Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire

Author:Charles Baudelaire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2009-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

XXV

Dorothea the Beautiful

Sun levels this town with direct and terrible light; sand dazzles, the sea glitters. A stunned world sinks cravenly into siesta, the siesta a delicious kind of death in which the sleeper, half roused, savors the delights of his own extinction.

Dorothea, nevertheless, strong and proud as the sun, makes her way along the deserted street, only living soul at this hour under the blue immensity, a dark shiny spot in the light.

She proceeds, slight torso balanced on broad hindquarters. Her dress of clinging silk, gaudy pink, contrasts strongly with her shadowy skin and shows exactly the length of waist, the hollow of her back, her pointed breasts.

Her red parasol, straining the light, rouges her dark face with hints of blood.

Her slightly bluish hair weighs enough to bend her delicate head back, giving her the air of triumphant indolence. Heavy pendants tinkle secretly into her dainty ears.

From time to time the sea breeze lifts a corner of her billowing skirt to display a superb gleaming leg while her foot, like the feet of marble goddesses Europe would confine in a museum, leaves precise prints in the fine sand. Because Dorothea is so completely the coquette that the pleasure of being admired means more to her than being freed and, though free, she walks barefoot.

So she proceeds, harmoniously, happy to be alive and smiling a bland smile, as if she recognized in the distance a mirror reflecting her gait and her beauty.

At the hour when even dogs howl with pain in the sun’s jaws, what powerful motive brings out now the lazy Dorothea, beautiful and cold as bronze?

Why has she left her little hut, so coquettishly arranged, flowers and mats making up, quite cheaply, a perfect boudoir; where she takes such pleasure combing her hair, smoking, fanning herself or watching in the glass her great fan of feathers, while the sea, beating the shore a hundred feet away, makes powerful monotonous accompaniment to her inchoate reveries, while the iron pot, seething with a ragout of crabs with rice and saffron, sends her, from the far end of the court-yard, its exciting scents?

Maybe she has an assignation with some young officer who, on a distant shore, once heard his comrades refer to the famous Dorothea. Without fail she will beg him, simple creature that she is, to describe the Opera Ball, ask him if it is possible to attend barefoot, like the Sunday dances at which even old Kaffir women get drunk and go wild with joy — and then again, if the belles of Paris are really all more beautiful than she.

Dorothea is admired and petted by everyone and she would be perfectly happy, if she were not obliged to come up with piastre after piastre to buy back her little sister, eleven years old, already matured, and so beautiful! She will certainly succeed, the good Dorothea; the child’s master being quite stingy, too stingy to understand any beauty but that of cash.

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