the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek art fallen into deliquescence. (F 124–25; E 19–20; trans. modified)
Gautier borrows from and radically transforms the prevailing nineteenth-century definition of decadent style. Like Nisard and other neoclassical critics, who saw in decadent style the evidence of social and political breakdown, Gautier associates Baudelaire’s love of decadence with the end of empire. Yet the poet is a witness to decadence, not a victim of it—a researcher or explorer, who pushes back the boundaries of language and draws deliberately from the other arts and sciences to describe his political moment. Gautier plays on the language and imagery of extremes. From the Latin exter, meaning outward, foreign, or strange, the word names both spatial (as in the French extrême Orient, Far East) and conceptual limits. Decadence is an index of extreme maturity, extremes of language, of imperial dominion in extremis. But the word also describes Baudelaire’s stance as an outsider, an observer, and a translator.13 He is closer in spirit to the barbarians and Christians who take down the Roman Empire than to its doomed citizens. Gautier notes that Baudelaire’s favorite Latin writers are not high imperial figures like Horace and Virgil but social and territorial outsiders, whose language “has the black radiance of ebony”: the African Apuleius; the satirist Juvenal; and the provincial Christians Augustine and Tertullian, both also Africans (F 125; E 21). Rather than succumbing to decadence, Baudelaire is an outsider stoically anatomizing the fall of the empire.
Gautier was by no means a political radical—quite the contrary, in fact, by 1868. Although he became famous for his flamboyant advocacy of l’art pour l’art in the 1830s and the sexual daring of novels such as Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), he disdained the revolutionary acts of 1848 and made himself comfortable in the Second Empire. Much to the chagrin of younger writers who admired his works, he was employed by the regime’s official newspaper, Le Moniteur universel, and later served as the librarian for Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Louis Napoleon. He remained critical of the bourgeois Philistinism that marked the Second Empire, but he never seriously challenged the legitimacy of the regime, and there is little reason to believe that he sympathized with or genuinely comprehended either Baudelaire’s early radicalism or his later turn to the work of Maistre. Indeed, the invocation of 1848 in the “Notice” arguably depoliticizes Baudelaire’s work by reducing revolution to a signifier for generalized social disorder. And yet Gautier’s use of the funeral oration deliberately connects Baudelaire and the revolutions with the idealized political model of Periclean Athens, an example radically at odds in its valorization of active citizenship with the purely formal manner of political participation afforded the populace during the Second Empire. Baudelaire here is at once an artistic and a political model, the epitome of the decadent poet and an avatar of republican virtue in the midst of what Gautier clearly perceived was a declining empire. Gautier’s dating of his first meeting with Baudelaire has yet another resonance: 1849 was the year Poe died. Baudelaire inherits the role he apportions to Poe: critic of and eventual sacrifice to a decadent mass modernity and the tottering empire that fosters it.
Seen in this light, Gautier’s account of Baudelaire’s critical detachment takes on a significant political edge. With his hair resembling a “Saracen helmet” and a willingness to sacrifice himself for his art, Baudelaire models an aesthetic politics of internal exile. He depicts France itself as if through foreign eyes, conceiving “a land unexplored, a sort of rough and wild Kamschatka” (F 123; E 17) from within the heart of his native country.14 In a seemingly casual allusion with wide-ranging significance for his argument, Gautier connects Baudelaire with the legendary seventeenth-century Italian alchemist and court poisoner for the Borgias, Exili, who wore a “glass mask [masque de verre]” when preparing his “powder of succession” (F 135; E 40). The allusion compares Baudelaire’s contemporary readers to Exili, mocking them for their fear that the poems are somehow “poisonous” and need to be held at a distance. Earlier in the essay, Gautier had compared these poems to poison and disease, but he refers to the palette Baudelaire draws upon to describe his world, not to the nature of the poems themselves: “the roses of consumption, the pallor of chlorosis, the hateful bilious yellows, the leaden grey of pestilential fogs, the poisoned and metallic greens smelling of sulphide of arsenic, the blackness of smoke diluted by the rain on plaster walls” (F 133; E 36). These are the colors produced by the industrialized modernity Baudelaire’s poems document; the poet is only being true to his time in painting with them. Yet playing on the homophony of verre (glass) and vers (verse), Gautier suggests that Baudelaire and Exili do have something important in common. As if donning a protective glass mask, Baudelaire writes about the poisonous remainders of modernity; the homophony of Exili’s name with the act of exile (in French, exil) defines his chosen response.15
For Gautier, Baudelaire epitomizes this detached but critical relationship to his decadent age. He stresses the poet’s “British” reserve and formalized, almost aristocratic manners, and observes the same kind of detachment in the poetry and critical writings (F 120; E 13). The formal perfection of Baudelaire’s verse is a kind of “armour” distancing the poet from what he describes (F 133; E 35). He approaches evil like a “magnetised bird”: drawn into the “unclean mouth of the serpent,” he always escapes at the last moment to “bluer and more spiritual regions” (F 127; E 24). Many of the relatively few poems Gautier chooses to discuss in the “Notice” describe or epitomize the poet’s stoic detachment. He groups two poems—“Élévation [Elevation]” and “Le Soleil [The Sun]”—which are widely separated in the 1868 edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but which both imagine the poet soaring above the everyday world. Gautier praises the dandaical hero of “Don Juan aux Enfers [Don Juan in Hell]” for his refusal of emotion. The most significant poem Gautier discusses in this regard is “Bénédiction,” the opening poem of Les Fleurs du mal proper. In line with Gautier’s larger argument in the “Notice,” “Bénédiction” casts the poet’s life as a form of martyrdom. Scorned by his mother and his family, tormented by his lover, and overseen by a guardian angel who can only weep ineffectually over his charge’s sad “pilgrimage” on earth, the young poet dreams that literary glory will sanctify his suffering. In his commentary on the poem, Gautier describes the lover who tortures the poet as a Delilah, “happy in delivering him up to the Philistines” (F 134; E 36). This detail is nowhere in Baudelaire’s poem. Gautier’s elaboration makes plain his interpretation of Baudelaire’s life: suffering for Truth and Beauty, the poet sacrifices himself on the altar of a Philistine readership that cares only about money and outward propriety, not the Ideal. Baudelaire’s torment is part of a larger cultural conflict between artists and their bourgeois public, his critical detachment from modernity a mode of resistance as well as a defense.
Gautier opens the “Notice” with an extended recollection, incorrectly dated, as I noted above, of his first meeting with Baudelaire among the small circle of artists, poets, and models who congregated in and around Gautier’s rooms at the Hôtel Pimodan in Paris. The “strange apartment” Gautier occupies “communicated” with that of Ferdinand Boissard by a private hidden staircase not to be seen from outside. This image of a social group circulating and “communicating” outside the view of the public aptly figures the counter-cultural sociality and practice of internal exile that defines Baudelaire’s contribution to modern poetry. When Gautier first met him, he recognized that Baudelaire was destined for leadership. Acknowledged by artists and writers, he remains, at this time, a mystery to the larger public: “Charles Baudelaire was then an almost unknown genius, preparing himself in the shadow for the light to come … his name was already becoming known amongst poets and artists, who heard it with a quivering of expectation, the younger generation, coming after the great generation of 1830, seemed to be looking to him a great deal. In the mysterious upper chamber where the reputations of the future are sketched out [s’ébauchent] he passed as the strongest” (F 113; E 2; trans. modified). Baudelaire’s talent marks him as not merely a great poet but also as a kind of secular messiah-in-waiting, the harbinger of a new post-Romantic generation. Gautier’s images blend the typological with the aesthetic. Baudelaire’s future is “sketched out” like a drawing; shadow and light are figures for fame as well as the medium of painting.16 Gautier notes that the artist’s model Maryx (Joséphine
