distinguishing feature between antiquity and the modern age was the cigarette, which

became "the most important thing to study, the one most worthy to occupy the attention

of the historian of culture." The pleasure of the cigarette, he claimed in an 1896 short

story titled "Une Volupte Nouvelle," was "the only new pleasure man had invented in

eighteen hundred years" (Klein 28). But what was so distinctive about this "volupte

nouvelle"?

 Merging volupte with gesture, the mid-nineteenth century Parnassian poet

Theodore de Banville argued that the cigarette's pleasure was primarily tactile. For

Banville, volupte was in the performance of smoking. Unlike other commodities, and

indeed unlike the cigar or the pipe, rolling tobacco became an aesthetic act. The process

might look mundane, Banville declared: "It is a pinch of tobacco, rolled in a little leaf of

tissue paper. But once the tobacco has been placed and distributed equally, the leaf must

be rolled elegantly, rapidly, with a rhythmic harmony, with a rapid, confident gesture"

(qtd. in Klein 42). The figure who perfected this aesthetic mode of smoking was the

dandy, who, according to Baudelaire, "has no other occupation than the pursuit of

pleasure; .. who has no other profession but that of elegance" (54). Banville, who was

influenced and admired by Baudelaire, considered the dandy ideal because he would

regard the cigarette in aesthetic rather than utilitarian terms.21 And that is precisely the

appeal of Bogart's signatory gesture as well. As the opening sequence begins, Spade sits

behind the desk, rolling his own cigarette.22 Instead of using machine-pressed cigarettes,

which would be quicker to light and hence more suited to the quick-paced noir thriller,

Spade makes his own cigarette-he pours tobacco from a pouch onto a rolling paper,

tightens the pouch string with his teeth, and begins rolling a cigarette between his fingers,