Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verraije plus que dans l’éternité?Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! Trop tard! Jamais peut-être!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!The deafening street was screaming all around me.
Tall, slender, in deep mourning—majestic grief—
A woman made her way, with fastidious hand
Raising and swaying festoon and hem;Agile and noble, with her statue’s limbs.
And there was I, who drank, contorted like a madman,
Within her eyes, that livid sky where hurricane is born
Gentleness that fascinates, pleasure that kills.A lightning-flash...then night!—O fleeting beauty
Whose glance all of a sudden gave me new birth,
Shall I see you again only in eternity?Far, far from here! Too late! or maybe, never?
For I know not where you flee, you know not where I go,
O you I would have loved (o you who knew it too!)In a widow’s veil, mysteriously and mutely borne along by the crowd, an unknown
woman comes into the poet’s field of vision. What this sonnet communicates is simply
this: far from experiencing the crowd as an opposed, antagonistic element, this very
crowd brings to the city dweller the figure that fascinates. The delight of the urban poet is
love—not at first sight, but at last sight. It is a farewell forever which coincides in the
poem with the moment of enchantment. Thus the sonnet supplies the figure of shock,
indeed of catastrophe. But the nature of the poet’s emotions has been affected as well.
What makes his body contract in a tremor—crispé comme un extravagant, Baudelaire
says—is not the rapture of a man whose every fibre is suffused with eros; it is, rather,
like the kind of sexual shock that can beset a lonely man. The fact that ‘these verses could
only have been written in a big city’, as Thibaudet put it, is not very meaningful. They
reveal the stigmata which life in a metropolis inflicts upon love. Proust read the sonnet in
this light, and that is why he gave his later echo of the woman in mourning, which
appeared to him one day in the form of Albertine, the evocative caption ‘La Parisienne’.
Walter Benjamin 25