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unmasking that is going on. Baudelaire's denouement, in which the
hero's halo slips off his head and rolls through the mud-rather than
being torn off with a violent
grand geste,
as it was for Marx (and Burke
and Shakespeare)-evokes vaudeville, slapstick, the metaphysical prat–
falls of Chaplin and Keaton. It points forward to a century whose
heroes will come dressed as antiheroes, and whose most solemn
moments of truth will be not only described but actually experienced as
clown shows, music-hall or nightclub routines,
shticks.
The setting
plays the same sort of decisive role in Baudelaire's black comedy that it
will play in Chaplin's and Keaton's later on.
"Loss of a Halo" is set on the same new boulevard as "Eyes of the
Poor. " But although the two poems are separated physically by only a
few feet, spiritually they spring from different worlds. The gulf that
separates them is the step from the sidewalk into the gutter. On the
sidewalk, people of all kinds and all classes know themselves by
comparing themselves to each other as they sit or walk. In the gutter,
people are forced to forget what they are as they run for their lives. The
new force that the boulevards have brought into being, the force that
sweeps the hero's halo away and drives him into a new state of mind, is
modern
traffic.
When Haussmann's work on the boulevards began, virtually no
one understood why h e wanted them so wide: from a hundred feet to a
hundred yards across. It was only when the job was done that people
began to see that these roads, immensely wide, straight as arrows,
running on for miles, would be ideal speedways for heavy traffic.
Macadam, the surface with which the boulevards were paved, was
remarkably smooth, and provided perfect traction for horses' hooves.
For the first time, riders and drivers in the heart of the city could whip
their horses up to full speed. Improved road conditions not only
speeded up previously existing traffic, but-as twentieth-century high–
ways would do on a larger scale-helped to generate a volume of new
traffic far greater than anyone, apart from Haussmann and his
engineers, had anticipated. Between 1850 and 1870, while the central
city population (excluding newly incorporated suburbs) grew by about
25 percent, from about 1.3 million to 1.65 million, inner-city traffic
seems to have tripled or quadrupled. This growth exposed a contradic–
tion at the heart of Napoleon 's and Haussmann's urbanism. As David
Pinkney says in his authoritative study,
Napoleon III and the Rebuild–
ing of Paris,
the arterial boulevards "were from the start burdened with
a dual function: to carry the main streams of traffic across the city and
to
serve as major shopping and business streets; and as the volume of
