‘À une passante’: A Passing Appreciation

Abstract

This appreciation of Baudelaire is shamefully non-decadent. During French language classes, students sometimes encounter the pluperfect subjunctive as an instance of the conditionnel passé deuxième forme, which may give rise to understandable consternation on everyone’s part. In full awareness that the poet’s primary intention was doubtless to exemplify this feature of French modality, as a language tutor this is my cue to share a personal favourite example of this verb form, namely the conclusion of Baudelaire’s celebrated sonnet, ‘À une passante’, ‘Ô toi que j’eusse aimée’. Even a fleeting encounter with the poem would suggest that its meaning is past conditional as a kind of imagined memory of the future: ‘Oh you who I would have loved’. With that point duly resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, we can return to the excitement of the translation passage we were supposed to be working on.