In Les Fleurs du mal , we find poems that evoke the period before the arrival of gas lighting, as well as others that follow in its wake. If there is a hatred of gas (the modern world, says Baudelaire of Poe, is a "great gas-lit barbarism"), this is also accompanied by an admiration, which is not linked to lighting, but more to the idea of explosion. Baudelaire likes to present himself as a breaker of glass in the "crystal palace" that is literature, even if, in retrospect, the following generation is usually seen as that of the poetry of explosion. Baudelaire himself is seen as explosive and eruptive.
There are a significant number of explosions in Le Spleen de Paris, while there are very few in Les Fleurs du mal ; these are linked to ardor, festivity, excess, malignant and unhealthy laughter. Gas lighting and gas explosions are, in short, the sic et non, the pro et contra of modernity, dominated chaos or a return to chaos.
But there's also a third phase to this Baudelairean duality or dialectic of gas, for example in L'Amour du mensonge, a poem from 1860, which the poet attached to a letter to Poulet-Malassis in mid-March, under the title Le Décor. It speaks of the sweetness of gas, the effect of its light on a woman who is no longer young, but rejuvenated by it, according to the epigraph borrowed from Athalie ("Pour réparer des ans l'irréparable outrage"). Gas lighting rejuvenates a woman, making her "strangely fresh", compared to the old lighting in Le Jeu.
The ambivalence of gas, both illuminating and explosive, is echoed in the poem Anywhere out of the world, a place the poet locates high in the Baltic, near the pole: "There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternations of light and night suppress variety and increase monotony, that half of nothingness. There, we'll be able to take long baths in darkness, while, to entertain us, the northern lights will send us their pink sprays from time to time, like reflections from a firework display from Hell!". Finally, my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: "Anywhere! anywhere! as long as it's out of this world!" ". The relief brought by the lightning-filled night is indeed that of Hell: "Hell or Heaven, what does it matter?"
