Certain of these pages are ironical and sinister and cynical; as, for instance, in this sentence: "Quant aux insectes amoureux, je ne crois pas que les figures de rhétorique dont ils se servent pour gémir leurs passions soient mesquines; toutes les mansardes entendant tous les soirs des tirades tragiques dont la Comédie Française ne pourra jamais bénéficier." And it is in regard to this that I give certain details of an anecdote related by Cladel of Baudelaire, which refers to the fatal year when he left Paris for Brussels.
Both often went to the Café de la Belle-Poule; and, one night, when Cladel was waiting for Baudelaire, a very beautiful woman seated opposite him asked him to present her to Baudelaire. He laughed and they waited, and Baudelaire was presented, who, after giving them the usual drinks, at the end of an hour went away. This went on for a whole month; when Baudelaire, after her incessant assiduities to him, brought her home with him, Cladel also. They talk. The woman becomes lascivious. Baudelaire answers that he has a passion for beautiful forms and does not wish to expose himself to a deception. She undresses slowly. She is magnificent, and her tresses are so long that, with leaning over a little, she could put her naked feet on the ends of them. She assumes, being probably aware of it, the exact pose of Mademoiselle de Maupin when she stands naked before d'Albert. Cladel goes out. He has not quite closed the door when he hears Baudelaire, prematurely old and worn out, say: "Rhabille-toi." Still vital, he has no more the abstract heat of rapture of the passionate lover in Gautier's famous self-confessions; for, in that wonderful book, there is nothing besides a delicately depraved imagination and an extreme ecstasy over the flesh and the senses. And he also realized, as Baudelaire did not always, that the beauty of life was what he wanted, and not the body, that frail and perishable thing, that has to be pitied, that so many desire to perpetuate.
Yet never in Baudelaire, as in Gautier, did the five senses become articulate, as if they were made specially for him; for he speaks for them with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are—never Baudelaire's—in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have no recollection. Yet neither were absolutely content with the beauty of a woman's body: for the body must finally dwindle and expand to some ignoble physical condition, and on certain women's necks wrinkles will crawl, and the fire in one's blood sometimes loses some of its heat; only, one wants to perpetuate the beauty of life itself, imperishable at least in its recurrence.
In his preface Baudelaire compares Murger with Musset, both Bohemian classics, only one spoke of Bohemia with a bitter bantering, and the poet, when he was not in his noble moods, had crises of fatuity. "All this evil society, with its vile habits, its adventurous morals, was painted by the vivid pencil-strokes of Murger; only he jested in his relations of miserable things." Yes, Murger is a veracious historian; believe him, if you do not know or have forgotten, that such are the annals of Bohemia. There, people laugh just so lightly and sincerely, weep and laugh just as freely, are really hungry, really have their ambitions, and at times die of all these maladies. It is the gayest and most melancholy country in the world. To have lived there too long, is to find all the rest of the world in exile. But if you have been there or not, read Murger's pages; there, perhaps, you will see more of the country than anything less than a lifetime spent in it will show you.
IX
In April, 1864, Baudelaire left Paris for Brussels, where he stayed in the Hôtel du Grand-Miroir, rue de la Montagne. Before then his nerves had begun to torment him; they played tricks with his very system; he wrote very little prose and no verse. It was with a kind of desperate obstination—a more than desperate obstinacy—that he strove to prevent himself from giving way to his pessimistic conceptions of life, to his morbid over-sensibility that ached as his flesh ached. Unsatiated, unsatisfied, for once in his existence irresolute in regard to what he wanted to do, watching himself with an almost casuistical casuistry, alone and yet not alone in the streets of Paris, he wandered, a noctambule, night after night, sombre and sinister. So a ghost self-obsessed might wander in desolate cities seeing ever before him the Angel of Destruction.
Did he then know that he was becoming more and more abnormal? This I ignore. This, I suppose, he alone knew; and hated too much knowledge of his precarious condition. He was veritably more alone than ever, before he plunged—as one who might see shipwreck before him—into that gulf that is no gulf, that extends not between hell and heaven, but that one names Brussels.
Autograph Letter of Baudelaire to Charles Asselineau, 1865.
Still he frequented his favourite haunts, the Moulin-Rouge, the Casino de la rue Cadet, and other cabarets. He saw then, as I saw many years afterwards, pass some of his Flowers of Evil—some who knew him and had read his verses, most of whom he ignored—macabre, with hectic cheeks and tortured eyes and painted faces; these strange nocturnal birds of passage that flit to and fro, the dancers and the hired women; always—so Latin an attitude of their traditional trade!—with enquiring and sidelong glances at men and at women.