FrenchStudies, Vol. LV, No. 3, j51—62
SUPERFLUOUS INTRIGUES IN BAUDELAIRE'S PROSE
POEMS
MARIA SCOTT
In recent years, Baudelaire's Petits poemes en prose have been enjoying a high
level of scrutiny by literary critics of all persuasions. The ironic layering of
the prose poems has proven to be of particular interest to many.1 However,
despite the well-documented duplicity of almost every aspect of the prose
poems, there is a widespread tendency to assume that the narrator's
somersaults between irony and good faith occur in synchrony with those of
the poet. Even where criticism avoids referring to the speaker or main
character in a text as 'the poet', it usually guards the assumption that this
figure expresses Baudelaire's own views in a more or less direct fashion.
Thus, for example, *La Femme sauvage et la petite maltresse' is often cited as
an illustration of the poet's misogyny, 'Le Confiteor&e l'artiste' as a snapshot
of his aesthetic, 'L'Invitation au voyage' as evidence of his wish to undermine
or parody his own poetic project, and so on. This article proposes that there
may be another angle from which Baudelaire's prose poems can be read.
The assumption of authorial sincerity would indicate that we generally
approach these 'poemes en prose' as poetic self-expressions rather than as
prose fictions. Marcel Ruff, for example, writes of'la communication directe
que le poeme en prose s'efforce d'etablir entre l'ame de l'auteur et celle du
lecteur'.2 However, as Winifred Nowottny points out, it is when poems seem
most transparent, least artificial, that critics should be most alert to their
authors' linguistic deviousness.3 If we are to read Baudelaire's texts as poetic
communications, it is logical to give their internal analogies and correspondences as much attention as their overt message. Baudelaire himself placed
correspondences at the centre of his aesthetic. To read the prose poems for
the places where they reflect back on themselves, though, is to be led to
suspect that the kind of communication that takes place between poet and
reader in these texts is quite different from the sort described by Ruff.
This article will argue that certain texts of Le Spleen de Paris hinge on a
critical disjunction between their ideological logic and their analogical logic.
1
See, in particular, Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford
University Press, 1999) and J. A. Hiddleston, Baudelaire and 'Le Spleen de Pans' (Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1987).
2
Baudelaire: I'bommeetPauvre(Pans, Hatier-Boivin, 19)5)1 P- >8o.
3
Tbe Language Poets Use (London, Athlone Press, 1962), p. 11
C Society for French Studies aooi
352
MARIA SCOTT
It will contend that die explicit message of these texts is writ so large diat it
conceals dieir oblique message. The very simplicity of die device might be
responsible for its success, just as Poe's purloined letter was never better
hidden than when it was most obviously displayed. Indeed, Poe's ironized
first-person narrators could be viewed as the older brothers of the various
authorial semblances that feature in the prose poetry of his French translator.
In many texts in die collection, half-hidden internal echoes and symmetries
seem ironically to undermine the explicidy advertised irony. In 'Les Yeux des
pauvres' and 'La Belle Dorodiee', for example, the first-person narrator's
prestige as a Baudelairean ironist may be contested by an uncanny analogy
between what die text says and how it says it.
'Les Yeux des pauvres' retrospectively recounts the shattering of the
narrator's illusion of unity widi his mistress after she fails to echo his own
thoughts in relation to a poor family that stands staring into a cafe outside
which die two are sitting. The stated moral of die story is diat, even between
people who love each odier, communication is impossible. The vehement
tone of this conclusion is established by die text's opening address to die
mistress:
Ah! vous voulez savoir pourquoi je vous hais aujourd'hui. II vous sera sans doute
moins facile de le comprendre qu'a moi de vous l'expliquer; car vous etes, je crois, le
plus bel exemple d'impermeabilite feminine qui se puisse rencontrer.4
In view of die fact diat the mistress is addressed here as 'vous', and dius
stands alongside die reader in the position of narratee, it seems advisable to
reread the text to see if there is any aspect of its communication to which we
too might need to be more sensitive.
The text's tide refers not to die insensible gaze of the mistress, upon
which it eventually concentrates, but to 'les yeux des pauvres'. Indeed, die
text dwells at some lengdi on die eyes gazing into die new cafe:
Ces trois visages etaient extraordinairement serieux, et ces six yeux contemplaient
fixement le cafe nouveau avec une admiration egale, mais nuancee diversement par
Page.
Les yeux du pere 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 garcon: 'Que c'est
beaul que c'est beau! mais c'est une maison oil peuvent seuls entrer les gens qui ne
sont pas comme nous.' — Quant aux yeux du plus petit, ils etaient trop fascines pour
exprimer autre chose qu'une joie stupide et profonde. (O.c, i, 318)
After reflecting on how he was moved by diis vision of die poor family's
admiration for die cafe's splendour, and on how he was slighdy shamed by
4
CEums compfttis, ed. by Claude Pichois, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, z vols (Pans, Gallimard,
1975—76), 1, 317. Future page references to this collection will appear in the text alongside the
abbreviations O.c, 1 or O.c, 11.
BAUDELAIRE S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS
35 3
the size of the glasses and carafes in front of him, 'plus grands que notre
soif', the narrator states that he turned to his mistress:
Je tournais mcs regards vers les votres, cher amour, pour y lire ma pensee; je plongeais
dans vos yeux si beaux et si bizarrement doux, dans vos yeux verts, habites par le
Caprice et inspires par la Lune, quand vous me dites: 'Ces gens-la me sont
insupportables avec leurs yeux ouverts comme des portes cocheres! Ne pourriez-vous
pas prier le maitre du cafe de les eloigner d'ici?'
Tant il est difficile de s'entendre, mon cher ange, et tant la pensee est incommunicable, meme entre gens qui s'aiment! (O.c, 1,319)
It seems to be the mistress's failure to read both his own eyes and the eyes of
the poor family that is responsible for the narrator's ire. As Geraldine
Friedman points out, 'the man's condemnation of the woman's callousness
ultimately charges her with being a bad reader' because she fails to give a
sensitive reading to 'the texts of his and the family's faces'.5
The temptation here is to assume that the narrator is justified in his attack
on the woman. However, what undermines the legitimacy of this attack is,
firstly, that he is as guilty of misreading her thoughts as she is guilty of failing
to intercept his. Indeed, the narrator's guilt is aggravated by the fact that he is
interested only in reading his own thoughts ('ma pensee') in his partner's
eyes. Secondly, the narrator's superior sensitivity to the suffering of the poor
family is belied by several details in the text After his initial description of
the family's obvious penury and physical frailty, the narrator remarks
ignorantly that the father 'remplissait l'office de bonne et faisait prendre a ses
enfants Fair du soir' (O.c, i, 318). In addition, the narrator accounts for his
slight sense of shame at the sight of the poor family's gazes by reference to a
songster's cliche, thus placing the sentiment firmly in the realm of
programmed, superficial response: 'Les chansonniers disent que le plaisir
rend Tame bonne et amollit le cceur' (O.c, 1, 318). Furthermore, the narrator
averts his gaze from the poor family as soon as they begin to make him feel
even a little uncomfortable, and seems easily to forget their eyes as soon as
he loses himself in those of his mistress.
All of the above points have been made before. However, the narrator's
obtuseness tends to be underlined even while the perspicacity of his
judgement against the mistress is accepted. For example, Maurice Delcroix's
excellent study of the text insists on the narrator's egotism while also
crediting him with self-irony.6 This attributes a moral superiority to the
narrator that is nowhere warranted by the text and seems dependent instead
on the assumption that the narrator speaks for the author. If, as Stephens
5
'Baudelaire's Theory of Practice: Ideology and Difference in "Les Yeux des pauvres"', PMLA,
104, no. } (1989), 317-28 (p. 320).
6
'Un poime en prose de Charles Baudelaire: Les Yeux des paumf, Cabien d'analjse ttxtuclle, 19
(1977). 47-65-
3 54
MARIA SCOTT
points out, 'there is, at the very least, an ironizing of the narrator of "Les
Yeux des pauvres" ',7 there is nothing to suggest that this irony is selfdirected.
Despite the often-noted fallibility of the narrator's reading strategy, the
accuracy of his optical reading of the poor family seems rarely to be
questioned.8 Nevertheless, all the signs point to the possibility that the
speaker is mistaken in his assumption that the eyes of the poor express
admiration for the cafe's aesthetics. After all, what the three outside the cafe
are staring at is described earlier in the text as 'toute l'histoire et toute la
mythologie mises au service de la goinfrerie' (O.c, i, 318). What the physically
weak family is seeing is an apotheosis of food.
The speaker's shame at the size of his drinking vessels recalls the text of
Arsene Houssaye's 'La Chanson du vitrier', heavily ironized by Baudelaire in
'Le Mauvais Vitrier'.9 In Houssaye's painfully unironic text, a ridiculous firstperson narrator offers a drink to a hungry man. Obviously unused to feeling
hungry, the narrator seems unaware of the potentially disastrous effects of
pouring alcohol into an empty stomach (particularly when valuable glass
assets are in close proximity to that stomach). Similarly, the narrator of
Baudelaire's prose poem seems to have no sense that food is a need more
primary than wine. It may be that the mistress, not as successful as the
narrator in putting the poor family out of her mind, reads their eyes more
accurately than he: leurs yeux ouverts comme des portes cocheres' is far
more descriptive of physical hunger than the narrator's pretty 'Que c'est
beau!' speech bubbles.
In his (mis)readings of the poor family and of his mistress, the narrator
projects his own aestheticizing vision on to the eyes he regards. The crucial
difference between his two egotistical projections is that the second is more
explicitly exposed as an illusion by the text than the first. Unlike the mistress,
the three members of the poor family are not in a position to make their real
thoughts direcdy heard by die narrator. However, that the poet 'hears' those
thoughts is suggested by way of correspondences that seem too artful to be
accidental. Firstly, there is the correspondence between the two scenes of
7
Baudtlairt's Prose Poems, p.96.
Delcroix remarks on la presomprion de cette lecture du regard d'autrui' ('Un poeme en prose
de Charles Baudelaire', p. 60) but goes no further than this in challenging the narrator's reading of
the eyes of the poor family. Friedman does go further by suggesting that the family may 'crave food
more urgendy than they do beauty' ('Baudelaire's Theory of Practice', p. 310) but makes dus point
marginal to her analysis of the text and avoids the questions that it raises with regard to the poet's
ironic intention. Margery A. Evans remarks on the reader's 'ironic awareness that the poet's
interpretation of "les yeux des pauvres" may have been as unfounded as his analysis of his mistress'
but, as her wording here suggests, does not give Baudelaire himself the benefit of the doubt
Qfaudelain andlntertextuaUty: Rxtry at the Crossroads, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. Ji).
9
See Stephens's incisive analysis of the ironic treatment or'La Chanson du vitrier' in Baudelaire's
dedicator)' letter to Houssaye and in 'Le Mauvais Vitrier' (BaMde/aJre's Prose Poems, pp. 9—10,
PP-75-78)8
BAUDELAIRE'S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS
35 5
(mis)reading within the text. Secondly, diere is the symmetry between die
thematic meaning of the tide and its self-referential import: the narrator's
aesthetic reading of 'les yeux des pauvres' might be seen to reflect the kind
of reading that 'Les Yeux des pauvres' invites.
The new cafe might be interpreted as a model of die workings of the text
itself. Firsdy, the artificial brightness of the new cafe would mirror the fake
transparency of the prose. Secondly, the cafe's mirrors would reflect the
text's own intricate reflexivity. Thirdly, the trompe-l'ceil mural would present
an image of the textual trickery in play.10 Fourthly, the bourgeois tastelessness
of the cafe's decoration, with its picturesque pages dragged by dogs on
leashes, might be understood to echo the simultaneous sentimentality and
brutality of Baudelaire's text, as well as the strange reversals of readingdirection that it organizes.
However, this unfolding of the text against 'naive' readings does not
measure the full extent of its irony. The 'sceptical' reader might also be
targeted by the prose poem. Recalling the first-person narrator of Houssaye's
'Chanson du vitrier', the suspicious reader might be lured into making the
inane presumption that s/he alone, 'seul au milieu de tous ces passants' (O.c,
1,1309), is sensitive to the other's hunger. Furthermore, to the extent that his
or her reading of irony in the poet's textual gaze relies on an analogical
deduction rather than on anything that is explicidy stated in the text, there
can be no certainty that s/he is not merely repeating the narrator's egotistical
gesture of self-projection on to the eyes of those he regards.
•Les Yeux des pauvres' bodi thematizes and dramatizes the problem of
interpretation. It makes a mockery of distinctions between naivety and
scepticism in reading. To a reading that treats the text as a more or less
transparent communication on the part of a poet-narrator, it states that
misreading is inevitable, 'meme entre gens qui s'aiment' (O.c, 1, 319). To a
reading that assumes the impossibility of correct readings and that consequendy distrusts the narrator's undisassembled first optical reading, the
text offers what seems like a 'correct', if ironic, reading. Both naive and
sceptical readings arrive, therefore, at conclusions that undo their own
premises.
The irreducible poverty' of the reader's eyes may be at the centre of a text
that demonstrates that all readings, even the most apparendy impartial,
necessarily make possibly mistaken assumptions about authorial intentions.
The prose poem does not suggest, however, that attempts at deciphering the
other should be avoided: indeed, it overdy attacks the mistress precisely for
her apparent evasion. It may be that what the text suggests is that the only
10
Without proposing the existence of a possible mile en abyme, Delcroix observes that the text's
description of the cafe's mural might initially mislead the reader into thinking that its nymphs and
goddesses are moving around the cafe itself ('Un po£me en prose', p. )4)-
356
MARIA SCOTT
'correct' reading of the other is one which admits that there can be no
definitive reading of the other, including the other that is Baudelaire's text.
If there is a hidden attack on the reader beneath the explicit attack on the
mistress in 'Les Yeux des pauvres', 'La Belle Dorothee' might be seen to turn
on a similar device. In this text, an oblique reading is invited by the implied
parallel between the poetically inclined narrator and the object of his scorn.
The text begins with an evocation of the voluptuous and deathly
slothfulness induced by the terrible heat of the midday sun. Only Dorothee
is out walking on the deserted road. The text describes in languorous detail
the physical appearance of this beautiful black woman. She is wearing a
clinging pink silk dress and heavy earrings and is carrying a red parasol. The
narrator explains Dorothee's inappropriate attire and the fact that she is out
walking at midday by repeated reference to her prodigious vanity. For
example, he claims that she is Tieureuse de vivre et souriant d'un blanc
sourire, comme si elle apercevait au loin dans l'espace un miroir refletant sa
demarche et sa beaute' (O.c, i, 316). The narrator goes on to propose that the
reason Dorothee is out in the cruel heat is because she has a meeting with
'quelque jeune officier qui, sur des plages lointaines, a entendu parler par ses
camarades de la celebre Dorothee' (O.c, 1, 317). At the end of the text, we
learn that the woman is saving her 'piastres' desperately so that she can buy
her eleven-year old sister back from slavery. In conclusion, the narrator
exclaims virulently that the master will, no doubt, release the sister, because
le maitre de l'enfant est si avare, trop avare, pour comprendre une autre
beaute que celle des ecus!' (O.c, 1, 317). There is an oblique suggestion here
that the narrator would know better than to release the young girl whom he
describes, possibly lasciviously, as 'deja mure, et si belle!' (O.c, 1,317).
Although recent commentators have deduced, from the evidence of the
text, that Dorothee is a prostitute, the narrator never says this. Instead, he
accounts for her (presumably excruciating) midday walk in all her finery by
reference to her immense vanity, thereby managing temporarily to exclude a
corruptive reality from his picturesque notion of a happy, innocent woman.11
As if her indolence were necessary to his fantasy, the narrator represents
Dorothee as lazy rather than industrious: she is 'la paresseuse Dorothee, belle
et froide comme le bronze' (O.c, 1, 317). If the sister's master is blind to
beauty, seeing only commerce, the narrator is blind to industry, seeing only
11
Ainslie Armstrong McLees remarks on the narrator's self-protection from reality, but
nevertheless reads the text as a caricatural attack on (the master's) materialism and a defence of (the
narrator's) aesthetic sensibility (Baudelaire's Argot Plastiquc': Fbe/ic Caricature and Modernism (Athens,
University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 77). Rosemary Lloyd, by contrast, noting that the poetic style
of narration suggests 'a nostalgic reluctance to move into the hard-nosed world of quotidian reality'',
identifies the poet with Dorothee ('Some Reflections on "La Belle DorotheV", Frtncb Studies
Bulletin, 41 (1991—92), 8—10).
BAUDELAIRE'S LE SPLEEN DE PARTS
357
beauty. Each type of vision might be understood to be as cruelly reductive as
the other.
The analog)' between the narrator and the slave-master is most clearly
established in the paragraph that stands in die exact middle of the text (just
as the excessively glaring sun seems to be situated, by the text, in the middle
of the sky):
De temps en temps la brise de mer souleve par le coin sa jupc flottante et montre sa
jambe luisante et superbe; et son pied, pareil aux pieds des deesses de marbre que
l'Europe enferme dans ses musees, imprime fidelement sa forme sur le sable fin. Car
Dorothee est si prodigieusement coquette, que le plaisir d'etre admirec l'emporte chez
elle sur Porgueil de l'affranchie, et, bien qu'elle soit hbre, elle marche sans souliers. (O.c,
The appropriation of exotic works of art by European museums is placed
here in direct relation with the appropriation of 'exotic' human beings by
European individuals. By reducing Dorothee to an object of visual pleasure,
the narrator's description of her combines both forms of appropriation.
Instead of evoking the pain of walking on hot ground in bare feet, the
narrator insists on the beauty of those feet. In claiming that Dorothee
foregoes shoes because her vanity is greater than the pride she feels in her
liberation, other possibilities are effectively hidden from the reader's view:
penury, defiance, market demand, for example. Finally, the narrator's twofold
assertion, in the above passage, of the woman's current state of freedom
betrays no perceptible nuance of irony, despite the fact that it is difficult to
see how Dorothee the prostitute intent on buying her sister out of slavery is
more free than Dorothee the slave.
The high sun is described in the first paragraph as inducing a deathly sleep.
Similarly, the very centrality of the analogy between enslavement and
aestheticism in the text might dull our sensitivity to it. Like the feather fan in
the woman's boudoir, the text may play a dual role: as a static mirror, it offers
Dorothee's beautiful reflection for our delectation; as something that the
reader must unsettle a little, by contrast, it suggests the extent to which the
woman must suffer in the terrible heat:
Pourquoi a-t-elle quitte sa petite case si coquettement arrangee, dont les fleurs et les
nattes font a si peu de frais un parfait boudoir; oil elle prend tant de plaisir a se peigner,
a fumer, a se faire eventer ou a sc regarder dans le miroir de ses grands eventails de
plumes, pendant que la mer, qui bat la plage a cent pas de la, fait a ses reveries indecises
un puissant et monotone accompagnement, et que la marmite de fer, oil cuit un ragout
de crabes au riz et au safran, lui envoie, du fond de la cour, ses parfums excitants? (O.c,
'.3'7)
The discreet placement of 'a si peu de frais' suggests a suppression
Dorothee's hardship, while the syntactic sidelining of 'a se faire eventer'
the subsequent clause suggests the narrator's occlusion of the functional
the artistic. This eclipsing of the prosaic is also figured stylistically in so
of
by
by
far
3 J8
MARIA SCOTT
as 'se faire eventer' is a far more pedestrian construction than the bizarrely
elliptical 'se regarder dans le miroir de ses grands eventails de plume'.
All the signs in the text suggest that the narrator is a pleasure-seeking
aesthete. In 'L'Ecole paienne', published ten years before 'La Belle Dorothee',
Baudelaire wrote scathingly about the artist who values physical beauty too
highly, neglecting virtue and usefulness:
L'utile, le vrai, le bon, le vraiment aimable, toutes ces choses lui seront inconnues.
Infatue de son reve fatigant, il voudra en infatuer et en fatiguer les autres. 11 ne pensera
pas a sa mere, a sa nourrice; il dechirera ses amis, ou ne les aimera qucpour Uurforme', sa
femme, s'il en a une, il la meprisera et l'avilita. (O.c, it, 48)
Eileen Souffrin-Le Breton points to possible intertextual references in 'La
Belle Dorothee' to the work of Theophile Gautier, noting the fact that a
fixed feathered fan containing a mirror also features in Mademoiselle de
Maupin}1 It may be that Baudelaire's text, which brings aesthetic, sexual and
commercial appropriation into direct correspondence, parodies the ambitions of the first-person narrator-aesthete of Mademoiselle de Maupin. The latter
longs to find 'une maitresse tout a fait a moi' and wonders if 'un sac ou deux
de piastres' could not help him fulfil this 'ideal presque bourgeois'. 13 It may
also be that Baudelaire's prose poem parodies Gautier's view that 'II n'y a de
vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir a rien'.14 For Baudelaire's narrator, it
seems that Dorothee is beautiful only to die extent that she can be distanced
from the logic of exchange which, at the end of the text, is shown to rule her.
The narrator does not acknowledge, until the moment when this
acknowledgement can be framed as a defence of aesdietics, that Dorothee
must save every penny and endure the heat of the streets so as to free her
young sister. Both the overt nature of the text's concluding attack on
materialism and die sensuousness of the poem's subject and style function to
blind us to the narrator's suppression of the reality of Dorothee's pain,
'faisant sur la lumiere une tache eclatante et noire' (O.c, 1, 318). It may be that
Baudelaire's text plays upon our blind spot to Dorothee's suffering. Like her
fan, the prose poem may contain a mirror in which the poet could be
suspected of watching us reading from behind our backs.15
As in 'Les Yeux des pauvres', the text also catches the sceptical reading in
its artful folds and mirrors. By insisting on the text's suppression of
Dorothee's misery, the reader who suspects a ruse is implicidy aligned widi
the anti-aesdietic slave-owner, the object of the narrator's scorn. Baudelaire's
12
'More on the Mirror of "La Belle Dom&iic" \ Frmdb S/udies Bu/Zehn, 50(1994), 16-18.
Mademoiselledt Maupin (Paris, Gallimard, 1932), pp. )o, 61.
Mademoiselle de Maupin, p. 29.
15
Souffrin-Le Breton remarks that the purpose of the fixed fan with mirror was 'to enable the lady
holding this fixed fan both to contemplate her own image and to check on what was happening
behind her' (*More on the Mirror', p. 17).
13
14
BAUDELAIRE'S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS
359
text allows for no absolute certainty, therefore, as to the direction of its
irony.
What our analysis of two prose poems has insisted on is die irremediable
partiality of our knowledge about Baudelaire's intention. In each instance,
the act of narrative cnonciation undermines the narrative enonce so artfully that
the reader may be led to suspect that a clandestine critical disjunction is at
work. This suspicion would be ungrounded, however, if it could not be
extended to the entirety of Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire having always insisted
on the unity of his collection.16
If Baudelaire made die reading habits of his nineteenth-century public the
target of his venom, his decision was undoubtedly influenced by the hostile
reception accorded by diat public to Les Fleurs du mal. Although two prose
poems by Baudelaire were published in 1855, the first ones to appear as part
of a projected collection were published in he Present only four days after the
trial of the verse poems in 18 5 7. It is very possible that die prose poems were
motivated as much by a desire for vengeance as by a wish to experiment with
new textual forms. Scott Carpenter claims that the anecdotal aspect of
Baudelaire's prose poems masks dieir subversive, allegorical attacks on a
repressive dominant culture: 'Silenced by die law, Baudelaire finds a way to
speak, but "mutely", as it were'.17 In a similarly sceptical vein, Jacques
Derrida writes of one of die prose poems, T a Fausse Monnaie', that the
structure of the text seems to mirror its content, such that the transparent
naturalism of die text might be as counterfeit as the coin that die narrator's
friend offers to die beggar.18 As Derrida's careful analysis seems obliquely to
suggest, Baudelaire's texts might very well deconstruct deconstruction.
Instead of revealing diemselves, upon deconstruction, to say something
other than what diey mean to say, the prose poems may catch die sceptical
reader off guard precisely by seeming to intend to say something other than
what diey appear to say.
In a letter of 1866 to Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire describes die narrator of Le
Spleen de Paris as 'un nouveau Joseph Delorme accrochant sa pensee
rapsodique a chaque accident de sa flanerie et tirant de chaque objet une
morale desagreable'.19 What our reading of two texts from the collection
suggests is that the situational readings carried out by Baudelaire's narrators,
complete with rhapsodic aestheticism and disagreeable morality, may function
16
For a study of this oblique irony as it might apply to other texts by Baudelaire (and others), see
my doctoral thesis, 'Anamotphic Texts: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Lacan, Derrida' (October 1999). Trus
thesis was supervised by David Scott, whose help, then and now, was indispensable.
17
"The Esthetic Mask: Irony and Allegory in Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris', in Arts of Fiction: Risistana
and Revolutionfrom Sade to Baudelaire (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 12;—48.
18
Donner le temps: 1. La Fausse Monnaie (Paris, Galilee, 1991), p. 214. Derrida also states that 'ce
qu'on dit du titre de ce bref reck peut aussi se dire du titre du livre bien qu'il n'en intitule qu'une
part, une petite piece' (p. 112).
" Comspoitdante, ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1973),11, p. 583.
360
MARIA SCOTT
as an ironic mise en abynte of the very acts of reading that the texts invite. Every
reader might be seen to become, from one angle or another, and whether
s/he knows it or not, the butt of a grotesque joke. The best response to the
caricatural assault of the prose poems may thus be the 'philosophical' laughter
associated with Baudelaire's 'comique absolu'. This is the kind of laughter we
might give forth when we suddenly see ourselves as ridiculous.
Stephens has discussed certain parallels between Daumier's caricatures of
the Parisian bourgeoisie and the texts of Le Spleen de Paris.20 It is interesting
to note, in diis connection, that Daumier produced a series of visual
caricatures entitled Cent et un Robert Macaire, in which a swindler, adopting
different disguises, moves invisibly among the crowd.21 Although there are
only fifty poems in Le Spleen de Paris, die fact that the poet had intended to
produce one hundred prose poems, which along with the sardonic 'dedicace'
would have made one hundred and one, suggests that his collection may owe
a certain debt to Daumier's conception. It may be diat, like Macaire,
Baudelaire aimed to deceive die readers he was to encounter along die road.
If so, the odierwise radically heterogeneous collection of prose poems would
be unified by its cruel but discreet parodying of the reader who feels sure of
die ground s/he walks on.23
Caricature was, in Baudelaire's time, a popular strategy of retaliation for
artistic rejection: 'The Salon caricatural at midcentury, anticipating the Salon des
Refuse's, provided a means by which artists whose work had not been accepted
for display in the prestigious Parisian salons could express their disdain for
20
See Stephens's chapter o n 'The Prose Poem and the Dualities of Comic A r t ' , in Baudelaire's Prose
Poems, p p . 108—59.
21
O n Baudelaire's admiration for Daumier's Robert Macaire, see O.c, n , j 5 j .
22
See Baudelaire's letter t o Sainte-Beuve o f May 1 8 6 ; , Correspondence, 11, 493. Les Fleurs in mal, t o
w h i c h Le Spleen de Paris was conceived as a ' p e n d a n t ' , originally c o n t a i n e d o n e h u n d r e d p o e m s ;
however, this number changed after the edition of 18; 7.
23
I n Baudelaire and Caricature: From tbe Comic to an Art ojModernity (University Park, Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1992), Michele Hannoosh insists on a cancatural dimension to Le Spktn de
Paris but does not continue or develop that intuition of a motivated deception that inflects her
analysis of the prose poem 'Une mort heroique'. In Baudelaire's Argot Plastique', McLees also writes
about the centrality of caricature to Baudelaire's literary production, including his prose poems, but
does not suggest that the latter parody the strategies of reading they invite. David Scott's study of
Le Spleen dt Parts (London, Grant and Cuder, 1984) gives particular attention to the category of the
'poeme-boutade', and even states that poems outside this category too contain 'more than a smack
of the boutade' (p. 88), but does not construct an argument for hidden irony. Hiddleston's Baudelaire
and 'Le Spleen de Paris' observes caricatural elements in the prose poems, noting that 'interpretations
of these poems which do not take sufficient account of the poet's irony and his desire to mystify
run the risk of being naively literal' (p. 40). However, Hiddleston continues to assume an identity
between an albeit seTf-ironizing narrator and the poet (see for example pp. 29, 36, j 1). HiddJeston's
identification may be no more 'naive' than our separation of narrator and poet, but it necessarily
excludes consideration of the possibility that the reader who is sensitive to the narrator's irony is
himself or herself targeted by the poet's irony. While Stephens overtly defends the conventional
association of the author of the prose poems with his apparent spokesperson (Baudelaire's Prose
Poems, p. 61), her argument that the texts parody genre reveals a degree of scepticism with regard to
the good faith of the narrator or main speaker.
BAUDELAIRE'S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS
361
24
the conventions governing those salons'. Indeed, Baudelaire penned the
following possibly far-seeing lines in his prologue to the Salon caricatural of
1846:
J'ai l'orgueil, tant je suis innocent ct naif,
D'amuser ceux-la meme a qui mon crayon vif
Infligea le tourment de la caricature (O.c, n, 5 00)
If the public had failed to recognize the beauty of Baudelaire's poetry of
correspondences, what better way to attack this blindness than subdy to
mobilize an artillery of veiled correspondences in prose? The public's
incomprehension of analogies could be turned invisibly against it.
To the extent that Baudelaire feigned acceptance of the moral and aesthetic
principles of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, he might be understood to
resemble the artist of'le comique absolu', whom he conceived as encouraging
a sense of personal superiority (le comique significatif') in his audience
precisely by seeming less self-aware than he really was (O.c, n, 543). However,
if the poet were simultaneously and secretly to mock the very audience he
pleases, he too could indulge in 'le comique significatif, seeing his audience
figuratively decapitated at the same time as he decapitates himself figuratively
for their benefit 25 For Baudelaire, as for Flaubert and other nineteenthcentury writers, and as for innumerable satirical writers before and since, 'Le
ridicule est plus tranchant/ Que le fer de la guillotine' (O.c, 11, 116).
The first collective tide that Baudelaire gave to his prose poems was Poemes
nocturnes. Ruff comments on the thematic inappropriateness of the tide.26
However, it may be that the nocturnal epithet refers to the shrouded
workings of the texts rather than to their themes. Another of Baudelaire's
tides for the prose poetry collection was Petitspoemes lycanthropes, the reference
to lycanthropy suggesting a ferocious transformation of form as well as
alluding to Petrus Borel's love of violating 'les habitudes morales du lecteur'
(O.c, 11, 154).Yet another provisional tide was equally suggestive of malicious
intent and of a potential for transformation:
J'ai cherche des titres. Les 66. Quoique cependant cet ouvrage tenant de la vis et du
kaleidoscope [. . .] put bien etre pousse jusqu'au cabalistique 666 et meme 6666. ..
(O.r.,11,365)
One formula, 'La Lueur et la Fumee: Poeme, en prose', was referred to by
Baudelaire as 'un titre qui rend bien mon idee'.27 This tide might be
24
McLees, Baudelaire's Argot Plasttque', p. 59.
O n the distinction between l e comique absolu' and l e comique ordinaire' or 'significatif, see
Baudelaire's ' D e l'essence du rire', O.c, 11, ; 25—43. O n the comic value of mimed decapitation, see
O.c, 11, 5 39-40.
26
Baudelaire: I'bomme et I'aupre, p . 170.
27
Letter t o Houssaye, Correspondence, 11, 197
25
362
MARIA SCOTT
understood to evoke the kind of spectral (transparent/opaque, multi-faceted,
malevolent, intangible) intrigue that this essay is arguing for.
That Baudelaire was interested in deceptive transformations is suggested
by his interest in Ernest Christophe's anamorphic sculpture, Le Masque,
which hides a sorrowful face behind a smiling one. A similarly unsettling
kind of twist might be at play in the collection that Baudelaire described as a
snake in dedicating it to a newspaper editor. It may be that Le Spleen de Paris
directs its poison at the Parisian newspaper-reading public which gave
Baudelaire his spleen (the prose poems were published in newspapers and
reviews before being published posthumously as a collection). As Derrida
asks: 'Que fait-on quand on dedie un serpent — tout entier ou en
morceaux?' 28
If the content of certain texts is reflected back upon the way in which that
content is framed, what is revealed is the possible existence of 'une intrigue
superflue' (Ox, 1, 275). Symmetries between (nonce and inonriation remain
invisible to the kind of teleological reading that is often accorded to prose,
but offer themselves quite readily to the kind of analogical reading
conventionally associated with poetry. Emmanuel Adatte associates Baudelaire's particular interest in analogy with an assertion of his freedom from
mortality and 'les turpitudes du spleen'.29 It may be that the tide 'Le Spleen
de Paris' refers to the workings of the collection at least as much as to its
content. In other words, the prose poems may have permitted Baudelaire's
self-liberating but strangely tactful venting of spleen against the very
audience that gave him his spleen. Similarly, 'le galant tireur' in the prose
poem of the same name decapitates his muse in effigy, before graciously
thanking her for his success.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
28
29
Donntr It temps, p . 116.
'Les F/tun du mat'et ']j Splttn de Paris'" essai sur le depassement du riel(Pans,
C o r t i , 1 9 8 6 ) , p . 13J.