Fanfarlo, page 1
Copyright
FANFARLO
by Charles Baudelaire
First published in the Bulletin de la société des gens de lettres, January 1847, under the name Charles Defayis, his mother’s family name.
Text from Claude Pichois, ed. oc1 553-580; notes: 1413-29.
Translation © 2012 by Edward K. Kaplan
© 2012 Melville House Publishing
First Melville House Printing: July 2012
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-61219-110-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: a catalog record is available from the Library of Congress
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Fanfarlo
Illuminations
Fanfarlo
A Paradoxical Character
Samuel Cramer, who authored some of his Romantic follies as Manuela de Monteverde, – in the good old days of Romanticism, – is the contradictory product of a pallid German and a brown Chilean woman. Add to that double origin a French education and literary refinement, and you will be less surprised, – if not satisfied and edified, – by the weird complexities of that character. – Samuel has a noble and pure brow, eyes that glow like drops of coffee, a nose that tantalizes and taunts, impudent and sensual lips, a square and tyrannical chin, a pretentiously Raphaëlesque hairstyle. – He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.
Among those half-famous notables I have known in that horrifying Parisian existence, Samuel was, more than all the others, the man of failed works of beauty; – a fantastical and sickly creature, whose poetry shines forth much more in his person than in his works, and who, around one o’clock in the morning, between the dazzling of a coal fire and the clock’s tick-tock, always seemed to be the god of impotence, – a modern and hermaphrodite god, – so colossal an impotence, so enormous, reaching epic proportions!
How to make you aware, and make you understand quite clearly that murky nature, colored with lively flashes, – both idle and enterprising, – prolific in difficult plans and in ludicrous miscarriages; – the sort of mind in which paradox takes the shape of naïveté, and whose imagination was as vast as absolute solitude and absolute indolence? – One of Samuel’s most natural failings was to deem himself the equal of those he could admire; after an impassioned reading of a beautiful book, his unwitting conclusion was: now that is beautiful enough for me to have written! – and, in only the space of a dash, from there to think: therefore, I wrote it.
In today’s world, that sort of character is more widespread than we think; such beings teem on the streets, in public walkways, taverns, and all the refuges for strollers. They identify so well with the new pattern that they almost believe they invented it. – Here today they are painfully unraveling the mystical writings of Plotinus[1] or of Porphyrius[2]; tomorrow they will admire the fickle and French side of their character, expressed so well by Crébillon fils.[3] Yesterday they had casual conversations with Jérôme Cardin; now, here they are playing with Sterne or wallowing with Rabelais in all the gluttonies of hyperbole.[4] In fact they are so happy in each of their metamorphoses that they are not at all angry at those fine geniuses for being the first to win the esteem of posterity. – Naïve and respectable effrontery! Such was the unfortunate Samuel.
By birth a very respectable man and, something of a scoundrel in order to pass the time, – by temperament an actor – he staged unsurpassable tragedies, or, more exactly, tragicomedies, for himself and behind closed doors. It must be acknowledged that he felt touched and titillated by cheerfulness, and that our man practiced how to roar with laughter. When some memory would make a teardrop well up in the corner of his eye, he would go to the mirror and watch himself weep. If some woman, in a fit of childish and brutal jealousy, scratched him with a sewing needle or a pocket knife, Samuel boasted to himself that he had survived a dagger attack, and when he owed some poor wretches 20,000 francs, he shouted joyously: “What a sad and miserable destiny to be a genius plagued by a million debts!”
On the other hand, do not believe that he was unable to recognize genuine emotions, and that passion no more than brushed his epidermis. He would have sold his shirt for a man he hardly knew, and whom, just yesterday, he had established as his intimate friend after inspecting his brow and his hands. He brought to matters of mind and soul the idle contemplation of Germanic natures, – in matters of passion he brought his mother’s swift and fickle fervor, – and in practical life all the failings of French vanity. He would have fought a duel for an author or an artist who had been dead for two hundred years. Just as he had been fiercely devout, he was a passionate atheist. All at once he was every artist he had studied and every book he had read, and yet, despite that actor’s gift, he remained deeply original.
He was still the sweet, capricious, lazy, fearsome, learned, ignorant, slovenly, and well-dressed Samuel Cramer, the Romantic Manuela de Monteverde. He adored a male friend as he would a woman, loved a woman like a pal. He possessed the logic of finer feelings and knew all the intricacies of all sly tricks, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. – What’s astonishing about that? He was always in the process of conceiving it.
Madame de Cosmelly
One evening, Samuel had the idea to go out; the weather was pleasant and scented. – Following his natural taste for excess, he had equally violent and persistent habits of imprisonment and unruliness, and for a long time he had remained faithful to his abode. His mother’s laziness, the Creole indolence that flowed in his veins, prevented him from suffering from the mess of his room, his laundry, and his dirty and extremely snarled hair. So he combed his hair, washed, and in just a few minutes was able to take on the clothing and the composure of people for whom elegance is a daily thing; then he opened the window. – Hot, gilded daylight rushed into the dusty room. Samuel was astonished at how springtime had arrived so quickly in just a few days, and without giving any shouts of warning. Balmy air permeated with lovely aromas opened his nostrils, – some rising to his brain, filling it with reverie and desire, – some licentiously stirring his heart, stomach, and liver. – He resolutely snuffed out his two candles, one of which was still quivering on a volume of Swedenborg, and the other expiring on one of those shameful books beneficial only to minds possessed by an excessive taste for the truth.[5]
From the summit of his solitude, cluttered with paperwork, paved with books, and populated with his dreams, Samuel often noticed, as he walked on a path in the Luxembourg Gardens, a shape and a face he had loved yesteryear in the provinces, – at the age when you are in love for its own sake. – Her features, although matured and fattened by some years of practical life, had the deep and decent grace of a respectable woman; from time to time there still glowed in the depths of her eyes the moist reveries of a girl. She would walk back and forth, usually escorted by a rather elegant maid, and whose face and bearing suggested that she was a confidant or a lady’s companion instead of a domestic servant. She seemed to seek out forsaken places, and she would sit sadly with a widow’s bearing, sometimes holding in her distracted hand a book she didn’t read.
Samuel had known her in the vicinity of Lyons, young, quick-witted, playful, and thinner. By dint of watching her and thereby recognizing her, he had recovered one by one all the tiny memories associated with her in his imagination; he had recounted to himself, detail by detail, this whole young novel, which, since that time, had gotten lost in his life’s worries and in the labyrinth of his passions.
That particular evening, he greeted her, but more carefully and with more attention. As he passed in front of her, he heard this fragment of dialogue behind him:
– “Marietta, how do you like that young man?” [6]
But it was spoken with such a casual tone of voice, that the most mischievous observer would have found nothing in it to hold against the lady.
– “Well, Madame, I like him quite well. Does Madame know that he is Monsieur Samuel Cramer?”
And with a harsher tone of voice: “Marietta, how do you know that?”
* * *
That is why the next day Samuel took great care to bring her handkerchief and her book, which he found on a bench, and which she had not lost, since she was nearby, watching the sparrows fighting over crumbs, or appearing to contemplate the vegetation’s inner processes. As often happens between two beings whose conspiring destinies have elevated their souls to an equal harmony, – starting the conversation rather brusquely, – nevertheless he was weirdly lucky enough to find a person inclined to listen and to answer him.
“Madame, could I be fortunate enough to remain housed in a corner of your memory? Have I changed so much that you cannot recognize me as a childhood friend, with whom you condescended to play hide-and-seek and skip school?”
– “A woman,” – the lady answered with a half-smile, – “does not have the right to recognize people so easily; that is why I thank you, Monsieur, for first offering me the opportunity to bring me back to those lovely and cheerful memories. – And then. . . each year of life contains so many events and thoughts. . . and it really seems to me that many years ago. . . ?”
– “Years,” – replied Samuel, – “which for me have been sometimes quite slow, or quite ready to fly away, but all of them cruel in various ways!”
– “And poetry?. . .” said the lady with smiling eyes.
– “Always, Madame!” Samuel answered, laughing, – “But what are you reading there?”
– “A novel by Walter Scott.”[7]
– “Now that explains your frequent interruptions. – Oh! what a boring writer! – A dusty unearther of chronicles! – a tedious heap of bric-a-brac descriptions, – a pile of old things and cast-offs of all sorts: suits of armor, kitchen ware, furniture, Gothic inns and melodrama castles, where some mechanical mannequins walk around, clothed in jerkins and multicolored doublets; well-known types, which in ten years would no longer interest an eighteen-year-old plagiarist; impossible ladies of the castle and lovers perfectly irrelevant to today, – no truthfulness of the heart, no philosophy of feelings! How different from our good French novelists, where passion and analysis always prevail over the material description of objects! – Does it matter if the lady of the castle wears a ruff or petticoats, or crinolines by Oudinot, provided that she sobs or betrays appropriately?[8] Does the lover intrigue you more if he carries a dagger in his vest instead of calling cards, and does a despot dressed in black terrify you less poetically than a tyrant clad in buffalo leather and iron?”
Samuel, as can be seen, was entering the category of absorbing people, – unbearable and impassioned men, whose trade is to ruin conversations, and for whom any opportunity lends itself, even knowledge improvised next to a tree or on a street, – even if it is not that of a rag-picker, – to developing obstinately their ideas. – Among traveling salesmen, wandering industrialists, galvanizers of business partnerships, and absorbing poets the only difference is the one between an advertisement and a sermon; vices among the latter are completely unselfish.
Now the lady simply replied:
– “My dear Monsieur Cramer, I am merely the public, suffice it to say that my soul is innocent. So for me pleasure is the easiest thing in the world to find. – But let’s talk about you; – I would consider myself happy if you judge me worthy of reading some of your productions.”
– “But Madame, how is it that. . . ?” – replied the astonished poet’s huge vanity.
– “The manager of my lending library says that he doesn’t know you.”
And she smiled sweetly as if to dull the effect of this passing tease.
“Madame,” Samuel said sententiously, “in the nineteenth century the true public is women; your approval will make me greater than twenty academies.”
– “Well, Monsieur, I count on your promise.”
– “Marietta, be sure to take your parasol and scarf; someone might be losing patience at home. You know that Monsieur returns early.”
She gave him a graciously shortened good-bye, which contained nothing that would be considered compromising, and whose familiarity did not exclude dignity.
Samuel was not surprised to find a former love of his youth enslaved in conjugal obligations. In the universal history of feelings, it has proven its necessity. Her name was Madame de Cosmelly, and she lived on one of the most aristocratic streets of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.[9]
The next day he found her, with her head tilted in a gracious and almost affected manner toward the blossoms of a flowerbed, and he gave her his volume The Ospreys, a collection of sonnets, like those everyone has written and everyone has read, at the age when our judgment was so short and our hair so long.
Samuel was quite curious to know if his Ospreys had charmed the soul of this melancholy beauty, and if the shrieks of those ugly birds had given her a favorable impression; but a few days later, she told him with appalling candor and honesty:
“Monsieur, I am only a woman, and, consequently, my judgment does not count for much; but I find that the sorrows and love affairs of gentlemen authors hardly resemble the sorrows and love affairs of other men. You address amorous remarks, probably quite elegant and quite exquisitely well chosen, to ladies whom I respect enough to believe that sometimes they might be terrified. You celebrate the beauty of mothers in a style that might deprive you of their daughters’ approval. You inform the world that you are wild about the feet or hands of Madame So-and-So, who, let’s assume for the sake of her honor, spends less time reading you than knitting socks and mittens for the feet or hands of her children. By a most unusual contrast, and whose mysterious cause I still don’t know, you save your most mystical incense for weird creatures who read still less than the ladies, and you swoon platonically at lowlife Sultanas, who must, I think, at the sight of a poet’s fragile person, stare widely as cattle awakened amidst a conflagration. Moreover, I don’t know why you so cherish funereal subjects and anatomical descriptions. When we are young and like you, possessing a fine talent and all the conditions necessary for happiness, I think it much more natural to celebrate the good health and joys of a respectable man, than to practice cursing, and chatting with Ospreys.”
Here is what he answered:
– “Madame, pity me, or rather pity yourself, for I have many brothers of my kind; it is hatred of everyone and of ourselves that has led us toward these lies. It is from despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have so weirdly painted our faces. We have exerted so much effort trying to make our hearts more sophisticated, we have so misused the microscope in order to study hideous growths and shameful warts that cover them, and which we magnify at will, that it is impossible for us to speak the language of other people. They live in order to live, and we, alas! we live in order to learn. Therein lies the whole mystery. Age changes only our voice and obliterates only our hair and our teeth; we have altered nature’s tone, we have extirpated one by one the virgin modesties that grew like bristles deep down in our hearts as respectable men. We have psychologized like madmen, which increases their madness by striving to understand it. The passing years have weakened only our limbs, we have distorted our passions. A curse, three curses on crippled fathers who created us with rickets and made us feel unwelcome, we are predestined to engender only the stillborn!”
– “Once again your Ospreys!” she said; “Look, give me your arm and let’s admire these unfortunate flowers that springtime makes so happy!”
Instead of admiring the flowers, Samuel Cramer, inspired to oratorical eloquence, began to put into prose and declaim some bad stanzas in his earliest manner. The lady let him go on.
– “What a difference, and how little remains of the same man, except for memory! Yet memory is but a new kind of suffering. What fine weather in which morning never roused our exhausted or sluggish knees from the weariness of dreams, in which our bright eyes rejoiced with all nature, in which our soul does not rationalize but lives and takes pleasure; in which our sighs gently flow noiselessly and without pride! How many times, in the leisures of imagination, have I recovered one of those beautiful autumn evenings in which young souls progress like trees that grow several cubits when struck by lightning.
“It is then that I see, I feel, I understand; the moon awakens large butterflies; the hot wind opens the beautiful night-flowers; the water of large pools becomes still. – Let your mind hear the abrupt waltzes of that mysterious piano. The storm’s aromas enter the windows; it is the moment when gardens are filled with pink and white dresses not afraid of getting wet. Obliging bushes catch onto flowing skirts, brown hair and blond curls whirl around entangled. – Do you still remember, Madame, the huge haystacks, that we could knock down so quickly, and the old nursemaid who ran after you so slowly, and the bell, in the large dining room, so ready to call you back under your aunt’s watchful eye?”
Madame de Cosmelly interrupted Samuel with a sigh, wanting to say something, probably a request for him to stop, but he had already resumed his speech.
– “What is most grievous,” he said, “is that all loves always end badly, so much the worse if more divine and more winged at their beginning. There is no dream, whatever its ideal, that we recover without a gluttonous plump baby hanging on her breast; there is no refuge, no cottage so delightful and so hidden, that the pickaxe does not come to knock it down. Still, that destruction is entirely material; but there is another kind that is more ruthless and more secretive, that attacks invisible things. Imagine that the moment you entrust yourself to the being of your choice, and you tell him: let’s fly away together and seek heaven’s depths! – a relentless and serious voice at your ear tells you that our passions lie, and that myopia is what makes faces beautiful, and our ignorance beautifies souls, and that a day will come when the idol, to a more clear-sighted eye, remains nothing more than an object, not of hatred, but one of contempt and astonishment!”
