The Arcades Project - Operi

solves into a legal opposition and an anarchist opposition. Baudelaire's am­
bivalent position between the two. His flight into the asocial.
The motif of death in Baudelaire's poetry penetrates the image of Paris. TI,e
"Tableaux parisiens;' the Spleen de Paris. Excursus on the cbthonic side of
the city of Paris. 11,e old bed of the Seine. The subterranean chalmels. Leg­
ends of subterranean Paris. Conspirators and cornmunards in the cata­
combs. Tw ilight in the catacombs. Their ambiguity. They stand midway
between house and street, between pavilion and hall. The undersea world
of the arcades. Their importance for prostitution. Emphasis on the com·
modity character of the woman in the market of love. The doll as wish
symbol.
Tout pour moi devient Allegorie.
-Baudelaire, "Le Cygne"
Baudelaire's genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical genius.
For the first time, with Baudelaire, Paris became the subject of lyric poetry ...
Facilis descensus Averill.
Virgil
It is the unique disposition of Baudelaire's poetry that the image of the woman
and the image of death intermingle in a third: that of Paris. The Paris of his
poems is a sunken city, and more submarine than subterranean. It is the city of a
death-franght idyll. Yet the substrate of this idyll is nothing natural, and consists
in neither the subterranean channels of Paris nor its catacombs and the legends
that have grown up around them. It is, rather, a social, and that is to say, a
modern substrate. But precisely the modern, la rnoderniti, is always citing primal
history. Here, this occurs through the ambiguity peculiar to d,e social relations
and products of this epoch. The twilight of the arcades, which contemporaries
compared to an undersea landscape, lies over the society that built d,em. Their
construction itself is ambiguous. They stand midway between house and street,
on the one hand; between pavilion and hall, on the other. At the same time, this
ambiguity set the tone for the market of love. Prostitution, in which the woman
represents merchant and merchandise in one, acquires a particular significance.
J e voyage pour COIlllaltre ma geographie.
The last poem of Les Fleurs du mal: "Le Voyage." The last journey of the flfureur:
death. Its destination: the new. Newness is a quality independent of the use value
of the thing. It is the last word of fashion. It is the semblance that forms the