False Passante Charles Baudelaire

A une passante is one of Charles Baudelaire’s most celebrated poems. This sonnet was first published by the artist in 1855, in the French magazine L’Artiste, and later added to the last edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. It belongs to the section Tableaux Parisiens of the collection, since its content can be easily linked to the theme of contemporary life and to the poet’s experience of modernity. Indeed, this composition delineates the chance meeting between a man (the sonnet’s narrator) and a magnetising unknown woman, in the crowded streets of Paris. My reading of A une passante will focus on the ways in which this sonnet’s form actively emphasises its major contextual subjects, with particular attention to the most modern ones. Firstly, I will
She is magnified by the recurrence of adjectives belonging to the lexical field of “greatness”, ‘grand’ and ‘majestueuse’ (l.2), referring to her deep sorrow (she is probably in grief), and by her comparison to a ‘statue’. This analogy underscores the woman’s nobleness. Through the poet’s words she is idealised; her ‘oeil’ (l.7) is referred to as a stormy sky, thus making her a superior godless-like being, through which the narrator can experience extreme pleasure and pain. As Galand writes: ‘Cette apparition est une hiérophanie. Elle incarne le mystère fascinant et terrible du sacré’ (Galand 1969:372). These characteristics all reflect Baudelaire’s conception of the beautiful: ‘something intense and sad, something a little vague, leaving scope for conjecture’ (Baudelaire
It is characterised by two words belonging to the semantic field of sound (‘assourdissante’ and ‘hurlait’), thus placing the episode and the narrator in an unpleasant noisy environment. This distressing cacophony is emphasised by the personification of the ‘rue’, which is described as “screaming”, by the alliteration of the letter “r”, and by two hiatuses, one for each hemistich. The placement, in the middle of the line, of the word ‘assourdissante’, and the fact that it is much longer than any other word in the verse, also contribute to the creation of an acoustically overwhelming environment, and to the impression that the narrator is deafened and addled by his surroundings. Nonetheless, like a perfect flâneur, he stands in the middle of this chaos, observing the whole of Paris flowing around him, trying to mingle into the crowd, but condemned to be alone. Even when the ‘passante’ invades the sonnet and claims his attention, he is unable to communicate with her. In fact, although the remaining part of the opening quatrains seems to suggest, through the absence of sound-related words, the detachment of the narrator and the woman from the rest of Paris, they are irretrievably plunged in a loud, hectic environment. Indeed, they are isolated from everybody else, but also isolated from one another, and because of the loudness, they can only get in touch through an quick