The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Charles Baudelaire · Petits poèmes en prose · fifty prose poems with a dedication to Arsène Houssaye · first collected after Baudelaire’s death by Charles Asselineau and Théodore de Banville in volume IV of the Oeuvres complètes, Michel Lévy frères, Paris, 1869 · scored on Baudelaire’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and Edward K. Kaplan’s translation, The Parisian Prowler (1989), for sense
Mode
Lyric without verse: fifty prose poems that move between the reverie and the urban parable, the anecdote, the joke, the moral fable and the fait divers, with the poet the target of his own irony
Mythos
The stranger who loves the clouds; the old saltimbanque at the edge of the fair; the poet who has lost his halo; the crowd as an element to bathe in; the widow; the jester killed by his prince; Satan as a courteous gambler
Phase
Pieces published in periodicals from 1855 to 1867, among them twenty in La Presse in 1862; left unfinished at Baudelaire’s death on 31 August 1867; collected by his editors in 1869
Presentation
A dedication to Arsène Houssaye, then fifty numbered pieces in prose, among them prose doublets of poems in Les Fleurs du mal; narrated mostly in the first person, by turns lyric, satirical, confessional and essayistic
Register
From the cadenced reverie and the incantation of a single imperative to the flat report of a suicide and the moralist’s timed reversal; dialogue, reported argument and the sudden essay beside the lyric
Scale
One consciousness in one city: the crowd and the poor, money and the gift, art and the artist’s condition, love and its cruelty, childhood, death, and the sacred as Satan, the infinite and the lost halo
Governing Proposition
The master of French verse sets verse aside and writes fifty short pieces of prose: a stranger who loves only the passing clouds, a glazier whose panes are smashed from a window, a poor family looking in at a café window, a counterfeit coin given in alms, a poet’s halo dropped in the mud of the boulevard. The wager of the book is that the modern city makes a new self, constituted by strangers, in which every relation, charity, love, art and friendship, is shot through with money and with a cruelty the self hides from itself; and that only a prose supple and jolting enough to follow the starts of a conscience can tell it, in a book that admits it can be cut anywhere.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine”
“Take out a vertebra, and the two pieces of this twisting fantasy will join again without trouble.” The dedication to Arsène Houssaye stands before the fifty numbered pieces and tells the reader how to hold them. The whole is “à la fois tête et queue”, “head and tail at once”, and may be cut where one likes. The book announces its own removability, and the announcement is part of what it means.
The dedication names its model, Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), and its difference: to apply to modern life, “ou plutôt à une vie moderne et plus abstraite”
“or rather to a modern and more abstract life”, the procedure Bertrand had applied to the picturesque past. It names the ideal of a prose “musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience”
“musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and jolting enough to fit the lyric movements of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the starts of conscience”. That ideal, it says, was born of “la fréquentation des villes énormes”, “the frequenting of enormous cities”. The long sentence that states it is an instance of it.
Most of the pieces appeared in periodicals between 1855 and 1867: twenty in La Presse in 1862, others in the Revue nationale et étrangère, Le Figaro and L’Artiste; editors refused or cut some of them. Baudelaire spoke of the book as unfinished, and he died on 31 August 1867 without seeing it. Two years later Charles Asselineau and Théodore de Banville collected it in volume IV of the Oeuvres complètes (Michel Lévy frères, 1869), under the title Petits poèmes en prose; Baudelaire had used that title and Le Spleen de Paris both. The work scored here is that book as it stands, the dedication and fifty pieces. The verse epilogue drafted for it is context, not part of it.
Movement II
The first piece, “L’Étranger”, is a single paragraph. Its stranger loves only this: “les nuages... les nuages qui passent... là-bas... là-bas... les merveilleux nuages!”
“the clouds... the clouds that pass... over there... over there... the marvellous clouds!” The figure who belongs to nothing and looks elsewhere opens the book, and it has outlived the book as a figure of the modern self.
The lyric pieces of spleen reach high and are broken. “Le Confiteor de l’artiste” begins in the grandeur of an autumn evening over the sea and ends in a cry of pain at the infinite: “il n’est pas de pointe plus acérée que celle de l’Infini”
“there is no point sharper than that of the Infinite.” “La Chambre double” builds a room of paradise, and a bailiff’s knock destroys it: Time returns. This is the book’s characteristic motion, elevation broken by a knock at the door, a joke or a pistol shot, and it is why its heights, though real, are not sustained.
Several pieces are prose doublets of poems in Les Fleurs du mal: “Un hémisphère dans une chevelure” of “La Chevelure”, “L’Invitation au voyage” of the poem of that name, “Le Crépuscule du soir” of the verse “Crépuscule du soir”, and, less exactly, “Les Projets” and “La Belle Dorothée” beside the exotic verse. They show the method: in verse the hair is a hymn, in prose a reverie that can be interrupted. Read beside the verse, though, the prose is the lesser text, and the book carries it. These are verse content in a prose container, and they belong to the verse book’s law more than to the city’s.
Movement III
“Multitude, solitude: termes égaux et convertibles pour le poète actif et fécond.”
“Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible terms for the active and fertile poet.” “Les Foules” is a sudden essay: the crowd is an element to be bathed in. It names a new mode of experience, the one the great city makes possible and the verse lyric of the time had no room to argue.
The crowd has its margins. “Les Veuves” turns to the widow; “Le Vieux Saltimbanque” finds, at the edge of a fair, a used-up performer, and the narrator recognises in him the writer who has outlived his generation. The poet as the old saltimbanque is one of the book’s figures of the artist’s condition. “Les Fenêtres” and “Le Port” turn the same watching gaze toward a still, cold transport.
Art and power meet in “Une mort héroïque”. Fancioulle, a jester, performs before his prince, and the performance is perfect; a whistle kills him. The piece holds the terror of that perfection, and the state appears in it as a prince who kills his jester. Elsewhere Satan appears as a courteous gambler (“Le Joueur généreux”), and allegories such as “Chacun sa chimère”, “Les Tentations” and “Les Dons des fées” stand nearer the emblem than the myth: the book builds its figures piece by piece, and no one structure governs them.
Movement IV
In “Les Yeux des pauvres” the narrator sits with the woman he loves at a café, and a poor family looks in at the window. She cannot bear their eyes, and his tenderness curdles into hatred. The piece ends on thought incommunicable “même entre gens qui s’aiment”
“even between people who love each other.” The scene is love, wealth and poverty at one table, and the book does not let any of them off.
The parables of money and cruelty are pressed hard, each turning on one act. In “Le Gâteau” two children fight a war over a crust in a landscape of sublime peace. In “La Fausse Monnaie” a man gives alms with a coin that proves, in the last lines, to be false: he has bought paradise cheaply, and the narrator’s verdict is that the unforgivable thing is to be wicked through stupidity. In “Le Mauvais Vitrier” the narrator smashes a glazier’s panes and shouts down from his window, flat and exultant: “La vie en beau! la vie en beau!”
“Life made beautiful! life made beautiful!”
The flatness is the instrument. “La Corde” tells of a boy who hangs himself and of the mother who comes afterwards for the rope, to sell it; the telling is terrible because it is controlled. “Mademoiselle Bistouri”, with a prostitute’s living at its centre, leaves open whether its regard is pity or contempt. The prose can hold the anecdote, the dialogue and the reported argument, and the second thought that undoes the first, and the book’s knowledge lies there, in the interruption.
Movement V
In “Perte d’auréole” the poet’s halo slips into the mud of the macadam, and he is glad of it: now he can walk incognito. The piece states the poet’s new condition in a joke, and the joke has carried a century of thought about modernity, from Benjamin’s essays on the crowd and the experience of shock to Berman’s reading of it as a primal scene of the boulevard.
“Enivrez-vous” is one imperative and its return: “Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là.”
“One must always be drunk. That is everything.” Wind, wave, star, bird and clock answer together, in a list perfectly cadenced. In “Assommons les pauvres!” the escape is by violence: the narrator beats a beggar until the beggar beats him back, and then shares his purse with him, and asks: “Qu’en dites-vous, citoyen Proudhon?”
“What do you say to that, citizen Proudhon?” Whether that is satire of Proudhon or agreement with something harder, the book does not say.
“Any where out of the world” is a dialogue of the poet with his soul that climbs to its final cry: “N’importe où! n’importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!”
“Anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of this world!” Flight here, violence on the street corner: one law, the escape from the world as it is, and each attempt ironised. From this book Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Max Jacob and the prose poem of the next century took a form a major poet could stake his work on.
Act III · The Twelve
The book invites the subtractive test and answers it itself. The dedication calls the whole “à la fois tête et queue”, “head and tail at once”, and says that a vertebra may be taken out and the two pieces of the twisting fantasy will join again without trouble. That is a poetics of non-necessity at the level of the whole, and an honest one: the order is not an argument. The best pieces are pressed hard. “Le Mauvais Vitrier”, “Le Gâteau”, “La Fausse Monnaie”, “Perte d’auréole” and “Assommons les pauvres!” each turn on one act and one sentence, with nothing idle. But the prose doublets are lesser versions of poems the reader already has, and “Les Dons des fées”, “Portraits de maîtresses” and “Le Galant Tireur” could go with little lost. The strongest third is irreducible; the whole, by its own avowal, is removable.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in the modern city the self is constituted by strangers, and every relation in it, charity, love, art, friendship, is shot through with the cash nexus and with a cruelty the self conceals from itself. In “Les Yeux des pauvres” tenderness curdles into hatred at a café window, and the piece ends on thought incommunicable “même entre gens qui s’aiment”, “even between people who love each other”. “La Fausse Monnaie” exposes the giver who buys paradise cheaply with a counterfeit coin; “Le Gâteau” finds war over a crust in a landscape of sublime peace; “Les Foules” names a new mode of experience. These are meanings, not moods. Held below the top because the spleen pieces are mood at a high pitch rather than further disclosure, and irony often turns the social truth into a question the book will not settle.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The book is built to deflate: its characteristic motion is elevation broken by a knock at the door, a joke or a pistol shot. The heights are real and several. “Le Confiteor de l’artiste” begins in the grandeur of an autumn evening over the sea and ends in the cry that “il n’est pas de pointe plus acérée que celle de l’Infini”, “there is no point sharper than that of the Infinite”. “La Chambre double” builds a room of paradise and destroys it with the bailiff’s knock and the return of Time. “Le Port” and “Les Fenêtres” reach a still, cold transport; “Any where out of the world” climbs through a dialogue with the soul to its final cry; “Une mort héroïque” holds the terror of a perfect performance and the whistle that kills the performer. Across fifty pieces the frequency is moderate, and the deliberate bathos lowers it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Built in part, evoked in more. The book makes three figures that have become myths of modernity: the stranger of the first piece, who loves only the clouds that pass; the poet as the old saltimbanque, the used-up performer at the edge of the fair, in whom the narrator recognises the writer who has outlived his generation; and the poet who has lost his halo. Beside them stand the crowd as an element to bathe in, the widow, the jester killed by his prince, and Satan as a courteous gambler in “Le Joueur généreux”. They carry weight inside their pieces. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth is distributed: no single archetypal structure governs the book, and allegories such as “Chacun sa chimère”, “Les Tentations” and “Les Dons des fées” stand nearer the emblem than the myth.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The swerve was not from nothing. Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842) came first, and the dedication names it; Guérin’s Le Centaure and the prose poetry of the Romantics stood behind it. The difference is the one the dedication states: to apply to modern life, “ou plutôt à une vie moderne et plus abstraite”, “or rather to a modern and more abstract life”, the procedure Bertrand had applied to the picturesque past. The turn is double: a lyric without verse, and a lyric given over to the newspaper anecdote, the joke, the moral fable and the fait divers, with the poet the target of his own irony. The stake was paid: the master of French verse set his craft aside, editors refused or cut the pieces, and the book did not appear in his life. Bertrand’s named precedent holds the figure where it is.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. In verse “La Chevelure” is a hymn; in prose “Un hémisphère dans une chevelure” is a reverie that can be interrupted, and the book’s knowledge lies in the interruption: the bailiff in “La Chambre double”, the second thoughts of “La Fausse Monnaie”, the narrator of “Le Mauvais Vitrier” shouting down from his window after the glazier’s panes are smashed, “La vie en beau! la vie en beau!”, “Life made beautiful! life made beautiful!”. Prose holds the anecdote, the dialogue, the reported argument and the sudden essay of “Les Foules” and “Les Veuves”, which the verse lyric of the time could not. The cut-anywhere whole is itself the form of the city’s discontinuous experience. Held below the top because the doublets put verse content in a prose container, and the whole, by its own avowal, is a series and not a form.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence first. A century and a half of return has been unusually productive for a short book: Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire, the crowd and the experience of shock, with “Perte d’auréole” at the centre; Marshall Berman on the same piece and on “Les Yeux des pauvres” as primal scenes of modernity on the boulevard (All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 1982); Barbara Johnson on the verse and prose doublets (Défigurations du langage poétique, 1979); Derrida’s long reading of “La Fausse Monnaie” in Donner le temps (1991). The questions stay open: whether “Assommons les pauvres!” satirises Proudhon or agrees with something harder; whether “Mademoiselle Bistouri” is pity or contempt; how far the irony reaches. Below the top because the lyric pieces yield less on return than the parables, and the yield gathers in perhaps fifteen pieces.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is French poetry of the nineteenth century and the European lyric after it. The force: the book made the prose poem a form a major poet could stake his work on, and fixed its two modes, the lyric reverie and the urban parable. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Une saison en enfer; Mallarmé’s prose poems, later gathered in Divagations; Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror in part; Huysmans, whose Des Esseintes prizes the form in À rebours; Max Jacob’s Le Cornet à dés (1917), whose preface argues with the line of Bertrand and Baudelaire; Reverdy, Ponge, Michaux and Char; in English, Wilde’s Poems in Prose and the American prose poem; and in thought, the flâneur and the crowd in Benjamin. Held just short of 9.0: much of the reach is shared with Les Fleurs du mal and with Bertrand, and the form it founded has stayed a minor genre beside verse and the novel.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Form, then presence. The text survives whole as the edition of 1869 set it, a span of a hundred and fifty-seven years, and longer for the pieces printed in periodicals from 1855. The order and the title are the editors’ decisions, taken from Baudelaire’s notes (he used both Le Spleen de Paris and Petits poèmes en prose), and some pieces may lack his final revision: a small charge on form. Presence is continuous: read, taught in French schools and universities, translated many times into English and into most European languages, and “Enivrez-vous” and “L’Étranger” are among the most quoted French prose of their century. That presence is wide, but below that of Les Fleurs du mal, and the book is read more in the academy than its verse sibling. The figure sits at the foot of its range.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the French. The command is of the prose period and of the turn. The dedication’s long sentence on poetic prose is itself an instance of what it describes. “Enivrez-vous” is built on one imperative and its return, “Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là.”, “One must always be drunk. That is everything.”, and its list of wind, wave, star, bird and clock answering together is perfectly cadenced. The anecdotes are timed like a moralist’s: the coin revealed false in the last lines, the halo in the mud, the beating returned. “La Corde”, with the boy who hangs himself and the mother who comes for the rope to sell it, is told with a terrible flatness that is entirely controlled. Charges: the doublets are weaker than their verse originals, some pieces are prolix or unrevised, “Portraits de maîtresses” and parts of “Les Vocations” among them, and the allegories are stiffer than the parables.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law: the double consciousness of the city dweller, who longs for the infinite and lives among things for sale, and whose every lyric impulse is answered by irony, money or cruelty. Take the two most distant pieces: “Any where out of the world”, a pure dialogue of the soul’s longing, and “Assommons les pauvres!”, a beating on a street corner. They obey the same law: an escape from the world as it is, attempted once by flight and once by violence, and each ironised. The voice, lyric, satirical, confessional and essayistic by turns, stays one voice, a narrator who watches and judges himself, and the range it covers is wide. Held where it is because the poetics of the removable vertebra admits a looseness, the doublets belong to the verse book’s law more than to the city’s, and the allegories sit apart in tone.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged as a book of short prose poems, it holds much and integrates it. Consciousness, fully and in many states. The city as a whole: boulevard, café, fair, public gardens, crowds, garret. The poor, at length and from many sides, in “Les Veuves”, “Le Joujou du pauvre”, “Les Yeux des pauvres” and “Assommons les pauvres!”. Labour and trade: the glazier, the saltimbanque, the prostitute’s living in “Mademoiselle Bistouri”. Money and the gift; art and the artist’s condition; love and its cruelty; childhood, in “Le Gâteau”, “Les Vocations” and “La Corde”; death and suicide; the sacred, as Satan, as the infinite, as the lost halo; the state, as a prince who kills his jester. One consciousness and one city hold these together. What holds the axis here, the lowest of the twelve: the family across time, history and the natural order are thin, and the form keeps each order to a page or two.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Imperishable at 9.0. A lyric made without verse and given over to the anecdote, the joke, the moral fable and the fait divers, paid for by a master of French verse who set his craft aside and did not see the book in his life; and a text that has survived whole since 1869 and is still read, taught, translated and quoted. Next to them, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by vantage and scale: the family across time, history and the natural order are thin, and the form keeps each order to a page or two, although consciousness, the city, the poor, money, art, love, childhood, death and the sacred are held. Next above it, The Inevitable at 7.9: by the dedication’s own avowal a vertebra can be taken out, the doublets are lesser versions of verse the reader has, and several pieces could go with little lost.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.8, The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short, its figures built piece by piece and not into a governing whole. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below The Inevitable at 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The aggregate, at 8.6, stands below the summit in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (Petits poèmes en prose) as the book was first collected after his death by Charles Asselineau and Théodore de Banville in volume IV of the Oeuvres complètes, Michel Lévy frères, Paris, 1869: the dedication to Arsène Houssaye and fifty numbered prose poems. It is scored as the book stands. Its posthumous assembly, with an order and a title settled by the editors from Baudelaire’s notes, is named and charged where it costs, on The Imperishable and The Inevitable. The verse epilogue drafted for the book is context and is not credited. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Baudelaire’s French. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath, and cited by piece; everything else is paraphrased. The pieces weighed most, the dedication, “L’Étranger”, “Le Confiteor de l’artiste”, “La Chambre double”, “Le Mauvais Vitrier”, “Les Foules”, “Les Veuves”, “Le Vieux Saltimbanque”, “Le Gâteau”, “Les Yeux des pauvres”, “Une mort héroïque”, “La Fausse Monnaie”, “La Corde”, “Enivrez-vous”, “Les Fenêtres”, “Le Port”, “Perte d’auréole”, “Mademoiselle Bistouri”, “Any where out of the world” and “Assommons les pauvres!”, are read closely; the rest less closely. Translation · Edward K. Kaplan’s The Parisian Prowler (1989) was used for sense, because it is the closest of the English versions, beside Louise Varèse’s Paris Spleen (New Directions, 1947) and Keith Waldrop’s (2009). None is quoted, and nothing in them is charged or credited to the book. Facts that could not be verified, among them whether the order of 1869 follows a table Baudelaire left, the number of pieces he planned for the book, any division of the pieces by date into a lyric and an anecdotal manner, and the dates of particular pieces, are not given.