Proust admired Baudelaire’s work for many reasons, above all those of the heart ❤️🩹 and the mind.
Translated from French.
Proust admired Baudelaire’s work for many reasons, above all those of the heart ❤️🩹 and the mind. As I continually rediscover them, I find that they share, above all, a talent for metaphor. Many authors use rather clichéd or overly didactic metaphors: Proust and Baudelaire had a genuine flair for the (not so) fortuitous encounter between the thing being compared and the thing to which it is compared, and for the finely crafted phrasing. 🖋️
On 1 June 1921, to mark the centenary of Baudelaire’s birth, @nrf.larevue published an article by Proust entitled “On Baudelaire”, presented in the form of a letter ✉️ to Jacques Rivière. In it, Proust assesses Baudelaire’s work in the light of Vigny and Hugo. He speaks of him above all as a brother in suffering: “Perhaps, alas! one must harbour the approaching death within oneself, be threatened with aphasia like Baudelaire, to possess such lucidity in true suffering, such religious undertones in satanic works.” 🪦
In 1866, Baudelaire had embarked on a lecture tour of Belgium, which, incidentally, was not at all well received by the public or the press 🗞️. Whilst passing through Namur, the poet returned to see a church he described as a “masterpiece of masterpieces”, staggered, then collapsed. Baudelaire had just experienced, in advance… Bergotte’s stroke whilst viewing ‘The View of Delft’, in “The Prisoner”.
However, Proust, who was already a great admirer of Baudelaire, reread his works and carried out research in the spring of 1921 for his article. It was also in the spring of 1921 that he visited the Vermeer exhibition 🖼️ at the Jeu de Paume museum, where he was taken ill. He drew inspiration from this to write ‘The Death of Bergotte’, a passage he continued to revise right up until his final night, on 18 November 1922.
One final curious connection: the church in Namur where Baudelaire collapsed on 16 March 1866, before suffering a stroke that left him with hemiplegia on the 31st, rendering him almost aphasic… is the Church of Saint-Loup. 🐺
As a final gesture of camaraderie, or even brotherhood, between Charles and Marcel. 🖇️
#MarcelProust #proustagram #CharlesBaudelaire #SaintLoup #Namur #Belgique #métaphore #Bergotte #LaPrisonnière #LesFleursduMal
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