Discordant Locations for the Me-ospheric Void: Theophile Gautier vs. La Sylphide

Regina Fletcher Sadono

doi:10.5070/pg7152003072

Discordant Locations for the Me-ospheric Void: Theophile Gautier vs. La Sylphide

Paroles gelées ◽

10.5070/pg7152003072 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Regina Fletcher Sadono

Keyword(s):

Theophile Gautier

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Aquarelles parisiennes: Gautier, Baudelaire, and the Poetry of Urban Watercolours

Nottingham French Studies ◽

10.3366/nfs.2019.0246 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 58 (2) ◽

pp. 170-182

Author(s):

Karen F. Quandt

Keyword(s):

Urban Landscape ◽

Second Empire ◽

Theophile Gautier ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Meeting Point ◽

Mise En Scene ◽

Bleed Through ◽

Fleurs Du Mal

Baudelaire refers in his first essay on Théophile Gautier (1859) to the ‘fraîcheurs enchanteresses’ and ‘profondeurs fuyantes’ yielded by the medium of watercolour, which invites a reading of his unearthing of a romantic Gautier as a prescription for the ‘watercolouring’ of his own lyric. If Paris's environment was tinted black as a spiking population and industrial zeal made their marks on the metropolis, Baudelaire's washing over of the urban landscape allowed vivid colours to bleed through the ‘fange’. In his early urban poems from Albertus (1832), Gautier's overall tint of an ethereal atmosphere as well as absorption of chaos and din into a lulling, muted harmony establish the balmy ‘mise en scène’ that Baudelaire produces at the outset of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ (Les Fleurs du mal, 1861). With a reading of Baudelaire's ‘Tableaux parisiens’ as at once a response and departure from Gautier, or a meeting point where nostalgia ironically informs an avant-garde poetics, I show in this paper how Baudelaire's luminescent and fluid traces of color in his urban poems, no matter how washed or pale, vividly resist the inky plumes of the Second Empire.

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