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Ihe Faust who summoned her from the abyss of which her eyes retain the devastating memory must have exged her presence for his soul; black Helens lips suck the marrow from the poets spirit, although she wishes to do no such thing. Apart from her meals and a few drinks, she is without many scious desires. If she were a Buddhist, she would be halfway on the road to sainthood because she wants so little, but, alas, she is still pricked by needs.The cat yawned and stretched. Jeanne woke from her trance. Folding another spill out of a dismantled soo ignite a fresh cheroot, her bib of cut glass a-jingle and a-jangle, she turo the poet to ask, in her inimitable half-raucous, half-caressing voice, voice of a crow reared on honey, with its dawdling at of the Antilles, for a little money.
Nobody seems to know in what year Jeanne Duval was born, although the year in which she met Charles Baudelaire (1842) is precisely logged and biographies of his other mistresses, Aglaé-Josephine Sabatier and Marie Daubrun, are well doted. Besides Duval, she also used the names Prosper and Lemer, as if her name was of no sequence. Where she came from is a problem; books suggest Mauritius, in the Indian o, or Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean, take your pick of two different sides of the world. (Her pays dine of less importahan it would have been had she been a wine.) Mauritius looks like a shot in the dark based on the fact the Baudelaire spent some time on that island during his abortive trip to India in 1841. Santo Domingo, bus Hispaniola, now the Domini Republic, a troubled history, borders upon Haiti. Here Toussaint LOuverture led a successful slave revolt against French plantation owners at the time of the French Revolution.
Although slavery had been abolished without debate throughout the French possessions by the National Assembly in 1794, it was reimposed in Martinique and Guadeloupe -- though not in Haiti -- by Napoleon. These slaves were not finally emancipated until 1848. However, Afri mistresses of French residents were often manumitted, together with their children, and intermarriage was by no means a rare occurrence. A middle-class Creole population grew up; to this class belong the Josephine who became Empress of the Fren her marriage to the same Napoleon.
It is uhat Jeanne Duval beloo this class if, in fact, she came from Martinique, which, since she seems to have been Francophone, remains a possibility.
He made a note in Man Coeur Mis à Nu: "Of the Peoples Hatred of Beauty. Examples: Jeanne and Mme Muller." (Who was Mme Muller?)
Kids ireets chucked sto her, she so tall and witchy and when she issed, teetering along with the vulnerable, self-scious dignity of the drunk which always invites mockery, and, always she held her bewildered head with its enormous, unravelling cape of hair as proudly as if she were carrying upon it an enormous pot full of all the waters of Lethe. Maybe he found her g because the kids ireet were chug sto her, calling her a "black bitch" or worse and spattering the beautiful white flounces of her olih handfuls of tossed mud they scooped from the gutters where they thought she belonged because she was a whore who had the o sashay to the er shop for cheroots or ordinaire or rum with her uck up in the air as if she were the Empress of all the Africas.
But she was the deposed Empress, royalty in exile, for, of the entire aerogeneous wealth of all those tries, had she not been dispossessed?
Robbed of the broeway of Benin; of the iros of the Amazons of the court of the King of Dahomey; of the esoteric wisdom of the great uy of Timbuktu; of the urbanity of glamorous desert cities before whose walls the horsemen wheel, weling the night on trumpets twice the length of their own bodies. The Abyssinia of black saints and holy lions was not even so much as a legend to her. Of those savannahs where mele with leopards she knew not o. The splendid tio which her skin allied her had been excised from her memory. She had been deprived of history, she was the pure child of the y. The y -- <u></u>white, imperious -- had fathered her. Her mother went off with the sailors and her granny looked after her in one room with a rag-covered bed.
Her granny said to Jeanne: "I was born in the ship where my mother died and was thrown into the sea. Sharks ate her. Another woman of some other nation who had just still-born suckled me. I dont know anything about my father nor where I was ceived nor on what coast nor in what circumstances. My foster-mother soon died of fever in the plantation. I was weaned, I grew up."
heless, Jeaained a ive iance; if you tried to get her to do anything she didnt want to, if you tried to erode that little steely of her free will, which expressed itself as lethargy, you could see how she had worn away the patience of the missionaries and so e to i, not even self-pity, only the twenty-nine legally permitted strokes of the whip.
Her granny spoke Creole, patois, knew no other language, spoke it badly and taught it badly to Jeanne, who did her best to vert it into good French when she came to Paris and started mixing with swells but made a hash of it, her heart wasnt in it, no wonder. It was as though her tongue had been cut out and another one sewn in that did not fit well. Therefore you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not uand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lovers poetry but, that it erpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed u because his eloquence denied her language. It made her dumb, a dumbness all the more profound because it maed itself in a harsh clatter of ungrammatical recriminations and demands which were not directed at her lover so much -- she was quite fond of him -- as at her own dition, great gawk of an ignorant black girl, good for nothing: corre, good for only ohing, even if the spirochetes were already burrowing away diligently at her spinal marrow while she bore up the superb weight of oblivion on her Amazonian head.
The greatest poet of alienation stumbled upon the perfect straheirs was a match made in heaven. In his heart, he must have known this.
The goddess of his heart, the ideal of the poet, lay resplely on the bed in a room morosely papered red and black; he liked to have her make a spectacle of herself, to provide a sumptuous feast for his bright eyes that were always bigger than his belly.
Venus lies on the bed, waiting for a wind to rise: the sooty albatross hankers for the storm. Whirlwind!
She was acquainted with the albatross. A scallop-shell carried her stark naked across the Atlantic; she clutched an enormous handful of dreadlocks to her pubic mound. Albatrosses hitched glides on the gales the wee black cherubs blew for her.
The Albatross fly around the world i days, if only it sticks to the stormy places. The sailors call the huge bird ugly names, goonies, mollyhawks, because of their foolish clumsiness on the ground but wind, wind is their element; they have absolute mastery of it.
Down there, far below, where the buttocks of the world slim down again, if you go far south enough you reach again the realm of perpetual cold that begins and ends our experience of this earth, thes of ice mountains where the bull-r winds bay and bellow and no people are, only the stately penguin in his frock coat not unlike yours, Daddy, the estimable but,<bdo>?9９liｂ.</bdo> unlike you, uxorious penguin who balahe precious egg on his feet while his dear wife goes out and has as good a time as the Antarctic may afford.
If Daddy were like a penguin, how much more happy we should be; there isnt room for two albatrosses in this house.
Wind is the element of the albatross just as domesticity is that of the penguin. In the "R Forties" and "Furious Fifties", where the high winds blow ceaselessly from west to east between the remotest tips of the inhabited tis and the blue nightmare of the uninhabitable ice, these great birds glide in delighted glee, south, far south, so far south it is the notional south of the poets parrot-forest and glittering beach; down here, down south, only the phlegmatioe, flightless birds form the audience for the wonderful aerielistes who live in the heart of the storm -- like the beoisie, Daddy, sitting good and quiet with their eggs on their feet watg artists such as we dare death upon the high trapeze.
The woman and her lover wait for the rising of the wind upon which they will leave the gloomy apartment. They believe they asd and soar upon it. This wind will be like that from a new pla.
The young man ihe aroma of the ut oil which she rubs into her hair to make it shine. His agonised romanticism transforms this homely odour of the Caribbean kit into the perfume of the air of those tropical islands he sometimes persuade himself are the happy lands for which he longs. His lively imagination performs an alchemical alteration on the healthy tang of her sweat, freshly awakened by dang. He thinks her sweat smells of amon because she has spices in her pores. He thinks she is made of a different kind of flesh than his.
It is essential to their e that, if she should put on the private garments of nudity, its non-sartorial regalia of jewellery and rouge, then he himself must retain the publieteenth-tury mase impedimenta of frock coat (exquisitely cut); white shirt (pure silk, London tailored); oxblood cravat; and impeccable trousers. Theres more to Le Déjeuner sur lHerbe thahe eye. (Ma, another friend of his.) Man does and is dressed to do so; his skin is his own business. He is artful, the creation of culture. Woman is; and is therefore, fully dressed in no clothes at all, her skin is on property, she is a being at oh nature in a fleshly simplicity that, he insists, is the most abominable of artifices.
Once, before she became a kept woman, he and a group of Bohemians trived to kidnap her from her ers at the cabaret, spirited her, at first protesting, then laughing, off with them, and they wandered along the streets in the small hours, looking for a place to take their prize for another drink and she urinated ireet, right there, didnt annou; o off into an alley to do it on her own, she did not even leave go of his arm but straddled the gutter, legs apart and pissed as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Oh, the ued ese bells of that liquid cascade!
(At which point, his Lazarus arose and knocked unbidden on the coffin-lid of the poets trousers.)
Jeached up her skirts with her free hand as she stepped across the pool shed made, so that he saw where she had splashed her white stogs at the a seemed to his terrified, exacerbated sensibilities that the liquid was a kind of bodily acid that burned away the knitted cotton, dissolved her petticoat, her stays, her chemise, the dress she wore, her jacket, so that now she walked beside him like an ambulaish, savage, obse, terrifying.
He himself always wloves of pale pink kid that fitted as tenderly close as the rubber gloves that gynaecologists will wear. Watg him play with her hair, she tranquilly recollected a red-haired friend in the cabaret who had served a brief apprenticeship in a brothel but retired from the profession after she discovered a signifit proportion of her ers wanted nothing more of her than permission to ejaculate intnifit Titian mane. (How the girls giggled over that.) The red-haired girl thought that, on the whole, this messy business was less distasteful and more hygienic than regular intercourse but it meant she had to wash her hair so often that her ing, indeed -- she was a squint-eyed little thing -- unique glory was stripped of its essential, natural oils. Seller and odity in one, a whore is her own iment in the world and so she must take care of herself; the squinting red-head decided she dare not risk squandering her capital so recklessly but Jeanne never had this temperament of the tradesperson, she did not feel she was her own property and so she gave herself away to everybody except the poet, for whom she had too much respect to offer su ambivalent gift for nothing.
"Get it up for me," said the poet.
"Albatrosses are famous for the courtship antics they carry on throughout the breeding season. These involve grotesque, awkward dang, apanied by bowing, scraping, snapping of bills, and prolonged nasal groans."
Birds of the World, Oliver L. Austin Jnr
They are not great builders. A slight depression in the ground will do. Or, they might hollow out a little mound of mud. They will make only the most squalid cessions to the earth. He envisaged their bed, the albatrosss , as just such a fleeting kind of residen which Destiny, the greatest madame of all, had closeted these twe birds together. In this transitory exile, anything is possible.
"Jeanne, get it up for me."
Nothing is simple for this fellow! He makes a performance worthy of the édie Fran?aise out of a fuck, bringing him off is a five-act drama with farcical interludes and other passages that could make you cry and, afterwards, cry he does, he is ashamed, he talks about his mother, but Jeanne t remember her mother and her granny sed her with a ships mate for a couple of bottles, a bargain with which her granny said she was well satisfied because Jeanne was already getting into trouble and growing out of her clothes and ate so much.
While they had been untangling together the history ression, the fire went out; also, the small, white, shining, winter moon iop left-hand er of the top left-hand pane of the few sheets of clear glass in the window had, apanied by its satellite star, pleted the final se of its slow arc over the black sky. While Jeaoically laboured over her lovers pleasure, as if he were her vineyard, she laying up treasure in heaven from her thaoil, moon and star arrived together at the lht-hand windowpane.
If you could see her, if it were not so dark, she would look like the victim of a robbery; her bereft eyes are like abysses but she will hold him to her bosom and fort him for betraying to her in his self-disgust those trace <samp></samp>elements of on humanity he has left inside her body, for which he blames her bitterly, for which he will glorify her, awardihe eternity promised by the poet.
The moon and star vanish.
Nadar says he saw her a year or so after, deaf, dumb and paralysed, Baudelaire died. The poet, finally, so far estranged from himself that, in the last months before the disease triumphed over him, when he was shown his refle in a mirror, he bowed politely, as to a stranger. He told his mother to make sure that Jeanne was looked after but his mother didnt give her anything. Nadar says he saw Jeanne hobbling on crutches along the pavement to the dram-shop; her teeth were gone, she had a mammy-rag tied around her head but you could still see that her wonderful hair had fallen out. Her face would terrify the little children. He did not stop to speak to her.
The ship embarked for Martinique.
You buy teeth, you know; you buy hair. They make the best wigs from the shorn locks of novices in vents.
The man who called himself her brother, perhaps they did have the same mother, why not? She hadnt the fai idea what had happeo her mother and this hypothetical, high-yellow, demi-sibling popped up in the nick of time to take over her disordered finances with the skill of a borrepreneur -- he might have been Mephistopheles, for all she cared. Her brother. Theyd salted away what the poet mao smuggle to her, all the time he was dying, when his mother wasnt looking. Fifty francs for Jeanne, here; thirty francs for Jeahere. It all added up.
She was surprised to find out how much she was worth.
Add to this the sale of a manuscript or two, the ones she hadnt used to light her cheroots with. Some books, especially the ones with the flowery dedications. Sale of cuff-links and drawerful upon drawerful of pink kid gloves, hardly used. Her brother knew where to get rid of them. Later, any memorabilia of the poet, even his clumsy drawings, would fetch a surprising sum. They left a portfolio with aerprising agent.
In a new dress of black tussore, her somewhat ravaged but carefully repaired face partially cealed by a flattering veil, she chugged away from Europe on a steamer bound for the Caribbean like a respectable widow and she was not yet fifty, after all. She might have been the Creole wife of a minor civil servaing off home after his death. Her brother went first, to look out the property they were going to buy.
Her voyage was interrupted by no albatrosses. She hought of the slavers route, unless it was to pare her grandmothers crossing with her own, fortable one. You could say that Jeanne had found herself; she had e down to earth, and, with the aid of her ivory e, she walked perfectly well upon it. The sea air did her good. She decided to give up rum, except for a si last thing at night, after the ats were pleted.
Seeing her, now, in her deing years, every m i black, leaning a little oick but stately as only one who has snatched herself from the lions mouth be. She leaves the charming house, with its vine-covered veranda; "Good m, Mme Duval!" sings out the obsequious gardener. How sweet it sounds. She is taking last nights takings to the bank. "Thank you so much, Mme Duval." As soon as she had got her first taste of it, she became a glutton for deference.
Until at last, ireme old age, she succumbs to the ache in her bones and a ce of grieving girls takes her to the churchyard, she will tio dispeo the most privileged of the ial administration, at a not excessive price, the veritable, the authentic, the true Baudelairean syphilis.
The lines on page 237 are translated from:
SED NON SATIATA
Bizarre déité, brune e les nuits,
Au parfum mélangé de musc et de havane,
Oeuvre de quelque obi, le Faust de la savane,
Sorcière au flanc débène, enfant des noirs minuits,
Je préfère au stance, à lopium, au nuits,
Lélixir de ta bouche où lamour se pavane;
Quaoi mes désirs partent en caravane,
Tes yeux sont la citerne où boivent mes ennuis.
Par ces deux grands yeux noirs, soupiraux de ton ame,
? démon sans pitié! verse-moi moins de flamme;
Je ne suis pas le Styx pour tembrasser neuf fois,
Hélas! et je ne puis, Mégère libertine,
Pour briser ton ce et te mettre aux abois,
Dans lenfer de ton lit devenir Proserpine!
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
The other poems in Les Fleurs du Mal believed to have been written about Jeanne Duval, are often called the Black Venus Cycle, and include "Les Bijoux", "La Chevelure", "Le Serpent qui danse, "Parfum Exotique", "Le Chat", "Je tadore à legal de la vo?te noe", etc.
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