[4] An error of Baudelaire’s. The plate is the Petit-Pont.
“He asked me if I had read the tales of a certain Edgar Poe. I answered that I knew them better than any one else, and for a good reason. He then asked me in a very emphatic manner, if I believed in the reality of this Edgar Poe. I naturally asked him to whom he attributed all his tales. He replied: ‘To a society of men of letters who are very clever, very powerful, and who are in touch with everything.’ And here is one of his reasons: ‘The Rue Morgue. I have made a design of the Morgue.—An Orang-ou-tang. I have often been compared to a monkey.—This monkey murders two women, a mother and her daughter. I also have morally assassinated two women, a mother and her daughter.—I have always taken the story as an allusion to my misfortunes. You would be doing me a great favor if you could find out for me the date when Edgar Poe, supposing that he was not helped by any one, composed this story, so that I could see if the date coincided with my adventures.’
“He spoke to me, with admiration, of Michelet’s book on Jeanne d’Arc, but he is convinced that this book is not by Michelet.
“One of his great preoccupations is cabalistical science, but he interprets it in a strange fashion that would make a cabalist laugh.
Meryon. Le Petit Pont
“He drew my attention to the fact, in another of his plates, that the shadows cast by one of the masonry constructions of the Pont-Neuf on the lateral wall of the quay represented exactly the profile of a sphinx; that this had been, on his part, quite involuntary, and that he had only remarked this singularity later, on recalling that this design had been made a short time before the coup d’état.”
Charles Baudelaire in a letter to Poulet-Malassis (January 8, 1860).
Size of the original etching, 9⅝ × 7¼ inches
Portrait of Charles Meryon