Emile Deroy, Charles Baudelaire, 1844, oil on canvas, Musee de Versailles
Anyone living in a big city, consisently using mass transit, or simply walking down a busy street understands the feeling of seeing someone for a flash - a spectacular moment of connection - only to see it vanish forever in a few steps. It's a peculiar phenomena of city-life - these ephemeral love affairs, ending as quickly as they begin...a thousand tiny little deaths every day.
In Paris in the 1850s, Charles Baudelaire, gentleman stroller of the city streets par excellence, experienced the very same feeling. His poem, À une passante (To A Passer-By), is one of a series of poems called the Tableaux Parisiens, in the 1861 edition of his Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil):
To A Passer-By
Amid the deafening traffic of the town,
Tall, slender, in deep mourning, with majesty,
A woman passed, raising, with dignity
In her poised hand, the flounces of her gown;
Graceful, noble, with a statue's form.
And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills,
From her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm,
The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.
A flash...then night! O lovely fugitive,
I am suddenly reborn in your swift glance;
Shall I never see you till eternity?
Somewhere, far off! too late! never, perchance!
Neither knows where the other goes or lives;
We might have loved, and you knew this might be!
In a previous entry I was musing on the Victorian fascination with physiognomy and it's correlation with the onset of city life in the age of Industrialization -- and there clearly is a connection here. The crowd can be menacing, filled with criminals and deviants, but it also allows for a new kind of romance....the fleeting, spectral, modern kind.
