The Arcades Project - Operi

conjured by "Le Soleil;' no less than in the allegorical evocation of the Louvre in
"Le Cygne." [J57a,3]
On the physiognomy of Baudelaire as that of the mime: Courbet reports that he
looked different every day. [J57a,4]
With the inhabitants of Romance-language nations, a refinement of the sensorium
does not diminish the power of sensuous apprehension. With the Germans,
on the other hand, the refinement, the advancing cultivation of sensuous
enjoyment is generally purchased with a decline in the art of apprehension; here,
the capacity for pleasure loses in concentration what it gains in delicacy. (Compare
the "reek of wine-casks"318 in "Le Vm des chiffonniers.") [J57a,5]
The eminent aptitude for pleasure on the part of a Baudelaire has nothing at all
to do with any sort of coziness. The fundamental incompatibility of sensuous
pleasure with what is called Gemutlichkeit is the mark of an authentic culture of
the senses. Baudelaire's snobbism is the eccentric repudiation of complacency,
and his satanism is the readiness to subvert this habit of mind wherever and
whenever it should arise. [J58,l]
The streets of Paris, in Meryon's rendering, are chasms, high above which float
the clouds. [J58,2]
Baudelaire wanted to make room for his poems, and to this end he had to push
aside others. He managed to devalue certain poetic liberties of the Romantics
through his classical deployment of rhyme, as he devalued the traditional alexandrine
through his introduction of certain ebbings and points of rupture. In short,
his poems contained special provisions for the elimination of competitors.
[J58,3]
Baudelaire was perhaps the first to have had the idea of a market-oriented originality,
which just for that reason was more original in its day than any other. The
creation of his poncif,ng led him to adopt methods that were the stock in trade of
the competition. His defamatory remarks about Musset Or Beranger have just as
much to do with this as his imitations of Victor Hugo. [158,4]
The relation of the crowd to the individual comes, practically of itself, to unfold
as a metaphor in which the differing inspirations of these two poets-Hugo and
Baudelaire-can be grasped. Words, like images, present themselves to Hugo as
a surging, relentless mass. With Baudelaire, in contrast, tlley take the side of the
solitary who, to be sure, fades into the multitude, but not before appearing with
singular physiognomy to one who allows her gaze to linger. [158,51
What good is talk of progress to a world sinking into rigor mortis? Baudelaire
found the experience of such a world set down with incomparable power in the