Parapluies and Petticoat tails: Baudelaire’s ‘À une passante’, a Couturière’s Delight

Abstract

The early 1990s were a time of heightened unrest in Belfast. The hurlements and city sounds in that place were of a different kind to those described in Baudelaire’s Parisian street scenes. At that time, I was a Modern Languages undergraduate at Queen’s University Belfast studying, among other great works, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. The title intrigued me because finding illumination was something we had to do for ourselves during les temps sombres.

‘À une passante’, one of eighteen poems which make up the ‘Tableaux parisiens’, was read aloud in our French lecture hall by Professor Peter Broome. Listening to his animated voice, as he defined vocabulary and provided instruction for annotation, we followed the decadent nineteenth-century lexicon, beguiled by the dazzle of a jewelled hand, the rustle of a dress. The poetry worked its effect on each of us.