The Arcades Project - Operi

On "the metaphysics of the agent provocateur" : ""Without being too prejudiced in
the matter, one may still feel a little uneasy in reading Les Mysteres galans [Les
Mysteres galans des theatres de Paris ]471 to think that Baudelaire had a hand in
this. If he himself has disowned this piece of youthful extravagance, there are
nonetheless good reasons for believing, with M. Crepet, that he is in fact one of the
authors. Here then is a Baudelaire on the brink of blackmail, spiteful toward all
success? This would suggest that throughout his career, from these Mysteres to the
Amoenitates Belgicae, the great poet had need, from time to time, of voiding a sac
of venom." Jean Prevost, review of the work mentioned, La Nouvelle Revue
fraltaise, 27 , no. 308 (May 1, 1939), p. 888. [J85a,3]
Apropos of Baudelaire's ""Au Lecteul"" "'The first six books of the Confessions
have . . , a certain advantage built into their very subject: each reader, insofar as
he is not the slave of literary or mundane prejudices, becomes an accomplice."
Andre Monglond, Le Preromantismefraru;a,is, vol. 2, Le JIIlai'tre des ames sensibles
(Grenoble, 1930), p. 295. [J86,1]
In an important passage by de Maistre, we not only encounter allegory in its
satanic provenance, and in the very perspective that would later be that of Baudelaire;
we also discover-here invested with the mysticism of Saint-Martin or
Swedenborg-the correspondances. And these latter constitute, revealingly, the
antidote to allegory. The passage is found in the eighth of Les Soirees de Saint­
Pi tersbourg, and reads: "One can form a perfectly adequate idea of the universe
by considering it under the aspect of a vast museum of natural history exposed to
the shock of an earthquake. The door to the collection rooms is open and
broken; there are no more windows. Whole drawers have fallen out, while others
hang by their hinges, ready to drop. Some shells have rolled out into the hall of
minerals, and a hummingbird's nest is resting on the head of a crocodile. What
madman, though, could have any doubt of the original intention, or believe that
the edifice was built to look this way? ... The order is as visible as the disorder;
and the eye that ranges over this mighty temple of nature reestablishes without
difficulty all that a fatal agency has shattered, warped, soiled, and displaced. And
there is more: look closely and you can recognize already the effects of a restoring
hand. Some beams have been shored up, some paths cut through the rubble;
and, in the general confusion, a multitude of analogues have already taken their
place once again and come into contactC'0!72 [J86,2]
On Baudelaire's prosody. A phrase has been applied to it that originally referred
to Racine: "graze the prose, but with wings;' [J86,3]
Concerning Baudelaire's "Voyage it Cythere":
Cythera is there, depIcted and lugubrious,
Absurd £leath's head of the dream of love,
And gleaming skull of pleasure , . .