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PARTISAN REVIEW
at least-are with the Right, the Party of Order: we have something,
they want it, so we'd better
"prier le maitre,"
call somebody with the
power to get rid of them. Thus the distance between the lovers is not
merely a gap in communication, but a radical opposition in ideology
and politics. Should the barricades go up on the boulevard-as in fact
they will in 1871, seven years after the poem's appearance, four years
after Baudelaire's death-the lover could well find them elves on
opposite sides.
That a loving couple should find itself split by politics is reason
enough to be sad. But there may be other reasons: maybe, when he
looked deeply into her eyes, he really did, as he hoped to do, "read
my
thoughts there." Maybe, even a he nobly affirms his kinship in the
universal family of eyes, he shares her nasty desire to deny the poor
relations, to put them out of sight and out of mind. Maybe he hates the
woman he loves because her eyes have shown him a part of himself that
he hates to face. Maybe the deepest split is not between the narrator and
his love, but within the man himself.
If
this is so, it shows us how the
contradictions that animate the modern city street resonate in the inner
life of the man on the street.
Baudelaire knows that the man's and the woman's responses,
liberal sentimentality and reactionary ruthlessness, are equally futile:
on one hand, there is no way to assimilate the poor into any family of
the comfortable; on the other hand, there is no form of repression that
can get rid of them for long-they'll always be back. Only the most
radical reconstruction of modern society could even begin to heal the
wounds-personal as much as social wounds-that the boulevards
bring to light. And yet, too often, the radical solution seems to be
dissolution: tear the boulevards down, turn off the bright lights, expel
and resettle the people, kill the sources of beauty and joy that the
modern city has brought into being. We can hope, as Baudelaire
sometimes hoped, for a future in which the joy and beauty, like the city
lights, will be shared by all. But our hope is bound to be suffused by the
self-ironic sadness that permeates Baudelaire's city air.
THE MIRE OF THE MACADAM
Our next archetypal modern scene is found in the prose poem
"Loss of a Halo"
(Paris Spleen
#46), written in 1865 but rejected by the
press and not published until after Baudelaire's death. Like "The Eyes
of the Poor," this poem is set on the boulevard; it presents a confronta-
