ABSTRACT
Charles Meryon's works were of course etchings, a genre that Baudelaire was later to write about more fully in 'L'Eau-forte est a la mode'. When Baudelaire cites the stanza of 'A l'Arc de Triomphe', he supposes that Hugo must have been happy to see Meryon's prints, for 'il a retrouve, dignement represente, sa "Morne Isis" '. In 1859 Baudelaire wrote a description of Meryon's etchings, dense with imagery and including a stanza of a poem by Victor Hugo, later sending the passage off to Hugo himself. Hugo's reverie is an evocation of absent things — people but also places — a long list that descends into deepening chaos. The absent poet is the poet of absence. But 'absence' applies to Baudelaire too, for in 1859, he was living with his mother in Honfleur and was already thinking of exile himself, a project he would only act on in 1864 by moving.
