The Arcades Project - Operi

If "Le Cn'puscule du matin" opens with the sound of reveille in the barrack
squares, one must remember that under Napoleon III, for reasons easy to understand,
the interior of the city was filled with barracks. [J7l,4]
Smile and sob, as cloud formation of the human face,
manifestation of its spirituality.
are an unsurpassable
[J7l,S]
In "Rve parisien;' the forces of production are seemingly brought to a standstill,
put out of commission. The landscape of this dream is the dazzling mirage of the
leaden and desolate terrain that in "De Profundis clamavi" becomes the universe.
"A frozen sun hangs overhead six months; I the other six, the earth is in its
shroud- / no trees, no water, not one creature here, / a wasteland naked as the
polar north!"38? [J71,6]
The phantasmagoria of "Rve parisien" recalls that of the world exhibitions,
where the bourgeoisie cried out to the order of property and production their
"Ahide, you are so fair!"'·8 [J7l,7]
Proust on "granting a kind of glory to the erowd": 'It would seem impossible to
better that. ":\B9 U7la, 1]
"And which, on those golden evenings when you.!eel yourse!lrevive"390-the second
half of the line collapses on itself. Prosodically, it works to contradict what it
affirms. This is, for Baudelaire, a characteristic procedure. [J7la,2]
"Whose name is known only to the buried prompter"391-this comes from the
world of Poe (compare "Remords posthume;' "Le Mortjoyeux"). [J7la,3]
The only place in Le Fleurs du mal where the Baudelairean view of children is
contravened is the fifth stanza of the first section of "Les Petites Vieilles": "the
eyes of a child, a little girl who laughs I in sacred wonder at whatever shines!""""
To arrive at this outlook on childhood, the poet takes the longest way-the way
leading through old age. [J7la,4]
In Baudelaire's work, poems 99 and 100 of Les Fleurs du mal stand apart-as
strange and solitary as the great stone gods of Easter Island. We know that they
belong to the oldest parts of the text; Baudelaire himself pointed them out to his
mother as poems referring to her, poems to which he had given no title because
any advertisement of this secret connection was odious to him. What these
poems mark out is a death-tranced idyll. Both, but especially the first, breathe an
air of peace such as rarely obtains in Baudelaire. Botll present the unage of the
fatherless family; the son, however, far from occupy ing the place of the father,
leaves it empty. The distant sun that is setting Ul the first poem is the symbol of
the father, of him whose gaze-"huge open eye in the curious sky"''''-lingers