The Arcades Project - Operi

The following passage shows the crowd depicted by Hugo as though with the
burio of an engraver:
The night with its crowd, in this hideous dream,
Came on-growing denser and darker together­
And, in these regions which no gaze can fathom,
The increase of men meant the deepening of shadow.
All became vague and uncertain; only a breath
That from moment to moment would pass,
As though to grant me a view of the great anthill,
Opened in the far-reaching shadow some valleys of light,
As the wind that blows over the tossing waves
Whitens the foam, or furrows the wheat in the fields.
Victor Hugo, Oeuvres completes, Poesie, vol. 2
(paris, 1880), pp. 363, 365-366.
(Les Orientales, Feuilles d'automne)
[J32,1]
Jules Troubat-Sainte-Beuve's secretary-to Poulet-Malassis, April 10, 1866:
"See, then, how poets always end! Though the social machine revolves, and regulates
itself for the bourgeoisie, for professional men, for workers, . .. no benevolent
statute is being established to guarantee those unruly natures impatient of all
restraint the possibility at least, of dying in a bed of their own.-'But the
brandy?' someone will ask. What of it? You too drink, Mister Bourgeois, Mister
Grocer; you have as many vices as-and even more than-the poet. ... Balzac
burns hbnself out with coffee; Musset besots himself with absinthe and still produces
his most beautiful stanzas; Murger dies alone in a nursing home, like Baudelaire
at this very moment. And not one of these writers is a socialist!" (Cited in
Crepet, pp. 196-197.) The literary market. [J32,2]
In a draft of the letter to Jules Janin (1865), Baudelaire plays Juvenal, Lucan, and
Petronius off against Horace. [J32,3]
Letter to Jules lanin: "melancholy, always inseparable from the
beauty." Oeuvres, ed. Le Dantec, vol. 2, p. 610.
feeling for
[J32,4]
"Every epic intention ... is the result of an iInperfect sense of art.'
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe" (Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires [paris, 1886],
p. 18).15" This is, in embryo, the whole theory of "pure poetry?' (Immobilization!)
[J32,5]
According to Crepet ( p. 155), most of the drawings left
by Baudelaire portray " macabre scenes." [J32a,1]
"Among all the books in the world today, the Bible being the sole exception, Les
Fleurs du ma,l is the most widely published and the most often translated into other
languages." Andre Suares, Trois Grands Vivants (Paris