Ihe Faust who summoned her from the abyss of which her eyes retain the devastating memory must have exged her presence for his soul; black Helens lips suck the marrow from the poets spirit, although she wishes to do no such thing. Apart from her meals and a few drinks, she is without many scious desires. If she were a Buddhist, she would be halfway on the road to sainthood because she wants so little, but, alas, she is still pricked by needs.
The cat yawned and stretched. Jeanne woke from her trance. Folding another spill out of a dismantled soo ignite a fresh cheroot, her bib of cut glass a-jingle and a-jangle, she turo the poet to ask, in her inimitable half-raucous, half-caressing voice, voice of a crow reared on honey, with its dawdling at of the Antilles, for a little money.
Nobody seems to know in what year Jeanne Duval was born, although the year in which she met Charles Baudelaire (1842) is precisely logged and biographies of his other mistresses, Aglaé-Josephine Sabatier and Marie Daubrun, are well doted. Besides Duval, she also used the names Prosper and Lemer, as if her name was of no sequence. Where she came from is a problem; books suggest Mauritius, in the Indian o, or Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean, take your pick of two different sides of the world. (Her pays dine of less importahan it would have been had she been a wine.) Mauritius looks like a shot in the dark based on the fact the Baudelaire spent some time on that island during his abortive trip to India in 1841. Santo Domingo, bus Hispaniola, now the Domini Republic, a troubled history, borders upon Haiti. Here Toussaint LOuverture led a successful slave revolt against French plantation owners at the time of the French Revolution.
Although slavery had been abolished without debate throughout the French possessions by the National Assembly in 1794, it was reimposed in Martinique and Guadeloupe -- though not in Haiti -- by Napoleon. These slaves were not finally emancipated until 1848. However, Afri mistresses of French residents were often manumitted, together with their children, and intermarriage was by no means a rare occurrence. A middle-class Creole population grew up; to this class belong the Josephine who became Empress of the Fren her marriage to the same Napoleon.
It is uhat Jeanne Duval beloo this class if, in fact, she came from Martinique, which, since she seems to have been Francophone, remains a possibility.
He made a note in Man Coeur Mis à Nu: "Of the Peoples Hatred of Beauty. Examples: Jeanne and Mme Muller." (Who was Mme Muller?)
Kids ireets chucked sto her, she so tall and witchy and when she issed, teetering along with the vulnerable, self-scious dignity of the drunk which always invites mockery, and, always she held her bewildered head with its enormous, unravelling cape of hair as proudly as if she were carrying upon it an enormous pot full of all the waters of Lethe. Maybe he found her g because the kids ireet were chug sto her, calling her a "black bitch" or worse and spattering the beautiful white flounces of her olih handfuls of tossed mud they scooped from the gutters where they thought she belonged because she was a whore who had the o sashay to the er shop for cheroots or ordinaire or rum with her uck up in the air as if she were the Empress of all the Africas.
But she was the deposed Empress, royalty in exile, for, of the entire aerogeneous wealth of all those tries, had she not been disposs
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