Portrait of Charles Baudelaire
From the etching by Félix Bracquemond. Of the same size as the original etching. Evidently an excellent likeness, since it exactly renders that ecclesiastical aspect of the poet which made one of his friends compare him to a cardinal.
Baudelaire’s negotiations with the “terrible Bracquemond,” as he came to call him, were carried on for the most part through Poulet-Malassis, which perhaps affords a partial explanation of the misunderstanding concerning the macabre frontispiece. And, although he speaks in one letter of having met the artist and repeated verbally the instructions which he had already given, with characteristically minute attention to detail, in writing, no such special interest attaches to this meeting, by no means unique, as to that between Baudelaire and Meryon which occurred about the same time, and to which we owe one of the most vivid and fantastic presentments we possess of that mad genius. In his Salon of 1859, Baudelaire had written of Meryon with an enthusiasm which awoke a responsive reverberation in the breast of Victor Hugo.
“Since you know M. Meryon,” the latter wrote to Baudelaire (April 29, 1860), “tell him that his splendid etchings have dazzled me. Without color, with nothing save shadow and light, chiaroscuro pure and simple and left to itself: that is the problem of etching. M. Meryon solves it magisterially. What he does is superb. His plates live, radiate, and think. He is worthy of the profound and luminous page with which he has inspired you.”
This page, which Baudelaire afterward incorporated in his Peintres et Aqua-fortistes, where he speaks further of Meryon as “the true type of the accomplished aqua-fortiste,” and praises the famous perspective of San Francisco as his masterpiece, does, indeed, betray the subtle penetration of the poet into the very spirit of his fellow-artist: “By the severity, the delicacy, and the certitude of his design, M. Meryon recalls what is best in the old aqua-fortistes. I have rarely seen represented with more poetry the natural solemnity of a great capital. The majesties of accumulated stone, the spires pointing a finger to the skies, the obelisks of industry vomiting their thick clouds of smoke heavenward, the prodigious scaffoldings of monuments under repair, relieved against the solid mass of architecture, their tracery of a filmy and paradoxical beauty, the misty sky, charged with wrath and with rancor, the depths of the perspectives augmented by the thought of the dramas contained therein,—none of the complex elements of which the dolorous and glorious setting of civilization is composed is here forgotten.”
Grateful for such recognition on the part of a distinguished man of letters who was also accepted as one of the leading art critics of the day in Paris, Meryon evidently wrote to Baudelaire, thanking him, and asking permission to call; for in his letter of January 8, 1860, to Poulet-Malassis, the poet writes as follows:
“What I write to-night,” he begins, “is worth the trouble of writing: M. Meryon has sent me his card, and we have met. He said to me: You live in a hotel whose name must have attracted you, because of the relation it bears, I presume, to your tastes.—Then I looked at the envelope of his letter. On it was ‘Hôtel de Thèbes,’ and yet his letter reached me.”
Portrait of Charles Meryon