The Arcades Project - Operi

Apropos of "The greathearted servant . . . " and the end of ""Le Voyage" ("·0
Death, old captain . .. "), L. Daudet speaks of a Ronsardian flight (in Le Stupide
XIX" Siilcle, p. 140). [J23,3]
·'My father had caught a glimpse of Baudelaire, and he told me about his impression:
a bizarre and atrabilious prince among boors." Leon Daudet, Le Stupide
XIX" Siilcle (Paris, 1922), p. 141. [J23,4]
Baudelaire calls Hugo a "genius without borders. "m [J23,S]
It is presumably no accident that, in searching for a poem by Hugo to provide
with a pendant, Baudelaire fastened on one of the most banal of the banal-"Les
Fantomes:' h1 this sequence of six poems, the first begios: "How many maidens
fair, alas! I've seen I Fade and die." The third: "One form above all,-'twas a
Spanish maid:' And further on: "What caused her death? Balls, dances-dazzling
balls; I They filled her soul with ecstasy and joi' This is followed by the
story of how she caught cold one morning, and eventually sank into the grave.
The sixth poem resembles the close of a popu1ar ballad: "0 maidens, whom such
festivefiites decay! I Ponder the story of this Spanish maid."'" [J23,6]
WIth Baudelaire's "La Va lli" compare Victor Hugo's 'Ce qu'on
entend sur la montagne" . The poet gives ear
to the world storm:
Soon with that voice confusedly combined,
Two other voices, vague and veiled, I find.
And seemed each voice, though mixed, distinct to be,
As two cross-currents 'neath a streanl you see.
One from the seas-triumphant, blissful song!
Vo ice of the waves, which talked themselves among;
The other, which from the earth to heaven ran,
Was full of sorrow-the complaint of man.
TI,e poem tal,es, as its object, the dissonance of the second voice, which is set off
against the harmony of the first. Ending:
Why God . ..
Joins in the fatal hymn since earth began,
The song of Nature, and the cries of man?125 [J23,7]
Isolated observations from Barbey d'Aurevilly's "M. Charles Baudelaire" ; j,( .I
sometimes imagine . .. that, if Timon of Athens had had the genius of Archilochus,
he would have been able to write in this manner on human nature and to insult it
while rendering it!" (p. 381). ''"Conceive, if you will, a language more plastic than
poetic, a language hewn and shaped like hronze and stone, in which eaeh phrase
has its volutes and Huting" (p. 378). (.This profound dreamer ... asked himself