SOURCE: Hult, David F. “The Allegoresis of Everyday Life.” Yale French Studies 95 (1999): 212-33.

In the excerpt that follows, Hult asserts that in Belle Dame sans mercy Chartier uses the techniques of allegory to construct a critique of the form itself and its interpretation.

Tout pour moi devient allégorie …

—Charles Baudelaire

Picture the following scene: a young man, about twenty years old, having reached adulthood yet still inexperienced in the domains of love and sexuality, comes upon a gathering of sophisticated people in opulent surroundings who are clearly having a good time.¹ There is music, talk, mingling. Following upon this initial entry into a society that is eminently attractive and yet that elicits some measure of ambivalence, the young man is drawn into the seductions offered to him and encounters both the delights and the sufferings, the invitations and the obstacles that seem inevitably to strew the path...