The Toy and the Cemetery

Abstract

Baudelaire is not to everybody’s taste, but he does touch a lot of people. I remember visiting his grave in Montparnasse, many years ago. I realized at the last minute that I very much wanted to leave a gift but discovered that only the only flowers I could buy nearby were in the form of lavish funeral wreaths. I didn’t have a lot of money, and after all Baudelaire had been dead for quite a long time; also, unlike him, I had never been of a naturally extravagant disposition. As a last resort, I went into a shop beside the graveyard and put a coin into a dispensing machine full of cheap toys in plastic capsules. This seemed an appropriate enough gift for a man who, in both his essay ‘A Philosophy of Toys’ and the prose poem ‘The Toy of the Poor’, recommends the supposedly innocent and amusing pastime of distributing cheap, mass-produced toys to street children for the sheer pleasure of seeing their eyes widen before they scamper off like cats with their prizes.