Beautiful Dorothy

The sun overwhelms the town with its strict and terrible light; the sand is dazzling and the ocean sparkles. The stuporous world sinks limply and takes a siesta, a siesta which is a kind of tasty death where the sleeper, half-awake, tastes the pleasures of his annihilation.

Meanwhile Dorothy, strong and proud as the sun is, goes along through the empty street, the only living person now under the immense blue, making against the light a sparkling dark blot.

She goes along, softly swaying her figure so delicate upon her hips so wide. Her sticky silk dress, of a bright pink shade, contrasts with her shady skin and molds exactly her high waist, her hollow back and pointed bosom.

Her red umbrella, filtering the light, projects onto her somber face the bleeding makeup it reflects.

The weight of her great hair nearly blue pulls back her delicate head and gives her a triumphal and lazy air. Heavy pendants warble secretly to her pretty ears.

From time to time a seabreeze lifts by one corner her hovering skirt and shows her gleaming and superb leg; and her foot, like the feet of marble goddesses Europe seals in its museums, faithfully imprints its form on the fine sand. For Dorothy is so prodigiously coquettish that the pleasure of being admired prevails with her over the pride of the freedman, and, though she is free, she walks shoeless.

She goes along, harmoniously, happy to be alive and smiling an empty smile, as if she perceived afar a mirror reflecting her beauty walking.

At the time when the very dogs howl with pain under the biting sun, what puissant motive makes lazy Dorothy go in this way, beautiful and cold like bronze?

Why has she left her little hut so coquettishly arranged, whose flowers and mats make so cheaply a perfect boudoir; in which she takes so much pleasure dressing her hair, with tobacco, fanning herself and seeing herself in the mirror of her large feather fans, as the sea, slapping the beach a hundred steps from there, makes to her vague daydream a pulsant and monotone accompaniment, and the iron pot in which a crab stew with saffron and rice cooks, sends to her from out in the yard its exciting perfume?

Perhaps she has an appointment with some young officer who on far-off beaches heard his fellows speaking of the celebrated Dorothy. Certainly she would beg him, the simple creature, to tell her about the Opera ball, and would ask him if one could go there with bare feet, like the Sunday dances, where even the old negresses get drunk and mad with joy; and then again if the beautiful ladies of Paris are all more beautiful than she.

Dorothy is admired and cherished by all, and she could be perfectly happy is she did not have to heap up piaster on piaster to buy back her little sister who is all of eleven years old, and who is already mature, and so beautiful! She will doubtless succeed, the good Dorothy: the child’s master is so greedy, too greedy to understand another beauty than cash!

Charles Baudelaire