Here are phrases from the opening paragraph. “Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart……Soft twists of mist invade the alleys, rise up from the slow river like exhalations of an exhausted spirit.” What immediately attracted me to Angela Carter was the language, the lush vitality of her painterly prose, Proustian in its polyphony with surprising metaphors and vivid imagery. ‘Black Venus’ is about Jeanne Duval, the courtesan mistress of Baudelaire, his mistress-of mistresses, with whom he had a tumultuous on-off relationship. She was his muse for several of the poems in Flowers of Evil, the one central to this story being ‘La Serpent Qui Danse’. In the central scene she dances naked for Baudelaire in his apartment evoking the seamier side of the Belle Époque. Then, later, ‘Venus lies on the bed, waiting for a wind to rise’, as Carter conjures images of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Interspersed with scenes from Baudelaire’s apartment, Carter reimagines her early years prior to her arrival in Paris and then her final syphilis-ridden days after she suffered a stroke. But, oh, the language! If only I could write like that.
First published in Black Venus, Chatto & Windus, 1985; collected in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Stories, Penguin, 1996
A Personal Anthology 