His apartment on the Rue de Salleon was like himself and called forth feelings and memories by their departure. A sort of permanent state of premature nostalgia. To actually be there, in the room, was a deliquescent form of absence….
An infinity of absence was the only decor, a plaster and candelabra evocation of staring at the sea–that intense feeling of nothingness such immensity commands. He stood, a dandified shard of driftwood, in soft shadows where the uncertainties of the candleabra’s candles overlapped. In the center of the room, surrounded by six thigh-high red votive candles, stood a dusky dame stripped to her waist. She had been a secret obsession of Baudelaire’s for some time, and one his whim was determined to comprehend completely.
He addressed Remarque, a ‘poet of debauch,’ as he styled himself in those days:
“Remarque, do you not find Jeanne attractive, the whore?”
Remarque turned to Baudelaire, affecting indifference, and answered:
“She’ll do.”
“I find in her the cruel rumor of a lion’s beauty. Her neck alone is a downspout of godly bloods, always as hot as a slap below the arched frontiers of her nostrils…. Notice how the curve of darkness lingers into a comma, the invitation to experience for yourself, again perhaps, the very essence of all scents… and where would that lead? Oh, she is dangerous! Such a city of desires is impossible to fix on any map, and must be continually re-explored in the blindness of the bed.”
Remarque was becoming sensibly aroused by this description.
“Well, it is as you say…. She….”
Baudelaire abruptly turned his stare across the room and said, in the most agreeable tones:
“What do you think, Jeanne? Do you like your portrait? It is fleshed out in Remarque’s heavy stare. Do you like him? What do you think of him? An intense young man by all accounts.”
Jeanne, undisturbed, drew deeply on her opium cigarette. The rolling paper and the herb combined to make the simple room smell of orange blossoms.
“Oh, I cannot stand this,” cursed Remarque, and in a single swift motion stood before us, disrobed. He strode toward Jeanne, who exhaled with an unimpeded ease, and looked… I could not tell where her eyes were directed, they were too heavily lidded. Either to myself or Baudelaire. Was there an appeal in her glance? To this day I am uncertain. But Remarque shifted her petticoats–always of the lightest available material for such garments with Jeanne–and mounted her from the rear.
“Nudity is, of course, such a perfectly pitched expression,” said Baudelaire, turning to catch my attention as I was bolted to the sofa at the sight of the extraordinary coupling going on, “of boredom.”
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