The Rope
Charles Baudelaire
To Edouard Manet
My friend used to say to me, “Illusions are as numerous, perhaps, as relationships among men, or between them and things. And when the illusion disappears, that is to say when we see the being or the fact such as it exists outside of us, we experience a strange feeling, complicated partly by regret for the vanished phantom, partly by a pleasant surprise before the new, before the real fact. If there exists a phenomenon evident, banal, always the same, and of such a nature that no mistake is possible, it is maternal love. It is as difficult to suppose a mother without maternal love as a light without heat; is it not perfectly legitimate, therefore, to attribute to maternal love all the actions and words of a mother which relate to her child? And yet, listen to this little story, in which I was unusually mystified by the most natural illusion.
“My profession of painter impels me to look attentively at faces and facial expressions which I encounter on my way, and you know what pleasure we derive from this faculty which for our eyes makes life more vivid and meaningful than for other men. In the distant neighborhood where I live, and where large spaces covered with grass still separate the buildings, I often noticed a boy whose fiery and mischievous expression appealed to me at first, more than all the others. More than once he modeled for me. At times I made a gypsy out of him, at other times an angel, and still at other times a mythological Cupid. I made him carry the vagabond’s violin, the Crown of Thorns and the Nails of the Passion, and the torch of Love. I took such keen pleasure in the comic manner of this boy that one day I begged his parents, who were poor people, to let me have him, and I promised to clothe him well, to give him some money and not to impose on him any other work save that of cleaning my brushes and running my errands. This child, cleaned up, became a charming creature, and the life he led with me seemed to him a paradise, compared to what he would have had to undergo in his father’s hovel. Yet I must say that this little fellow amazed me at times by strange fits of precocious sadness, and that he soon showed an immoderate liking for sugar and liqueurs; to such an extent, that one day when I saw he had again committed, in spite of my many warnings, a new theft of this nature, I threatened to send him back to his parents. Then I left, and my business kept me away from home for quite some time.
“Imagine my horror and astonishment when, on entering the house, the first thing I saw was that little fellow, the mischievous companion of my life, hanging from the closet door! His feet almost touched the floor; a chair, which he must have pushed aside with his foot, was overturned beside him; his head was twisted over one shoulder; his swollen face and his eyes, wide open with a terrifying gaze, made me believe first that he was alive. To get him down was not as easy a job as you may think. He was already stiff, and I had an inexplicable repugnance at the thought of dropping him abruptly to the ground. I had to hold up his entire body with one arm, and with the hand of my other arm, cut the rope. But all was not was over when that was done; the little monster had used a very thin string, which had cut deeply into the flesh, and I had to pry with narrow scissors between the two rings of swollen flesh, in order to release his neck.
“I neglected to tell you that I had called loudly for help; but my neighbors had all refused to come to my aid. In that, they were faithful to the custom of civilized man who—I don’t know why—never wants to get mixed up with the business of a hanged man. At last a doctor came and declared that the child had been dead for several hours. Later, when we had to undress him for the burial, the rigidity of the corpse was such that, renouncing hope of bending the limbs, we had to slash and cut his clothes in order to take them off.
“The police inspector, to whom, naturally, I had to report the accident, looked at me quizzically and said: ‘There’s something fishy about this!’ impelled doubtless by some innate desire and habit of frightening, on the off-chance, the innocent as well as the guilty.
“One supreme task remained to be done, and the thought of it alone caused me terrible anguish: I had to inform the parents. My legs refused to take me there. At last I summoned courage. But, to my amazement, the mother showed no emotion, and not a tear trickled from the corner of her eye. I attributed this strange behavior to the horror she must have been feeling, and I remembered the well-known saying, ‘The deepest suffering is mute.’ As for the father, he merely said, half stupefied, half dreaming: “After all, it is perhaps better that way; he would have come to a bad end anyhow!”
“In the meantime the body lay stretched out on my couch, and, helped by a maid, I was busy with the final details, when the mother came into my studio. She said she wanted to see the body of her son. I could not, in truth, prevent her from enjoying emotionally her grief and refuse this supreme and sad consolation. Then she begged me to show her the place where her child had hanged himself. ‘Oh, no, Madame, ’ I replied, ‘that would upset you.’ And as my eyes involuntarily turned toward that sinister closet, I saw, with a feeling of disgust mixed with horror and anger, that the nail had remained planted in the panel, and a long piece of rope was still dangling from it. Quickly I went over to tear off those last vestiges of the catastrophe, and was about to throw them out the window, when the poor woman seized my arm and said to me in an irresistible tone of voice: ‘Oh! Monsieur! Give me that, I beg you, I implore you!’ It seemed to me that her despair had doubtless so bewildered her that now she had feelings of tenderness for what had served as an instrument of death for her son, and wanted to keep it as a horrible and precious relic. She seized the nail and the string.
“At last! At last! It was all over! Nothing remained for me to do except to resume my work, more avidly than usual, to drive out gradually that little corpse which haunted the recesses of my mind and whose ghost wore me out with his wide staring eyes. But the next day I received a bundle of letters: some were from tenants of my house, others from nearby houses; one from the second floor, another from the third, another from the fourth, and so on; some in a half-joking style, as if trying to disguise under an obvious banter the sincerity of the request, others grossly insolent and misspelled, but all concerned with the same purpose, namely to obtain from me a piece of the fatal and beatific rope. I must say that among the signers there were more women than men; but they all, believe me, did not belong to the lowest and commonest class. I have kept those letters.
“And then suddenly a light dawned on me, and I understood why the mother was so bent on snatching the string from me and by what kind of trade she intended to be consoled.”