Baudelaire and "A Philosophy of Toys."

artículo
Baudelaire, Charles
A Philosophy of Toys


Brandon Lattu. Alll Toys , 2006

Many years ago I was taken by my mother to visit a certain Madame Panckoucke. (…) I remember very clearly that this lady was clad in velvet and fur. At the end of a short time, she said: ‘Here we have a little boy whom I would like to give something to – to remember me by.’ She took me by the hand and we passed through several rooms; then she opened the door of a chamber where an extraordinary and truly fairylike spectacle met my gaze. The walls were literally invisible, so covered were they with toys. The ceiling had vanished behind an efflorescence of toys which hung from it like marvellous stalactites. On the floor was hardly a narrow catwalk to place one’s feet upon. It was a whole world of toys of all kinds, from the most costly to the most trifling, from the simplest to the most complicated.



‘This,’ said she, ‘is the children’s treasury. I regularly set aside a small sum of money to add to it, and when a nice little boy comes to see me, I bring him here so that he can take away a souvenir of me. Make your choice.’ With admirable and luminous alacrity which is typical of children, in whose minds desire, deliberation and action make up, so to speak, but a single faculty – a fact which distinguishes them from degenerate man, with whom, in contrast, deliberation absorbs almost the whole of his time – I seized hold of the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most showy, the newest, the most unusual of the toys. My mother protested against my impertinence and obstinately refused to let me take it away with me. She wanted me to be content with an infinitely ordinary object. But I could not agree, and to make everything all right, resigned myself to a fair compromise.


Alice Anderson. Still Life, 2006

It has often struck me that it would be amusing to know all the ‘nice little boys’ who have now crossed a good part of life’s cruel desert and have for a long time been handling something other than toys, and yet whose carefree childhood once upon a time took away a souvenir from Madame Panckoucke’s treasury. This episode is responsible for my never being able to stop in front of a toyshop and run my eyes over the inextricable muddle of strange shapes and clashing colours of its contents without thinking of the velvet-and-fur-clad lady who appeared to me as the Toy Fairy. I have moreover retained a lasting affection and a reasoned admiration for that strange statuary art which, with its lustrous neatness, its blinding flashes of colour, its violence in gesture and decision of contour, represents so well childhood’s idea about beauty. There is an extraordinary gaiety in a great toyshop which makes it preferable to a fine bourgeois apartment. Is not the whole of life to be found there in miniature – and far more highly coloured, sparkling and polished than real life? There we see gardens, theatres, beautiful dresses, eyes pure as diamonds, cheeks ablaze with rouge, charming lace, carriages, stables, cattle-sheds, drunkards, charlatans, bankers, actors, punchinellos like foreworks, kitchens, and whole armies, in perfect discipline, with cavalry and artillery. (...)