From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordAtmosphere is not merely the background against which a narrative happens.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées XI places an instruction about atmosphere beside reminders about drama's marvellous element, sorcery and romance.
- In this edition‘Steeped’ in Fusées XI and ‘Immerse the whole’ in Fusées XXII preserve related soaking metaphors, although noyer is stronger than the latter English choice and can mean drown.
- A place to readLes milieux, les atmosphères, dont tout un récit doit être trempé.
Meaning
Atmosphere is not merely the background against which a narrative happens. It is the medium in which the whole account must be steeped, giving disparate details a shared pressure and tone. Milieu can name a setting, but Baudelaire's soaking verbs make the relation reciprocal: objects and events are saturated by the environment in which they become perceptible.
The term also joins physical air to an emotional or imaginative climate. This does not require every landscape to mirror a character's mood. A carefully sustained atmosphere can act upon a character and reader before either can explain it.
Use in the book
Fusées XI places an instruction about atmosphere beside reminders about drama's marvellous element, sorcery and romance. Its explicit example is Poe's Usher, and its further point of reference is the deep sensations of hashish and opium. The direction is toward a narrative-wide effect, not simply an inventory of Gothic furnishings or an instruction to write while intoxicated.
Poe's tale makes its oppressive air both an experienced force and a conjecture entertained by distressed observers. The house, tarn, interior and family appear connected through that climate. This primary-text parallel supports Baudelaire's choice of model without authorizing a claim that every notebook image derives from Poe. It also shows why atmosphere can organize uncertainty: the reader feels a relation before its cause becomes decidable.
Fusées XXII proposes transforming a lyrical or fairy farce into a serious novel and drowning the whole in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere. Genre transformation depends on treatment rather than merely changing the story's incidents. The request that the result be lulling and even serene in passion further separates atmospheric unity from a single loud emotion. An invented world can sustain an altered state with very few declarations about what the reader ought to feel.
Places to read
- Fusées XILes milieux, les atmosphères, dont tout un récit doit être trempé. — The whole narrative is to be saturated, not merely decorated.
- Fusées XIVoir Usher — Poe’s tale is an explicit point of comparison.
- Fusées XXIINoyer le tout dans une atmosphère anormale et songeuse — A later project makes immersion central to a change of genre.
- Fusées XXIImême de serein dans la passion — Atmosphere can hold passion without becoming uniformly agitated.
Translation in this edition
‘Steeped’ in Fusées XI and ‘Immerse the whole’ in Fusées XXII preserve related soaking metaphors, although noyer is stronger than the latter English choice and can mean drown. ‘Dreamy’ for songeuse gives the projected atmosphere a receptive, suspended quality; it is not the same as simply inserting a dream episode. The edition correctly retains ‘Usher’ as a brief working reference and supplies the title in a note rather than expanding the fragment into a finished citation.
Source note
Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, first publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1839), especially the narrator’s conjecture about an atmosphere belonging to the house and the later account of its influence: The Fall of the House of Usher. The comparison concerns the tale’s narrated perceptions, not an endorsed physical explanation.