The didactic poetry of the end of the eighteenth century often put the ideas of doctors and philosophers into verse. It wanted on the one hand to spread admiration for the conquests of science, to invent the De rerum natura of the new learning, while on the other hand it was not slow to sound the alarm about the disenchantment of the world caused by the successes of meas ure ment and calculation. The truths of science being universal, commonplaces were established at a time when scientific knowl edge itself remained indebted to poetry. So it was with the knowledge that was formed under the sign of the neologism “nostalgia,” an amalgam of two Greek words (nostos, return, and algia, pain), proposed in a Basel medical thesis of 1688, defended by Andreas Hofer of Mulhouse and presided over by Johannes Jacob Harder of Basel. This term gave a learned warranty to the popular notion of “homesickness” (Heimweh), [1] and gathered in the memory of a poetic tradition going back to Homer. But the medical cases cited told of recent observations. The malady, the author affirmed, most often affects students and soldiers, illustrative examples of those who are separated from their birthplace by constraint. These were “modern” examples, which took over from the older examples of the exile and the prisoner. The medical neologism, nicely fashioned into a feminine trisyllable, was gradually introduced into current vocabulary. A whole European tradition, of religious or Platonizing inspiration, had developed the motif of the soul’s exile. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their long-distance journeys some times imposed by force, a sharper awareness of the diversity of social conditions involving uprootedness and the loss of freedom allowed the motif to be brought up to date—to be laicized.

In his Pleasures of Memory (1792), the English poet Samuel Rogers is one witness among many others. He has not forgotten what was said in the medical treatises, and then by the popularizers (up to Rousseau in the article “Music” in his Dictionnaire), on the nostalgia of the Swiss soldier who “guards a foreign shore.” He adds to him the Savoyard peddler with “his pipe of merry sound,” crossing the Alps above the clouds and storms, thinking he hears the voices of his children left behind in the village, mingled with the noise of the torrent.

The intrepid Swiss, who guards a foreign shore,
Condemn’d to climb his mountain-cliffs no more,
If chance he hears the song so sweetly wild
Which on those cliffs his infant hours beguiled,
Melts at the long-lost scenes that round him rise,
And falls a martyr to repentant sighs.
[. . .]
When the blithe son of Savoy, journeying round
With humble wares and pipe of merry sound,
From his green vale and sheltered cabin hies,
And scales the Alps to visit foreign skies;
Though far below the forked lightnings play,
And at his feet the thunder dies away,
Oft, in a saddle rudely rocked to sleep,
While his mule browses on the dizzy steep,
With memory’s aid, he sits at home, and sees
His children sport beneath their native trees,
And bends to hear their cherub-voices call,
O’er the loud fury of the torrent’s fall. [2]

These voices heard are a “paracousia,” an accoustical illusion which accompanies half sleep, and at the same time they come from an act of recollection, mixing memory with present perception.

These images of desolate solitude in a foreign land are found again in Jacques Delille, in some desperately elegant verses from the fourth canto of L’Imagination (1794):

Mais voyez l’habitant des rochers helvétiques:
A-t-il quitté ces lieux, tormentés par les vents,
Hérissés de frimas, sillonnés de torrents?
Dans les plus doux climats, dans leurs molles délices,
Il regrette ses lacs, ses rocs, ses precipices,
Et comme, en le frappant d’une sévère main,
La mère sent son fils se presser sur son sein,
Leurs horreurs mêmes en lui gravent mieux leur image;
Et, lorsque la victoire appelle son courage,
Si le fifre imprudent fait entendre ces airs
Si doux à son oreille, à son âme si chers,
C’en est fait, il répand d’involontaires larmes;
Ses cascades, ses rocs, ses sites pleins de charmes,
S’offrent à sa pensée: adieu, gloire, drapeaux,
Il vole à ses chalets, il vole à ses troupeaux,
Et ne s’arrête pas, que son âme attendrie
De loin n’ait vu ses monts et senti sa patrie:
Tant le doux souvenir embellit le désert! [3]

But behold the dweller of Helvetic crags:
Is he gone from these wind-tormented places,
Bristling with hoarfrost, furrowed by swift streams?
In the most gentle climes, their soft delights,
He longs for his lakes, his rocks, his precipices,
And as, in striking him with hand severe,
The mother feels her son press to her breast,
Their horrors better grave in him their image;
And thus, when victory calls upon his courage,
If the imprudent fife lets sound those airs,
So sweet to his hearing, to his soul so dear,
It’s all done, he pours out unwilling tears,
His falls, his rocks, his sites so full of charm,
Come to his thoughts, and farewell, glory, banners,
He flies to his chalets, flies to his flocks,
And never stops until his melting soul
Far off has seen his mountains, felt his homeland:
So much sweet memory beautifies the desert!

The sounds of nature, by themselves, can awaken the same reminiscences as music and the voice. The “man of sensibility” composed his personality by attributing to himself the ecstasies and reveries in nature. Antoine de Bertin, adopting an elegiac note, writes in a letter: “Sitting on the bank of this torrent whose noise, like that of the sea, deafens us night and day, I give myself up to the sweetest melancholy. The flight of the water recalls for me the flight of time. I think back over all the losses I have gone through at so unadvanced an age.” [4] Jean-Antoine Roucher establishes the same associations:

À moi-même rendu, je vais jouir encore,
Le long de ce ruisseau que l’eglantier décore;
Je promène mes pas de détour en détour:
Je la vois se cacher, se montrer tour à tour,
Je descends avec lui dans la vallée ombreuse,
Agreste labyrinthe, où ma voix amoureuse
A soupiré jadis mes plaisirs, mes tourments.
Ce lieu réveille en moi de trop chers sentiments,
Vit, dans le double aspect des tombes and des flots,
L’éternel mouvement et l’éternel repos.
Et, par degrés, au sein de la mélancholie,
Mon âme doucement tombe, rêve et s’oublie. [5]

Restored to myself, I go for joy again
Along this stream decked out with eglantine;
I guide my steps meander by meander:
I see it hide and show itself by turns,
I descend with it into the shady valley,
Rustic labyrinth, where my loving voice
Once sighed away my pleasures and my torments.
This place awakens too-dear feelings in me,
Lives, in the double guise of tombs and tides,
Eternal movement and eternal rest.
And gradually to melancholy’s breast
My soul falls sweetly, dreams, forgets itself.

William Cowper, in the beautiful beginning of the sixth book of The Task (1795), is more original: he evokes there the village bells and the irruption of memories, which bring back to him the memory of his dead father, then that of a winter walk at noon.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;
And as the mind is pitch’d the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk, or grave:
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch’d within us, and the heart replies.
How soft the music of those village bells,
Falling at intervals upon the ear
In cadence sweet, now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again, and louder still,
Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on!
With easy force it opens all the cells
Where Memory slept. Wherever I have heard
A kindred melody, the scene recurs,
And with it all its pleasures and its pains.
Such comprehensive views the spirit takes,
That in a few short moments I retrace
(As in a map the voyager his course)
The windings of my way through many years. [6]

Cowper compares past existence to a voyage. To be sure, the image is banal. But what is less expected is that the reminiscence provoked by the sound of bells brings a synoptic and instantaneous image of all the stages in the itinerary of a whole life. The restitution is total, analogous to that attributed to the “panoramic vision of the dying.” [7]

There is another sound that provokes a flood of memories and of sadness: that of the barrel organ. In her Mémoires, Madame de Genlis, describing its effect, speaks of the keenness of her sudden perception of misfortune: “All at once a barrel organ passes down the street, well-tuned, sweet-voiced, playing an air whose melody speaks to my heart, revives in it the feeling curbed and repressed by reason. Moving and cruel memories recall themselves vividly to my imagination, superfluous regrets rend my soul; I rediscover all my misfortune, I see it in all its detail, I feel it in all its extent; the feelings of melancholy and grief have lifted this mysterious veil that half hid it from me. All the wounds of my heart reopen at once. My brush falls from my hand; bitter tears bathe the flower I just sketched out.” [8]

A peculiar instrument was in favor for a time: the Aeolian harp. Made of tightened strings that vibrated to the breath of the wind, it made aerial fluctuations and atmospheric changes sensible and audible in their apparent randomness. It was nature that played on it and thus made heard her own music. Or, rather, it is an immediate accoustical translation of a capricious natural flux, on an instrument man conceived in order to capture it. In 1795 Coleridge composed a very beautiful poem entitled “The Aeolian Harp,” where it is not personal memories but the whole of nature that awakens in the listener:

O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.

Memory and fiction mingle in the Ossianic invention. And its original place is the bank of flowing waters. We know how James Macpherson identified with the primitive poet of whom he pre tend ed to be merely the editor. His “forgery” is the para phrase of a text supposedly lost and rediscovered. In fact, it is an imaginary reconstruction. The fictive poet, for his part, is also presented as a transcriber: he has heard his songs as stories of the past, dictated by the voices of Scottish rivers and valleys. The words attributed to Ossian are thus presented, in their own past, as nostalgic echoes of another past, much more distant, pre served in the memory of the streams. We are witness to a redou bling of reminiscence. The fictive Ossian is an early poet miraculously rediscovered, who sings the stories of a more distant age, while echoing the voice of nature: “The deeds of days of other years! The murmur of thy streams, O Lora! brings back the memory of the past.” [9] It is the sound of water that gives the impulse to reminiscence. Most of the epic poems of Greco-Latin antiquity begin with an “I sing” or an invocation to the Muses. “Ossian” defines himself as an early “romantic” by the fact that his inspiration is attributed to the voice of the elements, to the spirit of a place, to the genius of a nation. The “bard” is presented as a listener who catches a music coming from the depths of the ages. We read in Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (VIII): “I hear the river below murmuring hoarsely over the stones. What dost thou, O river, to me? Thou bringest back the memory of the past.”

In 1792, Wordsworth composed the Descriptive Sketches, in which he recomposed his impressions of a recent journey in Switzerland. He inserts an evocation of a young mercenary driven from his native home by his own father, and who is perishing in the distant plains:

When long familiar joys are all resigned,
Why does their sad remembrance haunt the mind?
Lo! where through flat Batavia’s willowy groves,
Or by the lazy Seine, the exile roves,
O’er the curled waters Alpine measures swell,
And search the affections to their inmost cell;
Sweet poison spreads along the listener’s veins,
Turning past pleasures into mortal pains;
Poison, which not a frame of steel can brave,
Bows his young head with sorrow to the grave. [10]

In the course of his narration, Wordsworth had evoked a “Tradition” which speaks of an Alpine golden age and an ancient reign of freedom (1793 version, ll. 474–485 and 520–535; 1850 version, ll. 386–405). On his return, the poet, crossing France during the revolution, experiences a feeling of hope and joy. He sees the dawning of justice and freedom, and he greets a new birth and a new earth: “Lo, from the flames a great and glorious birth; / As if a new-made heaven were hailing a new earth!” [11] The picture of the expatriated young mercenary’s nostalgia is thus inscribed in a larger chronological frame, between regret for a very ancient happiness and the announcement of a new age in which oppression will disappear. And it must be added that nostalgic pining away is only a passing figure in Wordsworth’s repertory of images. Even when he turns towards his own past, Wordsworth, in his poetry, is a man in motion, before whom the depth of the world reveals itself. He is too eager, too impatient to be stopped by separation. “Beauty . . . waits upon my steps,” he writes in the beautiful lines that serve as preface and “prospectus” to The Excursion. Beauty is “a living Presence of the Earth.” [12] It is into himself that Wordsworth wishes to descend, to climb up again higher than the heavens. This earth, then, is the earth of today, not that of which the great myths speak.

. . . Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day. [13]

If the feeling of loss has intervened, it is so that the call may sound at once for setting off in the right direction, for a marriage with the simplicity of the real, as the poet says: “May my Life / Express the image of a better time.” [14] But the poet must also lend an ear to the plaintive sounds of solitary anguish in the fields, to the tumult of the rebellious masses in the cities. The great acoustic theme of nostalgia is thus extended, for Wordsworth, over all human suffering at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

This complex of partly traditional images offered itself to diffusion, to analogical combinations and permutations. It could be used for the interpretation of the modern condition at the beginning of the industrial era. Though hackneyed, the theme of homesickness could still lend itself to popular or pseudo-popular poetic versions. For instance, the song of the deserter condemned to death, “Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz,” from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, [15] skillfully reworked by Clemens Brentano, and later set to music by Gustav Mahler. On the other hand, Balzac did not refrain from imagining heroes of novels stricken by nostalgia (Louis Lambert, Pierrette, and, in the simultaneously tragic and ironic mode, Cousin Pons). The phenomena of memory connected to sounds, or to other sensorial registers, could then be mentioned for their own sake, accompanied by melancholy, no doubt, but also by wonder. Subjective consciousness found reasons here for perceiving itself as a world. That is what we find in the great moments of Chateaubriand, starting with the letters to Joubert (December 1803) and to Fontanes (January 1804) on the Roman campagna: it is a question of the sound of the cascade at Tivoli, which makes him think of the wind in the forests of America, of the sound of the beaches of Armorica. When he evokes the song of the thrush at Mont boissier, in the famous page from the beginning of the Mémoires (Book III, I), [16] Chateaubriand feels no privation, no deadly aggravation of his habitual feeling of finitude: he suddenly rediscovers Combourg and the disturbing images of his child hood. No doubt there would be grounds for examining the incestuous components of this return to the past, which also makes him rediscover his beloved sister. Just as there would be grounds for asking if the painful nostalgia of Mignon, in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, does not come from the incest that led to her birth . . . But I would not make the admirable “Infinito” of Leopardi say anything other than what it says, when the poet hears “the wind / . . . rustling among these bushes” and compares “The infinite silence to this voice / . . . and the eternal comes to my mind / And the dead seasons and this present / And living one, and the sound of it.” [17]

II

The system of the image-types of nostalgia lends itself to many variants. Certain of them are not exempt from irony. As if he was making fun of an old catch phrase, Baudelaire declares, in “Horreur sympathique”: “I will not whine like Ovid / Driven out of the Latin paradise.” [18] It is a manner of challenging the tradi tional rhetoric of nostalgia, of eluding it while recalling it. And it is interesting to notice, in Baudelaire, how indirect the reference to the typology of nostalgia has become, while remaining insistent. In many a poem, and particularly in “Le cygne,” [19] the poet’s thought passes through a series of delegated figures, for whom he certainly feels compassion, but with whom he does not confuse himself. [20] The figures evoked—Andromache, the swan, “the Negress, emaciated and consumptive,” then the indefinite throng of exiles—are certainly victims and incarnations of nostalgia. In this quality, however, they only represent a deeper pain, a more radical desertion. Before the new Paris that presents to its view a vast theater of exile, the poet’s thought expresses a meta-nostalgia, which is not to be appeased by the possibilty of any sort of return. Towards what place could a return be direct ed? It is precisely the place itself that has met with destruction, while the poet, who has not left this place, experiences in his own life—in his “heart”—the same labor of destruction. “The old Paris is no more.” The loss is irremediable. The poet evokes his “dear memories,” petrified, become “heavier than rocks,” and he fabulizes his own exile in a forest where “an old Memory sounds a loud blast of the horn!” But there can be no exile’s return here, and we clearly discern, behind such images, the essential void they try to conceal: the loss is too radical for it to be possible to seek a remedy for it anywhere else than in a universe of signs, allegories, musics . . . Poetic construction has thus substituted for naïve nostalgia, which still believed in a true return, a reflexive representation, which knows very well that it is only setting up a simulacrum, in the way that Andromache had constructed the “empty tomb” of Hector, a repatriation in image only.

If we compare the several uses Baudelaire made of the word “nostalgia,” we will see that it was to make it paradoxical, in an inverted formula taken up several times. He makes it express a particularly strong desire, an aspiration turned not towards the past but towards the unknown, towards the distance. Baudelaire thus reads in the eyes of Delacroix “an inexplicable nostalgia, something like the memory and regret of things not known.” [21] The prose version of “L’invitation au voyage” (Invitation to a Voyage) evokes in its turn “this nostalgia for a country one does not know.” In “Le joueur généreux” (The Generous Gambler), the perfume of cigars offered by the Devil gives the soul “nostalgia for unknown countries and blessings.” [22]

In the stereotype of nostalgia, as we have seen, the various elements of a repeatable story are collected, analogous to those of a dramatic plot or the chart of an illness: the soldier, expatriation, music that revives memories, the sweetness of good things lost, despair, death. Baudelaire had doubtless encountered this stereotype a thousand times (if only by the intermediary of Ovid), but the model had become too common and banal to be faithfully repeated. Baudelaire several times undoes its elements in order to redo them differently. Yet we have no trouble recognizing them. These linguistic units, which were offered to him not by nature but by culture, took their place among the terms of his dictionary of images: he made use of them, no doubt instinctively, to compose a new self-image. It is thus that the elements of the stereotype reappear, grouped differently, in “La cloche fêlée.” [23] This poem, the first version of which was entitled “Spleen,” precedes the four “Spleen” poems in all editions of Les fleurs du mal.

Il est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d’hiver,
D’écouter, près du feu qui palpite et qui fume,
Les souvenirs lointains lentement s’élever
Au bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.

Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux
Qui, malgré sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,
Jette fidèlement son cri religieux,
Ainsi qu’un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente!

Moi, mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu’en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l’air froid des nuits,
Il arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie

Semble le râle épais d’un blessé qu’on oublie
Au bord d’un lac de sang, sous un grand tas des morts,
Et qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d’immenses efforts.

Bitter and sweet it is, on winter nights,
To listen, by the flickering, smoking fire,
To distant memories slowly rising up
At the sound of carillons singing in the mist.

Blessed is the bell of vigorous throat,
That, alert and in good health, despite its age,
Faithfully flings out its religious cry
Like an old soldier who keeps watch from the tent!

As for me, my soul is cracked, and in its cares,
When it would people the cold night air with songs,
It often happens that its weakened voice

Seems the thick rasp of a wounded man forgotten
By a lake of blood, beneath a great heap of dead,
Who dies, unstirring, with the greatest strain.

The title of the poem, as has been noted, echoes an image that appears in the Comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death) of Théophile Gautier, but the latter does not interiorize the “cracked bells” he listens to. The “memories” of Baudelaire’s first quatrain, awakened by “the sound of carillons,” even if they echo Gautier, inscribe themselves just as convincingly in the prolongation of the passage by William Cowper on village bells which I have cited above.

We remain here in the field of influence of the powers attributed to the “Alpine measures,” bearers of signes mémoratifs (memorative signs) as Rousseau put it. What is at once “bitter and sweet” is the consciousness of what exists only in the far distance. This sweetness, coupled with the pain of loss, is also part of the complex of notions that grouped themselves around nostalgia.

But the system of metaphors in Baudelaire’s poem also reveals something quite different to us. The poetic “I” grants life to the sound he listens to in the night and speaks in praise of the bell, of the source of the sound, conferring upon it the status of a person, whose song comes from a “throat”: “Blessed is the bell” that “faithfully flings out its religious cry”. . . This personification is reinforced by the simile with the “old soldier” who stands guard. Its “religious cry” makes one think of Baudelaire’s “noc turnal anguish” and the help he looked for from prayer: “The man who says his prayers at night is a captain posting sentinels. He can sleep.” [24] Allegorized under the figure of a soldier, the voice of the bell attests to a fortitude that the poet despairs of equaling. The “I” of the poet, appearing in the more limited space of the tercets, declares his affliction by comparison: he does not have the strength to fling out the same “religious cry,” and he is another soldier, no longer the one who keeps watch, but the one whom the enemy has mortally wounded, rendering him aphasic. The voice finally evoked is not one that we hear, but one that the defeated poet’s last representative, the dying soldier, is unable to make speak. It does not have the power of the first carillon heard, which goes through night and cold. With the “greatest strain” of the dying man, the poem ends in the depths of the body, at the limits of the final agony. Contrary to the initial ascent of memories “rising up” (line 3), the last verses evoke the weighing down of the “great heap of dead” (line 13). And the “distant memories” of the first quatrain have given way in the second tercet to the “wounded man forgotten.” The antitheses are impressive. The contrast is equally striking between line 13, formed entirely of monosyllables, and the phonic structure of line 3, where the vigor of the carillon is symbolized by much more ample trisyllabic groupings. The poet, let us note, does not compare himself directly to the wounded man. The comparison concerns the “voice” of his “soul” and indicates a privation—a crack—that affects the center of being. The movement of the poem is one of implacable descent. Starting from the “vigorous throat” of the night bell, going on to the cry of the soldier who keeps watch, then to the rasp of the wounded man, the poem develops a comparative sequence in which power is turned antithetically into powerlessness. It is no longer a question of a gap and a distance, as in so many poems of nostalgia, but of an ontological degradation (which so many of Baudelaire’s poems inscribe under the sign of Satan). To be sure, we recognize here that distress of speech, that mutism, which count among the constitutive components of the nostalgic constellation. But we cannot stop at that reading, which would inscribe Baudelaire in the prolongation of a poetry of exile.

The poem ends with some admirable lines, but we also cannot stop at the noting of another tradition, attested to a thousand times in sonnet writing, which consists in expressing a personal defeat in the form of a fall perfectly carried out according to the metrical constraints of this fixed form. From the beginning of sonnet writing, poetic speech sought to show itself as happy, owing to the perfect mastery with which it evoked the very opposite of happiness, such as suffering, amorous failure, the prospect of ruin and death. The sonnet had to close with a superb expression of that which is moving towards its end. Thus Baudelaire, in “La cloche fêlée,” was able to evoke with the greatest art, in unforgettable terms, a defeat and an atrocious death in forgottenness. It is an extreme result of the becoming-poetry of nostalgia, far beyond the pining away of the exile. In a fine study of “Les soldats de Baudelaire” (Baudelaire’s Soldiers), [25] John Jackson speaks of the “allegorization” of the cracked bell as a dying soldier, after the poet’s “soul” has itself been allegorized as a “cracked bell”: “If the bell is a soldier who has kept good watch, the soul, on the contrary, is a cracked bell, whose songs are at best connected with the ‘thick rasp of a wounded man forgotten.’” I even see here one of the aspects that mark the novelty of Baudelaire in relation to the tradition I recalled at the beginning of these remarks. The poem, beginning with the usual association of memories and the sound of the bell, ends with something quite other than regret for a lost time or place. Past life, the former world, the temporal and spatial gap, are not evoked. An irreparable wound alone prevails, the affliction that is a crack, and that alters being itself in its substance. The nostalgic man, even if he pines away, can still imagine a return to his birthplace. “La cloche fêlée,” which Baudelaire once thought of entitling “Spleen,” is, like the four other “Spleen” poems, a poem of inner affliction in its irrevocability. Poetry does not heal this affliction. The best it can do is bear witness to it.

[Translated from the French by Richard Pevear]

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1. I refer the reader to two previous works of mine: “Le concept de nostalgie” (The Concept of Nostalgia), in Diogène 54, Paris, 1966, pp. 92–115, and “Sur la nostalgie. La mèmoire tourmentée” (On Nostalgia. The Tormented Memory), in Cliniques méditerranéenes, No. 67, 2003/1, pp. 91–102.
2. Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory (London, 1792).
3. Jacques Delille, Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works), 6th edition (Paris, 1850), p. 136.
4. Antoine de Bertin , “Lettre au Comte de Parn***, écrite des Pyrénées” (Letter to the Count of Parn***, written from the Pyrenees), Poésies et oeuvres diverses (Poems and Various Works)(Paris, 1879), ed. by Asse, pp. 283–284.
5. Jean-Antoine Roucher, “Les mois du printemps. Mai, chant troisième”(The Spring Months. May, third canto), in Les mois(The Months) (Paris, 1780), I, 94.
6. William Cowper, The Task, Book VI, “The Winter Walk at Noon,” ll. 1–18, in The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. by James Sambrook (London, 1994). Starobinski quotes a French prose translation by William Hughes, cited by Saint-Beuve in his Causeries du lundi(Monday Chats), 20 and 27 November, 4 December, 1864 (translator’s note).
7. See Georges Poulet, “Bergson. Le thème de la vision panoramique des mourants et la juxtaposition” (Bergson. The Theme of the Panoramic Vision of the Dying and Juxta- position), in L’Espace proustien(Proustian Space) (Paris, 1963), pp. 137–177.
8. Mme de Genlis, Mémoires inédits sur le XVIIème siècle et la révolution française (Unpublished Memoirs on the Seventeenth Century and the French Revolution), in Bibliothèque des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France(Library of Memoirs Relating to the History of France) (Paris, 1825), XV, p. 273.
9. James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and other related Works, ed. by Howard Gaskell (Edinburgh, 1996) (translator’s note). Ossian, fils de Fingal (Ossian, son of Fingal), trans. by Letourneur (Paris, 1777), Vol. II, p. 2. See Christopher Lucken, “Ossian contre Aristote ou l’invention de l’épopée primitive” (Ossian Against Aristotle or The Invention of the Primitive Epic), in Plaisir de l’épopée (The Pleasure of the Epic), under the direction of Gisèle Mathieu-Colombani (Vincennes, 2000), pp. 229–255.
10. William Wordsworth, “Descriptive Sketches Taken During a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps,” 1850 version, ll. 518–527, in The Poems, ed. by John O. Hayden (London, 1977), I, 109–110; 1793 version, ll. 622–631, pp. 913–914. The expression “inmost cell” comes from the text by Cowper cited above, a testimony to Wordsworth’s admiration as early as the 1793 version.
11. Descriptive Sketches,” 1850 version, ll. 645–646.
12. Wordsworth took this “prospectus” from an earlier poem, “The Recluse” (ll. 795–798) (translator’s note).
13. The Poems, vol. II, pp. 38–39.
14. The Poems, vol. II, p. 40.
15. “The Boy’s Magic Horn,” a collection of German folk poetry edited and much rewritten by the poets Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, published in Heidelberg from 1805 to 1808 (translator’s note).
16. Mémoires d’outre-tombe(Memoirs from Beyond the Grave), written from 1811 to 1841, and published after the author’s death [translator’s note].
17. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, poem XI, “The Infinite” (translator’s note).
18. “Sympathetic Horror,” poem LXXXII of Les fleurs du mal(Flowers of Evil) (translator’s note).
19. “The Swan,” poem LXXXIX of Les fleurs du mal (translator’s note).
20. I proposed a reading of this poem in La Mélancolie au Miroir (Melancholy in the Mirror). Paris, 1994.
21. Charles Baudelaire, “L’Oeuvre et la vie d’Eugène Delacroix” (The Work and Life of Eugène Delacroix), Oeuvres complètes (Complete Works), ed. by Claude Pichois (Paris, 1975–76), II, 760. To indicate this turnabout of homesickness, Heimweh, the Germanlanguage has created the composite Fernweh (farsickness).
22. Spleen de Paris(1869), Nos. XVIII and XXIX (translator’s note).
23. “The Cracked Bell,” poem LXXIV of Les fleurs du mal (translator’s note).
24. Baudelaire, “Journaux intimes” (Intimate Diaries), Oeuvres complètes, Vol. I, p. 672
25. John E. Jackson, Baudelaire sans fin(Baudelaire Without End) (Paris, 2005), pp. 75–91.