The Arcades Project - Operi

the sea for the roar of applause." He spent fifty years draping his love of confusion-of
all confusion, provided it was rhythmic-in his love for the people." Leon
Daudet, Les Oeuvres dans les hommes (Paris, 1922), pp. 47-48, 11. [dS,3]
A saying ofVacquerie s about Victor Hugo: "The towers of Notre Dame were the H
of his name. ' Cited in Leon Daudet, Les Oeuvres dans les hommes (Paris, 1922),
p. 8. [dS,4]
Renouvier wrote a book on Victor Hugo's philosophy. [dS,S]
Victor Hugo in a letter to Baudelaire-with particular reference to Les Sept
Vieillards" and "Les Petites Vieilles" (both poems were dedicated to Hugo, and, as
Baudelaire indicated to Poulet-Malassis, for the second of them Hugo's work
served as the poees model): "You have endowed the sky of art with an indescribable
macabre gleam. You have created a new frisson."6 Cited in Louis Barthou,
Autour de Baudelaire (Paris, 1917), p. 42 ("Victor Hugo et Baudelaire"). [dS,6]
Maxime Leroy, Les Premiers Amisfran,ais de wagner, suggests that a revolutionary
impulse played a very large part in Baudelaire's enthusiasm for Wagner; indeed,
Wagner's works inspired an antifeudal Fronde. The fact that his operas dispensed
with ballet infuriated habitues of the Opera. [dS, 7]
From Baudelaire s essay on Pierre Dupont: We had been waiting so many years
for some solid, real poetry! Whatever the party to which one belongs, whatever the
prejudices one has inherited, it is impossible not to be moved by the sight of that
sickly throng breathing the dust of the workshops, swallowing lint, becoming saturated
with white lead, mercury, and all the poisons necessary to the creation of
masterpieces, sleeping among vermin in the heart of districts where the humblest
and greatest virtues live side by side with the most hardened vices and with the
dregs from prisons. That sighing and languishing throng to which the earth owes
its marvels, which feelsjlowing in its veins an ardent red blood, which looks long
and sadly at the sunshine and shade of the great parks and, for its only comfort
and consolation, bawls at the top of its voice its song of salvation: Let us love one
another . . ." -"'There will come a time when the accents of this worldngman's
Marseillaise will circulate like a Masonic password, and when the exiled the abandoned,
and the lost, whether under the devouring tropical sky or in the snowy
wilderness, will be able to say, I have nothing more to fear-I am in France!' as he
hears this virile melody perfume the air with its primordial fragrance: Nous dont
la lampe Ie matin I Au clairon du coq se rallume, I Nous tous qu'un salaire incertain
I Ramime avant l'aube a l'enclume . . . "-On the (;Chant des ouvriers":
(;Whcn I heard that wonderful cry of melancholy and sorrow, I was awed and
moved. "7 Cited in Maxime Leroy, l.Jes Premiers Amis franr;ais de Wagner (Paris