Placelessness in Baudelaire’s ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’
Modern Language Review October 2014 [November 2014; February 2015] Page 1 of 11
Abstract
Focussing on the urban heart of the 1861 edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, this ecocritical
analysis is concerned with the poetic consequences of placelessness in ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les
Petites Vieilles’. Establishing a link between versification and environmental alteration, the
unsettling diptych can be perceived as evoking a threshold for place identity amid Haussmann’s
modernization of Paris.
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By the mid-1850s, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s restructuring works were coming to define
Paris (the Rue de Rivoli was developed between 1853 and 1855, and the Boulevard St Michel was
constructed between 1855 and 1859). The project was founded on a desire to prevent insurrectionary
barricades, enhance the health of the Parisian populace, and bring the form of the city into the
modern age as an emblem of the power of Napoleon III. Appointed Prefect of the Seine département
in 1853, Haussmann undertook the modernization of Paris by demolishing older parts of the city,
replacing squalid tenements and winding streets with grand structures and broad boulevards.
Haussmann notes that this process coincided with the idealistic spirit of progress in the Second
Empire: ‘l’exécution des diverses opérations […] de 1858 à 1859 […] était l’éventrement du Vieux
Paris, du quartier des émeutes, des barricades, par une large voie centrale, perçant, de part en part, ce
dédale presque impraticable’.
1
In slightly over fifteen years, Haussmann fundamentally reconfigured
the city at a cost of over two billion francs, displacing over a quarter of a million people (especially
from areas around Les Halles). These demolition and construction works were greeted with varying
degrees of hesitation by residents who felt that their home was no longer recognizable. Edmond de
Goncourt describes the unsettling atmosphere of the transitioning city on 18 November 1860:
Mon Paris, le Paris où je suis né, le Paris des mœurs de 1830 à 1848 s’en va. Il s’en va
par le matériel, il s’en va par le moral. La vie sociale y fait une grande évolution [...]. Je
suis étranger à ce qui vient, à ce qui est, comme à ces boulevards nouveaux sans tournant,
[…] implacables de ligne droite, qui ne sentent plus le monde de Balzac, qui font penser à
quelque Babylone [...] de l’avenir. Il est bête de venir en un temps en construction, l’âme
y a des malaises comme un corps qui essuierait des plâtres.
2
This vanishing of the older incarnation of Paris in material and moral terms entailed uncertainty
about the relationship of humanity to the environment. It was amid this structural and social upheaval
that Baudelaire sought to eke out an existence while refining his only collection of verse, Les Fleurs
du mal (first published on 25 June 1857).
Condemned by the moral authorities of the Second Empire for his tales of the disturbing
elements of metropolitan life, Baudelaire was obliged to excise six poems containing elements of
vampirism and lesbianism two months after the release of the collection. The thirty-six-year-old
author resolved to issue a new version of the work, reconceived in its entirety, and the second edition
of Les Fleurs du mal was published on 9 February 1861. Its structure was bolstered by the addition
of thirty-five poems to the ninety-four permitted pieces, as well as by the creation of a
groundbreaking second section, the ‘Tableaux parisiens’.
3
Following the eighty-five ennui-infused
accounts in the first section (‘Spleen et idéal’), the eighteen urban vignettes of the ‘Tableaux
parisiens’ offer a variegated sketch of Parisian society undergoing Haussmann’s modernization
projects, and presage the desire to flee the trappings of everyday life in the four concluding sections
1
Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Mémoires du Baron Haussmann, 3 vols (Paris: Victor-Havard, 1890-
93), III (1893), 54.
2
Edmond de Goncourt & Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 9
vols (Paris: Charpentier, 1891-96), I (1891), 346.
3
Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. by C. Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1975-76), I
(1975), 82-104.
PLACELESSNESS IN BAUDELAIRE Page 2 of 11
(‘Le Vin’; ‘Fleurs du mal’; ‘Révolte’; ‘La Mort’). The lowly protagonists of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’
(ranging from a red-haired beggar-girl to seven old men) are situated alongside the self-conscious
narrator as part of an urban life-cycle. The metrocentric section heralds the threshold that Baudelaire
was approaching at the end of the 1850s, as he began the transition to the prose poetry of Le Spleen
de Paris (published posthumously on 19 June 1869).
‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, two of the most innovative pieces in the
‘Tableaux parisiens’, unfold amid the urban jumble of Haussmannian Paris. Marked by the spectre of
marginalization and the homogenizing influence of the crowd, these two anthropocentric vignettes
foreground the struggle between tradition and progress that the latter half of the nineteenth century
encapsulates. David Harvey dissects Baudelaire’s complicated relationship with tradition:
There is a contradiction in Baudelaire’s sense of modernity after the bittersweet
experience of creative destruction on the barricades […] in 1848. Tradition has to be
overthrown, violently if necessary, in order to grapple with the present and create the
future. But the loss of tradition wrenches away the […] anchors of our understanding and
leaves us drifting, powerless.
4
In ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, the old-world values embodied by the elderly men
and women are juxtaposed with the modernizing world of the city, highlighting the powerlessness
and blurred identities at the heart of the abjection of Baudelaire’s protagonists. As the narrator
immerses himself in the heterotopic spaces of Paris, a creeping atmosphere of powerlessness raises
questions about the effects of urban life on humanity and communication. William Sharpe asserts
that the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ are ‘the climax of Baudelaire’s confrontation with the disintegratory
forces of urban life’.
5
Implying a transference of uncertainty from physical space to poetic space, the
troubling descriptions and prosody of ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ upset
reassuring preconceptions of stability based on an optimistic vision of progress by bringing to light
blurred identities and disintegrated connections.
Evoking the homogenizing effects of urban life, the nigh identical figures in ‘Les Sept
Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ indicate a mistrustful attitude towards the positivity of
modernization. Baudelaire’s unease about the mutating metropolis is channelled through the
discomfiting prosody of the moments in which he is confronted with the disorientating spectres of a
traditional past in the new incarnation of Paris. The sense of non-belonging embodied by the seven
old men and the little old women relates to the swirling rush of crowds and progress that suffuses the
energetic and complex drama of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’. James Lawler asserts that the section
‘breaks with the solitude of salon, bedroom, study to confront the modern city […]. A new lesson is
learned in the urban landscape: […] successive moments of expansion and contraction govern the
man who regards his fellow citizens with fraternal compassion’.
6
The expansiveness of Baudelaire’s
verse arises from prosodic peculiarities that challenge the confines of the alexandrine. Pursuing the
hypothesis that the structure of poetry is influenced by environmental alterations, the shifting
structure of a number of keystone pieces in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du mal can be equated to
the demolition of the sinuous streets of old Paris in favour of capacious boulevards.
Paralleling modernizing changes in the physical landscape, the rhythmic structure of verse
became progressively unstable in the nineteenth century, as poets began to depart from sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century models. The commonplace structure of an alexandrine marked by medial
accentuation between two hexasyllabic hemistichs was called into question by the use of the e caduc
4
David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 15.
5
William C. Sharpe, Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot,
and Williams (Baltimore, NJ: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 40.
6
James R. Lawler, Poetry and Moral Dialectic: Baudelaire’s ‘Secret Architecture’ (Madison, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), pp. 186-87.
PLACELESSNESS IN BAUDELAIRE Page 3 of 11
at the caesura in Romantic verse, as well as by the emergence of the alexandrin trimètre (containing
three tetrasyllabic units) as an alternative rhythm. The verse of Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier
(Baudelaire’s chief predecessors) often breaks from the classical understanding of the caesura,
demonstrating that the alexandrine was becoming more fluid in the era preceding the publication of
Les Fleurs du mal. This progressive deterritorialization of poetic space is perpetuated through
Baudelaire’s expansive concept of his art, symbolized by the peculiarities of versification in the
‘Tableaux parisiens’. David Evans notes that ‘the verse poems composed during 1858-59, added to
the 1861 edition, mark in both their content and their form a radical departure from the 1857
edition’.
7
The poems composed for the 1861 edition inventively foreground the difficulties of the
transition to modernity for Paris and its inhabitants. The extraordinary presences in the ‘Tableaux
parisiens’ demonstrate that there is something momentous at stake for poetry in the changing form of
the city. In order to get to the heart of the upheaval that Baudelaire’s verse encompasses, it is helpful
to consider it from an ecocritical perspective, using the optic of place identity.
Spatial and relational knowledge is developed through familiarization with fixed topographic
referents, around which our everyday existence and movements revolve. The reconfiguration of a
familiar setting consequently represents a quasi-traumatic event, involving a feeling of
disconnectedness that is proportional to the magnitude of the personal association with the bygone
incarnation of a site. Edward Relph espouses the idea of ‘placelessness’ as a way of conceptualizing
the debilitating consequences of ‘the weakening of distinct and diverse experiences and identities of
places’
8
on human consciousness. The narrator and several of the protagonists in the ‘Tableaux
parisiens’ exhibit the effects of weakened place identities: they find it difficult to inhabit Paris,
despite their longstanding relationship with the city. Instead of dwelling-places, Baudelaire’s vision
of the mutating metropolis evokes anonymous and anonymizing spaces that cannot sustain the
figures who move through them, leading to the type of disorientation and estrangement identified by
Relph: ‘existential outsidedness involves a self-conscious and reflective […] alienation from people
and places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world, and of not belonging’.
9
The
descriptions and versification of ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ are characterized by
the negative consequences of encounters with alterity, since the prosodic volatility of the diptych
increases according to the level of destabilization in the narrator’s surroundings. The unsettling
content and form of the two poems thus bear the hallmarks of a quasi-infernal atmosphere of
anonymization and disconnection, provoked by the metamorphosing structure of Paris.
The dépaysement at the heart of Baudelaire’s verse can be psychogeographically illuminated
by Marc Augé’s proposal that ‘jamais […] les repères d’identification collective n’ont été aussi
fluctuants’.
10
The ‘Tableaux parisiens’ evoke fluctuations in comforting points of reference, since the
heterotopic spaces of modernizing Paris lack the traits of the older elements of the city that
stimulated identification. In contrast to the reassuring qualities of time-weathered places, the spaces
of Baudelaire’s verse are steeped in an atmosphere of rootlessness, disconnectedness and ambiguous
identities. Augé observes that ‘[la] pluralité des lieux […] et l’effet de “dépaysement” qui en résulte
[…] introduisent entre le voyageur-spectateur et l’espace du paysage qu’il parcourt ou contemple une
rupture qui l’empêche d’y voir un lieu, de s’y retrouver pleinement’.
11
Embodying environmental
changes, Baudelaire’s verse encompasses several unsettling aspects that evoke the peculiarity of the
rewoven fabric of Paris due to Haussmann’s remodelling works. By focussing on the traces of
7
David E. Evans, Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 81.
8
Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), p. 6.
9
Relph, Placelessness, p. 51.
10
Marc Augé, Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris: Seuil, 1992),
p. 51.
11
Augé, Non-lieux, p. 108.
PLACELESSNESS IN BAUDELAIRE Page 4 of 11
placelessness in ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ and ‘Les Petites Vieilles’, it is possible to shed new light on the
scope of Baudelaire’s changing relationship to societal and prosodic tenets in the 1861 edition of Les
Fleurs du mal.
Taking into account elements of Baudelaire’s versification that can be interpreted as enacting
urban experience during Haussmannization, this ecocritical analysis will use ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ as
an exemplar of key prosodic devices that can be linked to place identity, before considering the
reconfiguration of the expressive resources of the alexandrine in ‘Les Petites Vieilles’ from the
perspective of placelessness and metropolitan ecology. Focussing on ‘Les Sept Vieillards’, the three
features that will be scrutinized as indicators of diminishing referents in poetic space are: first, the
submersion of the caesura in the flow of a line due to the elision of an e caduc, creating a tighter
juncture between the sixth and seventh syllables that diminishes medial accentuation; second,
enjambement within and between stanzas (along with concomitant rejets and contre-rejets),
involving sense overflowing prosodic boundaries; third, the strategic use of rhyme that is not riche or
léonine, indicating a weakening of the borders of verse. The initial two of these three devices evoke
increased fluidity in Baudelaire’s verse due to the diminution of traditional markers of rhythm.
Instances of meagre rhymes augment this phenomenon, as they insinuate degradation in poetic space
because of their decreased richness. Taken together, these structural aspects are suggestive of an
evolving relationship between versification and environmental factors in Baudelaire’s later verse. It
will ultimately be demonstrated that the prosodic mechanisms at the heart of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’
indicate a threshold for poetry that is analogous to the material transition represented by
Haussmann’s reconfiguration of Paris.
Les Fleurs du mal, XC, ‘Les Sept Vieillards’
‘Les Sept Vieillards’
12
is the fifth poem in the ‘Tableaux parisiens’, the ninetieth piece in Les Fleurs
du mal, and the immediate antecedent of ‘Les Petites Vieilles’. Following the vision of the tumult
and displacement caused by modernization in ‘Le Cygne’ (‘Le vieux Paris n’est plus// (la forme
d’une ville | Change plus vite, hélas!// que le cœur d’un mortel)’ (LXXXIX.7-8)), the confrontation
with the quasi-hallucinogenic spectacle of seven almost indistinguishable old men destabilizes the
narrator’s consciousness, driving him to the brink of madness. A banal street (reminiscent of ‘Le
Soleil’, with its ‘vieux faubourg’ (LXXXVII.1)) is transformed into the site of a walking nightmare.
Compounding the motif of physical degradation in ‘Le Cygne’ (‘Je pense à la négresse,/ amaigrie et
phtisique, | Piétinant dans la boue’ (LXXXIX.41-42)), the unceasing multiplication of the initial old
man is suggestive of the debilitating flows and cyclical processes of metropolitan life during
Haussmannization. The poem offers an insight into the infernality of immersion in a city that lacks
comforting referents and familiar figures, as identities and sense become blurred.
Five instances of a submerged caesura at the beginning and end of the thirteen quatrains of
‘Les Sept Vieillards’ (two in the opening three quatrains; three in the concluding three quatrains)
offer a preliminary indication of the unstable place identity of the piece. The submerged caesura due
to the elision of the e caduc in the sixth line (‘Les maisons, dont la brume/ allongeait la hauteur’)
signals the spatial uncertainty of the poem, paralleling the transformative effects of the mist on the
physical environment of Paris. This emphasis on fluidity in the early stages echoes the foggy
atmosphere of the first ‘Spleen’ vignette (‘les faubourgs brumeux’ (LXXV.4)) fifteen poems earlier.
Ross Chambers draws attention to the climatic phenomenon with which ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ opens:
‘Baudelaire’s “brouillard sale et jaune [...]” [is] invasive, constrictive, and polluting like dangerous
industrial waste’.
13
Extrapolating this concept of corrupting envelopment, the haze can be interpreted
as a product of human action that muddles the spatial referents of the poem. The submerged caesura
due to the elision of the e caduc at the heart of the ninth line (‘Un brouillard sale et jaune/ inondait
12
Baudelaire, Œuvres, pp. 87-88.
13
Ross Chambers, ‘Daylight Specter: Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old Men”’, Yale French Studies,
125-26 (2014), 45-65 (p. 52).
PLACELESSNESS IN BAUDELAIRE Page 5 of 11
tout l’espace’) perpetuates the fluidity of the forbidding fog, adding to the atmosphere of uncertainty
that arises from the narrator’s distorted surroundings. Analogous to Haussmann’s reconfiguration of
the spaces of Paris, the reduced accentuation at the midpoint of the line represents an unsettling
diminution of the traditional identity of verse. Rachel Killick focusses on the menace of the tumult in
‘Les Sept Vieillards’:
‘Les Petites Vieilles’ et ‘À une passante’ [...] présentent une expérience urbaine qui, tout
en comprenant des éléments inquiétants, permet un enrichissement du moi au contact de
l’Autre. En revanche, la ville dans ‘Les Sept Vieillards’ et ‘Les Aveugles’ se propose
comme un espace hostile qui enlève au narrateur sa liberté d’action, et le confronte au
spectacle de sa propre impuissance.
14
The narrator’s powerlessness and the escalating instability of the poem are highlighted by the two
cases of a submerged caesura (due to the elision of an e caduc in the forty-second line; due to liaison
in the forty-third line) in the midst of the eleventh quatrain: ‘Sosie inexorable,/ ironique et fatal |
Dégoûtant Phénix, fils/ et père de lui-même’ (42-43). These instances of reduced accentuation at the
midpoint of the line insinuate upsets in the place identity of the poem that equate to the
homogenizing effects of Haussmann’s cyclical reconstruction works on the identity of Paris and its
inhabitants. Akin to alterations in the physical space of the city that disturb established patterns of
behaviour and movement, the reduced medial accentuation in these two lines disrupts the habitual
flow of the alexandrine. Richard Burton claims that ‘what the poet encounters in “Les Sept
Vieillards” is [...] the sheer otherness [...] of existence, [...] of the city, of other people’,
15
foregrounding the feverishness of the poem in the wake of the narrator’s flight from the elderly
protagonists. The submerged caesura due to the elision of the e caduc in the concluding line of the
penultimate quatrain underscores the outpouring of distress unleashed by the encounter: ‘Blessé par
le mystère/ et par l’absurdité!’ (48). Evoking the destabilizing effects of changes in the architecture
of a familiar place, this case of reduced medial accentuation foregrounds the negative consequences
of a physical encounter with alterity. The monstrous eruption of the seven old men cannot be
rationalized, and poetic space convulses in line with the suffering of the narrator’s consciousness.
Five noteworthy cases of elongated phrases and enjambement at key points in the fifty-two
lines offer a second marker of the diminished referential framework of ‘Les Sept Vieillards’.
Following the fluid sketch of the environment in the first three quatrains (prefiguring by fifteen
poems the setting of ‘Le Vin des chiffonniers’ in the ‘cœur d’un vieux faubourg’ (CV.3)), the arrival
of the first old man is remarkable for the extent of the description of the troubling figure, as the
enjambement of sense over two quatrains evokes the disjointedness of Parisian life during
Haussmannization. The phrase between the subject in the thirteenth line (‘un vieillard’) and its
complementary passé simple in the seventeenth line (‘M’apparut’) encompasses forty-two syllables,
warping the thread of the description by elongating it across the stanzaic break. Prosody incarnates
the troubled state of the narrator in the unfolding description, as the unsettling versification
surrounding the appearance of the old man embodies agitation. Exploring the seven versions of ‘Les
Sept Vieillards’, Felix Leakey notes that ‘le ton général du poème [est] déclamatoire et
“pathétique”’,
16
casting the bleakness of Baudelaire’s description of human tragedy in the light of a
new kind of urban mythology centred on destabilized souls. From a declamatory perspective, the
spatial tension in the poem is augmented by the full-stop that signals a visual break between the third
and fourth syllables in the seventeenth line, at which point a liaison elongating the trisyllabic opening
14
Rachel Killick, ‘Espaces du moi, espaces de la ville: Forme et signification dans quatre poèmes
des “Tableaux parisiens”’, Essays in French Literature, 39 (2002), 153-70 (p. 161).
15
Richard D. E. Burton, Baudelaire in 1859: A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 120-21.
16
Felix W. Leakey, Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988, ed. by E. Jacobs (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 145 [‘Les Sept Versions des Sept Vieillards’].