With eyes as deep as drops of coffee, sensual lips, and a pretentious Renaissance hairstyle, Baudelaire threw himself into the whirlwind of Paris at the age of twenty, “bold as a butterfly, beetle, and poet.” His manicured hands, like those of a woman, his steely voice—inspired by that of Saint-Just, sharp and capable of alternating between icy politeness and atrociously impertinent responses—and his blue suit, imitating a portrait of Goethe, set him apart. He walked with a slow, swaying, slightly effeminate gait, dodging the mud with meticulous attention and observing himself in his patent leather shoes, in which he liked to contemplate himself.
Like any dandy, he would have liked to spend his life before the relentless truth of a mirror. In every gesture, he sought that inimitable blend of gravity and frivolity: sometimes he displayed the marks of a fallen angel in a muddy Styx; at other times, he spoke of art with the provocative familiarity of a man of the world, scattering words on paper like a chef mixing sauces and displaying his artifices as a seamstress does with her dresses and bouquets in the shop window. But his singeries and jongleries led him into dangerous territory. He spent afternoons in the company of the Lord of Hell, admiring his suave conversation, and lost his soul in that game, “as if he had lost his calling card while out walking.” He took his extravagant antics, his hyperbolic Pierrot gestures, to the realms where death reigns, seeking and watching over the abyss that opens beneath the footsteps of every mortal.
Some mornings, if the young and vigorous genius possessed him, he would cross Paris like an incognito prince, entering that immense reservoir of electricity that is the crowd. He would immerse himself in streets full of light, observing the majestic and brilliant river of vitality, the landscapes of stone and iron, the elegant carriages, the proud horses, the splendor of the grooms, the changing clouds of fabric that enveloped the women, and the light fanfares of a marching regiment, seductive as hope. At nightfall, alone or accompanied, he would go out again, now attracted by what the city had discarded, lost, and despised during the day. His gaze explored the “archives of dissolution, the chaos of waste,” contemplating the living monstrosities of Paris: its grotesque and sinister treasures, the blood-filled sewers rushing toward hell. In the darkness, he discovered ghosts and dark enchantments, the same spectral world that trembles in the corners of the novels of Hugo and Balzac.
Few friends ventured into the small, miserable hotels where Baudelaire lived, unable to bear the anguish of a prolonged stay. On the wall, above dusty furniture and incomplete manuscripts, hung the silent portrait of his father. The fireplace was cold; his clothes were pawned; on the table, a bottle of laudanum was a substitute for food, and a pair of old shoes with holes in the soles lay in a corner. Creditors knocked incessantly on the door, demanding payment of debts that accumulated around him, suffocating him. The “strange deity, dark as the night, perfumed with musk and cigar smoke” with whom he lived asked for money. His mother tortured him with her generous and senseless love; he offended her and then begged her to come, to save him, to place her gentle hand on his anguished forehead.
His dreams became increasingly terrifying; he heard voices uttering trivial phrases with terrifying clarity; the snow of time enveloped him, and shame, remorse, and vague fears compressed his heart like crumpled paper. Lost in a darkness as thick as tar, without stars or lightning, he waited for a theatrical angel, a golden, ethereal figure to descend upon the desperate scene of his soul. But no one could prevent the final catastrophe. Long feared and invoked, heralded by a sad procession of dizziness, fainting spells, and migraines, paralysis immobilized the right side of his body in March 1866. He lived for more than a year: blind in one eye, his tongue stammering simple phrases that the doctor taught him: “Bonjour monsieur,” “Bonsoir monsieur.” As a young man, he had decided to live before the impeccable gaze of the mirror; now, he looked at himself in it without recognizing himself, offering a polite and cautious greeting, as if to a stranger.
Baudelaire’s heart was, according to a verse from The Flowers of Evil, “burning like a volcano.” All the curses, blasphemies, lamentations, ecstasies, cries, and human Te Deums fell deafly upon him, causing storms of flames capable of setting the universe ablaze. The sensations that his refined organism collected—the new perfumes of the earth, the misty and golden colors of the horizon, the most subtle nervous shocks and the bitter dissatisfactions of the senses—resonated in his heart like an echo repeated in a thousand labyrinths. No human instrument can match this sounding board. Blasphemies and lamentations, scents and shocks rise with a hundredfold force, expanding and vibrating on the surface of the world, leaving an uncontrollable trail of emotions in their wake.
But that burning heart was, at the same time, “as deep as the void”: an immense cavity, a boundless abyss that opened up to the top of the sky and the circles of hell. Without limits, his feelings threw themselves into that double abyss, lost in the terrifying infinite. How to name them? How to stop that terrifying impulse to flee? Every action, dream, desire, and word of Baudelaire seemed to deny itself in an abyss that rendered all experience vain. Solids dissolved, liquids turned to gas, and that gas was lost in an even more volatile substance. The goals Baudelaire seemed to seek in life—the green paradise of childhood loves, primal splendor, the charm of Satan and crime—were mere shadows, capable of containing only a fraction of the heartbreaking force that boiled within him.
No poet, perhaps, possesses both that flame and that flight, that concentration and that expansion; for this reason, few involve us so deeply in their destiny. But when his sorrows invade us like a sea, what an unexpected turn! His orchestra of “brass” plays sumptuous music: it displays the wisdom of exclamations, the vibrant sweetness of vocatives, the calculated art of repetition, the triumph of enumerations. As in the verses of a classic, feelings dissolve into the gold and honey of rhetoric. We thought we knew a man swept away by the burning, empty abyss of his heart, and now we glimpse only an exquisite rhetorician, strolling among Desires, Melancholies, and Despair, entertaining himself with them to fill his leisure time.
As he wanders through old Paris, Baudelaire glimpses in every black woman, in every escaped swan nervously dipping its wings in the dust, new mythical figures: an exiled Andromache, a falsified Simois. In every person and thing he finds a symbol, an allegory. He drops those grandiose and sensual images that have forever sealed his name onto the appearances of the universe; anthropomorphic figures, caryatids of air, deities who for an instant abandon their refuge and reveal themselves.
Metaphor triumphs in his verses, transforming them into closed forms, into sublime units that are imprinted on our memory: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom,” “The familiar empire of future darkness.” These verses are the backbone of his poems, surrounded by broad melodic waves, exuberant chains of images. Thus, the hair of the beloved woman becomes an “aromatic forest,” an “ebony sea,” a “black ocean” that contains all oceans.
Baudelaire’s images do not have that hasty, abrupt passage. Barely unfolded, they glide with a wave-like, elastic movement, like a “beautiful ship setting sail, rocking gently.” As we contemplate nature through his eyes, we observe melodic harmonies: the sunset becomes a red fanfare that tinges the green of the grass with purple before fading under vast blue shadows. A woman’s hand displays combinations of greens, pinks, and browns in her veins and joints. Created by God as a “complex and indivisible whole,” nature becomes pictorial harmony, a vibration of tones reminiscent of Titian and Rubens.
Baudelaire seems to follow the opposite path to nature: he brings together in his verses all the chirps and dissonances of the world, the classical and the vulgar, foreign words and ironic adjectives. But after provoking the chirping, he reabsorbs it into the web of his analogies, into the rhythmic continuity of his poetic breath. If nature mixes red and green, he transforms syllables and verses into a single, velvety word.
Baudelaire was well aware of the dangers of false grandeur. But why count syllables, force the world into sonnets, if not to rescue something of what was once called “sublime”? As soon as we reach the vast breath of his verses, we feel a stable grandeur, a lyrical solemnity, a simple elevation. Like the street sweeper of Paris, Baudelaire combed through the archives of dissolution, the chaos of waste; he gathered the mud of our soul, kneaded it, and, “like a perfect alchemist, like a holy soul,” extracted from it nothing but gold.
Essay included in Il tè del Cappellaio matto (Adelphi, 1972).
Translation from Italian: Rafael Cienfuegos Lamberti.
