It is essential to their connection that, if she should put on the private garments of nudity, its non-sartorial regalia of jewellery and rouge, then he himself must retain the public nineteenth-century masculine impedimenta of frock coat (exquisitely cut); white shirt (pure silk, London tailored); oxblood cravat; and impeccable trousers. Theres more to Le Déjeuner sur lHerbe than meets the eye. (Manet, another friend of his.) Man does and is dressed to do so; his skin is his own business. He is artful, the creation of culture. Woman is; and is therefore, fully dressed in no clothes at all, her skin is common property, she is a being at one with nature in a fleshly simplicity that, he insists, is the most abominable of artifices.
Quand vers toi mes désirs partent en caravane,
The young man inhales the aroma of the coconut oil which she rubs into her hair to make it shine. His agonised romanticism transforms this homely odour of the Caribbean kitchen into the perfume of the air of those tropical islands he can sometimes persuade himself are the happy lands for which he longs. His lively imagination performs an alchemical alteration on the healthy tang of her sweat, freshly awakened by dancing. He thinks her sweat smells of cinnamon because she has spices in her pores. He thinks she is made of a different kind of flesh than his.
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Her granny spoke Creole, patois, knew no other language, spoke it badly and taught it badly to Jeanne, who did her best to convert it into good French when she came to Paris and started mixing with swells but made a hash of it, her heart wasnt in it, no wonder. It was as though her tongue had been cut out and another one sewn in that did not fit well. Therefore you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not understand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lovers poetry but, that it was a perpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed under it because his eloquence denied her language. It made her dumb, a dumbness all the more profound because it manifested itself in a harsh clatter of ungrammatical recriminations and demands which were not directed at her lover so much -- she was quite fond of him -- as at her own condition, great gawk of an ignorant black girl, good for nothing: correction, good for only one thing, even if the spirochetes were already burrowing away diligently at her spinal marrow while she bore up the superb weight of oblivion on her Amazonian head.
Her voyage was interrupted by no albatrosses. She never thought of the slavers route, unless it was to compare her grandmothers crossing with her own, comfortable one. You could say that Jeanne had found herself; she had come down to earth, and, with the aid of her ivory cane, she walked perfectly well upon it. The sea air did her good. She decided to give up rum, except for a single tot last thing at night, after the accounts were completed.
In a new dress of black tussore, her somewhat ravaged but carefully repaired face partially concealed by a flattering veil, she chugged away from Europe on a steamer bound for the Caribbean like a respectable widow and she was not yet fifty, after all. She might have been the Creole wife of a minowww.99ｌiｂ.netr civil servant setting off home after his death. Her brother went first, to look out the property they were going to buy.
Par ces deux grands yeux noirs, soupiraux de ton ame,
Once, before she became a kept woman, he and a group of Bohemians contrived to kidnap her from her customers at the cabaret, spirited her, at first protesting, then laughing, off with them, and they wandered along the streets in the small hours, looking for a place to take their prize for another drink and she urinated in the street, right there, didnt announce it; or go off into an alley to do it on her own, she did not even leave go of his arm but straddled the gutter, legs apart and pissed as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Oh, the unexpected Chinese bells of that liquid cascade!
Wind is the element of the albatross just as domesticity is that of the penguin. In the "Roaring Forties" and "Furious Fifties", where the high winds blow ceaselessly from west to east between the remotest tips of the inhabited continents and the blue nightmare of the uninhabitable ice, these great birds glide in delighted glee, south, far south, so far south it inverts the notional south of the poets parrot-forest and glittering beach; down here, down south, only the phlegmatic monochrome, flightless birds form the audience for the wonderful aerielistes who live in the heart of the storm -- like the bourgeoisie, Daddy, sitting good and quiet with their eggs on their feet watching artists such as we dare death upon the high trapeze.
He made a note in Man Coeur Mis à Nu: "Of the Peoples Hatred of Beauty. Examples: Jeanne and Mme Muller." (Who was Mme Muller?)
Lélixir de ta bouche où lamour se pavane;
Seeing her, now, in her declining years, every morning in decent black, leaning a little on her stick but stately as only one who has snatched herself from the lions mouth can be. She leaves the charming house, with its vine-covered veranda; "Good morning, Mme Duval!" sings out the obsequious gardener. How sweet it sounds. She is taking last nights takings to the bank. "Thank you so much, Mme Duval." As soon as she had got her first taste of it, she became a glutton for deference.
Au parfum mélangé de musc et de havane,
"Jeanne, get it up for me."
Dans lenfer de ton lit devenir Proserpine!
While they had been untangling together the history of transgression, the fire went out; also, the small, white, shining, winter moon in the top left-hand corner of the top left-hand pane of the few sheets of clear glass in the window had, accompanied by its satellite star, completed the final section of its slow arc over the black sky. While Jeanne stoically laboured over her lovers pleasure, as if he were her vineyard, she laying up treasure in heaven from her thankless toil, moon and star arrived together at the lower right-hand windowpane.
Nothing is simple for this fellow! He makes a performance worthy of the Comédie Fran?aise out of a fuck, bringing him off is a five-act drama with farcical interludes and other passages that could make you cry and, afterwards, cry he does, he is ashamed, he talks about his mother, but Jeanne cant remember her mother and her granny swapped九_九_藏_书_网 her with a ships mate for a couple of bottles, a bargain with which her granny said she was well satisfied because Jeanne was already getting into trouble and growing out of her clothes and ate so much.
The cat yawned and stretched. Jeanne woke from her trance. Folding another spill out of a dismantled sonnet to ignite a fresh cheroot, her bib of cut glass a-jingle and a-jangle, she turned to the poet to ask, in her inimitable half-raucous, half-caressing voice, voice of a crow reared on honey, with its dawdling accent of the Antilles, for a little money.
Nevertheless, Jeanne retained a negative inheritance; if you tried to get her to do anything she didnt want to, if you tried to erode that little steely nugget of her free will, which expressed itself as lethargy, you could see how she had worn away the patience of the missionaries and so come to inherit, not even self-pity, only the twenty-nine legally permitted strokes of the whip.
The lines on page 237 are translated from:
Je ne suis pas le Styx pour tembrasser neuf fois,
It is unlikely that Jeanne Duval belonged to this class if, in fact, she came from Martinique, which, since she seems to have been Francophone, remains a possibility.
Kids in the streets chucked stones at her, she so tall and witchy and when she was pissed, teetering along with the vulnerable, self-conscious dignity of the drunk which always invites mockery, and, always she held her bewildered head with its enormous, unravelling cape of hair as proudly as if she were carrying upon it an enormous pot full of all the waters of Lethe. Maybe he found her crying because the kids in the street were chucking stones at her, calling her a "black bitch" or worse and spattering the beautiful white flounces of her crinoline with handfuls of tossed mud they scooped from the gutters where they thought she belonged because she was a whore who had the nerve to sashay to the corner shop for cheroots or ordinaire or rum with her nose stuck up in the air as if she were the Empress of all the Africas.
The ship embarked for Martinique.
Although slavery had been abolished without debate throughout the French possessions by the National Assembly in 1794, it was reimposed in Martinique and Guadeloupe -- though not in Haiti -- by Napoleon. These slaves were not finally emancipated until 1848. However, African mistresses of French residents were often manumitted, together with their children, and intermarriage was by no means a rare occurrence. A middle-class Creole population grew up; to this class belong the Josephine who became Empress of the French on her marriage to the same Napoleon.
She was acquainted with the albatross. A scallop-shell carried her stark naked across the Atlantic; she clutched an enormous handful of dreadlocks to her pubic mound. Albatrosses hitched glides on the gales the wee black cherubs blew for her.
The greatest poet of alienation stumbled upon the perfect stranger; theirs was a match made in heaven. In his heart, he must have known this.
Birds of the World, Oliver L. Austin Jnr
(At which point, his Lazarus arose and knocked unbidden on the coffin-lid of the poets trousers.)
They are not great nest builders. A slight depression in the ground will do. Or, they mighwww.99lib.nett hollow out a little mound of mud. They will make only the most squalid concessions to the earth. He envisaged their bed, the albatrosss nest, as just such a fleeting kind of residence in which Destiny, the greatest madame of all, had closeted these two strange birds together. In this transitory exile, anything is possible.
Robbed of the bronze gateway of Benin; of the iron beasts of the Amazons of the court of the King of Dahomey; of the esoteric wisdom of the great university of Timbuktu; of the urbanity of glamorous desert cities before whose walls the horsemen wheel, welcoming the night on trumpets twice the length of their own bodies. The Abyssinia of black saints and holy lions was not even so much as a legend to her. Of those savannahs where men wrestle with leopards she knew not one jot. The splendid continent to which her skin allied her had been excised from her memory. She had been deprived of history, she was the pure child of the colony. The colony -- white, imperious -- had fathered her. Her mother went off with the sailors and her granny looked after her in one room with a rag-covered bed.
? démon sans pitié! verse-moi moins de flamme;
He himself always wore gloves of pale pink kid that fitted as tenderly close as the rubber gloves that gynaecologists will wear. Watching him play with her hair, she tranquilly recollected a red-haired friend in the cabaret who had served a brief apprenticeship in a brothel but retired from the profession after she discovered a significant proportion of her customers wanted nothing more of her than permission to ejaculate into her magnificent Titian mane. (How the girls giggled over that.) The red-haired girl thought that, on the whole, this messy business was less distasteful and more hygienic than regular intercourse but it meant she had to wash her hair so often that her crowning, indeed -- she was a squint-eyed little thing -- unique glory was stripped of its essential, natural oils. Seller and commodity in one, a whore is her own investment in the world and so she must take care of herself; the squinting red-head decided she dare not risk squandering her capital so recklessly but Jeanne never had this temperament of the tradesperson, she did not feel she was her own property and so she gave herself away to everybody except the poet, for whom she had too much respect to offer such an ambivalent gift for nothing.
Sorcière au flanc débène, enfant des noirs minuits,
Add to this the sale of a manuscript or two, the ones she hadnt used to light her cheroots with. Some books, especially the ones with the flowery dedications. Sale of cuff-links and drawerful upon drawerful of pink kid gloves, hardly used. Her brother knew where to get rid of them. Later, any memorabilia of the poet, even his clumsy drawings, would fetch a surprising sum. They left a portfolio with an enterprising agent.
She was surprised to find out how much she was worth.
Venus lies on the bed, waiting for a wind to rise: the sooty albatross hankers for the storm. Whirlwind!
The woman and her lover wait for the rising of the wind upon which they will leave the gloomy apartment. They believe they can ascend and soar upon it. This wind will be like that from a new planet.
Oeuvre de quelque obi九-九-藏-书-网
, le Faust de la savane,
You can buy teeth, you know; you can buy hair. They make the best wigs from the shorn locks of novices in convents.
The man who called himself her brother, perhaps they did have the same mother, why not? She hadnt the faintest idea what had happened to her mother and this hypothetical, high-yellow, demi-sibling popped up in the nick of time to take over her disordered finances with the skill of a born entrepreneur -- he might have been Mephistopheles, for all she cared. Her brother. Theyd salted away what the poet managed to smuggle to her, all the time he was dying, when his mother wasnt looking. Fifty francs for Jeanne, here; thirty francs for Jeanne, there. It all added up.
"Get it up for me," said the poet.
Pour briser ton courage et te mettre aux abois,
Je préfère au Constance, à lopium, au nuits,
But she was the deposed Empress, royalty in exile, for, of the entire and heterogeneous wealth of all those countries, had she not been dispossessed?
Hélas! et je ne puis, Mégère libertine,
Down there, far below, where the buttocks of the world slim down again, if you go far south enough you reach again the realm of perpetual cold that begins and ends our experience of this earth, those ranges of ice mountains where the bull-roaring winds bay and bellow and no people are, only the stately penguin in his frock coat not unlike yours, Daddy, the estimable but, unlike you, uxorious penguin who balances the precious egg on his feet while his dear wife goes out and has as good a time as the Antarctic may afford.
Bizarre déité, brune comme les nuits,
SED NON SATIATA
If Daddy were like a penguin, how much more happy we should be; there isnt room for two albatrosses in this house.
Tes yeux sont la citerne où boivent mes ennuis.
"Albatrosses are famous for the courtship antics they carry on throughout the breeding season. These involve grotesque, awkward dancing, accompanied by bowing, scraping, snapping of bills, and prolonged nasal groans."
Nobody seems to know in what year Jeanne Duval was born, although the year in which she met Charles Baudelaire (1842) is precisely logged and biographies of his other mistresses, Aglaé-Josephine Sabatier and Marie Daubrun, are well documented. Besides Duval, she also used the names Prosper and Lemer, as if her name was of no consequence. Where she came from is a problem; books suggest Mauritius, in the Indian ocean, or Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean, take your pick of two different sides of the world. (Her pays dorigine of less importance than it would have been had she been a wine.) Mauritius looks like a shot in the dark based on the fact the Baudelaire spent some time on that island during his abortive trip to India in 1841. Santo Domingo, Columbus Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic, a troubled history, borders upon Haiti. Here Toussaint LOuverture led a successful slave revolt against French plantation owners at the time of the French Revolution.
Nadar says he saw her a year or so after, deaf, dumb and paralysed, Baudelaire died. The poet, finally, so far estranged from himself that, in the last months before the disease triumphed over him, when he was shown his reflection in a mirror, he bowed politely, as to a stranger. He told hisｗww.9９lｉb•ｎeｔ mother to make sure that Jeanne was looked after but his mother didnt give her anything. Nadar says he saw Jeanne hobbling on crutches along the pavement to the dram-shop; her teeth were gone, she had a mammy-rag tied around her head but you could still see that her wonderful hair had fallen out. Her face would terrify the little children. He did not stop to speak to her.
Her granny said to Jeanne: "I was born in the ship where my mother died and was thrown into the sea. Sharks ate her. Another woman of some other nation who had just still-born suckled me. I dont know anything about my father nor where I was conceived nor on what coast nor in what circumstances. My foster-mother soon died of fever in the plantation. I was weaned, I grew up."
The Albatross can fly around the world in eight days, if only it sticks to the stormy places. The sailors call the huge bird ugly names, goonies, mollyhawks, because of their foolish clumsiness on the ground but wind, wind is their element; they have absolute mastery of it.
The other poems in Les Fleurs du Mal believed to have been written about Jeanne Duval, are often called the Black Venus Cycle, and include "Les Bijoux", "La Chevelure", "Le Serpent qui danse, "Parfum Exotique", "Le Chat", "Je tadore à legal de la vo?te nocturne", etc.
Jeanne hitched up her skirts with her free hand as she stepped across the pool shed made, so that he saw where she had splashed her white stockings at the ankle. It seemed to his terrified, exacerbated sensibilities that the liquid was a kind of bodily acid that burned away the knitted cotton, dissolved her petticoat, her stays, her chemise, the dress she wore, her jacket, so that now she walked beside him like an ambulant fetish, savage, obscene, terrifying.
If you could see her, if it were not so dark, she would look like the victim of a robbery; her bereft eyes are like abysses but she will hold him to her bosom and comfort him for betraying to her in his self-disgust those trace elements of common humanity he has left inside her body, for which he blames her bitterly, for which he will glorify her, awarding her the eternity promised by the poet.
The moon and star vanish.
The goddess of his heart, the ideal of the poet, lay resplendently on the bed in a room morosely papered red and black; he liked to have her make a spectacle of herself, to provide a sumptuous feast for his bright eyes that were always bigger than his belly.
Indeed, the Faust who summoned her from the abyss of which her eyes retain the devastating memory must have exchanged her presence for his soul; black Helens lips suck the marrow from the poets spirit, although she wishes to do no such thing. Apart from her meals and a few drinks, she is without many conscious desires. If she were a Buddhist, she would be halfway on the road to sainthood because she wants so little, but, alas, she is still pricked by needs.
Until at last, in extreme old age, she succumbs to the ache in her bones and a cortège of grieving girls takes her to the churchyard, she will continue to dispense, to the most privileged of the colonial administration, at a not excessive price, the veritable, the authentic, the true Baudelairean syphilis.