With Baudelaire in Brussels, #04
Félix Nadar is about to set off in the Géant, his hot air balloon
To mark the 160th anniversary of Georges Barral’s trip to Brussels and his five-day visit with the poet Charles Baudelaire, I am publishing my translation of the first four days from his memoir on Substack. You can find the previous instalments here.
Nadar has seen us. He comes forward with his hand extended. Straight away he takes us to the middle of the area, where a large hole for the gas connection has been made in the floor. He then takes us to a platform built against the parapet of the garden, at the corner of the boulevard Botanique. There are gold armchairs, upholstered with crimson velvet. It is here that he will receive and welcome Léopold I and his ministers. The royal procession is expected at five o’clock.
“I’ll present you to the King, and let you have a word,” says Nadar to Baudelaire. “Get your compliments ready, and tell the ruler that you have recently decided to stay in Brussels in order to become a great Belgian poet.”
“Incorrigible smart-aleck,” hisses Baudelaire through his clenched teeth.
And without further ado, Nadar assigns me my final responsibilities in the overall operation. He orders me to initiate Baudelaire to the principals of aeronautical science and to serve as his guide. Baudelaire is insatiably curious, anxious to acquire the fundamentals of this new field. His agitated mind is keen to grasp the unknown. He has long wanted to experience the sensation of travelling through the air for himself, rather than reading reports of it. Nadar has promised to take him along this time, and he is counting on leaving with us. I am to put him beside me at my scientific observation post in the gondola.
It is two o’clock. The crate containing the instruments has been dropped off beneath a movable tent. I unpack them with the poet’s help. Meticulously, and with the timidity of a child, Baudelaire receives from my hands a barometer, maximum and minimum thermometers, a hygrometer, a rain gauge, a compass, and collection of bells to study variations in sound. I explain to him with a few summary details the operation and function of all these mysterious looking instruments.
We head for the gondola, a fine little cabin with two floors. It is there standing upright on the cobblestones, waiting for the moment to be fastened to the envelope cables. We enter inside and climb to the higher part. In the corner that has been set aside for me, I work with Baudelaire to set up my instruments according to an ad hoc plan. I complement my companion on how well he has taken to the job.
“I missed my calling,” he replies. “I was destined to become a learned old scientist. If only I had it to do over! But one cannot begin life again. We must travel inexorably along the path we have chosen until we reach the very end.”
At this point I consider Baudelaire closely. He stands in stark contrast to his friend Nadar. Their eyes are equally bright and sparkling, although the poet’s are deeper, more attractive, and perfectly oval. I admire the nimbleness of his long fingers, at the end of which shine artfully pointed fingernails
He is dressed all in black, like a Quaker. I examine his grave and sorrowful face where physical suffering and moral anguish have carved deep lines. It is September 26, 1864, which means he is forty-three years and five months old, having been born on April 21, 1821. Nadar is older by one year, having also come into the world in April – on the fifth. “It is the month of the flying fish,” Nadar once told me. “That is the secret to my destiny.”
Both men are in their prime, at the summit of their lives, enjoying both physical strength and fully developed intellectual power. I compare them, for they are both before my eyes. Nadar seems like a young man, he exudes vitality. In fact, he will live to the age of ninety. Death has already claimed Baudelaire. Before three years elapse, he will become appallingly decrepit. He will succumb after a prolonged agony – the kind in which the mind remains alert while the helpless victim observes his own decline despairingly.
But I shall continue to detail the appearance of my illustrious companion. His hair is peppered with a dusty silver and is beginning to thin towards the top of his head, like a monk’s tonsure. A few long, grey curls fall on the collar of his jacket. It is not the thick, close cut, jet black mane that Théophile Gautier saw in 1840. There may be one fault in his elegant and sober attire: like Nadar, he is wearing a knotted, floppy, bow tie. But Nadar’s is bright red with white checks. Baudelaire’s tie is made of Madras cloth, a souvenir from his stay in Mauritius. He wears Molière shoes which reveal a small foot and a very high instep. He sports a smooth, shimmering, black top hat. Like Nadar’s, the crown has an eccentric contour, appropriate to his tortured aesthete image. The hat will be the cause of some comic misadventures, as the people of Brussels will prove unable to make him anything similar. His shirt is swan white, and only lightly starched.
I am kneeling down before the Fortin barometer in order to adjust the smaller cistern. After me, Baudelaire tightens the adjustable screw and calculates the height of the mercury. Nadar, who had left left us abruptly, reappears.
He has just inquired about how matters are progressing, and announces that the Belgian scientific committee has arrived. “Alright, my learned fellows, we must go and welcome them. I can make out a couple — commissioned officers in their military uniforms — Captain Sterckx and Lieutenant Frédérix.”
Nadar has taken up position beside Baudelaire. The difference in their size is remarkable. At a height of one meter and seventy-eight centimetres, the aeronaut is quite tall. The writer is barely above average height, about that of Napoléon or Hugo, and measures one metre and sixty five centimetres. Both of them have the type of short and round head common to Latins. I find this striking in the midst of all the long-headed, Germanic Belgians who surround us.
Time passes. It is half past four o’clock, and the sun is beginning to set. The Géant is almost completely inflated and is already beginning to lift off. It is swaying, held down by one hundred and twenty infantrymen. There is flourish of activity — it is the King who is arriving in a d’Aumont carriage.
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A splendid read. There's such a moment-to-moment immediacy to his description that transports you to that moment and place. One thing that struck me as odd was Barral's description of B's and Nadar's heads. This is the kind of observation that would never occur in our time--but probably stems from the interest in phrenology of that era.