UDK 821.133.1.09-1 Baudelaire C.:821.124'02.09-1 
CLASSICAL PAST IN BAUDELAIRE'S LE CYGNE: A RECONSIDERATION 
Marko MarinCic 
Abstract 
In the the third preface to Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire curiously refers to Virgil as the only 
'source' for his Le Cygne. It has been seen that Horace's description of the living poet's metamorphosis 
into a swan (Carmina 2.20) is a much more obvious classical reference as far as the title character is 
concerned, and the mention of »l'homme d'Ovide« seems to point the reader to Ovid's narrative of 
the creation of man in the Metamorphoses (1.76-86) as a model e contrario for the degradation of the 
divine bird in Baudelaire's poem. Baudelaire's modern version of the classical symbol of the sublime 
at first seems to suggest an ironic response to Horace and Ovid. On a second reading, however, the 
basic 'negativism' orsaudelaire's swan myth reveais a hidden thread of continuity with the classical 
past: it reveals Ovid's experience as an exilee as the primary parallel to the situations of Andromache 
and the swan. Conversely, Horace's swan-metamorphosis, though essentially Platonic, provides, 
through its over-literal, grotesque realism, an ante litteram alternative to the Platonising aesthetics of 
the earlier Romantics. 
In a note at the end of the third preface to Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire strik-
ingly acknowledges his debt to a number of classical and contemporary poets by a dry 
list of 'plagiarisms': 
Note sur les plagiats. - Thomas Gray. Edgar Poe (2 passages). Longfellow 
(2 passages). Stace. Virgile (tout le morceau d'Andromaque). Eschyle. 
Victor Hugo.1 
For a literary historian inquiring into the poet's literary lineage, this short stock of 
models is an invaluable source of information although it is little more than a reaffirma-
tion of the obvious. Moreover, its risk of diverting the critic's attention from other, less 
obvious but no less important literary presences in the collection is quite realistic. 
Le Cygne is a case in point. Baudelaire's Andromache clearly is a Virgilian char-
acter, but only the first part of the first of the two poems (Le Cygne I) is conspicuously 
based on Virgil's Aeneid: 
Andromaque, je pense a vous ! Ce petit fleuve, 
Pauvre et triste miroir ou jadis resplendit 
1 Baudelaire 184. 
179 
L'immense majeste de vos douleurs de veuve, 
Ce Simo1s menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit, 
A feconde soudain ma memoire fertile, 
Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel. 
Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville 
Change plus vite, helas! que le camr d'un mortel); 
Jene vois qu'en esprit tout ce camp de baraques, 
Ces tas de chapiteaux ebauches et de filts, 
Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l'eau des :flaques, 
Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-a-brac confus. 
La s'etalaitjadis une menagerie; 
Laje vis, un matin, a l'heure OU sous les cieux 
Froids et clairs le Travail s'eveille, ou la voirie 
Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l'air silencieux, 
Un cygne qui s 'etait evade de sa cage, 
Et, de ses pieds palmes frottant le pave sec, 
Sur le sol raboteux tralnait son blanc plumage. 
Pres d'un ruisseau sans eau la bete ouvrant le bee 
Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre, 
Et disait, le creur plein de son beau lac natal: 
«Eau, quand done pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?» 
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe etrange et fatal, 
Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l'homme d'Ovide, 
Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu, 
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tete avide, 
Comme s'il adressait des reproches a Dieu! 
5 
10 
15 
20 
25 
The obvious 'source' is Aeneas' encounter with the widow of Hector in Aeneid 
III; le Simois menteur unmistakably recalls the miniature model of Troy Andromache 
shows to Aeneas upon his visit at Buthrotum: 
progredior portu classis et litora linquens, 
sollemnis cum forte dapes et tristia dona 
ante urbem in luco falsi Simoentis ad undam 
libabat cineri Andromache manisque uocabat 
Hectoreum ad tumulum ... 
talia fundebat lacrimans longosque ciebat 
incassum fletus, cum sese a moenibus heros 
Priamides multis Helenus comitantibus adfert, 
agnoscitque suos laetusque ad limina ducit, 
300 
345 
2 Baudelaire set as an epigraph to the first publication of the poem a quotation from the Aeneid: »falsi 
Simoentis ad undam«; ibid. 1008. 
180 
et multum lacrimas uerba inter singula fundit. 
procedo et paruam Troiam simulataque magnis 
Pergama et arentem Xanthi cognomine riuum 350 
agnosco, Scaeaeque amplector limina portae ... 
I was walking away from the harbour leaving ships and shore behind me 
when I caught sight of Andromache, offering a ritual meal and performing 
rites to the dead in a grove in front of a city on the banks of a river Simo is. 
but not the true Simois of Troy (lit. 'the false Simois'). 
She was weeping her useless tears and sobbing bitterly as these words 
poured from her when the hero Helenus, son of Priam, arrived from the 
walls of the city with a great escort. He recognized his own people and 
took us gladly to his home. He too was weeping and could speak only a 
few broken words to us between his tears. As I walked I recognized a little 
Troy, a citadel modelled on great Pergamum and a dried-up stream they 
called the Xanthus. 
(Tr. D. West) 
The parallel is almost too neat: the vieux Paris is as dead as Troy, and the archi-
tectural complex constructed by Haussmann in the place of the old quarter between the 
Arc du Carrousel and the Louvre as a part of the urban renewal of 1852 is an artificial 
substitute similar to Andromache' s miniature model of Troy. 3 A further similarity, ne-
glected or considered of marginal importance by most interpreters, is the water imagery 
introduced by the river augmented by a flood of tears: »Ce Simois menteur qui par VOS 
pleurs grandit.« Simois is described as 'false' in Virgil's text; the rendition of falsus 
with the stronger menteur+ seems to suggest that in Baudelaire' s version, Andromache' s 
'fake Troy' is little more than a delusion metaphorically referred to as a river watered 
by tears. While the stream of tears is not Virgilian, the underlying idea of a dry river-
bed definitely is: Xanthus (=Scamander), the main river in Andromache's parva Troia 
(and indeed the main river of the Troad), is described as 'dry' (arens Xanthus, 350; cf. 
the ruisseau sans eau in the swan scene, 20). Taken together, the flow of tears and the 
attribute menteur suggest, or at least make possible, a rationalising explanation of An-
dromache's 'little Troy' as a psychological delusion produced by grief. Virgil's Simois 
is a palpable although artificial replica of the real river, and the riverbed of Xanthus 
is there, even if empty. But the fusion of two Virgilian rivers, one 'deceiving' and the 
other 'arid', results in the surrealistic metaphor of a dry riverbed filled with tears: even 
if the little Troy is really there, the big river Andromache sees in the place of the dry 
channel is a hallucination sprung from 'tearful' memories.5 
3 Cf. Chambers, Baudelaire's Paris 107: »This story is a history of cities, viewable on the one hand as 
a history of change and progress, as ancient Troy yields to Greece, then to Rome and finally to Paris, but 
on the other as a narrative of exclusion and suffering that in its essentials has never changed since the sack 
of Troy.« 
4 See Hampton 442--43: 'menteur' implies deliberate trickery. Less convincing is the claim that Simois 
is twice a liar because it conceals its real identity as the Seine. 
5 Another interesting detail: the lying river is represented as an active agent, and Andromache as a 
victim not very much different from the swan who is ironically looked down on by the cruel blue sky. The 
181 
The imagery of water is one of the few 'Virgilian' elements in the second part of 
Le Cygne I. Andromache's situation is almost literally reproduced in the swan's dustbath 
besides a waterless brook: le beau lac natal is just a dream inspired by memories. Except 
for the ruisseau sans eau, however, the image of the swan hardly recalls Virgil. It could 
recall the transformation of Cycnus, Apollo's beloved, into a swan, a metamorphosis 
curiously narrated atAeneid 10.189-93, but only as one among many ancient passages. 
What, then, is the swan doing in Le cygne?6 Curiously enough, the most likely ancient 
model for the swan is provided by Horace, an author curiously not acknowledged as an 
influence in the preface. 
The text in question is Carmina 2.20, a poem in which the poetic 'I' intriguingly 
describes his own bodily metamorphosis into a swan:7 
iam iam residunt cruribus asperae 
pelles et album mutor in alitem 
supeme nascunturque leves 
per digitos umerosque plumae. 
iam Daedaleo notior Icaro 
visam gementis litora Bosphori 
Syrtisque Gaetulas canorus 
ales Hyperboreosque campos ... 
absint inani funere neniae 
luctusque turpes et querimoniae; 
conpesce clamorem ac sepulcri 
rnitte supervacuos honores. 
Already, even now, rough skin is forming on my legs, my upper part is 
changing into a white bird and smooth feathers are sprouting along my 
fingers and shoulders. Soon more famous than Icarus, son of Daedalus, I 
shall be a harmonious bird and visit the shores of the moaning Bosphorus, 
the Gaetulian Syrtes, and the Hyperborean plains . ... 
Let there be no dirges or squalid mourning or lamentation at my corpse-
less funeral. Check your cries of grief and do not trouble with the empty 
honour of a tomb. 
(Tr. D. West) 
The gradual transformation of the poet-figure into the feathered white animal 
repelled critics like Frankel,8 and it might have inspired Baudelaire's drastic realism, 
but the fact that Horace's 'swanification' draws on Platonic imagery9 is only a further 
speaker of the poem, on the contrary, is more self-consciously aware of the illusionary character of visual 
memories: Jene vois qu'en esprit ... On the self-conscious character ofBaudelaire's spleen (as opposed to 
the contemplative melancholy of the Romantics) see the fundamental study by Starobinski. 
6 Terdiman 115. 
7 On Horace Carmina 2.20 as a model Lowrie; Elkins. 
8 Fraenkel 301. 
9 Gantar 135-140. 
182 
element of dissension between Baudelaire and his classical model. At the same time, 
the almost parodic degradation of the classical swan marks Baudelaire's own departure 
from the more classicising stance of his earlier poem, L'Albatros: 10 
Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees 
Qui hante la tempete et se rit de !'archer; 
Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees, 
Ses ailes de geant l'empechent de marcher. 
In Spleen, Baudelaire's dialogue with Horace's more famous Exegi monumentum 
(C. 3.30) suggests a decidedly polemical attitude towards Horace's classicising aesthetics: 
the timeless tyranny of spleen materializes in the imagery of death and decay Horace 
uses only as a negative foil to his claim to eternity.11 
Virgil, as far as the author of Les Fleurs du Mai is to be trusted, provided the 
material for »the whole Andromache piece«. The only poetic model explicitly referred 
to in the poem, though, is Ovid. The mention of Ovid, who described two swan meta-
morphoses in his epic poem (Met. 7.371-81, 12.71-167), might by itself suggest the 
idea of metamorphosis, all the more since the swan is called »a strange and fatal myth« 
(ce mythe etrange et fatal, 24). But again, this self-evident association is glossed over 
by a more concrete allusion to the creation of man narrated at the beginning of Ovid's 
Metamorphoses: 
Sanctius his animal mentisque capacius altae 
deerat adhuc et quod dominari in cetera posset: 
natus homo est, sive hunc divino semine fecit 
ille opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo, 
sive recens tellus seductaque nuper ab alto 
aethere cognati retinebat semina caeli. 
quam satus Iapeto, mixtam pluvialibus undis (!), 
finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum, 
pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, 
os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre 
iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus 
(1.76-86) 
A holier creature, of a loftier mind, 
Fit master of the rest, was lacking still. 
Then man was made, perhaps from seed divine 
Formed by the great Creator, so to found 
A better world, perhaps the new-made earth. 
So lately parted from the ethereal heavens, 
Kept still some essence of the kindred sky-
Earth that Prometheus moulded, mixed with water, 
10 Wright 43: »There (sc. in L'albatros), in the last quartain, the point is rather laboriously(!) made that 
the poet is 'like' this prince of the clouds .... Together, the albatross and the swan mark the distance covered 
by Baudelaire in the development of his poetic genius.« 
11 On this see Michele Lowrie's insightful discussion, esp. p. 46. 
183 
In likeness of the gods that govern the world, 
And while the other creatures on all fours 
Look downwards, man was made to hold his head 
Erect in ma;esty and see the sky, 
And raise his eyes to the bright stars above. 
(Tr. A. D. Melville) 
The innate dignity of Ovid's man, created to look upwards to the sky, is mirrored 
in the swan as a classical paradigm of the sublime. Interestingly, Ovid presents the 
creation of man as a metamorphosis, and a very atypical, overtly 'optimistic' instance 
of metamorphosis: not only is the creation of man from earth and water one of the few 
instances of transition from dead matter to life (cf. Pygmalion's statue); it also gives 
birth to a semi-divine sanctius animal. Yet at the same time, Baudelaire's antropomor-
phic (de ses pieds palmes frottant le pave sec, 18) representation of the sublime bird 
bathing in dry dust opens a still wider gap between the earthly and heavenly realms. 
The ascension of Ovid's semi-divine man to the ranks of a swan implies a fundamen-
tal reversal of status: Baudelaire's swan is not a divine singer but a miserable beast, a 
parody, as it were, of the classical divine bird. It has literally returned to the dust from 
which Prometheus had created the human race. The absence of the second ingredient 
used by Prometheus, the 'pluvial water', speaks for itself. 
Whereas a metamorphosis of some kind has taken place on the way between 
the two texts, the reference to Ovid rather calls attention to the fact that the swan 
cannot escape its present state as an exile by an 'Ovidian' metamorphosis - not even 
by a symbolic metamorphosis of sorrow into song. Unlike man, whose supremacy 
over other beings is largely based on the faculty of speech, Baudelaire's swan is an 
immobilized, silenced exile; his unrealized swan song, as a 'missing' metamorphosis, 
is a silent expression of spleen, and a testimony to the poem's modernity. »Comme 
l'homme d'Ovide« is to be read as »a la difference de l'homme d'Ovide«: the only real 
parallel is Ovid himself, the (almost) silenced exilee, as a parallel to the addressee of 
the poem, Victor Hugo.12 
Andromache, the tragic heroine par excellence, undergoes a similar metamorphic 
degradation (Le Cygne II, 37-40): 
Andromaque, des bras d'un grand epoux tombee, 
Vil b6tail, sous la main du superbe Pyrrhus, 
Aupres d'un tombeau vide en extase courbee 
Veuve d'Hector, helas! et femme d'H616nus! 13 
The grim wordplay tombee-tombeau strips Andromache, bowed in ecstatic mourn-
ing, of the last vestige of tragic decorum: she is now only a step away from »the starved 
and phthisic negress tramping the mud«. Andromache's posture is as un-Racinian as 
12 On the theme of exile as a hidden tertium comparationis see also Nelson 340; Hampton 1982, 444. An 
important contribution to the understanding of the political context is Chambers, Un despotisme 1987 (on 
spleen as a form of resistance to the reactionary politics of the time). 
13 Hampton 443 compares >>Veuve d'Hector, Mias!, et femme d'He!enus« (40) with »me famulo famu-
lamque Heleno transmisit habendam« (Aen. 3.329), and »des bras d'un grand epuoux tombee« (37) with 
»heu! quis te casus deiectam coniuge tanto excipit« (Aen. 3.317-18). 
184 
it can be; if there is a tragic model behind Baudelaire's vii betail, then it is Euripides 
rather than Racine. Her grieving posture and the convulsive gestures of the swan are a 
testimony to the spleen's antiphrastic relationship to the classical aesthetics, incorporated 
in the swan as an icon of musical harmony and immortal fame. 
Baudelaire's strange modern version of the poetic swan seems to suggest, at least 
at the surface level, a bitterly ironic response to both Horace and Ovid. As a prisoner 
of his present exile, immobilized by nostalgia for the past, Baudelaire's grand cygne 
is the exact contrary to his fame-seeking Horatian counterpart, and the reproaches he 
addresses to the inexorable sky are simultaneously directed against Ovid's optimistic 
portrait of the first man. On a second reading, however, the basic 'negativism' of 
Baudelaire's swan myth reveals a hidden thread of continuity with the classical past. 
The context of the ironic reference to Ovid's semi-divine first man suggests Ovid's 
experience as an exilee as the primary (and indeed the only possible) parallel to the 
situations of Andromache and the swan. The same can be said of Horace's swan-
metamorphosis: it is essentially Platonic, but it also provides, through its over-literal, 
grotesque realism, an ante litteram alternative to the Platonising aesthetics of the 
earlier Romantics.14 To be sure, this particular point of contact does not invalidate 
the basic contrast between the white singer triumphing over an empty grave and the 
silent beast bathing in dust, but it clearly shows that Baudelaire's use of the Horatian 
myth of poetic eternity is not purely polemical: it presupposes a model that is itself 
open to ambiguity. --
Perhaps there is more than a touch of irony about Horace's mention of Icarus, 
the mythic paradigm of the artist's downfall, in the context of poetic flight: »iam 
Daedaleo notior Icaro« (»Soon more famous than Icarus, son of Daedalus ... «).15 The 
ironic possibility that the human swan is just a second Icarus might even explain why 
he so haughtily refuses the idea of a funeral. This is admittedly a very Baudelairean 
interpretation, but it is in fact suggested by another poem in Les Fleurs du Mai, a poem 
entitled Les plaintes d'un /care: 
En vainj'ai voulu de l'espace 
Trouver la fin et le milieu; 
Sous je ne sais quel oeil de feu 
J e sens mon aile qui se casse; 
Et brille par l'amour du beau, 
Je n'aurai pas l'honneur sublime 
De donner mon nom a l' abime 
Qui me servira de tombeau. 
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 
14 Baudelaire's relationship to the Romantic Platonism is conveniently summarized in Wolfreys 43-46. 
15 See Johnson 274-75; Tatum 14-15; Nisbet and Hubbard ad Loe.; cf. also Sharrock on Ovid's self-
consciously ironic use of the myth in Ars amatoria II. 
185 
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186