In 1861 Poulet-Malassis showed Baudelaire the manuscript of _Les
Martyrs ridicules_ of Léon Cladel, who was so excited as he read it, so
intrigued by his antithetical constructions and by the mere singularity
of the title, and so amazed by this writer's audacity, that he made his
acquaintance, went over his proofs, and helped to teach him the craft
of letters. So, in his sombre and tragic and passionate and feverish
novels, we see the inevitable growth out of the hard soil of Quercy,
and out of the fertilizing contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of this
whole literature, so filled with excitement, so nervous, so voluminous
and vehement, in whose pages speech is always out of breath. And one
finds splendid variations in his stories of peasants and wrestlers and
thieves and prostitutes: something at once epic and morbid.
Baudelaire, in his preface, points out the solemn sadness and the
grim irony with which Cladel relates deplorably comic facts; the
fury with which he insists on painting his strange characters; the
fantastic fashion in which he handles sin with the intense curiosity
of a casuist, analysing evil and its inevitable consequences. He notes
"la puissance sinistrement caricatural de Cladel." But it is in these
two sentences that he sums up, supremely, the beginning and the end of
realistic and imaginative art. "The Poet, under his mask, still lets
himself be seen. But the supremacy of art had consisted in remaining
glacial and hermetically sealed, and in leaving to the reader all the
merit of indignation. (_Le poète, sous son masque, se laisse encore
voir. Le supreme de l'art eût consisté à rester glacial et fermé, et à
laisser au lecteur tout le mérite de l'indignation._)"
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Certain of these pages are ironical and sinister and cynical; as, for
instance, in this sentence: "Quant aux insectes amoureux, je ne crois
pas que les figures de rhétorique dont ils se servent pour gémir leurs
passions soient mesquines; toutes les mansardes entendant tous les
soirs des tirades tragiques dont la Comédie Française ne pourra jamais
bénéficier." And it is in regard to this that I give certain details of
an anecdote related by Cladel of Baudelaire, which refers to the fatal
year when he left Paris for Brussels.
Both often went to the Café de la Belle-Poule; and, one night, when
Cladel was waiting for Baudelaire, a very beautiful woman seated
opposite him asked him to present her to Baudelaire. He laughed and
they waited, and Baudelaire was presented, who, after giving them the
usual drinks, at the end of an hour went away. This went on for a
whole month; when Baudelaire, after her incessant assiduities to him,
brought her home with him, Cladel also. They talk. The woman becomes
lascivious. Baudelaire answers that he has a passion for beautiful
forms and does not wish to expose himself to a deception. She undresses
slowly. She is magnificent, and her tresses are so long that, with
leaning over a little, she could put her naked feet on the ends of
them. She assumes, being probably aware of it, the exact pose of
Mademoiselle de Maupin when she stands naked before d'Albert. Cladel
goes out. He has not quite closed the door when he hears Baudelaire,
prematurely old and worn out, say: "Rhabille-toi." Still vital, he
has no more the abstract heat of rapture of the passionate lover in
Gautier's famous self-confessions; for, in that wonderful book, there
is nothing besides a delicately depraved imagination and an extreme
ecstasy over the flesh and the senses. And he also realized, as
Baudelaire did not always, that the beauty of life was what he wanted,
and not the body, that frail and perishable thing, that has to be
pitied, that so many desire to perpetuate.
Yet never in Baudelaire, as in Gautier, did the five senses become
articulate, as if they were made specially for him; for he speaks
for them with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are--never
Baudelaire's--in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have
no recollection. Yet neither were absolutely content with the beauty of
a woman's body: for the body must finally dwindle and expand to some
ignoble physical condition, and on certain women's necks wrinkles will
crawl, and the fire in one's blood sometimes loses some of its heat;
only, one wants to perpetuate the beauty of life itself, imperishable
at least in its recurrence.
In his preface Baudelaire compares Murger with Musset, both Bohemian
classics, only one spoke of Bohemia with a bitter bantering, and the
poet, when he was not in his noble moods, had crises of fatuity. "All
this evil society, with its vile habits, its adventurous morals, was
painted by the vivid pencil-strokes of Murger; only he jested in his
relations of miserable things." Yes, Murger is a veracious historian;
believe him, if you do not know or have forgotten, that such are the
annals of Bohemia. There, people laugh just so lightly and sincerely,
weep and laugh just as freely, are really hungry, really have their
ambitions, and at times die of all these maladies. It is the gayest and
most melancholy country in the world. To have lived there too long, is
to find all the rest of the world in exile. But if you have been there
or not, read Murger's pages; there, perhaps, you will see more of the
country than anything less than a lifetime spent in it will show you.