Beneath the portrait of the mulatta, the dandy has written the Latin words: Quaerens quem devoret. Is this a dictum, an insignia? Long ago, horsemen used to enter the tourney with their faces covered, identifiable only by the colours of their garments and shield and the curt, laconic enchantment of a motto. We read, for example, in Curial and Guelfa: Lover without beloved – Desire before piety – A wayward heart knows no home, and we imagine those knights, darkly clothed with black shields, entering the fray under a bright day’s sky, with a flash of metal, of horseshoes and lances that wounds the eyes of the ladies seated on the risers.
But now, there is nothing in the world that can wound these eyes: they are eyes with the ‘heavy brilliance of somber ponds and the unguent calm of tropical seas’. The woman is ‘black and luminous’, bright like a beacon, with the yellowish, pallid glimmer of gas lamps in the febrile, ailing Parisian night. Yes: the mulatta, ambling in the world of evening, is a tigress, a vampire, or an Amazon, or even more, the blue aloofness of the lunar glow, which has, in the dark corners of the immense, putrescent city, a very soft scuffing of silk about it, slight and ravenous: Quaerens quem devoret. The words are old, from the First Epistle of Saint Peter: ‘Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour’. Here, in the ‘the hidden stairway of the bedchamber’, the relationship between Jeanne Duval and Charles-Pierre Baudelaire is like the relationship of the lion to his prey. The sullen beauty devours the dandy in the stifling velvets of the dressing room, where the rarefied air sticks in the throat, amid perfumed, acrid shadows, muffling all thought of a hoarse cry.
We know what Baudelaire looked like: a man with pink gloves, long, dyed hair tucked in a ringlet behind his ear, ankle boots so shiny he could use them as a mirror – and he does so, he likes to look at himself in them, at his frail, fearless figure: a spectral apparition, a frozen figment, like a face in a cameo. He has been spotted walking up the embankment of the Namur Gate: on tiptoe, zigzagging to avoid stepping in the filth, or hopping in the rain, intangible in his white shirt, or dressed, like an actor, in a baggy houppelande. He lived in permanent familiarity with elegance, at a place and time where doing so became both an ascetic discipline and a controlled and almost stoic sort of obscenity. More than perverse, the dandy is a moralist: he makes of elegance a school, a life project, rigorous, based in a certain way on the transmutation of lived matter, on a meticulous and systematic exaltation that might seem gratuitous, did it not sustain a form of ethical passion. A form of religion, in a manner of speaking, devoid of religious faith, but potent and functional nonetheless. ‘Even if it were proven’, the dandy writes, ‘that God didn’t exist, religion would still be saintly and divine.’ Is this a provocation? No more so than his association of the mulatta Jeanne Duval – his obsession, the guiding specter or erotic fetish at his life’s center – with the lion from the distant sacred epistle. There is a deep moral truth at the heart of the dandy’s construct of elegance and eccentricity: the intuition, lucidly expressed, of an analogy between inner experience and eroticism conceived as part of a life framed deliberately, unswervingly in terms of moral evaluation.
We know where the dandy was born: on the corner of Rue Hautefeuille and Boulevard Saint-Germain. The house was demolished in one of those feverish fits of urban renewal Paris is prone to. Now, the Rue Hautefill boasts four small cinemas, all in the same complex. Toward evening, when the sky is still bright – of a soft blue, textured and luminous, or else of a wet pearl grey – next to a bookstore devoted to the esoteric and occult, there are four lines of people, not very long, awaiting the start of the show. Each line leads to a different cinema, but the boundaries between them are blurred, uncertain at times: you have to trace out a modest itinerary, sketch out precisely, on a map in the mind, the topography of the place. At the end of a hallway, or at the top of the stairs, you are surprised by the sudden appearance of the screen, unexpected, exultantly bright in the darkness. No: even now, Baudelaire is not so far away, because what we see here is ‘the clear fire that fills the lucid spaces’. And are these pallid silvery shadows on the virgin celluloid not, perhaps, ‘living pillars, uttering at times words confused’? Do we not see here a ‘forest of symbols’?
When we step out on the street, it is already rather cold: maybe it has rained a bit, a fine rain like a shiver coating the streets and the terraces of the cafes. A river of faces passes on the boulevard. When Baudelaire had already been dead for three years, Nadar, the photographer – the man who, on an afternoon at the theater, had introduced the young Baudelaire to the mulatta actress a quarter-century before – sees a singular figure on the boulevards: Jeanne Duval, old, walking on crutches and talking alone. No one saw her again. We may suppose that Nadar, the photographer, turned his head and followed her with his eyes. Laid low, but never vanquished, the dark goddess prowled like the lion Baudelaire had glimpsed. Look: already she is far away. The maws of Paris have devoured yet another shadow.
9 March 1980