In "Le Vin des chiffonniers", as in Du Vin et du Haschisch, the ragpicker's stumbling gait is compared to that of the poet wandering the cities. In "Le Soleil", the poet "stumbles", "collides". Now, to bump into something is not only "to bump into", but also "to find", a double meaning found in The Physiology of Physiologies with regard to "literary ragpickers", and which may recall the dedication of Le Spleen de Paris. W. Benjamin saw in this "fantasque fencing" the poet's modern clash with the crowd - a "spiritual" crowd, as the streets are deserted; it's more a case of the poet-chiffonnier bumping his verses into the corner of the bollard, as confirmed by the rest of the poem's evocation of "crutch-bearers", lame devils or former grognards.
The ragman's hook is often likened to a bladed weapon. In a double engraving by Henri Valentin (in Texier's Le Tableau de Paris ), the disguised grisette's saber becomes a ragpicker's hook. In the Augsburg Gazette, Henri Heine describes the ragpicker riot of 1832 as a "little counter-revolution", and in La Mode, a Legitimist magazine that actually supported the riot, the ragpicker's hook crosses the city sergeant's saber. Let's not forget that a "baudelaire" is first and foremost a double-edged short sword, and Baudelaire could substitute his signature with a scimitar, in the form of a rebus.
The first of the "Seven Old Men" combines many of the ragman's traits: bent body, clumsy gait, cane, beard like a "sword", mud... The esoteric number of the procession itself recalls the little name of the cane with a beak, which Baudelaire sometimes uses. In "Le Soleil", the frozen locution "flairant dans tous les coins" is remotivated by the crumpling system. The connection between the hook and the metal quill pen, which began to flourish in 1830 (replacing the quill pen, despite resistance from Baudelaire or Flaubert), confirms the connection between the ragpicker and the poet, beyond the actual period of ragpicking. Finally, in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Constantin Guys is depicted as a fencer returning from his nocturnal collections.
