“Love, which tempts us with its contretemps, will, like a Python beheaded in its deathgrip, never release its victim. This is an image of the human affections which once disturbed me greatly, despite or because of its inherent truth does not matter, until one day, greeting my dear Jeanne from her toilet, I noticed in her sigh a hint of the laughter that would move through her when she heard my death rattle. Yes, very definitely, Gerard. I have seen in her smile the sine curve of derision at its nefarious inception. In her ecstatic cries, delight at my helplessness. In her interest in the poems I dedicate to her beauty, I have spotted the clinician scanning a patient for defects, abnormalities that can be depended on to produce future fees. Who has not used their eye to crucify, their weakness to command? Bonadventure, Nerval, I know you do not have the power to imply otherwise, not while you quail here beneath my scrutiny; my gaze which implores with the desperation of a slave. Looking at the pair of you, I have no hope for my own freedom, certainly not any freedom from love’s delusions.”
This is how Baudelaire counseled Gerard de Nerval in his romances, which he always prosecuted with the desolate innocence of a child.
“But Aurelia…. The thunder that accompanies her kiss, is it from fear then that my own pulse responds?”
Nerval seemed almost mortally abandoned, ripped to shreds by the mechanical continuance of Baudelaire’s arguments, steady and regular as a clockwork’s cold progression; adding up the little nothings of a second until the sun is gone. I sat there beside him and did nothing at all to help.
O the ropes of regret that bind one to the experimenter’s steel table! And for what? The hope of something new!
I glanced at Nerval–the look on his face, it was… but then Charles was at the helm again, pressing on into wilder spaces–
“I hold myself above the lovers like a disembodied bulb, prepped to flash out a recording light; I am but the instrument of a crime scene photographer.”
“But, but, but” Nerval hiccoughed, “you yourself once said that ‘an artist is someone with the beautiful inability to settle for someone else’s reality?'”
This is the worst tack to take with Baudelaire if you want to get anyplace in a discussion–this quoting of himself against himself–the absolute worst. He considers it a form of kidnapping; a form which produces only a clumsy kind of intimacy of disregard when the true operator of such bad feeling should of course be oneself who, knowing the victim, could construct an orgy of self-loathing and produce a ream of ripping ‘ransom notes,’ which is what he occasionally styled his poems to be as he would thrust a revised sheaf at me for my purview.
“We already know that I am my own worst enemy, and my own best critic too, as you so ably quote, Gerard. Do you really love me so much, that you would torture me this way?”
The gentle Nerval, who had not a single schoolyard dart nib in his arsenal, flinched as he replied.
“Of, of course I love you, Charles. You know that I would never…. If-f….”
So Charles, charmingly, knowing the softness of the soul of our love-cuffed Nerval–leapt like a puma for his undulating jugular.
“Well, then, tell us of this Aurelia, the one love without a wound.”
Nerval–have I mentioned?–always wore what was called a chevalier’s tie, a type of bowtie that played itself out near the throat in a single silken lump, a bolted bobbin of very fine material that jumped up and down whenever he swallowed hard–which is what he did now. Nerval, whether through some mistake of nature or freak genius of God, had the stiff face of a Greek tragedian’s mask; the same fixed features, the enduring–if never daring–stare.
“I was out walking this morning,” he began plainly enough, referring to one of the kilometers-long and incessant treks that his perennial insomnia forced upon him most summer evenings, and which commenced at three a.m. or thereabouts and often continued on until noon, his head full of restless delights or the morose melodies he would hum loudly with all the grace of a thirsty horse.
“And dawn was infiltrating the city, crushing the dreams of thousands with morning’s daily visibility. I had just turned down the Rue de Mortefontaine, when,” and here Nerval’s mask of a face didn’t exactly change, but the lines that had been worn into it by lavish feeling, became more pronounced, more deeply drawn. He began to chant something, but so feebly that both Baudelaire and I had to lean into the soft aura of his whisper.
“A lady leans on her copper windowsill, absence-eyed, yet fair in antique crinoline…. Deep in the dream of another life, Aurelia, we’ve lived together–and live there still! Impeccable Utopias! Hesitation’s engorged expectancy! Vague enthusiasms of dreaming youth! The aspirant’s purest wish of aspiration! All, all were there, unmauled, in the blessed bouquet of her being. The only torch that responded to the sun herself: Aurelia! And then, I know you will not believe me but I do not care–not a pence–then she looked at me; our eyes met.”
There was such a long pause at this point, so ‘glorious’ a hesitation, that I was afraid that Nerval would leave it at that, and lose his side of the argument to Baudelaire without a fight, resonant phrases notwithstanding.
And then Nerval looked up with, well I don’t know rightly how to describe it–but, I guess, something of a lambency in his eyes; a saint’s glance, a martyr’s transformation, these words are empty….
“She resembled the ardent virgins in that choral portrait by Loungemains, the one in the Louvre that floats there in the blue room–as indeed the angels themselves must float in Heaven. I close my eyes, just now, and see her in a sort of wondrous self-containment looking over the adorable shoulder of a sister in perfection. But, as strongly as that image leapt to life when I saw it–when compared to the dirty Paris streets–so much more bright and lively is her image to me. I had never thought that souls could change bodies while they lived, or that two souls might inhabit a single frame. Pythagoras disapproved of it, and I learned in his school. But that glance of Aurelia’s, that instant, I felt her take complete possession of me, of all that I could feel to be myself or my soul; and I knew her as well, as sharply as anything that moves beneath my crosshairs; and there I have remained, since that moment, gentlemen, staring from that copper windowsill–and there I am now.”
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