's Metamorphosis In Curiosités Sur Baudelaire

Pierre Citron asserts that, of all great French poets, Charles Baudelaire was “the one whose life was most permanently riveted to Paris.” Furthermore, Louis Thomas wrote in Curiosités sur Baudelaire, “Baudelaire thought of himself as being at home everywhere [in Paris]. Whether on the streets or on the quays, he was as comfortable as if he had been in his own room. Wherever he walked on the island, it was as if he was still on his own property, so that one might run into him in slippers, hatless, wearing the smock that was his working clothes.” Baudelaire was born in Paris, lived at forty-three Paris addresses throughout his life, and died there at the age of forty-five. Because of his deep connection to Paris, evocations of the city pervade
However, his most ambitious task was to reshape the city by adding his famous boulevards. To do this, he plowed through the narrow, winding streets of medieval Paris, leveling entire sections of the city, and reconstructed wide boulevards in their place. The boulevards prohibited the construction of barricades, thereby imposing social discipline on the unruly French people. Lasting twenty years, it was the largest urban renewal project the world had ever seen.
Haussmann, commonly known as “the demolisher,” replaced the medieval core of the city, transforming it into something more modern, imposing, and even alienating for some. The identity of Paris was completely changed. Thus, Baudelaire felt entirely displaced, even exiled, in the newly modernized city. Furthermore, he felt like a foreigner in the place he called home. The author’s sense of alienation pervades “Tableaux
Because the speaker feels estranged by modern Paris, he likens himself to Andromache, the Greek mythological character who lost all of her relatives and was “torn from [her] hero’s arms” when Troy was taken by Achilles. The speaker suggests that, like Andromache, he has lost everything that he held dear. In addition to Andromache, the swan is symbolic of the alienation and displacement the speaker feels. Taken from his native lake, the swan can find only “dry pavement,” “a waterless stream,” and “dust” in the city, thus cries out “O water, when then wilt thou come in rain? Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?” The swan asks for rain to soak the streets, suggesting that, with rain, Paris will be restored to its antique purity.
The speaker desires Paris to return to the city he once knew, as he feels completely alienated from it. The “new palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks, and suburbs old, are symbols” of the chaos of the city’s rebuilding. He comments, “the shape of a city changes more quickly, alas! Than the heart of a mortal.” Paris’ rapid metamorphosis and drastic transformation remind the speaker of the ruthlessness of time’s passage and his own mortality. He laments the destruction of the old Paris, for which he definitively asserts is “no more,” rather, it exists “in his mind” only as a distant