…[Manet, at the opening of Die Valkyries]

The opera was a blaze of lights. As we found our seats, and the candles got snuffed one by one, Baudelaire began another of his educational exhortations.

“Come, Manet, push, push your paints. Explore! Artists are voyagers of the psychic wilderness–or they are nothing. Every brushstroke sends the artist further, not into the chiaroscuro surfaces of daily reality, but further into those abscesses and unlit cubbies of his own mysterious mind. There, and only there, we confront our own reality-making machinery–those stock characters who haunt the manikins we make of our hapless compatriots and conquests. There are the warehouses stuffed with the quotidian or outrageous furnishings that litter the landscapes of our dreams. There, at the business end of your artist’s brush, loaded with rainbows, you paint, always, your own astonished face–the face of an ape discovering fire!”

I felt as if my beard were being burnt off as he spoke. Such words! And yet, we were really here at the opera to do no more than scope out Mme. Sabatier in person, to lay eyes on the ‘white diamond’ as Baudelaire had dubbed her; it was a boys’ mission to the girls’ locker room–no more than that.

“Your silence does you credit, my painterly confederate. Are you familiar with the story behind Die Valkyries?“

I shook my head in the negative. It was the costumes and the dances (and the intense lighting effects) that most drew me to Wagner’s works; he left all of the senses spoiled with surfeit after his feting. Even the smells of Paris seemed remote after overwhelming yourself on his weltanschauung.

“It is a most unusual romance…. That love is best which touches least…. The plot is infantile, the music unsurpassable….”

Before Baudelaire could further quote the virtues of sexless, father-defying Brunhilde over husband-horning, humping Sieglinde, his wry eye alighted on the glitter of a microscopic pair of opera glasses. They floated on a gilt stick in a hand he deemed, beneath his breath (and, I think, completely unconsciously, so thunderstruck (E Major) he seemed) to be ‘perfect, arsenic-pale.’ When the glasses finally flitted away from Mme. Sabatier’s face, like a golden dragonfly forced by a new wind from its dancing attendance upon a winter-white water lily, Baudelaire had held his breath for a length of time that put the length of old Wotan’s son-slaying spear to shame.

“Here is a damsel I must defile,” he said in a gulp. “Not that she would allow….”

Then Mme. Sabatier coughed, rouging her cheeks and pinking her bent brow, while Baudelaire rose upright from his ensconcing seat, waving to dismissive silence all the harmonies of the charging Valkyrie, and proffering with profane hand his hemp hankie (designed to scratch more than succor the nose) toward the fat wart of her balcony (whose hiccoughing hawker he preferred to Wagner’s vital sublimity)–where two embossed cherubs (roly-poly in their roles) played cupid and concupiscent cur.

Shortly thereafter the curtain rang down like a rowdy waterfall, and the opera house bloomed once again into a disorienting blaze of lights. We found the street only by conceding to the thrust and tumble of the crowd. Baudelaire pressed me for Madam’s address and only eventually (two absinthes later) was I able to content him with an ironclad invitation to Madam’s next Sunday salon.