieux vaut le moindre engoulevent!
Par le diable, sans être un aigle,
Je vois clair et ne suis pas bigle.
Fi des idiots qui balbutient!
Gloire au savant qui m’entretient!7
(The insulted man who holds himself back / Is, for certain, calm and patient. /
However, the man with a sour temper / Slaps he who denigrates him. / Me, I only
act wisely: / But beware the irritants who test me! / Be they from Château-
l’Abbaye / Or born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, / I join them where they hail
from, / For my anger is permanent. / These people who take themselves for
Shakespeares! / Or kings of the Baléares islands! / Who, like condors, rise! /
Better the smallest croak! / By the devil, without being an eagle, / I see clearly
and am not blinded. / Fi the bumbling idiots! / Glory to the wise man who
entertains me!)
And the even more playful couplet in which he replaces the anticipated holorime
“emmerdante” with “ennuyeuse,” followed by a justification in which he states his
preference for a false rhyme to triviality:
Ah! vois au pont du Loing! de là, vogue en mer, Dante!

Hâve oiseau, pondu loin de la vogue ennuyeuse.
La rime n’est pas très riche, mais j’aime mieux ça que la trivialité.8
(Ah! See at the Loing bridge! From there, sailing the sea, Dante! / Haggard bird,
hatched far from the boring swell. / The rhyme is not very rich, but I like it better
than triviality.)
7 Originally published in Le Sourire, December 7, 1901. Alphonse Allais, Par les bois du Djinn /
Parle et bois du gin. Poésies complètes, ed. François Caradec (Paris: Gallimard [Poésie], 2005), 19–20.
8 Allais, Par les bois du Djinn, 51; original emphasis.
Baudelaire and Valéry were not the first to consider the limits of consciousness
and, specifically, of the senses’ ability to be useful in that regard. Consider these
lines from Victor Hugo’s “Magnitudo Parvi” (Les Contemplations, 1856):
[… . . . … . . . … . . . .]
Il sent, faisant passer le monde
Par sa pensée à chaque instant,
Dans cette obscurité profonde
Son œil devenir éclatant;
Et, dépassant la créature,

Montant toujours, toujours accru,
Il regarde tant la nature,
Que la nature a disparu!
Car, des effets allant aux causes,

L’œil perce et franchit le miroir,
Enfant; et contempler les choses,
C’est finir par ne plus les voir.
La matière tombe détruite

Devant l’esprit aux yeux de lynx;
Voir, c’est rejeter; la poursuite
De l’énigme est l’oubli du sphinx.
Il ne voit plus le ver qui rampe,

La feuille morte émue au vent,
Le pré, la source où l’oiseau trempe
Son petit pied rose en buvant; [. . .]
Ni les mondes, esquifs sans voiles,

Ni, dans le grand ciel sans milieu,
Toute cette cendre d’étoiles;9
(He feels, making the world pass / By his thoughts in every instant, / In this deep
darkness / His eyes becoming bright; // And, surpassing the creature, / Rising always,
always increased, / He watches nature so much, / That nature has disappeared! // For,
9 Victor Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre Albouy, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade], 1964–74), 2: 631–2.
from the effects to the causes, / The eye pierces and passes through the mirror, /
Child; and contemplating things, / Is to end up no longer seeing them. // Matter
falls to pieces / Before the lynx-eyed mind; / To see is to reject; to pursue / The
enigma is to forget the sphinx. // He no longer sees the crawling worm, / The
dead leaf moved by the wind, / The field, the spring where the bird splashes / Its
small pink foot while drinking; [. . .] // Nor worlds, sail-less skiffs, / Nor, in the
great middle-less sky, / All this ash of stars.)
Not only are there realms that exist outside consciousness, but attempts to com-
prehend them only make them disappear all the more quickly: “Il regarde tant la
nature, / Que la nature a disparu!.” As the subject of “Magnitudo Parvi” concludes,
“[. . .] contempler les choses, / C’est finir par ne plus les voir.” In light of Valéry’s
chiasmus of depth, it comes as little surprise to read his suggestion that, upon
reaching the limits of one sense’s perception, another one can perhaps take up the
relay: “L’oreille est le sens préféré de l’attention. Elle garde, en quelque sorte, la
frontière, du côté où la vue ne voit pas” (The ear is the preferred sense for atten-
tion. It guards, in a way, the limit, on the side where sight does not see).10
What the eyes might or might not see is a recurring question in Baudelaire’s
verse poetry:
Eyes have long been recognized as occupying a place à part in the at once highly
conventional and highly personalized blason du corps féminin elaborated in Les
Fleurs du Mal. [. . .] A more than usually insistent preoccupation with women’s
eyes is also to be found in other poems written between late 1858 and
early 1860.11
To this preoccupation we could add similarly literal questions about eyes on verse
poetry, which can easily be traced along lines of what is seen and what is heard: a
sonnet is nearly as recognizable as a paragraph, and engaging with verse produces
a familiarity with what rhyme and meter sound like. In what ways might the prose
poem frame this aequatio of seeing and hearing in poetry?12

11 Richard D. E. Burton, Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 138–9; original emphasis.
12 Philippe Ortel considers the connections between the visual and the prose poem as they are
encouraged and framed by photography; see Philippe Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie:
enquête sur une révolution invisible (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 2002), 141–67. See also Kathryn
Oliver Mills, Formal Revolution in the Work of Baudelaire and Flaubert (Newark, DE: University of
Delaware Press, 2012), 81–5.
The Eyes Have It
Le Fou et la Vénus
Quelle admirable journée! Le vaste parc se pâme sous l’œil brûlant du soleil,
comme la jeunesse sous la domination de l’Amour.
L’extase universelle des choses ne s’exprime par aucun bruit; les eaux elles-
mêmes sont comme endormies. Bien différente des fêtes humaines, c’est ici une
orgie silencieuse.
On dirait qu’une lumière toujours croissante fait de plus en plus étinceler les
objets; que les fleurs excitées brûlent du désir de rivaliser avec l’azur du ciel par
l’énergie de leurs couleurs, et que la chaleur, rendant visibles les parfums, les fait
monter vers l’astre comme des fumées.
Cependant, dans cette jouissance universelle, j’ai aperçu un être affligé.
Aux pieds d’une colossale Vénus, un de ces fous artificiels, un de ces
bouffons volontaires chargés de faire rire les rois quand le Remords ou l’Ennui
les obsède, affublé d’un costume éclatant et ridicule, coiffé de cornes et de
sonnettes, tout ramassé contre le piédestal, lève des yeux pleins de larmes vers
l’immortelle Déesse.
Et ses yeux disent:—“Je suis le dernier et le plus solitaire des humains, privé
d’amour et d’amitié, et bien inférieur en cela au plus imparfait des animaux.
Cependant je suis fait, moi aussi, pour comprendre et sentir l’immortelle Beauté!
Ah! Déesse! ayez pitié de ma tristesse et de mon délire!”
Mais l’implacable Vénus regarde au loin je ne sais quoi avec ses yeux de
marbre. (OC 1: 283–4)
(What an admirable day! The vast park swoons under the sun’s blazing eye, like
youth under Love’s domination.
The universal ecstasy of things declares itself without noise; the very waters
seem to sleep. Quite unlike human celebrations, here is a silent orgy.
An ever-increasing light seems to make objects increasingly sparkle. Aroused
flowers burn with the desire to outdo the sky’s azure by the energy of their
colors, and the heat, turning scents visible, seems to make them rise to the stars
like smoke.
However, amid this universal rapture, I noticed an afflicted creature.
At the feet of a colossal Venus, one of those artificial fools, one of those volun-
tary buffoons assigned to make kings laugh when pursued by Remorse or Ennui,
rigged out in a flashy and ridiculous costume, capped in horns and bells, all
healed against the pedestal, raises his tear-filled eyes toward the immortal
Goddess.
And his eyes say, “I am the lowest and the most lonely of humans, deprived of
love and of friendship and for that reason quite inferior to the most incomplete
animals. However I am made, I as well, to understand and to feel immortal

Beauty! Oh Goddess! Take pity on my sorrow and my madness!”
But the implacable Venus looks into the distance at something or other with
her eyes of marble). (PP, 11)
In considering what is seen and heard in “Le Fou et la Vénus,” we are immediately
struck by the dominance of the visual field in the first paragraph: not only the
seeing inherent to “admirable”13 nor the great open space of “Le vaste parc”—its
expansive reach emphasized by the assonance that pulls through the entire line:
“Quelle admirable journée! Le vaste parc se pâme”—but also the burning eye of
the sun. Overloading a dominant visual space with aural examples suggests that
one is never far from the other; and sure enough, the visual is quickly replaced by
the aural, or rather the absence of the aural: the absolute, deafening silence of that
which could reasonably be considered to be the most boisterous, “L’extase univer-
selle.” Even language falls short, as homophony suggests that even “les ‘o’”
(couched in “les eaux”) have fallen asleep. The return to silence at the end of the
paragraph with the “orgie silencieuse” is interrupted by the piercing assonance of
[i] that haunts the end of the phrase: “c’est ici une orgie silencieuse.” The constant
tension from this back-and-forth between seeing and hearing continues with the
return of the sun’s burning eye, this time so hot that it makes visible that which is
ordinarily invisible: “rendant visibles les parfums.”
What these senses lack, though, is a source, which arrives in the fourth para-
graph—at the center of this poem—with an interruption: “Cependant.” This pivot
serves the same purpose as what in a verse poem is referred to as the volta, or turn
(in a sonnet, between the two quatrains and the two tercets):
A musical and prosodic term for a turn, particularly the transition point between
the octave and sestet of the sonnet [. . .]. The volta is significant because both the
particular rhymes unifying the two quatrains of the octave and also the envelope
scheme are abandoned simultaneously, regardless of whether this break is fur-
ther reinforced syntactically by a full stop at the end of the octave (though usu-
ally it is), creating a decisive “turn in thought.” By extension the term is applied
to the gap or break at line 9 of any sonnet type [. . .] From the point of view of
print culture, the turn is effected in white space, i.e. in the gap between stanzas.14
13 See the discussion on the visual element underpinning the words miracle and admire in this
study’s Introduction, supra.
14 Alex Preminger and Terry V. F. Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1367. Hiddleston includes this poem in a group of
similar pieces from Le Spleen de Paris that share “examples of the kinds of structure which succeed the
stanzaic”:
“Le Désespoir de la vieille,” “Un plaisant,” “Chacun sa chimère,” “Le Fou et la Vénus,” “Le
Chien et le flacon,” “La Solitude,” “Les Fenêtres,” “Le Désir de peindre,” “Les Bienfaits de la
lune,” and “Laquelle est la vraie?” [. . .] have a structure which, in a way vaguely reminiscent
The reiteration of the general with which the poem opened (“cette jouissance
universelle” echoing the earlier “extase universelle des choses”) abruptly shifts to
the particular, based on not just any personal perception but that of the poetic
subject, who arrives on the scene: “j’ai apercu.” For Maria Scott, this point also
marks an important shift: from active verbs and their “impression of sexual ardor
and potency” to “the passive verbal form in the portrait of the clown [which] indi-
cates that he is acted upon rather than acting.”15 The difference between seeing
and perceiving is, as Littré reminds us, one of time: “apercevoir” refers, in the blink
of an eye, to the moment when one begins to see and to comprehend what one
sees (1: 160). The simultaneity of seeing and understanding is already suggested
by the word that serves as pivot, “cependant,” with its temporal mot-valise “pen-
dant” always lurking in the shadows.
At the same time, we glimpse the poem’s emotional contrast: between “affligé”
and “jouissance” (which echo the two poles of Spleen and Idéal). The affliction of
this specific “fou” is spelled out visually: from his vertically challenged position at
Venus’s feet to his physical appearance to his own sad, tearful eyes. That he is
ridiculous is plain to see: his role of jester is one of bringing levity to the court
through verbal and physical comedy, and the latter is apparent in his clothing and
its accoutrements (“un costume éclatant et ridicule, coiffé de cornes et de son-
nettes”). Worse still, he is described as a “bouffon”: the verb “bouffer” is thought
to be a derivative of its homophone “pouffer,” and comes from the plosives associ-
ated with puffing cheeks and making silly facial expressions. If this “fou” is cap
able of verbal comedy, we haven’t heard a word of it yet (the only sonorous
elements of the line are the repetitions that weave various aspects of his function
tightly to one another: “bouffons volontaires” and “faire rire les rois”).
And, not surprisingly, it is in his eyes that we see the limits of what one can
see16—and, as Valéry might say, where we reach the limit so closely guarded by
the ear—for, well beneath the ridiculous, laughter-provoking exterior, the eyes
express an unmistakable sadness and are raised upwards toward the goddess.
That is to say: the eyes speak.
The penultimate line shatters the silence of the first half of the poem with
a strange noise, a discourse which is not one. It is quoted speech, set off with
of the sonnet or the “rondel,” is so geometrical as to be immediately perceptible to

the eye. (J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987), 81)
15 Maria Scott, “How to Read (Women) in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems,” Approaches to Teaching
Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, in Cheryl Krueger (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems
(New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2017), 96–106 (102). Similarly, for Kaplan this
point is a “pivotal contradiction” (Edward K. Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, The
Ethical, and the Religious in the Parisian Prowler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990, 121).
16 For Walter Benjamin, “Baudelaire describes eyes that could be said to have lost the ability to
look.” Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Michael W. Jennings (ed.), The Writer of
Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. by Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press [Belknap], 2006), 205.
guillemets and even introduced with the dash that traditionally announces the
beginning of speech. And yet it is not: eyes cannot speak, and so the reported
speech is anything but.17 Rather, it is the kind of impossible discourse that gets
irrevocably caught in the speaker’s throat like in another prose poem, “Le Vieux
Saltimbanque”:
Mais quel regard profond, inoubliable, il promenait sur la foule et les lumières,
dont le flot mouvant s’arrêtait à quelques pas de sa répulsive misère! Je sentis ma
gorge serrée par la main terrible de l’hystérie, et il me sembla que mes regards
étaient offusqués par ces larmes rebelles qui ne veulent pas tomber.18
(But what a deep, unforgettable gaze he moved over the crowd and the lights
whose flowing movement stopped a few steps away from his disgusting misery! I
felt my throat tighten under the terrible hand of hysteria, and it seemed to me
that my glances were hidden by those rebellious tears which refused to fall).
(PP, 29; modified)
The notion of direct straightforward prose—prorsus—that is presented as a kind

of speech act underscores one of the fundamental aspects of Baudelaire’s poetic
project in Le Spleen de Paris, as is evidenced by the tonal oscillations in a prose
that is more or less poetic, and more or less quoted or paraphrased. For Michel
Murat, it is precisely this quality that distinguishes Baudelaire’s prose poetry from
that of his predecessors and contemporaries: unlike those on the axis that runs
from Bertand through Rimbaud and which Murat identifies as following a trace-
able evolution in poetry from verse to non-verse, Baudelaire turns his prose into
poetic prose: “Il va de la prose à la prose: d’une prose courante—au sens soci-
ologique plus qu’esthétique de ce mot—à un poème en prose, ce qui implique un
changement de statut et un déplacement générique: autrement dit, la confection
17 The present consideration of the role of verba dicendi focuses on its demarcation from and con-
tribution to the multi-layered texture of Baudelaire’s poetic language. As a full linguistic analysis of
this category of language is beyond the scope of the present study, I ask for the reader’s indulgence as
I proceed with this broad category; for a thorough study, see Sophie Marnette, Speech and Thought
Presentation in French: Concepts and Strategies (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005), in particular
“Enunciation Theory and S&TP” and “What is ‘reported discourse’?,” 19–38 and 39–83, respectively.
18 OC 1: 296. And yet, as Jean-Michel Maulpoix explains, the poet finds a way to express the words
that choke: “La voix traversée de bâillements, de trous d’air, le poète tardif chante malgré tout. Des
clous rouillent dans sa gorge” (With his voice full of yawns and air holes, the late poet sings despite
everything. Nails rust in his throat) (Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Domaine public (Paris: Mercure de France,
1998), 22). Speechlessness is more menacing in “Les Bienfaits de la lune” (see infra, Chapter 4), in
which it is the result of the moon’s tight grip on the child’s throat (“elle t’a si tendrement serrée à la
gorge que tu en as gardé pour toujours l’envie de pleurer” (she held you so tightly by the throat that
you felt like crying forever), OC 1: 341). Steve Murphy points out that this reference is to a “symptôme
précis du serrement de gorge très bien connu à l’époque” (precise symptom of throat-clenching, which
was very well known at the time) (Steve Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire: lectures du Spleen de
Paris (Paris: Honoré Champion [Champion classiques], 2007), 496 n. 65) and is, for Baudelaire, a
symptom of hysteria “s’exprimant dans les femmes par la sensation d’une boule ascendante et asphyxi-
ante” (expressed in women by the sensation of an ascending and asphyxiating ball) (OC 2: 83).
d’un objet littéraire.”19 (He goes from prose to prose: a common prose—in the
aesthetic sense of the word more than the sociological—to a prose poem, which
implies a change in status and a generic movement: in other words, the confection
of a literary object.) Gérard Genette sees the prose poem similarly, although he
frames prose in terms of its distance from the norm of verse: “c’est que le langage
poétique se définit, par rapport à la prose, comme un écart par rapport à la norme
[. . .] la poésie, c’est l’antiprose.”20 (Poetic language defines itself, in relation to
prose, as a separation from the norm [. . .] poetry is antiprose.)
While this movement is not entirely linear, neither is it so cleanly binary.
Instead, as Baudelaire remodels prose to fashion something literary and poetic,
the resulting poems retain traces of and bear witness to the process that brought
him there; by extension, they demonstrate and exhibit the full range that the form
can offer. On this point, there is a clear development in Baudelaire’s approach to
showing his hand. About the 1845 Salon—a good decade before his experimenta-
tions in poetic prose, when all of his poems were in verse—he had written that
“Moins l’ouvrier se laisse voir dans une œuvre et plus l’intention en est pure et
claire, plus nous sommes charmés” (OC 2: 402–3) (The less the creator leaves to
be seen in a work, the purer and clearer is its intention, and the more we are
charmed). By contrast, some of the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris that he
wrote later in life are like sculptures that show smooth contours emerging out of
the rough-hewn marble, with the artist’s etchings and carving marks still visible
(Figure 1). The overall effect is that we confront it all: raw material being manipu-
lated and polished, process and finished product alike.21
Baudelaire had considered sculpture in his art criticism, although his low opin-
ion of the medium was more a function of the reception and interpretation of the
final product, and not related to the artistic process that brought it there. In the
section entitled “Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse” from his Salon de 1846
essay, he complains that the real problem with sculpture is that its three dimen-
sions push the work beyond what the artist can control; by being in the eye of the
beholder, beauty is irrevocably beyond the artist’s grasp:
19 Michel Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud, revised edition (Paris: José Corti, 2013 [2002]), 197–8. Murat is
right to point to the important studies that situate Baudelaire’s prose poetry with the broader context
of other prose publications (in La Presse and elsewhere), including the important presence of journal-
istic prose in the mid-century. On this point, see Graham Robb, “Les origines journalistiques de la
prose poétique de Baudelaire,” Les Lettres romanes, xliv (1990), 15–25; Marie- Ève Thérenty, La
Littérature au quotidien: poétiques journalistiques au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2007); and Thomas
C. Connolly, “Baudelaire the Frequent Flyer: Prostitution, the Press, and How the Prose Poem Almost
Sold its Soul,” Romance Notes, 55.3 (2015), 463–74.
20 Gérard Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil [Tel Quel], 1969), 127–8; original emphasis.
21 Without presuming to offer an exhaustive bibliography on such a complex topic, see David Scott,
“Tensions dynamiques: le rapport sculpture/poétique en France, 1829–1859,” Sculpture et poétique:
Sculpture and Literature in France, 1789–1859, in L. Cassandra Hamrick and Suzanne Nash (eds.),
special issue of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 35.1 (Fall 2006), 132–50, among other essays in
that volume.
Figure 1. Auguste Rodin, La Main de Dieu
La sculpture a plusieurs inconvénients qui sont la conséquence nécessaire de ses

moyens. Brutale et positive comme la nature, elle est en même temps vague et
insaisissable, parce qu’elle montre trop de faces à la fois. C’est en vain que le
sculpteur s’efforce de se mettre à un point de vue unique; le spectateur, qui
tourne autour de la figure, peut choisir cent points de vue différents, excepté le
bon, et il arrive souvent, ce qui est humiliant pour l’artiste, qu’un hasard de
lumière, un effet de lampe, découvrent une beauté qui n’est pas celle à laquelle il
avait songé. (OC 2: 487)22
(Sculpture has many cons which are the necessary consequence of its means.
As brutal and positive as nature, it is simultaneously vague and intangible,
because it shows too many sides at once. It is in vain that the sculptor forces
himself to place himself in a single perspective; the spectator, who walks around
the figure, can choose a hundred different perspectives, apart from the right one.
22 He would soften his stance a decade later when, in the Salon de 1859, he was more generous in
his comments about sculpture, which he compared to lyric poetry: “De même que la poésie lyrique
ennoblit tout, même la passion, la sculpture, la vraie, solennise tout, même le mouvement; elle donne à
tout ce qui est humain quelque chose d’éternel et qui participe de la dureté de la matière employée” (In
the same way that lyric poetry ennobles everything, even passion, true sculpture renders everything
more solemn, even movement, it gives to all things human, something of the eternal, and which
participates from the strength of the material used) (OC 2: 671).
And as often happens, which is humiliating for the artist, a trick of the light and
an effect from the lamplight expose a beauty which is not the one he had
imagined.)
A different kind of spectator engaging with a statue is on display in “Le Fou et la

Vénus,” in which the subject rehearses a mise en abyme of the role of poet: inter-
preting “things”—“L’extase universelle des choses” initially, now the tears in the
madman-as-poet’s eyes—and transposing them in the lowly diction of the para
phrase: lowly because filtered and distanced from the source. As such, we have
several layers of the particular, the presence of which could hardly be felt more
poignantly, since the eyes begin by stating “Je suis le dernier et le plus solitaire des
humains.” The madman-as-poet’s inner sadness, once identified, manifests itself
not in language but in tears, which are interpreted by another poetic voice (our
narrator in this poem, the subject of “apercevoir”), and that interpretation is itself
set in the language of the prose poem.
This use of the verb “dire” is indeed odd, as is more generally this presence of
quoted speech that is not quoted speech at all. But it is not the first iteration in the
poem of “dire”; the third paragraph offers that:
On dirait qu’une lumière toujours croissante fait de plus en plus étinceler les
objets; que les fleurs excitées brûlent du désir de rivaliser avec l’azur du ciel par
l’énergie de leurs couleurs, et que la chaleur, rendant visibles les parfums, les fait
monter vers l’astre comme des fumées.
The contrast is clear: the general “On dirait” is of the vague, hypothetical variety,
detached from individual perspective and accumulating details as it goes with
each repetition of the coordinating conjunction “que” (“On dirait qu’une lumière
[. . .]; que les fleurs excitées brûlent du désir [. . .], et que la chaleur [. . .] les fait
monter [. . .]”). Such impersonal visual observations of the exterior world are
countered, in the supposedly quoted speech of what is heard in the madman-as-
poet’s eyes, by that part of “apercevoir” that is the result of what is observed after
having been sifted through the filter of time, when something seen becomes
something felt: alienation, lack of love or even friendship, being lower than the
lowest despite bearing the same innate potential as everyone else to reach higher
and higher. It is again reminiscent of “Le Vieux Saltimbanque,” this time the
poem’s sad concluding tone and the state of the poet:
Et, m’en retournant, obsédé par cette vision, je cherchai à analyser ma soudaine
douleur, et je me dis: Je viens de voir l’image du vieil homme de lettres qui a
survécu à la génération dont il fut le brillant amuseur; du vieux poète sans amis,
sans famille, sans enfants, dégradé par sa misère et par l’ingratitude publique,
et dans la baraque de qui le monde oublieux ne veut plus entrer! (OC 1: 297)
(And, turning away, obsessed with this vision, I sought to analyse my sudden
pain, and I told myself: I have just seen the image of an old writer who has
outlived the generation of which he was the brilliant entertainer; of the old poet
without friends, family, or children, debased by his misery and by public ingrati-
tude, and in the barracks into which the forgetful world no longer wishes to
enter!) (PP, 30; modified)
In her discussion of “Ciel brouillé,” a different verse poem by Baudelaire (OC 1:

49–50), Maria Scott argues that the hesitation over the eyes’ color and the objecti-
vation of the eyes yields the failure of a meaningful encounter with the other,
including in ethical terms.23 More generally, Scott argues, “the frustration of the
lyric subject’s active, mastering gaze may produce something that resembles an
ethical relation to the other, one respectful of her difference”; she further asserts
that “the fantasy of a full meeting of gazes, of complete and unproblematic legibil-
ity, is revealed in Baudelaire’s writing to be a narcissistic lure.”24
This relationship between perspective, perception, and how it reflects in us—
this poetry, this aequatio—recalls Valéry’s formulation “Les choses que je vois me
voient autant que je les vois. Ce que je vois alors m’explique en quelque manière,
m’exprime.” While this echo appears clearly in the madman-as-poet’s exuberant
expression of sadness and delirium (“Cependant je suis fait, moi aussi, pour com-
prendre et sentir l’immortelle Beauté! Ah! Déesse! ayez pitié de ma tristesse et de
mon délire!”), this kind of mirroring is suggested much earlier, even in the poem’s
first words: “Quelle admirable journée!.” As this emotive outburst lacks any par-
ticular source—that is, other than the standard lyric voice to which we would
typically attribute such statements—we can consider the extent to which it, too,
suggests looking outwards and inwards, simultaneously. That the day is described
as “admirable” offers a useful conceptual frame: this day, and in fact the whole
scene on display here, have as their stem mirer, “Regarder comme dans un miroir”
and, figuratively, “se voir, se reconnaître” (Littré 3: 572). This “admirable journée”
thus offers the moment of poetic inspiration stretched to its limits—in temporal
terms established by the verb “apercevoir.” The mirror between the madman-as-
poet and what he sees, and in what he sees and how that reflects and is reflected in
what can be seen in him, exists at the very limit of sight. It is precisely this outer
limit that recalls the second paragraph from the poem “Le Joueur généreux”:
Il y avait là des visages étranges d’hommes et de femmes, marqués d’une beauté

fatale, qu’il me semblait avoir vus déjà à des époques et dans des pays dont il
m’était possible de me souvenir exactement, et qui m’inspiraient plutôt une
23 Maria C. Scott, “Reading the Look and Looking at Reading in Baudelaire,” The Modern Language
Review, 104.2 (2009), 375–88 (378).
24 Scott, “Reading the Look and Looking at Reading in Baudelaire,” 382 and 387.
sympathie fraternelle que cette crainte qui naît ordinairement à l’aspect de

l’inconnu. Si je voulais essayer de définir d’une manière quelconque l’expression
singulière de leurs regards, je dirais que jamais je ne vis d’yeux brillant plus éner-
giquement de l’horreur de l’ennui et du désir immortel de se sentir vivre.
(OC 1: 325)
(There were strange faces of men and women, marked with a fatal beauty, which
I might have already seen at times and in lands impossible for me to recall
exactly, and which aroused my brotherly sympathy rather than that fear usually
provoked by the sight of the unknown. If I wanted to try to define their gaze’s
singular expression, I might say that never have I seen eyes shining more force-
fully with a dread and an immortal desire to feel themselves live).
(PP, 71–3; modified)
In “Le Fou et la Vénus,” the point at which sight no longer suffices—the “expres-
sion singulière de leurs regards” from “Le Joueur généreux”—is inscribed in the
goddess’s stony stare.25 Such is the duplicity of the madman-as-poet: the happi-
ness that can be gleaned from his exterior (ridiculous costume, his task of making
others laugh) betrays his internal sadness, the sort of poetic essence which exists
only in what the eyes make heard: at that limit where l’Œil yields to l’Oreille,
where what had been a deafening silence is replaced by the sounds of spoken
language that is not really spoken. It is, in other words, poetry.
This same poetry is precisely the answer to a verse poem of Baudelaire’s, “Les
Aveugles,” from the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du Mal. Beginning
with a first line that begs for the kind of contemplation that comes after percep-
tion and comprehension (“Contemple-les, mon âme”), it draws on a number of
themes also present in “Le Fou et la Vénus,” especially combining the ridiculous
with the inability to see beyond the physical and terrestrial:
Contemple-les, mon âme; ils sont vraiment affreux!

Pareils aux mannequins; vaguement ridicules;
Terribles, singuliers comme les somnambules;
Dardant on ne sait où leurs globes ténébreux.
25 It also recalls the eyes’ silence in “La Fausse Monnaie”:

Je ne connais rien de plus inquiétant que l’éloquence muette de ces yeux suppliants, qui
contiennent à la fois, pour l’homme sensible qui sait y lire, tant d’humilité, tant de
reproches. Il y trouve quelque chose approchant cette profondeur de sentiment compliqué,
dans les yeux larmoyants des chiens qu’on fouette (OC 1: 323)
(I know of nothing more worrying than the silent eloquence of those begging eyes,
which simultaneously contain, for the sensitive man who knows how to read them, so
much humility, so much reproach. There he finds something close to the depth of complex
feeling, in the tearful eyes of dogs being whipped). (PP, 69; modified)
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.
Ils traversent ainsi le noir illimité,

Ce frère du silence éternel. Ô cité!
Pendant qu’autour de nous tu chantes, ris et beugles,
Éprise du plaisir jusqu’à l’atrocité,

Vois! je me traîne aussi! mais, plus qu’eux hébété,
Je dis: Que cherchent-ils au Ciel, tous ces aveugles? (OC 1: 92)
(Behold them, my soul; they are truly hideous! / Like mannequins; vaguely
ridiculous; / Terrible, strange like sleepwalkers;/ Pointing their shadowy orbs
who knows where. // Their eyes, from which the divine sparkle has gone, / As if
they were looking into the distance, remain raised / To the sky; one never sees
them toward the cobblestones / Dreamily lean their heavy heads. // This is how
they pass through the boundless black, / That brother of eternal silence. O city! /
While around us you sing, laugh, and bellow, // In love with pleasure to the point
of atrocity, / Look! I too am dragging myself along! But, more dazed than they
are, / I say: What do they seek in Heaven, all these blind men?)
As “Les Aveugles” ends by asking what “tous ces aveugles” are looking for, their
eyes offer no response. Instead, they remain silent despite the breadth of their
search: beyond the strict limits of the physical, underscored by the enjambment
that, stretched out across three verses, gives them lift-off toward the heavens:
“Leurs yeux [. . .] / [. . .] restent levés / Au ciel.” Such is, perhaps, the limit of verse
poetry, for Baudelaire: taking what can be seen as far as it can go, but not provid-
ing the answer because it lays beyond the limits of what is accessible to l’Œil.
Might it require the additional support of deciphering from other senses, such as
l’Oreille? As “Le Fou et la Vénus” reminds us, the answer is found in quoted-yet-
not-really-quoted speech; in that aequatio between what we see and what we hear,
at the very limit of the depth sensed by both l’Œil and l’Oreille: the prose
poem itself.
“Le Fou et la Vénus” was one of fourteen prose poems that Baudelaire pub-
lished in La Presse on August 26 and 27, 1862, under the title Petits Poèmes en
prose. Just a few days later, Théodore de Banville published a brief review in
Étienne Carjat’s short- lived journal Le Boulevard, calling the publication of
Baudelaire’s poems in La Presse “Un véritable événement littéraire”: “Ces courts
chefs-d’œuvre artistement achevés, où, dégagée de toute intrigue, et, pour ainsi
dire, de toute construction matérielle, la pensée libre, agile, apparaît dans sa

nudité éclatante, n’ont eu qu’à se montrer pour faire tomber en poussière la foule
des colosses prétentieux et vides.”26 (These short masterpieces, artistically fin-
ished, where, removed from all intrigue, and, so to speak, from all material con-
struction, free, agile thought appears in its striking nudity, only had to show
themselves to reduce to dust the crowd of pretentious and empty giants.) The
emphasis on the visual (“apparaît dans sa nudité éclatante”) underscores what
Banville remarks most: the freedom from “toute construction matérielle,” that is
to say the kind of construction that wears its form on its sleeve and makes its
construction so apparent, like the finished sculpture that is polished but also
retains marks of its carving strokes. Along with formal constraints, Banville states,
from poetry Baudelaire also stripped away rhythm and rhyme:
ôtez au poëte le vers et la lyre, mais laissez-lui une plume; ôtez-lui cette plume et
laissez-lui la voix; ôtez-lui la voix et laissez-lui le geste; ôtez-lui le geste, attachez
ses bras, mais laissez-lui la faculté de s’exprimer par un clin d’œil, il sera toujours
le poëte, le créateur, et s’il ne lui est plus permis que de respirer, sa respiration
créera quelque chose. O fous bizarres de vous imaginer que c’est à un certain
balancement de syllabes, à une suspension de sens, au retour régulier de certains
sons qu’a été donné le privilège inouï d’enfanter des êtres! Quand les dieux
emplissent l’éther de comètes, de constellations, d’étoiles et secouent sur lui une
poussière d’astres, ce n’est pas à l’aide de leurs mains qu’ils suspendent dans
l’immensité bleue ces lumières chantantes, mais par un simple acte de leur
pensée génératrice!27
(Take from the poet the verse and the lyre, but leave him the pen; take from him
this pen and leave him his voice; take from him the voice and leave him the ges-
ture; take from him the gesture, bind his arms, but leave him the means to
express himself with a wink, and he will remain the poet, the creator, and if he is
only allowed to breathe, his breathing will create something. Oh madmen,
bizarre from imagining that only a certain swaying of syllables, a suspension of
meaning, a regular return of certain sounds that has been given the innate priv
ilege of birthing beings! When the gods fill the ether with comets, constellations,
stars and shake over it a dusting of heavenly bodies, it is not with their hands
that they suspend these singing lights in the blue vastness, but by a simple act of
their generative thought!)
26 Théodore de Banville, “La Semaine dramatique et littéraire,” Le Boulevard (August 31, 1862).
Quoted in Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poëmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris), vol. 4 of Œuvres complètes de
Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques Crépet (Paris: Louis Conard, 1926), 227.
27 Banville, “la Semaine dramatique et littéraire,” quoted in Baudelaire, Petits Poëmes en prose, 228.
The result remains eminently poetic and, if by magic or perhaps by some sort of
miracle, it is held together without actually being held, suspended without signs
of its suspension. Some thirty-five years before Mallarmé’s “disparition élocutoire
du poète” from “Crise de vers” (1897),28 here Banville asserts that it is nothing less
than the hand of poet-as-god (or rather, poets-as-gods, “les dieux”) that leaves no
trace, making it all happen with the sheer generative force of poetic thought.
Such poetic sleight of hand is just that, for it is impossible to avoid the materi-
ality of a poem altogether. As Baudelaire suggests in a passage in his 1863 essay
“Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” the trap is relying too exclusively on the visual; not
only does it always invite the impossibility of committing to memory every detail
seen, but the consequences are equally serious since attempts to pin down artistic
form only produce a greater profusion of details that escape the artistic grasp
(which, in the context, one might be tempted to call a choke-hold):
Il s’établit alors un duel entre la volonté de tout voir, de ne rien oublier, et la

faculté de la mémoire qui a pris l’habitude d’absorber vivement la couleur
générale et la silhouette, l’arabesque du contour. Un artiste ayant le sentiment
parfait de la forme, mais accoutumé à exercer surtout sa mémoire et son
imagination, se trouve alors comme assailli par une émeute de détails, qui tous
demandent justice avec la furie d’une foule amoureuse d’égalité absolue. Toute
justice se trouve forcément violée; toute harmonie détruite, sacrifiée; mainte
trivialité devient énorme; mainte petitesse, usurpatrice. Plus l’artiste se penche
avec impartialité vers le détail, plus l’anarchie augmente. Qu’il soit myope ou
presbyte, toute hiérarchie et toute subordination disparaissent.29
(From that point onwards appears a duel between a desire to see everything, to
forget nothing, and the faculty of memory which is used to brightly absorbing
the general color and silhouette, the arabesque of the contour. An artist with a
perfect feel for form, but used to exerting his memory and his imagination above
all else, finds himself in some ways assailed by a pack of details which all demand
justice with the fury of a crowd obsessed with absolute equality. All justice is
necessarily violated; all harmony destroyed, sacrificed; many a triviality becomes
enormous; many a detail, a usurper. The more the artist leans impartially toward
detail, the more anarchy increases. Whether the artist is near or farsighted, all
hierarchy and subordination disappear.)
That this discussion of the visual and the poetic has drifted into the more gener-
ally artistic will not come as a surprise to readers of Baudelaire, for whom the
28 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1998–2003), 2: 211.
29 OC 2: 698–9. Pierre Pachet explains that the seemingly simple aim of “tout voir” is exceedingly
fraught; see Pierre Pachet, Le Premier Venu: essai sur la pensée de Baudelaire, revised edition (Paris:
Denoël, 2009), 122.
essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” is a major source text for understanding his
poetic project. As Elissa Marder explains:
for Baudelaire all artists share a common vocation: poetic expression in images.
The function of images (be they verbal or visual) is to render something visible.
Images are not however objects of perception, but rather a medium that trans-
forms and discloses some aspect of experience into a vision that can be com-
municated and transmitted to others. Painters express ideas, visions, and feelings
in images, and poets paint images with words and sounds. [. . .] in “Le Peintre de
la vie moderne” [. . .] the term “peintre” recalls a lost art of seeing, an aesthetic
vision and a historical sensibility that may once indeed have belonged to the
realm of painting but that now must be found—or created—elsewhere.30
That “elsewhere,” in the context of the modernity that is both the focus of
Baudelaire’s essay and the central driving force of his poetics, necessarily includes
the nascent visual art of photography. While a full consideration of photography
and Baudelaire’s prose poem is not the goal of the present study,31 it is worth
recalling that that medium grappled with what could be seen, and transposed,
and how; in a different but not entirely unrelated context, Nadar famously wrote
that “il n’y a pas de photographie artistique. Il y a en photographie, comme par-
tout, des gens qui savent voir et d’autres qui ne savent même pas regarder”32
(there is no such thing as artistic photography. There are, in photography, as
everywhere, people who know how to see and others who don’t even know how
to look). The similarities between what is seen by Nadar’s “gens qui savent voir”
and Rimbaud’s “Voyant” remain in the aequatio beyond the traditional limits of
the senses: as in the stony silence of Venus’s sculpted eyes in “Le Fou et la Vénus,”
read into the mind’s eye to access moments of life that, existing beyond limits and
measures, can only be expressed by a poetic language sufficiently suited for pur-
pose. Later in the “Peintre de la vie moderne” essay, Baudelaire would refer to a
black frame around an image as offering the kind of view beyond, “une apparence
plus décidée de fenêtre ouverte sur l’infini” (a more certain appearance of a
30 Elissa Marder, “Baudelaire’s Feminine Counter-Signature: ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’’s Photographic

Poetics,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 46.1–2 (Fall–Winter 2017–18), 1–25 (3).
31 A number of such projects have already been undertaken; see Philippe Ortel, La littérature à l’ère
de la photographie: enquête sur une révolution invisible (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 2002); Marder,
The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, and Deconstruction
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); and Marit Grøtta, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The
Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th Century Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). For similar con-
siderations brought to bear on the poetry that followed Baudelaire, see Anne Reverseau, Le Sens de la
vue: le regard photographique dans la poésie moderne (Paris: Sorbonne Université Presses, 2018).
32 Nadar, letter to Hippolyte de Villemessant, director of Le Figaro, L‘Événement, April 1866, quoted
in Roger Greaves, Nadar ou le paradoxe vital (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 181; original emphasis. See
Mallarmé’s praise of Nadar’s photographs—“des plus beaux poëmes en prose écrits depuis Baudelaire”—
in the Introduction, supra.
window open onto the infinite) (OC 2: 717), and, in formal terms, poetry written
in prose seems to offer a similar endlessness. As Philippe Ortel explains, “le poème
en prose moderne proclame l’efficacement du logos et l’efficacité de son mécan-
isme: plus besoin de justifier rhétoriquement ou poétiquement son œuvre quand
elle prétend obéir à une autre logique.”33 (The modern prose poem proclaims the
erasure of the logos and the efficacy of its mechanisms: no more need to rhetoric
ally or poetically justify its work when it claims to obey a different logic.)
Seeing Time, Telling Time
A useful object to help consider the stakes of a poetics that pushes for a different
logic is, paradoxically enough, the clock, which Pierre Larousse defined as:
HORLOGE s.f. (or-log-je—lat. Horologium; du gr. Hôra, heure; legô, je dis).

Machine qui sert à marquer et à sonner les heures; se dit particulièrement des
grandes machines qui sonnent et marquent l’heure pour le public. [. . .]
Le disque de l’horloge est le champ du combat
Où la mort de sa faux par millions nous abat.
Th. Gautier.
—Par ext. Ce qui rend sensible le cours du temps ou en règle la distribution.34
(Machine which serves to mark and chime the hours; especially said of the big
machines which chime and mark the hour for the public. [. . .]
The face of the clock is the battlefield
Where Death kills us by the millions with his scythe.
Théophile Gautier.
—By extension. What makes the passing of time available to our senses, or
regulates its distribution.)
Baudelaire’s hatred of the clock’s measuring of the omnipresent weight of the

ineluctable passing of time is well-documented throughout his writings;35 in a
passage from Hygiène he spells it out succinctly:
33 Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie, 144.

34 Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle: français, historique, géographique,
mythologique, bibliographique…, 17 vols (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel,
1866–77), 9: 392.
35 A full bibliography of studies of time in Baudelaire’s work would go well beyond the scope of this
note, or even this chapter. For starters, one would do well to consider studies of time as allegorical fig-
ure for loss, including Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); and Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the
Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
À chaque minute nous sommes écrasés par l’idée et la sensation du temps. Et il

n’y a que deux moyens pour échapper à ce cauchemar,—pour l’oublier: le Plaisir
et le Travail. Le Plaisir nous use. Le Travail nous fortifie. Choisissons.
Plus nous nous servons d’un de ces moyens, plus l’autre nous inspire de
répugnance. (OC 1: 669)
(Every minute we are crushed by the idea and the sensation of time. And there
are only two ways of escaping this nightmare,—of forgetting: Pleasure and Work.
Pleasure wears us out. Work fortifies us. We must choose.
The more we use one of these means, the more the other one repulses us.)
He considered this theme on numerous occasions in his poetry, from the last ter-
cet from his sonnet “L’Ennemi”:
—Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,

Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le cœur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie! (OC 1: 16)
(Oh pain! Oh pain! Time devours life, / And the dark Enemy that chews on our
hearts / Grows and fortifies itself from the blood we let!)
Much has also been written about Baudelaire’s two poems entitled “L’Horloge”:
one in Les Fleurs du Mal and one in prose in Le Spleen de Paris. Without revisiting
all of the scholarship here, it is important to remember that he worked on the two
poems, and the two poetic forms, consistently over a period of five years. The
prose poem was published first, in 1857, followed by the verse poem in 1860 and
1861, then the prose poem appeared in revised form in 1861 and 1862.36 Such a
back and forth between prose and verse argues convincingly in favor of a period
of continuous tinkering rather than an evolution from one form to the other. Or,
as Baudelaire jotted down in his series of biographical notes: “Préoccupations
simultanées de la philosophie, et de la beauté en Prose et en Poésie” (OC 1: 785).
In the verse poem “L’Horloge,” the realization that memory does not capture
the past and that “Le Temps mange la vie” is a source of fateful sadness. By show-
ing the limits of moments as they are lived, felt, and perceived, the poem marks
time, literally; as if to emphasize the point, the poem’s twenty-four verses follow
the number of hours in a day, and its comprehensiveness suggests that no moment
36 The full version is as follows: the prose poem first in Le Présent on August 24, 1857, in a group of
six poems entitled “Poèmes nocturnes” alongside “Le Crépuscule du soir,” “La Solitude,” “Les Projets,”
“La Chevelure,” and “L’Invitation au voyage.” The verse version was published with seven other new
poems in verse first in L’Artiste on October 15, 1860, and then in the second edition of Les Fleurs du
Mal in February 1861. Later that year (November 1), the Revue fantaisiste published a slightly modi-
fied version of the prose poem, which would appear in La Presse on September 24, 1862, again with
changes: “la belle Féline” instead of “le chat” in the fourth paragraph and the first appearance of the
final paragraph.
escapes the grasp of time. Thus the attempt to find levels of feeling and perception
(and a language suitable for conveying them) is always fated to fail, its striving all
the more beautiful for it. Thinking of the poem as a timepiece is only part of the
story, though; more than just measuring time, Larousse insists that the clock tells
time: hôra for hour, legô for telling. It’s hardly novel to think of a clock as an object
that tells time, but it does more than that: it tells us of how time is measured, or
cut into hours; and it is precisely the object through which the time-telling passes,
as we slip from legô to logos, or discourse. While it is telling the story of history,
during the course of which each second, minute, and hour is notched, it is also
setting the limits for the poetic moment which, beyond the traditional (hor)logos,
cannot be measured by a clock.37 A poem entitled “L’Horloge” also clearly under-
scores the aural component, since the clock does more than merely tell the story
of time and of history: its function of giving history a sound is so important that
it is as important as correctly measuring time in the first place, as Larousse cas
ually lists the functions interchangeably and slips between the verbs “marquer,” to
mark, and “sonner,” to ring: “qui sert à marquer et à sonner les heures,” then “qui
sonnent et marquent l’heure” in the second phrase.38
If demarcating limits and making them audible are of equal importance, it is
interesting to note the source text for Baudelaire’s poems “L’Horloge,” which is
Théophile Gautier’s poem of the same title (forty-eight verses: the multiple of
twenty-four is no accident).39 Gautier’s clock-poem was the mid-century model
for the site of the struggle between humanity’s mortality and time’s fleeting nature:
Le disque de l’horloge est le champ du combat,

Où la Mort de sa faux par milliers nous abat;
La Mort, rude jouteur qui suffit pour défendre
L’éternité de Dieu, qu’on voudrait bien lui prendre. (v. 27–30)
(The face of the clock is the battlefield, / Where Death kills us by the millions
with his scythe; / Death, harsh jouster is enough to defend / God’s eternity,
which we would like to take from him.)
It opened with the epigraph Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat (They all wound, the
last one kills), a memento mori commonly inscribed on clocks and, in this case,
on the sun dial on the Église Saint- Vincent in Urrugne (Gautier indicated
37 For a reading of Rimbaud’s prose poem “H” that considers it pointing to the possibility of an
extra-temporal poetic moment, see my “Lire ‘H’: une question de temps,” in Paul Perron and Sergio
Villani (eds.), Lire Rimbaud: approches critiques (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000), 183–200.
38 The sound of clocks and church bells marking time is not unique to this poem; the carillon toll
throughout Baudelaire’s poetic work.
39 Originally published November 15, 1841, in Revue des deux mondes, then reprinted in the collec-
tion España (1846). See John E. Jackson, “Baudelaire lecteur de Gautier: les deux Horloges,” Revue
d’histoire littéraire de la France, 84.3 (May–June 1984), 439–49.
“Urrugne, 1841” at the end of his poem).40 Gautier’s poem put the church from
the small Basque town so much in the minds of mid-century readers that
Baudelaire makes direct reference to it and to Gautier’s poem “L’Horloge” in his
essay on Gautier, in which he encouraged his reader to consider “l’admirable
paraphrase de la sentence inscrite sur le cadran de l’horloge d’Urrugne” (The
admirable paraphrase of the sentence written on the clock face in Urrugne)
(OC 2: 126).
It is measurements of time that bear the inscription Vulnerant omnes, ultima
necat: the gnomon and the markers for the shadow it casts, the twenty-four or
forty-eight verses (themselves multiples of the alexandrine’s number twelve) to
calculate time while it passes. From the “Douleur!” exclaimed in “L’Ennemi” to
the pain in the inscription (“They all wound, the last one kills”), the violence is
unavoidable. What if there were a different way to experience and perceive time?
What kind of language might provide an alternate means for telling time?
L’Horloge
Les Chinois voient l’heure dans l’œil des chats.
Un jour un missionnaire, se promenant dans la banlieue de Nankin, s’aperçut
qu’il avait oublié sa montre, et demanda à un petit garçon quelle heure il était.
Le gamin du céleste Empire hésita d’abord; puis, se ravisant, il répondit: “Je
vais vous le dire.” Peu d’instants après, il reparut, tenant dans ses bras un fort
gros chat, et le regardant, comme on dit, dans le blanc des yeux, il affirma sans
hésiter: “Il n’est pas encore tout à fait midi.” Ce qui était vrai.
Pour moi, si je me penche vers la belle Féline, la si bien nommée, qui est à la
fois l’honneur de son sexe, l’orgueil de mon cœur et le parfum de mon esprit,
que ce soit la nuit, que ce soit le jour, dans la pleine lumière ou dans l’ombre
opaque, au fond de ses yeux adorables je vois toujours l’heure distinctement,
toujours la même, une heure vaste, solennelle, grande comme l’espace, sans divi-
sions de minutes ni de secondes,—une heure immobile qui n’est pas marquée
sur les horloges, et cependant légère comme un soupir, rapide comme un
coup d’œil.
Et si quelque importun venait me déranger pendant que mon regard repose
sur ce délicieux cadran, si quelque Génie malhonnête et intolérant, quelque
Démon du contre-temps venait me dire: “Que regardes-tu là avec tant de soin?
Que cherches-tu dans les yeux de cet être? Y vois-tu l’heure, mortel prodigue et
fainéant?” je répondrais sans hésiter: “Oui, je vois l’heure; il est l’Éternité!”
40 Gautier begins his poem “La voiture fit halte à l’église d’Urrugne” (v. 1) and the scene is actually
not unlikely: Urrugne was one of the first in the series of relais de poste (places to rest for the postal
carriers and, especially, their horses) that Louis XIV established, and the building, which today houses
Urrugne’s Office de tourisme, is directly across from the church and its sun dial.
N’est-ce pas, madame, que voici un madrigal vraiment méritoire, et aussi

emphatique que vous-même? En vérité, j’ai eu tant de plaisir à broder cette
prétentieuse galanterie, que je ne vous demanderai rien en échange.
(OC 1: 299–300)
(The Chinese tell time in a cat’s eyes.
One day, walking in the outskirts of Nanking, a missionary realised he had
forgotten his watch, and he asked a little boy what time it was.
At first the kid from the Celestial Empire hesitated; then, reconsidering, he
answered, “I am going to tell you.” Not many moments later, he reappeared,
holding a very fat cat in his arms, and looking at it, as they say, straight in the
eye, he asserted without hesitation, “It is not yet quite noon.” Which was true.
As for me, if I turn toward beautiful Felina, so well named, who is at once the
honor of her sex, my heart’s pride and my mind’s perfume, whether it be night,
whether it be day, in full light or dark shadow, I always see the time clearly, in
the depths of her adorable eyes, a vast, solemn time, always the same, huge as
space, without divisions into minutes of seconds,—an immobile time not marked
on clocks, and yet light as a sigh, swift as a glance.
And if some meddler happened to interrupt me while settling my gaze upon
that delectable dial, if some rude and intolerant Genie, some Demon of untime-
liness happened to ask me, “What are you watching with such care? What are
you looking for in that creature’s eyes? Do you see the time there, prodigal and
lazy mortal?” I would directly answer, “Yes, I see the time; it is Eternity!”
Now is this not, Madam, a truly praiseworthy madrigal, and as exaggerated as
yourself? In fact, I took such delight in elaborating this pretentious romance,
that I will ask for nothing in exchange). (PP, 34)
“Au commencement est le bruit, le bruit ne cesse pas. Il est notre aperception du
chaos, notre appréhension du désordre, notre seul lien à la distribution éparse des
choses. L’ouïe est notre ouverture héroïque au trouble et à la diffusion, les autres
récepteurs nous assurent de l’ordre.”41 (At the beginning is noise, the noise does
not stop. It is our apperception of chaos, our apprehension of disorder, our only
link to the scattered distribution of things. Hearing is our heroic opening to con-
fusion and diffusion, the other receptors assure us of order.) Such is how Michel
Serres describes how we perceive the world: specifically, how sounds are the sen-
sory site of chaos. The verse poem is the counterargument to this claim: it is pre-
cisely the elements of verse poetry that resonate as we hear them—rhymes,
rhythmic patterns—that assure us of order. And when Baudelaire revisits the idea
of a poetic timepiece, the fashioning of poetry in prose necessarily marks a sig-
nificant change and brings with it a new dimension: moving from the traditional
41 Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980), 170.

order of verse to precisely the kind of “ouverture héroïque au trouble” that Serres
mentions. The prose poem “L’Horloge”42 opens on a decidedly different note:
Les Chinois voient l’heure dans l’œil des chats

[Le] [∫inwa] [vwa] [lœr] [dã] [lœj] [de] [∫a]
Or, rather, it opens on a note that is not a note at all: it is Serre’s “désordre,” the
cacophony that results from the collision of a number of singular, discrete elem
ents. There are two pairs of aural repetitions: the sounds [e ∫] are repeated at the
beginning and end of the line (“Les Ch,” “des ch”) and they surround the quick
assonance of [wa] (“Chinois voient”). The [l] sound of the definite article con-
nects the basic discrete elements of the proposed knowledge (“Les Chinois,”
“l’heure,” “l’œil”) and sets the poem’s opening tone in a world of a truth that seems
universal, its potential universality underscored by a geographic situation some
5,000 miles away.43 Its very source is presented as a series of deep layers that we
excavate as we pass through the line, following the rhythm [l] [d] [l] [d] as with
each step we go deeper and see one thing inside another: “l’heure dans l’œil
des chats.”
But what do we make of this line, presented as truth, just one of what
John E. Jackson identifies as set phrases in these prose poems: “sentences ou de
formules empruntées à un style gnomique”44 (sentences or formulas borrowed
from an atemporal style)? Is it an aphorism, a pithy summative comment that
we’re meant to take as truth and move on from just as quickly? If so, this is merely
a glance, into a cat’s eyes: perhaps a momentary glimpse of truth as fleeting as
time itself. It does seem to be an example of one of what Baudelaire describes as a
“Coup d’œil individuel, aspect dans lequel se tiennent les choses devant l’écrivain”
(Individual glance, aspect in which things present themselves before the writer)
(OC 1: 658). Surely it is troublesome to have at the outset of a poem something as
threatening as an aphorism because of its radical independence from authority;
as Jan Mieszkowski explains,
aphorisms are threatening because they aspire to be independent of any concep-

tual or linguistic system that might understand or control them. An aphorism is
not a first principle and does not allow for clear lines of inference or deduction.
42 The anecdote that serves as point of departure for Baudelaire’s poem is in Évariste Régis Huc,
L’Empire chinois, faisant suite à l’ouvrage intitulé Souvenirs d’un voyage dans la Tartarie et le Thibet,
Gaume frères, 1854; 3rd edition 1857, vol. 2, 329–30; this source text was unveiled by Gustave L. van
Roosenbroek, “The Source of Baudelaire’s Prose- Poem, ‘L’Horloge,’” The Romanic Review, 20.4
(October–December 1929), 356–9. As Robert Kopp notes, Baudelaire was revising his prose poem in
September 1852 with a view to submitting it for publication in La Presse (Kopp, 244).
43 For David Evans, Baudelaire “stresses the need for an impression of universality in poetry,” espe-
cially in the “Religion, histoire, fantaisie” section of his Salon de 1859 essay. David Evans, Rhythm,
Illusion and the Poetic Idea: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 104.
44 John E. Jackson, Baudelaire (Paris: Le Livre de poche [Références], 2001), 161.
Unlike an axiom, it does not present itself as a building block for anything larger.
Unlike a dictum, it is not underwritten by or uttered in the name of any particu-
lar authority; its legitimacy comes not from the identity of its author or the
situation in which it is articulated, but from the peculiar interplay of staple and
substance it effects, irrespective of context.
Above all, aphorisms do not ask for our assent or endorsement as much as
they assume it. Reading one, we may find ourselves according it great signifi-
cance before we have even begun to think about what it means.45
The great significance that is typically attributed to this poem stems from the
modern poet’s subjective relationship with time: perceiving time, experiencing
time, telling time.46 In “L’Horloge,” then, Baudelaire is working through not only
“des moments de l’existence où le temps et l’étendue sont plus profonds, et le
sentiment de l’existence immensément augmenté” (moments of existence where
time and breadth are deeper, and the feeling of existence immensely exalted)
(OC 1: 658), but also how to tell that time, as it were, in a poem: how we perceive
the world, and how we might talk about those perceptions.
For with its aphorism, the start of the poem begins at one extreme in the broad
spectrum along which we can plot the power of perception and language’s ability
to capture it: it is language without unique perspective. On this point we are
reminded of Baudelaire’s comment from his essay on the 1855 Exposition univer-
selle about the beauty in the foreignness, intensity, and form of Chinese art:
je le demande à tout homme de bonne foi, pourvu qu’il ait un peu pensé et un
peu voyagé [. . .], que dirait-il en face d’un produit chinois, produit étrange,
bizarre, contourné dans sa forme, intense par sa couleur, et quelquefois délicat
jusqu’à l’évanouissement? Cependant c’est un échantillon de la beauté universelle
(I ask every man of good faith, so long as he has thought and travelled a little
[. . .], what he would say faced with a Chinese product, a strange, bizarre product,
of a roundabout form, intense in color, and sometimes so delicate it could almost
faint? However, it is a sample of universal beauty). (OC 2: 576)
Such universality continues in the second paragraph with the role of the mission-
ary, whose task it is to spread “the word”—that is to say, not his own personal
word(s)—to the four corners of the globe. The holy text is disseminated perva-
sively to the farthest reaches of the planet, extending even to the outskirts of
45 Jan Mieszkowski, Crises of the Sentence (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 45.
46 In this respect the current discussion is indebted to Elissa Marder’s more elaborate analysis of
time in modernity, including when she states that “Although ‘modernity’ is often used to designate the
specific historical period that was inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth century, it is better understood
as a way of experiencing time rather than as a period in time” (Marder, Dead Time, 4).
Nankin, a two-syllable urban toponym that could hardly sound more distant to
French ears than “Paris” or “Bruxelles.”47
Just as the timelessness of the aphorism is broken up by the conventional meas-
urement of time that opens the second paragraph, “Un jour,” the missionary’s
existence in the world of the borrowed language he carries with him to proselyt-
ize is interrupted by his own perception of the world, reinforced by the reflexive
pronoun in the verb “s’aperçut.” From the atemporal and global we awake in the
realm of the individual, itself in the particular situation of marking history by
straddling multiple time periods through the act of recognizing, in the moment
of the poem, what one has forgotten, in the past; or, grammatically speaking, rec-
ognizing in the simple or historical past (“s’aperçut”) what had been forgotten in
the more distant past of the pluperfect (“il avait oublié”).48
This realization marks the point that leads away from the universal language
that the proselytizer represents—borrowed and, since it is not the missionary’s
own language, it is somewhat distant to him: at best adopted, at worst unconvin
cingly insincere (for the missionary relies on sincerity and convincingness to be
successful)—and toward a personal and sincere language based on the particular.
Or, from language without perception (aphorism, holy scripture without an iden-
tifiable scriptor) to language based on perception. And, with it, the move from the
written and the reported (for aphorism lives in the realm of “they say”) to direct
discourse (“demanda”): spoken and heard.
But the missionary’s specific realization is that he had lost “sa montre.” It is
precisely this time-straddling moment that sets the poem in motion: the bearer of
universal logos loses sight of the particular, and to recover it he has his own par-
ticular speech as recourse. Time, certainly, is what is lost and sought: he lost his
watch and he asks the local boy for the time. Dictionaries of the period had sev-
eral meanings for “une montre” that were more prevalent than a wristwatch:
“Objets exposés, étalés devant une porte de magasin pour indiquer le genre de
marchandises que l’on vend. [. . .] État d’une personne qui se donne ou est donnée
en spectacle.”49 (Objects shown, and spread out in front of a shop door to indicate
the type of merchandise sold there. [. . .] State of a person who makes, or has a
47 And yet it was a foreign word that had sufficiently worked its way into French for Littré to
include it, primarily for being a cotton fabric of a specific yellow; although he adds “ordinairement
(non toujours, car il y a du nankin blanc),” quoting Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788)
as a source. It specifically evokes southern climes as well: “Nankin, ville de Chine, dont le nom nan-
king signifie capitale (king) du sud (nan)” (Littré 3: 687). More contemporaneous with Baudelaire,
Flaubert refers to it in a letter of November 24, 1859, referring to China as the “pays des paravents et
du nankin” (Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau and Yvan Leclerc, 5 vols (Paris:
Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1973–2007), 3: 58); the word would make the headlines a few
years later, in May 1862, when the Xiang Army began its siege of the city.
48 Cheryl Krueger is right to identify in this poem “the dynamic of the genre, a perpetual hesitation
and vacillation between polarities” (Cheryl Krueger, The Art of Procrastination: Baudelaire’s Poetry in
Prose (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 36).
49 Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 11.2 (MOLK-NAPO): 526.
spectacle made of them.) It is only after a dozen other meanings and locutions
that Pierre Larousse includes what were then the rather specialized usages: first for
music (“Jeu d’orgues dont les tuyaux, en étain poli, sont placés en vue en avant du
buffet” (Organs whose pipes, in polished pewter, are displayed at the front of the
sideboard)), fencing (“Endroit d’une salle d’armes où les fleurets des élèves sont
placés à un râtelier” (Place in a hall of arms where students’ foils are placed in a
stand)), a military parade (“Revue mensuelle ou trimestrielle passée par un chef
de corps qui avait ses troupes à ses propres gages” (Monthly or trimesterly review
given by a commanding officer who maintained his troops out of his own wages)),
maritime use (“appareil employé pour indiquer le nombre de degrés de la dérive”
(device used to indicate the degree of drift)), an archaic use for pyroscope, and
then, finally: “Petite horloge portative, combinée de façon à pouvoir fonctionner
dans toutes les positions et disposée pour pouvoir être mise commodément dans
la poche.” (A small portable clock, put together in such a way that it can work in
all positions, and made to comfortable fit into a pocket.)50
The definition of “montre” as pocketwatch fits particularly well in this poem
based so much on time. But what else could it mean for the missionary who dis-
covers that he has lost “sa montre”? Is there something about the universality of
general language that leads the missionary to lose “le genre de marchandises” that
he is peddling? The missionary is the source of showing wares just as he is himself
put on display (“une personne qui se donne ou est donnée en spectacle”). Without
needing to venture into whether Baudelaire is postulating a more strident com-
mentary on religion as commodity, it certainly seems that the bearer of the uni-
versal language has lost touch with the personal, the particular—for “sa montre”
includes not one but two personal adjectives: sa and montre—and, with it, a bit of
himself. Thus the need to recapture it, by asking the young boy the specific nature
of time as they perceived it in that very specific moment (“quelle heure il était”),
and to do so via the language that best meets the circumstances of that instance,
direct speech.
It is worthwhile to dwell on the lost-and-found in this poem: the missionary
loses the object for telling time and seeks not a replacement for that object—not a
new measuring device that will allow him to tell time by looking at it himself—
but instead he asks to be told, to learn it by hearing it. The freedom that comes
from losing control of both legô and logos—which to this day can be felt by decid-
ing not to wear one’s watch one day, or by disconnecting oneself from our modern
ubiquitous time-life-discourse-keeper, the mobile phone51—is the freedom from
relying on the individual’s own agency of observation, and replacing it with the
receptive open mind of hearing. It is the shift from looking at a sundial, clock, or
watch to see, understand—that is to say, “telling time” without truly telling or
50 Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 11.2 (MOLK-NAPO): 526.

51 It is beyond the scope of this note, and indeed this entire monograph, to list the numerous points
raised by the encroachment of “screen time” into our own modern moment.
saying anything—to being told, by an other. Finally, it marks the shift from the
overly subjective perception—observation and understanding one’s observations,
legô and logos—to the interpersonal, the multiple (you tell time, you tell me, I hear
you), the sequential (first vision, then time-telling; first reading, then logos), and
the communicative.
From this moment in the poem Baudelaire unveils the jewel of perception-
based language: speech between the missionary and the young boy, and the lan-
guage of the prose poem between him and us. Under the spectre of this
otherworldly “céleste Empire,” both realms of language are subjected to the vicis-
situdes of time, which is initially laid out in straightforward chronological (if not
narratological) terms: “Le gamin du céleste Empire hésita d’abord; puis, se
ravisant, il répondit: ‘Je vais vous le dire.’” If the missionary (representing the
atemporal holy word) had at one point lost his sense of time, the young denizen
of the Empire has a firm grip on his own, manipulating it (“hésita”) and leading it
methodically through its paces (“d’abord; puis”). He continues to show similar
control and poise in the next line by using the additional layer of quoted speech
to create suspense, forestalling his answer to the missionary in what is essentially
a response that is actually not a response at all: “Je vais vous le dire.” Similar brio
closes out the paragraph, as he proves to be as comfortable with confident and
immediate direct speech as he had been with hesitation and narrative steps (“il
affirma sans hésiter”). Meanwhile, the poetic subject plays the role of narrator,
complete with an expression “highlighted,” for lack of a better term, by the unin-
spiring use of vague reported language that echoes the blandness of the opening
aphorism “le regardant, comme on dit, dans le blanc des yeux.” That is, the young
boy seems linguistically more impressive than the poetic narrator until we
remember that the boy only exists through the narration itself, and they both use
the verb “dire” not to indicate direct speech or prorsus but rather as a device,
either to stall (promising some action rather than performing it right away) or to
generate hollow aphoristic language (“comme on dit”). As a result, it is the narra-
tor who suggests a kind of superior standard in terms of his simultaneous use of
several perspectives, each with its own linguistic tools. Similarly, as impressive as
it is that the young boy is able to tell time accurately by looking into a cat’s eyes,
we only know of that accuracy because the narrator validates it: the veracity of his
framed tale reinforces his own poetic authority. The affirmation itself is remark
able: even without reading much into ten syllables “Il n’est pas encore tout à fait
midi,” nor dividing it into two even halves of five (“Il n’est pas encore” and “tout à
fait midi”), nor even attempting to over-analyze that the response is similarly
made of five syllables (“Ce qui était vrai”), while reading the end of this paragraph
one cannot help feeling the even-handedness of the young boy’s statement: the
cool authority of his speech and its calm, steady rhythm.52
52 If pressed, one could also note that “Je vais vous le dire” is similar, in fluidity and syllable count alike.
It is with this linguistic prowess that the poetic voice moves beyond that tale.
If the third paragraph offered a display of the time of narrative and spoken dis-
courses—that is to say, the typical realm of prose—the fourth one swings back
toward a decidedly more poetic tone, opening with a personal and introspective
voice (emphasized once again by a reflexive verb, itself preceded by the additional
emphasis of a stress pronoun: “Pour moi, si je me penche…”). Contrasted with
the direct speech and short pronouncement that preceded it, this meandering
paragraph is one long sentence replete with oppositions (“que ce soit la nuit, que
ce soit le jour, dans la pleine lumière ou dans l’ombre opaque”), cumulative effects
(“une heure vaste, solennelle, grande comme l’espace”), and the corrective “et
cependant.” The paragraph is made up of two parts:
Pour moi, si je me penche vers la belle Féline, la si bien nommée, qui est à la fois
l’honneur de son sexe, l’orgueil de mon cœur et le parfum de mon esprit, que ce
soit la nuit, que ce soit le jour, dans la pleine lumière ou dans l’ombre opaque, au
fond de ses yeux adorables
and
je vois toujours l’heure distinctement, toujours la même, une heure vaste, solen-
nelle, grande comme l’espace, sans divisions de minutes ni de secondes,—une
heure immobile qui n’est pas marquée sur les horloges, et cependant légère
comme un soupir, rapide comme un coup d’œil.
Both are extended ruminations constructed of a simple subject-verb combin

ation: “je me penche” and “je vois,” followed by attributes either with or without
the verb “être” (“bien nommé,” “que ce soit,” “qui n’est pas marquée”). The two
halves unfold, picking up speed as they tumble through a series of digressions,
each one of which adds a complementary dimension. In many ways this para-
graph puts itself on display (“se donne en spectacle”), doing precisely what it is
saying: it is a perfect example of poetic prose stretched to the limits of its already
remarkable elasticity, precisely one of “des moments de l’existence où le temps et
l’étendue sont plus profonds, et le sentiment de l’existence immensément aug-
menté.” As such, it is an excellent example of “le miracle d’une prose poétique,
musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter
aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts
de la conscience” (see Introduction, supra). This stretch of time that is always the
same and which cannot be divided is what Baudelaire’s poetic subject perceives,
even in the blink of an eye: not marked by measurements such as clocks, watches,
or any other attempts to define, limit, or constrain it, be they within the temporal
realm of the lived experience or in the space-time within the poem itself. Just as
verse poetry could not hope to contain or convey such rhythmed language, nor
can these paragraphs do much better: the next one begins with the conjunction
“Et,” a connector that, like some prose-bound enjambment, shows the extent to
which these “ondulations de la rêverie” spill over beyond any limits in their way.
“Et” signals the deeper consideration of this idea of a moment that eludes
measurement: specifically, the poetic subject revels in it. It also leads the way into
this penultimate paragraph’s tension between, on the one hand, the clarity that
comes from reverie, the visual, and the silent and, on the other, the trouble associ-
ated with language, speech, and interruption. Naturally, the battle is waged in the
arena of time: the subject floats in the ether of timelessness as the potential inter-
ruption—little matter if from above or below, “Génie” or “Démon”—threatens.
The threat is not merely a bother, but a prolonged one: Littré explains that the
characteristic that distinguishes “importun” from merely “fâcheux” is how they
exist in time: “celui qui fâche ou ce qui fâche peut n’être fâcheux qu’une fois,
tandis que celui qui importune ou ce qui importune est fâcheux d’une manière
répétée, continue” (He who angers or that which angers can anger only once,
whereas he or that which annoys is anger-inducing in a repeated and continuous
way) (Littré 3: 34; emphasis added). This repetitive nature is reflected in this
paragraph, for the first definition that Littré gives for “contre-temps” is, succinctly,
“Inopportunité,” with a particularly relevant subheading: “Accident inopiné qui
rompt les mesures prises” (1: 787). The very nature of quoted speech breaks with
“mesures prises”: with the escape from traditional means of taking measurements
of time and, no less important, the silence that filled it. Dialogue is a blunt instru-
ment that situates the speaker vis-à-vis another and necessarily marks one’s place
in time and in space: it is the basest form of the direct, straightforward language,
of the prorsus: precisely what the poetic and the atemporal seek to elude. The
presence of quoted speech in “L’Horloge” thus undermines the possibility of a rev-
erie that escapes the (hor)logos. By leading first with “Que” and “Y,” then verbs of
sight, and then, finally, the viewer, the series of questions of what is seen threatens
to devalue individual perception even further. Pushed into a corner of insignificance,
the poetic subjects stands firm and pushes back in a tremendous affirmation:
erasing any doubt with “Oui,” placing subjectivity and its related perception front
and center with “je vois l’heure” and then fighting back against the particular
attack with the broadest possible answer, with the emphasis of an exclamation:
“il est l’Éternité!”
Oral production bursting onto the visual scene is not limited to spoken speech,
however; in this regard “Une mort héroïque” (OC 1: 319–23) offers a useful
example. The poem’s object is Fancioulle, the mime actor whose very name—the
language that labels and identifies him—reinforces the silence of his profession
since it is “a gallicized form of the Italian fanciullo and so derives from the Latin
in-fans (meaning ‘not speaking,’ and hence ‘child’).”53 It seems that language,
speech, names, and naming are ongoing preoccupations in this poem, which
53 Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism,
trans. Mary Seidman Trouille (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 11.
begins with elements that ostensibly (i.e., a little too visibly) slip out of our focus
in this poem: take for instance the anaphoric “presque” opening up paragraphs 1
(“Fancioulle était un admirable bouffon, et presque un des amis du Prince”
(Fancioulle was an admirable buffoon, and almost one of the Prince’s friends))
and 3 (“Je croirais volontiers que le Prince fut presque fâché de trouver son comé-
dien favori parmi les rebelles” (I readily believe that the Prince was almost angry
to find his favorite actor among the rebels)). States and emotions nearly
(“presque”) rise to the level of the words chosen to describe them; put another
way, words overshoot their mark, highlighting their own approximation, if not
inaccuracy.54
It hardly comes as surprise, then, that in a (poetic) universe in which language
can do no better, it would fall even shorter in capturing the narrator’s observa-
tions. Language’s letdown is all the more apparent, and tragic, since Fancioulle,
performing as if his life depends on it, offers his spectators an act initially notable
for its visual effects, perceptible only to the poetic subject.55 Consistent with other
poems discussed in this chapter, the visual is something that eludes description in
language, even by the narrator himself:
Fancioulle fut, ce soir-là, une parfaite idéalisation, qu’il était impossible de ne

pas supposer vivante, possible, réelle. Ce bouffon allait, venait, riait, pleurait, se
convulsait, avec une indestructible auréole autour de la tête, auréole invisible
pour tous, mais visible pour moi, et où se mêlaient, dans un étrange amalgame,
les rayons de l’Art et la gloire du Martyre. Fancioulle introduisait, par je ne sais
quelle grâce spéciale, le divin et le surnaturel, jusque dans les plus extravagantes
bouffonneries. Ma plume tremble, et des larmes d’une émotion toujours présente
me montent aux yeux pendant que je cherche à vous décrire cette inoublia-
ble soirée.
(That evening, Fancioulle was a perfect idealisation, impossible not to imagine as
living, possible, real. The buffoon went, came, laughed, wept, contorted himself,
with an indestructible halo around his head: a halo invisible to everyone but
visible to me, and in which were blended, in a strange amalgam, the rays of Art
and the glory of Martyrdom. By what special grace I know not, Fancioulle infused
the divine and the supernatural, even into his most extravagant buffooneries. My
pen trembles, and tears of a still-present emotion fill my eyes as I try to describe
that unforgettable evening). (PP, 65; modified)
54 For a study that focuses on the degree of power in the poem’s discourses, see Nathaniel Wing,
“Poets, Mimes and Counterfeit Coins: On Power and Discourse in Baudelaire’s Prose Poetry,”
Paragraph, 13.1 (March 1990), 1–18.
55 The present discussion focuses on the poem’s stakes for language, art, and poetry; for a compel-
ling discussion of the poem’s political dimension, complete with a comparison to its intertext (Poe’s
“Hop Frog”), see Debarati Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 65–79.
If his act was powerful enough to silence the master of language—the poetic
subject, who could only react with his body (trembling hand holding pen, tears
falling from his eyes)—Fancioulle also had the spectating public under his spell, as if
hypnotized by what they saw: “Tout ce public, si blasé et frivole qu’il pût être, subit
bientôt la toute-puissante domination de l’artiste. Personne ne rêva plus de mort, de
deuil, ni de supplices. Chacun s’abandonna, sans inquiétude, aux voluptés multipliées
que donne la vue d’un chef-d’œuvre d’art vivant. (The whole audience, as jaded and
frivolous as could be, soon yielded to the artist’s all-powerful domination. No one
dreamed any longer of death, of mourning, nor of torture. Everyone succumbed,
without fear, to the multiplied voluptuous pleasures bestowed by the sight of a
masterpiece of living art) (PP, 65). Unable to describe Fancioulle’s “chef-d’œuvre” in
words, the poetic subject still retained his ability to see what others missed, especially
while examining the Prince’s face, itself full of non-linguistic expression:
Cependant, pour un œil clairvoyant, son ivresse, à lui, n’était pas sans mélange.
Se sentait-il vaincu dans son pouvoir de despote? humilié dans son art de terri-
fier les cœurs et d’engourdir les esprits? frustré de ses espérances et bafoué dans
ses prévisions? De telles suppositions non exactement justifiées, mais non absol-
ument injustifiables, traversèrent mon esprit pendant que je contemplais le vis-
age du Prince, sur lequel une pâleur nouvelle s’ajoutait sans cesse à sa pâleur
habituelle, comme la neige s’ajoute à la neige. Ses lèvres se resserraient de plus en
plus, et ses yeux s’éclairaient d’un feu intérieur semblable à celui de la jalousie et
de la rancune, même pendant qu’il applaudissait ostensiblement les talents de
son vieil ami, l’étrange bouffon, qui bougonnait si bien la mort.
(However, for a discerning eye, his intoxication, his own, was not unmixed. Did
he feel defeated in his despotic power? Humiliated in his art of terrifying hearts
and numbing minds? Frustrated in his hopes and flouted in his predictions?
Such assumptions, not exactly justified, but not entirely unjustifiable, crossed my
mind as I was contemplating the Prince’s face, upon which a new pallor continu-
ously increased his usual pallor, like snow added to snow. His lips tightened
more and more, and his eyes shone with an inner fire like jealousy and spite,
even while he was conspicuously applauding the talents of his old friend, the
strange buffoon, who was playing death’s buffoon so well.) (PP, 66; modified)
Those familiar with the poem know that the Prince engages a young page to slip
away—leaving the poetic subject’s visual field—and interrupt Fancioulle’s act by
whistling. The use of the word “page” is hardly innocent, for it brings the add
itional resonance of the written word—that is, written on a page—into this strictly
visual scene that so directly eludes description in language; the page is the first
recipient of spoken language in the poem: “À un certain moment, je vis Son
Altesse se pencher vers un petit page, placé derrière elle, et lui parler à l’oreille.”
The end is nigh, and if it is instigated by a whisper, it is driven forward by a
histle: whether linguistic or not, oral production remains out of reach for the
w
poetic subject and, far more tragically, for Fancioulle, who dies from it:
Quelques minutes plus tard un coup de sifflet aigu, prolongé, interrompit Fancioulle
dans un de ses meilleurs moments, et déchira à la fois les oreilles et les cœurs.
Et de l’endroit de la salle d’où avait jailli cette désapprobation inattendue, un
enfant se précipitait dans un corridor avec des rires étouffés.
Fancioulle, secoué, réveillé dans son rêve, ferma d’abord les yeux, puis les rou-
vrit presque aussitôt, démesurément agrandis, ouvrit ensuite la bouche comme
pour respirer convulsivement, chancela un peu en avant, un peu en arrière, et
puis tomba roide mort sur les planches.
Le sifflet, rapide comme un glaive, avait-il réellement frustré le bourreau? Le
Prince avait-il lui-même deviné toute l’homicide efficacité de sa ruse? Il est per-
mis d’en douter. Regretta-t-il son cher et inimitable Fancioulle? Il est doux et
légitime de le croire.
(A few minutes later a shrill, drawn-out whistle blast interrupted Fancioulle in
one of his greatest moments, shattering ears and hearts. And from the spot in the
theater where that unexpected disapproval had burst forth, a child rushed into a
corridor with muffled laughter.
Fancioulle, jolted, awakened from his dream, initially closed his eyes then
almost immediately opened them, disproportionately enlarged, then opened his
mouth as though breathing convulsively, staggered a little forward, a little back-
ward, and then fell down on the stage, stone dead.
Had the whistle, swift as a sword, truly thwarted the executioner? Had the
Prince himself suspected the homicidal efficiency of this trick? There is ground
to doubt it. Was he sorry about his dear and inimitable Fancioulle? It is sweet
and legitimate to believe so.) (PP, 66; modified)
Fancioulle doesn’t go down without a fight, and the battle is waged in terms of
what might be seen or heard; shaken from the dreamlike state of his act, his first
reaction is an attempt to recalibrate the visual plane in the hopes of seeing and
understanding—“Fancioulle [. . .] ferma d’abord les yeux, puis les rouvrit presque
aussitôt, démesurément agrandis”—and then right away opens his mouth in what
was a failed attempt to breathe: from that, he drops dead.
Yet again, in a scene where the poetic subject’s vaunted ability to see what is
invisible to others has already proven to be shaky—he sees the Prince speak to the
page and makes certain assumptions about what comes next, although “Le sifflet,
rapide comme un glaive” came from a source that he could not see—we ought not
limit ourselves to his description of the mime’s open mouth, open “comme pour
respirer convulsivement.”56 The series of questions that follow and the conclusion
56 Roger Pearson relates “Le Mauvais Vitrier” to the broken window parable first articulated by
Frédéric Bastiat in his Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas, ou L’Économie politique en une leçon (Paris:
“Il est permis d’en douter” do in fact justify our taking significant latitude in this
respect. It could just as well be that the poetic subject, not seeing as clearly as
he thinks he does, does not recognize that the mime is not attempting to
breathe, but that he is about to speak: and perhaps the very attempt at speech
is enough to kill the mime—which, since by definition it is an actor who does
not speak, the presence of speech renders him no longer a mime; put another
way, when Fancioulle/fanciullo/infans enters into language, he ceases to be
Fancioulle/fanciullo/infans—or, rather, some attempt at linguistic utterance that,
caught in his throat, takes his breath away, killing the oral in favor of the written.
If, professionally speaking, Fancioulle fits in the long tradition of artistic medi
ation in which he inherits the opera buffa, the burlesque, and the carnivalesque,
his strictly visual act makes him a sort of silent film star, some fifty years avant la
lettre. As the silent film era was whisked away by the incursion of language, via the
talkies,57 so is the mime killed off by speech acts, whether whispered (by the
Prince, to the page) or attempted (by the silent Fancioulle). If, as Jacques Derrida
maintains, spoken language always bears the potential presence of the written
word,58 it would seem that the page—the boy from whom the whistle appears, the
page on which writing appears—is the site where the written is actualized, where
spoken language (whispered to him) and the written word (on the page) collide.
Poor Fancioulle, that one-trick pony whose stuff only plays in silence, is himself
silenced by his own inability to produce an oral expression at the very moment
of its double arrival via the (written) page’s whistling.
Furthermore, the fact that Fancioulle dies “sur les planches” resonates further
with the presence and incursion of the printed word into this silent, corporal,
scene of acting. For in addition to referring to the stage, “les planches” can also
designate the metal plates used for printing engravings in books (Littré 3: 1150).
While the traditional reading of “Une mort héroïque” points to the page’s whist
ling as the murder weapon that kills Fancioulle, perhaps it is what is heard—lan-
guage, whistling, and poetry—that marks the death of the merely visual. Framed
in this prose poem—prose added to more and more prose “comme la neige
s’ajoute à la neige”—is poetry itself brought to the brink of death, only to let its
own heroic death emerge from the victory of orality over the visual? As Philippe
Hamon asks, “que voit-on quand on lit un texte?”59
Guillaumin & Cie, 1850) (Roger Pearson, The Beauty of Baudelaire: The Poet as Alternative Lawgiver
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 526–8). Bastiat informs Pearson’s astute reading of the poem
more broadly (526–32). As Bastiat, asks, “À quelque chose malheur est bon. De tels accidents font aller
l’industrie. Il faut que tout le monde vive. Que deviendraient les vitriers, si l’on ne cassait jamais de vitre?”
(Every cloud has a silver lining. Accidents like this make industry go forward. Everyone has to live. What
would happen to glaziers if no glass was ever broken?) (5). Bastiat’s key distinction between good and
bad—for economists and economic theories alike—separates ce qu’on voit from ce qu’on ne voit pas.
57 See Sheila J. Nayar, “Seeing Voices: Oral Pragmatics and the Silent Cinema,” Early Popular Visual
Culture, 7.2 (July 2009), 145–65.
58 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 159.
59 Philippe Hamon, “Hypotyposes: que voit-on?,” in Bérengère Voisin (ed.), Fiction et vues imag-
eantes, typologie et fonctionnalités, Studia Romanica Tartuensia (Paris: Centre d’études francophones
The initial version of “L’Horloge” ended there, but for the 1862 edition
Baudelaire added a final paragraph that marks an abrupt shift in tone60 and
reveals this story about telling time to be a framed story: a story within a story.
Among Gérard Genette’s list of functions that such framed stories serve are what
he terms the “fonction distractive” and the “fonction obstructive”:61 viewed either
way, the frame that Baudelaire sets around this story circumvents the prorsus by
creating additional twists and turns. In this respect, I share Cheryl Krueger’s
interest in “the extent to which Baudelaire’s storytelling tells the story of the
Baudelairean prose poem genre itself.”62 In more general terms, Marie Maclean’s
compelling study of narrative in Le Spleen de Paris teases out the poems’ com-
plexity and richness:
The prose poems reflect the many possible variants of the writer-reader relation-
ship, ranging from full reader participation in the creation of the text at one
extreme to almost total incomprehension or misdirection at the other. [. . .] The
relationship between a writer figure and a reader figure is mirrored in the
narrator-narratee relationships presented in many of the texts themselves. They
experiment with a wide variety of narrative voices and focalization [. . .] but the
preferred voice is that of the first-person narrator who represents different
recorder/observer figures, such as the flaneur or the poet.63
In “L’Horloge,” the temporal situation presented—immediately after an emphatic

declaration of “l’Éternité!”—creates and sets into motion the poem’s circular
nature: the present tense in this final paragraph connects it to the same moment
of the first paragraph, thus connecting the end to the beginning and suggesting
that this present moment also harbors a glimpse of the eternal. What we were lis-
tening to—an anecdote about looking into a cat’s eyes—is a not only deserving
but emphatic madrigal, and the opening aphorism was nothing more than a finely
spun silk of storytelling, a story in and of time.64 By calling it a madrigal,
Baudelaire makes it more than merely a story about time: he is once again drawing
Robert Schuman, University of Tartu) (November 2008), 7; reprinted online in Atelier de Fabula,
March 2019, www.fabula.org/atelier.php?Hypotyposes
60 Murphy describes it as “l’irruption d’une pointe épigrammatique qui casse cette tonalité” (the
eruption of an epigrammatic point which breaks the tone) (Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 28).
61 Gérard Genette, Nouveau discours du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 63.
62 Krueger, The Art of Procrastination, 42.
63 Marie Maclean, Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment (London: Routledge,
1988), 48–9.
64 Baudelaire was certainly not the only poet to tie the genre of the madrigal to questions of poetic
form; in his volume Coffret de santal (1873) Charles Cros would include “Madrigal sur un carnet
d’ivoire,” a four-quatrain octosyllabic poem; a “Sonnet madrigal” with the irreverent rhyme scheme
AAAA BBBB CCC DDD; and, finally a prose poem entitled “Madrigal” (which had initially appeared
in La Renaissance littéraire et artistique on July 27, 1872; see the present study’s discussion of
“Distrayeuse,” infra, Chapter 4) that opens, like Baudelaire’s “L’Horloge,” with a consideration of
“Le temps, implacable alchimiste.”
our attention to questions of form and tone. From its origins in the sixteenth
century, a madrigal was a traditional musical piece for voices without accompani-
ment; from there, the term was used to designate a “pièce de poésie renfermant,
en un petit nombre de vers, une pensée ingénieuse et galante” (piece of poetry
containing an ingenious and gallant thought in a few verses), and by extension
“paroles de galanterie qu’on adresse aux femmes” (words of gallantry addressed to
women) (Littré 3: 373). This brief missive follows up on the assertive “Oui, je vois
l’heure” of the end of the previous paragraph by seeking confirmation: “N’est-ce
pas.” But rather than serve as some sort of prose enjambment, the request for sup-
port is directed to a “madame”—thus consistent with the nature of such madrigals
of gallant prose (Littré’s one example of “madrigal” in a sentence is: “Il va débitant
des madrigaux à toutes les dames”)65—and puts its very nature into question:
what does the poetic subject really mean by asking if the madrigal is truly praise-
worthy, and what is meant when it is as emphatic or exaggerated as she is? Is this
question sincere or ironic? Is this text truly remarkable for its construction—in
which case, she is as just as important—or it is rather a little nothing, a short
meaningless bit of text, and by extension she is similarly debased and irrelevant?66
It is easy to see why the subject is pleased with himself (“j’ai eu tant de plaisir”):
he’s able to leave the text’s semantic value as open- ended as its tem poral
potentiality.
It is worth noting that the idea of weaving a poem is certainly not unique to
Baudelaire; in her 1867 volume Le Livre de jade, Judith Walter (the nom de plume
of Judith Gautier; she would use her own name for the second edition in 1902)
builds her prose poem “Chant des oiseaux, le soir” around this very notion, alter-
nating paragraphs of quoted speech and narration:
Chant des oiseaux, le soir

Selon Li-Taï-Pé
Au milieu du vent frais, les oiseaux chantent gaiement, sur les branches
transversales.
65 For the possibility of other significations lurking within the gallant nature of a poetic text, see the
present study’s reading of “Le Galant tireur,” infra, Chapter 3.
66 The present study is not the only one who finds in the end of this poem more questions than
answers; as Maria Scott explains,
The final paragraph opens the text up to a number of incompatible interpretations: does
the “madrigal” constitute a parody of Baudelaire’s own love poetry, of love poetry in gen-
eral, or is it to be read as non-parodic? Is the text mocking a utilitarian approach to poetry,
on the part of either poet or reader, or is it mocking the stupidity of the mistress, incapable
of understanding poetry in terms other than those of exchange? The final paragraph brings
plurality to bear on the text, thereby encouraging us to decide in what direction to read it.
Will we interpret it as the narrator reads his mistress’s eyes, by seeing it as unproblematic
ally transparent in its meaning? Or will we read it otherwise?
(Scott, “Reading the Look and Looking at Reading in Baudelaire,” 383)
Derrière les treillages de sa fenêtre, une jeune femme qui brode des fleurs bril-
lantes sur une étoffe de soie, écoute les oiseaux s’appeler joyeusement dans
les arbres.
Elle relève sa tête et laisse tomber ses bras; sa pensée est partie vers celui qui
est loin depuis longtemps.
“Les oiseaux savent se retrouver dans le feuillage; mais les larmes qui tombent
des yeux des jeunes femmes, comme la pluie d’orage, ne rappellent pas les
absents.”
Elle relève ses bras et laisse pencher sa tête sur son ouvrage.
“Je vais broder une pièce de vers, parmi les fleurs de la robe que je lui destine,
et peut-être les caractères lui diront-ils de revenir.”67
(Birdsong, in the evening
After Li-Taï-Pé
At the heart of the cool breeze, the birds sing gayly, on the intersecting
branches.
Behind the trellis of his window, a young woman embroidering shiny flowers
on silk listens to the birds joyfully calling to each other in the trees.
She raises her head and lets her arms fall; her thoughts have wandered toward
he who has been far away for a long time.
“The birds know how to find each other in the foliage; but the tears which fall
from the young women’s eyes, like rain in a storm, don’t call the missing back.”
She raises her arms once again and lets her head tilt downwards to her work.
“I will embroider a line of verse amongst the flowers on the robe I am making
for him, and maybe the characters will tell him to come back.”)
Unlike Baudelaire’s poetic subject, whose weaving works within the single
medium of words, here the verses are stitched into two other already intermin-
gled fabrics: flora and silk. The consequences and aims, too, could hardly be more
different: Baudelaire’s gallant mode places its interlocutor (“N’est-ce pas, mad-
ame”) front and center, and no doubt draws on certain expectations of what his
words can produce: if not expectations of the woman then certainly of the reader,
imagining how this madrigal will be received. On the other hand, Walter offers
her verses to complement the dress without knowing what will result, without
making any claims to what might come of it (“peut-être les caractères lui diront-
ils de revenir”).
Paradoxically, thinking of this text as a madrigal reduces any grandeur we
might have attributed to its opening line, which is now just a little ditty. At the
same time, we gain new awareness of and appreciation for the poem’s ingenuity:
farther and farther from the “Génie” or the “Démon” wielding direct speech, we
67 Judith Walter, Le Livre de jade (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1867), 19–20.

now see that we’re confronted with a text that creates the very pause in time that it
announces, by forcing the moment of reading to yawn open to allow for its full
comprehension. From what seems to be some timeless truth firsts explicated into
a search for escaping time, then interrupted by speech that anchors its speaker
and recipient, the process of unveiling a new pair of dialogic partners similarly
unveils the passage of poetic time, the (hor)logos: far from the directness of prose,
we’ve been led on a meandering journey through this text only to discover that
we’ve never left the present. Despite it all, we see that we’re still here: the word that
anchors us in the eternal present of the poetic frame, “voici,” is a composite of the
imperative “vois” and “ici”: see here. And we see that this present clin d’œil of the
poetic (hor)logos frames yet another four-part poem: paragraphs beginning
“Un jour,” “Le gamin,” “Pour moi,” and “Et si.” Through these paragraphs, it remains
resolutely poetic: in his review of Le Livre de jade, Paul Verlaine wrote:
Je ne connais d’analogue à ce livre dans notre littérature que le Gaspard de la nuit

de cet à jamais regrettable Aloysius Bertrand. Et encore, si l’on me donnait à
choisir, préférerais-je de beaucoup Le Livre de jade pour son originalité plus
grande, sa forme plus pure, sa poésie plus réelle et plus intense.68
(The only thing like this book in our literature that I know of is Gaspard de la
nuit, by that forever unfortunate Aloysius Bertrand. And again, given the choice
I would much prefer Le Livre de jade for its greater originality, its purer form and
its truer and more intense poetry.)
We are reminded once again of the end of “Les Aveugles”—“Je dis: Que cherchent-
ils au Ciel, tous ces aveugles?”—for it offers a particularly helpful example for
considering the function that quoted speech can perform in Baudelaire’s poems:
prose and verse alike. Unlike the use of “dire” in “L’Horloge,” here the first two
words “Je dis” do what they say—that is, they do what they say they will say—as
the last line’s first syllables establish the speaker’s primacy and turn the end of the
poem into a concluding assertion. The last line of a sonnet, referred to as a “chute,”
traditionally packs the punch; as Théodore de Banville explains in his Petit Traité
de poésie française:
Le derniers vers du Sonnet doit contenir un trait—exquis, ou surprenant, ou

excitant l’admiration par sa justesse et par sa force.
Lamartine disait qu’il doit suffire de lire le dernier vers d’un Sonnet; car, ajou-
tait-il, un Sonnet n’existe pas si la pensée n’en est pas violemment et ingénieuse-
ment résumée dans le dernier vers.69
68 Paul Verlaine, Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade], 1972), 623.
69 Théodore de Banville, Petit Traité de poésie française (Paris: Charpentier, 1883; facsimile edition
Paris: Éditions Ressouvenances, 1998), 201.
(The last line of a Sonnet must contain a stroke—exquisite, surprising, or

eliciting admiration by its truth and its strength.
Lamartine said that it must be enough to read the final verse of a Sonnet;
because, he added, a Sonnet does not exist if its thought is not violently and
ingeniously summarised in the final line.)
That the last line of a sonnet fulfils its role as a “chute” is not remarkable; in light
of the fluidity in Baudelaire’s poetics, it is worth considering whether some of
the structural elements of verse form are also perceptible in his prose poetry.
Certainly poems like “Les Aveugles,” which draw our attention to sight and to the
tensions between its potential and its obstacles, almost explicitly invite such
reflections. Thinking about what precisely is seen during the act of reading,
Philippe Hamon underscores the presence of the visual, on both thematic and
material levels:
le lecteur a souvent à faire avec la thématique même du voir. Beaucoup de textes

sont des “mises en scènes,” explicitées, thématisées, verbalisées, et souvent même
plus ou moins démultipliées, de l’acte de voir. [. . .] Il voit le texte, cet objet matériel
écrit, dans sa linéarité inscrite sur la page.70
(the reader often has to contend with the very theme of seeing. Many texts are
“stagings”: explained, verbalised, and often more or less multiplied, by the act of
seeing. [. . .] He sees the text, this written material object, in its linearity written
on the page.)
“Les Aveugles” is a case in point, and its structure follows the traditional poetic
order commonly found in verse: after the situation or problem in the first quat-
rain is amplified in the second, the volta marks the point at which the poetic voice
offers some sort of commentary or solution. From there, the two tercets clarify
and enhance the scene presented in the quatrains, either work as a coherent sestet
(six-line stanza) or representing two three-line alternatives; for Banville:
Ce qu’il y a de vraiment surprenant dans le Sonnet, c’est que le même travail doit
être fait deux fois, d’abord dans les quatrains, ensuite dans les tercets,—et que
cependant les tercets doivent non pas répéter les quatrains mais les éclairer,
comme une herse qu’on allume montre dans un décor de théâtre un effet qu’on
n’y avait pas vu auparavant.71
(What is really surprising about the Sonnet is that the same work must be done
twice—first in the quatrains, and then in the tercets—and that despite this, the
tercets must not repeat the quatrains, but illuminate them, like stage lighting
which, when turned on, can show a previously unseen aspect of a theater’s set.)
70 Hamon, “Hypotyposes: que voit-on?”

71 Banville, Petit Traité de poésie française, 202.
Then, the “chute” and the concluding “trait”; as Banville explains, the “chute” is not
remarkable for its surprise, since the reader has a sense of what is coming; instead,
it is in the poet’s ability to produce the unexpected despite the reader expecting it:
Enfin, un Sonnet doit ressembler à une comédie bien faite, en ceci que chaque
mot des quatrains doit faire deviner—dans une certaine mesure—le trait final, et
que cependant ce trait final doit surprendre le lecteur,—non par la pensée qu’il
exprime et que le lecteur a devinée,—mais par la beauté, la hardiesse et le
bonheur de l’expression. C’est ainsi qu’au théâtre un beau dénouement emporte
le succès, non parce que le spectateur ne l’a pas prévu,—il faut qu’il l’ait prévu,—
mais parce que le poëte a revêtu ce dénouement d’une forme plus étrange et plus
saisissante que ce qu’on pouvait imaginer d’avance.72
(Lastly, a Sonnet must resemble a well put-together comedy, in that each word of
the quatrains must allow us to intuit—to a certain degree—the fine stroke, and
that this final stroke must nonetheless surprise the reader,—not by the thought it
expresses and that the reader has intuited,—but by the beauty, the boldness, and
the joy of its expression. This is how a beautiful denouement in theater succeeds,
not because the spectator hasn’t guessed it,—he must have guessed it,—but
because the poet has clothed the denouement in a strange and more striking
form than could previously have been imagined.)
Surely this structure is precisely what Baudelaire follows in “Le Fou et la Vénus,”
after the initial aphorism that serves as the frame, leading us into the heart of the
matter. The situation presented in the first paragraph—that of setting the scene
and asking for time via paraphrase—is developed further: the “petit garçon” is
transformed into “Le gamin du céleste Empire” and his character takes flight
through the complexity and subtlety of his actions (“il hésita d’abord; puis, se
ravisant, il répondit”) and through his speech act, as we have already seen. At the
volta, the poem turns back to the poetic subject (“Pour moi”), and his reflections
on this situation, the continuation of which is marked by the “Et” at the start of
the last framed paragraph, “Et si quelque importun,” before arriving at this prose
poem’s version of the “chute,” which certainly inspires “l’admiration par sa justesse
et par sa force.” In addition, it bears an undeniable tone of morality, a feature com-
mon to the end of Baudelaire’s poems more generally according to Murat: “Le
modèle le plus prégnant du corpus baudelairien peut être envisagé comme une
transformation de l’anecdote moralisante en fable de la vie moderne”73 (the most
poignant model of the Baudelairean corpus can be seen as a transformation of the
moralising anecdote into a fable of modern life).
72 Banville, Petit Traité de poésie française, 202.

73 Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud, 200.
There is a similar structure at work in “Le Miroir,” with an opening setting, its
development, a pivot and an ending note of “justesse” and “force”:
Le Miroir
Un homme épouvantable entre et se regarde dans la glace.
“Pourquoi vous regardez-vous au miroir, puisque vous ne pouvez vous y voir
qu’avec déplaisir?”
L’homme épouvantable me répond: “—Monsieur, d’après les immortels princ-
ipes de 89, tous les hommes sont égaux en droits; donc je possède le droit de me
mirer; avec plaisir ou déplaisir, cela ne regarde que ma conscience.”
Au nom du bon sens, j’avais sans doute raison; mais, au point de vue de la loi,
il n’avait pas tort. (OC 1: 344)
(A frightful man enters and looks at himself in the mirror.
“Why do you look at yourself in the mirror, since you must dee yourself there
only with displeasure?”
The rightful man replies, “Sir, according to the immortal principles of ’89, all
men are by right equal. Thus I possess the right to see my reflection; with pleas-
ure or displeasure, that only concerns my conscience.”
According to common sense, I was probably right; but, from the legal view-
point, he was not wrong). (PP, 101)
If prose poems considered thus far have displayed what is seen and the language
to say it, in “Le Miroir” the stakes are raised, exponentially: it is, unsurprisingly,
about seeing double,74 about seeing and hearing both sides and the uneasiness or
readiness to accept that lack of clarity, or multitude of possibilities, that are
implied.75 That such clarity is reserved for the poet in such situations is already
clearly stated in Baudelaire’s poem “Les Foules”: in the opening line, “Il n’est pas
donné à chacun de prendre un bain de multitude” (Not everyone is capable of
taking a bath of multitude) and later, describing the poet’s privileged position, “Le
poète jouit de cet incomparable privilège, qu’il peut à sa guise être lui-même et
autrui” (The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able, at will, to be
himself and an other) (OC 1: 291). He develops this idea further in his essay “Le
Peintre de la vie moderne” and frames his thoughts about the flâneur in the crowd
in terms at once multiple and visual:
Pour le parfait flâneur, pour l’observateur passionné, c’est une immense jouis-
sance que d’élire domicile dans le nombre, dans l’ondoyant, dans le mouvement,
74 See Maria Scott’s important work on duplicity in a number of Baudelaire’s prose poems (cf.
Introduction, supra): “Intertextes et mystifications dans les poèmes en prose de Baudelaire.”
75 Rightly pointing to the poem’s parodic potential, Murphy suggests that the poem could be read
as a reminder of how a writer can reflect her or his own self in a written work (Logiques du dernier
Baudelaire, 210).
dans le fugitif et l’infini. Être hors de chez soi, et pourtant se sentir partout chez
soi; voir le monde, être au centre du monde et rester caché au monde, tels sont
quelques-uns des moindres plaisirs de ces esprits indépendants, passionnés,
impartiaux, que la langue ne peut que maladroitement définir. L’observateur est
un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito. [. . .] On peut aussi le comparer, lui,
à un miroir aussi immense que cette foule; à un kaléidoscope doué de con-
science, qui, à chacun de ses mouvements, représente la vie multiple et la grâce
mouvante de tous les éléments de la vie. C’est un moi insatiable du non-moi, qui,
à chaque instant, le rend et l’exprime en images plus vivantes que la vie elle-
même, toujours instable et fugitive. (OC 2: 691–2; original emphasis)
(For the perfect flâneur, the passionate observer, it is an immense joy to make
one’s home in numbers, in undulation, in movement, in the fugitive and the
infinite. To be out of one’s home, and yet to feel perfectly at home everywhere; to
see the world, to be in the center of the world and yet hidden from it, these are
some of the smallest pleasures for these independent, passionate, and impartial
spirits, which language can only clumsily define. The observer is a prince who
takes joy from his anonymity, everywhere. [. . .] He can also be compared to a
mirror as vast as the crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness
which, with each movement, presents life in all its multiplicity and the moving
grace of all the elements of life. It is an I insatiable for the non-I which, at every
moment, returns it and expresses it in images more alive than life itself, ever
unstable and fugitive.)
The different perspectives and prisms that the flâneur offers himself provide
opportunities for seeing and not seeing or being seen (“rester caché”), knowing
and not knowing (literally: “incognito,” unknowing).76 If the kaleidoscope offers a
seemingly infinite number of facets and possibilities, the mirror is much flatter
for it merely offers one inverse image; for Jean Starobinski, “l’acte de se mirer reste
un privilège aristocratique aux yeux de Baudelaire, qui considère inversement la
démocratisation du miroir comme un sacrilège.”77 Can the poetic bring the mir-
ror beyond itself, past the duality of self and reflection, toward a more nuanced
understanding of seeing, of seeing multiples, and of expressing them?
The first sentence of “Le Miroir” would seem to suggest so. Here, the man
who enters the poetic subject’s interior space is “épouvantable”: provoking
“l’épouvante,” or fear, fright, horror, terror. But in the eyes of whom? In the public,
perhaps, but not in those of the subject, who describes his entrance, actions, and
general presence with cold detachment; nor with the “homme épouvantable”
76 Jacques Derrida relates the word “incognito” and its presence in Baudelaire to the larger matter
of the secret; Jacques Derrida, “Responding To / Answering For: The Secret,” trans. Kevin Newmark, in
E.S. Burt, Elissa Marder, and Kevin Newmark (eds.), Time for Baudelaire (Poetry, Theory, History), Yale
French Studies, 125–6 (2014), 7–29.
77 Jean Starobinski, La Mélancolie au miroir: trois lectures de Baudelaire (Paris: Julliard, 1989), 25.
himself, for looking at himself in the mirror provokes no reaction that we know of:
it is an action without a reaction, seemingly anodyne. Despite what the simple
image of the mirror might suggest, Baudelaire sets us not in the binary but in the
kaleidoscopic: in this respect the poem opens on a scene that in many ways
“représente la vie multiple et la grâce mouvante de tous les éléments de la vie.” And
yet, this multitude also somehow coexists in a time frame that is frozen in the
immediate, the contemporaneous, the absolute instantaneous. Without elapsing
seconds that would allow for an action and a reaction, the simultaneous seeing and
being seen reject the historical, and representation more generally: the image per-
ceived is not a reflection of a past state, but only of the precise moment of the pre-
sent. For Paul de Man, this absolute immediacy is central to Baudelaire’s notion of
modernity, in his poetry and as he develops it in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne”:
Baudelaire’s conception of modernity [. . .] stems from an acute sense of the pre-

sent as a constitutive element of all aesthetic experience. [. . .] All these experi-
ences of immediacy [. . .] strive to combine the openness and freedom of a present
severed from all other temporal dimensions, the weight of the past as well as the
concern with a future, with a sense of totality and completeness that could not be
achieved if a more extended awareness of time were not also involved.78
In “Le Miroir,” the interruption of a speech act forces “a more extended awareness
of time,” exacerbating the already complicated multiplicity and setting the poem
into motion: unadorned by narrative framing such as in “L’Horloge,” the quota-
tion fills the second paragraph with a question composed of a veritable cacophony
of repeated sounds. Both halves of the question begin with words with plosives,
[p] at the start and [k] in the middle—“Pourquoi” ([puʁ.kwa]) and “puisque”
([pɥisk])—and the profusion of iterations of the pronoun “vous,” complemented
by words designating seeing (“regardez,” “voir”) and its related pleasure or lack
thereof (“(dé)plaisir”), fill the audible space with the back and forth between the
plosive [p] and the fricative [v]:
“Pourquoi vous regardez-vous au miroir, puisque vous ne pouvez vous y voir

qu’avec déplaisir?”
If the clock in “L’Horloge” provoked a question to elude it, here the titular
object is the arena where the action happens, the only site where the mirroring
can actually take place. Even this visual space is mentioned in different iterations
(one might say kaleidoscopically) three times in the first two sentences: “dans une
glace,” “au miroir,” and “y.”
78 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition
(London: Routledge, 1983), 156–7.
The volta between the second and third paragraphs marks the departure of the
physicality of the mirror, and of the poetic subject seeing his reflection, in favor of
new registers of language; narration, discourse laden with the social, rational
deduction and the figurative. It is also heavy with tones of civility, history, and
cliché, since the speaker refers to the first line of the “Article premier” of
the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen: “Les hommes naissent
et demeurent libres et égaux en droits” (Men are born and remain free and equal
in rights). For Christopher Prendergast, the very notion of “cliché” “characteris
tically emerges in the context of the romantic opposition between banality and
originality, public and private, along with the corresponding desire for a uniquely
‘individual’ language within, or beyond, the terms of public and social discourse.”79
In “Le Miroir” the phrase becomes the object of paraphrase as it is merely a
reference, an inaccurate quotation. Baudelaire’s “homme épouvantable”—the
transition from viewing subject to speaking subject also provides him with greater
agency as the indefinite article “un homme” is replaced with the definite article
“l’homme”—replaces birth and remaining with the less specific being and
removing the liberty stated in the Déclaration. At the same time, his phrase ends
with words lifted verbatim from the Déclaration, “égaux en droits,” and the speaker
even amplifies the statement’s universal message by insisting on the multiplicity
therein: not “les hommes” but “tous les hommes.” It is thus part paraphrase—from
para meaning beside, next to, near, or against—and part citation: a hybrid platitude
if ever there were one. Unlike the tone it sets at the outset of the Déclaration, in
Baudelaire’s version the line serves a role not unlike the aphorism at the start of
“L’Horloge”: a statement bearing universal truth with an authoritative tone that
no one would dare question, even though both are very much open to question,
and interpretation. As such, the language of these prose poems puts its own
elasticity on display, and it both enables and heralds the arrival of a new way of
thinking: embracing multiple, seemingly contradictory options.80 The solution
to the duality between two versions of the same image—underscored by the
seemingly infinite repetition of “vous” and the insistence on equality amid the
multitudes (“tous les hommes sont égaux”)—is not to choose one or the other, but
to acknowledge them both (“avec plaisir ou déplaisir”). While the speaker does
present them as alternatives to each other—one or the other, “ou,” not both—he is
also careful not to choose, or at least not to show his hand and indicate what his
choice might be, between the two views of himself he sees in the mirror or any
79 Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 183.
80 As David Evans convincingly argues, prose poems
must both maintain our faith and guard their secret. The hope of revealing the key to their
poeticity, therefore, must be tempered by an acceptance of the necessary irresolvability of
the enterprise, a willingness to be confounded at every turn for the common good: the
preservation of the mystery of Poetry. (Evans, Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea, 119)
related (dis)pleasure (“me mirer, avec plaisir ou déplaisir, cela ne regarde que ma
conscience”)81 (to admire myself, with pleasure or displeasure, it is entirely up to
my own conscience); as such the choosing itself is deferred, delayed, while the
two coexist in the time-space of the language of this poetic phrase at least.
One particular aspect of this phrase is worthy of some additional attention:
unlike in the first two paragraphs (“Un homme [. . .] se regarde” and “Pourquoi
vous regardez-vous”), here the verb “regarder” means to interest or concern
(“Avoir rapport à, intéresser”; Littré 4: 1556). While not precisely a figurative
meaning—related to “égard,” the verb traditionally meant to care for or pay atten-
tion to something—by the nineteenth century this meaning had fallen a few
notches, in favor of the physical, direct meaning still most common today. This
meaning is more distant from looking with the eyes stricto sensu and is thus
deferred in a manner that recalls the use of “dire” from “L’Horloge.” There, saying
without really saying; here, seeing without really seeing: “Le Miroir” offers
another view into seeing, perceiving, what it might mean and the language used
to express it.
We sense this in the poem’s final line—which fulfils Banville’s charge that it be
“exquis, ou surprenant, ou excitant l’admiration par sa justesse et par sa force.” It
is both exquisite and powerful, and for several reasons. First, and most obvious, is
the incredible balance: two near equal halves, each one set up with a contextual-
ization (“Au nom du bon sens” and “au point de vue de la loi”) and the second one
expressing the mirror image of the first (“j’avais sans doute raison” reflected in “il
n’avait pas tort”). That they pivot on the adversative conjunction “mais” signals
their coexistence, and so we remain in the poetic space of a coexistence of seem-
ingly exclusive terms. As we dig deeper, though, we see that the two settings pit
certain elements against each other: word and meaning in the first part, sight and
law in the second. It is here that Baudelaire revisits one particular usage of
“regarder” with a similarly specific usage of the poem’s other verb of sight, “voir”:
“au point de vue de la loi.” What, precisely, is the status of law: not the word of law,
because Baudelaire has placed the word (the “nom”) in the first half of the sen-
tence, but rather the law’s perspective, that is to say its interpretation? What is left
of the law when the very opening article of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme
et du citoyen is undermined, its authority shaken and its meaning left bare, to be
paraphrased and rephrased at will? What is the perspective that leads to “il n’avait
pas tort,” and what are the sight lines that bring the poetic subject to that conclu-
sion? The first half of the “chute” raises similar questions: not about “point de vue”
and what is seen but rather the language to express it. The phrase “bon sens”
doesn’t merely mean common sense, since “sens” can also refer to meanings,
81 For Marie Maclean, the end of the poem “leaves open the matter of how aware the man is of his
own appearance” (Maclean, Narrative as Performance, 54).
senses, and directions;82 and this poem’s final line seems to suggest—among other
things—a multitude of possibilities that fly in the face of the previously held
dominant poles of words, meaning, observation, and law. In addition to being
another example of Murat’s “modèle le plus prégnant du corpus baudelairien,”
surely the end of “Les Fenêtres” provides a useful example of such undercutting of
morality (or, in this instance, some notion of truth), as the poetic subject responds
to the imagined reader’s imagined question: “Peut-être me direz-vous: ‘Es-tu sûr
que cette légende soit la vraie?’ Qu’importe ce que peut être la réalité placée hors
de moi, si elle m’a aidé à vivre, à sentir que je suis et ce que je suis?” (Perhaps you
will ask, “Are you sure that legend is the true one?” Does it matter what the reality
located outside of me might be if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am and
what I am?) (OC 2: 339). Ultimately Baudelaire does wrap up this poem, and
thoughts about prose poetry more generally, in this exquisite last line: if language
supports reason—whether common sense or commonly-held understanding of
general rules—then it is poetic language that goes beyond the laws (of reason, of
the physical world, of nature, of poetry) to allow for exclusive attributes to coex-
ist, for opposites (right and wrong, pleasure and displeasure) to sit side-by-side,
for an original and its reflection to mirror each other in an infinite, immortal,
timeless loop.
A similar set of questions from and about poetry can be found in “Le Confiteor
de l’artiste”:
Le Confiteor de l’artiste
Que les fins de journées d’automne sont pénétrantes! Ah! pénétrantes jusqu’à
la douleur! car il est de certaines sensations délicieuses dont le vague n’exclut pas
l’intensité; et il n’est pas de pointe plus acérée que celle de l’Infini.
Grand délice que celui de noyer son regard dans l’immensité du ciel et de la
mer! Solitude, silence, incomparable chasteté de l’azur! une petite voile frisson-
nante à l’horizon, et qui par sa petitesse et son isolement imite mon irrémédiable
existence, mélodie monotone de la houle, toutes ces choses pensent par moi, ou
je pense par elles (car dans la grandeur de la rêverie, le moi se perd vite!); elles
pensent, dis-je, mais musicalement et pittoresquement, sans arguties, sans syllo-
gismes, sans déductions.
Toutefois, ces pensées, qu’elles sortent de moi ou s’élancent des choses, devi-
ennent bientôt trop intenses. L’énergie dans la volupté crée un malaise et une
souffrance positive. Mes nerfs trop tendus ne donnent plus que des vibrations
criardes et douloureuses.
Et maintenant la profondeur du ciel me consterne; sa limpidité m’exaspère.
L’insensibilité de la mer, l’immuabilité du spectacle, me révoltent . . . Ah! faut-il
82 See Seth Whidden, Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2007), 126.
éternellement souffrir, ou fuir éternellement le beau? Nature, enchanteresse sans

pitié, rivale toujours victorieuse, laisse-moi! Cesse de tenter mes désirs et mon
orgueil! L’étude du beau est un duel où l’artiste crie de frayeur avant d’être vaincu.
(OC 1: 278–9)
(How penetrating are the ends of autumn days! Ah! Penetrating to the verge of
pain! For there are certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does not
exclude intensity; and there is no sharper point than Infinity.
Sheer delight to drown one’s gaze in the immensity of sky and sea! Solitude,
silence, incomparable chastity of the azure! A small sail trembling on the horizon,
and whose smallness and isolation imitate my irremediable existence, monotonous
melody of the swell—all these things think through me, or I think through
them (for in the grandeur of reverie, the self is quickly lost!). They think, I say,
but musically and pictorially, without quibblings, without syllogisms, without
deductions.
However, these thoughts, whether they emerge from me or spring from
things, soon grow too intense. The force of voluptuous pleasure creates uneasi-
ness and concrete suffering. Then my excessively taut nerves produce nothing
but shrill and painful vibrations.
And now the sky’s depth fills me with dismay; its limpidity exasperates me.
The sea’s insensitivity, the scene’s immutability appall me . . . Ah! Must we suffer
eternally, or else eternally flee the beautiful? Nature, sorceress without mercy,
ever victorious rival, let me be! Stop tempting my desires and my pride! The
study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with fright before being
defeated). (PP, 4; modified)
Structurally, this poem’s four paragraphs follow what is now a somewhat familiar
pattern: the first paragraph’s thesis about the vagaries of any attempt at expression
due to the vastness of infinity is expanded with examples in the second: “Solitude,
silence, incomparable chasteté de l’azur!.” Then the pivot at the volta, before the
third movement, signalled with “Toutefois” and its corrective tone in “pensées
[. . .] trop intenses” and an energy that yields “un malaise et une souffrance posi-
tive.” In the final paragraph, pressures come full circle to reveal the consequences
for the poet (“me consterne,” “m’exaspère,” “me révoltent”), leading to his looking
for a way out (either through suffering or flight) and then giving up, pleading to
be left alone.
In the title, the word Confiteor, meaning “I confess,” is the incipit that opens a
prayer of penitence common in Catholic mass; from this prayer comes the well-
known phrase Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa (it is my fault, my fault,
my most grievous fault). It seems that the poetic subject is confessing to the diffi-
culty—one that seemingly beats him, were it not for the poem itself which is
proof of his ultimate success—of navigating the pains and suffering of existence
and acknowledging the inherent travails of expressing them. Such reflections on
how to put into words what is seen, heard, or felt are built of themes already dis-
cussed: the obvious repetition that fills the opening paragraph makes it feel
relentless, in “pénétrantes! Ah! pénétrantes,” in the [s] of “certaines sensations
délicieuses” and in the [p] of “pas de pointe plus acérée.” (Given the repetition for
which the Confiteor is known, in French “c’est ma faute, c’est ma faute, c’est ma très
grande faute”—such repetition is perhaps all the more expected.) The poem also
offers a more complex example of a mirrored echo—a sort of internal ABBA or
rime embrassée of sounds—in the pointed question of the last paragraph, “faut-il
éternellement souffrir, ou fuir éternellement le beau?,” again with the choice left
unchosen, the two options left to hang in the air for simultaneous consideration.
But the difference is that this confession is laced with irony, introduced first by
the profusion (if not overuse) of exclamations in the first paragraph with the
exaggerated emotion in the repetition of “pénétrantes” and then the hyperbolic
language (“L’infini,” “l’immensité du ciel,” “incomparable chasteté de l’azur,” “sa
petitesse et son isolement,” “mon irrémédiable existence”). They are then followed
by the risibly flat “toutes ces choses,” themselves announced by the “mélodie
monotone,” and then emphasized by the suggestion that the poetic is the result of
things that think through the poet musically and pictorially (coupled with yet
another use of the verb “dire” that doesn’t actually refer to anything spoken: “dis-je”):
“toutes ces choses pensent par moi, ou je pense par elles (car dans la grandeur de
la rêverie, le moi se perd vite!); elles pensent, dis- je, mais musicalement et
pittoresquement, sans arguties, sans syllogismes, sans déductions.” A few years
later, Arthur Rimbaud would echo this sentiment by saying “C’est faux de dire: Je
pense, on devrait dire On me pense” (It is wrong to say: I think, one should say
I am being thought) as part of his explanation of his poetics of the “Voyant,”83 and
the levity that Rimbaud adds by exposing the play on words between the
homophonous verbs “penser” (to think) and “panser” (to groom) adds to the pos-
sibility that “Le Confiteor de l’artiste” ends on something other than a sincere note.
In light of the poetic “moi” that loses itself quickly—for Kaplan, “the dreamer
[. . .] has lost the anchor of his own subjectivity”84—and the heavy play on the
subject either thinking actively or being thought by objects, it is ironic that critics
have given (and continue to give) such weight to the poem’s conclusion: “L’étude
du beau est un duel où l’artiste crie de frayeur avant d’être vaincu.” Are we sud-
denly meant to take this final sentence as the theorem that justifies Baudelaire’s
entire poetic project, as some critics have done? Should we not be wary of such a
grand statement in a poetic text that has already eschewed logic and reason and
explicitly evacuated them from the poetic? Rather than a slogan to live and write
83 Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 340; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, 371, modified.
84 Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 23; Kaplan offers a particularly cogent discussion of this
poem (20–4).
by, might this phrase be an example, instead, of what not to do, of how not to
create poetry?
Instead, we might see that there is a trap in the word “l’étude” at the end of this
poetic confession, of this confession in and of poetry: the passivity of the poetic
flowing via thoughts through the poet is the better model, rather than the pre-
meditated study of beauty. The realization prefigures the understanding that
Rimbaud will reach at the end of “Alchimie du verbe” from Une saison en enfer:
“Ce fut d’abord une étude. J’écrivais des silences, des nuits, je notais l’inexprimable.
Je fixais des vertiges” (It was at first a study. I wrote out silences and nights.
I recorded the inexpressible. I described the frenzies)85 and, after quoting his
own verse poem “O saisons, ô châteaux,” he concludes: “Cela s’est passé. Je sais
aujourd’hui saluer la beauté.” (That is over. Today I know how to salute beauty.)86
We might also see in Baudelaire’s poetry a return to Valéry’s formula from the
start of this chapter: blurring the line between activity and passivity (“Les choses
que je vois me voient autant que je les vois. Ce que je vois alors m’explique en
quelque manière, m’exprime”); between verse and prose; between history and the
present; and landing on the aequatio between them.87 Rather than flip a series of
dualities, Baudelaire’s prose poetry adds a wrinkle to them, another on which they
might operate, just as traces of poeticity can make themselves felt in prose. The
results come not from studying poetic language, but from pursuing questions to
which there are no clear answers: questions to which the only answer is a tran-
scription that, in its contradictions and its vagaries, is nothing less than the cre
ation of a whole poetic universe, poiesis.
85 Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 263; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, 287.
86 Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 269; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, 295, modified.
87 It is a state of being that echoes what Baudelaire describes at the end of his 1851 essay “Du vin et
du hachisch, comparés comme moyens de multiplication de l’individualité”: “Les grands poètes, les
philosophes, les prophètes sont des êtres qui, par le pur et libre exercice de la volonté, parviennent à un
état où ils sont à la fois cause et effet, sujet et objet [. . .]” (The great poets, philosophers, and prophets
are beings who, through the pure and free exercise of their will, achieve a state in which they are
simultaneously cause and effect, subject and object) (OC 1: 398).
2
Speech Interrupting Poetic Prose
This study’s Introduction considered the fundamental tension between verse and
prose, verto and prorsus. Another useful contrast is with the root of poetry itself:
poiesis, meaning to make or create. Whatever distinction there is between the
turning of verse and the straightforwardness of prose, they both serve to qualify
the nature of language: poiesis, however, signals a bringing forth. In order to
juxtapose or meld the realms of prose and poetry, then, the poet must somehow
reconcile these two very different modes that language can express: on the one
hand the full activity of creation, on the other direct language with or without
action. Baudelaire’s heterogeneous prose poems explore the interstitial space, in
language’s latent potential, between action and inaction. How can his prose poetry
be thought of as a series of manifestations of this potential, activated, that remains
in the space between them? This chapter considers how poems in Le Spleen de
Paris produce and present the uneasy and unlikely coexistence of both: prorsus
and poiesis, dialogue and activity, saying and doing.
When the Eyes Don’t Have It
From the first time that he raises the possibility of “le miracle d’une prose poé-
tique,” Baudelaire frames his project in terms of what it might sound like. And
yet, his approach to sounds, noise, and silence does not always narrow in on a
definition of a prose that is musical while remaining devoid of rhythm and rhyme.
This lack of clarity is central to his new modern poetics; specifically, it is a funda-
mental part of his prose poems’ soundscape. It is worth considering what
Baudelaire makes audible, and how he does so, in several poems from Le Spleen
de Paris, and beyond the numerous important studies of the noisy city to which
he referred in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” by saying that Constantin Guys
“admire l’éternelle beauté et l’étonnante harmonie de la vie dans les capitales, har-
monie si providentiellement maintenue dans le tumulte de la liberté humaine”1
1 OC 2: 693. In this respect the present study expands on Christopher Prendergast’s important
work on Baudelaire’s urban poetry: for Prendergast,
The dissonances of the city strike at what for Baudelaire is the very heart of verse, the principle
of harmony. [. . .] Poetry, according to Baudelaire, embodies the “instinct immortel du Beau,” itself
connected with the desire to attain to the realm of “harmonie universelle.” Through its
(admires the eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in capital cities,
a harmony maintained by providence in the tumult of human freedom). Sometimes,
the “langue muette” that Baudelaire identifies in “La Chambre double” speaks to
us, despite and through the silence of fabrics, flowers, skies, and sunsets (“Les
étoffes parlent une langue muette, comme les fleurs, comme les ciels, comme les
soleils couchants” (Fabrics speak a mute language, like flowers, like the heavens,
like sunsets) (OC 1: 280)). At other times, inconsistent layers of noise inhabit
poems, such as the cacophony that swirls around the madman in “Le Fou et la
Vénus” and connects him to the statue’s expressive eyes, which speak volumes
despite their stony silence (see Chapter 1, supra). Ultimately it is in this kind of
contrast that we hear most clearly what we might call “the harmony of the prose
poem,” or what Baudelaire called “la suffisante clarté et la délicieuse obscurité de
l’harmonie” (the sufficient clarity and delicious darkness of harmony).2
Such contradictions are abetted by the suggestion of some harmonious order
against the din made up of urban noise and poetic musicality, and looking for a
coherent system in the rapidly changing modern city is like looking for a needle
in a haystack to which pieces of hay are constantly being added and removed; as a
result, the tantalizing thought that a solution is close at hand is always met with
the unshakable feeling and persistent disappointment that it is always still out of
reach. Harmony and order sit adjacent to disharmony and chaos, and the realiza-
tion of this immutable truth can lead to despair or, more optimistically, to a will-
ingness to participate and play along, while remaining aware that every moment
in which the shape-shifting prose poem comes into view is ephemeral and
momentary. Such is precisely what Baudelaire says in his famous line from “Le
Peintre de la vie moderne”: “La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contin-
gent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable” (Modernity
is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the
eternal and the immutable).3
regularities of sound and rhythm, verse binds together, integrates, resolves or at least holds in
equilibrated tension the scattered and fragmentary bits and pieces of experience.
(Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 129)
I would argue that Baudelaire’s prose poems sit in a different kind of equilibrated tension and, as
Baudelaire himself asserts, an altogether different kind of “harmonie,” perhaps closer to the notion of
complementarity that Benjamin develops in his essay on translation (see this study’s Introduction,
supra), as well as to the notion of “enharmonie” (Epilogue, infra).
2 “La Chambre double” (OC 1: 280). This chapter’s consideration of speech in the prose poems is
indebted to studies of speech at theory in general and, in particular with respect to Baudelaire, Marie
Maclean’s Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment (London: Routledge, 1988), which
she opens by reminding us: “Oral performance is not just an act of saying something, it is produced by
all the different acts involved in saying something. What is said is less important than the saying, an
interaction which, as we have seen, involves purpose, energy, and effect as well as the ‘message’ con-
veyed” (7; original emphasis).
3 OC 2: 695. It is a sentiment that returns often in literature situated in Baudelaire’s wake; in his
Invisible Cities Italo Calvino makes fruitful use of the metaphor of the city as game of chess, saying,
At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system
underlying the infinite deformities and discords, but no model could stand up to the
Speech Interrupting Poetic Prose 119
For Michel Serres, the mere possibility of harmony is itself the rarest of events:
La chose la plus étonnante du monde est qu’il y ait parfois du concert. De

l’entente, de l’harmonie [. . .] L’harmonie n’est pas une loi, elle n’est pas la régu-
larité, l’harmonie est la rareté même. Elle est, très précisément, un miracle.
J’appelle miracle une très haute improbabilité. Quand le miracle vient, d’une
entente improbable, elle produit un chant nouveau [. . .]4
(The most astonishing thing in the world is that it is sometimes in synchronicity.
Agreement, harmony [. . .] Harmony is not a law, it is not regular; harmony is
rarity itself. It is, very precisely, a miracle. What I call a miracle is an elevated
improbability. When a miracle comes, with improbable agreement, it produces a
new song.)
Without saying as much, Serres is touching on some of what Baudelaire is devel-

oping in his own “chant nouveau”: the poetic prose of Le Spleen de Paris. For
Baudelaire himself had similar thoughts about harmony and understanding, as he
explains in Mon Cœur mis à nu:
Dans l’amour comme dans presque toutes les affaires humaines, l’entente cor-
diale est le résultat d’un malentendu. Ce malentendu, c’est le plaisir. L’homme
crie: “Oh! mon ange!” La femme roucoule: “Maman! maman!” Et ces deux
imbéciles sont persuadés qu’ils pensent de concert.—Le gouffre infranchissable,
qui fait l’incommunicabilité, reste infranchi.5
comparison with the game of chess. Perhaps, instead of racking one’s brain to suggest with
the ivory pieces’ scant help visions which were anyway destined to oblivion, it would suf-
fice to play a game according to the rules, and to consider each successive state of the
board as one of the countless forms that the system of forms assembles and destroys.
(Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver
(London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974), 122)
4 Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980), 163, 164.
5 OC 1: 695–6; I borrow this rapprochement from Robert Kopp (Kopp, 285). In this respect,
Baudelaire situates his thoughts in a continuum that includes earlier expressions of the potential pres-
ence of harmony in poetry, including the Romantics’ notion of the poet, which inherits the role of poet
as serving as God’s mouthpiece (as well as that of representing human creative expression). Consider
the importance of “accord” in these lines from Lamartine’s “Poésie ou Pèlerinage dans le Golfe de
Gênes” (Harmonies poétiques et religieuses):
Ô Dieu! tu m’as donné d’entendre
Ce verbe, ou plutôt cet accord,
Tantôt majestueux et tendre,
Tantôt triste comme la mort!
Depuis ce jour, Seigneur, mon âme
Converse avec l’onde et la flamme,
Avec la tempête et la nuit:
Là chaque mot est une image,
Et je rougis de ce langage,
Dont la parole n’est qu’un bruit!
(In love as in almost all human matters, cordial agreement is the result of
misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is pleasure. Man cries out: “Oh! My
angel!” Woman purrs: “Mother! Mother!” And these two fools are convinced
that they are thinking as one.—The uncrossable abyss, which makes up the
uncommunicable, remains uncrossed.)
For Baudelaire, the gulf that divides is built of language’s failure as a vehicle for
communication.6 Both of the imbecilic outbursts underscore the unbridgeable
gap (“infranchi”) between such attempts at expression and any meaningful goal.
Traditionally poetry (poiesis) stems from creation while prose (prorsus) is
“straightforward or direct speech” (see Introduction, supra): that is, saying with-
out necessarily doing.
In considering speech acts in Baudelaire’s prose poetry, the present study draws
on Marie Maclean’s cogent development of J. L. Austin’s foundational work, par-
ticularly in his How to Do Things with Words:7
Austin posited three types of speech act: the act of locution, of saying or produ
cing a message; the act of illocution, in which the communication of the mes-
sage is dependent on interaction between the speaker and the hearer and on
their acceptance of the conditions of the verbal contract between them; and the
act of perlocution whereby the message takes effect on the hearer. [. . .] In these
three divisions, I suggest that we can recognize the three major elements of per
formance: purpose, energy, and effect.8
While examples of speech in Baudelaire’s prose poems do fulfill Austin’s defin

ition of perlocution—a speech act that can “often, or even normally, produce
certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audi-
ence, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design,
(Oh God! You have allowed me to hear, / This word, or rather, this chord, / Majestic and tender, /
Then as sad as death! / Since that day, Oh Lord, my soul / Converses with the ripple and the flame, /
With the storm and the night: / There, each word is an image, / And I blush because of this
language, / Of which speech is merely a sound.)
Alphonse de Lamartine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Marius-François Guyard (Paris: Gallimard
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1963), 331. For an exhaustive discussion of how poets situated themselves
within this rich tradition, see Roger Pearson, Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in
Post-Revolutionary France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
6 For Rosemary Lloyd, communication breakdown plays a central role, on several levels: “the failure
of the narrators becomes the triumph of the text” and “several poems register a complete absence of
communication between central figures, brought about because the speaker chose a language unintel-
ligible to, or indecipherable by, the other”; Rosemary Lloyd, “Dwelling in Possibility: Encounters with
the Other in Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris,” Australian Journal of French Studies, 29.1 (January 1992),
68–77 (69).
7 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
8 Maclean, Narrative as Performance, 28–9.
intention, or purpose of producing them”9—some lack the more basic criteria of

locution or illocution, while others have a connection to “the conditions of the
verbal contract” that is tenuous at best. That the collection Le Spleen de Paris is
inconsistent in this regard is not surprising: as Steve Murphy explains, “le sujet
lyrique du Spleen de Paris est si protéiforme qu’il est difficile de trancher entre une
multiplicité de locuteurs (à chaque prose son locuteur) et un locuteur instable ou
qui, plutôt, se cache constamment, recourant à des discours hétérogènes et parfois
incompatibles” (The lyric subject of Le Spleen de Paris is so changeable that it is
difficult to decide between a multiplicity of speakers (to each prose its speaker)
and an unstable speaker or one who, rather, constantly hides, seeking recourse in
heterogenous and sometimes incompatible discourse).10 While Austin’s work
offers a very useful framework for considering direct and indirect speech that are
straightforward, direct expressions of prorsus, however, in its “chant nouveau”
poetic language marries clarity and obscurity. Austin even hints at the unique
situation of language in poetry, saying that
we may speak of “a poetical use of language” as distinct from “the use of lan-
guage in poetry.” These references to “use of language” have nothing to do with
the illocutionary act. For example, if I say “Go and catch a falling star” it may be
quite clear what both the meaning and the force of my utterance is, but still
wholly unresolved which of these other kinds of things I may be doing. [. . .] The
normal conditions of reference may be suspended, or no attempt made at a
standard perlocutionary act, no attempt to make you do anything, as Walt
Whitman does not seriously incite the eagle of liberty to soar.11
Similarly, speech in Baudelaire’s poetry often resists Austin’s categories and resides
in the tension, in language’s latent potential, between action and inaction; for
Rosemary Lloyd, “The slippery character of language is further illustrated
through various verbal fiascos, where speech acts are shown to be as unstable as
air.”12 In this respect she is echoing Austin, who jotted in his notes “‘uttering
9 Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 101.

Champion [Champion classiques], 2007), 28.
11 Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 104. Austin adds,
Furthermore, there may be some things we “do” in some connexion with saying something
which do not seem to fall, intuitively at least, exactly into any of these roughly defined
classes, or else seem to fall vaguely into more than one; but any way we do not at the outset
feel so clear that they are as remote from our three acts as would be joking or writing
poetry. (104–5)
He then cites insinuation as an example of speech that resists his categories; see infra, Chapter 3, for
the presence of insinuation in “Le Galant tireur.”
12 Lloyd, “Dwelling in Possibility,” 71. Stating that “At a first reading it may seem that Le Spleen de
Paris abounds in such conversations,” Lloyd deftly problematizes this notion and points to “the con-
flict between the fleeting, unsatisfactory, yet contemporary nature of spoken language, and the less
words’ not so simple a notion anyway!”13 If there is a way in which Baudelaire’s

poetic prose might be thought of as this potential being activated, while still exist-
ing in this textual space, it is because he flips the paradigm, allowing dialogue to
activate his poetic prose, and thus the whole poem.14
“Les Yeux des pauvres”15

Ah! vous voulez savoir pourquoi je vous hais aujourd’hui. Il vous sera sans
doute moins facile de le comprendre qu’à moi de vous l’expliquer; car vous êtes,
je crois, le plus bel exemple d’imperméabilité féminine qui se puisse rencontrer.
Nous avions passé ensemble une longue journée qui m’avait paru courte.
Nous nous étions bien promis que toutes nos pensées nous seraient communes à
l’un et à l’autre, et que nos deux âmes désormais n’en feraient plus qu’une;—un
rêve qui n’a rien d’original, après tout, si ce n’est que, rêvé par tous les hommes, il
n’a été réalisé par aucun.
mobile, unmodern, yet permanent nature of written language” (68). Helen Abbott, concurs, stating
that “Baudelaire’s prose poems seem to favour commonplace representations of voice; in fact
Baudelaire introduces certain strategies which exploit the dynamic capabilities of the human voice”
(Helen Abbott, Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation, and Music (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009), 73). Elsewhere, Lloyd and Sonya Stephens identify speech as one of a number of sources of
contradictions in Baudelaire’s prose poetry, which “owes much of its tensile strength to contradictions
between what the narrators say and what the text reveals, between speech and gesture, and between
the interpretation of gesture offered within a particular prose poem, and the meanings the reader may
infer from imagery, sound patterning, irony, or intertextual references” (Sonya Stephens and Rosemary
Lloyd, “Promises, Promises: The Language of Gesture in Baudelaire’s ‘Petits Poèmes en prose’,” Modern
Language Review, 88.1 (January 1993), 74–83 (74).
13 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 165.
14 The situation of speech in poetic language would be a central preoccupation of Stéphane
Mallarmé’s, as he explains in his essay “Crise de vers”: “Un désir indéniable à mon temps est de séparer
comme en vue d’attributions différentes le double état de la parole, brut ou immédiat ici, là essentiel”
(An undeniable desire of our times is to separate, as if into different categories, the double state of
speech: raw or immediate here, essential there) (Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand
Marchal, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1998–2003), 2: 212). Émile Benveniste
encourages the consideration of such examples: “Il faudrait aussi distinguer l’énonciation parlée de
l’énonciation écrite. Celle-ci se meut sur deux plans: l’écrivain s’énonce en écrivant et, à l’intérieur de
son écriture, il fait des individus s’énoncer. De longues perspectives s’ouvrent à l’analyse des formes
complexes du discours, à partir du cadre formel esquissé ici” (A distinction should also be made
between spoken and written enunciation. The latter moves on two levels: the writer enunciates himself
while writing, and, in his writing, he makes individuals enunciate themselves. Far-reaching perspec-
tives are opened up for the analysis of complex forms of discourse, based on the formal framework
outlined here) (Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard [tel],
1974), 2: 88). For his part, Benveniste relies on Roman Jakobson’s discussion of an enunciation’s differ-
ent linguistic functions; see Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique générale, trans. Nicolas Ruwet
(Paris: Minuit [double], 1963), 213–21. While Gérard Genette’s work on discourse helpfully distin-
guishes between three types of discourse—narrativized discourse, discourse transposed into indirect
style, and a dramatic reported discourse in which the narrator pretends to yield control of the narra-
tive to the character (Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 191–203)—his examples of the
presence of discourse in narration come exclusively from novels, with no mention of the added layer
of complexity in poetic prose.
15 First published in La Vie parisienne, July 2, 1864, and then again in Revue de Paris, December
25, 1864.
Le soir, un peu fatiguée, vous voulûtes vous asseoir devant un café neuf qui
formait le coin d’un boulevard neuf, encore tout plein de gravois et montrant
déjà glorieusement ses splendeurs inachevées. Le café étincelait. Le gaz l ui-même
y déployait toute l’ardeur d’un début, et éclairait de toutes ses forces les murs
aveuglants de blancheur, les nappes éblouissantes des miroirs, les ors des
baguettes et des corniches, les pages aux joues rebondies traînés par les chiens en
laisse, les dames riant au faucon perché sur leur poing, les nymphes et les déesses
portant sur leur tête des fruits, des pâtés et du gibier, les Hébés et les Ganymèdes
présentant à bras tendu la petite amphore à bavaroises ou l’obélisque bicolore
des glaces panachées; toute l’histoire et toute la mythologie mises au service de la
goinfrerie.
Droit devant nous, sur la chaussée, était planté un brave homme d’une quar-
antaine d’années, au visage fatigué, à la barbe grisonnante, tenant d’une main un
petit garçon et portant sur l’autre bras un petit être trop faible pour marcher. Il
remplissait l’office de bonne et faisait prendre à ses enfants l’air du soir. Tous en
guenilles. Ces trois visages étaient extraordinairement sérieux, et ces six yeux
contemplaient fixement le café nouveau avec une admiration égale, mais nuan-
cée diversement par l’âge.
Les yeux du père disaient: “Que c’est beau! que c’est beau! on dirait que tout
l’or du pauvre monde est venu se porter sur ces murs”.—Les yeux du petit gar-
çon: “Que c’est beau! que c’est beau! mais c’est une maison où peuvent seuls
entrer les gens qui ne sont pas comme nous”.—Quant aux yeux du plus petit, ils
étaient trop fascinés pour exprimer autre chose qu’une joie stupide et profonde.
Les chansonniers disent que le plaisir rend l’âme bonne et amollit le cœur. La
chanson avait raison ce soir-là, relativement à moi. Non-seulement j’étais atten-
dri par cette famille d’yeux, mais je me sentais un peu honteux de nos verres et
de nos carafes, plus grands que notre soif. Je tournais mes regards vers les vôtres,
cher amour, pour y lire ma pensée; je plongeais dans vos yeux si beaux et si
bizarrement doux, dans vos yeux verts, habités par le Caprice et inspirés par la
Lune, quand vous me dites: “Ces gens-là me sont insupportables avec leurs yeux
ouverts comme des portes cochères! Ne pourriez-vous pas prier le maître du
café de les éloigner d’ici?”
Tant il est difficile de s’entendre, mon cher ange, et tant la pensée est incom-
municable, même entre gens qui s’aiment! (OC 1: 317–19; original emphasis)
(Ah! you’d like to know why I loathe you today. It will undoubtedly be harder
for you to understand it than for me to explain it for you, for you are, I believe,
the finest example of feminine impenetrability one could ever meet. We had
spent a long day together which had seemed short to me. We had promised each
other that all of our thoughts would be shared between one another, and that
our souls, from this point onwards, should be one;—a thoroughly unoriginal
dream, after all, if only that, if it has been dreamed by all men, it has been
achieved by none.
In the evening, rather tired, you wanted to sit in front of a new café which
made up the corner of a new boulevard, still full of debris and already gloriously
displaying its unfinished splendor. The café glimmered. Its gas lights displayed
all the ardour of a grand opening, and lit with all its might the blindingly white
walls, the dazzling expanses of the mirrors, the gold-plating of the moldings and
cornices, the plump cheeks of pageboys dragged by leashed dogs, laughing
women with falcons perched on their arms, the nymphs and goddesses balan
cing fruits, pâtés, and prey on their heads, Hebes and Ganymedes stretching
their arms forward to offer the small amphora of mousse or the bicolored obel
isk of mixed ice cream, all of history and mythology put in the service of greed.
Right before us, on the street, stood a stout man in his forties, with a tired
face, a greying beard, holding in one hand a small boy and carrying on his other
arm a little creature too weak to walk. He was fulfilling the role of nursemaid
and was taking his children out in the evening air. All were in rags. The three
faces were extraordinarily serious, and the six eyes gazed fixedly at the new café
with equal admiration, but nuanced by their ages.
The father’s eyes said: “How beautiful! How beautiful! It’s as if all the gold in
the world has come to rest on these walls.”—The small boy’s eyes: “How beauti-
ful! How beautiful! But it is a house into which only people not like us may
enter.”—As for the smallest one’s eyes, they were too fascinated to express any-
thing other than a stupefied and profound joy.
Singers say that pleasure makes the soul good and softens the heart. The song
rang true that evening, with regards to me. Not only had I been touched by this
family of eyes, but I felt somewhat ashamed of our glasses and carafes, bigger
than our thirst. I turned my gazes toward yours, dear love, to read in them my
own thought; I was diving into your so beautiful and so strangely soft eyes, into
your green eyes, inhabited by Caprice and inspired by the Moon, when you said
to me, “These people are unbearable with their eyes wide open like carriage
doors! Couldn’t you ask the head waiter to take them away from here?”
How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how incom-
municable thought is, even between people who love each other!).
(PP, 60–1; modified)
We see such speech activity from the “après-coup” opening of “Les Yeux des
pauvres,”16 since the poetic subject’s emotional outburst “Ah!” is not an opening
gambit, but rather a response: one that suggests the clarity of understanding
(finally, perhaps, as its hint of exasperation suggests) precisely what his bien-aimée
wants to know. And while she is “le plus bel exemple d’imperméabilité féminine
16 For Murphy, “Ce début moins in medias res qu’après-coup annonce le cadre de la narration” (This
beginning, less in medias res than after the fact, announces the framework of the narration); Logiques
du dernier Baudelaire, 246.
qui se puisse rencontrer,” it is the permeable types—the poor—and, specifically,

their speech acts, that drive the rest of the poem: in fact, their eyes won’t shut up,17
their “admiration égale” broken down along expressions of speech according to
their age.18
Or so it would seem: the father and the young boy both have a hand—which
they share, literally, as they are holdings hands (“tenant d’une main”)—in putting
into words their varied reactions to the scene on which they lay eyes. The tired,
grey-bearded man is dazzled by the brilliance of the surface, while the young
boy’s eyes repeat and improve upon the sentiment, offer impressive clarity, and
see the walls for their exclusion: not what they look like or suggest, but what they
really mean, what they are really saying.19 Between the superficial commentary
and the deeper interpretative stance, the two pairs of speaking eyes offer the spec-
trum of expressions that language can provide in such circumstances, and in this
respect one might see the man and the boy as representing different generational
approaches to how we use words to describe beauty . . . that is to say, different
approaches to poetry. Similar—their eyes express the same bewilderment, “Que
c’est beau! que c’est beau!,” in a quotation which is not a quotation, or a non-
locutionary act, since eyes cannot actually speak20—yet different in depth and
subject, the former focuses on the natural resources committed to the construc-
tion before him while the latter its implications in the social arena.21 Grappling
17 Jonathan Monroe is unequivocal:

“Les Yeux des pauvres” displays a contrasting reciprocity in which the speaker [. . .] contem-
plates with beggarly characters of his anecdote only to have these objects of his contempla-
tion look back at and even “speak” to him (albeit in his own words). [. . .] significantly, in
“Les Yeux des pauvres,” it is the eyes that do the talking.
(Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 112; original emphasis)
18 See the earlier discussion of admiration in the Introduction, supra.
19 For Maurice Samuels, their discourse is invented by the narrator, “a man accustomed to project-
ing onto others his own thoughts and feelings” and who “expects to see his carefully calibrated tender-
ness mirrored back to him by his lover”; see Maurice Samuels, “Baudelaire’s Boulevard Spectacle:
Seeing Through ‘Les Yeux des pauvres,’” in E. S. Burt, Elissa Marder, and Kevin Newmark (eds.), Time
for Baudelaire (Poetry, Theory, History), Yale French Studies, vols 125–6 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2014), 167–82 (171).
20 While Roland Barthes uses his formulation of a quotation without inverted commas (“la citation
sans guillemets”) to refer to intertextuality, the example in this poem of a quotation qui n’en est pas une
is positioned similarly with respect to language, and with similar stakes: “c’est alors du langage, et non
un langage, fût-il décroché, mimé, ironisé” (it is therefore from language, and not a language, whether
it is disconnected, mimed, mocked) (Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed.
Éric Marty [Paris: Seuil, 1994], 1509–10; original emphasis). As Barthes’s last word reminds us, the use
of the citational mode—whether with or without quotation marks—is an effective vehicle for convey-
ing irony. For an elegant discussion of Flaubert’s use of quotations, see Christopher Prendergast, The
Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1986), 202–4.
21 Murphy points out the former’s social import since its additional example of unspoken speech—
“on dirait que”—situates the father “en deçà de la critique sociale qui pouvait être formulée, à savoir
que lorsqu’on évalue globalement l’économie du Second Empire, c’est bien l’argent du pauvre monde
qui permet la fabrication de ces scènes de luxe” (beyond the social criticism which could be formu-
lated, which is to say that when we examine the economy of the Second Empire generally it is indeed
with language in different ways, they are far removed from any suggestion of
omnipotence that might be heard in the gods, or “dieux,” that audibly lurk in “cette
famille d’yeux.”
Beyond these evident tropes of Romantic poetry, the eyes of the smallest child
remain silent: or, rather, they offer no quotable speech recognizable to the poetic
subject.22 From his initial appearance in the poem, the young child is presented as
being different: unlike the first son, who is “un petit garçon,” this one is “un petit
être trop faible pour marcher.” His weakness extends to his eyes’ ability to be
summarized in language, since they can only convey “une joie stupide et

profonde.” The stupor that underpins “stupide” does not necessarily connote a
lack of intellectual capacity, however, as the depth of the joy confirms. Instead,
this languageless infant (itself a redundancy, as in-fans means lacking
language; see supra, Chapter 1) shows the limits of language itself: or, more
specifically, the limits of commonplace poetic language that his brother and
father exemplify through the echoed platitude “Que c’est beau! que c’est
beau!.”23 Instead, the combination of joy, stupor, surprise, and depth—one
could consider it a shock, a point to which we’ll soon return—produces an
experience that resists expression in the existing linguistic and poetic modes.
One could read in the infant’s surprised, joyful eyes the opportunity for, if not
the very site of, a different kind of expression of the human experience: one to
come from the future, the next generation.
As Baudelaire explains in his essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” the novelty
with which a child sees the world operates in a liminal space—alternately com-
pared to drunkenness; nervous, almost involuntary reactions; and weakness—
that is also the childlike state to which the genius aspires, so as to create (poiesis)
by rediscovering both form and content (couleur):
L’enfant voit tout en nouveauté; il est toujours ivre. Rien ne ressemble plus à ce
qu’on appelle l’inspiration, que la joie avec laquelle l’enfant absorbe la forme et la
couleur. J’oserai pousser plus loin; j’affirme que l’inspiration a quelque rapport
avec la congestion, et que toute pensée sublime est accompagnée d’une secousse
nerveuse, plus ou moins forte, qui retentit jusque dans le cervelet. L’homme de
génie a les nerfs solides; l’enfant les a faibles. Chez l’un, la raison a pris une place
considérable; chez l’autre, la sensibilité occupe presque tout l’être. Mais le
the money of the poor which allows for the construction of these scenes of luxury) (Logiques du dernier
Baudelaire, 249–50; original emphasis).
22 For the sake of clarity I wish to reiterate here that the first-person pronoun “je” should not at all
be taken to refer to Charles Baudelaire himself; not only does such a reading derive from an oversim-
plification that seriously undercuts the poet’s imaginative reach, but, as Murphy reminds us, it reas-
serts the kind of traditional relationship between writer and reader that Baudelaire actively sought to
reject (Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 245–6).
23 For additional examples of Baudelaire’s blending of humor and platitudes, see his “Choix de
maximes consolantes sur l’amour” (OC 1: 546–52).
génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté, l’enfance douée maintenant, pour
s’exprimer, d’organes virils et de l’esprit analytique qui lui permet d’ordonner la
somme de matériaux involontairement amassée. C’est à cette curiosité profonde
et joyeuse qu’il faut attribuer l’œil fixe et animalement extatique des enfants
devant le nouveau, quel qu’il soit, visage ou paysage, lumière, dorure, couleurs,
étoffes chatoyantes, enchantement de la beauté embellie par la toilette. (OC 2:
690; original emphasis)
(The child sees all as novelty, he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what
is called inspiration than the joy with which the child absorbs shape and color.
I would dare to venture further; I affirm that inspiration is related in some way
to congestion, and that each sublime thought is accompanied by a nervous
tremor of variable strength which resounds up to the brain. A man of genius has
strong nerves; a child’s are weak. In one, reason has taken a considerable place;
in the other, sensibility occupies almost the whole being. But genius is only
childhood regained at will, childhood endowed now, to express itself, with virile
organs and the analytical mind which allows him to put into order the sum of
the materials involuntarily amassed. It is to this profound and joyful curiosity
that one must attribute the fixed and animalistically ecstatic eye of children
before the new, whatever it may be: face or landscape, light, gilding, colors,
shimmering fabrics, enchantment of beauty enhanced by grooming.)
Extending this consideration from children and genius to poetry art (with an
explicit nod to poetry), Jacques Garelli sees this act of discovery as nothing less
than the vitality of the human experience:
L’“humanité” de l’artiste se mesure à sa capacité à inventer une dimension

jusque-là inconnue des choses, que ce soit telle couleur du ciel, telles sonorités et
tel rythme musical, tel rapprochement entre les significations les plus éloignées,
qui, en cette rencontre et cet écart, forment Monde. Car le destin de l’homme s’y
trouve remis en question en son être et en son sens. L’homme n’étant pleinement
homme que dans cet effort de dépassement. Selon cette perspective, l’activité
créatrice du poète dans sa vocation à susciter l’“étonnement” (Thaumazein) est
transformatrice de la condition humaine [. . .] l’activité créatrice du poète est
métamorphosante, par le changement de structure d’être et de pensée qu’elle met
en œuvre. Le poème est le cheminement, la fracture ou l’éclat par lesquels
l’homme fait exploser les barrières de la subjectivité et de l’objectivité instituées,
pour s’‘aboucher’ au Monde. Le verbe poétique ouvre l’espace de cette mutation,
rythme le temps de cette métamorphose.24
24 Jacques Garelli, “L’Écoute et le Regard,” L’Entrée en démesure suivi de L’Écoute et le Regard; et de

Lettre aux aveugles sur l’invisible poétique (Paris: José Corti, 1995), 51–83 (82).
(The artist’s “humanity” can be measured by the capacity to invent an as-of-yet

unknown dimension of things, be it this color of the sky, that sound and this
musical rhythm, that coming together of the most distanced meanings which, in
this meeting and this distance, create World. For man’s destiny finds itself ques-
tioned in its being and in its meaning. Man only being fully man in this effort of
going beyond. According to this perspective, the creative activity of the poet in
his vocation of causing “astonishment” (Thaumazein) can transform the human
condition [. . .] the poet’s creative activity is metamorphosing, by the change in the
structure of being and of thinking that it brings about. The poem is the pathway,
the fracture, or the spark through which man explodes the barriers of established
subjectivity and objectivity, to “join up” in the World. The poetic word opens up
the space of this mutation, gives rhythm to the time of this metamorphosis.)
Just as Garelli’s reflections end with the linguistic time and space of this funda-
mental metamorphosis, in “Les Yeux des pauvres,” Baudelaire turns to language,
shifting into a different mode (“verbe poétique”) after the remark about the
youngest child’s silence and locating truth in song: “Les chansonniers disent que
le plaisir rend l’âme bonne et amollit le cœur. La chanson avait raison ce soir-là,
relativement à moi.” Or, rather, not precisely in song, for truth resides not in sing-
ers’ lyrics but rather in what they say, as a kind of aphorism: “Les chansonniers
disent que.”25 By consequence, their song—like the poetry of the poor—is an unfit
vehicle for conveying truth, and it comes as little surprise that the poetic subject
feels shameful for instances of incommunicability, of lack of connection, of falling
short. Amid the disconnect of this deficiency we hear the echoes of conventional
poetry—specifically, of verses—in the homophone “verres” and “vers” in the line
“je me sentais un peu honteux de nos verres et de nos carafes, plus grands que
notre soif,” which also offers the possible suggestion that the banal repetition of
the eyes’ quoted-speech-as-poetry is similarly shame-provoking and unfit for
purpose.26 Seeking a resolution, the poetic subject looks into his companion’s
eyes to discover that she is the least poetic of all, her speech coming from her
mouth (“Je tournais mes regards vers les vôtres, cher amour, pour y lire ma pen-
sée; je plongeais dans vos yeux si beaux et si bizarrement doux, dans vos yeux
verts, habités par le Caprice et inspirés par la Lune, quand vous me dites [. . .]”)
and disrupting the established theme of speaking eyes by her own eyes’ silence
and their inability to read into the three pairs of poor eyes, “cette famille d’yeux,”
25 See the discussion of Baudelaire’s use of aphorism in the prose poems, particularly in the open-
ing line of “L’Horloge,” in Chapter 1, supra.
26 Murphy picks up on another audible element in this poem: “L’enchaînement vous voulûtes vous a
quelque chose de volontairement cacophonique, aux antipodes de l’euphonie à laquelle aspirent sou-
vent les énonciateurs sentimentaux et romantiques—sans oublier les producteurs de prose poétique”
(The sequence vous voulûtes vous has something deliberately cacophonous about it, at odds with the
euphony to which sentimental and romantic enunciators often aspire—without forgetting those who
produce poetic prose) (Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 258; original emphasis).
any way other than transparently: she sees a pair of wide-open doors (which echo
the phrase “des yeux comme des portes cochères”27) and nothing more.28
Baudelaire paints a more threatening situation for the poetic subject in this
paragraph from “Portraits de maîtresses,” specifically in a passage where he com-
plains about her rants in which she questions his masculinity:
Tels étaient les insupportables refrains qui sortaient de cette bouche d’où je
n’aurais voulu voir s’envoler que des chansons. À propos d’un livre, d’un poème,
d’un opéra pour lequel je laissais échapper mon admiration: “Vous croyez
peut-être que cela est très-fort? disait-elle aussitôt; est-ce que vous vous connais-
sez en force?” et elle argumentait.
Un beau jour elle s’est mise à la chimie; de sorte qu’entre ma bouche et la
sienne je trouvai désormais un masque de verre. Avec tout cela, fort bégueule.
(OC 1: 346)
(Such were the intolerable refrains leaving that mouth from which I only wanted to
see songs escaping. About a book, a poem, an opera for which I let my admiration
slip out: “Maybe you think that’s quite strong?,” she would say straight away.
“What do you know about strength?” and she would argue.
One fine day, she took up chemistry; in such a way that between my mouth
and hers I now found a glass mask. And with all of this, such prudishness.)
(PP, 105; modified)
In “Les Yeux des pauvres,” the subject’s conclusion of the lack of “entente”—hear-
ing each other—is tied to the incommunicability of thought, and the
“verres”/“vers” are ultimately (and perhaps due to their transparency) unable to
bridge the gap.29 What’s worse, as “Portraits” suggests, they are a barrier—of arti-
fice, of posturing (“masque de verre”)—that seemingly makes understanding
impossible. By exposing this fundamental deficiency of conventional poetic lan-
guage, the poor illustrate the evolving poverty of (poetic) language itself, ending
with the silent infans for whom the failure of language as a means of expression
27 As Prendergast explains, the phrase “was a perfectly standard idiom for the wide-eyed in the
nineteenth century, and from the narrator’s mistress almost certainly ‘means’ no more than its given
idiomatic sense”; in the rest of his exegesis he explains how this phrase highlights the politics of class
that courses through this poem (Prendergast, Paris in the Nineteenth Century, 39).
28 Through her lack of compassion “She also reverses the figural space”; Maclean, Narrative as
Performance, 119–20.
29 For Ross Chambers, in Le Spleen de Paris
anonymity becomes an active factor of estrangement, one that results from the ironic
inaccessibility to knowledge of that which is nevertheless recognizable and familiar, and
more particularly from the unreadability of the ordinary faces in the street that one may see,
simultaneously present and absent, every day. An anonymity/unreadability that includes
the people, not excluding oneself, with whom one may live in the closest proximity.
(Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 125)
has already been fully actualized; or, rather, he is in a prelapsian mode in which
he has not yet come to accept society’s belief that language has value. Perhaps the
infant was on to something after all, keeping his thoughts and feelings out of
the reach of language and, instead, remaining open to other kinds of “entente”—
other kinds of harmony, potentially residing in poiesis—despite, or even comforted
by, the obscurity that surrounds it; it’s no wonder that Serres used similar terms to
express harmony’s rarity. Like the infans of the “petit être,” the poetic subject of “Les
Yeux des pauvres” distances himself from quoted speech. Elsewhere in Le Spleen de
Paris, though, Baudelaire locates the site of harmony, “entente,” and a sort of
understanding, in prose poetry: in a textual space where saying and doing collide.
Saying and Doing
Another poem that offers a similar nod to a poetic space beyond the direct or lit-
eral language of prorsus is “La Soupe et les nuages.” It was rejected in 1865 by the
Revue nationale et étrangère and published for the first time in the posthumous
1869 edition of Le Spleen de Paris.
La Soupe et les nuages

Ma petite folle bien-aimée me donnait à dîner, et par la fenêtre ouverte de la
salle à manger je contemplais les mouvantes architectures que Dieu fait avec les
vapeurs, les merveilleuses constructions de l’impalpable. Et je me disais, à tra
vers ma contemplation: “—Toutes ces fantasmagories sont presque aussi belles
que les yeux de ma belle bien-aimée, la petite folle monstrueuse aux yeux verts.”
Et tout à coup je reçus un violent coup de poing dans le dos, et j’entendis une
voix rauque et charmante, une voix hystérique et comme enrouée par l’eau-
de-vie, la voix de ma chère petite bien-aimée, qui disait: “—Allez-vous bientôt
manger votre soupe, s. . . . b…. . de marchand de nuages?” (OC 1: 350)
(My little crazy beloved was serving me dinner, and through the dining room’s
open window I was contemplating the moving architectures that God fashions
from vapours, the marvellous constructions of the impalpable. And I was saying
to myself, through my contemplation: “All these phantasmagorias are almost as
beautiful as the eyes of my beautiful beloved, my little green-eyed monstrous
madwoman.”
And suddenly I received a violent punch in the back, and I heard a hoarse and
charming voice, hysterical and husky as if from brandy, the voice of my dear lit-
tle beloved, which was saying “—Will you ever eat your soup, you goddamn
cloud peddler!”) (PP, 110; modified)
The title’s initial words hover in several semantic fields, for they evoke not only
the domestic space of the kitchen but also the expression “la soupe et le bœuf ”
which designates the conjugal version of “l’occupation la plus ordinaire et la plus

légitime de chacun”: “SOUPE ET LE BŒUF (La) ou le bouilli. L’ordinaire
conjugal:—les mêmes bonjours, les mêmes bonsoirs, les mêmes coups tirés par le
même homme,—avec la même femme.”30 Paul Verlaine’s “La Soupe et le soir”
from Jadis et Naguère (1885) describes an impoverished and similarly uninspiring
kitchen, the “chambre étroite et froide” in which we find
Un seul lit, un bahut disloqué, quatre chaises,

Des rideaux jadis blancs conchiés des punaises,
Une table qui va s’écroulant d’un côté,—
Le tout navrant avec un air de saleté.31
(A single bed, a broken sideboard, four chairs, / Formerly white curtains covered
with bug shit, / A table tilting to one side,— / Everything sorry with an air of filth.)
Verlaine uses familiar words to emphasize that his kitchen is the site at which the
downtrodden and the quotidian meet: “Tous se sont attablés pour manger de la
soupe / Et du bœuf ” (All sat down to eat soup / And beef). Finally, the expression
“la soupe et…” similarly invites two possible linguistic outcomes: “Cette locution:
la soupe et le bouilli donne tout de suite à entendre en France qu’il est question de
bœuf, et cette autre locution, la soupe et le bœuf, pourrait tout aussi bien signifier
une soupe à l’oignon et un roast-beef, qu’une soupe grasse et du bœuf bouilli.”
(This saying “soup and broth” immediately makes us think that in France it
involves beef, and this other saying, “soup and beef,” could equally mean an onion
soup and a roast beef, or a fatty soup and boiled beef.)32 Whereas such a substitu-
tion raises the culinary question of the interchangeability of “le bœuf ” and “le
bouilli,” the ingredients in Baudelaire’s “Soupe” are not interchangeable. Instead,
their juxtaposition in the shared poetic space is precisely what gives the poem its
bite: opposing forces that Baudelaire somehow manages to make coexist in a state
of suspended (linguistic, poetic) tension.
But Baudelaire doesn’t tuck into “le bœuf ” directly. Instead, in a manner
repeated in a number of his prose poems, he frames this scene spatially; the poetic
30 Alfred Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne: nouvelle édition, revue, corrigée considérablement
augmentée par l’auteur et enrichie de nombreuses citations (Bâle: imprimerie de Karl Schmidt, 1864).
Later, Jules Jouy—himself often censored for pornography—would use the expression in September
1883 for the series of banquets-goguettes that he held at the Cabaret des assassins when he broke off
from the Le Chat noir cabaret. See Émile Goudeau, Dix ans de bohème suivi de Les Hirsutes de Léon
Trézenik, ed. Michel Golfier, Jean-Didier Wagneur, and Patrick Ramseyer (Seyssel: Champ Vallon,
2000), 72 n. 2.
31 Paul Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Yves-Gérard Le Dantec and Jacques Borel (Paris:
Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1962), 365.
32 G[ervais]-N[épomucène] Redler, Journal de la langue française et des langues en général, 3e série,
tome 1, 1837–8 (Paris: Au bureau du Journal, 1838), 285.
subject, situated in the domestic interior,33 gazes out the window at the marvels of
the modernity all around him. In this regard “La Soupe et les nuages” begins with
a reflection on what Giorgio Agamben has referred to as “an intensity that can
suddenly give life to any field.”34 Similarly, it offers a variation on the theme of
contemplating the order of the universe from the opening of the poem “Le Port”:
“Un port est un séjour charmant pour une âme fatiguée des luttes de la vie.
L’ampleur du ciel, l’architecture mobile des nuages, les colorations changeantes de
la mer, le scintillement des phares, sont un prisme merveilleusement propre à
amuser les yeux sans jamais les lasser” (A port is a pleasant place for a soul tired
of life’s travails to sojourn. The vastness of the sky, the mobile architecture of the
clouds, the changing colorations of the sea, the shining of the lighthouses, are a
prism specially made to amuse the eyes while never boring them) (OC 1: 344).35
It is also on this point—specifically, the gaze—that “La Soupe et les nuages” pre-
sents the first of its oppositions: between sight and sound. In this manner it
echoes this quatrain from Baudelaire’s verse poem “Rêve parisien”:
Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles

Planait (terrible nouveauté!
Tout pour l’œil, rien pour les oreilles!)
Un silence d’éternité.
(OC 1: 103)
(And over these moving marvels / Hovered (horrible novelty! / All for the eye,
nothing for the ears!) / An eternal silence.)
The act of contemplation, repeated in the first two sentences of “La Soupe et les
nuages,” insists on a particular way of seeing: “Considérer attentivement, avec
amour ou admiration” (Littré 1: 764). Since, as Littré’s definition continues, in its
33 To Meltzer’s characterization of the “paradisal first room of ‘La Chambre double’” (Françoise
Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 213),
which she sees echoed in the opening of the prose poem “L’Horloge,” I would add the opening here of
“La Soupe et les nuages.”
34 As Agamben explains,
Philosophy isn’t an essence, but an intensity that can suddenly give life to any field: art,
religion, economics, poetry, passion, love, even boredom. It resembles something more
like the wind or the clouds or a storm: like these, it suddenly produces, shakes, transforms
and even destroys the produced place, but just as unpredictably, it passes and disappears.
(Giorgio Agamben, Interview with Antonio Gnoli, La Repubblica (May 15, 2016),
trans. Ido Govrin, Religious Theory: E-supplement to the Journal for Cultural and
Religious Theory (February 6, 2017), jcrt.org/religioustheory/2017/02/06/philosophy-as-
interdisciplinary-intensity-an-interview-with-giorgio-agamben-antonio-gnolioido-govrin/)
I am indebted to Robert St. Clair to bringing the intensity of Agamben’s thought to my attention.
35 The two poems were contemporaries: “Le Port” was published in Revue de Paris on Christmas
day 1864, while “La Soupe et les nuages” was one of the poems rejected in 1865 by the Revue nationale
et étrangère.
purest form contemplation is linked to the divine,36 it is not surprising that

the subject contemplates sights with sources in the heavens: “les mouvantes
architectures que Dieu fait avec les vapeurs, les merveilleuses constructions de
l’impalpable.” In terms of what precisely is contemplated, clouds offer a sheer con-
tingent form that is also a kind of formlessness, or perhaps a potentiality of form:
its ever-shifting nature and amorphousness recalls the haze in “La Chambre
double,” whose very colors, ending in “-âtre,” lack specificity as well: “quelque
chose de crépusculaire, de bleuâtre et de rosâtre; un rêve de volupté pendant une
éclipse” (Something crepuscular, blue and pinkish; a dream of lust during an
eclipse) (OC 1: 280). Like clouds, Baudelaire’s prose poems represent the sugges-
tion of form while simultaneously pointing to the inevitable impossibility of
arriving at a clear, distinct form.37 In contrast to the darkness of murky clouds, the
evocation in “La Soupe et les nuages” of “fantasmagories”—or “ghosts in the city”
(the fantômes in the agora)—underscores the visual via the practice of the well-
known trompe l’œil, popularized by the magic lanterns of the late eighteenth cen-
tury, whereby images projected on a screen make ghosts seem to come to life
(Littré 2: 1616). To some extent, the presence of phantasmagoria is the poem’s
signalling, exposing, and illuminating the figure of the poet as demiurge: a kind
of discursive equivalent of a trompe l’œil. The insistence on the visual continues
with the repeated mention of the eyes of the subject’s “bien-aimée,” with the add
ition in their second instance of the color green.
The change between the poem’s two paragraphs could not be more sudden or
stark,38 and the modal shift from the diffuse, idyllic, and atemporal imperfect to
the abrupt, punctual time of completed events in the passé simple also follows a
chiasmus between sight and sound. The visual field of the first paragraph fades in
the second, when the seen is replaced with the unseen . . . literally, as the subject
36 “Examiner par la pensée. Contempler les choses divines” (Littré 1: 764). The intertextual refer-
ence to Victor Hugo’s Les Contemplations is obvious enough that, in Pierre Larousse’s Grand
Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle: français, historique, géographique, mythologique, bibliographique…,
17 vols (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1866–77), Hugo’s 1856 publication
had its own entry after “Contemplation” (tome IV, 2e partie [COLL.-CONT.]: 1079–80).
37 When considered as an example of Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of a random aggregate of foam,
present-day clouds stocked with information and coding are, through their formlessness, a potentially
useful way of thinking about modern poetry. See Peter Sloterdijk, Foams, Vol. 3: Spheres, trans.
Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2016). I am grateful to Robert St. Clair for bringing this
dimension of formlessness to my attention.
38 J. A. Hiddleston underscores this point and uses it as one of the defining characteristics for one
of his groupings of the poems in Le Spleen de Paris: “Those which are based upon a ‘soubresaut’ have a
clear turning-point, most often in the middle of the poem” (J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and Le Spleen
de Paris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 82). Other poems are “Le Désespoir de la vieille,” “La
Chambre double,” “Le Fou et la Vénus,” “Le Vieux Saltimbanque,” “Le Gâteau,” “Les Bienfaits de
la lune” (111 n. 51). Similarly, for Edward Kaplan poems such as “La Chambre double,” “Le Fou et la
Vénus,” and “La Soupe et les nuages” are divided into two equal parts portraying dialectical opposites
(Edward K. Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, The Ethical, and the Religious in the Parisian
Prowler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 122). See also Cheryl Krueger, The Art of
Procrastination: Baudelaire’s Poetry in Prose (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 85.
receives “un violent coup de poing dans le dos” (which also replaces the impalp
able with the very tangible and palpable nature of the physical violence). Emerging
from a blind spot,39 it is a blow to the back just as the interruption of sound in “La
Chambre double” is a kick in the gut: “Mais un coup terrible, lourd, a retenti à la
porte, et, comme dans les rêves infernaux, il m’a semblé que je recevais un coup de
pioche dans l’estomac” (But a terrible hard blow was struck upon the door, and
like in hellish dreams, it seemed to me that I was being hit in the stomach with a
pickaxe) (OC 1: 281). In “La Soupe et les nuages,” the silence of the first
paragraph—the only sounds come from the speaking that takes place in the
subject’s head, “je me disais”—is filled by the tricolon of “voix” in the second.
Baudelaire thus presents differing roles for speech acts. For language can mean—
that is, it can vouloir dire, it can want to say—different things when produced by
different characters in these poems. When the source of “dire” is the character of
the poetic subject, language is often used reflexively, relegated to internal mono-
logue and reverie. That mise en abyme of linguistic representation—in which the
subject keeps language to himself rather than use it for communication—is in
stark contrast with the specific linguistic moment in which we readers are
engaged, in which Baudelaire the poet quite successfully uses language to repre-
sent, signify, and transfer meaning. And, finally, other characters possess the
potential to produce meaningful speech acts when they use “dire” in a manner
altogether different from how the poetic subject uses it when talking to himself.40
But whatever physicality is announced by the “coup de poing dans le dos,” the
“voix” arrives without body: without the “yeux” of the first paragraph, the first
appearance of the “bien-aimée” only comes to us through the description of her
voice. This shapeless “bien-aimée,” who could very well be the kind of ghostly
figure announced in the “fantasmagorie,” seems to undergo a peculiar transform
ation, each time she is mentioned: from “Ma petite folle bien-aimée” to “les yeux
de ma belle bien-aimée”41 to “la petite folle monstrueuse aux yeux verts.” Then,
after the “violent coup de poing dans le dos” of which she is presumably the
source, she is the person behind the “voix rauque et charmante, une voix hystérique
39 The subject’s blind spot is one that we readers share; in this respect it echoes Maria Scott’s discussion
of “texts that manipulate the receiver’s blind-spots. Anamorphosis exploits the limitations of vision in
much the same way as I am suggesting that Baudelaire’s prose poetry takes advantage of the mental
blind- spots of readers” (Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 10).
40 The verb “dire” represents a different kind of interruption in Les Paradis artificiels, in the numer-
ous passages where the narration suddenly shifts to the first person, who “speaks” in and through the
text; thanks to Ellen Burt for bringing this point to my attention.
41 The size of the eyes seems to have mattered on Baudelaire’s manuscript, where “yeux” was
crossed out and replaced with “vastes yeux” and in which “petite” preceded “bien-aimée” before being
itself crossed out: “Toutes ces fantasmagories sont Presque aussi belles que les yeux vastes yeux de ma
petite bien aimée” (All of these phantasmagories are Almost as beautiful as the eyes vast eyes of my
little beloved’) (Le Manuscrit autographe: numéro spécial consacré à Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Auguste
Blaizot, 1927), 94).
et comme enrouée par l’eau-de-vie” and then, finally, “ma chère petite bien-aimée.”
The craziness in her monstrous nature42 and in her green eyes gives way to the
subject’s appreciation of other qualities: her charming and hysterical nature, all of
which endear her to him. But what are we to make of the physical absence of this
“bien-aimée” who would be completely absent were it not for the “violent coup de
poing” that cleaves the poem into its two halves?43 It hardly comes as a surprise,
in the context of Baudelaire’s work, that her voice is hoarsened by “l’eau-de-vie,” for
we find this same theme in “Les Tentations ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire,” another
prose poem in Le Spleen de Paris: “Ce qui me frappa le plus, ce fut le mystère de sa
voix, dans laquelle je retrouvais le souvenir des contralti les plus délicieux et aussi
un peu de l’enrouement des gosiers incessamment lavés par l’eau-de-vie” (What
struck me the most was the mystery of her voice, in which I found the memory of
the most delicious contralti, and also a little of the hoarseness of throats cease-
lessly cleaned by eau-de-vie) (OC 1: 310; original emphasis). Through its very
name, the liquor is life-giving in a manner that recalls the bringing forth of poie-
sis; whatever creative language her voice will soon bring to life, however, is imme-
diately undercut by both its high alcohol content and its own repeated flatness.
There is no discernible distinction to be made between “une voix rauque,” and
“une voix [. . .] comme enrouée par l’eau-de-vie” (a voice, scratchy from liquor), as
Littré reminds us that “enroué” and “rauque” both come from the Latin stem rau-
cus (2: 1411).44 Before we even hear it, as the words are still in the back of her
throat, language is already repeating itself: it does not sound promising. Finally, it
is worth remarking that the “bien-aimée” is the sole source of heard speech in the
poem, and her voice of noise, materiality, and estrangement is the only one to
mention the two title words “soupe” and “nuages.” The “see no evil, speak no evil”
split between sight and sound is thus divided between, on the one hand, the poetic
subject who sees but whose use of language remains limited to an internal mono-
logue built of a basic comparison (“this is almost as beautiful as that”) and the
“bien-aimée” whose language communicates impatience and insult and carries all
the weight of the poem: from its title words to its last line.45
42 In this respect, this description recalls the folly, madness, and hysteria in “Mademoiselle
Bistouri”; see Elissa Marder, “Baudelaire’s Feminine Counter-Signature: ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’’s
Photographic Poetics,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 46.1–2 (Fall–Winter 2017–18), 1–25.
43 Jean-Luc Nancy similarly reflects on the tension between the absence and presence of the
woman in Baudelaire’s poem “Le Désir de peindre” in his “Le Rire, la présence,” Une pensée finie
(Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1990), 297–324.
44 That is, notwithstanding the difference between description that is direct and transparent (“une
voix rauque”) and one that relies on suggestion and simile (“une voix [. . .] comme enrouée par l’eau-
de-vie”). Far more important still is the passage from “charmante” to “hystérique”; in the context of
Baudelaire’s work it is yet another example of his recurrent misogyny. For a broader consideration
of hysteria in its nineteenth-century context, see Janet L. Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of
Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
45 The division of this poem into two parts supports this reading, even if the two paragraphs are
not equal: for those keeping score at home, the first paragraph is made up of sixty-four words, of
Before we get to the end of the poem, though—or, rather, slipped in between
the titular words of “soupe” and “nuages”—is the insult of the last line. As Freud
reminds us in “The Censorship of Dreams,” blank space in a text often signals
what is “no doubt [. . .] the most interesting thing in the [text]—the ‘best bit.’”46
Especially since the abbreviation “s. . . b…” is not of Baudelaire’s doing, as he clearly
wrote out “sacré bougre” on his manuscript,47 the words merit our attention. An
even longer swear-riddled exclamation can be found in “Mademoiselle Bistouri,”
in the beautifully alliterative phrase “Sacré Saint Ciboire de Sainte Maquerelle!”
that appears on Baudelaire’s manuscript; it, too, is (commonly, inexplicably)
abbreviated in many modern editions.48 About the euphemizing abbreviations in
these two poems, I agree with Jean-Pierre Moussaron that “Il est remarquable que
les points de suspension servant dans toutes les éditions à transcrire ces jurons
selon la bienséance, figurent typographiquement, par leur pointillé trouant les
mots et les syntagmes, les blessures ou brisures que lesdits jurons infligent à la
langue.” (It is remarkable that the ellipses, which serve in all of these editions to
transcribe these swear words for reasons of politeness, typographically represent,
by their dots piercing words and phrases, the wounds or breaks that the afore-
mentioned swear words inflict on language.)49 As holes puncturing language can
stand for its very deficiencies, this line inflicts violence while still allowing for the
hope of forging a new expression, in a manner not unlike the infant’s silence in
“Les Yeux des pauvres.” In the case of “La Soupe et les nuages” the “best bit” of
“s. . . b…” involves the opposition of the poem’s two creative presences: the “sacré”
of “Dieu” in the first paragraph and, in the second, its opposite: the “bougre”
which twenty-one are presented as a quotation (thirty-three per cent), and the second paragraph is
fifty words long, of which eleven are a quotation (twenty-two per cent).
46 Sigmund Freud, “The Censorship of Dreams,” in James Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (New York: Random House,
2001 [1963]), 15: 136–48 (139):
Where shall we find a parallel to such an event? You need not look far in these days. Take
up any political newspaper and you will find that here and there the text is absent and in its
place nothing except the white paper is to be seen. This, as you know, is the work of the
press censorship. In these empty places there was something that displeased the higher
censorship authorities and for that reason it was removed—a pity, you feel, since no doubt
it was the most interesting thing in the paper—the “best bit.”
I wish to thank Robert St. Clair for bringing this passage to my attention.
47 Charles Asselineau, Théodore de Banville, or editor Michel Lévy would seem to be the
perpetuator(s), as the fac-simile published in Le Manuscrit autographe clearly reads “sacré bougre” in
Baudelaire’s hand (94). And yet, as Murphy rightly points out (Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 487
n. 55), modern editions continue to perpetuate the euphemizing abbreviations with little justification
for doing so. Littré’s definition of the word “bougre” (1: 387) reminds us that not only is it a “Jurement
très grossier,” but that the practice of such an editorial abbreviation was commonplace in the nineteenth
century as well: “Dans ce sens, ce mot ne s’écrit jamais que par sa première lettre.”
48 For the phrase as Baudelaire wrote it, see OC 1: 1348; it appears abbreviated in the Pléiade edi-
tion, OC 1: 354.
49 Jean-Pierre Moussaron, “Vers la ruine du poétique,” in Dominique Rabaté, Joëlle de Sermet, and
Yves Vadé (eds.), Le Sujet lyrique en question, Modernités 8 (Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de
Bordeaux, 1996), 101–28 (114 n. 25).
(heretic, from bulgare). It does in fact seem that Freud might be right here, and if
we’re not getting to the “best bit,” we’ve at least arrived at a very good one. This
contrast mirrors that of much of the rest of the poem: the opposition of “Dieu”
and the “bougre” drives a wedge into the word “sacré,” pitting the former—the
literal “sacré”—against the latter and its obviously figurative, ironic sense (else-
where Freud notes that “sacer” is one of those antithetical primordial words as it
means both “sacred” and “accursed”50).
The belief systems that God and the heretic respectively represent and reject
go far beyond the religious, for each oversees a realm of creation with vastly
different raw materials: in the first paragraph the poetic subject remarks that
God-as-creator—the ultimate source of poiesis—works with “les vapeurs, les
merveilleuses constructions de l’impalpable” whereas, in Littré’s definition, the
“bougre” is circumscribed by the register of words used to describe him: “terme de
mépris et d’injure, usité dans le langage populaire le plus trivial et le plus grossier”
(disdainful and insulting term, used in the most trivial and coarsest of popular
language) (1: 387; original emphasis). The fact that the subject’s “bien-aimée”
insults him by describing him as trading in clouds pits the creative moment
against its market value (and we recall that the agora in “fantasmagorie” refers to
the forum, the site of political speech and the marketplace). The poetic subject
imagines and valorizes creativity in the first paragraph and, after being literally
knocked to his senses via the “violent coup de poing dans le dos,” he is reminded
of the extent to which he debases his own creation by offering it as merchandise.
The second wedge, pushing apart language and poetry, is the prise de parole that
shatters the indolent, naïve daydreaming of the lyric: that is, the “lyrical” subject.
When his companion speaks, she disturbs and problematizes the very nature of
poetry both in what she says and in the very act of saying it in the first place.
For this insult is about the commodification of poetry51 and the inherent
contradiction between the bourgeois satisfactions and artistic ideals. On this very
subject, Flaubert declared: “Oui, je soutiens (et ceci, pour moi, doit être un dogme
pratique dans la vie d’artiste) qu’il faut faire dans son existence deux parts: vivre
en bourgeois et penser en demi-dieu. Les satisfactions du corps et de la tête n’ont
rien de commun” (Yes, I maintain (and this, for me, must be a practical dogma in
my life as an artist) that one’s existence must be made of two parts: living as a
bourgeois and thinking like a demi-god. The satisfactions of the body and the
mind have nothing in common).52 The insult is also about much more; such
50 Sigmund Freud, “Meaning of Primal Words,” Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 9. Giorgio Agamben develops this polyvalence in his Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998).
51 Baudelaire was all too aware of the market for his poems, and for literature more generally; see
his letter to his mother on August 30, 1851 (C 1: 175–9).
52 Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet [August 21, 1853], Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau
and Yvan Leclerc, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1973–2007), 2: 402.
insults in Baudelaire’s prose poems derive their strength from what Murphy,
providing another possible resonance of the color green in the poem, has called
“l’interférence entre le domaine sacralisé de la religion ou de la poésie et celui de
la sexualité, puis entre la langue cultivée et la langue verte” (The interference
between the sacralised domain of religion or of poetry and that of sexuality, and
then between cultivated language and crass slang).53 In addition, the commer-
cialization of art—in this case, its remnant, an artefact, a produit dérivé or by-
product—recalls the end of Baudelaire’s prose poem “La Corde” and its stark
contrast between the two sides of art’s value: between its idealized form and the
cold, harsh reality of its existence as commodity: “Et alors, soudainement, une
lueur se fit dans mon cerveau, et je compris pourquoi la mère tenait tant à
m’arracher la ficelle et par quel commerce elle entendait se consoler” (And then,
suddenly, a glow appeared in my brain, and I understood why the mother was so
attached to ripping the cord from me, and by which trade she planned to console
herself) (OC 1: 331). In both poems, it is quoted speech that interrupts the visu-
ally based ideal (clouds, a work of art, the cord to which it is synecdochally tied)
with the prorsus of reality. The overall result is a poetics of remaining grounded,
and the prose poem simultaneously puts on display and serves as the arena for
the fundamental tension between the language used to describe the aspirational
là-bas (previously reserved for poetry, most commonly verse) and the language
for ici-bas (prorsus, including the orality of which speech is but one example).
That the interruption of quoted speech is a jolt is also a reminder of the tension
that persists, and of how easily poetry carries the reader away, toward the beyond,
the dream state, the ideal.
The very form of the prose poem is particularly well-suited to harbor, if not
encourage and embrace, such discursive interference, as Richard Terdiman’s work
has convincingly shown (see Introduction, supra). The quoted speech in “La
Soupe et les nuages” has the kind of shock value that Christopher Prendergast, in
his discussion of “Les Yeux des pauvres,” refers to as a common characteristic in
Baudelaire’s prose poems.54 It is an extension of Walter Benjamin’s landmark
reflections on how Baudelaire’s poetry engages with impressions and perceptions,
capturing the shock factor (Chockerfahrung) central to Baudelaire’s poetry, so as
to pin experience down to a specific moment in time.55 Benjamin precedes his
discussion of shock in Baudelaire by quoting a passage from Paul Valéry’s
53 Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 506.

54 “Abruptly, however, the illusion snaps, in a characteristic instance of the Baudelairian tactic of
poetic ‘shock.’” Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 38.
55 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Michael William Jennings and Howard
Eiland (eds.), Selected Writings, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 4: 313–55.
See E. S. Burt, “Out of Time: Today in ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’,” in Burt, Marder, and Newmark (eds.),
183–99. Also useful is Matei Calinescu’s distinction between two types of temporality in nineteenth-
century France: bourgeois modernity, which relies on scientific progress and time as captured and
measured by capitalism, and aesthetic modernity, which emphasizes the subjective experience of time
“Analecta”: “Les impressions ou sensations de l’homme prises telles quelles, n’ont

rien d’humain. Elles sont de l’ordre d’une surprise—d’une insuffisance de l’humain.
Nous pouvons—mais non toujours—rechercher cette mise en défaut—rattraper
ce qui vient d’être—à l’état informe.”56 (A person’s impressions or sensations,
taken as they are, have nothing of human about them. They are of the order of a
surprise—of a human deficiency. We can—but do not always—seek out this
default—recapture what has just been—in its formless state.) By evoking the
potentially surprising nature of feelings and perception, Valéry echoes poetry’s
fundamental insufficiency. Faced with such a fatal flaw, poets can do little more
than grasp at solutions that are worthy attempts despite being doomed to fail. To
Baudelaire’s thoughts about forging a new poetic language to counter its incom-
municability we can add Valéry’s comment, here, about “l’état informe”: formal
amorphousness—such as in the prose poem—certainly offers a way out from, and
a response to, the “insuffisance” that typifies any attempt to capture human
experience.
In “La Soupe et les nuages” the sudden, surprising, violent “coup” on which the
poem turns is the element of shock that inscribes this scene in a moment experi-
enced in time, in history; and it is the action on which the poem’s opposing forces
pivot as, together, they produce the harmony that arises from Baudelaire’s poetic
prose. Sight and sound; presence and absence; language for internal reflection
and for external communication; the poet-as-“bougre”—what Littré calls “Celui
qui se livre à la débauche contre nature” (He who gives himself up to unnatural
debauchery)—seeing, hearing, and valuing things differently than others, either
God or the “bien-aimée”: each interferes with and challenges the other, creating a
poetics of standoff. “La Soupe et les nuages” is a poem about the poetic, and not
merely because the tension between sight and sound reimagines the age-old con-
flict between la rime pour l’œil and la rime pour l’oreille but because it celebrates
the productive tension between prorsus and poiesis and suggests a poetics of
creating and reveling in friction and static.57
While central to his prose poems, the tension between the visual and the aud
ible is not unique to them58; it is one of the primary forces that drives his poem
as it is related to creativity. See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977).
56 Paul Valéry, “XCVI,” Tel Quel (Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de
la Pléiade], 1957–60), 2: 741).
57 In her discussion of Stéphane Mallarmé’s prose poem “La Déclaration foraine,” Barbara Johnson
draws on Austin and argues that “Poetry, if it is indeed the ‘subject’ of the poem, becomes here not
some ideal and statuesque Concept, but a function of a specific interlocutionary situation: an act of
speech”; Barbara Johnson, “Poetry and Performative Language,” Yale French Studies, 54 (1977), 140–58
(142; original emphasis).
58 To cite but one example, see Jennifer Yee’s reading of “La Beauté” in Jennifer Yee, “‘La Beauté’:
Art and Dialogism in the Poetry of Baudelaire,” Neophilologus, 102.1 (2018), 1–14.
“Paysage,” the opening poem to the “Tableaux parisiens” section that he added to
Les Fleurs du Mal for its second edition in 1861:
Je veux, pour composer chastement mes églogues,

Coucher auprès du ciel, comme les astrologues,
Et, voisin des clochers, écouter en rêvant
Leurs hymnes solennels emportés par le vent.
5 Les deux mains au menton, du haut de ma mansarde,
Je verrai l’atelier qui chante et qui bavarde;
Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mâts de la cité,
Et les grands ciels qui font rêver d’éternité.
Il est doux, à travers les brumes, de voir naître

10 L’étoile dans l’azur, la lampe à la fenêtre,
Les fleuves de charbon monter au firmament
Et la lune verser son pâle enchantement.
Je verrai les printemps, les étés, les automnes;
Et quand viendra l’hiver aux neiges monotones,
15 Je fermerai partout portières et volets
Pour bâtir dans la nuit mes féeriques palais.
Alors je rêverai des horizons bleuâtres,
Des jardins, des jets d’eau pleurant dans les albâtres,
Des baisers, des oiseaux chantant soir et matin,
20 Et tout ce que l’Idylle a de plus enfantin.
L’Émeute, tempêtant vainement à ma vitre,
Ne fera pas lever mon front de mon pupitre;
Car je serai plongé dans cette volupté
D’évoquer le Printemps avec ma volonté,
25 De tirer un soleil de mon cœur, et de faire
De mes pensers brûlants une tiède atmosphère.
(OC 1: 82)
(I want, to compose my eclogues chastely, / To lie by the sky, like the astrologers, /
And, near the steeples, listen dreamily / To their solemn hymns carried by the wind. /
With both hands on my chin, from high up my garret, / I'll see the workshop
singing and chattering; / The chimneys, the steeples, these masts of the city, / And
the great skies that make us dream of eternity. // It is sweet, through the mists, to see
born / Stars in the blue sky, lamps in windows, / The rivers of coal rise in the
firmament / And the moon spreads out its pale enchantment. / I shall see the
springs, the summers, the autumns; / And when winter comes with its monotonous
snows, / I’ll close doors and shutters everywhere / To build my fairy palaces in the
night. / Then I will dream of bluish horizons, / Of gardens, of water spouts weeping
into alabaster, / Of kisses, of birds singing night and morning, / And all that is most
childlike in the Idyll. / Riot, banging vainly at my window, / Shall not lift my
brow from my desk; / For I shall be immersed in the delight / Of evoking Spring
with my will, / Of drawing a sun from my heart, and of making / Of my burning
thoughts a warm atmosphere.)
From the poem’s first eight lines, the potential for dreams’ creativity seems to be
located to equal degrees in the audible and the visual, whether in the sounds of
the “hymnes solennels emportés par le vent” or “l’atelier qui chante et qui
bavarde,” or as the poet scans the urban horizon and its interplay between archi-
tecture’s pointy heights (“Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mâts de la cité”) and the
great expanse above them.
The more modest expanse of the white space between lines 8 and 9 ushers in
a greater focus on the visual—in “Il est doux [. . .] de voir naître” (v. 9), and “Je
verrai,” repeated from the first grouping of lines (v. 6, 13)—as the poetic subject
moves from general reflection on dreamy desires (“Je veux”) toward the par-
ticular, starting with “Et quand” (v. 14). Closing himself off from the city and
locking himself inside his dreams’ “féeriques palais” (v. 16), the battened down
doors and shutters operate in a manner similar to the wide-open doors through
which the companion couldn’t see in “Les Yeux des pauvres.” Offering unfettered
access when open—that is, to those who can see into and through them properly—
when the eyes into the soul are shut, so are the visual faculties: sounds take over.
Without additional formal breaks in the poem, it is as if the long block of eighteen
lines underscores the lack of visual cues to guide us; without such signposts the
readers are like the subject, reliant solely on the poem’s sounds. They, in turn,
generate the present; through their participle forms (“pleurant,” “chantant,”
“tempêtant”) they emphasize it and further anchor it in a precise temporal
mode—the modern moment of the poetic subject’s reflections, at once hovering
(and recognizable to the point where he can describe them) and kept at bay, not
interrupting the ongoing act of contemplation. The lack of language in the infans
of “enfantin,” the pack of dogs suggested in “L’Émeute,” and the storm brewing in
the “tempête” of “tempêtant” all fall on deaf ears. . . and yet they don’t. For the
verses’ sonorous elements lift them up and make the poetic subject notice them,
retain them, and recognize them, albeit ex post facto and even though they fail to
rouse him from his dream state. These lines’ alliterations and assonances ([d], [de],
[j], [ã], [a], [t], [v]) create an unmistakeable cacophony, an audible soundscape
that matches the titular “paysage” that has irrevocably put aside its traditional
visual components for other means of expression:
Des jardins, des jets d’eau pleurant dans les albâtres,

Des baisers, des oiseaux chantant soir et matin,
Et tout ce que l’Idylle a de plus enfantin.
L’Émeute, tempêtant vainement à ma vitre,
Thus “Paysage” offers a different kind of expression, and relationship with that
expression, in which its own poetic language is a new means for working through
the pressures of the visual and the audible. While perceptible in this poem from
Les Fleurs du Mal, this tension is further on display in prose poems such as “La
Soupe et les nuages,” where it operates in the poem’s fold between, on the one
hand, the visual, the imaginary, the fantasy, and the illusion and, on the other, the
aural, the traumatic, the paradoxical or oxymoronic, and the (meta)critical. It is
on this point that when we readers look into the “yeux verts” of the “bien-aimée”
in “La Soupe et les nuages” we also see the same eyes looking back at us in “Les
Yeux des pauvres,”59 where “yeux verts” are part of a sudden, cacophonous
explosion that includes homophony and brings poetry to life: le vers/vert/verre
and all potentially related fragments. The shame of “nos verres” morphs into the
direction of the gaze—“Je tournais mes regards vers les vôtres, cher amour, pour y
lire ma pensée”—and then the “vôtres” itself is replaced by “vos yeux si beaux et si
bizarrement doux, dans vos yeux verts” (OC 1: 319). These bits of poetry/glass
and all that they can reflect and refract—that is, the best bits—are, like prose
poetry itself, so many glimpses of where the poetic subject goes to lose himself in
thought, the objects that he “fantasizes” about in order to ignore the “fantasmago-
rie,” the ghosts in the city.
Poems so replete with such opposing forces might suggest that one aspect
obliterates the other at some point; after all, the soup is offered as an interruption
of the poetic subject’s reverie, and the insulting tone of the final line is meant to
bring the subject back down to earth—a chute if there ever was one—to the inter
ior space of the dining room and to simpler, basic needs such as sustenance. This
is a bitter pill to swallow: to be a poet, one must make sure to be standing on as
firm a “ground” as possible given how catastrophic the market (agora) is for poets.
(Lack of sure footing plagues the poetic subject in other poems, as we shall soon
see.) And yet, this poem’s success resides in its ability to produce and sustain the
coexistence of the opposing forces: sight and sound, “sacré” and “bougre.” We
need not choose, as the word “et” in the title “La Soupe et les nuages” makes clear:
in Baudelaire’s prose poetry, we get to have our soup and eat it, too. Such is the
case in “Le Tir et le cimetière” as well, as we will discuss later (see infra, Chapter 3):
rather than force the reader to between past and present, sight and sound,
Baudelaire’s modernity offers a poetic space in two places at once, proposing
seemingly opposing forces and making them coexist. After all, just as the poetic
59 In addition to the echoes from “Les Yeux de Berthe” (OC 1: 161) from Les Épaves, Kopp mentions
the additional examples of “yeux verts”: in “Les Bienfaits de la lune” (which also repeats the theme of a
“voix rauque et douce”) and, from Les Fleurs du Mal, in “Tout cela ne vaut pas le poison qui découle /
De tes yeux, de tes yeux verts, / Lacs où mon âme tremble et se voit à l’envers…” (All of this is not
worth the poison which flows / From your eyes, your green eyes, / Lakes where my soul shakes and
sees itself upside down) from “Le Poison” (OC 1: 49) and “J’aime de vos longs yeux la lumière verdâtre”
(I like the greenish light of your long eyes) from “Chant d’automne” (OC 1: 57). See Kopp, 340–1.
contains its own other—the non-poetic—the reverse is also true: for Baudelaire,
in the directness of prose resides its own other, the poetic. What matters, and
what signifies, is their potential for coexistence, perhaps even their mutual
dependency. Thus the counter-discourse is not the opposite of the dominant so
much as it is a discourse that undoes the poles of dominant and secondary, and
offers an entirely new way of reading, hearing, and engaging with poetry.60 The
coexistence of stark contrasts—what is seen and heard, or seen but not heard, or
heard but not seen61—are so many examples of the counter-discursive nature
inherent to the straddling of poiesis and prorsus, so many examples of the “suff-
isante clarté” and “délicieuse obscurité” with which Baudelaire fashions his
prose poems.
Repeating (One’s) Self
Laquelle est la vraie?

J’ai connu une certaine Bénédicta, qui remplissait l’atmosphère d’idéal, et
dont les yeux répandaient le désir de la grandeur, de la beauté, de la gloire et de
tout ce qui fait croire à l’immortalité.
Mais cette fille miraculeuse était trop belle pour vivre longtemps; aussi est-elle
morte quelques jours après que j’eus fait sa connaissance, et c’est moi-même qui
l’ai enterrée, un jour que le printemps agitait son encensoir jusque dans les
cimetières. C’est moi qui l’ai enterrée, bien close dans une bière d’un bois par-
fumé et incorruptible comme les coffres de l’Inde.
Et comme mes yeux restaient fichés sur le lieu où était enfoui mon trésor, je
vis subitement une petite personne qui ressemblait singulièrement à la défunte,
et qui, piétinant sur la terre fraîche avec une violence hystérique et bizarre, disait
en éclatant de rire: “C’est moi, la vraie Bénédicta! C’est moi, une fameuse
canaille! Et pour la punition de ta folie et de ton aveuglement, tu m’aimeras telle
que je suis!”
Mais moi, furieux, j’ai répondu: “Non! non! non!” Et pour mieux accentuer
mon refus, j’ai frappé si violemment la terre du pied que ma jambe s’est enfoncée
jusqu’au genou dans la sépulture récente, et que, comme un loup pris au piège, je
restai attaché, pour toujours peut-être, à la fosse de l’idéal. (OC 1: 342)
(I met a certain Benedicta, who filled the atmosphere with the ideal, and whose
eyes spread the desire for grandeur, beauty, fame, and everything that makes us
believe in immortality.
60 Arthur Rimbaud would later attempt a similar maneuver in the “Délires” section from Une saison
en enfer, which is an un-reading (dé-lire) as much it is a kind madness (delirium); see my Authority in
Crisis in French Literature, 1850–1880 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 117–20.
61 Edward Kaplan addresses seeing and not seeing, particularly with respect to numerous “ethical
predicaments,” in his section entitled “Blindness is Universal” (Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 103–6).
But that miraculous girl was too beautiful to live long, so she died a few days after
I had made her acquaintance, and it is I myself who buried her, one day when
spring was shaking its censer even into the cemeteries. It is I who buried her, tightly
sealed into a coffin made of aromatic and rot-proof wood like Indian chests.
And since my eyes were fastened on the place where my treasure was buried,
I suddenly saw a little person who uncannily resembled the deceased, and who,
stamping the fresh soil with a hysterical and weird violence, was saying with
bursts of laughter, “It is I, the true Benedicta! It is I, a first-class riffraff! And to
punish your madness and your blindness, you will love me as I am!”
But, furious, I answered: “No! No! No!” And to emphasize my refusal more,
I stamped the ground so violently that my leg sank up to the knee in the recent
burial place; and, like a trapped wolf, I remained fettered, perhaps forever, to the
grave of the ideal). (PP, 98; modified)
The possibility of this poem’s resemblance to what we’ve already seen termed a
sonnet in prose62 is supported by the repetitions that structure its four para-
graphs: especially the “Mais. . . Et…” connectors and the pattern they establish, in
which a corrective is followed by its additional supporting evidence.63 That the
conjunctions alternate between correction and addition reinforces the underlying
uncertainty in the title, both as it first appeared in Le Boulevard in June 1863 (the
version reproduced here) and in its later iteration, entitled “L’Idéal et le Réel,”
which appeared in the Revue nationale et étrangère on September 7, 1867, one
week after Baudelaire’s death. This lack of clarity about what about the poem—if
not the poem itself—is real is the central theme of Jacques Derrida’s reading of
another prose poem, “La Fausse Monnaie”:
Mais comme la convention nous le permet, nous savons, Baudelaire et nous, les
lecteurs, que cette fiction est une fiction, il n’y a là aucun phénomène de “fausse
monnaie,” c’est-à-dire d’abus de confiance faisant passer le faux pour vrai. Il reste
que la possibilité de la fausse monnaie, la possibilité de l’effet de fausse monnaie,
partage la même condition énérale: faire passer une fiction pour “vraie.”64
(But as convention allows us, we know—Baudelaire and us, the readers—that
this fiction is a fiction, and in it there is no phenomenon of “false currency,” that
is to say an abuse of confidence which makes falsities pass for truths. It remains
that the possibility of false currency, the possibility of the effect of false currency,
shares the same general condition: to make a fiction pass for “truth.”)
62 Other poems that share some formal attributes include “Le Port,” “Le Désespoir de la vieille” (see
infra in this chapter), “Le Confiteor de l’artiste” (see Chapter 1, supra), “Un plaisant,” “À une heure du
matin,” “Le Gâteau” (see infra in this chapter), “Le Thyrse,” “Le Miroir” (see Chapter 1, supra), “Le Tir
et le cimetière” (see Chapter 4, infra), and “Perte d’auréole.”
63 “Enivrez-vous” also follows the same series of conjunctions (see Chapter 4, infra).
64 Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps. Vol. 1. La Fausse Monnaie (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1991), 122;
original emphasis.
From the opening words of “Laquelle est la vraie?” it seems clear that the poetic
subject (“J’ai connu”) dominates, while he is quickly eclipsed by the visual as the
first sentence grows to encompass the entire first paragraph: taking over, her eyes
silently trigger the desire that yearns for immortality and the infinity that it
implies. The “Mais” that opens the second paragraph indicates that there is more,
however, and in fact we are forewarned that there is much more to this woman
than meets her eyes: “une certaine Bénédicta.” Her very name is not merely
a simple blessing from above, but rather, first and foremost, a function of
language; as Barbara Johnson explains, “Ce n’est sans doute pas un hasard si
cette héroïne, reprise directement et presque parodiquement de la poésie d’Edgar
Poe, s’appelle ‘Bénédicta’: ‘la Bien Dite.’ Elle est l’image même d’une poésie de
l’idéal que Baudelaire ne cesse d’enterrer” (It is doubtless no coincidence that
this heroine, almost exactly lifted and parodied from Edgar Poe’s poetry, is
called “Bénédicta”: “the Well Said.” She is the very image of an ideal poetry that
Baudelaire never stops burying).65 While the notion of refined, blessed speech
might suggest some beneficent prorsus from above, the word “Mais” also begins
the series of conjunctions which push the poem away from the infinity suggested
by Bénédicta’s eyes, down to the level of worldly encounters and actions, and
through the poem.
And the second paragraph opens with a warning that the visual—conveyed not
only through her eyes but also through her being described as “miraculeuse,” a
reminder of what one sees (see the Introduction, supra)—will not last forever. The
mention of her death makes her dazzling visual beauty irrevocably a thing of
the past and opens the floodgates to a profusion of all the signs of benedire, of the
elevated pyrotechnics of refined language in poetry: repetitions, alliterations, and
assonances adorn the phrase that describes the act of burying her, modified for
the second time as if the subject’s own facility with language is insufficient to cap-
ture the action. Contrasted with the flat repetition of “c’est moi-même qui l’ai
enterrée [. . .] C’est moi qui l’ai enterrée” there are all of the percussive sounds that
accompany the descriptions of “Bénédicta”:
son encensoir [s]-[an]-[s]-[an]-[s]

bien close dans une bière d’un bois [b]-[d]-[b]-[d]-[b]
incorruptible comme les coffres de l’Inde [ko]-[ko]-[ko]
65 Barbara Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique: la seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris:

Flammarion, 1979), 76. It is worth recalling that the first poem in Les Fleurs du Mal bears the similar
title “Bénédiction,” and that its
differing dynamic designations, signaled by different vocal enactments, not only serve the
narrative drama of the poem but also draw attention to the ways in which the human voice
can be exploited in poetic language. This is a poem in which the human voice is put into
action in so many diverse ways that it prompts the reader to become more aware of his or
her own voice, and of how the human voice can be manipulated to create different effects.
(Abbott, Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé, 65)
These repetitions are further underscored by the fact that—like the line “Que c’est
beau! que c’est beau!” from “Les Yeux des pauvres”—the phrase “C’est moi” in
“Laquelle est la vraie?” stems from a prorsus that is shared by multiple characters.
First, it is produced by, and thus belongs to, the poetic subject (“C’est moi qui l’ai
enterrée”) and, in the third paragraph, Bénédicta herself—the real one, who
doubles the recently buried ideal: “C’est moi, la vraie Bénédicta! C’est moi, une
fameuse canaille!” Such a doubling that stems from the collision of the ideal and
the real recalls the narrator’s reflections early in Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia:
Ici a commencé pour moi ce que j’appellerai l’épanchement du songe dans la vie
réelle. À dater de ce moment, tout prenait parfois un aspect double,—et cela sans
que le raisonnement manquât jamais de logique, sans que la mémoire perdît les
plus légers détails de ce qui m’arrivait. Seulement mes actions, insensées en
apparence, étaient soumises à ce que l’on appelle illusion, selon la raison
humaine…
Cette idée m’est revenue bien des fois que dans certains moments graves de la
vie, tel Esprit du monde extérieur s’incarnait tout à coup en la forme d’une per-
sonne ordinaire, et agissait ou tentait d’agir sur nous, sans que cette personne en
eût la connaissance ou en gardât le souvenir.66
(Here started for me what I shall call the outpouring of the dream into real life.
From that moment on, everything would sometimes take on a double aspect—
and this, without my reasoning ever lacking logic, without memory losing the
slightest details of what was happening to me. Only my actions, apparently
senseless, were subject to what is called illusion, according to human reason…
This idea came back to me many times, such that at certain serious moments
of life, some Spirit of the outer world suddenly took shape in the form of an
ordinary person, and acted or tried to act upon us, without that person ever
knowing or having any memory of it.)
Despite the abrupt shift in perspective—from Bénédicta’s eyes in the first para-
graph to the subject’s eyes here—the sonorous repetitions continue:
mes yeux restaient fichés [e]-[ɛ]-[e]67

subitement une petite personne [u]-[u]-[p]-[p]
ressemblait singulièrement [s]-[s]
If the poetic subject is suddenly able to produce some kind of benedire, it is

because Bénédicta is again present, in a sense. While his eyes are stuck on a
66 Gérard de Nerval, Œuvres completes, ed. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, 3 vols (Paris:
Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1989–93), 3: 699.
67 The sounds [ɛ] and [e] are close but not identical to each other.
place—not on a thing, but rather on the surface under which was buried the
treasure that he cannot see—he is able to see not what is hidden but a replace-
ment, who addresses him directly: not the (silenced) ideal but the (speaking) real.
Here Baudelaire brings us not only to questions of presence and absence, but to
our ability to access them: through our senses and through language.68
The subject’s eyes are stuck in neutral, in the real, as well as in a strictly linear,
causal telling of action; one after another after another, cause and effect, action
and reaction. The ideal—embodied in Bénédicta, expressed in the benedire that
accompanies her description—not only stretches to infinity via the immense
expanses of the end of the first paragraph, but also is nimble enough to allow for
simultaneity: “piétinant sur la terre fraîche avec une violence hystérique et bizarre,
disait en éclatant de rire.” In this respect, the repeated iterations of “C’est moi”
could hardly be more different; all the narrator in the second paragraph can do in
language is state and describe his past action, whereas in the third paragraph the
miniature Bénédicta asserts her subjectivity and calls the narrator out for his
blind spots, his “aveuglement.” Through her prorsus, her benedire, her language
illuminates all that he didn’t see. On this point, “Laquelle est la vraie?” truly is a
“bagatelle,” the term that Baudelaire often used to describe his prose poems (see
his letters to Sainte-Beuve from May 4, 1865 and January 15, 186669). The word
comes from the Italian bagatella, meaning acrobat or magician’s trick; Henri Scepi
points out that it is also related to “ces poètes saltimbanques et quelque peu sor-
ciers qui savent retourner les apparences et créer, au cœur de l’expérience sensible
et de la perception commune, des aperçus inouïs, visions ou apparitions qui
définissent ‘l’attitude mystérieuse que les objets de la création tiennent devant le
regard de l’homme’” (these performing and somewhat magical poets who know
how to invert appearances and create, at the heart of sensory experience and
68 Returning to the earlier discussion of “Une mort héroïque” (OC 1: 319–23; see supra, Chapter 1),
I should add that not only does the mime Fancioulle both embody and enact language’s failure, but he
also underscores elements of absence and presence, in terms of the visible and the hidden and, par-
ticularly useful for the present discussion, in terms of tombs:
Fancioulle me prouvait, d’une manière péremptoire, irréfutable, que l’ivresse de l’Art est
plus apte que toute autre à voiler les terreurs du gouffre; que le génie peut jouer la comédie
au bord de la tombe avec une joie qui l’empêche de voir la tombe, perdu, comme il est, dans
un paradis excluant toute idée de tombe et de destruction. (1: 321)
As Françoise Meltzer has explained, in this poem Baudelaire’s poetic prose
foregrounds, even as it declares, the tomb as hidden, forgotten, excluded. The passage does
this by repeating the word “tomb” (tombe) three times in one phrase (a phrase, one might
add, that is preceded by one ending in gouffre). Like a child repeating an obscenity by
insisting that it is a word that must never be said, this passage bludgeons us with the
tomb while assuring us that genius can overcome all thoughts of it. Art, in other words,
is helpless before the void. Instead of an antidote to thoughts of mortality, art becomes
a memento mori (Remember! Souviens toi!)—a reminder of mortality, the terrors of the
void (les terreurs du gouffre). The veil that art throws over the void, in other words,
merely emphasizes it. (Meltzer, Seeing Double, 206; original emphasis)
69 C 2: 493 and 2: 583, respectively.
communal perception, uncanny glimpses, visions, or apparitions which define

“the mysterious attitude that objects of creation hold before a man’s gaze”).70 Scepi
quotes from Baudelaire’s essay on Gautier (OC 2: 117), written in September 1858
and published in L’Artiste in March 1859, and in which Baudelaire cautions that
“la France a été providentiellement créée pour la recherche du Vrai préférable-
ment à celle du Beau” (France was providentially created for the search for the
Truth rather than for Beauty) (OC 2: 125).
In “Laquelle est la vraie?” there is more at stake here than sleight of poetic hand;
the opposition between poetic subject (narrator, singular) and object (Bénédictas,
plural) is also played out on the ground, with their feet, in both cases marked as
sources of violence: “piétinant sur la terre fraîche avec une violence hystérique et
bizarre” and “j’ai frappé si violemment la terre du pied.” Since “pied” can also refer
to a measure of verse poetry,71 it is worth considering the differing degrees of
violence that this poem’s actors bring down on the house of verse. And while
Bénédicta remains in the realm of the inexplicable (“bizarre”), her presence
throughout this poem pushes toward a poetics that does away with, and ultim
ately does without, “pieds” and verse: away from the easy measurements of beats
and toward the timelessness of immortality.72 On the contrary, the poetic subject
puts his foot in it, in more ways than one, and Scott Carpenter is right to note:
70 Henri Scepi, “Face à l’informe,” in Yoshikazu Nakaji (ed.), Baudelaire et les formes poétiques
(Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes [La Licorne], 2008), 11–23 (22–3).
71 “Terme de versification française. Un pied, deux syllabes; ainsi notre alexandrin qui a douze syl-
labes, est un vers de six pieds, et le vers de sept syllabes est un vers de trois pieds et demi” (Term of
French versification. One foot, two syllables; and thus our twelve-syllable alexandrine is a verse with
six feet, and a seven-syllable verse is a verse of three and a half feet) (Littré 3: 1112). See also poems III
and IV of Verlaine’s Épigrammes (1894): the third poem ends with the seventeen-syllable line “Je pren-
drai l’oiseau léger, laissant le lourd crapaud dans la piscine” (I will take the light bird, leaving the heavy
toad in the pool), and the fourth poem opens with the exclamation “J’ai fait un vers de dix-sept pieds!”
(I made a verse of seventeen feet!), a claim corrected two quatrains later with the lines “Mon vers n’est
pas de dix-sept pieds, / Il est de deux vers bien divers, / Un de sept, un de dix” (My verse is not seventeen
feet long, / It is two distinct verses, / One of seven, one of ten) and then ending with the seventeen-
syllable line “Du distinguo: c’est bon, rire. Et c’est meilleur encore, aimer vos vers” (Of distinguo: it is
good to laugh. And better still, to like your verse) (Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, 856–7).
72 Similarly troubling the erstwhile sure footing of verse is the end of “Le Squelette laboureur,” in
which the poem’s charge is interrupted with the gaping hole of an alexandrine between quatrains. The
reader is left hanging in suspense (and uncertainty, “peut-être”) with verses that, treading in the
unknown (“inconnu”), end with a bare and bloodied “foot”:
Qu’envers nous le Néant est traître;
Que tout, même la Mort, nous ment,
Et que sempiternellement
Hélas! il nous faudra peut-être
Dans quelque pays inconnu
Écorcher la terre revêche
Et pousser une lourde bêche
Sous notre pied sanglant et nu?
(OC 1: 94).
(That toward us the Void is traitorous; / That everything, even Death, lies to us, / And that
sempiternally / Alas! Maybe we will have to // In some unknown country, / Scrape the hostile
earth / And push the heavy shovel / under our bloody and naked foot?)
“How ironic that the poet should lose his footing precisely at the moment of his
greatest certainty, when firm ground gives way. In this single moment we find the
conjunction of shock, stumbling, surprise, allegory, and fakes.”73 For one thing, the
subject’s blind spots and inability to see what is really going on, to understand
what he is seeing, and to explain it clearly all create the gaps in our understanding,
and our subsequent head-scratching about what this poem is truly depicting; as
Carpenter says, “the narrator’s repeated misunderstandings suffice to leave the
very notion of understanding on rather unstable ground.”74 The subject’s foot
trips him up literally as well, as he finds himself stuck in his own attempt to enact
violence with his own “pied,” for the word “piège” also derives from the Latin pes
or pedis, for foot. But if his eyes were stuck on a specific place at the start of the
third paragraph, the arrival of the little Bénédicta and, especially, her quoted
speech (which ends with her assertion of her own subjectivity, “telle que je suis!”),
forces the subject to come to grips with the difficulty of well-crafted prose. While
he begins with a repetition that, like his earlier one, is wholly uninspired (“Non!
non! non!”), he is able to elevate his refusal—“accentuer” is the term he uses—
with some musically poetic prose that suggests that a bit of benedire has worn off
on him (as Baudelaire explained to his mother in a letter from January 9, 1856, “Le
propre des vrais poètes [. . .] est de sortir d’eux-mêmes, et de comprendre une
toute autre nature” (C 1: 365)):
mon refus, j’ai frappé [r]-[f]-[fr]

ma jambe s’est enfoncée jusqu’au genou [j]-[j]-[j]
la sépulture récente, et que [e]-[e]-[ɛ]
pris au piège, je restai attaché, pour toujours peut-être [p]-[p]-[t]-[ata]-[e]-
[pu]-[u]-[u]-[p]-[t]-[t]
From fluid passages lacking repetition to phrases reiterated verbatim to sentences

replete with alliteration and assonance, the language in “Laquelle est la vraie?”
runs the gamut of different poetic rhythms. Like it or not—as he was stuck in it,
he had little choice—it seems that, in his use of language laden with repetition in
this final paragraph, the poetic subject starts to concede the possibility of an
extratemporal linguistic mode (one in which Bénédicta can be in two places at
the same time). If there is a move toward the immortality and the infinite in
73 Scott Carpenter, “What’s the Point? Allegory and the Prose Poems,” in Cheryl Krueger (ed.),
Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (New York: Modern Language Association of
America, 2017), 45–53 (51).
74 Scott Carpenter, Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009), 151; see 151–4. Elsewhere, Carpenter is right to identify a recurring theme in Le Spleen de Paris
of (mis)readings, (mis)interpretations, or (mis)understandings that are radically upended or over-
turned: often when it is a matter of discerning the reality of a given situation. The first example to
which he turns is, naturally, “Laquelle est la vraie?.” See Scott Carpenter, “Entendre, s’entendre dans Le
Spleen de Paris,” in Steve Murphy (ed.), Lectures du Spleen de Paris (Rennes: Presses universitaires de
Rennes [Didact Français], 2014), 197–208 (200).
which Bénédicta makes us believe, it is because her effect on language, her

benedire, makes us believers: just like the subject who moves from initial bewil-
derment to his first attempts at his own poetic prose—that is, with his feet on the
high wire between prorsus and poiesis—in the final paragraph. In addition to the
formal tension in its four paragraphs—with its numerous conjunctions adding to
and qualifying the confusion—and the tonal friction between emotion and lan-
guage, this poem sets up other oppositions, pitting seeing and beauty against real-
ity and mortality. Baudelaire had long been critical of attempts of facile notions of
“the real,” including attempts to represent it, as he famously showed in his essay
“Puisque réalisme il y a” (1855), where he wrote the following about Champfleury:
“Si les choses se tiennent devant lui dans une allure quelque peu fantastique, c’est
à cause de la contraction de son œil un peu myope.—Comme il étudie minutieuse-
ment, il croit saisir une réalité extérieure. Dès lors, réalisme,—il veut imposer ce
qu’il croit son procédé” (If things stand before him with a somewhat fantastical
allure, it is because of the contraction of his slightly myopic eye.—As he studies
meticulously, he believes he is grasping an external reality. As a result: realism,—
he seeks to impose what he believes to be his process) (OC 2: 58; original
emphasis). Poetry is the escape: “La Poésie est ce qu’il y a de plus réel, c’est ce qui
n’est complètement vrai que dans un autre monde” (Poetry is that which is the
most real, it is what is completely true only in another world) (OC 2: 59; original
emphasis).
The oppositions at play in this text are hardly hidden, for they are already
posited in the title: or, rather, titles. The interrogative title that asks which is the
real Bénédicta presents the problem of a lack of clarity. Rather than addressing
anyone directly, though, this question is more of a summary of the problem
presented by the existence of the two Benedictas. . . which naturally raises much
larger questions of identity. First there is, as Maria Scott points out, the matter
of misogyny:
Baudelaire’s prose poems highlight the tensions but also the continuities between
two versions of femininity that were current in his day: the idealized, deified
woman, on the one hand, and the excessively physical, sexual woman, on the
other. The conjunction of apparently opposed attitudes toward women in the
prose poems may be interpreted in a variety of ways—as illustrative of the dis-
sonance and hybridity characteristic of prose poetry, as symptomatic of the
poet’s cynicism, as indicative of the extent to which Baudelaire typified his age,
as suggestive of his ironic awareness of his own contradictions or those of
his age.75
75 Maria Scott, “How to Read (Women) in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems,” 105.

In addition, and more generally, there are consequences for us all, as Baudelaire
asked in his review of Charles Asselineau’s collection of short stories entitled La
Double Vie, “Qui parmi nous n’est pas un homo duplex? Je veux parler de ceux
dont l’esprit a été dès l’enfance touched with pensiveness; toujours double, action et
intention, rêve et réalité; toujours l’un nuisant à l’autre, l’un usurpant la part de
l’autre” (Who among us is not a homo duplex? I mean to speak of those whose
mind has been, from childhood, touched with pensiveness, always double, action
and intention, dream and reality; one always harming the other, one usurping the
other’s part) (OC 2: 87; original emphasis). When reading Baudelaire’s poem
under its the later title “L’Idéal et le Réel,” the reader is faced with a series of
choices about the present, in time and in space: between past and present, and
between absence and presence.76 We need not worry about choosing, though, for
this title reminds us that the question is not meant to be answered at all: as was
the case in poems discussed earlier, Baudelaire’s universe of poetic prose is one
in which two incompatible elements coexist: “La Soupe et les nuages” (presence
and absence in spatial terms), “Le Fou et la Vénus” (in the present are the
madman and the statue that serves to memorialize what is absent, the past).77
Here, in “L’Idéal et le Réel,” the memory—the knowledge, in the present, of
what existed in the past—shares the same plane as the full awareness of what
is present, in the present moment. . . while that, too, is ephemeral and thus
never more than about to become a memory in the past.78 As Baudelaire
explained in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” “Le plaisir que nous retirons de la
représentation du présent tient non seulement à la beauté dont il peut être
revêtu, mais aussi à sa qualité essentielle de présent” (The pleasure we draw
from representing the present is not just about the beauty in which it can be
dressed up, but also about its essential quality as the present) (OC 2: 684). For
76 For Emmanuel Adatte, this point is central, and fundamental: “Pour Baudelaire, il semble de
toute manière que la distorsion qui existe entre le réel et l’idéal est inhérente à la condition humaine”
(For Baudelaire, it would seem in any case that the distortion which exists between the real and the
ideal is inherent to the human condition). Emmanuel Adatte, Les Fleurs du Mal et Le Spleen de Paris:
essai sur le dépassement du réel (Paris: José Corti, 1986), 105.
77 This theme of the prose poem harboring the coexistence of elements that are incompatible and
which seem to be in an unresolvable tension is particularly prevalent in the first batch of prose poems
published in Houssaye’s revue La Presse, to the point of even appearing as such in poems’ titles: the
first nine poems published on August 26, 1862, include “La Chambre double,” “Le Fou et la Vénus,”
and “Le Chien et le flacon.”
78 The numerous other studies that have considered the role of time and memory in Baudelaire’s
expressions of modernity (see the discussion of “L’Horloge” supra, in Chapter 1) include Chambers,
An Atmospherics of the City; Marder, Dead Time; Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double, particularly “In
Memory of the Present” (209–18); Richard Terdiman, “Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’: Memory, History, and
the Sign,” 106–48 in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993); Thomas Klinkert, “Historical Time, Cultural Time, and Biological Time in Baudelaire,” in
Niklas Bender and Gisèle Séginger (eds.), Biological Time, Historical Time (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi,
2018), 180–95; and, for Baudelaire’s art criticism, J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and the Art of Memory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Paul de Man, this present-in-the-present-ness is precisely the goal of Baudelaire’s

poetic prose built of the coexistence of contradictory forces:
All these experiences of immediacy coupled with their implicit negation, strive
to combine the openness and freedom of a present severed from all other tem-
poral dimensions, the weight of the past as well as the concern with a future,
with a sense of totality and completeness that could not be achieved if a more
extended awareness of time were not also involved.79
We are again reminded of Baudelaire’s famous definition of modernity, built of

two temporal halves: “le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont
l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable”; see the beginning of this chapter, supra).
Its central tensions are evident in a great number of his poems, including the
famous lines from “Le Cygne”:
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.
… . . . … . . . … . . . … . . . … . . . … . . . . . . .
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!
(v. 29–32, 49–52; OC 1: 86, 87)
(Paris changes! But nothing in my melancholy / Has moved! New palaces,
scaffolding, blocks of stone, / Old quarters, all has become allegory for me, / And my
dear memories are heavier than rocks. / [. . .] / And so in the forests where my spirit
retreats / An old Memory rings out loud with the force of a horn! / I think of
forgotten sailors on an island, / Of the captives, the defeated!. . . and so many others!)
Baudelaire also develops this theme in his essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne”
when, during his discussion of sketch-work by Constantin Guys, he opens up a
digression about Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd”:
Vous souvenez-vous d’un tableau (en vérité, c’est un tableau!) écrit par la plus
puissante plume de cette époque, et qui a pour titre L’Homme des foules? Derrière
la vitre d’un café, un convalescent, contemplant la foule avec jouissance, se mêle,
par la pensée, à toutes les pensées qui s’agitent autour de lui. Revenu récemment
79 de Man, Blindness and Insight, 157. Here I am particularly indebted to Françoise Meltzer’s read-
ing of de Man, particularly the section “In Memory of the Present” from her Seeing Double, 209–19.
des ombres de la mort, il aspire avec délices tous les germes et tous les effluves de
la vie; comme il a été sur le point de tout oublier, il se souvient et veut avec
ardeur se souvenir de tout. Finalement, il se précipite à travers cette foule à la
recherche d’un inconnu dont la physionomie entrevue l’a, en un clin d’œil, fas-
ciné. La curiosité est devenue une passion fatale, irrésistible! (OC 2: 689–90)
(Do you remember a painting (in truth, it is a painting!) written by the most
powerful pen of our time, and which is entitled L’Homme des foules? Behind the
window of a café, a convalescing man contemplating the crowd joyfully absorbed
through his thoughts with all the thoughts swirling around him. Recently
returned from the shadows of death, he inhales with delight all the essences and
odors of life; as he had been on the point of forgetting it all, he remembers and
ardently wishes to remember everything. Finally he throws himself into the
crowd, in pursuit of a stranger whose glimpsed physiognomy, in the blink of an
eye, fascinated him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!)
Beyond the visual arts, however—and such a sideways step is hardly radical, for
Baudelaire himself refers to Poe’s story as a “tableau”—there are additional
dimensions to consider when the intersection of sight, time, and death is cast in
poetic prose. Following the example set by Poe, Baudelaire creates an arena for
the collision of the past in the present; in so doing he marks the modernity of
time, with its present and future that simultaneously retain the traces and mem-
ory of the past.80 On this point Françoise Meltzer offers a crucial reminder of
Baudelaire’s distinctive poetics: “Baudelaire’s crisis is not with language; it is with
time and mortality (not that these preclude the first), the horrors of which lan-
guage is fit to recount. Language is still there to articulate.”81 Following Meltzer,
we see that one of the vital roles of Baudelaire’s poetic prose is that it fills gaps;
where action fails, his language steps in and takes over, and the timely contribu-
tion of prorsus helps turn the ineffectual into the creative force of poiesis. Similarly,
it makes connections: between the visible and the obscured; between what we can
and cannot see; and between the impossible, unreal of dreams, and the concrete
reality ici-bas.
In addition to these tensions, we must also consider the two Bénédictas and
their two respective versions of benedire—two sources of the kind of language
(poetic prose) that leads beyond the limits of what we can see, beyond the sights
to which we can bear witness.82 One Bénédicta spoke with her eyes and was
80 For Françoise Meltzer, “the present for Baudelaire acts as a place from which to see the past on
the one hand and the future on the other—not as interdependent but as endlessly, irrevocably noncon-
tiguous.” Meltzer, Seeing Double, 214.
81 Meltzer, Seeing Double, 216.
82 Cheryl Krueger similarly considers the role of language in this poem: “Just as he secures
Bénédicta’s body in the airtight case, the narrator attempts to seal her essence in words.” Krueger pro-
poses “an allegorical reading of the poem, casting Bénédicta in one of two roles: that of the text that
uried before she could utter a word; the other’s bizarre stomping and her speech
b
set the poem on a new course of action. Prose poetry is not always about dazzling
repetitions or fancy footwork; the first Bénédicta can represent a different kind of
expression with her feet/poetry stilled, from within (if not beyond) the grave. On
this point, it is worth recalling that in his “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe”
Baudelaire had written that “C’est à la fois par la poésie et à travers la poésie, par
et à travers la musique que l’âme entrevoit les splendeurs situées derrière le tom-
beau” (It is simultaneously by poetry and through poetry, by and through music
that the soul glimpses the splendors beyond the tomb) (OC 2: 334; original
emphasis). Within it, the prorsus of quoted speech snaps us out of that untethered
dream state and anchors us in the feeling, in the urgency of the modern moment.
As Baudelaire’s poetic prose shows, the ideal is a trap. . . although not one to be
avoided because it is ultimately redeemable: in the modern world there is always
someone to remind us of the reality we’re actually in and, if we’re lucky, to show
us the trap we’ve put our foot in (and, if we’re really lucky, how to get out of it). It
is a rejection of the ideal that Baudelaire expressed as early as his Salon de 1846
essay: “Les poètes, les artistes et toute la race humaine seraient bien malheureux,
si l’idéal, cette absurdité, cette impossibilité, était trouvé. Qu’est-ce que chacun
ferait désormais de son pauvre moi,—de sa ligne brisée?” (Poets, artists, and the
whole human race would be rather unhappy if the ideal—this absurdity, this
impossibility—were to be found. What would each of them do with their poor
self, with their broken line?).83 Remaining attached to the ideal, “pour toujours
peut-être,” is also keeping one foot in one and one foot in another: “la fosse de
l’idéal”; “la folie de l’idéal” as it appeared in Le Boulevard (apparently the result of
a typographical error); and its homonym “la fausse de l’idéal,” as a number of
scholars have suggested.84 These feet are steps, beats, and rhythms, and it is easy
to see that the straddling that Baudelaire engenders is similarly evidenced in Le
Spleen de Paris, with one foot in poetry and one in prose.
Seeking truth in the ideal is madness (“folie”), looking for it despite its false-
hoods (“fausse”) and the depths into which we can fall if we’re not careful
(“fosse”). By excavating through the strata of Baudelaire’s poetic prose we find
ourselves in several at once: a kind of vertical enjambment through layers of lan-
guage, of sanity, and of truths.85 Instead, fighting back—counter-discursively—by
stomping one’s feet and yelling “No!” leads to the only truth, grounded in reality
undergoes transformations at the writer’s will, or that of the poetic ideal which ultimately escapes and
mocks the poet” (Krueger, The Art of Procrastination, 123 and 124; original emphasis).
83 OC 2: 455; original emphasis. In Baudelaire’s novella La Fanfarlo, Samuel Cramer expresses a
similar sentiment: “Il n’est pas de rêve, quelque idéal qu’il soit, qu’on ne retrouve avec un poupard
glouton suspendu au sein…” (There is no dream, however perfect it may be, which can’t be found with
a greedy swollen man hanging from its breast) (OC 1: 561).
84 Carpenter, Aesthetics of Fraudulence, 152.
85 See Carpenter’s comment, supra, about “the conjunction of shock, stumbling, surprise, allegory,
and fakes.”
because of the foot stuck in the trap: the acknowledgment and acceptance of this
impossible state, and of the prose poem that made it all possible. The space that
allows for both Bénédictas, with vary degrees of falsehoods, pitfalls, and (in)san-
ity, the back-and-forth interplays in “Laquelle est la vraie?”—of prorsus and poiesis
and of speech and action—ultimately lead to the same conclusion: whether for
madness, depths of existence, or distance from truth and reality, chasing the
ideal—which is what the eyes set up—is un piège, a trap, a fool’s errand.86
Speaking and doing lead to a different kind of trap, and another reason not to
get one’s hopes up, in “Le Désespoir de la vieille,” which was first published in La
Presse in August 1862, less than a year before “Laquelle est la vraie?” appeared
in print:
Le Désespoir de la vieille
La petite vieille ratatinée se sentit toute réjouie en voyant ce joli enfant à qui
chacun faisait fête, à qui tout le monde voulait plaire; ce joli être, si fragile
comme elle, la petite vieille, et, comme elle aussi, sans dents et sans cheveux.
Et elle s’approcha de lui, voulant lui faire des risettes et des mines agréables.
Mais l’enfant épouvanté se débattait sous les caresses de la bonne femme
décrépite, et remplissait la maison de ses glapissements.
Alors la bonne vieille se retira dans sa solitude éternelle, et elle pleurait dans
un coin, se disant:—“Ah! pour nous, malheureuses vieilles femelles, l’âge est
passé de plaire, même aux innocents; et nous faisons horreur aux petits enfants
que nous voulons aimer!” (OC 1: 277–8)
(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, tooth-
less 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.
So 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 chil-
dren we try to love!” (PP, 3; modified)
This poem offers some formal similarities to “Laquelle est la vraie?,” including a
certain logic that organizes its paragraphs; the additions and corrections of its
86 For more on the question of reality and falsehood (particularly as they play out in “Laquelle est
la vraie?,” “Le Masque,” “La Chambre double,” and “La Fausse Monnaie”), see Scott Carpenter,
“Entendre, s’entendre dans Le Spleen de Paris,” 199–202; and as well as Carpenter, “Baudelaire and the
Originality of the Copy,” Aesthetics of Fraudulence, 137–54.
conjunctions create the shifts that lead us through the scene’s emotional highs
and lows.87 It also presents varying degrees of silence and noises, each of which
offer an opportunity to consider the potential for communication: within or with-
out language, in or beyond poetic prose.
First, though, we open with the visual, as was the case in “Laquelle est la vraie?”
(“J’ai connu une certaine Bénédicta, qui remplissait l’atmosphère d’idéal, et dont
les yeux répandaient le désir de la grandeur, de la beauté, de la gloire et de tout ce
qui fait croire à l’immortalité”). The second paragraph adds a shrinking physical
distance (“Et elle s’approcha de lui”) to a proximity in qualities that the two char-
acters already shared: as the wrinkly and bald old woman has no teeth, she is
unable to articulate words in a manner that will be clearly understood by others,
and is thus close to the infans on whom she sets eyes. Despite this linguistic
impediment that they had in common, the old woman hoped that they could still
communicate: not through language—which was unavailable to her—but by
smiling and making funny faces.88 (This early optimism hardly sets readers up for
a surprising chute at the end, though: with a title like “Le Désespoir de la vieille”
we already know how it will end.) Through its absence in the mouths of the
poem’s actors, language forges its own undoing, since whatever beauty is sug-
gested in the repeated word “joli” in the first sentence is immediately countered
by the interruption of the hiatus that follows both occasions: “joli enfant” and
“joli être” are otherwise surrounded by the fluidity and rhythm generated by the
festive alliteration according to which “chacun faisait fête” and the repetitions in
“comme elle, la petite vieille, et, comme elle aussi” and “sans dents et sans cheveux.”
It seems that the narrative voice is stuck under the weight of the ironic contrast
between ugliness of the bald, toothless, and wrinkled old woman and the linguis-
tic ugliness that accompanies “joli.”89 Thus “Le Désespoir de la vieille” remains in
the silent realm of the visual, that is, until the “Mais” that opens the third para-
graph and second half of the poem—as would be befitting a volta if this were a
stanza in verse (see supra, Chapter 1)—and as the child desperately tries to get
87 For Gilbert Guisan, this poem is particularly remarkable for its strong internal symmetry, which
is the key element of Baudelaire’s prose poems: “La cohérence que nous avons constatée à l’intérieur de
chaque paragraphe se retrouve dans l’ensemble du poème: chaque paragraphe est en effet lié au pré-
cédent par une conjonction: ‘Et. . . Mais. . . Alors. . .’” (The coherence we noticed inside each paragraph
is found in the whole poem: each paragraph is in fact linked to the previous one by a conjunction:
“And. . . But. . . So…”). Gilbert Guisan, “Prose et poésie d’après Baudelaire,” Études de lettres. Bulletin de
la Société des Études de Lettres (Lausanne: Imprimerie de la Concorde, February 1948), 70:
87–107 (95).
88 The poem’s “risettes” and “mines” recall the means of expression available to the mime actor
Fancioulle in “Une mort héroïque”; see supra, Chapter 1.
89 Such a break across two words—proscribed in classical versification—constitutes a “hiatus tran-
sitoire” (for Benoît de Cornulier it is a “hiatus métrique”), unlike for example the example thought of
more commonly today that stems from adjacent vowel sounds (in verbs like “tuer” or “puer”; some-
times called a “hiatus interne,” it is actually a “défaut d’élision métrique”; see Benoît de Cornulier, Art
poétique: notions et problèmes de métrique (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1995), especially, in
his “Glossaire” (235–73), the entries for “élision métrique” (250), “fiction graphique” (255), and “hia-
tus” (257–8).
away, yelping and squealing so loudly that the noise fills the house. While the
“Mais” and the pivot of the poem spin it into action, we remain far from the lin-
guistic, since the utterance of “glapissement” is associated with animals. As we see
in the contrast that Littré adds to his definition, we are about as far away from
poetry as one can get: “Au lieu de chanter, elle glapit” (2: 1880).
Again, and as is the case in “La Soupe et les nuages” and “Laquelle est la vraie?,”
eyes set up a scene dashed by reality, and emotion is only expressed in dialogue,
rather than in poetic prose—that is, because poetic prose was already presented,
in the examples of hiatus, as a source of hiccups, interruptions, halts, and rup-
tures. That the woman describes herself not merely as an unindividuated member
of a group is one degree of dehumanization, made only worse by the shift from
women to “malheureuses vieilles femelles.” It sets up the expression, which could
be thought of as the anti-lyric despite its opening “Ah!” and its e xclamation marks,
the only ones in the poem. Or is it? If we look more closely at the last paragraph,
we see that the old woman’s quoted internal monologue—it would be hard to
characterize it as quoted speech, since she has no teeth—arrives as a different
kind of lyricism that recovers the fluidity of expression that the start of the poem
had lost.90 The alliteration of [p] in “passé de plaire,” admittedly, does not lead
very far, except for the fact that in its repetition it signals the definitive end of a
break from the past—“l’âge est passé de plaire”—and we could even see the narra-
tive’s final hiatus “et elle pleurait” as a last gasp of the choppier narrative voice of
the past. With this break, and with the old woman’s quoted thoughts, come a new
kind of expression that, unlike the hiatuses that chopped up the narrator’s descrip-
tion of the child, includes the wisdom (earned by longevity) to see to a new kind
of lyric, in fluid prose: “Alors la bonne vieille se retira dans sa solitude éternelle, et
elle pleurait dans un coin, se disant:—‘Ah! pour nous, malheureuses vieilles
femelles, l’âge est passé de plaire, même aux innocents; et nous faisons horreur
aux petits enfants que nous voulons aimer!’” If this recovery in language seems
too good to be true, perhaps it is.
“Le Désespoir de la vieille” seems to separate action and language, beginning
with the narrator’s own inconsistent and halting prose: his inability to account, in
a consistent prose, for full spectrums of finite attributes (of age and of beauty) is a
stylistic weakness for which there is no remedy. Of the poem’s two characters who
are not able to speak clearly, the child physically moves away from the woman—
and, with her, the possibility of communication and understanding—while seek-
ing refuge resolutely far from language: the infans remaining in the realm of the
non-linguistic. Despite the failure of the old woman’s silent attempt at altruism
(moving closer to the infant), she brushes the rejection off and discovers her own
90 For Monroe, the situation of the lyric in Le Spleen de Paris provides evidence of the prose poems’
“destructive project toward the Romantic conception of poetry and literature” (Monroe, A Poverty of
Objects, 33).
refuge in the lyricism of her interior monologue, quoted and expressed (nuanced
here since it remains silent, and is not really spoken) with the fluidity that shows it
to be elevated far above all that had been oppressively holding her back (advanced
age, loss of skin tone and teeth). While the old woman and the child both begin
without access to speech, we can take some solace in the idea that with the wom-
an’s advanced age comes, if not wisdom, then at least the kind of experience—the
real, as opposed to the idealized dream of being able to love another—on which
she draws to produce her lyric prose, plaintive as it is. Ultimately, it is the emotion
of the lyric and that gives rise to the poiesis, manifested in the fluidity of her
quoted interior monologue. The combination of the poiesis of the lyric and the
prorsus of quoted speech yields nothing less than “le miracle d’une prose poé-
tique”: the fully actualized potential of language in Baudelaire’s prose poems.
The poem “Le Gâteau” (OC 1: 297–9) shares a number of themes with the
poems already discussed in this chapter, although not necessarily with the same
results. The tableau opens with a voyage to a peaceful, idealized tableau (similar
to the opening of “La Soupe et les nuages”) notable for it being so far away from
everything available to the eyes or the ears (“éloignées [. . .] loin, bien loin,” as out
of reach as the idealized Bénédicta in “Laquelle est la vraie?”), with the shadow
cast by a passing cloud the only interruption in this dream state.91
Je voyageais. Le paysage au milieu duquel j’étais placé était d’une grandeur et

d’une noblesse irrésistibles. Il en passa sans doute en ce moment quelque chose
dans mon âme. Mes pensées voltigeaient avec une légèreté égale à celle de
l’atmosphère; les passions vulgaires, telles que la haine et l’amour profane,
m’apparaissaient maintenant aussi éloignées que les nuées qui défilaient au fond
des abîmes sous mes pieds; mon âme me semblait aussi vaste et aussi pure que la
coupole du ciel dont j’étais enveloppé; le souvenir des choses terrestres n’arrivait
à mon cœur qu’affaibli et diminué, comme le son de la clochette des bestiaux
imperceptibles qui paissaient loin, bien loin, sur le versant d’une autre montagne.
Sur le petit lac immobile, noir de son immense profondeur, passait quelquefois
l’ombre d’un nuage, comme le reflet du manteau d’un géant aérien volant à tra
vers le ciel. Et je me souviens que cette sensation solennelle et rare, causée par un
grand mouvement parfaitement silencieux, me remplissait d’une joie mêlée de
peur. Bref, je me sentais, grâce à l’enthousiasmante beauté dont j’étais environné,
en parfaite paix avec moi-même et avec l’univers; je crois même que, dans ma
parfaite béatitude et dans mon total oubli de tout le mal terrestre, j’en étais venu
à ne plus trouver si ridicules les journaux qui prétendent que l’homme est né
bon [. . .]. (OC 1: 297–8)
91 Critics have highlighted this poem’s lyrical echoes, which Hiddleston compares to Alphonse de
Lamartine’s “Le Vallon” (Hiddleston, Baudelaire and Le Spleen de Paris, 76). Murphy explains the
presence of Rousseau and Hugo (Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 309–15 and 315–18, respectively).
(I was traveling. I was set in a landscape of irresistible grandeur and nobility. Just
then something of it probably entered my soul. My thoughts were fluttering as
lightly as the atmosphere; vulgar passions, such as hatred and profane love, now
felt as distant as the clouds parading deeply in the abysses beneath my feet; my
soul seemed as vast and pure as the sky’s dome which enveloped me; the recol-
lection of earthly things reached my heart only weakened and diminished, like
the sound of bells of imperceptible animals grazing far, far away, on another
mountain slope. Over the little motionless lake, black in its immense depth, a
cloud’s shadow would sometimes pass, like the reflection of an airborne giant’s
cloak flying across the sky. And I remember that this rare and solemn sensation,
caused by a grand and perfectly silent movement, filled me with a joy mingled
with fear. In short, I felt myself to be in perfect peace with myself and with the
universe, thanks to the impassioning beauty encircling me. I even believe that, in
my perfect beatitude and in total forgetfulness of all earthly evil, I had arrived at
the idea of no longer finding so ridiculous the newspapers which claim that
people are born good [. . .]). (PP, 31; modified)
As we have seen in other poems, the ideal is shattered yet again by a noise that wakes
the poetic subject out of it: a “petit être” (recalling “Les Yeux des pauvres”) specifically
calling on him to use his eyes in the beginning of the second paragraph:
Je découpais tranquillement mon pain, quand un bruit très-léger me fit lever les
yeux. Devant moi se tenait un petit être déguenillé, noir, ébouriffé, dont les yeux
creux, farouches et comme suppliants, dévoraient le morceau de pain. Et je l’entendis
soupirer, d’une voix basse et rauque, le mot: gâteau! Je ne pus m’empêcher de rire
en entendant l’appellation dont il voulait bien honorer mon pain presque blanc,
et j’en coupai pour lui une belle tranche que je lui offris. Lentement il se rappro-
cha, ne quittant pas des yeux l’objet de sa convoitise; puis, happant le morceau
avec sa main, se recula vivement, comme s’il eût craint que mon offre ne fût pas
sincère ou que je m’en repentisse déjà. (OC 1: 298)
(As I was placidly cutting my bread, a very slight noise made me look up. Before
me stood a ragged little creature: black, disheveled, with hollow eyes, wild as if
beseeching, that were devouring the piece of bread. And I heard him, in a low,
hoarse voice, moan the word cake! I couldn’t help laughing when I heard the
designation he chose to honour my almost white bread, and so I cut off a good-
sized slice and gave it to him. Slowly he came near, not taking his eyes off the
object of his greed; then, snatching the piece with his hand, retreated briskly, as
if he were afraid that my offer was not sincere or that I had already regretted
making it). (PP, 31–2; modified)
The combination of the narrator’s visual and audible fields (“un bruit très-léger
me fit lever les yeux”) leads—as in “Le Désespoir de la vieille”—out of the dream
state and into potential communion with another character. But once again any
hope of shared experience is quickly dashed: rather than exist in the literal and
use eyes to see and mouth to speak or eat, the “petit être” relies on the figurative,
devouring the bread with his eyes. Like the infans who rejects the old woman’s
advances with squeals, here the “petit être” responds first from beyond the lin-
guistic (“je l’entendis soupirer”) and then we learn with a word that strikes the
narrator as a malapropism. Furthermore, the coarseness of the “voix basse et
rauque” recalls the “voix rauque et charmante” of “La Soupe et les nuages” and the
“voix rauque et douce” of “Les Bienfaits de la lune” (see infra, Chapter 4). But
unlike in “Le Désespoir de la vieille,” there is a moment of understanding, for
here the narrator shows his mastery of language, or at least the ability to navigate
between the literal and the figurative. There is also a moment of rapprochement,
as the “petit être” accepts the piece of bread offered him—again with eyes working
metaphorically, “Lentement il se rapprocha, ne quittant pas des yeux l’objet de sa
convoitise.” It would seem, then, that the “petit être” is able to muster up just
enough of the prorsus to turn language into action. And yet, the word is not pro-
nounced; or, rather, if it is, the narrator does not quote it. Instead of quotation
marks which would give the other character unfettered expression and presence
in the poem, the narrator’s use of paraphrase and italics reminds us that it is he
who recounts the story, controls discourse, and applies emphasis and emotion as
he sees fit.
Whatever control of language the narrator might manage, the visual field is
about to run amok. As in “La Soupe et les nuages,” the poem’s action blindsides
the subject, seeming to come out of nowhere and making him see double, unable
to distinguish between the “petit être” and the “autre petit sauvage” who has just
appeared:
Mais au même instant il fut culbuté par un autre petit sauvage, sorti je ne sais
d’où, et si parfaitement semblable au premier qu’on aurait pu le prendre pour
son frère jumeau. Ensemble ils roulèrent sur le sol, se disputant la précieuse
proie, aucun n’en voulant sans doute sacrifier la moitié pour son frère. Le prem
ier, exaspéré, empoigna le second par les cheveux; celui-ci lui saisit l’oreille avec
les dents, et en cracha un petit morceau sanglant avec un superbe juron patois.
Le légitime propriétaire du gâteau essaya d’enfoncer ses petites griffes dans les
yeux de l’usurpateur; à son tour celui-ci appliqua toutes ses forces à étrangler
son adversaire d’une main, pendant que de l’autre il tâchait de glisser dans sa
poche le prix du combat. Mais, ravivé par le désespoir, le vaincu se redressa et fit
rouler le vainqueur par terre d’un coup de tête dans l’estomac. À quoi bon décrire
une lutte hideuse qui dura en vérité plus longtemps que leurs forces enfantines
ne semblaient le promettre? (OC 1: 298)
(But at the same instant he was knocked over by another little savage, sprung
from nowhere, and so perfectly resembling the first one that he could be taken
for his twin brother. They rolled around on the ground, fighting over the pre-
cious prey, neither apparently willing to sacrifice his half to his brother. The first
one, exasperated, clutched the second by the hair; the other one bit his ear and
spat out a little bloody piece of it, along with a fantastic swear in local patois. The
cake’s rightful owner tried to sink his little claws into the usurper’s eyes; the
other in turn applied all his strength to strangling his adversary with one hand,
while with the other he tried to slip the spoils of the battle into his pocket. But,
rekindled by despair, the loser stood straight up and sent the victor sprawling to
the ground with a head-butt to the stomach. What good is it to describe a hid
eous struggle which in fact lasted longer than their childish strength might lead
one to expect?) (PP, 32; modified)
It seems that sights and sounds are split: while the narrator initially focuses on
how closely the two beggars resemble each other visually, he retains his mastery
of language while detailing the blow-by-blow of their actions, despite wondering
what good will come of it (“À quoi bon décrire une lutte hideuse”). At the same
time, the two fighters use their eyes and ears not for the lofty aims of conveying in
prose some remarkable scene, but for battle. The site of communication in lan-
guage—passing from mouth to ear—is here less for prorsus than for biting, as
befitting infans and other languageless members of the animal kingdom.
As we see in the poem’s second paraphrase (“superbe juron patois”), though, they
are not entirely infans. The paraphrase is also another recurrence of the real, and for
performing in this poetic space a role similar to that of quoted speech—like the voice
of the “bien-aimée” which brings the dreaming subject back down to Earth in “La
Soupe et les nuages”—they provide a recurrence of the real. It is on this point that “Le
Gâteau” marks a significant departure from other poems in which speech adds a bolt
of energy into the poetic prose: rather than quoted speech, the effect of the prorsus is
muted by its appearance as paraphrase, both in the exclamation “gâteau!” and in the
hasty and distanced summary of the “superbe juron patois.”
Another important distinction between “Le Gâteau” and “Le Désespoir de la
vieille” is the nature of the emotion that floods the final paragraph:
Ce spectacle m’avait embrumé le paysage, et la joie calme où s’ébaudissait mon

âme avant d’avoir vu ces petits hommes avait totalement disparu; j’en restai triste
assez longtemps, me répétant sans cesse: “Il y a donc un pays superbe où le pain
s’appelle du gâteau, friandise si rare qu’elle suffit pour engendrer une guerre par-
faitement fratricide!” (OC 1: 299)
(That spectacle had fogged up the landscape for me, and the calm joy in which
my soul used to revel before seeing these little men had completely disappeared;
I remained saddened for quite a while, repeating over and over to myself: “So
there is a magnificent land where bread is called cake, a delicacy so rare that it is
enough to beget a perfectly fratricidal war.”) (PP, 32–3; modified)
While the dream state of the ideal is completely dashed and replaced by the sadness
of the real ici-bas, its description is phrased in terms of the visual and the figurative,
beginning with “Ce spectacle m’avait embrumé le paysage.” By exteriorizing the vis-
ual field that is blurry because of eyes welling up with tears, the narrator focuses
more on what his eyes have just seen (“avoir vu,” “avait totalement disparu”).92
And so it returns, invariably, to language: to some version of prose cohabiting
with poetry, prorsus alongside poiesis. It is more layered and complicated, in the
mind of the narrator who retains his hold on discourse: the poem’s final words are
a quoted internal monologue as in “Le Désespoir de la vieille,” but here they also
frame the paraphrase of gâteau, which makes its return. This time, the title word
is stripped of its speaker via use of the passive voice and it also lacks the emo-
tional weight of the exclamation point that accompanied its first appearance. The
emotion and speaking voice of the “petit être” are all but wiped away, with only
the depersonalized utterance left. It seems a stretch to hear in “s’ébaudissait” the
infinitive “ébaudir,” which phonetically houses the homophones “beau dire” ([bo
diʀ]) so perfectly that they could almost be taken for twins. And yet, whether the
previously amused subject’s soul expresses its profound sadness, it makes little
difference (that is, the expression “avoir beau dire,” practically an answer to the
“À quoi bon…” question from earlier): despite this incessant repetition, the subject
remained sad for a long time. The fundamental inability in language to express
such grief recalls the line from “La Corde,” “je me souvins de la sentence connue:
‘Les douleurs les plus terribles sont les douleurs muettes’” (I remembered the
well-known phrase: “The most terrible pains are the silent pains”) (OC 1: 330).93
In the end, by entitling this poem “Le Gâteau,” Baudelaire shows that language is
not strictly about the literal; if the infans doesn’t have the last word, then at least
the use of the word gâteau is given the place of honor, no doubt for its serving as
vehicle capable of passing between the literal and the figurative. Not entirely the
prorsus of quoted speech, nor exactly designating cake either: gâteau hovers in
the world of poetic prose. Beyond the repeated and ineffective lamentation by the
narrator, despite all his linguistic prowess, it is the morsel that gives the poem its
title and its meaning. Somehow resisting the chains of the narrator’s paraphrase, it
is the word that upends the tableau, the point where all the opposites converge:
literal and figurative, high and low, poiesis and prorsus.
92 That the visual field oscillates between clarity and obscurity is not only in keeping with broader
questions of the sights and sounds of the prose poem as we have identified them in this poem, but
Baudelaire found its fundamental tension compelling as well: one of his early titles for what would
become Le Spleen de Paris was “La Lueur et la Fumée: poème, en prose” (C 2: 197).
93 As the narrator sets it up, it is not only a commentary on language’s inability to express the deep-
est sadness, and thus its limits, but also the hollowed-out nature of its set pieces: “la sentence connue”
recalls the earlier discussion of aphorism (see supra, Chapter 1), and the notion that it is the emptiness
of clichés that expose all the more clearly the gaps that language always never fills.
Final Words
The relationship between what is seen and what is described in words, and in
the poetic, is similarly central to “Les Fenêtres,” first published in the Revue
nationale et étrangère in December 1863:
Les Fenêtres
Celui qui regarde au dehors à travers une fenêtre ouverte, ne voit jamais
autant de choses que celui qui regarde une fenêtre fermée. Il n’est pas d’objet plus
profond, plus mystérieux, plus fécond, plus ténébreux, plus éblouissant qu’une
fenêtre éclairée d’une chandelle. Ce qu’on peut voir au soleil est toujours moins
intéressant que ce qui se passe derrière une vitre. Dans ce trou noir ou lumineux
vit la vie, rêve la vie, souffre la vie.
Par-delà des vagues de toits, j’aperçois une femme mûre, ridée déjà, pauvre,
toujours penchée sur quelque chose, et qui ne sort jamais. Avec son visage, avec
son vêtement, avec son geste, avec presque rien, j’ai refait l’histoire de cette
femme, ou plutôt sa légende, et quelquefois je me la raconte à moi-même en
pleurant.
Si c’eût été un pauvre vieux homme, j’aurais refait la sienne tout aussi aisément.
Et je me couche, fier d’avoir vécu et souffert dans d’autres que moi-même.
Peut- être me direz- vous: “Es- tu sûr que cette légende soit la vraie?”
Qu’importe ce que peut être la réalité placée hors de moi, si elle m’a aidé à vivre,
à sentir que je suis et ce que je suis?94
(He who looks outside through a window open never sees as many things as he
who looks at a window closed. There is no object deeper, more mysterious, more
fertile, more obscure, more dazzling than a window lit by a candle. What can be
seen in sunlight is always less interesting than what transpires behind a window-
pane. In that black or luminous hole life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
Beyond the billowing rooftops, I notice a mature woman, already wrinkled,
poor, always bent over something, and who never goes out. With her face, with
94 1: 339. The poem’s first line was changed to “Celui qui regarde du dehors” for its appearance in
the posthumous 1869 edition of Le Spleen de Paris. For Sima Godfrey, this change “is crucial to our
understanding of the flaneur-voyeur-artiste as he evolves in Baudelaire’s aesthetics. Baudelaire has
deliberately and abruptly wrenched him from his upper-story interior lodgings, from which he had
earlier observed so much of Paris [. . .] and thrust him down into the streets” (Sima Godfrey,
“Baudelaire’s Windows,” L’Esprit créateur, 22.4 (Winter 1982), 83–100 (p. 90)). However, as Murphy
notes, it is not clear if the change came from Baudelaire or from the posthumous editors, nor if it rep-
resented a correction, an improvement, or an error. Arguing in favor of an adjustment rather than a
correction, Murphy puts more emphasis on the more important change in perspective, from the first
part of the poem to the second (Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 202–3). Without more definitive
information, I reproduce the poem as it first appeared, in the Revue nationale et étrangère in
December 1863.
her clothing, with her gestures, with almost nothing, I have refashioned that
woman’s history, or rather her legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself weeping.
If it had been a poor old man, I would have just as easily refashioned his just
as easily.
And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in others than myself.
Perhaps you will ask, “Are you sure that legend is the true one?” Does it matter
what the reality located outside of me might be, if it has helped me to live, to feel
that I am and what I am?). (PP, 93; modified)
In many respects, Baudelaire offers “Les Fenêtres”—“the quintessential celebra-

tion of the poet-flâneur”95—as a meditation on vision and language. The former,
source of poiesis, changes according to perspective. The latter marks the intersec-
tion of prorsus and poiesis; specifically, language’s ability (and difficulty) in keep-
ing up with the visual amid (and despite) its multiple permutations.96 The poetic
universe created by the visual is unusually complicated because of its own morph
ing. While the first two paragraphs share a repetitive rhythm (“plus” and “la vie”
in the first, “avec son” in the second) and some alliterative passages (the [f] in
“fenêtre fermée,” the [d] in “Par-delà des vagues de toits” and the [de] in “ridée
déjà”), they bear witness to an important shift in what is seen: from the lack of
precision conveyed by the general and demonstrative (“celui,” “ce que,” “ce qui”)
to the more precise and definite realm of the particular and personal, albeit not
quite intimate (“je,” “une femme”). This is another level on which seeing is not
just one thing: like the windows, which offer simultaneous reflection and trans-
parency (thus “becoming the legible surface of observation and reading”97). It is
on this point that we should consider the extent to which Baudelaire’s mention of
windows’ legibility enables and even explicitly calls for both symptomatic reading
and surface reading,98 yet another coexistence rather than a choice between two
seemingly incompatible opposites. As Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus explain,
symptomatic reading is “an interpretive method that argues that the most inter-
esting aspect of a text is what it represses [. . .] The notion underlying all forms of
symptomatic reading [is] that the most significant truths are not immediately
apprehensible or and may be veiled or invisible,”99 whereas surface reading focuses
on “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden
nor hiding; what in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness,
and therefore covers no depth. A surface is what insists on being looked at rather
95 Godfrey, “Baudelaire’s Windows,” 90.

96 For Godfrey, this is an aspect of “the fundamental tension between vision and language which
Baudelaire attempts to integrate within the structure of the prose poem” (Godfrey, “Baudelaire’s
Windows,” 84).
97 Godfrey, “Baudelaire’s Windows,” 90.
98 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations, 108.1
(Fall 2009), 1–21.
99 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 3, 4.
than what we must train ourselves to see through.”100 While the first paragraph of
“Les Fenêtres” states which visions are more interesting, the comparative keeps
both in play: the surface of the text/window and what can been seen/read by
looking into/through it, neither one negating the other but instead contributing
to the more complex kaleidoscopic, multi-faceted vision.
Looking both at (surface) and through (symptomatic) windows can be thought
of as another way of expressing varying degrees of distance and proximity. While
the first half of the poem presents several perspectives of looking at or through
windows, the second paragraph opens with rooftops and one city dweller,
described for their exterior, for what can be seen on their surfaces:101 the waves of
roofs and those attributes of the woman that can be seen and gleaned from afar,
the distance underscored by “Par-delà” and the verb “apercevoir,” which Littré
underscores by adding “de loin” several times to his dictionary entries.102 The
external view is reinforced both by the objectification of the woman and her being
affixed in her own interior space, “une femme [. . .] qui ne sort jamais.”
In the movement from the general to the particular, from the external vantage
point into the closed, interior space, we remain in the world of poiesis: of the
poetic universe created in the mind’s eye. By contrast, it is the arrival of a different
kind of language—here, it is her “histoire,” which stands in for the prorsus—that
sets the poem in motion, in the line “j’ai refait l’histoire de cette femme, ou plutôt
sa légende, et quelquefois je me la raconte à moi-même en pleurant.” Actually, it is
less the “histoire” than the correction of that “histoire”—“ou plutôt sa légende”—
which resets the role of language and charts a new course for the rest of this
poem. The narrator didn’t immediately have the mot juste at hand, and only came
to it after first mentioning the factual realm of history, with its accuracy and
truths (“Récit des faits, des événements relatifs aux peuples en particulier et à
l’humanité en général” (Account of the facts, of the events relative to peoples in
particular and to humanity in general); Littré 2: 2027; emphasis added) which, in
this case, were not accurate after all. The direct, transparent nature of the lan-
guage used to account for history—the prorsus—was dismissed and corrected as
quickly as it was evoked,103 the “légende”—the poetic prose—taking its place and
taking over. While the corrective conjunction “Mais” has in other poems served a
100 Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 9; original emphasis.

101 Considering this passage’s surface, we are reminded that “The neutrality of description is thus
not neutrality about the constraints themselves, which we may find ourselves moved to deplore, but
neutrality about the existences entwined with them, which we would like to be able to recognize with-
out judging”; Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 18.
102 “Apercevoir de loin [. . .] Ils se sont aperçus de loin” (Littré 1: 160).
103 As Kaplan reminds us, any notion of language successfully fostering dialogue here “is another
faulty claim, a conversation only in potential” (Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 125). Lloyd concurs,
noting that “In Le Spleen de Paris, the fable [. . .] and the discourse [. . .] are frequently at odds, with the
various narrators’ reminiscences, monologues and judgements subtly undercut by suggestions embed-
ded in the text through such devices as metaphor, irony or sound patterning” (Lloyd, “Dwelling in
Possibility,” 69). Abbott adds that “Baudelaire’s conversations tend towards the more extraordinary by
central role, here there are other elements that act similarly: not only the preci-
sion “ou plutôt sa légende,” which clarifies the more general reference to the
woman’s “histoire,” but also the verb “refaire.” By undertaking to redo with words
what had previously been seen, the narrator insists on the additional precision
that the prorsus can provide. The emotional tableau that he produced out of thin
air—immediately after “presque rien”—persists, and he continues to emote, vic
ariously through what he sees in others: the woman, a man, or anyone he sets eyes
on. The shift from the observation, through imagination, to the language which
tells the story and brings the emotional weight, leads to the fullness of existence,
through the full and tiring range of a life’s experiences and suffering.
That the narrator is able to flip the cool, objective view of the cityscape into a
charged emotional scene that brings himself to tears is notable; what makes it
remarkable is that he can do so with practically nothing (“avec presque rien”): just
his visions (poiesis) and a poetic prose suitable to express them.104 In fact, the idea
of writing more from the mind’s eye than what one actually sees is reminiscent of
Baudelaire’s exaggerated claim of writing his Salon de 1859 essay without having
actually seen the paintings, relying instead on the descriptions in the accompany-
ing brochure: in a letter to Nadar on May 14, 1859, he wrote: “j’écris maintenant
un Salon sans l’avoir vu. Mais j’ai un livret. Sauf la fatigue de deviner les tableaux,
c’est une excellente méthode, que je te recommande.” (I am now writing a Salon
without having seen it. But I have a brochure. Aside from the exhaustion of guess-
ing the paintings, this is an excellent method, which I recommend.) Two days
later he backed down a bit:
Quant au Salon, hélas, je t’ai un peu menti, mais si peu! J’ai fait une visite, UNE
SEULE, consacrée à chercher les nouveautés, mais j’en ai trouvé bien peu; et
pour tous les vieux noms, ou les noms simplement connus, je me confie à ma
vieille mémoire, excité par le livret. Cette méthode, je le répète, n’est pas mau-
vaise, à la condition qu’on possède bien son personnel.
(As for the Salon, alas, I lied a little, but only a little! I visited once, ONCE, a visit
devoted to looking for new works, but I found very few; and for all the old
names, or the ones that are merely known, I trust my old memory, revived by the
brochure. This method, I repeat, isn’t bad, as long as one has a good grasp of
oneself).105
The “légende” in “Les Fenêtres” is, in many senses, the key to it all.106 More than
merely correcting the idea of “histoire,” the “légende” invites fabrication beyond
beginning to break down accepted conventions of conversational exchange” (Between Baudelaire and
Mallarmé, 122; see Abbott’s section “Baudelaire’s Conversations” (122–30).
104 In this respect it is reminiscent of the importance that Baudelaire places on imagination in “La
Reine des facultés,” part 3 of his Salon de 1859 (OC 2: 619–23).
105 C 1: 575, 578; original emphasis.
106 While critics tend to think of the modern use of the term “légende” and read this passage as
potentially reducing Baudelaire’s vision to a photograph (especially since the window provides the
the mundane realm of the factual and real, providing access to what can be seen
in the deepest depths of the mind’s eye by opening up toward the imaginative, the
fabricated, the idealized.107 For Johnson, the end of this poem signals the break-
down of the distinction between legend and reality, fiction and truth.108 That the
word “légende” comes from the act of reading (legere) only reinforces the pres-
ence of interpretation, including a number of competing possibilities which
include the high, the low, and the literary.109 Most important, though, is the flexi-
bility that allows for the “légende” to be composed of fact, fiction, and everything
in between: “Il en est autrement des légendes qui côtoient l’histoire, s’attachent aux
grands faits ou aux grands hommes et les défigurent, sous prétexte de les éclairer”
(It is different for the legends which rub shoulders with history, attach themselves to
great facts or to great men and distort them, under the pretext of illuminating
them).110 In “Les Fenêtres,” the real of the woman seen from afar, through her win-
dow, is contaminated by the Ideal, conveyed in a different version of the “beau dire,”
the poetic prose that was so valued in “Laquelle est la vraie?” Instead, here, it is less
a matter of prorsus as speech than its written counterpart: the presence of the
“légende” marks the point at which language is written. Beyond a transcription of
prorsus (for which the definition of a slogan on a coin would be apposite), the mul-
tiple possible definitions of “légende” inscribe and anchor this poem’s poetic prose
in the complex and almost contradictory realms of all that the “légende” has to offer.
With the prospect of a “légende” rewriting the woman’s history, the accuracy or
veracity of the quoted speech that opens the poem’s last paragraph is an after-
thought at best. Once again it is not quoted speech at all; rather, it is a quotation
that the narrator puts in the mouth of his speaker, a quoted question that is pre-
ceded by “Peut-être,” the doubt of its very existence. For a number of reasons, the
end of “Les Fenêtres” recalls “Laquelle est la vraie?,” not only for inserting the
supportive framing), neither the Littré nor Larousse dictionaries mentions a caption, thus somewhat
weakening this possible reading (Littré 3: 271 and Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siè-
cle, 10: 322, respectively.) It is rather the key that serves to help decipher a map’s letters, symbols, or
colors, or the slogan engraved in coins.
107 Murphy points to the intertextual resonance in this passage from “histoire” to “légende,” of
Victor Hugo’s La Légende des siècles (1859), with the subtitle “Histoire—Les Petites Épopées” (Logiques
du dernier Baudelaire, 207.
108 Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique, 69. Maclean concurs:
The final question-answer, which directly engages not only the implied audience but the
actual reader, contains in itself a whole theory, not only of compassion but of text-reader
relationships. The nineteenth-century (and after!) demand for textual realism is con-
fronted by another “truth,” that of the text which helps one to know what one is and that
one is, but at the same time renders the fixed reality of the subject as problematic as that of
the text.
(Maclean, Narrative as Performance, 53)
109 “récit de la vie d’un saint, d’un martyr [. . .] Fam. Énumération longue et fastidieuse de choses
peu intéressantes [. . .] La légende, ainsi comprise, est inoffensive; elle n’est plus qu’un genre littéraire,
dans lequel l’écrivain, le poète, peuvent déployer toute leur imagination” (Story of the life of a saint, of
a martyr [. . .] Familiar. Long and fastidious enumeration of boring things [. . .] The legend, understood
in this way, is harmless; it is merely a literary genre, in which the writer and the poet, can deploy all
their imagination) (Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 10: 322).
110 Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 10: 322.
readers into the poem directly and explicitly, but also in the suggestion, shared by
both poems, that the answer is (in) the poem itself. As Carpenter rightly states,
“the disjunction between reality and illusion is considerable.”111
Across this expanse, Baudelaire’s poetic prose and the end of “Les Fenêtres”
offer a stable if uneasy crossing. Specifically, the quoted speech provides the meld-
ing of the cogito—the ultimate affirmation of the particular, the intimate, and the
personal: “que je suis”—with the lurking addition, and the return from the first
paragraph, of the vagaries that are part of the general: “ce que je suis”). At stake is
the fundamental question of existence, and it is not surprising to see the emphatic
and repeated, explicit presence of the cogito, quoted as if to insist on the direct-
ness of its address, in both poems: “tu m’aimerais telle que je suis!” in “Laquelle
est la vraie?” and “à sentir que je suis et ce que suis?” in “Les Fenêtres” (itself
bearing a harbinger of this existential question via the presence of the portman-
teau “être” in “fenêtres”). In the end, the question of reality ultimately is moot:
“Qu’importe.” And yet, that reality (whether truly real or not) is fully actualized
thanks to the coexistence of a series of opposing forces.112 The visual realm (poie-
sis) is paired not with the prorsus of historical facts but rather its cousin, the poetic
prose of storytelling. The external perspective of observation merges with the
intimate, internal world of emotions, while the generalized, depersonalized ideal
that one can perceive from afar (“apercevoir”) meets with the harsh, raw, per-
sonal, and individual existence that one can feel (“vivre,” “sentir”).113
Such is, perhaps, precisely what the “légende” reveals, as the key to the city of
“Les Fenêtres” and of Le Spleen de Paris more generally: less the caption beneath a
painting than the complex language—with its coexisting layers (written,
spoken)—necessary to decipher this map of the heart, of the city, and of the mod-
ern condition, with all of their registers, tones, and potential (mis)readings. As
such, the question of existence—what is idealized, what is real—is not the right
question to be asking in the first place. It matters little if the little Bénédicta atop
the freshly-covered grave is a figment of the poet’s imagination, just as it makes
little difference if the “légende”—the poet’s imagined story—corresponds to the
111 Carpenter, Aesthetics of Fraudulence, 151.

112 In his discussion of mimesis in Flaubert, Prendergast arrives at a similar conclusion: “The ques-
tion is both crucial and unanswerable, or crucial because unanswerable. The blurring of the source of
enunciation blurs everything else” (Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, 200; original
emphasis). Here, the verifiable nature of the source of speech is impossible, and yet vital, and every-
thing crumbles with it: “the confusion as to who is speaking and the value of what is being said fulfils
admirably Flaubert’s declared project of dislocating the reader’s frames of reference. From the initial
question as to who is responsible for the discourse, the reader is lost in a veritable proliferation of
questions” (200).
113 As Carpenter explains in his eloquent analysis, the question “Qu’importe” is the point on which
the very possibility of understanding hinges: “Quelle est l’importance de nos interprétations, de leur
soi-disant vérité, tant qu’elles nous sont utiles, tant qu’elles nous aident à réfléchir?” (How important
are our interpretations, their so-called truth, as long as they are useful, as long as they help us to
think?) (Carpenter, “Entendre, s’entendre dans Le Spleen de Paris,” 208)
woman he observed. Accurate or missing the mark, they all lead to the same place:
feeling alive, aware of that feeling and of one’s place in the moment. Keeping one’s
head in the (poetic) clouds as in “La Soupe et les nuages” is not feeling or experi-
encing life, any more than is clinging to the memory of the recently departed (and
even more recently buried) Bénédicta. The miracle of Baudelaire’s poetic prose
speaks to us, sometimes directly, and it always helps us live and feel that we are,
and what we are.
3
The Dialect of Modernity
W. S. Graham reflected on his poem “The Nightfishing,” with three years’

hindsight, by saying:
I remember that always somewhere under the live and speaking idiom of the
Voice in poetry there is the count, the beats you can count on your fingers. Yes
always under the shout and whimper and the quick and the slow of poetry there
is the formal construction of time made abstract in the mind’s ear. And the
strange thing is that that very abstract dimension in the poem is what creates the
reader’s release into the human world of another.1
That the fingers are tapping to a rhythm that lies underneath “the live and speaking
idiom of the Voice in poetry” points to the multiple layers that make up the poetic
voice: time and rhythm hover, lurk, or in some other way inhabit the space
beneath “the shout and whimper,” “the quick and the slow”: under our skin, they
make themselves felt underneath—supporting, buttressing—what we hear of
what we read. How a text sounds and how it feels are not merely elements of a
text; they are vital to what makes it resonate, “into the human world”: they are
central to what makes it poetic.2 The examples of speech from the previous chapters
are evidence of this as well, for they contribute meaningfully to “le miracle d’une
prose poétique”; but while dialogue is a useful tool that allows Baudelaire to
infuse his poetic language with multiple registers, it is one among many.3 In fact,
1 Quoted in Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 210.
2 For a more thorough reading of Graham’s poem and his comments on it, see Leighton, On Form,
204–13. This potential ability to access the human by getting under the skin recalls the epigraph that
Rousseau placed at the opening of the first book of his Confessions: “intus et in cute” (within and under
the skin), the center of the following line from Persius: “Ego te intus et in cute novi” (I know you fully,
within and under the skin).
3 Gilbert Guisan also referred to such linguistic layers in his essay (see supra, Chapter 2):
Par d’habiles alternantes de la langue familière—celle de la narration, de la conversation,
du dialogue—et de la langue poétique dont nous avons défini le principe, par le contraste,
Baudelaire souligne la dualité de la vie: ici le beau, là le trivial, ici l’innocence, la générosité,
là la cruauté, l’ironie, la mesquinerie, la bêtise; d’une part, comme le dit le poète, “des yeux
qui réfléchissent la douceur du ciel, d’autre part un cœur crispé comme l’enfer….”
(Through skilful replacement and manipulation of informal language—narration, conver-
sation, dialogue—and of poetic language whose principles we have defined, by contrast,
Baudelaire highlights the duality of life: here is beauty, there the trivial, here is innocence,
generosity, there lies cruelty, irony, pettiness, stupidity; on one hand, as the poet says, “eyes
The Dialect of Modernity 171
he has other means at his disposal for getting underneath “the live and speaking
idiom of the Voice” in his prose poetry: for uncovering one layer to offer a
glimpse, a whiff, or a faint echo of what lies beneath. But it is not the case of
excavating deeper and deeper: in Baudelaire’s modern poetic idiom it is less a
question of bringing the lofty poetic down to Earth (where it would get trapped in
some coffin for all eternity; see “Laquelle est la vraie?,” supra, Chapter 2) than
pushing its elasticity to the point where it is able to stretch so far as to encompass
both là-haut and ici-bas.4 Or, as Baudelaire explained to Houssaye immediately
after suggesting the miracle of poetic prose, it could take the form of a glazier’s
cry that would reach from the city streets, through the urban fog, and all the way
up to the rooftops: “Vous-même, mon cher ami, n’avez-vous pas tenté de traduire
en une chanson le cri strident du Vitrier, et d’exprimer dans une prose lyrique
toutes les désolantes suggestions que ce cri envoie jusqu’aux mansardes, à travers
les plus hautes brumes de la rue?” (You yourself, my dear friend, did you not try
to translate into a song the strident cry of a Glazier, and to express in a lyric prose
all the devastating suggestions that this cry sends up to the attics, through the
highest street fogs?) (OC 1: 276; original emphasis).5 As the soundscape stretches
from the pavement to the heavens in the shared poetic space, other discursive
layers similarly contribute to the complexity of the modern poetic lexicon that
Baudelaire is fashioning in his prose poems. In this regard they are closely aligned
with the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, in which multiple voices of a given
culture, people, and historical moment coexist, with multiple languages existing
in every word.6 Among its numerous layers, heteroglossia includes a dominant
discourse and one that is sub- dominant, in a manner that recalls Richard
Terdiman’s casting of the prose poem itself as a counter-discourse (see supra,
which reflect the tenderness of the sky, on the other hand, as harsh as hell”…). (Guisan,
“Prose et poésie d’après Baudelaire,” Études de lettres. Bulletin de la Société des Études de
Lettres, vol. 70 (Lausanne: Imprimerie de la Concorde, February 1948), 87–107 (99))
the quotation is actually a paraphrase from the last part of “Portraits de maîtresses” (OC 1: 349).
4 As Prendergast explains, the modern prose poem “reflect[s] that tendency from the early nineteenth
century onwards to break the traditional hierarchy of genre, in particular the distinction between
the high ‘poetic’ and the low ‘prosaic’ ”; Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 157.
5 In this question, Baudelaire is referring to Houssaye’s own prose poem “La Chanson du vitrier”;
see Pichois’s notes in OC 1: 1309–11.
6 Referring to “the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions,” Bakhtin defines
“heteroglossia” as that “internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its
historical existence [. . . permitting] a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and
interrelationships” (263). Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981). See in par-
ticular his chapter “Discourse in the Novel,” 259–422. While Bakhtin reserves his notion of heteroglos-
sia for novels in prose—he states that “the poet is a poet insofar as he accepts the idea of a unitary
singular language” (The Dialogic Imagination, 296)—Monroe reminds us that “the prose poem pre-
sents a variety of voices representing various speech types in conflict with one another” (Jonathan
Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1987), 33).
Introduction). Reading and hearing the poems in a way that makes room for the
sub-dominant—this is “the responsibility of the reader who must also turn his or
her mind to what might be heard”7—allows for elements of Baudelaire’s modern
idiom to inform the soundscape, and his whole poetic universe.
What Else is Heard
In May 1901, an anonymous essay entitled “La Galanterie française” appeared in

La Justice, the daily paper founded by Georges Clemenceau.8 In it, the traditional
mode of gallantry was under attack: “La galanterie française n’a jamais été que
l’hypocrisie la plus éhontée de l’homme vis-à-vis de la femme, elle n’a jamais servi
qu’à préparer ses chutes, et ses déchéances morales [. . .].” (“French gallantry has
never been anything other than the most shameless hypocrisy of men toward
women, it has only ever served to prepare their falls and their moral failings”).9
While the most egregious offence was gallantry’s duplicity and its implicit misogyny,
the signs that attracted the greatest ire were linguistic in nature, since “la galanterie a
un vocabulaire masculin qui n’apprend rien et n’apporte rien à la femme” (gallantry
has a masculine vocabulary which does not teach anything, and has nothing to be
gained for women), “Les gracieuses et vides phrases de la galanterie et les menus
gestes qu’elle entraîne, ne sont en somme, que des banalités apprises” (The graceful
and empty phrases of gallantry and the fine gestures it entails, are, all told, merely
banalities learned by rote), and “elle a des phrases toutes faites” (it has ready-made
sentences).10 What happens, though, at the confluence of the hollow, ready-made
banalities of the gallant and the transcendent aims of the poetic? Can the later
elevate the former?
Le Galant tireur
Comme la voiture traversait le bois, il la fit arrêter dans le voisinage d’un tir,
disant qu’il lui serait agréable de tirer quelques balles pour tuer le Temps. Tuer ce
monstre-là, n’est-ce pas l’occupation la plus ordinaire et la plus légitime de
chacun?—Et il offrit galamment la main à sa chère, délicieuse et exécrable
femme, à cette mystérieuse femme à laquelle il doit tant de plaisirs, tant de
douleurs, et peut-être aussi une grande partie de son génie.
Plusieurs balles frappèrent loin du but proposé; l’une d’elles s’enfonça même
dans le plafond; et comme la charmante créature riait follement, se moquant de
la maladresse de son époux, celui-ci se tourna brusquement vers elle, et lui dit:
7 Leighton, On Form, 211.

8 La Justice had former Zutiste Camille Pelletan as its main editor from its inception in 1880 until
October 1893.
9 “La Galanterie française,” La Justice (May 3, 1901), 2. 10 “La Galanterie française,” 2.
“Observez cette poupée, là-bas, à droite, qui porte le nez en l’air et qui a la mine
si hautaine. Eh bien! cher ange, je me figure que c’est vous.” Et il ferma les yeux et
il lâcha la détente. La poupée fut nettement décapitée.
Alors s’inclinant vers sa chère, sa délicieuse, son exécrable femme, son inévitable
et impitoyable Muse, et lui baisant respectueusement la main, il ajouta: “Ah! mon
cher ange, combien je vous remercie de mon adresse!”11
(As the carriage was crossing the woods, he had it stop in the vicinity of a shoot-
ing range, saying that it would be enjoyable for him to shoot a few bullets to kill
Time. Kill that monster, isn’t that everyone’s most usual and most legitimate
pastime?—So he gallantly offered his hand to his dear, delectable, and execrable
wife, to that mysterious woman to whom he owed so many pleasures, so many
woes, and perhaps also a large part of his genius.
Several bullets hit far from their intended target; one of them even sank into
the ceiling. And since the charming creature was laughing madly, mocking her
spouse’s clumsiness, he abruptly turned toward her, and said, “Look at that doll,
over there, to the right, with its nose in the air and such a haughty expression.
Well! dear angel, I’m imagining that it is you.” And he shut his eyes and pulled the
trigger. The doll was cleanly decapitated.
Then bowing to his dear, his delectable, his execrable wife, his inescapable and
ruthless Muse, and respectfully kissing her hand, he added, “Ah!, my dear angel, I
thank you so much for my skill!”) (PP, 109; modified)
If critics have devoted less attention to “Le Galant tireur” than to other poems in
the Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire himself could be to blame, thanks to the passage
from Fusées in which he offers what seems to be a transparent, straightforward
summary of the poem:
Un homme va au tir au pistolet, accompagné de sa femme.—Il ajuste une pou-

pée, et dit à sa femme: Je me figure que c’est toi.—Il ferme les yeux et abat la
poupée.—Puis il dit en baisant la main de sa compagne: Cher ange, que je te
remercie de mon adresse!
(A man goes to the shooting range with his wife.—He takes aim at a mannequin
and says to his wife: “I’m imagining that it’s you.”—He closes his eyes and shoots
the doll.—Then he says, kissing his partner’s hand: Dear angel, thank you for my
skill!”).12
While “Le Galant tireur” does present the very scene described in Fusées, a con-
sideration of its poetic nature reveals additional layers that in turn support a
11 OC 1: 349–50.
12 OC 1: 660. For more on fragments X and XI, see OC 1: 657–8 and 658–60, respectively.
heretofore unexplored interpretation: specifically in light of the role of innuendo

and the extent to which it is inherent to the very nature of “Le Galant tireur” and
to Baudelaire’s poetic prose more generally.13 Nearly all poetry draws on both the
literal and the figurative; Baudelaire’s does so as part of his engagement with the
idiom of the day. For in his discussion of allegory—for which he turns to Walter
Benjamin and allogoria—“speaking otherwise”—Scott Carpenter reminds us that
“Critics have long associated this complex rhetorical figure with Baudelaire, and
the prose poems offer a laboratory for experimenting with it.”14 With its myriad
layers (both literal and figurative) that are connected to all that is modern about
the mid- century urban milieu, Baudelaire’s poetic language offers—like the
modernity that it reflects—an expression that grapples with, and motions in,
multiple directions at once.
Baudelaire similarly reaches into his moment to forge a means of critique from
within; as he famously explains in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” the goal of the
modern artist is “de dégager de la mode ce qu’elle peut contenir de poétique dans
l’historique, de tirer l’éternel du transitoire” (to draw out of fashion what is poetic in
the historical, to pull the eternal from the transitory) (OC 2: 694); the language of
his prose poetry does just that, digging through layers of the new city’s linguistic
“transitoire” to draw out an eternal poetic quality and shape it into a form that,
mirroring the semantic, presents itself in one way while alluding to another. By
evoking something without mentioning it explicitly—obliquely, playfully, and we
recall the ludic that is at the heart of allusion—Baudelaire’s prose poetry thus oper-
ates on multiple layers that allow for one reading while pointing toward another, all
within a lexicon of modernity that is unique to his historical, linguistic, and
poetic moment.
By the time the Revue nationale et étrangère rejected “Le Galant tireur” in
August 1865 (along with “Perte d’auréole,” “Assommons les pauvres!,” and “La
13 I do not mean to suggest that innuendo is rampant in all of the prose poems, but that, in certain
poems, it can be one of the numerous layers heard in Baudelaire’s poetic prose. For example, the sim-
ple fact that Delvau defines the expression “bénir des pieds” as “Se dit des spasmes amoureux, pendant
lesquels l’homme et la femme gigotent des jambes, comme s’ils voulaient envoyer leur bénédiction
urbi et orbi” (Alfred Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne: nouvelle édition, revue, corrigée considéra-
blement augmentée par l’auteur et enrichie de nombreuses citations (Bâle: Karl Schmidt, 1874), 39) does
not, despite the presence of feet and benediction in the definition, contribute anything meaningful to
our understanding of “Laquelle est la vraie?” (see supra, Chapter 2). As it is, I argue, an aspect of the
modernity of Baudelaire’s poetic language, it is only natural that innuendo would be present in his
verse poems as well; such is Burton’s reading of the lines “Aimons-nous doucement. L’Amour dans sa
guérite, / Ténébreux, embusqué, bande son arc fatal. / Je connais les engins de son vieil arsenal” (Let us
love each other tenderly. Love in its guardhouse, / Dark, ambushed, strings its deadly bow. / I know all
of the tools in its old arsenal), from “Sonnet d’automne” (Richard D. E. Burton, Baudelaire in 1859: A
Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 136).
14 Scott Carpenter, “What’s the Point? Allegory and the Prose Poems,” in Cheryl Krueger (ed.),
Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (New York: Modern Language Association of America,
2017), 46.
Soupe et les nuages”),15 it had already published a number of Baudelaire’s prose

poems, and would continue to do so for two more years: seven from June to
December 1863, and six more in August, September, and October 1867.16 In light
of this success rate, it is worth wondering why the Revue nationale et étrangère
considered “Le Galant tireur” unpublishable. Could there be more to this text
than meets the ear?17
This poem is not the only one of Baudelaire’s to refer to the seventeenth-
century tradition of “poésies galantes,” for five poems from Les Épaves—the short
1866 collection that includes poems removed from Les Fleurs du Mal, after the
trial, for their licentious nature—were grouped under the title “Galanteries.”18 In
“Le Galant tireur,” Baudelaire seem to offer a wink at the obvious: the very nature
of “galanterie” has steadfastly retained its duality, as Diderot explained at the out-
set of his definition: “On peut considérer ce mot sous deux acceptions générales”
(This word can be considered in light of two general meanings).19 Gallant lan-
guage can be sweet, innocent, thoughtful, and well-intentioned,20 or manipulated
to suit a certain purpose.21 As Diderot explains:
1 C’est dans les hommes une attention marquée à dire aux femmes, d’une
manière fine et délicate, des choses qui leur plaisent, et leur donnent bonne
opinion d’elles et de nous. Cet art qui pourrait les rendre meilleures et les con-
soler, ne sert que trop souvent à les corrompre.
15 All four poems were published for the first time in the posthumous edition of 1869; see
Kopp, 416.
16 They include “Les Tentations ou Éros, Plutus et la gloire” and “La Belle Dorothée” in June 1863;
“Une mort héroïque” and “Le Désir de peindre” in October 1863; “Le Thyrse,” “Les Fenêtres,” and
“Déjà!” in December 1863; “Les Bons chiens” on the day of Baudelaire’s death, August 31, 1867;
“Laquelle est la vraie?” (later entitled “L’Idéal et le Réel”) the following week (September 7), followed
by “Les Bienfaits de la lune” (September 14), “Portraits de maîtresses” (September 21), “Any Where Out
of the World” (September 28), and “Le Tir et le cimetière” (October 1). For a complete pre-publication
list of the prose poems, see Edward K. Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, The Ethical, and
the Religious in the Parisian Prowler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 175–81.
17 The present reading of “Le Galant tireur” is a modest attempt to respond to Kevin Newmark’s
astute charge for reading Baudelaire’s prose poems: “No matter which poème en prose one takes, it
has to be converted into a poetic thyrse before it can be treated as anything more than a useless ‘stick,’ ”
Kevin Newmark, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Baudelaire’s Modernité,” Nineteenth-Century French
Studies, 44.1–2 (Fall–Winter 2015–16), 1–24 (15).
18 OC 1: 1137–47. Polysemy is at play in these five poems as well; as Claude Pichois states about the
word “paranymphe” from the title “Le Monstre, ou le paranymphe d’une nymphe macabre,” “Il semble
que Baudelaire joue sur les deux sens du mot” (OC 1: 1145).
19 Denis Diderot, Dictionnaire encyclopédique, 3, Œuvres de Denis Diderot (Paris: J.L.J. Brière,
1821), 497.
20 “La galanterie encapsulates the principal code used to depict love as an ideal of sociability in the
seventeenth century. Based nostalgically on rewritten tenets of courtly love (men submitting them-
selves to women, whom they serve in hopes of receiving the gift of love)”; Domna C. Stanton, The
Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (London: Routledge, 2016),
85 n. 14.
21 “C”est de manière indissociable que se sont développées l’estime pour la liberté des femmes et
une érotique de la suggestion,” Claude Habib, Galanterie française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 227.
[. . .]
2 La galanterie, considérée comme un vice du cœur, n’est que le libertinage
auquel on a donné un nom honnête. En général, les peuples ne manquent guère
de masquer les vices communs par des dénominations honnêtes.22
(1 There is, in men, a marked attention in saying to women, in a refined and deli-
cate manner, things that please them and give them a good opinion of them-
selves and us. This art which could improve and console them, is too often ends
up corrupting them. [. . .]
2 Gallantry, considered to be a vice of the heart, is but libertinage with an honest
name. In general, people hardly ever pass up a chance to mask common vices
with honest names.)
Alain Viala reminds us that in the seventeenth century
deux mots connaissent leur apogée: l’un déjà bien établi est toujours vert, galant,
et l’autre tout jeune et bien “frisque,” galanterie [. . .] Pour le dire d’un mot, un
galant homme est un homme parfaitement poli et un homme galant peut être un
parfait polisson. Coexistent ainsi deux images contrastées, voire contradictoires,
de la galanterie.
(two words reached their peak: one, already well-established, is still crass, gal-
lant, and the other, very young and rather “lively,” galanterie [. . .] To put it sim-
ply, a galant homme is a perfectly polite man, and an homme galant can be a
perfect rascal. In this way, two contrasting or even contradictory images of gal-
lantry coexist.)23
Jean-Michel Pelous concurs:
Le processus est toujours identique: la galanterie confisque à son profit un lan-

gage amoureux dont elle méconnaît sciemment la signification authentique; les
croyances qui le fondaient sont encore assez proches pour qu’il ne paraisse pas
trop étrange, et la rupture avec l’esprit s’accompagne d’une étonnante fidélité à
la lettre. Tout l’édifice repose sur le vide: l’histoire d’une simple métaphore
donne un premier aperçu de la manière galante. Mais la tradition romanesque
22 Diderot, Dictionnaire encyclopédique, 497–8 and 500. See Alain Viala, La France galante: essai
historique sur une catégorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’à la révolution (Paris: Presses universitaires
de France [Les Littéraires], 2008); and Jean-Michel Pelous, Amour précieux, amour galant: essai sur la
représentation de l’amour dans la littérature et la société mondaines (1654–1675) (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1980).
23 Viala, La France galante, 31 and 37. As mentioned earlier (cf. Introduction, supra), Maria Scott
has compellingly identified the central role of duplicity in a number of Baudelaire’s prose poems,
including “Le Galant Tireur”; see Maria C. Scott, “Intertextes et mystifications dans les poèmes en
prose de Baudelaire,” Romantisme, 156.2 (2012), 63–73.
offre a cette littérature un champ beaucoup plus vaste où pourra s’exercer son
entreprise de récupération ironique.24
(The process is always the same: gallantry confiscates for its own gain a language
of love whose true meaning it consciously ignores; the beliefs on which it is
based are still close enough that it does not seem too odd, and the break with the
mind is accompanied by an astonishing faithfulness to the word. The whole edi-
fice rests on nothing: the matter of a simple metaphor gives a first glimpse of
gallant style. But the novelistic tradition gives this literature a much broader
field in which its enterprise of ironic recovery can be expressed.)
Closer to Baudelaire’s moment, Alfred Delvau’s Dictionnaire érotique moderne

points to this inherent contradiction in its own definition of “galant,” as something
that denies its own state of being: “GALANT. Amant—d’une galanterie
douteuse,25 and Steven Rubenstein notes that Baudelaire was “well versed in the
argot of Delvau’s dictionary.”26
Pelous’s mention of irony raises another important aspect of Baudelaire’s use of
figurative language throughout Le Spleen de Paris, as Sonya Stephens and a num-
ber of other critics have discussed at length.27 In her convincing study, Stephens
argues that the irony that courses through Le Spleen de Paris is fundamental to
the poems because “it reveals the dualities of the text as well as the duplicities of
the author.”28 In an early comment on “Le Galant tireur” Henri de Régnier con-
curred, referring to the poem as “prodigieux et ironique” and calling it one of “de
vrais chefs-d’œuvre.”29 Baudelaire acknowledges, and even celebrates, language’s
24 Pelous, Amour précieux, amour galant, 164–5. Of course, the “champ” is greater still when it is
broadened beyond “la tradition romanesque” to include prose poetry . . .
25 Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne [1874], 201. Unless indicated otherwise, all references to
Delvau refer to this volume and will henceforth appear in parentheses. Delvau and Baudelaire were
hardly the only nineteenth-century French writers to play with the term “galant,” and Paul Verlaine’s
Fêtes galantes are exemplary in this regard; see Steve Murphy, “ ‘En tapinois’: ‘Des sujets érotiques, si
vagues’ dans les Fêtes galantes,” in Murphy (ed.), Lectures de Verlaine. Poèmes saturniens, Fêtes galantes,
Romances sans paroles (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 169–93.
26 Steven Rubenstein, “The Figuration of Genre: Baudelaire’s Prose Poem ‘L’Horloge,’ ” Romanic
Review, 82.3 (1991), 331–45 (333 n. 4).
27 Sonya Stephens provides the most sustained and thorough consideration of irony throughout
the entire corpus of prose poems in her Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); no less important is Debarati Sanyal’s The Violence of
Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006). An exhaustive survey of the numerous studies that have discussed irony in Baudelaire’s prose
poems is beyond the scope of the present study; in addition to the critical studies already mentioned,
readers are encouraged to consider Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1974); Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the
Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, revised 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 1983), 187–228; and
Philippe Hamon, L’Ironie littéraire: essai sur les formes de l’écriture oblique (Paris: Hachette, 1996).
28 Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, vii; furthermore, Stephens asserts, “the prose poems explore
and [are] shown to betray an ironic separation” (viii).
29 Quoted in André Guyaux (ed.), Baudelaire: un demi-siècle de lecture des Fleurs du Mal, 1855–1905
(Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), 1047.
figurative potential, its ability to signify one thing and allude to another, in Fusées:
“Profondeur immense de pensée dans les locutions vulgaires, trous creusés par
des générations de fourmis” (Profound depth of thought in vulgar locutions, holes
dug by generations of ants) (OC 1: 650). The “locutions vulgaires”—that is, words
of ordinary, uneducated speakers—tunnel under the surface and lead readers
through so many layers of sediment toward a poetic bedrock that we will never be
reached: examples of the stylistic elements that can inhabit poetic texts, or what
Gérard Genette refers to as “vocabulaires réservés.”30 As Maria Scott explains,
degrees of misunderstanding and duplicity followed Baudelaire through his cor-
pus: “Une certaine incertitude vis-à-vis de la sincérité de Baudelaire a toujours
flotté autour de son œuvre” (a certain incertitude about Baudelaire’s sincerity has
always floated around his work), to the point where “Même les proches du poète
ne savaient pas s’il fallait prendre ses efforts au sérieux” (Even those close to the
poet didn’t know whether to take his efforts seriously).31 Scott’s compelling con-
clusion about Le Spleen de Paris—that the collection’s “manque apparent de cohé-
sion cache une logique partagée: celle de la duplicité” (apparent lack of cohesion
hides a shared logic: that of duplicity)32—is an important critical foundation on
which this chapter relies.
In his analysis of “Le Galant tireur,” Murphy acknowledges one possibility of
where innuendo can lead: “la maladresse du tireur, ridiculisé par sa maîtresse,
n’est pas sans rapports possibles avec l’expression tirer un coup et avec une dérision
de la femme portant sur son incompétence sexuelle” (The marksman’s clumsi-
ness, mocked by his mistress, isn’t without possible links to the expression tirer un
coup (to get laid) and with the woman’s derision about his sexual incompetence).33
This passing comment is the point of departure for the present discussion: not to
show how this poem is inscribed in a space of sexuality—although it hopes to
achieve that goal—but to consider how Baudelaire’s poetic prose is rich in the kind
of allusive language of which innuendo is one example.34 The potential presence
30 Genette, Figures II (Paris: Seuil [Tel Quel], 1969), 123. See the opening pages of the present
study’s Introduction, supra.
31 Scott, “Intertextes et mystifications,” 63. 32 Scott, “Intertextes et mystifications,” 64.
Champion [Champion classiques], 2007), 665. In an altogether different context, Baudelaire uses
“tirer” in its more standard meaning, to pull or draw from, and even then—in “La Corde”—immense
pleasure is still close at hand: “vous savez quelle jouissance nous tirons de cette faculté qui rend à nos
yeux la vie plus vivante et plus significative que pour les autres hommes” (OC 1: 329). (you know what
delight we draw from that faculty which makes life appear to our eyes more lively and more meaning-
ful than to other people) (PP, 77; modified).
34 As the poet-narrator asks in “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” “Quelles bizarreries ne trouve-t-on pas
dans une grande ville, quand on sait se promener et regarder?” (OC 1: 355). Elissa Marder asserts that
the question goes to the heart of what is at stake in the poem; we can approach “Le Galant tireur” simi-
larly and see that it “raises serious doubts about whether we, as readers, know [. . .] how to read the
‘bizarreries’ of the text we have been reading” (Elissa Marder, “Baudelaire’s Feminine Counter-
Signature: ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’’s Photographic Poetics,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 46.1–2
(Fall–Winter 2017–18), 1–25 (18)).
of obscenity in Baudelaire’s prose poetry recalls Ross Chambers’s discussion of

cultural obscenity which, like its etymological sister obscure, refers to “the ‘off-
stage’ or ‘backstage’ space that delimits, and is simultaneously inseparable from, a
scene of activity on which attention is focused. The cultural obscene is ‘obscured’
or ‘covered’ with respect to a scene of culture, but without being discontinuous
with it.”35 Residing in a liminal space, obscene language—like the modern idiom
that is Baudelaire’s innuendo-laden prose in “Le Galant tireur”—refers to, illumin
ates, and defies the cultural limits alongside which it sits:
What I call the cultural offstage, and hence the sense of the obscene, arises, how-
ever, from the knowledge cultural subjects may have, but do not necessarily
acknowledge, that cultural “otherness”—what to them is alien, barbaric, and so
forth—is actually of a piece with their own cultural identity—of a piece with
because constitutive of that identity. Thus, the obscene becomes a liminal phe-
nomenon, culturally speaking, in the sense that it is neither completely beyond
cultural ken nor squarely acknowledged as integral to the cultural scene. More
particularly, it occupies a “space” of liminality that is reserved for those cultur-
ally definitional events and experiences that individual cultural subjects experi-
ence as traumatic, and others treat as barbaric, hence as unmentionable or
unspeakable, precisely because such happenings are felt to be “out of bounds”
with respect to their own culture, a culture that is thereby redefined, by ideo
logical sleight-of-hand, as civilized. Such events and experiences are extreme,
both in the sense that they are unusually violent or grueling, intensely degrad-
ing, or profoundly unjust and in the sense that they are therefore relegated to a
position at the very “edge” of consciousness, the position of that which has to be
both known and, at the same time, unrecognized.36
Drilling down further to the local and semantic level, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur
explains that a word’s obscene value varies according to a context that is built
in part on
the contrast between two registers of language, crude and polite, or, even better,
crude and elegant, a contrast which actualizes the desired transgression at the
linguistic level [. . .] The obscene word assumes a function of unmasking by
35 Ross Chambers, Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 23. Not surprisingly, the obscene simultaneously
draws on both high and low: “it is tinged with a sense of the sacred (Latin obscenus meant of ill augur),
but also of stigma and abjection, both of which refer to the mixture of fascination and repulsion
exerted by objects that are expelled from within the social or physical body” (23).
36 Chambers, Untimely Interventions, 23. See also Elisabeth Ladenson’s excellent study of indecency
in French literature, Dirt for Art’s Sake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), especially her sec-
ond chapter “Charles Baudelaire: Florist of Evil” (47–77).
denouncing sentimental discourse as a kind of euphemism intended to cover up

the truth of sexual desire.37
In this regard she echoes the sentiment that Alfred Delvau expressed about his
own Dictionnaire and its ability to bridge the crude and the elegant, saying that it
was a “publication jugée nécessaire cependant par tout le monde, par les gour-
mets aussi bien que par les goinfres, par les lettrés aussi bien que par les simples
curieux” (publication judged necessary by everyone, by the gourmets as well as
the greedy, by the literate as well as the simply curious) (viii). Delvau would con-
tinue by prefiguring Chambers’s discussion of the liminality of the obscene being
both unrecognized and (in Delvau’s eyes) ultimately known by all: “l’argot d’un
peuple entier est une langue, spécialement l’argot érotique; s’il vit en marge du
Dictionnaire officiel, comme les gens qui le parlent vivent en marge de la société
officielle, il n’en finira pas moins, à un moment donné, par se confondre comme
eux dans la circulation générale” (The slang of a whole people is a language, espe-
cially erotic slang; if it lives in the margins of the official Dictionary, as the people
who speak it live in the margins of official society, it will nevertheless end up, at
some point, merging, as they do, in the general flow of words) (xvi).
Specifically with respect to the stakes for genres, Chambers points directly to
how the obscene can be so productive—for example, through its presence in a
certain culturally-determined register of language (for our purposes, the poetic):
It requires us, therefore, to consider briefly how and why the array of genres
that constitutes a culture may be vulnerable to takeover, or at least open to
infiltration, by a discourse of extremity such as witnessing writing, a figural
‘presentation’ of the obscene that thereby itself becomes representative of the
obscene within culture, intervening in the affairs of culture as the bearer of a
reminder of what culture-as-civilization ignores. [. . . The obscene] is im-pertinent
in the sense that it can only be ‘mentioned’ at the price of some degree of
inappropriateness or generic infraction, in respect of field, tenor, or register, and
testimonial interventions, as reminders that signpost the obscene, are thus
inevitably untimely incursions on the scene of culture.38
Just as in the “galanterie” of the title of “Le Galant tireur,” the possibility of saying
one (culturally pertinent) thing with a nod toward another (culturally im-pertinent)
one—innuendo coming from in- “toward” and nuere “to nod”—coincides with a
37 Lucienne Frappier- Mazur, “Truth and the Obscene Word in Eighteenth- Century French
Pornography,” in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography (New York: Zone, 1993), 206, 213.
William Olmsted applies Frappier-Mazur’s discussion of obscenity to Baudelaire’s verse poetry in his
The Censorship Effect: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Formation of French Modernism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016), 116–18.
38 Chambers, Untimely Interventions, 25–6; emphasis added.
generic infraction: that fundamental, unresolvable tension always lurking in or

near Baudelaire’s poetic language, according to which prose is not appropriate for
poetry.39 In this respect, poems like “Le Galant tireur” are textual examples of
what is already present and well-known in their visual cousins, caricature:
If the prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris need to be deciphered before their

humour reveals itself, they are no different from much graphic caricature of the
nineteenth century. In order to elude censorship under the July monarchy and
the Second Empire, French caricaturists had recourse to the art of allusion,
employing devices such as puns, allegories, and emblems.40
Comme la voiture traversait le bois, il la fit arrêter dans le voisinage d’un tir, dis-
ant qu’il lui serait agréable de tirer quelques balles pour tuer le Temps.
At first blush, the poem’s opening sentence seems straightforward. While much
critical focus has justifiably been devoted to the phrase “tuer le Temps”—begin-
ning with Barbara Johnson’s important exegesis41—such attention at the end of
the phrase misses a key detail that, if read other than at face value, can also point
in the direction of what is to come. Baudelaire situates this stop not in a shooting
range precisely but near “un tir,”42 the nature of which is reinforced by the passage
through “le bois” at the outset. The “bois” itself is important less for its precise
geographic location43 and more for the spaces and activities that it harbors; long
39 Suzanne Bernard identifies the prose poem’s anarchical and destructive qualities with respect
both to poetic form and to language itself (Suzanne Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à
nos jours (Paris: Nizet, 1959), 13).
40 Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 45.
41 See Barbara Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique: la seconde révolution baudelairienne
(Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 83–100. For Patrick Labarthe, in the expression “tuer le Temps” Baudelaire
underscores the passage between the figurative and the literal as the poem “consiste à remonter du
sens figuré de l’expression ‘tuer le Temps’ à une acception ‘nettement’ plus littérale.” Similarly, “Le Tir et
le cimetière” also hinges on Baudelaire’s deft use of polysemy: “Il s’agit, en somme, d’une variation sur
la double acception du mot ‘cible’ ” (Patrick Labarthe, Baudelaire et la tradition de l’allégorie, 2nd edi-
tion (Geneva: Droz, 2015), 311 and 310, respectively).
42 The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française of 1835 attests to “tir” meaning shooting range: “TIR se
dit quelquefois d’Un lieu où l’on s’exerce à tirer des armes de feu” (Dictionnaire de l’Académie française
(1835), Vol. 2: Dictionnaires d’autrefois, ARTFL Reference collection, artfl-project.uchicago.edu/con-
tent/dictionnaires-dautrefois). Thanks to Scott Carpenter for discussing this and many other aspects
of the present study. For Margery A. Evans this poem participates in “the multiple associations of ‘le
tirage’ and ‘le tir’: that is, with shooting ranges, with the explosive uncorking of bottles, with lottery
draws for fate’s winning numbers, and with the act of printing itself, and the product of the printing
press” (Margery A. Evans, Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 54; original emphasis).
43 Not least because Baudelaire was in Brussels when he wrote the poem, as Scott Carpenter
reminds us (Scott Carpenter, Aesthetics of Fraudulence in Nineteenth-Century France (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009), 165). If some literary examples use “le Bois” to designate the Bois de Boulogne specifically,
the practice was sufficiently common that the lower-case “bois” could easily apply more generally to
other wooded parks. For more about the importance of the transformation of Parisian green space in
mid-century literature, see Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 164–88.
promenades for leisurely walking, gazing, and other less innocent pursuits: “Le
Bois représente surtout un lieu de distraction et d’oisiveté pour les habitués
comme pour les néophytes” (The woods represent above all a place of distraction
and leisure for its regulars as for its novices).44 Baudelaire acknowledges precisely
this setting in the final section of his essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” entitled
“Les Voitures”:
Ainsi se continuent, coupées par d’innombrables embranchements, ces longues

galeries du high life et du low life. [. . .] Dans cette série particulière de dessins se
reproduisent sous mille aspects les incidents du sport, des courses, des chasses,
des promenades dans les bois, les ladies orgueilleuses, les frêles misses, con-
duisant d’une main sûre des coursiers d’une pureté de galbe admirable, coquets,
brillants, capricieux eux-mêmes comme des femmes. [. . .] Tantôt ce sont des
haltes et, pour ainsi dire, des campements de voitures nombreuses, d’où, hissés
sur les coussins, sur les sièges, sur les impériales, des jeunes gens sveltes et des
femmes accoutrées des costumes excentriques autorisés par la saison assistent à
quelque solennité du turf qui file dans le lointain; tantôt un cavalier galope
gracieusement à côté d’une calèche découverte, et son cheval a l’air, par ses cour-
bettes, de saluer à sa manière. La voiture emporte au grand trot, dans une allée
zébrée d’ombre et de lumière, les beautés couchées comme dans une nacelle,
indolentes, écoutant vaguement les galanteries qui tombent dans leur oreille et
se livrant avec paresse au vent de la promenade. (OC 2: 722–3)
(Thus continue—interrupted by innumerable branches—the long galleries of
high life and low life. [. . .] The events of sport, races, hunts, walks in the woods,
proud ladies, weak misses are reproduced in this very particular series of draw-
ings, driving with a steady hand steeds with admirably pure outlines, coquettish,
gleaming, as capricious themselves as women. [. . .] Sometimes there are stops
and, as it were, encampments of many carriages, where, hoisted onto cushions,
44 Noëlle Benhamou, “La Promenade au Bois dans le roman du XIXe siècle,” in Aude Déruelle and
José-Luis Diaz (eds.), Actes du Congrès La Vie parisienne, une langue, un mythe, un style, June 7–9,
2007, (Paris: Société des Études Romantiques et Dix-neuviémistes (SERD), 2008), 1–12 (2), etudes-
romantiques.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/vieparisienne.html. As Benhamou explains:
Très vite, le Bois draine un monde interlope, constitué de déclassés et de parasites bien
décidés à profiter de la bonne société en place et à la concurrencer. Ainsi viveurs et spécu-
lateurs, types décrits dans Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, marchandes à la toilette et
entremetteuses comme la Tricon zolienne, attirent les femmes de mauvaise vie. (3)
(Very quickly, the Bois attracts an underworld, made up of down-and-outs and parasites
determined to take advantage of and compete with the established good society. Thus, lively
men and speculators, the types described in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, toiletry
traders and matchmakers like Zola’s Madame Tricon, attract women of ill repute).
Also see Lola Gonzalez-Quijano, Capitale de l’amour: filles et lieux de plaisirs à Paris au XIXe siècle
(Paris: Vendémiaire, 2015), 25–7.
on the seats and the imperials, slender young people and women decked out in
the eccentric costumes of the season notice with some solemnity the turf speeds
off in the distance; other times a rider gallops gracefully alongside an open car-
riage, and his horse seems, thanks to his prancing, to be saluting it in turn. The
carriage heads down an alley streaked with shadow and light at a good clip with
the beauties reclining as if in a basket, indolent, vaguely listening to the galanter-
ies falling into their ears and lazily giving themselves to the wind of the ride.)
Such activity was so frequent that it was familiar terrain throughout nineteenth-
century literature, as we recall from the opening lines of Zola’s La Curée:
Au retour, dans l’encombrement des voitures qui rentraient par le bord du lac, la
calèche dut marcher au pas. Un moment, l’embarras devint tel, qu’il lui fallut
même s’arrêter. [. . .]
Les voitures n’avançaient toujours pas. Au milieu des taches unies, de teinte
sombre, que faisait la longue file des coupés, fort nombreux au Bois par cette
après-midi d’automne, brillaient le coin d’une glace, le mors d’un cheval, la poi-
gnée argentée d’une lanterne, les galons d’un laquais haut placé sur son siège. Çà
et là, dans un landau découvert, éclatait un bout d’étoffe, un bout de toilette de
femme, soie ou velours. Il était peu à peu tombé un grand silence sur tout ce
tapage éteint, devenu immobile. On entendait, du fond des voitures, les conver-
sations des piétons. Il y avait des échanges de regards muets, de portières à
portières; et personne ne causait plus, dans cette attente que coupaient seuls les
craquements des harnais et le coup de sabot impatient d’un cheval. Au loin, les
voix confuses du Bois se mouraient.
Malgré la saison avancée, tout Paris était là [. . .]45
(On the way back, in the congestion of carriages which wound by the edge of the
lake of the Bois de Boulogne, the carriage could only advance slowly. At one
point, it was such a mess that it all came to a standstill. [. . .]
The carriages were still not moving forward. Amid the uniform, dark patches
of the long line of cars, so numerous in the Bois on this autumn afternoon, there
shone the corner of a mirror, a horse’s bit, the silver handle of a lantern, the
braids of a lackey high up on his seat. Here and there, an open landau revealed a
piece of fabric, a part of a woman’s dress in silk or velvet. Little by little, a great
silence had fallen over this dark hubbub, which had gradually come to a halt.
The pedestrians’ conversations were audible from the backs of the cars. There
45 Émile Zola, La Curée, in Armand Lanoux and Henri Mitterand (eds.), Les Rougon-Macquart:
histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, [Bibliothèque
de la Pléiade], 1960), 319–20. See Florence de Chalonge, “Espace, regard et perspectives. La promenade
au bois de Boulogne dans La Curée d’Émile Zola,” Littérature 65.1 (1987), 58–69. Guy de Maupassant
would famously draw on this well-known trope in his Bel-Ami (1885).
were exchanges of silent glances, from door to door; and no one spoke anymore,
during this waiting which was only disturbed by the creaking of harnesses and
the impatient stamp of a horse’s foot. In the distance, the confused voices of the
Bois were dying out.
Despite the lateness of the season, all of Paris was there.)
Furthermore, William Olmsted reminds us that “the use of a fiacre for sex was a
well-established visual and literary image,”46 a moving target in the mid-century
lexicon that allowed the reader to gain access to additional levels of meaning.47 In
his perspicacious study, Olmsted identifies strategies that Flaubert and Baudelaire
employed in anticipation of the Second Empire censors. Given that their works
were the subjects of a pair of famous court cases in 1857, and particularly in light
of the fact that Baudelaire was convicted for “outrage à la morale publique,” ini-
tially fined 300 francs (on appeal it would be reduced to fifty), and forced to
remove six poems from the volume, it should not be surprising that Baudelaire
might consider additional strategies such as euphemism and innuendo, in his
subsequent poems.
The judgment against the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal found Baudelaire
guilty of
offense à la morale publique et aux bonnes mœurs: Attendu que l’erreur du poète
dans le but qu’il voulait atteindre et dans la route qu’il a suivie, quelque effort de
style qu’il ait pu faire, quel que soit le blâme qui précède ou qui suit ses pein-
tures, ne saurait détruire l’effet funeste des tableaux qu’il présente au lecteur, et
qui, dans les pièces incriminées, conduisent nécessairement à l’excitation des
sens par un réalisme grossier et offensant pour la pudeur. (OC 1: 1181–2)
(Offense to public morality and to good mores: it is expected that the poet’s
error in the goal he pursued and in the path he followed, whatever stylistic
efforts he could have undertaken, whatever blame precedes or follows his paint-
ings, could not destroy the morbid effect of the depictions he presents to the
reader, and which, in the accused pieces, necessarily lead to the excitation of the
senses through a crude and indecent realism.)
The direct questioning of the real, pitted against the ideal in “Laquelle est la
vraie?” (and explicitly its later title “L’Idéal et le Réel”), seems almost to respond
directly to this charge of realism. One of the notable aspects of Baudelaire’s trial
was that, as it specifically targeted poetry, it marked “L’entrée de la poésie dans le
46 Olmsted, The Censorship Effect, 53; see also 194 n. 28. See also Michael Riffaterre, “Flaubert’s
Presuppositions,” Diacritics, 11.4 (Winter 1981), 2–11 (9).
47 For Prendergast, in Le Spleen de Paris the urban park is “almost exclusively a landscape of
rejected and damaged life” (Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century, 179).
prétoire réservé à la prose” (The entry of poetry into the sacred preserve of
prose).48 Recently acquitted Flaubert commiserated in the letter he wrote to
Baudelaire on August 17, 1857, when he learned of the latter’s upcoming trial:
“Ceci est du nouveau: poursuivre un livre de vers! Jusqu’à présent la magistrature
laissait la poésie fort tranquille. Je suis grandement indigné” (This is new: pros
ecuting a book of verse! Until now the judiciary has left poetry alone. I am most
indignant).49 For his part, Baudelaire had a good idea of what he was getting him-
self into, for his letters to friends and family show that he was already familiar
with censorship, both editorial and Imperial. As early as 1843 he had a submis-
sion refused by the Démocratie pacifique “pour cause d’immoralité” (C 1: 103),
and a decade later, on March 26, 1853, he acknowledged that for a publication in
the Revue de Paris the previous October “Il y avait une pièce de vers de moi, fort
dangereuse, et pour laquelle j’ai failli être poursuivi” (There was one of my verse
pieces, very dangerous, and for which I was almost prosecuted) (C 1: 217).
Such was already the case for his verse poetry, and in that respect Baudelaire
was in good company. Its numerous rules offering just as many opportunities for
rule-breaking, versification was long the site for transgression, and thus for
obscenity. Such is the case, for example, in this tercet from Paul Verlaine, in which
the enjambment in the name Leconte de Lisle reduces the fellow poet to “le con,”
an insult only emphasized further by the end-line rhyme:
Voyez de Banville, et voyez Lecon

Te de Lisle, et tôt pratiquons leur con-
Duite et soyons, tels ces deux preux, nature.50
(Look at de Banville, and look at Lecon / Te de Lisle, and then let’s cunt- / Duct
ourselves like them and be, like these two knights, genuine.)
Another example is the poem “Madrigal”:
Tu m’as, ces pâles jours d’automne blanc, fait mal

À cause de tes yeux où fleurit l’animal,
Et tu me rongerais, en princesse Souris,
Du bout fin de la quenotte de ton souris,
48 Yvan Leclerc, Crimes écrits: la littérature en procès au XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1991), 231. For spe-
cific details related to the role of poetry in the trial, see Leclerc’s chapter “L’opération chirurgicale des
Fleurs du Mal” (223–81); for more on its effect on Baudelaire’s work more generally, see Georges
Brosset and Claude Schmidt, Le Procès des Fleurs du Mal ou l’affaire Charles Baudelaire (Geneva: Ed.
de la Basoche, 1947); and Olmsted, The Censorship Effect.
49 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau and Yvan Leclerc, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1973–2007), 2: 758.
50 Paul Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Yves-Gérard Le Dantec and Jacques Borel (Paris:
Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1962), 560. See Benoît de Cornulier, Art poëtique: notions et
problèmes de métrique (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1995), 55.
Fille auguste qui fis flamboyer ma douleur

Avec l’huile rancie encor de ton vieux pleur!51
(You have, on these pale days of white autumn, hurt me / With your eyes where
the animal blooms / And you would gnaw at me, princess Mouse, / With the
thin end of your mouse teeth, / August girl who inflamed my pain / With the
rancid oil of your old cries!)
The regular 6-6 rhythm of the first three alexandrine lines leads us into fourth
line, where the word “quenotte,” meaning a child’s tooth, straddles the caesura
and offers the far more suggestive sounding “Et tu me rongerais, en princesse
Souris, / Du bout fin de la queue…” (“queue” is slang for the phallus). Similarly
transgressive is the obscenity lurking in “Ces passions qu’eux seuls nomment
encore amours”:
Ces passions qu’eux seuls nomment encore amours

Sont des amours aussi, tendres et furieuses,
Avec des particularités curieuses
Que n’ont pas les amours certes de tous les jours.52
(These passions that only they still call love / Are loves too, tender and furious, /
With curious particularities, / That our everyday loves certainly lack.)
In the first overtly pro-homosexual poem that Verlaine published (1889), the
regular rhythm that traditionally supports the medial caesura in the third line, if
not the space of liminality, then at least the point at which something less appar-
ent becomes more so:
Ces passions qu’eux seuls + nomment encore amours

Sont des amours aussi, + tendres et furieuses,
Avec des particu + larités curieuses
The rhythmic emphasis on the phoneme “cu” (and thus the word “cul”) does
point to a particularity that was not universally thought of as part of “les amours
certes de tous les jours.”
To be sure, these examples from Verlaine appeared in print after the end of the
Second Empire, but they bear witness to poetry’s potential to include (and, to a
certain degree, mask) the kind of content that the censors might find morally
51 Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, 376.

52 Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, 521. Thanks to Steve Murphy for bringing this internal
enjambment to my attention.
objectionable.53 During the argument against Les Fleurs du Mal, prosecutor

Ernest Pinard specifically cited Baudelaire’s project of exposing the intimate
details of human nature:
Il fouillera la nature humaine dans ses replis les plus intimes; il aura, pour la
rendre, des tons vigoureux et saisissants, il l’exagérera surtout dans ses côtés
hideux; il la grossira outre mesure, afin de créer l’impression, la sensation [. . .].
Ou le sens de la pudeur n’existe pas, ou la limite qu’elle impose a été audacieuse-
ment franchie. (OC 1: 1206–7)
(He will rummage through the most intimate folds of human nature; and to dis-
play it, he will have vigorous and striking tones, he will mostly exaggerate its
most hideous sides; he will expand it excessively in order to create an impres-
sion, a sensation [. . .]. Either decency does not exist, or the limit it imposes has
been boldly crossed.)
Pinard takes the happening of Les Fleurs du Mal as being “out of bounds,” to use
Chambers’s formulation. In his concluding argument, Pinard asserted that
Baudelaire blatantly forced his readers to confront the poems’ morally dubious
content (rather than, say, couch it in figurative language or innuendo): “l’auteur
s’évertue à forcer chaque situation comme s’il tenait la gageure de donner des sens
à ceux qui ne sentent plus” (the author strives to force each situation as if he had
been challenged to give meaning to those who no longer sense it) (OC 1: 1208).
Tellingly, in his rebuttal, Gustave Chaix d’Est-Ange cautioned the judge to not
lose the generic forest for the trees; after quoting the first, second, and fourth
quatrains of “Au lecteur,” he asks:
Transformez cela en prose, messieurs, supprimez la rime et la césure, recherchez

ce qu’il y a au fond de ce langage puissant et imagé, quelles intentions s’y cachent;
et dites-moi si nous n’avons jamais entendu tomber ce même langage du haut de la
chaire chrétienne, et des lèvres de quelque prédicateur ardent; dites-moi si nous ne
trouverions pas les mêmes pensées, et quelquefois peut-être les mêmes expres-
sions dans les homélies de quelque rude et sévère père de l’Église? (OC 1: 1211)
(Turn this into prose, gentlemen, remove the rhyme and the caesura, look for
what is in the depths of this powerful and pictorial language, what intentions are
hidden in it; and tell me if we have never heard this same language fall from
the heights the Christian pulpit, and from the lips of some ardent preacher; tell
me if we would not find the same thoughts, and sometimes perhaps the same
expressions in the homilies of some coarse and harsh church Father?)
53 An obvious counter-example is the 1871 Album zutique: as the contributions were written by and
for the zutistes themselves, their obscenity is blatant, and there was no need to consider obfuscation or
innuendo for these pages that had no chance of being approved by any Imperial censor.
While Chaix d’Est- Ange’s rhetorical questions went unanswered, they help
articulate some broader considerations about the presence of potentially offensive
content in poetry and how its ability to be felt, perceived, or hidden might vary
according to its presentation in verse or in prose. If Chaix d’Est-Ange and the
other lawyers in the courtroom could consider this point, it seems not unreason-
able to believe that the talented poet on trial was aware of its potential as well.
Not only did Baudelaire write “Le Galant tireur” and others in Belgium—and
thus beyond the reaches of French Imperial censors54—but also, as the use of the
“fiacre” shows, the very nature of his modern idiom is that it is infused with layers
of meaning available to those who wish to access it (the last word in Delvau’s title
insists on the zeitgeist aspect of his Dictionnaire érotique moderne). As Olmsted
notes, effects of censorship display a bias that “manifests itself most clearly with
regard to sexual themes [. . .] often handled by means of euphemism, circumlocu-
tion, and ambiguity.”55 The slang in this poem, this communally comprehensible
shorthand, is thus part of what Michael Riffaterre calls a sociolect: “language not
just as lexicon and grammar, but also as the repository of the myths and stereo-
types with which a society organizes and allegorizes a consensus of its members
about what they imagine reality to be.”56 In his essay “Quelques caricaturistes
français,” Baudelaire famously referred to the use of symbols in caricature as a
kind of plastic argot, conflating the reduction to a symbol with a local idiom
whose subversive qualities enable it to signify while avoiding authority (and its
related censorship). Discussing caricatures of Louis-Philippe as a pear, Baudelaire
concluded:
On a fait des expériences analogues sur la tête de Jésus et sur celle de l’Apollon,
et je crois qu’on est parvenu à ramener l’une des deux à la ressemblance d’un
crapaud. Cela ne prouvait absolument rien. Le symbole avait été trouvé par une
analogie complaisante. Le symbole dès lors suffisait. Avec cette espèce d’argot
plastique, on était le maître de dire et de faire comprendre au peuple tout ce
qu’on voulait.57
(Similar experiments were carried out on the heads of Jesus and Apollo, and
I believe we managed to reduce one of the two to the likeness of a toad. It proved
54 Baudelaire spent considerable time in Brussels not only to avoid the French Imperial censors but
also because his publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis fled there in October 1863, after declaring bank-
ruptcy and six months’ incarceration for not keeping his financial books in order. (See Nicolas Valazza,
“L’Éditeur et le Graveur en société avec le Poète: Poulet-Malassis, Rops et Baudelaire en Belgique,”
L’Esprit créateur 58.1 (2018), 87–100.)
55 Olmsted, The Censorship Effect, 16.
56 Michael Riffaterre, “Fear of Theory,” The Romanic Review, 93.1–2 (January–March 2002),
185–99 (192).
57 OC 2: 550. See Sonya Stephens, “Argot littéraire, argot plastique: Caricature in Baudelaire’s Prose
Poetry,” Australian Journal of French Studies, 30.2 (1993), 197–206; and Ainslie Armstrong McLees,
Baudelaire’s “Argot Plastique”: Poetic Caricature and Modernism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 1989), 75–9 and 148–9.
absolutely nothing. The symbol had been found by a complacent analogy. The
symbol was therefore sufficient. With this kind of plastic slang, we were the mas-
ters of telling people and making them understand whatever we wanted.)
The recourse not just to slang but to a slang that is malleable—plastique—is par-
ticularly useful for thinking about ways in which a modern lexicon could be used
similarly, and to the point where symbols suffice.
Such examples are most successful when they are nearly commonplace; and
fiacres were so numerous in the nineteenth-century cityscape that they literally
produced traffic jams, as the Goncourt brothers complained on February 22, 1857:
L’autre dimanche, il y avait tant de voitures au bois de Boulogne qu’on les a fait
revenir par les contre-allées, au lieu de leur faire prendre l’avenue de l’Impératrice.
Qui n’a pas voiture aujourd’hui? Singulière société où tout le monde se ruine. Jamais
le paraître n’a été si impérieux, si despotique et si démoralisateur d’un peuple.
(Last Sunday, there were so many carriages in the Bois de Boulogne that they
were made to come back via back- alleys, instead of taking l’avenue de
l’Impératrice. Who doesn’t have a carriage today? What a funny society, where
everyone is ruining themselves with debt. Never has appearance been so imperi-
ous, so despotic, and so demoralising for a whole population.)58
As would be befitting someone who has the means to have his own coachman or
hire a cab (“il la fit arrêter”) for a horse-drawn stroll through the park, the scene
of “Le Galant tireur” is set in a time and place of leisure, supported by the means
to enjoy it. For Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, among the distinctions that it was
important to make among different kinds of prostitutes there were those who
belonged in what he termed “PREMIÈRE CLASSE.—Celles qui provoquent pub-
liquement, aux fenêtres, dans les rues, sur le pas de leurs portes, sur les places
et dans les promenades publiques” (FIRST CLASS.—Those who solicit publicly,
58 Edmond Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: mémoires de la vie littéraire, vol.
1: 1851–61 (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1891), 169–70; original emphasis. Baudelaire situates his
prose poem “Les Veuves” in the dirty underbelly of public parks:
Vauvenargues dit que dans les jardins publics il est des allées hantées principalement par
l’ambition déçue, par les inventeurs malheureux, par les gloires avortées, par les cœurs
brisés, par toutes ces âmes tumultueuses et fermées, en qui grondent encore les derniers
soupirs d’un orage, et qui reculent loin du regard insolent des joyeux et des oisifs. Ces
retraites ombreuses sont les rendez-vous des éclopés de la vie. (1: 292)
(Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there are paths haunted mostly by failed ambi-
tion, unhappy inventors, miscarried glories, broken hearts, by all the disturbed and closed
off souls, in which a storm’s final sighs still rumble, and who retreat far from the insolent
gaze of the joyful and the lazy. These shady refuges are the meeting places of the invalids of
life). (PP, 23; modified)
As Kopp and Pichois explain, the Vauvenargues reference is to his “Sur les misères cachées” (1857);
see Kopp, 229–30, and OC 1: 1316–18.
in the windows, the streets, on their doorsteps, on town squares and public
promenades).59 Of course, having time to spare and money to burn are not
enough to make a common practice into a literary trope; as Charles Bernheimer
explains, “the prostitute is ubiquitous in the novels and the paintings of this
period not only because of her prominence as a social phenomenon but, more
important, because of her function in stimulating artistic strategies to control and
dispel her fantasmatic threat to male mastery.”60 If Debrau sums it up bluntly in
his short verse “Et dans un bois, je savais la tirer”61 (And in a woods, I knew how
to do her), Alain Corbin’s additional description is further help in understanding
some of the stakes that resonate in “Le Galant tireur”:
Les femmes galantes, en bonnes courtisanes, exercent un choix et peuvent, de ce

fait, avoir l’illusion de se donner; parfois, mais cela se pratique de moins en
moins, elles réservent leurs faveurs à un amant unique. Le plus souvent, elles
constituent, comme certaines filles soumises isolées, des sociétés en comman-
dite d’amants multiples, et prennent le soin de réserver à chacun d’eux son jour
et sa nuit. Jamais la femme galante ne se livre au racolage ou au “raccrochage,”
pour employer un terme alors répandu; elle se vend à qui lui plaît après un simu-
lacre de cours ou procède à un “levage,” comme savent le faire les femmes de
café ou de restaurant de nuit et même les grandes “horizontales” lors de leur
promenade au Bois.62
(Gallant women, as good courtiers, have choices and because of this, can some-
times have the illusion of giving themselves away; sometimes, but this is done
less and less, they reserve their favors for a single lover. More often than not, like
certain isolated prostitutes, they make up limited partnerships of multiple lovers,
59 Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, 3rd edition (Paris:

J-B Baillière et fils, 1857), 1: 172.
60 Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 2. While focusing on the earlier period of and
between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, Jann Matlock’s book is no less fundamental in understand-
ing the nexus of prostitution and representation in the nineteenth century: Jann Matlock, Scenes of
Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994). Finally, in addition to Alain Lescart’s Splendeurs et misères de la gri-
sette: évolution d’une figure emblématique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), other more general and
recent studies of prostitutes in nineteenth-century include Éléonore Reverzy, Portrait de l’artiste en fille
de joie: la littérature publique (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016); Mireille Dottin-Orsini and Daniel
Grojnowski, L’Imaginaire de la prostitution: de la Bohème à la Belle Époque (Paris: Hermann, 2017);
and Marjorie Rousseau-Minier, Des filles sans joie: le roman de la prostituée dans la seconde moitié du
XIXe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2018).
61 Quoted in Delvau, Dictionnaire érotique moderne, 353.
62 Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution (XIXe siècle) (Paris: Flammarion,
1982), 197–8. Delvau supports this possible meaning of “femme galante”: “FEMME GALANTE. Femme
dont le métier est de faire jouir les hommes—qui en ont les moyens” (GALLANT WOMAN. Woman
whose job is to provoke pleasure in men—those who can afford it) (181), and the phrase appears first
in Dottin-Orsini and Grojnowski’s list of “les innombrables variations complétant le mot ‘femme’ ou
‘ille’ ” in the nineteenth century (Dottin-Orsini and Grojnowski, L’Imaginaire de la prostitution, 14–15).
and take care to reserve a particular day and night for each of them. The gallant
woman never partakes in solicitation or in “picking up,” to use a common term;
she sells herself to whoever pleases her after a simulacrum of courtship, or car-
ries out a “successful hook-up,” like the women in the cafés or night restaurants,
or even the great “practitioners of the horizontal arts” do when walking in
the Bois.)
More generally, and in a passage that could be a reference to “Une martyre,”

Walter Benjamin reminds us of the central role of the prostitute in Baudelaire’s
poetic world, saying both “For Baudelaire, prostitution is the yeast that causes the
great urban masses to rise in his imagination” and “Woman in Baudelaire: the
most precious booty in the ‘triumph of allegory’—the life which signifies death.
This quality is most inalienably the whore’s. It is the only thing about her that
cannot be bought, and for Baudelaire it is the only thing that matters.”63 Take, for
example, the oft-cited lines from “Le Crépuscule du soir”:
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
Comme un ver qui dérobe à l’Homme ce qu’il mange.64
(Prostitution lights up in the streets; / Like an anthill it opens its exits; / It makes
its haunted way everywhere, / Like the enemy who also tries his hand; / It stirs in
the heart of the city of filth / Like a worm stealing Man’s food.)
As for the target shooting without a specified target—“il lui serait agréable de tirer
quelques balles pour tuer le Temps”—the activity is undertaken, as critics have rightly
underscored, to kill Time.65 In light of the present discussion of innuendo, it is
63 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed.
Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
[Belknap], 2006), 147 (fragment 18) and 144 (fragment 14).
64 OC 1: 95, v. 15–20. For a thorough consideration of intertextuality throughout Le Spleen de Paris,
see Scott, “Intertextes et mystifications.” While the scattered notes weren’t intended for publication,
even in their rough state the pages of Baudelaire’s Fusées include additional thoughts and comparisons
related to prostitution, including “L’amour, c’est le goût de la prostitution. Il n’est même pas de plaisir
noble qui ne puisse être ramené à la Prostitution” (OC 1: 649). For more on prostitution elsewhere in
Baudelaire’s œuvre: in “À une passante,” see Beryl Schlossman, “The Night of the Poet: Baudelaire,
Benjamin, and the Woman in the Street,” MLN, 119.5 (December 2004), 1013–32; in La Fanfarlo, see
Nathalie Buchet Rogers, “La Fanfarlo: la prostituée rend au poète la monnaie de sa pièce,” Nineteenth-
Century French Studies, 32.3–4 (Spring–Summer 2004), 238–52.
65 This expression also appears in “À une heure du matin,” as the subject details a day in his hor
rible life: “être monté pour tuer le temps, pendant une averse, chez une sauteuse qui m’a prié de lui
dessiner un costume de Vénustre” (OC 1: 288; original emphasis). Killing time occurs during a storm,
“une averse,” a turning away from; despite of the specific time indicated in the title, this moment is a
not unreasonable to read the shooting release of “quelques balles,” metonymically,

as ejaculations: a pleasant enough way to spend a leisurely afternoon. Lest the
vulgarity of such an interpretation seem anachronistic, Delvau attests the very
definition and even situates the sources of ejaculate squarely in a lexicon of shoot-
ing: “BALLES. Les testicules, à cause de leur forme: c’est avec eux qu’on fusille les
femmes—à bout portant’ (BULLETS. Testicles, because of their shape: they are
used to shoot at women—at point blank range) (45).66
The phrase “tuer le Temps” has received the lion’s share of this poem’s critical
attention—including, for Barbara Johnson, as one of the keys that unlock an
important reading of the poem’s metaphors67—and by virtue of its allegorical
presence, the notion of “Temps” does deserve some consideration. The poem
“Portraits de maîtresses” precedes “Le Galant tireur” immediately and thus—
despite Baudelaire’s invitation (to Houssaye and to us) to cut up Le Spleen de Paris
as we see fit (“Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie, vous le
manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture” (We can split it where we want, me with my rev-
erie, you with the manuscript, the reader with his reading) (OC 1: 275))—its final
words offer a transition to the killing in “Le Galant tireur”: “Ensuite on fit apporter
de nouvelles bouteilles, pour tuer le Temps qui a la vie si dure, et accélérer la Vie
qui coule si lentement” (And then new bottles were brought to kill Time whose
life is so hard, and to accelerate life’s slow trickle) (OC 1: 349).68 Elsewhere in
Baudelaire’s œuvre, Time—the “joueur avide / Qui gagne sans tricher, à tout
coup!” (Insatiable player / Who wins suddenly, without cheating!)—famously
plays along despite the omnipresent threat of the clock, “dieu sinistre, effrayant,
impassible” that is always able to catch us no matter where we go: “Remember!
turning away from—ab and vertō, hardly an innocent etymon in the present discussion of turning
away from verse—the miserable present, toward the pleasures that surpass time (specifically, the pleas-
ures offered by the prostitute (“sauteuse”) mentioned in the end of the phrase).
66 Steve Murphy similarly elucidates Rimbaud’s “L’Enfant qui ramassa les balles” in Rimbaud et la
ménagerie impériale (Lyon/Paris: Presses universitaires de Lyon / Éditions du CNRS, 1991), 66–8. For
another consideration of double-entendre informing one of Baudelaire’s prose poems, see Rubenstein,
“The Figuration of Genre.” For Bakhtin, the kind of linguistic diversity that allows for such reading
stems, precisely, from the opposition between individuals: “Oppositions between individuals are only
surface upheavals of the untamed elements in social heteroglossia, surface manifestations of those
elements that play on such individual oppositions, make them contradictory, saturate their conscious-
ness and discourses with a more fundamental speech diversity” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination,
326; original emphasis).
67 It is also central to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire in Donner le temps. Taking the phrase
“tuer le Temps” in a different direction, Maria Scott suggests that “le texte peut aussi être lu comme une
attaque figurée contre le lecteur qui se fie aux significations littérales, car celui qui ne saisit pas le sens
allégorique du texte ignorerait forcément que le texte le vise” (the text can also be read like a figurative
attack against the reader who relies on literal meanings, because he who cannot grasp the allegorical
meaning of the text would necessarily remain ignorant of the fact that the text is targeting him) (Scott,
“Intertextes et mystifications,” 71).
68 Murphy sees a succession in the shared lexicon between “Portraits de maîtresses,” “Le Galant
tireur,” and “Le Tir et le cimetière”; see Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 472 n. 33. For a discus-
sion of killing time in “Le Mauvais Vitrier” and “Portraits de maîtresses,” see Cheryl Krueger, “Telling
Stories in Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 30.3–4 (Spring–Summer
2002), 282–300.
Souviens-toi, prodigue! Esto memor!.”69 More generally, many studies have

addressed the growing presence of timekeeping devices as the industrial revolu-
tion created an increasing number of opportunities to measure the extent to
which time means money.70 It is helpful, however, to consider “tuer le Temps” with
the sentence that immediately follows it:
il lui serait agréable de tirer quelques balles pour tuer le Temps. Tuer ce monstre-
là, n’est-ce pas l’occupation la plus ordinaire et la plus légitime de chacun?
Or, rather: the question that immediately follows it. The Baudelairian narrator’s
free indirect style—already potentially evident in the participle “disant” from the
first sentence—addresses all those who would logically pursue “l’occupation la
plus ordinaire et la plus légitime”: all those who seek to be “ordinaire” and “légi-
time,” that is to say (nearly) all of us.71 Here, then, is the moment when we readers
become complicit in this scene, when we nod in agreement that a carriage ride
through a wood is both ordinary and legitimate—the protagonist is merely going
to shoot a bit, to idle away the hours—at the same time that we also nod, know-
ingly, that there might also be more…
But the temporal desire in this poem isn’t merely the act of looking for any
banal activity to fill some blank space; rather, it is an attempt to kill time, to put it
down and out, make it stop ticking, and move beyond it.72 As we read in Fusées
69 “L’Horloge” (OC 1: 81); see the discussion of the prose poem of the same title supra, in Chapter 1.
Additional echoes from “L’Horloge” that will resurface in “Le Galant tireur” identify the heart as a tar-
get: “Les vibrantes Douleurs dans ton cœur plein d’effroi / Se planteront bientôt comme une cible” (the
vibrant Pains in your terrified heart / will soon land in a target) (v. 3–4). Time’s unstoppable force,
pushing us to our death, remains at the forefront of Crispin Jones’s watch “The Accurate”: “This is the
most accurate wristwatch you can buy. The hour hand reads ‘remember,’ the minute hand ‘you will die’ ”
(mrjoneswatches.com/collections/mens-watches/products/the-accurate, consulted July 20, 2017); see
Simon Garfield, Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time (Edinburgh: Canongate,
2017), 328).
70 See, among many others: E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,”
Past and Present, 38 (December 1967), 56–97; Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour:
Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1996); Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992); and
David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press / Belknap, 2000). Garfield reminds us that in the mid-nineteenth century
“with railways, a new time consciousness affected all who travelled” and “the railways began to imprint
their own clock upon the world” (Timekeepers, 46, 47).
71 In his Salon de 1859, Baudelaire mused, “existe-t-il [. . .] quelque chose de plus charmant, de plus
fertile et d’une nature plus positivement excitante que le lieu commun?” (is there anything more
charming, more fertile and with a more positively exciting nature than the commonplace?) (OC 2: 609;
original emphasis). For similar consideration elsewhere in Baudelaire’s poetic work, see Graham Robb,
“The Poetics of the Commonplace in Les Fleurs du Mal,” Modern Language Review, 86.1 (January
1991), 57‒65.
72 For Krueger, “to kill time in the sense of abolishing it suggests the transcendence of time-
boundedness associated with lyric poetry” (Cheryl Krueger, The Art of Procrastination: Baudelaire’s
Poetry in Prose (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 17). Chambers develops this point
further in his brilliant analysis of the “Tableaux parisiens” from Les Fleurs du Mal:
and, specifically, on the same feuillet that includes his surface-level summary of
“Le Galant tireur”: “Il y a des moments de l’existence où le temps et l’étendue sont
plus profonds, et le sentiment de l’existence immensément augmenté” (There are
moments in life where time and breadth are deeper, and the feeling of existence is
vastly augmented). (OC 1: 658)73 Orgasm is a kind of force pushing out of oneself;
an abandonment of identity. It also causes a collapse of the ego: in exhaustion, the
body abandons itself to the flow of the currents that pass through it and it
regresses to the vegetative mode, the “petite mort” to which Georges Bataille
refers: “Par la violence du dépassement je saisis dans le désordre de mes rires et de
mes sanglots, dans l’excès des transports qui me brisent, la similitude de l’horreur
et d’une volupté qui m’excède, de la douleur finale et d’une insupportable joie” (By
the violence of excess I grasp in the chaos of my laughter and my sobs, in the
excesses of the transports which break me, the similarity of horror and of a lust
that exceeds me, of a final pain and an intolerable joy).74 This theme finds an echo
in the opening paragraphs of Baudelaire’s prose poem “Un cheval de race,” first
published in Le Figaro, February 24, 1864:
Elle est bien laide. Elle est délicieuse pourtant!

Le Temps et l’Amour l’ont marquée de leurs griffes et lui ont cruellement
enseigné ce que chaque minute et chaque baiser emportent de jeunesse et de
fraîcheur.
(OC 1: 343)
(She is rather unsightly. But delectable nonetheless!
Time and Love have marked her with their claws and have cruelly taught
her what each minute and each kiss take from youth and vitality.)
(PP, 99; modified)
In offering two figurations of a world governed by time—as a place where (in verse) the
noise of history allegorically bespeaks an evil transcending power, and as a place (in prose)
where, ironically, the noise of daily process simply exists, in its own limitless readability—
he prepares for his readers an unstable and therefore uncertain and divided position of
reading, in relation to the time-governed world of the city, that mirrors the unresolvable
situation of knowing that one doesn’t know—the experience of an interpretability that
cannot conclude—that I am calling disalienation. [. . .] Literature’s response to the problem-
atics of time, experienced as the noise of entropy, is then to engineer for the reader a salu-
tary if disconcerting experience of disalienating resistance to closure.
(Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 60–1)
See in particular his “Allegory, History, and the Weather of Time” (51–118).
73 This citation and the passage that offers one summary of “Le Galant tireur” are both on feuillet XI
(1: OC 658–60).
74 Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard [Blanche], 1987), 10: 577. Thanks to Robert
St. Clair for discussing this and many other aspects of the present study. Barbey d’Aurevilly would
make the same connection between killing time and sexual pleasures in “Le Rideau cramoisi” (from
Les Diaboliques, first published in 1874): “il avait ramassé parmi les grisettes de la ville une assez jolie
petite fille, qu’il avait prise pour maîtresse, et qui lui servait, disait-il, à tuer le temps…” (he had picked
up a rather pretty young girl from the streetwalkers of the day before, had taken her as a mistress, and
he used her, he said, to kill time) (Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, “Le Rideau cramoisi,” Œuvres romanesques
complètes, ed. Jacques Petit, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1964–6), 2: 28.
The moment of ecstasy in “Le Galant tireur”—the moment of the “tir”—thus offers a
combination of release, transcendence, and lassitude that disrupts the perception of
time, which in turn is slowed down, suspended, or, just perhaps, killed:75
—Et il offrit galamment la main à sa chère, délicieuse et exécrable femme, à cette

mystérieuse femme à laquelle il doit tant de plaisirs, tant de douleurs, et peut-
être aussi une grande partie de son génie.
Critical studies tend to pursue a transparent reading in which “sa chère, délicieuse
et exécrable femme” is the protagonist’s wife. In addition, however, the return of
the language of gallantry (“il offrit galamment la main”) could be a gleam in
Baudelaire’s eye, hinting that there is more to be uncovered. One additional level
of meaning is obvious, and still operates in the literal, through polysemy: that of
“chère” meaning expensive. In fact, while the woman to whom the hand is
extended could be inside the carriage, if we consider her outside—a more figura
tive, allusive “femme galante” waiting for the carriage to arrive at a pre-arranged
“heure délicieuse du rendez-vous” as Baudelaire calls it in his Salon de 1859 (OC
2: 679)—then the outstretched hand is perhaps helping her down and out of the
carriage toward some external shooting range that a literal reading would pro-
vide, while also alluding to an invitation up and into the carriage, where a differ-
ent kind of shot is about to be lined up. Although in this case the outstretched
hand need not be so outstretched after all, since “il offrit galamment la main” sup-
ports the possible presence of innuendo. First, let us start with Émile Littré, who
invokes a literal definition of the first meaning of “galanterie” in his definition:
“Donner la main, offrir la main, soit pour aider quelqu’un, soit en signe de poli-
tesse à une dame pour la mener quelque part’ (To give one’s hand, to offer one’s
hand, either to help someone, or as a sign of politeness to a lady in order to lead
her somewhere) (3: 382). Reading on, we are reminded that it can also mean to
join forces (“Donner la main à, s’unir avec”; 3: 382), before we arrive at the
numerous social situations—from card games to dances—in which “la main”
75 I consider this very notion of ecstasy offering—much like poetry—moments that stretch beyond
the limits of time in my “Lire ‘H.’: une question de temps” (in Paul Perron and Sergio Villani (eds.), Lire
Rimbaud: approches critiques (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000), 183–200).” Of course, this ten-
sion continues to persist today, as Jonathan Taylor explains (“Temporal Tragedy: Some Problems with
Thinking about Time,” TLS (March 10, 2017), 5). Particularly interesting are Crispin Jones’s watches,
including the “Average Day,” which uses data from the director of the Oxford Centre for Time Use
Research to show, in twenty-four colored slots around the dial, what the average person is doing at any
given time of day—“The challenge to the wearer is to break free from the routine” (Garfield,
Timekeepers, 329)—and the Cyclops, which
dispenses with a conventional arrangement of hour, minute and second hands; instead a
single hour marker passes around the coloured dial. Each hour is represented by a different
coloured circle, the black hoop gradually passes over each circle to indicate the time.
Cyclops can be read with a relaxed kind of accuracy that offers a counterpoint to our hectic
modern lives. (mrjoneswatches.com/collections/mens-watches/products/cyclops, consulted
July 20, 2017; emphasis added)
refers to leading one’s partner(s) and having a control that can be retained or
ceded (3: 386). The multiple possible significations of “la main” underscore the
“deux images contrastées, voire contradictoires, de la galanterie.” Through this
scene’s duality a sincere “main” can signify an offer to help the woman out of the
carriage. On the other hand, it can represent a less chaste and more unseemly invi-
tation, referring to the hand that is performing another action entirely, preparing
to take the first shot, and one ceding control to another. For, as Littré explains, the
word is also used “pour caractériser la manière d’agir de la main dans certaines
opérations” (3: 385), and on this point Delvau once again offers some assistance,
combining manual dexterity with “galanterie”:
MAIN EXPERTE (Avoir la). Savoir bien branler les hommes, chose difficile, en
effet, et pour laquelle toute femme galante doit faire un apprentissage fort long et
très minutieux [. . .]
MAIN LÉGÈRE (Avoir la). Se dit d’une femme versée dans l’art de la volupté, qui
branle un homme avec une telle dextérité qu’il jouit sans savoir à quoi attribuer
sa jouissance, à une bouche ou à une main. (244)
(EXPERT HAND (to have an). To know how to jerk a man off, a difficult thing
indeed, and for which all gallant women must undertake a long and painstaking
training [. . .].
LIGHT TOUCH (to have a). Said of a woman, well-versed in the art of lust, who
gets a man off with such dexterity that he climaxes without knowing to what he
should attribute his pleasure, a mouth or a hand.)
As this mysterious woman lacks identifying characteristics, she is an amalgam for

all of the women whom he has met in similar circumstances; thus the offer of a
hand—be it “experte” or “légère”—helps us see better how he can consider “her”
to be the source of “tant de plaisirs, tant de douleurs, et peut-être aussi une grande
partie de son génie.”76
la maladresse de son époux [. . .]
Having followed the consistent presence of innuendos to this point, this next
passage seems rather evident: to specific target-shooting language such as “une
76 Albert Glatigny combined these themes in his 1863 play Scapin maquereau: “Elle ne sera pas une
fille ordinaire, / Réclamant aux vieillards libidineux ses gants, / Et tirant tous les jours des coups
extravagants….” (She will not be an ordinary girl, / Begging gloves off of libidinous old men, / And
turning extraordinary tricks every day) (Albert Glatigny, Scapin maquereau, drame en deux actes
(1862–3), Le Théâtre érotique de la rue de la Santé (Batignolles [Brussels]: [Poulet-Malassis], 1864–6),
116–17 (107–25).
cible” Baudelaire prefers a more vague and allusive (and elusive) “but proposé.”77
The subject’s “maladresse” is a series of off-target “shots,” led astray by his inability—
a literal lack of dexterity—to handle their source. Littré reminds us that, beyond
all of its gallant resonance, “adresse” refers to bodily control and, in his inclusion
of the word “manier,” the related importance of wielding and manipulating a tool
or other object: “Habileté à s’y prendre soit dans les exercices du corps, soit dans
les choses de l’intelligence. Son adresse à manier un fusil, un cheval. Un tour
d’adresse. Persuadé qu’il fallait user d’adresse” (Skill in either physical or mental
exercises. One’s skill in handling a gun, a horse. A show of skill. Convinced that
skill was needed) (Littré 1: 59). That a shot might even hit the roof remains within
the realm of plausibility if such a scene takes place inside a covered carriage, as
opposed to a shooting range in a sylvan setting, which would most logically not
have a roof: such was the case, for example, for the Tir national de Vincennes,
inaugurated in 1860.78 Finally, the return of a relationship category that befits the
“ordinaire” and the “légitime”—that is to say, “son époux”—is yet another term
that simultaneously establishes legitimacy and alludes to a figurative meaning of
lover or mistress, attested by Delvau;79 such a playful use of “époux” here could
even suggest the familiarity with meeting the “femme galante” at their meeting
place and time.
As the sentence moves from the third person to a direct address between
“époux”—while the vouvoiement does not necessarily imply the same lack of
familiarity as the adjective “mystérieuse,” neither does it preclude the possibility
that this relationship is little more than an acquaintance—the arrival of a “pou-
pée” brings the tension and violence to new heights. As with “Laquelle est la
vraie?” (see supra, Chapter 2), the three paragraphs that make up the second half
of the poem are punctuated with quoted speech that marks a shift from the
reported speech or thought signaled by the participle “disant” of the opening line
to spoken acts of and through language:
la maladresse de son époux, celui-ci se tourna brusquement vers elle, et lui dit:
“Observez cette poupée, là-bas, à droite, qui porte le nez en l’air et qui a la mine
77 This more general notion of an objective that is the object of the proposition is, not surprisingly,
also attested by Delvau: “BUT D’AMOUR, ou BUT DU DÉSIR, ou BUT MIGNON DE FOUTERIE
(Le). La nature de la femme, à laquelle tendent tous les membres suffisamment virils” (PURPOSE OF
LOVE, or PURPOSE OF DESIRE, or PURPOSE OF TENDER SCREWING (The). The woman’s
nature, to which all adequately virile members aspire”) (76).
78 See Jules Gaildrau, Tir national de Vincennes (1861), Paris: Capital of the 19th Century. Brown
Digital Repository, Brown University Library, Providence, RI, repository.library.brown.edu/studio/
item/bdr:86827/
79 “ÉPOUX, ÉPOUSE. Amant, maîtresse. ‘Les femmes elles-mêmes appellent leurs amants: mon
époux’ ” (SPOUSE, WIFE. Lover, mistress. “Women themselves call their lovers: ‘my husband’ ”) (156).
si hautaine. Eh bien! cher ange, je me figure que c’est vous.” Et il ferma les yeux et
il lâcha la détente. La poupée fut nettement décapitée. (original emphasis)
According to critics’ traditional interpretation, the woman becomes a target only

after she makes fun of the subject’s “maladresse”: in Johnson’s important analysis,
which emphasizes the central role of the poem’s figures, “la femme n’est visée dans
la deuxième figure que parce qu’elle est figure de l’échec de la première figure” (the
woman becomes a target in the second figure only because she is the figure of the
failure of the first figure).80 While similarly seeing the woman’s laughter as a key
moment in the poem, Maria Scott deftly reads it as, on the one hand, a possible
metaphor for the poet’s aim with Le Spleen de Paris more generally—specifically
with respect to those who mocked his prose poetry—and, on the other, “a figural
attack on the literal-minded reader.”81 Concurring with Scott on the importance
of reading figuratively, I maintain—and this point is reinforced by the lack of pre-
cision in Baudelaire’s lexicon of targets—that the woman was the target all along,
that the amalgamation of “femme” and “poupée” reflects a vague generalization
that is the focus of the subject’s sexual impulse. Such blurring is reinforced in the
mirroring of sounds between the “épouse” inherent in “époux” and “poupée,”
phonetically [epu] and [pupe]; such audible blurring is an element of the miracle
of Baudelaire’s poetic prose, the miraculum for which Littré gives, in the defin
ition of the word “mirer,” the example “Il mira longtemps, et cassa la poupée” (He
aimed for a while, and broke the doll) (3: 572). The visual and audible are in full
force here, as the quoted speech begins with an insistence on looking (“Observez”),
only to be followed by a lack of sight (“il ferma les yeux”) and an ultimate removal
of the source of sight and sound altogether (“décapitée”). As far as the poetic sub-
ject is concerned, she could just as easily be Woman, or Anywoman—just as the
multiple plurals of the preceding prose poem, “Portraits de maîtresses,” serve to
blur the boundaries of individuation82—and she is thus an accessory to his priority
of killing Time. But she is also more: as target, and through her decapitation, the
feminine object is the other that enables the attempted reification of the phallic
power of the implicit gun that not only hits her but destroys (decapitates) her.
As Debarati Sanyal convincingly explains,
For Baudelaire, “woman” is a site of contested meaning at the crossroads

of aesthetic modernism and the material conditions of capitalist, urban
80 Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique, 90; original emphasis.

81 Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, 134–5. In a similar vein, Edward Kaplan states that “Literature’s
figurative functions become the second paragraph’s target”; Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 139.
82 For Leo Bersani, “Sexual excitement momentarily breaks down that structure of the self which
enables us to ‘bind’ both internal and external stimuli within a controlling and organizing subjective
wholeness. This excitement is threatening precisely because it destroys such organization and control.”
Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 87. For more
on sadism in Baudelaire, see Jean-Pierre Richard, Poésie et profondeur (Paris: Seuil, 1955), 124; and
Georges Blin, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire (Paris: José Corti, 1948).
modernity. His representations of women map the violence of a body’s

inscription into form within an increasingly market-oriented imperial and
colonial culture. This preoccupation with the body’s through forms of sexual,
economic, and racial violence is tied into a critique of poetry’s performative
force, that is to say, of poetry’s explicit and often violent production of the
bodies it designates.83
In “Le Galant tireur,” then, Baudelaire posits a break between degrees of the
figurative: namely, between, on the one hand, the metaphor of killing time and,
on the other, the use of decapitation as a not inaccurate way of expressing the
pressure, fear, anger, and release that are inherent in the sadistic orgasm.84 Thus
in an admittedly roundabout way, I return to Johnson’s analysis, this time to agree
with an important aspect of it: specifically, with her reminder that, for Aristotle,
the genius—explicitly present in “Le Galant tireur” by way of the woman inspiring
“une grande partie de son génie”—excels in using figurative language:
It is a great thing to make a proper use of each of the elements mentioned, and of
double words and rare words too, but by far the greatest thing is the use of
metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius. For the right use
of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.85
The genius of this passage is its abundance of innuendo: from “balles” and “but
proposé” to “maladresse” and “époux” we now add “poupée,” which preserves the
coexistence in this poem of the literal and the allusive; the former is reinforced by
Littré’s definition of a “Petite figure en plâtre qui sert de but dans les tirs” (small
83 Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity, 13; see especially her chapter 3, “Bodies in Motion, Texts on
Stage: Baudelaire’s Women and the Forms of Modernity” (95–134). Burton underscores the extent to
which this phenomenon is in no way limited to the prose poems:
it is of the greatest significance that each of the three main cycles of love poems in Les
Fleurs du Mal culminates with or includes a poem whose avowed purpose is, using lan-
guage itself as an instrument of violence, to beat, torture, humiliate or rape the woman who
elsewhere—or, still more characteristically, in the same poem—has been transformed into
a suprahuman idol before which the lover prostrates himself with masochistic fervor.
(Burton, Baudelaire in 1859, 133; original emphasis)
84 Marder astutely addresses Baudelaire’s sexual sadism in relation to temporality in her book Dead
Time, especially the chapter “Women Tell Time” (14–67). For Bersani, Baudelaire’s most explicit poem
of sadistic sexuality is “À celle qui est trop gaie,” with honorable mention going to “À une Madone”
(Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 71); Charles D. Minahen explores this poem more fully in “Irony and
Violence in Baudelaire’s ‘À celle qui est trop gaie,’” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures,
62.1 (2008), 3–15. Finally, Philippe Sollers combines these topics pithily in his exclamations “Tringlages
de culs à la chaîne! Gougnoteries en série! Décapitations!” (Assembly-line ass-ramming! Serial pussy-
eating! Decapitations!) (Philippe Sollers, Femmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 261).
85 Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a, quoted in Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique, 91. Indeed, “Le
texte semble donc illustrer la conception traditionnelle de la métaphore comme substitution d’un
terme à un autre au moyen d’une ressemblance” (The text thus seems to illustrate the traditional con-
cept of the metaphor as a substitution of one term for another through resemblance) (Johnson,
Défigurations du langage poétique, 88; original emphasis).
plaster figure which is used as a target for shooting) (3: 1274), the latter by
Delvau’s “Femme galante avec le cul de laquelle il est permis à tout le monde de
jouer” (prostitute whose ass anyone can play with) (311). But it is not her body in
general that causes the subject to notice her: it is her face; or, to be precise, what
her face signifies. Not the angle of her nose in the air but what having one’s nose
in the air means; not the arrangement of her various facial muscles but their abil-
ity to give her a certain air. Calling it “l’objet [. . .] le plus intéressant dans la
société,” Baudelaire offers his reflections on reading the complexity of a woman’s
face in Fusées: specifically on feuillet X, the one that precedes his comments
related to “Le Galant tireur”:
J’ai trouvé la définition du Beau,—de mon Beau. C’est quelque chose d’ardent et
de triste, quelque chose d’un peu vague, laissant carrière à la conjecture. Je vais, si
l’on veut, appliquer mes idées à un objet sensible, à l’objet, par exemple, le plus
intéressant dans la société, à un visage de femme. Une tête séduisante et belle,
une tête de femme, veux-je dire, c’est une tête qui fait rêver à la fois,—mais d’une
manière confuse,—de volupté et de tristesse; qui comporte une idée de mélancolie,
de lassitude, même de satiété,—soit une idée contraire, c’est-à-dire une ardeur, un
désir de vivre, associé avec une amertume refluante, comme venant de privation ou
de désespérance. Le mystère, le regret sont aussi des caractères du Beau.
[. . .] cette idée de volupté, qui dans un visage de femme est une provocation
d’autant plus attirante que le visage est généralement plus mélancolique. Mais
cette tête contiendra aussi quelque chose d’ardent et de triste,—des besoins spir-
ituels, des ambitions ténébreusement refoulées,—l’idée d’une puissance gron-
dante, et sans emploi,—quelquefois l’idée d’une insensibilité vengeresse (car le
type du Dandy n’est pas à négliger dans ce sujet),—quelquefois aussi,—et c’est
l’un des caractères de beauté les plus intéressants,—le mystère, et enfin (pour que
j’aie le courage d’avouer jusqu’à quel point je me sens moderne en esthétique), le
Malheur. (OC 1: 657)
(I found the definition of Beauty—of my Beauty. It is something ardent and sad,
something a little vague, leaving itself open to conjecture. I will, if I am allowed,
apply my ideas to a sensitive object, for example, to the most interesting object in
society, a woman’s face. A seductive and beautiful face, a woman’s face, I mean, is
a face which makes one dream at the same time—but in a confused manner—of
voluptuousness and sadness; which carries an idea of melancholy, lassitude, and
even satiety—or of a conflicting idea, meaning an ardor, a will to live, associated
with an ebbing bitterness, as if coming from privation or despair. Mystery and
regret are also characteristics of Beauty.
[. . .] this idea of voluptuousness, which in a woman’s face is a provocation
which becomes more attractive the more the face is generally melancholic. But
this face will also contain something ardent and sad—spiritual needs, darkly
repressed ambitions—the idea of an unused, thundering power—sometimes the

idea of a vengeful insensitivity (for the ideal type of the Dandy is not to be
neglected on this topic),—sometimes also—and it is one of the most interesting
characteristics of beauty—mystery, and, finally (so that I may the courage to
admit how modern I feel in my aesthetics), Misfortune.)
A “manière confuse” is putting it lightly; the woman’s face provokes as many emo-
tions in the source of the male gaze, which finds it seductive, beautiful, voluptu-
ous, sad, bearing melancholy, lassitude, and satiety, ardor, bitterness, desperation,
mystery, and regret. Its overall provocation—part attraction, part sadness—is
what produces Baudelairian sadism: the combination of love and violence, “des
besoins spirituels” joined with “des ambitions ténébreusement refoulées,” all of
which give rise to the very real threat of a “puissance grondante,” the kind of
strength that can overtake the gazer and result in violent acts. It is on this note
that he closes his prose poem “Le Désir de peindre” (see infra, Chapter 4): “Il y a
des femmes qui inspirent l’envie de les vaincre et de jouir d’elles; mais celle-ci
donne le désir de mourir lentement sous son regard” (There are women who
inspire the desire to defeat them and to take full pleasure in them; but this one
makes one want to die slowly under her gaze).86 Baudelaire constructs a poetic
space built of equal parts conquering and pleasure, seeing and dying: taking
delight in watching a death. As Leo Bersani explains, the very presence of the
multiple objects of desire only serves to destabilize the subject himself: “The
investing of multiple images with the affects of desire involves a scattering of the
self; a radical indeterminacy of being is the result of a continual displacement of
being” (86). It is on this precise point—which recalls Viala’s comment of “deux
images contrastées, voire contradictoires”87—that “Portraits de maîtresses” sets
up “Le Galant tireur” nicely yet again, particularly as the last “compagnon” in the
conversation in “Portraits” announces the impulsive violence that is often a part
of Baudelairian love:
Figurez-vous une personne incapable de commettre une erreur de sentiment ou

de calcul; figurez-vous une sérénité désolante de caractère; un dévouement sans
comédie et sans emphase; une douceur sans faiblesse; une énergie sans violence.
[. . .] Combien de fois ne me suis-pas retenu de lui sauter à la gorge, en lui criant:
“Sois donc imparfaite, misérable! afin que je puisse t’aimer sans malaise et sans
colère!” Pendant plusieurs années, je l’ai admirée, le cœur plein de haine.
86 OC 1: 340. It is, too, an important contributing factor to the misogyny in Baudelaire’s writing,
such as in “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” in which woman is “une espèce d’idole, stupide peut-être,
mais éblouissante” (a sort of idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling) (OC 2: 713).
87 Viala, La France galante, 37.
[….] Un soir, dans un bois. . . au bord d’une mare…, après une mélancolique
promenade où ses yeux, à elle, réfléchissaient la douceur du ciel, et où mon cœur,
à moi, était crispé comme l’enfer…
[. . .] il fallait accorder ce sentiment avec l’horreur que cet être m’inspirait; me
débarrasser de cet être sans lui manquer de respect. Que vouliez-vous que je
fisse d’elle, puisqu’elle était parfaite? (OC 1: 348–9; original emphasis).
(Imagine a person incapable of making a mistake in sentiment or calculation;
imagine a devastating serenity of character; a devotion without pretense or
emphasis; a gentleness without weakness; an energy without violence. [. . .] How
many times did I refrain from jumping her by the throat and shouting: ‘Be
imperfect, wretch! so that I may love you without discomfort and without
anger!’ For many years I admired her with a heart full of hatred.
[. . .] One evening, in a wood. . . at the edge of a pond…, after a melancholy
walk during which her eyes were reflecting the sweetness of the sky, and my
heart was as tight as hell…
[. . .] I had to reconcile that feeling with the horror that this creature was
arousing in me; get rid of this creature without disrespecting her. What would
you expect me to do with her, since she was perfect?). (PP, 107–8; modified)
As for the violent act described in “Le Galant tireur,” the present reading of
decapitation could suggest that it is related to the expression “guillotine de
Cythère,” designating female genitalia: “GUILLOTINE DE CYTHÈRE. Le con-
traire de l’autre, qui est un instrument de mort, tandis que celui-ci est une
machine à vit:—une belle femme” (CYTHERA’S GUILLOTINE: The opposite of
the other one, which is an instrument of death, while this one is a machine of liv-
ing/shaft:—a beautiful woman).88 A more nuanced engagement with the meta-
phor (if not genius) of the decapitation leads not directly to the phallus via the
“guillotine de Cythère” but rather, via an allusion to displaced violence stemming
from the subject’s sadism, to the decapitation of the “poupée” and the choice of
violent imagery to represent losing one’s superior air; such a reading is supported
by Delvau’s explanation of the expression “Faire sa tête. Faire le dédaigneux; se
donner des airs de grand seigneur ou de grande dame” (To put on a face. To be
disdainful; to give oneself the airs and graces of a great lord or lady).89 This act is
thus the ultimate revenge toward the woman whose laugh is a rire castrateur,
whose very existence the subject finds threatening: hence the need to close his
88 Note the pun involving “vie” (life) and “vit” (phallus). J.-Ch-X [Jules Choux], Le Petit Citateur:
notes érotiques et pornographiques. Recueil de mots et d’expressions anciens et modernes, sur les choses de
l’amour, etc., pour servir de complément au Dictionnaire érotique du professeur de langue verte (Paphos
[Brussels], 1869), 194; original italics. See also Patrick Wald Lasowski, Guillotinez-moi! Précis de décap-
itation (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 39 and supra.
89 Alfred Delvau, Dictionnaire de la langue verte (Paris: E. Dentu, 1866), 374.
eyes and imagine someone else.90 The present study’s reading of “Le Galant tireur”
runs parallel to Bersani’s groundbreaking analysis of “À celle qui est trop gaie”
(one of the six poems that Baudelaire was forced to remove from Les Fleurs du
Mal) and “À une Madone”: “The venomous ejaculation into the wound at the end
of ‘À celle qui est trop gaie’ also kills the desiring imagination. Desire will no
longer ‘travel,’ and neither will the poet’s being. The poet’s sadism is an act of spec-
tacular single-mindedness.”91 This notion of traveling desire is crucial upon the
arrival of the “poupée”; as Bersani explains:
Desire “travels,” moves from one representation to another. This movement is

destructive in two ways. First of all, images are constantly being abandoned for
other images; secondly, the entire movement is generated by the need to get rid
of the irritating lack in desire, to replace the emptiness in even the most ecstatic
fantasy by the (imaginary) plenitude of satisfaction.92
Thus the act of figuring one woman (nearby, outside the carriage, in the subject’s
line of sight) for another (the “femme galante” in the carriage with him)—a sub-
stitution made even easier by the lack of the individuation with which they are
presented and the subject’s treatment of them as occupying the same amorphous
space for objects of desire—sets into motion the transposition of one image over
another. The decomposition and recomposition that results in the face of the
“poupée” (with her “nez en l’air” and “mine si hautaine”) sitting atop the body of
the “femme galante” is so violent that the act it sets up is framed in similar terms:
90 For more on the sadistic misogynist violence in these prose poems, see Murphy, Logiques du
dernier Baudelaire, 662.
91 Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 74. Lisa Downing expands on Bersani and takes this death drive
one step further, also evoking themes similar to those discussed in the present study:
There may be a temptation to read the two poems discussed above as describing displaced
and transformed sadistic orgasms, gained by killing rather than sex. However, it is my con-
tention that orgasm—or any high point of tension and release—is a mere hiatus in the
terms of poetic economy being described. It is death itself, not the “little death,” that is
being sought. (Lisa Downing, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century
French Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2003), 78–9)
Similarly, in her discussion of “Une martyre” she touches on the fact that the killer is named “ton
époux” and “the imaginative trip through time” (82), both of which are echoed in “Le Galant tireur” (as
is the image of decapitation: “Un cadavre sans tête,” OC 1: 112). See in particular her chapter “The
Poetics of Baudelaire’s Liebestod” (67–91). Finally, the presence of the “poupée” also evokes the carnival
game common in “fêtes foraines” of “jeu de massacre,” with its audible homophonic echoes of maso-
chism that bring “je” and “massacre” into such close proximity.
92 Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, 86. Jean-Luc Nancy points out that desire also travels in “Le Désir
de peindre”: “rien n’est plus visible que le passage d’un désir à l’autre. Le poème est écrit pour ça: pour
nous porter du ‘désir de peindre’ qui fait son titre au ‘désir de mourir’ que prononce sa dernière phrase.
Le poème va d’un désir à l’autre” (nothing is more visible than the passage from one desire to another.
This is why poems are written: to carry us from the “desire to paint,” its title, to the “desire to die,” its
final line. The poem goes from one desire to another) (Jean-Luc Nancy, Une pensée finie (Paris:
Éditions Galilée, 1990), 302). I am grateful to Elissa Marder for bringing Nancy’s suggestive reading to
my attention.
wanting to wipe the haughty look off the face he has in his mind, the subject
pushes his violent aggression and desire to the point where the only ways out are
literal decapitation or some other extreme release that comes from a figurative
death like a “petite mort.”93
Alors s’inclinant vers sa chère, sa délicieuse, son exécrable femme, son inévita-
ble et impitoyable Muse, et lui baisant respectueusement la main, il ajouta: ‘Ah!
mon cher ange, combien je vous remercie de mon adresse!’
The proposed return to comfortable and conventional signposts of “ordinaire”

and “légitime” through the gallant act of “s’incliner” and “lui bais[er] respec-
tueusement la main”94 is met with a near perfect repetition of the phrase “sa
chère, délicieuse et exécrable femme,” the difference residing in the additional
possessive adjectives (“sa chère, sa délicieuse, son exécrable femme, son inévitable
et impitoyable Muse”) with which the subject clings ever so tightly to the woman
who has proven successful in her role as Muse. Of course, his ejaculation does not
literally decapitate the woman, for it takes place in the immediate space of the
carriage, whereas the “poupée,” outside the carriage, is at more than arm’s length
from the action. The decapitation is similarly distant in metonymic terms, as it is
not the entire head that is literally removed but rather the face that is diminished;
but there, too, it is not the face itself that is altered, but rather its “air hautain.” The
subject’s own reading of the woman’s facial arrangement and expression has been
diminished, but rather than saying that his opinion of her had changed, the sub-
ject graphs the change onto the face itself, reconnecting it to the corporal realm in
keeping with much of the rest of the poem. It is for this reason that the post-
ejaculatory gratitude, in which the subject thanks his Muse for his own “adresse,”
is added to a violence brought to the pleasure’s very source: “lui baisant respec-
tueusement la main.” As much as “respectueusement” does in fact mean what it
says, Johnson is right to insist on the death that lurks via the portmanteau of the
word “-tueuse.”95 Such echoes are not new to Baudelaire, and recall two of the
three first rhymes in “À une passante”:
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
93 As he writes elsewhere in Fusées, “Il y a dans l’acte de l’amour une grande ressemblance avec la
torture” (OC 1: 659).
94 For Georges Blin, in this passage the subject expresses his “humilité cérémonieuse, parfaitement
caractéristique” (Le Sadisme de Baudelaire, 38).
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,

Dans son œil, livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.96
(The deafening street around me screamed. / Long, thin, in great mourning,
majestic pain, / A woman passed, with a lavish hand / Lifting, swinging the fes-
toon and hem; // Agile and noble, with her statue leg. / I was drinking, tense as
an extravagant, / In her livid eye, where the hurricane germinates, / The sweet-
ness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.)
The rhymes in these two quatrains prefigure this slow killing of a rhyme’s ability
to flourish: in the devolution from majes-tueuse to fas-tueuse to sta-tue to tue,
they are whittled down each time, or boiled down to their essence. . . which is, lit-
erally, “tue,” a killing.
In “Le Galant tireur,” the subject’s “adresse” having been righted, we can appre-
ciate the herky-jerky nature of the inspiration that leads to the self-professed
results of “génie.” Tracing its path from “maladresses” to ridicule and then to a
corrected measure where he hits his target, the tortuous path of the subject’s
inspiration underscores the ironic dimension of this poem: is his ultimate success
truly worth all the excitement? In and of itself, the success that finally does come
is quite “ordinaire”; or it would have been were it not for the subject’s earlier
misfires. It is through the effusive thanks and in the return to an elevated tone of
gallantry to describe the Muse’s assistance with his “adresse” that we see with full
force the poem’s allusive dimension, leading us yet again from Baudelaire’s own
summary in Fusées to something much more lurid, suggestive, and poetic.97 In
addition, the fact that the poem closes with this emphatic remark about the poetic
subject’s address (“mon adresse!”)—fundamental to the very nature of the
lyric98—encourages us to consider the poem’s auto-referential nature and to pursue
96 OC 1: 92, v. 1–8. For more discussion of these verses, as well as an insightful reading of what he
calls “the first great love poem of our ‘modernity’,” see Robert St. Clair, “Material Inscriptions: Charles
Baudelaire and the Poetry of the Modern World,” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature,
ed. Ken Seigneurie, vol. 4, 1771–919 (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), doi.org/10.1002/9781118635193.
ctwl0194. Both St. Clair and Philippe Rocher engage with Jean Starobinski’s famous reading of the
same rhymes, as well as the “-tue / Moi” of v. 5–6); see Jean Starobinski, L’Encre de la mélancolie
(Paris: Seuil, 2012), 493 and, especially, Rocher’s very strong rebuttal: Philippe Rocher, “Le Poème
et le détail: contribution à une ‘histoire rapprochée’ des vers de Rimbaud,” Parade sauvage, 27
(2016), 95–114 (96–8).
97 The preface to Nicolas Blondeau’s Dictionnaire érotique latin-français speaks quite directly to this
for a discussion of the use of arms to figure sexuality and the ambiguous message that results:
“l’adresse consiste alors à trouver des développements tels, qu’ils conviennent à deux sujets, l’un hon-
nête et décent, qui est exprimé, l’autre érotique, sous-entendu, et que les termes dont on se sert
s’adaptent aussi aisément à l’un qu’à l’autre” (the address consists of finding developments which suit
both subjects, one honest and decent, which is expressed, the other erotic, implied, and whose descrip-
tors adapt themselves to one another easily); Nicolas Blondeau, Dictionnaire érotique latin-français
(Paris: 1885), xliii; quoted in Murphy, Rimbaud et la ménagerie impériale, 65. Murphy develops the
metonymical relations further (65–8).
98 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 186–243.
the numerous productive ways in which this text can address: reinforcing, for
example, the present reading’s connection between procreation/masturbation
and literary productivity.
The coexistence of these multiple layers of address are examples of the greater
freedom that Baudelaire felt in the prose poem (“Je suis assez content de mon
Spleen. En somme, c’est encore Les Fleurs du Mal, mais avec beaucoup plus de
liberté, et de détail, et de raillerie”;99 see supra, Introduction). The prose poem’s
ludic, mocking tone and the censor-eluding potential of innuendo are central
elements of Baudelaire’s allusive poetic language that give his prose poems their
force, the very reason why Suzanne Bernard concluded that the prose poem “se
veut moins une ‘chose de beauté’ qu’un instrument de pouvoir” (thinks itself less
of a “thing of beauty” and more an instrument of power).100 Baudelaire’s prose
poetry is uniquely equipped to express levels of emotion via a figurative language
replete with innuendo; as Rosemary Lloyd explains, Baudelaire’s “art lies in pithi-
ness, suggestion, and implication.”101
As in so many of the prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, the art of “Le Galant
tireur” resides in the suggestive nature of Baudelaire’s poetic language. This poem
can be read as a road map for many others, for the question at the heart of this
poem is in the “adresse” and the skill that it takes to reach its object.102 Misfires,
taking aim again, learning how to hit one’s spots: such is the process of the lan-
guage of the poem, for poet and reader alike. In many respects, the very notion of
being a “Galant tireur” stands in stark contrast with the familiar term, “franc-
tireur,” itself operating on several levels. For one thing, Littré’s definition of “franc”
speaks quite directly to the kind of linguistic expression at play in this poem:
“Vrai, naturel, sans nuance d’ironie” (2: 1765): a kind of prorsus. A “galant” poetic
expression, simultaneously operating on several planes, is very different from the
blunt and transparent directness of le franc parler: “Avoir son franc parler, dire
tout haut ce qu’on pense” (to be a blunt talker, to say out loud what one thinks
(2: 1765)). As the richness of “Le Galant tireur” shows, if the target is hard to hit, it
is because every target alludes to another; and we begin to discern the full weight
of the poem when we recognize more and more of the shot’s resonance. Allusion
carries us far beyond prorsus, all the way through Le Spleen de Paris, to the very
99 It is this passage that allows Blin to connect the dots between duplicity, prose poetry, and sad-
ism: “Du persiflage au sarcasme, du trait de raillerie au paradoxe narquois, Baudelaire prétend épuiser
dans ses proses tout le sadisme de l’humour” (From banter to sarcasm, from mockery to snide para-
doxes, Baudelaire claims to exhaust all the sadism of humor in his prose). Blin, quoted in Bernard, Le
Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours, 123–4.
100 Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours, 765.
101 Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 232. For a dis-
cussion of similar strategies in language with respect to his city poems, in which “the reading of texts
and of memories is echoed and intensified by the determination to read the city itself as a series of
symbols and suggestions,” that is, through Baudelaire’s use of the term ‘allegory’, see Lloyd, Baudelaire’s
World, 20 and supra.
102 I am indebted to Ross Chambers for pointing me in the direction of this poetics of taking aim.
heart of Baudelaire’s modern poetic prose, and of the prose poem itself: just as
Baudelaire’s poetic language is replete with allusive language that underlines the
coexistence of multiple layers and of “deux images contrastées, voire contradic-
toires, de la galanterie,” so does the prose poem itself simultaneously operate on
multiple planes. By drawing the “éternel” out of the “transitoire,” the sexual innu-
endo out of the literal, Alfred Delvau out of Émile Littré, the “poupée” out of the
“femme,” and poiesis out of prorsus, Baudelaire playfully invites us into the uni-
verse of poems like “Le Galant tireur,” to bear witness to his poetic coup.
Stealing Signs
Echoes of “Le Galant tireur”—literal echoes, that is—are audible in another prose
poem that was written in Brussels. “Le Tir et le cimetière” was first published in
the Revue nationale et étrangère on October 11, 1867:
—À la vue du cimetière, Estaminet.—“Singulière enseigne,”—se dit notre

promeneur,—“mais bien faite pour donner soif! À coup sûr, le maître de ce
cabaret sait apprécier Horace et les poètes élèves d’Épicure. Peut-être même
connaît-il le raffinement profond des anciens Égyptiens, pour qui il n’y avait
pas de bon festin sans squelette, ou sans un emblème quelconque de la brièveté
de la vie.”
Et il entra, but un verre de bière en face des tombes, et fuma lentement un
cigare. Puis, la fantaisie le prit de descendre dans ce cimetière, dont l’herbe était
si haute et si invitante, et où régnait un si riche soleil.
En effet, la lumière et la chaleur y faisaient rage, et l’on eût dit que le soleil ivre
se vautrait tout de son long sur un tapis de fleurs magnifiques engraissées par la
destruction. Un immense bruissement de vie remplissait l’air,—la vie des infini-
ment petits,—coupé à intervalles réguliers par la crépitation des coups de feu
d’un tir voisin, qui éclataient comme l’explosion des bouchons de champagne
dans le bourdonnement d’une symphonie en sourdine.
Alors, sous le soleil qui lui chauffait le cerveau et dans l’atmosphère des
ardents parfums de la Mort, il entendit une voix chuchoter sous la tombe où il
s’était assis. Et cette voix disait: “Maudites soient vos cibles et vos carabines,
turbulents vivants, qui vous souciez si peu des défunts et de leur divin
repos! Maudites soient vos ambitions, maudits soient vos calculs, mortels
impatients, qui venez étudier l’art de tuer auprès du sanctuaire de la Mort!
Si vous saviez comme le prix est facile à gagner, comme le but est facile à
toucher, et combien tout est néant, excepté la Mort, vous ne vous fatigueriez
pas tant, laborieux vivants, et vous troubleriez moins souvent le sommeil de
ceux qui depuis longtemps ont mis dans le But, dans le seul vrai but de la
détestable vie!” (OC 1: 351–2)
(—Cemetery Vista, Tavern.—“Strange sign,” our stroller said to himself, “but

intended to make you thirsty! For certain, the pub’s owner appreciates Horace
and the poet students of Epicurus. He might even be familiar with the profound
refinement of the ancient Egyptians, who consider no good feast possible with-
out a skeleton, or without some sort of emblem of life’s brevity.”
And he went in, drank a glass of beer facing the tombs, and slowly smoked a
cigar. Then a whim came over him to go down to that cemetery, whose grass was
so high and so inviting, and where such a rich sun held sway.
Indeed, the light and the heat were raging, and the drunken sun seemed to be
wallowing all over a carpet of magnificent flowers, fertilised by the decay. A vast
rustling of life filled the air—the life of the infinitely small—interrupted at regular
intervals by the cracking of gun shots from a nearby shooting range, bursting
like champagne corks exploding in the hum of a muted symphony.
Then, under the sun that warmed his brain and in the atmosphere of
Death’s blazing aromas, he heard a voice whispering under the grave where he
was sitting. And that voice said, “Cursed be your targets and your rifles, unruly
living ones, who care so little heed for the deceased and their divine rest!
Cursed be your ambitions, cursed be your calculations, impatient mortals,
who come to study the art of killing near Death’s sanctuary! If only you under-
stood how easy it is to win the prize, how easy it is to hit the target, and how
everything is nothingness, except Death, you would not wear yourselves out so
much, hard-working living ones, and you would less often disturb the sleep of
those who have long since reached the Goal, the only true goal of detestable
life!”) (PP, 111–12; modified)
Or, rather, echoes are only partially audible; for as was the case at the outset of “Le
Galant tireur,” the speech act in the poem’s opening line is muted here for speak-
ing to one’s self: “se dit notre promeneur.” As for “notre promeneur” himself, he is
similar to the protagonist in “Le Galant tireur,” both of them notable for their
passing through the cityscape and their dandy nature: here a leisurely drink and a
cigar and take the place of target shooting. In both instances the body is directly
engaged with the desire to kill time, no more apparent in this poem than by the
reference to the well-known story told by Herodotus about the postprandial prac-
tice whereby rich Egyptians would circulate a small figurine representing a dead
body and raise a glass in recognition of time’s fleeting nature.103 The “raffinement
profond” that the Egyptians display, and with which the protagonist is familiar, is
103 Herodotus, The Histories, Book 2, chapter 78, section 1, Perseus Digital Library, ed.
Gregory R. Crane (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/):
After rich men’s repasts, a man carries around an image in a coffin, painted and carved in
exact imitation of a corpse two or four feet long. This he shows to each of the company,
saying “While you drink and enjoy, look on this; for to this state you must come when you
die.” Such is the custom at their symposia.
another sign of, if not his gallant nature, then at least of his refined, subtle
sensitivities. Another notable similarity with “Le Galant tireur” is that he is our
“promeneur”: we readers are immediately complicit in this scene through the
“nous,” and pulled in closer to this poetic “adresse.” Thus, from its outset the poem
implicates the reader in the poetic subject’s scene, in the event of this poem,104
and in the poetic and lyric more broadly. Whatever might become of poetry here
is, it would seem, of particular importance to all of us.
And so it begins, as all poems do, with a sign. This one is for all the eyes to see,
with a mise en abyme of visual references: the use of italics; the fact that the tav-
ern’s name refers to what is seen there; and, as the next words indicate, we learn
that this visual is, literally, a sign.105 The obvious referent is to elsewhere in
Baudelaire’s œuvre—specifically, to “Un cabaret folâtre (sur la route de Bruxelles à
Uccle),” a two-quatrain poem that ends with the lines: “Devant cette enseigne
imprévue, / J’ai rêvé de vous: À la vue / Du cimetière, Estaminet!” (Before the
unexpected sign / I dreamt of you: In sight / Of the cemetery, Tavern!) (OC 1: 178).
But there is more, as multiple resonances continue with the first word, “singulière”
which, like “galant,” brings not merely polysemy but the particular polysemic
quality whereby the word can mean one thing or its opposite;106 after the meaning
“D’une excellence rare” Littré explains that “Il se dit de ce qui, en bonne ou en
mauvaise part, excite l’étonnement, paraît extraordinaire. Voilà un fait bien sin-
gulier, une aventure bien singulière” (It is said of what, for better or worse, excites
astonishment, seems extraordinary. It makes for quite a strange fact, a very singu-
lar adventure) (4: 1950). Extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad; we seem to
get little resolution as the narrative pause of “se dit notre promeneur” is followed
by the conjunction “mais”—meant to present contrast—and then no more infor-
mation about the sign’s quality other than it makes the viewer thirsty. Perhaps the
matter of quality is avoided entirely, and it is the power of suggestion that is
important here: reading the very word “Estaminet” provokes the Pavlovian
response and leads to thirst. The sign itself—that source of language to which
Baudelaire draws our attention by placing it at the start of the poem, in italics, and
surrounded by dashes—is more important for its suggestive potential than for its
Montaigne discusses this practice in “Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir” (Essais, book 1
chapter 20).
104 “Address to someone or something gives the poem a character of event”; Culler, Theory of the
Lyric, 188.
105 Labarthe sees not only the same scene and the protagonists’ similar dandy nature, but also the
duality of the story’s structure: “dualité des lieux [. . .]; dualité d’ordre structurel.” While he is right to
insist on the opening phrase, he incorrectly states that it serves as both “le titre du poème et l’enseigne
du cabaret.” Instead, the opening signpost “À la vue du cimetière, Estaminet,” while indeed presented as
the sign adorning this northern (Belgian or French) watering hole, offers an important distinction
from the poem’s title (Labarthe, Baudelaire et la tradition de l’allégorie, 211).
106 Freud discusses precisely this phenomenon—and specifically with examples from Egyptian—in
“The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (New York: Random
House, 2001 [1953–74]), 11: 155–61).
ability to convey a specific qualitative judgment. Without going so far as to say

that “Le Tir et le cimetière” prefigures Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous preference for
suggestion over denotation,107 it does seem that this poem puts into question,
from its outset, some of the fundamental assumptions about what poetic language
can and cannot do.
These questions continue with additional polysemy in the second paragraph
where, to sight, thirst, and time Baudelaire adds taste, smoke, and fantasy; this
shift recalled the tension between within the self that Baudelaire claims accounts
for “everything” at the start of Mon Cœur mis à nu: “De la vaporisation et de la
centralisation du Moi. Tout est là. D’une certaine jouissance sensuelle dans la
société des extravagants” (Of the fragmentation to the centralisation of the Ego.
Everything is there. Of a certain sensual pleasure in a society of extravagance)
(OC 1: 676). For when the poetic subject in “Le Tir et le cimetière” enters into
these additional sensations (“Et il entra”) he reenacts the Egyptian practice of
raising a glass (and, in this case, adding a cigar to the mix) while confronting the
dead and marking the individual absences represented by the tombs (“en face des
tombes”). Rather than attempting to kill time as had been the case in “Le Galant
tireur,” and in contrast to the historic past with which he downs his beverage (“il
but”), the response here seems to be one of escapism through the bourgeois trap-
pings of leisure: he slows things down and revels in the moment, savoring time
even as it passes him by and smoking his cigar slowly (“lentement”).108 While
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,109 at other times it is much more; and in this case
the combination of smoke and drink transcend the immediate with a nod to other
meanings, resulting in echoes of death, drink, and poetry swirling all around. For
“un verre de bière” is just a glass of beer; but through, respectively, homophony
and polysemy, the words lean toward other meanings at the same time. The word
“bière” also means a coffin (Littré 1: 343); the resonance in this cemetery scene
and in a phrase that provides some sort of “bière en face des tombes” is unmistak-
able. For Murphy, “cette homonymie produit chez le promeneur un glissement
sémantique inconscient entre les deux domaines évoqués, favorisé peut-être par
l’homéotéleute bière-cimetière” (this homonymy produces an unconscious semantic
107 As Mallarmé would famously tell Jules Huret in 1891, “Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les
trois quarts de la jouissance du poëme qui est faite de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve” (To
name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the poem’s joy, which is made up of intuiting little by
little: to suggest it, that is the dream) (Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal,
2 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1998–2003), 2: 700; original emphasis).
108 As Culler reminds us, the connection between fleeting time, mortality, and our consciousness of
our own mortality goes back to the earliest iterations of the lyric. One of the first carpe diem poems is
Horace’s ode 1.11, “Tu ne quaesieris [. . .]”: “While we speak, envious time flies past. Seize the day, /
Trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.” “Dum loquimur, fugerit invida / aetas: carpe diem, quam
minimum credula postero.” Both the Latin original and Niall Rudd’s translation (modified by Culler)
are quoted in Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 202.
109 This saying often attributed to Freud is first mentioned in Allen Wheelis, “The Place of Action in
Personality Change,” Psychiatry, 13.2 (May 1950), 135–48 (139 n. 9).
slide, for the walker, between the two areas mentioned, perhaps encouraged by
the homeoteleuton bière-cimetière).110 This additional echo of death might be a
harbinger of what this poem is saying about poetry, as the word “verre” shares its
sound with “vers,” or verse. Could this scene’s numerous fragments of language
floating around—from the “Singulière enseigne” to the engravings we can infer
from the tombstones to the homophonous “vers” sitting next to a casket (“bière”)—
be just as many nails in the coffin of verse poetry? It recalls the narrator getting
his poetic feet stuck in the death-trap (a coffin described as a “piège”) in “Laquelle
est la vraie?” (see supra, Chapter 2). Here, “Le Tir et le cimetière” announces
the death of a kind of writing that clings to Romantic notions of death as a
great mystical communion with the world that is increasingly—and crassly or
disrespectfully (via the very presence of a shooting range near a cemetery)—
demystified about death. This combination is reminiscent of the subject’s difficulty
in finding solid footing—again, the resonance of “pied” looms large—amid the
funereal “tombeau” (itself also designating the practice of verse poetry written in
memory of a recently departed writer) in the tercets of the sonnet “Le Coucher du
soleil romantique,” the opening poem in Les Épaves:
Mais je poursuis en vain le Dieu qui se retire;

L’irrésistible Nuit établit son empire,
Noire, humide, funeste et pleine de frissons;
Une odeur de tombeau dans les ténèbres nage,
Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du marécage,
Des crapauds imprévus et de froids limaçons.
(OC 1: 149)
(But in vain I pursue the retreating God; / Irresistible Night establishes its
empire, / Black, damp, morbid and full of shivers; // An odor of the grave swims
in the darkness, / And my fearful foot rubs, at the edge of the swamp, /
Unforeseen toads and cold snails.)
Perhaps in “Le Tir et le cimetière” there is a comment on the quality of the lan-
guage of verse after all; for Littré reminds us of the expression “enseigne à bière,”
which points to a poorly executed work of art: “C’est une enseigne à bière, se dit
d’un tableau, d’un portrait très mal peint” (It is a crude sign, said about a painting,
a poorly painted portrait) (1: 343), in a way that prefigures the poetic subject’s
lament in Rimbaud’s poem “Larme,” which similarly both hints at and enacts the
end of verse poetry:
Loin des oiseaux, des troupeaux, des villageoises,

Je buvais, accroupi dans quelque bruyère
110 Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 469; original emphasis.

Entourée de tendres bois de noisetiers,

Par un brouillard d’après-midi tiède et vert.
Que pouvais-je boire dans cette jeune Oise,
Ormeaux sans voix, gazon sans fleurs, ciel couvert.
Que tirais-je à la gourde de colocase?
Quelque liqueur d’or, fade et qui fait suer.
Tel, j’eusse été mauvaise enseigne d’auberge.
Puis l’orage changea le ciel, jusqu’au soir.
Ce furent des pays noirs, des lacs, des perches,
Des colonnades sous la nuit bleue, des gares.
L’eau des bois se perdait sur des sables vierges,
Le vent, du ciel, jetait des glaçons aux mares…
Or! tel qu’un pêcheur d’or ou de coquillages,
Dire que je n’ai pas eu souci de boire!
(Far from birds, herds, village girls, / I would drink, kneeling in some heather /
Surrounded by soft woods of hazel trees, / In an afternoon fog warm and green.
// What could I drink from this young Oise, / Voiceless elms, grass without
flowers, cloudy sky? / What did I draw from the gourd of the colocynth? / Some
golden liquor, insipid, which brings on sweat. // Such, I would have been a bad
sign for an inn. / Then the storm changed the sky, until evening. / They were
black countries, lakes, poles, / Colonnades under the blue night, railway stations.
// The woods water disappeared into virgin sands, / The wind, from the sky,
threw icicles over the ponds. . . / But! like a fisher for gold or shells, / To say that I
gave no thought of drinking!)111
Beyond the acknowledgment that he would be a poor sign for an inn—“Tel,

j’eusse été mauvaise enseigne d’auberge,” another way of signaling some degree of
inappropriateness or generic infraction—the poem conveys the end of poetry
through its failing rhymes (“couvert”/“suer”; “auberge”/“perches”), leaving us, like
the subject, thirsty for something else, something more than “Quelque liqueur
d’or, fade et qui fait suer.” Similarly, the textual fragments in “Le Tir et le cimetière”
make the “promeneur” thirsty (for beer and its potential to alter the senses, away
from time and the verse poetry that is either bad or dying, or both) and, presum-
ably, creating cigar smoke that adds to his atmosphere a kind of formlessless
(which has particular resonance in “La Soupe et les nuages”; see supra, Chapter 2).
The result of these sensory stimulants is, literally, pure fantasy (“la fantaisie le
prit”): one in which he is drawn away from natural elements that have been con-
torted for the subject’s leisurely pursuits—fermented barley or wheat, tobacco
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 2009), 207; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie,
revised edition by Seth Whidden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 183, modified.
leaves dried and now smoldering—to the grass that, drenched in sunlight, is
growing tall and flourishing with life (“l’herbe était si haute et si invitante, et où
régnait un si riche soleil”).
Another conjunction—not just a grammatical connection but also, potentially,
the coincidence of several events occurring at the same point in time or in
space—marks the transition from the poem’s first two paragraphs to its last two.
“En effet” promises a confirmation and development of what preceded, and we do
in fact receive information that complements what we had already read: if the sun
was “un si riche soleil” before, now its brilliance and heat lead to rage, drunken-
ness, and the destruction of flowers: here not flowers of evil, but rather flowers
that have be defiled by evil, in a manner recalling an obviously intertextual source
for this poem, the fourteenth poem from Victor Hugo’s Les Rayons et les Ombres
(1840), entitled “Dans le cimetière de….”112 As he passes through a cemetery,
Hugo’s protagonist defines himself as “l’homme des solitudes, / Le promeneur
pensif sous les arbres épais” (v. 5–6) whose contemplation and hymns are under-
stood by the deceased under foot. Despite the death all around him, he explains:
Moi, c’est là que je vis!—cueillant les roses blanches,

Consolant les tombeaux délaissés trop longtemps,
Je passe et je reviens, je dérange les branches,
Je fais du bruit dans l’herbe, et les morts sont contents.
(v. 17–20)
(I live there!—picking white roses, / Consoling long-abandoned headstones, / I
walk by and come back, I disturb the branches, / I make noise in the grass, and
the dead are pleased.)
Hugo’s poem ends with a quenched thirst: not with the homophonous “bière” but
with the equally duplicitous “tombe”: the drink is water fallen before daybreak, a
fall that is repeated in the mention of the tombstone. The satisfied thirst in Hugo’s
poem is metaphoric and spiritual, as the verb for quench, “désaltérer,” is only pre-
sent in its absence, through its incompleteness: rather than a quenched thirst, the
poetic subject’s mind is “altéré”—not “désaltéré”—and he will go for a figurative
drink in the poem’s final lines:
Comme au creux du rocher vole l’humble colombe,

Cherchant la goutte d’eau qui tombe avant le jour,
Mon esprit altéré, dans l’ombre de la tombe,
Va boire un peu de foi, d’espérance et d’amour!
(v. 33–6)
112 Victor Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre Albouy, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade], 1964–74), 1: 1058–9.
(As in the hollow of the rock, the humble dove flies, / Searching for the drop of
water that falls before daybreak, / My altered mind, in the shadow of the grave, /
Will drink a little faith, hope, and love.)
The literal and figurative contributions of drink are similarly at play in “Le Tir et
le cimetière.” While the literal beer of the poem’s first half is contrasted with the
sun’s figurative drunkenness, the sense of sight and its concomitant echoes of
clarity and understanding—the sun’s “lumière” contributes to its rage—is also
confronted with the poem’s other dominant sense: sound. The silence of the first
two paragraphs—from the poetic subject’s speech which, only in his head, goes
unheard, to the all the silenced bodies of the past (not only those marked by
tombstones but also Horace, the poets who learned from Epicurus, the ancient
Egyptians, and even the “squelette”)—is replaced with a noisy atmosphere in the
final two. And not just any noise: the clarity of the discrete visual images is con-
trasted with the enormity of confusing sounds of the “immense bruissement.”
When a “verre de bière” sounds a kind of death knell for verse poetry, it is worth
wondering what kind of poetic expression could replace it—for surely, the very
existence of “Le Tir et le cimetière” is a kind of sign that there is a different poetry
to take its place. Could we see—or, rather, hear—in this cacophony a new poetic
sound? Immediately following the “destruction” of the poetic trope of “un tapis de
fleurs magnifiques,” we hear an “air” (not just atmosphere, but also a musical air)
filled with sounds that defy conventional understanding, appreciation, and meas-
ure—“immense” coming from immensus, that which cannot be measured—punctu-
ated with the explosive, popping sounds from nearby shots and the “bourdonnement,”
the vague humming or buzzing that seems to come from nowhere, or all around,
including the [d], [b], [ch], and [s] of “des bouchons de champagne dans le bour-
donnement d’une symphonie en sourdine,” followed by the repeated [aʀ] in “ardents
parfums.” This soundscape is indeed a “symphonie en sourdine”: a richly complex
confluence of noises that are attenuated, muted, contorted.
But the distinction here is not merely between what is seen in the first poem’s
first half and what is heard in the second one, but rather how both senses are
mediated by distance. Much of what is visible in the first paragraphs is simultan
eously seen and a marker for the unseen. In this visual field replete with symbols,
if the “enseigne” denotes what still is (the “estaminet” it advertises), the sign’s
explicit mention of the cemetery and the numerous graves and tombstones offer a
series of representations of what once was: that is to say, what is distant in time. It
serves as a “lieu de mémoire” of and for poetry: straddling time zones, simultan
eously residing in the present and leaning toward the past. The cemetery also
exists in several spatial planes, as the markers on the surface—again the notion of
“surface reading” is useful to keep in mind here113—exist and signify in their own
113 See Chapter 2, supra.

right while they also lean or nod (in-nuere), point, and refer to a meaning that is
deeper, in all senses of the word. Through these same tombstone-signifiers, the
cemetery simultaneously offers another important pair of opposites: absence and
presence. A visit to a cemetery is certainly a way of engaging with both, by bearing
witness, via one’s presence, to another who is absent, the tension between absence
and presence operating in time as well as in space.
Sound is similarly set up in terms of the distance that it signifies: the “tir voisin”
places what is heard—as we saw in “Le Galant tireur,” the “tir” can be read as a
way of framing a poetic “adresse”—in a space that is absent from this cemetery
scene.114 There is thus what seems to be an irreconcilable tension between the
ongoing activity/“tirs”—off in the distance, so distant and out of sight, but still
within earshot—and all the past attempts, fixed in immobility in their final rest-
ing places. Their peaceful, eternal burial ground (history, poetry of the past, most
of which is in verse) is disrupted by the nearby “tirs” / noise / modern poetic
attempts. Finally, there is the mediation of sound itself, for the description of the
symphony being “en sourdine” refers literally to it being without sound or damp-
ened through the use of a mute, or, figuratively, existing in secret. In a way that
prefigures Verlaine’s idea of Romances sans paroles, Baudelaire presents a sym-
phony that is muted, silent, or secret: that is to say, a symphony that, lacking the
-phony, is not a symphony at all. The confusion of the muted, secretive, non-
descript sounds sits in stark contrast with the clarity of the visual signs and clues
of the first two paragraphs—few markers are more immediately legible than
advertising signs or tombstones—and the distinction between what is seen and
what is heard could not be more apparent. In light of Pierre Nora’s assertion that
“un lieu de mémoire dans tous les sens du mot va de l’objet le plus matériel et
concret, éventuellement géographiquement situé, à l’objet le plus abstrait et intel-
lectuellement construit” (a place of memory, in every sense of the word, goes
from the most material and concrete object, even geographically situated, to the
most abstract and intellectually constructed object),115 in this scene Baudelaire
sets up a “lieu de mémoire de la poésie”: simultaneously marking and memorial-
izing the “vers,” the past writers and traditions, those buried beneath us, and the
attempts at (poetic) “adresse” that are audible yet spatially distant. “Le Tir et le
cimetière” also marks the presence and absence of the poetic, or of some trap-
pings of the poetic; by evoking and contorting the homonym “vers”/“verre,” there
is a kind of trace of poetry’s past—and with it, not just verse but lines, meter, and
rhyme—denoting its absence through a presence that is deferred and displaced.
Marking such an absence in the charged space of the cemetery is hardly innocent,
114 This scene is not without recalling the rape scene of the prostitute Élisa in the “Ancien cimetière
de Boulogne” in Edmond de Goncourt’s 1877 novel La Fille Élisa. See Jessica Leigh Tanner, Mapping
Prostitution: Sex, Space, Taxonomy in the Fin-de-Siècle French Novel, dissertation (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University, 2013).
115 Pierre Nora, La République, vol. 1 of Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), xvii.
of course; this poem bears witness to, and perhaps even mourns, the loss of an
earlier poetics, as the lyrical gives way to the prosaic, as we shall soon see. If the
clarity of the visual (the source of signs easily decipherable) is quickly eclipsed
by the chaotic and confusion of the audible, what is the state of the poetry
that persists?
The poetic subject is caught between the two: between the past and the present
(“tir”/“adresse”/poetry), old attempts to which he’d like to show reverence and
new ones that he can’t fully appreciate, as they’re out of sight; between inaudible
language (fragments of text) and non-linguistic sounds. What to do? Leave the
place of mourning in the past to join the present? Or remain in a space between
the two, between the physical-and-visual (the old, the cemetery) and the invisible-
yet-audible? As we saw in the earlier discussion of antithetical primal signifiers,
ambivalence abounds: positive and negative poles do not cancel each other out so
much as they coexist in a state of contra-diction, saying opposing things without
negating either one. An additional factor might be important in this tension: that
of order. For the rows of graves and tombstones (each one an “enseigne”: both lit-
erally and etymologically a sign) are ways of fixing, immobilizing, organizing,
and structuring the past in visually satisfying ways, whereas the distant noise
from unseen sources represents the more threatening realm of chaos and disorder
in the present. . . and thus in the modern. Whereas in “La Beauté” (Les Fleurs du
Mal), we read “Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,” in “Le Tir et le
cimetière” the tension of movement within or away from the linear remains
important and is further troubled by the poetic moment in which “un vers” (a
verse) is replaced by “un verre” (drinking glass) at the same time that it is replaced
by a paragraph (like its French counterpart “alinéa,” designating the start of a text
that, moving away from the margin, literally deviates from the line, a linea).
One would be forgiven for thinking that the last paragraph in “Le Tir et le
cimetière” presents a threat to poetry; after all, the death of old poetry is so close
that the poetic subject can, if not taste it, then at least smell it, through the
“ardents parfums de la Mort.” And yet, what happens is quite the contrary: the
poem’s four sections show Baudelaire creating something new while grappling
with the very “adresse” of the prose poem, with tensions between the visible and
the invisible, between the audible and the inaudible, and in our ability to bear
witness despite the distance that always keeps us from it. This poem is actively
engaged in exposing and expressing how such witnessing is perceived by the
senses (whether heightened by drink and smoke) and transcribed (textual frag-
ments or more confusing utterances beyond language) and, if “Le Galant tireur”
raises the question of fine-tuning one’s poetic “adresse,” it seems that “Le Tir et le
cimetière” offers a glimpse of that process in media res. Through its structure of four
paragraphs and the pivot of “En effet” from presentation to confirmation and
from the (in)visible to the (in)audible, and with the strange noises seeming to
sound a death-knell for a poetry based on the homophonous “verre”/“vers,” there
is an unmistakable progression as we move through its four movements. As

Baudelaire says in his Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, “Un sonnet lui-même a
besoin d’un plan, et la construction, l’armature, pour ainsi dire, est la plus impor-
tante garantie de la vie mystérieuse des œuvres de l’esprit” (a sonnet itself needs a
plan, and its construction, the framework, as it were, is the most important guar-
antee of the mysterious life of works of the mind) (OC 2: 332). Without wishing to
call this poem a “sonnet en prose” (see supra, Introduction), there remain some
visible and audible signposts of the poetic for us to decipher; for as Yves Vadé
points out, even if a prose poem “est encore moins une ‘forme fixe’ comparable
aux formes poétiques en vers caractérisées par des règles impératives [. . .] il n’est
pas absurde de chercher à déterminer certaines domaines thématiques exploités
avec constance par les auteurs de poèmes en prose” (is even less of a “fixed form,”
comparable to the versified poetic forms characterised by prescriptive rules [. . .] it
is not absurd to seek to determine certain thematic areas, steadily exploited by
writers of prose poems).116 For the volta, or logical turn between the two sections,
is here announced by the words “En effet” at the start of the poem’s second half,
which moves from the description of the first half to its confirmation through
embellishment and heralds the shift from, on the one hand, the literal, visual, and
transparent to, on the other, the figurative, the audible, and the concomitant lack
of clarity, if not downright confusion.
As we have seen in other prose poems by Baudelaire, here the appearance of
the verb “dire” to denote a speech act is a pivot point in this tension that leads to
the lyrical giving way to the prosaic. After the poetic subject’s language—the
lyric—turns inward (“se dit notre promeneur”), the next two paragraphs are
devoid of language, the only sound being the “immense bruissement de vie.” This
sound is then followed in the last section by the long monologue (itself longer
than any of the three paragraphs that preceded it) of clearly defined direct dis-
course in which a voice comes up from below ground to address a “vous.” Even its
introduction situates it unmistakably in the realm of language: “et cette voix
disait.” But there is more, for this tirade is accompanied not only by exclamation
points at the end of every sentence but also by the repetition of speech in the
thrice repeated performative utterance of damning, a sort of prosopopoeia in
which time is given a voice to curse humanity: “Maudites soient vos cibles et vos
carabines [. . .] Maudites soient vos ambitions, maudits soient vos calculs [. . .].”
Language’s potential enacts an important shift as it moves from the poetic to the
prosaic. In the first paragraph, poetic language is impotent as it remains internal-
ized, and perhaps put away for good through the repeated death knell of “la
Mort.”117 Then, after the absence of language in the second and third paragraphs,
116 Yves Vadé, Le Poème en prose et ses territoires (Paris: Belin, 1996), 7.
117 For Bernard, this repetition of “la Mort” echoes the refrain “Nevermore” from Poe’s “The Raven”
(Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours, 135).
it returns with the full force of the performative in the prosaic, where saying
equals doing and language moves beyond description to alter reality. As if to mir-
ror the distance from the noises associated with the “tir,” the prosaic in this last
paragraph moves even further from the traditional signposts of the poetic—in
this case, rhythmic repetitions of sounds that are part and parcel with verse—
through the repetition of “maudit(e)s” and the portmanteau of “dire” in the phrase
that describes language: “il entendit une voix chuchoter.” A sonorous repetition
thus connects “dit” to “entendit,” dire to entendre, speaking to hearing: communi-
cation in spite of itself, and with a repetition that forces a rhythmic pattern
unrelated to verse poetry’s reliance on syllables to generate meter and rhythm.
Similarly, echoes of language and speech (“entendit,” “disait,” “maudit(e)s”) signal
the fall of the lyric(al) and the arrival (if not triumph) of the prosaic; in several
respects this shift marks the poem’s “chute,” which is itself anticipated by being
couched in the voice that announces it, “chuchoter” harboring the very word
“chute” (chuchoter) as it whispers the poem’s end. The onomatopoeic whispering
heralds a new poetic language created out of the alchemy that sees the realm of
language infused with the vagaries of the “bruissement”; this poiesis, this new
means of expression, is part of the balancing act that is the hallmark of the
modernity of Baudelaire’s poetry. This final paragraph in “Le Tir et le cimetière”
precisely puts on display how the prose poem can include both the poetic/
internal/impotent and the prosaic/external/performative: much less a question of
the (in)audible or the (in)visible, the absent or the present, than creating in a new
poetics a time and space in which the forces can coexist despite the tensions
between them. After all, the poem is entitled “Le Tir et le cimetière,” and as such
we could say that Baudelaire situates his modern prose poetry under the sign of
coexistence: specifically, of the coexistence of the incompatible.
4
Inebriations and Irritations
If, in surpassing the limits of its own form, the poem itself is revitalized and
enriched, if it gives access to new dimensions of some of its fundamental qualities,
then the same can be said of the human experience that it reflects, captures, and
expresses. Such is one of the points raised by Jacques Garelli’s comparison of poetic
discovery which, by surpassing the present, requires a metamorphic transcend-
ence that in turn contributes to a deeper, fuller level of understanding (discussed
supra in Chapter 2):
L’“humanité” de l’artiste se mesure à sa capacité à inventer une dimension

jusque-là inconnue des choses, que ce soit telle couleur du ciel, telles sonorités et
tel rythme musical, tel rapprochement entre les significations les plus éloignées,
qui, en cette rencontre et cet écart, forment Monde. Car le destin de l’homme s’y
trouve remis en question en son être et en son sens. L’homme n’étant pleinement
homme que dans cet effort de dépassement. [. . .] l’activité créatrice du poète est
métamorphosante, par le changement de structure d’être et de pensée qu’elle met
en œuvre. Le poème est le cheminement, la fracture ou l’éclat par lesquels
l’homme fait exploser les barrières de la subjectivité et de l’objectivité instituées,
pour s’“aboucher” au Monde. Le verbe poétique ouvre l’espace de cette mutation,
rythme le temps de cette métamorphose.1
(The artist’s “humanity” can be measured by the ability to invent an as-of-yet
unknown dimension of things, be it this color of the sky, that sound and this
musical rhythm, that coming together of the most distanced meanings which, in
this meeting and this distance, create World. For man’s destiny is called into
question in its being and its meaning. Man only being fully man in this effort of
going beyond. [. . .] the poet’s creative activity is metamorphosing, by the change
in the structure of being and of thinking that it brings about. The poem is the
pathway, the fracture, or the spark through which man explodes the barriers of
established subjectivity and objectivity, to “join up” in the World. The poetic
word opens up the space of this mutation, gives rhythm to the time of this
metamorphosis.)
1 Jacques Garelli, L’Entrée en démesure suivi de L’Écoute et le Regard; et de Lettre aux aveugles sur
l’invisible poétique (Paris: José Corti, 1995), 82; emphasis added.
In light of Garelli’s claim, it seems worthwhile to consider how, when infused with
“cet effort de dépassement,” the “verbe poétique” can lead to this transformation
that is so important to the creative moment.
Going Beyond
Enivrez-vous
Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c’est l’unique question. Pour ne pas sentir
l’horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il
faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.
Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d’un palais, sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé, dans
la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l’ivresse déjà diminuée
ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge, à tout
ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce
qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est; et le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau,
l’horloge, vous répondront: “Il est l’heure de s’enivrer! Pour n’être pas les esclaves
martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie
ou de vertu, à votre guise.” (OC 1: 337)
(You must always be drunk. Everything depends on it: it is the only question. So
as not to feel the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back and bending you
to the ground, you must get drunk without respite.
But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever you like. But get drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps to a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the
gloomy solitude of your room, you wake up, your intoxication already waning
or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, and everything that
flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings,
everything that speaks, ask what time it is; and the wind, the waves, the stars, the
birds, clocks, will answer, “It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred
slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on vir-
tue, as you wish.” (PP, 89; modified)
The poem’s beguiling title reaches out from the page and grabs the reader through
the direct address of the imperative. It also pushes the reader: beyond self, via “cet
effort de dépassement.”2 While “Enivrez-vous” makes a compelling statement in
favor of altered states and their ability to provide release from the trials of the
everyday—a central point to which we will return—the root word “ivre” offers
2 Adatte considers “le dépassement” as central to Baudelaire’s verse and prose poetry alike; see
Emmanuel Adatte, Les Fleurs du Mal et Le Spleen de Paris: essai sur le dépassement du réel (Paris: José
Corti, 1986).
Inebriations and Irritations 221
more than that: “Berry, ébriat; provenç. ibre, ivre; espagn. et portug. ebrio; ital.
ebbro, ebro; du lat. ebrius, qui vient, d’après les étymologistes latins, de e, hors,
et bria, sorte de mesure: mot à mot qui est hors de la mesure” (Littré 3: 164). Such
an idea of ebrius, or being beyond a standard measurement, relies specifically, at
least in part, on measurements of time and the potential to surpass them.3 Jean-
Luc Nancy frames the extra-temporal in terms of “minuscules ivresses”:
C’est ce qui ne cesse pas d’arriver, si l’on veut bien considérer combien souvent la
préoccupation se suspend sans qu’on y prenne gare au profit de minuscules
absences, saisissements, emportements dans un moment qui passe, une saveur,
un parfum, un affect ou un concept. Minuscules ivresses, infinitésimales, éva-
nescentes, non moins existantes mais que nous dissimule, toujours recommencé,
le recouvrement par la préoccupation, le projet, l’action, ce qui confond la vérité
avec l’exécution d’un processus.4
(This is what keeps happening if one considers how often this preoccupation is
substituted, without our knowing, by tiny absences, shocks, being carried away
in a fleeting moment, a taste, a smell, an affect, or a concept. Minuscule intoxica-
tions: infinitesimal, evanescent, no less existent but which conceal us, always
restarted, covered over by preoccupation, the plan, action, what confuses truth
with the execution of a process.)
The notion of ebrius is also useful for considering the literary. There, too, Nancy
points to two poles traditionally pitted against each other: “Un discours sobre ou
un discours ivre [. . .] raison ou passion, philosophie ou poésie.”5 For our purposes,
Nancy’s comments invite consideration of poetry that resists the typical measure
that defines it: the verse, with its set axes of time and space. The prose poem seems
a prime candidate for the kind of poetry that resists such measurements.6 While
not evoking explicitly the same terms, the tension that Nancy identifies seems to
mirror that between prorsus and poiesis, and here, too, it is a paradigm that
3 That is, if one is not going to kill time outright (see supra, Chapter 3). The ubiquitous and
ft-remarked pressures of time in Baudelaire’s œuvre include this passage from “Les Dons des Fées”:
o
“le monde intermédiaire, placé entre l’homme et Dieu, est soumis comme nous à la terrible loi du
Temps et de son infinie postérité, les Jours, les Heures, les Minutes, les Secondes” (the intermediate
world, placed between man and God, is like us subjected to the terrible law of Time and its infinite
posterity, the Days, the Hours, the Minutes, the Seconds) (OC 1: 306).
4 Jean-Luc Nancy, Ivresse (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2013), 50–1.
5 Nancy, Ivresse, 13. Later in the same study, Nancy muses, “Comment la plénitude pourrait-elle ne
pas se déborder? Comment la perfection ne pas passer outre au parfait?” (How could plenitude not
overflow its limits? How could perfection not go beyond the perfect?) (62). Working through ques-
tions of plenitude and overflowing, Nancy was evidently not satisfied with his subsequent consider
ations—that is, he didn’t feel that he had made satis, enough—so he repeated them verbatim (79).
6 For similar considerations brought to bear on Rimbaud’s prose poetry, see my Leaving Parnassus:
The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), especially the chapter
“Rimbaud, Beyond Time and Space” (119–205).
Baudelaire seems to reject outright. Neither the directness of reason nor the twists
and turns of passion, poetic prose can be both: to differing degrees, at different
moments, in different poems.
It would require quite a leap to suggest that Baudelaire’s prose poetry is itself a
kind of poetic drunkenness, a departure from sober, staid verse poetry; and with-
out wanting to go that far, this reminder of the definition of ebrius recalls an
important element in Claude Pichois’s statement (cf. Introduction, supra) that
Baudelaire’s dream of the miracle of a poetic prose is paradoxical because it calls
for a musicality that lacks the two elements that normally define it: namely,
“mesure et sonorité.”7 Such thoughts were not entirely foreign to Baudelaire, who
wrote in May 1859, “je crains bien d’avoir simplement réussi à dépasser les limites
assignées à la Poésie” (I fear I have simply managed to exceed the limits assigned
to Poetry).8 Baudelaire had begun this letter—to Revue française director Jean
Morel—with the (verse) poem “Les Sept vieillards” (bearing the title “Fantômes
parisiens”), about which Baudelaire said “c’est le premier numéro d’une nouvelle
série que je veux tenter” (it is the first number of a new series I wish to attempt).
While the series he envisioned also included “Les Petites vieilles” (see C 1: 1030)
and no doubt other verse poems that would later be included in the “Tableaux
parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du Mal (for example, the group of poems pub-
lished by the Revue contemporaine: “Les Sept vieillards,” “Les Petites vieilles,”
“Sonnet d’automne,” “Chant d’automne,” “Le Masque”), it is entirely conceivable,
if not likely, that he was thinking about some kind of effort de dépassement with
respect to the set limits of poetry that included prose poems, and specifically
some if not all of the nine that he would publish under the title Poëmes en prose
(with the promise of more: “La suite à la prochaine livraison”) in the Revue fantai-
siste less than two years later, on November 1, 1861.9
7 OC 1: 1303; emphasis added.

8 C 1: 583. Two years earlier, in his “Notes Nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” (1857) Baudelaire had written
about “cet admirable, cet immortel instinct du Beau [. . .] La soif insatiable de tout ce qui est au-delà
[. . .] C’est à la fois par la poésie et à travers la poésie” (this admirable, immortal instinct for Beauty [. . .]
The unquenchable thirst for what is beyond [. . .] It is simultaneously by poetry and through poetry)
(OC 2: 334; original emphasis). Some forty years later, Stéphane Mallarmé would consider the stand-
ard measure of poetry, and thus the potential for ebrius, in the preface to his poem “Un coup de dés
jamais n’abolira le hasard.” Insisting on the relationship between the visual (blank space) and sound
(silence), Mallarmé goes beyond what Baudelaire accomplishes in Le Spleen de Paris: “Les ‘blancs,’ en
effet, assument l’importance, frappent d’abord; la versification en exigea, comme silence alentour,
ordinairement, au point qu’un morceau, lyrique ou de peu de pieds, occupe, au milieu, le tiers environ
du feuillet: je ne transgresse cette mesure, seulement la disperse” (Blank spaces, in fact, assume import
ance, strike first; versification requires them, as silence all around, usually, to the point that a piece,
lyrical or of few feet, occupies, in the middle, about a third of the page: I do not transgress this measure,
only disperse it) (Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1998–2003), 1: 391; emphasis added).
9 He had also recently published “La Genèse d’un poème” (Revue française, April 20, 1859), which
includes his translation of Poe’s “The Raven” and of The Philosophy of Composition (under the title
“Méthode de composition”), which influenced Baudelaire’s own thoughts about poetry. As Richard
Burton explains about Baudelaire in 1859, “ ‘ivresse’ connotes a heightened mode of being in which the
artist is both conscious and unconscious, activated by forces that lie above or below the reason and the
A certain kind of ebrius is also central to “Une mort héroïque” (discussed supra
in Chapters 1 and 2), which already surpasses some typical notions of poetic
voice since, as Maria Scott explains, “Much of the complexity of this text stems
from the fact that whereas the prose poems usually present an identifiable
(if potentially bogus) authorial voice, [‘Une mort héroïque’] invites us to locate
the poetic persona in any one—or all—of its three main characters.”10 Her claim
is particularly relevant in this passage, with its nexus of echoes from so many
other poems in Le Spleen de Paris:11
Fancioulle me prouvait, d’une manière péremptoire, irréfutable, que l’ivresse de

l’Art est plus apte que toute autre à voiler les terreurs du gouffre; que le génie
peut jouer la comédie au bord de la tombe avec une joie qui l’empêche de voir la
tombe, perdu, comme il est, dans un paradis excluant toute idée de tombe et de
destruction. (OC 1: 321)
(Fancioulle proved to me, in a preemptory, and irrefutable manner, that the
intoxication of Art is more apt than all others to conceal the terrors of the abyss;
that genius can perform comedy at the edge of a grave with a joy which prevents
it from seeing the grave, lost, as it is, in a paradise excluding any idea of a tomb
and destruction.) (PP, 65; modified)
Amid the “stubborn resistance to analysis”12 that is a mise en abyme that speaks
both to Fancioulle’s performance and the “mystery at the core of the text,”13 this
scene acted out on the edge of a grave recalls both the “herbe verte” atop the
“fosse” in “Enivrez-vous,” and that important “fosse” in “Laquelle est la vraie?”
(see supra, Chapter 2), particularly its opposition between the real and the unreal.
Rather than blurring or complicating the lines between them, however, in
“Enivrez-vous” the opposites are pitted against each other: on the one hand, the
will, yet blessed with a kind of clairvoyant self-possession that enables him to channel and bring to
birth the work that is striving towards form within him” (Richard D. E. Burton, Baudelaire in 1859: A
Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 180); Burton’s
notions of forces lying “above or below,” and formal considerations, are consistent with the present
reading of ebrius.
10 Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005), 142.
11 Debarati Sanyal takes a different approach to “Une mort héroïque,” which she connects to other
poems from Le Spleen de Paris because “the poetic and political spheres, so often divorced in
Baudelaire’s theoretical writings, gradually contaminate and mirror one another. By challenging poet-
ry’s immunity to politics and ultimately unveiling art’s potential complicity with political power, such
texts contest the absolute claims of both aesthetic and ideological sovereignty” (Debarati Sanyal, The
Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2006), 65; for her brilliant analysis of “Une mort héroïque,” see 65–79). She builds on
a number of other studies that concur with Murphy, for whom the poem “explore surtout les rapports
entre pouvoir politique et illusion théâtrale” (Steve Murphy, Logiques du dernier Baudelaire: lectures
du Spleen de Paris (Paris: Honoré Champion [Champion classiques], 2007), 153).
12 Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, 145. 13 Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity, 72.
real and the boundaries that delimit it, under the incessant pressure of time
(cf. “Le Galant tireur”; supra, Chapter 3); on the other, the imaginary, the ebrius
that flows beyond limits. The paradise that excludes death and destruction is a
space not of subtraction but, rather, of addition: a space in which prorsus and
poiesis collide and, in their tension, persist. Consistent with this poetic ebrius,
“Enivrez-vous” insists, from its opening injunction, on the value of exceeding the
limits of what time can impose on us and remaining in an in-ebriated temporal
ity.14 Indeed, it can be thought of as the sine qua non of art: “Pas d’art sans ivresse.
Mais alors: ivresse folle! que la raison bascule! délire! le plus haut degré du délire!
plongée dans la brûlante démence! Bien plus loin qu’aucun alcool ne va! L’art est
la plus passionnante orgie à portée de l’homme” (No art without intoxication. But
in that case: mad intoxication! let reason totter! delirium! the highest degree of
delirium! a plunge into burning insanity! Much further than any alcohol can go!
Art is the most exciting orgy available to man).15 As is the case in his other poems
that evoke time—including “La Chambre double,” “L’Horloge,” and “Le Galant
tireur,” among many others—Baudelaire’s modern poetry seeks to flee the cold
harsh daylight of the real; in “Enivrez-vous” it is the “herbe verte,” the new growth
that sprouts out of what is dead and buried.
At the same time, that opening line—“Il faut être toujours ivre”—is both a
charge, echoing the imperative of the title, and an aphorism, presented as if offer-
ing some large, universal truth in a manner that recalls the opening of “L’Horloge”
(see supra, Chapter 1). The great difference here, though, is in its aggression: con-
fronting the reader flatly, directly, head-on. For the brevity that “L’Horloge” shares
with “Enivrez-vous” is a double-edged sword; while the latter invites (or, rather,
implores) the reader to escape the mundane and experience ebrius, the impera-
tive presupposes that the imagined reader needs to be told in the first place, and
that the same reader would also be receptive to being told what to do. This latter
point might not be too great a stretch, since the prescription explicitly calls for
poetry, which the reader is in the process of reading. Rather than simply telling a
poetry reader to read more poetry, the opening gambit of “Enivrez-vous” calls for
a specific kind of engagement with poetry—and, I argue, with a specific kind of
poetry—in order to achieve one of the mentioned examples of ebrius. The shock
of the poem’s title and beginning comes from their ability to express far further
than where their blunt literal value would typically carry them: it is about more
14 In this respect it echoes Baudelaire’s remarks on the effects of hashish from Les Paradis artificiels:
“Car les proportions du temps et de l’être sont complètement dérangées par la multitude et l’intensité
des sensations et des idées. On dirait qu’on vit plusieurs vies d’homme en l’espace d’une heure” (The
proportions of time and of being are completely disrupted by the multitude and the intensity of feel-
ings and ideas. It is like living several human lives in the space of an hour) (1: 420; quoted in Charles
Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, ed. Aurélia Cervoni and Andrea Schellino (Paris: GF-Flammarion,
2017), 224.
15 Jean Dubuffet, “Notes pour les fins-lettrés,” L’Homme du commun à l’ouvrage (Paris: Gallimard,
1973), 54.
than being drunk, and the reader had better be attentive to the realities that lay
beyond the literal.16
The literal (the prorsus) is further undermined in the next sentence, “Tout est
là: c’est l’unique question.” Not only is the phrase to which it refers (“Il faut être
toujours ivre”) not a question, sensu stricto, but it is also not the unique one.
(Frequent readers of Baudelaire will recognize that the formula “Tout est là” is
itself not unique here, either, for it famously appears at the beginning of Mon
Cœur mis à nu; see supra, Chapter 3.) “Enivrez-vous” is built, after its initial pos-
turing, of not one but two questions and responses: “Mais de quoi?” at the start of
the second paragraph and the question that is paraphrased in the middle of the
third one (“demandez quelle heure il est”).17 Read and heard together, they are
reminiscent of kinds of questions residing elsewhere in layers of Baudelaire’s
poetic prose, in other poems in Le Spleen de Paris. The question “Mais de quoi?”
is—in addition to another series of conjunction-signposts that open paragraphs
and serve to guide the reader through the poem’s movements—a variant of the
speech which is not actually speech at all, such as in the speaking eyes in “Le Fou
et la Vénus” or “Les Yeux des pauvres” (see supra, Chapters 1 and 2, respectively).
Complicating further some examples that we have considered in earlier chapters
of a parole qui n’en est pas une, in “Enivrez-vous” the subject acts as puppet mas-
ter, pulling the discursive strings for both interlocutors in this dialogue that never
exists, both in the question asked on behalf of another and in the long clause that
runs through the rest of poem (couched in another imperative, “demandez”; this
is a pushy poetic subject, or at least one who envisions a compliant object-reader).
Baudelaire empowers his subject not only to put words in the interlocutors’
mouths, but also to be a discursive shape-shifter, able to speak from the position
of subject and object. Coupled with the fact that the assertive claim in the poem’s
third paragraph (“ask the wind, the sea, etc., they will tell you”) presents a false-
hood—that is, wind and waves cannot respond—the poem’s supposed dialogues
make all the more evident the distance from the real. “Although intoxication may
intensify exterior perception,” Kaplan asserts, “despair is its premise”;18 escaping
the real, at all costs and by any means, is thus paramount. This is never more
apparent than in the long line that opens the third paragraph:
Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d’un palais, sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé, dans la
solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou
16 Maclean reads this title and “Assommons les pauvres!” similarly, noting that such direct address
“reaches the reader as immediately as it shocks”; Marie Maclean, Narrative as Performance: The
Baudelairean Experiment (London: Routledge, 1988), 165.
17 Scott refers to the poem’s suggestion of eluding the tyranny of Time as “either implausibly opti-
mistic or acidly ironic” (Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, 197).
18 Edward K. Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in the
Parisian Prowler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 119.
disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge, à tout ce

qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui
parle, demandez quelle heure il est; et le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau, l’horloge,
vous répondront: “Il est l’heure de s’enivrer!”
Here it is the object’s position vis-à-vis the real—“demandez quelle heure il est,”
or the temporal version of “where am I?”—which elicits a response that is quoted
speech which cannot possibly be spoken (since none of the elements mentioned
can actually speak). But even the existential question for temporal grounding and
situating is itself subject to manipulation, as is the case in the opening aphorism
of “L’Horloge” about the ability to tell time by reading cats’ eyes. Here in “Enivrez-
vous,” the most basic questions about self in the world (and thus the cogito itself)
can be contorted so that their resonance and weight shift from the literal to the
figurative, from the real to the apocryphal. This distance—from the literal and the
real and their neat boundaries to the figurative and its propensity to eschew limits
and blow right by them—is crossed by the slippage of the poetic ebrius which this
poem simultaneously prescribes and displays.
Some sense of overflowing is also apparent in the answer to this question, the
famous formulation “de vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise,” important
enough to be repeated verbatim at the end of the poem, closing the circle of the
opening gambit by leaving it in the reader’s hands: pick your poison, take your
pick, whatever suits your fancy. To this only question—which, again, is neither a
question nor the only question—there is more than one solution and, as a result,
the one-to-one of individual expression (in the context of poetry, such direct
intimacy would seem to be not far from the lyric) is surpassed, its multiple possi
bilities not only overflow but run roughshod over its boundaries and exacerbate
the muddiness already brought by a subject who is playing several speaking parts
at once. “Enivrez-vous” is overflowing in all directions; for E. S. Burt, “the whole
of human freedom boils down to a choice of intoxicants: We aren’t free to decide
whether to get drunk but need to educate ourselves on the available intoxicants
because we do get to decide how to do so.”19 What does it mean, then, to get
drunk on wine, poetry, or virtue? With the two ‘v’s of “vin” and “vertu” as its
bookends, the creative force of poetry is at the center, and thus at the heart of this
mise en abyme in which Baudelaire labels what is swirling all around in the poem:
ebrius points to the potential for excessive fluidity in modern prose poetry, which
cannot be contained within the traditional confines of the poetic.
The presence of virtue in this triad recalls the passage from Les Paradis artifi-
ciels in which, evoking Rousseau, Baudelaire shows the insufficiency of virtue in
our desire to attain any sort of ideal:
19 E. S. Burt, Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and
Wilde (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 141–2.
“Cette action ridicule, lâche ou vile, dont le souvenir m’a un moment agité, est
en complète contradiction avec ma vraie nature, ma nature actuelle, et l’énergie
même avec laquelle je la condamne, le soin inquisitorial avec lequel je l’analyse
et je la juge, prouvent mes hautes et divines aptitudes pour la vertu. Combien
trouverait-on dans le monde d’hommes aussi habiles pour se juger, aussi sévères
pour se condamner?” Et non seulement il se condamne, mais il se glorifie.
L’horrible souvenir ainsi absorbé dans la contemplation d’une vertu idéale, d’une
charité idéale, d’un génie idéal, il se livre candidement à sa triomphante orgie
spirituelle. Nous avons vu que, contrefaisant d’une manière sacrilège le sacre-
ment de la pénitence, à la fois pénitent et confesseur, il s’était donné une facile
absolution, ou, pis encore, qu’il avait tiré de sa condamnation une nouvelle
pâture pour son orgueil. Maintenant, de la contemplation de ses rêves et de ses
projets de vertu, il conclut à son aptitude pratique à la vertu; l’énergie amoureuse
avec laquelle il embrasse ce fantôme de vertu lui paraît une preuve suffisante,
péremptoire, de l’énergie virile nécessaire pour l’accomplissement de son idéal. Il
confond complètement le rêve avec l’action, et son imagination s’échauffant de
plus en plus devant le spectacle enchanteur de sa propre nature corrigée et idé-
alisée, substituant cette image fascinatrice de lui-même à son réel individu, si
pauvre en volonté, si riche en vanité, il finit par décréter son apothéose en ces
termes nets et simples, qui contiennent pour lui tout un monde d’abominables
jouissances: “Je suis le plus vertueux de tous les hommes!”
Cela ne vous fait-il pas souvenir de Jean-Jacques [. . .]? L’enthousiasme avec
lequel il admirait la vertu, l’attendrissement nerveux qui remplissait ses yeux de
larmes, à la vue d’une belle action ou à la pensée de toutes les belles actions qu’il
aurait voulu accomplir, suffisaient pour lui donner une idée superlative de sa
valeur morale. Jean-Jacques s’était enivré sans haschisch.20
(“The ridiculous, cowardly and vile action whose memory briefly stirred me is a
complete contradiction to my true nature, my current nature, and the energy
with which I condemn it, this inquisitorial care with which I analyse and judge
it, show my high and mighty aptitudes for virtue. How many people like this
could you find in the world, so skilled in judging themselves, so severe in con-
demning themselves?” And not only does he condemn himself, but he glorifies
himself. The horrible memory thus absorbed into the contemplation of an ideal
virtue, an ideal charity, an ideal genius, he candidly indulges in his triumphant
spiritual orgy. We have seen that, sacrilegiously counterfeiting the sacrament of
penitence, simultaneously a penitent and a confessor, he had given himself an
20 OC 1: 435–6. Drawing on a connection first made by Robert Kopp (“Quant à la vertu, Rousseau
s’en était grisé même sans le secours des excitants, ce que Baudelaire ne manqua pas de lui reprocher”
(As for virtue, Rousseau had been elated by it even without external enhancement, which Baudelaire
didn’t hesitate to hold against him); Kopp, 315), Kaplan sees in this quotation “Baudelaire’s perspicu-
ous reproach of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 119).
easy absolution, or, worse yet, he had drawn from his condemnation a new
lifeblood for his pride. Now, from the contemplation of his dreams and his virtu-
ous projects, he concludes that he has a practical aptitude for virtue; the loving
energy with which he embraces this phantom of virtue seems to him a sufficient
and peremptory proof of the virile energy necessary to attain his ideal. He com-
pletely conflates dream and action, and his imagination, becoming more and
more heated before the enchanting spectacle of his own corrected and idealised
nature, substitutes this fascinating image of himself for his real self, so poor in
willpower, so rich in vanity, and he ends up decreeing his apotheosis in these
clear and simple terms, which contain for him a whole world of abominable
joys: “I am the most virtuous of all men!”
Does that not remind you of Jean-Jacques [. . .]? The enthusiasm with which
he admired virtue, the nervous tenderness that filled his eyes with tears at the
sight of a beautiful deed or at the thought of all the beautiful deeds he would
have liked to accomplish, were enough to give him a superlative sense of his own
moral value. Jean-Jacques had gotten high without hashish.)
Despite Rousseau’s alleged view of humankind, all its good ideas and deeds might
have been enough to make him drunk on the optimism of virtue, but “Il confond
complètement le rêve avec l’action.” And yet, the world of “Enivrez-vous” is not
one in which actions speak louder than words,21 but, instead, one in which words
are, like wine and virtue, presented as equally valid means of surpassing the limits
of the mundane, escaping the pressures of the world, and arriving at intoxication.
But the release valve of inebriation is not one of inactivity:22 as befitting the
charge of the beginning of the poem, arriving at that state involves the purpose-
ful, conscious act of choosing one of the prescribed means.23
For the literal drunkenness from excessive drinking, critics have tended to
draw parallels between this passage in “Enivrez- vous” and the presence in
Baudelaire’s writing of altered states brought on by alcohol and drugs. Most notable
are the section of Les Fleurs du Mal entitled “Le Vin,” with its five wine-related
21 On this point, Rimbaud sought to pick up where Baudelaire left off, placing the poetic ahead of
action: “La Poésie ne rythmera plus l’action; elle sera en avant” (Poetry will not lend its rhythm to
action; it will be in advance) (Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. André Guyaux and Aurélia
Cervoni (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 2009), 347; original emphasis; and Complete
Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie, revised edition by Seth Whidden (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), 379).
22 See Audrey Evrard and Robert St. Clair (eds.), The Politics of Idleness, special issue of Nottingham
French Studies, 55.1 (March 2016); the volume considers “the discourses, practices, politics, horizons
and amphibologies of un-working, inoperativity, non-employment [. . .] laziness, leisure: in a word,
idleness” (1).
23 This is a point on which Rimbaud would draw in his letter to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871: “Le
Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens” (The Poet makes
himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses) (Rimbaud, Œuvres com-
plètes, 344; original emphasis; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, 377).
poems—“L’Âme du vin,” “Le Vin des chiffonniers,” “Le Vin de l’assassin,” “Le Vin
du solitaire,” and “Le Vin des amants”—and their reformulation, in prose, in the
essay in Les Paradis artificiels entitled “Du vin et du haschisch, comparés comme
moyens de multiplication de l’individualité.”24 It is in this essay that Baudelaire
links wine to leisure and inactivity—“Je suis l’espoir des dimanches. Le travail
fait les jours prospères, le vin fait les dimanches heureux” (I am Sunday’s hope.
Work makes for prosperous days, wine makes for happy Sundays) (OC 1: 380,
original emphasis)—and in its conclusion where he concludes in favor of wine
and its ability to complement productivity, above the lethargy and inactivity
induced by hashish:
L’idée m’est venue de parler du vin et du haschisch dans le même article, parce
qu’en effet il y a en eux quelque chose de commun: le développement poétique
excessif de l’homme. Le goût frénétique de l’homme pour toutes les substances,
saines ou dangereuses, qui exaltent sa personnalité, témoigne de sa grandeur. Il
aspire toujours à réchauffer ses espérances et à s’élever vers l’infini. Mais il faut
voir les résultats. Voici une liqueur qui active la digestion, fortifie les muscles,
et enrichit le sang. Prise en grande quantité même, elle ne cause que des désor-
dres assez courts. Voilà une substance qui interrompt les fonctions digestives,
qui affaiblit les membres et qui peut causer une ivresse de vingt-quatre heures.
Le vin exalte la volonté, le haschisch l’annihile. Le vin est un support physique, le
haschisch est une arme pour le suicide. Le vin rend bon et sociable. Le haschisch
est isolant. L’un est laborieux pour ainsi dire, l’autre essentiellement paresseux. À
quoi bon, en effet, travailler, labourer, écrire, fabriquer quoi que ce soit, quand
on peut emporter le paradis d’un seul coup? Enfin le vin est pour le peuple qui
travaille et qui mérite d’en boire. Le haschisch appartient à la classe des joies
solitaires; il est fait pour les misérables oisifs. Le vin est utile, il produit des résultats
fructifiants. Le haschisch est inutile et dangereux. (OC 1: 397)
(The idea came to me to talk about wine and hashish in the same article, because
they do in fact have something in common: the excessive poetic development of
man. His frenetic taste for all healthy or dangerous substances that exalt his per-
sonality bears witness to his greatness. He always aspires to revive his hopes and
elevate himself to the infinite. But we must see the results. One is liquid that
activates digestion, fortifies the muscles, and enriches the blood. Even if taken in
large quantities, it only causes short-lived disorders. The other is a substance
which interrupts the digestive functions, weakens the limbs and can cause a
24 (OC 1: 105–10 and 1: 277–400, respectively); see Burt, Regard for the Other, especially chapter 5
(entitled “Eating with the Other in Les Paradis artificiels”) in particular “The Self-Divided Moment of
Rousseau’s Cry,” 146–51. The presence of De Quincey in Burt’s title points to De Quincey’s Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater (1821), which Baudelaire translated and included in Les Paradis artificiels
as “Un mangeur d’opium” (OC 1: 442–517).
twenty-four hour high. Wine exalts ambition, hashish annihilates it. Wine is a
crutch, hashish a weapon of suicide. Wine makes you good and sociable. Hashish
isolates you. One is industrious, so to speak, the other essentially lazy. In fact, what
good is working, writing, making anything at all, when you can grasp paradise in
one go? Finally, wine is for working people who deserve to drink it. Hashish
belongs to the class of solitary pleasures; it is made for miserable idlers. Wine is
useful, it produces fruitful results. Hashish is useless and dangerous.)
While Baudelaire’s other writings on wine and drugs are consistent with the time-
altering state sought in “Enivrez-vous,” I’d like to consider a different intertextual
marker: the prose poem “Any Where Out of the World” (OC 1: 356–7). The title’s
foreignness surpasses the limits of the semantic; even if French readers didn’t
understand the title words—which were followed by their French equivalent
when they first appeared in the Revue nationale et étrangère on September 28,
1867 (Figure 2)—it signifies a linguistic étrangeté, having overflowed the limits of
French: an otherness, a distance, an elsewhere.
Figure 2. Charles Baudelaire, “ANY WHERE OUT OF THE WORLD”
As we dig deeper, the poem reveals the anywhere, the restlessness that dominates:
Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit.
Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poêle, et celui-là croit qu’il guérirait à côté
de la fenêtre.
Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de
déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme. (OC 1: 356)
(This life is a hospital in which every patient is haunted by the desire to change
beds. This one wants to suffer in front of the stove, and that one believes he will
recover next to the window.
It seems that I would always be content where I am not, and this question of
relocation is one that I constantly discuss with my soul). (PP, 119; modified)
It is on this point—which is but a question, “cette question,” this time without the
pretense of being the only one—that the comparison with “Enivrez-vous” is most
apposite: at the level of the “qu’importe” or “n’importe,” which is at the heart of
the example from which Baudelaire’s title comes. It is Thomas Hood’s poem
“Bridge of Sighs” (1844)—which Poe had already quoted in The Poetic Principle
(1850), much of which would find its way into Baudelaire’s “Notes nouvelles sur
Edgar Poe”25—specifically the passage about throwing caution to the wind, mind-
ing far less the result than the act of going in the first place:
The bleak wind of March

Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life’s history,
Glad to death’s mystery,
Swift to be hurl’d—
Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!
(v. 63–71)
The possibility of another place, the specifics of which are nearly irrelevant, is a
recurring theme in Baudelaire’s poetry.26 Far too numerous to list here, some of
the more prominent examples appear in poems from Le Spleen de Paris such as
25 “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” (OC 2: 319–37) was first published in Nouvelles Histoires
extraordinaires by Michel Lévy frères in 1857. Poe referred to Hood as “one of the noblest—and,
speaking of Fancy, one of the most singularly fanciful—of modern poets”; Edgar Allan Poe, “The
Poetic Principle,” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Random House
[Vintage Books], 1975), 900. Poe quotes the entire poem (901–3) and follows it by saying “The vigor of
this poem is no less remarkable than its pathos. The versification, although carrying the fanciful to the
very verge of the fantastic, is nevertheless admirably adapted to the wild insanity which is the thesis of
the poem” (904). See Margaret Gilman, “Baudelaire and Thomas Hood,” Romanic Review, 26.3 (July–
September 1935), 240–4 (243 n. 5).
26 As Brett Brehm reminds me, another dimension of the not-mattering-ness or the ebrius of
Baudelaire’s prose poetry is the lack of place names (not sitting neatly in any measured or recognizable
space)—remarkable especially for this poetry that is so closely associated with Paris, obviously
reflected in the very title Le Spleen de Paris. On this point they are not unlike poems from the “Tableaux
parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du Mal, with the notable exception of “Le Cygne” (“Comme je traversais
le nouveau Carrousel” (As I was walking through the new Carousel), “Aussi devant ce Louvre une image
m’opprime” (And so in front of the Louvre an image oppresses me), OC 1: 85 and 1: 86, respectively).
“La Chambre double,” “Le Mauvais Vitrier,” “Les Vocations,” and “Les Fenêtres,”
as well as in verse poems from Les Fleurs du Mal such as “Hymne à la Beauté,”
“Danse macabre,” “L’Amour du mensonge,” and, most famously, the end of “Le
Voyage.” And yet, without requiring a full list, giving them our more considered
attention matters, precisely because it shows the full extent of not mattering in
Baudelaire’s ebrius.
Their nonchalance is directed differently each time: about the source of “Idole,
la souveraine des rêves” in “La Chambre double” (“Mais comment est-elle ici?
Qui l’a amenée? quel pouvoir magique l’a installée sur ce trône de rêverie et de
volupté? Qu’importe? la voilà! je la reconnais” (But how is she here? Who brought
her? What magic power put her on this throne of reverie and lust? Does it matter?
Here she is! I recognise her); OC 1: 208); about the subject’s remarks about
eternal damnation in “Le Mauvais Vitrier” (“Ces plaisanteries nerveuses ne
sont pas sans péril, et on peut souvent les payer cher. Mais qu’importe l’éternité
de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde l’infini de la jouissance?” (OC
1: 287) (Such neurotic pranks are not without peril, and one can often pay
dearly for them. But what does an eternity of damnation matter to someone
who has experiences for one second the infinity of delight?) (PP, 15)); about
the lack of deciding between the truth or falsehood of a tale in “Les Fenêtres”
(“Peut-être me direz-vous: ‘Es-tu sûr que cette légende soit la vraie?’ Qu’importe
ce que peut être la réalité placée hors de moi, si elle m’a aidé à vivre, à sentir
que je suis et ce que je suis?” (OC 1: 339) (Perhaps you will ask, “Are you sure
that legend is the true one?” Does it matter what the reality located outside of me
might be, if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am and what I am?) (PP, 93);
discussed supra in Chapter 2).27
The lack of importance of any particular direction—also expressed in the prose
poem “Les Vocations” (“Je ne suis jamais bien nulle part, et il me semble toujours
que je serais mieux ailleurs que là où je suis” (I am never happy anywhere, and it
always seems to me that I would be better off somewhere other than where I am)
(OC 1: 334))—is also the central force that, in the subject’s flippant expression of
equal disregard for heaven and hell, courses through the verse poem “Hymne à la
Beauté” from Les Fleurs du Mal:
Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe,

Ô Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu!
Si ton œil, ton souris, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte
D’un Infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu?
27 While for Johnson, “dans le poème en prose, ce ‘qu’importe?’ ne sert qu’à enlever à la polarité
dehors/dedans tout contenu signifiant” (in the prose poem, this “what does it matter?” only serves to
remove all meaningful content from the inside/outside polarisation) (Barbara Johnson, Défigurations
du langage poétique: la seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 69), the present
study reads it as having a more central, subversive function.
De Satan ou de Dieu, qu’importe? Ange ou Sirène,

Qu’importe, si tu rends,—fée aux yeux de velours,
Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine!—
L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?
(OC 1: 25)
(Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, / O Beauty! vast,
terrifying, ingenuous monster! / If your eye, your smile, your foot, open the door
for me / To an Infinite that I love and never knew? // Of Satan or God, what does
it matter? Angel or Siren, / What does it matter, if you make,—fairy with velvet
eyes, / Rhythm, perfume, glow, O my only queen!— / The universe less hideous
and moments less heavy?)
Moments of not caring about sources of pleasure such as that in “La Chambre
double” also appear in “Danse macabre” (“Qu’importe le parfum, l’habit ou la toi-
lette? / Qui fait le dégoûté montre qu’il se croit beau” (What do the perfume, the
clothes, or the toiletries matter? / He who acts disgusted shows that he thinks he
is beautiful) (OC 1: 98)), as well as in the last two lines of “L’Amour du mensonge”
(“Qu’importe ta bêtise ou ton indifférence? / Masque ou décor, salut! J’adore ta
beauté” (What do your foolishness or your indifference matter? / Mask or decor
ation, hail! I adore your beauty) (OC 1: 99)). Central to Baudelaire’s modern
poetry is this poetics of not mattering: in any particular way, direction, sense, or
meaning.28 A decade before Rimbaud charted a course for attaining the unknown
via the wanton destruction of senses, directions, and meanings—“Il s’agit d’arriver
à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens” (It is a question of reaching the
unknown by the derangement of all the senses)29—Baudelaire called for a discov-
ery of the unknown that was built of not mattering, as long as it was to the far-
thest reaches of no-matter-where, in the famous end of “Le Voyage”:
Verse-nous ton poison pour qu’il nous réconforte!

Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?
Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!
(OC 1: 134; original emphasis)30
28 Claire Chi-ah Lyu considers the ways that readers react to this “qu’importe,” which she says is
“aesthetically praiseworthy in the verse poems but ethically questionable in the prose poems” (31)—
see Claire Chi-ah Lyu, “A Renewed Relationship with Words: Reacting to Evil Through ‘Le Mauvais
Vitrier’,” in Cheryl Krueger (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems (New York: Modern
Language Association of America, 2017), 29–36.
29 Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 340; original emphasis; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, 371.
See the discussion of the full resonance of the word “sens” in my Leaving Parnassus, 126–7.
30 As Richard D. E. Burton reminds us, “the poem was first entitled not ‘Le Voyage’ but ‘Les
Voyageurs,’ as though to stress the underlying sameness of their compulsive globe-trotting—[the trav-
ellers] head relentlessly as though impelled by forces over which they have no control toward a destin
ation which ‘n’étant nulle part, peut être n’importe où!’ ” (Burton, Baudelaire in 1859, 119).
(Pour us a glass of your poison to comfort us! / We want, while this fire burns
our brains, / To dive to the bottom of the abyss, Heaven or Hell, what does it
matter? / To the depths of the unknown to find the new!)
In a manner that is not entirely unlike the equally-not-mattering extremes of

heaven or hell, in “Enivrez-vous” the elements that can bring about ebrius—“de
vin, de poésie ou de vertu”—are similarly vast. Whether the external stimulus of
liquor consumed in excess; language’s transcendent potential unlocked through
the creative process of poiesis; or the quality, behavior, or stance that suggests con-
forming to some predetermined notion of good moral character, it seems to mat-
ter little whether it is some external object (wine); if it was created out of one’s
imagination, which Baudelaire famously called “La Reine des facultés” in his
Salon de 1859 essay (OC 2: 619); or if it refers to a set of reactions that stem from
conformity to certain norms. What matters most in this ebrius, in this poetics of
overflow regardless of where, is the importance that Baudelaire attributes to the
steps undertaken, to the distance, to the là-bas: the overflowing, beyond the con-
fines of the (spatial) here and (temporal) now.
Elsewhere in his œuvre, the lack of particular importance also appears at the con-
fluence of literal drunkenness and poetry—specifically, the drunk violin and the
tune (the lyric) it produces—in the story of the Spanish guitarist in the essay “Du
vin et du haschisch, comparés comme moyens de multiplication de l’individualité”
from Les Paradis artificiels (earlier in the essay Baudelaire had insisted “Mais dans
l’ivresse il y a de l’hyper-sublime, comme vous allez voir” (But in intoxication there
is something of the extreme sublime, as you will see) (OC 1: 383–4)):
Mais bien en prit à ceux chez qui la pudeur n’éteignit pas la curiosité et qui
eurent le courage de rester. “Commence,” dit le guitariste au marbrier. Il est
impossible d’exprimer quel genre de sons sortit du violon ivre; Bacchus en délire
taillant de la pierre avec une scie. Que joua-t-il, ou qu’essaya-t-il de jouer? Peu
importe, le premier air venu. Tout à coup, une mélodie énergique et suave,
capricieuse et une à la fois, enveloppe, étouffe, éteint, dissimule le tapage criard.
La guitare chante si haut que le violon ne s’entend plus. Et cependant c’est bien
l’air, l’air aviné qu’avait entamé le marbrier.
La guitare s’exprime avec une sonorité énorme; elle jase, elle chante, elle
déclame avec une verve effrayante, et une sûreté, une pureté inouïes de diction.
La guitare improvisait une variation sur le thème du violon d’aveugle. Elle se
laissait guider par lui, et elle habillait splendidement et maternellement la grêle
nudité de ses sons. Mon lecteur comprendra que ceci est indescriptible; un témoin
vrai et sérieux m’a raconté la chose. Le public à la fin était plus ivre que lui.
(OC 1: 386; emphasis added)
(But it is well for those whose modesty does not dim their curiosity and who
had the courage to stay. “Begin,” says the guitarist to the stonemason. It is
impossible to say what kinds of sounds came out of the drunken violin: a fren-
zied Bacchus cutting stone with a saw. What did he play, or what did he try to
play? No matter, the first tune that came along. All at once, an altogether ener-
getic, suave, and capricious melody envelops, muffles, extinguishes, hides the
shrill din. The guitar sings so loudly that the violin can no longer be heard. And
yet it is indeed the tune, the drunken tune that the stonemason had started.
The guitar expresses itself with a massive sound; it chatters, it sings, it recites
with frightening verve, and innate confidence and purity of diction. Improvising
a variation on the theme of the blind man’s violin, the guitar let itself be guided,
and it splendidly and maternally dressed up its sounds’ sharp nudity. My reader
will understand that this is indescribable; a true and serious witness told me
about it. In the end, the audience was drunker than he was.)
In “Any Where Out of the World,” ebrius remains a matter for the spatial, both in
concrete, literal, even geographic terms—Lisbon or Holland, Batavia or Tornéo—
and in the figurative: being there, in language, or not. It would seem that discourse’s
nature (over)flows in one way, but it doesn’t return, and perhaps the reason that
the subject also plays the role of object in “Enivrez-vous” is due less to arrogance
than to being the sole source and competent practitioner of poetic prose.31 The
object of “Any Where Out of the World”—the speaker’s soul—displays no more
facility:
Mon âme ne répond pas. (My soul does not answer)

Mon âme reste muette. (My soul remains mute)
Pas un mot.—Mon âme serait-
elle morte? (Not a word.—Might my soul
be dead?)
Enfin, mon âme fait explosion, et sagement elle me crie: “N’importe où!
n’importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!” (At last, my soul explodes,
and wisely she shouts at me, “Anywhere! anywhere! As long as it is out of this
world!”)32
While this last line of “Any Where Out of the World” insists on this poetic not-
mattering-ness, in “Enivrez-vous” there is a similar proposed call-and-response,
not without its own obstacles and presuppositions.33
31 For Kaplan, this poem “waves an enticing tapestry of ‘prose’ and ‘poetry’ ”; Kaplan, Baudelaire’s
Prose Poems, 153.
32 Fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth (final) paragraphs, respectively.
33 For a reading of Baudelaire that considers intertextual calls and responses—specifically, between
“L’Invitation au voyage” and “Grab Your Passport” by Australian poet John Tranter—see Ross
Chambers, “Significant Others, or Textual Congress: Concerning Baudelaire and Tranter,” Australian
Journal of French Studies, 55.3 (2018), 223–36. I am grateful to Maria Scott for this reference.
demandez au vent, à la vague, à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à

tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle,
demandez quelle heure il est; et le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau, l’horloge, vous
répondront [. . .]
It is customary to compare this passage to the list from Victor Hugo’s poem
“Pan,”34 its idea of merging inebriation and poetry, and its references to the
sounds of the seas and the skies:
Enivrez-vous de tout! enivrez-vous, poètes,

Des gazons, des ruisseaux, des feuilles inquiètes,
Du voyageur de nuit dont on entend la voix,
De ces premières fleurs dont février s’étonne,
Des eaux, de l’air, des prés, et du bruit monotone
Que font les chariots qui passent dans les bois!
(v. 43–8)
(Get drunk on everything! get drunk, poets, / Of the lawns, the streams, the
restless leaves, / Of the voice you hear from the night traveller, / Of the first
shocking flowers of February, / Of the waters, the air, the fields, and the
monotonous sound / That the carriages make as they pass through the woods!)
This intertextual referent is certainly apposite, but it only tells part of the story.
When read with the stanza that precedes it, it shows further the extent of the
ebrius of Baudelaire’s poetic prose:
C’est Dieu qui remplit tout. Le monde, c’est son temple;

Œuvre vivante, où tout l’écoute et le contemple.
Tout lui parle et le chante. Il est seul, il est un.
Dans sa création tout est joie et sourire.
L’étoile qui regarde et la fleur qui respire,
Tout est flamme ou parfum!
Enivrez-vous de tout! enivrez-vous, poètes,
Des gazons, des ruisseaux, des feuilles inquiètes,
Du voyageur de nuit dont on entend la voix;
De ces premières fleurs dont février s’étonne;
Des eaux, de l’air, des prés, et du bruit monotone
Que font les chariots qui passent dans les bois
(v. 37–48)
34 From the 1831 collection Les Feuilles d’automne; Victor Hugo, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Pierre
Albouy, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1964–74), 1: 803–5.
(It is God who fills everything. The world is his temple; / A living work, where
everything listens to him and contemplates him. / Everything speaks to him and
sings of him. He is alone, he is one. / In his creation, all is joy and smiles. / The
watchful star and the breathing flower, / All is flame or scent! // Get drunk on
everything! get drunk, poets, / Of the lawns, the streams, the restless leaves, / Of the
voice you hear from the night traveller, / Of the first shocking flowers of February, /
Of the waters, the air, the fields, and the monotonous sound / That the carriages
make as they pass through the woods!)
That is to say: God fills everything (“C’est Dieu qui remplit tout”), but it is the
poets who overfill themselves, who are engaged with the act of overflowing.
The specific elements on which Baudelaire draws contribute to this mise en
abyme of a poetics of overflowing and not mattering where or how that is at the
center of “Enivrez-vous.” Through the repetitive sounds of [v] (“vent”/“vague”)
and [wa] (“l’étoile”/“l’oiseau”) in the substantives and the combination [a]+[l] that
courses through it all, its recurrence accelerates through the phrase:
au vent, à la vague, à l’ étoile, à l’ oiseau, à l’ horloge

[o] [vã] [a la] [vag] [a l] [etwal] [a l] [wazo] [a l] [ɔʁ.lɔʒ]
A reader’s natural preference for order and balance—an order suggested even more
blatantly by its repetition in the compound subject that follows, as the verbs bookend
the nouns (“demandez [. . .] et le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau, l’horloge, vous
répondront”)—pulls us toward a consideration of the objects and their verbal
propositions, as if one group logically follows or could be mapped onto the other:
demandez… à tout ce qui…

au vent fuit
à la vague gémit
à l’étoile roule
à l’oiseau chante
à l’horloge parle
The ebrius at play here not only spills over any sort of rhythmic measure in the
words and their sounds, but it also operates, in the figurative realm, in a manner
that is similar to the literal problem with the “unique question” which is neither a
question nor a unique one. For once again, there is a lack of one-to-one congru-
ence in these lists of the proposed or suggested questions’ recipients. For while
the wind can fly off, so can, of course, Time; it is more often wind, rather than
waves, that howls (“gémir”); the verb “rouler” can refer to a great number of
actions, from stars rolling across the sky (“mouvement circulaire apparent du ciel
et des astres”), to sounds rumbling on (“des bruits qui se prolongent”), particu-

larly in storms or in drumming (“Roulez, tambours! commandement de battre le
tambour”) to, once again, the passage of Time (Littré quotes from La Fontaine,
“Douze lustres et plus ont roulé sur ta vie” (Twelve eons or more have rolled
through your lifetime) (4: 1770). The mentions of a singing bird and a talking
clock require little discussion here, for the former grounds the enumeration in
literary commonplace and the latter has already been discussed earlier (see supra,
Chapter 1). If the lack of one answer to a single question undermined the lyric in
the example of the “unique question,” it is logic itself that is undermined here; or,
rather, logic is surpassed as the poem flows beyond its limits, in this list that
respects no boundaries.35
Well beyond the repeated, literal references to drunkenness, beyond mattering
about in the directions in which it is headed, well beyond erstwhile methods of
measuring poetry, “Enivrez-vous” overflows, in this paragraph’s very composition, at
the limits of the grammatical (which would be “Et si quelquefois [. . .] vous vous
réveillez [. . .] demandez quelle heure il est et [compound subject] vous répondront”):
1. Conditional clause Et si quelquefois

2. Prepositional phrase sur les marches d’un palais
3. Prepositional phrase sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé
4. Prepositional phrase dans la solitude morne de votre chambre
5. Continuation of the vous vous réveillez
conditional clause
6. Qualifying clause l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue
7. Main clause, imperative demandez
8. Indirect objects (5 nouns) au vent, à la vague, à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge
9. Indirect objects (5 indefinite à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce
relative pronouns) qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle
10. Repetition of the imperative demandez quelle heure il est
11. Conjunction et
12 Compound noun (5 nouns) le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau, l’horloge
13. Indirect object and verb vous répondront:
14. Quoted response “Il est l’heure de s’enivrer! [. . .]”
The main clause—if some time you wake up, ask what time it is, and they will tell
you—seems straightforward enough, and hardly poetic. Instead, and unsurpris-
ingly, the poetic surpasses the direct language of prorsus and holds steady in the
limits, in the space where poeisis and prorsus collide. Specifically, the three prepos
itional phrases keep us in suspense from the mention of time (“Et si quelquefois”)
and the rest of that clause:
35 And yet, Baudelaire’s forward-looking, modern prose poetics of ebrius also provide echoes of the
past; for example, the wind was already fleeing back in 1632, in Pierre Corneille’s play Clitandre (“Mes
menaces déjà font trembler tout le monde / Le vent fuit d’épouvante et le tonnerre en gronde” (My threats
already make everyone tremble / The wind flees in terror and the thunder rumbles), act IV, sc. ii)…
preposition precise aspect place

sur les marches d’un palais
sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé
dans la solitude morne de votre chambre
Despite their parallel structures, the three phrases offer a series of differing
perspectives, like a kaleidoscope in which we can perceive, and imagine being in,
several places at once. The steps of a palace are at the bottom looking up, while the
green grass grows on the top of a ditch or grave, no matter how low, and its very
mention has us training our mind’s eye downwards to envision it. Spatial referents
disappear into gloom and despair, into the depths of the individual’s solitude
(“votre chambre”) in the modern city.36
With spatial markers all but vaporized by the big city, we return to the main
clause (“Et si quelquefois [. . .] vous vous réveillez”), only to be interrupted and
qualified by another poetic incursion: “Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d’un
palais, sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous
vous réveillez, l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague,
à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge [. . .].” Without spatial referents to surpass, the inter-
ruption here is temporal because it is rhythmic, in the sounds of the words that
explode with [v], [e], [i], and [d]: “vous vous réveillez, l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou
disparue, demandez.” As the past participles suggest, this present looks to its
past—toward what is lost, what is gone, and what happened while the “vous” was
sleeping—the specific nature of which, or rather its degree (“l’ivresse déjà
diminuée ou disparue”) is less important than what it represents: being roused
from being elsewhere, and brought back to reality, ici-bas. As if it, too, was sud-
denly startled awake, language is upended, semantic precision wavers, and the
words generate meaning elsewhere: through their puttering and stammering
sounds, as the linguistic engine sputters through its first few strokes until it finds
its new poetic rhythm.
From there, when repetitions reemerge, their sonorous echoes leave behind
assonance or alliteration in favor of repetitions of the grammatical order, insisting
via the indefinite, and seemingly infinite, relative pronoun phrase “tout ce qui” (in
the formula “à tout ce qui”). This new additional emphasis leaps to center stage,
its fivefold repetition far overtaking the “v” in “vent” and “vague” or the [i] of
36 This jumbled spatial incursion that interrupts and upends the temporal prefigures Rimbaud’s
“Enfance III” from Illuminations: its famous topsy-turvy line “Il y a une cathédrale qui descend et un
lac qui monte” (There is a cathedral coming down and a lake going up) appears in the middle of a
poem that begins and ends with temporal cues of interruption (“Au bois il y a un oiseau, son chant
vous arrête et vous fait rougir” (In the woods there is a bird whose singing stops you and makes you
blush) and “Il y a enfin, quand l’on a faim et soif, quelqu’un qui vous chasse” (And then there’s someone
who chases you off when you’re hungry and thirsty) (Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 291; and Complete
Works, Selected Letters, 311 and 313).
“fuit” and “gémit,” more modest sonorous adornments that can accompany, but-
tress, or add dimension or depth:
au vent, à la vague, à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge

à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à
tout ce qui parle
This list’s reach is as all-encompassing and near-universal as the not-mattering of

phrases with “n’importe” or “qu’importe”; Baudelaire’s new poetics of ebrius reso-
nates throughout the universe, to the ends of the stratosphere and to the farthest
depths below, through and beyond time and space of the modern city and of the
modern prose poem.37
Les Bienfaits de la lune

La Lune, qui est le caprice même, regarda par la fenêtre pendant que tu dor-
mais dans ton berceau, et se dit: “Cette enfant me plaît.”
Et elle descendit moelleusement son escalier de nuages et passa sans bruit à
travers les vitres. Puis elle s’étendit sur toi avec la tendresse souple d’une mère, et
elle déposa ses couleurs sur ta face. Tes prunelles en sont restées vertes, et tes
joues extraordinairement pâles. C’est en contemplant cette visiteuse que tes yeux
se sont si bizarrement agrandis; et elle t’a si tendrement serrée à la gorge que tu
en as gardé pour toujours l’envie de pleurer.
Cependant, dans l’expansion de sa joie, la Lune remplissait toute la chambre
comme une atmosphère phosphorique, comme un poison lumineux; et toute
cette lumière vivante pensait et disait: “Tu subiras éternellement l’influence de
mon baiser. Tu seras belle à ma manière. Tu aimeras ce que j’aime et ce qui
m’aime: l’eau, les nuages, le silence et la nuit; la mer immense et verte; l’eau uni-
forme et multiforme; le lieu où tu ne seras pas; l’amant que tu ne connaîtras pas;
les fleurs monstrueuses; les parfums qui font délirer; les chats qui se pâment sur
les pianos et qui gémissent comme les femmes, d’une voix rauque et douce!
“Et tu seras aimée de mes amants, courtisée par mes courtisans. Tu seras la
reine des hommes aux yeux verts dont j’ai serré aussi la gorge dans mes caresses
nocturnes; de ceux-là qui aiment la mer, la mer immense, tumultueuse et verte,
l’eau informe et multiforme, le lieu où ils ne sont pas, la femme qu’ils ne connais-
sent pas, les fleurs sinistres qui ressemblent aux encensoirs d’une religion incon-
nue, les parfums qui troublent la volonté, et les animaux sauvages et voluptueux
qui sont les emblèmes de leur folie.”
37 It will be another point of divergence for Rimbaud, who ends his prose poem “À une Raison”
from Illuminations with a more positive, utopian opening up to infinity in both time and space:
“Arrivée de toujours, qui t’en iras partout” (You will go everywhere, since you have come from all time)
(Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 297; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, 321).
Et c’est pour cela, maudite chère enfant gâtée, que je suis maintenant couché à
tes pieds, cherchant dans toute ta personne le reflet de la redoutable Divinité, de
la fatidique marraine, de la nourrice empoisonneuse de tous les lunatiques.
(OC 1: 341–2; original emphasis)
(The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked through the window while you were
sleeping in your cradle, and said to herself, “I like that child.”
And she softly descended her stairway of clouds and silently passed through
the windows. Then she lay on top of you with a mother’s agile tenderness, and
she placed her colors on your face. Your pupils remained green, and your cheeks
extraordinarily pale. It was in contemplating that visitor that your eyes were so
strangely enlarged; and she clutched you so tenderly by the throat that you for-
ever felt the urge to cry.
However, in the expansion of her joy, the Moon filled the whole bedroom like
a phosphorescent atmosphere, like a luminous poison; and all that living light
thought and said, “You will be eternally influenced by my kiss. You will be beau-
tiful in my way. You will love what I love and what loves me: water, clouds,
silence, and night; limitless, green sea; uniform and multiform water; the place
where you will not be; the lover you will not know; monstrous flowers; aromas
that make you delirious; cats swooning on pianos and moaning like women, in a
hoarse, sweet voice!
“And you will be loved by my lovers, courted by my courtiers. You will be the
queen of men with green eyes whose throats I also squeezed with my nocturnal
caresses; of those who love the sea, the limitless, tumultuous, and green sea,
shapeless and multiform water, the place where they are not, the woman they do
not know, the sinister flowers the resemble censers of an unknown religion, aro-
mas that disturb the will, and the wild and voluptuous animals that are the
emblems of their madness!”
And that, cursed dear spoiled child, is why I am now lying at your feet, seek-
ing in your entire person the reflection of dreaded Divinity, of the fateful god-
mothers, of the poisonous nursemaid of all lunatics!) (PP, 96–7; modified)
The poem opens with a rat-a-tat-tat that recounts what is quietly being seen: the
Moon’s silent gaze through the window is expressed with the phrase “regarda par
la fenêtre” while the child is introduced with a different rhythm, composed of the
[t], [d], and nasals vowels in “pendant que tu dormais dans ton berceau.” With
such conflicting presences of (silent) sight and (unmistakeably percussive) sound,
it is not surprising to discover them converge in the object of the Moon’s gaze, the
child. For this child is introduced in words that make her only partially apparent;
there is no audible distinction between “cet enfant” and “cette enfant.” That the
child is feminine is never actually in doubt in the poem, but this fact is only avail-
able to the person who reads this poem, who sees it. That the language should
cleave in this manner—providing full information to those who see it, partially
obscured for those who hear it—should not come as a surprise since the pleasure
(“me plaît”) is focused, precisely, on the in-fans: the one who lacks language, and
for whom language is a let-down: insufficient in describing her, or him, satisfac
torily. It is partly for this reason that Marie Maclean reads this poem alongside the
following passage from Baudelaire’s 1859 essay on Théophile Gautier:
C’est alors que la couleur parle, comme une voix profonde et vibrante; que les
monuments se dressent et font saillie sur l’espace profond; que les animaux et les
plantes, représentants du laid et du mal, articulent leur grimace non équivoque;
que le parfum provoque la pensée et le souvenir correspondants; que la passion
murmure ou rugit son langage éternellement semblable. (OC 2: 118)
(And thus color speaks, a deep and vibrant voice; thus monuments are raised
and protrude into the depths of space; thus animals and plants, representatives
of ugliness and evil, make their grimace unequivocal; thus perfume elicits cor-
responding thoughts and memories; thus passion murmurs or roars its eternally
similar language).38
Both within and beyond language, while sound or hearing is cloaked in ambigu-
ity, sight or reading produces the fuller picture. Not only is this the case with “cette
enfant” but, more generally, with the gender of the “tu” throughout the entire sec-
ond paragraph, all the way to and including the word “serrée,” its additional “e”
visible but not heard. It is only in the next paragraph, when the Moon begins the
monologue with the identification (a reflection, expressed by the “reflet de la red-
outable Divinité” in the poem’s final line) that the ambiguity is lifted: “Tu seras
belle à ma manière.”39 As clarity arrives with the mention of her beauty—a visible
attribute if ever there was one—the insistence on the value of seeing underscores,
especially, the inadequacies of sounds alone. After all, and to be precise, it is actu-
ally the moonlight—a vision—that speaks, in a run-on phrase that floods (and
even overflows, ebrius) the poem’s stanzas as the light floods the room. Its repeti-
tions and rhythms, of which this paragraph’s “atmosphère phosphorique” is
another charged example,40 remind us that the narration thus far—closer to pror-
sus—is not enough. It is upon the mention of her (future) beauty that sound
catches up to sight, just as thunder completes the meaning of the lightning that
precedes it. By seeing her as “belle,” and by explicitly mentioning this visible
dimension, through her quoted speech the Moon offers a corrective to the dis-
crepancies between sight and sound—not unlike the tension between la rime
38 See Maclean, Narrative as Performance, 64.

39 The speech attributed to the moon recalls a similar scene in Baudelaire’s verse poem “Confession”
(OC 1: 45–6).
40 Furthermore, the sound [f] betrays its visual appearance, as it bears no audible relation to the
sounds produced by the letters “p” or “h.”
pour l’œil and la rime pour l’oreille (see Introduction, supra)—and ushers in a new
kind of language. Beyond limits that are as many inadequacies, the ebrius of her
speech provides much, much more.
While the poem bestows clarity upon its reader via privileged access to visible
information about the “enfant,” the poem’s other optical relationship is less
straightforward. It starts with moonlight, typically white because it is the combin
ation of all colors; it is only perceived to be a certain color when that particular
color is not absorbed. As a result, when the Moon floods the child’s face, “ses
couleurs” refer simultaneously to all of them (the white light that results from all
colors together) and to none of them since the human eye perceives white as a
complete absence of color. It is perhaps due to this confusion—the presence of the
full spectrum of colors appearing as its opposite—that the moonlight’s arrival
seems to have no effect on the child: “Tes prunelles en sont restées vertes, et tes
joues extraordinairement pâles.” (One could say that the confusion persists due to
the fact that the “prunelles,” while remaining green, also suggest the color of a
plum, “prune.”) Little wonder, therefore, that the sight of the luminous visitor
provokes the reaction of speechlessness that we have already encountered in the
prose poems.41 Here, in “Les Bienfaits de la lune,” the tightening throat blocks the
possibility of prorsus and, instead, only allows for crying: the kind of expression
that, while emanating from the mouth, is its own kind of linguistic ebrius.
After the poem’s shift (if not a volta draped in prose42), announced with the
adversative conjunction “Cependant” that opens the third paragraph and sets up
the Moon’s speech, we learn that if the Moon is limited to internal monologue
(“La Lune [. . .] se dit,” again an example of speech that is not actually spoken), it is
the moon’s light that is able to wield language (actual quoted speech: “dire” rather
than “se dire”). However (“Cependant”), speech comes not through something as
direct as the prorsus; instead, it overflows something so basic (resulting in some
words being quoted but not spoken, or others that get lost because they are stuck
in someone’s head) and is mediated through the metonym of the moonlight
speaking for the Moon herself. Actualized once it is identified for its combination
as elemental (“phosphorique”) and ominously threatening (“un poison”), the light
comes to life, fully anthropomorphized as a thinking, speaking presence. Itself a
temporal placeholder, the word “Cependant” marks time and encourages us to
pause for a moment at the confluence of the visual (moonlight, a vision) and
sound: specifically, an entirely different set of sights, sounds, and rhythms. The
41 See, for example, earlier discussions of “Le Fou et la Vénus” and “L’Horloge” (both supra,
Chapter 1) and “La Soupe et les nuages” (supra, Chapter 2).
42 Hiddleston includes this poem among “Those which are based upon a ‘soubresaut’ [and which]
have a clear turning-point, most often in the middle of the poem” (J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and Le
Spleen de Paris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 82). His examples are “Le Désespoir de la vieille,” “La
Chambre double,” “Le Fou et la Vénus,” “Le Vieux Saltimbanque,” “Le Gâteau,” “Les Bienfaits de la lune”
(111 n. 51).
result is a long list—repeated, with modifications—that recalls “Enivrez-vous” in

its breadth and reach (see supra), a run-on phrase that overflows the poem’s
stanzas as light floods the room.
While traditionally pitted against each other as adversaries—that is, the kinds
of adversaries that would normally contribute to the tension that underpins
“Cependant”—here the active and passive voices complement each other: strad-
dling the very additive conjunction word “Et” at the start of the fourth paragraph.
The shift from “Tu aimeras” to “Tu seras aimée de” are two sides of the same coin:
here, again, stances typically incompatible with and even pitted against each other
coexist in the same sphere. These words also bridge the gap between the past and
the present, from the past participle (“aimée,” “courtisée”) to the nominal form
that, stemming from the present progressive, insists on the activity’s ongoing
nature. One could even go so far as to say that the “Et” is almost misleading;
rather than continuity, the second list repeats the first while offering corrections
and precisions:
Third paragraph Fourth paragraph

La mer immense et verte La mer immense, tumultueuse et verte
L’eau uniforme et multiforme L’eau informe et multiforme
Les fleurs monstrueuses Les fleurs sinistres qui ressemblent aux
encensoirs d’une religion inconnue
Characterized by ebrius, the shifts that give the second list its distinctiveness spill
out in all directions. The sea’s newfound tumultuousness brings not only elements
of noisiness, disorder, and confusion but, through its figurative meaning of
“Trouble intérieur” (Littré 4: 2377) and its etymon tumultus, from tumeō, it desig-
nates a swelling. Already unmeasurable (immensus, that which cannot be meas-
ured), the sea grows even more so as it spills out further with respect to form:
losing its uniformity and definition, as we move from “la mer” to the more generic
“water” it becomes still more shapeless. Confusion reigns, since “informe” negates
form while “multiforme” reaffirms it, appearing in multiple shapes at once.43
Once a building block for the universe, here water undermines shape, the very
notion of a foundational piece, and by extension any hope to build something
with it. This simultaneous lack and multiple possibilities recalls poem titles such
as “La Soupe et les nuages” and “Le Tir et le cimetière” (see Chapter 3, supra) in
43 The word “multiforme” does not mean able to appear in a number of different forms, but rather
simultaneously existing in different forms: Littré’s succinct definition is illustrated not with some being
that reappears in different shapes but rather with Aristotle’s comment on the vulture, which, like a
centaur, simultaneously embodies several forms: “Qui a plusieurs formes. Aristote a eu raison de dire
que le genre du grand vautour était multiforme, puisque ce genre est en effet composé de trois espèces: du
griffon, du grand vautour, et du vautour à aigrette” (Having several forms. Aristotle was right to say that
the genus of the great vulture was multiform, as its genus is indeed composed of three species: the
griffon, the great vulture, and the egret vulture) (3: 666; original emphasis).
which Baudelaire sets the stage not with a choice between seeming incompatible
elements, but rather their coexistence, as complicated (if not impossible) as it might
seem. It is this same overflowing that leads the “fleurs monstrueuses” to be turned
into the rhythmic and hissing “fleurs sinistres qui ressemblent aux encensoirs
d’une religion inconnue.”
While these sinister flowers could well recall other Fleurs du Mal from
Baudelaire’s corpus, we should not underestimate the importance of their sounds
that evoke this unknown religion, one of a confusing poetics of overflowing
shapelessness: the repeated [s], [r], and nasals; the [a] in the “chats qui se pâment
sur les pianos,” the sounds [e] and [ɑ] laid down in an ABAB pattern despite the
simultaneous AABB pattern of the root words (“aimé,” “amant”; “courtisée,”
“courtisans”). In fact, we should continue to be mindful of all of the sounds that
inform our reading of these paragraphs, for Baudelaire’s own pronunciation of
this poem was sufficiently noteworthy that Eugène Delacroix referred to it when
he told his student Pierre Andrieu the story of when he first learned of this poem,
and its subsequent effect on him. According to René Piot, Delacroix said:
“Je hais plus que personne l’infernale habileté de la brosse, mais ce qui fait le vrai
peintre, c’est qu’il tire de son outil la qualité ailée qui fait l’éloquence de la pein-
ture comme le violoniste tire de son archet l’accent de son âme.
“Sachez, mon petit clerc (c’était le nom familier qu’il donnait à Andrieu), que
le jour où les peintres auront perdu la science et l’amour de leur outil, les théo-
ries stériles commenceront. Car ne sachant plus écrire leur pensée avec des
formes et des couleurs, ils l’écriront avec des mots et les littérateurs les auront. Je
ne parle pas du vrai poète, comme l’était mon bon petit Chopin, mais du pion
qui veut expliquer un vers de Virgile.”
C’est ce que je disais hier à M. Baudelaire qui était venu me lire ce qu’il appelle
ses petits poèmes en prose. Et après qu’il m’eut lu les Bienfaits de la lune, je lui dis
que c’était la plus belle correspondance du fond de l’Embarquement pour Cythère
et qu’il m’en a fait plus sentir ainsi le mystère aérien que par toute autre explica-
tion littérale.44
(I hate the infernal skill of the brush more than anyone, but what makes a true
painter is that he draws from his tool the winged quality which makes the elo-
quence of painting in the same way the violinist draws the accent of his soul
from his bow.
“You should know, my little clerk (the pet name he gave to Andrieu), that the
day painters lose the science and love of their tool, sterile theories will begin.
Because, no longer knowing how to write their thoughts with shapes and colors,
they will write them with words, and the literati will have them. I am not
44 René Piot, Les Palettes de Delacroix (Paris: Librairie de France, 1931), 67. The famous painting in
question is by Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), Embarquement pour Cythère (1717); Paris, musée du
Louvre, www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/11-550799-2C6NU0WL5WM6.html
speaking of real poets, as my good little Chopin was, but of the pawn who tries
to explain a line of Virgil.”
That is what I said yesterday to Mr. Baudelaire when he came to read me what
he calls his little prose poems. And after he had read me the Bienfaits de la lune,
I told him that it was the most beautiful correspondence from the depths of the
Embarquement pour Cythère, and that with it he made me feel the ethereal mys-
tery more than with any other literal explanation.)
Delacroix’s account leads us into the very heart of the prose poem itself, to its
pushes and pulls between the visible and the audible. On the one hand, he main-
tains that this prose poem is the best expression, in language, of what Watteau
attained in his famous painting of the same title.45 And yet, it was not a general
sense provided by the poem that evoked Watteau’s scene, but specifically
Baudelaire’s reading of it, to which Delacroix refers twice (“M. Baudelaire qui était
venu me lire,” “après qu’il m’eut lu”). The sounds that so strongly evoke the back-
ground of Watteau’s painting are precisely what Delacroix has in mind when he
refers to the eloquence (which we hear, as it is a function of speech) of a painting
(which we see). Not just any sounds: specifically, the sounds of Baudelaire’s prose
poetry, which remind the painter of the kinds of forms and colors which distin-
guishes someone like Chopin from. . . a lowly writer who can merely write about
poetry, “[le] pion qui veut expliquer un vers de Virgile.”46 The present discussion
of “Les Bienfaits de la lune” attempts to read, and hear, the poem similarly.
The confusion and formlessness persist after the moonlight’s speech, into the
poem’s final paragraph where we learn what is presented as the moral of the story:
the subject’s devotion to the “enfant,” looking up to her from her feet (as in “Le
Fou et la Vénus”; see supra, Chapter 1). Or what’s left of them: prostrate before
45 Baudelaire’s poetic renderings of this scene had already included the 1851 verse poem “Un voy-
age à Cythère” from Les Fleurs du Mal (OC 1: 117–19). The question of whether the painting’s travel-
lers are arriving at or leaving Cythera was first raised by Michael Levey in “The Real Theme of
Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera,” The Burlington Magazine, 103.698 (May 1961), 180–5.
46 Théophile Gautier’s account of Baudelaire reciting his own poetry confirms Delacroix’s insist-
ence on Baudelaire’s artistry: “[Baudelaire] mesurait ses phrases, n’employait que les termes les plus
choisis, et disait certains mots d’une façon particulière, comme s’il eût voulu les souligner et leur don-
ner une importance mystérieuse. Il avait dans la voix des italiques et des majuscules initiales”
([Baudelaire] measured his phrases, only used the most carefully chosen terms, and said certain words
in a specific way, as if he wanted to highlight them and give them a mysterious importance. He had
italics and initial capital letters in his voice). Théophile Gautier, Portraits et souvenirs littéraires (Paris:
Michel Lévy frères, 1874), 139–40. For a broader discussion of the resonance of poets reciting their
own poetry, see David Evans, “Tough Crowd: The Perils of Reading Poetry Aloud, or How Literary
Value is Negotiated Through Performance,” in Joseph Acquisto, Adrianna M. Paliyenko, and Catherine
Witt (eds.), Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France: Critical Reflections (London: Institute of
Modern Languages Research [University of London], 2015), 207–28. In his wide-reaching discussion
of the complex relationship between physiology and aesthetics at the onset of modernism, Robert
Michael Brain considers the role of poetry’s rhythm; see Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of
Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Seattle, WA: University of Washington
Press, 2015), especially chapter 5, “Liberating Verse: Rhythm and Measure in Poetry,” 150–73.
her, the narrator is just as equally expressing his devotion to the newfound poetics
of ebrius, beyond traditional poetic “pieds.” Imitation is the highest form of
flattery; as if permanently inscribed with it, this last paragraph reflects the moon-
light’s overflowing language just as the narrator looks for the reflection of the
foreboding-yet-maternal, divine presence that started it all, the Moon, muse for
all the lunatiques and “les emblèmes de leur folie.”
The proximity between ebrius and madness recalls the end of “Le Mauvais
Vitrier”:
Enfin il parut: j’examinai curieusement toutes ses vitres, et je lui dis: “Comment?
vous n’avez pas de verres de couleur? des verres roses, rouges, bleus, des vitres
magiques, des vitres de paradis? Impudent que vous êtes! vous osez vous prome-
ner dans des quartiers pauvres, et vous n’avez pas même de vitres qui fassent voir
la vie en beau!” Et je poussai vivement vers l’escalier, où il trébucha en grognant.
Je m’approchai du balcon et je me saisis d’un petit pot de fleurs, et quand
l’homme reparut au débouché de la porte, je laissai tomber perpendiculairement
mon engin de guerre sur le rebord postérieur de ses crochets; et le choc le ren-
versant, il acheva de briser sous son dos toute sa pauvre fortune ambulatoire qui
rendit le bruit éclatant d’un palais de cristal crevé par la foudre.
Et, ivre de ma folie, je lui criai furieusement: “La vie en beau! la vie en beau!”
Ces plaisanteries nerveuses ne sont pas sans péril, et on peut souvent les payer
cher. Mais qu’importe l’éternité de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde
l’infini de la jouissance? (OC 1: 286–7)
(He finally appeared; I examined all his glass curiously, and I said, “What? Don’t
you have any colored panes? pink panes, red, blue, magic panes, panes of para-
dise? You are shameless! You dare walk through poor neighborhoods, and you
don’t even have panes that make life look beautiful!” And I briskly pushed him
to the stairs, where he stumbled and grunted.
I went to the balcony and I grabbed a little pot of flowers, and when the man
reappeared at the entrance, I dropped my little war machine perpendicularly on
the back edge of his pack; and the shock knocking him over, he wound up shat-
tering under his back his entire poor traveling fortune, which produced the bril-
liant sound of a crystal palace burst by lightning.
And, drunk with my madness, I shouted at him furiously, “Make life beauti-
ful! Make life beautiful!”
Such neurotic pranks are not without peril, and one can often pay dearly for
them. But what does an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has
experienced for one second the infinity of delight?) (PP, 15; modified)
The mad drunkenness that follows the vicious act of shattering the glazier’s goods
is announced with the repeated line “La vie en beau!.” Given the subject’s rage, it
is worth considering the elements that contribute to the “jouissance” that he feels.
At first glance, “La vie en beau” echoes the charge expressed to the glazier earlier
in the poem that life should be seen in color: “Comment? vous n’avez pas de
verres de couleur? des verres roses, rouges, bleus, des vitres magiques, des vitres
de paradis? Impudent que vous êtes! vous osez vous promener dans des quartiers
pauvres, et vous n’avez pas même de vitres qui fassent voir la vie en beau!” The
insistence on the “verres” in all their possible colors underscores the great divide
between the goods for sale and the potential for seeing beauty: between the com-
mon and the uncommon.47 Unsurprisingly, the narrator’s demand for seeing life
in a manner that commercial goods cannot satisfy leads to the heroic act of taking
a stand against such commodities: throwing his “engin de guerre” down upon
them. The blow from the flowers breaking glass is hardly innocent: first, the word
“verre” recalls its homophone “vers,” and it shares the same Latin root as the other
word used for windowpane, “vitre.” As Barbara Johnson notes,
le récit de la destruction des vitres du Mauvais vitrier peut être lu comme un jeu
anagrammatique sur le calembour “briser les verres = briser les vers.” Le passage
de la poésie à la prose correspond à une amputation de tout ce qui, dans la
poésie, s’érige comme unité, totalité, immortalité, puissance.
(The story of the destroyed windows in “Le Mauvais Vitrier” can be read as an
anagrammatical play on the pun “briser les verres = briser les vers” [breaking
glass = breaking verses]. The passage from poetry to prose involves an amputa-
tion of everything which, in poetry, presents itself as unity, totality, immortality,
strength.)48
The homophonic connection that links the glazier to the poet is hardly new to
Baudelaire. In one of the famous parodies of Victor Hugo’s 1830 play Hernani—
the similarly titled N, I, Ni—the authors poke fun not only of bohemian verre/
vers, but specifically of Hugo’s departure from classical verse (and which in turn
led to the play’s famous reception and role in defining romantic theater) whereby
he would “break” a verse by having a noun and a related adjective sitting on either
side of the caesura in the middle of an alexandrine. In this passage, the glazier/
poet (dealer of verre/vers) has a long dash fall in the middle of the line: that it is
the line in which he defines himself as he comes to pick up all the shards (of glass
and of poetry) makes the parody all the more pointed:
47 In his compelling analysis of “Le Mauvais Vitrier,” Scott Carpenter shows how “The alienation of
common usage is one of the aesthetic devices standard to [Baudelaire’s] prose poems” (Scott Carpenter,
Acts of Fiction: Resistance and Resolution from Sade to Baudelaire (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1996), 140). Carpenter relies on Terdiman’s discussion of counter-discourse as a
means to engage with the use of clichés as an example of how Baudelaire “confers strangeness and
opacity upon what had formerly been reduced to seemingly transparent usage” (140).
DON PATHOS, à gauche.

Qu’es-tu ?
LE VITRIER, au milieu.
Je suis le grand — vitrier de Bohême.
Salut, grand Arlequin!. . . Tes vœux réalisés…
DÉGOMMÉ, à part, à l’extrême droite.
Un vitrier. . . Il vient pour tous les vers brisés. [. . .]
N.I. NI, à part.
Je ne m’étonne plus qu’il soit froid comme glace.49
(DON PATHOS, to the left. / Who are you? // THE GLAZIER, center. / I am the
great—glazier of Bohemia. / Hail, great Harlequin!…Your wishes have been
granted. . . // DÉGOMMÉ, aside, far right. / A glazier. . . he is coming for all the
broken glass/verse, // N.I. NI, aside. / I’m no longer surprised that he’s as cold
as ice.)
Additionally, we could read this “petit pot de fleurs” as a most unique weapon of
choice: an anthology.50 In rejecting the commercial nature of verre/vers by explod-
ing them with a collection of flowers/florilegium/anthology, the narrator also
effectuates a vital shift in the locus of senses from the visual to the audible, since
the shattered verre/vers litter the city with what Aimée Boutin calls a “ ‘brilliant’
sound and light show,”51 a million shards on the pavement and the city sound-
scape filled with noise: “le choc le renversant, il acheva de briser sous son dos
toute sa pauvre fortune ambulatoire qui rendit le bruit éclatant d’un palais de cris-
tal crevé par la foudre.” It only seems logical, then, that the narrator—relating this
story in prose—would feel a moment of “jouissance” for having used his collec-
tion of flowers/florilegium/anthology to successfully transform the visual field
dictated by verre/vers, with all its limitations, into a thunderous noise that leaves
him drunken with pleasure that even he cannot put into words other than to
repeat a linguistic shard from his earlier conversation (“La vie en beau! la vie en
beau!”). This repetition is telling, for it suggests that if the verre/vers might be
broken, it is not altogether gone. Shards remain, in platitudes (“La vie en beau!”)
that persist in an echo, in a kind of refrain: new poetic language has not entirely
49 Pierre Carmouche, Frédéric de Courcy, and Charles Dupety, N, I, Ni, ou le danger des Castilles,
amphigouri-romantique, en cinq actes et en vers sublimes, mêlés de prose ridicule (Paris: Bezou, 1830),
31; I am grateful to Steve Murphy for bringing this passage to my attention.
50 From the Greek anthos, flower; and -logia, collection. I am grateful to Scott Carpenter for this
and a number of other comments on an earlier version of this reading.
51 Aimée Boutin, “The Glazier’s Cry: Dissonance in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems,” in Krueger (ed.),
Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 120–7 (126).
supplanted it.52 Instead, the new poetic expression that takes the place of trans-
parent verre/vers will be not color in the visual sense, but perhaps in a musical
one, as timbre (Littré 1: 839). In its mixture of ivresse, madness, and fury, the prose
poem offers a moment of “jouissance” that is worth it, every time.53
Returning to the end of “Les Bienfaits de la lune,” where it comes full circle, we
are reminded that the Moon, referred to as “le caprice même,” is itself a composite
of a number of definitions that resonate with the ebrius of Baudelaire’s
poetic prose:
CAPRICE (ka-pri-s’) s. m. || 1º Volonté subite qui vient sans aucune raison. 2º

Saillie d’esprit et d’imagination, en bonne ou en mauvaise part. Ce poëte ne
compose guère que de caprice. C’est un auteur plein de caprice. Terme de
musique et, plus particulièrement, de musique instrumentale. Composition où
l’artiste écrit au gré de son inspiration, c’est-à-dire sans s’assujettir aux formes
qui caractérisent les pièces de musique réglées, telles que les rondeaux, les vari
ations, les menuets, etc. Ce pianiste a joué un fort beau caprice. 3º Inconstance,
irrégularité, mobilité. Les caprices de la fortune. Les caprices de la mode.
(Littré 1: 479)
(1. Sudden desire which appears without a reason. 2. A projection of the spirit
and imagination, for better or worse. This poet only composes caprices. He is
a very capricious author. Musical term, and specifically instrumental music.
Composition where the artist writes following his inspiration, which is to
say that he does not submit to the forms which characterise set musical
pieces, such as rondos, variations, minuets, etc. This pianist has played a
lovely caprice. 3. Inconstancy, irregularity, mobility. Caprices of fortune.
Caprices of fashion.)
That such uncontrollable desires, imagination (for better or worse, “en bonne ou
en mauvaise part”: in other words, “qu’importe”), poetry, music, and irregularity
might be created without respect for fixed forms is consistent with the movement
in the poem of the Moon’s metonym: the moonlight, which enables vision.
Flooding the visual space and passing through windowpanes, its irregular move-
ment courses throughout this poem’s ebrius of language as we move from narra-
tion to quoted discourse, and as the monologue ebbs and (over)flows, repeating
itself by swelling beyond its bounds to create a new poetic expression that has
both no forms and many at once. In several respects, Baudelaire’s moon
52 For more on refrains in the poetic, see Helen Abbott, Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice,
Conversation, and Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 207–19.
53 Kaplan reminds us that it’s not that simple; for the ethical complexity at the end of this poem, see
Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 46.
exemplifies the “caprice” label that it was given at the outset, and through the
poem enacts the very (non-)category in which it finds itself; as Littré would later
add in the Supplément to his dictionary: “Pièce littéraire où l’on n’a pas observé les
règles de l’art.” In this version of the ebrius of poetic prose, the spillage of form—
at once an absence and multiple presences—results in yet another coexistence of
impossibilities, the likes of which would never follow rules of art.
Distractions
A year before his death, Baudelaire wrote to Catulle Mendès about the corrections
to page proofs of the poems that were forthcoming in the fifth installment of Le
Parnasse contemporain. Complaining about his declining health and increasingly
illegible handwriting—the letter was actually dictated to Gustave Millot—he
added a postscript in which he insisted on certain details:
P.-S.—C’est madrigal triste et non pas le madrigal; c’est épigraphe

pour un livre condamné et non pas épigraphe pour un livre; à
une malabaraise et non pas à une malabraise.
Le dernier vers de la pièce intitulé: bien loin d’ici doit être précédé d’un
tiret (—), pour lui donner une forme d’isolement, de distraction. (C 2: 630)
(P.-S.—It is sad madrigal and not the madrigal; it’s epigraph for
a condemned book and not epigraph for a book; to a malabar
woman and not to a malabrese woman.
The last verse of the piece entitled far from here must be preceded by a
dash (—), to give it a sense of isolation, of distraction.)
“Bien loin d’ici” would indeed appear as the poet requested:
Bien loin d’ici

C’est ici la case sacrée
Où cette fille très parée,
Tranquille et toujours préparée,
D’une main éventant ses seins,
Et son coude dans les coussins,
Écoute pleurer les bassins:
C’est la chambre de Dorothée.
— La brise et l’eau chantent au loin
Leur chanson de sanglots heurtée
Pour bercer cette enfant gâtée.
Du haut en bas, avec grand soin,

Sa peau délicate est frottée
D’huile odorante et de benjoin.
— Des fleurs se pâment dans un coin.54
(Here is the sacred hut / Where this very bejewelled girl, / Calm and always
ready, // Fanning her breasts with one hand, / An elbow in the cushions, / Listens
to the pools crying; // This is Dorothy’s room. / — In the distance, breeze and
water sing / Their sobbing song struck / To lull this spoiled child to sleep. //
From head to toe, with great care, / Her delicate skin is rubbed / With fragrant
oils and benzoin / — Flowers swoon in a corner.)
Unlike the “sonnets en prose” discussed in the Introduction, this form, called a
“sonnet renversé,”55 seeks less to confuse the rules that define the sonnet than to
toy with them.56 While upending them, it keeps them intact despite holding them
upside-down.57 Indeed, Baudelaire had referred to it as a sonnet when he sent it,
along with two other poems, to Alphonse de Calonne, founder and editor of the
Revue contemporaine (February 23, 1864, C 2: 348). More important for our pur-
poses is the lasting importance that Baudelaire attributed—from February 1864
to May 1866, a year and a few months before he died—to the visual appearance of
his poetry, and its potential for distraction. Such potential is even enhanced by the
poem’s rhythm; as David Scott notes, “Lacking the Alexandrine’s scope for linear
expansion, the octosyllable obliges the poet to present his propositions or evoca-
tions in a series of vertically juxtaposed fragments. The reader thus confronts the
text more as a figure.”58
In the delicate, uneasy balance between what we see and what we hear, visual
appearance can go far, sometimes too far; in the course of his discussion of
artistic production (and specifically Paul Klee’s work), Pierre Boulez reflects not
only on how visual and acoustic elements interact, but when one can overstay
its welcome, go beyond its own limits, and distract the reader from appreciating
it in its totality:
54 First in the March 31, 1866, installment of Le Parnasse contemporain, then again when the first
standalone volume was published later that year. See OC 1: 145.
55 Verlaine referred to this as a “sonnet les jambes en l’air” (Œuvres poétiques complètes, 570).
56 During his discussion of the poem’s rhymes and its very status Clive Scott asserts that “Bien loin
d’ici” offers “fascinating structural problems” (Clive Scott, French Verse-Art: A Study (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), 178). For more on this poem within the broader context of
Baudelaire’s sonnets, see Steve Murphy, “Bien loin de Pétrarque: sur quelques ‘irrégularités’ du sonnet
baudelairien,” French Studies Bulletin, 35.132 (Autumn 2014), 60–4.
57 Or, as Murphy says, “le sonnet renversé se prête au mimétisme, suggérant que quelque chose a été
inversé, permuté ou culbuté” (the sonnet renversé is well suited to mimesis, suggesting that something
has been inverted, swapped or tipped over). Murphy, “Bien loin de Pétrarque,” 61.
58 David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth- Century France
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 100.
C’est l’un des problèmes qui se posent au musicien, expliquant que, dans son
écriture, il a quelquefois tendance à outrepasser les possibilités auditives de la
musique, trop captivé qu’il est par la belle apparence optique de la partition. Et
l’on a connu, il n’y a pas si longtemps, une mode des partitions visuelles, canevas
pour toutes sortes d’improvisations. Quelques musiciens se sentaient libérés de
toute contrainte conventionnelle ou traditionnelle. Mais si l’œil éprouvait parfois
du plaisir, le résultat prouvait que l’oreille était restée à l’écart, et que la corre-
spondance entre ce que nous voyons et ce que nous entendons doit se fonder
sur des bases plus solides.59
(It is one of the problems facing the musician, which explains why, in his writ-
ing, he sometimes tends to overstep music’s aural possibilities, too captivated as
he is by sheet music’s beautiful optical appearance. And not too long ago, we
witnessed a fashion for visual sheet music, as a canvas for all sorts of improvisa-
tions. Some musicians felt liberated from all conventional or traditional con-
straints. But while the eye sometimes felt pleasure, the result was that the ear had
been kept at a distance, and the correspondence between what we see and what
we hear must be built on stronger foundations.)
As we have already seen, Baudelaire was sensitive to such questions in his poetry,
in verse and in prose alike. Similarly, we have noted the potential for distraction
inherent to a text’s poetic qualities, what Michel Brix refers to as “tout ce qui
pouvait distraire l’attention du lecteur, et donc était susceptible d’altérer la com-
préhension immédiate du discours” (everything which could disturb the reader’s
attention, and which was therefore prone to altering the immediate understanding
of discourse).60 It is perhaps useful to consider the extent to which distractions
are unique to Baudelaire: to his poetry, to his prose poetry, or to poetic prose
more generally. Is there something about the modern French prose poem, in the
early days of its modernity in the nineteenth century—something that Le Spleen
de Paris puts on display particularly well—that made it a particularly productive
medium for such distractions? Another prose poem might be instructive in
this regard.
The September 21, 1872, issue of La Renaissance littéraire et artistique61
included the poem “Distrayeuse” by Charles Cros (1842–88), who had recently
contributed two poems to the second volume of Le Parnasse contemporain (dated
59 Pierre Boulez, Le Pays fertile: Paul Klee, ed. Paule Thévenin (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 100. For
more on Boulez’s considerations of Klee, see this study’s Introduction, supra.
60 Michel Brix, Poème en prose, vers libre et modernité (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2014), 22; also see the
present study’s Introduction.
61 Created earlier that year by former Zutiste Émile Blémont; for more on La Renaissance, see
Michael Pakenham, Une revue d’avant-garde au lendemain de 1870. La Renaissance littéraire et artis-
tique, dirigée par Émile Blémont, doctoral thesis (Paris: université Paris IV, 1996), of which chapter 4,
“Bonshommes et Zutistes,” was reprinted in Seth Whidden (ed.), La Poésie jubilatoire. Rimbaud,
Verlaine et l’Album zutique (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010), 13–32.
1869 but actually published in 1871). It was the third poem that the poet, inventor,
and former member of the Cercle zutique had published in La Renaissance over
the previous four months, following “Le Meuble” on May 18 and “Madrigal” on
July 27.62 The following year he would return to these poems, which he placed at
the end of his collection Le Coffret de santal (1873) and to which he gave a series
title, “Fantaisies en prose,” for they marked his experiments in combining poetry
and prose.
It is worth remembering that, in 1872, the word “fantaisie” was hardly innocent
in the context of French poetry. It had been the battering ram that Victor Hugo
used to blow open the door of poetry in the opening to his preface of Les
Orientales (1829): “L’auteur de ce recueil n’est pas de ceux qui reconnaissent à la
critique le droit de questionner le poète sur sa fantaisie [. . .]” (The author of this
collection is not one of those who allow criticism the right to question the poet on
his fantasies).63 In addition to declaring the poet free with respect to content,
mood, and inspiration, Hugo framed this notion of “fantaisie” in terms that reso-
nated strongly with formal matters of poetics, including time and space:
Hors de là, la critique n’a pas de raison à demander, le poète pas de compte à
rendre. L’art n’a que faire des lisières, des menottes, des bâillons; il vous dit: Va! et
vous lâche dans ce grand jardin de poésie, où il n’y a pas de fruit défendu. L’espace
et le temps sont au poète. Que le poète donc aille où il veut, en faisant ce qui lui
plaît; c’est la loi. Qu’il croie en Dieu ou aux dieux, à Pluton ou à Satan, à Canidie
ou à Morgane, ou à rien, qu’il acquitte le péage du Styx, qu’il soit du Sabbat; qu’il
écrive en prose ou en vers, qu’il sculpte en marbre ou coule en bronze [. . .] Le
poète est libre. Mettons-nous à son point de vue, et voyons.64
(Beyond this, criticism has no reason to ask, the poet has no one to be account-
able to. Art has no time for borders, handcuffs, gags; it says Go! and lets you
loose in this great garden of poetry, where there is no forbidden fruit. Space and
time belong to the poet. So the poet should go where he wants, doing as he
pleases; it is the law. Whether he believes in God or gods, in Pluto or Satan, in
Canidia or Morgana, or in nothing at all, whether he pays the toll to cross the
Styx, or keeps the Sabbath; whether he writes in prose or verse, whether he sculpts
from marble or shapes molten bronze [. . .] The poet is free. Let us adopt in his
point of view, and see.)
It was also the key word in the subtitle of Bertrand’s volume of prose poems,
Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot. While the
notion of “fantaisie” remained a key term during the Romantic movement,
62 For more on Cros’s multiple poems entitled “Madrigal,” see supra.

63 Hugo, Les Orientales, in Œuvres poétiques, 1: 577.
64 Hugo, Les Orientales, in Œuvres poétiques, 1: 577; emphasis added.
Bernard Vouilloux reminds us that it remained vague, while authorizing and even
imposing a lack of clarity.65 It was a catch-all notion: slippery at best. We see this
even in the earliest moments of the publication that proudly bore its name: the
first issue of the Revue fantaisiste (1861) begins with an open letter by Jules Noriac
to editor Catulle Mendès, which reads: “Je sais par à peu près ce que c’est qu’une
revue, mais j’avoue que je ne comprends pas ce que peut être une Revue fantai-
siste. Vague, vague, très-vague!”66 (I sort of know what a revue is, but I must admit
that I don’t know what a Revue fantaisiste might be. Vague, vague, very-vague!)
In the next issue Alcide Dusolier echoed (not without irony) with a counter-
definition, declaring: “Je définis—définitivement—la Fantaisie: ‘un je ne sais quoi.’”67
The lack of precision supports the idea commonly held by writers and reflected in
dictionaries of the period (evolving through the century, the adjective “fantaisiste”
first appeared in the 1843 Bescherelle): the very notion of “fantaisie” placed
imagination at the forefront, and all other concerns stemmed from it.
And while he referred to the entire collection Le Spleen de Paris as a “tortueuse
fantaisie” in his prefatory letter to Arsène Houssaye, Baudelaire took more time to
explain what he meant by “fantaisie” in his Salon de 1859 essay: specifically in the
fifth section, entitled “Religion, histoire, fantaisie.” As had been the case under
Hugo’s pen thirty years earlier, “fantaisie” goes so far to represent a freedom that it
subverts the very notion of genre: “la fantaisie est d’autant plus dangereuse qu’elle
est plus facile et plus ouverte; dangereuse comme la poésie en prose, comme le
roman, elle ressemble à l’amour qu’inspire une prostituée et qui tombe bien vite
dans la puérilité ou dans la bassesse; dangereuse comme toute liberté absolue”
(fantasy is even more dangerous because it is easier and more open; as dangerous
as prose poetry, like the novel, it resembles the love inspired by a prostitute and
which quickly falls into childishness and vulgarity; as dangerous as any total
65 Bernard Vouilloux, Écritures de fantaisie: grotesques, arabesques, zigzags et serpentins (Paris:

Hermann, 2008), 148. The term would evolve by the mid-century, and was used, to take down
Théophile Gautier in the 1840s as members of an “école fantaisiste” which represented a degenerate
form of Romanticism, and in the preface to his Odes funambulesques (1857) Théodore de Banville
would underscore the word’s implied frivolity: “Voilà assurément des fantaisies plus que frivoles; elles
ne changeront en rien la face de la société, et elles ne se font même pas excuser, comme d’autres
poëmes de ce temps, par le génie” (Here are fantasies which are certainly more than frivolous; they
won’t change the face of society in the slightest, they are not even excused, like other poems of our
times, by genius) (Théodore de Banville, Odes funambulesques, ed. Peter J. Edwards, vol. 3 of Œuvres
poétiques complètes (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), 5). See Jean-Louis Cabanès and Jean-Pierre
Saïdah, “Présentation,” in Jean- Louis Cabanès and Jean- Pierre Saïdah (eds.), La Fantaisie post-
romantique (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2003), 13–15; Michelle Benoist, La Fantaisie et
les fantaisistes dans le champ littéraire et artistique en France de 1820 à 1900, doctoral thesis (Paris:
université Paris III, 2000), 199–200; and Philippe Andrès, La Fantaisie dans la littérature française du
XIXe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000).
66 Jules Noriac, “À Monsieur le Rédacteur en chef de La Revue fantaisiste,” Revue fantaisiste
(February 15, 1861), 3–7 (3). Mendès would respond at the beginning of the journal’s second issue, in
a letter that begins “Cher confrère, Vous m’avez écrit la plus étrange lettre du monde” (Dear colleague,
You have written me the strangest letter in the world) (Catulle Mendès, “À Monsieur Jules Noriac,”
Revue fantaisiste (March 1, 1861), 67–71 (67)).
67 Alcide Dusolier, “Revue dramatique,” Revue fantaisiste (March 1, 1861), 122–6 (125).
freedom) (OC 2: 644). This danger goes right to the heart of the literary enterprise,
which Baudelaire explains in Fusées in his discussion of “le surnaturel,” which is
synonymous with “fantaisie”: “Deux qualités littéraires fondamentales: surnatu-
ralisme et ironie. Coup d’œil individuel, aspect dans lequel se tiennent les choses
devant l’écrivain, puis tournure d’esprit satanique. Le surnaturel comprend la
couleur générale et l’accent, c’est-à-dire intensité, sonorité, limpidité, vibrativité,
profondeur et retentissement dans l’espace et dans le temps” (Two fundamental
literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. Single glance, how things appear to
the writer, then satanic literary witticism. The supernatural includes general color
and accent, or the intensity, sonority, clarity, vibrancy, depth and resonance in
space and time) (OC 1: 658).
On this point, Baudelaire’s discussion of “fantaisie” marks a contrast with
“qu’importe”: while the poetics of ebrius suggests that the specific source, means,
or direction of overflowing is good—that is, it is about not distinguishing—here
he seems to be positing that there are limits, and that certain freedoms can be
dangerous or, as he writes in his Salon de 1846, sterile (“il faut être aujourd’hui
Delacroix ou Ingres pour surnager et paraître dans le chaos d’une liberté épu-
isante et stérile” (today one must be Delacroix or Ingres to overcome and survive
amid the chaos of an exhausting and sterile freedom) (OC 2: 492)). Perhaps the
bridge between the two is, precisely, the notion of “intensité”: an intensification,
not a release.68 A final point worth noting in this brief discussion of the presence
of “fantaisie” in the context of Baudelaire’s work is that he published nine of his
prose poems under the title “Poëmes en prose” in the November 1, 1861 issue of
the Revue fantaisiste.69
Cros would pick up on “fantaisie” twice in titles of sections within Le Coffret de
santal: first for verse poems under the heading “Drames et fantaisies” and then at
the end of the collection, where “Distrayeuse” appears in “Fantaisies en prose.”70
In so doing, he situates the work under the sign of imagination that crosses genres
and can produce seemingly limitless freedoms.71 Baudelaire’s warning that such
freedoms could be dangerous would seem to pertain particularly to someone like
Cros, who possessed boundless creativity himself. If in this poem he trains his
attention on what we see and hear, it is because considerations of perception
already represented an ongoing preoccupation in his experiments, scientific and
68 I wish to thank Nikolaj Lübecker for bringing this contrast to my attention.

69 The poems were “Le Crépuscule du soir,” “La Solitude,” “Les Projets,” “L’Horloge,” “La Chevelure,”
“L’Invitation au voyage,” “Les Foules,” “Les Veuves,” and “Le Vieux Saltimbanque” (see Kopp, 420).
70 It would reappear in his posthumous collection Le Collier de griffes, in the section title “Fantaisies
tragiques.”
71 Dardani concurs, saying that Cros’s prose poems respond even better than his verse poems to his
need for creativity and that provide an answer to his metaphysical concerns (“I ‘poèmes en prose’ di
Cros [. . .] risponde, forse più dell’opera poetica vera e propria, ad una esigenza di creatività ed una ris-
posta alle sue inquietudini metafisiche”; Enrica Dardani, Charles Cros, l’inventeur d’un monde nou-
veau (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 1981), 64.
poetic alike.72 On May 20, 1872—or two days after La Renaissance published
Cros’s prose poem “Le Meuble”—he sent a study entitled “Théorie mécanique de
la perception, de la pensée et de la réaction” to the Académie des Sciences, where
it was to be peer- reviewed by none other than Claude Bernard.73 As Cros
explained in a note that he submitted with his study, his primary focus was visual
perception, to be followed by the other senses:
J’ai l’honneur de présenter à l’Académie des sciences la première partie d’un

ouvrage qui a pour titre: Théorie mécanique de la perception, de la pensée et de la
réaction. Cette première partie a pour objet l’étude de la perception, c’est à dire de
la pénétration et de l’enregistrement des choses perçues dans les appareils
nerveux.
Je suis amené à étudier tout d’abord les fonctions visuelles à cause de leurs
caractères de perfection et de variété, d’où suit la possibilité de généraliser les
résultats et de les appliquer aux autres modes de percevoir.74
(I have the honor of presenting to the Academy of Sciences the first part of a
work intitled: Théorie mécanique de la perception, de la pensée et de la réaction.
This first part focuses on the study of perception, meaning the penetration and
recording of things perceived by the nervous system.
I was first brought to study visual functions because of their characteristics of
perfection and variety, from which comes the possibility of generalising the
results and applying them to other modes of perception.)
Cros’s experimentations with perceptions continued. A few years later, he wrote

to the Académie des Sciences and described his invention—an early phonograph
72 Ortel concurs, referring to “l’unité d’une démarche qui entrecroise étroitement science et poésie”
(the unity of a method which weaves together science and poetry). Philippe Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère
de la photographie: enquête sur une révolution invisible (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 2002), 70.
73 Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences, publiés, conformément à
une décision de l’Académie en date du 13 juillet 1835, par MM les Secrétaires perpétuels (January–June
1872), 74: 1350–1. The study seems to have gone without a trace, except for the announcement of the
forthcoming publication of its first part, as Mécanique cérébrale, 1re partie, La perception, in the first
issue of Cros’s own Revue du Monde nouveau (March 1874). It later appears in numbers 4–7 (August–
November 1879) of La Synthèse médicale, a scientific journal under the supervision of Charles’s other
brother Antoine Cros. About this study, see Charles Cros, Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Forestier and
Pascal Pia (Paris: J-J Pauvert, 1964), 623–5; and Louis Forestier, Charles Cros, l’homme et l’œuvre (Paris:
Minard [Lettres modernes], 1969), 180. Louis Forestier concurs and treats experimentation in poetry
and science as part of a broader intellectual project with its related highs and lows (drawing on
“Distrayeuse” as he goes): “Dans l’ordre scientifique, ses inventions lui échappent presque aussitôt
qu’entrevues, tout comme, en poésie, les visions se sauvent avant d’avoir irisé le papier du poudroie-
ment nacré de leurs ailes” (In science, his inventions escape him almost as soon as he glimpses them,
just as in poetry, where visions flee before they have made the page gleam with their wings’ pearly
powder) (Forestier, Charles Cros, l’homme et l’œuvre, 494).
74 Archives de l’Académie des sciences, pochette de séance (May 20, 1872). I wish to thank the
Service des Archives et du Patrimoine scientifique of the Académie des sciences for its assistance with
these materials.
he called the paléophone75—as a “procédé d’enregistrement et de reproduction

des phénomènes perçus par l’ouïe” (a process of recording and reproduction of
phenomena perceived by hearing).76 Two weeks after “Distrayeuse” was published
Cros expressed pleasant surprise when he wrote to his brother Antoine “Envoie-
moi immédiatement les numéros de La Renaissance où il y a quelque chose de
moi. J’ai appris avec beaucoup de plaisir qu’on avait imprimé la ‘Distrayeuse’; mais
ne m’ont-ils pas mis des vers?” (Send me straight away the issues of La Renaissance
that contain anything by me. I was very pleased to learn that the “Distrayeuse”
has been printed; but haven’t they included any of my verses?).77 Cros’s question
about why La Renaissance hadn’t published his verses shows that he was experi-
menting with verse and prose concurrently: that is, just as concurrently as he was
experimenting in poetry and science.
For its part, La Renaissance was experimenting, too, and it ran Cros’s writing
alongside Armand Silvestre’s fourteen-poem series entitled Gloria in excelsis. Just
before “Distrayeuse,” La Renaissance published the final nine poems (numbered
VI through XIII, followed by “Épilogue: Le Testament”) of Silvestre’s series. His
initial poems I and II appeared in the August 10 issue, just before Cros’s own
forty-eight-verse poem “À la promenade.” Poems III, IV, and V appeared on
August 24, right after Cros’s famous story “Un drame interastral.”78 In it, a couple
of astronomers’ children fall in love in the year 2872, their long-distance relation-
ship between Earth and Venus facilitated by the serial photos that they send each
other of their bodies via a long-distance telescope. Truth be told, the Earthling
son, called Glaux, wasn’t much of a scientist, a point that Cros’s narrator feels is
worthy of a digressive paragraph:
Le jeune homme, doué d’une imagination vive, presque indisciplinée, n’avait

aucun goût pour les études astronomiques et ne voulait faire que de la peinture
et des vers. Il a du reste laissé des poésies estimées des gens spéciaux, quoiqu’elles
aient un caractère d’étrangeté peu admissible pour ceux qui, comme moi,
n’admettent que les chefs-d’œuvre normaux et incontestables du XXVe siècle.
Revenons à notre histoire.79
75 See Brett Brehm, “Paleophonic Futures: Charles Cros’s Audiovisual Worlds,” Nineteenth-Century
French Studies, 45.3–4 (Spring–Summer 2017), 179–97.
76 Charles Cros, “Procédé d’enregistrement et de reproduction des phénomènes perçus par l’ouïe”
(Process for recording and reproducing phenomena perceived by hearing), Charles Cros and Tristan
Corbière, Œuvres complètes, eds. Louis Forestier and Pierre- Olivier Walzer (Paris: Gallimard
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1970), 579–80.
77 Letter to Antoine Cros, October 4, 1872; quoted in Forestier, Charles Cros, l’homme et l’œuvre, 271.
78 Cros did not appear in the issues of September 7—which included poems by Émile Blémont,
Léon Valade, Albert Glatigny, and J. Lazare (Job- Lazare, the pseudonym of Émile Kuhn)—or
September 14—which featured poems by Albert Mérat, Valéry Vernier, a certain “A. Rimbaud” (it was
his poem “Les Corbeaux”), and Lazare.
79 Charles Cros, “Un drame interastral,” La Renaissance littéraire et artistique (August 24, 1872),
139–40 (140).
(The young man, gifted with a lively, almost undisciplined imagination, had no
taste for the study of astronomy, and only wanted to paint and write verse poetry.
He also produced poems that are esteemed by unusual people, despite their
having a strange character which would not be acceptable to those who, like me,
only accept normal and unquestionable masterpieces of the twenty-fifth century.
Let us return to our story.)
After an initial series of communications using the “appareil de correspondance

terrestre,” they had to wait because of the planets’ respective rotations: “les réfrac-
tions atmosphériques brouillent les images et ne permettent bientôt plus que les
signes plusieurs fois répétés: À demain!” (atmospheric refractions blur images
and will soon only allow us to send repeated signals saying: See you tomorrow!).
When the woman of his visions was in sight, though, the love-struck observer
focused on trying to capture her: specifically, her body, in whatever materials he
had at his disposal and, of course, her voice in writing:
Glaux, aux heures où l’observation était close, s’enfermait en une salle et repro-
duisait dans des fumées ou des poussières l’image mouvante de sa bien-aimée,
image impalpable faite de lumière seule. Il réalisa aussi la forme immobile en
substances plastiques.
C’est alors qu’ils imaginèrent de s’envoyer leur son de voix, leurs paroles, leurs
chansons. Tout cela était noté par des courbes et reproduit dans l’appareil élect-
rique à diapasons. Je ne puis rien dire des paroles et des chansons (?) venues de
si loin.80
(In the hours when the observatory was closed, Glaux would shut himself in a
room and reproduce, amid the smoke and the dust, his beloved’s moving image,
an impalpable image made only of light. He also made a motionless figure out of
plastic.
It was then that they imagined sending each other the sound of their voices,
their words, their songs. All of it was written down in curves on graphs and
reproduced in the electric tuning fork apparatus. I cannot say anything about
the words and songs (?) that came from so far away.)
The narrator’s question mark of whether the Venerian’s language constitutes songs
leaves them open to interpretation; other results of this story based on scientific
observation have an even more definitively poetic resonance. Not only was the
three-year-long romance never consummated, it ended with an interplanetary
suicide pact sealed with a long-distance kiss: “Glaux et la jeune fille échangèrent
un dernier baiser à travers l’espace implacable et se tuèrent” (Glaux and the young
80 Cros, “Un drame interastral,” 140.

girl shared a last kiss through implacable space and killed themselves). Furthermore,
the experience resulted in a notebook that captured it all, written by the young
poet-turned-observer (and, just perhaps, scientist despite himself): “Ces détails
résultent du journal en prose et en vers qu’a laissé Glaux” (these details are from
the prose and verse journal that Glaux left behind).81 From the notebook of the
23-year-old Earthling named Glaux with his head in the clouds—not much of a
scientist or a poet—it is not much of a stretch to move to the “journal en prose et
en vers” of the 30-year-old Earthling named Cros who was similarly trying his
hand at a number of things: among them, a prose poem concerned with noting
down what one observes.
A brilliant reflection of form and content that Suzanne Bernard calls “une
remarquable démonstration de virtuosité formelle,”82 “Distrayeuse” is written in a
poetic language full of repeating sounds, and a seemingly heightened auditory
awareness more generally. This self-awareness operates in the semantic level’s
mise en abyme, as it is a poem about writing poetry: “Distrayeuse” details the
poetic subject’s inability to complete the verse poem in progress because of the
italicized “Elle” and her repeated interruptions which undermine his attempts to
transpose his visions into verse. Just as he had sought to do with the paléophone,
Cros would attempt to capture “des phénomènes perçus” in what was for him the
innovation of prose poetry.
DISTRAYEUSE
La chambre est pleine de parfums. Sur la table basse, dans des corbeilles, il y a
du réséda, du jasmin et toutes sortes de petites fleurs rouges, jaunes et bleues.
Blondes émigrantes du pays des longs crépuscules, du pays des rêves, les
visions débarquent dans ma fantaisie. Elles y courent, y crient et s’y pressent
tant, que je voudrais les en faire sortir.
Je prends des feuilles de papier bien blanc et bien lisse, et des plumes couleur
d’ambre qui glissent sur le papier avec des cris d’hirondelles. Je veux donner aux
visions inquiètes l’abri du rythme et de la rime.
Mais voilà que sur le papier blanc et lisse, où glissait ma plume en criant
comme une hirondelle sur un lac, tombent des fleurs de réséda, de jasmin et
d’autres petites fleurs rouges, jaunes et bleues.
C’était Elle, que je n’avais pas vue et qui secouait les bouquets des corbeilles
sur la table basse.
81 Cros, “Un drame interastral,” 140.

82 Suzanne Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Nizet, 1959), 351.
Despite this praise for the poem’s formal qualities, she says that there’s little else: “À vrai dire, une telle
composition a toujours quelque chose d’un peu artificiel, et la réussite de Cros me paraît ici surtout
formelle” (To tell the truth, a composition like this always seems a little artificial, and Cros’s success
here seems mostly formal to me) (352).
Mais les visions s’agitaient toujours et voulaient repartir. Alors, oubliant

qu’Elle était là, belle et blanche, j’ai soufflé contre les petites fleurs semées sur le
papier et je me suis repris à courir après les visions, qui, sous leurs manteaux de
voyageuses, ont des ailes traîtresses.
J’allais en emprisonner une,—sauvage fille au regard vert,—dans une étroite
strophe,
Quand Elle est venue s’accouder sur la table basse, à côté de moi, si bien que
ses seins irritants caressaient le papier lisse.
Le dernier vers de la strophe restait à souder. C’est ainsi qu’Elle m’en a empê-
ché, et que la vision au regard vert s’est enfuie, ne laissant dans la strophe ouverte
que son manteau de voyageuse et un peu de la nacre de ses ailes.
Oh! la distrayeuse!. . . J’allais lui donner le baiser qu’elle83 attendait, quand les
visions remuantes, les chères émigrantes aux odeurs lointaines ont reformé leurs
danses dans ma fantaisie.
Aussi, j’ai oublié encore qu’Elle était là, blanche et nue. J’ai voulu clore l’étroite
strophe par le dernier vers, indestructible chaîne d’acier idéal, niellée d’or stellaire,
qu’incrustaient les splendeurs des couchants cristallisées dans ma mémoire.
Et j’ai un peu écarté de la main ses seins gonflés de désirs irritants, qui mas-
quaient sur le papier lisse la place du dernier vers. Ma plume a repris son vol, en
criant comme l’hirondelle qui rase un lac tranquille, avant l’orage.
Mais voilà qu’Elle s’est étendue, belle, blanche et nue, sur la table basse, au-
dessous des corbeilles, cachant sous son beau corps alangui la feuille entière de
papier lisse.
Alors les visions se sont envolées toutes bien loin, pour ne plus revenir.
Mes yeux, mes lèvres et mes mains se sont perdus dans l’aromatique brous-
saille de sa nuque, sous l’étreinte obstinée de ses bras et sur ses seins gonflés
de désirs.
Et je n’ai plus vu que ce beau corps alangui, tiède, blanc et lisse où tombaient,
des corbeilles agitées, les résédas, les jasmins et d’autres petites fleurs rouges,
jaunes et bleues.84
(The room is full of scents. On the low table, in baskets, there is reseda, jasmine,
and all sorts of red, yellow, and blue flowers.
Blond emigrants from the land of long twilight, from the land of dreams,
visions bustle into my fantasies. They run, shout, and crowd around so much
that I want to get them out.
I take sheets of smooth white paper, and amber quills that glide over the paper
with a swallow’s cry. I want to give the worried visions the shelter of rhythm
and rhyme.
83 Note: this word is capitalized and italicized in the version of the poem that appeared in La
Renaissance littéraire et artistique.
84 Cros and Corbière, Œuvres complètes, 151–2; original emphasis.
But here, on the smooth white paper, where my pen slid while crying out like
a swallow on a lake, fall flowers of reseda and jasmine, and other red, yellow, and
blue flowers.
It was She, whom I hadn’t seen, shaking the bouquets from the baskets out
over the low table.
But the visions, still agitated, wanted to go away. So, forgetting that She was
there, pale and beautiful, I blew on the little flowers scattered on the paper and
went back to chasing the visions who, under their traveller’s coats, have treach-
erous wings.
I was about to capture one,—a wild girl with a green gaze,—in a tight stanza,
When She came and leaned her elbow on the low table next to me, in such a
way that her stimulating breasts caressed the smooth paper.
The last verse of the stanza remained to be soldered. This is how She stopped
me from finishing it, and how the green-eyed vision fled, leaving in the open
stanza only her traveller’s coat and some mother-of-pearl from her wings.
Oh! Distractress!. . . I was about to give her the kiss she was waiting for, when
the moving visions, the dear emigrants with their foreign scents resumed their
dances in my fantasy.
So I once again forgot that She was there, white and naked. I wanted to close
the tight stanza with the last line, an indestructible chain of ideal steel, inlaid
with astral gold, which the splendors of sunsets firmly dug into my memory.
And with my hands I pushed aside her breasts, swollen with their stimulating
desires, which were covering the place of the last verse on the smooth paper. My
pen took flight once again, crying out like a swallow skimming a still lake before
a storm.
But there She was, stretched out, beautiful, white, and naked, on the low table,
under the baskets, hiding the whole sheet of smooth paper under her beautiful
languorous body.
Then the visions all flew away, never to return.
My eyes, my lips and my hands got lost in the aromatic scruff of her neck,
under her arms’ obstinate embrace and on her breasts swollen with desires.
And all I could see was that stretched out beautiful body, warm, white, and
smooth, where reseda, jasmine, and other red, yellow, and blue flowers were fell
from the shaking baskets.)
Or, rather, “Distrayeuse” is a poem about not writing poetry. Unlike the Muse—
the feminine presence who inspires the poet’s visions and thoughts and pushes
him to transpose them successfully into beautifully wrought verses—the feminine
presence in Cros’s poem gets in the way: in this sense the “Distrayeuse” is the
anti-Muse.
Of course she is also an invention, even a neologism: “Le mot distrayeuse—
celle qui distrait l’esprit du poète et le détourne de sa tâche créatrice—semble bien
être de l’invention de Cros” (The word distrayeuse—she who distracts the poets
mind and turns him away from the task of creation—seems to be of Cros’s own
invention).85 The word’s arrival in the poem is framed as a discovery, preceded by
an emphatic exclamation and followed by an ellipsis that allows the word to linger
so that we may give it our fullest consideration: “Oh! la distrayeuse!….” While
neologisms were of course not entirely revolutionary—in science or in litera-
ture—this one seems particular apposite and could even be considered a micro-
cosm of the poem itself. This new word is not immediately of the obscure,
head-scratching variety: this is no Mallarméan ptyx. Instead, it offers elements
that are immediately recognizable even if they appear together for the first time:
the stem, distray-, obviously comes from the verb distraire, and the suffix -euse is
equally obvious for its feminine anthropomorphizing, turning the word into a
person, or at least a clearly feminine agency.86 Could the same be said, in Cros’s
poetic visions, of the prose poem itself? Its components of prose and poetry are
instantly recognizable on their own, but their combination, or juxtaposition, suf-
fices in creating something completely new; together they justify a new word and
title, if not an entire category. A final hint of familiarity also comes from the title’s
lack of an article: neither “La Distrayeuse” or “Une Distrayeuse,” “Distrayeuse” is
pulled away from a noun or a name, and toward the adjective. As such, the word
itself even eludes grammatical categories and the semantic weight they can
imply.87 As an adjective, it suggests a quality; as a noun it is as a name given to the
feminine agency, or to the naming that accompanies scientific discovery. Either
way, this naming suggests thorough knowledge and familiarity, if not intimacy,
although its nature—whether insult, nickname, new species, or a different kind of
name altogether—is unclear at the poem’s outset.
As much as we can glean from what Cros’s new word means, we can also think
about what the word is not: the notions of distraction and diversion are so closely
related that Littré felt the need to add some precision in his definition of
“distraire”:
DISTRAIRE, DIVERTIR. De ces deux mots, l’un signifie, étymologiquement,

tirer de côté et d’autre, l’autre tourner de côté et d’autre. Mais de là ils ont pris
85 Cros and Corbière, Œuvres complètes, 1138. The word also offers an echo with the character of
the “Vaporeuse” in Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Nuits de Paris, as Robert St. Clair reminds me. Indeed,
Restif squarely places the “Vaporeuse” under the sign of distraction, which saves her from boredom;
see Dominique Jullien, Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade. Variations modernes sur les Mille et une nuits
(Geneva: Droz, 2009), especially “La Vaporeuse de Restif, ou la bienfaisance comme divertisse-
ment,” 29–32.
86 “DISTRAYANT: Qui donne une distraction. Lecture distrayante” (DISTRACTING: Which pro-
vides distraction. A distracting read) (Littré 2: 1196); “-EUR, -EUSE. Finale des noms d’agents formés
avec le radical des verbes” (-EUR, -EUSE. Suffix of nouns made from the root of a verb) (Littré
2: 1541).
87 I am grateful to Nikolaj Lübecker and Maria Scott for directing me to this word’s pull and its
distractive potential.
respectivement une signification qui les différencie: le divertissement est

beaucoup plus que la distraction; on se divertit quand on se livre à divers amuse-
ments, tels que spectacles, bals, fêtes, repas; pour se distraire, il n’est pas besoin
de tout cela; il suffit de quelques plaisirs même solitaires, de quelques simples
satisfactions. (2: 1195)
(TO DISTRACT, TO DIVERT. Of these two words, etymologically one means to
pull from one side to another, the other to turn from one side to another. But from
there they have each taken on a meaning that differentiates them: diversion is
much more than distraction; we are diverted when we indulge in various amuse-
ments such as shows, balls, parties, or dinners; for a distraction, none of that is
needed; a few pleasures suffice, even solitary ones, a few simple satisfactions.)
The distraction—or, in this case, the distractress—of “Distrayeuse” is decidedly

not a simple question of amusing sights, galas, or other light-hearted fare that
serves the role of a diversion: this is not Pascal’s divertissement, that avoidance
mechanism that allows us to turn our back on reality, and especially on our
inescapable mortality. Indeed Cros’s search for new knowledge about perception
in both the arts and sciences was part of a major wave in scientific discovery:
“a new mode of seeing begins the nineteenth century” and “distraction is the main
symptom of such a change—an overload of stimuli causing constant shifts in
attention and thus actual physical changes in human vision.”88 Furthermore, the
word “diversion” shares the same etymon as verse poetry: verto, to turn, and it is
for this reason that Littré defines “divertir” as “tourner de côté et d’autre.” And
this is precisely the point: the tension central to “Distrayeuse” is the refusal to
turn, or operate, as a verse poem should: Cros’s poetic subject (and, by extension,
Cros himself) has a verse poem that, stalled, won’t turn over. Despite his attempts,
he is feeling the pull—“tirer de côté et d’autre”—away from the verse-that-won’t-
turn: toward something new, something else.
At first blush, the poetic subject’s goals seem clear: he seeks to put down on
paper the fantastic visions that fill his head—the “blondes émigrantes” that open
the second paragraph—by enclosing them in a shelter of rhythm and rhyme, the
hallmarks of verse (“Je veux donner aux visions inquiètes l’abri du rythme et de la
rime”). This desire to get the visions to stop moving so he can get them down
recalls Baudelaire’s sentiment from La Beauté’ (Les Fleurs du Mal), “Je hais le
mouvement qui déplace les lignes.”89 Trying to make his visions fit into the lines
88 Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 2011), 3. For more on the studies of ocular perception in the nineteenth century, see Gillian
Beer, Optical Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 298; and
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 104–36.
89 1: 21. As Tim Ingold explains,
In Western societies, straight lines are ubiquitous. We see them everywhere, even when
they do not really exist. Indeed the straight line has emerged as virtual line of modernity,
he is writing, Cros’s poet contemplates how to inscribe their presence and their
actions: having come from the land of dreams and long twilights, they move
toward and indeed flood the poet’s mental and visual fields. The poetic inscription
is specifically meant to fit the tight confines of rhythm and rhyme; this shelter is
more of a jail cell, framed in a lexicon of imprisonment with narrow spaces and
bars waiting for a final bit of soldering.90 Cros is far from the first to refer to verse
poetry in such terms; recall Victor Hugo’s verse “J’ai pris et démoli la bastille des
rimes” (cf. Introduction, supra).
The prison bars also recall Auguste Vacquerie’s poem “À un ami” from the first
(1866) volume of Le Parnasse contemporain,91 in which the thirty-six verses begin
with a warning for the poem’s recipient, the friend who wishes for poetry in
which no word is out of place; the warning itself is menacing since the enjamb-
ment that is deemed repulsive in the opening line actually appears in three of the
first six verses:
Ami, l’enjambement te répugne, et tu veux

Que Sara la baigneuse attache ses cheveux
Et rentre dans les fils d’un hamac plus avare
Son petit pied pleuré des mines de Carrare.
Te voilà désolé si la liberté veut
Qu’un mot sorte du vers. Jamais ton vers ne peut,
Comme un chasseur heureux d’un hibou qu’il rapporte,
Clouer joyeusement une idée à sa porte.
(v. 1–8)
(Friend, you are repulsed by enjambment, and you want / Sara the bather to tie up
her hair / And tuck into the threads of a stingier hammock / Her little foot lamented
in the mines of Carrara. / You are sorry if freedom wants / A word to come out of
an index of the triumph of rational, purposeful design over the vicissitudes of the natural
world. The relentlessly dichotomising dialectic of modern thought has, at one time or another,
associated straightness with mind against matter, with rational thought as against sensory
perception, with intellect as against intuition, with science as against traditional knowledge,
with male against female, with civilisation as against primitiveness and—on the most general
level—with culture as against nature. It is not difficult to find examples of every one of these
associations. (Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2016), 156–7)
For Louis Forestier, the insistence in “Distrayeuse” on the poet’s visions connects it to Rimbaud’s pro-
ject of the Voyant, especially the line “Il arrive à l’inconnu, et quand, affolé, il finirait par perdre
l’intelligence de ses visions, il les a vues!” from his May 15, 1871, letter to Paul Demeny (Forestier,
Charles Cros, l’homme et l’œuvre, 405).
90 Scott Carpenter reminds me that, if turned sideways, prison bars could look like verses (personal
communication). In a similar vein, David Evans is right to read formal stakes in the question from “La
Belle Dorothée,” that “Pourquoi a-t-elle quitté sa case?” (Why did she leave her space?): “In the same
way, a prose poem asks a disturbed reader: pourquoi la poésie a-t-elle quitté sa forme? (why did poetry
leave its form?), inspiring a search for new values of poeticity”; David Evans, Rhythm, Illusion and the
Poetic Idea: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 110.
91 Auguste Vacquerie, “À un ami,” Le Parnasse contemporain (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1866), 45–6.
Thanks to David Evans for bringing this poem to my attention.
the verse. Never can your verse, / Like a hunter happy with an owl he brings
back, / Nail an idea joyously to the door.)
The friend specifically denies the pleasure of seeing the poem in a different light:
Tu ne permets jamais que, pour attirer l’œil,

Un adjectif pimpant se tienne sur le seuil.
Tu défends qu’une strophe, interrompant la classe,
Cause avec sa voisine, ou bouge de sa place.
Tu te fais proprement un caporal en vers.
(v. 9–13)
(You never allow, to catch the eye, / A dashing adjective to stand on the threshold. /
You forbid a stanza, interrupting the class, / To talk with its neighbour, or move
from its place. / You make yourself a right corporal in verse.)
The poem reaches its most urgent moment when the poetic subject asks his friend
if he is a poet or a jailer: “Qu’est-ce donc que t’ont fait, pour ainsi les lier, / Tes
propres vers? Es-tu leur père ou leur geôlier?” (What have you done to bind them
so, / Your own verses? Are you their father or their jailer?) (v. 17–18). That the
rhyme conjoins one word pronounced with diaeresis (“lier”) with another pro-
nounced with syneresis (“geôlier”) is not at all revolutionary; however, that it
occurs at the moment that combines the direct address of a question with the
poem’s sole alexandrin trimètre (a twelve-beat line split 4-4-4 instead of the trad
itional 6-6) makes for a powerful shift of mood, tone, and rhythm:
Qu’est-ce donc que t’ont fait, / pour ainsi les lier, (6-6)
Tes propres vers? / Es-tu leur père / ou leur geôlier? (4-4-4)
or:
Qu’est- ce donc que t’ont fait, pour ain si les li er,

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Tes pro pres vers? Es- tu leur père ou leur geô lier?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Vacquerie then closes the poem with more prison lexicon, calling for a liber
ation from the jail cell of verse poetry (even though the final lines don’t them-
selves bear any such freedoms from verse):
Romps ces compartiments et ces étroits barreaux

Qui ne distinguent pas les aigles des pierrots,
Et, jetant ton ciseau mortel à ce qu’il taille,
Laisse voler en toi des vers de toute taille,

Entrecroisés ainsi que dans un vol réel.
Ta forme est une cage et devrait être un ciel!
Varie en chacun d’eux les lois universelles.
Pas de rejet? alors tu hais les étincelles?
(v. 29–36)
(Break these compartments and these narrow bars / That do not distinguish
eagles from sparrows, / And, throwing your deadly chisel at what he cuts, / Let
verses of all sizes fly within you, / Criss-crossed as in real flight. / Your form is a
cage and it should be a sky! / Vary in each one the universal laws. / No rejet? so
you hate flashiness?)
Like Vacquerie, for Cros verse poetry is a dead end of stasis and thus a restrictive
force to these visions, as we see in the repeated topos of limited movement, poten-
tial liberation, and attempted recapturing in phrases such as “Mais les visions
s’agitaient toujours et voulaient repartir” and “J’allais en emprisonner une.”
In many respects the visions in Cros’s prose poem are presented in direct
opposition to the “distrayeuse”: they are plural while she is singular; their move-
ment has them arriving from afar, while the “distrayeuse” literally evokes a pulling
away, implicitly from what is near; and, finally, the visions’ movement is intransi-
tive (they move from là-bas to ici), whereas the “distrayeuse” involves the transi-
tive action of pulling the subject, poet, reader, and poetry away from the present
and its concomitant rules and limits.
It seems clear enough: the poet recognizes these visions that appear to him, as
if out of nowhere, and he finds a way to put them down on paper, doing so in a
shelter made of rhythm and rhyme and/or protecting them from rhythm and
rhyme. But it is the one who got away—or, rather, the one he never saw coming—
who gets in the way, and makes it take a turn for the worse. It is a distant precur-
sor to the metaphor on which Dany Laferrière closes his Journal d’un écrivain en
pyjama, his series of essays on writing, and getting ideas written down:
Je regarde les nuages en espérant une petite pluie en plein midi ensoleillé. La vie
immobile. J’observe une forme assez floue qui s’avance dans ma direction. Est-ce
un nuage de poussières? Une femme? Pas elle!
— Je savais que je te retrouverais sur cette place, me dit-elle simplement.
— Et comment saviez-vous que j’allais venir ici?
— Vous autres, les écrivains, vous laissez vos traces partout. On n’a qu’à vous
lire pour savoir où vous êtes.
Je tourne sur moi-même. Personne d’autre que nous. Elle me regarde sans
cesser de sourire.
— Je dois admettre que vous aviez vu juste l’autre jour.
— J’aurais vu quoi?
Elle éclate de rire.
— Je suis une métaphore.
Lancé ainsi par-dessus cette mer turquoise, le mot métaphore prend subite-
ment sa véritable ampleur. Les lieux ont un effet sur les mots ou est-ce le con-
traire? Je rêve de cette cahute sur la montagne afin de lire l’Odyssée près de la mer.
— Et de quoi êtes-vous la métaphore?
— Vous ne le saurez que si vous m’attrapez, lance-t-elle joyeusement en cour
ant vers la mer.
Elle file vers l’île de la Gonâve, à une folle vitesse, en tournant de temps en
temps pour voir où j’en suis. Je me lance à sa poursuite. Corps phosphorescent
bondissant par-dessus les vagues. La voilà qui plonge dans un mouvement si
harmonieux que j’ai failli perdre connaissance devant tant de grâce. J’allais la
suivre, complètement sous le charme, mais je me suis arrêté à temps. Plus loin,
j’ignore ce qui m’attend. Je retourne vers la plage en sachant que je passerai le
reste de ma vie à regretter ce geste. [. . .] Je ne sais plus ce qui m’a pris de courir
ainsi vers la mer. Je me suis mis à nager jusqu’à épuisement. Juste au moment de
couler, j’ai senti qu’on me tirait par le bras. Cela a duré le temps d’un sommeil.
Un temps qu’il est toujours difficile d’évaluer. Était-ce une minute, une heure ou
une vie?92
(I watch the clouds hoping for a little rain in the middle of some noontime sun.
Motionless life. I observe a blurry shape moving toward me. A dust cloud? A
woman? Not her!
— I knew I would find you here in this square, she says to me, simply.
— And how did you know I was going to come here?
— You writers leave your traces all over the place. We only need to read you to
know where you are.
I turn around. No one but us. She looks at me, smiling the whole time.
— I must admit that you had seen things right the other day.
— What do you think I saw?
She laughs aloud.
— I am a metaphor.
Pronounced in that way over the turquoise sea, the word metaphor subtly
takes on its true size. Spaces have an effect on words, or is it the other way
around? I dream of that mountain hut where I can read the Odyssey by the sea.
— And what are you a metaphor for?
— You’ll only know if you catch me, she said joyfully, running toward the sea.
She races off toward the island of Gonâve at top speed, turning around from
time to time to see if I am keeping up. I set off after her. A phosphorescent body
bounding over the waves. She dives in with such a harmonious movement that
I almost faint before such gracefulness. I was about to follow her, completely
charmed, but I stopped myself in time. Farther away, I do not know what awaits
92 Dany Laferrière, Journal d’un écrivain en pyjama (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2013), 310–12.
me. I walk back to the beach knowing that I will spend the rest of my life regret-
ting this gesture. [. . .] I don’t know what came over me to run to the sea like that.
I began to swim to the point of exhaustion. Just as I was about to sink, I felt my
arm being pulled. It lasted as long as sleep: a time that is always difficult to count.
Was it a minute, an hour or a lifetime?)
For Cros, the one, singular, anthropomorphized, and italicized vision Elle is the
one vision he hadn’t seen: “C’était Elle, que je n’avais pas vue et qui secouait les
bouquets des corbeilles sur la table basse.” From her arrival into this poetic arena
(and this arena of poetics), she shakes up the entire house of poetry: literally, for
the “corbeilles de fleurs” are, as they were in “Le Mauvais Vitrier,” anthologies;
that the leaves named in the poem are actually “feuilles de papier” only strength-
ens this connection. The flowers themselves are presented as being of the stand-
ard variety: in the vague, general phrase that presents them—“toutes sortes de
petites fleurs rouges, jaunes et bleues”—and which is repeated verbatim in the
poem’s final words: that they only come in primary colors only further under-
scores their lack of novelty. On the other hand, the vision that the poet attempted
to capture sits on the fault line between two colors: first “sauvage fille au regard
vert” then “la vision au regard vert,” she occupies the space on the visible spec-
trum between yellow and blue, between two of the primary colors mentioned.
Whether representing nature, spring, rebirth and renewal, or jealousy and envy,
her position—equidistant between two of the colors, or, in painting, created by
the combination of the two—she is the alternative to the easily caught basic
colors; she is all juxtaposition, combination, amalgam, without her own defined
place and occupying space between two others.
There is little surprise, then, that such a profoundly significant shake-up to
verse would result in the poet being unable to bring to closure his transcription in
verse of the visions:
J’allais en emprisonner une,—sauvage fille au regard vert,—dans une étroite

strophe,
Quand Elle est venue s’accouder sur la table basse, à côté de moi, si bien que
ses seins irritants caressaient le papier lisse.
Le dernier vers de la strophe restait à souder. C’est ainsi qu’Elle m’en a empê-
ché, et que la vision au regard vert s’est enfuie, ne laissant dans la strophe ouverte
que son manteau de voyageuse et un peu de la nacre de ses ailes.
Unlike the first six paragraphs—indeed, like every other paragraph in the poem—
the seventh is the only one that is an incomplete thought: ending in a comma and
continuing with the “Quand Elle” at the start of the next paragraph. The phrase
that precedes the comma, “une étroite strophe,” lends additional support to see in
these paragraphs a sort of enjambment in prose, a mise en abyme in which Cros
shows the very real difficulty of transposing a vision coherently and succinctly
into poetry.93 On the verge of capturing his vision in words, he is confronted with
the limits of poetry. In an attempt to complete the task, he doubles down and
evokes soldering it so as to harden it in a permanent rigidity.
Such reflections on the difficulty of pinning down an inspirational feminine
vision recall Baudelaire’s “Le Désir de peindre”:94
Le Désir de peindre
Malheureux peut-être l’homme, mais heureux l’artiste que le désir déchire!
Je brûle de peindre celle qui m’est apparue si rarement et qui a fui si vite,
comme une belle chose regrettable derrière le voyageur emporté dans la nuit.
Comme il y a longtemps déjà qu’elle a disparu!
Elle est belle, et plus que belle; elle est surprenante. En elle le noir abonde: et
tout ce qu’elle inspire est nocturne et profond. Ses yeux sont deux antres où scin-
tille vaguement le mystère, et son regard illumine comme l’éclair: c’est une explo-
sion dans les ténèbres.
Je la comparerais à un soleil noir, si l’on pouvait concevoir un astre noir ver-
sant la lumière et le bonheur. Mais elle fait plus volontiers penser à la lune, qui
sans doute l’a marquée de sa redoutable influence; non pas la lune blanche des
idylles, qui ressemble à une froide mariée, mais la lune sinistre et enivrante, sus-
pendue au fond d’une nuit orageuse et bousculée par les nuées qui courent; non
pas la lune paisible et discrète visitant le sommeil des hommes purs, mais la lune
arrachée du ciel, vaincue et révoltée, que les Sorcières thessaliennes contraignent
durement à danser sur l’herbe terrifiée!
Dans son petit front habitent la volonté tenace et l’amour de la proie.
Cependant, au bas de ce visage inquiétant, où des narines mobiles aspirent
l’inconnu et l’impossible, éclate, avec une grâce inexprimable, le rire d’une
grande bouche, rouge et blanche, et délicieuse, qui fait rêver au miracle d’une
superbe fleur éclose dans un terrain volcanique.
Il y a des femmes qui inspirent l’envie de les vaincre et de jouir d’elles; mais
celle-ci donne le désir de mourir lentement sous son regard. (OC 1: 340)
(Unhappy perhaps the man, but happy the artist whom desire shatters!
I burn to paint the one who appeared to me so rarely and who fled so quickly,
like a beautiful lamented thing left by the traveler carried off into the night. How
long ago she disappeared!
She is beautiful, and more than beautiful; she is surprising. In her blackness
abounds, and everything she inspires is nocturnal and deep. Her eyes are two
93 That the line includes an echo of verse in the homophone “vert” (“sauvage fille au regard vert”)
adds additional sonorous weight to this possibility.
94 Thanks to Maria Scott for encouraging these reflections.
lairs in which mystery flickers dimly, and her gaze illumines like lightning: it is
an explosion in the darkness.
I would compare her to a black sun, if one could imagine a black star pouring
forth light and happiness. But she makes one think more readily of the moon
which probably branded her with her fearsome influence; not the white moon of
idylls, which resembles a frigid bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon,
suspended at the bottom of a stormy night and jostled by fleeting clouds; not the
peaceful and discreet moon visiting the sleep of pure men, but the moon ripped
from the sky, defeated and revolted, which the witches of Thessaly fiercely com-
pel to dance on the terrified grass!
On her small brown dwell stubborn will and the love of prey. However,
beneath this disquieting face, where mobile nostrils inhale the unknown and the
impossible, there bursts, with inexpressible grace, the laughter of a large mouth,
red and white, and delicious, which calls to mind the miracle of a superb flower
blooming in volcanic soil. There are women who inspire the desire to defeat
them and to take full pleasure from them; but this one makes one want to die
slowly under her gaze). (PP, 94–5; modified)
At the start of this poem, the destructive force of the artist’s impulse is clear. The
words “désir déchire” provide a sonorous proximity that counters the opening
sentence’s opposite poles, one couched in the other: “Malheureux [. . .] heureux.”
As the desire comes into focus (“Je brûle de peindre”) and the attempt grows
nearer, language increasingly fails the poetic voice who loses the ability to find the
right words and stumbles, repeating the platitude “belle”: “Elle est belle, et plus
que belle; elle est surprenante.” Her eyes’ chiaroscuro offers the greatest obstacles;
described as a series of contrasts of light and darkness, while they remain within
the limits of what the poet/artist could convey, they are beyond the limits of what
words can make us believe: “Je la comparerais à un soleil noir, si l’on pouvait con-
cevoir un astre noir versant la lumière et le bonheur.” No, the reputed master of
language (the poet/artist) self-corrects, it is not the sun but the moon: not one
extreme but its opposite. The center paragraph circles around a series of “not X
but Y” descriptors in which the linguistic presence of both sides of the coin (the
inaccurate description and the accurate one) coexist. If the painter can cover an
initial attempt with a final, corrected version, the poet cannot: the false starts lin-
ger, echo, and hold their place in the textual tableau. It is perhaps on this level that
the not-the-sun-but-the-moon is itself presented with ebrius: beyond the seman-
tic resonance of “la lune” itself, the moon is additionally laden with all that it is
not, all that cannot be erased, the sound of the bell that cannot be unrung. While
the sounds hang in the air, the saving grace comes from the visual. Not only does
laughter come from a large, delicious, teethy, and full-lipped mouth, but it inspires
a dream that is itself a vision, a miracle. Not the full collection of a coherent
anthology but a lone, miraculous flower, growing despite (and remaining closed
to protect itself from) its harsh surroundings. Such a miracle—surely an example

of “le miracle d’une prose poétique”—is enough to make a poet/artist die happy.
In Cros’s “Distrayeuse,” though, the mouth is of a different order, the site not of
miracles but of more trouble; the “distrayeuse” leads the character of the poet to
try to kiss her, only to see his visions transformed into new movements (“danses,”
he calls them). Returning to try again, he bears down on the task at hand and
enumerates the specific restrictions that will get him across the finish line: “Aussi,
j’ai oublié encore qu’Elle était là, blanche et nue. J’ai voulu clore l’étroite strophe
par le dernier vers, indestructible chaîne d’acier idéal, niellée d’or stellaire,
qu’incrustaient les splendeurs des couchants cristallisées dans ma mémoire.” As if
descendant from the elements in the title of Théophile Gautier’s volume Émaux et
camées (enamels and cameos), the bejeweled metallurgy in this proposed final
verse (“dernier vers”) is also an attempt to return to the drumbeat of prosody, for
this line proposes what Louis Forestier calls “la chaîne d’acier idéal du poème,
projection de la chaîne éternelle du temps” (the poem’s chain of ideal steel, a pro-
jection of the eternal chain of time).95 While one could force the issue and assert
that the phrase “indestructible chaîne d’acier idéal” is an alexandrine, when read
with mute “e” pronounced at the end of “indestructible” and “chaîne,” it is not
necessary to impose an artificial reading of verse onto prose (indeed, as Benoît de
Cornulier has shown, it is undesirable, and even just plain wrong96). Nor is it
necessary to find an example of the twelve-syllable line that was the standard of
French verse poetry to read this line’s insistence on time as an unbreakable and
perfect metal chain, and to appreciate the traditional rigidity that the “dernier
vers” represents in this part of “Distrayeuse.”
Despite all the promise of its splendors and its ideal and indestructible nature,
the temporal gives way to the spatial, one could even say in a manner that is not
unlike a move in poetry from verse to prose. And it is irrevocable, as is a true
innovation: after making us perceive the world in a new way, a return to old
modes of seeing and hearing is rendered impossible. In this poem, the out-
stretched body of the “distrayeuse” takes over the space and makes disappear all
the visions that were fitting into verse, so that at the end the subject could no
95 Forestier, Charles Cros, l’homme et l’œuvre, 382. Indeed, for Forestier, the central tension in
“Distrayeuse” is that “le poète ne parvient pas à modifier le cours du temps. Chaque fois qu’il oublie le
monde extérieur c’est-à-dire quand il mène son rêve en dehors de la durée normale, “Elle” revient” (the
poet cannot alter the passage of time. Every time he forgets the outside world, that is to say when he
takes his dream beyond its usual duration, “She” returns) (439).
96 In following Cornulier, I disagree with Edward Kaplan who, following Henri Lemaître and
Robert Kopp, attempts to read second half of the last paragraph of the prose poem “Les Veuves” as
lines of verse (after alteration). While it is true that one does not count the mute “e” when reading
prose, it is also true that one doesn’t read, hear, anticipate, feel, or count syllables when reading prose
either. (See Kaplan, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems, 71–2; Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poèmes en prose (Le
Spleen de Paris), ed. Henri Lemaître (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1962), 69–70; and Kopp, 233.) For more
on the tensions involved in reading prose poetry as verse, see Evans, “Poetry and the Search for
Rhythm,” in Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea, 117–28.
longer see anything but her body. Or, rather, her body’s numerous attributes, all of
which have been repeated throughout the poem in such a way that provides the
kind of rhythm that makes a prose poem poetic. For there are additional spatial
consequences that “Elle” brings to the arena of verse: enjambments connect verses
while retaining and respecting their lengths (that is to say, one can only surpass
one line and flow into the following one if there is a line end to be surpassed). By
stretching out, the “distrayeuse” calls for another spatial order entirely.
While the movement of the “blondes émigrantes” was a force that the poet
attempted to capture in verse, during this moment of poetic creation there is a
different series of movements in poetic language that escape his clutches. Just as
“Elle” remains beyond his grasp, so are modulations in poetic prose the kinds of
free-flowing aspects of poetic language that he didn’t anticipate. Perhaps the best
illustration can be seen in the chiasmus of moving sounds in the third and fourth
paragraphs; the repetition of “lisse” is contracted, as the movement of visions gets
closer to the subject who perceives them, while the repetition of [i] in “cri” and
“hirondelle” begins in close proximity and then is repeated as a more distant echo:
Je prends des feuilles de papier bien blanc et bien lisse, et des plumes couleur
d’ambre qui glissent sur le papier avec des cris d’hirondelles. Je veux donner aux
visions inquiètes l’abri du rythme et de la rime.
Mais voilà que sur le papier blanc et lisse, où glissait ma plume en criant
comme une hirondelle sur un lac, tombent des fleurs de réséda, de jasmin et
d’autres petites fleurs rouges, jaunes et bleues.
There is a similar kind of elasticity at play in the repeated appearance of her

breasts and their effects. They are first presented as a source of stimulation in “ses
seins irritants” (paragraph 8). The verb “irriter” first refers to a force that pro-
duces anger, and its definitions are framed in terms of the pure carnal, even the
bestial: Littré’s first example is “Mettre en colère [. . .] Irriter un taureau, un lion”
(To anger [. . .] To irritate a bull, a lion) (3: 158). More figuratively, an irritation or
a stimulation, like the expansiveness of Cros’s prose, is a question of accentuating
and exacerbating: “Rendre plus vif, plus ardent [. . .] plus violent” (To make
brighter, more ardent [. . .] more violent) (3: 158). The word’s Latin root points to
irrire, for growling like a dog, and it does not seem out of place that “Elle” would
bring into the poetic universe of “Distrayeuse” an emotional and/or epidermal
response that sits outside language. After the poet’s repeated mention of his
attempt to “clore l’étroite strophe par le dernier vers,” the breasts themselves are
repeated, now swelling with desire in a phrase that is twice as long: “ses seins gon-
flés de désirs irritants” (paragraph 12). With this expansion comes a slippage that
is consistent with the irritant itself: what was at first clearly not linguistic is now
even further untethered as the stimulation, grammatically ambiguous, can modify
either the breasts or the desires. At the moment when the poet returns to his
thoughts about his poetic production, desire literally gets in the middle and sows
confusion. Of course the confusion leaves with the visions, and the final mention
of her breasts is folded into the physical embrace, with the desire clearly directed
at her swelling breasts: “Mes yeux, mes lèvres et mes mains se sont perdus dans
l’aromatique broussaille de sa nuque, sous l’étreinte obstinée de ses bras et sur ses
seins gonflés de désirs” (paragraph 15). While a stimulation leads to swelling
desire which makes it disappear, Cros’s prose itself moves in a similar progression,
as the noun phrase itself swells from three words (“ses seins irritants”) to six (“ses
seins gonflés de désirs irritants”) and then, after shedding its irritation, one fewer
(“ses seins gonflés de désirs”).
In addition to the expansion and contraction of repeated sounds and phrases,
there is also significant repetition, and evolution, in the attributes initially given
to paper and then given to “Elle”: “des feuilles de papier bien blanc et bien lisse”
(paragraph 3) first in the progression from “belle et blanche” (paragraph 6), then
“blanche et nue” (paragraph 11), then “belle, blanche et nue” (paragraph 13), then
ending by returning to and appropriating the attributes that had initially
described paper: “ce beau corps alangui, tiède, blanc et lisse.”97
Such repetitions are undeniable markers of the poetic: rhythming the
“Distrayeuse” in a manner consistent with meter in a verse poem. On this point
we are reminded of Baudelaire’s comments about Poe’s use of refrains:
De même qu’il avait démontré que le refrain est susceptible d’applications infini-
ment variées, il a aussi cherché à rajeunir, à redoubler le plaisir de la rime en y
ajoutant cet élément inattendu, l’étrangeté, qui est comme le condiment indis-
pensable de toute beauté. Il fait surtout un usage heureux des répétitions du
même vers ou de plusieurs vers, retours obstinés de phrases qui simulent les
obsessions de la mélancolie ou de l’idée fixe,—du refrain pur et simple, mais
amené en situation de plusieurs manières différentes,—du refrain-variante qui
joue l’indolence et la distraction,—des rimes redoublées et triplées, et aussi d’un
genre de rime qui introduit dans la poésie moderne, mais avec plus de précision
et d’intention, les surprises du vers léonin. (OC 2: 336; original emphasis)98
97 “Ce moment où la blancheur du papier s’irise d’une impalpable poudre, il faut tenter de le saisir,
mais il faut aussi prendre garde qu’un faux mouvement ne disperse à jamais chaque atome de couleur”
(That moment when the whiteness of the paper gleams with an impalpable powder, one must try to
grasp it, but one must also take care that a misstep does not forever disperse every atom of color)
(Forestier, Charles Cros, l’homme et l’œuvre, 256).
98 Refrains occupy a central place in a number of form-defying poems by Marie Krysinska; in “Les
Fenêtres,” which she subtitled “poème en prose,” she returns five times to the phrase “Le long des
boulevards et le long des rues”: in addition to opening and closing the poem itself, it appears in other
beginnings or ends of the poem’s sections, or movements. Marie Krysinska, Œuvres complètes, ed.
Florence Goulesque and Seth Whidden (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2022–). Section I: Poésie, vol. 1:
Rythmes pittoresques, ed. Seth Whidden; Joies errantes, ed. Yann Frémy (Paris: Honoré Champion,
2022), 57–9.
(Just as he had shown that the refrain is susceptible to infinitely varied applications,
he also sought to rejuvenate and to redouble the pleasure of rhyme by adding
this unexpected element, strangeness, which is like the indispensable condiment
of all beauty. He makes especially good use of repetitions of the same verse or
of several verses, insistent returns of phrases which simulate the obsessions of
melancholy or of a fixed idea—of a pure and simple refrain, but brought into
being in different ways—of the refrain-variant which feigns carelessness and
distraction—of double and triple rhymes, and also a kind of rhyme which
introduces into modern poetry, albeit with more precision and intention, the
surprises of leonine verse.)
Contrary to the attempt to “souder” the poem’s final verse in this poem that we
never get to see, it is clear that Cros plays with the malleability of poetic language
within prose in the poem that we actually do get to see: that is, the one we are
reading.
As the temporal had given way to the spatial, the poem hinges on what the poet
can and cannot see while things come into view and disappear just as quickly.
Poetry hangs in the balance, for it is in the act of pushing aside her desirous breasts
that he reveals the space for poetry (“ses seins gonflés de désirs irritants [. . .]
masquaient sur le papier lisse la place du dernier vers”). Freed from her presence,
poetry takes flight, only to be grounded with the deictic “voilà” and the flood into
his visual field of corporality and physicality, with her outstretched, naked body
making the paper invisible to him (“cachant sous son beau corps alangui la feuille
entière de papier lisse”). The grave consequences continue to be told in terms
of what is and is not seen: first, the poetic visions, the “blondes émigrantes,”
disappear for good and, by co-opting the verb of flight that the poet had just used
to describe his own writing (“Ma plume a repris son vol,” “Alors les visions se sont
envolées”), they take with them any last hope of writing verse poetry, “pour ne
plus revenir” indeed. (One could also consider the extent to which his pen takes
his theft again: stealing the poetic from verse, so as to instill it in prose.) Then,
the poetic subject himself gives in, since what is left cannot be perceived by
traditional means: specifically, as he describes it, it cannot be seen, tasted, or felt
(“Mes yeux, mes lèvres et mes mains se sont perdus”). Instead, it is to be perceived
up close, as a combination of olfactory and sensual, carnal stimulation: “dans
l’aromatique broussaille de sa nuque, sous l’étreinte obstinée de ses bras et sur ses
seins gonflés de désirs.” The expression “coucher sur le papier” (put down on
paper) resonates here: synonymous for writing, it encapsulates this moment of
double intimacy: with “Elle” and with the kind of writing that their encounter
creates.99
99 I am grateful to Scott Carpenter for bringing this expression to my attention.

While the phrase of this obstinate embrace begins with the realization that his
eyes would no longer suffice (“Mes yeux [. . .] se sont perdus”), their full surrender
opens the final paragraph, ushered in with the cumulative “Et” that underscores
this conclusive tone: “Et je n’ai plus vu que ce beau corps [. . .].” Poetry is no longer
a matter of capturing visions and getting them down in neat rows with familiar
rhythms; it comes not from forging ahead but by being pulled away—eyes closed,
mind open—and it results in a long, meandering sentence of thirty-one words at
the end of a series of sixteen short paragraphs: a poetic language that can only
exist in a new, un-verse, un-turning spatial dimension.100 Surely this is what
Rimbaud had in mind in his famous commentary on invention and poetic form:
“Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu. [. . .] il devra faire sentir, palper, écouter
ses inventions; si ce qu’il rapporte de là-bas a forme, il donne forme: si c’est
informe, il donne de l’informe. Trouver une langue” (Therefore the poet is truly
thief of fire. [. . .] he will have to make his inventions smelled, felt, and heard; if
what he brings from down there has form, he gives form; if it is formless, he gives
formlessness. A language must be found).101
So what, then, is this “Elle,” this feminine presence that gets in the way of the
poetic subject/poet capturing fantastical visions and transcribing them in verse,
this source of agency that makes him fail in writing a verse poem while ultimately
enabling the creation of a new kind of poetry? What is this singular “Elle” who
obscures the multiple others (“Elles y courent, y crient…”; paragraph 2)? Perhaps
the answer lies in her shape-shifting nature, her complete and absolute domin
ance of the visual field always obliterating everything else. For she arrives unseen
(“C’était Elle, que je n’avais pas vue…”; paragraph 5) and by the end of her cre
ation—this prose poem that produces her (and this prose poem that she cre-
ates)—she induces even greater negation, rendering any other visions impossible
in the future: (“Et je n’ai plus vu que ce beau corps…”; last paragraph).
Her presence could hardly be more dominant; in this poem about what is and
is not written, “Elle” is written, repeatedly throughout the poem and, through the
use of italics, emphatically. In addition to this emphasis, her written presence is
an even more ubiquitous vocable (Oxford English Dictionary: “A syllable or sound
without lexical or referential meaning”) as her sonorous echo is couched in
“hirondelle[s],” the swallow that is itself repeated three times in the poem, in
“belle,” and, lastly, in the wings that are at times traitorous or nacreous (“des ailes
traîtresses,” “la nacre de ses ailes”).102 Such additional resonance is particularly
100 For Franz Rauhut, the poem’s division into numerous sections is evidence of its insistence on
the musicality of prose poetry, a characteristic that Cros was attempting to refine after inheriting it
from Baudelaire; Franz Rauhut, Das französische Prosagedicht (Hamburg: de Gruyter, 1929), 74–5.
101 Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, 346; original emphasis; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, 379.
102 Mallarmé’s “Crise de vers” is instructive here, for it is the vocable of “elle” that constitutes the
feminine “distrayeuse.” And while his mention of the role of vocables is applied to verse—“Le vers qui
de plusieurs vocables refait un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue et comme incantatoire” (The verse
that, with several vocables, makes a whole new word, foreign to language and almost like an
notable given all of the repeated words and sounds in this poem. Her efforts to
impede a particular kind of inscribing visions somehow enable her own inscrip-
tion in this different kind of writing, in this other kind of poetry. Ultimately
“Elle” and the poem are written: in spite of themselves, perhaps, but they are
definitely written.
As she is inscribed, so is all that she represents: the invention, the novelty, the
unknown, the “fantaisie”: a force that pulls us away, irrevocably, from the ability
to capture visions and imprison them in the rigid straitjacket of verse. Instead, all
that is left is a new visual field, in which wildflowers (Reseda lutea is also called
yellow or wild mignonette), jasmines, and other small, colorful flowers fall from
the shaken anthology of poetry, as pages detached from the worn and broken
spine of an old collection of verse. Ultimately “Distrayeuse” raises questions fun-
damental to the poetic adventure, to the moment of poetic innovation: how can
one transcribe new modern scenes in poetry? What kind of poetry can handle
such visions and sounds, and what does that look like, and sound like, in a poem:
in general, and as each of us perceives the world? For his part, Cros answers these
questions by walking us through them, and the answer is as clear as it is unclear:
it is a pull away from verse; it is a prose poem that somehow emanates from the
fraught moment of creation, the happenstance invention that was not originally
sought but which is no less beautiful, no less rhythmic, no less poetic.
incantation)—he later reminds Jules Huret, and us, that “Le vers est partout dans la langue où il y a
rythme” (Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm). I am indebted to Roger Pearson to
helping me consider this vocable’s full resonance.
Epilogue
The Prose Poem after Le Spleen de Paris
Baudelaire’s prose poems first appeared as a collection posthumously (he died on

August 31, 1867): editor Michel Lévy published them between May 29 and June 5,
1869, under the title Petits Poëmes en prose, the fourth of the multi-volume
Œuvres complètes edited by Charles Asselineau and Théodore de Banville.1 Young
Arthur Rimbaud sent some of his first verse poems to Banville in May of the fol-
lowing year,2 and he knew Baudelaire’s prose poems well by September, a few
weeks before he turned sixteen.3 Eight months later, after the fall of the Second
Empire and the Prussian siege of Paris, and during the Paris Commune, Rimbaud
wrote his two famous letters called “du Voyant.” In the latter of the two, while
declaring his revolutionary poetic project, Rimbaud referred to Baudelaire as
king of poets, “un vrai Dieu.” Rather than take that oft-quoted sound bite out of
context, however, it is worthwhile to consider the entire passage: “Baudelaire est
le premier voyant, roi des poètes, un vrai Dieu. Encore a-t-il vécu dans un milieu
trop artiste; et la forme si vantée en lui est mesquine: les inventions d’inconnu
réclament des formes nouvelles” (Baudelaire is the first seer, king of the poets, a
real god. And yet he still lived in too artistic a milieu; and his much-celebrated
form is trivial: inventions of the unknown require new forms).4
What could it mean for a poetic God to be a lightweight, formally speaking?
Already in his verse poems, Rimbaud was looking for other forms—inventions
1 In Feuilleton du Journal général de l’imprimerie et de la librairie, 58e année, 2e série, 22 (May 29,
1869), 561, the volume is announced as forthcoming (“pour paraître la semaine prochaine”), and in
the following issue it is listed as “en vente” (no. 23 (June 5, 1869), 567).
[Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 2009), 323–30; and Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace
Fowlie, revised edition by Seth Whidden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 363. Unless
indicated otherwise, all references to Rimbaud’s work in this chapter refer to these two editions—the
Pléiade for the French, abbreviated OC, the Complete Works for the English, abbreviated CW—with a
semicolon between them, e.g. “(OC 348; CW 381).”
3 Not least, as Murphy explains, because the 1869 volume was the only one available in 1870. (Steve
Murphy, “Au-delà de l’illusion intimiste: vers une scato-idéo-logique des ‘Effarés,’ ” Parade sauvage, 30
(2019), 13–66.) During the winter of 1871–2, Rimbaud’s reading of Baudelaire incited the young poet
to try his own hand at prose poetry, as he discussed with his friend Ernest Delahaye a different project
of prose poems, entitled L’Histoire magnifique, which would open with a series entitled Photographie
des temps passés. See Frédéric Eigeldinger and André Gendre, Delahaye témoin de Rimbaud (Neuchâtel:
La Baconnière, 1974), 37 and 41.
4 OC 348, original emphasis; CW 381, modified.
Epilogue 279
occasioned by the confrontation of the unknown. Whether he sensed them while

reading Le Spleen de Paris, he hinted at tensions between poetry and prose when
he gave the title “Roman” (Novel)5 to a verse poem, dated September 29, 1870; he
reminded us not to take the eight quatrains too seriously in the famous first verse,
“On n’est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans” (We aren’t serious when we’re
seventeen years old). He would be much more irreverent with respect to “la
forme” in 1872, in his verse poems that put on display their own formal demise.
But it would be in the collection Illuminations—composed of prose poems and
the two first modern free-verse poems written in French6—that Rimbaud would
fully unleash a cataclysm on poetry, when he would take what he saw as Baudelaire’s
meek formal considerations a step further. It begins after the fall and after the
flood: “Aussitôt après que l’idée du Déluge se fut rassise” (As soon as the idea of
the Flood had subsided), a post-apocalyptic set-up (for poetry and everything
else) that is echoed in the first line of “Barbare”: “Bien après les jours et les saisons,
et les êtres et les pays” (Long after the days and the seasons, and the people and the
countries).7 As if in dialogue with texts discussed in this study’s Introduction,
the second part of his prose poem “Jeunesse” is entitled “Sonnet”: it signals that the
fixed form of the sonnet is, despite its centuries of traditions, merely a phase in
the long history of the development of poetry. That Rimbaud would make such an
assertion is all the more notable when one considers what the form of the sonnet
meant at the time; as David Scott explains:
It is a paradox that after the 1860s and 70s, when [. . .] the sonnet was at the
height of its vogue, its essential creative role was becoming undermined. Perhaps
it was its very popularity that, leading to over-exploitation and stereotyping,
made any unified trend of development an impossibility. [. . .] When in the
Illuminations Rimbaud calls part of his prose poem Jeunesse of 1874 Sonnet, he
prefigures the loss of prestige that the sonnet will suffer in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century in France. For the sonnet was no longer accepted by the
avant garde poets of this period as a consecrated form.8
5 OC 88–9; CW 39, 41.

6 Jacques Roubaud sees Illuminations—for which he cites the passage “Le haut étang [. . .] descen-
dre?” from “Phrases” as an example—less as prose poetry (which he acknowledges as the poem’s for-
mal layout) than as poetic language whose organization comes from the erasure of limits between
potential verses. Later in the same study, while describing the history of prose poetry as being either
poetry which otherwise would have been prose (prose in poetry) or poetry which blurs the limits of
verse (poetry in prose), he characterizes the prose poems in Illuminations as “poème en prose du vers
libre.” I disagree on both points. (Jacques Roubaud, La Vieillesse d’Alexandre: essai sur quelques états du
vers français récent (Paris: Ivrea, 2000 [1978]), 35, 139).
7 Respectively, OC 290 and 309; CW 309 and 341.
8 David Scott, Sonnet Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century France: Sonnets on the Sonnet,
Occasional Papers in Modern Languages No. 12 (Hull: University of Hull, 1977), 88.
Figure 3. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of “Jeunesse II” alias “Sonnet”
The major critical editions of Rimbaud’s “Sonnet” (Figure 3) continue to insist on

retaining the margins on his manuscript, where the prose poem is precisely four-
teen lines long, like the sonnet, beginning with rimes embrassées ABBA (“chair,”
“verger;—ô” / “prodiguer;—ô,” “terre”):
II
Sonnet
Homme de constitution ordinaire, la chair
n’était-
elle pas un fruit pendu dans le verger;—ô
journées enfantes!—le corps un trésor à prodiguer;—ô
aimer, le péril ou la force de Psyché? La terre
avait des versants fertiles en princes et en artistes
et la descendance et la race vous poussaient aux
crimes et aux deuils: le monde votre fortune et votre
péril. Mais à présent, ce labeur comblé,—toi, tes calculs,
—toi, tes impatiences—ne sont plus que votre danse et
votre voix, non fixées et point forcées, quoique d’un double
événement d’invention et de succès + une raison,
—en l’humanité fraternelle et discrète par l’univers,
sans images;—la force et le droit réfléchissent la
danse et la voix à présent seulement appréciées.9
9 OC 317; CW 355; both modified. The transcription follows the manuscript, at the Fondation
Martin Bodmer, Cologny (R-28.3, (1), www.e-codices.ch/fr/fmb/ms-Rimbaud-R-028-003/1).
Epilogue 281
Man of ordinary constitution, the flesh

wasn’t it a fruit hung up in an orchard;—oh
childish days!—the body a treasure to be lavished;—oh
to love, the peril or the strength of Psyche? The Earth
had slopes ripe with princes and artists
and your descendants and your race drove you to
crime and mourning: the world your fortune and your
peril. But now, this labor fulfilled,—you, your calculations,
—you, your impatience—are only your dance and
your voice, unfixed and unforced, although of a double
event made up of invention and of success + a reason,
—in brotherly and discreet humanity throughout the universe,
without pictures;—force and right reflect the
dance and the voice which are now only appreciated.
If pursued further, though, the initial rhyme scheme dies out as quickly as it was
established.10 Perhaps this prose text entitled “Sonnet” problematizes and exposes
its own impossibility, more than the “sonnets en prose” which retained so many
of the recognizable trappings of sonnets (Introduction, supra). It does so more
than some of Baudelaire’s prose poems that have been discussed earlier in this
study, for suggestions of traces of verse organization in their paragraphs (“Le
Confiteor de l’artiste” (supra, Chapter 1), “La Soupe et les nuages,” “Laquelle est la
vraie?,” or “Le Désespoir de la vieille” (these three supra, Chapter 2)) or a volta as
in “Le Fou et la Vénus” or “Le Miroir (both supra, Chapter 1) or “Le Tir et le
cimetière” (supra, Chapter 3): remnants of verse still perceptible through the veil
of prose. Instead, Rimbaud’s “Sonnet” creates its own erasure, as the traditional
bases for poetry—the lyric, reinforced by the repeated “ô,” and romanticism’s con-
nection of humans to nature, “la chair” to “La terre”—give way to the poet’s more
mundane, modern preoccupations, as in “La Soupe et les nuages” (supra,
Chapter 2): “artistes” and “calculs,” the suggestion of two ways of thinking about
the universe, and the ways of expressing it (“votre danse et votre voix,” later “la
danse et la voix”11). While Baudelaire raised some of the same issues—which
Rimbaud highlights in “Sonnet” as the tension between “ce labeur comblé” and
10 On this point I diverge with Roger Little, who uses this opening quatrain as justification for fur-
ther scansion: “By writing out the ‘octave’ as eight lines of twelve or thirteen syllables, rhyming sounds
emerge in several cases in a way which seems not to be mere chance”; Roger Little, “Rimbaud’s
‘Sonnet,’ ” Modern Language Review, 75.3 (July 1980), 528–33 (530). I do agree with Little’s ultimate
conclusion, however, that in this poem “There is a discreet and purposely evasive organization of the
‘sonnet’ aimed at disturbing self-satisfied response patterns, and it makes phonic coherence a foil for
semantic and syntactic oddity” (533).
11 For Edward J. Ahearn, “the very overtly organized pairings in the last sentence quoted all might
be read as evoking childhood through the distance of convention, the filter of gathering cliché.”
Edward J. Ahearn, Rimbaud, Visions and Habitations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1983), 87.
Figure 4. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of “Guerre”
untetherable dance and voice—he did so within a form whose neatness and tidi-
ness failed, at least for Rimbaud, to accompany the modern thrust of its content.
Another departure of Rimbaud’s from Baudelaire’s “forme [. . .] mesquine”
stands as a sort of calling card in the prose poems in Illuminations: a final tag line,
twisted and dripping with irony, recalling the impact of the chute at the end of
the traditional verse sonnet and reaching out from the page and grabbing the
reader. This, too, is an extension of what we have seen in Le Spleen de Paris, for
example the last lines of “Les Yeux des pauvres” (supra, Chapter 2) or “Le Galant
tireur” (supra, Chapter 3). In Illuminations, examples abound, from including the
famous endings in poems such as “H,” “Parade,” “Matinée d’ivresse,” and “Aube,” to
name but a few.12 While those endings invite the reader to go back to the poem and
reread it anew, a more wanton and directed attack is on full display in “Guerre”
(Figure 4):
Enfant, certains ciels ont affiné mon optique: tous les caractères nuancèrent ma
physionomie. Les Phénomènes s’émurent.—À présent l’inflexion éternelle des
moments et l’infini des mathématiques me chassent par ce monde où je subis
tous les succès civils, respecté de l’enfance étrange et des affections énormes.—Je
songe à une Guerre, de droit ou de force, de logique bien imprévue.
C’est aussi simple qu’une phrase musicale. (OC 315)
(As a child, certain skies sharpened my eyesight: all the characters nuanced
my physiognomy. The Phenomena grew excited.—Now the eternal inflection of
moments and the infinity of mathematics hunt me through this world where I
experience all civic successes, respected by strange children and enormous affec-
tions.—I dream of War, of right or of power, of unsuspected logic.
It is as simple as a musical phrase. (CW 351, 353))
12 See Gerald Macklin, “A Study of Beginnings and Finales in Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations,”
Neophilologus, vol. 46 (1984), 22–36.
Epilogue 283
Few poems from Illuminations capture the essence of the poetic project that
Rimbaud details in his “lettres du Voyant” as well as “Guerre.” Here, the prose
poem is the site, the battleground for the war of poetry, where the goal of seeing
beyond what even the typical poet can see—“Je veux être poète, et je travaille à
me rendre Voyant” (OC 340; original emphasis) can be attained. The clarity
announced in the poem’s opening statement—reflected in his face like the naked-
ness that Jakobson’s missionary witnessed (see supra, Introduction)—is merely
the starting point, in childhood: “Enfant,” the same childhood designates that
phase of poetry when the term “Sonnet” signified a previously stable mode of
expression that was already losing its way. This is the youthful state beyond which
the “Voyant” looks: once again to greater affirmation and appreciation (“des affec-
tions énormes”), from which the adult poetic subject senses its own alienation.13
More specifically, the “Voyant” looks not toward Baudelaire’s “mouvantes archi-
tectures que Dieu fait avec les vapeurs, les merveilleuses constructions de l”im-
palpable” (from “La Soupe et les nuages,” see supra, Chapter 2) that are visible to
the eyes, but toward the dream-state, as “Guerre” opens with a refined, sharpened
vision and closes with that which cannot be anticipated or foreseen: “imprévue.”14
As it moves from heightened vision to dreaming of the unforeseen, it also leaves
rhythm behind: pairings of assonance and alliteration (“certains ciels,” “mon
optique,” “caractères nuancèrent,” “Phénomènes s”émurent”) disappear, replaced
with a dissipating thump of [d] in “une Guerre de droit ou de force, de logique
bien imprévue,” before the final line that might bring new understanding to the
reader, “C’est aussi simple qu’une phrase musicale.” The joke is on the reader:
what is simple about war, either this poetic one or any other? What is simple
about this poem, which goes to the heart of prose poetry in this final tag line’s
insistence on the “phrase,” in both its root emphasis on speech (Lat. phrasis; dic-
tion15) and its musical acceptation, which Littré defines as a “suite de sons
13 See Ahearn, Rimbaud, Visions and Habitations, 29

14 It is worth wondering if there is a germ of the tension between “seen” and “heard’ in the first four
verses of Rimbaud’s poem “Bannières de mai”:
Aux branches claires des tilleuls
Meurt un maladif hallali.
Mais des chansons spirituelles
Voltigent parmi les groseilles. (OC 209)
(In the clear linden branches / Dies a sickly hunting call. / But lively songs / Dance among the
currant bushes. (CW 183))
Specifically, a sort of visual rime embrassée (ABBA) is built on the pronunciation of the double letter
“L”: the “y” sound [j] in “tilleuls” [ti.jœl] and “groseilles” [ɡʁo.zɛj]) surrounds the sound [l] in “hallali”
[a.la.li] and “spirituelles” [spi.ʁi.tɥɛl].
15 “phrase, n.” (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)). From there, the word would quickly move to
encompass not only speech but ways of speaking (see Gérard Dessons, L’Art et la Manière: art, littéra-
ture, langage (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004); and Arnaud Bernadet and Gérard Dessons (eds.), Une
histoire de la manière (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes [La Licorne], 2013); in fencing it has
referred, since the end of the nineteenth century, to a short, uninterrupted series of movements.
(OED: “A continuous sequence of thrusts and parries occurring without any pause.”)
musicaux avec un arrêt ou repos après le dernier, présentant à l’oreille un rhythme

semblable à celui d’une phrase parlée” (3: 1101)? In one sense telling us what we
already know, through its irony the last line of “Guerre” turns itself outward and
offers some helpful direction for how we might read poetry as a not-at-all-simple
“phrase musicale.” Rimbaud’s notion of complicated musical phrase with a rhythm
similar to that of spoken language16 builds on Baudelaire’s own ideal of poetic
prose: “le miracle d’une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime” (see
Introduction, supra). More than expanding on the prose poetry of the “vrai Dieu,”
though, Rimbaud’s Illuminations mark a significant departure from the tradition
that Baudelaire inaugurated with the miracle of his poetic prose. Nowhere is that
more apparent than in Rimbaud’s prose poem “Phrases” (Figures 5 and 6):
Phrases.
Quand le monde sera réduit en un seul bois noir pour nos quatre yeux éton-
nés,—en une plage pour deux enfants fidèles,—en une maison musicale pour
notre claire sympathie,—je vous trouverai.
Qu’il n’y ait ici-bas qu’un vieillard seul, calme et beau, entouré d’un “luxe
inouï,”—et je suis à vos genoux.
Que j’aie réalisé tous vos souvenirs,—que je sois celle qui sait vous garrotter,—
je vous étoufferai.
Quand nous sommes très forts,—qui recule? très gais, qui tombe de ridicule?
Quand nous sommes très méchants, que ferait-on de nous.
Parez-vous, dansez, riez.—Je ne pourrai jamais envoyer l’Amour par la fenêtre.
— Ma camarade, mendiante, enfant monstre! comme ça t’est égal, ces malheu-

reuses et ces manœuvres, et mes embarras. Attache-toi à nous avec ta voix
impossible, ta voix! unique flatteur de ce vil désespoir.
[end of ms page 11 / beginning of ms page 12]
Une matinée couverte, en Juillet. Un goût de cendres vole dans l’air;—une
odeur de bois suant dans l’âtre,—les fleurs rouies,—le saccage des promenades,—
la bruine des canaux par les champs—pourquoi pas déjà les joujoux et l’encens?
xxx
J’ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre;
des chaînes d’or d’étoile à étoile, et je danse.
xxx
Le haut étang fume continuellement. Quelle sorcière va se dresser sur le
couchant blanc? Quelles violettes frondaisons vont descendre?
xxx
16 Tzvetan Todorov opens his essay on the Illuminations with words that point to the texts” phrasée:
“de quoi parlent ces textes énigmatiques?”; Tzvetan Todorov, Les Genres du discours (Paris: Seuil, 1978),
204; emphasis added.
Epilogue 285
Pendant que les fonds publics s’écoulent en fêtes de fraternité, il sonne une
cloche de feu rose dans les nuages.
xxx
Avivant un agréable goût d’encre de Chine, une poudre noire pleut douce-
ment sur ma veillée,—je baisse les feux du lustre, je me jette sur le lit, et tourné
du côté de l’ombre je vous vois, mes filles! mes reines!
xxx
(When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled
eyes—to a beach for two faithful children—to a musical house for our clear sym-
pathy—then I shall find you.
When there is only one old man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in
“unsurpassed luxury,” then I am at your knees.
When I have realized all your memories—when I am the girl who can tie your
hands,—then I will stifle you.
When we are very strong, who backs down? Very happy, who collapses from
ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us.
Dress up, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw Love out the window.
— My comrade, beggar girl, monstrous child! How little you care about
the wretched women, and these machinations and my embarrassments. Join us
with your impossible voice, oh your voice! the one flatterer of this vile despair.
A dark morning in July. A taste of ashes in the air;—a smell of wood sweating
in the hearth,—steeped flowers,—the devastation of paths—drizzle over the
canals in the fields,—why not already playthings and incense?
xxx
I stretched out ropes from spire to spire; garlands from window to window;
golden chains from star to star, and I dance.
xxx
The high pond is constantly steaming. What witch will rise up against the
white sunset? What purple flowers will descend?
xxx
While public funds disappear in brotherly celebrations, a bell of pink fire
rings in the clouds.
xxx
Arousing a pleasant taste of Chinese ink, a black powder gently rains on my
night.—I lower the jets of the chandelier, throw myself on the bed, and, turning
toward the dark, I see you, my daughters! my queens!
x x x17
17 OC 298–9; CW 323, 325; both quotations modified.

Figure 5. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of “Phrases,” feuillet 11

Epilogue 287
Figure 6. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of “Phrases,” feuillet 12
Here Rimbaud fully exploits formal matters, light years beyond Baudelaire’s form
that he felt was “mesquine.” Beyond the simple issue raised by labeling—calling a
prose poem a “sonnet en prose” or giving another one the title “Sonnet”—is the
fundamental question of just what this text is. Or, more specifically, since it is not
in verse: what kind of prose text this is. Figuring on several manuscript pages in a
collection of texts that are for the most part easily recognizable as paragraph-
based prose poem (see for example the end of “Matinée d’ivresse,” at the top of
manuscript feuillet 11), “Phrases” forces readers to confront questions about what
a poem is.18
18 Aspects of a text that previously held together during the act of reading would be more fully
disconnected in Apollinaire’s poetry a few decades later; see Timothy Mathews, Reading Apollinaire:
Theories of Poetic Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
First, and in a manner that its title supports, it is simultaneously one and
ultiple: since the manuscript pages were first examined, critics have oscillated
m
between treating the two pages as part of the same poem or as separate ones.19
Do the wavy lines on f. 11 and the three Xs on f. 12 suggest two different poems,
or one poem divided into two series, or movements, each one with its different
moments of pause? Or is it like “Enfance,” composed of smaller poems? If so, how
many: one series of three (f. 11) and a second series of five (f. 12) or eight small
poems? Before engaging with the lack of simplicity in this/these “phrase(s) musi-
cale(s),” readers have to confront an internal logic that is entirely unforeseeable, a
“logique bien imprévue.” Where do we draw the line between a series of phrases
and a poem entitled “Phrases,” between what something is and the language used
19 Rimbaud’s childhood friend Ernest Delahaye said that the poet meant for the poem “Phrases” to
include both manuscript pages, full of “poèmes si brefs qu’il les intitule simplement ‘Phrases,’” although
Delahaye’s recollections were not always precise on all matters. (Ernest Delahaye, Les Illuminations et
Une saison en enfer de Rimbaud (Paris: Albert Messein, 1927), 111.) In the famous letter from Laïtou
of May 1873, Rimbaud wrote to the same Delahaye and said that, if Delahaye went to see Verlaine in
Bouillon, Verlaine would no doubt give him “quelques fraguemants en prose de moi ou de lui, à me
retourner” (a few fragments of my prose or his to return to me) (OC 370; CW 393). For André Guyaux,
“le fragment est une forme littéraire, inaccomplie, ou définie par l’inaccompli” (the fragment is a liter-
ary form, unfinished, or defined by the unfinished). André Guyaux, Poétique du fragment (Neuchâtel:
À la Baconnière, 1985), 197. The history of the critical vacillation about “Phrases” is too long to develop
fully here, but take, for example, Albert Py’s early analysis of the manuscript pages: “il est difficile de
dire si ces deux groupes de trois et de cinq phrases constituent deux poèmes (ou ébauches de poèmes)
ou seulement des notes disparates, impressions poétiques, comme V. Hugo en consignait dans ses car-
nets” (it is difficult to say if these groups of three or five sentences make up two poems (or drafts of
poems) or only disparate notes, poetic impressions like the ones that Victor Hugo banished to his
notebooks). Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, ed. Albert Py (Geneva/Paris: Droz/Minard [Textes lit-
téraires français], 1967), 121. After his study of what he calls Rimbaud’s poetic “fragment,” André
Guyaux went so far as to separate the two pages in his critical edition of Illuminations (Arthur
Rimbaud, Illuminations, ed. André Guyaux (Neuchâtel: À la Baconnière, 1985), 47 and 58). The next
critical shift came with Steve Murphy’s conclusion that the order of the manuscript pages of
Illuminations is of Rimbaud’s doing, in Steve Murphy, “Les Illuminations manuscrites: pour dissiper
quelques malentendus concernant la chronologie et l’ordre du dernier recueil de Rimbaud,” Histoires
littéraires (2000), 5–31. Following that study, Murphy added that “Phrases” represents, under one over-
arching title, two series of phrases, “chacune comportant sa propre logique temporelle, thématique et
rhétorique” (Arthur Rimbaud, Fac-similés, vol. 4 of Œuvres complètes, ed. Steve Murphy (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2002), 607). Guyaux revised his ordering of the manuscript pages in the 2009 Pléiade edi-
tion—in which the text on the two pages follows directly (298–9)—and asked, “le folio 12 et les cinq
fragments qui y figurent sont-ils encore gouvernés par le même titre, comme semble l”indiquer la
séquence des manuscrits numérotés, et comme la tradition éditoriale le comprend le plus souvent?”
(Are folio 12 and the five fragments on it be collected under the same title, like the sequence of num-
bered manuscript seems to suggest, and as the editorial tradition most often suggests?) (OC 958). Most
recently, Michel Murat—for whom “Phrases” is a series of micro-poems—has read the word and title
“Phrases” to designate, like “Conte” (another title from Illuminations) a generic title that indicates the
creation of a genre rather than refers to a previously established one; furthermore, for Murat, the term
“fragment” is inappropriate because it suggests negation, whereas “phrase” suggests positive construc-
tion: “On ‘fait’ des phrases (tous les enfants ont entendu cette injonction), et on les assemble en tant
qu’elles sont les unités de base du discours, hiérarchisées et pourvues d’un ‘sens complet’ que marque
une courbe prosodique” (We “make” sentences (every child has heard this injunction) and we assem-
ble them as the base units of discourse, hierarchically ordered and possessing a “full meaning” marked
by a prosodic curve). Michel Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud, revised edition (Paris: José Corti, 2013
[2002]), 236.
Epilogue 289
to say what it is? Therein resides the poeticity of “Phrases”: the full force of the
departure from Baudelaire’s poetic prose can be seen as another reminder of
Jakobson’s definition of “the setting or attitude (Einstellung) toward the message
as such, the focus on the message for its own sake” (see supra, Introduction). It is
this text’s attitude toward its message—its displacement and dispersion into a
number of disjointed phrases, its resistance to being understood as a coherent
unified piece, its requiring that the reader engage with its constituent parts about
which it is not immediately apparent that when combined they produce a
greater whole.20
This is, though, a visual representation—the disparity between the two manu-
script pages makes this even clearer—of what proposes to have semantic, gram-
matical, and/or phonic weight at its core. The tension, in poetic prose, between
what we see and what we hear is brought to a discord of impasse here: the two
exist on different planes, two constitutive elements of a linguistic text that no longer
intersect. Gone is any hope for compossibility, or the coexistence of incompatibil-
ities that Baudelaire managed to forge in Le Spleen de Paris (see supra,
Introduction); the separation here cuts deep.
Instead, Rimbaud’s prose poem is built of fault lines that determine how we
read it. The visual dominates the first part of “Phrases,” its insistence on the tem-
poral21 and a series of images reduced again to what can be seen by “deux enfants”
when the world is reduced to embers before “nos quatre yeux étonnés.”
Surrounding the old man is another sensory layer: the “luxe inouï,” part of this
world is unheard of as well. This future world (“Quand le monde sera réduit…”) is
one of repetitions and oppositions, as the world is whittled down from pairs of
pairs (“nos quatre yeux”) to one pair (“deux enfants”) to a single, plural possessive
(“notre claire sympathie”). Beyond the repeated [wa] in “bois noir,” the “m” in
“maison musicale” or the sounds [ã] and [f] in “deux enfants fidèles,” more
20 For Todorov, the fractured and fragmentary nature of “Phrases” is one of the fundamental char-
acteristics of Rimbaud’s prose poems: “les Illuminations ont érigé la discontinuité en règle fondamen-
tale” (Illuminations established discontinuity as a fundamental rule) (Les Genres du discours, 210); in
this respect he echoes Suzanne Bernard, who had already identified what she calls an “esthétique du
discontinue” in the Illuminations: “Est-il besoin de souligner que nulle forme, mieux que la prose, ne
pouvait se prêter à imiter, dans la structure même des phrases, cette dislocation foncière et cette désor-
ganisation qui caractérisent l’univers rimbaldien?” (Is there any need to highlight that no form, better
than prose, could lend itself to imitating, in the phrases’ very structure, the fundamental dislocation
and disorganisation that characterise the rimbaldian universe?) (Suzanne Bernard, Le Poème en prose
de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Nizet, 1959), 182).
21 The poem “Matinée d’ivresse,” which immediately precedes “Phrases” on this manuscript page,
ends with an uneasy temporality that is not clarified by its final line “Voici le temps des Assassins”; for
André Guyaux, “Par la confusion de la veille et de la matinée, deux temporalités coexistent et le texte
n’a plus d’exacte situation chronologique, comme s’il pouvait s’absorber dans l’espace défini par le dis-
cours poétique” (By the conflation of veille and matinée, the two temporal spaces coexist and the text
no longer has an exact chronological situation, as if it could be absorbed into the space defined by
poetic discourse) (Rimbaud, Illuminations, ed. André Guyaux, 168; original emphasis).
notable is the repeated structure that appears at the level of the phrases themselves,
after “Quand le monde sera réduit”:
en un seul bois noir pour nos quatre yeux étonnés,—

en une plage pour deux enfants fidèles,—
en une maison musicale pour notre claire sympathie,—
Each of the three paragraphs ends—after the dramatic pause of a comma and a
dash—with a charge of interpersonal connection between subject and object:
— je vous trouverai.
— et je suis à vos genoux.
— je vous étoufferai.22
For Michel Murat, if this pattern—parallel constructions followed by the doubled

punctuation—is common to a number of poems in Illuminations, its iterations
here in “Phrases” are central to both this/these poem(s) and to the collection
more generally because its structure coincides with and delineates the very notion
of a “phrase,” thus separating out each instance of what is the poem’s core unit and
function: illustrated, identified, enacted.23 And phrases continue, throughout
“Phrases”: across the visual demarcations that define, limit, and separate them
from each other; through more repeated structures as in “[Quand nous sommes]
très” followed by a question. Despite the visual tableau with which it opens, the
beginning of “Phrases” places considerable insistence on its spoken root in order
to become apparent, felt, intelligible; as Jean-Luc Steinmetz states about the poem’s
first three sections, “il suffit de les dire pour constater que chacun en soi constitue
un ensemble structural complet.”24 Beneath the bells and whistles, the ornamenta-
tion (“Parez-vous”) and spectacles (“dansez, riez”), what is left, and how can it be
conveyed? If the subject can scarcely imagine throwing love out the window, it’s
not because there’s none left: the problem is what—in poetry, language, words,
letters, sounds—can adequately express it. Nothing, just scattered groupings of
sounds that are heard beyond the “inouï”: the repeated [a] in “camarade,” the
repeated [ã] in “mendiante, enfant,” and the [se ma] of “ces malheureuses et ces
manœuvres.”
The visual and the auditory give way to a fourth movement of odors that still
ends with disappointment and more questions than answers—“pourquoi pas déjà
les joujoux et l’encens?”—leading the poetic subject to return with a series of
rhythmed phrases built of pairings of connection:
22 In his breakdown of these phrases, André Guyaux asserts that each one “offre un point de chute”;
see Rimbaud, Illuminations, ed. André Guyaux, 168–9.
23 Murat, L’Art de Rimbaud, 271–6.
24 Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations suivi de Correspondance (1873–1891), vol. 3 of Œuvres, ed. Jean-
Luc Steinmetz (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1989), 156; original emphasis.
Epilogue 291
J’ai tendu
des cordes de clocher à clocher;
des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre;
des chaînes d’or d’étoile à étoile,
et je danse.
The progression of connectors leaves the traditional source of the lyric—“cordes”

echoes the lyre and the phrase “Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon” from the
first of the “lettres du Voyant” (340)—and moves to ornamentation of increasing
weight, “des chaînes d’or” a striking endpoint that stands in contrast with the
alchemy of which the poet might have dreamt. And yet, what began as a “logique
bien imprévue” bears few signs of arriving at a more recognized one, as Rimbaud’s
promised “le dérèglement de tous les sens” spins the end of “Phrases” into a synthe-
sis of what came before25 and a whirlwind of the unknown: the clanging of a rosy-
fired bell, the taste of China ink being made more vibrant. To be sure, these complex
notions are not beyond what Baudelaire could have conceived, for he had noted the
infinite expanse of the imagination in his Salon de 1859 essay: “L’imagination est la
reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Elle est positivement
apparentée avec l’infini.”26 However, moving one last time beyond the neat and tidy
form of Baudelaire’s prose poetry, Rimbaud’s subject turns his back to the knowable
and marks what only the Voyant can see, followed by three more Xs that suggest
that the poem(s) might continue (or, perhaps, that the manuscript did continue
and we only have a part of it): “je baisse les feux du lustre, je me jette sur le lit, et
tourné du côté de l’ombre je vous vois, mes filles! mes reines!” Perceiving only what
can be seen with eyes closed, or with lights turned low and shut off from the senses
that only get in the way, in “Phrases” Rimbaud provides a clear example of the
25 For Sergio Sacchi, the last part of “Phrases”

remplit sa fonction de synthèse et d’accomplissement du poème tout entier: on dirait
qu’envisagées sous ce jour inédit, les aventures précédentes sont réduites à leur navrante
dimension réelle. Ainsi, le “désespoir” final est l’état d’âme de quelqu’un qui aurait compris
que son lot en amour est l’échec: en essayant de renouer avec sa nature première, il peut
aussi mesurer toute la distance qui sépare cette nature originaire de ce qu’il a vraiment
vécu par la suite.
(fulfils its function as a synthesis and accomplishment of the whole poem: when seen
through this new lens, one could say that the previous adventures are reduced to their dis-
appointing real size. Thus the final “despair” is the state of mind of someone who has
understood that his lot in love is failure: by trying to reconnect with his original nature, he
can also measure the full distance that separates this original nature from what he really
experienced afterwards).
(Sergio Sacchi, Études sur les Illuminations de Rimbaud, eds. Olivier Bivort, André
Guyaux, and Mario Matucci (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002), 156)
For more on this poem, see Sacchi’s important exegesis (140–57).
26 OC 2: 621; original emphasis. According to Graham Robb, Baudelaire uses the word “imagin
ation” sixty-nine times in the Salon de 1859; see Graham Robb, “Révolutions et contre-révolution,”
Baudelaire toujours: hommage à Claude Pichois “L’Année Baudelaire,” 9–10 (2005–6), 253–64 (255).
endgame of his poetics of the “Voyant”: “Il arrive à l’inconnu, et quand, affolé, il
finirait par perdre l’intelligence de ses visions, il les a vues!” (OC 344; CW 377).
“Inspecter l’invisible et entendre l’inouï”
Just as Baudelaire’s letter to Houssaye has typically been read as a preface to Le

Spleen de Paris, Rimbaud’s letter to Demeny similarly announces what is to come.
Or, rather, it offers a bridge that links poetry’s past to its future; the fuller version
of the passage cited earlier will be instructive:
Les seconds romantiques sont très voyants: Th. Gautier, Lec. de Lisle, Th. de
Banville. Mais inspecter l’invisible et entendre l’inouï étant autre chose que
reprendre l’esprit des choses mortes, Baudelaire est le premier voyant, roi des
poètes, un vrai Dieu. Encore a-t-il vécu dans un milieu trop artiste; et la forme si
vantée en lui est mesquine: les inventions d’inconnu réclament des formes nou-
velles. (OC, 348; original emphasis)
(The second Romantics are very much seers: Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle,
Théodore de Banville. But since inspecting the invisible and hearing the unheard
is different from recovering the spirit of dead things, Baudelaire is the first seer,
king of the poets, a real god. And yet he still lived in too artistic a milieu; and his
much-celebrated form is trivial: inventions of the unknown require new forms.)
(CW 381, modified)
Beyond the oft-emphasized mention of Baudelaire as “Voyant” is what justifies

that attribution: “inspecter l’invisible et entendre l’inouï,” seeing the invisible and
listening to the unheard. Whereas Parnassians such as Gautier, Leconte de Lisle,
and Banville were focused on resuscitating tales from the past (“reprendre l’esprit
des choses mortes”), Baudelaire engaged with his own moment: seeing and hear-
ing it, rendering it visible and audible. For Rimbaud, the kind of poetry that could
fully do justice to the expansiveness of new ideas—the mention of the unknown
(“inconnu”) pointedly echoes the last line of Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” “Au fond de
l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!”27—would need to shake free from the kinds
of the remnants of traditional poeticity that are still perceptible in Baudelaire’s
prose poetry.
Three years after his “lettres du Voyant,” Rimbaud would detail this new expan-
sive poetry, once again by outlining a new poetic project in a letter to a kindred
spirit. This time it was in April 1874, when Rimbaud wrote to former Communard
(and fellow French expatriate residing in London) Jules Andrieu. By giving his
27 OC 1: 134; original emphasis; see Chapter 4, supra.

Epilogue 293
upcoming work the provisional title L’Histoire splendide, Rimbaud bestowed upon
it the sense (from the Latin splendidus) of bright, shining, and grand that would
resonate in that other title of his, Illuminations. Rimbaud opens his letter to
Andrieu with what could be read as a nod to Baudelaire, the vrai Dieu who had
mastered the poetry of the crowd:
Je voudrais entreprendre un ouvrage en livraisons, avec titre: L’Histoire splen-

dide. Je réserve: le format; la traduction, (anglaise d’abord) le style devant être
négatif et l’étrangeté des détails et la (magnifique) perversion de l’ensemble ne
devant affecter d’autres phraséologie que celle possible pour la traduction
immédiate [. . .] Pour terminer: je sais comment on se pose en double-voyant
pour la foule, qui ne s’occupa jamais à voir, qui n’a peut-être pas besoin de voir.
En peu de mots (!) une série indéfinie de morceaux de bravoure historique,
commençant à n’importe quels annales ou fables ou souvenirs très anciens. Le
vrai principe de ce noble travail est une réclame frappante; la suite pédagogique
de ces morceaux peut être aussi créée par des réclames en tête de la livraison, ou
détachées.—Comme description, rappelez- vous les procédés de Salammbô:
comme liaisons et explanations mystiques, Quinet et Michelet: mieux. Puis une
archéologie ultrà-romanesque suivant le drame de l’histoire; du mysticisme de
chic, roulant toutes controverses; du poème en prose à la mode d’ici; des
habiletés de nouvelliste aux points obscurs.28
(I would like to undertake a work in instalments, with the title: L’Histoire splen-
dide. I reserve: the format; the translation, (English first) the style needing to be
negative and the strangeness of the details and the (magnificent) perversion of
the whole to affect no phraseology than that is possible for immediate transla-
tion [. . .] To conclude: I know how one poses as a double-seer for the crowd,
which never bothered to see, which perhaps does not need to see.
In a few words (!) an indefinite series of pieces of historical bravura, starting
from any annals or fables or very ancient memories. The true principle of this
noble work is a striking demand; the pedagogical follow-on for these pieces
could also be created by little announcements at the head of each issue, or separ
ate from them.—As a description, recall what was done for Salammbô: for con-
nections and mystical explanations. Quinet and Michelet: even better. Then an
ultra-romanesque archaeology following the drama of history; the mysticism of
chic, covering all controversies; the prose poem in fashion here; the skills of the
journalist on obscure points.)
28 Quoted in Frédéric Thomas, “ ‘Je serai libre d’aller mystiquement, ou vulgairement, ou savam-
ment.’ Découverte d’une lettre d’Arthur Rimbaud,” Parade sauvage, 29 (2018), 320–45 (328–9; original
emphasis). All subsequent quotations from Rimbaud’s letter to Andrieu refer to this article, and are
indicated by the page number.
Like Baudelaire’s intensely modern prose poetry, Rimbaud’s new project will be
seen differently, in part because the poet is keeping close tabs on its format, its
translation (English first), its mood (negative), and surpassing (“double-voyant”)
the crowd-based urban subject that Baudelaire exploited in his “Tableaux parisiens”
and in Le Spleen de Paris. The comment about posing as a “double-voyant” for the
crowd, “qui ne s’occupa jamais à voir, qui n’a peut-être pas besoin de voir,” clearly
shows Rimbaud’s debt to Baudelaire’s flâneur, whose perspective we follow as we
read so many of the urban poems in “Tableaux parisiens” and Le Spleen de Paris.
As Baudelaire writes in the beginning of “Les Foules”:
Les Foules
Il n’est pas donné à chacun de prendre un bain de multitude: jouir de la foule
est un art; et celui-là seul peut faire, aux dépens du genre humain, une ribote de
vitalité, à qui une fée a insufflé dans son berceau le goût du travestissement et du
masque, la haine du domicile et la passion du voyage.
Multitude, solitude: termes égaux et convertibles pour le poète actif et fécond.
Qui ne sait pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule
affairée.
Le poète jouit de cet incomparable privilège, qu’il peut à sa guise être lui-
même et autrui. Comme ces âmes errantes qui cherchent un corps, il entre,
quand il veut, dans le personnage de chacun. Pour lui seul, tout est vacant; et si
de certaines places paraissent lui être fermées, c’est qu’à ses yeux elles ne valent
pas la peine d’être visitées. (OC 1: 291)
(Not everyone can take a bath of multitude: enjoying crowds is an art; and he
alone can go, at the expense of the human species, on a binge of vitality, into his
cradle a fairy breathed the taste for disguises and masks, the hatred of home and
the passion for travel.
Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and fertile
poet. He who does not know how to populate his solitude, does not know how
to be alone in a busy crowd either.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and
others at will. Like those wandering souls who seek a body, he enters, when he
wants, into each person’s character. For him alone, everything is empty; and if
certain places seem to be closed to him, it is because in his eyes they are not
worth the trouble of being visited). (PP, 21; modified)
Unimpressed in 1874, Rimbaud already knows this: “Pour terminer: je sais com-
ment on se pose en double-voyant pour la foule.” Evoking the “poème en prose à
la mode d’ici,” he says that one can begin anywhere in the annals of human his-
tory, pursue any path, find a series of atrocities commonly called history
Epilogue 295
that—particularly in the aftermath of the Paris Commune—require a new form

of expression:
Voyons: il y aura illustrés en prose à la Doré, le décor des religions, les traits du
droit, l’enharmonie des fatalités populaires exhibées avec les costumes et les
paysages,—le tout pris et dévidé à des dates plus ou moins atroces: batailles,
migrations, scènes révolutionnaires: souvent un peu exotiques, sans forme
jusqu’ici dans les cours ou chez les fantaisistes. D’ailleurs, l’affaire posée, je serai
libre d’aller mystiquement, ou vulgairement, ou savamment. Mais un plan est
indispensable. [. . .] je sollicite de vous une demi-heure de conversation, l’heure
et le lieu s’il vous plaît, sûr que vous avez saisi le plan et que nous l’expliquerons
promptement—pour une forme inouïe et anglaise— (329–30; original emphasis)
(Let’s see: illustrated in prose à la Doré there will be the setting of religions, the
features of law, the enharmony of popular fatalities exhibited with costumes and
landscapes,—everything taken and emptied at more or less atrocious dates: bat-
tles, migrations, revolutionary scenes: often a little exotic, without form until
now in the courts or among the fantasists. Besides, once this is done, I’ll be free
to go mystically, or vulgarly, or wisely. But I must have a plan [. . .] I am asking
you for a half-hour conversation, indicate the time and place please, certain that
you have understood the plan, and that we’ll explain it quickly—for an
unheard-of and English form.)
That the new form that Rimbaud proposed to Andrieu would be both unheard
of and “anglaise” remained to be seen—we don’t know if Andrieu ever took the
half-hour meeting that Rimbaud requested. But the notion that the “fantaisies”
evoked could go off in any direction—“mystiquement, ou vulgairement, ou
savamment”—announces the kind of heterogeneous prose poetry that we find
in Illuminations, which includes poems with titles such as “Mystique” and
“Nocturne vulgaire.”
This passage includes another moment that attracts our attention, for its ability
to bring back to the surface one of the poetry’s central tensions, and as such it is
an additional example of the distance that Rimbaud puts between himself and
Baudelaire’s “forme [. . .] mesquine” in this letter to Andrieu: “l’enharmonie des
fatalités populaires.” It would seem that Rimbaud had come a long way in the
three years since his “lettres du Voyant,” when he wrote that future poems would
be “[t]oujours pleins du Nombre et de l’Harmonie” (OC 346–7; original emphasis);
instead, “enharmonie” is the “Passage où le même son est désigné par deux notes
différentes, comme ut dièse et ré bémol, mi dièse et fa naturel” (Littré 2: 1400).
How can there be anything simple about a “phrase musicale” if written symbols
such as C♯ and D♭ can denote the same sound?
Rimbaud’s idea of prose poems bearing “enharmonie” brings us full circle:

s pecifically, to the point at which a sound’s visual representation betrays its aural
presence. Our earlier mention of Baudelaire’s use of the “rime normande” “aimer”/
“mer” (see supra, Chapter 1) showed the extent to which verse poetry could trig-
ger one of the fundamental questions of written poetry—how to write what
poetry sounds like. Here, the rupture in “enharmonie” between a sound and its
multiple arbitrary signifiers shows the extent to which Rimbaud takes the musi-
cality of prose poetry beyond Baudelaire’s dream of “une prose poétique, musicale
sans rythme et sans rime.”
It is precisely this point that Rimbaud asserts in the first sentences of his poem
“Matinée d’ivresse,” his own moment of ebrius, which offers unequivocal echoes
of his letter to Andrieu:
Ô mon Bien! Ô mon Beau! Fanfare atroce où je ne trébuche point! chevalet

féerique! Hourra pour l’œuvre inouïe et pour le corps merveilleux, pour la
première fois! Cela commença sous les rires des enfants, cela finira par eux. Ce
poison va rester dans toutes nos veines même quand, la fanfare tournant, nous
serons rendu à l’ancienne inharmonie.
(Oh my Good! oh my Beautiful! Terrible fanfare where I never stumble! magical
rack! Hurrah for the unheard-of work and for the marvelous body, for the first
time! It all began with the laughter of children, it will end with them. This poi-
son will still be in my veins even when, the fanfare fading away, we are returned
to the earlier inharmony.)29
Breaking with history as he so often does in Illuminations,30 Rimbaud imagines a

future moment when, the poison of poetry coursing through our veins, we will be
returned to a former state of discord.31 In tracing this trajectory from past to
future all the way to a point where they converge, Rimbaud asserts that the broad
arc of history (both general and poetic) is a series of pendulum swings between
order and chaos, harmony and discord. Earlier we saw that for Baudelaire, this
29 OC 297, original emphasis; CW 321, 323, modified. After reminding us that the notion of
“ inharmonie” has been the focus of a number of studies of the Illuminations, as a sign of the natural
world’s incoherence and disorder (Jacques Rivière); for melding semantic dissonance and musical
consonance (Paul Valéry); or for the disquieting relationship between humans and language (Roger
Munier, following Heidegger), Andrea Schellino identifies “une dialectique, tantôt transparente, tantôt
en filigrane” (a dialectic oscillating from the transparent to the implicit) between the “ancienne
harmonie” in this poem and the “nouvelle harmonie” evoked in the poem “À une Raison”; Andrea
Schellino, “Bruit et harmonie dans les Illuminations,” Rimbaud poéticien, ed. Olivier Bivort (Paris:
Classiques Garnier, 2015), 169–78 (169–73, 174).
30 Cf. my reading of “Barbare,” Seth Whidden, Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and
Rimbaud (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 180–3.
31 For Sacchi it is a “Harmonie instable qui, en se prolongeant, change de direction pour basculer
dans un état contraire” (unstable harmony which changes direction as it stretches on, to swing into a
contrary state). Sacchi, Études sur les Illuminations de Rimbaud, 105.
Epilogue 297
axis intersects with questions of clarity—the “suffisante clarté et la délicieuse

obscurité de l’harmonie” that he forges in his prose poems, the harmonious
accord that for Michel Serres is the rarest of unlikely and remarkable exceptions
(see supra, Chapter 2). While Rimbaud’s departure from Baudelaire leads us to a
poetic space for prose that is outside of it all, being brought to “l’ancienne inhar-
monie” does not mean a return to the discord and chaos, for too much time has
transpired; Heraclitus would be quick to remind us that what is old (“ancienne”)
is not the same when considered anew. When Rimbaud discovers the former lack
of harmony in new attempts at prose poetry, we find ourselves confronted not
with the same old chaos, but with the “enharmonie” that represents an entirely
new way of framing the question that has plagued poetry all along.
Coda: “où la prose décolle”
There was a time when it was common to quote Léon-Paul Fargue’s pithy defin
ition of poetry and its relationship to prose, from his essay entitled “Poésie”: “La
poésie, c’est le point où la prose décolle” (Poetry is the point where prose takes
flight).32 It is indeed a great formulation, but it is incomplete, and on several
levels. First, because the original formulation is but one part of a series which,
taken together, represents an attempt to define poetry:
— La poésie, cette vie de secours où l’on apprend à s’évader des conditions du

réel, pour y revenir en force et le faire prisonnier.
— La seule prestidigitation qui ne soit pas truquée.

— Le seul rêve où il ne faille pas rêver.
— Le point ou la prose décolle.
— Le moment où la prose marmotte, se lève de table, et pousse sa romance.
— Une leçon de choses chantée.33
(— Poetry, this life of rescue in which we learn to escape the constraints of
reality, to come back stronger and to take it prisoner. // — The only magic that is
not rigged. / — The only dream where one must not dream. / — The point where
prose takes flight. / — The moment when prose mumbles, gets up from the table,
and pushes its romance. / — A sung lesson in things.)
The point where prose lifts off is just one part of it: poetry also helps us escape the
real—think of the second title of “Laquelle est la vraie?,” “L’Idéal et le Réel,” or the
question at the end of “Les Fenêtres, “Qu’importe ce que peut être la réalité placée
32 Léon-Paul Fargue, “Poésie,” Lanterne magique (Marseille: Robert Laffont, 1944), 24.
33 Fargue, “Suite familière,” Sous la lampe (Paris: Gallimard, 1929), 53–4.
hors de moi, si elle m’a aidé à vivre, à sentir que je suis et ce que je suis” (both
supra, Chapter 2)—it is magical, it is the dream state that does not require dream-
ing, and it is a lesson, sung: standing up from the table, belting it out. While this
more complex collection of elements of poetry and poetic language head in the
direction of a more satisfying formulation, they are still not enough. That is: they
are not enough for Fargue himself. For the second point on which the short
quotation falls short; as he explained when he returned to his earlier writings
some fifteen years later, he felt that the problem with any attempt to define poetry
is that—much like the elusive vision that was beyond the poetic subject’s grasp in
Cros’s “Distrayeuse” (supra, Chapter 4)—it is always on the verge of evaporating,
disappearing:
Je ne tenterai pas, une fois de plus, de circonscrire la notion de poésie. Je n’essaie-

rai, après tant d’autres, d’en chercher une définition incomplète ou manquée. J’en
ai fait naturellement, de nombreuses. Et chaque fois que je croyais en tenir une,
elle était déjà hors d’atteinte, et chaque fois que je me disais: c’est la bonne, elle
s’était déjà volatilisée: “La poésie, c’est le point où la prose décolle. . . C’est le
moment que l’homme, assis prosaïquement ‘au banquet de la vie’ dans une
grande faim de bonheur, se sent l’âme mélodieuse à l’heure où, comme dit
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, grand poète en prose, un peu de liqueur après le repas
fait qu’on s’estime, se lève de table et se met à chanter. . . La poésie consiste à con-
struire en soi, pour la projeter au dehors, un bonheur que la vie n’a pas voulu
vous donner.”
C’est peut-être là de l’impressionnisme.34
(I will not try, yet again, to circumscribe the notion of poetry. I will not try, after
so many others, to look for an incomplete or lacking definition of it. Naturally, I
have made many. And every time I thought I had one, it was already out of
reach, and each time I said to myself: that’s the one, it had already vanished:
“Poetry is the point where prose takes flight. . . It is the moment where man, pro-
saically sat ‘at the banquet of life’ with a great hunger for happiness, feels his
soul melodious at the time when, as the great prose poet Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
said, a little after-dinner liquor gives us confidence, makes us get up from the
table and start singing . . . Poetry consists in building inside of ourselves, in order
to project outwardly, a happiness that life did not want to give you.”
This might be impressionism.)
The resonance with the present study of Baudelaire and prose poetry in the nine-
teenth century is there: the paraphrase of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89),
“grand poète en prose,” the importance of listening to the song of the prose
34 Fargue, Lanterne magique, 23–4.

Epilogue 299
poem—that is, some of the quality that makes prose poetic—and the ability to
take us beyond (“projeter au dehors”) to discover life anew. But even that is
incomplete; rather, it is worth taking a moment to sit, this time with Fargue, who
begins this 1944 essay entitled “Poésie” by stating:
La poésie, c’est le moment de le dire un peu plus fort, n’a jamais cessé d’être, en
dehors des textes ou en dépit des textes, chose essentielle et que je m’obstine à
croire, à quelque degré et dans quelque forme que ce soit, et sans qu’il s’en doute,
aussi indispensable à l’homme que l’oxygène ou le charbon. Mais elle le devient
plus que jamais dans les temps que nous vivons. C’est le meilleur contrepoison,
l’îlot blindé où l’intelligence se rassemble, la pièce close où l’âme accablée s’ac-
corde un moment musical. Le répit qu’elle peut donner nous ouvre parfois le
seul refuge où l’esprit affolé puisse espérer retrouver l’esprit.
Cette poésie, que les naïfs avaient cru morte, elle saute aujourd’hui d’entre les
décombres et prend une chaleur nouvelle, comme un retour de flamme sort d’un
crassier qu’on croyait éteint.35
(Poetry, this is the moment to say it a little louder, has never stopped being, out-
side of or in spite of texts, something essential and something which I obstin
ately believe, to whatever degree and in whatever form, and without any doubt,
as necessary to man as oxygen or coal. But it is becoming even more so in the
times in which we live. It is the best antidote, the armored island where intelli-
gence gathers, the closed room where the overwhelmed soul grants itself a
musical moment. The respite it can give sometimes opens up for us the only ref-
uge where the distressed soul can hope to regain its spirit.
This poetry, which the naïve had believed dead, is now leaping from the rub-
ble and taking on a new heat, like an old flame rising up from a slag heap that
was believed to be extinguished.)
If poetry is, “dans les temps que nous vivons,” as essential as oxygen, Fargue con-
cluded, so is the role of reading, of giving of oneself: “la poésie est aussi un grand
calme qu’on entend, qui vous saisit et vous accélère, et elle est une sorte de scintil-
lement permanent auquel il faut se donner” (poetry is also a great calm that one
hears, it seizes you and accelerates you, and it is a sort of permanent scintillation
to which we must abandon ourselves).36 Let us breathe poetry in, let us take ref-
uge in it, so that the echo of its “moment musical” will continue to hang in the air.
35 Fargue, Lanterne magique, 22–3. 36 Fargue, Lanterne magique, 28.

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Index
Works by Charles Baudelaire
poetry collections “Rêve parisien” 132

Les Fleurs du Mal 2, 4, 6n17, 37, 41, 43, 72, 87,
184–5, 187, 203, 222, 228 “Les Sept vieillards” 222
Les Épaves 175 “Sonnet d’automne” 174n13, 222
“Tableaux parisiens” 2, 37, 81, 140, 193–4n72, “Le Squelette laboureur” 148n71
222, 231n26, 294
Le Spleen de Paris 2–5, 6n17, 8, 25, 45–7, “Le Vin de l’assassin” 229
74–5n14, 76–7, 87, 102, 120–1, 133n38, “Le Vin des amants” 229
149n74, 157n90, 162n92, 165n103, 177–8, “Le Vin des chiffonniers” 66, 229
181, 191n64, 192, 198, 223n11, 253, 255 “Le Vin du solitaire” 229
“Le Voyage” 232, 233–4, 292
“Un voyage à Cythère” 246n45
verse poems
“À celle qui est trop gaie” 199n84, 203 “Les Yeux de Berthe” 142n59
“À une Madone” 199n84, 203
“À une Malabaraise” 251
“L’Âme du vin” 229 prose poems
“L’Amour du mensonge” 232, 233 “À une heure du matin” 144n62, 191n65
“Les Aveugles” 81–2, 105, 106 “Any Where Out of the World” 26n68, 175n16,
230–1, 235
“La Beauté” 139n58, 216, 264 “Assommons les pauvres!” 26n68,
“Bénédiction” 145n65 174–5, 225n16
“Bien loin d’ici” 251–2
“Les Bijoux” 69 “La Belle Dorothée” 26n68, 175n16, 265n90
“Les Bienfaits de la lune” 74–5n14, 76n18,
“Chant d’automne” 142n59, 222 133n38, 142n59, 160, 175n16, 240–7, 250–1
“Ciel brouillé” 80 “Les Bons chiens” 26n68, 175n16
“Confession” 242n39
“Le Crépuscule du soir” 191 “Chacun sa chimère” 74–5n14
“Le Cygne” 152, 231n26 “La Chambre double” 25–6, 118, 132n33, 133,
134, 155n86, 224, 232, 233, 243n42
“Danse macabre” 232, 233 “Un cheval de race” 194
“La Chevelure” (prose poem pub. 1857), see
“L’Ennemi” 87, 89 “Un hémisphère dans une chevelure”
“Épigraphe pour un livre condamné” 251 “Le Chien et le flacon” 74–5n14, 151n77
“Le Confiteor de l’artiste” 113–16, 144n62, 281
“L’Horloge” 53n134, 87–8, 192–3 “La Corde” 138, 162, 178n33
“Hymne à la Beauté” 232–3 “Le Crépuscule du soir” 34n83, 87n36
“Madrigal triste” 251 “Déjà!” 175n16

“Le Masque” 155n86, 222 “Le Désespoir de la vieille” 74–5n14, 133n38,
144n62, 155–62, 243n42, 281
“Paysage” 140–2 “Le Désir de peindre” 26n68, 74–5n14, 135n43,
“Les Petites vieilles” 18n47, 222 175n16, 201, 203n92, 270–2
“Le Poison” 142n59 “Les Dons des fees” 221n3
316 index
“Enivrez-vous” 144n63, 220–40, 244 “Les Projets” 87n36, 256n69
“La Fausse Monnaie” 81n25, 144, 155n86 “Les Sept vieillards” 222
“Les Fenêtres” 74–5n14, 113, 163–9, 175n16, “La Solitude” 34n83, 74–5n14, 87n36, 256n69
232, 297–8 “La Soupe et les nuages” 130–9, 142–3, 151, 157,
“Le Fou et la Vénus” 73–5, 79–83, 85, 107, 118, 158, 160, 161, 169, 175, 212, 243n41, 244–5,
133n38, 151, 225, 243, 246, 281 281, 283
“Les Foules” 5n13, 108, 256n69, 294
“Les Tentations, ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire”
“Le Galant tireur” 4n11, 121n11, 172–83, 40–1, 135, 175n16
188–207, 208, 209, 210, 215, 216, “Le Thyrse” 144n62, 175
224, 282 “Le Tir et le cimetière” 142, 144n62, 175n16,
“Le Gâteau” 133n38, 144n62, 158–62, 243n42 181n41, 192n68, 207–18, 244–5, 281
“Un hémisphère dans une chevelure” 46, 87n36, “Les Veuves” 189n58, 256n69, 272n96
256n69 “Le Vieux Saltimbanque” 76, 79–80, 133n38,
“L’Horloge” 87, 89–97, 102–3, 105, 110, 111, 243n42, 256n69
112, 128n25, 132n33, 151n78, 193n69, 224, “Les Vocations” 232
243n41, 256n69
“Les Yeux des pauvres” 26n68, 122–30, 136, 138,
“L’Idéal et le Réel,” see “Laquelle est la vraie?” 141, 142, 146, 159, 225, 282
“L’Invitation au voyage” 46, 87n36, 235n33,
256n69 Essays
“Du vin et du hachisch, comparés comme
“Le Joueur généreux” 80–1 moyens de multiplication de l’individualité”
(Les Paradis artificiels) 42n110, 66–67,
“Laquelle est la vraie?” 26n68, 74–5n14, 143–55, 229–30, 234–5
156, 157, 158, 167–8, 171, 174n13, 175n16, Exposition universelle de 1855 92
184, 197, 211, 223, 281, 297 Fusées 57–8n141, 173, 178, 191n64, 193–4,
200–1, 204n93, 205, 256
“Mademoiselle Bistouri” 37, 135n42, “Un mangeur d’opium” (Les Paradis artificiels)
136, 178n34 229n24
“Le Mauvais Vitrier” 4n11, 100–1n56, 192n68, Mon Cœur mis à nu 119–20, 210, 225
232, 247–50, 269 “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” 154, 217,
“Le Miroir” 108–13, 144n62, 281 222n7, 231, 274–5
“Une mort héroïque” 26n68, 97–101, 147n68, Les Paradis artificiels 226–8
156n88, 175n16, 223 “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” 1–2, 3, 65, 84–5,
108–9, 110, 117–8, 126–7, 151, 152–3, 174,
“Perte d’auréole” 144n62, 174–5 182–3, 201n86
“Un plaisant” 74–5n14, 144n62 Salon de 1845 77
“Le Port” 132 Salon de 1846 77–9, 154, 256
“Portraits de maîtresses” 26n68, 129–30, Salon de 1859 78n22, 91n43, 166, 193n71, 195,
170–1n3, 175n16, 192, 198, 201–2 234, 255, 291
General Index
Abbott, Helen 8n24, 43n115, 121–2n12, 145n65, Blémont, Émile 253n61, 258n77
165–6n103, 250n52 Blin, Georges 6n17, 43n120, 198n82,
Adatte, Emmanuel 151n76, 220n2 204n94, 206n99
Agamben, Giorgio 132, 137n50 Blondeau, Nicolas 205n97
Ahearn, Edward J. 281n11, 283n13 Booth, Wayne C. 177n27
Allais, Alphonse 18n47, 69–70 Borges, Jorge Luis 9n29
Andrès, Philippe 255n65 Boulez, Pierre 9–11, 15–16, 38, 252–3
Andrieu, Jules 45–6n123, 292–6 Boutin, Aimée 42n110, 249
Andrieu, Pierre 245–6 Brain, Robert Michael 246n46
Aristotle 199, 244n43 Brehm, Brett 231n26, 258n75
Armitstead, Claire 49n130 Brix, Michel 2–3n7, 11–14, 23–4n59, 34n83, 253
Asselineau, Charles 39, 136n47, 151, 278 Brogan, Terry V. F. 74n14
Attridge, Derek 8n26 Brosset, Georges 185n48
Austin, J. L. 120–2, 139n57 Burt, E. S. 138n55, 226, 229n24
Burton, Richard D. E. 72n11, 174n13, 199n83,
Bachelard, Gaston 39 222–3n9, 233n30
Badiou, Alain 8n21, 42n114 Byron, Lord George Gordon 58, 61
Bakhtin, Mikhail 171, 192n66
Banville, Théodore de 18–19, 22, 39, 47n126, Cabanès, Jean-Louis 255n65
82–4, 105–7, 112, 136n47, 185, 255n65, Calinescu, Matei 138–9n55
278, 292 Calvino, Italo 118–19n3
Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules 53–8, 59, 63, 194n74 Cargo, Robert T. 25–6n67
Barthes, Roland 125n20 Carmouche, Pierre 248–9
Bastiat, Frédéric 100–1n56 Carpenter, Scott 4n11, 148–9, 154, 155n86, 168,
Bataille, Georges 194 174, 181n43, 248n47
Becq de Fouquières, Louis 17 Cassagne, Albert 69n6
Beer, Gillian 264n88 Certeau, Michel de 25
Beizer, Janet L. 135n44 Cervoni, Aurélia 34n83
Benhamou, Noëlle 182n44 Chaix d’Est-Ange, Gustave 187–8
Benjamin, Walter 57–8n141, 75n16, 117–18n1, Chalonge, Florence de 183n45
137–8, 174, 191 Chambers, Ross 8, 13n35, 37n94, 86, 97n53,
Benoist, Michelle 255n65 129n29, 151n78, 179–80, 187,
Benveniste, Émile 122n14 193–4n72, 235n33
Bernadet, Arnaud 283n15 Chateaubriand, François-René de 11, 55n137
Bernard, Claude 257 Chopin, Frédéric 245–6
Bernard, Suzanne 28, 35n86, 42n113, 43, Choux, Jules 202n88
181n39, 206, 217n117, 260, 289n20 Clover, Joshua 1
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri 93n47 Colet, Louise 37, 39–40, 137n52
Bernheimer, Charles 190 Combe, Dominique 27n71
Berryman, John 47n126 Connolly, Thomas C. 24n60, 77n19
Bersani, Leo 198n82, 199, 201, 203 Corbin, Alain 190–1
Bertrand, Aloysius 5n14, 22, 26–36, 38n98, 44, Cornulier, Benoît de 18n47, 156n89,
49, 63, 105, 254 185n50, 272
Best, Stephen 164–5 Courcy, Frédéric de 248–9
318 General Index
Crary, Jonathan 264n88 Gagne, Élise 44–5, 63

Cros, Antoine 257n73, 258 Gaildrau, Jules 197n78
Cros, Charles 40n104, 47n126, 102n64 Garelli, Jacques 127–8, 219–20
“À la promenade” 258 Garfield, Simon 193
“Distrayeuse” 253, 256, 260–5, 267, 269–70, Gautier, Judith, see Walter, Judith
272–7, 298 Gautier, Théophile 27, 41, 54n135, 55, 86, 88–9,
“Un drame interastral” 258–9 148, 242, 246n46, 255n65, 272, 292
“Madrigal” 102n64, 103n66, 254 Gendre, André 278n3
“Le Meuble” 254 Genette, Gérard 24–5, 35, 35–6n87, 77, 102,
“Théorie mécanique de la perception, de la 122n14, 178
pensée et de la réaction” 257–8 Gilman, Margaret 231n25
Culler, Jonathan 2n7, 205n98, 209n104, Glatigny, Albert 196n76, 258n77
210n108 Godfrey, Sima 37n93, 163n94, 164
Goncourt, Edmond de 189, 215
Dardani, Enrica 256n71 Goncourt, Jules de 189
Debrau, Émile 190 Gonzalez-Quijano, Lola 182n44
Delacroix, Eugène 245–6, 256 Gosetti, Valentina 29–30
Delahaye, Ernest 278n3, 288n19 Goudeau, Émile 131n30
Delvau, Alfred 131n30, 174n13, 177, 180, Graham, W. S. 170
190n61, 190n62, 192, 196, 197, 200, 202, 207 Greaves, Roger 85n32
de Man, Paul 110, 152, 177n27 Grojnowski, Daniel 190
Demeny, Paul 26n69, 228n23, 264–5n89, 292 Grøtta, Marit 85n31
De Quincey, Thomas 229n24 Guisan, Gilbert 156n87, 170–1n3
Derrida, Jacques 10n32, 101, 109n76, Guyaux, André 177n29, 288n19, 289n21,
144, 192n67 290n22
Dessons, Gérard 283n15 Guys, Constantin 117–18
Diderot, Denis 175–6
Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard 193n70 Habib, Claude 175n21
Dottin-Orsini, Mireille 190 Hamon, Philippe 101, 106, 177n27
Downing, Lisa 203n91 Haxell, Nichola Anne 12n34, 57
Dubuffet, Jean 224n15 Heine, Heinrich 55n137
Dujardin, Édouard 3n8, 19n51 Heraclitus 297
Dupety, Charles 248–9 Herodotus 208
Dusolier, Alcide 255 Hetzel, Pierre-Jules 45
Hiddleston, J. A. 6, 43, 74–5n14, 133n38,
Edison, Thomas Alva 40n104 151n78, 158n91, 243n42
Edwards, Peter J. 19 Homer 55n137
Eigeldinger, Frédéric 278n3 Hood, Thomas 231
Elias, Norbert 193n70 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 38–9
Epicurus 208, 214 Horace 207–8, 210n108, 214
Etkind, Efim 55n137 Houssaye, Arsène 3–4n10, 26–8, 39, 46n124,
Evans, David 19n49, 22n56, 91n43, 111n80, 151n77, 171, 192, 255, 292
246n46, 265n90, 272n96 Huc, Évariste Régis 91n42
Evans, Margery A. 181n42 Hugo, Victor 14–16, 18n47, 19–22, 44, 55, 69n6,
Evrard, Audrey 22 71–2, 133n36, 158n91, 167n107, 213–14,
236–7, 248, 254, 255, 265, 288n19
Fargue, Léon-Paul 297–9 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 41
Fénelon, François 22, 55n137
Flaubert, Gustave 37, 39–40, 93n47, 125n20, Ingold, Tim 264–5n89
137, 168n112, 184, 185 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 256
Fongaro, Antoine 51n132
Forestier, Louis 257n73, 264–5n89, 272, 274n97 Jackson, John E. 88n39, 91
Frappier-Mazur, Lucienne 179–80 Jakobson, Roman 11–13, 122n14, 283, 289
Freud, Sigmund 136–7, 209n106, 210n109 Jamison, Anne 2–3n7, 44n121
Fried, Michael 39n99 Job-Lazare (Émile Kuhn) 258n77
General Index 319
Johnson, Barbara 6–7, 27n71, 139n57, 145, 167, Marcus, Sharon 164–5
181, 192, 198, 199, 204, 232n27, 248 Marder, Elissa 37n94, 85, 86n35, 92n46, 135n42,
Jones, Crispin 193n69, 195n75 151n78, 178n34, 199n84
Jouy, Jules 131n30 Marnette, Sophie 76n17
Jullien, Dominique 263n85 Mathews, Timothy 287n18
Matlock, Jann 190n60
Kahn, Gustave 19 Maulpoix, Jean-Michel 38, 49n130, 76n18
Kaplan, Edward K. 1n2, 75n15, 115, 133n38, McLees, Ainslie Armstrong 188n57
143n61, 165n103, 175n16, 198n81, 225, Meltzer, Françoise 35, 37n94, 132n33, 147n68,
227n20, 235n31, 250n53, 272n96 151n78, 152n79, 153, 264n88
Klee, Paul 9–10, 15, 252 Mendès, Catulle 251, 255
Klinkert, Thomas 151n78 Mérat, Albert 258n77
Kopp, Robert 2n3, 39n101, 91n42, 119n5, Michelet, Jules 37, 61–2, 293
142n59, 175n15, 189n58, 227n20, Mieszkowski, Jan 91–2
256n69, 272n96 Millot, Gustave 251
Krueger, Cheryl 2n6, 5–6, 7n19, 36n88, 93n48, Mills, Kathryn Oliver 2n6, 72n12
102, 133n38, 153–4n82, 192n68, 193n72 Milton, John 11, 55n137
Krysinska, Marie 19n51, 55n137, 58–63, 274n98 Minahen, Charles D. 199n84
Monroe, Jonathan 125n17, 157n90, 171n6
Labarthe, Patrick 181n41, 209n105 Montaigne, Michel de 208–9n103
Ladenson, Elisabeth 179n36 Moreau, Pierre 55n137
La Fontaine, Jean de 238 Morel, Jean 222
Laferrière, Dany 267–9 Morier, Henri 18n47
Lamartine, Alphonse de 55, 105–6, Moussaron, Jean-Pierre 136
119–20n5, 158n91 Murat, Michel 34n83, 40n103, 76–7, 107, 113,
Landes, David 193n70 288n19, 290
Lang, Abigail 40n103 Murphy, Steve 46, 76n18, 102n60, 108n75, 121,
Larousse, Pierre 86, 88, 94, 133n36, 166–7n106 124n16, 125–6n21, 126n22, 128n26,
Lasowski, Patrick Wald 202n88 136n47, 138, 158n91, 163n94, 167n107,
Lautréamont, comte de (Isidore Ducasse) 23 177n25, 178, 192, 203n90, 205n97, 210–11,
Leclerc, Yvan 185n48 223n11, 252, 278n3, 288n19
Leconte de Lisle, Charles 185, 292
Lefèvre-Deumier, Jules 36n89 Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) 37,
Leighton, Angela 38–9, 170n1, 172n7 85, 166
Lemaître, Henri 272 Nancy, Jean-Luc 16–17, 135n43, 203n92, 221–2
Leroy, Christian 26n70 Nayar, Sheila J. 101n57
Lescart, Alain 190n60 Neruda, Pablo 47n126
Levey, Michael 246n45 Nerval, Gérard de 12n34, 41, 55n137, 146
Lévy, Michel 136n47, 278 Nesci, Catherine 2n6
Little, Roger 281n10 Newmark, Kevin 175n17
Littré, Émile 25n65, 40, 75, 93n47, 97, 103, Noel-Tod, Jeremy 38n98
132–3, 135, 137, 139, 157, 165, 166–7n106, Nora, Pierre 215
195–7, 198, 199–200, 206, 207, 209, 211, Noriac, Jules 255
238, 251, 263–4, 273, 283–4
Lloyd, Rosemary 2n7, 37n94, 120n6, 121–2, Olmsted, William 37n94, 180n37, 184,
165–6n103, 206 185n48, 188
Longenbach, James 23n58 Ortel, Philippe 36, 72n12, 85n31, 86, 257n72
Louÿs, Pierre 63n150
Lyu, Claire Chi-ah 233n28 Pachet, Pierre 84n29
Pakenham, Michael 253n61
Macklin, Gerald 282n12 Pardo, Céline 40n103
Maclean, Marie 3n8, 102, 112n81, 118n2, 120, Parent-Duchâtelet, Alexandre 189–90
129n28, 167n108, 225n16, 242 Paterson, Don 47–9
Mallarmé, Stéphane 3n8, 22–3, 37, 84, 85n32, Pearson, Roger 42, 100–1n56, 119–20n5
122n14, 139n57, 210, 222n8, 263, 276–7n102 Pelous, Jean-Michel 176–7
320 General Index
Pichois, Claude 2n5, 39–40n102, 43–4n120, Sanyal, Debarati 37n94, 98n55, 177n27,
171n5, 175n18, 189n58, 222, 231 198–9, 223
Pinard, Ernest 187 Scepi, Henri 147–8
Piot, René 245–6 Schellino, Andrea 34n83, 296n29
Poe, Edgar Allan 2, 54–5, 98n55, 145, 152–4, Schlegel, Friedrich 42n112
217, 222, 231, 274–5 Schlossman, Beryl 57–8n141, 191n64
Poulet-Malassis, Auguste 48n128, 188n54 Schmidt, Claude 185n48
Preminger, Alex 74n14 Scott, Clive 252n56
Prendergast, Christopher 37n94 Scott, David 5, 6n17, 14n39, 15, 29–30n78,
Py, Albert 288n19 34–5, 37, 77n21, 252, 279
Scott, Maria 3–4n10, 37n94, 45n123, 75, 80,
Quinet, Edgar 293 103n66, 108n74, 134n39, 150, 176n23, 178,
181n40, 192n67, 198, 223, 225n17
Rancière, Jacques 43 Serres, Michel 90–1, 119–20, 130, 297
Rauhut, Franz 276n100 Silvestre, Armand 258
Redler, G.-N. 131n32 Sloterdijk, Peter 133n37
Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas 263n85 Sollers, Philippe 199n84
Reverseau, Anne 85n31 St. Clair, Robert 205n96, 228n22
Reverzy, Éléonore 190n60 Stanton, Domna 175n20
Richard, Jean-Pierre 198n82 Starobinski, Jean 109, 205n96
Richards, Marvin 29–30n78 Stephens, Sonya 121–2n12, 177, 188n57
Riera, Gabriel 42n114
Riffaterre, Michael, 1, 24n61, 184n46, 188 Tanner, Jessica 215n114
Rimbaud, Arthur 3, 5n14, 14, 18n47, 19, 20n53, Taylor, Jonathan 195n75
22, 26, 34n83, 45–6n123, 60n145, 67, 76, Terdiman, Richard 4, 6, 13, 138, 151n78,
85, 88n37, 115, 116, 143n60, 192n66, 171–2, 248n47
195n75, 211–12, 221n6, 228, 233, 239n36, Thérenty, Marie-Ève 77n19
240n37, 258n77, 264–5n89, 276, 278–97 Thomas, Frédéric 45–6n123, 293n28
“Guerre” 282–4 Thompson, E. P. 193n70
L’Histoire splendide 45–6n123, 293–5 Todorov, Tzvetan 43–4n120, 284n16, 289n20
“Jeunesse II” aka “Sonnet” 279–81, 287 Tranter, John 235n33
“Larme” 18n47, 211–12 Trebutien, Guillaume-Stanislas 53–4
“Matinée d’ivresse” 282, 287, 289n21, 296 Troubat, Jules 4n12 43n120
“Phrases” 279n6, 284–92
Robb, Graham 77n19, 193n71, 291n26 Uchard, Mario 3
Rocher, Philippe 205n96
Rodenbach, Georges 55n137 Vacquerie, Auguste 265–7
Rogers, Nathalie Buchet 191n64 Vadé, Yves 41n109, 43n116, 63n150, 217
Ronsard, Pierre de 17 Valazza, Nicolas 188n54
Rostand, Edmond 18n47 Valéry, Paul 35, 65–9, 71, 72, 75, 80, 116,
Roubaud, Jacques 9, 279n6 138–9, 296n29
Roumette, Julien 43n116 Vallette, Alfred 63n150
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 158n91, 170n2, 226–8 van Roosenbroek, Gustave L. 91n42
Rousseau-Minier, Marjorie 190n60 Verlaine, Paul 47n126, 48n128, 105, 131,
Rubenstein, Steven 177, 192n66 148n71, 177n25, 185–7, 215,
Rudd, Niall 210n108 252n55, 288n19
Vernier, Valéry 258n77
Sacchi, Sergio 291n25, 296n31 Viala, Alain 176, 201
Saïdah, Jean-Pierre 255n65 Villemessant, Hippolyte de 85n32
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 5n13, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste de 298–9
15, 36, 147 Vincent-Munnia, Nathalie 12n34, 26n70, 36n89
Samuels, Maurice 125n19 Virgil 55n137, 245–6
Sand, George (Aurore Dupin) 49–53, 57, 63 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 42n112
Sandras, Michel 34n83 Vouilloux, Bernard 255
General Index 321
Wagner, Richard 3n8 Witt, Catherine 49n131

Walter, Judith (Judith Gautier) 103–5 Wright, Barbara 6n17, 34–5
Wanlin, Nicolas 30n79
Warner, Marina 63 Yamaguchi, Liesl 14n39, 24n60
Watteau, Antoine 245n44, 246n45 Yee, Jennifer 139n58
Wettlaufer, Alexandra 2n4, 24
Wheelis, Allen 210n109 Zachmann, Gayle 37n92
Wing, Nathaniel 98n54 Zola, Émile 182n44, 183

Seth Whidden - Reading Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris and The Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem-Oxford University Press (2022)

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/04/22, SPi

Reading Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

1. Auguste Rodin, La Main de Dieu (modeled ca. 1896–1902,

2 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

Nouvelles de Poe. Fantaisies. Variétés

With such wide-­ranging interests, he would not be overly limited to formal

4 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

Aware of prose poetry’s inside-­outness while he pursued his varied experiments

complexity of those tensions, we can better understand some of the subtle

paragraphs of “Les Foules”:

6 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

of Delaware Press, 2007), 12.

18 OC 1: 275–6; PP 129; translation modified.

8 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

Fordham University Press, 2015), xii.

Pour le musicien, il y a un rapport très dangereux, sinon subtil, entre l’œil

ful to Nikolaj Lübecker for bringing this study to my attention.

10 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

30 Boulez, Le Pays fertile, 97–8. 31 Boulez, Le Pays fertile, 101.

Le problème n’est pas nouveau, nous venons de le dire, du compositeur en train

33 Boulez, Le Pays fertile, 101–2; original emphasis.

12 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

texte d’arrivée, même en prose, sera généralement divisé en courts paragraphes

being indissolubly linked to versification and metrical rhythm—nevertheless

Briefly, poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical

14 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrits, NAF 13423, fol. 81, expositions.bnf.fr/hugo/grand/347.htm

Comparing two poems published in 1829—Victor Hugo’s “Sara la baigneuse” (Les

16 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

43 Jean-Luc Nancy, Les Muses (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994), 46.

45 Nancy, Les Muses, 54–5 note 3.

18 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

“maître”/“disparaître”).47 A few years after coediting the first edition of Baudelaire’s

ou invitation à l’expérimentation libre?” Romantisme, 163.1 (2014), 91–100 (94).

20 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

J’ai dit aux mots: Soyez république! soyez

Les préjugés, formés, comme les madrépores,

Les préjugés, formés, comme les madrépores, (6-­6)

22 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

Elle est l’expression, elle est le sentiment, (6-­6)

As the Lautréamont and Baudelaire quotations that serve as epigraphs to this

24 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

As the standard of poetry, verse suggests the text’s ongoing movement—turning

While this phonic, metrical aspect was always fundamental in determining so

The Miracle of Poetic Prose

Thinking of Baudelaire’s modern prose poem as miraculous can be useful not

64 Genette, Figures II, 123; original emphasis.

26 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

tra­verse le crépuscule; ces subtiles et terribles mirettes, que je reconnais à leur

Complete Works, Selected Letters, 377.

C’est en feuillant, pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameux Gaspard de la Nuit,

28 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

75 OC 1: 276, original emphasis; PP 130, translation modified.

As Valentina Gosetti suggests, this poem’s visual field is made of “a constellation

77 Bertrand, Œuvres complètes, 117–18.

30 Reading Baudelaire ’ s Le Spleen de Paris

considers what it means to be set in stone, as well as the lasting or ephemeral

With such wide-ranging interests, he would not be overly limited to formal

Aware of prose poetry’s inside-outness while he pursued his varied experiments

Les préjugés, formés, comme les madrépores, (6-6)

Elle est l’expression, elle est le sentiment, (6-6)

traverse le crépuscule; ces subtiles et terribles mirettes, que je reconnais à leur

“On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”

Le bûcher est dressé, le triomphal bûcher, 6-6

with final hiatus-induced rhyme of [o] (“haut”/“héros”) serving as bookends for

trésor de sa vie virginale, une splendide et toute-puissante existence, à faire pâlir