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La muse ténébreuse de Charles Baudelaire
Pour la postérité, le nom de Jeanne Duval reste lié à celui de Charles Baudelaire. Apprentie comédienne ou fille de joie, muse ou diablesse, qui était vraiment celle qui traversa la brève existence du poète, enchanta sa plume et le plongea dans les tourments de l’amour et de la passion ? Qui était Jeanne Duval, venue des îles d’Amérique ou de l’océan Indien, ou peut-être du pays des Maures, et qui fit découvrir à Baudelaire un monde insoupçonné de sensualité et d’exotisme ? Un monde encore plus singulier que celui offert par le chanvre indien et l’opium dont l’auteur des Fleurs du mal faisait une consommation déraisonnable…
C’est cette passion torride, délétère et sublime que nous raconte Raphaël Confiant dans un roman foisonnant émaillé de vers célèbres. Des pavés parisiens de l’île Saint-Louis jusqu’aux îles Mascareignes, en passant par Saint-Domingue devenue Haïti, et la Belgique, sa plume alerte nous entraîne sur les traces du poète français, auprès duquel évoluent tous les grands artistes de ce XIX e siècle flamboyant, Nadar, Dumas, Lamartine, Flaubert, Manet, Delacroix, Nerval, Gautier, et bien d’autres…
C’est cette passion torride, délétère et sublime que nous raconte Raphaël Confiant dans un roman foisonnant émaillé de vers célèbres. Des pavés parisiens de l’île Saint-Louis jusqu’aux îles Mascareignes, en passant par Saint-Domingue devenue Haïti, et la Belgique, sa plume alerte nous entraîne sur les traces du poète français, auprès duquel évoluent tous les grands artistes de ce XIX e siècle flamboyant, Nadar, Dumas, Lamartine, Flaubert, Manet, Delacroix, Nerval, Gautier, et bien d’autres…
272 pages, Paperback
Published September 2, 2021
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May 23, 2023
Overall, a missed opportunity. Confiant clearly did his research, but his imagination only sometimes peeps out from behind literary-historical facts he repeats over and over again, as if he never reread what he’d already written. While vaguely progressing chronologically from the time Baudelaire met Duval to the eve of her death, with flashbacks to Baudelaire’s voyage to Mauritius, the novel seems to have no real structure or stakes. The narrative alternates between the first person (Baudelaire and Jeanne’s perspectives) and the third. Sometimes the first-person accounts come in the form of excerpts from the two protagonists’ diaries, which are not very convincing in terms of style (Jeanne’s prose is not creolized [a strange missed opportunity for the author of L’Éloge de la créolité], and Baudelaire’s is not decadent—not even very creative). The prose style overall is pedestrian; there is not one breathtaking sentence in the whole book, which, considering that it voices the one and only Charles Baudelaire, seems criminal. Its only remarkable virtue is the quirky nineteenth-century Parisian lingo that Confiant revives in some of his vocabulary choices.
The fragmented chapters, sadly, avoid scenic description, characterization, and full dialogues for almost the entire novel. What we get is mostly vague mentions of the Bohemian literary scene and the extreme vissicitudes of the couple’s relationship—sex, fight, repeat. Confiant somehow manages to include Gautier, Manet, Courbet, Flaubert, Nadar, Nerval, de Lisle, and other fascinating personalities of the time without giving the least hint of color to their characters. We hear of landmark events in this literary lineage, such as Baudelaire and Flaubert’s obscenity trials and Nerval’s suicide, without much excitement or even sense of event. A mere three scenes remain in my memory, rare ones given actual detail: Jeanne’s theater employer groping her in the beginning, Baudelaire reaching Mauritius towards the middle, and Jeanne raving in the streets of Batignolles at the end of the book. A third narrative perspective is introduced early on, that of Dorothée Dormeuil, the Mauritian lover that Baudelaire conflates with Jeanne in his opioid dazes; but this promising diversification of the perspectives of colonized women fades to oblivion as the novel progresses.
To my eye, there are three interesting aspects of the novel, and they are all interrelated. The first is Jeanne’s literacy. When Jeanne’s mother (a maid in the house of the proprietor of a coffee plantation in Jacmel, Haiti) dies of yellow fever, her foster mother teaches her to read on the transatlantic boat ride to France. Working in lowbrow theaters, Jeanne, whom Confiant gifts a prodigious memory, memorizes monologues from Corneille’s Cid, and later Racine’s Phèdre, to impress her employer. The three books she carries with her in her bag are Le Cid, the Bible, and a French dictionary. She also grows to be an avid reader of journalism. She is at times haughty and mocking of her poet’s work, but she nevertheless memorizes many of his poems, tries to stitch together drafts he rips to shreds, and secrets away drafts in her jewelry box when she can. Then there are many moments where she expresses a bewilderment, a kind of estrangement from his artworks.
This leads to my other points of interest, the novel’s moral ambiguity and the couple’s almost paradoxical compatibility. Both Jeanne and Baudelaire are toxic, borderline abusive lovers. Neither is monogamous. They both have syphilis. Baudelaire’s habitus as a metropolitan white man is ambivalent. On the one hand, he blatantly exoticizes women of color, labeling Jeanne variously (like other French people do) as Roma, Malagasy, Indian, Creole, and Mediterranean. He doesn’t allow her to join his salons. He doesn’t denounce slavery and mocks his colleagues’ attempts to address the colonial problem in their work. But he also sustains Jeanne throughout her adult life, especially towards the end of it as their health deteriorates. For years he escorts her shamelessly in public and lavishes her with praise. He continues to court her long-term despite society’s, his friends’, and his family’s (particularly his mother’s) admonishments. He immortalizes her in verse—albeit, in an abstracted, extreme manner.
The wonder of the story is that despite—or in fact because of—his embrace of the ugliness in the human soul, Baudelaire comes to seem like the perfect match for Jeanne. She herself is no saint. She can be capricious and spiteful. She appreciates his status as social pariah, and even in her arch critiques of his poetasting one might detect the kind of jabs that only a true lover can make. His status as internal exile appears to complement hers as external exile. By the end, although apparently somewhat crazed, the failing Jeanne proclaims to the streets her glory as his muse. Confiant’s greatest accomplishment, I think, is rendering the constant, inexplicable contradictions of the two’s emotions.
The fragmented chapters, sadly, avoid scenic description, characterization, and full dialogues for almost the entire novel. What we get is mostly vague mentions of the Bohemian literary scene and the extreme vissicitudes of the couple’s relationship—sex, fight, repeat. Confiant somehow manages to include Gautier, Manet, Courbet, Flaubert, Nadar, Nerval, de Lisle, and other fascinating personalities of the time without giving the least hint of color to their characters. We hear of landmark events in this literary lineage, such as Baudelaire and Flaubert’s obscenity trials and Nerval’s suicide, without much excitement or even sense of event. A mere three scenes remain in my memory, rare ones given actual detail: Jeanne’s theater employer groping her in the beginning, Baudelaire reaching Mauritius towards the middle, and Jeanne raving in the streets of Batignolles at the end of the book. A third narrative perspective is introduced early on, that of Dorothée Dormeuil, the Mauritian lover that Baudelaire conflates with Jeanne in his opioid dazes; but this promising diversification of the perspectives of colonized women fades to oblivion as the novel progresses.
To my eye, there are three interesting aspects of the novel, and they are all interrelated. The first is Jeanne’s literacy. When Jeanne’s mother (a maid in the house of the proprietor of a coffee plantation in Jacmel, Haiti) dies of yellow fever, her foster mother teaches her to read on the transatlantic boat ride to France. Working in lowbrow theaters, Jeanne, whom Confiant gifts a prodigious memory, memorizes monologues from Corneille’s Cid, and later Racine’s Phèdre, to impress her employer. The three books she carries with her in her bag are Le Cid, the Bible, and a French dictionary. She also grows to be an avid reader of journalism. She is at times haughty and mocking of her poet’s work, but she nevertheless memorizes many of his poems, tries to stitch together drafts he rips to shreds, and secrets away drafts in her jewelry box when she can. Then there are many moments where she expresses a bewilderment, a kind of estrangement from his artworks.
This leads to my other points of interest, the novel’s moral ambiguity and the couple’s almost paradoxical compatibility. Both Jeanne and Baudelaire are toxic, borderline abusive lovers. Neither is monogamous. They both have syphilis. Baudelaire’s habitus as a metropolitan white man is ambivalent. On the one hand, he blatantly exoticizes women of color, labeling Jeanne variously (like other French people do) as Roma, Malagasy, Indian, Creole, and Mediterranean. He doesn’t allow her to join his salons. He doesn’t denounce slavery and mocks his colleagues’ attempts to address the colonial problem in their work. But he also sustains Jeanne throughout her adult life, especially towards the end of it as their health deteriorates. For years he escorts her shamelessly in public and lavishes her with praise. He continues to court her long-term despite society’s, his friends’, and his family’s (particularly his mother’s) admonishments. He immortalizes her in verse—albeit, in an abstracted, extreme manner.
The wonder of the story is that despite—or in fact because of—his embrace of the ugliness in the human soul, Baudelaire comes to seem like the perfect match for Jeanne. She herself is no saint. She can be capricious and spiteful. She appreciates his status as social pariah, and even in her arch critiques of his poetasting one might detect the kind of jabs that only a true lover can make. His status as internal exile appears to complement hers as external exile. By the end, although apparently somewhat crazed, the failing Jeanne proclaims to the streets her glory as his muse. Confiant’s greatest accomplishment, I think, is rendering the constant, inexplicable contradictions of the two’s emotions.
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