My first encounter with Baudelaire was soon after his attempted suicide… an event of which he himself, somewhat shockingly, apprised me at that time. He said it was the inevitable response of one too bored with the unimaginative repetitions of his own heartbeat; da-blah, blah-da, day in and day out. The metronome’s monotony drove him mad!
I was just coming up to the Pont de Nada, just beyond the old Spanish Embassy, when I saw a vibrant fellow, young as myself, staring at his reflection in the still, mysterious waters beneath the bridge. His hair was dyed a splendid sky-blue, matching his dandy’s waistcoat and a pair of large buckled shoes that were impeccably clean, even though he stood in the unbelievable mud of a busy roadway. By his side was a wooden box half-filled with empty wine bottles, an odd assemblage of old corks, many connected together with an able wire into suggestive shapes, and various scraps of scribbled parchment–sketches of an eye agape here, the slanted dash and cross-outs of poetic composition there.
As I approached, dodging carefully to the far side of a coach roaring down the main way, Baudelaire bent down, calmly as though the coach hadn’t missed scalping his pate by inches, and began scribbling something on the blank back of a scrap paper in green ink. His face was concentrated like the string of a draw-purse scrunched to a wrinkly O. I could see it was a sonnet taking shape and waited quietly to see what would be the result of this silent fury.
In a few moments, as the shadow of an unsinging bird crossed at our feet, he was blowing on the paper. Then he stooped to retrieve a bottle and cork. He rolled the parchment into a tight tube expertly, dropped it in the bottle, and sealed it with the cork all in one expert motion, fluid as a swan’s wing. And then, as if all the energy of his inspiration had dissipated as quickly as it had manifested, he let the bottle roll off the bridge and into the accepting waters, not even bothering to watch the plop!
Now he fetched one of his wire-and-cork models from his box, a dancing man, it seemed, with a cork for a top-hat, the bone of a cat’s leg for a cane, feet of cockle shells, the rear-end made of an eggshell, and an obscene protuberance from the groin of four more corks threaded by a stiff wire. He danced this concatenation across the stone railing of the bridge, singing under his breath and gyrating in time to his grimly flashing grin. It all seemed extraordinarily mad to me.
“Monsieur, whatever are you doing?” I asked him, unable to contain my curiosity, and flustered enough to blurt out my question without so much as introducing myself.
“Garbage art,” he said, his grin fixed, his eyes still on the pantomime before him as he toyed with the corks.
“Ah,” I said. “Trash to treasure? Is that the idea?”
He grumbled, threw the now Pan-like dance-man over the side of the bridge dismissively. “Art made of garbage. A life made of garbage. Garbage art. Garbage life. Garbage. That is all.”
“And the sonnet you consigned to the waves?” I would not be put off the scent by the jigsaw curves of this puzzle if I could help it. There was that in his eyes which bespoke of a loneliness, and a certain skewed (skewering?) vision. “I repeat, what are you doing?”
“Luring rescuers.”
My face must have retained its uncomprehending expression, jaw slack and eyes aghast, for he soon continued.
“You see, each sonnet is a plea for help. A nugget of desperation and self-pity; gold salting the fake mine of my manipulations.”
“I beg your pardon….”
“Begging, while amusing, is not necessary. When a sonnet, such as the several dozen I have composed and tossed away this afternoon, reach a sufficiently lively and sympathetic soul, one whose sense of superiority lies in the belief in his own generosity, the hook in my little lure will have bitten flesh. The ‘rescuer’ will be tugging, quite unwittingly, at my line.”
The wind lifted the blue fringe of his wild hair, like an aurora borealis flaring above his sun-browned dome. His plot to “lure rescuers” seemed as implausible as punching a giraffe in the nose, but again, my curiosity drew me alluringly along.
“And what, pray tell, is to be the fate of this person, motivated by human sympathy, and generous enough to act upon it? What will the spider do with the pitiful fly?”
“Do not deceive yourself. It is their own good self-regard that they are rescuing by these New Testament ‘acts of love’ that they perpetrate!”
“And their fate?”
“Oh,” he said, now appearing quite bored with our conversation, “one amusement or another–or should I dress up my own depravity by calling them ‘experiments’?”
I did not know what to say to this rather extraordinary confession of depravity, and must have looked a bit like the proverbial fish out of water, for he continued again after a pause.
“Come, I see you are a country mouse in the city. It is quite rude of me to go on this way without offering any refreshment. My last dram of wine you have just seen roll into the stream. Pick up my box and follow me. My chest is still only incompletely healed from that blasted stab wound (I am an incompetent suicide). I shall let you in on the delights of a most amusing little establishment. Trust my weighty taste, and I shall trust your purse’s heft.”
So saying, he turned on his heel and strode away. There was nothing for it but to pick up his box and follow. He continued speaking without looking back over his shoulder to confirm my attendance to his whim. Perhaps the slight rattle of the bottles communicated that I now was ‘hooked.’ What could have lead to the poor man’s self-stabbing? Lifting this load for him seemed the least I could do, given the circumstances, and the still-unwhetted thirst of my own curiosity.