The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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political edge. With his hair resembling a “Saracen helmet” and a willingness to sacrifice himself for his art, Baudelaire models an aesthetic politics of internal exile. He depicts France itself as if through foreign eyes, conceiving “a land unexplored, a sort of rough and wild Kamschatka” (F 123; E 17) from within the heart of his native country.14 In a seemingly casual allusion with wide-ranging significance for his argument, Gautier connects Baudelaire with the legendary seventeenth-century Italian alchemist and court poisoner for the Borgias, Exili, who wore a “glass mask [masque de verre]” when preparing his “powder of succession” (F 135; E 40). The allusion compares Baudelaire’s contemporary readers to Exili, mocking them for their fear that the poems are somehow “poisonous” and need to be held at a distance. Earlier in the essay, Gautier had compared these poems to poison and disease, but he refers to the palette Baudelaire draws upon to describe his world, not to the nature of the poems themselves: “the roses of consumption, the pallor of chlorosis, the hateful bilious yellows, the leaden grey of pestilential fogs, the poisoned and metallic greens smelling of sulphide of arsenic, the blackness of smoke diluted by the rain on plaster walls” (F 133; E 36). These are the colors produced by the industrialized modernity Baudelaire’s poems document; the poet is only being true to his time in painting with them. Yet playing on the homophony of verre (glass) and vers (verse), Gautier suggests that Baudelaire and Exili do have something important in common. As if donning a protective glass mask, Baudelaire writes about the poisonous remainders of modernity; the homophony of Exili’s name with the act of exile (in French, exil) defines his chosen response.15
For Gautier, Baudelaire epitomizes this detached but critical relationship to his decadent age. He stresses the poet’s “British” reserve and formalized, almost aristocratic manners, and observes the same kind of detachment in the poetry and critical writings (F 120; E 13). The formal perfection of Baudelaire’s verse is a kind of “armour” distancing the poet from what he describes (F 133; E 35). He approaches evil like a “magnetised bird”: drawn into the “unclean mouth of the serpent,” he always escapes at the last moment to “bluer and more spiritual regions” (F 127; E 24). Many of the relatively few poems Gautier chooses to discuss in the “Notice” describe or epitomize the poet’s stoic detachment. He groups two poems—“Élévation [Elevation]” and “Le Soleil [The Sun]”—which are widely separated in the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but which both imagine the poet soaring above the everyday world. Gautier praises the dandaical hero of “Don Juan aux Enfers [Don Juan in Hell]” for his refusal of emotion. The most significant poem Gautier discusses in this regard is “Bénédiction,” the opening poem of Les Fleurs du mal proper. In line with Gautier’s larger argument in the “Notice,” “Bénédiction” casts the poet’s life as a form of martyrdom. Scorned by his mother and his family, tormented by his lover, and overseen by a guardian angel who can only weep ineffectually over his charge’s sad “pilgrimage” on earth, the young poet dreams that literary glory will sanctify his suffering. In his commentary on the poem, Gautier describes the lover who tortures the poet as a Delilah, “happy in delivering him up to the Philistines” (F 134; E 36). This detail is nowhere in Baudelaire’s poem. Gautier’s elaboration makes plain his interpretation of Baudelaire’s life: suffering for Truth and Beauty, the poet sacrifices himself on the altar of a Philistine readership that cares only about money and outward propriety, not the Ideal. Baudelaire’s torment is part of a larger cultural conflict between artists and their bourgeois public, his critical detachment from modernity a mode of resistance as well as a defense.
Gautier opens the “Notice” with an extended recollection, incorrectly dated, as I noted above, of his first meeting with Baudelaire among the small circle of artists, poets, and models who congregated in and around Gautier’s rooms at the Hôtel Pimodan in Paris. The “strange apartment” Gautier occupies “communicated” with that of Ferdinand Boissard by a private hidden staircase not to be seen from outside. This image of a social group circulating and “communicating” outside the view of the public aptly figures the counter-cultural sociality and practice of internal exile that defines Baudelaire’s contribution to modern poetry. When Gautier first met him, he recognized that Baudelaire was destined for leadership. Acknowledged by artists and writers, he remains, at this time, a mystery to the larger public: “Charles Baudelaire was then an almost unknown genius, preparing himself in the shadow for the light to come … his name was already becoming known amongst poets and artists, who heard it with a quivering of expectation, the younger generation, coming after the great generation of 1830, seemed to be looking to him a great deal. In the mysterious upper chamber where the reputations of the future are sketched out [s’ébauchent] he passed as the strongest” (F 113; E 2; trans. modified). Baudelaire’s talent marks him as not merely a great poet but also as a kind of secular messiah-in-waiting, the harbinger of a new post-Romantic generation. Gautier’s images blend the typological with the aesthetic. Baudelaire’s future is “sketched out” like a drawing; shadow and light are figures for fame as well as the medium of painting.16 Gautier notes that the artist’s model Maryx (Joséphine Bloch), who was present at this fateful meeting, later became famous for depicting the allegorical figure of Glory in Paul Delaroche’s 1855 mural, “The Hemicycle.” In the mural, Glory hands laurel crowns to the legendary Greek painters Phidias, Apelles, and Ictinus, who are flanked by modern masters. In the scene Gautier describes, she figuratively hands the crown to Baudelaire. Awarded to victorious poets and generals alike, the wreath signifies Baudelaire’s posthumous role as the unofficial and subversive poet laureate. Rather than singing the praises of the empire, he inspires a small group of internal exiles during a moment of great disorder.
The laurel wreath is also present in another allusion in the opening paragraphs of the “Notice.” Regretting the lost sense of community he felt at the time of his first meeting with Baudelaire, Gautier looks back to a crucial moment in the classical republican imaginary: the Florentine city-state of the Renaissance. “They have passed,” he writes, “those charming leisure hours, where coteries [décamérons] of poets, artists, and beautiful women were gathered together to talk of art, literature, and love, as in the century of Boccaccio. Time, death, and the imperious necessities of life, have dispersed these free and sympathetic groups; but the memory is dear to all those who had the good fortune to be admitted to them” (F 118–19; E 10; trans. modified). The tone of this passage is elegiac, but the allusion is cutting. In The Decameron, the group of Florentine young people who tell one another stories is trying to escape the plague and the social breakdown that follows in its wake. In his introduction to the collection, Boccaccio stresses the plague’s corrosive influence on social, political, and familial order. Having come from the East, the plague manifests itself in Italy as a disorder of sociality. It spreads by contiguity, infecting healthy persons “who conversed or had any dealings with the sick.”17 Yet it also divides, separating the sick from the healthy, parents from children, husbands from wives, citizens from their city. Having all lost their families to the plague, Boccaccio’s storytellers leave the city seeking refuge in a series of country estates. But their escape is not merely escapist: in place of the old order they fashion a new imaginary republic, with a rotating leadership signified by a laurel crown, “the outward symbol of sovereign power and authority” for the group.18 Out of the ashes of one society, they form a new society based on art, complete with laws, sovereignty, and an orderly succession. Like Gautier’s bohemian counterculture, they constitute a polity apart, devoted to pleasure and self-preservation.
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