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Ronsard’s Mignonne, Madame de Lafayette’s Letter, and Baudelaire’s Passer-By
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2023
Ch 3: The third chapter concerns pleasure and happiness conveyed by a brief moment in time. Ronsard’s hedonistic poem uses dialectical reasoning and rhetorical deliberation to perfect the pleasure that is ephemeral. It is because the pleasure does not last that it becomes an absolute imperative; the pleasure of the moment is not viewed as lesser than the happiness conferred in duration. In the Princesse de Clèves, a scene of mutual pleasure taken by the protagonist and her beloved is reduced to a series of statements of causation, submitted to intense pressure of time, and turns out to be the only “pure” joy the protagonist feels throughout the novel. Baudelaire’s famous “À une passante,” an example of the new urban lyric, ironizes the lyric tradition while similarly proposing the ephemeral as the source of perfect pleasure.
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