208
PARTISAN REVIEW
they are confronted with other people's eyes. A poor family, dressed in
rags-a greybearded father, a young son, and a baby-come to a stop
directly in front of them, and gaze raptly at the bright new world that is
just inside. "The three faces were extraordinarily serious, and those six
eyes contemplated the new cafe fixedly with an equal admiration,
differing only according to age." No words are spoken, but the narrator
tries to read their eyes. The father's eyes seem to say, "How beautiful it
is! All the gold of the poor world must have found its way onto these
walls." The son's eyes seem to say, "How beautiful it is! But it is a
house where only people who are not like us can go." The baby's eyes
"were too fascinated to express anything but joy, stupid and pro–
found." Their fascination carries no hostile undertones; their vision of
the gulf between the two worlds is sorrowful, not militant, not
resentful but resigned. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, the
narrator begins to feel uneasy, "a little ashamed of our glasses and
decanters, too big for our thirst." He is "touched by this family of
eyes," and feels some sort of kinship with them. But when, a moment
later, "I turned my eyes to look into yours, dear love, to read
my
thoughts there" (Baudelaire's italics), she says: "Those people with
their great saucer eyes are unbearable! Can't you go tell the manager to
get them away from here?"
This is why he hates her today, he says. He adds that the incident
has made him sad as well as angry: he sees now "how hard it is for
people to understand each other, how incommunicable thought is" –
so the poem ends-"even between people in love. "
What makes this encounter distinctively modern? What marks it
off from a multitude of earlier Parisian scenes of love and class tension?
The difference lies in the urban space where our scene takes place:
"Toward evening you wanted to sit down in front of a new cafe that
formed the corner of a new boulevard, still piled with rubble but
already displaying its unfinished splendors." The difference, in one
word, is the
boulevard:
the . new Parisian boulevard was the most
spectacular urban innovation of the nineteenth century, and the
decisive breakthrough in the modernization of the traditional city.
In the late 1850s and through the I860s, while Baudelaire was
working on
Paris Spleen,
Georges-Eugene Haussmann, the Prefect of
Paris and its environs, armed with the imperial mandate of Napoleon
III, was blasting a vast network of boulevards through the heart of the
old medieval city. Napoleon and Haussmann envisioned the new roads
as arteries in an urban circulatory system-these images, commonplace
today, were revolutionary in the context of nineteenth-century urban
