The Paris of Zola: Real Presences and Mythic Horizons

The "Tableaux parisiens" of Baudelaire evoke a city the modernity of which is indicated only by hidden hints and signals. Baudelaire’s myth of Paris is in different ways a place of confrontation between moment and eternity, between the ridiculous and the sublime, experiences of the palimpsest memory of a flâneur in the city. Only once, the situation of the poem is given a precise historical and political reference. In "Le Cygne" ("The Swan") the crossing of the nouveau Carrousel, finished onl...