The Arcades Project - Operi

work in the latter are different sorts of powers: a genius of melancholy gravity,
another of Ariel-like spirituality. [J67a,6]
In view of its position immediately after "La Destruction;'
..
""
,jUne Martyre" is rich in associations. The allegorical intention has done its work
on this martyr: she is in pieces. [J67a,7] l
.
In "La Mort des amants;' correspondences weave away without any hint of allegorical
intention. Sob and smile-as cloud fonnations of the human face-mingle
in the tercets. Vt lliers de l'Isle-Adam saw in this poem, according to a letter he
wrote to Baudelaire, the application of the latter's "musical theories:' [J67a,8]
"La Destruction" on the demon: "he fills my burning lungs / with sinful cravings
never satisfied:"'" 1ne lung as the seat of desire is the boldest intimation of
desire's unrealizability that can be imagined. Compare the invisible stream in
"Benediction:' [J68,1]
Of all the Baudelairean poems, "La Destruction" comprises the most relentless
elaboration of the allegorical intention. The "bloody retinue;' which the poet is
forced by the demon to contemplate, is the court of allegory-the scattered
apparatus by dint of which allegory has so disfigured and so unsettled the world
of things that only the fragments of that world are left to it now, as object of its
brooding. The poem breaks off abruptly; it itself gives the impression-doubly
surprising in a sonnet-of something fragmentary. [J68,2]
Compare 'Le Vin des chiffonniers" with Dans ce Cabriolet/ by Sainte-Beuve
« Les Consol"tions,> vol. 2 [Paris, 1863], p. 193):
Seated in this cabriolet, I examine the man
Who drives me, the man who s little morc than machine,
Hideous with his thick beard, his long matted hair:
Vice and wine and sleep weigh down his sottish eyes.
How far then, I thought, can humanity sink?
And I draw hack to the other cornel' of the seat.
The poet goes on to ask himself whether his own soul is not just as unkempt as the
soul of the coachman. Baudelaire mentions this poem in his letter of January 15,
1866, to Sainte-Beuve."" [J68,3]
The ragpicker is the most provocative figure of human misery. "Ragtag"
in a double sense: clothed in rags and occupied with rags. "Here
we have a man whose job it is to pick up the day's rubbish in the capital. He
collects and catalogues everything that the great city has cast off, everything it
has lost, and discarded, and broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery,
and the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice; like
a miser hoarding treasure, he collects the garbage that will become objects of
utility or pleasure when refurbished by Industrial magic" ("Du Vrn et du
n