Her portrayal in the poem is built upon oppositions and antitheses: bras d’un grand époux / tombeau vide (arms of a great husband / empty tomb), la main du superbe Pyrrhus / vil bétail (hand of the superbe Pyrrhus / vile cattle).
Note the alliterations in [s], expression of a sigh, in the line Je pense à mon grand cygne , avec ses gestes fous (I think of my great swan with its mad gestures), and in [i] in the lines Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime / Et rongé d’un désir sans trêve !
Her portrait is built on oppositions: the mud, the wall, the mist echoed the coconut tree and sublime Africa.
The Negress is surely a reference to Jeanne Duval, the poet’s first mistress, a mixed race woman.
They are implicitly linked together and put on an equal footing— with Andromache becoming an animal (vil bétail / vile cattle), while the swan is humanized (avec ses gestes fous / with its mad gestures).
Memory passes from plural to singular, from heaviness to lightness, from matter to music, from banality to value.
The correspondences, allegories and images bring back to life those memories made static by spleen.
One notes the opposition between two semantic fields: one of architecture expressing stability, the other one of mutation, with the nostalgia for a city turned upside down by the Hausmannian alterations.