"Les Petites vieilles" in Les Fleurs du mal carry "a little bag embroidered with flowers or rebuses". There was a vogue for rebuses at the time, but Baudelaire refers to the old engravings in Pierre de La Mésangère's Journal des dames et des modes, and to the fashion for "reticules" under the Directoire, contemporary with that of the "sentimental album". Among these engravings, only one shows a rebus: the number 100, the letter D and a tower, to signify "without detour", a formula of a gallant nature and an ideal rebus often cited in dictionaries. In his Histoire du Directoire (1851), Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac describes this outfit, and Arsène Houssaye drew inspiration from it to dress Madame Tallien in Notre-Dame de Thermidor, but without the rebus bag. Baudelaire, on the other hand, moves the bag to Haussmann's Paris. The chiffonnière Nerval met at Paul Niquet's house was a former "merveilleuse": aren't "petites vieilles" also chiffonnières? In Le Figaro in 1837, Théophile Gautier describes, without signing, an artist's room piled high with all sorts of debris, reminiscent of Baudelaire's room caricatured by Émile Durandeau. He writes "rebus" without the final "t". In one of Ernest Prarond's poems attributed to Baudelaire, "rébus" rhymes with "abus", but in the same collection, Le Vavasseur rhymes "rébus" with "Phœbus", "Gibus" and "omnibus". In Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste's Dictionnaire universel de la langue française, 1823 edition, the article "Rébus" mentions the expression "Mettez les rébus au rebut", indicating a common pun. The little old ladies are indeed ragpickers, and it's at the scrap heap that they've found their old rebus bag.
The detour via the rag gave us a better understanding of Baudelaire, the ragpicker's poetic rather than political "accomplice". The ragpicker was a considerable figure, a carnivalesque double of the king and the emperor. He was the ideal of 19th-century Paris as a capital city, but in 1867, in the Paris-Guide, we read that "Liard has gone where all things go, and [that] we no longer have a philosophical ragpicker". In the paintings of Raffaëlli, the books of Vallès and the photographs of Eugène Atget, the ragpicker officiates beyond the gates, far from rue Mouffetard. His time has passed, yet Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Corbière and Lautréamont still identify with him. It's important to distinguish the ragpicker from his neighbors, the collector, the thrift shop owner, the thrift dealer and the clothes merchant, and not to dissolve this figure into an aesthetic of universal recovery. Today, ragpickers interest us because we've returned to a "circular economy" of recycling. In Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, Agnès Varda uses the vanished metaphor to refer to herself. At the start of the 21st century, when we sort everything, we've all become ragpickers.
