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Baudelaire and Bossuet on Laughter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
After certain preliminaries, Baudelaire plunges into the main body of his essay on laughter, “De l'essence du rire,” with these striking words: “Le Sage ne rit qu'en tremblant. De quelles lèvres pleines d'autorité, de quelle plume parfaitement orthodoxe est tombée cette étrange et saisissante maxime? Nous vient-elle du roi philosophe de la Judée? Faut-il l'attribuer à Joseph de Maistre, ce soldat animé de l'Esprit-Saint? J'ai un vague souvenir de l'avoir lue dans un de ses livres, mais donnée comme citation, sans doute. Cette sévérité de pensée et de style va bien à la sainteté majestueuse de Bossuet; mais la tournure elliptique de la pensée et la finesse quintessenciée me porteraient plutôt à en attribuer l'honneur à Bourdaloue, l'impitoyable psychologue chrétien.” Of course, it is the variations which Baudelaire extracted from his somber theme, “Le Sage ne rit qu'en tremblant,” and, even more, his own original suggestions, which are of primary interest to the reader and student of Baudelaire. But in view of the speculations which occupy most of the passage above, the secondary question of the source of that theme is one which obviously intrigued Baudelaire and one, therefore, which calls for an answer from his present-day students.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965
References
1 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes: Curiosités esthétiques, ed. Jacques Crépet (Paris: Louis Conard, 1923), pp. 371–372. The page numbers in parentheses following quotations from Baudelaire or from Crépet's notes refer to this text. Unless otherwise indicated, italics in all quotations used in this paper reflect the material being quoted. The Biblical references in brackets or parentheses are to the King James version.
2 Notably by Mother Mary Alphonsus, The Influence of Joseph de Maistre on Baudelaire (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Marie Brearton, 1943), and Daniel Vouga, Baudelaire et Joseph de Maistre (Paris: Corti, 1957).
3 Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, (Œuvres, 43 vols. (Versailles, 1815–19), xxxvii, 609. The page numbers in parentheses following quotations from Bossuet's treatise refer to this text. As for the mechanics of Bossuet's possible influence, Baudelaire could have read the Maximes et réflexions in the edition just mentioned or in Bossuet, Discours sur la vie cachée en Dieu. Traité de la concupiscence. Opuscules. Maximes et réflexions sur la comédie (Paris: N. Pichard, 1821).
4 The quotation from Lavater's Souvenirs pour des voyageurs suggested by Henri Lemaltre in the notes to his edition of Baudelaire's critical writings (Curiosités esthétiques; L'art romantique, Paris: Garnier, 1962, p. 243, ii.) makes interesting connections butis not as close to Baudelaire's phrase as the words from Ecclesiasticus and Bossuet which are the kernel of this paper. The quotation from Lavater's book is: “Le Sage sourit souvent et rit rarement.”
5 The cover of Baudelaire's Salon de 1845 announced the forthcoming publication of a work entitled De la caricature; in a letter to his mother written 4 December 1847 he says he had been assigned to write a Histoire de la caricature eight months earlier (see the Correspondance générale, i, 94).
6 For other Biblical texts on laughter and mirth, see Ecclesiastes vii.3–4, vii.6, viii.15, x.19, and Proverbs xiv.13.
7 In his notes on “De l'essence du rire” (p. 500), Crépet points out that a poem by Baudelaire's friend Gustave Le Vavasseur (in Vers, Paris: Herman Frères, 1843, p. 19) contains the line: “Dieux joyeux, je vous hais: Jésus n'a jamais ri.” Whatever one may think of Jules Mouquet's attribution to Baudelaire of a large number of the poems in Vers (see Baudelaire, Vers retrouvés, ed. Jules Mouquet, Paris: Emile-Paul, 1929), there can be little doubt that Baudelaire read Le Vavasseur's poem. For a brief history of the tradition that Jesus never laughed, see Ch. Urbain and E. Lévesque, L'Église et le théâtre (Paris: Grasset, 1930), p. 258 (Urbain's and Lévesque's book is, in effect, a richly annotated edition of Bossuet's Maximes et réflexions sur la comédie). Some notes which W. T. Bandy of the Univ. of Wisconsin has kindly made available to me seem to throw light on the question of Baudelaire's immediate source for this idea and, in fact, for other ideas in his essay on laughter. According to Bandy's notes, P. Scudo, in his Philosophie du rire (Paris: Poirée, 1840), wrote as follows: “Aussi l'idéal de la miséricorde, Jésus-Christ ne rit jamais.” The probability that Baudelaire knew Scudo's book is enhanced when we note that among the book's chapter headings are: “Le rire n'est jamais innocent,” “Le rire décèle notre imperfection,” and “Le rire n'exprime pas le bonheur.” There is a strong Baudelairian flavor to several passages in Scudo's book, notably: “Le rire est à la fois le signe de la supériorité de l'homme et de son imperfection. Il rit parce qu'il pense, mais il rit aussi parce qu'il est méchant. … Nous rions les uns des autres et l'humanité forme une échelle immense de rieurs au bout de laquelle est Dieu, qui contemple cette vaste comédie avec le sérieux de la puissance et de la bonté. Dieu ne peut pas rire!” That Scudo was working in a tradition congenial to Baudelaire is evidenced by the following remark: “Une physionomie du rire serait un livre élémentaire des plus intéressants pour la connaissance de l'homme, a dit le bon Lavater.” In 1852, Baudelaire's tentative title for his essay on laughter was Physiologie du rire (see Crépet's notes, p. 499); his interest in Lavater and the latter's influence on him have been amply documented by Jean Pommier, La Mystique de Baudelaire (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1932).
8 See, however, Jean Pommier, Dans les chemins de Baudelaire (Paris: Corti, 1945).