On March 13, 1856, a Thursday, Baudelaire was woken at five by Jeanne, who was making a noise shifting a piece of furniture in her room. His awakening interrupted a complex dream. He immediately wrote it down in a letter to his friend Asselineau.
I also include some of my own artwork illustrating the dream.
BAUDELAIRE’S DREAM
It is (in my dream) 2 or 3 in the morning, and I am walking alone along the street. I meet Castille, who, I believe, had various things to attend to, and I tell him I shall accompany him and take advantage of the cab to see to a personal matter. So we take a cab. I felt it my duty to offer to the madam of a great house of prostitution a book of mine that had just come out. On looking at the book I was holding in my hand, it turned out to be an obscene book, which explained to me the necessity to offer the work to that woman.
Moreover, in my head, this necessity was basically an excuse, a chance to screw, on finding myself there, one of the girls of the house, and this implies that, without the need to offer the book, I wouldn’t have dared to go into a house of that kind. I say nothing of all this to Castille, I have the cab stop in front of the door of that house and I leave Castille in the cab, promising myself not to make him wait long. Immediately after ringing and going inside, I realize that my prick is hanging out of the open fly of my pants, and I decide that it is indecent to present myself that way, even in a place of that kind. In addition, since my feet feel very wet, I realize that I am barefoot and that I have stepped in a wet patch at the foot of the stairs. Bah! – I say to myself – I’ll wash them before I get laid, and before leaving the house. I go upstairs. From this moment on the book no longer appears.
I find myself in immense galleries, adjoining, poorly lit, with a sad and run-down look, like old cafés, the reading rooms of once upon a time, or squalid gambling dens. The girls, scattered around those immense galleries, chat with various men, among whom I spot some high school kids. I feel very sad and very intimidated; I’m afraid they will see my feet. I look at them, I realize that one is shod. After a bit I realize that I have shoes on both feet.
What makes an impression on me is that the walls of these immense galleries are adorned with all kinds of drawings, framed. Not all are obscene. There are also architectural drawings and Egyptian figures. Since I feel ever more intimidated and dare not approach a girl, I amuse myself by examining all the drawings with meticulous attention.
In a remote part of one of these galleries I find a highly singular series. In a number of small frames I see drawings, miniatures, photographs. They portray colorful birds with the most brilliant plumage, birds with lively eyes. At times, there are only halves of birds. Sometimes they portray images of bizarre, monstrous, almost amorphous beings, like so many aerolites. In the corner of each drawing there is a note. The girl such and such, aged … brought forth this fetus in the year such and such; and other notes of this kind.”
The thought came to me that that kind of drawing is certainly not made to inspire ideas of love.
Another reflection is this: there really does exist only one newspaper in the world, and it’s Le Siècle, capable of being stupid enough to open a house of prostitution and at the same time put inside it a kind of museum of medicine. In fact, I tell myself suddenly, it was Le Siècle that financed the speculation of this brothel, and the museum of medicine can be explained by its mania for progress, science, and the spread of enlightenment. Then I reflect that modern stupidity and arrogance have their mysterious usefulness, and that often, by virtue of a spiritual mechanics, what was done for ill turns into good.
I admire in myself the rightness of my philosophical spirit.
But among all those beings there is one who has lived. He is a monster born in the house, who stands perpetually on a pedestal. Although he’s alive, he is part of the museum. He’s not ugly. His face is even pleasing, very burnished, of an Oriental color. In him there is a lot of pink and green. He is hunkered down, but in a bizarre and contorted position.
In addition there is something blackish wound several times around his body and his limbs, like a large snake. I ask him what it is and he replies saying that it is a monstrous appendage that starts from his head, something elastic like rubber, and so long, so long that if he wound it around his head like a horse’s tail it would be too heavy and impossible to carry, and so he is obliged to wind it around his limbs, which after all produces a better effect.
I chat for a long time with the monster. He informs me about his troubles and his pains. By that time he has been obliged to stay in that room for years, on that pedestal, for the curiosity of the public. But the main nuisance, for him, is dinnertime … because he is a living being, he has to dine with the girls of the house – staggering along with his rubber appendage as far as the dining room – and there he has to keep it wound around himself or rest it on a chair like a coil of rope, because if he let it drag along the floor, it would pull his head backward.
Moreover he is obliged, he who is small and squat, to eat beside a tall, well-made girl. What’s more he gives me all this information without bitterness. I dare not touch him – but I’m interested in him.
“In that moment (this is no longer a dream) my wife makes a noise with a piece of furniture in her room and this wakes me up. I awake tired, enfeebled, with aching bones, my back, legs and sides all painful. I presume I had been sleeping in the monster’s contorted position.”
The above is a drawing I did in honor of the cursed Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik born on April 29th.
She committed suicide at age 36.
Here I've placed her in the dream of Baudelaire.
It doesn't matter if when love calls
I am dead.
I'll come.
I will always come
if ever
love calls.
—Alejandra Pizarnik
"I know, in a visionary way, that I will die of poetry. Sensation of losing a lot of blood from some wound that I cannot locate"
~ Diaries, 1962
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