La muse ténébreuse de Charles Baudelaire

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The name of Jeanne Duval remains inseparably linked to Charles Baudelaire’s. Budding actress or prostitute, muse or she-devil, who really was the one who shared a part of the brief existence of the poet (1821-1867), enchanted his pen and plunged him into the torments of love and passion? Who was Jeanne Duval, from the American islands or the Indian Ocean, or perhaps from the country of the Moors, and who made Baudelaire discover an unknown world of sensuality and exoticism? A world even more singular than the one offered by the indian hemp and the opium of which the author of the Flowers of Evil made an unreasonable consumption in the Club des Hashischins…

It is the story of this torrid, deleterious and sublime love passion that Raphaël Confiant tells us in a teeming novel enamelled with famous verses. From the parisian cobblestones of the Île Saint-Louis to the Mascarene Islands, through Saint-Domingue which became Haiti, and Belgium, his lively pen makes us follow in the tracks of the great French poet, with whom interacted all the great artists of the time, such as Nadar, Dumas, Lamartine, Flaubert, Manet, Delacroix, Nerval, Gautier, and many others…

Raphaël Confiant lives in Martinique, where he was born. He is one of the leaders of the Creolity literary movement and the author of numerous novels, including Mme Saint-Clair, reine de Harlem (translated in Italian language at Stampa Alternativa and in English language at Dialogos Books) et Grand Café Martinique.