All the opening fragments of Fusées are in line with this Maistrian reading of the city, a vision that is both positive and negative, euphoric and dysphoric, ecstatic and horrific, and ambivalent still, of the relationship with the crowd as prostitution - profane or sacred: "The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of the enjoyment of the multiplication of number. / Everything is number. Number is in everything. Number is in the individual. Drunkenness is a number The importance of number is remarkable in Maistre's Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg : "Le nombre, messieurs, le nombre! [...] Number is the obvious barrier between the brute and us [...]. God gave us numbers, and it is through numbers that He proves Himself to us, just as it is through numbers that man proves himself to his fellow man." Baudelaire certainly denounces the mysticism of paganism, but the principle of mystical union, Maistre's prisca theologia , links Christian charity to pagan sacrifice: both rest on the same theme of reversibility.
Baudelaire relates everything to prostitution as a universal truth; his famous aphorism in Mon cœur mis à nu comes to mind: "The most prostituted being is the being par excellence, that is God, since he is the supreme friend for each individual, since he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love." God belongs to all: here again is a provocation from the poet, but behind this proposition lies the figure of Christ, whom Paul, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, compares to a spiritual prostitute.
For Baudelaire, the religious, sacred and mystical character of the poet's relationship with modern urban crowds is indisputable: drunkenness, nuptials and communion, "poetry and charity". The Pauline scheme is transposed to the big city. The modern sublime is that of the "solitary wanderer", not in the forests, but among the urban crowds, i.e. the "Parisian prowler".
These nuptials with the urban crowd are described in similar terms in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, in reference to Constantin Guys. The "perfect flâneur" is Guys, but he is also Manet. In La Corde, dedicated to Manet, Baudelaire writes: "My profession as a painter compels me to look attentively at the faces, the physiognomies, that offer themselves in my path, and you know what enjoyment we derive from this faculty, which makes life more alive and meaningful to our eyes than to other men." In Le Spleen de Paris, the poet is often in the position of an observer or voyeur. This central but hidden voyeur, seeing but not seen, is exemplified in Une mort héroïque, featuring the prince and the jester, the jester as prince to the prince, and the prince as jester to the jester, with, behind them, above them, the poet as superior prince and jester.
