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Art and language

Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning

Girardin; Ptolémées; souverainement ridicule; Pecudesque locutæ

Girardin in Fusées X and Mon cœur Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI is Émile de Girardin, the journalist targeted by the notebook’s quoted ridicule.

From the book

Intimate Journals

Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordGirardin in Fusées X and Mon cœur Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI is Émile de Girardin, the journalist targeted by the notebook’s quoted ridicule.
  • In Intimate JournalsMon cœur mis à nu XXVI begins with the proverb about taking the bull by the horns, followed by Girardin’s proposed act of taking a speech from its end.
  • In this editionTranslator notes 11 and 122 distinguish the historical Ptolemy source note from the modern explanation and preserve the uncertain Latin without a fabricated translation.
  • A place to readGirardin parler latin !

Meaning

Girardin in Fusées X and Mon cœur Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI is Émile de Girardin, the journalist targeted by the notebook’s quoted ridicule. He must be distinguished from Saint-Marc Girardin, the separately named target in Mon cœur mis à nu LXXX. The passages make the handling of language a test of intellectual authority: a mixed metaphor, an astronomical analogy and an uncertain Latin sequence become materials for satire.

Use in the book

Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI begins with the proverb about taking the bull by the horns, followed by Girardin’s proposed act of taking a speech from its end. Baudelaire literalizes the comparison and pretends that Girardin locates the bull’s horns behind it, where the tail belongs. This is an aggressive reading of an awkward transition, not a zoological error independently reported about the journalist. The joke makes the incongruity of the phrases visible by insisting that their figurative objects share one body.

The longer quotation invokes journalistic ‘Ptolemies’ while defending an opinion as certainly true as the earth’s rotation and the sun’s non-rotation. The attached historical source note quotes Ptolemy calling a rotating earth supremely ridiculous. The structure reverses the authority of a confident judgement: what sounds certain can be exposed as mistaken by the very scientific history recruited for the analogy. The lexicon need not treat the notebook as a modern astronomy lesson to explain the rhetorical trap. Its concern here is the relation between confidence, analogy and the retrospective appearance of error.

Fusées X had already turned Girardin’s Latin into a prodigy by appending the Virgilian cattle-speaking phrase. That allusion presents the journalist’s attempt at learned speech as an unnatural event. Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI’s later Latin is less recoverable: the governing print’s sequence cannot be securely construed. Its attribution to Girardin does not make an invented English joke legitimate. Preserving the difficulty is more exact than silently repairing words until a plausible meaning appears.

These barbs sit within a larger hostility toward editors and newspapers, but they have distinct evidentiary statuses. The attack on printed absurdity differs from an unexpanded list of people to portray, and both differ from the generalized indictment of the newspaper’s daily violence in Mon cœur mis à nu CIII. Saint-Marc Girardin’s ‘Let us be mediocre’ in Mon cœur mis à nu LXXX is a separate attributed remark directed toward the sublime. Keeping the two Girardins apart prevents the force of several attacks from collapsing into a fictitious single portrait.

Places to read

  1. Fusées XGirardin parler latin ! Pecudesque locutæ. — A classical prodigy is redeployed as a journalistic insult.
  2. Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIIl confond les cornes avec la queue. — The joke literalizes the relation of horns, tail and the end of a speech.
  3. Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIEt habet mea mentrita mentum. — The supplied governing Latin is retained without a confident reconstruction.
  4. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXSaint-Marc Girardin a dit un mot qui restera — This is a separately named person and a separate attributed saying.

Translation in this edition

Translator notes 11 and 122 distinguish the historical Ptolemy source note from the modern explanation and preserve the uncertain Latin without a fabricated translation. Note 18 identifies the Virgil phrase in Georgics I.478, while the English body translates it. The source’s unclosed date parenthesis in Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI is also retained. These choices matter: a lexicon can explain the satire without turning the edition’s unresolved textual details into established facts.