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MfourM Dark Rooms A Macabre Pantomime by the 1830s, the Romantics, always eager to ‹nd new and unexpected modes of expression, had fallen under the spell of pantomimes.1 In 1842, Théophile Gautier wrote a review of The Used Clothes Peddler (Le Marchand d’habits) for La Revue de Paris.2 He was struck by the hybrid nature of this “strange drama in which laughter is tinged with terror.”3 In the pantomime, Pierrot falls in love with a beautiful Duchess, but since he is too poor to be introduced to her, he kills a used clothes peddler, steals his most resplendent ‹nery, and meets the lady dressed in his illgotten gains. After some time has passed, and Pierrot and the duchess are about to be married, the ghost of the old peddler comes back onto the scene to drag Pierrot to his death. The role of Pierrot was performed by the celebrated mime Jean-Gaspard-Baptiste Deburau. The Romantic fascination with pantomimes such as The Used Clothes Peddler can be attributed in part to Deburau’s charisma. Witnesses remember most of all both his feline agility and his uncanny stillness.4 Pantomimes such as Deburau ’s told stories that left ample room for spectacular acrobatics. (A funambule is a rope dancer; when the Théâtre des Funambules opened in 1816, the actors had no choice but to make their entrance on a tightrope that led up to the stage.)5 But Deburau, according to his contemporaries, carried the pantomime into a more ethereal realm. Théodore de Banville, who published a collection of poems called Odes funambulesques in 1857, said of Deburau that each of his pantomimes was like another rhapsody added to a single long poem.6 The poem came to an end in June 1846, when Jean-Gaspard-Baptiste Deburau died. A few months later, Baudelaire and his friends Théophile Gautier, Théodore de 80 Banville, and Gérard de Nerval attended the opening night of a bleak pantomime entitled Pierrot Servant of Death (Pierrot serviteur de la mort), with Deburau’s older son Paul playing the part originally written for his father .7 The author of the pantomime was Champ›eury, a young shortstory writer who had already been praised by Victor Hugo.8 Gustave Le Vavasseur, a school friend of Baudelaire’s, remembered that the future author of Les Fleurs du mal was obsessed with the original Deburau, JeanGaspard -Baptiste, during his adolescence. Even then, Baudelaire haunted the Théâtre des Funambules.9 If Banville had claimed that Deburau’s pantomimes, when seen one after another, were all episodes of a continuous poem, the same can be said of the Petits poèmes en prose. Each is like a scene from a single pantomime of the type known as pantomime macabre. Paris is the stage set on which Baudelaire’s visions are being acted out. As the only member of the audience who is in on the secret, Baudelaire hides in the shadows of a world that has become a theater. It is impossible to tell whether the stories told in the prose poems are drawn from real life or merely staged for effect. Baudelaire keeps a straight face throughout, maintaining an icy sangfroid no matter how bizarre the scenario. A pantomime is “unnatural ,” to quote Champ›eury’s word; in contemporary terms, the arti‹ciality of the pantomime could be compared to that of a silent ‹lm.10 Gestures, bodily attitudes, and gazes are exaggerated so as to become visible to the furthest reaches of the audience. Pantomimes have no claim to realism or verisimilitude. Their plots are often illogical, the stage sets exaggeratedly arti‹cial. One style of pantomime, called pantomime féerique, used magical tricks, sorcerers, and fairies. Pantomimes always rely on clichés (poncifs). Sadness, joy, and greed are signi‹ed by glaringly legible expressions. Paradoxically, pantomimes can also seem less arti‹cial than spoken theater, because the corporeal language of the actor is understood with an immediacy and clarity that words, especially those spoken in alexandrine verse, rarely achieve. The aim of the pantomime is to reach, through exaggeration, condensation, and simpli‹cation , toward a more primitive truth. In his essay on the comic, Baudelaire de‹nes pantomime both as “the essence of comedy” and as “comedy stripped bare.”11 For Baudelaire, the effect of the comic is to awaken in us a satanic feeling of superiority: we laugh when we watch someone fall. But that which is...

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