Introduction: Redefining the Role of Art and the Artist at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

In Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “Perte d’Aureole” (“Loss of a Halo,” 1862), a poet loses his halo while “hastily” and “abruptly” crossing a busy, cosmopolitan street, which he describes as a “moving chaos in which death comes galloping toward you from all sides at once.” Not having “the courage” to pick up the halo from the muddy road, the poet decides “that it would be less disagreeable to lose [his] insignia than to break [his] bones.” Yet rather than lament the act of becoming a “simple mortal,” the halo-less poet rejoices in the newfound freedom and anonymity associated with his inferior, humanly position in society. Freed from his fetters, he can now “walk about incognito, commit base actions, and give [himself] over to debauchery.” And despite the interlocutor’s surprise at finding the poet in “a place of ill-repute,” we learn that the poet — whom “dignity bores” — feels “quite comfortable” in what is most certainly a brothel. This former “drinker of quintessences” and “eater of ambrosia” has no intention of placing a lost-and-found ad or filing a claim at the police station for the missing aureola. His former insignia, now simply lost property and an exchangeable commodity, will soon belong to someone else, yet the poet “can’t help but feel joyful” contemplating the possibility that “some bad poet” will pick up the halo and “impudently set it on his head.” In this way, the poet can delight in making someone else happy, especially if it were someone such as “X, or Z!” who could make him laugh and “be funny.”