discover an entire history out of a single detail-just as Victor Fournel was able to

reconstruct "an entire conversation, an entire existence" out of a word heard in passing

(qtd. in AP, "M [The Flaneur]" 431).

 The Parisian landscape opens up before the flIneur like the interior of a room,

where every facet holds the promise of a new discovery.17 He lingers along the streets,

which present a "'world in miniature,' 'a grand poeme de l'etalage,' a spatial verse of

visual display" (Friedberg 74). From sidewalk to sidewalk, he crisscrosses the

labyrinthine city streets-a task made more complicated and hazardous since the

regulation of street traffic-in pursuit of moments of visual rapture. Again and again,

Benjamin's wanderer returns to the arcades, where objects have become commodities,

and loses himself in the crowd. He surrenders himself to "the intoxication of the

commodity around which surges the stream of customers" ("The Flineur" 55). The

merchandise excites him. But his is not the excitement of a consumer. Fldnerie does not

concern itself with the utilitarian value of things; the flIneur's idle reveries do not result

in economic transactions. He is like a practicing new historicist, who, as Catherine

Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt suggest, likes "to pick up a tangential fact and watch

its circulation" (4). He does not subscribe to any particular philosophy or approach, for

his is an investment in things not theories. The flIneur finds "ever more irresistible the

magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name" (AP,

"M [The Flaneur]" 417).

 Because he makes idling itself an aesthetic project, the flIneur would be an ideal

historian figure to gaze at the mysterious objects of film noir. Following the flaneur's

path, as he elegantly takes[] a tortoise out walking" (AP, "M [The Flaneur]" 422), might