Capturing images: Baudelaire’s account of Meryon’s etchings

Abstract

Letters written over the course of 1859–60 tell of an effort on Charles Baudelaire’s part to republish Charles Meryon’s Vues sur Paris, augmented with descriptive texts by the poet. The collaboration failed and, ever since, readers have wondered what would have come of it. At the same time, Baudelaire was “courting” Victor Hugo, sending him new and not-quite-new poems dedicated to him. At the very end of 1859, Baudelaire includes his Salon description of Meryon’s etchings in a letter to Hugo, one Walter Benjamin qualifies as among Baudelaire’s best prose pieces. Further, Baudelaire cites Hugo in his description of Meryon’s etchings, and declares that the etchings would certainly please him. Was the promise of more texts about the etchings nothing more than the tail end of an effort to please Hugo? Whatever the case, the project’s failure is not simply to be laid to the account of Meryon, afflicted by “délire mélancolique compliqué d’hallucination,” and dying at Charenton the year following Baudelaire’s own death. Baudelaire’s decisions are difficult to understand, and seem as influenced by Hugo as by other considerations. In particular, in his description of Meryon’s etchings, Baudelaire seeks to “inscribe” something on them, much as Hugo sought to inscribe his father’s name in his representation of the Arc de Triomphe. In fact, Baudelaire imposes the story of a dispute between father and son, or more exactly, God and man, on the etchings, a story modeled on his own relations to Hugo. Later accounts of Meryon follow the same pattern, insisting on finding narratives in images that they all acknowledge as monumental. This insistence on finding diachrony in synchronic images is the madness that afflicted Meryon.