Man of the Crowd

Baudelaire is following De Quincey, in so far as he translates an idea which is implicit in the original text, but he does so in terms which are closer to his own poetry. The bain de multitude announces the first lines of Les Foules (itself inspired by Poe s Man of the Crowd - the intertextual spiral is endless) ... 

To conclude this analysis, a final example - that of the translation of Poe s Man of the Crowd ( L Homme des foules ),107 a passage in Un Mangeur d opium,108 the prose poem Les Foules 109 and two passages in Le Peintre de la vie moderne - is enlightening 110... 

See my article, Baudelaire and Poe s Man of the Crowd , in Emily Salines and Raynalle Udris (eds), Modernism and Intertextuality in Comparative Literature (Dublin Philomel, 2003). 

The passage names a number of stories of the founding narratives of generation and of literary heritage (mothers or fathers) of urban modernism (the perspectives of the man of the crowd or of the detached observer at the upper window or on the balcony). The discussion is ostensibly about states of mind , a prelude to Woolf s discussion of creative androgyny . Yet it marks a political as much as a psychological position, its uneasy pronouns ( it , one , she ) suggesting the uncertain place of women in a culture, a nation, which they cannot fully call their own. 

Although I focus on Poe s major contribution to detective fiction, the Dupin stories, students of the genre also note the presence of detection in other stories, particularly The Gold-Bug (1843), The Man of the Crowd (1840), and Thou Art the Man (1844). 

Figure 14.3 Alfred Kubin, The Man of the Crowd. From Das Teuerpferd und andere Novellen (Miinchen G. Muller, 1910).

Ambros testified to a growing excitement as the train drew into the city of Paris. A man of the sternest discipline when subjected to the lachrymose properties of tear gas, with which he was quite familiar, he was near tears at the sight of the crowds. Call them not "just friends" — he loved them What he saw around Paris not only confirmed that the French were going to be a much happier people from now on, but augured well for his plan to get Frenchmen, by pure persuasive affection, to come to Germany. 

And then he appears. An old man in a Santa Claus outfit. He seems to tower above the crowds, but strangely none of the police find him peculiar. Yet the man is clearly out of place. For some reason, you feel embar-... 

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