I had the pleasure to meet Mme. Baudelaire only twice in my life, but the impression she makes is quite strong and lingers in the mind of one sensitive to the traces of a fabulous youth tragically foreshortened; a subject of almost infinite meditation to one at first caught unawares in such circumstances….
The Madam, as she was always known to me, had about her the impeccable starkness of the religious convert–one to whom the simplicities of a religious life offer, if nothing else, a burnt-down and stripped landscape in which to suppress our more wiry emotions. Her mother, a penniless Catholic exile maintained by charity in an introverted England, expired, just after Napoleon’s rescinding of the more harsh laws restricting the practice of that barbaric faith. By luck, or a darker, feudal sense of life-debts, she was adopted by the Praslins–a family who owed much to Joseph-Francois Baudelaire’s own Draconian sense of mystical debts and holy accounts of interpersonal obligations. A gothic, almost pointlessly legal atmosphere hangs over the entire spiritual and sexual proceedings of that family–from a certain point of view.
“Bounce in, bounce about,
God will know how to bounce you out!”
This is how the Madam welcomed me into her dim abode. There was a lightness to her manner, and a hidden leven in everything she undertook. Perhaps this was the outcome of what Charles said was true of all of his family, right back to Eve: “idiots or maniacs, all of them vivid victims of terrible passions.” With Madam, this factoid only became apparent in retrospect, upon my own remembered reflections of our discussions, which were mainly concerned with how to coordinate Baudelaire’s defense before the Minister of Justice on the ridiculous and petty-minded immorality charges resulting from his publication of certain inflammatory poems.
“If there is no feeling, how can there be a poem? My Charles knows this, and follows the rule, although the world may make him pay.”
She poured me a small cognac and opened a heavy curtain to let the daylight into the chamber.
During one of these meetings Madam, always elegant, behaved a little strangely, perhaps freed from her usual restrictions by the desperation of Baudelaire’s case, the death of her own group of friends, herself having had some cognac, or even, as I suspect, a more than usual sense of her own lost lightness and youth, wasted on an old man (M. Baudelaire) whose sensibilities diverged from Madam’s to the utmost degree and in every particular. She had all the enthusiams of the young, he the cynicism and clarity of age; she was vibrant, he ironic and reserved; she was devoted to an active social calendar, and all the joys and inanities that go with such essentially meaningless diversions, he had his cronies, artists all, devoted to late nights and philosophy. Into this divided house fell Baudelaire, a child of the most unique sensibilities. He who had always “felt like a globe unto myself, a little criminal, ecstatic world, utterly extraneous to all of my neighbors and contemporaries, with whom one is so arbitrarily supposed to feel a pervading peerage.”
“Life is so like the death God warns us of in the Good Book,” she sighed. “But then, we are all accursed; my own life was crippled by my sense of goodness, the wish to do one good thing back for all the kindnesses I had received from the prodigal Praslins.”
I must have looked shocked, for she continued, “no, do not be so alarmed, M. Bonadventure, at a certain age everyone sights down their own life like a sharpshooter finding the nervous heart of an unsuspecting hare. Do not bother to respond; I know this much is true: my grateful spring of innocence has evaporated into bitterness. And I do not even have the cruel, cosmic sense of humor of my child or my first husband to laugh at myself. Ahh… M. Bonadventure….” She put her hand upon my arm, and breathed my name in a most compelling manner. I confess I felt myself stirring. But then I realized the exile that would await me at Baudelaire’s hands if he were even to suspect…. and I drew back from her heavy familiarity. But not before she apprised herself of my state by a quick touch that seemed far too sure, and alluring, for one of the Madam’s age. It seemed to me that some of her lightness had come back to her, and she dismissed me with a glance, turning calmly to the materials of the case before her.
As I stepped down the hall, seeing myself to the front door, I could hear her singing to herself, in a renaissance air:
“Bounce in, bounce about,
God will know how to bounce you out!”
“You know, don’t you, that I never found a permanent grave for the old man’s bones?” Her grin was almost… rapacious as she said this; and I understood that the ‘old man’ was Baudelaire’s father, a stern and distant character by all accounts, but not one to ever (even in death) lightly dismiss.
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