Le Stryge (The Vampire)

Master etcher Charles Meryon was a friend of Baudelaire and shared many of his sensibilities. Though produced during a period of modernization, this work uses medieval motifs. The gargoyles perched atop Notre Dame Cathedral overlook the Saint Jacques Tower and the city streets below, many of which—dirty, narrow, and dimly lit—still looked much the same as they had in the middle ages. For Meryon, Paris is a city of lustful appetites, which no amount of urban reform can quell. <
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> Meryon chose to personify “Luxuria,” or Lust—one of the seven deadly sins—as a stryge (translated here as vampire), a creature from Greek mythology with the head of a woman and the body of a bird. The stryge also has a long association in French with the figure of the prostitute. When Baudelaire wrote to his mother about this print, he likely referred to a moral abyss as much as to a topographical one: “The hideous and colossal figure [...] is one of the figures decorating the exterior of Notre Dame. In the background is Paris, viewed from a height. How the devil this man manages to work so calmly over an abyss I do not know.”