When Yslaire draws Baudelaire. How can a nineteenth-century poet be so current? Baudelaire is the French poet who always speaks to the reader. His fellow, his brother (poem "To the reader" of the Flowers of Evil) to whom he confides that the worst of vices is Boredom. And it is this same boredom that will push Baudelaire to come to meet Jeanne Duval, a young mixed-race actress with disturbing beauty. Object of all the mystifications in literary history (her burning correspondence with Baudelaire was destroyed by her mother at her death), Jeanne bears the strange epithet of "Black Venus", for having been the muse of the poet. Sometimes her passionate lover, sometimes the catalyst of her vices. Posterity quickly cast shame on her, but what is it really? Yslaire proposes to explore the relationship that the poet had with her. But the reader must be warned! This 32-page story of sex, passion and death is limited to 2,500 copies. Its relatively modest price and the care given to the sketches should make this album a sought-after work quickly sold out. Also, this issue is the first chapter of Black Venus for the "Aire Libre" collection. It was published by Dupuis in June 2020 and we are looking forward to its sequel on October 2nd!
Baudelaire, a timeless passion
Despite its political instability, the France in the nineteenth century manages to raise the art of many artists to perfection. After a romantic aesthetic close to nature led by Chateaubriand and Lamartine, poets during the century realized that the sublime was elsewhere. Somewhere, under this " low and heavy sky that weighs like a lid" ("Spleen", the Flowers of Evil). Paris, this centripetal force with flamboyant monuments looking down on passers-by, is an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Parisian Bohemia oscillates between the Latin Quarter and Montmartre. The poet became an observer of his time and described "scenes from Parisian life". This theme of Parisian life is also highlighted by Yslaire, making Paris a hallucinatory gallery of complex images. Baudelaire, demiurge, recreates an alternative Paris and proposes a renewed vision. In this issue, the gargoyles overlook a gray and dark Paris. They mingle with the bodies of Charles and Jeanne. This reminds us of William Bouguereau's painting "Dante and Virgil" (1850), inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy . This mixture of bodies, sometimes human, sometimes chimerical, is a tribute to Baudelaire's work, swearing to rid poetry of morality and to mix the beautiful and the ugly. 
"You gave me your mud and I made gold out of it". (In a draft of an epilogue for the second edition of The Flowers of Evil.) This is Baudelaire's palaver that Yslaire respects and pursues. This tumultuous relationship between Jeanne and Charles, ugly by criticism, is above all a passion punctuated by pieces of bravery and beauty. In this issue, two scenes take place in a cemetery: the death of the poet in 1867 and that of his father when Charles was seven years old. Otherwise the Pantheon theater, the love alcove and the Baudelaire apartments, the preponderant action takes place during funerals. The imagination of the poet as a child sails and lands somewhere between the tombstones. This is where the poet begins to be a poet. In the cemetery, the anthropomorphism of the raven, which Charles' mother mistakes for an albatross, is astonishing. He croaks "nevermore", one of the sentences of the eponymous character of Edgar Poe's poem translated by Baudelaire. As if Baudelairian imagery had its source in a childhood battered by the premature death of the father and the remarriage of an absent and idle mother with General Aupick. In short, Yslaire reminds us that Baudelaire is a poetic figure in the same way as those he created. He is an allegorical character of the hell of Parisian routine, where Boredom kills the Ideal.
Parisian loves
But what interests us is the figure of Jeanne Duval. From the outset, Yslaire introduces the poem "Sed non satiata" from The Flowers of Evil, which he recites in bed to his muse. She is a "deity", a "witch", a "libertine shrew". If the poem is beautiful, it condemns Joan to be the ruthless muse. The femme fatale eternally beautiful and eternally impossible to understand. This adjective of "Black Venus", more than being demeaning, is a seal making Joan only the mistress of a poet. Now, Jeanne has a voice, a word, a thought. This is what Yslaire wants to highlight for the first time. It undermines a sexist literary myth that Jeanne Duval is Baudelaire's terrible black woman. This funny lady from whom we do not know where she comes from and who exists only the rest and comfort of the poet called "cursed". Yslaire "rehabilitates" Jeanne and breaks her black legend thanks to the letter she writes to the poet's mother at the time of her death. It is addressed to the mother as well as to the reader:
Yes, by nature of my race, I can only lie, thief, greedy and illiterate in your eyes. Posterity, be sure, will confirm it to you and will not cease to write it in his biographies ."
Implicit Jeanne indicates that her melanin plays against her. Indeed, no poet's lover has been mystified as Joan was. One projects on Jeanne perhaps an orientalist tendency making like a naked and dancing odalisque, twirling for the pleasure of the colonist. But Yslaire kicks the anthill by giving the floor to Jeanne for the first time. And even, by restoring to him his status as a human being endowed with speech and reason. 
The nineteenth century, that of taking a step back?
The world of comics takes pleasure in exploring literary monuments. With its enchanting eye, the comic pursues the topoi of castigat ridendo mores (laughter corrects morals) and placere et docere (learning while having fun). That is to say, only this art of comics can produce a language strong enough to reveal what reading alone in a book cannot do. Yslaire gives a body and a word to Jeanne when in the Flowers of Evil she is only a sexualized mistress. Yslaire gives her the right to express herself when Baudelaire's mother has made her a temptress whose son is lost in her fold. It seems that the time has come for a more objective, deconstructed context and rid of colonial and sexist myths to show the real love story of Jeanne and Charles. In short, this series is all the more important because it tackles a difficult literary type. It is that of the Baudelairian temple and its companion of misfortune. Yslaire offers a style in stripped sketches, then autumnal colors. As if to put in image the Baudelaire work, built on the desire to escape, to leave "anywere out of the world" (Le Spleen de Paris, small prose poems). Jeanne and Baudelaire, Baudelaire and Jeanne. This real and yet so literary couple still inspires artists today, as Yslaire demonstrates. But, he also made the artistic rut of singers like Serge Gainsbourg ("Baudelaire", "Couleur café", "L'alcool", "Le poinçonneur des Lilas", the character of Almeria in "Initials BB"…). So, Yslaire draws Baudelaire…
