Benjamin, Bodler I Žena Na Ulici

The Night of the Poet: Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Woman in the Street
Author(s): Beryl Schlossman

Source: MLN, Vol. 119, No. 5, Comparative Literature Issue (Dec., 2004), pp. 1013-1032
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251888
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The Night of the Poet:
Baudelaire,Benjamin, and the
Woman in the Street
Beryl Schlossman
A Une Passante
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balancant le feston et l'ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sajambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispe comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide oiu germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un eclair ... Puis la nuit!-Fugitive beaute,
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaitre,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'eternite?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais, peut-etre!
Carj'ignore ou tu fuis, tu ne sais ou je vais,
O toi que j'eusse aimee, 6 toi qui le savais!
[To A Woman Passing By

Around me, the deafening street howled.
Tall, slender, dressed in mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed by, with her ceremonious hand
lifting, swaying her festoon and hem;
Agile and stately, with the leg of a statue.
Caught in a standstill, extravagant, I drank
MLN119 (2004): 1013-1032? 2005 by TheJohns HopkinsUniversityPress
1014 BERYL SCHLOSSMAN
from her eye, a livid sky where hurricanes

take seed, sweet fascination and fatal pleasure.
A flash of lightning ... then night!-Lovely fugitive,
with eyes that suddenly resurrected me,
will I not see you again before eternity?
Someplace, far away from here! too late! neverperhaps!
For I know not where you flee, nor you where I go,
O you I could have loved, o you who knew it!]
Baudelaire's Flowers ofEvil are shaped by modernity and memory. The
section named "Parisian Tableaux" features women who pass through
city streets. A feminine figure emerges as the bearer of modernity; she
plays the double role of poetic and erotic object. In "To A Woman
Passing By [A Une Passante]," Baudelaire stages her in three ways: she
appears in the sonnet as the object of a gaze, as an image, and as the
incomparable resonance of desire.1
This feminine object is not anchored in a source or a history; she
does not belong to monumental or collective memory, and her
intimate or personal history is unknown. In any case, the notion of
her origin does not seem pertinent in Baudelaire's eyes. He praises
artifice and the use of theater sets. He accentuates the gaze and the
effect produced by distance (CB II: 668).2
Baudelaire's images are observed at a distance. They do not reveal
the object's point of origin. They make an offering of the unique
appearance of a distance that Walter Benjamin names aura (WB I:
440).3 One of the aura's most remarkable qualities is that it alone can
arouse the viewer's glance or cause the viewer to look up.4 But in
Baudelaire's modernity, the glance or the gaze is caught between the
power of Aura and its dissolution or ruin ("der Verfall der Aura" [WB
I: 647] or "die Zertrummerung der Aura" [WB I: 440]). In Baudelaire's
writing, the unique appearance of a distance crumbles or falls apart;
perhaps the viewer has come too close to the image. In spite of the
heavy materiality of some of Benjamin's terms, like the "ruin" or
"crumbling" of aura, the conceptual focus of his reading of modern
subjectivity is the scene of the gaze (or glance).5 An ambivalent and
paradoxical gaze enters Benjamin's interpretation of nineteenth-
century Paris from Baudelaire's writings. In Baudelaire's world, the
subject is threatened: vision threatens to succumb to the overwhelm-
ing shock of modernity. Like nightfall, a black screen neutralizes the
viewer's gaze as it renders the world invisible and impenetrable. In
this sense, the aura appears accompanied (or haunted) by its own
dissolution, ruin, loss, or crumbling.
M LN 1015
Benjamin relates the images that appear in the poet's work to the
gaze that produces them-the poet's gaze.6 This interpretive move
echoes Baudelaire's attempt to come to terms with a vision of
modernity rendered in a work of art: in his approach to the art of
Constantin Guys, Baudelaire observes the way Guys looks at things in
connection with Guys' drawings of images of modern life. In the
sketch of 1935 for the preface to the "Arcades Book," Benjamin
brings together the Poet, the Allegorist, and the Flaneur: their gazes
intersect in the gaze that Benjamin attributes to Baudelaire. The man
in the crowd and the prostitute are also present at this crossroads of
seeing (WB V.I: 54). In formulating the principle of his reading of
the nineteenth century through Baudelaire, Benjamin captures Baude-
laire's unique success and poetic power in the terms of seeing. The
crossroads of Baudelaire's gaze produce a kind of montage. Benjamin
writes: "It is the unique quality of Baudelaire's poetry that the images
of Woman and Death penetrate a third image, the one of Paris" (WB
V.I: 55). An exploration of Baudelaire's poetics of seeing will show
that the encounter between the Aura and its ruin shapes Baudelaire's
montage of Woman, Death, and the City. This encounter-or the
flash of lightning that signals the irreconcilable break between Aura
and the modernity that puts an end to its magic-shapes the d6cor of
Flowersof Evil. Among the "Parisian Tableaux," the sonnet "To A
Woman Passing By" makes this encounter visible.
Baudelaire's sonnet explores the feminine figure as a poetic object
and an erotic object. "To A Woman Passing By" offers Baudelaire's
reading of modernity through the figure of the object. Benjamin
interprets the Baudelairean modernity evoked in this poem in several
of his works: he discusses it in more detail than any other poem in
Flowersof Evil. The "ArcadesWork," the writings published as a book
entitled Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, and
the essay entitled "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" refer to Baudelaire's
sonnet. In the "Flaneur"chapter of the Baudelaire book, Benjamin's
presentation of the sonnet accentuates the view of the crowd that
Baudelaire found in Poe. At the crossroads of modern life translated
by Baudelaire, the crowd, the city, and the erotic encounter intersect.
The crowd, Benjamin writes, is the moving veil ("der bewegte
Schleier"): it might be the image of the city that transforms the
masses themselves into a phantasmagoria (a collective fantasy) ob-
served by the flaneur. The crowd gives the poem its form, but it does
not appear in the poem. Benjamin writes: "No turn, no word make it
possible to name the crowd in the sonnet 'A une passante.' And yet
1016 BERYLSCHLOSSMAN
the event rests entirely on it" (WB I: 622). The veil's function is to
hide or mask the object, and to render its gaze enigmatic. The veil
diminishes the transparence of the object's gaze and threatens to
render it opaque. The subject who looks at the object projects the
image of the phantasmagoria onto it. Veiled and nameless, the crowd
cannot be seen: it is the invisible protagonist who sets up the poem's
event from within the secret intimacy of Baudelaire's poetics.
Inside the virtual space of poetic strategy are its most important
elements, unseen at the surface. This interiorization is connected to
the use of allegory, essential to Baudelaire's poetics. The crowd,
brought into view in the writings of Marx and Poe, shapes the drama
that unfolds in Baudelaire's sonnet. The crowd appears in the poem
only as violence that is heard. Its screaming resonates from the hollow
of silence that Baudelaire places in the eye of the storm. Its visible
form in the poem is entirely negative: it blends into the unnamed
darkness of night that swallows up the woman whose passage propels
her toward an eternal disappearance. The crowd's effect on the
poetic Narrator is a kind of black-out: the stage of the poem is
emptied of any other human presence. In the same way, the crowd's
movement is transmitted through the sudden frozen state of the
Narrator, whose gaze stops him in his tracks; his gaze transforms the
rhythmically moving woman into a statue. The "I"of the poem is the
intimate source of a gaze, a desire, and a silence-ecstatic and fatal.
"To a Woman Passing By" is a love poem written in a lyrical style,
but the event that takes place in it cannot be read as a model of
amorous approach nor as an auratic experience of love. Immediately
after the chance encounter that produces a flash of lightning, the
abyss opens up in the time and space of the poem. The distance
separating the Narrator subject from the veiled object stretches into
infinity, and the instant of anticipated reunion is given away to
eternity at the fatalistic cry of "Never."Instead of the living branch
that Benjamin inscribes in the exemplary experience of aura (quoted
from another section of "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"), Baudelaire's
sonnet petrifies the object into the leg of a statue, watched by a
subject stopped in his tracks. The fetishized leg-the fragment of an
idol or the divided body of allegory-corresponds to the subject's
desire, a suffering that nails him to the spot. Desire petrifies him; an
erotic shock suspends him before the image of a woman. She is
unknown to him, except for what he sees; her beauty, the veil that
keeps the voyeur's gaze at a distance, and the clothing that reveals her
to be in mourning. In the eyes of the Allegorist, the veiled woman is
M LN 1017
distinct from the vision of the crowd that surrounds her. The auditory
image of the first verse is the only indication of the crowd remaining
in the poem.
In Benjamin's interpretation of love, Eros dominates the impres-
sion of a distance that mediates the approach of the beloved object.
The final impression, however, is of consumed proximity, ruled by
Sexus. The conflict between the close and the far-away,between Sexus
and Eros, is resolved only in the tomb's secrecy: "The grave as the
secret chamber in which Eros and Sexus even out their old battle"
(WB I: 660). This consummation (and consolation) takes a Baude-
lairean form.
The poem's event occurs as a unique instant, a single glance. The
two players are completely silent. The articulation of this instant
produces an atmosphere of violence that Benjamin reads as shock or
catastrophe (PW N10, 2). The anonymous man out for a walk is filled
with desire rather than love; mixed with solitude, hopeless desire
strikes him with violence. His suffering produces the "stigmata" of
love in the big city. Benjamin's enigmatically religious image enters
the itinerary of the city dweller that he conceives as Baudelaire's
stations of the cross. Erotic wounds turned into stigmata are the
indelible marks of suffering; their form rendered sublime in
Baudelaire's poetry allows for the reflection in them of the feminine
image, images of the fleetingly seen object.
At the moment of their encounter, the gaze of the enraptured
Narrator penetrates the unknown woman as a mouth and a throat, to
drink from her eyes. The exchange of glances stops movement, time,
and nightfall. His gaze turns her into a statue, and yet allows him to
witness her passing toward disappearance. Her statue's leg that walks
and seems to dance, solemnly and majestically, is perfectly petrified
by her allegorical beauty: the antithesis of a leg frozen and in
movement underlines the power of mourning, disappearance, and
death. In this way, the power of the woman's desire, expressed by
rapid movement, is stopped in its flight by the allegory of Death. All
of Baudelaire's desiring and desired women are caught in flight at the
edge of the grave; the horror that is staged in many of Baudelaire's
poems about women anticipates the inner petrifying power of Death
as if it were the lover's ally. The spectator of horror is frozen on the
spot like the viewer of the Medusa, or like certain characters glimpsed
in Poe's fiction. The figure seen in the spectacle, however, is in flight.
A second antithesis places the Narrator who speaks in the same
paradoxical state as the woman. She passes by with legs like a statue,
while her potential lover presents himself as petrified and raving mad
(in baroque French, "extravagant"). The sight of her transforms
Baudelaire's desiring subject into a stone, but also into the opposite
of petrification, the wandering movement of passion and excess.
"Crisp6 comme un extravagant," the desiring subject reflects the
antithesis of the woman's passage. Simultaneously frozen and in
flight, this subject of Death strangely resembles (at least in rhetoric)
the admired woman dressed in mourning.
The Narrator's gaze transforms the woman's passage into an
instantaneous image, the French "instantanee" or snapshot; he
captures her image as a photograph or as a kinetoscopic flight of
movement. This portrait in movement anticipates the development
of cinema: since the late eighteenth-century invention of the magic
lantern, modernity has been possessed by the ambition to perfect a
technique for rendering movement in images, for its reproduction
and representation.
Seen through the Narrator's gaze, the woman's passage becomes
an intimate and invisible wound. The stigmata that Benjamin at-
tributes to the Narrator mark the other side of the image. The
deepened gaze that the Narrator plunges into the gaze of the object
in a moment of corresponding vision contrasts with the empty gaze of
many of Baudelaire's women, notably the prostitutes on the street.
Afflicted with an erotic wound, the Narrator searching the empty
streets begins to resemble those prostitutes looking for prey; like
them, he is ready to offer himself in an eroticized exchange. But
unlike them, he is looking for an idealized object. He is the prey of
desire, which Benjamin calls the "being touched strongly" that affects
him ("sexuellen Betroffenheit"). Without proximity, duration, or
words, love wears the widow's veil, or the veil of the image: Woman,
Death, the City. This instant of unbearable love occurs in a minimal
encounter, typical of city life. Benjamin writes: "Wearinga widow's veil
... an unknown woman passes before the Poet's gaze" (WB I: 622).
The poem represents a shock or a catastrophe, an event produced by
the crowd that carries the woman away from the viewer. Benjamin
reads in the subject's first gaze the final one; the poet, he writes, will
be spared rather than deprived.
Several sentences in the "ArcadesWork"indicate the impact of this
sparing: "Baudelaire introduces into lyric poetry the figure of sexual
perversion that seeks its objects in the street. But what is most
characteristic is that he does so with verses like 'crispe comme un
extravagant' in one of his most accomplished love poems" (PWJ21a,
M LN 1019
4). The old battle between Sexus and Eros is fought once more: the
ideal object is shadowed by the object of fantasy, the streetwalker.
Desire remains intact, and so does love. Both are preserved forever
through the fleeting, snapshot-like quality of their image.
The figure of perversion betrays a lyrical sensibility that follows an
unforeseen and possibly fatal path. Desire and violence shape its gaze.
"Trieb," or drive, this gaze is carried by the crowd, and stops at
nothing: it has no modesty before the taboos of religious worship or
the precious obstacles of love. The subject looking for love objects in
the street looks into the eyes of an anonymous woman passing by in
the crowd. The crowd (and its veil) makes his gaze possible. In a note
of the "Flaneur" chapter of Benjamin's Baudelaire book, the gaze
differentiates love in Baudelaire from love in Stefan George: "The
motif of love for a woman passing by is echoed in a poem by the
young George. The decisive moment has escaped him-the stream
that drives the woman, borne along by the crowd, before the poet ...
Baudelaire makes it quite clear that he has gazed deep into the
passing woman's eyes" (WB I: 438). Benjamin does not say the
obvious, namely that George maintains his hold on the inviolable
images of religious worship, while the gaze of the Modern takes
possession of the image. In this instance, Baudelaire the Modern
takes the object of worship off the pedestal; the figure of the Poet
turns his back on cult value.
While George's spirituality may surprise readers of Baudelaire,
George's impact on German letters may explain some of Benjamin's
own tactics in relation to Baudelaire's poem. Benjamin's translation
of the sonnet leads the translator toward the sounding of the abyss,
the translator's primary task. For Benjamin, the "passante"becomes a
lady. The rule of the hidden figure anchors Benjamin's interpretation
of the poem in the phenomenon of the crowd. In the first verse, a
rapid sentence conveys the atmosphere created by the unnamed
crowd: "La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait." The street is
the subject of the sentence, and the poem's first noun. The verb, in
the imperfect, is the rhyme word. The street that expresses the
sounds of the crowd sets the poem in motion like a comet: it does not
stop to let the caesura take a breath. The breath comes only at the
end of the line (and the sentence). By eliminating the caesura in the
first line, Baudelaire discretely distances his poem from traditional
sonnet forms. This beginning in poetic prose gives the sonnet a
modern tone.
The poem's event is finally abandoned to the imperfect tense that
marks the rhyme of beginning and end. But it is the silent woman
who has disappeared with her black veils and her mysterious hypo-
thetical knowledge who emerged at the spot (at the rhyme) where the
invisible crowd gave voice to its bestial suffering. The crowd's violent
expression in an impersonal voice is the backdrop for the Narrator's
silence: his encounter with the woman passing by takes place-or
does not take place-in their silence. The crowd is hyperbolically
expressive while love is a litote, a figure of understatement or missed
connections. The only words that are spoken tell the story of the
sonnet's Narrator.
In the eye of the storm, in the middle of the crowd as hurricane,
the speaking I of the poem evokes the deafening noise with sibilant
and liquid consonants (s, r, 1). Benjamin preserves these sounds in his
translation. He also keeps the syntax of the original, except for the
placement of the verb. The second line shifts from the crowd to the
woman, and delays the grammatical subject until the following line.
The effect of this suspense is a rallentando,as the music begins with
the woman's rhythmic passage: "Longue, mince, en grand deuil,
douleur majestueuse, / Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse."
The slowed effect produced by the pauses ("coupes") in the second
line (and by a very long rhyme word) is coupled with the semantic
effect created by the list of descriptive elements that culminate in the
allegorical abstraction of "majestic grief." The list awaits a subject and
a predicate, which the poem delays. The woman is unnamed, and her
passage occurs in an instant of the past. Benjamin delays the
translation of "majestueuse" until the fourth line.
The woman's form is nearly dissolved in an allegorical process. It
seems to capture her for a musical instant of rallentando,to fetishize
or cut her into pieces in the description, and to anticipate her
disappearance in the abstractions of her mourning and her beauty.
She wears the black clothing of "grand deuil" (formal mourning
clothes): black is worn for the ceremony of Death and Suffering (or
Evil), in consequence of original sin. The adjective "grand"seems to
agree with "majestueuse" and "fastueuse" to underline the effects of
sublime suffering and the royal distance that Baudelaire recognizes in
the baroque.7 The woman's mourning sets her off from the crowd,
except that it discreetly identifies her with the men wearing the "frac"
coats that Baudelaire associates with funerals. In Benjamin's transla-
tion, the formal clothes of mourning go unmentioned; their figure,
like that of the woman herself, is hidden by the veil.
The rhythm of the feminine form emerges in the slowed rhythm of
M LN 1021
the alexandrine and the rhyme words that give it a singular form. In
general, rhyme words are particularly strategic in Baudelaire's poetry;
for him as for his contemporaries, especially Banville, rhyme is the
most important element of prosody.8 Baudelaire gives a virtuoso
performance of rhyme in this sonnet; he moves away from traditional
forms and yet the sonnet displays the three types of rhyme found in
French poetry. One effect of rhyme in "A Une Passante" is the
emphasis on the break between the quatrains in brace rhyme and the
tercets in alternating rhyme with a final couplet.
Baudelaire's rhyme words mark the dramatic presentation of the
woman passing by with baroque gravity and the depth of mourning;
the solemn display of "fastueuse"echoes the grandeur of "majestueuse."
In the eyes of the solitary flaneur, the hand and leg of the woman-
statue seem to be isolated like fetish-objects or ruins from antiquity.
They are allegorical fragments of a feminine body that has already
been divided into descriptive elements. The subject and the predicate
of the first quatrain linger into the beginning of the second quatrain;
the effect is to link the quatrains and to accentuate the instance of
silence and loss that separates them from the tercets (or sestet). "Une
femme passa"-she passes by like a queen in mourning, but the noisy
city is the stage and the stage-set. A vague fantasy of the woman who
walks the street as a sexual commodity slips into this representation.
In Second Empire Paris, the anonymity of prostitutes offered to the
desiring gaze of observers aroused bourgeois masculine indignation
and fear: the controversy around Manet's "Olympia"gives substantial
journalistic evidence of these emotions, especially in connection with
the "honest women"-bourgeois wives and daughters-who could no
longer be visually distinguished from the "fallen"daughters of Eve on
city streets.9 The woman passing through the crowd in Baudelaire's
poem bears the stigmata of love. Like Baudelaire, perhaps, Benjamin
clearly takes pleasure in identifying her black form, intimate with
death, the anonymous identity of a woman drifting in search of
desire. This woman is both living flesh and exhumed statue, body and
monument.
The fourth line is a perfect alexandrine, with balanced hemistichs,
balanced participles and nouns, and equally divided repetitions of
nasal vowels and liquid consonants. The line is divided between
images of the woman's dance-like movement and precise reflections
of fashion: "Soulevant, balancant le feston et l'ourlet." The erotic
terms of the line remind us that the body enters into the process of
mourning, and that fashion offers a sign for the pain and suffering of
loss. In the Salon of 1846, Baudelaire comments on male fashion that

"all of us are celebrating a funeral" (CB II: 494). The etymology of the
festoon adds to this macabre celebration: the Italian "festone" is a
holiday ornament, a garland composed of flowers and leaves and
hung in an arc; in architecture, the festoon is an ornament figuring a
garland; in sewing, it is an embroidered or lacy border. Navigating the
images of nature and artifice, the festoon echoes the hem, a stitched
fold of fabric that finishes the dress.
The measure of the dance places in the rhyme word the leg ... of
a statue. It rhymes with murder, in "the pleasure that kills." For
Benjamin, reader and translator, the movement of the hand raising
the dress, in a hinted evocation of sexual signaling, overwrites the
rhythm of the dance. Does this woman present the image of an idol,
an offering, or a commodity? The ambiguity or ambivalence does not
lessen the allegorical power of her image.
Her erotic anonymous presence reminds us that the fantasies of
the Second Empire highlight a new feminine presence. Hundreds of
books and images bear witness to the intriguing and troubling impact
of the feminine. Artists and historians emphasize the new freedom of
women in the city. But the new liberty granted to women ultimately is
reduced to the subtle freedom of anonymity in the street, as shown in
Baudelaire's sonnet. The violent reactions in the Second Empire
include male fantasies of imaginary conspiracies among prostitutes in
order to seize power over men. In this fantasy, it is worth noting that
the principal weapon is the crowd, where fallen women mingled with
the women of the bourgeoisie. The hysterical reactions documented
in the controversy over Manet's "Olympia"lead from the naked gaze
of the courtesan-like nude, propped on pillows in Manet's boudoir
scene, to the unspoken desire of those proper women, also let loose
in the streets, and to the fear that they too might decide to follow the
path of desire.
In the line "Moi, je buvais, crisp6 comme un extravagant," Ben-
jamin reads an instant of desire that hits the subject with the violent
power of a shock. This violent event is conveyed by an analogy, in the
typical Baudelairean simile of "comme" (like). The epithet of "an
extravagant" is borrowed from the baroque to evoke the subject's
rapture in the terms of madness. Benjamin plays up the impact of this
erotic extravagance, and transforms the metaphoric drinking into the
surrender to intoxication, corruption, ruin . . . or someone. In this
line, the rhythm and punctuation of the first three syllables mark a
staccato effect, a syncopation, and the caesura occurs at the second
M LN 1023
comma. The hemistich beginning with "crispe" vibrates with the

occlusive, sibilant, and liquid consonants that form something like a
name for the anonymous woman. "Boire dans son oeil" unveils the
instant of erotic intoxication in the hyperbole of the Narrator's gaze.
"Jebuvais"echoes the vowels of the first rhyme while it anticipates the
sonnet's ultimate rhyme ("je vais / savais").
The image of drinking from her eyes indicates the poet's ambiva-
lent attitude toward the object of desire. The woman in the poem is
magical or fatal; like the wine that Isolde offers to Tristan, the gaze
that Baudelaire's Narrator consumes figures their relations. Bor-
rowed from the conventional poetics of courtly love, Baudelaire's
image is sexualized by the street context and deconventionalized by
the hyperboles of the Narrator's ambivalence. In "Le Balcon," Baude-
laire reveals the unnamed love object in the same terms of drink and
consumption: the woman is both nectar and poison. In "A Une
Passante," the image of the subject drinking in the woman's eyes is
the most sensual and intimate connection between the spectator and
the feminine figure. It marks the instant of their encounter with the
power of poetic fusion and the "fondu" (melting, dissolving) of
correspondance,celebrated in Baudelaire's introduction to Spleen de
Paris.
In the enjambment and the rejet of lines 6 and 7, the alternation
between the Narrator's self-reference ("moi") and the woman ("elle")
again carries the reader's attention toward the woman. At the precise
instant of the gaze, the woman's eye infinitely expands in the
metaphor of the "livid sky where the storm brews." Elsewhere in
Baudelaire, the livid sky is libertine, and therefore emptied of the
blue sublime: here, Baudelaire portrays the Parisian sky as the stage
set of a sexual drama. The hyperbole of line 7 recalls the hyperbole of
the first verse and its crowd surrounding the speaking I. This echo
occurs at the moment when the woman's eye becomes the metonymic
image of the vast sky.
In the violence of hyperbole, the woman passing by becomes the
veiled image of the sky and the crowd. Her admirer enters the storm
for the second time. He enters her. In contrast to this scenario, in the
poem "AUne Madone [To a Madonna]," the lover who speaks in the
name of his love to a woman begins by interiorizing his madonna
figure inside himself. Later he enters her, in the breaking of the
taboo that maintained her as an object of his adoration. He ultimately
resembles the Narrator of "A Une Passante," who plunges into the
drifting course of desire and its metonymic flow or flight. Frozen at
the spot of vision, he projects himself into the distance with his gaze.
The figure who gazes at his madonna is riveted to a cult object,
motionless as a statue. She will not pass him in the street, and he, who
declares himself in an ex-voto(from the Latin formula: ex votosuscepto,
following the vow taken) will have to sacrifice her in order to make
her disappear. His ambivalent worship of her has already divided her
into the separate pieces of a ruin or an allegory.
The Catholic ex-votois characterized by a formula of recognition. In
Baudelaire, this appreciative recognition follows a particular path,
since the woman adored in the first stanza will incarnate the Blessed
Virgin Mary in the second, when the cult becomes a satanic celebra-
tion of violence and ritual sacrifice. The lover in the poem will not
play the lover who respects the taboos of the cult of courtly love: his
love is tinged with libertine blackness, with violence, and pleasure. In
this way, Baudelaire adds to the resonances of medieval and Renais-
sance allegory the modern allegory that bears his signature. The
nameless erotic object who plays the Madonna is constructed as an
allegorical form divided into pieces and fragments. Her status is
underscored by the poet's use of capital letters in the lover's portrayal
of her. The lover's representation of her includes the artifices of the
emblem and of statuary,and an emphasis on death. It is unfortunate
for her that she has a heart, made for suffering. The lover's adoration
and worship succumb to "le mal": evil corruption, suffering, and
destruction take possession of her.
In the encounters of correspondence, between the visible mourn-
ing of the woman passing by and the elegy of the solitary flaneur, the
woman vanishes. Modern allegory formulates the montage of Woman,
Death, and the City.When Baudelaire combines the cult of the Virgin
with courtly love, the New takes on the form of evil and suffering that
devour the Adorer from within himself: evil arouses his ferocity, and
modern allegory is represented by the sadistic anticipation of the
second stanza ("A Une Madone"). The poet's strategy reflects an
effort to free himself of the romantic vision of the feminine. Baudelaire
attempts to render virtual the figure of the woman on the pedestal:
his Narrator (or figure of the Poet) must get rid of her in order to
take possession of her in memory. He reconstructs her as an image
that takes its truth from the resonances of allegory. The veiled femi-
nine image is a fleeting one: she arouses the desire of the extravagant
Narrator, and is lost in a labyrinth typical of the baroque. In "A Une
Madone," the emblematic cult image absorbed in the cult of worship
and blasphemy is frozen in the niche of a medieval chapel. Her
M LN 1025
idealized image is caught in stone: she hovers over him. His sadistic
violence is a response to her permanent presence. In both poems,
melancholy and evil-or desire and its blackness-set off an explo-
sion, a flash in the night.
In the instant of the glance, the melancholic sees the object of
desire in the mirror of resemblance that Baudelaire calls analogy.
From the romantic use of the term that comes to Baudelaire most
powerfully from Edgar Allan Poe, analogy becomes a form of
Baudelairean correspondence. Benjamin names it as "die Ahnlichkeit"
or similarity. In "A Une Passante," the flaneur's loss and inner
mourning are reflected in the veiled figure of the woman in black.
The drama of love lost is played out in the instant of her passing; the
moment of the Narrator's gaze places the "Passante" in a cityscape
that is the stage for a beautiful celebration of Death. In the quasi-
liturgical verse of "A Une Madone," the blackness of the interior
space is illuminated by the flame of love that burns before the statue
of the Virgin; eventually, however, this fire will destroy Her statue.
With some subtle shifts of liturgical emphasis and some role reversals,
Baudelaire transforms mariolatry, the worship of the Virgin, into a
cult of Death. The subject's adoration of his Madonna ritually breaks
her body in pieces. In the end, the lover-the apostate of Courtly
Love-ritually pierces her heart.
Line 8 of "A Une Passante" reveals the woman's eyes (or the
allegorical singular, her eye) as the secret source of the violence
celebrated with venom in "A Une Madone." The Narrator drinks
from her glance "La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue." The
grammatically and rhythmically identical hemistichs form a perfectly
balanced line of verse: it places the fascination of Eros and the fatality
of Sexus in equilibrium. "Sweetness"and "pleasure" are the perfectly
romantic (and banal) abstractions that represent them: sweetness is
fascinating, but pleasure can kill. The roles are reversed in "A Une
Madone," when the lover's erotic intoxication proves fatal to the
beloved woman.
The in-depth gaze cannot last: "Un eclair, puis la nuit!" The eye of
the woman and the eye of the storm come together in the consumed
instant of the gaze that begins the first tercet. The line is divided into
trimeter: the caesura occurs at the moment when the subject apostro-
phizes the fugitive as "tu," the pronoun of familiarity, love, or
intimacy. The pronoun and the apostrophe occupy the two tercets.
A key element of the poem and of Baudelaire's aesthetic is the
word "beauty":it falls at the rhyme, and follows the adjective that gives
its form to the woman and to her modern form of beauty: "fugitive."
The woman's passage through the street and the crowd locates her in
a panoramic view of flight and movement. Her silhouette appears
against this backdrop; when her beautiful form strikes the Narrator's
gaze, the crowded street recedes in the background. Benjamin puts
this beauty aside: he keeps only a trace of it in the veil and the
shimmering of the crowd that displays a phantasmagoric image of the
city. This veil is essential to the Baudelairean gaze: "In Baudelaire,
Paris becomes the object of lyric poetry for the first time. This poetics
is not an art of nostalgia for the Homeland, but rather, the glance of
the Allegorist that hits the city is the glance of the alienated one. It is
the gaze of the Flaneur, whose way of life disguises in a consoling
nimbus the future distress of the city dweller" (WB V.I: 54). In the
French project description of 1939 that reworks most of the elements
of the 1935 project description, Benjamin translates "Schimmer"as "a
mirage." The veil is present in the text of 1935 as a figure of
phantasmagoria: "The crowd is the veil through which the familiar
city waves to the flaneur as a phantasmagoria" (WB V.I: 54). In the
"Arcades Book," Benjamin writes: "Die 'Menge' ist ein Schleier, der
dem flaneur die 'Masse' verbirgt [The 'crowd' is a veil that hides the
'masses' from the flaneur]" (PWJ 59, 2).
The feminine object's gaze fatally hits the Narrator drinking from
her eyes at the precise moment when the vision of her reawakens his
sexuality. Benjamin performs a kind of cover-up at this point in his
translation: the woman's beauty and her gaze are distanced by a
scintillating, shimmering veil. The one who is reborn in this gaze-
the one, according to Benjamin, who is in the process of becoming-
locates the instantaneous sexual experience in the context of the
sublime renunciation of love. This renunciation echoes the fatal
moment of succumbing to her gaze, when he drinks from her eyes.
Baudelaire inscribes an explosive flash of lightning in the split second
of their chance encounter. Body and soul, Baudelaire's poetics
confronts the instant of desire exposed with the lyrical gaze of love. In
the terms of Benjamin's allegorical vocabulary of love, it might be
said that Sexus confronts Eros.
The Narrator experiences desire as a violent tension comparable to
shock-a violence that takes the subject over the edge, in this case,
into the madness and rapture of extravagance. The poem presents
the scene of sexual impact as a renunciation of love. In this sense, "A
Une Passante" anticipates the loss of Aura. The sonnet stages the
drama of the Modern subject, wandering alone in the streets. The
M LN 1027
prose poem entitled "Perte d'Aur6ole [Loss of a Halo]" offers a

poetics of the modern subject slipping into prose: the renunciation of
lyric poetry and the sacrifice of the poet's romantically divine image
also anticipate the loss of Aura. In "A Une Passante," the anticipation
of the loss or denial of love starts with the crowded street of the first
line and continues in the explicit sexuality of the encounter in the
tenth line. In his reading as well as in his translation, Benjamin
emphasizes the illusory quality of the instant of vision; the crowd
becomes a semi-opaque screen or a fata morganathat hides the image
of his desire from the Narrator. Benjamin's screen transforms
Baudelaire's personified abstraction of the woman as a "beauty"into
a phantasmagoria of mourning and a three-fold allegory: 1) she is the
crowd's veil; 2) this veil is worn by the city in the guise of a woman;
and 3) the formal clothes of mourning connect her with the majesty
of tragic women in antiquity and the details of modern fashion.
Baudelaire's Woman passing in the street incarnates the beauty of
mourning, the hidden key figure ("verborgene Schlfisselfigur") of
passing figures who gaze at each other and are forever separated by
Night. For an instant, the allegorical Night of eternity appeared to be
the night of intimacy evoked in "Le Balcon." That night thickened
like a screen ("s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison") to hide the lovers
as if they were conspirators. Benjamin borrows this screen for his
theoretical framework for modernity. The screen of Baudelairean
intimacy that Benjamin designates as a cover-up resonates in his
theoretical framework like the navel of the dream in Freud's interpre-
tation. The navel of a particular dream, according to Freud, is
attached to the dream-text like an opaque spot or a screen that blocks
the access to its meaning. The navel attaches to the dream when the
dream analysis seems to be blocked by a mysterious power of
repression. Freud remarks that the navel of the dream is anchored in
Death.10
In the ruin of Aura, Eros disappears forever, and Sexus wears the
veil like a mask. The veiled figure is anonymous, and like a nameless
prostitute, she is seening lifting her dress and revealing her legs. This
moment reveals the scandalous union of Eros and Sexus, Benjamin's
own allegorizations of idealized love and excessive, unmediated
desire: Eros and Sexus combine the tragic grandeur of antiquity and
the graphic self-advertising of modernity. This union of love and sex
must have appeared difficult if not impossible to Benjamin, the
Jewish Berliner drifting along the paths of Parisian desire, as it must
have appeared to Baudelaire the allegorist. Baudelaire saw a painful
complicity linking the artist and the prostitute, and something like
the commodification of the object of desire, but nothing like
Benjamin's Eros, the magically charged elixir of love. The sonnet "A
Une Passante" dramatizes the old quarrel between Eros and Sexus; its
Night of eternity is the site of their reconciliation.1
The negation of line 11 ("Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'6ternite?")
shifts the encounter outside mortal life and into eternity. "Eternity"is
the rhyme word, with beauty ("beaute"). These words are the mascu-
line rhyme within an alternating rhyme form; the feminine rhyme
words of "renaitre" and "peut-etre" signal the rebirth of desire and
the Narrator's fearful anticipation. The masculine and feminine
rhymes alternate, according to the classical rule (confirmed by
Ronsard and rendered absolute by Malherbe) that Baudelaire gener-
ally follows. A gender reversal is an unexpected poetic effect that
results from this alternate rhyme: beauty becomes masculine, and
reborn virility takes on a feminine appearance.
The first verse of the final tercet posits eternal night as an abyss,
since the desired repeated encounter will not take place. The breaks,
the syncopated effect of "Ailleurs"and "jamais,"and the exclamation
points make these lines brittle as glass. The fluidity of the first tercet
is underscored by the staccato effect of the second. Baudelaire's
musical form of tension and brittleness is linked to the petrification
that Benjamin reads in other Baudelairean portrayals of modernity.12
The final tercet shapes the Narrator's lament about the lost opportu-
nity for love: the woman's fluid movement of flight is in stark contrast
to the Narrator's brittle immobility. Baudelaire underlines 'jamais" in
anticipation of the final couplet ('je vais / savais") and internal
echoes.
Baudelaire's sonnet is filled with parallels and symmetrical forms.
The remarkable symmetry in grammar, syntax, and prosody is un-
usual among the love poems of The Flowers of Evil. The central
encounter implies neither the sadism nor the irony that most
frequently characterize the lover's reflection of his object. The last
two lines of the sonnet perfect the poem's symmetry, when the
Narrator declares himself in a double passage and a doubled igno-
rance. The anonymous woman takes flight in rhythmic movement,
and leaves the Narrator with his unexpected hyperboles of love.
The street is the theater of this crisis of love that begins with the
view of a woman and ends with an apostrophe to the woman seen and
lost. In "Le Balcon [The Balcony]," an apostrophe to the beloved
begins the poem with her role as a given. If the "mere des souvenirs,
M LN 1029
maitresse des maitresses [mother of memories, mistress of mis-

tresses]" vanishes into thin air later in "Le Balcon," she vanishes from
an interior and does not display herself in the street. In "Le Balcon,"
the alcove scene is seductively invoked through memory. The lover
summons powerfully evocative memories from an imprecise past: he
suspends the woman's undecidable reality by taking her out of the
present tense. The lover of the woman passing by, on the other hand,
does not have a past to invoke in the context of his love. Perhaps the
extravagance of his love is an effect of the total absence of memories
related to its object, a stranger glimpsed in the street.
In the last verse of the sonnet, love turns into knowledge. This love
is simultaneously eloquent and silent; the lover attempts to see the
woman as the Other who knows. In Lacan's seminar entitled Encore,
he suggests that the fantasy of the "autre suppos6 savoir"is integral to
the structure of love: he spells it "amour" to indicate the presence of
the soul.13 But the knowledge that Baudelaire's Narrator accusingly
attributes to the woman who has disappeared forever is tenuous. The
Night of Racine's tragedies and the infinite Night of mystical unknow-
ing reconcile the lover who dies of knowing too much with the
subject who knows only that he loves, and whose night has become an
abyss.
The lover has the last word. The last line of the sonnet is an
exclamation that accuses the beloved of betraying him: "6 toi qui le
savais!"She knew, and yet she continued her course. The imperfect
tense of "savais," the rhyme word, expands the dimension of the
present indicative time frame in the thirteenth line. The moment of
the gaze is complex: the Poet figure falls in love at first sight, but his
gaze remains the gaze of the Allegorist who observes the ruin of the
Aura. This modern gaze takes in the constellation of the Woman,
Death, and the City. Its privileged figures are widows veiled in
mourning and anonymous prostitutes and demi-mondaines.The Sec-
ond Empire opens a window on the antagonism between Eros and
Sexus; Sexus seems to have the upper hand, and Eros is suffering.
The love object is veiled in anonymity and lost in an instant. The crisis
of modernity that Benjamin associates with tradition, with cult value,
and with art value, the crisis that he theorizes as the loss of Aura, also
resonates in Eros. The ruin of Aura is a catastrophe of lost love: it
leaves traces in nearly all of Baudelaire's writings.
The violent shock of love lost produces an echo of Stendhal in
Baudelaire's "Consoling Maxims on Love." But there is no consolation
in a world of aging romanticism and the twilight of auratic love.
Baudelaire's echoes of love in the medieval, Renaissance, and ba-

roque past frequently surrender to a representation of love in crisis,
love that does not occur. This is part of Baudelaire's search for
something New. The non-occurrence of love is Baudelaire's contribu-
tion to the tradition of love lyric, and in a certain sense the end of
that tradition. The end of "A Une Passante" proclaims love in the
realization of its loss. The last line with its past conditional "j'eusse
aim6e" inscribes love in memory: destiny or modernity have spared
the lover his aesthetic passion. Baudelaire's truest representation of
love is sung in the figure of its flight. But the exchange of a gaze has
occurred: the instant of rapid consummation will last forever, in the
antiquity of Souvenir, and in the transports of the Modern.
Baudelaire's sonnet translates love into the terms of modernity:
love emerges in a fragment and disappears in a moment of destruc-
tion. Love is offered as an impossibility and retreats in an image of
anonymity. Like the mistress on the balcony and the underground
madonna, the woman passing by is an enduring image torn from the
passage of time to represent love. Her appearance, as she passes by, is
the object of the lover's gaze, the image of desire and the flight of
time. Only the letters and lines of a love poem can preserve her
image. As the object of a lover's discourse, this feminine figure evokes
the distant magic of Eros, but the modernity that puts an end to Eros
shows her to the Narrator as an apparition, an erotic mirage or
illusion. Her appearance contains the figure of Sexus, who dispenses
with distance and marks the approach of Death. In Baudelaire's
poem, Love falls into the abyss of a Night without end. Benjamin
locates the fugitive beauty of the sonnet in the Night of the Hidden
Figure.
CarnegieMellon University
NOTES
1 The English translation of "A Une Passante" (XCIII) is mine. The French text is
quoted from Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvrescompletes(Paris: Gallimard, 1975), vol. 1,
92-93. For commentary on "A Une Passante," and "Tableaux parisiens," see Les
Fleursdu Mal, edited by Jacques Crepet and Georges Blin (Paris:J. Corti, 1942),
460-61, and especially Claude Pichois, OC 1, 1022-23.
On Baudelaire, see Claude Pichois's bibliography in OC 2, the updated
bibliography in the Bulletin Baudelairien,and the following: Hans-Jost Frey, Studies
in PoeticDiscourse:Mallarme,Baudelaire,Rimbaud,Holderlin(Stanford: Stanford UP,
1996); Paul de Man, The Rhetoricof Romanticism(NY: Columbia UP, 1984); Ross
Chambers, "'Je' dans les Tableaux Parisiens de Baudelaire" in NineteenthCentury
FrenchStudiesvol. 9 (1980-81): 59-68; by the same author, "Baudelaire's Street
M LN 1031
Poetry" in NineteenthCenturyFrenchStudiesvol. 13 (1985): 244-59; by the same

author, Mlancolie et opposition:les debutsdu modernismeen France(Paris:Jose Corti,
1987), 167-86; Jonathan Culler, "Intertextuality and Interpretation: Baudelaire's
'Correspondances"' in Nineteenth-CenturyFrench Poetry, edited by Christopher
Prendergast (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 118-37; Richard Stamelman,
LostBeyondTelling(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990); by the same author, "L'Anamorphose
baudelairienne: L'Allegorie du 'Masque"' in Cahiersde l'Associationinternationale
des etudes francaises vol. 41 (1989): 251-67; Jean Starobinski, "Sur quelques
repondants allegorique du poete" in RHLF67 (1967): 402-12;James Hiddleston,
"Baudelaire et l'art du souvenir" in Les Fleursdu Mal: L'interioritede laforme (Paris:
SEDES, 1989); J.D. Hubert, LEsthetiquedes Fleursdu Mal (Geneve: Pierre Cailler,
1953); Marc Eigeldinger, Poesieet metamorphose (Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1973);
Geoffrey Hartman, Criticismin the Wilderness(New Haven: Yale U P, 1980); Victor
Brombert, The Hidden Reader(Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1988); John E. Jackson,
La Mort Baudelaire (Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1982) and by the same author,
Passions du sujet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1990), 203-42; Georges Poulet, La
Poesie&clat&e:Baudelaire/Rimbaud (Paris:PUF, 1980); Nathaniel Wing, "The Danaides
Vessel: On Reading Baudelaire's Allegories" in TheLimitsof Narrative(Cambridge:
Cambridge U P, 1986), 8-18. The essays of Theophile Gautier, Paul Valery, Marcel
Proust, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Auerbach, as well as essays by Noyer-Weidner,
Felix Leakey, Michael Riffaterre, Margaret Gilman, Alison Fairlie, Bernard
Weinberg, Gerald Antoine, and Wolfgang Drost are collected in WegederForschung:
Baudelaire,edited by Alfred Noyer-Weidner (Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buch-
gesellschaft, 1976), Band cclxxxiii. See the notes below for references to "A Une
Passante"and melancholy in the writings of Chambers, Stamelman, and Starobinski.
2 References to Baudelaire, indicated in parentheses within the text, refer to
volumes 1 and 2 of the Gallimard Pleiade edition by Claude Pichois, Charles
Baudelaire,Oeuvrescompletes(Paris: Gallimard, 1975 and 1976).
3 References to the writings of Walter Benjamin refer to the edition of the complete
works by Rolf Tiedemann: GesammelteSchriften(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1974-89). The abbreviation of PW refers to the unfinished manuscript of the
"Passagenarbeit," published as Passagenwerk[Arcades Book] in the Suhrkamp
edition. All translations are mine.
4 See "Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire [On Some Motifs in Baudelaire]" (WB
1.2: 646-47).
5 PWJ47, 6 and PWJ47a, 1. On Baudelaire and Benjamin, see Rainer Nagele, Echoes
of Translation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997); by the same author, "The
Poetic Ground Laid Bare (Benjamin Reading Baudelaire)" in WalterBenjamin:
TheoreticalQuestions,edited by David S. Ferris (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 118-
38; and by the same author, "Traumlekture:Benjamin liest Baudelaire I," Lesarten
der Moderne:Essays (Eggingen: Edition Klaus Isele, 1998), 33-54; Samuel Weber,
"MassMediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin" in
Ferris, ibid., 27-49; Rodolphe Gasche, "The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and
the Early Romantics" in Ferris, ibid., 50-74.
6 Benjamin quotes the passage from "Peintre de la vie moderne" in Charles
Baudelaire,"Die Moderne" (WB I: 571).
7 See Walter Benjamin, Urspriingdes deutschenTrauerspiels[The Origin of the German
Mourning-Play],WB op. cit., 1982, and Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and
Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy(London: Nelson, 1964). On mourning and
melancholy in Baudelaire, see the following: Ross Chambers, "The Storm in the
Eye of the Poem: Baudelaire's 'A Une Passante"' in TextualAnalysis:SomeReaders
Reading, edited by Mary Ann Caws (NY: MLA, 1986), 156-66, and by the same
author, "Pour une poetique du vetement" in Michigan RomanceStudies 1 (1980):
18-46; Richard Stamelman, "The Shroud of Allegory: Death, Mourning and

Melancholy in Baudelaire's Work" in TexasStudies in Literatureand Language 25
(1983): 390-409, and by the same author, Lost Beyond Telling:Representationsof
Death and Absencein ModernFrenchPoetry(Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1990), 3-69; Jean
Starobinski, La melancolieau miroir(Paris:Julliard, 1989), and by the same author,
"L'Immortalite melancolique" in Le Tempsde la reflexion(1982) vol. 3: 231-251.
8 See Albert Cassagne, Versification et metriquede CharlesBaudelaire(Geneve: Slatkine
Reprints, 1972), and the discussion of romantic verse in Maurice de Gramont,
Petit traitede versificationfrancaise (Paris: Armand Colin, 1965).
9 See TJ. Clark, ThePainting of ModernLife (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1984);
Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute (Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1989);
Hollis Clayson, Painted Love (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991); Robert L. Herbert,
Impressionism:Art, Leisure,and Parisian Society(New Haven: Yale UP, 1988); and
Theodore Reff, Manet and ModernParis (U of Chicago P, 1982).
10 Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung(Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1972),
Studienausgabe,Band II, chapter II, 130, and chapter VII: A, 503. (See TheStandard
Edition 4, 110 and 5, 525).
11 See Benjamin's fragment published as Zentralpark5, WB I: 660.
12 On petrification and allegory, see Benjamin's Trauerspielbook and his remarks on
"Le Cygne" in CharlesBaudelaire,cited above. On allegory in Benjamin, see Paul
de Man, "'Conclusions' on Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Translator,"' The
Resistanceto Theory(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986); Rodolphe Gasche,
"SaturnineVision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on WalterBenjamin's
Theory of Language" in Rainer Nigele, Benjamin's (;round, op. cit., 83-104;
Samuel Weber, "Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth, and Allegory in Benjamin's
Origin of the German Mourning Play"in ModernLanguageNotes106 (1991): 465-
500; Carol Jacobs, "Topographically Speaking" in Ferris, 94-117; by the same
author, TheDissimulatingHarmony(Johns Hopkins UP, 1978); Werner Hamacher,
"The Word Wolke-If It Is One" in Nagele, op. cit., 147-176. On Baudelaire,
memory, and "LeCygne"see Hans-JostFrey,"Ueber die Erinnerung bei Baudelaire"
Symposium33: 4 (1979), 312-30; and Richard Terdiman, Present Past (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1993), 107-47.
13 See Jacques Lacan, Le SeminaireXX. Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975). Samuel Weber
makes a similar point in "MassMediauras," op. cit.

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The Night of the Poet: Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Woman in the Street

Author(s): Beryl Schlossman

[To A Woman Passing By

MLN119 (2004): 1013-1032? 2005 by TheJohns HopkinsUniversityPress

from her eye, a livid sky where hurricanes

loss. In the Salon of 1846, Baudelaire comments on male fashion that

comma. The hemistich beginning with "crispe" vibrates with the

prose poem entitled "Perte d'Aur6ole [Loss of a Halo]" offers a

maitresse des maitresses [mother of memories, mistress of mis-

Baudelaire's echoes of love in the medieval, Renaissance, and ba-

Poetry" in NineteenthCenturyFrenchStudiesvol. 13 (1985): 244-59; by the same

18-46; Richard Stamelman, "The Shroud of Allegory: Death, Mourning and

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