Sainte-Beuve & Baudelaire

 Kamchatka

Sainte-Beuve hovered over Parisian literary life like an authoritative and malevolent uncle. Baudelaire and a few others called him Uncle Beuve. A certain deference was obligatory as was the expectation of, or sometimes the demand for, some critical blessing on his part, which could be of vital importance. But this was seldom granted, especially to writers of great talent. Sainte-Beuve got rattled and became evasive as soon as he suspected certain of his contemporaries of greatness. This happened regularly: with Stendhal, with Balzac, with Baudelaire, and with Flaubert. He mentioned them only to belittle them. And sometimes he barely mentioned them at all (Baudelaire was the cruelest case) or avoided them altogether (as happened with Nerval). In those same years, he was indulgent and scrupulous with many mediocre writers. Yet Sainte-Beuve’s elusive and disparaging words went farther, even with those writers he ostentatiously ignored, and his words are of more help in understanding them than anything written by their first devotees. Subsequently, Sainte-Beuve’s sidestepping became the main argument for sidestepping Sainte-Beuve’s own work, a posthumous vendetta of the harshest sort, which made Port-Royal one of the least read great books in French literature.

But Sainte-Beuve did not ooze venom only for writers who were younger than he or his contemporaries. Even with regard to masters he ostensibly venerated, such as Chateaubriand, he was lethally venomous, and sometimes he could not manage to conceal this. 

His course on Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l’Empire teems with defamatory asides, whispered in a corner by an old friend of Mme Récamier’s who willingly let everyone suspect that Chateaubriand had a detailed knowledge of the secrets and tricks of the house, some of which he practiced himself to please the Enchanter and his lady.

Once more Baudelaire wrote to Sainte-Beuve, daring to ask for a review. As always, in vain. In the postscript, he added that a few days before, heading toward rue Montparnasse, where Sainte-Beuve lived, he had passed in front of a gingerbread shop – and had been struck by the ‘conviction that he [Sainte-Beuve] must have liked gingerbread.’ He followed with a detailed explanation of how to eat it (with wine, as a dessert, or also in the English manner, with butter and jam). Then the conclusion: ‘I hope you have not taken this piece of gingerbread, coated with angelica, for a naughty boy’s joke and that you have eaten it with simplicity … Warmest greetings. Wish me well. I am in a great crisis.’

About Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve’s feelings first of all betrayed a certain fear. The great critic, whose task it was to show every Monday, with calm affability – albeit invariably with some drops of concealed venom – the correct attitude toward matters of literature and the world, realized that Baudelaire had gone too far. That he had crossed the barriers of civilized society and had by now settled in some remote territory, forest, or steppe.

Sainte-Beuve vowed not to talk about Baudelaire – or even about Poe, that sinister alter ego of his, even though his editor had judged Poe to be suitable material for him. For a critic-judge of Sainte-Beuve’s ilk, the decision not to write about a contemporary was a political act of great consequence. But at times the critic was obliged to express himself fitfully and circuitously, condensing in a few stray lines all that he was loath to discuss in depth.

On more than one occasion Sainte-Beuve, with the agility of a monkey, avoided writing an article about Baudelaire. When he finally decided to do so, he took such a roundabout approach that no one could have suspected him. On Monday, January 20, 1862, instead of dealing with a single author, as was his custom, he published an article titled ‘Des prochaines élections à l’Académie,’ a current affairs piece on a subject that was always a delicate one. This seldom happened, and all the ladies or illustrious officials whom Sainte-Beuve imagined savoring his words every Monday must have felt a mild frisson on picking up their copy of Le Constitutionnel that day. Sainte-Beuve’s arguments were, as always, clear and seamlessly written. But an attentive eye would have spotted, right from the first lines, that this was a discourse on various levels of which most readers would have done well not to notice. And yet again Sainte-Beuve would humor them in their wish not to know, thanks to his tone of ‘decent liberty,’ which implied a firm resolve to round off any rough edges. Yet the topic was fraught with risk. It was not so much a matter, as Sainte-Beuve claimed, of proposing a new procedure for the selection of candidates for the Académie, but of insinuating a sharp, peremptory judgment on what the Académie was in itself. And this, since Richelieu’s day, was tantamount to making a judgment on the state of health of the literary world. A master of reticence, Sainte-Beuve was also a master of the sudden, piercing thrust. So, after having described the academicians with affectionate irony as figures devoted to ‘perfect idleness’ and relieved of any menial task because they were held only to ‘correspond directly’ with the sovereign, Sainte-Beuve dared to write, ‘The Académie, in the persons of various important members, is, in effect, very much afraid.’ Let’s remove the padding. What remains? That the Académie is very much afraid. But who could threaten it? Perhaps politics, ever oppressive and intrusive? No, there is something even more worrisome: ‘the fear of the literary Bohème.’ At this point the prudent Sainte-Beuve realizes that he has gone over the score. And he immediately circumscribes the statement. But, notoriously, toning down statements often ends up making them even more emphatic. And that is what happens here: ‘Nonetheless it is a good thing not to exaggerate its extent, to know where it begins and ends [for a moment, Bohème returns to its geographical connotation]. A discussion of the names considered suspect would be useful [suspect? whom? and regarding what?]. It is necessary to avoid, by dint of being on one’s guard against the Bohème, to abstain from all current, vital literature.’ Prudent now, and on his guard, he ends by referring to the zone from which the danger is coming: ‘current, vital literature.’ But who are we talking about? Why should the Forty Immortals, protected as they often are by their noble birth and impregnable social position, be afraid of a certain literature of shady origin? Sainte-Beuve immediately avoids answering questions that he himself has raised and cuts things short, as if frightened by what he has done. By way of an excuse, he says that the public (‘which must always be taken more or less into account’) has not yet reached the point in which it ‘imperiously imposes one of those choices whereby renowned fame almost assumes the right to do violence to the naturally conservative spirit.’ It is an irresistibly slippery downward slope: with every word of apology and mitigation for what he has just said, Sainte-Beuve makes his situation worse. There is nothing else he can do but cut things short. And so he moves on to the examination of the candidates for M. Scribe’s position: a list made up of three lines of names now forgotten, at the end of which we read, ‘M. Baudelaire.’ For the other vacant position, that of Lacordaire, there was only one candidate: the Prince de Broglie. (And Sainte-Beuve was later to explain the reasons for this undisturbed solitude: the duke was someone who ‘has made the effort to be born’ – and by this he implied that all other efforts in his life would have been superfluous.) Brief portraits of the candidates follow, all imbued with a lethal bonheur. Praise of the critic Cuvillier-Fleury, as soon as it goes into specifics, becomes sardonic: ‘He is a man of true merit, learned, conscientious, who applies himself.’ And immediately after: ‘Sometimes he is ingenious, but after much sweat. He is more estimable than agreeable. It is never necessary to dare him to make a gaffe because he does this by himself, even without being asked to.’ Few can match Sainte-Beuve in the art of debunking with what seems like praise.

At the tail end of the list, it is Baudelaire’s turn. Since the other candidates were presented by Sainte-Beuve as highly respectable – even though, for different reasons, they have nothing much to qualify them – Baudelaire appears to be the only one to whom Sainte-Beuve’s initial argument about the perils of the ‘literary Bohème’ and the fears that it aroused may apply. Not to mention the fact that, for Baudelaire, who was certainly not a bohemian but ‘a dandy lost in the bohème,’ according to Gautier’s definition, it already sounded humiliating to be considered in such a light.

But Sainte-Beuve was only at the beginning of the humiliations he felt obliged to inflict upon the oldest of his young friends. How was it that Baudelaire had so much as entertained the idea of presenting his candidature for the Académie? Sainte-Beuve answers his own question: ‘At first one wondered if M. Baudelaire, in applying, wished to make an epigram, to mock the Académie; unless his intention was to let the Académie know in this way that the time was ripe for welcoming into its ranks that poet and writer so distinguished and so able in all genres of writing who is Théophile Gautier, his master.’ One humiliation heaped upon another: to make it understood that Baudelaire’s candidature was in itself an affront, and hence conceivable only as a joke; and even as such, comprehensible only if understood as an allusion to a better writer than Baudelaire, one who was his master (just to keep things in the right proportion). But there’s more. Baudelaire is not only minor, but nonexistent: ‘It was necessary to make known, to spell out M. Baudelaire’s name, to more than one member of the Académie, who was completely unaware of his existence.’ For no previous candidate had Sainte-Beuve felt obliged to produce such a certificate of nonexistence. Moreover, he knew Baudelaire well enough to understand how sensitive he was about the way in which his 

name was liable to be mispronounced. This time, too, Sainte-Beuve made sure he wounded at least twice with the same blow. There follow some lines of measured appreciation for Les Fleurs du mal, in which, however, the emphasis is on the generous efforts that, one is led to suppose, Sainte-Beuve had to make in order to illustrate the work: ‘It is not as easy as one might think to prove to certain political academicians and men of state that in Les Fleurs du mal there are some passages that are truly remarkable for talent and art.’ This is the highest praise that Sainte-Beuve would allow himself. But here, too, he does not hold back from betrayal, giving us the very words he might have uttered to the face of some impassive, incredulous, and bored academician absorbed with some problem of state: ‘As you can see, my dear friend, we have done everything possible.’

One might think that, once his judgment of Les Fleurs du mal had been handed down – and once he had defined as ‘gems’ two prose pieces in Le Spleen de Paris – Sainte-Beuve no longer felt bound to justify his lukewarm attitude toward Baudelaire himself. But Sainte-Beuve was not just a shrewd voyager in the baser waters of literary life. He was also a great writer, and at times, even in the most stifling contexts, he managed to shrug off all his fears and scruples to say some tremendously precise, definitive words, which erupt in the middle of his argument. It had been hard enough to make sclerotic academicians understand the singular beauties of some of Baudelaire’s poems. But it would have been even harder to introduce them to the locus of Baudelaire. ‘All in all,’ Sainte-Beuve continues, ‘M. Baudelaire has found a way to construct, at the extremities of a strip of land held to be uninhabitable and beyond the confines of known Romanticism, a bizarre pavilion, a folly, highly decorated, highly tormented, but graceful and mysterious, where people read the books of Edgar Allan Poe, where they recite exquisite sonnets, intoxicate themselves with hashish to ponder about it afterward, where they take opium and thousands of other abominable drugs in cups of the finest porcelain. This singular folly, with its marquetry inlays, of a planned and composite originality, which for some time has drawn the eye toward the extreme point of the Romantic Kamchatka, I call Baudelaire’s folly. The author is content to have done something impossible, in a place where it was thought that no one could go.’ This passage is the foundation of all that can be said and has been said about Baudelaire. It cannot be replaced with any other description; it should be observed in every detail, as if one were wandering around that solitary folly, which stands out against a desolate landscape. It does not appear that Sainte-Beuve had particular geographical or ethnographic interests. For him, Kamchatka must have been one of those names that appeared in Le Magasin Pittoresque along with some exotic drawing. But his choice of place for the transposition of Baudelaire into an image could not have been more apt. Of course, Kamchatka is a slender strip of land (to signify that Baudelaire, too, is more like a pointed extremity than a vast rustling forest), but behind him there extends the immensity of Asia, which supports him. But to what does that boundless steppe and taiga correspond? To ‘known Romanticism,’ which borders on civilized eighteenth-century Europe to become, little by little, ever more ‘uninhabitable’ before finally extending, as if in a final lunge, to that Kamchatka pierced by one hundred and twenty volcanoes, which would be the place ‘beyond the confines’ of Romanticism itself. And there stands a folly that contains a blend of the horror vacui of primitive ornamentation and the sobriety of the products of perfect civilization (the exquisite porcelain). A place that is ‘highly decorated, highly tormented, but graceful and mysterious’: a quadrilateral of words that delimit the locus of Baudelaire, where the pleasure of ornament is united with self-inflicted torture, where mystery cannot forgo being frivolous and erotic seduction opens the doors of mystery. In the middle of a desert inhabited only by shamanic presences, what meets the eye, like a mirage, is a Folly, a name that stands not only for that which has always eluded psychic habitation and rational control – and this is the real reason for that ‘fear of the Bohème,’ which was rather a fear of Kamchatka – but also for certain enchanting maisons de plaisance, pavilions devoted to idleness and pleasure. Since the days of the Régence up to Bagatelle, which the count of Artois had built in two months, like a dream, to win a bet with the very young Marie Antoinette, such constructions dotted the outskirts of Paris. Later absorbed into the metropolis, they often became the residences of the supreme demi-mondaines. Ambiguous and mad, uninhabitable and sensual, Baudelaire’s folly was a self-sufficient, sovereign place, which would have been pointless to introduce to the academicians. They could never have understood it. Then, little by little, like successive waves of nomads who made their camps in it, there grew up around that folly the essence of that which was to appear since then under the name of literature.As soon as he had finished the memorable lines on Kamchatka, Sainte-Beuve felt the need to fall back on the triple cross, as if afraid that he had exposed himself too much. And the sound of this falling back grates more than ever. ‘At this point, and after having explained as well as possible to somewhat amazed and esteemed colleagues all these exotica, these piquant flavors, these refinements, could they then see them as qualifications for the Académie, and could the author have perhaps been able to convince himself of this?’ A brusque return to the initial argument: Baudelaire’s entire œuvre is a curiosity that the author had thought to propose to the Académie only in jest. And Sainte-Beuve wants his colleagues to be completely convinced that this is what he thinks, too. But the high point of the gibe, which Sainte-Beuve inflicts simultaneously on Baudelaire and his colleagues, and on himself, comes immediately after, in a few words as heartfelt as a peroration in favor of a young man accused of some reckless behavior: ‘Certainly, M. Baudelaire loses nothing by being seen [in person], and whereas one expects to find a strange, eccentric man, one finds oneself in the presence of a courteous, respectful, exemplary candidate, a good boy, refined in speech and entirely classical in form.’ At this point the curtain is drawn, and the ‘good boy,’ Baudelaire, withdraws again to his folly in Kamchatka.

From: Roberto Calasso

LA FOLIE BAUDELAIRE