Ticho plné vichru – Babnik Ouattara Gabriela (2026)

Jeanne Duval, the woman, lover, actress, dancer and above all muse of poet Charles Baudelaire, is often reduced in literary history to an exotic symbol of the poet’s opium, a body that inspired but never spoke. This novel approaches her story from another angle. She is no longer merely an ornament in Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, but a flesh-and-blood woman, tired of Paris and of the man who once adored her and then abandoned her. After years spent in his shadow, she is alone in the changing Paris of the nineteenth century, in a body marked by illness and in a time that is running out. When a doctor gives her a fatal diagnosis, she decides to raise her head one last time, get on her bicycle, her symbol of freedom, and set out from the noise of the city into the silence of the countryside, from fame into oblivion. The journey becomes her rebellion against pain, fate and a world that wanted to see her only as “Baudelaire’s black woman.” Baudelaire returns as an invisible second voice: a man unable to escape the influence of his despotic mother and incapable of empathy, who turned Jeanne into an image and ultimately lost her. In the echoes of his verse are reflected everything their relationship contained: passion, opium, decay, tenderness and destruction. Jeanne, however, learns to look differently at the world, at men and at herself. This intimate, lyrical novel portrays a woman defying her own legend, a body turning to dust and a soul that wants to breathe one last time. It explores how even a muse can have the final word, and how death can also be a form of freedom. The book is in Czech.