Jeanne
Duval (1818-1868): Baudelaire’s “Black Venus”, the woman with whom he lived for twenty-years, starting in 1842 when she was twenty-four and he just twenty-one. A Creole, probably from Haiti or the Dominican Republic, probably of mixed-race parentage, the progeny of a French plantation owner and a forced slave, she arrived in Paris with her mother and brother in 1840, and officially earned her living at the Théâtre de la Porte Sainte, rather more a cabaret than a playhouse, and at the wrong end of the Champs Élysees; a one-line speaking part, at least on the night that Baudelaire saw her.
He went to do precisely that because his friend the photographer Nadar had been going on and on about her voluptuousness and availability. Baudelaire fell in love at first sight, but it was some days later, and in Montmartre, that he rescued her from a bunch of drunks who were harassing her on the street - and invited her to move in with him. She said yes, as quickly as that, probably because it brought to an end her other way of earning money and he looked like he could afford her: Baudelaire's father had died that year, bequeathing him enough money that he could focus on poetry and never need to work.
Except that they quickly squandered it, partly just on lifestyle, mostly on laudanum, the liquid form of opium to which she was already, and he now became addicted. She was also addicted to men, and carried on affairs with numerous, both complete strangers that she happened to take a fancy to, and most of Baudelaire's close friends: "Tu mettrais l'univers entier dans ta ruelle, Femme impure!" as he wrote in one of the poems in the 1857 first edition of "Les Fleurs de Mal".
But he was addicted to her, even more than to laudanum and poetry (the poem immediately before the one I have just quoted says "Je t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne - I love you just as much when you flee from me at night"), and to writing "Les Fleurs de Mal", and apparently the one was unachievable without the other. She dominated poems twenty to thirty-five in the collection, was the subject-matter of several that were banned - "Les Bijoux" for example, here in French, here in English translation - and even when he was dying and reduced to virtual poverty he went on begging friends for help to pay her - her not his - medical equirements: she had been paralysed down the right side of her body in 1859 - look at Manet's 1862 painting of her (below) and read "La Muse Malade" in French and English here - probably caused by a stroke, and shortly afterwards her eyesight began failing. He put her in care at the Maison de Santé Dubois, and later paid for to be nursed in a flat in Neuilly. But he died in 1867, and she didn't have anyone else to help her. She died on December 20th of the following year.
And why is she on this page? Because I want to celebrate her life, and the only certain date about her is her death - almost all her personal documents were destroyed in a fire around that time. So which date to place her on? And self-evidently this one. Why? Because Charles Baudelaire, French poet, was born today in 1821; click here for my piece about him in "Private Collection". You can also find him mentioned on Jan 3, quoted on Jan
4, "Les Fleurs du Mal" published on June 25, but banned on Jan 8.
Amber pages
Paul Leroy Robeson, actor and singer, born today in 1898
Thomas Andrew
(Tom) Lehrer, singing satirist and Harvard Math professor, born today in 1928
and two historic dates, the first of which is meaningless to me, though I have heard it mentioned many times - so why not take the opportunity to flesh it out, or even try to make a silk purse out of it: today, in 1731, Robert Thomas
Jenkins' ear was cut off, leading to the "War of Jenkins' Ear"...
the second, today, in 1865, and which frankly I am only including because I love the coincidence of today being Tom Lehrer's birthday, and I really do wanna go back to Dixie, so let's do it...right here (if it's on time):
Robert E Lee (what does the E. stand for; and who was the first American to give such importance to the initial letter of the middle name?) surrendered to General whatever-he-was-called Grant (that is a very subtle, multi-lingual, Homeric and Joyceian jest; please send your solutions anonymously to DavidHPrashker@polyphemus.net), ending the military hostilities part of the American Civil War (almanacs tell me it happened at 1:30 pm, but which time zone was that? as far as I can tell the non-military hostilities are still on-going, in several states of the USA).
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