Paris, France

In Literature and Life

To be sure, nineteenth-century Paris has remained in all its mythical glory, to which the world-renowned novelists Balzac and Flaubert contributed much, but there was much else, both in literature and in art. Romanticism, besides its extraordinary flowering in Germany and England, gave to the world the poems of Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo; they may have lived elsewhere, but their political lives were tied up with the capital and its events. The all-important Charles Baudelaire, the bridge between romanticism and symbolism, was the author of unforgettable poems about Paris, about its outcasts and degradation (“A une cadavre” or “To a Corpse”), about its misfits like the poet himself (“L'Albatros” or “The Albatross”), and about its passersby and the possibilities of encounter they offered (“A une passante” or “To a Passerby,” with its yearning: “You, whom I would have loved …”) have marked poetry ever since. His writings about art in his reporting on the various salons yield the surest sense we have of what was going on in the artistic circles of the time. Baudelaire's wanderer or flâneur was the epitome of the urban wanderer—from the store window to the park, from the banks of the Seine to the dance hall, this figure floated or walked or strode. The idea of the Paris walker was endemic to the poetry of the nineteenth century and continued through the twentieth and even now. To be sure, one could walk in the countryside, but the city walker was another phenomenon and an exciting one. [Page 580]And as for the later literary movement of symbolism, its unchallenged leader, Stéphane Mallarmé, held his own salon every Tuesday, leaning on his mantelpiece (wonderfully captured by the great painter of ballerinas and bathers, Edgar Degas, with Auguste Renoir in Mallarmé's living room). These gatherings and Mallarmé's discourse remain the source of the movement in its social and community aspect.

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