I found Xaviere Gautheir through a search for Hans Bellmer.  She brought me to Angela Carter, who will give me some fiction to read once my copy of Angela Carter, Black Venus arrives in the mail.

On Jeanne Duval and Charles Baudelaire;

"He said she danced like a snake and she said, snakes can't dance: they've got no legs, and he said, but kindly, you're an idiot, Jeanne; but she knew he'd never so much as seen a snake, nobody who'd seen a snake move - that quick system of transverse strikes, lashing itself like a whip, leaving a rippling snake in the sand behind it, terribly fast - if he'd seen a snake move, he'd never have said a thing like that. 

(BV 14/15)"
-Angela Carter