L'Héautontimorouménos

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In the Book of Numbers, as Moses leads the Israelites through the desert to the Promised Land, God commands him to tell a rock to give him water. Instead Moses strikes the rock twice. Water jets from the rock, but God is angry with Moses for disobeying his instructions and thus usurping responsibility for the miracle, and for this Moses is forbidden from himself entering the Promised Land.^[2][3] The compulsive laughter of the final stanza is a reference to Melmoth the Wanderer, whose laughter, Baudelaire writes in his essay on "The Essence of Laughter," is "the perpetual explosion of his anger and his suffering."^[4]

Jean Prévost writes that the poem "begins with the three most sadistic strophes that Baudelaire ever composed."^[5] In his book on Baudelaire, Prévost articulates the account of the poem's writing under which L'Héautontimorouménos is the work Baudelaire was conceiving when he wrote in a letter to Victor de Mars of "an Epilogue, addressed to a woman." However, this has been disputed.^[6]

Jean-Paul Sartre characterizes Baudelaire as a man forever looking into himself. According to Sartre, external objects have for Baudelaire a veiled, denatured reality; they interest him only as occasions to inspect his own consciousness, and his crisis stems from the fact that this consciousness continually eludes him through his very immersion. He is unable to see or estimate himself as he sees or estimates others, as a coherent being with motivations and qualities. Thus he tries to "become two," and bends his effort on reflexive consciousness, on dividing himself to allow for self-knowledge and self-possession. This, for Sartre, is the drama of L'Héautontimorouménos. Because he can't see himself, Baudelaire will appropriate himself as the executioner appropriates the victim, and will satisfy his need for knowing what he holds through the violent probing force of the dagger.^[7] Other authors have remarked that it is this self-consciousness or "Irony" that makes the poem's narrator "a false chord in the divine symphony."^[6]

Jean Starobinski, like Sartre, associates L'Héautontimorouménos with two lines from L'Irremediable: "Tête-à-tête sombre et limpide / Qu'un coeur devenu son miroir." ("Somber clear dialogue / Of a heart become its own mirror."). He notes that these two poems, as well as in Le Cygne ("The Swan"), feature a characteristically Baudelaireian "melancholy that aggravates in reflecting itself," and reminds the reader that the laugh in Baudelaire, along with the images in mirrors and the experience of melancholy itself, is affiliated to Satan. He further quotes an anecdote from Charles Asselineau's biography of Baudelaire, in which Baudelaire, afflicted with tertiary syphilis, is unable to stop laughing.^[8] Starobinski claims that Baudelaire, in L'Héautontimorouménos, makes the same account of melancholy as will later be elaborated in Mourning and Melancholia^[8] where Freud writes: "If one listens patiently to a melancholic's many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should love."^[9] The melancholic's accusation against the object is the same accusation he directs against himself, meaning Baudelaire's sadism and masochism are one and the same.

The poem is seven four-line stanzas of alexandrines in rimes embrassées (ABBA rhyme scheme). The first three quatrains of the poem oppose an "I" and a "you" representing the narrator and a woman with whom he is in a sadistic relationship.^[3] The poem pivots at the fourth stanza, which both shifts the poem from the future to the present tense as well as representing the only question posed in the poem.^[6] From there the "I" and "you" become identified, and the narrator turns his sadism towards himself. It is notable that the narrator only compares himself to a butcher when speaking of the other, while he actually declares himself to be his own executioner.^[3] According to Fabrice Wilhelm in his book on Baudelaire and narcissism, the comparison to Moses can give rise to several interpretations, depending on whether more weight is given to the miracle of the water or to Moses' doubt of God's instructions. In Wilhelm's own interpretation, Baudelaire believes homage to woman has usurped divine praise in the splenetic heart, but man doubts of women just as he doubted God.^[3]

Wilhelm also speaks of the "lying mirrors" (miroirs menteurs) in Baudelaire. As seen in his poem Correspondances, considered his ars poetica, Baudelaire takes humanity as longing for an ideal world of harmony that it obscurely recalls through experiences of the numinous. This is represented in the "divine symphony" of the poem. According to Wilhelm, this nostalgia presents two distinct paths: not spleen and ideal, but ideal and false ideal, the world of art sought out by the heroic poet and the world of ephemeral pleasure frequented by the "vile multitude" from his poem Recueillement.^[3] Wilhelm quotes from Le Goût de l'Infini ("The Taste for Infinity," from Baudelaire's Les Paradis artificiels) an excerpt postulating moments of reminiscence that are like "a magic mirror where man is invited to see himself as beautiful" (un miroir magique où l'homme est invité à se voir en beau). Women are important to this experience of nostalgia, as representing the ideal and the false ideal, as well as the mechanism of the reminiscence (Baudelaire famously wrote to his mother of his "period of passionate love" for her, before the arrival of General Aupick, his stepfather).^[10] Here, the woman is Magaera, one of the Furies of Greek mythology.