With Baudelaire in Brussels, #08

Quails are served. Baudelaire continues to denigrate the Belgians. We meet his chambermaid.

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.

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The quails are served on a silver platter, and they are four in number. They fill the room with their aroma. Baudelaire seizes two of them dextrously and places them in the middle of my plate. They are laid out on golden pastry, dressed in lightly browned vine leaves. Then he grasps the spoon and covers them with sauce elegantly. I note that he has given me the plumpest ones, and I reproach him for it.

“The host must look after his guest,” he replies. “Quails cooked by a culinary artist are a dish of the gods. These are lightly roasted, crunchy, and tender. The juice has flavoured the meat.”

We savour them in a religious silence. We are overcome by a weakness for fine food, and forget ideas of the mind. When there is nothing left on our plates but insignificant debris, Baudelaire pours the aged Corton into the two glasses that have been waiting for this decisive moment. He cups the crystal glass in his loving hand, softly inhales the divine bouquet, raises his arm towards me and says, “To the glory of the aviators of the next century!”

He then drinks a little bit at a time, in slow sips, and adds, “Now this is a wine the Belgians would never be able to appreciate!” He fills our glasses again and I think to myself that Baudelaire really has it in for Belgium. But he does not stay quiet for long, and he takes up the thread of our earlier conversation.

“Your society’s meetings must be very pleasant and instructive! Ah, if I was in Paris, what a pleasure it would be to attend. But, there you are.”

I empty my glass for the third time, and put it down. This old burgundy wine is eloquent and despotic. I have a feeling that it will make me indiscreet.

“Yes, certainly, our meetings are animated, passionate, sometimes even stormy. Everyone sticks to his own design, and does not easily accept the refusal of his calculations! And then we also have to defend ourselves against the invasion of false science. There are all kinds of false theories that serious researchers should avoid. Montucla, in the eighteenth century, used to say that the human mind faces a number of stumbling blocks. He listed them as the circumference of the square, the steering of balloons, doubling the cube, perpetual motion, the universal cure-all, the philosopher’s stone, squaring the circle, and trisecting the angle.”

“It seems to me that you could add predicting the weather and predicting the future to this lexicon of of human stupidity,” says Baudelaire. “But as for steering balloons, have there not already been a few encouraging results? If memory serves, I have read reports of some interesting experiments in the newspapers.”

“First of all, one should not speak of ‘steering’, but rather of ‘dirigeability’ or ‘dirigibility’,” I quickly reply. “And the word balloon should also be cast aside. It is appropriate for hot-air balloons or spheres, but childish and imprecise when speaking of elongated, pear-shaped aerostats. In fact the word balloon comes from ball, which is a round object thrown into space. I gave a lecture on the subject of aerial vocabulary at one of our meetings, and in it I explained that the word is ultimately derived from the ancient Greek. I’m a bit of a Hellenist, Mr. Baudelaire ... ”

Baudelaire interrupts me, parodying the voice and accent of Philaminte speaking to Balise in Les Femmes Savantes.¹ “Greek! Oh heavens! Sister, he knows Greek!”

“All that is logical, and too little known,” he continues. “But since you are rightly concerned with establishing precise terms, I must object to the words ‘dirigeability’, and ‘dirigeable’. Properly written and spoken, it should be ‘dirigibility’, and ‘dirigible’.”

“We thought of that. But look, it is a question of how it sounds. People were put off by the vowel ‘i’ — three of them in the adjective, and five in the substantive! Someone said that ‘dirigibility’, and ‘dirigible’ were irritating words, tart as green apples.”

Henri Matisse, La Bonne (1896)

The door opens suddenly and a maid appears in the doorway, carrying a tray in her hand. It is the coffee! She rushes in without any warning and skilfully places the silver pot, a porcelain sugar bowl, and a bottle of many-starred cognac in the middle of the table. While arranging the cups and spoons, she winks mischievously at my host, who smiles.

“Madame has instructed me to tell you that she was the one who prepared the coffee, and not I.”

She laughs loudly, opening her lips to show lovely teeth. This singular girl is both reverent and familiar with Baudelaire. She is cheeky and respectful at the same time. She is a pretty waitress, and a feast for the eyes. Thanks to her mother she has French blood in her veins, while her father is a Walloon from Belgium. Like so many frontier children, she is a white half-breed. She has, to an extreme degree, both the virtues and the faults of the two neighbouring countries. The list is worse than the cloth, as they say…²

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1. A comedy by Molière

2. According to Émile Littré la lisière est pire que le drap — the list is worse than the cloth (the word “list” in this case signifies a bordering strip or hem) — is a Norman proverb; it means that servants tend to be more insolent with foreigners than they are with their usual, domestic employers.