Parce que c’était lui; parce que c’était moi: Sharing Baudelaire’s music

Abstract

My first meeting with Baudelaire was through a Flammarion paperback edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire was a ‘set author’ on the first-year syllabus of the French undergraduate degree programme I was embarking on. I had never encountered the poet’s work before, though I had read some Hugo and Verlaine. At first, I hardly knew what to make of Baudelaire’s writing. I found myself having to look up a lot of words in the dictionary – le chemin bourbeux, le feston et l’ourlet, un grand reposoir, un siècle vaurien – and started to build a picture of a poetic world that was strangely enticing. I still own that same paperback, which is filled with pencil scribbles, underlining ideas and concepts that inspired or confused, annotating unfamiliar meanings and connotations, and sketching out links between poems.