A poet who has inspired me enormously is Charles Baudelaire, especially through his work Paris Spleen (1869), a collection of prose poems which transport us to a Paris shaped both by Haussman's urban transformations and by the sentient experiences of the characters. Last year I started to illustrate poems from the Spleen with collages, interpreting Baudelaire's texts in my own way. The images below illustrate his poem The Mirror. One of the shortest poems in the collection, Baudelaire manages to get his sardonic message across in the space of four sentences.
In this series I used a limited color palette, mainly red and beige, to give a sense of space-time unity to the scene and to anchor it in a unique setting. The narrative of The Mirror is held in a single space and a very short lapse of time.
The scene takes place in a private mansion in the 16th arrondissement of Paris (the mansion in the collage is located on rue Cimarosa). Baudelaire witnesses a "ghastly man" looking at himself in the mirror and is surprised that he can admire his reflection. From behind, the man looks ordinary, interpreted by a sculpture of Théodore Rivière (French sculptor of the 19th century). It is only when he turns around that we discover the source of his ugliness: the man's face is in fact one of the mascarons found under the Pont Neuf. In the third vignette, the ghastly man is accompanied by his equals, eleven men without facial deformities, also interpreted by statues of Rivière.