Baudelaire’s Paris Looking at Africa, and Vice Versa

ABSTRACT

This article tests the textual differences between those of Baudelaire's poems that are typically considered ‘Parisian' or ‘foreign'. It argues that ‘La Belle Dorothée' is not only a poem about an African gaze on France, or indeed only a poem set in Africa, but that it can also be shown to represent an allegory for a Parisian view of self. The more overtly Parisian ‘À une passante’, for its part, glances at more than a poet struck down in Paris by the shock of Modernity; it also gazes inter alia on African beauty, Sara Baartman, aka the Hottentot Venus.

KEYWORDS:

• Charles Baudelaire
• Sara Baartman
• Hottentot Venus
• ‘La Belle Dorothée’
• ‘À une passante’
• autodifferentiation
• prose poetry

In September 1814, some years before any of Charles Baudelaire’s poems would place Venus on the streets of Paris, a woman entered Parisian society under that very name. While the Venus of Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Le Fou et la Vénus’ simultaneously brings the goddess downwards from the Heavens and brings a statue of her to life, Sara Baartman found herself named in the Parisian press after a famous Roman marble statue of the same goddess, the Aphrodite Kallipygos, or Callipygian Venus. Baartman’s own movements were also double. Her brief period in French society is often considered a debasement, an act of profiteering typical of colonialism, but there is also a way in which she can be considered to have been elevated to something like star status. Baartman was a Khoisan woman, born in South Africa around 1790. She was allegedly orphaned as a child and subsequently taken to labour on Dutch European farms. Later, she worked as a maid and nursemaid in Cape Town until 1810 when she was taken to London to be exhibited as a carnival or freak show attraction under the stage name the ‘Hottentot Venus’. From there, she was sold and taken to France to be exhibited by an animal trainer. Baartman died on 29 December 1815. Her body was then famously the object of an autopsy conducted by Georges Cuvier, the text of which has taken its own place in scholarly debates about how, or whether, to study Baartman’s story (see, for example, Lyons 2018).¹ In the field of French studies, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (1999) has done much to explain Baartman’s important role in the French imaginary, including in the works of Baudelaire.

The poem on which Sharpley-Whiting focuses is the prose poem ‘La Belle Dorothée’, in which she finds the clearest example of an African woman suffering under French colonial rule. While we find Sharpley-Whiting’s analysis powerful, we are minded that to read Dorothée categorically as a black prostitute is also to read against her metaphorical (and, as we shall see, also metonymic) role as an allegory for Paris. In a Parisian reading, Dorothée might easily be white. In making such a case, we aim to keep in view the doubleness that is at the heart of Baudelaire’s prose poems. It is not a question of arguing white rather than black; instead, it seems important to us to remember that the prose poems are both black and white, always and at the same time. In this way, we hope to demonstrate that what is at work in Baudelaire’s poetry is a more complex dynamics of interaction, an interweaving of the one into the other. We might think, for example, of ‘La Chambre double’, whose dichotomy could not at first glance be clearer, but which, on closer examination, reveals its poetic side to be undermined with the stuff of everyday life and its humdrum side to be teeming with poetic ideals. The doubleness of its adjective is, after all, matched by the singularity of its definite article. So too, poems that appear to portray African beauty can also be shown to be articulating an internal, Parisian difference. Thus, the exoticness of the other is also that of the one; and no matter how clearly the other is marked, this idea of internal difference remains, as we shall see, critical. Any focus on binaries that favours one over the other (and especially the other at the expense of the one) runs the risk of obfuscating the movement across divisions that is always in play in Baudelaire’s poetry, and especially in his prose poems with their clear arrangement around a central pivot, or prosaicized volta.² We take Africa as our starting point precisely because it marks the extreme limit of otherness from Baudelaire’s Parisian perspective. By testing this limit, we question the possibility of a clear origin story for ‘La Belle Dorothée’, before crossing back to Paris to reverse the lens and to question the singular identity of ‘À une passante’’s famous passer-by.

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Mary Ann Caws begins her reading of Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems with a clear warning: ‘Mind the gap’, she declares, echoing an announcement familiar to anyone who has travelled on the London Underground (2006, 186). Conscious of her position as a woman reading Baudelaire, Caws focuses on the women on whom Baudelaire focuses. First, she poses the problem of the gap: ‘Making a binary move: all too easy with Baudelaire’ (2006, 186). Next, she ventures across it, reminding us of the two most celebrated women of the poet’s oeuvre: ‘the dark muse Jeanne Duval, available, and the white marble Madonna Mme Sabatier, available or not’ (2006, 186). Sharpley-Whiting also speaks of difference in terms of a gap: for her, Dorothée’s blackness ‘represents the unbridgeable gap between the colonized and the colonizer, the black and the white, the French and the Cafrines in this Manichean world’ (1999, 69). It is not our intention here to argue against Caws by suggesting that specific muses cannot be allocated to specific poems; instead, we wish simply to suggest that such allocation is not the end of the story. Similarly, while Sharpley-Whiting’s focus on the effects of colonialism is a necessary reminder that the French literary canon is exploitative and exclusionary, both in terms of race and gender, it is our contention that a close reading of Dorothée’s Africanness must also take into account her Parisanness; the one cannot be exchanged for the other. Furthermore, we are not arguing that Baudelaire’s poetic world is not a Manichean one, for its oppositions are all too evident; but again, the Manicheanism on display is constantly mobilized, its two sides forever criss-crossing. If we need to mind the gap, in other words, it is in part because when we are on one side looking across at the other, we find that the other is already beneath our feet. Far from being unbridgeable, such gaps are always already bridged. And neither is our aim in this regard without precedent; indeed, by arguing that the critical difference between Baudelaire’s women is not what distinguishes them one from another but what differentiates them from themselves, we are also clearly engaging with Barbara Johnson’s seminal essays on Baudelairean difference, in which she exposes that the prose poems do not serve simply as verse poetry’s other but, rather, as reminders of poetry’s own self-alterity, to which, she notes, it is often itself blind (1980, especially 38). The counter-readings that we propose will, however, allow us to look again with fresh eyes at some well-, and perhaps over-, regarded female bodies.

Sharpley-Whiting would likely not disagree that Jeanne Duval is a model for the titular figure in ‘La Belle Dorothée’. She is keen nonetheless to locate Dorothée, and her work as a black prostitute in the colonies, outside what are known as the Vénus noire poems of Les Fleurs du mal. This decision stems less from the poem’s status as a prose poem than from the fact that Dorothée channels much more directly what Sharpley-Whiting considers the master text of black sexuality in the French nineteenth-century imaginary, that is, the body of Sara Baartman, aka the Hottentot Venus. For Sharpley-Whiting,

black women, embodying the dynamics of racial/sexual alterity, historically invoking primal fears and desire in European (French) men, represent ultimate difference (the sexualized savage) and inspire repulsion, attraction, and anxiety, which gave rise to the nineteenth-century collective male imaginations of Black Venus (primitive narratives) (1999, 6, emphasis original).

This suggestion of an ultimate difference (the one opposing black to white, primitive to civilized) occludes its deconstructionist other, which goes to the heart of Baudelaire’s prose poetry and which sees black and white, primitive and civilized, brought together under considerable poetic tension in the form of the one (plural) body that is Paris. To demonstrate that this tension is an expression of Paris, and vice versa, we turn briefly to the question of the overarching title of the prose poems, which itself hinges on a gap that is both posed and bridged.

In most editions of the prose poems, the full title includes a subtitle, whether opposed across a colon or, as in the Gallimard Poésie edition (1973), with parentheses – Petits Poëmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris). The opposition presented at the level of the collection’s title is indicative of the poems within. On one side of the central pivot there are the little prose poems, and on the other is Paris’s spleen. If the word ‘spleen’ is elevated by the capitalization of its S and its association with Paris, the capital of modernity in the nineteenth century, the prose poems are themselves described as small. And yet, this opposition of descent into smallness and elevation into the ether is itself opposed, and this on both sides: the poems resist the downwards slide, clinging on to their capital P;³ and spleen, however much it is elevated, remains by its very nature of this world, and thus opposed to poetic Ideals. In other words, the title sets in opposition two concepts that are already self-opposed: prose poetry is above all an oxymoron (Rolls 2021; Stephens 2006); and spleen stands in defiance of the romantic Ideal of the capital. Interestingly, Paris takes centre-stage in the collection’s title (if slightly off to the side), only thereafter to be remarkable by its absence. We suggest that Paris sits problematically in this titular set-up: it appears to oppose spleen as the Ideal; and at the same time, it is the place, the very stuff of spleen.⁴ The move made here is from an explicit Parisianness, on display in Les Fleurs du mal, including in poems like ‘Le Cygne’, where the city is both named as itself and represented by a series of metaphors, to an implicit Parisianness in the prose poems, whose lack of specific geographical markers is overarched by Paris as paratextually present. Paris is therefore a metonym, and as such ever an absence–presence, in the prose poems.⁵ Further, it is also a metonym of prose poetry, its genitive case in the title rendering it both in the oxymoron (Paris versus spleen) and of the oxymoron (Paris equals prose poem, and vice versa). The move from metaphor to metonym is itself a sign of a distancing. Historically, by the time of the later verse poems, the Baudelaire of romantic ideals was already a witness to mid-century revolution and the dramatic physical change of his beloved city; in the prose poems, the trauma apparent in ‘Le Cygne’ has been replaced by a fetish, which disavows Paris (the site of the traumatic truth of change), removing it from view but also retaining it as trace.

The prosaic turn of the prose poems is, of course, such that mundane objects that are not ordinarily the stuff of poetry are overvalued. Rather than entirely replacing poetic Ideals with prosaic objects, however, the Satanic, downwards pull of prose poetry always already contains a counter-movement, which sees the mundane poeticized. In the Freudian scenario, Fetishism also sees an everyday object overvalued, with all that this implies in terms of double movement: if it is certainly the case that the truth of woman’s sexuality is screened by an object, and thus in a way debased, it is equally the case that that object becomes, henceforth and everywhere, a symbol of that truth and is thereby simultaneously elevated (Freud 1961). Sharpley-Whiting invokes the fetish in her discussion of the aprons worn by nineteenth-century prostitutes in Paris. Citing sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, she notes that the apron is a garment worn over one’s clothes, which looks nonetheless like an item of underwear and thus suggests what lies beneath (1999, 64–65). The apron appealed to the prostitutes’ clients, for whom it added a fantasy of ancillary love. For Khoisan women like Sara Baartman, on the other hand, the apron was a garment worn in lieu of other clothes and to cover the other famous apron beneath, that is, her genitals with their extended labia minora. Sharpley-Whiting’s concern is to refocus the critical gaze of academia on the original apron, not that worn in Paris, which was ‘already fetishized in the French scientific and cultural imagination’ (1999, 65). Accordingly, her reading foregrounds the aspirations of a black African prostitute, her ‘futile, pathetic imitations of whiteness – the slave’s simple attempts at trying to be mistress’ (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 70). The historical figure of Sara Baartman herself, however, by virtue of her move to, and association with, Paris allows a reorientation of this critique. If the poem is read as an African-inflected vision dreamt from the streets of Paris, the beautiful Parisian ladies to whom Dorothée compares herself become ironic transpositions of the white apron-wearing streetwalkers, who sought to resemble the maids whom masters pursued in the absence of their mistresses, and who might willingly have exchanged their own lowly places in society for Dorothée’s place in the sun.⁶ The overvaluation of the African setting, which appears to replace Parisian prostitutes with a black woman walking on a beach, is, we argue, most important, not for its locale, but as an act of overvaluation, and thus as an embodiment of the prose poems.

As we have seen, Paris is announced in the title of the collection and then disappears. In terms of the urban experience that it mirrors, the poetic lens is too closely focused, showing us a street-level view from which a broader perspective of the street’s place in the topography of the city, and thus its place in a nameable schema, is impossible. And yet, the paratextual signage that overarches the parts ensures that the whole (collection) remains understandable as Paris. These mechanics may be more difficult to perceive in the case of ‘La Belle Dorothée’ because of the comparisons drawn to European statues and Parisian ladies, which suggest a place beyond France, and the dances attended by ‘les vieilles Cafrines’, or the old women of Kaffraria, which appear to mark this space as African (OC, 311).⁷ Whereas comparison of two opposed spaces that are nonetheless one and the same is otherwise a marker of the less problematically Parisian prose poems – as seen before, ‘La Chambre double’ comes readily to mind – this use of geographical markers, and perhaps especially the unusual mention of Paris itself in the text, appears to set the poem firmly in Africa. And yet, the first reference to Europe comes only in the sixth paragraph of eleven, and thus around the mid-point of the poem, namely, at the point at which the pivot typically occurs. Before that, the overwhelming impression is of the oppressive glare of the sun in what is simply described as ‘la ville’ (OC, 310). Dorothée makes, as Sharpley-Whiting notes, ‘a striking and dark mark’, but it is not stated in the text that she is walking along a ‘deserted sandy beach’ (1999, 67–68, 67); mention is made instead of ‘la rue déserte’, which has already been located in a city (OC, 310). Later mentions of a sea breeze and fine sand enable us to imagine a shoreline, but it is not clear that the sandy beach is anything other than that – an imaginary one.

The first point to note is that the sun’s light overwhelms the city (‘accable la ville’) and that the sand is blinding (‘éblouissant’) (OC, 310). In sensory terms, the poem begins very much like one of its famous verse predecessors, ‘À une passante’, in which the city street is announced as roaring (‘hurlait’) and deafening (‘assourdissante’) (OC, 162).⁸ The effects are similar: what is presented is difficult to see clearly, which gives the scene an unreal edge. A second verse poem is summoned in the second paragraph, in which we meet Dorothée walking in the street ‘forte et fière’ like the sun itself (OC, 310). This description demands comparison with ‘la négresse’ of ‘Le Cygne’, whom the poet, confronting the rubble of Haussmannian Paris, imagines stumbling in the mud ‘amaigrie et phthisique’ (OC, 157), or the very opposite of Dorothée. The black figure of ‘Le Cygne’ is just one metaphor of Paris and the trauma of its inhabitants, who cannot reconcile the city to which they are present with the city that they represent in their minds. And of these metaphors, these figures of exile and alienation, she is the lowliest, but only insofar as she is the third mentioned in a list beginning with the grief-stricken Andromache, followed by the titular swan. Behind what is described as an immense wall of fog, she searches for the absent coconut palms of Africa. This comparison is clearly in Africa’s favour.

Given the metonymics of Baudelaire’s prose poems, according to which all subjects are overvalued (albeit by turns), and thus equal to each other, and all are signifiers of the city whose identity their overvaluation masks, it makes sense, we argue, to read Dorothée as an allegory of Paris. In this light, she is a metonymic version of the metaphorical role played by ‘la négresse’ in ‘Le Cygne’ and can be read as one of the lowly Parisian streetwalkers discussed by Sharpley-Whiting, in this case, one dreaming of the African sun from a dreary city street rather than an African prostitute imagining the splendour of Paris from an African beach. Dorothée’s hair, which is described as almost blue, speaks of Paris as much as it does of Africa, seen as it is against the light filtered through her red parasol (OC, 310). Red and blue are, after all, the colours of the Parisian flag. Even the word black itself is used metonymically in the poem, describing the stain that she forms against the blinding light of the sky. In this sense, its role in the second paragraph is to undermine the comparison made between Dorothée walking proudly forwards and the listlessness of the first paragraph. In a paragraph that is full of poetic splendour, the stain that she forms, that is her form, is typical less of black women in Africa than of the stuff of Baudelaire’s prose poems. No matter how universal the ecstasy, it is, as seen in ‘Le Fou et la Vénus’, always an ecstasy of things, just as, for their part, things grounded in time and space simultaneously reach up into universal ecstasy (OC, 280). The equivalence of objects in the prose poems stems from the fact that their individual value is always secondary to the role that they play in embodying the oxymora and double-movements of the prose poem. This double-movement happens not only across the central pivot, but also on either side, hence the role of this most prosaic of stains in a paragraph that is otherwise ethereal, poetic. At the micro level, too, the stain offers various oppositions: first, it is contrasted with the light (‘faisant sur la lumière une tache’); second, it constitutes an oxymoron when it is immediately qualified by the adjective ‘éclatante’ (‘une tache éclatante’); third, another adjective is added, which opposes the first (‘éclatante et noire’) (OC, 310). Blackness is therefore a marker of internal difference (Dorothée embodies an oxymoron), like that of the Idol’s eyes in ‘La Chambre double’, which are ‘ces étoiles noires’ in comparison to the ‘cascades neigeuses’ of the muslin drapery from which she emerges (OC, 278). One may well question the possibility, desirability or ethics of speculating as to the colour of Dorothée’s skin. It seems enough to point out that she is black metonymically, just as the prose poems are Parisian metonymically. By virtue of its mechanics – its double-movements and oxymora placed on either side of a central pivot, with the two sides broadly opposing each other while also hosting within themselves internal opposition – ‘La Belle Dorothée’ is doubly differentiated, that is, from the other (Europe and Parisian ladies), but also from itself.

When, in the sixth paragraph, a sea breeze blows into the poem, it lifts up the corner of her dress, which is said to float:

De temps en temps la brise de mer soulève par le coin sa jupe flottante et montre sa jambe luisante et superbe; et son pied, pareil aux pieds des déesses de marbre que l’Europe enferme dans ses musées, imprime fidèlement sa forme sur le sable fin. (OC, 311)

Again, rather than simply comparing this black prostitute to European models of beauty (and finding her lacking), this description breaks at least one marble goddess out of her imprisonment and maps her, faithfully (by which can be inferred recognizably) onto a sandy backdrop. The marble goddess most clearly signalled is the woman passing by of ‘À une passante’. The passer-by’s leg is described, precisely, as a ‘jambe de statue’ and she as ‘agile et noble’ (OC, 162); Dorothée’s leg is described as ‘luisante et superbe’ (and she as ‘forte et fière’), and it is her foot that evokes statues. If the foot leaves its trace faithfully in the sand, it is because it is bare; the passer-by’s foot is not mentioned, but her hand is ‘fastueuse’, suggesting that it is decorously gloved (OC, 162). Divested therefore, and no longer confined, textually, to the Paris of verse poetry, the woman passing by now leaves her trace quite legibly in foreign sands.

In the verse poem ‘Le Cygne’, Paris is explicitly present but at the same time phantasmatically transported elsewhere, in time and space, in the form of three metaphors: Andromache, a swan and a black woman. All are metaphors for the trauma of loss and of Paris (as site of loss), and all three are rendered equal. In ‘La Belle Dorothée’, Paris has been disavowed, paratextually reduced/elevated to the level of overarching metonymy, but the extremeness of the poem’s travel – to the distant shores of Africa – can be read as a test case for the metonymics of the prose poems’ (re)presentation of Paris, that is, Paris remains Paris even when translated onto an African setting, because, and only because, Paris is contiguously present in the title of the collection. The poem’s exceptional status extends to its specific mention of Paris; but this is, of course, logical, given that Paris is mentioned as other. To name itself other is, here, the ultimate expression of autodifferentiation. As is made clear in the final poem of Les Petits poèmes en prose, the epilogue, Paris is hell on earth, a prison and, of course, a brothel (OC, 354).⁹ And if Baudelaire can at last speak this aloud, it is only because the epilogue is in verse, its poetry offsetting the city’s ultimate debasement. The poet loves the city’s courtesans as they are, which is to say, misunderstood by the ‘vulgaires profanes’ (OC, 354), who recall those holding Dorothée’s sister captive. So, if Dorothée is not white, neither are things black or white. She is clearly one with Sharpley-Whiting’s white French prostitutes, and her comparison of herself with the beautiful ladies of Paris is equally theirs.

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Such an argument inescapably verges on what Sharpley-Whiting defines as a ‘mediation of the white through the black’ (1999, 2). While we agree that Baudelaire was influenced by a number of black women (images in books, women he had known and women he had heard of), our argument remains that it is the opposition of black and white – within a single poem, a single body – that is exploited here above all else, and this precisely in order to articulate the critical differentiation of self from self. As has been seen, Dorothée’s sister is held captive (we assume by a white colonizer or someone profiting from that system), but so too are the marble statues, which, the poem states, are shut away in Europe’s museums. To return to Caws’s opposition of Baudelairean women, we can see that both the ‘dark muse’ and the ‘white marble goddess’ are evoked in this one poem, and they are accorded an equal status in line with the way in which poetic Ideals and base objects have equal value in the prose poems, at the meeting point of timelessness and the situated historical moment. This equivalence is also intertextual, following from that which saw a black woman follow on the heels, and stand as the equal, of a figure from Greek antiquity and a white swan. In the last lines of ‘Le Cygne’, these metaphors expand into a chain of grieving figures, including sailors marooned on a desert island (‘[aux] matelots oubliés dans une île, [aux] captifs, [aux] vaincus!’), culminating in the infinity of an all-capturing et cætera (‘[à] bien d’autres encor!’) (OC, 157). And by ‘all-capturing’, we mean both the way in which all figures to come have the potential to stand as metaphors for a lost Paris and the way in which to be captured (in poetry) is both to be marooned and to be home, to be excluded (from Paris) and included (in Paris).

We have seen how, in addition to the influence of ‘Le Cygne’, the echoes between ‘À une passante’ and ‘La Belle Dorothée’ reveal the latter to be walking in the footsteps of the former. Let us now see whether the vice-versa effect of Baudelairean poetics allows black figures to be seen in the steps of the most famous passer-by of them all.

Sharpley-Whiting’s analysis of French representations of Sara Baartman includes an arresting description of her arrival in Paris, as reported by the Journal des dames et des modes: ‘The doors of the salon open, and the Hottentot Venus could be seen entering. She is a “Callipygian Venus.” Candies are given to her to leap about and sing; she is told that she is the prettiest woman in all society’ (1999, 18–19, Sharpley-Whiting’s translation). The movements on display here echo those seen above: Baartman is made Venus in name and as such is ironically elevated to the status of a goddess; at the same time, Venus is brought down to ground, made to ‘leap about and sing’, very much playing the role of a motley fool. While the term ‘Hottentot Venus’ can be said to contain these dual, opposed movements, including its tense balancing in the European imaginary of a word conjuring blackness with another typically associated with whiteness, so too does ‘Callipygian Venus’. The cultural reference made in this case is to the famous statue of the Callipygian Venus held in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. That Venus is so-called because of the beauty of her buttocks (from the Greek kallipūgos, where kallos means ‘beauty’), and it is this statue that is given as the example of the word callipyge in the French dictionary (Le Petit Robert 1993, 289). There is a double-movement, or turning point, here too, however, as the word callipyge, according to the same dictionary, also means ‘having excessively large buttocks’, a meaning that is more properly conveyed, etymologically speaking, by the term stéatopyge, or ‘steatopygous’ (from the Greek steat, meaning ‘tallow’). And the example given for the latter word in the French dictionary is ‘La Vénus hottentote’ (Le Petit Robert 1993, 2143). It seems a fair assumption that Baartman’s importance in the French imaginary has led to this collapsing of these two quasi-opposed terms, to the point that callipyge is effectively, like Baudelaire’s prose poems, autoantonymic, the buttocks of the two Venuses being markedly different and yet interchangeable.

The words ‘callipygous’ and ‘steatopygous’ appear to have retained their difference from each other according to the definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary. Examples of the former include, however, a jocular reference to ‘callipygous matrons’, which seems to play on the generally opposed connotations of these two words.¹⁰ This undecidability, or potential for misinterpretation, of the word ‘callipygous’ brings us back to ‘À une passante’. Notably, its use, or rather the use of the variant, ‘callipygian’, by Clive Scott (2000, 97–98) in his translation of the poem has caused critical eyebrows to be raised. In her review of Scott’s Translating Baudelaire, Carol Clark takes issue with the double look in Scott’s version, which enables the poem to take a callipygous turn:

In Baudelaire’s poem, the eye contact is so fleeting because the characters walk towards each other, pass, then each is presumably too well-bred to turn round and stare after the other. In Scott’s, however, the woman is immobilized by the traffic, and the man is somehow able both to look into her eyes and to admire her bottom. (2001, 280)

This admiration is conveyed via the repeated use of ‘callipygian’, which occurs four times in the poem (because of its part in Scott’s rhyme scheme). Clark does her own etymological search: ‘“Callipygian” (“having beautiful buttocks”) is found in nineteenth-century texts, but the twentieth-century word is “callipygous”’ (2001, 281). For Clark, Scott is out-of-step historically. And yet, his insistence on this word and its associations with the nineteenth century speak to his own autobiography, to his own depth of reading. As he puts it,

translation is [also], I believe, part of the spiritual autobiography of a relation with the ST [source text]. Translation is not only an account of a text, but an account of a response to a text, of cohabitation with a text. We read translations not only to understand the ST better, but also to come to know another reader, and to come to know about the process of translation. (Scott 2000, 181–182)

The type of intertextuality evoked in Scott’s approach to translation suggests that Scott the reader is in touch with Baudelaire the reader, which explains the belatedness behind the use of callipygian as opposed to callipygous.¹¹ Our contention here is that Scott’s preference for this older term, which is also arguably closer in sound to the French callipyge, reveals that he is indeed translating Baudelaire’s ‘spiritual autobiography’ rather than one confined poem.¹²

In addition to opening up ‘À une passante’ by translating it as part of a broader account of Baudelaire’s poetry, Scott also emphasizes the duality of the woman passing by, making of her two opposed women: ‘Was she grieving grande dame or a whore on her beat’, the poem questions (2000, 98). Clark objects to this translation choice, noting that the passer-by may not be a widow, ‘[s]ince in ‘good’ families full mourning was worn for many relatives’, and that while she ‘need not be a newly-bereaved widow, but nor need she be a whore’ (2001, 280). While this question is intrinsically interesting – Chambers notes, for example, that ‘in mid-nineteenth century Paris streets, it was often hard to distinguish prostitutes on the job from respectable, fashionably dressed, women’ (2008, 46) – our focus here is on the duality itself: rather than question what kind of woman she is, we are concerned with the women that she potentially channels.

In order to reveal the women behind the woman passing by, it first seems necessary to explore how the poem lends itself structurally to historical influence. Such a question seems to work against the poststructuralist model of intertextuality that has guided our critique to this point, which draws heavily on Johnson’s work, and that also informs Scott’s translation practice. As he notes, intertextuality of this kind ‘destroys both the notion of causality and the linearity of time’, and, in so doing, ‘authorial control’ (2006, 196). And yet, a key aspect of the duality of ‘À une passante’ is its tense relationship to time: it is simultaneously out of time (outside temporality, history) and in time or of its time (grounded in a specific moment, the critical modernity of mid-nineteenth-century Paris). Much the same can be said of ‘Le Cygne’, which, as we have seen, moves from a geographically specific place in Paris at the beginning of the period of post-1848 urban renewal and explodes into an infinitely open future.¹³ In that case, of course, metaphors mix freely with, and become, the objects of urban experience, and those metaphors are of grief, of loss. Clearly then, ‘Le Cygne’ has a prehistory (the loss of Greek antiquity is the example that is actualized by the poet’s thoughts) as well as an afterlife, with both blending situatedness (named figures) and timelessness (myth). For its part, ‘À une passante’ has mourning as a metaphor, but its opening, which is in medias res, seems to deny access to prediegetic space (what is mourned). The key, if not to unlocking, then at least to imagining this space lies in what Chambers calls ‘the double open-endedness of the chiastic relation’ (2008, 49). Logically, if two figures cross, then there is a direction in which they are headed and one from which they have come. Thus, however, brief the encounter between the (stationary, voyeuristic) poet and the beautiful woman passing by (she passes by; their eyes meet; she keeps moving), if there is a chiasmus, there must be movement from as well as towards. This is certainly the case for the woman’s departure, for the poem’s penultimate line contains one of the most famous chiasmata of French verse: ‘Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais ou je vais’ (OC, 163).¹⁴ If the future is marked as uncertain, the past, for its part, is blocked out, screened by a blitz of white noise, from which the two figures are released into the immediacy of the present moment.¹⁵ And yet, prediegetic space is still evoked by the ‘double open-endedness of the chiastic relation’. Furthermore, it is a reflexive double open-endedness, for the opening line also displays a chiasmus, which frames the poem in double-movement: ‘La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait’ (OC, 162). In this way, ‘À une passante’ functions textually, and thus intertextually, as a junction in time, intending both backwards and forwards.

With its lightning-bolt volta that heralds the central pivots of the prose poems, most notably perhaps the terrible blow on the door that transitions from the first room of ‘La Chambre double’ into the second and same room (OC, 278), ‘À une passante’, first published in 1855 and later included in the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ section of the second (1861) version of Les Fleurs du mal, serves proleptically to usher in the prose poems. For example, the love that might have been, as understood by the woman passing by, will be forever set in stone as a love that can never be and that must forever pass unacknowledged. Seen in this light, the poem that best stops the frenetic onward motion of ‘À une passante’ is ‘Le Fou et la Vénus’, in which the infinite non-intersection of the couple’s future, as predicated on the parting chiasmus, is embodied in the freezing of the statuesque passer-by as a statue of Venus and the hamstringing of the poet as a lowly fool.¹⁶ This freezing in/of time is also accompanied by a silencing that clearly responds to the noisy entrance (into time) of the passer-by. The previously quoted ecstasy of things is markedly noiseless: ‘L’extase universelle des choses ne s’exprime par aucun bruit’ (OC, 280–281).¹⁷ This intertextual oxymoron harks back (in silent attention) to the verse poem’s deafening noise, pointing up the latter’s own status as oxymoron, that is, a noise so loud that it cannot be heard. In this way, the unknown future of the poet and the passer-by, and the chiasmata of their passing, is seen, and heard, again, their opposed lines of flight forever (re)captured in this prose-poetic mirror image of (mis-/non-)communication, in which the woman is both elevated and brought to earth (her flight stopped) as Venus.

The noise generated by the bottling of the ‘open-endedness of the chiastic relation’ inside the in-medias-res opening of ‘À une passante’ might usefully be read through the lens of an individual text(uality)’s emergence from the infinity of the Intertext.¹⁸ Certainly, this open-endedness shows the text intending backwards, or analeptically, almost despite its own structure (which is ostensibly quite different to that of ‘Le Cygne’, where the present is saturated with the past), to earlier texts and earlier Venuses. One chronologically anterior text that it appears to reference is Honoré de Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ (1830), precisely the short story used by Roland Barthes to formulate his understanding of the readerly and writerly texts, and subsequently by Johnson to found her analysis of critical difference.¹⁹ For Johnson, the segue between S/Z and Baudelaire’s ‘two invitations au voyage’ is castration; for our purposes, Balzac’s novella offers a model for the body parts of the woman passing by. As Johnson writes, ‘[Like the readerly text,] Sarrasine’s deluded image of La Zambinella is a glorification of perfect unity and wholeness’ (1980, 8).²⁰ Balzac’s sculptor sees in the prima donna the unification in one living body of the perfect body parts that he had previously sourced from any number of different (and markedly imperfect) models when creating his statues of Beauty. While the passer-by has a ‘jambe de statue’, for example, La Zambinella’s allures include ‘les rondeurs d’une jambe accomplie’ (in Barthes 1970, 243). And in addition to this and her other individual body parts, the narratee is asked to imagine all the marvels of Venus as rendered by the chisels of the great Greek artists. In ‘À une passante’, the statue of Venus that was brought to life in the form of La Zambinella in Balzac’s story is broken down once again into its constituent body parts (notably, legs and eyes). In this way, her grief is in part intertextual. Even her mourning garb, with its lifting and swinging of festoons and hems,²¹ recalls the beginning of Balzac’s narrative. The narrator is looking on at the rowdy festivities of partygoers from the retreat of a window, in which he is hidden beneath a curtain whose rich folds are described as ‘undulating’ (‘sous les plis onduleux d’un rideau de moire’ [in Barthes 1970, 227]). The streets beneath him are alive with beautiful women: ‘Là, fourmillaient, s’agitaient et papillonnaient les plus jolies femmes de Paris’ (in Barthes 1970, 227). The story of La Zambinella emerges, like Baudelaire’s passer-by, from the noise of a Parisian street,²² whose busy-ness is made up of the best examples of female beauty, as if her narrative is framed against the best that Paris has to offer, just as her body combines the fragments of Sarrasine’s models. And these women are all swinging their festoons and hems: ‘C’était de légers frémissements, des pas voluptueux qui faisaient rouler les dentelles, les blondes, la mousseline autour de leurs flancs délicats’ (in Barthes 1970, 227). Despite their undulation, the curtains from behind which the narrator looks out are contrasted with the orgiastic scenes below, as though he is himself in mourning: ‘ici, la nature froide, morne, en deuil; là, les hommes en joie’ (in Barthes 1970, 228). If we ignore the shift from the beautiful women to the mention of joyous men, which proleptically signals the twist to La Zambinella’s beauty, what are opposed here are the dual elements (mourning and swinging hems) of Baudelaire’s singular beauty.

If the woman passing by is a composite figure, textually, and passes through, or intertextually, as much as she passes by, it may well be too much of a stretch to consider her to be passing in the way that La Zambinella does.²³ Nonetheless, the lifting and swinging of her hems, rather like the aprons of Sharpley-Whiting’s streetwalkers, appear an invitation to the male gaze to discover what lies beneath the black skirts. If that secret is ostensibly kept in the poem, the reference to ‘le plaisir qui tue’ reminds us of the cutting edge of Baudelairean metaphor (OC, 162). And what if those black skirts are themselves barely disguised fetishes, sporting over the woman’s clothes a blackness also found beneath? Such passing as there is here therefore, rather than raising questions of the woman’s sexuality, is of the racial kind. Certainly, she is black metaphorically (in mourning and as harbinger of storms and night); we should argue, too, that she is black metonymically, contiguously linked as she is to all other Baudelairean women, whose traits mix elements of the ‘dark muse’ and the ‘white marble’ of statuary. In this way, it is at least possible to suggest that she may well be black in less metaphorical, less metonymic ways. In terms of its colour-coding, the poem is undecidable. In her eye is a ‘ciel livide’ (OC, 162), which McGowan translates as ‘black sky’ (Baudelaire 1998, 189). Livide is, however, a problematic word in French, almost an autoantonym: while it means ‘leaden’ (commonly of skies), it also means ‘pale’ or ‘white’ (usually in reference to skin from which the blood has drained). And of course, marble statues can be black as well as white. As Chambers writes, if Baudelaire was

fascinated by sculpture and the statuesque, it’s because a statue, endowing recognizable reality with ‘form’, makes it comparable to those religiously charged objects that, in modern times, mariners had brought back to Europe from West Africa, objects they called fetishes (2008, 43).

Chambers’s point about the African origins of the statues that Baudelaire had in mind, which combine reality with form, joins that made by Sharpley-Whiting, for whom ‘La Belle Dorothée’ can be traced, via a picture of an apron-clad ‘Femme de Caffre’ (1999, 66), to the real historical person of Sara Baartman. If ‘La Belle Dorothée’ can, as we have shown here, be read as an allegory of Paris, so, by the same token, or at least its flip side, ‘À une passante’ performs a fetishistic display of blackness, one that lends a cutting edge to the reference to ‘le plaisir qui tue’ and forces us to notice the position of this pleasure in the poem. It falls just before the volta, which itself slices the poem in two. The words that follow – ‘Un éclair … puis la nuit!’ (OC, 163) – are themselves divided by a small internal volta in the form of an ellipsis, which has the effect of opposing the brightness of lightning to the black of night. Of course, these cuts are first and foremost poetic devices, and pleasure and death, light and dark oppose each other as metaphors of modernity.²⁴ And yet, another Parisian scene can be discerned here.

*  *  *

This article has sought to highlight the complexity of the interactions between historical women and the women in Baudelaire’s poems. It has also noted how historical readings of Baudelaire’s poems can have the effect of occluding certain aspects of their textuality. The reverse, however, is also the case: close textual analysis can also reveal unexpected glimpses of historical figures. We wish to conclude here by suggesting that the lifting of black skirts in ‘À une passante’ echoes the posthumous dissection of Baartman’s body. Certainly, that body, with its famous apron, became a text, and entered the popular imaginary, during Baartman’s lifetime. It was further textualized in Cuvier's autopsy report. And decades later, in Baudelaire’s poems, it is again (absent-)present, inter- or para-textually. Importantly, this trace in Baudelaire’s poetry allows us to detect a certain poetic edge even in the text of Cuvier’s autopsy.

Let us consider the way that Baudelaire reveres Dorothée’s legs and feet and the surprisingly tender terms used by Cuvier when he examines Baartman’s body:

De temps en temps la brise de mer soulève par le coin sa jupe flottante et montre sa jambe luisante et superbe; et son pied, pareil aux pieds des déesses de marbre que l’Europe enferme dans ses musées, imprime fidèlement sa forme sur le sable fin. (OC, 311)

Ses épaules, son dos, le haut de sa poitrine avoient de la grâce. La saillie de son ventre n’étoit point excessive. Ses bras un peu grêles, étoient très bien faits, et sa main charmante. Son pied étoit aussi fort joli … (Cuvier 1817, 263)

In Cuvier’s report, such passages can be said to oppose the comparisons made to primates and craniometry, which Sharpley-Whiting notes. Certainly, there is a counter-movement here, of Baartman’s body towards an ideal of Beauty, and this echoes Dorothée’s comparison of herself to the beautiful ladies of Paris. Cuvier’s admiration of Baartman’s form next proceeds, via a lifting of flesh and then an incision, to reveal the hidden truth of her apron. While incisions abound in Baudelaire’s poems, this lifting of the apron is also present in both the passage above from ‘La Belle Dorothée’, in which the sea breeze lifts the corner of a floating skirt, and ‘À une passante’:

Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse

Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet; (OC, 162)

This parallel use of the verb soulever points to the bi-directionality, the mutual predication that Johnson notes at work between the prose poems and their verse counterparts (1980, 48); but it also, and again in line with Johnson’s argument, suggests an intertextual pairing based on a double instance of autodifferentiation: Dorothée and the passer-by reflect each other because both eschew self-coincidence. In the former case, Parisian realities lie beneath a walk on an African shoreline; in the latter, an historical interest in African otherness can be glimpsed in the (hyper-Parisian) shock of modernity. Interestingly, the luxury of ornamentation suggested by the adjective ‘fastueuse’ pertaining to the passer-by’s hand recalls Baartman’s own apparent love of jewellery. As Cuvier notes, ‘Les colliers, les ceintures de verroteries et autres atours sauvages lui plaisoient beaucoup’ (1817, 263). Here, the adjective ‘sauvages’ represents the counter-movement, from the metropolitan centre to the colonial fringe. This savagery is perhaps also double-edged, however, for the hand that lifts hems recalls another’s, which lifts Baartman’s apron, the one that was only revealed – to the scientific, male gaze – in death.

If therefore, as we have argued here, ‘La Belle Dorothée’ is not simply a story of a beautiful black woman’s suffering under colonial rule, the reverse is also possible. Amid its metaphors of modernity, ‘À une passante’ allows glimpses, as Scott’s version shows, of another Venus, decked out in her finery, passing through Paris, and under the knife, into a European museum, certainly, but also into legend.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alistair Rolls

Alistair Rolls is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His interests include twentieth-century author Boris Vian, crime fiction and intertextuality.

Marguerite Johnson

Marguerite Johnson is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. Her research expertise is predominantly in the area of ancient Mediterranean cultural studies, particularly in representations of gender, sexualities and the body. Together, Alistair and Marguerite are the editors of Remembering Paris in Text and Film (Intellect, 2021) and authors of “Georges Cuvier's Autopsy Report on Sara Baartman: A Translation and Commentary” (Terrae Incognitae, 2023).

Notes

1 We have chosen to use the word ‘autopsy’ here, even if what Cuvier conducted on Baartman’s body would now more properly be defined as a dissection. Prior to the nineteenth century the word did not typically pertain to the examination of corpses; instead, an autopsy described an act of seeing with one’s own eyes.

2 On the role of the central pivot in the prose poems, see Whidden (2022, 74).

3 This is also a function of French title case, but the paratextual effect remains the same.

4 For an excellent analysis along these lines, see also Covin (2000, 51–55).

5 As will be seen below, the move towards a metonymic representation of Paris begins in the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ section added to the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Those poems for the most part rely entirely on the section heading for their Parisianness. ‘Le Cygne’, however, with its explicit and metaphorical references to Paris, is not in this vein.

6 As Edward Ahearn writes, ‘in the lines on the black woman lost in Paris we glimpse the movement of an urban, industrial, and colonizing civilization, incapable of returning to the sources of happiness, destroying the being who seemed to hold out the promise of a healthier and more joyful life’ (1977, 220).

7 All references to Baudelaire’s poems are to the 1951 Pléiade edition of his complete works edited by Y.-G. Le Dantec. 1951. For ease of citation, the abbreviation OC is used throughout.

8 Our English terms here are drawn from McGowan’s translation in Baudelaire (1998, 189).

9 The word Baudelaire uses for prison is bagne, which connotes forced labour but also evokes transportation to prison colonies overseas.

10 https://www.oed.com/search/advanced/Quotations?textTermText0=callipygous&textTermOpt0=QuotText (accessed 1 August 2023).

11 Scott’s use of intertextuality, in line with the use made of it by other translation theorists, comes close to what elsewhere in literary studies might be considered paratextuality. For an excellent reading of Baudelaire’s poetry that interrogates the difference/similarity between the intertext and the paratext, see Chambers (2018).

12 Scott himself notes that his inspiration for the use of the word came ‘from, among other things, [a] passage in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow’. Personal correspondence (email, 8 September 2023). We are indebted to Scott for his generosity in discussing his translation practice with us and, further, for the invaluable comments that he made on an early draft of this article.

13 Ahearn makes much the same point about ‘Le Cygne’: ‘[T]he generalizing tendency does not reduce the importance of the text’s precise historical and cultural statement’ (1977, 219).

14 Chambers points out that this chiasmus is in fact a parallelism because ‘there’s no point of meeting’ (2008, 49).

15 Even in the absence of any markers more specific than the reference to ‘the city’, this noise situates the poem historically. As Chambers writes, the poem ‘can be read inter alia as an allegorical account of [Baudelaire’s] own personal wake-up, amid the tumult of history’, which is to say, the period ‘after 1848–51 and the installation of the new Napoleonic régime’ (2008, 45, 46).

16 In Walter Martin’s translation of ‘À une passante’, the poet is already described in these terms: ‘I shook like a fool, drinking from those eyes’ (Baudelaire 1997, 243).

17 Our thanks here go to Andrea Jonsson, who pointed out to us at the Australian Society for French Studies conference in Sydney (8 December 2023) that this expression of voicelessness is given extraordinary, and paradoxical, voice through the range of vowel sounds deployed. In the same vein, Whidden picks up the ‘piercing assonance of [i]’ (2022, 74) in ‘c’est ici une orgie silencieuse’ (see OC, 281), which, paradoxically, makes the silence visually audible.

18 We are thinking here of Chambers’s (2015) study of poetic noise and urban atmospherics.

19 Intertextual echoes of Balzac have been seen before in Baudelaire’s poetry. Prior to poststructuralist understandings of (inter)textuality, making connections of this kind could lead critics to being accused of labelling Baudelaire a plagiarist. In 1938, Régis Michaud (1938, 253n) levelled such a charge at Randolph Hughes.

20 Sarrasine is ‘deluded’ because La Zambinella is a castrato.

21 We are drawing here on McGowan’s translation of the line ‘Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet’: ‘Lifting and swinging her festoon and hem’ (Baudelaire 1998, 189).

22 Just as ‘À une passante’ is part of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ section of Les Fleurs du mal, ‘Sarrasine’ is one of the ‘Scènes de la vie parisienne’ of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine.

23 Rebecca Armstrong (2019) notes that castrati were commonplace, in male and female roles, in the Italian opera in the eighteenth century, and some passed as women on and off stage. The intertextual echoes between ‘À une passante’ and ‘Sarrasine’ suggest that such a gendered reading is not impossible.

24 Given the apocopic function of metonymy, which severs Paris at the head (in the paratext) but leaves it impressed upon the body (of the poems), this cutting edge is sharper still in the prose poems (with their vicious central pivots); indeed, as Johnson writes, ‘[t]hat castration is somehow constitutive of the prose poem is repeatedly suggested throughout the various texts of Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose, where metaphors of violent blows and cuts indeed proliferate’ (1980, 45).