Abstract: Ordeals in poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Corbière revise Musset’s idealistic pelican scenario. Rimbaud and Corbière rethink L’Albatros, a model itself concerned with "the essence of laughter"… as was the primal scene of La Nuit de mai. In Rimbaud’s Le Cœur supplicié, the sadism inflicted on the albatross reappears in the ithyphallic frescos of a striking but obscure evocation of sexual molestation.
