SOURCE: "The 'Jeanne Duval' Poems in Les Fleurs de mal," in Yale French Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall-Winter, 1948, pp. 86-93.

In this essay, Pasinetti analyzes the relationship between Baudelaire's sense of poetic craft and his portrayal of a woman believed to have been Jeanne Duval.

When we take poems XX-XXXV (first ed.) of the Fleurs du mal as the Jeanne Duval group, as is often done, we do not claim an interest in biographical study. On the contrary, when we accept Baudelaire's own ordering of the book and we isolate an area in it, our assumption is that that ordering did not occur at the documentary level (as a man would order his journal for purposes of record) but at the level where the poet has already invented himself into character. He is the "speaker of the poem," and knows it. Such "invention" is possibly implicit in the very...