ABSTRACT
The July Monarchy and the Second Empire witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of the art of caricature. In an article of December 1861, Charles Asselineau, Baudelaire's close friend, goes so far as to suggest a causal link between the innately grotesque character of the bourgeoisie and the production of caricatures. Baudelaire did not restrict himself to being a simple object of caricature, however. He claimed that reflections on the subject were, for him, 'une espece d'obsession'. Maclean highlights various parodic elements in this prose poem, including its deflation of machismo by way of the feminizing description, in the opening line, of the men's smoking room as 'un boudoir d'hommes' and the 'almost caricatured misogyny' of the first story that is recounted. The listeners' apparent admiration for the speaker's ability to murder recalls an 1844 caricature by Daumier that presents an image of a well-dressed philanthropist effectively congratulating a convict for having killed three men by the age of twenty-two.
