Paris Spleen: little poems in prose

XVIII: Invitation to the Voyage

33 xviii Invitation to the Voyage Superb land, Cockaigne it’s called, that I dream of visiting with my long-standing loved one. Singular land, drowned in our Northern fog—it could be labeled Orient-West, Europe’s China, so much enthused and capricious fantasy has reared, so patiently and relentlessly heightened with improved and delicate vegetation. A true land of milk and honey, where all is beautiful, opulent, tranquil , honest; where luxury prides its orderliness; where life is rich, easy-going, altogether excluding disorder, turbulence, the unforeseen ; where joy merges with quiet; where even cooking is poetic, at once plentiful and exciting; where everything, my angel, resembles you. Don’t you feel the feverish illness wrapping us in bleak misery, this nostalgia for a land we don’t know, the anguish of curiosity? But there is a region that resembles you, where everything is beautiful, opulent, tranquil, honest, where fantasy has built an occidental Cathay, where the breath of life is sweet, where joy merges with quiet. That is where we must live, where we must die. Yes, there we must go to breathe, to dream, to extend the hours by an infinity of sensations. A musician has written Invitation to the Waltz; who will compose Invitation to the Voyage to offer to the woman we love, to our chosen sister? Yes, in that atmosphere we could build the good life—there where slower time yields more thought, where clocks chime out happiness with a deeper and more significant solemnity. On glistening walls, or on darkly gilded vellum, live unobtrusive paintings, blissful, calm, deep, like the souls of the artists who created them. The setting sun’s violent colors reach dining room and parlor , subdued by fine curtains or through tall windows worked in small leaded panes. The furnishings are immense, curious, bizarre, larded 34 with locks and secret recesses, like subtle souls. Mirrors, metals, fabric , gold-work, earthenware, compose for the eyes a mute and mysterious symphony, while from all of it—from every corner, crevices in drawers, folds of the linen—a singular perfume escapes, a Sumatra come-back-here, the soul of the apartment. A true Cockaigne, I tell you, where all is opulent, proper, gleaming, like a clean conscience, like magnificent kitchen utensils, like splendid gold-work, like gaudy jewels! Treasures of the world abound there, as in the house of a hard worker who has well deserved the whole world. Singular land, as superior to all others as Art is to Nature, Nature made over by dream, corrected, embellished, remolded. Let them search and continue to search, ceaselessly to push back their happiness limit—alchemists of horticulture! Let them offer sixty or a hundred thousand florins to someone who can solve their difficult problems! As for me, I have found my black tulip and my blue dahlia!6 Incomparable flower, retraced tulip, dahlia of allegory, is it not there, in that fair land so calm and dreamlike, we must go in order to live and to flower? Would you not step into your analogy; could you not see yourself in—as the mystics put it—your own proper correspondence? Dreams! always dreams! The more ambitious and discerning the soul, the more dreams distance it from the possible. Every man carries within him his dose of natural opium, secreted and renewed endlessly. From birth to death, how many of our hours can we count fulfilled by positive delight, by action decided and done? Will we ever live, ever cross into this picture my spirit paints, this picture which resembles you? Such treasures, such furnishings, this abundance, this order, these perfumes, miraculous flowers—all this is you. You as well, the grand rivers and tranquil canals. Afloat on them, loaded with valuables, amid the monotony of the crew’s songs, those enormous ships are 6. La Tulipe noire is the title of a novel by Dumas père; the image comes from an episode of the Dutch tulipomania. “Le Dahlia bleu” is a song by Pierre Dupont, a popular poet much admired by Baudelaire. 35 my thoughts, on your bosom sleeping or sailing. You conduct them gently towards that sea which is the Infinite, reflecting the while celestial depths in your beautiful and pellucid soul. And when, sick of the sea-swell and overloaded with Eastern goods, they return to their native port, my thoughts, grown rich, still turn again from the Infinite towards...