VERSE OF FORTUNE
Synopsis

 

Prologue: As ghostly images of Paris, and particularly the cemetery at Montparnasse, cross-fade in a moonlit, star filled sky, and autumnal leaves float gently in the breeze, the face of Charles Baudelaire appears. At first he is seen as a young Dandy, painted by artist and friend Emile Deroy, when Baudelaire was in his early twenties. Successive mages of him  then get progressively older until we see him as he was at the time of his death, gaunt, with his hair long and silver-grey. The “real” Charles Baudelaire, a personification of this last image, now materializes as if walking in his sleep. A female voice calls out his name. It belongs to Jeanne Duval, his lover and muse. It is when he hears Jeanne’s voice that he opens his eyes and comes to life. He calls her name, and on a front scrim his drawing of her comes into focus, huge and ghostly. This is crossed by undulating waves of text in French and English that are taken from Baudelaire's poems inspired by Jeanne. From behind the scrim he reaches towards Jeanne’s image. He sings about their life together, wishing that they could recapture their past. Her voice intermittently responds and beckons. The light around him begins to pulse, and as flashes of color break through Charles is swept upstage and disappears as we are transported back in time.

Act One: 1842 - In the Luxembourg Gardens we see the Charles of Deroy’s painting strolling with his good friend, the photographer Nadar. Their witty repartee encompasses the life of the Dandy, marriage, and God. An attractive yet slightly manic redhead approaches. She is Marianne de Cosmelly, a childhood friend from Lyon. Nadar departs and Marianne tells Charles how happy she is, and what a blissful life she has with her husband. Eventually, though, she collapses in tears, admitting that her husband, Etienne de Cosmelly, has left her for a “dusky” dancer who is appearing in music hall on the left bank. Charles volunteers to go and see this woman and persuade her to leave Etienne so he might return to Marianne.

Charles rushes home to his lavish rococo apartment in the Hotel Pimodan to find his mother, Mme Aupick, waiting for him. She has bad news. She and her husband, Charles’ stepfather, have decided, in order to curtail Charles’ spendthrift ways, to severely restrict his access to his inheritance. He will from now on receive only a modest monthly stipend from the family lawyer, Ancelle. There is to be a pivotal meeting the following Monday morning in Ancelle’s office that Charles is required to attend. His future depends on it. He promises his mother that he will be there. Mme Aupick does however give her son the five hundred francs he had asked for previously. He thanks her, promises to attend the meeting in two days time with Ancelle, and rushes out – to the music hall.

The moment Charles sees Jeanne on stage he is smitten. She appears as one of the seated women in a tableau vivant based on Eugène Delacroix’ 1834 painting, Women Of Algiers In Their Apartment. She is a ravishing woman of color from Haiti, yet she has insisted on portraying one of the light-skinned women seated around a hookah. Charles’ vision of Jeanne belies the tawdry performance she is actually presenting, and she changes before his eyes into a regal mystical beauty.

Backstage in her dressing room Jeanne is restless and unhappy with Etienne. She feels like one of the butterflies in his collection: beautiful but dead, and pinned under glass. He reminds her that he “owns” her, saying that a woman can never leave a man, he must always be the one to end any relationship, and that she must always be loyal to him. He leaves her dressing room and Jeanne, in a rage, searches her soul and considers her miserable future. Charles knocks at her door, captivates her with his words, and presents her with jewels (bought with the money his mother has just given him). She succumbs to his allure, choosing to leave Etienne and go with Charles.

Two days later Etienne is indeed back with Marianne, but he is furious at having been forsaken by Jeanne. The married couple quarrel bitterly then run into Charles strolling with Jeanne on his arm. The women have a politely venomous confrontation. Etienne is profoundly shaken, and leaves with Marianne. Charles and Jeanne return to the splendors of the Hotel Pimodan.

There are already signs of Charles’ impending plight: some of the furniture has gone, and some expensive paintings are now missing from the walls. Charles is depressed and turns to his opium pipe for solace. Jeanne, wearing a pair of jeweled earrings he has just given her (despite the relative poverty that is approaching), changes into a transparent flowing nightgown. She wears nothing underneath except more jewels around her neck and her waist. In an opium induced dream state Charles makes love to her, rhapsodizing as the drug takes hold. They fall asleep in the shadows of the apartment as the fire in the hearth dies down and dawn breaks.

A furious Mme Aupick bangs at the door, lets her self in, and strides towards the bedroom, believing Charles must have overslept. He has missed the important meeting with Ancelle. Jeanne emerges from the shadows still naked and covered with jewels. Mme Aupick is stunned. She gasps for breath, and in her haste to flee the apartment she drops her rosary. Jeanne, now realizing whom this intruder was, picks up the rosary and dissolves into laughter. Charles awakes, sees Jeanne with his mother’s rosary, realizes what has happened, and, gripped by despair, embarrassment, and depression, sinks to the floor.

 

 

Act Two: 1852 - We find Jeanne alone in a seedy Paris hotel room wrapped in a shawl for warmth. She shows signs of age. Charles’ papers and books are everywhere. He enters, drawn and dissipated. He has been forced to leave the luxurious Hotel Pimodan and move from one cheap hotel to another. Jeanne has stayed with him, and she still inspires his writing, but she is fed up and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They fight, but when they hear the landlady coming up the stairs they hide in a tall armoire. Mme Sylvain, the landlady, wants the two weeks’ rent Charles owes, and shovels all his work into her apron as “collateral” as she leaves. Charles comes out of hiding and discovers all his work is gone. Jeanne comforts him, singing to him like a mother to a child.

At a carnival costume ball a tipsy Nadar and a woman of the evening are dancing. Etienne enters with another dubious woman, and Nadar recognizes him from earlier times with Jeanne. Charles and Jeanne arrive at the ball. She is dressed as Columbine, Charles is the only one not in costume. Jeanne is dying to dance, but Charles will have none of it. In fact his deteriorating health will not permit it. They bicker, and Jeanne is swept away by a young man who invites her to dance. As they change partners she ends up dancing with Etienne, who at once wants her back yet delights in subtly insulting her somewhat less radiant appearance, and the man she has been living with, Charles. She slaps his face and runs to Charles, begging him to dance with her. He refuses, and so, cursing Charles to his face, she takes to the floor on her own to dance wildly and lasciviously with every man in sight. She is ‘swallowed up” by the jubilant crowd, and Charles, left alone, decides at that moment that she is out of his life for good.

Mme Aupick reads letters from her son spanning ten years. They detail his hardships, and invariably include a request for money. Alternating with these, Jeanne sings melancholy verses of a song that represents her return to the stage. With each verse and each letter the respective women age as the ten years pass. This is interrupted by a collage of accusatory voices confronting Charles: he is on trial in 1857 for obscenity. The focus of the voices’ wrath is Charles’ opus magnum Les Fleurs Du Mal. He is sentenced to pay a fine and the judges gavel rings out like a shot to Charles’ heart. Jeanne finishes her song, aged and ravaged by drugs and absinthe.

1862 - Nadar is an established photographer, but is enamored of his new pastime, the hot air balloon. He confides in Charles that he finds peace and spiritual harmony when he’s up in the clouds taking pictures of Paris from above. Charles says that Wagner’s music gives him the same feeling, and describes how artists are the link between man and God. He says that he believes there must be a heaven (a celestial nest), a spiritual reward, waiting as recompense for all the hell and hardships artists endure on earth. He and Nadar drink a toast to Art and Freedom. Charles confides that Jeanne has come back to him, but that she is no longer beautiful, yet he loves her still. He poses for a photograph, and Ernestine, Nadar’s wife of eight years, enters to invite Charles to stay to dinner. Charles declines, but then almost collapses as he departs. Nadar tells him to take care of himself as he leaves.

1867 - Charles is now white-haired and wizened. He sits alone on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens. Marianne passes by, almost not recognizing her old friend. She turns back and approaches him, shocked at his appearance. He drifts in and out of reality, telling her that Jeanne has left him again, and how whenever he sees something of beauty he misses her. Marianne realizes that he really loved Jeanne, and feels guilty that she was the catalyst for his romantic trials and pain. She admits to him cathartically that Etienne has left her, too, leaving her with wealth and property, but no love. She offers to take Charles to dinner, but he tells her that he has felt “the wind of the wing of madness” pass over him. He hallucinates that he is once again a small child waltzing with his mother. A mysterious woman from Charles’ childhood, Mme Mercier enters. She draws behind her a magnificent wooden chariot that Charles had wanted as a boy. The chariot eludes Charles’ grasp. In his youth it had represented flight from mediocrity. The chariot rises into the air as if by magic, and Charles reaches for it. Mme Aupick, however, pulls his hand down and slaps it. This action, in front of Mme Mercier, had been devastating to him as a child, and now in adulthood, it catapults him into a catatonic state.

In a nursing home in 1867 Charles is being tended to by Nadar, who rattles on about his big air balloon, Le Géant, and how it eventually crashed to earth causing him to once again become an agnostic. Charles tries to speak, but can only utter the words “Sacré Nom”, and ultimately just “Crénom”, blasphemous corruptions of the phrase Nom Sacré de Dieu. He gestures that he wants to go to the window. Nadar helps him, and when they get there the view becomes a golden surrealist  panorama of Paris glistening in the evening sun. Nadar, Mme Aupick and Marianne, who are also present, see this epiphany and are transfixed. There must be a God for such beauty to exist! They help Charles back to a divan, and Nadar suggests that Mme Aupick read to her son. She opens to a page in Les Fleurs du Mal, and begins to read one of the poems. Half way through the words catch in her throat – her son has written about his own death. Charles’ “spirit” sings the final words of the poem as he passes unseen from Marianne to Nadar and back to his mother to bid them goodbye. He makes the sign of the Cross and dies in his mother’s arms.

Four angels sing the words Nom Sacré de Dieu. Behind them, Nadar, Marianne, and Mme Aupick scatter roses on Charles’ grave. The scene changes into a heavenly salon (the one Charles spoke to Nadar about). The angels become four of Charles’ dear friends who pre-deceased him. They gather around the roses that lie in their midst. Charles materializes as the young man whom we saw in the Prologue. He is welcomed by his friends: the artist Delacroix; the subject of one of his poems To A Creole Lady, Mme Autard de Bragard; a young painter, Emile Deroy; and Mme Mercier. They each pick up some of the roses and present them to him until his arms are filled with flowers. All is joyful and serene. Charles looks around for someone. He is told that she did die, but that she is not here. If Charles wants her to join him he must think of her and tell his hosts why she was the one person he continued to love even through the pain the relationship brought him. Charles explains that she was the one who haunted his heart, that he adored her touch, and the scent of her hair and everything about her – good and bad. He needed her.

His words cast the spell, and a voice is heard calling Charles’ name as in the Prologue. Jeanne emerges, radiant and beautiful as when he first saw her. As she runs to his embrace the roses cascade to the floor.