![]() ![]() Having started his career as an art student in Paris, he had fallen spectacularly under the influence of Victor Hugo and enlisted as one of the shock troops of Romanticism, sporting shoulder-length hair and scarlet waistcoats, and publishing ultra-Romantic poetry ( Albertus, 1832) and a scandalous novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), whose heroine spends much of her time dressed as a man. In 1857 Théophile Gautier was forty-six, and at the height of his reputation as a poet and critic. ![]() But a forgotten sequence of Gautier’s bizarre short stories, never collected in his own lifetime but now known as Les Contes fantastiques, may throw some light-perhaps a blue, phosphorescent, erotic moonlight-on this intriguing question. The significance of this flamboyant dedication to Gautier, and especially that unexpected word magicien, has puzzled readers ever since. Following a trial for obscenity (guilty on six counts), The Flowers of Evil rightly became the most famous book of erotic poetry published in nineteenth-century France, and the wording of Baudelaire’s dedication to Gautier became equally celebrated: “ Au poète impeccable, au parfait magicien ès lettres françaises” (“To the irreproachable poet, perfect magician of French literature”). In 1857 Charles Baudelaire dedicated his collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal, to his “friend and master” Théophile Gautier. ![]()
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