Baudelaire, his prose and poetry

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Baudelaire, his prose and poetry is a book on French poet Charles Baudelaire by Thomas Robert Smith (1880-1942). It features text and comments from F. P. Sturm, Arthur Symons, Joseph T. Shipley and W. J. Robertson.

1 Full text[1]

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Full text[1]

BAUDELAIRE:

HIS PROSE AND POETRY

Edited by T. R. SMITH

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

1919

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   Dedication (To Arsène Houssaye)
   A Jester
   The Dog and the Vial
   The Wild Woman and the Coquette
   The Old Mountebank
   The Clock
   A Hemisphere in a Tress
   The Plaything of the Poor
   The Gifts of the Fairies
   Solitude
   Projects
   The Lovely Dorothea
   The Counterfeit
   The Generous Player
   The Rope (To Edward Manet)
   Callings
   A Thoroughbred
   The Mirror
   The Harbor
   Mistresses' Portraits
   Soup and the Clouds
   The Loss of a Halo
   Mademoiselle Bistoury
   Let us Flay the Poor
   Good Dogs (To Mr. Joseph Stevens)

   LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE. Translated by F. P. Sturm

   Every Man His Chimæra
   Venus and the Fool
   Already!
   The Double Chamber
   At One o'Clock in the Morning
   The Confiteor of the Artist
   The Thyrsus (To Franz Liszt)
   The Marksman
   The Shooting-range and the Cemetery
   The Desire to Paint
   The Glass-vendor
   The Widows
   The Temptations; or, Eros, Plutos, and Glory

   THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. Translated by F. P. Sturm

   The Dance of Death
   The Beacons
   The Sadness of the Moon
   The Balcony
   The Sick Muse
   The Venal Muse
   The Evil Monk
   The Temptation
   The Irreparable
   A Former Life
   Don Juan in Hades
   The Living Flame
   Correspondences
   The Flask
   Reversibility
   The Eyes of Beauty
   Sonnet of Autumn
   The Remorse of the Dead
   The Ghost
   To a Madonna
   The Sky
   Spleen
   The Owls
   Bien Loin d'Ici
   Contemplation
   To a Brown Beggar-maid
   The Swan
   The Seven Old Men
   The Little Old Women
   A Madrigal of Sorrow
   Mist and Rain
   Sunset
   The Corpse
   An Allegory
   The Accursed
   La Beatrice
   The Soul of Wine
   The Wine of Lovers
   The Death of Lovers
   The Death of the Poor
   Gypsies Travelling
   Franciscæ Meæ Laudes
   A Landscape
   The Voyage

   THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. Translated by W. J. Robertson

   Benediction
   Ill Luck
   Beauty
   Ideal Love
   Hymn to Beauty
   Exotic Fragrance
   Sonnet XVIII
   Music
   The Spiritual Dawn
   The Flawed Bell

   THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE. Translated by Richard Herne Shepherd

   A Carcass
   Weeping and Wandering
   Lesbos

   INTIMATE PAPERS FROM THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF BAUDELAIRE.
   Translated by Joseph T. Shipley

   TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

   Rockets
   My Heart Laid Bare

FLOWERS OF EVIL

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AVE ATQUE VALE

_In Memory of Charles Baudelaire_

By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

   Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs;
   Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
   Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres,
   Son vent mélancolique a l'entour de leurs marbres,
   Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats.
                                    Les Fleurs du Mal

   Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
     Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
     Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea,
   Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,
     Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,
     Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?
   Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before,
     Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat
     And full of bitter summer, but more sweet
   To thee than gleanings of a northern shore
   Trod by no tropic feet?

II

   For always thee the fervid languid glories
     Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;
     Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
   Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
     The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
     That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
   Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.
     Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,
     The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear
   Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,
     Blind gods that cannot spare.

III

   Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother,
     Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us:
     Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous,
   Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other
     Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime;
     The hidden harvest of luxurious time,
   Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech;
     And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep
     Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep;
   And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each,
     Seeing as men sow men reap.

IV

   O sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping,
     That were athirst for sleep and no more life
     And no more love, for peace and no more strife!
   Now the dim gods of death have in their keeping
     Spirit and body and all the springs of song,
     Is it well now where love can do not wrong,
   Where stingless pleasure has no foam or fang
     Behind the unopening closure of her lips?
     It is not well where soul from body slips
   And flesh from bone divides without a pang
     As dew from flower-bell drips.

   It is enough; the end and the beginning
     Are one thing to thee, who are past the end.
     O hand unclasped of unbeholden friend,
   For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning,
     No triumph and no labor and no lust,
     Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust.
   O quiet eyes wherein the light saith nought,
     Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night
     With obscure finger silences your sight,
   Nor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought,
     Sleep, and have sleep for light.

VI

   Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over,
     Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet,
     Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet
   Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover,
     Such as thy vision here solicited,
     Under the shadow of her fair vast head,
   The deep division of prodigious breasts,
     The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep,
     The weight of awful tresses that still keep
   The savor and shade of old-world pine-forests
     Where the wet hill-winds weep?

VII

   Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?
     O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom,
     Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?
   What of despair, of rapture, of derision,
     What of life is there, what of ill or good?
     Are the fruits gray like dust or bright like blood?
   Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours,
     The faint fields quicken any terrene root,
     In low lands where the sun and moon are mute
   And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers
     At all, or any fruit?

   VIII

   Alas, but though my flying song flies after,
     O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet
     Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet,
   Some dim derision of mysterious laughter
     From the blind tongueless warders of the dead,
     Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine's veiled head,
   Some little sound of unregarded tears
     Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes,
     And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs--
   These only, these the hearkening spirit hears,
     Sees only such things rise.

IX

   Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow,
     Far too far off for thought or any prayer.
     What ails us with thee, who art wind and air?
   What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow?
     Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,
     Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,
   Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find.
     Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies,
     The low light fails us in elusive skies,
   Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind
     Are still the eluded eyes.

   Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes,
     Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul,
     The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll
   I lay my hand on, and not death estranges
     My spirit from communion of thy song--
     These memories and these melodies that throng
   Veiled porches of a Muse funereal--
     These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold
     As though a hand were in my hand to hold,
   Or through mine ears a mourning musical
     Of many mourners rolled.

XI

   I among these, I also, in such station
     As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods,
     And offering to the dead made, and their gods,
   The old mourners had, standing to make libation,
     I stand, and to the gods and to the dead
     Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed
   Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom,
     And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear,
     And what I may of fruits in this chilled air,
   And lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb
     A curl of severed hair.

XII

   But by no hand nor any treason stricken,
     Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King,
     The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing,
   Thou liest and on this dust no tears could quicken
     There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear
     Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear
   Down the opening leaves of holy poet's pages.
     Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns;
     But bending us-ward with memorial urns
   The most high Muses that fulfil all ages
     Weep, and our God's heart yearns.

   XIII

   For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often
     Among us darkling here the lord of light
     Makes manifest his music and his might
   In hearts that open and in lips that soften
     With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine.
     Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine,
   And nourished them indeed with bitter bread;
     Yet surely from his hand thy soul's food came,
     The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame
   Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed
     Who feeds our hearts with fame.

XIV

   Therefore he too now at thy soul's sunsetting,
     God of all suns and songs, he too bends down
     To mix his laurel with thy cypress crown
   And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting.
     Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art,
     Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart,
   Mourns thee of many his children the last dead,
     And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs
     Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes,
   And over thine irrevocable head
     Sheds light from the under skies.

XV

   And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,
     And stains with tears her changing bosom chill;
     That obscure Venus of the hollow hill,
   That thing transformed which was the Cytherean,
     With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine
     Long since, and face no more called Erycine
   A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.
     Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell
     Did she, a sad and second prey, compel
   Into the footless places once more trod,
     And shadows hot from hell.

XVI

   And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,
     No choral salutation lure to light
     A spirit with perfume and sweet night
   And love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.
     There is no help for these things; none to mend,
     And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend,
   Will make death clear or make life durable.
     Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine
     And with wild notes about this dust of thine
   At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell
     And wreathe an unseen shrine.

   XVII

   Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
     If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live
     And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.
   Out of the mystic and the mournful garden
     Where all day through thine hands in barren braid
     Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade,
   Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants gray,
     Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted,
     Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started,
   Shall death not bring us all as thee one day
     Among the days departed?

   XVIII

   For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
     Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.
     Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
   And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,
     With sadder than the Niobean womb,
     And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb.
   Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done:
     There lies not any troublous thing before,
     Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
   For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
     All waters as the shore.

[From inside-leaf: Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on April 9,1821, and died there on August 31, 1867. Flowers of Evil was published in 1857 by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet Malassis, who had inherited a printing business at Alençon. Some of them had already appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The poet, the publisher, and the printer were found guilty of having offended against public morals.]

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PREFACE

In presenting to the American public this collection in English of perhaps the most influential French poet of the last seventy years, I consider it essential to explain the conditions under which the work has been done.

Baudelaire has written poems that will, in all likelihood, live while poetry is used as a medium of expression, and the great influence that he has exercised on English and continental literature is mainly due to the particular quality of his style, his way of feeling or his method of thought. He is a master of analytical power, and in his highest ecstasy of emotional expression, this power can readily be recognized. In his own quotation he gave forth his philosophy on this point:

"The more art would aim at being philosophically clear, the more will it degrade itself and return to the childish hieroglyphic: on the other hand, the more art detaches itself from teaching, the more will it attain to pure disinterested beauty.... Poetry, under pain of death or decay, cannot assimilate Herself to science or ethics. She has not Truth for object, she has only Herself." What appears at first glance in the preceding phrases to be a contradiction is really a confirmation of Baudelaire's conception of the highest understanding of æsthetic principle. Baudelaire's ideal beauty is tempered with mystery and sadness, the real too, but never the commonplace.

No poet has brought so many new ideas in sensation into a literary style. Intellectually he is all sensation, though he seldom degenerates into abstract sentimentality. This sum totality of the power of absorbing external sensation is Baudelaire. From the effect of his objectivity his art expresses itself as if solely subjective. This condition of mind and art makes him most difficult to translate into another language, in particular, English.

This collection of his verse and prose is gathered from those experiments in translation which I think will most effectively convey to the English reader those qualities that made Baudelaire what he is. There are numerous translations from Baudelaire in English but most of them may be dismissed as being seldom successful. Mr. Arthur Symons' translation of some of the prose poems is a most beautiful adventure in psychological sensations, effective though not always accurate in interpretation. Mr. F. P. Sturm's effort with the Flowers of Evil and the Prose Poems is always accurate, sometimes inspired, and often a tour de force of translation. Mr. W. J. Robertson's translations from the Flowers of Evil is the most successful of all. He maintains with amazing facility all the subtlety, beauty and one might also say the perfume of Baudelaire's verse. Mr. Shipley does a most meritorious work in his translations from the prose poems, and the reader will be everlastingly grateful to him for his fine painstaking translation of the _Intimate Papers_ from Baudelaire's unpublished novels.

There are few interesting or valuable essays on the mind and art of Baudelaire in English, but the reader will find the following critical appreciations to be of inestimable use in the study of the poet:

"The Influence of Baudelaire": G. Turquet-Milnes (Constable: 1913); "The Baudelaire Legend": James Huneker (Egoists: Scribner's: 1909); and Théophile Gautier's essay on Baudelaire, of which an excellent English translation has been made by Prof. Sumichrast.

I think that this anthology will give the reader an intelligent understanding of the mind and art of a very great French poet.

                                                         T. R. Smith.

June, 1919.

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CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY BY F. P. STURM.

Charles Baudelaire was one of those who take the downward path which leads to salvation. There are men born to be the martyrs of the world and of their own time; men whose imagination carries them beyond all that we know or have learned to think of as law and order; who are so intoxicated with a vision of a beauty beyond the world that the world's beauty seems to them but a little paint above the face of the dead; who love God with a so consuming fire that they must praise evil for God's glory, and blaspheme His name that all sects and creeds may be melted away; who see beneath all there is of mortal loveliness, the invisible worm, feeding upon hopes and desires no less than upon the fair and perishable flesh; who are good and evil at the same time; and because the good and evil in their souls finds a so perfect instrument in the refined and tortured body of modern times, desire keener pleasure and more intolerable anguish than the world contains, and become materialists because the tortured heart cries out in denial of the soul that tortures it. Charles Baudelaire was one of these men; his art is the expression of his decadence; a study of his art is the understanding of that complex movement, that "inquietude of the Veil in the temple," as Mallarmé called it, that has changed the literature of the world; and, especially, made of poetry the subtle and delicate instrument of emotional expression it has become in our own day.

We used to hear a deal about Decadence in the arts, and now we hear as much about Symbolism, which is a flower sprung from the old corruption--but Baudelaire is decadence; his art is not a mere literary affectation, a mask of sorrow to be thrown aside when the curtain falls, but the voice of an imagination plunged into the contemplation of all the perverse and fallen loveliness of the world; that finds beauty most beautiful at the moment of its passing away, and regrets its perishing with a so poignant grief that it must needs follow it even into the narrow grave where those "dark comrades the worms, without ears, without eyes," whisper their secrets of terror and tell of yet another pang--

   "Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts."

All his life Baudelaire was a victim to an unutterable weariness, that terrible malady of the soul born out of old times to prey upon civilisations that have reached their zenith--weariness, not of life, but of living, of continuing to labour and suffer in a world that has exhausted all its emotions and has no new thing to offer. Being an artist, therefore, he took his revenge upon life by a glorification of all the sorrowful things that it is life's continual desire to forget. His poems speak sweetly of decay and death, and whisper their graveyard secrets into the ears of beauty. His men are men whom the moon has touched with her own phantasy: who love the immense ungovernable sea, the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where they are not; the woman they will never know; and all his women are enigmatic courtesans whose beauty is a transfiguration of sin; who hide the ugliness of the soul beneath the perfection of the body. He loves them and does not love; they are cruel and indolent and full of strange perversions; they are perfumed with exotic perfumes; they sleep to the sound of viols, or fan themselves languidly in the shadow, and only he sees that it is the shadow of death.

An art like this, rooted in a so tortured perception of the beauty and ugliness of a world where the spirit is mingled indistinguishably with the flesh, almost inevitably concerns itself with material things, with all the subtle raptures the soul feels, not by abstract contemplation, for that would mean content, but through the gateway of the senses; the lust of the flesh, the delight of the eye. Sound, colour, odour, form: to him these are not the symbols that lead the soul towards the infinite: they are the soul; they are the infinite. He writes, always with a weary and laborious grace, about the abstruser and more enigmatic things of the flesh, colours and odours particularly; but, unlike those later writers who have been called realists, he apprehends, to borrow a phrase from Pater, "all those finer conditions wherein material things rise to that subtlety of operation which constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve and the keener touch can follow."

In one of his sonnets he says:

   "Je hais la passion et l'esprit me fait mal!"

and, indeed, he is a poet in whom the spirit, as modern thought understands the word, had little or no part. We feel, reading his terrible poems, that the body is indeed acutely conscious of the soul, distressfully and even angrily conscious, but its motions are not yet subdued by the soul's prophetic voice. It was to forget this voice, with its eternal _Esto memor_, that Baudelaire wrote imperishabl of perishable things and their fading glory.

Charles Baudelaire was born at Paris, April 21st, 1821, in an old turreted house in the Rue Hautefeuille. His father, a distinguished gentleman of the eighteenth-century school, seems to have passed his old-world manners on to his son, for we learn from Baudelaire's friend and biographer, Théophile Gautier, that the poet "always preserved the forms of an extreme urbanity."

At school, during his childhood, he gained many distinctions, and passed for a kind of infant prodigy; but later on, when he sat for his examination as _bachelier ès lettres_, his extreme nervousness made him appear almost an idiot. Failing miserably, he made no second attempt. Then his father died, and his mother married General Aupick, afterwards ambassador to Constantinople, an excellent man in every respect, but quite incapable of sympathising with or even of understanding the love for literature that now began to manifest itself in the mind of his stepson. All possible means were tried to turn him from literature to some more lucrative and more respectable profession. Family quarrels arose over this all-important question, and young Baudelaire, who seems to have given some real cause for offence to the step-father whose aspirations and profession he despised, was at length sent away upon a long voyage, in the hopes that the sight of strange lands and new faces would perhaps cause him to forget the ambitions his relatives could but consider as foolish and idealistic. He sailed the Indian Seas; visited the islands of Mauritius, Bourbon, Madagascar, and Ceylon; saw the yellow waters of the sacred Ganges; stored up the memory of tropical sounds and colours and odours for use later on; and returned to Paris shortly after his twenty-first birthday, more than ever determined to be a man of letters.

His parents were in despair; no doubt quite rightly so from their point of view. Théophile Gautier, perhaps remembering the many disappointments and martyrdoms of his own sad life, defends the attitude of General Aupick in a passage where he poignantly describes the hopelessness of the profession of letters. The future author of _The Flowers of Evil_, however, was now his own master and in a position, so far as monetary matters were concerned, to follow out his own whim. He took apartments in the Hôtel Pimodan, a kind of literary lodging-house where all Bohemia met; and where Gautier and Boissard were also at that period installed. Then began that life of uninterrupted labour and meditation that has given to France her most characteristic literature, for these poems of Baudelaire's are not only original in themselves but have been the cause of originality in others; they are the root of modern French literature and much of the best English literature; they were the origin of that new method in poetry that gave Mallarmé and Verlaine to France; Yeats and some others to England. It was in the Hôtel Pimodan that Baudelaire and Gautier first met and formed one of those unfading friendships not so rare among men of letters as among men of the world; there also the "Hashish-Eaters" held the _séances_ that have since become famous in the history of literature. Hashish and opium, indeed, contribute not a little to the odour of the strange _Flowers of Evil_; as also, perhaps, they contributed to Baudelaire's death from the terrible malady known as general paralysis, for he was a man who could not resist a so easy path into the world of _macabre_ visions. I shall return to this question again; there is internal evidence in his writings that shows he made good literary use of these opiate-born dreams which in the end dragged him into their own abyss.

It was in 1849, when Baudelaire was twenty-eight years of age, that he made the acquaintance of the already famous Théophile Gautier, from whose admirable essay I shall presently translate a passage giving us an excellent pen-sketch of the famous poet and cynic--for Baudelaire was a cynic: he had not in the least degree the rapt expression and vague personality usually supposed to be characteristic of the poetic mood. "He recalls," wrote M. Dulamon, who knew him well, "one of those beautiful Abbés of the eighteenth century, so correct in their doctrine, so indulgent in their commerce with life--the Abbé de Bernis, for example. At the same time, he writes better verse, and would not have demanded at Rome the destruction of the Order of Jesuits."

That was Baudelaire exactly, suave and polished, filled with sceptical faith, cynical with the terrible cynicism of the scholar who is acutely conscious of all the morbid and gloomy secrets hidden beneath the fair exteriors of the world. Gautier, in the passage I have already mentioned, emphasises both his reserve and his cynicism: "Contrary to the somewhat loose manners of artists generally, Baudelaire prided himself upon observing the most rigid _convenances_; his courtesy, indeed, was excessive to the point of seeming affected. He measured his sentences, using only the most carefully chosen terms, and pronounced certain words in a particular manner, as though he wished to underline them and give them a mysterious importance. He had italics and capital letters in his voice. Exaggeration, much in honour at Pimodan's, he disdained as being theatrical and gross; though he himself affected paradox and excess. With a very simple, very natural, and perfectly detached air, as though retailing, _à la Prudhomme_, a newspaper paragraph about the mildness or rigour of the weather, he would advance some satanically monstrous axiom, or uphold with the coolness of ice some theory of a mathematical extravagance; for he always followed a rigorous plan in the development of his follies. His spirit was neither in words nor traits; he saw things from a particular point of view, so that their outlines were changed, as objects when one gets a bird's-eye view of them; he perceived analogies inappreciable to others, and you were struck by their fantastic logic. His rare gestures were slow and sober; he never threw his arms about, for he held southern gesticulation in horror; British coolness seemed to him to be good taste. One might describe him as a dandy who had strayed into Bohemia; though still preserving his rank, and that cult of self which characterises a man imbued with the principles of Brummel." At this time Baudelaire was practically unknown outside his own circle of friends, writers themselves; and it was not until eight years later, in 1857, when he published his _Flowers of Evil_, that he became famous. Infamous would perhaps be a better word to describe the kind of fame he at first obtained, for every Philistine in France joined in the cry against a poet who dared to remind his readers that the grave awaits even the rich; who dared to choose the materials of his art from among the objects of death and decay; who exposed the mouldering secrecies of the grave, and painted, in the phosphorescent colours of corruption, frescoes of death and horror; who desecrated love in the sonnet entitled "Causerie":

   "You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose!
   But all the sea of sadness in my blood
   Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lip morose
   Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.

   In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er;
   That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
   By woman's tooth and talon: ah! no more
   Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate!

   It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
   And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay!
   --A perfume swims about your naked breast,
   Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
   With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
   Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!"

We can recall nothing like it in the literary history of our own country; the sensation caused by the appearance of the first series of Mr. Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads_ was mild in comparison; just as Mr. Swinburne's poems were but wan derivatives from Baudelaire--at least as far as ideas are concerned; I say nothing about their beauty of expression or almost absolute mastery of technique--for it is quite obvious that the English poet was indebted to Baudelaire for all the bizarre and Satanic elements in his work; as Baudelaire was indebted to Poe. Mr. Swinburne, however, is wild where Baudelaire is grave; and where Baudelaire compresses some perverse and morbid image into a single unforgettable line, Mr. Swinburne beats it into a froth of many musical lovely words, until we forget the deep sea in the shining foam.

If we call to mind the reception at first given to the black-and-white work of Aubrey Beardsley, it will give some idea of the consternation caused in France by the appearance of the _Flowers of Evil_. Beardsley, indeed, resembles Baudelaire in many ways, for he achieved in art what the other achieved in literature: the apotheosis of the horrible and grotesque, the perfecting of symbols to shadow forth intellectual sin, the tearing away of the decent veil of forgetfulness that hides our own corruption from our eyes, and his one prose romance, _Under the Hill_, unhappily incomplete at his death at the age of twenty-four, beats Baudelaire on his own ground. The four or five chapters which alone remain of this incomplete romance stand alone in literature. They are the absolute attainment of what Baudelaire more or less successfully attempted--a testament of sin. Not the sin of the flesh, the gross faults of the body that are vulgarly known as sin; but sin which is a metaphysical corruption, a depravity of pure intellect, the sin of the fallen angels in hell who cover their anguish with the sound of harps and sweet odours; who are incapable of bodily impurity, and for whom spiritual purity is the only terror. And since mortality, which is the shadow of the immortal, can comprehend spiritual and abstract things only by the analogies and correspondences which exist between them and the far reflections of them that we call reality, both Baudelaire and Beardsley, as indeed all artists who speak with tongues of spiritual truth, choose more or less actual human beings to be the shadows of the divine or satanic beings they would invoke, and make them sin delicate sins of the refined bodily sense that we may get a far-off glimpse of the Evil that is not mortal but immortal, the Spiritual Evil that has set up its black throne beside the throne of Spiritual Good, and has equal share in the shaping of the world and man.

I am not sure that Baudelaire, when he wrote this sinister poetry, had any clear idea that it was his vocation to be a prophet either of good or evil. Certainly he had no thought of founding a school of poetry, and if he made any conscious effort to bring a new method into literature, it was merely because he desired to be one of the famous writers of his country. An inspired thinker, however, whether his inspiration be mighty or small, receives his thought from a profounder source than his own physical reason, and writes to the dictation of beings outside of and greater than himself. The famous Eliphas Levi, like all the mystics who came before and after him, from Basilides the Gnostic to Blake the English visionary, taught that the poet and dreamer are the mediums of the Divine Word, and sole instruments through which the gods energise in the world of material things. The writing of a great book is the casting of a pebble into the pool of human thought; it gives rise to ever-widening circles that will reach we know not whither, and begins a chain of circumstances that may end in the destruction of kingdoms and religions and the awakening of new gods. The change wrought, directly or indirectly, by _The Flowers of Evil_ alone is almost too great to be properly understood. There is perhaps not a man in Europe to-day whose outlook on life would not have been different had _The Flowers of Evil_ never been written. The first thing that happens after the publication of such a book is the theft of its ideas and the imitation of its style by the lesser writers who labour for the multitude, and so its teaching goes from book to book, from the greater to the lesser, as the divine hierarchies emanate from Divinity, until ideas that were once paradoxical, or even blasphemous and unholy, have become mere newspaper commonplaces adopted by the numberless thousands who do not think for themselves, and the world's thought is changed completely, though by infinite slow degrees. The immediate result of Baudelaire's work was the Decadent School in French literature. Then the influence spread across the Channel, and the English Æsthetes arose to preach the gospel of imagination to the unimaginative. Both Decadence and Æstheticism, as intellectual movements, have fallen into the nadir of oblivion, and the dust lies heavy upon them, but they left a little leaven to lighten the heavy inertness of correct and academic literature; and now Symbolism, a greater movement than either, is in the ascendant, giving another turn to the wheel, and to all who think deeply about such matters it seems as though Symbolist literature is to be the literature of the future. The Decadents and Æsthetes were weak because they had no banner to fight beneath, no authority to appeal to in defence of their views, no definite gospel to preach. They were by turns morbid, hysterical, foolishly blasphemous, or weakly disgusting, but never anything for long, their one desire being to produce a thrill at any cost. If the hospital failed they went to the brothel, and when even obscenity failed to stimulate the jaded palates of their generation there was still the graveyard left. A more or less successful imitation of Baudelaire's awful verses entitled "The Corpse" has been the beginning of more than one French poet's corrupt flight across the sky of literature. That Baudelaire himself was one of their company is not an accusation, for he had genius, which his imitators, English or French, have not; and his book, even apart from the fact that it made straight the way for better things, must be admitted to be a great and subtly-wrought work of art by whosoever reads it with understanding. And, moreover, his morbidness is not at all an affectation; his poems inevitably prove the writer to have been quite sincere in his perversion and in his decadence.

The Symbolist writers of to-day, though they are sprung from him, are greater than he because they are the prophets of a faith who believe in what they preach. They find their defence in the writings of the mystics, and their doctrines are at the root of every religion. They were held by the Gnostics and are in the books of the Kabbalists and the Magi. Blake preached them and Eliphas Levi taught them to his disciples in France, who in turn have misunderstood and perverted them, and formed strange religions and sects of Devil-worshippers. These doctrines hold that the visible world is the world of illusion, not of reality. Colour and sound and perfume and all material and sensible things are but the symbols and far-off reflections of the things that are alone real. Reality is hidden away from us by the five senses and the gates of death; and Reason, the blind and laborious servant of the physical brain, deludes us into believing that we can know anything of truth through the medium of the senses. It is through the imagination alone that man can obtain spiritual revelation, for imagination is the one window in the prison-house of the flesh through which the soul can see the proud images of eternity. And Blake, who is the authority of all English Symbolist writers, long since formulated their creed in words that have been quoted again and again, and must still be quoted by all who write in defence of modern art:--_"The world of imagination is the world of Eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereat the world of generation, or vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature!"_

In spite of the cry against _Flowers of Evil_, Baudelaire did not lack defenders among literary men themselves; and many enthusiastic articles were written in praise of his book. Thierry not unjustly compared him to Dante, to which Barbey d'Aurevilly replied, "Baudelaire comes from hell, Dante only went there"; adding at the finish of his article: "After the _Flowers of Evil_ there are only two possible ways for the poet who made them blossom: either to blow out his brains or become a Christian." Baudelaire did neither. And Victor Hugo, after reading the two poems, "The Seven Old Men" and "The Little Old Women," wrote to Baudelaire. "You have dowered the heaven of art with one knows not what deathly gleam," he said in his letter; "you have created a new shudder." The phrase became famous, and for many years after this the creation of a new shudder was the ambition of every young French writer worth his salt.

When the first great wave of public astonishment had broken and ebbed, Baudelaire's work began to be appreciated by others than merely literary men, by all in fact who cared for careful art and subtle thinking, and before long he was admitted to be the greatest after Hugo who had written French verse. He was famous and he was unhappy. Neither glory, nor love, nor friendship--and he knew them all--could minister to the disease of that fierce mind, seeking it knew not what and never finding it; seeking it, unhappily, in the strangest excesses. He took opium to quieten his nerves when they trembled, for something to do when they did not, and made immoderate use of hashish to produce visions and heighten his phantasy. His life was a haunted weariness. Thomas de Quincey's _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ seems to have fascinated him to a great extent, for besides imitating the vices of the author, he wrote, in imitation of his book, _The Artificial Paradises_, a monograph on the effects of opium and hashish, partly original, partly a mere translation from the _Confessions_.

He remembered his visions and sensations as an eater of drugs and made literary use of them. At the end of this book, among the "Poems in Prose," will be found one entitled "The Double Chamber," almost certainly written under the influence of opium, and the last verse of "The Temptation"--

   "O mystic metamorphosis!
     My senses into one sense flow--
   Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
     Her breath is music faint and low!"

as well as the last six lines of that profound sonnet "Correspondences"--

   "Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
   Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
   Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
   Have all the expansion of things infinite:
   As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
   Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight,"

are certainly memories of a sensation he experienced under the influence of hashish, as recorded in _The Artificial Paradises_, where he has this curious passage:--"The senses become extraordinarily acute and fine. The eyes pierce Infinity. The ear seizes the most unseizable sounds in the midst of the shrillest noises. Hallucinations commence.... External objects take on monstrous appearances and show themselves under forms hitherto unknown.... The most singular equivocations, the most inexplicable transposition of ideas, take place. _Sounds are perceived to have a colour, and colour becomes musical._" Baudelaire need not have gone to hashish to discover this. The mystics of all times have taught that sounds in gross matter produce colour in subtle matter; and all who are subject to any visionary condition know that when in trance colours will produce words of a language whose meaning is forgotten as soon as one awakes to normal life; but I do not think Baudelaire was a visionary. His work shows too precise a method, and a too ordered appreciation of the artificial in beauty. There again he is comparable to Aubrey Beardsley, for I have read somewhere that when Beardsley was asked if ever he saw visions, he replied, "I do not permit myself to see them, except upon paper." The whole question of the colour of sound is one of supreme interest to the poet, but it is too difficult and abstract a question to be written of here. A famous sonnet by Rimbaud on the colour of the vowels has founded a school of symbolists in France. I will content myself with quoting that--in the original, since it loses too much, by translation:

   "A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,
   Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes,
   A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
   Qui bourdonnent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

   Golfes d'ombres; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
   Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombrelles;
   I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
   Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;

   U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
   Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides
   Que l'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux.

   O, suprême clairon, plein de strideurs étranges,
   Silences traversés des mondes et des anges.
   --O l'Oméga, rayon violet de ses yeux."

It is to be hoped that opium and hashish rendered Baudelaire somewhat less unhappy during his life, for they certainly contributed to hasten his death. Always of an extremely neurotic temperament, he began to break down beneath his excesses, and shortly after the publication of _The Artificial Paradises_, which shows a considerable deterioration in his style, he removed from Paris to Brussels in the hope of building up his health by the change. At Brussels he grew worse. His speech began to fail; he was unable to pronounce certain words and stumbled over others. Hallucinations commenced, no longer the hallucinations of hashish; and his disease, rapidly establishing itself, was recognised as "general paralysis of the insane." Gautier tells how the news of his death came to Paris while he yet lived. It was false news, but prematurely true. Baudelaire lingered on for another three months; motionless and inert, his eyes the only part of him alive; unable to speak or even to write, and so died.

He left, besides _The Flowers of Evil_ and _Little Poems in Prose_ (his masterpieces), several volumes of critical essays, published under the titles of _Æsthetic Curiosities_ and _Romantic Art; The Artificial Paradises_, and his translations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe--admirable pieces of work by which Poe actually gains.

III

Baudelaire's love of the artificial has been insisted upon by all who have studied his work, but to my mind never sufficiently insisted upon, for it was the foundation of his method. He wrote many arguments in favour of the artificial, and elaborated them into a kind of paradoxical philosophy of art. His hatred of nature and purely natural things was but a perverted form of the religious ecstasy that made the old monk pull his cowl about his eyes when he left his cell in the month of May, lest he should see the blossoming trees, and his mind be turned towards the beautiful delusions of the world. The Egyptians and the earliest of the Christians looked upon nature not as the work of the good and benevolent spirit who is the father of our souls, but as the work of the rebellious "gods of generation," who fashion beautiful things to capture the heart of man and bind his Soul to earth. Blake, whom I have already quoted, hated nature in the same fashion, and held death to be the one way of escape from "the delusions of goddess Nature and her laws." Baudelaire's revolt against external things was more a revolt of the intellect than of the imagination; and he expresses it, not by desiring that the things of nature should be swept away to make room for the things of the spirit, but that they should be so changed by art that they cease to be natural. As he was of all poets the most intensely modern, holding that "modernity is one-half of art," the other half being something "eternal and immutable," he preferred, unlike Blake and his modern followers, to express himself in quite modern terms, and so wrote his famous and much misunderstood Éloge du Maquillage to defend his views. As was usual with him, he pushed his ideas to their extreme logical sequence, and the casual reader who picks up that extraordinary essay is in consequence quite misled as to the writer's intention.

It seems scarcely necessary at this time of day to assert that the _Éloge du Maquillage_ is something more than a mere _Praise of Cosmetics_, written by a man who wished to shock his readers. It is the part expression of a theory of art, and if it is paradoxical and far-fetched it is because Baudelaire wrote at a time when French literature, in the words of M. Asselineau, "was dying of correctness," and needed very vigorous treatment indeed. If the _Éloge du Maquillage_ had been more restrained in manner, if it had not been something so entirely contrary to all accepted ideas of the well-regulated citizen who never thinks a thought that somebody else has not put into his head, it might have been passed over without notice. It was written to initiate the profane; to make them think, at least; and not to raise a smile among the initiated. And moreover, it was in a manner a defence of his own work that had met with so much hatred and opposition.

He begins by attempting to prove that Nature is innately and fundamentally wrong and wicked. "The greater number of errors relative to the beautiful date from the eighteenth century's false conceptions of morality. Nature was regarded in those times as the base, source, and type of all possible good and beauty.... If, however, we consent to refer simply to the visible facts,... we see that Nature teaches nothing, or almost nothing. That is to say, she _forces_ man to sleep, to drink, to eat, and to protect himself, well or ill, against the hostilities of the atmosphere. It is she also who moves him to kill and eat or imprison and torture his kind; for, as soon as we leave the region of necessities and needs to enter into that of luxuries and pleasures, we see that Nature is no better than a counsellor to crime.... Religion commands us to nourish our poor and infirm parents; Nature (the voice of our own interest) commands us to do away with them. Pass in review, analyse all that is natural, all the actions and desires of the natural man, and you will find nothing but what is horrible. All beautiful and noble things are the result of calculation. Crime, the taste for which the human animal absorbs before birth, is originally natural. Virtue, on the contrary, is _artificial_, supernatural, since there has been a necessity in all ages and among all nations for gods and prophets to preach virtue to humanity; since man alone would have been unable to discover it. Evil is done without effort, _naturally_ and by fatality; good is always the product of an art."

So far the argument is straightforward and expresses what many must have thought, but Baudelaire, remembering that exaggeration is the best way of impressing one's ideas upon the unimaginative, immediately carries his argument from the moral order to the order of the beautiful, and applies it there. The result is strange enough. "I am thus led to regard personal adornment as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul. The races that our confused and perverted civilisation, with a fatuity and pride entirely laughable, treats as savages, understand as does the child the high spirituality of the toilet. The savage and the child, by their naïve love of all brilliant things, of glittering plumage and shining stuffs, and the superlative majesty of artificial forms, bear witness to their distaste for reality, and so prove, unknown to themselves, the immateriality of their souls."

Thus, with some appearance of logic, he carries his argument a step farther, and this immediately brings him to the bizarre conclusion that the more beautiful a woman naturally is, the more she should hide her natural beauty beneath the artificial charm of rouge and powder. "She performs a duty in attempting to appear magical and supernatural. She is an idol who must adorn herself to be adored." Powder and rouge and kohl, all the little artifices that shock respectability, have for their end "the creation of an abstract unity in the grain and colour of the skin." This unity brings the human being nearer to the condition of a statue--that is to say, "a divine and superior being." Red and black are the symbols of "an excessive and supernatural life." A touch of kohl "lends to the eye a more decided appearance of a window opened upon infinity"; and rouge augments the brilliance of the eye, "and adds to a beautiful feminine face the mysterious passion of the priestess." But artifice cannot make ugliness any the less ugly, nor help age to rival youth. "Who dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?" Deception, if it is to have any charm, must be obvious and unashamed; it must be displayed "if not with affectation, at least with a kind of candour."

Such theories as these, if they are sincerely held, necessarily lead the theorist into the strangest bypaths of literature. Baudelaire, like many another writer whose business is with verse, pondered so long upon the musical and rhythmical value of words that at times words became meaningless to him. He thought his own language too simple to express the complexities of poetic reverie, and dreamed of writing his poems in Latin. Not, however, in the Latin of classical times; that was too robust, too natural, too "brutal and purely epidermic," to use an expression of his own; but in the corrupt Latin of the Byzantine decadence, which he considered as "the supreme sigh of a strong being already transformed and prepared for the spiritual life."

One of these Latin poems has appeared in all editions of _The Flowers of Evil_. Though dozens as good are to be found in the Breviary of the Roman Church, "Franciscæ Meæ Laudes" has been included in this selection for the benefit of those curious in such matters. It is one of Baudelaire's many successful steps in the wrong direction.

In almost every line of _The Flowers of Evil_ one can trace the influence of Edgar Poe, and in the many places where Baudelaire has attained a pure imaginative beauty as in "The Sadness of the Moon" or "Music" or "The Death of Lovers," it is a beauty that would have pleased the author of _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_. Another kind of beauty, the beauty of death--for in Baudelaire's crucible everything is melted into loveliness--is even more directly traceable to Poe. In spite of the sonnet "Correspondences," and in spite of his Symbolist followers of the present day, Baudelaire himself made but an imperfect use of such symbols as he had; and these he found ready to his hand in the works of the American poet. The Tomb, the symbol of death or of an intellectual darkness inhabited by the Worm, who is remorse; the Abyss, which is the despair into which the mortal part of man's mind plunges when brought into contact with dead and perishing substances; all these are borrowed from Poe. The Worm, who "devours with a kiss," occasionally becomes Time devouring life, or the Demon, "the obscure Enemy who gnaws the heart"; and when it is none of these it is the Serpent, as in that sombre poem "To a Madonna"--the Serpent beneath the feet of conquering purity. Baudelaire's imagination, however, which continually ran upon _macabre_ images, loved remorse more than peace, and loved the Serpent more than the purity that would slay it, so he destroys purity with "Seven Knives" which are "the Seven Deadly Sins," that the Serpent may live to prey upon a heart that finds no beauty in peace. Even Love is evil, for his "ancient arrows" are "crime, horror, folly," and the god Eros becomes a demon lying in wait:

   "Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat
   Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
   And I too well his ancient arrows know:
   Crime, Horror, Folly...."

Gautier pretends that the poet preserved his ideal under the form of "the adorable phantom of La Beatrix, the ideal ever desired, never attained, the divine and superior beauty incarnated in an ethereal woman, spiritualised, made of light and flame and perfume, a vapour, a dream, a reflection of the seraphical world"; but when Baudelaire has a vision of this same Beatrice he sees her as one of a crowd of "cruel and curious demons" who mock at his sorrow, and she, too, mocks him, and caresses the demons who are his spiritual foes.

Baudelaire was too deeply in love with the artificial to care overmuch for the symbols he could have found among natural objects. Only once in _The Flowers of Evil_ does he look upon the Moon with the eyes of a mystic; and that is when he remembers that all people of imagination are under the Moon's influence, and makes his poet hide her iridescent tear in his heart, "far from the eyes of the Sun," for the Sun is lord of material labours and therefore hostile to the dreams and reveries that are the activity of the poet. He sought more for bizarre analogies and striking metaphors than for true symbols or correspondences. He is happiest when comparing the vault of the heaven to "the lighted ceiling of a music hall," or "the black lid of the mighty pot where the human generations boil"; and when he thinks of the unfortunate and unhappy folk of the world, he does not see any hope for them in any future state; he sees, simply, "God's awful claw" stretched out to tear them. He offers pity, but no comfort.

Sometimes he has a vision of a beauty unmingled with any malevolence; but it is always evoked by sensuous and material things; perfume or music; and always it is a sorrowful loveliness he mourns or praises. Perhaps of all his poems "The Balcony" is most full of that tender and reverential melancholy we look for in a poem of love; but even it tells of a passion that has faded out of heart and mind and become beautiful only with its passing away, and not of an existing love. The other love poems--if indeed such a name can be given to "A Madrigal of Sorrow," "The Eyes of Beauty," "The Remorse of the Dead," and the like--are nothing but terrible confessions of satiety, or cruelty, or terror. I have translated "The Corpse," his most famous and most infamous poem, partly because it shows him at his worst as the others in the volume at his best, partly because it is something of the nature of a literary curiosity. A poem like "The Corpse," which is simply an example of what may happen if any writer pushes his theories to the extreme, does not at all detract, be it said, from Baudelaire's delicate genius; for though he may not be quite worthy of a place by Dante, he has written poems that Dante might have been proud to write, and he is worthy to be set among the very greatest of the moderns, alongside Hugo and Verlaine. Read the sonnet entitled "Beauty" and you will see how he has invoked in fourteen lines the image of a goddess, mysterious and immortal; as fair as that Aphrodite who cast the shadow of her loveliness upon the Golden Age; as terrible as Pallas, "the warrior maid invincible." And as Minerva loved mortality in the person of Ulysses, so Baudelaire's personification of Beauty loves the poets who pray before her and gaze into her eternal eyes, watching the rising and setting of their visionary Star in those placid mirrors.

The explanation of most of Baudelaire's morbid imaginings is this, that he was a man haunted by terrible dream-like memories; chief among them the memory that the loveliness he had adored in woman--the curve of a perfect cheek, the lifting of a perfect arm in some gesture of imperial indolence, the fall of a curl across, a pale brow, all the minute and unforgettable things that give immortality to some movement of existence--all these, and the woman and her lover, must pass away from Time and Space; and he, unhappily, knew nothing of the philosophy that teaches us how all objects and events, even the most trivial--a woman's gesture, a rose, a sigh, a fading flame, the sound that trembles on a lute-string--find a place in Eternity when they pass from the recognition of our senses. If he believed in the deathlessness of man's personality he gained no comfort from his belief. He mourned the body's decay; he was not concerned with the soul; and no heaven less palpable than Mohammed's could have had any reality in his imagination.

His prose is as distinguished in its manner as his verse. I think it was Professor Saintsbury who first brought _The Little Poems in Prose_, a selection from which is included in this volume, before the notice of English readers in an essay written many years ago. I am writing this in France, far from the possibility of consulting any English books, but if my memory serves me rightly he considered the prose of these prose poems to be as perfect as literature can be. I think he said, "they go as far as prose can go." They need no other introduction than themselves, for they are perfect of their kind, and not different in thought from the more elaborately wrought poems of _The Flowers of Evil_. Some of them, as for instance "Every Man His Chimæra," are as classical and as universally true as the myths and symbolisms of the Old Testament; and all of them, I think, are worthy of a place in that book the Archangel of the Presence will consult when all is weighed in the balance--the book written by man himself, the record of his deep and shallow imaginings. Baudelaire wrote them, he said, because he had dreamed, "in his days of ambition," "of a miracle of poetical prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme." His attitude of mind was always so natural to him that he never thought it necessary to make any excuse for the spirit of his art or the drear philosophy he preached; unless a short notice printed in the first edition of his poems, but withdrawn from the second edition, explaining that "faithful to his dolorous programme, the author of _The Flowers of Evil_, as a perfect comedian, has had to mould his spirit to all sophisms as to all corruptions," can be considered as an excuse. From whatever point of view we regard him: whether we praise his art and blame his philosophy, or blame his art and praise his philosophy, he is as difficult to analyse as he is difficult to give a place to, for we have none with whom to compare him, or very few, too few to be of service to the critic. His art is like the pearl, a beautiful product of disease, and to blame it is like blaming the pearl.

He looked upon life very much as Poe, whom he so admired, looked upon it: with the eye of a sensitive spectator in some gloomy vault of the Spanish Inquisition, where beauty was upon the rack; he was horrified, but unable to turn from a sight that fascinated him by its very terror. His moments of inspiration are haunted by the consciousness that evil beings, clothed with horror as with a shroud, are ever lingering about the temple of life and awaiting an opportunity to enter. He was like a man who awakens trembling from a nightmare, afraid of the darkness, and unable to believe the dawn may be less hopeless than the midnight. Perhaps he was haunted, as many artists and all mystics, by a fear of madness and of the unseen world of evil shapes that sanity hides from us and madness reveals. Is there a man, is there a writer, especially, who has not at times been conscious of a vague and terrible fear that the whole world of visible nature is but a comfortable illusion that may fade away in a moment and leave him face to face with the horror that has visited him in dreams? The old occult writers held that the evil thoughts of others beget phantoms in the air that can make themselves, bodies out of our fear, and haunt even our waking moments. These were the shapes of terror that haunted Baudelaire. Shelley, too, writes of them with as profound a knowledge as the magical writer of the Middle Ages. They come to haunt his Prometheus.

   "Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
   And hollow underneath, like death."

They are the elemental beings who dwell beside the soul of the dreamer and the poet, "like a vain loud multitude"; turning life into death and all beautiful thoughts into poems like _The Flowers of Evil_, or into tales like the satanic reveries of Edgar Poe.

   "We are the ministers of pain, and fear,
   And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,
   And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
   Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn,
   We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
   When the great King betrays them to our will."

And every man gives them of the substance of his imagination to clothe them in prophetic shapes that are the images of his destiny:

   "From our victim's destined agony
   The shade which is our form invests us round,
   Else we are shapeless as our mother Night."

The greatest of all poets conquer their dreams; others, who are great, but not of the greatest, are conquered by them, and Baudelaire was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Poe that Baudelaire may well have pondered as he laboured at his translation, for it reveals the secret of his life: "There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man is no Carathis to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful; but, like the demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep or they will devour us--they must be suffered to slumber or we perish."

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POEMS IN PROSE Translated by Arthur Symons

NOTE

The "Petits Poëmes en Prose" are experiments, and they are also confessions. "Who of us," says Baudelaire in his dedicatory preface, "has not dreamed, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, subtle and staccato enough to follow the lyric motions of the soul, the wavering outlines of meditation, the sudden starts of the conscience?" This miracle he has achieved in these _bagatelles laborieuses_, to use his own words, these astonishing trifles, in which the art is not more novel, precise and perfect than the quality of thought and of emotion. In translating into English a few of these little masterpieces, which have given me so much delight for so many years, I have tried to be absolutely faithful to the sense, the words, and the rhythm of the original. A. S.

THE FAVOURS OF THE MOON

The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in through the window when you lay asleep in your cradle, and said inwardly: "This is a child after my own soul."

And she came softly down the staircase of the clouds, and passed noiselessly through the window-pane. Then she laid herself upon you with, the supple tenderness of a mother, and she left her colours upon your face. That is why your eyes are green and your cheeks extraordinarily pale. It was when you looked at her, that your pupils widened so strangely; and she clasped her arms so tenderly about your throat that ever since you have had the longing for tears.

Nevertheless, in the flood of her joy, the Moon filled the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison; and all this living light thought and said: "My kiss shall be upon you for ever. You shall be beautiful as I am beautiful. You shall love that which I love and that by which I am loved: water and clouds, night and silence; the vast green sea; the formless and multiform water; the place where you shall never be; the lover whom you shall never know; unnatural flowers; odours which make men drunk; the cats that languish upon pianos and sob like women, with hoarse sweet voices!

"And you shall be loved by my lovers, courted by my courtiers. You shall be the queen of men who have green eyes, and whose throats I have clasped by night in my caresses; of those that love the sea, the vast tumultuous green sea, formless and multiform water, the place where they are not, the woman whom they know not, the ominous flowers that are like the censers of an unknown rite, the odours that trouble the will, and the savage and voluptuous beasts that are the emblems of their folly."

And that is why, accursed dear spoilt child, I lie now at your feet, seeking to find in you the image of the fearful goddess, the fateful god-mother, the poisonous nurse of all the moonstruck of the world.

WHICH IS TRUE?

I knew one Benedicta who filled earth and air with the ideal; and from whose eyes men learnt the desire of greatness, of beauty, of glory, and of all whereby we believe in immortality.

But this miraculous child was too beautiful to live long; and she died only a few days after I had come, to know her, and I buried her with my own hands, one day when Spring shook out her censer in the graveyards. I buried her with my own hands, shut down into a coffin of wood, perfumed and incorruptible like Indian caskets.

And as I still gazed at the place where I had laid away my treasure, I saw all at once a little person singularly like the deceased, who trampled on the fresh soil with a strange and hysterical violence, and said, shrieking with laughter: "Look at me! I am the real Benedicta! a pretty sort of baggage I am! And to punish you for your blindness and folly you shall love me just as I am!"

But I was furious, and I answered: "No! no! no!" And to add more emphasis to my refusal I stamped on the ground so violently with my foot that my leg sank up to the knee in the earth of the new grave; and now, like a wolf caught in a trap, I remain fastened, perhaps for ever, to the grave of the ideal.

III

"L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE"

There is a wonderful country, a country of Cockaigne, they say, which I dreamed of visiting with an old friend. It is a strange country, lost in the mists of our North, and one might call it the East of the West, the China of Europe, so freely does a warm and capricious fancy flourish there, and so patiently and persistently has that fancy illustrated it with a learned and delicate vegetation.

A real country of Cockaigne, where everything is beautiful, rich, quiet, honest; where order is the likeness and the mirror of luxury; where life is fat, and sweet to breathe; where disorder, tumult, and the unexpected are shut out; where happiness is wedded to silence; where even cooking is poetic, rich and highly flavoured at once; where all, dear love, is made in your image.

You know that feverish sickness which comes over us in our cold miseries, that nostalgia of unknown lands, that anguish of curiosity? There is a country made in your image, where all is beautiful, rich, quiet and honest; where fancy has built and decorated a western China, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wedded to silence. It is there that we should live, it is there that we should die!

Yes, it is there that we should breathe, dream, and lengthen out the hours by the infinity of sensations. A musician has written an "Invitation à la Valse": who will compose the "Invitation au Voyage" that we can offer to the beloved, to the chosen sister?

Yes, it is in this atmosphere that it would be good to live; far off, where slower hours contain more thoughts where clocks strike happiness with a deeper and more significant solemnity.

On shining panels, or on gilded leather of a dark richness, slumbers the discreet life of pictures, deep, calm, and devout as the souls of the pointers who created it. The sunsets which colour so richly the walls of dining-room and drawing-room, are sifted through beautiful hangings or through tall wrought windows leaded into many panes. The pieces of furniture are large, curious, and fantastic, armed with locks and secrets like refined souls. Mirrors, metals, hangings, goldsmith's work and pottery, play for the eyes a mute and mysterious symphony; and from all things, from every corner, from the cracks of drawers and from the folds of hangings, exhales a singular odour, a "forget-me-not" of Sumatra, which is, as it were, the soul of the abode.

A real country of Cockaigne, I assure you, where all is beautiful, clean, and shining, like a clear conscience, like a bright array of kitchen crockery, like splendid jewellery of gold, like many-coloured jewellery of silver! All the treasures of the world have found their way there, as to the house of a hard-working man who has put the whole world in his debt. Singular country, excelling others as Art excels Nature, where Nature is refashioned by dreams, where Nature is. corrected, embellished, remoulded.

Let the alchemists of horticulture seek and seek again, let them set ever further and further back the limits to their happiness! Let them offer prizes of sixty and of a hundred thousand florins to whoever will solve their ambitious problems! For me, I have found my "black tulip" and my "blue dahlia!"

Incomparable flower, recaptured tulip, allegoric dahlia, it is there, is it not, in that beautiful country, so calm and so full of dreams, that you live and flourish? There, would you not be framed within your own analogy, and would you not see yourself again, reflected, as the mystics say, in your own "correspondence"?

Dreams, dreams ever! and the more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things. Every man carries within himself his natural dose of opium, ceaselessly secreted and renewed, and, from birth to death, how many hours can we reckon of positive pleasure, of successful and decided action? Shall we ever live in, shall we ever pass into, that picture which my mind has painted, that picture made in your image?

These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these odours, these miraculous flowers, are you. You too are the great rivers and the quiet canals. The vast ships that drift down them, laden with riches, from whose decks comes the sound of the monotonous songs of labouring sailors, are my thoughts which slumber or rise and fall on your breast. You lead them softly towards the sea, which is the infinite, mirroring the depths of the sky in the crystal clearness of your soul; and when, weary of the surge and heavy with the spoils of the East, they return to the port of their birth, it is still my thoughts that come back enriched out of the infinite to you.

THE EYES OF THE POOR

Ah! you want to know why I hate you to-day. It will probably be less easy for you to understand than for me to explain it to you; for you are, I think, the most perfect example of feminine impenetrability that could possibly be found.

We had spent a long day together, and it had seemed to me short. We had promised one another that we would think the same thoughts and that our two souls should become one soul; a dream which is not original, after all, except that, dreamed by all men, it has been realised by none.

In the evening you were a little tired, and you sat down outside a new café at the corner of a new boulevard, still littered with plaster and already displaying proudly its unfinished splendours. The café glittered. The very gas put on all the fervency of a fresh start, and lighted up with its full force the blinding whiteness of the walls, the dazzling sheets of glass in the mirrors, the gilt of cornices and mouldings, the chubby-cheeked pages straining back from hounds in leash, the ladies laughing at the falcons on their wrists, the nymphs and goddesses carrying fruits and pies and game on their heads, the Hebes and Ganymedes holding out at arm's-length little jars of syrups or parti-coloured obelisks of ices; the whole of history and of mythology brought together to make a paradise for gluttons. Exactly opposite to us, in the roadway, stood a man of about forty years of age, with a weary face and a greyish beard, holding a little boy by one hand and carrying on the other arm a little fellow too weak to walk. He was taking the nurse-maid's place, and had brought his children out for a walk in the evening. All were in rags. The three faces were extraordinarily serious, and the six eyes stared fixedly at the new café with an equal admiration, differentiated in each according to age.

The father's eyes said: "How beautiful it is! how beautiful it is! One would think that all the gold of the poor world had found its way to these walls." The boy's eyes said: "How beautiful it is! how beautiful it is! But that is a house which only people who are not like us can enter." As for the little one's eyes, they were too fascinated to express anything but stupid and utter joy.

Song-writers say that pleasure ennobles the soul and softens the heart. The song was right that evening, so far as I was concerned. Not only was I touched by this family of eyes, but I felt rather ashamed of our glasses and decanters, so much too much for our thirst. I turned to look at you, dear love, that I might read my own thought in you; I gazed deep into your eyes, so beautiful and so strangely sweet, your green eyes that are the home of caprice and under the sovereignty of the Moon; and you said to me: "Those people are insupportable to me with their staring saucer-eyes! Couldn't you tell the head waiter to send them away?"

So hard is it to understand one another, dearest, and so incommunicable is thought, even between people who are in love!

WINDOWS

He who looks in through an open window never sees so many things as he who looks at a shut window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more gloomy, or more dazzling, than a window lighted by a candle. What we can see in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind the panes of a window. In that dark or luminous hollow, life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Across the waves of roofs, I can see a woman of middle age, wrinkled, poor, who is always leaning over something, and who never goes out. Out of her face, out of her dress, out of her attitude, out of nothing almost, I have made up the woman's story, and sometimes I say it over to myself with tears.

If it had been a poor old man, I could have made up his just as easily.

And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in others.

Perhaps you will say to me: "Are you sure that it is the real story?" What does it matter, what does any reality outside of myself matter, if it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?

CROWDS

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude: to play upon crowds is an art; and he alone can plunge, at the expense of humankind, into a debauch of vitality, to whom a fairy has bequeathed in his cradle the love of masks and disguises, the hate of home and the passion of travel.

Multitude, solitude: equal terms mutually convertible by the active and begetting poet. He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd.

The poet enjoys this incomparable privilege, to be at once himself and others. Like those wandering souls that go about seeking bodies, he enters at will the personality of every man. For him alone, every place is vacant; and if certain places seem to be closed against him, that is because in his eyes they are not worth the trouble of visiting.

The solitary and thoughtful walker derives a singular intoxication from this universal communion. He who mates easily with the crowd knows feverish joys that must be for ever unknown to the egoist, shut up like a coffer, and to the sluggard, imprisoned like a shell-fish. He adopts for his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that circumstance sets before him.

What men call love is small indeed, narrow and weak indeed, compared with this ineffable orgie, this sacred prostitution of the soul which gives itself up wholly (poetry and charity!) to the unexpected which happens, to the stranger as he passes.

It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs. The founders of colonies, the shepherds of nations, the missionary priests, exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtless know something of these mysterious intoxications; and, in the midst of the vast family that their genius has raised about them, they must sometimes laugh at the thought of those who pity them for their chaste lives and troubled fortunes.

VII

THE CAKE

I was travelling. The landscape in the midst of which I was seated was of an irresistible grandeur and sublimity. Something no doubt at that moment passed from it into my soul. My thoughts fluttered with a lightness like that of the atmosphere; vulgar passions, such as hate and profane love, seemed to me now as far away as the clouds that floated in the gulfs beneath my feet; my soul seemed to me as vast and pure as the dome of the sky that enveloped me; the remembrance of earthly things came as faintly to my heart as the thin tinkle of the bells of unseen herds, browsing far, far away, on the slope of another mountain. Across the little motionless lake, black with the darkness of its immense depth, there passed from time to time the shadow of a cloud, like the shadow of an airy giant's cloak, flying through heaven. And I remember that this rare and solemn sensation, caused by a vast and perfectly silent movement, filled me with mingled joy and fear. In a word, thanks to the enrapturing beauty about me, I felt that I was at perfect peace with myself and with the universe; I even believe that, in my complete forgetfulness of all earthly evil, I had come to think the newspapers are right after all, and man was born good; when, incorrigible matter renewing its exigencies, I sought to refresh the fatigue and satisfy the appetite caused by so lengthy a climb. I took from my pocket a large piece of bread, a leathern cup, and a small bottle of a certain elixir which the chemists at that time sold to tourists, to be mixed, on occasion, with liquid snow.

I was quietly cutting my bread when a slight noise made me look up. I saw in front of me a little ragged urchin, dark and dishevelled, whose hollow eyes, wild and supplicating, devoured the piece of bread. And I heard him gasp, in a low, hoarse voice, the word: "Cake!" I could not help laughing at the appellation with which he thought fit to honour my nearly white bread, and I cut off a big slice and offered it to him. Slowly he came up to me, not taking his eyes from the coveted object; then, snatching it out of my hand, he stepped quickly back, as if he feared that my offer was not sincere, or that I had already repented of it.

But at the same instant he was knocked over by another little savage, who had sprung from I know not where, and who was so precisely like the first that one might have taken them for twin brothers. They rolled over on the ground together, struggling for the possession of the precious booty, neither willing to share it with his brother. The first, exasperated, clutched the second by the hair; and the second seized one of the ears of the first between his teeth, and spat out a little bleeding morsel with a fine oath in dialect. The legitimate proprietor of the cake tried to hook his little claws into the usurper's eyes; the latter did his best to throttle his adversary with one hand, while with the other he endeavoured to slip the prize of war into his pocket. But, heartened by despair, the loser pulled himself together, and sent the victor sprawling with a blow of the head in his stomach. Why describe a hideous fight which indeed lasted longer than their childish strength seemed to promise? The cake travelled from hand to hand, and changed from pocket to pocket, at every moment; but, alas, it changed also in size; and when at length, exhausted, panting and bleeding, they stopped from the sheer impossibility of going on, there was no longer any cause of feud; the slice of bread had disappeared, and lay scattered in crumbs like the grains of sand with which it was mingled.

The sight had darkened the landscape for me, and dispelled the joyous calm in which my soul had lain basking; I remained saddened for quite a long time, saying over and over to myself: "There is then a wonderful country in which bread is called cake, and is so rare a delicacy that it is enough in itself to give rise to a war literally fratricidal!"

VIII

EVENING TWILIGHT

The day is over. A great restfulness descends into poor minds that the day's work has wearied; and thoughts take on the tender and dim colours of twilight.

Nevertheless from the mountain peak there comes to my balcony, through the transparent clouds of evening, a great clamour, made up of a crowd of discordant cries, dulled by distance into a mournful harmony, like that of the rising tide or of a storm brewing.

Who are the hapless ones to whom evening brings no calm; to whom, as to the owls, the coming of night is the signal for a witches' sabbat? The sinister ululation comes to me from the hospital on the mountain; and, in the evening, as I smoke, and look down on the quiet of the immense valley, bristling with houses, each of whose windows seems to say, "Here is peace, here is domestic happiness!" I can, when the wind blows from the heights, lull my astonished thought with this imitation of the harmonies of hell.

Twilight excites madmen. I remember I had two friends whom twilight made quite ill. One of them lost all sense of social and friendly amenities, and flew at the first-comer like a savage. I have seen him throw at the waiter's head an excellent chicken, in which he imagined he had discovered some insulting hieroglyph. Evening, harbinger of profound delights, spoilt for him the most succulent things.

The other, a prey to disappointed ambition, turned gradually, as the daylight dwindled, sourer, more gloomy, more nettlesome. Indulgent and sociable during the day, he was pitiless in the evening; and it was not only on others, but on himself, that he vented the rage of his twilight mania.

The former died mad, unable to recognise his wife and child; the latter still keeps the restlessness of a perpetual disquietude; and, if all the honours that republics and princes can confer were heaped upon him, I believe that the twilight would still quicken in him the burning envy of imaginary distinctions. Night, which put its own darkness into their minds, brings light to mine; and, though it is by no means rare for the same cause to bring about opposite results, I am always as it were perplexed and alarmed by it.

O night! O refreshing dark! for me you are the summons to an inner feast, you are the deliverer from anguish! In the solitude of the plains, in the stony labyrinths of a city, scintillation of stars, outburst of gaslamps, you are the fireworks of the goddess Liberty!

Twilight, how gentle you are and how tender! The rosy lights that still linger on the horizon, like the last agony of day under the conquering might of its night; the flaring candle-flames that stain with dull red the last glories of the sunset; the heavy draperies that an invisible hand draws out of the depths of the East, mimic all those complex feelings that war on one another in the heart of man at the solemn moments of life.

Would you not say that it was one of those strange costumes worn by dancers, in which the tempered splendours of a shining skirt show through a dark and transparent gauze, as, through the darkness of the present, pierces the delicious past? And the wavering stars of gold and silver with which it is shot, are they not those fires of fancy which take light never so well as under the deep mourning of the night?

"ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD"

Life is a hospital, in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain that he would get well if he were by the window. It seems to me that I should always be happy if I were somewhere else, and this question of moving house is one that I am continually talking over with my soul.

"Tell me, my soul, poor chilly soul, what do you say to living in Lisbon? It must be very warm there, and you would bask merrily, like a lizard. It is by the sea; they say that it is built of marble, and that the people have such a horror of vegetation that they tear up all the trees. There is a country after your own soul; a country made up of light and mineral, and with liquid to reflect them."

My soul makes no answer.

"Since you love rest, and to see moving things, will you come and live in that heavenly land, Holland? Perhaps you would be happy in a country which you have so often admired in pictures. What do you say to Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships anchored at the doors of houses?"

My soul remains silent.

"Or perhaps Java seems to you more attractive? Well, there we shall find the mind of Europe married to tropical beauty."

Not a word. Can my soul be dead?

"Have you sunk then into so deep a stupor that only your own pain gives you pleasure? If that be so, let us go to the lands that are made in the likeness of Death. I know exactly the place for us, poor soul! We will book our passage to Torneo. We will go still further, to the last limits of the Baltic; and, if it be possible, further still from life; we will make our abode at the Pole. There the sun only grazes the earth, and the slow alternations of light and night put out variety and bring in the half of nothingness, monotony. There we can take great baths of darkness, while, from time to time, for our pleasure, the Aurora Borealis shall scatter its rosy sheaves before us, like reflections of fireworks in hell!"

At last my soul bursts into speech, and wisely she cries to me: "Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world!"

A HEROIC DEATH

Fancioulle was an admirable buffoon, and almost one of the friends of the Prince. But for persons professionally devoted to the comic, serious things have a fatal attraction, and, strange as it may seem that ideas of patriotism and liberty should seize despotically upon the brain of a player, one day Fancioulle joined in a conspiracy formed by some discontented nobles.

There exist everywhere sensible men to denounce those individuals of atrabiliar disposition who seek to depose princes, and, without consulting it, to reconstitute society. The lords in question were arrested, together with Fancioulle, and condemned to death.

I would readily believe that the Prince was almost sorry to find his favourite actor among the rebels. The Prince was neither better nor worse than any other Prince; but an excessive sensibility rendered him, in many cases, more cruel and more despotic than all his fellows. Passionately enamoured of the fine arts, an excellent connoisseur as well, he was truly insatiable of pleasures. Indifferent enough in regard to men and morals, himself a real artist, he feared no enemy but Ennui, and the extravagant efforts that he made to fly or to vanquish this tyrant of the world would certainly have brought upon him, on the part of a severe historian, the epithet of "monster," had it been permitted, in his dominions, to write anything whatever which did not tend exclusively to pleasure, or to astonishment, which is one of the most delicate forms of pleasure. The great misfortune of the Prince was that he had no theatre vast enough for his genius. There are young Neros who are stifled within too narrow limits, and whose names and whose intentions will never be known to future ages. An unforeseeing Providence had given to this man faculties greater than his dominions.

Suddenly the rumour spread that the sovereign had decided to pardon all the conspirators; and the origin of this rumour was the announcement of a special performance in which Fancioulle would play one of his best _rôles_, and at which even the condemned nobles, it was said, were to be present, an evident sign, added superficial minds, of the generous tendencies of the Prince.

On the part of a man so naturally and deliberately eccentric, anything was possible, even virtue, even mercy, especially if he could hope to find in it unexpected pleasures. But to those who, like myself, had succeeded in penetrating further into the depths of this sick and curious soul, it was infinitely more probable that the Prince was wishful to estimate the quality of the scenic talents of a man condemned to death. He would profit by the occasion to obtain a physiological experience of a _capital_ interest, and to verify to what extent the habitual faculties of an artist would be altered or modified by the extraordinary situation in which he found himself. Beyond this, did there exist in his mind an intention, more or less defined, of mercy? It is a point that has never been solved.

At last, the great day having come, the little court displayed all its pomps, and it would be difficult to realise, without having seen it, what splendour the privileged classes of a little state with limited resources can show forth, on a really solemn occasion. This was a doubly solemn one, both from the wonder of its display and from the mysterious moral interest attaching to it.

The Sieur Fancioulle excelled especially in parts either silent or little burdened with words, such as are often the principal ones in those fairy plays whose object is to represent symbolically the mystery of life. He came upon the stage lightly and with a perfect ease, which in itself lent some support, in the minds of the noble public, to the idea of kindness and forgiveness.

When we say of an actor, "This is a good actor," we make use of a formula which implies that under the personage we can still distinguish the actor, that is to say, art, effort, will. Now, if an actor should succeed in being, in relation to the personage whom he is appointed to express, precisely what the finest statues of antiquity, miraculously animated, living, walking, seeing, would be in relation to the confused general idea of beauty, this would be, undoubtedly, a singular and unheard of case. Fancioulle was, that evening, a perfect idealisation, which it was impossible not to suppose living, possible, real. The buffoon came and went, he laughed, wept, was convulsed with an indestructible aureole about his head, an aureole invisible to all, but visible to me, and in which were blended, in a strange amalgam, the rays of Art and the martyr's glory. Fancioulle brought, by I know not what special grace, something divine and supernatural into even the most extravagant buffooneries. My pen trembles, and the tears of an emotion which I cannot forget rise to my eyes, as I try to describe to you this never-to-be-forgotten evening. Fancioulle proved to me, in a peremptory, an irrefutable way, that the intoxication of Art is surer than all others to veil the terrors of the gulf; that genius can act a comedy on the threshold of the grave with a joy that binders it from seeing the grave, lost, as it is, in a Paradise shutting out all thought, of the grave and of destruction.

The whole audience, _blasé_ and frivolous as it was, soon fell under the all-powerful sway of the artist. Not a thought was left of death, of mourning, or of punishment. All gave themselves up, without disquietude, to the manifold delights caused by the sight of a masterpiece of living art. Explosions of joy and admiration again and again shook the dome of the edifice with the energy of a continuous thunder. The Prince himself, in an ecstasy, joined in the applause of his court.

Nevertheless, to a discerning eye, his emotion was not unmixed. Did he feel himself conquered in his power as despot? humiliated in his art as the striker of terror into hearts, of chill into souls? Such suppositions, not exactly justified, but not absolutely unjustifiable, passed through my mind as I contemplated the face of the Prince, on which a new pallor gradually overspread its habitual paleness, as snow overspreads snow. His lips compressed themselves tighter and tighter, and his eyes lighted up with an inner fire like that of jealousy or of spite, even while he applauded the talents of his old friend, the strange buffoon, who played the buffoon so well in the face of death. At a certain moment, I saw his Highness lean towards a little page, stationed behind him, and whisper in his ear. The roguish face of the pretty child lit up with a smile, and he briskly quitted the Prince's box as if to execute some urgent commission.

A few minutes later a shrill and prolonged hiss interrupted Fancioulle in one of his finest moments, and rent alike every ear and heart. And from the part of the house from whence this unexpected note of disapproval had sounded, a child darted into a corridor with stifled laughter.

Fancioulle, shaken, roused out of his dream, closed his eyes, then re-opened them, almost at once, extraordinarily wide, opened his mouth as if to breathe convulsively, staggered a little forward, a little backward, and then fell stark dead on the boards.

Had the hiss, swift as a sword, really frustrated the hangman? Had the Prince himself divined all the homicidal efficacy of his ruse? It is permitted to doubt it. Did he regret his dear and inimitable Fancioulle? It is sweet and legitimate to believe it.

The guilty nobles had enjoyed the performance of comedy for the last time. They were effaced from life.

Since then, many mimes, justly appreciated in different countries, have played before the court of ----; but none of them have ever been able to recall the marvellous talents of Fancioulle, or to rise to the same favour.

BE DRUNKEN

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."

XII

   EPILOGUE

   With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
   Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
   Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,

   Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
   Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
   Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;

   But, like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
   To drink delight of that enormous trull
   Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.

   Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full,
   Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand
   In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,

   I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
   Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
   The vulgar herd can never understand.

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POEMS IN PROSE Translated by Joseph T. Shipley

Poems in Prose

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DEDICATION To ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE

À Arsène Houssaye (Baudelaire)

MY DEAR FRIEND:

I send you a little work of which it cannot be said, without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail; since all of it, on the contrary, is at once head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. Consider, I pray you, what convenience this arrangement offers to all of us, to you, to me and to the reader. We can stop where we wish, I my musing, you your consideration, and the reader his perusal--for I do not hold the latter's restive will by the interminable thread of a fine-spun intrigue. Remove a vertebra, and the two parts of this tortuous fantasy rejoin painlessly. Chop it into particles, and you will see that each part can exist by itself. In the hope that some of these segments will be lively enough to please and to amuse you, I venture to dedicate to you the entire serpent.

I have a little confession to make. It was while glancing, for at least the twentieth time, through the famous _Gaspard de la Nuit_, by Aloysius Bertrand (a book known to you, to me, and to a few of our friends, has it not the highest right to be called famous?), that the idea came to me to attempt an analogous plan, and to apply to the description of modern life, or rather of a life modern and more abstract, the process which he applied in the depicting of ancient life, so strangely picturesque.

Which of us has not, in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rime, sufficiently supple, sufficiently abrupt, to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the windings and turnings of the fancy, to the sudden starts of the conscience?

It is particularly in frequenting great cities, it is from the flux of their innumerable streams of intercourse, that this importunate ideal is born. Have not you yourself, my dear friend, tried to convey in a chanson the strident cry of the glazier, and to express in a lyric prose all the grievous suggestions that cry bears even to the house-tops, through the heaviest mists of the street? But, to speak truth, I fear that my jealousy has not brought me good fortune. As soon as I had begun the work, I saw that not only was I laboring far, far, from my mysterious and brilliant model, but that I was reaching an accomplishment (if it can be called _an accomplishment_) peculiarly different--accident of which all others would doubtless be proud, but which can but profoundly humiliate a mind which considers it the highest honor of the poet to achieve exactly what he has planned.

Devotedly yours,

C. B.

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Rest of the poems

A JESTER

It was the outburst of the New Year: chaos of mud and snow, crossed by a thousand coaches, sparkling with baubles and gewgaws, swarming with desires and with despairs, official folly of a great city made to weaken the fortitude of the firmest eremite.

In the midst of this hubbub and tumult, a donkey was trotting along, tormented by a lout with a horsewhip.

As the donkey was about to turn a corner, a fine fellow, gloved, polished, with a merciless cravat, and imprisoned in impeccable garments, bowed ceremoniously before the beast; said to it, removing his hat: "I greet thee, good and happy one"; and turned towards some companions with a fatuous air, as though requesting them to add their approbation to his content.

The donkey did not see the clever jester, and continued steadily where its duty called.

As for me, I was overcome by an inordinate rage against the sublime idiot, who seemed to me to concentrate in himself the wit of France.

THE DOG AND THE VIAL

"My pretty dog, my good dog, my doggy dear, come and smell this excellent perfume bought at the best scent-shop in the city."

And the dog, wagging its tail, which is, I think, the poor creature's substitute for a laugh or a smile, approached and curiously placed its damp nose to the opened vial; then, recoiling with sudden fright, it growled at me in reproach.

"Ah! wretched dog, if I had offered you a mass of excrement, you would have smelled it with delight, and probably have devoured it. So even you, unworthy companion of my unhappy life, resemble the public, to whom one must never offer delicate perfumes, which exasperate, but carefully raked-up mire."

THE WILD WOMAN AND THE COQUETTE

"Really, my dear, you tire me immeasurably and unpityingly; one would say, to hear you sigh, that you suffered more than the sexagenarian gleaners or the old beggar hags who pick up crusts at the doors of restaurants.

"If at least your sighs expressed remorse, they would do you some honor; but they convey merely the surfeit of well-being and the languor of repose. And, too, you will not stop your constant flow of needless words: 'Love me well! I have so much need! Comfort me thus, caress me so!'

"Come! I shall try to cure you; perhaps we shall find a means, for two cents, in the midst of a fair, not far away.

"Take a good look, I pray you, at this strong iron cage, within which moves, howling like a damned soul, shaking the bars like an ourang-outang enraged by exile, imitating to perfection, now the circular bounds of the tiger, now the clumsy waddling of the polar bear, that hairy monster whose form vaguely resembles your own.

"That monster is one of those beasts one usually calls 'my angel'--that is, a woman. The other monster, he who bawls at the top of his voice, club in his hand, is a husband. He has chained his lawful wife like a beast, and he exhibits her in the suburbs on fair days--with the magistrates' permission, of course.

"Pay close attention. See with what voracity (perhaps not feigned) she tears apart the living rabbits and the cackling fowl her keeper throws her. 'Come,' he says, 'one must not eat one's whole store in a day'; and, with that wise word, he cruelly snatches the prey, the winding entrails of which remain a moment caught on the teeth of the ferocious beast--I mean, the woman.

"Come! A good blow to calm her! for she darts terrible glances of lust at the stolen food. Good God! The club is not a jester's slap stick! Did you hear the flesh resound, right through the artificial hair? Her eyes leap from her head now; she howls _more naturally_. In her rage she sparkles all over, like smitten iron.

"Such are the conjugal customs of these two children of Adam and Eve, these works of Thy hands, O my God! This woman is doubtless miserable, though after all, perhaps, the titillating joys of glory are not unknown to her. There are misfortunes less remediable, and with no compensation. But in the world to which she has been thrown, she has never been able to think that woman might deserve a different destiny.

"Now, as for us two, my fine lady! Seeing the hells of which the world is made, what would you have me think of your pretty hell, you who rest only on stuffs as soft as your own skin, who eat only cooked viands, for whom a skilled domestic takes care to cut the bites?

"And what can mean to me all these soft signs which heave your perfumed breast, my lusty coquette? And all those affectations learned from books, and that everlasting melancholy, intended to arouse an emotion far other than pity? Indeed, I sometimes feel like teaching you what true misfortune means.

"Seeing you so, my beautiful dainty one, your feet in the mire and your moist eyes turned to the sky, as though to demand a king, one would say indeed: a young frog invoking the ideal. If you scorn the log (which I am now, you know), beware the stork which will kill, swallow, devour you at its caprice.

"Poet as I am, I am not such a fool as you may think, and if you tire me too often with your whining affectations, I shall treat you as a wild woman, or throw you through the window as an empty flask."

THE OLD MOUNTEBANK

Everywhere the holiday crowd was parading, spread out, merry making. It was one of those festivals on which mountebanks, tricksters, animal trainers and itinerant merchants had long been relying, to compensate for the dull seasons of the year.

On such days it seems to me the people forget all, sadness and work; they become children. For the little ones, it is a day of leave, the horror of the school put off twenty-four hours. For the grown-ups, it is an armistice, concluded with the malevolent forces of life, a respite in the universal contention and struggle.

The man of the world himself, and even he who is occupied with spiritual tasks, with difficulty escape the influence of this popular jubilee. They absorb, without volition, their part of the atmosphere of devil-may-care. As for me, I never fail, like a true Parisian, to inspect all the booths that flaunt themselves in these solemn epochæ.

They made, in truth, a formidable gathering: they bawled, bellowed, howled. It was a mingling of cries, of blaring of brass and bursting of rockets. The clowns and the simpletons convulsed the features of their swarthy faces, hardened by wind, rain, and sun; they hurled forth, with the assurance of comedians certain of their wares, witticisms and pleasantries of a humor solid and heavy as that of Molière. The Hercules, proud of the enormousness of their limbs, without forehead, without cranium, stalked majestically about under fleshings fresh washed for the occasion. The dancers, pretty as fairies or as princesses, leapt and cavorted under the flare of lanterns which filled their skirts with sparkles.

All was light, dust, shouting, joy, tumult; some spent, others gained, the one and the other equally joyful. Children clung to their mothers' skirts to obtain a sugar-stick, or climbed upon their fathers' shoulders the better to see a conjurer dazzling as a god. And spread over all, dominating every odor, was a smell of frying, which was the incense of the festival.

At the end, at the extreme end of the row of booths, as if, ashamed, he had exiled himself from all these splendors, I saw an old mountebank, stooped, decrepit, emaciated, a ruin of a man, leaning against one of the pillars of his hut, more wretched than that of the most besotted barbarian, the distress of which two candle ends, guttering and smoking, lighted up only too well.

Everywhere was joy, gain, revelry; everywhere certainty of the morrow's bread; everywhere the frenetic outbursts of vitality. Here, absolute misery, misery bedecked, to crown the horror, in comic tatters, where necessity, rather than art, produced the contrast. He was not laughing, the wretched one! He was not weeping, he was not dancing, he was not gesticulating, he was not crying. He was singing no song, gay or grievous, he was imploring no one. He was mute and immobile. He had renounced, he had withdrawn. His destiny was accomplished.

But what a deep, unforgettable look he cast over the crowd and the lights, the moving stream of which was stemmed a few yards from his repulsive wretchedness! I felt my throat clutched by the terrible hand of hysteria, and it seemed as though glances were clouded by rebellious tears that would not fall.

What was to be done? What good was there in asking the unfortunate what curiosity, what marvel had he to show within those barefaced shades, behind that threadbare curtain? In truth, I dared not; and, although the reason for my timidity will make you laugh, I confess that I was afraid of humiliating him. At length, I had resolved to drop a coin while passing his boards, in the hope that he would divine my purpose, when a great backwash of people, produced by I know not what disturbance, carried me far away.

And leaving, obsessed by the sight, I sought to analyze my sudden sadness, and I said: "I have just seen the image of the aged man of letters, who has survived the generation of which he was the brilliant entertainer; of the old poet, friendless, without family, without child, degraded by his misery and by public ingratitude, into whose booth a forgetful world no longer wants to go!"

THE CLOCK

The Chinese tell the time in the eyes of cats. One day a missionary, walking in the suburbs of Nanking, noticed that he had forgotten his watch, and asked a little boy what time it was.

The youngster of the heavenly Empire hesitated at first; then, carried away by his thought he answered: "I'll tell you." A few moments later he reappeared, bearing in his arms an immense cat, and looking, as they say, into the whites of its eyes, he announced without hesitation: "It's not quite noon." Which was the fact.

As for me, if I turn toward the fair feline, to her so aptly named, who is at once the honor of her sex, the pride of my heart and the fragrance of my mind, be it by night or by day, in the full light or in the opaque shadows, in the depths of her adorable eyes I always tell the time distinctly, always the same, a vast, a solemn hour, large as space, without division of minutes or of seconds,--an immovable hour which is not marked on the clocks, yet is slight as a sigh, is rapid as the lifting of a lash.

And if some intruder comes to disturb me while my glance rests upon that charming dial, if some rude and intolerant genie, some demon of the evil hour, comes to ask: "What are you looking at so carefully? What are you hunting for in the eyes of that being? Do you see the time there, mortal squanderer and do-nothing?" I shall answer, unhesitant: "Yes, I see the time, it is Eternity!"

Is not this, madame, a really worth-while madrigal, just as affected as yourself? Indeed, I have had so much pleasure in embroidering this pretentious gallantry, that I shall ask you for nothing in exchange.

A HEMISPHERE IN A TRESS

Let me breathe, long, long, of the odor of your hair, let me plunge my whole face in its depth, as a thirsty man in the waters of a spring, let me flutter it with my hand as a perfumed kerchief, to shake off memories into the air.

If you could know all that I see! all that I feel! all that I understand in your hair! My soul journeys on perfumes as the souls of other men on music.

Your hair meshes a full dream, crowded with sails and masts; it holds great seas on which monsoons bear me toward charming climes, where the skies are bluer and deeper, where the atmosphere is perfumed with fruits, with leaves, and with the human skin.

In the ocean of your hair I behold a port humming with melancholy chants, with strong men of all nations and with ships of every form carving their delicate, intricate architecture on an enormous sky where lolls eternal heat.

In the caresses of your hair, I find again the languor of long hours on a divan, in the cabin of a goodly ship, cradled by the unnoticed undulation of the port, between pots of flowers and refreshing water-jugs.

At the glowing hearth-stone of your hair, I breathe the odor of tobacco mixed with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair, I see shine forth the infinite of the tropic sky; on the downy bank-sides of your hair, I grow drunk with the mingled odors of tar and musk, and oil of cocoanut.

Let me bite, long, your thick black hair. When I nibble your springy, rebellious hair, it seems that I am eating memories.

THE PLAYTHING OF THE POOR

I should like to give you an idea for an innocent diversion. There are so few amusements that are not guilty ones!

When you go out in the morning for a stroll along the highways, fill your pockets with little penny contrivances--such as the straight merryandrew moved by a single thread, the blacksmiths who strike the anvil, the rider and his horse, with a whistle for a tail--and, along the taverns, at the foot of the trees, make presents of them to the unknown poor children whom you meet. You will see their eyes grow beyond all measure. At first, they will not dare to take; they will doubt their good fortune. Then their hands will eagerly seize the gift, and they will flee as do the cats who go far off to eat the bit you have given them, having learned to distrust man.

On a road, behind the rail of a great garden at the foot of which appeared the glitter of a beautiful mansion struck by the sun, stood a pretty, fresh child, clad in those country garments so full of affectation.

Luxury, freedom from care, and the habitual spectacle of wealth, make these children so pretty that one would think them formed of other paste than the sons of mediocrity or of poverty.

Beside him on the grass lay a splendid toy, fresh as its master, varnished, gilt, clad in a purple robe, covered with plumes and beads of glass. But the child was not occupied with his favored plaything, and this is what he was watching:

On the other side of the rail, on the road, among the thistles and the thorns, was another child, puny, dirty, fuliginous, one of those pariah-brats the beauty of which an impartial eye might discover if, as the eye of the connoisseur divines an ideal painting beneath the varnish of the coach-maker, it cleansed him of the repugnant patina of misery.

Across the symbolic bars which separate two worlds, the highway and the mansion, the poor child was showing the rich child his own toy, which the latter examined eagerly, as a rare and unknown object. Now, this toy, which the ragamuffin was provoking, tormenting, tossing in a grilled box, was a live rat! His parents, doubtless for economy, had taken the toy from life itself.

And the two children were laughing together fraternally, with teeth of equal _whiteness_!

THE GIFTS OF THE FAIRIES

It was that great assembly of the fairies, to proceed with the repartition of gifts among the new-born who had arrived at life within the last twenty-four hours.

All these antique and capricious sisters of destiny, all these bizarre mothers of sadness and of joy, were most diversified: some had a somber, crabbed air; others were wanton, mischievous; some, young, who had always been young; others old, who had always been old.

All the fathers who believed in fairies had come, each bearing his new-born in his arms.

Gifts, Faculties, Good Fortunes, Invincible Circumstances, were gathered at the side of the tribunal, as prizes on the platform for distribution. What was peculiar here was that the gifts were not the reward of an effort, but, quite the contrary, a grace accorded him who had not yet lived, a grace with power to determine his destiny and become as well the source of his misfortune as of his good.

The poor fairies were kept very busy; for the crowd of solicitors was great, and the intermediate world, placed between man and God, is subject, like man, to the terrible law of Time and his endless offspring, Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds.

In truth, they were as bewildered as ministers on an audience day, or as guards at the Mont-de-Piété when a national holiday authorizes gratuitous liberations. I really think that from time to time they looked at the hands of the clock with as much impatience as human judges, who, sitting since morn, cannot help dreaming of dinner, of the family, and of their cherished slippers. If, in supernatural justice, there is a little of haste and of luck, we should not be surprised sometimes to find the same in human justice. We ourselves, in that case, would be unjust judges.

So some shams were enacted that day which might be thought bizarre, if prudence, rather than caprice, were the distinctive, eternal characteristic of the fairies.

For instance, the power of magnetically attracting fortune was awarded the sole heir of a very wealthy family, who, endowed with no feeling of charity, no more than with lust for the most visible goods of life, must later on find himself prodigiously embarrassed by his millions.

Thus, love of the beautiful and poetic power were given to the son of a gloomy knave, a quarry-man by trade, who could in no way develop the faculties or satisfy the needs of his deplorable offspring.

All the fairies rose, thinking their task was through; for there remained no gift, no bounty, to hurl at all that human fry, when one fine fellow, a poor little tradesman, I think, rose, and grasping by her robe of multi-colored vapors the Fairy nearest at hand, cried:

"Oh, Madam! You are forgetting us! There is still my little one! I don't want to have come for nothing!" The fairy could have been embarrassed, for there no longer was a thing. However, she recalled in time a law, well known, though rarely applied, in the supernatural world, inhabited by those impalpable deities, friends, of man and often constrained to mold themselves to his passions, such as Fairies, Gnomes, Salamanders, Sylphides, Sylphs, Nixies, Watersprites and Undines--I mean the law which grants a Fairy, in a case similar to this, namely, in case of the exhausting of the prizes, power to give one more, supplementary and exceptional, provided always that she has sufficient imagination to create it at once.

Accordingly the good Fairy responded, with self-possession worthy of her rank: "I give to your son.... I give him ... _the gift of pleasing!_"

"Pleasing? How? Pleasing? Why?" obstinately asked the little shopkeeper, who was doubtless one of those logicians so commonly met, incapable of rising to the logic of the Absurd.

"Because! Because!" replied the incensed Fairy, turning her back on him; and, rejoining the train of her companions, she said to them: "What do you think of this little vainglorious Frenchman, who wants to know everything, and who, having secured for his son the best of gifts, dares still to question and to dispute the indisputable?"

SOLITUDE

A philanthropic journalist once said to me that solitude is harmful to man, and, to support his thesis, he cited--as do all unbelievers--words of the Christian Fathers.

I know that the Demon gladly frequents parched places, and that the spirit of murder and lechery is marvellously inflamed in solitude. But it is possible that solitude is dangerous only to the idle, rambling soul, who peoples it with his passions and his chimeras.

It is certain that a babbler, whose supreme pleasure consists in speaking from a pulpit or a rostrum, would be taking great chances of going stark mad on the island of Crusoe. I do not demand of my journalist the courageous virtues of Robinson, but I ask that he do not summon in accusation lovers of solitude and mystery.

There are in our chattering races individuals who would accept the supreme agony with less reluctance, if they were permitted to deliver a copious harangue from the height of the scaffold, without fear that the drums of Santerre[1] would unseasonably cut short their oration.

I do not pity them, for I guess that their oratorical effusions bring them delights equal to those which others draw from silence and seclusion; but I despise them.

I desire above all that my accursed journalist leave me to amuse myself as I will. "Then you never feel," he says in a very apostolic nasal tone, "the need of sharing your joys?" Do you see the subtle jealous one! He knows that I scorn his, and he comes to insinuate himself into mine, the horrible killjoy!

"The great misfortune of not being able to be alone," La Bruyère says somewhere, as though to shame those who rush to forget themselves in the crowd, fearing, doubtless, that they will be unable to endure themselves.

"Almost all our ills come to us from inability to remain in our room," said another sage, Pascal, I believe, recalling thus in the cell of meditation the frantic ones who seek happiness in animation, and in a prostitution which I could call fraternary, if I wished to use the fine language of my century.

[Footnote 1: Santerre is the general of the French Revolution who ordered his drummers to play, drowning the words of Louis XVI from the scaffold.]

PROJECTS

He said to himself, while strolling in the great lonely park: "How beautiful she would be in an intricate, gorgeous court costume, descending, through the air of a beauteous evening, the marble stairs of a palace, opposite shallow pools and great greenswards. For she has naturally the air of a princess."

Passing along a street somewhat later, he stopped before a print-shop, and finding in a portfolio an engraving of a tropical scene, he said: "No, it is not in a palace that I should like to be master of her beloved life. We would not feel at home. Besides, walls riddled with gold would afford no niche to hold her likeness; in those solemn galleries there is no intimate corner. Decidedly it is _there_ I must live to develop the dream of my life."

And, analyzing the details of the engraving, he continued mentally: "At the edge of the sea, a little log cabin, surrounded by those shiny, bizarre trees, the names of which I have forgotten ... in the air, an indefinable, intoxicating perfume ... in the cabin, a potent fragrance of rose and of musk ... farther off, behind our little domain, mast-tops swaying with the swell ... around us, beyond the room lighted by a roseate glow sifted through the blinds, adorned with fresh matting and intoxicating flowers, with rare benches of Portuguese rococo, of a heavy and shadowy wood (where she will rest, so calm, so gently fanned, smoking tobacco tinged with opium), beyond the timbers of the ships, the racket of the birds drunk with the light, and the chattering of little negresses ... and, at night, to serve as accompaniment to my musings,' the plaintive song of musical trees, of melancholy beef-woods! Yes, in truth, there indeed is the setting that I seek. What have I to do with palaces?"

And still farther, as he followed a great avenue, he noticed a well-kept tavern, from a window of which, enlivened by curtains of checkered prints, two laughing heads leaned forth. And at once: "My fancy," he said, "must be a great vagabond to seek so far what is so near to me. Pleasure and good fortune are in the nearest tavern, in the chance tavern, so rich in happiness. A great fire, gaudy earthenware, a tolerable meal, rough wine, and an enormous bed with cloths somewhat coarse, but fresh; what more could be desired?"

And returning home, alone, at the hour when the counsels of Wisdom are not drowned by the hum of external life, he said: "I have had to-day, in my revery, three dwellings in which I have found equal pleasure. Why constrain my body to move about, when my soul voyages so freely? And to what end carry out projects, when the project itself is a sufficing joy?"

THE LOVELY DOROTHEA

The sun pours down upon the city with its direct and terrible light; the sand is dazzling, and the sea glistens. The stupefied world sinks cowardly down and holds siesta, a siesta which is a sort of delightful death, in which the sleeper, half-awake, enjoys the voluptuousness of his annihilation.

None the less, Dorothea, strong and proud as the sun, advances along the deserted street, alone animated at that hour, under the immense blue sky, forming a startling black spot against the light.

She advances, lightly, balancing her slender trunk upon her so large hips. Her close-fitting silk dress, of a clear, roseate fashion, stands out vividly against the darkness of her skin and is exactly molded to her long figure, her rounded back and her pointed throat.

Her red parasol, sifting the light, throws over her dark face the bloody disguise of its reflection.

The weight of her enormous, blue-black hair draws back her delicate head and gives her a triumphant, indolent bearing. Heavy pendants tinkle quietly at her delicate ears.

From time to time the sea-breeze lifts the hem of her flowing skirt and reveals her shining, superb limbs; and her foot, a match for the feet of the marble goddesses whom Europe locks in its museums, faithfully imprints its form in the fine sand. For Dorothea is such a wondrous coquette, that the pleasure of being admired overcomes the pride of the enfranchised, and, although she is free, she walks without shoes.

She advances thus, harmoniously, glad to be alive, smiling an open smile; as if she saw, far off in space, a mirror reflecting her walk and her beauty.

At the hour when dogs moan with pain under the tormenting sun, what powerful motive can thus draw forth the indolent Dorothea, lovely, and cold as bronze?

Why had she left her little cabin, so coquettishly adorned, the flowers and mats of which make at so little cost a perfect boudoir; where she takes such delight in combing herself, in smoking, in being fanned, or in regarding herself in the mirror with its great fans of plumes; while the sea, which strikes the shore a hundred steps away, shapes to her formless reveries a mighty and monotonous accompaniment, and while the iron pot, in which a ragout of crabs with saffron and rice is cooking, sends after her, from the courtyard, its stimulating perfumes?

Perhaps she has a rendezvous with some young officer, who, on far distant shores, heard his comrades talk of the renowned Dorothea. Infallibly she will beg him, simple creature, to describe to her the Bal de l'Opéra, and will ask him if one can go there barefoot, as to the Sunday dances, where the old Kaffir women themselves get drunk and mad with joy; and then, too, whether the lovely ladies of Paris are all lovelier than she.

Dorothea is admired and pampered by all, and she would be perfectly happy if she were not obliged to amass piastre on piastre to buy back her little sister, who is now fully eleven, and who is already mature, and so lovely! She will doubtless succeed, the good Dorothea; the child's master is so miserly, too miserly to understand another beauty than that of gold.

THE COUNTERFEIT MONEY

As we were moving away from the tobacconist's, my companion carefully sorted his money: in the left pocket of his waistcoat he slipped little gold pieces; in the right, little silver pieces; in the left pocket of his trousers, a mass of coppers, and finally, in the right, a silver two-franc pieces that he had particularly examined.

"Singular and minute distribution!" I said to myself.

We came across a pauper who, trembling, held forth his cap.--I know nothing more disquieting than the dumb eloquence of those suppliant eyes which hold, for the sensitive man who can read within, both so great humility and so deep reproach. Something lies there which approaches that depth of complex feeling in the tearful eyes of dogs that are being flogged.

The offering of my friend was much more considerable than mine, and I said to him: "You are right; after the pleasure of being astonished, none is greater than that of creating a surprise."--"It was the counterfeit," he answered tranquilly, as though to justify his prodigality.

But in my miserable brain, always busied seeking noon at two p.m. (of such a wearying faculty has nature made me a gift!), the idea suddenly came that such conduct, on the part of my friend, was excusable only by the desire to produce an occasion in the life of the poor devil, perhaps even to know the diverse consequences, disastrous or otherwise, that a counterfeit in the hands of a mendicant can engender. Could it not multiply itself in valid pieces? Could it not also lead him to jail? A tavern-keeper, a baker, for example, might perhaps have him arrested as a forger or a spreader of counterfeits. Quite as well the counterfeit coin might be, for a poor little speculator, the germ of a several days' wealth. And so my fancy ran its course, lending wings to the spirit of my friend and drawing all possible deductions from all imaginable hypotheses.

But he abruptly burst my revery asunder by taking up my own words: "Yes, you are right: there is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he expected."

I looked into the whites of his eyes, and I was frightened to see that his eyes shone with an undeniable candor. I then saw clearly that he wished to combine charity and a good stroke of business; to gain forty sous and the heart of God; to sweep into Paradise economically; in short, to entrap gratis the brevet of charitable man.

I would almost have pardoned in him the desire of the criminal joy of which I had just now thought him capable! I would have thought it curious, singular, that he found it amusing to compromise the poor; but I shall never pardon the ineptitude of his calculation. One is never to be forgiven for being wicked, but there is some merit in being conscious that one is;--the most irreparable of all evils is to do wrong through stupidity.

THE GENEROUS PLAYER

Yesterday, in the crowd of the boulevard, I felt myself grazed by a mysterious Being whom I have always wished to know, and whom I recognized at once, though I had never seen him. He doubtless had a similar wish to make my acquaintance, for he gave me a significant wink in passing which I hastened to obey. I followed him attentively, and soon I descended behind him into a resplendent subterranean abode, where sparkled a luxury that none of the better homes in Paris can nearly approach. It seemed odd to me that I could have passed by this enchanting den so often without divining the entrance. There reigned an exquisite, though heady atmosphere, which made one forget almost at once all the fastidious horrors of life; there one breathed a somber blessedness, similar to that which the lotus-eaters experienced when, disembarking on an enchanted isle, bright with the glimmerings of eternal afternoon, they felt growing within them, to the drowsy sound of melodious cascades, the desire never to see again their hearthstones, their wives, their children, and never to remount the high surges of the sea.

Strange visages of men and women were there, marked with a fatal beauty, which it seemed to me I had already seen in epochs and in lands I could not precisely recall, and which inspired me rather with a fraternal sympathy than with that fear which is usually born at sight of the unknown. If I wished to try to define in any way the singular expression of these visages, I should say that I had never seen eyes burning more feverishly with dread of ennui and with the immortal desire of feeling themselves alive.

My host and I were already, when we sat down, old and perfect friends. We ate, we drank beyond measure of all sorts of extraordinary wines, and--what was no less extraordinary--it seemed to me, after several hours, that I was no more drunken than he. Play, that superhuman pleasure, had meanwhile irregularly interrupted our frequent libations, and I must say that I staked and lost my soul, at the rubber, with heroic heedlessness and lightness. The soul is so impalpable a thing, so often useless and sometimes so annoying, that I experienced, at its loss, a little less emotion than if, on a walk, I had misplaced my visiting card. For a long time we smoked some cigars the incomparable savor and perfume of which gave the soul nostalgia for unknown lands and joys, and, intoxicated with all these delights, I dared, in an access of familiarity which seemed not to displease him, to cry, while mastering a cup full to the brim: "To your immortal health, old Buck!"

We talked, also, of the universe, of its creation and of its future destruction; of the great idea of the century, namely, progress and perfectibility; and, in general, of all forms of human infatuation. On this subject, His Highness never exhausted his fund of light and irrefutable pleasantries, and he expressed himself with an easy flow of speech and a quietness in his drollery that I have found in none of the most celebrated causeurs of humanity. He explained to me the absurdity of the different philosophies which have hitherto taken possession of the human brain, and deigned even to confide to me certain fundamental principles, the property and the benefits of which it does not suit me to share with the casual comer. He did not in any way be-moan the bad deputation which he enjoys in all parts of the world, assured me that he himself was the person most interested in the destruction of _superstition_, and confessed that he had never feared for his own power save once, on the day when he had heard a preacher, more subtle than his colleagues, cry from the pulpit: "My dear brethren, never forget, when you hear the progress of wisdom vaunted, that the cleverest ruse of the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist!"

The memory of this celebrated orator led us naturally to the subject of the academies, and my strange companion stated that he did not disdain, in many cases, to inspire the pen, the word, and the conscience of pedagogs, and that he was almost always present, though invisible, at the academic sessions.

Encouraged by so many kindnesses, I asked him for news of God, and whether he had recently seen Him. He answered, with a carelessness shaded with a certain sadness: "We greet one another when we meet, but as two old gentlemen, in whom an innate politeness cannot extinguish the memory of ancient bitterness."

It is doubtful that His Highness had ever granted so long an audience to a plain mortal, and I was afraid of abusing it. Finally, as the shivering dawn whitened the panes, this famous personage, sung by so many poets and served by so many philosophers who have worked unknowingly for his glory, said to me: "I want to leave you with a pleasant memory of me, and to prove that I, of whom so much ill is said, I can sometimes be a _good devil_, to make use of one of your common phrases. In order to compensate for the irremediable loss of your soul, I shall give you the stakes you would have won had fate been with you, namely, the possibility of relieving and of conquering, all through your life, that odd affection of ennui which is the source of all your maladies and of all your wretched progress. Never shall a desire be framed by you which I will not aid you to realize; you shall reign over your vulgar fellow-men; you shall be stocked with flattery, even with adoration; silver, gold, diamonds, fairylike palaces, shall come seeking you and shall pray you to accept them, without your having made an effort to attain them; you shall change fatherland and country as often as your fancy may dictate; you shall riot in pleasures, unwearying, in charming countries where it is always warm and where the women are fragrant as the flowers--et cetera, et cetera ..." he added, rising and taking leave of me with a pleasant smile.

If I had not been afraid of humiliating myself before so vast an assemblage, I should gladly have fallen at the feet of this generous player to thank him for his unheard of munificence. But little by little, after I had left him, incurable distrust reentered my breast; I dared no longer believe in such prodigious good fortune, and, on going to bed, still saying my prayers through silly force of habit, I repeated in semi-slumber: "My God! Lord, my God! Let it be that the Devil keep his word!"

THE ROPE

To Edward Manet

Illusions, my friend told me, are perhaps as numberless as the relations of men with one another, or of men to things. And when the illusion disappears, that is, when we see the being or the fact as it exists outside of us, we undergo a strange feeling, a complex half of regret for the vanished phantom, half of agreeable surprise before the novelty, before the real fact. If one phenomenon exists that is trite, evident, always the same, concerning, the nature of which it is impossible to be deceived, it is maternal love. It is as difficult to imagine a mother without maternal love as a light without heat; is it not then perfectly legitimate to attribute to maternal love all the words and actions of a mother, relating to her child? None the less hear this little story, in which I was singularly mystified by the most natural illusion.

"My profession of painter drives me to regard attentively the visages, the physiognomies, which present themselves on my way, and you know what joy we derive from this faculty which renders life more vivid and significant in our eyes than for other men. In the secluded section where I live, and where great grassy spaces still separate the buildings, I often observed a child whose ardent and roguish countenance, more than all the rest, won me straightway. He posed for me more than once, and I transformed him, now into a little gypsy, now into an angel, now into mythological Love. I made him bear the violin of the vagabond, the Crown of Thorns and the Nails of the Passion, and the Torch of Eros. At length, I took so lively a pleasure in all the drollery of the youngster, that one day I begged his parents, poor folk, to be kind enough to yield him to me, promising to clothe him well, to give him money and not to impose on him any task beyond cleaning my brushes and running my errands. The child, with his face washed, became charming, and the life he led with me seemed a paradise, compared to that he had undergone in the parental hovel. Only I must say that the little fellow astonished me at times by singular spells of precocious sadness, and that he soon manifested an immoderate taste for sugar and for liqueurs; so much so that one day when I found that, despite my numerous warnings, he had again been doing some pilfering of that sort, I threatened to send him back to his parents. Then I went out, and my business kept me away for quite some time.

"What was my surprise and horror when, reëntering the house, the first object that met my eyes was my little fellow, the frolicsome companion of my life, hanging from the panel of the closet! His feet almost touched the floor; a chair, which he had doubtless thrust back with his foot, was overturned beside him; his head was bent convulsively over one shoulder; his bloated face, and his eyes, quite wide open with a fearful fixity, gave at first the illusion of life. To take him down was not so easy a business as you might think. He was already quite stiff, and I had an inexplicable repugnance to letting him fall heavily to the floor. It was necessary to bear his whole weight on one arm, and, with the free hand, to cut the rope. But that accomplished, all was not yet done; the little monster had made use of a very slender twine which had entered deep into his flesh, and I must now, with delicate scissors, seek the cord between the two cushions of the swelling, to disengage the neck.

"I have neglected to tell you that I called vigorously for help; but all my neighbors refused to come to my assistance, faithful in that to the habits of civilized man, who never wishes, I know not why, to mix in the affairs of one that has been hanged. Finally a physician came, who said that the child had been dead several hours. When, later, we had to disrobe him for burial, the cadaverous rigidity was such that, despairing of bending his limbs, we had to tear and cut the garments to remove them."

"The commissioner, to whom, naturally, I had to announce the casualty, looked at me askew and said to me: 'Here's something suspicious,' moved doubtless by an inveterate desire and a professional habit of frightening, at all events, the innocent as well as the guilty.

"There remained a supreme task to perform, the thought of which alone gave me a terrible anguish: I had to notify the parents. My feet refused to guide me to them. Finally, I had the courage. But, to my great astonishment, the mother was unmoved, not a tear oozed from the corner of her eye. I attributed that strangeness to the very horror she must feel, and I recalled the well-known maxim: 'The most terrible sorrows are silent ones.' As to the father, he contented himself with saying with an air half brutalized, half pensive: 'After all, it is perhaps for the best; he would always have come to a bad end!'

"However, the body was stretched out on my couch, and, assisted by a servant, I was busying myself with the final preparations, when the mother entered my studio. She wished, she said, to see the body of her son. I could not, in truth, deny her the intoxication of her grief and refuse her that supreme and somber consolation. Then she begged me to show her the place where her little one had hanged himself. 'Oh no, madam' I answered, 'that would be bad for you.' And as my eyes turned involuntarily toward the fatal cupboard, I perceived, with disgust mingled with horror and wrath, that the nail had remained driven in the casing, with a long rope-end still hanging. I leapt rapidly to snatch away the last traces of the misfortune, and as I was going to hurl them out through the open window, the poor woman seized my arm and said in an irresistible tone: 'Oh! sir! leave that for me! I beg you! I beseech you.' Her despair had doubtless become, it seemed to me, so frantic that she was now overcome with tenderness toward that which had served her son as the instrument of death, and she wished to preserve it as a dear and horrible relic.--And she took possession of the nail and of the twine.

"At last! At last! all was accomplished. There remained only to set myself back at work, even more strenuously than usual, to drive out gradually the little corpse that haunted the recesses of my brain, the phantom of which wore me out with its great fixed eyes. But the next day I received a bundle of letters: some from lodgers in the house, several others from neighboring houses; one from the first floor, another from the second, another from the third, and so throughout! some in semi-humorous style, as though seeking to disguise beneath an apparent jocularity the sincerity of the request; others, grossly shameless and without spelling; but all tending to the same goal, namely, to securing from me a bit of the fatal and beatific rope. Among the signers were, I must say, more women than men; but not all, I assure you, belonged to the lowest class. I have kept the letters.

"And then, suddenly, a light glowed in my brain, and I understood why the mother was so very anxious to wrest the twine from me, and by what traffic she meant to be consoled."

CALLINGS

In a beautiful garden where the rays of the autumnal sun seemed to linger with delight, under a sky already greenish, in which golden clouds floated like voyaging continents, four fine children, four boys, doubtless tired of playing, were chatting away.

One said: "Yesterday I was taken to the theatre. In great, sad palaces, where in the background spread the sea and the sky, men and women, also serious and sad, but much more beautiful and much better dressed than any we see about, were talking with musical voices. They threatened one another, they entreated, they were disconsolate, and often they rested a hand on a dagger sunk within the sash. Ah! that is beautiful indeed! The women are much more beautiful and much greater than those that come to the house to visit us, and although with their great hollow eyes and their fiery cheeks they have a terrible look, you can not help loving them. You are afraid, you want to cry, and still you are content.... And then, what is stranger still, it all makes you want to be dressed the same, to say and to do the same things, to speak with the same voice...."

One of the four children, who for several moments had no longer been listening to his comrade's talk, and had been watching with surprising fixity some point or other in the sky, said all at once: "Look, look down there! Do you see _Him_? He is sitting on that little isolated cloud, that little fiery cloud, which is moving slowly. _He_ too, they say, He watches us."

"Who? Who?" asked the others.

"God!" he answered, with the accent of perfect conviction.--"Ah! He is already quite far away; by and by you will not be able to see Him. Doubtless He is traveling to visit every land. Look, He is going to pass in back of that line of trees near the horizon..., and now He is going down behind the steeple.... Ah! you can't see Him any longer!" And the child remained for some time turned in the same direction, fixing on the line which separates earth from the sky eyes in which burned an inexpressible glow of ecstasy and regret.

"He is a fool, that one, with his good God, whom he alone can see!" then said the third, whose whole person was marked with a singular vivacity and life. "_I_ am going to tell you how something happened to me which has never happened to you, and which is a little more interesting than your theatre and your clouds.... Several days ago my parents took me on a trip with them, and as the inn where we stopped didn't have enough beds for all of us, it was decided that I should sleep in the same bed as my nursery maid." He drew his comrades quite close and spoke in a lower tone. "That was a strange performance, now! not to sleep alone, and to be in bed with your maid, in the dark. As I couldn't sleep, I amused myself, while she was sleeping, by passing my hand over her arms, her neck, and her shoulders. She has a much thicker neck and arm than all other women, and her skin is so soft, so soft, that you might call it note-paper or silver paper. I liked it so much that I should have kept on for a long time, if I hadn't been afraid, afraid at first of waking her, and then still afraid of I don't know what. Then I buried my head in the hair which lay down her back, thick as a mane, and it smelled just as good, I assure you, as the flowers in the garden, right now. Try, when you can, to do as much, and you will see!"

The young author of this prodigious revelation, in telling his story, had his eyes wide open in a sort of stupefaction at what he still felt, and the rays of the setting sun, slipping across the sandy locks of his ruffled hair, illumined it like a sulphurous aureole of passion. It was easy to guess that this youngster would not lose his life seeking Divinity in the clouds, and that he would frequently discover it elsewhere.

At last the fourth spoke: "You know that I seldom find amusement at home. I am never taken to a play; my tutor is too stingy; God doesn't bother about me and my ennui, and I haven't a pretty nurse to fondle me. It has often seemed to me that I should just like to go forever straight ahead, without knowing where, without any one's being worried, always to see new lands. I am never well off anywhere, and I always think I shall be better somewhere else. Oh well! I saw, at the last fair at the nearby village, three men who lived as I should like to. You paid no attention to them, you others. They were large, almost black, and very proud, although in rags, looking as though they had need of no one. Their great gloomy eyes became quite brilliant while they played their music; a music so astonishing that it made you want now to dance, now to cry, or to do both together, and it would almost make you go mad if you listened too long. One, drawing his bow across his violin, seemed to be whispering sorrow; another, making his hammer skip over the keys of a little piano hung by a strap about his neck, appeared to be mocking the plaint of his neighbor; while from time to time the third clashed his cymbals with extraordinary violence. They were so pleased with themselves that they went on playing their wild music even after the crowd had gone away. Finally they gathered together their sous, piled their luggage on their back, and left. I wanted to know where they lived, and I followed them from afar, right to the edge of the forest, and only then, I understood that they lived nowhere.

"Then one said: 'Must we pitch the tent?'

"'Goodness! No!' answered the other. 'It's such a pleasant night!'

"The third spoke, while figuring up the collection: 'These folks do not appreciate music, and their wives dance like bears. Fortunately, within a month we shall be in Austria, where we shall find more amiable folk.'

"'Perhaps we'd do better to go toward Spain, for the season is forward; let us flee before the rains, and moisten nothing but our gullets,' said one of the others.

"I remember everything, as you see. Then each one drank a cup of brandy and went to sleep, with his forehead toward the stars. At first I wanted to beg them to take me along with them and to teach me to play their instruments; but I didn't dare, doubtless because it is always very difficult to come to a decision about anything, and also because I was afraid of being recaptured before we were out of France."

The slightly interested air of the three other comrades made me realize that this fellow was already _misunderstood_. I looked at him closely; there was in in his eye and on his brow that indescribable fatal precocity which generally repells sympathy, and which, I know not why, aroused my own to the point that for a moment I had the queer notion that I might have a brother unknown to me.

The sun had set. The solemn night was come. The children separated, each going in ignorance, according to circumstance and chance, to reap his destiny, scandalize his relatives, and gravitate toward glory or toward dishonor.

A THOROUGHBRED

She is quite ill-favored. None the less she is delightful! Time and Love have scarred her with their claws, and have cruelly taught her that every moment and every kiss bears away youth and freshness.

She is indeed ugly; she is an ant, a spider, if you insist, a very carcass; but she is, as well, a potion, a magistral, an enchantment! in short, she is exquisite!

Time could not break the sparkling harmony of her walk, nor the indestructible elegance of her stays. Love has not changed the sweetness of her childlike breath; Time has plucked nothing of her abundant mane, from which is breathed in tawny perfumes all the devilish vitality of Southern France: Nîmes, Aix, Arles, Avignon, Narbonne, Toulouse, towns blessed by the sun, amorous and charming!

Time and Love have vainly nibbled with sharp teeth; they have in no way lessened the vague but eternal charm of her hoyden breast.

Worn perhaps, but not wearied, and always heroic, she brings thoughts of those full-blooded horses which the eye of the true amateur will recognize, even hitched to a hackney or to a heavy truck.

And then she is so sweet and so fervent! She loves as one loves in the autumn; you would say that the approach of winter lights a new fire in her heart, and the servility of her tenderness is never wearying.

THE MIRROR

A frightful man enters, and looks at himself in a glass.

"Why do you look at yourself in the mirror, since you can view yourself only with displeasure?"

The frightful man answers me: "Sir, in accordance with the immortal principles of '89, all men have equal rights; therefore I have the right to behold myself; with pleasure or displeasure, that concerns only my conscience."

In the name of common sense, I was surely right; but, from a legal standpoint, he was not wrong.

THE HARBOR

A harbor is a charming abode for a soul weary of the struggles of life. The amplitude of the sky, the mobile architecture of the clouds, the changing colorations of the sea, the scintillating of the beacon-lights, form a prism marvellously adapted to entertain the eyes without tiring them. The slender forms of the ships, with their complicated rigging, to which the billows give harmonious oscillations, serve to maintain the taste for rhythm and for beauty. And, above all, there is a sort of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure for him who no longer has curiosity or ambition, in contemplating, couched in the turret or leaning on the pier, all the movements of those who depart and those who return, of those who still have the strength to will, the desire to travel or to acquire wealth.

MISTRESSES' PORTRAITS

In a men's boudoir, that is, in a smoking room adjoining a fashionable brothel, four men were smoking and drinking. They were not exactly either young or old, either handsome or ugly; but, old or young, they bore that unmistakable distinction of veterans of joy, that indescribable something-or-other, that cold and scoffing sadness that so clearly says: "We have lived forcefully, and we seek what we can love and prize."

One of them drew the talk to the subject of women. It would have been more philosophical not to have spoken of them at all; but there are men of parts who, after drinking, do not disdain commonplace conversations. One listens, then, to the one that speaks as to the music of a dance.

"All men," said this one, "have passed through the age of the Cherub: that is the period when, in default of dryads, one embraces, without disgust, the trunks of oaks. It is the first degree of love. At the second degree, one begins to choose. To be able to deliberate is already decadence. Then it is that one makes a decided search for beauty. As for me, gentlemen, I take pride in having long ago reached the climactic period of the third degree, when beauty itself no longer suffices, unless it be seasoned with perfume, with finery, et cetera. I will even confess that I sometimes aspire, as to an unknown happiness, to a certain fourth degree which is marked by absolute calm. But, all through my life, except at the Cherub age, I have been more sensible than all others of the enervating folly, of the irritating mediocrity, of women. What I like above all in animals is their candor. Judge then how much I suffered at the hands of my last mistress.

"She was a prince's bastard. Beautiful, that goes without saying; otherwise, why should I have taken her? But she spoiled that great quality by an unseemly, deformed ambition. She was a woman who wanted always to play the man. 'You're not a man!' 'Of the two, it is I who am the man! 'Such were the unbearable refrains that came from her mouth when I wished to see nothing but songs take wing.

"In regard to a book, a poem, an opera, for which I let my admiration escape: 'So you think this is rather powerful?' she would say at once; 'since when are you a judge of power?' and she would argue on.

"One fine day she took to chemistry; so that between her mouth and mine I found thenceforth-a mask of glass. With all that, quite squeamish. If now and then I jostled her with too amorous a gesture, she raved like a ravished virgin."

"How did it end?" asked one of the three others. "I never knew you so patient."

"God," he replied, "found the remedy in the ill. One day I found this Minerva, craving for ideal force, alone with my servant, and in a situation which forced me to retire discreetly, so as not to make them blush. That evening, I dismissed them both, giving them the arrears of their wages."

"As for me," continued the interrupter, "I have only myself to complain of. Happiness came to dwell with me, and I did not know her. Fate once granted me the enjoyment of a woman who was indeed the sweetest, the most submissive, the most devoted of creatures, and always ready, and without enthusiasm. 'I am quite willing, since it's agreeable to you.' That was her usual response. You might give a bastinado to this wall or this couch and draw from it as many sighs as the most infuriate transports of love would draw from the breast of my mistress. After a year of life together, she confessed to me that she had never known pleasure. I lost taste in the unequal duel, and that incomparable girl got married. Later I had a fancy to see her, and she said, showing me six fine children: 'Well, my dear friend, the wife is still as much a _virgin_ as was your mistress.' Nothing had changed. Sometimes I regret her; I should have married her."

The others burst into laughter, and a third spoke in turn:

"Gentlemen, I have known joys which you have perhaps neglected. I mean the comical in love, and a comical which does not bar admiration. I admired my last mistress, I think, more than you could have loved or hated yours. And every one admired her as much as I. When we entered a restaurant, after a few minutes every one forgot to eat in watching her. The barmaid and the waiters themselves felt the contagious ecstasy so far as to neglect their duties. In short, I lived for some time face to face with a living _phenomenon_. She ate, chewed, ground, devoured, swallowed up, but with the lightest and most careless air imaginable. In this way she kept me for a long time in ecstasy. She had a soft, dreamy, English and romantic way of saying: 'I am hungry.' And she repeated these words day and night, revealing the prettiest teeth in the world, which would soften and enliven you together.--I could have made my fortune exhibiting her at fairs, as a _polyphagous monster_. I nourished her well, but none the less she left me...."

"For a purveyor of provisions, undoubtedly?"

"Something of the sort, a kind of employee in the commissariat who, by some by-profit unknown to her, perhaps furnished the poor child with the rations of several soldiers. At least, so I imagine."

"As for me," said the fourth, "I have endured grievous, sufferings through the opposite of that with which we usually reproach the female egoist. You are quite unjustified, too happy mortals, in complaining of the imperfections of your mistresses!"

This was said in a very serious tone, by a man of pleasant and sedate appearance, of an almost clerical countenance, unhappily lighted by clear grey eyes, those eyes whose glances spoke: "I wish it!" or "It is necessary!" or indeed "I never forgive!"

"If, nervous as I know you to be, you, G----, slothful and trifling as you are, you two, K---- and J----, if you had been matched with a certain woman I know, either you would have fled, or you would have died. I survived, as you see. Imagine a person incapable of making an error, from feeling or from design; imagine a provoking serenity of mind, a devotion without sham and without parade, a softness without weakness, an energy without violence. The story of my love is like an endless voyage on a surface as pure and polished as a mirror, dizzily monotonous, reflecting all my feelings and my movements with the ironic exactness of my own conscience, so that I could not allow myself an unreasonable move or emotion without immediately beholding the dumb reproach of my inseparable spectre. Love seemed to me like a protectorate. How much nonsense she stopped me from committing, which I regret not having done! How many debts I paid despite myself! She deprived me of all the benefits I could have reaped from my personal folly. With a cold and impassable rule, she barred all my caprices. To crown the horror, she demanded no gratitude when the danger was passed. How many times have I not held myself from leaping at her throat, crying: 'Be imperfect, wretch! so that I can love you without uneasiness and wrath!' For several years I wondered at her, my heart full of hate. Finally, it was not I that died of it!"

"Ah!" said the others, "then she is dead?"

"Yes. Things could not go on like that. Love had become an overwhelming nightmare to me. Victory or death, as the Politics says, such was the alternative which destiny imposed. One evening, in a wood..., at the edge of a pond..., after a melancholy walk in which her eyes reflected the gentleness of heaven, and my heart was thrilling with hell...."

"What!"

"What's that?"

"What do you mean?"

"It was inevitable. I had too great a sense of justice to beat, to insult, or to dismiss an irreproachable servant. But I had to reconcile that feeling to the horror which that being inspired in me; rid myself of that being without losing her respect. What would you want me to do with her, _since she was perfect?_"

The three others looked at him with an uncertain and somewhat stupefied gaze, as though feigning not to understand and as though tacitly avowing that they did not feel themselves capable of so rigorous an act, however sufficiently accounted for in another.

Then they ordered fresh bottles, to kill time whose life is so sturdy, and to speed life, whose movement is so slow.

SOUP AND THE CLOUDS

My well-beloved little madcap was dining with me, and through the open window of the dining-room I was contemplating the moving architecture which God formed from the vapors, the marvellous constructions of the impalpable. And I was saying to myself, in my reflection: "All these phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as the eyes of my beautiful well-beloved, the little prodigious madcap with green eyes."

And all at once I received a violent punch in the back, and I heard a hoarse and charming voice, a voice hysterical and husky as with brandy, which said to me: "Are you going to eat your soup, s..., b... of a dealer in clouds?"

THE LOSS OF A HALO

"Eh! What! You here, my dear? You, in a place of ill! You, the drinker of quintessences! you, the eater of ambrosia! Indeed, this is something surprising!" "My dear, you know my dread of horses and carriages. Just now, as I was crossing the boulevard, in great haste, and as I was hopping about in the mud, in the midst of that moving chaos where death arrives at a gallop from all sides at once, my halo, in a sudden start, slipped from my head into the mire of the macadam. I did not have the courage to pick it up. I thought it less disagreeable to lose my insignia than to have my bones broken. And then, I reflected, it's an ill wind that blows, no good. I can now go about incognito, perform base actions, and give myself over to debauchery, like ordinary mortals. And here I am, quite like you, as you see!"

"You ought at least have the halo advertised, or asked for at the police."

"Heavens, no! I am quite well off here. You alone have recognized me. Besides, dignity was boring. Then, too, I think with joy that some poor poet will pick it up, and will impudently deck himself out. To make some one happy, what joy! and especially a happy one that makes me laugh! Think of X----, or of Z----! Oh! that would be comical!"

[edit]

MLLE. BISTOURY

When I had reached the heart of the slums, under the gaslights, I felt an arm which slid softly under mine, and I heard a voice which whispered: "You are a doctor, sir?"

I looked: it was a big girl, robust, slightly rouged, her eyes wide open, her hair floating in the wind with her bonnet strings.

"No, I am not a doctor. Let me pass."

"Oh yes! you are a doctor. I can see it well. Come to my house. You will be quite satisfied, I assure you. I shall doubtless go to see you, but later, _after the doctor, goodness me!_... Ha! Ha!" she exclaimed, still clinging to my arm and bursting into laughter. "You are a physician jokester. I have known several of that sort. Come."

I am passionately in love with mystery, because I always hope to unravel it. So I let myself be led by my companion, or rather, by the unlooked-for enigma.

I omit description of the hovel; it can be found in several well known old French poets. Only, detail unnoticed by Regnier, two or three portraits of renowned physicians were hung upon the wall.

How I was pampered! A great fire, warm wine, cigars; and while offering me these fine things and lighting a cigar for herself the comical creature said to me: "Make yourself at home; be quite at ease. This will bring back the hospital and the happy days of your youth.... Oh look! where did you win those white hairs? You were not like that, not so long ago, when you were interne at L----. I remember it was you that helped at the major operations. _There_ was a man that loved to cut, hew, lop off! It was you that handed him the instruments, the threads and the sponges.... And how proudly, the operation performed, he used to say, looking at his watch, 'Five minutes, gentlemen!' Oh! I, I go everywhere! I know these people well!"

A few moments later, in more familiar tone, harping on the same theme, she said: "You are a doctor, aren't you, darling?"

That unintelligible refrain brought me to my feet "No!" I cried, furious.

"Surgeon, then?"

"No! No! unless it be to cut off your head!"

"Wait," she continued, "you shall see."

And she drew from a closet a file of papers which was nothing else than the collection of illustrious doctors of the day, lithographed by Maurin, that was displayed for several years on the Quay Voltaire.

"Look, do you recognize this one?"

"Yes, it's X----. The name is at the bottom, besides; but I know him personally."

"I should say so! Look! Here is Z----, the one who said in his course, speaking of X----, 'this monster, bearing on his face the blackness of his soul!' all because the other did not agree with him in a certain case! How they laughed at that in the school, at the time! Do you remember?... Look! here is K----, who denounced to the authorities the rebels he was caring for at his hospital. That was at the time of the riots. How is it possible so handsome a man can have so little heart? ... This one is W----, a famous Englishman; I captured him on his visit to Paris. He looks like a girl, doesn't he?"

And as I touched a little tied-up parcel, also on the table: "Wait a while," she said, "In this one are the internes; and that package has the dressers."

And she spread out, fanlike, a mass of photographs, picturing much younger faces.

"When we see each other again, you will give me your portrait, won't you, deary?"

"But," I said to her, I also following my fixed idea, "what makes you think I am a doctor?"

"It's because you are so amiable and good to women!" "Peculiar logic," I said to myself.

"Oh! I am hardly ever mistaken; I have known quite a number. I love them so much that, even though I am not sick, I sometimes go to see them, only to see them. There are some who say coldly: 'You are not sick at all!' But there are others who understand me, because I ogle them."

"And when they do not understand?"

"Well, since I have disturbed them _fruitlessly_, I leave ten francs on the mantel.... They are so good and so kind, these folk! I discovered a little interne at the Pieté, pretty as an angel, and so refined! and a worker, the poor boy! His comrades told me he didn't have a sou, because his parents were poor folks who couldn't send him anything. That gave me confidence. After all, I am a fairly good looking woman, although not too young. I said to him: 'Come to see me, come to see me often. With me you needn't bother: I have no need of money.' But you know that I made him understand that in a host of ways, I didn't tell it to him bluntly; I was so afraid of humiliating him, the dear child!... Oh well! would you believe that I had a queer fancy I didn't dare to tell him?... I should have liked him to come to see me with his instrument case and his apron, even with a little blood on it."

She said this in the most candid manner, as a feeling man would say to an actress that he loved: "I want to see you dressed in the costume you wore in this famous _rôle_ that you created...."

I, persisting, continued: "Can you remember the time and the occasion when this so special passion was born in you?"

I made her understand with difficulty; finally I succeeded. But then she answered in a very sad tone, and even, as well as I can recall, lowering her eyes: "I don't know..., I can't remember."

What oddities can be found in a great city, if one knows how to walk about and watch. Life swarms with innocent monsters.--

Lord, my God! You, the Creator, You the Master, You who have created Law and Liberty; You, the Sovereign that doth not interfere; You, the Judge that pardoneth; You who are full of motives and causes, and who perhaps have planted a taste for horror in my mind in order to convert my soul, as the recovery after a sword; Lord, have pity, have pity on madmen and mad women! O Creator, can monsters exist in the eyes of Him who alone knows why they exist, how they are made, and how they need not have been made?

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LET US FLAY THE POOR [and the rest of the poems]

For a fortnight I was confined to my room, and I surrounded myself with the books of the day (sixteen or seventeen years ago); I mean those volumes which treat of the art of making people happy, wise and rich, in twenty-four hours. I had thus digested--swallowed, I should say--all the lucubrations of all those master-builders of the public weal, of those who advise all the poor to enslave themselves, and of those who persuade them they are all dethroned kings. There is, then, naught surprising in the fact that I was in a state of mind bordering on intoxication or stupidity.

It seemed to me merely that I felt, imprisoned in the depths of my intelligence, the obscure germ of an idea superior to all the old wives' formulæ the cyclopedia of which I had just run through. But it was only the thought of a thought, a something infinitely vague.

And I went forth with a great thirst, for the impassioned taste of poor reading engenders a proportionate need of open air and of refreshment.

As I was about to enter a tavern, a beggar held out his hat to me, with one of those unforgettable glances that would tumble down thrones, if the mental moved the material, and if a mesmerist's glance could ripen grapes.

At the same time, I heard a voice which whispered at my ear, a voice that I knew well: it was that of a good angel, or a good Demon, who is with me everywhere. Since Socrates had his good Demon, why may not I have my good Angel, and why may not I have the honor, like Socrates, of securing my brevet in folly, signed by the subtle Lélut and the well-advised Baillar get?[1]

There is this difference between the Demon of Socrates and my own, that his manifested itself only to warn, to forbid, to prevent, and that mine deigns to counsel, suggest, persuade. Poor Socrates had only a Demon prohibitor; mine is a great affirmator, mine is a Demon of action, or a Demon of combat.

Now, his voice whispered to me thus: "He alone is the equal of another, that proves it; and he alone is worthy of liberty, that can secure it."

Immediately I leapt upon the beggar. With one punch, I stopped an eye, which became in a moment large as a ball. I broke one of my nails shattering two of his teeth, and as I did not feel strong enough, having been born delicate and having had but little practice in boxing, to beat the old fellow to death right away, I grasped him by one hand by the collar of his coat, and with the other I throttled him, and I set to work dashing his head against a wall. I must avow that I had first inspected the surroundings in a glance, and had made sure that in that deserted suburb I should be long enough out of the reach of a policeman.

Having then, with a kick in the back, hard enough to break his shoulderblade, felled the enfeebled sexagenarian, I seized a great branch of a tree which lay along the ground, and I beat him with the determined energy of cooks trying to make a beefsteak tender.

All at once,--O miracle! O joy of the philosopher who proves the excellence of his theory!--I saw that antique carcass turn about, straighten up with an energy I should never have suspected in so strangely disordered a machine--and, with a glance of hate that seemed to me _good omen_, the decrepit ruffian hurled himself upon me, blackened both my eyes, broke four teeth, and with the same branch beat me stiff as a jelly. By my energetic medication, I had restored to him pride and life.

Then I made any number of signs to him to make him understand that I considered the matter closed, and, rising with the satisfaction of a philosopher of the Porch, I said to him: "Sir, _you are my equal!_ Kindly do me the honor of sharing my purse; and remember, if you are truly philanthropic, that you must apply to all your colleagues, when they ask for alms, the theory that I have had the _sorrow_ of trying on your back."

He swore to me that he understood my theory, and that he would obey my counsels.

[Footnote 1: Famous Parisian alienists of the time.]

GOOD DOGS

TO MR. JOSEPH STEVENS

I have never, even before the young writers of my century, been ashamed of my admiration for Buffon; but to-day it is not the spirit of that painter of lofty nature that I would call to my assistance. No.

Much more willingly I call to Sterne, and I say to him: "Descend from heaven, or climb to me from the Elysian Fields, to inspire me in behalf of good dogs, of poor dogs, with a song worthy of thee, sentimental farceur, farceur incomparable. Come back astraddle that famous ass which will always accompany you in the memory of the future; and especially do not let that ass forget to carry, delicately hung between his lips, his immortal macaroons."

Away with the academic muse! I have no business with that old prude. I invoke the familiar muse, the citizen, the boon companion, to aid me to sing the good dogs, the poor dogs, the dirty dogs, those whom every one drives away, pestiferous and lousy, except the poor, whose associates they are, and the poet, who sees them with fraternal eye.

Fie upon the foppish dog, upon the coxcomb quadruped, Dane, King Charles, pugdog or lapdog, so enamoured of himself that he darts inconsiderately between the legs or on the knees of the visitor, as if he were certain of pleasing, wild as a youngster, foolish as a flirt, often surly and insolent as a servant! Fie especially upon those four-pawed serpents, idle and shivering, that are called greyhounds, and that do not harbor in their pointed muzzle enough scent to follow the track of a friend, nor in their flattened head enough intelligence to play at dominoes!

To the kennel with all these plaguy parasites!

Let them slink to the kennel stuffed and sulky! I sing the dirty dog, the poor dog, the homeless dog, the stroller dog; the dog buffoon, the dog whose instinct, like that of the poor, the gypsy and the mountebank, is marvellously sharpened by necessity, that excellent mother, that true patron of intelligence!

I sing the distressful dogs, be they those that wander, alone, in the winding gullies of the great cities or those who have said to the forsaken man, with blinking spiritual eyes: "Take me with you, and of two miseries we shall make a sort of joy!"

"Whither go the dogs?" Nestor Roquepelan once said in an immortal leaflet which he has doubtless forgotten, and which I alone, and perhaps Saint-Beuve, recall today.

Where do the dogs go, you ask, heedless men? They go about their business.

Business engagements, affairs of love. Through the fog, through the snow, through the mire, under the biting dogstar, under the streaming rain, they come, they go, they hurry, they move along under carriages, excited by fleas, by passion, by duty or by need. Like us, they have risen bright and early, and they seek their livelihood or run to their pleasure.

There are some who sleep in a ruin in the suburbs and who come every day at a stated hour, to beg alms at the door of a Palais-Royal cook; others who run in troops, for more than five leagues, to partake of the repast which has been prepared for them through the charity of certain sexagenarian maids, whose unoccupied hearts are given over to beasts, since imbecile man wants them no more; others who, like runaway negroes, frantic with love, leave their province on certain days, to come to the city and romp for an hour with a handsome bitch, a little careless in her toilet, but proud and thankful.

And they are all very precise, without notebooks, without memoranda, without portfolios.

Do you know slothful Belgium, and have you, like me, admired all those vigorous dogs hitched to the cart of the butcher, of the milkmaid, of the baker, who give evidence in their triumphant barks, of the proud pleasure they feel in rivalling the horse?

And here are two that belong to a still more civilized order! Permit me to introduce you into the room of an absent mountebank. A bed, of painted wood, without curtains, with dragging covers stained with bugs; two cane chairs, a cast-iron stove, one or two disordered musical instruments. Oh, what sad furniture! But look, I pray you, at these two intelligent personages, clad in garments at once sumptuous and frayed, hooded like troubadours' or soldiers, who are guarding, with the close watch of a sorcerer, _the nameless something_ which simmers on the lighted stove, and from the center of which a long spoon stands forth, planted as one of those aerial masts which announce that the masonry is complete.

Is it not just that such zealous comedians should not set out without having well lined their stomachs with a strong, sound soup? And will you not forgive a little sensuality in these poor devils who all day have to face the indifference of the public and the injustice of a director who deems himself the whole show and who alone eats more soup than four actors?

How often have I contemplated, touched and smiling, all these four-footed philosophers, compliant, submissive or devoted slaves, whom the republican dictionary might well call "fellows,"[1] if the republic, too busied with the _happiness_ of men, had time to respect the _honor_ of dogs!

And how many times have I thought that perhaps there is somewhere (who knows, after all?), to reward so much courage, so much of patience and of labor, a special paradise for good dogs, for poor dogs, for dirty and afflicted dogs. Swedenborg affirms that there is one for the Turks and one for the Dutchmen!

The shepherds of Virgil and of Theocritus expected, as prize for their alternate songs, a good cheese, a flute from the best maker, or a she-goat with swelling udders. The poet who has sung the good dogs has received for reward a fine vest, of a color both faded and rich, which brings thoughts of the autumn suns, of the beauty of matured women and of the summers of Saint-Martin.

None of those who were present in the tavern of Rue Villa-Hermosa will forget with what petulance the painter was despoiled of his vest for the poet, so well had he understood that it is good and seemly to sing of poor dogs.

Thus a magnificent Italian tyrant, in the good old days, offered the divine Aretine a dagger rich with jewels, or a courtly gown, in exchange for a precious sonnet or a rare satiric poem.

And whenever the poet dons the painter's vest, he is forced to think of the good dogs, of the dog philosophers, of the summers of Saint-Martin and of the beauty of full-blown women.

[Footnote 1: "Officieux" was the term adopted by the Republic, to replace "domestique" and "valet," and to indicate the equality of all--even master and man.]

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LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE Translated by F. P. Sturm

EVERY MAN HIS CHIMÆRA

Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty plain devoid of grass, and where not even a nettle or a thistle was to be seen, I met several men who walked bowed down to the ground.

Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chimæra as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or as the equipment of a Roman foot-soldier.

But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, rather she enveloped and oppressed the men with her powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed with her two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her fabulous head reposed upon the brow of the man like one of those horrible casques by which ancient warriors hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy.

I questioned one of the men, asking him why they went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he nor the others, but that evidently they went somewhere, since they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to walk.

Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be irritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck and cleaving to his back: one had said that he considered it as a part of himself. These grave and weary faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of the heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an earth as desolate as the sky, they journeyed onwards with the resigned faces of men condemned to hope for ever. So the train passed me and faded into the atmosphere of the horizon at the place where the planet unveils herself to the curiosity of the human eye.

During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to comprehend this mystery; but irresistible Indifference soon threw herself upon me, nor was I more heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing Chimæras.

VENUS AND THE FOOL

How admirable the day! The vast park swoons beneath the burning eye of the sun, as youth beneath the lordship of love.

There is no rumour of the universal ecstasy of all things. The waters themselves are as though drifting into sleep. Very different from the festivals of humanity, here is a silent revel.

It seems as though an ever-waning light makes all objects glimmer more and more, as though the excited flowers bum with a desire to rival the blue of the sky by the vividness of their colours; as though the heat, making perfumes visible, drives them in vapour towards their star.

Yet, in the midst of this universal joy, I have perceived one afflicted thing.

At the feet of a colossal Venus, one of those motley fools, those willing clowns whose business it is to bring laughter upon kings when weariness or remorse possesses them, lies wrapped in his gaudy and ridiculous garments, coiffed with his cap and bells, huddled against the pedestal, and raises towards the goddess his eyes filled with tears.

And his eyes say: "I am the last and most alone of all mortals, inferior to the meanest of animals in that I am denied either love or friendship. Yet I am made, even I, for the understanding and enjoyment of immortal Beauty. O Goddess, have pity upon my sadness and my frenzy."

The implacable Venus gazed into I know not what distances with her marble eyes.

ALREADY!

A hundred times already the sun had leaped, radiant or saddened, from the immense cup of the sea whose rim could scarcely be seen; a hundred times it had again sunk, glittering or morose, into its mighty bath of twilight. For many days we had contemplated the other side of the firmament, and deciphered the celestial alphabet of the antipodes. And each of the passengers sighed and complained. One had said that the approach of land only exasperated their sufferings. "When, then," they said, "shall we cease to sleep a sleep broken by the surge, troubled by a wind that snores louder than we? When shall we be able to eat at an unmoving table?"

There were those who thought of their own firesides, who regretted their sullen, faithless wives, and their noisy progeny. All so doted upon the image of the absent land, that I believe they would have eaten grass with as much enthusiasm as the beasts.

At length a coast was signalled, and on approaching we saw a magnificent and dazzling land. It seemed as though the music of life flowed therefrom in a vague murmur; and the banks, rich with all kinds of growths, breathed, for leagues around, a delicious odour of flowers and fruits.

Each one therefore was joyful; his evil humour left him. Quarrels were forgotten, reciprocal wrongs forgiven, the thought of duels was blotted out of the memory, and rancour fled away like smoke.

I alone was sad, inconceivably sad. Like a priest from whom one has torn his divinity, I could not, without heartbreaking bitterness, leave this so monstrously seductive ocean, this sea so infinitely various in its terrifying simplicity, which seemed to contain in itself and represent by its joys, and attractions, and angers, and smiles, the moods and agonies and ecstasies of all souls that have lived, that live, and that shall yet live.

In saying good-bye to this incomparable beauty I felt as though I had been smitten to death; and that is why when each of my companions said: "At last!" I could only cry "_Already!_"

Here meanwhile was the land, the land with its noises, its passions, its commodities, its festivals: a land rich and magnificent, full of promises, that sent to us a mysterious perfume of rose and musk, and from whence the music of life flowed in an amorous murmuring.

THE DOUBLE CHAMBER

A chamber that is like a reverie; a chamber truly _spiritual_, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly touched with rose and blue.

There the soul bathes itself in indolence made odorous with regret and desire. There is some sense of the twilight, of things tinged with blue and rose: a dream of delight during an eclipse. The shape of the furniture is elongated, low, languishing; one would think it endowed with the somnambulistic vitality of plants and minerals.

The tapestries speak an inarticulate language, like the flowers, the skies, the dropping suns.

There are no artistic abominations upon the walls. Compared with the pure dream, with an impression unanalyzed, definite art, positive art, is a blasphemy. Here all has the sufficing lucidity and the delicious obscurity of music.

An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice, mingled with a floating humidity, swims in this atmosphere where the drowsing spirit is lulled by the sensations one feels in a hothouse.

The abundant muslin flows before the windows and the couch, and spreads out in snowy cascades. Upon the couch lies the Idol, ruler of my dreams. But why is she here?--who has brought her?--what magical power has installed her upon this throne of delight and reverie? What matter--she is there; and I recognize her.

These indeed are the eyes whose flame pierces the twilight; the subtle and terrible mirrors that I recognize by their horrifying malice. They attract, they dominate, they devour the sight of whomsoever is imprudent enough to look at them. I have often studied them; these Black Stars that compel curiosity and admiration.

To what benevolent demon, then, do I owe being thus surrounded with mystery, with silence, with peace, and sweet odours? O beatitude! the thing we name life, even in its most fortunate amplitude, has nothing in common with this supreme life with which I am now acquainted, which I taste minute by minute, second by second.

Not so! Minutes are no more; seconds are no more. Time has vanished, and Eternity reigns--an Eternity of delight.

A heavy and terrible knocking reverberates upon the door, and, as in a hellish dream, it seems to me as though I had received a blow from a mattock.

Then a Spectre enters: it is an usher who comes to torture me in the name of the Law; an infamous concubine who comes to cry misery and to add the trivialities of her life to the sorrow of mine; or it may be the errand-boy of an editor who comes to implore the remainder of a manuscript.

The Chamber of paradise, the Idol, the ruler of dreams, the Sylphide, as the great René said; all this magic has vanished at the brutal knocking of the Spectre.

Horror; I remember, I remember! Yes, this kennel, this habitation of eternal weariness, is indeed my own. There is my senseless furniture, dusty and tattered; the dirty fireplace without a flame or an ember; the sad windows where the raindrops have traced runnels in the dust; the manuscripts, erased or unfinished; the almanac with the sinister days marked off with a pencil!

And this perfume of another world, whereof I intoxicated myself with a so perfected sensitiveness; alas, Its place is taken by an odour of stale tobacco smoke, mingled with I know not what nauseating mustiness. Now one breathes here the rankness of desolation.

In this narrow world, narrow and yet full of disgust, a single familiar object smiles at me: the phial of laudanum: old and terrible love; like all loves, alas! fruitful in caresses and treacheries.

Yes, Time has reappeared; Time reigns a monarch now; and with the hideous Ancient has returned all his demoniacal following of Memories, Regrets, Tremors, Fears, Dolours, Nightmares, and twittering nerves.

I assure you that the seconds are strongly and solemnly accentuated now; and each, as it drips from the pendulum, says: "I am Life: intolerable, implacable Life!"

There is not a second in mortal life whose mission it is to bear good news: the good news that brings the inexplicable tear to the eye.

Yes, Time reigns; Time has regained his brutal mastery. And he goads me, as though I were a steer, with his double goad: "Whoa, thou fool! Sweat, then, thou slave! Live on, thou damnèd!"

AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING

Alone at last! Nothing is to be heard but the rattle of a few tardy and tired-out cabs. There will be silence now, if not repose, for several hours at least. At last the tyranny of the human face has disappeared--I shall not suffer except alone. At last it is permitted me to refresh myself in a bath of shadows. But first a double turn of the key in the lock. It seems to me that this turn of the key will deepen my solitude and strengthen the barriers which actually separate me from the world.

A horrible life and a horrible city! Let us run over the events of the day. I have seen several literary men; one of them wished to know if he could get to Russia by land (he seemed to have an idea that Russia was an island); I have disputed generously enough with the editor of a review, who to each objection replied: "We take the part of respectable people," which implies that every other paper but his own is edited by a knave; I have saluted some twenty people, fifteen of them unknown to me; and shaken hands with a like number, without having taken the precaution of first buying gloves; I have been driven to kill time, during a shower, with a mountebank, who wanted me to design for her a costume as Venusta; I have made my bow to a theatre manager, who said: "You will do well, perhaps, to interview Z; he is the heaviest, foolishest, and most celebrated of all my authors; with him perhaps you will be able to come to something. See him, and then we'll see." I have boasted (why?) of several villainous deeds I never committed, and indignantly denied certain shameful things I accomplished with joy, certain misdeeds of fanfaronade, crimes of human respect; I have refused an easy favour to a friend and given a written recommendation to a perfect fool. Heavens! it's well ended.

Discontented with myself and with everything and everybody else, I should be glad enough to redeem myself and regain my self-respect in the silence and solitude.

Souls of those whom I have loved, whom I have sung, fortify me; sustain me; drive away the lies and the corrupting vapours of this world; and Thou, Lord my God, accord me so much grace as shall produce some beautiful verse to prove to myself that I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those I despise.

THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST

How penetrating is the end of an autumn day! Ah, yes, penetrating enough to be painful even; for there are certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does not prevent them from being intense; and none more keen than the perception of the Infinite. He has a great delight who drowns his gaze in the immensity of sky and sea. Solitude, silence, the incomparable chastity of the azure--a little sail trembling upon the horizon, by its very littleness and isolation imitating my irremediable existence--the melodious monotone of the surge--all these things thinking through me and I through them (for in the grandeur of the reverie the Ego is swiftly lost); they think, I say, but musically and picturesquely, without quibbles, without syllogisms, without deductions.

These thoughts, as they arise in me or spring forth from external objects, soon become always too intense. The energy working within pleasure creates an uneasiness, a positive suffering: My nerves are too tense to give other than clamouring and dolorous vibrations.

And now the profundity of the sky dismays me; its limpidity exasperates me. The insensibility of the sea, the immutability of the spectacle, revolt me. Ah, must one eternally suffer, for ever be a fugitive from Beauty?

Nature, pitiless enchantress, ever-victorious rival, leave me! Tempt my desires and my pride no more. The contemplation of Beauty is a duel where the artist screams with terror before being vanquished.

THE THYRSUS

TO FRANZ LISZT

What is a thyrsus? According to the moral and poetical sense, it is a sacerdotal emblem in the hand of the priests or priestesses celebrating the divinity of whom they are the interpreters and servants. But physically it is no more than a baton, a pure staff, a hop-pole, a vineprop; dry, straight, and hard. Around this baton, in capricious meanderings, stems and flowers twine and wanton; these, sinuous and fugitive; those, hanging like bells or inverted cups. And an astonishing complexity disengages itself from this complexity of tender or brilliant lines and colours. Would not one suppose that the curved line and the spiral pay their court to the straight line, and twine about in a mute adoration? Would not one say that all these delicate corollæ, all these calices, explosions of odours and colours, execute a mystical dance around the hieratic staff? And what imprudent mortal will dare to decide whether the flowers and the vine branches have been made for the baton, or whether the baton is not but a pretext to set forth the beauty of the vine branches and the flowers?

The thyrsus is the symbol of your astonishing duality, O powerful and venerated master, dear bacchanal of a mysterious and impassioned Beauty. Never a nymph excited by the mysterious Dionysius shook her thyrsus over the heads of her companions with as much energy as your genius trembles in the hearts of your brothers. The baton is your will: erect, firm, unshakeable; the flowers are the wanderings of your fancy around it: the feminine element encircling the masculine with her illusive dance. Straight line and arabesque--intention and expression--the rigidity of the will and the suppleness of the word--a variety of means united for a single purpose--the all-powerful and indivisible amalgam that is genius--what analyst will have the detestable courage to divide or to separate you?

Dear Liszt, across the fogs, beyond the flowers, in towns where the pianos chant your glory, where the printing-house translates your wisdom; in whatever place you be, in the splendour of the Eternal City or among the fogs of the dreamy towns that Cambrinus consoles; improvising rituals of delight or ineffable pain, or giving to paper your abstruse meditations; singer of eternal pleasure and pain, philosopher, poet, and artist, I offer you the salutation of immortality!

THE MARKSMAN

As the carriage traversed the wood he bade the driver draw up in the neighbourhood of a shooting gallery, saying that he would like to have a few shots to kill time. Is not the slaying of the monster Time the most ordinary and legitimate occupation of man?--So he gallantly offered his hand to his dear, adorable, and execrable wife; the mysterious woman to whom he owed so many pleasures, so many pains, and perhaps also a great part of his genius.

Several bullets went wide of the proposed mark, one of them flew far into the heavens, and as the charming creature laughed deliriously, mocking the clumsiness of her husband, he turned to her brusquely and said: "Observe that doll yonder, to the right, with its nose in the air, and with so haughty an appearance. Very well, dear angel, _I will imagine to myself that it is you!_"

He closed both eyes and pulled the trigger. The doll was neatly decapitated.

Then, bending towards his dear, adorable, and execrable wife, his inevitable and pitiless muse, he kissed her respectfully upon the hand, and added, "Ah, dear angel, how I thank you for my skill!"

THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE CEMETERY

"CEMETERY VIEW INN"--"A queer sign,", said our traveller to himself; "but it raises a thirst! Certainly the keeper of this inn appreciates Horace and the poet pupils of Epicurus. Perhaps he even apprehends the profound philosophy of those old Egyptians who had no feast without its skeleton, or some emblem of life's brevity."

He entered: drank a glass of beer in presence of the tombs; and slowly smoked a cigar. Then, his phantasy driving him, he went down into the cemetery, where the grass was so tall and inviting; so brilliant in the sunshine.

The light and heat, indeed, were so furiously intense that one had said the drunken sun wallowed upon a carpet of flowers that had fattened upon the corruption beneath.

The air was heavy with vivid rumours of life--the life of things infinitely small--and broken at intervals by the crackling of shots from a neighbouring shooting-range, that exploded with a sound as of champagne corks to the burden of a hollow symphony.

And then, beneath a sun which scorched the brain, and in that atmosphere charged with the ardent perfume of death, he heard a voice whispering out of the tomb where he sat. And this voice said: "Accursed be your rifles and targets, you turbulent living ones, who care so little for the dead in their divine repose! Accursed be your ambitions and calculations, importunate mortals who study the arts of slaughter near the sanctuary of Death himself! Did you but know how easy the prize to win, how facile the end to reach, and how all save Death is naught, not so greatly would you fatigue yourselves, O ye laborious alive; nor would you so often vex the slumber of them that long ago reached the End--the only true end of life detestable!"

THE DESIRE TO PAINT

Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is tom with this desire.

I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her.

She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness.

I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star overthrowing light and happiness. But it is the moon that she makes one dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly constrain to dance upon the terrified grass.

Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the smile of a large mouth; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic land.

There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.

THE GLASS-VENDOR

There are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action, who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes act with a rapidity of which they would have believed themselves incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing to find some new vexation awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a cowardly fashion before the door without daring to enter; such a one is he who keeps a letter fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his mind at the end of six months to undertake a journey that has been a necessity for a year past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves precipitately thrust towards action, like an arrow from a bow.

The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet cannot explain whence comes this sudden and delirious energy to indolent and voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplishing the simplest and most necessary things, they are at some certain moment of time possessed by a superabundant hardihood which enables them to execute the most absurd and even the most dangerous acts.

One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one time set fire to a forest, in order to ascertain, as he said, whether the flames take hold with the easiness that is commonly affirmed. His experiment failed ten times running, on the eleventh it succeeded only too well.

Another lit a cigar by the side of a powder barrel, _in order to see, to know, to tempt Destiny_, for a jest, to have the pleasure of suspense, for no reason at all, out of caprice, out of idleness. This is a kind of energy that springs from weariness and reverie; and those in whom it manifests so stubbornly are in general, as I have said, the most indolent and dreamy beings.

Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes before the gaze of any man, and summon all his poor will before he dare enter a café or pass the pay-box of a theatre, where the ticket-seller seems, in his eyes, invested with all the majesty of Minos, Æcus, and Rhadamanthus, will at times throw himself upon the neck of some old man whom he sees in the street, and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished crowd. Why? Because--because this countenance is irresistibly attractive to him? Perhaps; but it is more legitimate to suppose that he himself does not know why.

I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. One morning I arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust as it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant act--and then, alas, I opened the window.

(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification is not the result of labour or combination, but rather of a fortuitous inspiration which would partake, were it not for the strength of the feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic by those who think a little more profoundly than the physician; the mood which thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and inconvenient acts.)

The first person I noticed in the street was a glass-vendor whose shrill and discordant cry mounted up to me through the heavy, dull atmosphere of Paris. It would have been else impossible to account for the sudden and despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.

"Hello, there!" I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile I reflected, not without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth landing, and the stairway very narrow, the man would have some difficulty in ascending, and in many a place would break off the corners of his fragile merchandise.

At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and then said to him: "What, have you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose and crimson and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You are insolent. You dare to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses that would make one see beauty in life?" And I hurried him briskly to the staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.

I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when the man appeared in the doorway beneath I let fall my engine of war perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful!"

Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?

THE WIDOWS

Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there are alleys haunted principally by thwarted ambition, by unfortunate inventors, by aborted glories and broken hearts, and by all those tumultuous and contracted souls in whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet again, and who thus betake themselves far from the insolent and joyous eyes of the well-to-do. These shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's cripples.

To such places above all others do the poet and philosopher direct their avid conjectures. They find there an unfailing pasturage, for if there is one place they disdain to visit it is, as I have already hinted, the place of the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the void has no attractions for them. On the contrary, they feel themselves irresistibly drawn towards all that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing, and bereft.

An experienced eye is never deceived. In these rigid and dejected lineaments; in these eyes, wan and hollow, or bright with the last fading gleams of the combat against fate; in these numerous profound wrinkles and in the slow and troubled gait, the eye of experience deciphers unnumbered legends of mistaken devotion, of unrewarded effort, of hunger and cold humbly and silently supported.

Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the deserted benches? Poor widows, I mean. Whether in mourning or not they are easily recognised. Moreover, there is always something wanting in the mourning of the poor; a lack of harmony which but renders it the more heart-breaking. It is forced to be niggardly in its show of grief. They are the rich who exhibit a full complement of sorrow.

Who is the saddest and most saddening of widows: she who leads by the hand a child who cannot share her reveries, or she who is quite alone? I do not know.... It happened that I once followed for several long hours an aged and afflicted woman of this kind: rigid and erect, wrapped in a little worn shawl, she carried in all her being the pride of stoicism.

She was evidently condemned by her absolute loneliness to the habits of an ancient celibacy; and the masculine characters of her habits added to their austerity a piquant mysteriousness. In what miserable café she dines I know not, nor in what manner. I followed her to a reading-room, and for a long time watched her reading the papers, her active eyes, that once burned with tears, seeking for news of a powerful and personal interest.

At length, in the afternoon, under a charming autumnal sky, one of those skies that let fall hosts of memories and regrets, she seated herself remotely in a garden, to listen, far from the crowd, to one of the regimental bands whose music gratifies the people of Paris. This was without doubt the small debauch of the innocent old woman (or the purified old woman), the well-earned consolation for another of the burdensome days without a friend, without conversation, without joy, without a confidant, that God had allowed to fall upon her perhaps for many years past--three hundred and sixty-five times a year!

Yet one more:

I can never prevent myself from throwing a glance, if not sympathetic at least full of curiosity, over the crowd of outcasts who press around the enclosure of a public concert. From the orchestra, across the night, float songs of fête, of triumph, or of pleasure. The dresses of the women sweep and shimmer; glances pass; the well-to-do, tired with doing nothing, saunter about and make indolent pretence of listening to the music. Here are only the rich, the happy; here is nothing that does not inspire or exhale the pleasure of being alive, except the aspect of the mob that presses against the outer barrier yonder, catching gratis, at the will of the wind, a tatter of music, and watching the glittering furnace within.

There is a reflection of the joy of the rich deep in the eyes of the poor that is always interesting. But to-day, beyond this people dressed in blouses and calico, I saw one whose nobility was in striking contrast with all the surrounding triviality. She was a tall, majestic woman, and so imperious in all her air that I cannot remember having seen the like in the collections of the aristocratic beauties of the past. A perfume of exalted virtue emanated from all her being. Her face, sad and worn, was in perfect keeping with the deep mourning in which she was dressed. She also, like the plebeians she mingled with and did not see, looked upon the luminous world with a profound eye, and listened with a toss of her head.

It was a strange vision. "Most certainly," I said to myself, "this poverty, if poverty it be, ought not to admit of any sordid economy; so noble a face answers for that. Why then does she remain in surroundings with which she is so strikingly in contrast?"

But in curiously passing near her I was able to divine the reason. The tall widow held by the hand a child dressed like herself in black. Modest as was the price of entry, this price perhaps sufficed to pay for some of the needs of the little being, or even more, for a superfluity, a toy.

She will return on foot, dreaming and meditating--and alone, always alone, for the child is turbulent and selfish, without gentleness or patience, and cannot become, anymore than another animal, a dog or a cat, the confidant of solitary griefs.

THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, PLUTUS, AND GLORY

Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not less extraordinary ascended the mysterious stairway by which Hell gains access to the frailty of sleeping man, and communes with him in secret. These three postured gloriously before me, as though they had been upon a stage--and a sulphurous splendour emanated from these beings who so disengaged themselves from the opaque heart of the night. They bore with them so proud a presence, and so full of mastery, that at first I took them for three of the true Gods.

The first Satan, by his face, was a creature of doubtful sex. The softness of an ancient Bacchus shone in the lines of his body. His beautiful languorous eyes, of a tenebrous and indefinite colour, were like violets still laden with the heavy tears of the storm; his slightly-parted lips were like heated censers, from whence exhaled the sweet savour of many perfumes; and each time he breathed, exotic insects drew, as they fluttered, strength from the ardours of his breath.

Twined about his tunic of purple stuff, in the manner of a cincture, was an iridescent Serpent with lifted head and eyes like embers turned sleepily towards him. Phials full of sinister fluids, alternating with shining knives and instruments of surgery, hung from this living girdle. He held in his right hand a flagon containing a luminous red fluid, and inscribed with a legend in these singular words:

"DRINK OF THIS MY BLOOD: A PERFECT RESTORATIVE";

and in his left hand held a violin that without doubt served to sing his pleasures and pains, and to spread abroad the contagion of his folly upon the nights of the Sabbath.

From rings upon his delicate ankles trailed a broken chain of gold, and when the burden of this caused him to bend his eyes towards the earth, he would contemplate with vanity the nails of his feet, as brilliant and polished as well-wrought jewels.

He looked at me with eyes inconsolably heart-broken and giving forth an insidious intoxication, and cried in a chanting voice: "If thou wilt, if thou wilt, I will make thee an overlord of souls; thou shalt be master of living matter more perfectly than the sculptor is master of his clay; thou shalt taste the pleasure, reborn without end, of obliterating thyself in the self of another, and of luring other souls to lose themselves in thine."

But I replied to him: "I thank thee. I only gain from this venture, then, beings of no more worth than my poor self? Though remembrance brings me shame indeed, I would forget nothing; and even before I recognised thee, thou ancient monster, thy mysterious cutlery, thy equivocal phials, and the chain that imprisons thy feet, were symbols showing clearly enough the inconvenience of thy friendship. Keep thy gifts."

The second Satan had neither the air at once tragical and smiling, the lovely insinuating ways, nor the delicate and scented beauty of the first. A gigantic man, with a coarse, eyeless face, his heavy paunch overhung his hips and was gilded and pictured, like a tattooing, with a crowd of little moving figures which represented the unnumbered forms of universal misery. There were little sinew-shrunken men who hung themselves willingly from nails; there were meagre gnomes, deformed and undersized, whose beseeching eyes begged an alms even more eloquently than their trembling hands; there were old mothers who nursed clinging abortions at their pendent breasts. And many others, even more surprising.

This heavy Satan beat with his fist upon his immense belly, from whence came a loud and resounding metallic clangour, which died away in a sighing made by many human voices. And he smiled unrestrainedly, showing his broken teeth--the imbecile smile of a man who has dined too freely. Then the creature said to me:

"I can give thee that which gets all, which is worth all, which takes the place of all." And he tapped his monstrous paunch, whence came a sonorous echo as the commentary to his obscene speech. I turned away with disgust and replied: "I need no man's misery to bring me happiness; nor will I have the sad wealth of all the misfortunes pictured upon thy skin as upon a tapestry."

As for the She-devil, I should lie if I denied that at first I found in her a certain strange charm, which to define I can but compare to the charm of certain beautiful women past their first youth, who yet seem to age no more, whose beauty keeps something of the penetrating magic of ruins. She had an air at once imperious and sordid, and her eyes, though heavy, held a certain power of fascination. I was struck most by her voice, wherein I found the remembrance of the most delicious contralti, as well as a little of the hoarseness of a throat continually laved with brandy.

"Wouldst thou know my power?" said the charming and paradoxical voice of the false goddess. "Then listen." And she put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet, enribboned, like a _mirliton_, with the titles of all the newspapers in the world; and through this trumpet she cried my name so that it rolled through space with the sound of a hundred thousand thunders, and came re-echoing back to me from the farthest planet.

"Devil!" cried I, half tempted, "that at least is worth something." But it vaguely struck me, upon examining the seductive virago more attentively, that I had seen her clinking glasses with certain drolls of my acquaintance, and her blare of brass carried to my ears I know not what memory of a fanfare prostituted.

So I replied, with all disdain: "Get thee hence! I know better than wed the light o' love of them that I will not name."

Truly, I had the right to be proud of a so courageous renunciation. But unfortunately I awoke, and all my courage left me. "In truth," I said, "I must have been very deeply asleep indeed to have had such scruples. Ah, if they, would but return while I am awake, I would not be so delicate."

So I invoked the three in a loud voice, offering to dishonour myself as often as necessary to obtain their favours; but I had without doubt too deeply offended them, for they have never returned.

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THE FLOWERS OF EVIL Translated by F. P. Sturm

   THE DANCE OF DEATH

   Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
   Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
   With all the careless and high-stepping grace,
   And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.

   Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?
   Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,
   Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod
   With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.

   The swarms that hum about her collar-bones
   As the lascivious streams caress the stones,
   Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,
   Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes

   Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays
   Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,
   Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebræ.
   O charm of nothing decked in folly! they

   Who laugh and name you a Caricature,
   They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,
   The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone,
   That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!

   Come you to trouble with your potent sneer
   The feast of Life! or are you driven here,
   To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir
   And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?

   Or do you hope, when sing the violins,
   And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,
   To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,
   And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?

   Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!
   Eternal alembic of antique distress!
   Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides
   The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.

   And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,
   Among us here, no lover to your mind;
   Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?
   The charms of horror please none but the brave.

   Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir,
   Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller
   Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath,
   The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.

   For he who has not folded in his arms
   A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,
   Reeks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,
   When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.

   O irresistible, with fleshless face,
   Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:
   "Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,
   Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!

   Withered Antinoüs, dandies with plump faces,
   Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,
   Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,
   Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.

   From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,
   The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;
   They do not see, within the opened sky,
   The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.

   In every clime and under every sun,
   Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;
   And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye;
   And mingles with your madness, irony!"

   THE BEACONS

   RUBENS, oblivious garden of indolence,
     Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,
   Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,
     As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move.

   LEONARD DA VINCI, sombre and fathomless glass,
     Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile,
   Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass,
     Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.

   REMBRANDT, sad hospital that a murmuring fills,
     Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,
   Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils,
     And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.

   Strong MICHELANGELO, a vague far place
     Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;
   Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,
     And tear their Shroud with clenched hands void of ease.

   The fighter's anger, the faun's impudence,
     Thou makest of all these a lovely thing;
   Proud heart, sick body, mind's magnificence:
     PUGET, the convict's melancholy king.

   WATTEAU, the carnival of illustrious hearts,
     Fluttering like moths upon the wings of chance;
   Bright lustres light the silk that flames and darts,
     And pour down folly on the whirling dance.

   GOYA, a nightmare full of things unknown;
     The fœtus witches broil on Sabbath night;
   Old women at the mirror; children lone
     Who tempt old demons with their limbs delight.

   DELACROIX, lake of blood ill angels haunt,
     Where ever-green, o'ershadowing woods arise;
   Under the surly heaven strange fanfares chaunt
     And pass, like one of Weber's strangled sighs.

   And malediction, blasphemy and groan,
     Ecstasies, cries, Te Deums, and tears of brine,
   Are echoes through a thousand labyrinths flown;
     For mortal hearts an opiate divine;

   A shout cried by a thousand sentinels,
     An order from a thousand bugles tossed,
   A beacon o'er a thousand citadels,
     A call to huntsmen in deep woodlands lost.

   It is the mightiest witness that could rise
     To prove our dignity, O Lord, to Thee;
   This sob that rolls from age to age, and dies
     Upon the verge of Thy Eternity!

   THE SADNESS OF THE MOON

   The Moon more indolently dreams to-night
   Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,
   Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
   Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.

   Upon her silken avalanche of down,
   Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
   And watches the white visions past her flown,
   Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.

   And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
   Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
   Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,

   Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
   Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,
   And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.

   THE BALCONY

   Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
     O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,
   Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,
     The charm of evenings by the gentle fire,
   Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!

   The eves illumined by the burning coal,
     The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings--
   How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul!
     Ah, and we said imperishable things,
   Those eves illumined by the burning coal.

   Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm,
     And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood,
   In bending o'er you, queen of every charm,
     I thought I breathed the perfume in your blood.
   The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm.

   The film of night flowed round and over us,
     And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet;
   I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous,
     And in my hands fraternal slept your feet--
   Night, like a film, flowed round and over us.

   I can recall those happy days forgot,
     And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past.
   Your languid beauties now would move me not
     Did not your gentle heart and body cast
   The old spell of those happy days forgot.

   Can vows and perfumes, kisses infinite,
     Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound;
   As rise to heaven suns once again made bright
     After being plunged in deep seas and profound?
   Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!

   THE SICK MUSE

   Poor Muse, alas, what ail's thee, then, to-day?
   Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,
   Upon thy brow in alternation play,
   Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn.

   Have the green lemure and the goblin red,
   Poured on thee love and terror from their urn?
   Or with despotic hand the nightmare dread
   Deep plunged thee in some fabulous Mintume?

   Would that thy breast where so deep thoughts arise,
   Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs;
   Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by wave

   In rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave,
   When Phœbus shared his alternating reign
   With mighty Pan, lord of the ripening grain.

   THE VENAL MUSE

   Muse of my heart, lover of palaces,
     When January comes with wind and sleet,
   During the snowy eve's long wearinesses,
     Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet?

   Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders
     In the moon-beams that through the window fly?
   Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders,
     Reap the far star-gold of the vaulted sky?

   For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul,
   Must swing a censer, wear a holy stole,
     And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between.

   Or, like a starving mountebank, expose
   Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those
     Who wait thy jests to drive away thy spleen.

   THE EVIL MONK

   The ancient cloisters on their lofty walls
     Had holy Truth in painted frescoes shown,
   And, seeing these, the pious in those halls
     Felt their cold, lone austereness less alone.

   At that time when Christ's seed flowered all around,
     More than one monk, forgotten in his hour,
   Taking for studio the burial-ground,
     Glorified Death with simple faith and power.

   And my soul is a sepulchre where I,
   Ill cenobite, have spent eternity:
     On the vile cloister walls no pictures rise.

   O when may I cast off this weariness,
   And make the pageant of my old distress
     For these hands labour, pleasure for these eyes?

   THE TEMPTATION

   The Demon, in my chamber high,
     This morning came to visit me,
   And, thinking he would find some fault,
     He whispered: "I would know of thee

   Among the many lovely things
     That make the magic of her face,
   Among the beauties, black and rose,
     That make her body's charm and grace,

   Which is most fair?" Thou didst reply
     To the Abhorred, O soul of mine:
   "No single beauty is the best
     When she is all one flower divine.

   When all things charm me I ignore
     Which one alone brings most delight;
   She shines before me like the dawn,
     And she consoles me like the night.

   The harmony is far too great,
     That governs all her body fair.
   For impotence to analyse
     And say which note is sweetest there.

   O mystic metamorphosis!
     My senses into one sense flow--
   Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
     Her breath is music faint and low!"

   THE IRRÉPARABLE

   Can we suppress the old Remorse
     Who bends our heart beneath his stroke,
   Who feeds, as worms feed on the corse,
     Or as the acorn on the oak?
   Can we suppress the old Remorse?

   Ah, in what philtre, wine, or spell,
     May we drown this our ancient foe,
   Destructive glutton, gorging well,
     Patient as the ants, and slow?
   What wine, what philtre, or what spell?

   Tell it, enchantress, if you can,
     Tell me, with anguish overcast,
   Wounded, as a dying man,
     Beneath the swift hoofs hurrying past.
   Tell it, enchantress, if you can,

   To him the wolf already tears
     Who sees the carrion pinions wave
   This broken warrior who despairs
     To have a cross above his grave--
   This wretch the wolf already tears.

   Can one illume a leaden sky,
     Or tear apart the shadowy veil
   Thicker than pitch, no star on high,
     Not one funereal glimmer pale?
   Can one illume a leaden sky?

   Hope lit the windows of the Inn,
     But now that shining flame is dead;
   And how shall martyred pilgrims win
     Along the moonless road they tread?
   Satan has darkened all the Inn!

   Witch, do you love accursèd hearts?
     Say, do you know the reprobate?
   Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts
     Make souls the targets for their hate?
   Witch, do you know accursèd hearts?

   The Might-have-been with tooth accursed
     Gnaws at the piteous souls of men,
   The deep foundations suffer first,
     And all the structure crumbles then
   Beneath the bitter tooth accursed.

II

   Often, when seated at the play,
     And sonorous music lights the stage,
   I see the frail hand of a Fay
     With magic dawn illume the rage
   Of the dark sky. Oft at the play

   A being made of gauze and fire
     Casts to the earth a Demon great.
   And my heart, whence all hopes expire,
     Is like a stage where I await,
   In vain, the Fay with wings of fire!

   A FORMER LIFE

   Long since, I lived beneath vast porticoes,
   By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired,
   Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows,
   Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired.

   The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies
   Mingled its music, turbulent and rich,
   Solemn and mystic, with the colours which
   The setting sun reflected in my eyes.

   And there I lived amid voluptuous calms,
   In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave,
   Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave,

   Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms.
   They were my slaves--the only care they had
   To know what secret grief had made me sad.

   DON JUAN IN HADES

   When Juan sought the subterranean flood,
     And paid his obolus on the Stygian shore,
   Charon, the proud and sombre beggar, stood
     With one strong, vengeful hand on either oar.

   With open robes and bodies agonised,
     Lost women writhed beneath that darkling sky;
   There were sounds as of victims sacrificed:
     Behind him all the dark was one long cry.

   And Sganarelle, with laughter, claimed his pledge;
     Don Luis, with trembling finger in the air,
   Showed to the souls who wandered in the sedge
     The evil son who scorned his hoary hair.

   Shivering with woe, chaste Elvira the while,
     Near him untrue to all but her till now,
   Seemed to beseech him for one farewell smile
     Lit with the sweetness of the first soft vow.

   And clad in armour, a tall man of stone
     Held firm the helm, and clove the gloomy flood;
   But, staring at the vessel's track alone,
     Bent on his sword the unmoved hero stood.

   THE LIVING FLAME

   They pass before me, these Eyes full of light,
   Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise;
   The holy brothers pass before my sight,
   And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes.

   They keep me from all sin and error grave,
   They set me in the path whence Beauty came;
   They are my servants, and I am their slave,
   And all my soul obeys the living flame.

   Beautiful Eyes that gleam with mystic light
   As candles lighted at full noon; the sun
   Dims not your flame phantastical and bright.

   You sing the dawn; they celebrate life done;
   Marching you chaunt my soul's awakening hymn,
   Stars that no sun has ever made grow dim!

   CORRESPONDENCES

   In Nature's temple living pillars rise,
     And words are murmured none have understood,
     And man must wander through a tangled wood
   Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.

   As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
     Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;
     Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
   Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.

   Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
     Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
   Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,

   Have all the expansion of things infinite:
     As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
   Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight.

   THE FLASK

   There are some powerful odours that can pass
   Out of the stoppered flagon; even glass
   To them is porous. Oft when some old box
   Brought from the East is opened and the locks
   And hinges creak and cry; or in a press
   In some deserted house, where the sharp stress
   Of odours old and dusty fills the brain;
   An ancient flask is brought to light again,
   And forth the ghosts of long-dead odours creep.
   There, softly trembling in the shadows, sleep
   A thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalides,
   Phantoms of old the folding darkness hides,
   Who make faint flutterings as their wings unfold,
   Rose-washed and azure-tinted, shot with gold.

   A memory that brings languor flutters here:
   The fainting eyelids droop, and giddy Fear
   Thrusts with both hands the soul towards the pit
   Where, like a Lazarus from his winding-sheet,
   Arises from the gulf of sleep a ghost
   Of an old passion, long since loved and lost.
   So I, when vanished from man's memory
   Deep in some dark and sombre chest I lie,
   An empty flagon they have cast aside,
   Broken and soiled, the dust upon my pride,
   Will be your shroud, beloved pestilence!
   The witness of your might and virulence,
   Sweet poison mixed by angels; bitter cup
   Of life and death my heart has drunken up!

   REVERSIBILITY

   Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
     Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite,
     And the vague terrors of the fearful night
   That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?
   Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?

   Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
     With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,
     When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,
   And makes herself the captain of our fate,
   Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?

   Angel of health, did ever you know pain,
     Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls
     The cold length of the white infirmary walls,
   With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?
   Angel of health, did ever you know pain?

   Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
     Know you the fear of age, the torment vile
     Of reading secret horror in the smile
   Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago?
   Angel of beauty, do you crinkles know?

   Angel of happiness, and joy, and light,
     Old David would have asked for youth afresh
     From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh;
   I but implore your prayers to aid my plight,
   Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.

   THE EYES OF BEAUTY

   You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
   But all the sea of sadness in my blood
   Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
   Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.

   In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
   That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
   By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more
   Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.

   It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
   And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay--
   A perfume swims about your naked breast!

   Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
   With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
   Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!

   SONNET OF AUTUMN

   They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes:
     "Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine?"
   Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise
     All save that antique brute-like faith of thine;

   And will not bare the secret of their shame
     To thee whose hand soothes me to slumbers long,
   Nor their black legend write for thee in flame!
     Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong.

   Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat,
   Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
   And I too well his ancient arrows know:

   Crime, horror, folly. O pale Marguerite,
   Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low,
   O my so white, my so cold Marguerite.

   THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD

   O shadowy Beauty mine, when thou shalt sleep
     In the deep heart of a black marble tomb;
   When thou for mansion and for bower shalt keep
     Only one rainy cave of hollow gloom;

   And when the stone upon thy trembling breast,
     And on thy straight sweet body's supple grace,
   Crushes thy will and keeps thy heart at rest,
     And holds those feet from their adventurous race;

   Then the deep grave, who shares my reverie,
   (For the deep grave is aye the poet's friend)
   During long nights when sleep is far from thee,

   Shall whisper: "Ah, thou didst not comprehend
   The dead wept thus, thou woman frail and weak"--
   And like remorse the worm shall gnaw thy cheek.

   THE GHOST

   Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove
   I will return to thy alcove,
   And glide upon the night to thee,
   Treading the shadows silently.

   And I will give to thee, my own,
   Kisses as icy as the moon,
   And the caresses of a snake
   Cold gliding in the thorny brake.

   And when returns the livid morn
   Thou shalt find all my place forlorn
   And chilly, till the falling night.

   Others would rule by tenderness
   Over thy life and youthfulness,
   But I would conquer thee by fright!

   TO A MADONNA

   (An Ex-Voto in the Spanish taste.)

   Madonna, mistress, I would build for thee
   An altar deep in the sad soul of me;
   And in the darkest corner of my heart,
   From mortal hopes and mocking eyes apart,
   Carve of enamelled blue and gold a shrine
   For thee to stand erect in, Image divine!
   And with a mighty Crown thou shalt be crowned
   Wrought of the gold of my smooth Verse, set round
   With starry crystal rhymes; and I will make,
   O mortal maid, a Mantle for thy sake!
   And weave it of my jealousy, a gown
   Heavy, barbaric, stiff, and weighted down
   With my distrust, and broider round the hem
   Not pearls, but all my tears in place of them.
   And then thy wavering, trembling robe shall be
   All the desires that rise and fall in me
   From mountain-peaks to valleys of repose,
   Kissing thy lovely body's white and rose.
   For thy humiliated feet divine,
   Of my Respect I'll make thee Slippers fine
   Which, prisoning them within a gentle fold,
   Shall keep their imprint like a faithful mould.
   And if my art, unwearying and discreet,
   Can make no Moon of Silver for thy feet
   To have for Footstool, then thy heel shall rest
   Upon the snake that gnaws within my breast,
   Victorious Queen of whom our hope is born!
   And thou shalt trample down and make a scorn
   Of the vile reptile swollen up with hate.
   And thou shalt see my thoughts, all consecrate,
   Like candles set before thy flower-strewn shrine,
   O Queen of Virgins, and the taper-shine
   Shall glimmer star-like in the vault of blue,
   With eyes of flame for ever watching you.
   While all the love and worship in my sense
   Will be sweet smoke of myrrh and frankincense.
   Ceaselessly up to thee, white peak of snow,
   My stormy spirit will in vapours go!

   And last, to make thy drama all complete,
   That love and cruelty may mix and meet,
   I, thy remorseful-torturer, will take
   All the Seven Deadly Sins, and from them make
   In darkest joy, Seven Knives, cruel-edged and keen,
   And like a juggler choosing, O my Queen,
   That spot profound whence love and mercy start,
   I'll plunge them all within thy panting heart!

   THE SKY

   Where'er he be, on water or on land,
     Under pale suns or climes that flames enfold;
   One of Christ's own, or of Cythera's band,
     Shadowy beggar or Crœsus rich with gold;

   Citizen, peasant, student, tramp; whate'er
     His little brain may be, alive or dead;
   Man knows the fear of mystery everywhere,
     And peeps, with trembling glances, overhead.

   The heaven above? A strangling cavern wall;
   The lighted ceiling of a music-hall
     Where every actor treads a bloody soil--

   The hermit's hope; the terror of the sot;
   The sky: the black lid of the mighty pot
     Where the vast human generations boil!

   SPLEEN

   I'm like some king in whose corrupted veins
   Flows agèd blood; who rules a land of rains;
   Who, young in years, is old in all distress;
   Who flees good counsel to find weariness
   Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred
   Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird;
   Whose weary face emotion moves no more
   E'en when his people die before his door.
   His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile
   Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile;
   The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good,
   Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood
   No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom
   Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb.
   The sage who takes his gold essays in vain
   To purge away the old corrupted strain,
   His baths of blood, that in the days of old
   The Romans used when their hot blood grew cold,
   Will never warm this dead man's bloodless pains,
   For green Lethean water fills his veins.

   THE OWLS

   Under the overhanging yews,
   The dark owls sit in solemn state,
   Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
   Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.

   Motionless thus they sit and dream
   Until that melancholy hour
   When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
   The nightly shades assume their power.

   From their still attitude the wise
   Will learn with terror to despise
   All tumult, movement, and unrest;

   For he who follows every shade,
   Carries the memory in his breast,
   Of each unhappy journey made.

   BIEN LOIN D'ICI

   Here is the chamber consecrate,
   Wherein this maiden delicate,
   And enigmatically sedate,

   Fans herself while the moments creep,
   Upon her cushions half-asleep,
   And hears the fountains plash and weep.

   Dorothy's chamber undefiled.
   The winds and waters sing afar
   Their song of sighing strange and wild
   To lull to sleep the petted child.

   From head to foot with subtle care,
   Slaves have perfumed her delicate skin
   With odorous oils and benzoin.
   And flowers faint in a corner there.

   CONTEMPLATION

   Thou, O my Grief, be wise and tranquil still,
   The eve is thine which even now drops down,
   To carry peace or care to human will,
   And in a misty veil enfolds the town.

   While the vile mortals of the multitude,
   By pleasure, cruel tormentor, goaded on,
   Gather remorseful blossoms in light mood--
   Grief, place thy hand in mine, let us be gone

   Far from them. Lo, see how the vanished years,
   In robes outworn lean over heaven's rim;
   And from the water, smiling through her tears,

   Remorse arises, and the sun grows dim;
   And in the east, her long shroud trailing light,
   List, O my grief, the gentle steps of Night.

   TO A BROWN BEGGAR-MAID

   White maiden with the russet hair,
   Whose garments, through their holes, declare
   That poverty is part of you,
     And beauty too.

   To me, a sorry bard and mean,
   Your youthful beauty, frail and lean,
   With summer freckles here and there,
     Is sweet and fair.

   Your sabots tread the roads of chance,
   And not one queen of old romance
   Carried her velvet shoes and lace
     With half your grace.

   In place of tatters far too short
   Let the proud garments worn at Court
   Fall down with rustling fold and pleat
     About your feet;

   In place of stockings, worn and old,
   Let a keen dagger all of gold
   Gleam in your garter for the eyes
     Of roués wise;

   Let ribbons carelessly untied
   Reveal to us the radiant pride
   Of your white bosom purer far
     Than any star;

   Let your white arms uncovered shine,
   Polished and smooth and half divine;
   And let your elfish fingers chase
     With riotous grace

   The purest pearls that softly glow,
   The sweetest sonnets of Belleau,
   Offered by gallants ere they fight
     For your delight;

   And many fawning rhymers who
   Inscribe their first thin book to you
   Will contemplate upon the stair
     Your slipper fair;

   And many a page who plays at cards,
   And many lords and many bards,
   Will watch your going forth, and burn
     For your return;

   And you will count before your glass
   More kisses than the lily has;
   And more than one Valois will sigh
     When you pass by.

   But meanwhile you are on the tramp,
   Begging your living in the damp,
   Wandering mean streets and alleys o'er,
     From door to door;

   And shilling bangles in a shop
   Cause you with eager eyes to stop,
   And I, alas, have not a sou
     To give to you.

   Then go, with no more ornament,
   Pearl, diamond, or subtle scent,
   Than your own fragile naked grace
     And lovely face.

   THE SWAN

   Andromache, I think of you! The stream,
   The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days
   Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,
   The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears,
   Made all my fertile memory blossom forth
   As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.
   Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,
   Changes more quickly than man's heart may change);
   Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
   The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
   The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
   The _débris_, and the square-set heaps of tiles.

   There a menagerie was once outspread;
   And there I saw, one morning at the hour
   When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
   And the road roars upon the silent air,
   A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
   On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
   And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.
   And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
   Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
   His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
   Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):
   "O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
   Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?"
                                    Sometimes yet
   I see the hapless bird--strange, fatal myth--
   Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up
   Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens,
   With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face,
   As though he sent reproaches up to God!

II

   Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.
   New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,
   And suburbs old, are symbols all to me
   Whose memories are as heavy as a stone.
   And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul,
   The image came of my majestic swan
   With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime,
   As of an exile whom one great desire
   Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you,
   Andromache! torn from your hero's arms;
   Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride;
   Bent o'er an empty tomb in ecstasy;
   Widow of Hector--wife of Helenus!
   And of the negress, wan and phthisical,
   Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes
   Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog
   The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;
   Of all who lose that which they never find;
   Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief
   Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;
   Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.
   And one old Memory like a crying horn
   Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost....
   I think of sailors on some isle forgotten;
   Of captives; vanquished ... and of many more.

   THE SEVEN OLD MEN

   O swarming city, city full of dreams,
   Where in full day the spectre walks and speaks;
   Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins
   My story flows as flows the rising sap.

   One morn, disputing with my tired soul,
   And like a hero stiffening all my nerves,
   I trod a suburb shaken by the jar
   Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified
   The houses either side of that sad street,
   So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood
   Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist,
   Unclean and yellow, inundated space--
   A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul.
   Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags
   Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks
   Should have brought alms in floods upon his head.
   Without the misery gleaming in his eye,
   Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed
   To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost
   Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard
   Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth.
   He was not bent but broken: his backbone
   Made a so true right angle with his legs,
   That, as he walked, the tapping stick which gave
   The finish to the picture, made him seem
   Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped
   Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud
   He walked with troubled and uncertain gait,
   As though his sabots trod upon the dead,
   Indifferent and hostile to the world.

   His double followed him: tatters and stick
   And back and eye and beard, all were the same;
   Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable,
   These centenarian twins, these spectres odd,
   Trod the same pace toward some end unknown.
   To what fell complot was I then exposed?
   Humiliated by what evil chance?
   For as the minutes one by one went by
   Seven times I saw this sinister old man
   Repeat his image there before my eyes!

   Let him who smiles at my inquietude,
   Who never trembled at a fear like mine,
   Know that in their decrepitude's despite
   These seven old hideous monsters had the mien
   Of beings immortal.

                    Then, I thought, must I,
   Undying, contemplate the awful eighth;
   Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double;
   Disgusting Phœnix, father of himself
   And his own son? In terror then I turned
   My back upon the infernal band, and fled
   To my own place, and closed my door; distraught
   And like a drunkard who sees all things twice,
   With feverish troubled spirit, chilly and sick,
   Wounded by mystery and absurdity!

   In vain my reason tried to cross the bar,
   The whirling storm but drove her back again;
   And my soul tossed, and tossed, an outworn wreck,
   Mastless, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea.

   THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN

   Deep in the tortuous folds of ancient towns,
   Where all, even horror, to enchantment turns,
   I watch, obedient to my fatal mood,
   For the decrepit, strange and charming beings,
   The dislocated monsters that of old
   Were lovely women--Lais or Eponine!
   Hunchbacked and broken, crooked though they be,
   Let us still love them, for they still have souls.
   They creep along wrapped in their chilly rags,
   Beneath the whipping of the wicked wind,
   They tremble when an omnibus rolls by,
   And at their sides, a relic of the past,
   A little flower-embroidered satchel hangs.
   They trot about, most like to marionettes;
   They drag themselves, as does a wounded beast;
   Or dance unwillingly as a clapping bell
   Where hangs and swings a demon without pity.
   Though they be broken they have piercing eyes,
   That shine like pools where water sleeps at night;
   The astonished and divine eyes of a child
   who laughs at all that glitters in the world.
   Have you not seen that most old women's shrouds
   Are little like the shroud of a dead child?
   Wise Death, in token of his happy whim,
   Wraps old and young in one enfolding sheet.
   And when I see a phantom, frail and wan,
   Traverse the swarming picture that is Paris,
   It ever seems as though the delicate thing
   Trod with soft steps towards a cradle new.
   And then I wonder, seeing the twisted form,
   How many times must workmen change the shape
   Of boxes where at length such limbs are laid?
   These eyes are wells brimmed with a million tears;
   Crucibles where the cooling metal pales--
   Mysterious eyes that are strong charms to him
   Whose life-long nurse has been austere Disaster.

II

   The love-sick vestal of the old "Frasciti";
   Priestess of Thalia, alas! whose name
   Only the prompter knows and he is dead;
   Bygone celebrities that in bygone days
   The Tivoli o'ershadowed in their bloom;
   All charm me; yet among these beings frail
   Three, turning pain to honey-sweetness, said
   To the Devotion that had lent them wings:
   "Lift me, O powerful Hippogriffe, to the skies"--
   One by her country to despair was driven;
   One by her husband overwhelmed with grief;
   One wounded by her child, Madonna-like;
   Each could have made a river with her tears.

III

   Oft have I followed one of these old women,
   One among others, when the falling sun
   Reddened the heavens with a crimson wound--
   Pensive, apart, she rested on a bench
   To hear the brazen music of the band,
   Played by the soldiers in the public park
   To pour some courage into citizens' hearts,
   On golden eves when all the world revives.
   Proud and erect she drank the music in,
   The lively and the warlike call to arms;
   Her eyes blinked like an ancient eagle's eyes;
   Her forehead seemed to await the laurel crown!

IV

   Thus you do wander, uncomplaining Stoics,
   Through all the chaos of the living town:
   Mothers with bleeding hearts, saints, courtesans,
   Whose names of yore were on the lips of all;
   Who were all glory and all grace, and now
   None know you; and the brutish drunkard stops,
   Insulting you with his derisive love;
   And cowardly urchins call behind your back.
   Ashamed of living, withered shadows all,
   With fear-bowed backs you creep beside the walls,
   And none salute you, destined to loneliness!
   Refuse of Time ripe for Eternity!
   But I, who watch you tenderly afar,
   With unquiet eyes on your uncertain steps,
   As though I were your father, I--O wonder!--
   Unknown to you taste secret, hidden joy.
   I see your maiden passions bud and bloom,
   Sombre or luminous, and your lost days
   Unroll before me while my heart enjoys
   All your old vices, and my soul expands
   To all the virtues that have once been yours.
   Ruined! and my sisters! O congenerate hearts,
   Octogenarian Eves o'er whom is stretched
   God's awful claw, where will you be to-morrow?

   A MADRIGAL OF SORROW

   What do I care though you be wise?
     Be sad, be beautiful; your tears
   But add one more charm to your eyes,
   As streams to valleys where they rise;
     And fairer every flower appears

   After the storm. I love you most
     When joy has fled your brow downcast;
   When your heart is in horror lost,
   And o'er your present like a ghost
     Floats the dark shadow of the past.

   I love you when the teardrop flows,
     Hotter than blood, from your large eye;
   When I would hush you to repose
   Your heavy pain breaks forth and grows
     Into a loud and tortured cry.

   And then, voluptuousness divine!
     Delicious ritual and profound!
   I drink in every sob like wine,
   And dream that in your deep heart shine
     The pearls wherein your eyes were drowned.

   I know your heart, which overflows
     With outworn loves long cast aside,
   Still like a furnace flames and glows,
   And you within your breast enclose
     A damnèd soul's unbending pride;

   But till your dreams without release
     Reflect the leaping flames of hell;
   Till in a nightmare without cease
   You dream of poison to bring peace,
     And love cold steel and powder well;

   And tremble at each opened door,
     And feel for every man distrust,
   And shudder at the striking hour--
   Till then you have not felt the power
     Of Irresistible Disgust.

   My queen, my slave, whose love is fear,
     When you awaken shuddering,
   Until that awful hour be here,
   You cannot say at midnight drear:
     "I am your equal, O my King!"

   MIST AND RAIN

   Autumns and winters, springs of mire and rain,
   Seasons of sleep, I sing your praises loud,
   For thus I love to wrap my heart and brain
   In some dim tomb beneath a vapoury shroud

   In the wide plain where revels the cold wind,
   Through long nights when the weathercock whirls round,
   More free than in warm summer day my mind
   Lifts wide her raven pinions from the ground.

   Unto a heart filled with funereal things
   That since old days hoar frosts have gathered on,
   Naught is more sweet, O pallid, queenly springs,

   Than the long pageant of your shadows wan,
   Unless it be on moonless eves to weep
   On some chance bed and rock our griefs to sleep.

   SUNSET

   Fair is the sun when first he flames above,
   Flinging his joy down in a happy beam;
   And happy he who can salute with love
   The sunset far more glorious than a dream.

   Flower, stream, and furrow!--I have seen them all
   In the sun's eye swoon like one trembling heart--
   Though it be late let us with speed depart
   To catch at least one last ray ere it fall!

   But I pursue the fading god in vain,
   For conquering Night makes firm her dark domain,
   Mist and gloom fall, and terrors glide between,

   And graveyard odours in the shadow swim,
   And my faint footsteps on the marsh's rim,
   Bruise the cold snail and crawling toad unseen.

   THE CORPSE

   Remember, my Beloved, what thing we met
     By the roadside on that sweet summer day;
   There on a grassy couch with pebbles set,
       A loathsome body lay.

   The wanton limbs stiff-stretched into the air,
     Steaming with exhalations vile and dank,
   In ruthless cynic fashion had laid bare
       The swollen side and flank.

   On this decay the sun shone hot from heaven
     As though with chemic heat to broil and bum,
   And unto Nature all that she had given
       A hundredfold return.

   The sky smiled down upon the horror there
     As on a flower that opens to the day;
   So awful an infection smote the air,
       Almost you swooned away.

   The swarming flies hummed on the putrid side,
     Whence poured the maggots in a darkling stream,
   That ran along these tatters of life's pride
       With a liquescent gleam.

   And like a wave the maggots rose and fell,
     The murmuring flies swirled round in busy strife:
   It seemed as though a vague breath came to swell
       And multiply with life

   The hideous corpse. From all this living world
     A music as of wind and water ran,
   Or as of grain in rhythmic motion swirled
       By the swift winnower's fan.

   And then the vague forms like a dream died out,
     Or like some distant scene that slowly falls
   Upon the artist's canvas, that with doubt
       He only half recalls.

   A homeless dog behind the boulders lay
     And watched us both with angry eyes forlorn,
   Waiting a chance to come and take away
       The morsel she had torn.

   And you, even you, will be like this drear thing,
     A vile infection man may not endure;
   Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring!
       O passionate and pure!

   Yes, such will you be, Queen of every grace!
     When the last sacramental words are said;
   And beneath grass and flowers that lovely face
       Moulders among the dead.

   Then, O Belovèd, whisper to the worm
     That crawls up to devour you with a kiss,
   That I still guard in memory the dear form
       Of love that comes to this!

   AN ALLEGORY

   Here is a woman, richly clad and fair,
   Who in her wine dips her long, heavy hair;
   Love's claws, and that sharp poison which is sin,
   Are dulled against the granite of her skin.
   Death she defies, Debauch she smiles upon,
   For their sharp scythe-like talons every one
   Pass by her in their all-destructive play;
   Leaving her beauty till a later day.
   Goddess she walks; sultana in her leisure;
   She has Mohammed's faith that heaven is pleasure,
   And bids all men forget the world's alarms
   Upon her breast, between her open arms.
   She knows, and she believes, this sterile maid,
   Without whom the world's onward dream would fade,
   That bodily beauty is the supreme gift
   Which may from every sin the terror lift.
   Hell she ignores, and Purgatory defies;
   And when black Night shall roll before her eyes,
   She will look straight in Death's grim face forlorn,
   Without remorse or hate--as one new-born.

   THE ACCURSED

   Like pensive herds at rest upon the sands,
     These to the sea-horizons turn their eyes;
   Out of their folded feet and clinging hands
     Bitter sharp tremblings and soft languors rise.

   Some tread the thicket by the babbling stream,
     Their hearts with untold secrets ill at ease;
   Calling the lover of their childhood's dream,
     They wound the green bark of the shooting trees.

   Others like sisters wander, grave and slow,
     Among the rocks haunted by spectres thin,
   Where Antony saw as larvæ surge and flow
     The veined bare breasts that tempted him to sin.

   Some, when the resinous torch of burning wood
     Flares in lost pagan caverns dark and deep,
   Call thee to quench the fever in their blood,
     Bacchus, who singest old remorse to sleep!

   Then there are those the scapular bedights,
     Whose long white vestments hide the whip's red stain,
   Who mix, in sombre woods on lonely nights,
     The foam of pleasure with the tears of pain.

   O virgins, demons, monsters, martyrs! ye
     Who scorn whatever actual appears;
   Saints, satyrs, seekers of Infinity,
     So full of cries, so full of bitter tears;

   Ye whom my soul has followed into hell,
     I love and pity, O sad sisters mine,
   Your thirsts unquenched, your pains no tongue can tell,
     And your great hearts, those urns of love divine!

   LA BEATRICE

   In a burnt, ashen land, where no herb grew,
   I to the winds my cries of anguish threw;
   And in my thoughts, in that sad place apart,
   Pricked gently with the poignard o'er my heart.
   Then in full noon above my head a cloud
   Descended tempest-swollen, and a crowd
   Of wild, lascivious spirits huddled there,
   The cruel and curious demons of the air,
   Who coldly to consider me began;
   Then, as a crowd jeers some unhappy man,
   Exchanging gestures, winking with their eyes--
   I heard a laughing and a whispering rise:

   "Let us at leisure contemplate this clown,
   This shadow of Hamlet aping Hamlet's frown,
   With wandering eyes and hair upon the wind.
   Is't not a pity that this empty mind,
   This tramp, this actor out of work, this droll,
   Because he knows how to assume a rôle
   Should dream that eagles and insects, streams and woods,
   Stand still to hear him chaunt his dolorous moods?
   Even unto us, who made these ancient things,
   The fool his public lamentation sings."
   With pride as lofty as the towering cloud,
   I would have stilled these clamouring demons loud,
   And turned in scorn my sovereign head away
   Had I not seen--O sight to dim the day!--
   There in the middle of the troupe obscene
   The proud and peerless beauty of my Queen!
   She laughed with them at all my dark distress,
   And gave to each in turn a vile caress.

   THE SOUL OF WINE.

   One eve in the bottle sang the soul of wine:
     "Man, unto thee, dear disinherited,
   I sing a song of love and light divine--
     Prisoned in glass beneath my seals of red.

   "I know thou labourest on the hill of fire,
     In sweat and pain beneath a flaming sun,
   To give the life and soul my vines desire,
     And I am grateful for thy labours done.

   "For I find joys unnumbered when I lave
     The throat of man by travail long outworn,
   And his hot bosom is a sweeter grave
     Of sounder sleep than my cold caves forlorn.

   "Hearest thou not the echoing Sabbath sound?
     The hope that whispers in my trembling breast?
   Thy elbows on the table! gaze around;
     Glorify me with joy and be at rest.

   "To thy wife's eyes I'll bring their long-lost gleam,
     I'll bring back to thy child his strength and light,
   To him, life's fragile athlete I will seem
     Rare oil that firms his muscles for the fight.

   "I flow in man's heart as ambrosia flows;
     The grain the eternal Sower casts in the sod--
   From our first loves the first fair verse arose,
     Flower-like aspiring to the heavens and God!"

   THE WINE OF LOVERS

   Space rolls to-day her splendour round!
   Unbridled, spurless, without bound,
   Mount we upon the wings of wine
   For skies fantastic and divine!

   Let us, like angels tortured by
   Some wild delirious phantasy,
   Follow the far-off mirage born
   In the blue crystal of the morn.

   And gently balanced on the wing
   Of the wild whirlwind we will, ride,
   Rejoicing with the joyous thing.

   My sister, floating side by side,
   Fly we unceasing whither gleams
   The distant heaven of my dreams.

   THE DEATH OF LOVERS

   There shall be couches whence faint odours rise,
   Divans like sepulchres, deep and profound;
   Strange flowers that bloomed beneath diviner skies
   The death-bed of our love shall breathe around.

   And guarding their last embers till the end,
   Our hearts shall be the torches of the shrine,
   And their two leaping flames shall fade and blend
   In the twin mirrors of your soul and mine.

   And through the eve of rose and mystic blue
   A beam of love shall pass from me to you,
   Like a long sigh charged with a last farewell;

   And later still an angel, flinging wide
   The gates, shall bring to life with joyful spell
   The tarnished mirrors and the flames that died.

   THE DEATH OF THE POOR

   Death is consoler and Death brings to life;
     The end of all, the solitary hope;
   We, drunk with Death's elixir, face the strife,
     Take heart, and mount till eve the weary slope.

   Across the storm, the hoar-frost, and the snow,
     Death on our dark horizon pulses clear;
   Death is the famous hostel we all know,
     Where we may rest and sleep and have good cheer.

   Death is an angel whose magnetic palms
   Bring dreams of ecstasy and slumberous calms
   To smooth the beds of naked men and poor.

   Death is the mystic granary of God;
   The poor man's purse; his fatherland of yore;
   The Gate that opens into heavens untrod!

   GYPSIES TRAVELLING

   The tribe prophetic with the eyes of fire
   Went forth last night; their little ones at rest
   Each on his mother's back, with his desire
   Set on the ready treasure of her breast.

   Laden with shining arms the men-folk tread
   By the long wagons where their goods lie hidden;
   They watch the heaven with eyes grown weariëd
   Of hopeless dreams that come to them unbidden.

   The grasshopper, from out his sandy screen,
   Watching them pass redoubles his shrill song;
   Dian, who loves them, makes the grass more green,

   And makes the rock run water for this throng
   Of ever-wandering ones Whose calm eyes see
   Familiar realms of darkness yet to be.

   FRANCISCÆ MEÆ LAUDES

   Novis te cantabo chordis,
   O novelletum quod ludis
   In solitudine cordis.

   Esto sertis implicata,
   O fœmina delicata
   Per quam solvuntur peccata

   Sicut beneficum Lethe,
   Hauriam oscula de te,
   Quæ imbuta es magnete.

   Quum vitiorum tempestas
   Turbabat omnes semitas,
   Apparuisti, Deitas,

   Velut stella salutaris
   In naufragiis amaris....
   Suspendam cor tuis aris!

   Piscina plena virtutis,
   Fons æternæ juventutis,
   Labris vocem redde mutis!

   Quod erat spurcum, cremasti;
   Quod rudius, exæquasti;
   Quod debile, confirmasti!

   In fame mea tabema,
   In nocte mea lucerna,
   Recte me semper gubema.

   Adde nunc vires viribus,
   Dulce balneum suavibus,
   Unguentatum odoribus!

   Meos circa lumbos mica,
   O castitatis lorica,
   Aqua tincta seraphica;

   Patera gemmis corusca,
   Panis salsus, mollis esca,
   Divinum vinum, Francisca!

   A LANDSCAPE

   I would, when I compose my solemn verse,
   Sleep near the heaven as do astrologers,
   Near the high bells, and with a dreaming mind
   Hear their calm hymns blown to me on the wind.

   Out of my tower, with chin upon my hands,
   I'll watch the singing, babbling human bands;
   And see clock-towers like spars against the sky,
   And heavens that bring thoughts of eternity;

   And softly, through the mist, will watch the birth
   Of stars in heaven and lamplight on the earth;
   The threads of smoke that rise above the town;
   The moon that pours her pale enchantment down.

   Seasons will pass till Autumn fades the rose;
   And when comes Winter with his weary snows,
   I'll shut the doors and window-casements tight,
   And build my faery palace in the night.

   Then I will dream of blue horizons deep;
   Of gardens where the marble fountains weep;
   Of kisses, and of ever-singing birds--
   A sinless Idyll built of innocent words.

   And Trouble, knocking at my window-pane
   And at my closet door, shall knock in vain;
   I will not heed him with his stealthy tread,
   Nor from my reverie uplift my head;

   For I will plunge deep in the pleasure still
   Of summoning the spring-time with my will,
   Drawing the sun out of my heart, and there
   With burning thoughts making a summer air.

   THE VOYAGE

   The world is equal to the child's desire
   Who plays with pictures by his nursery fire--
   How vast the world by lamplight seems! How small
   When memory's eyes look back, remembering all!--

   One morning we set forth with thoughts aflame,
   Or heart o'erladen with desire or shame;
   And cradle, to the song of surge and breeze,
   Our own infinity on the finite seas.

   Some flee the memory of their childhood's home;
   And others flee their fatherland; and some,
   Star-gazers drowned within a woman's eyes,
   Flee from the tyrant Circe's witcheries;

   And, lest they still be changed to beasts, take flight
   For the embrasured heavens, and space, and light,
   Till one by one the stains her kisses made
   In biting cold and burning sunlight fade.

   But the true voyagers are they who part
   From all they love because a wandering heart
   Drives them to fly the Fate they cannot fly;
   Whose call is ever "On!"--they know not why.

   Their thoughts are like the clouds that veil a star
   They dream of change as warriors dream of war;
   And strange wild wishes never twice the same:
   Desires no mortal man can give a name.

II

   We are like whirling tops and rolling balls--
   For even when the sleepy night-time falls,
   Old Curiosity still thrusts us on,
   Like the cruel Angel who goads forth the sun.

   The end of fate fades ever through the air,
   And, being nowhere, may be anywhere
   Where a man runs, hope waking in his breast,
   For ever like a madman, seeking rest.

   Our souls are wandering ships outweariëd;
   And one upon the bridge asks: "What's ahead?"
   The topman's voice with an exultant sound
   Cries: "Love and Glory!"--then we run aground.

   Each isle the pilot signals when 'tis late,
   Is El Dorado, promised us by fate--
   Imagination, spite of her belief,
   Finds, in the light of dawn, a barren reef.

   Oh the poor seeker after lands that flee!
   Shall we not bind and cast into the sea
   This drunken sailor whose ecstatic mood
   Makes bitterer still the water's weary flood?

   Such is an old tramp wandering in the mire,
   Dreaming the paradise of his own desire,
   Discovering cities of enchanted sleep
   Where'er the light shines on a rubbish heap.

III

   Strange voyagers, what tales of noble deeds
   Deep in your dim sea-weary eyes one reads!
   Open the casket where your memories are,
   And show each jewel, fashioned from a star;

   For I would travel without sail or wind,
   And so, to lift the sorrow from my mind,
   Let your long memories of sea-days far fled
   Pass o'er my spirit like a sail outspread.

   What have you seen?

IV

                         "We have seen waves and stars,
   And lost sea-beaches, and known many wars,
   And notwithstanding war and hope and fear,
   We were as weary there as we are here.

   "The lights that on the violet sea poured down,
   The suns that set behind some far-off town,
   Lit in our hearts the unquiet wish to fly
   Deep in the glimmering distance of the sky;

   "The loveliest countries that rich cities bless,
   Never contained the strange wild loveliness
   By fate and chance shaped from the floating cloud--
   And we were always sorrowful and proud!

   "Desire from joy gains strength in weightier measure.
   Desire, old tree who draw'st thy sap from pleasure,
   Though thy bark thickens as the years pass by,
   Thine arduous branches rise towards the sky;

   "And wilt thou still grow taller, tree more fair
   Than the tall cypress?
                          --Thus have we, with care,
   "Gathered some flowers to please your eager mood,
   Brothers who dream that distant things are good!

   "We have seen many a jewel-glimmering throne;
   And bowed to Idols when wild horns were blown
   In palaces whose faery pomp and gleam
   To your rich men would be a ruinous dream;

   "And robes that were a madness to the eyes;
   Women whose teeth and nails were stained with dyes;
   Wise jugglers round whose neck the serpent winds----"

   And then, and then what more?

VI

                                 "O childish minds!

   "Forget not that which we found everywhere,
   From top to bottom of the fatal stair,
   Above, beneath, around us and within,
   The weary pageant of immortal sin.

   "We have seen woman, stupid slave and proud,
   Before her own frail, foolish beauty bowed;
   And man, a greedy, cruel, lascivious fool,
   Slave of the slave, a ripple in a pool;

   "The martyrs groan, the headsman's merry mood;
   And banquets seasoned and perfumed with blood;
   Poison, that gives the tyrant's power the slip;
   And nations amorous of the brutal whip;

   "Many religions not unlike our own,
   All in full flight for heaven's resplendent throne;
   And Sanctity, seeking delight in pain,
   Like a sick man of his own sickness vain;

   "And mad mortality, drunk with its own power,
   As foolish now as in a bygone hour,
   Shouting, in presence of the tortured Christ:
   'I curse thee, mine own Image sacrificed.'

   "And silly monks in love with Lunacy,
   Fleeing the troops herded by destiny,
   Who seek for peace in opiate slumber furled--
   Such is the pageant of the rolling world!"

VII

   O bitter knowledge that the wanderers gain!
   The world says our own age is little and vain;
   For ever, yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,
   'Tis horror's oasis in the sands of sorrow.

   Must we depart? If you can rest, remain;
   Part, if you must. Some fly, some cower in vain,
   Hoping that Time, the grim and eager foe,
   Will pass them by; and some run to and fro

   Like the Apostles or the Wandering Jew;
   Go where they will, the Slayer goes there too!
   And there are some, and these are of the wise,
   Who die as soon as birth has lit their eyes.

   But when at length the Slayer treads us low,
   We will have hope and cry, "'Tis time to go!"
   As when of old we parted for Cathay
   With wind-blown hair and eyes upon the bay.

   We will embark upon the Shadowy Sea,
   Like youthful wanderers for the first time free--
   Hear you the lovely and funereal voice
   That sings: _O come all ye whose wandering joys_
   _Are set upon the scented Lotus flower,_
   _For here we sell the fruit's miraculous boon;_
   _Come ye and drink the sweet and sleepy power_
   _Of the enchanted, endless afternoon._

   VIII

   O Death, old Captain, it is time, put forth!
   We have grown weary of the gloomy north;
   Though sea and sky are black as ink, lift sail!
   Our hearts are full of light and will not fail.

   O pour thy sleepy poison in the cup!
   The fire within the heart so burns us up
   That we would wander Hell and Heaven through,
   Deep in the Unknown seeking something _new_!

[edit]

FROM THE FLOWERS OF EVIL Translated by W. J. Robertson

   BENEDICTION

   When, by the sovran will of Powers Eternal,
     The poet passed into this weary world,
   His mother, filled with fears and doubts infernal,
     Clenching her hands towards Heaven these curses hurled.

   --"Why rather did I not within me treasure
     "A knot of serpents than this thing of scorn?
   "Accursed be the night of fleeting pleasure
     "Whence in my womb this chastisement was borne!

   "Since thou hast chosen me to be the woman
     "Whose loathsome fruitfulness her husband shames,
   "Who may not cast aside this birth inhuman,
     "As one that flings love-tokens to the flames,

   "The hatred that on me thy vengeance launches
     "On this thwart creature I will pour in flood:
   "So twist the sapling that its withered branches
     "Shall never once put forth a cankered bud!"

   Regorging thus the venom of her malice,
     And misconceiving thy decrees sublime,
   In deep Gehenna's gulf she fills the chalice
     Of torments destined to maternal crime.

   Yet, safely sheltered by his viewless angel,
     The Childe forsaken revels in the Sun;
   And all his food and drink is an evangel
     Of nectared sweets, sent by the Heavenly One.

   He communes with the clouds, knows the wind's voices,
     And on his pilgrimage enchanted sings;
   Seeing how like the wild bird he rejoices
     The hovering Spirit weeps and folds his wings.

   All those he fain would love shrink back in terror,
     Or, boldened by his fearlessness elate,
   Seek to seduce him into sin and error,
     And flesh on him the fierceness of their hate.

   In bread and wine, wherewith his soul is nourished,
     They mix their ashes and foul spume impure;
   Lying they cast aside the things he cherished,
     And curse the chance that made his steps their lure.

   His spouse goes crying in the public places:
     "Since he doth choose my beauty to adore,
   "Aping those ancient idols Time defaces
     "I would regild my glory as of yore.

   "Nard, balm and myrrh shall tempt till he desires me
     "With blandishments, with dainties and with wine,
   "Laughing if in a heart that so admires me
     "I may usurp the sovranty divine!

   "Until aweary of love's impious orgies,
     "Fastening on him my fingers firm and frail,
   "These claws, keen as the harpy's when she gorges,
     "Shall in the secret of his heart prevail.

   "Then, thrilled and trembling like a young bird captured,
     "The bleeding heart shall from his breast be torn;
   "To glut his maw my wanton hound, enraptured,
     "Shall see me fling it to the earth in scorn."

   Heavenward, where he beholds a throne resplendent,
     The poet lifts his hands, devout and proud,
   And the vast lightnings of a soul transcendent
     Veil from his gaze awhile the furious crowd:--

   "Blessed be thou, my God, that givest sorrow,
     "Sole remedy divine for things unclean,
   "Whence souls robust a healing virtue borrow,
     "That tempers them for sacred joys serene!

   "I know thou hast ordained in blissful regions
     "A place, a welcome in the festal bowers,
   "To call the poet with thy holy Legions,
     "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers.

   "I know that Sorrow is the strength of Heaven,
     "'Gainst which in vain strive ravenous Earth and Hell,
   "And that his crown must be of mysteries woven
     "Whereof all worlds and ages hold the spell.

   "But not antique Palmyra's buried treasure,
     "Pearls of the sea, rare metal, precious gem,
   "Though set by thine own hand could fill the measure
     "Of beauty for his radiant diadem;

   "For this thy light alone, intense and tender,
     "Flows from the primal source of effluence pure,
   "Whereof all mortal eyes, though bright their splendour,
     "Are but the broken glass and glimpse obscure."
                                      SPLEEN ET IDEAL.

   ILL LUCK

   To bear so vast a load of grief
     Thy courage, Sisyphus, I crave!
     My heart against the task is brave,
   But Art is long and Time is brief.

   For from Fame's proud sepulchral arches,
     Towards a graveyard lone and dumb,
     My sad heart, like a muffled drum,
   Goes beating slow funereal marches.

   --Full many a shrouded jewel sleeps
   In dark oblivion, lost in deeps
       Unknown to pick or plummet's sound:

   Full many a weeping blossom flings
   Her perfume, sweet as secret things,
       In silent solitudes profound.
                                    LE GUIGNON.

   BEAUTY

   My face is a marmoreal dream, O mortals!
     And on my breast all men are bruised in turn,
     So moulded that the poet's love may burn
   Mute and eternal as the earth's cold portals.

   Throned like a Sphinx unveiled in the blue deep,
     A heart of snow my swan-white beauty muffles;
     I hate the line that undulates and ruffles:
   And never do I laugh and never weep.

   The poets, prone beneath my presence towering
   With stately port of proudest obelisks,
   Worship with rites austere, their days devouring;

   For I have charms to keep their love, pure disks
   That make all things more beautiful and tender:
   My large eyes, radiant with eternal splendour!
                                     LA BEAUTÉ.

   IDEAL LOVE

   No, never can these frail ephemeral creatures,
     The withered offspring of a worthless age,
   These buskined limbs, these false and painted features,
     The hunger of a heart like mine assuage.

   Leave to the laureate of sickly posies
     Gavami's hospital sylphs, a simpering choir!
   Vainly I seek among those pallid roses
     One blossom that allures my red desire.

   Thou with my soul's abysmal dreams be blended,
   Lady Macbeth, in crime superb and splendid,
     A dream of Æschylus flowered in cold eclipse

   Of Northern suns! Thou, Night, inspire my passion,
   Calm child of Angelo, coiling in strange fashion
     Thy large limbs moulded for a Titan's lips!
                                      L'IDÉAL.

   HYMN TO BEAUTY

   Be thou from Hell upsprung or Heaven descended,
     Beauty! thy look demoniac and divine
   Pours good and evil things confusedly blended,
     And therefore art thou likened unto wine.

   Thine eye with dawn is filled, with twilight dwindles,
     Like winds of night thou sprinklest perfumes mild;
   Thy kiss, that is a spell, the child's heart kindles,
     Thy mouth, a chalice, makes the man a child.

   Fallen from the stars or risen from gulfs of error,
     Fate dogs thy glamoured garments like a slave;
   With wanton hands thou scatterest joy and terror,
     And rulest over all, cold as the grave.

   Thou tramplest on the dead, scornful and cruel,
     Horror coils like an amulet round thine arms,
   Crime on thy superb bosom is a jewel
     That dances amorously among its charms.

   The dazzled moth that flies to thee, the candle,
     Shrivels and burns, blessing thy fatal flame;
   The lover that dies fawning o'er thy sandal
     Fondles his tomb and breathes the adored name.

   What if from Heaven or Hell thou com'st, immortal
     Beauty? O sphinx-like monster, since alone
   Thine eye, thy smile, thy hand opens the portal
     Of the Infinite I love and have not known.

   What if from God or Satan be the evangel?
     Thou my sole Queen! Witch of the velvet eyes!
   Since with thy fragrance, rhythm and light, O Angel!
     In a less hideous world time swiftlier flies.
                                      HYMNE À LA BEAUTÉ.

   EXOTIC FRAGRANCE

   When, with closed eyes in the warm autumn night,
     I breathe the fragrance of thy bosom bare,
     My dream unfurls a clime of loveliest air,
   Drenched in the fiery sun's unclouded light.

   An indolent island dowered with heaven's delight,
     Trees singular and fruits of savour rare,
     Men having sinewy frames robust and spare,
   And women whose clear eyes are wondrous bright.

   Led by thy fragrance to those shores I hail
     A charmed harbour thronged with mast and sail,
   Still wearied with the quivering sea's unrest;

   What time the scent of the green tamarinds
     That thrills the air and fills my swelling breast
   Blends with the mariners' song and the sea-winds.
                                      PARFUM EXOTIQUE.

   XXVIII SONNET

   In undulant robes with nacreous sheen impearled
     She walks as in some stately saraband;
   Or like lithe snakes by sacred charmers curled
     In cadence wreathing on the slender wand.

   Calm as blue wastes of sky and desert sand
     That watch unmoved the sorrows of this world;
   With slow regardless sweep as on the strand
     The long swell of the woven sea-waves swirled.

   Her polished orbs are like a mystic gem,
     And, while this strange and symbolled being links
     The inviolate angel and the antique sphinx,

   Insphered in gold, steel, light and diadem
     The splendour of a lifeless star endows
     With clear cold majesty the barren spouse.

   MUSIC

   Launch me, O music, whither on the soundless
            Sea my star gleams pale!
   I beneath cloudy cope or rapt in boundless
            Æther set my sail;

   With breast outblown, swollen by the wind that urges
            Swelling sheets, I scale
   The summit of the wave whose vexed surges
            Night from me doth veil;

   A labouring vessel's passions in my pulses
            Thrill the shuddering sense;
   The wind that wafts, the tempest that convulses,
            O'er the gulf immense
   Swing me.--Anon flat calm and clearer air
            Glass my soul's despair!
                                      LA MUSIQUE.

   THE SPIRITUAL DAWN

   When on some wallowing soul the roseate East
     Dawns with the Ideal that awakes and gnaws,
     By vengeful working of mysterious laws
   An angel rises in the drowsed beast.

   The inaccessible blue of the soul-sphere
     To him whose grovelling dream remorse doth gall
     Yawns wide as when the gulfs of space enthral.
   So, heavenly Goddess, Spirit pure and clear,

   Even on the reeking ruins of vile shame
     Thy rosy vision, beautiful and bright,
     For ever floats on my enlargëd sight.

   Thus sunlight blackens the pale taper-flame;
     And thus is thy victorious phantom one,
     O soul of splendour, with the immortal Sun!
                                      L'AUBE SPIRITUELLE.

   THE FLAWED BELL

   Bitter and sweet it is, in winter night,
     Hard by the flickering fire that smokes, to list
   While far-off memories rise in sad slow flight,
     With chimes that echo singing through the mist.

   O blessëd be the bell whose vigorous throat,
     In spite of age alert, with strength unspent,
   Utters religiously his faithful note,
     Like an old warrior watching near the tent!

   My soul, alas! is flawed, and when despair
   Would people with her songs the chill night-air
     Too oft they faint in hoarse enfeebled tones,

     As when a wounded man forgotten moans
   By the red pool, beneath a heap of dead,
   And dying writhes in frenzy on his bed.
                                      LA CLOCHE FÉLÉE.

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THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE Translated by Richard Herne Shepherd

   A CARCASS

   Recall to mind the sight we saw, my soul,
       That soft, sweet summer day:
   Upon a bed of flints a carrion foul,
       Just as we turn'd the way

   Its legs erected, wanton-like, in air,
       Burning and sweating past,
   In unconcern'd and cynic sort laid bare
       To view its noisome breast.

   The sun lit up the rottenness with gold,
       To bake it well inclined,
   And give great Nature back a hundredfold
       All she together join'd.

   The sky regarded as the carcass proud
       Oped flower-like to the day;
   So strong the odour, on the grass you vow'd
       You thought to faint away.

   The flies the putrid belly buzz'd about,
       Whence black battalions throng
   Of maggots, like thick liquid flowing out
       The living rags along.

   And as a wave they mounted and went down,
       Or darted sparkling wide:
   As if the body, by a wild breath blown,
       Lived as it multiplied.

   From all this life a music strange there ran,
       Like wind and running burns:
   Or like the wheat a winnower in his fan
       With rhythmic movement turns.

   The forms wore off, and as a dream grew faint,
       An outline dimly shown,
   And which the artist finishes to paint
       From memory alone.

   Behind the rocks watch'd us with angry eye
       A bitch disturb'd in theft,
   Waiting to take, till we had pass'd her by
       The morsel she had left.

   Yet you will be like that corruption too,
       Like that infection prove--
   Star of my eyes, sun of my nature, you,
       My angel and my love!

   Queen of the graces, you will even be so,
       When, the last ritual said,
   Beneath the grass and the fat flowers you go,
       To mould among the dead.

   Then, O my beauty, tell the insatiate worm,
       Who wastes you with his kiss,
   I have kept the godlike essence and the form
       Of perishable bliss!

II

   WEEPING AND WANDERING

   Say, Agatha, if at times your spirit turns
   Far from the black sea of the city's mud,
   To another ocean, where the splendour burns
   All blue, and clear, and deep as maidenhood?
   Say, Agatha, if your spirit thither turns?

   The boundless sea consoles the weary mind!
   What demon gave the sea--that chantress hoarse
   To the huge organ of the chiding wind--
   The function grand to rock us like a nurse?
   The boundless ocean soothes the jaded mind!

   O car and frigate, bear me far away,
   For here our tears moisten the very clay.
   Is't true that Agatha's sad heart at times
   Says, far from sorrows, from remorse, from crimes,
   Remove me, car, and, frigate, bear away?

   O perfumed paradise, how far removed,
   Where 'neath a clear sky all is love and joy,
   Where all we love is worthy to be loved,
   And pleasure drowns the heart, but does not cloy.
   O perfumed paradise, so far removed!

   But the green paradise of childlike loves,
   The walks, the songs, the kisses, and the flowers,
   The violins dying behind the hills, the hours
   Of evening and the wine-flasks in the groves.
   But the green paradise of early loves,

   The innocent paradise, full of stolen joys,
   Is't farther off than ev'n the Indian main?
   Can we recall it with our plaintive cries,
   Or give it life, with silvery voice, again,
   The innocent paradise, full of furtive joys?

III

   LESBOS

   Mother of Latin sports and Greek delights,
     Where kisses languishing or pleasureful,
     Warm as the suns, as the water-melons cool,
   Adorn the glorious days and sleepless nights,
   Mother of Latin sports and Greek delights.

   Lesbos, where kisses are as waterfalls
     That fearless into gulfs unfathom'd leap,
   Now run with sobs, now slip with gentle brawls,
     Stormy and secret, manifold and deep;
   Lesbos, where kisses are as waterfalls!

   Lesbos, where Phryne Phryne to her draws,
     Where ne'er a sigh did echoless expire,
     As Paphos' equal thee the stars admire,
   Nor Venus envies Sappho without cause!
   Lesbos, where Phryne Phryne to her draws,

   Lesbos, the land of warm and languorous nights,
     Where by their mirrors seeking sterile good,
   The girls with hollow eyes, in soft delights,
     Caress the ripe fruits of their womanhood,
   Lesbos, the land of warm and languorous nights.

   Leave, leave old Plato's austere eye to frown;
     Pardon is thine for kisses' sweet excess,
   Queen of the land of amiable renown,
     And for exhaustless subtleties of bliss,
   Leave, leave old Plato's austere eye to frown.

   Pardon is thine for the eternal pain
     That on the ambitious hearts for ever lies,
   Whom far from us the radiant smile could gain,
     Seen dimly on the verge of other skies;
   Pardon is thine for the eternal pain!

   Which of the gods will dare thy judge to be,
     And to condemn thy brow with labour pale,
     Not having balanced in his golden scale
   The flood of tears thy brooks pour'd in the sea?
   Which of the gods will dare thy judge to be?

   What boot the laws of just and of unjust?
     Great-hearted virgins, honour of the isles,
   Lo, your religion also is august,
     And love at hell and heaven together smiles!
   What boot the laws of just and of unjust?

   For Lesbos chose me out from all my peers,
     To sing the secret of her maids in flower,
     Opening the mystery dark from childhood's hour
   Of frantic laughters, mix'd with sombre tears;
   For Lesbos chose me out from all my peers.

   And since I from Leucate's top survey,
     Like a sentinel with piercing eye and true,
   Watching for brig and frigate night and day,
     Whose distant outlines quiver in the blue,
   And since I from Leucate's top survey,

   To learn if kind and merciful the sea,
     And midst the sobs that make the rock resound,
   Brings back some eve to pardoning Lesbos, free
     The worshipp'd corpse of Sappho, who made her bound
   To learn if kind and merciful the sea!

   Of her the man-like lover-poetess,
     In her sad pallor more than Venus fair!
     The azure eye yields to that black eye, where
   The cloudy circle tells of the distress
   Of her the man-like lover-poetess!

   Fairer than Venus risen on the world,
     Pouring the treasures of her aspect mild,
   The radiance of her fair white youth unfurl'd
     On Ocean old enchanted with his child;
   Fairer than Venus risen on the world.

   Of Sappho, who, blaspheming, died that day
     When trampling on the rite and sacred creed,
   She made her body fair the supreme prey
     Of one whose pride punish'd the impious deed
   Of Sappho who, blaspheming, died that day.

   And since that time it is that Lesbos moans,
     And, spite the homage which the whole world pays,
   Is drunk each night with cries of pain and groans,
     Her desert shores unto the heavens do raise,
   And since that time it is that Lesbos moans!

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INTIMATE PAPERS FROM THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF BAUDELAIRE Translated by Joseph T. Shipley

ROCKETS

MY HEART LAID BARE

The following pages (not included in the "complete" French edition) contain notes found after the death of Baudelaire; disconnected fragments; echoes; pistils of ideas, promising wondrous blossom, to which no pollen came. They epitomize the moral and intellectual life of the artist. In his own art, Baudelaire is the creator of a new mood, in which Maeterlinck and Verlaine are among his disciples, where Swinburne and Wilde have followed him; in painting and in music, his criticism was seeking in 1850 all that the later development of these arts has brought forth. The reflection of that brilliant mind glows in these intimate pages.

In the almost absolute isolation in which he confined himself more and more, Baudelaire, who had so loved to expand in conversation, felt the need of a confidant that would not importune him with useless counsels, nor with expressions of sympathy he would have repulsed, if only through dandyism. Paper alone could be that confidant.

The poet is wholly within these journals, with his religious, political, moral and literary theories, above all, with the explicit evidence of his weaknesses and his griefs. What skilled theologian has made a more haughty confession than this: "There are none great among men save the poet, the priest and the soldier; the man who sings, the man who blesses, the man who sacrifices others and himself. The rest is made for the whip"? What political economist has made a more absolute declaration of principles than this: "There is no reasonable, stable government save the aristocratic. Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd"?

His ideal of the greatness of the individual is derived logically from his conception of an aristocratic society under the triumvirate of the poet, the priest and the soldier. "Before all, to be a great man and a saint for one's self;" that, for Baudelaire, is the one ambition worthy of a superior nature. He has indicated the principal traits of the ideal "dandy" that he has sought unceasingly. The dandy is not only the most elegant of men, of the most original and discriminating tastes, which he exercises in his habits, in the choice of his books or his mistress; he is armed with a will superior to all obstacles, opposing caprice with invincible energy, and correcting in himself the inevitable faults of nature with all the resources of art.

The two manuscripts in which these ideals are scattered differ so slightly that it might seem impossible to decide which should be read first. A closer examination, however, indicates that _Rockets_ is of the period about ten years before the author's death, while _My Heart Laid Bare_ belongs entirely to the days when he felt the first attacks of the illness that was to bear him off. No effort has been made to group the paragraphs according to topic; they are printed as they appear in the manuscript (the page divisions of which are indicated by the successive numbers). The documents furnish an interesting supplement to the more formal works of the poet, and a valuable contribution to literature.

INTIMATE PAPERS

ROCKETS

Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine.

God is the only being who, to govern, need not even exist.

That which is created by the mind lives more truly than matter.

Love is the desire of prostitution. There is not even one noble pleasure which cannot be reduced to prostitution.

At a play, at a ball, each one finds pleasure in all. What is art? Prostitution.

The pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious expression of joy in the multiplication of number.

_All_ is number. Number is in _all_. Number is in the individual. Intoxication is a number.

The desire of productive concentration ought to replace, in a mature being, the desire of deperdition.

Love may spring from a generous emotion: desire of prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by the desire of possession.

Love would like to come out of itself, to merge itself in its victim, as the victor in the vanquished, while still preserving the privileges of the conqueror.

The delights of whoso keeps a mistress partake at once of the angel and of the proprietor. Charity and ferocity. They are even independent of sex, of beauty, of the animal kind.

Immense depth of thought in popular phrases, hollowed out by generations of ants.

Of the femininity of the Church, as the reason for its omnipotence.

Of the color violet (restrained, mysterious, veiled love, color of canoness).

The priest is immense, because he makes one believe in a host of astounding matters. That the Church wants to do all and to be all, is a law of the human mind. Mankind worships authority. Priests are the servants and sectaries of the imagination. The throne and the altar, revolutionary maxim. Religious intoxication of great cities. Pantheism. I, that is all; all, that is I. Vortex.

III

I think I have already written in my notes that love is very like torture or a surgical operation. But that idea can be developed in the bitterest way. Even though two lovers are deeply smitten and filled with reciprocal desire, one of the two will always be more calm, or less enraptured than the other. He or she is the surgeon, or the hangman; the other is the patient, the victim. Do you hear those sighs, preludes of a tragedy of shame, those groanings, those cries, those throat-rattlings? Who has not breathed them, who has not irresistibly summoned them forth? And what worse do you find in the torments applied by painstaking torturers? Those faraway eyes of the somnambulist, those limbs the muscles of which twitch and grow taut as under the action of a galvanic battery; drunkenness, delirium, opium, in their most infuriate consequences, surely yield no such frightful, no such curious examples. And the human countenance, which Ovid thought fashioned to reflect the stars, behold! it speaks only of insane ferocity, or is spread in a species of death. For, certainly, I believe it would be sacrilege to apply the word "ecstasy" to that sort of decomposition.

Frightful play, in which one of the players must lose control of himself!

Once, in my presence, it was asked in what lay the greatest pleasure of love. Some one answered naturally: in receiving, and another: in giving one's self. The former said: pleasure of pride; and the latter: delight of humility! All these blackguards spoke like the Imitation of Christ.--Finally, an impudent Utopian came forward to affirm that the greatest pleasure of love is to create citizens for the fatherland.

As for me, I said: The one and the supreme bliss of love rests in the certainty of doing _evil_. Both man and woman know, from birth, that in evil lies all bliss.

When a man takes to his bed, almost all his friends have a secret desire to see him die; some, to establish the fact that his health is inferior to theirs; others, in the disinterested hope of studying an agony.

The arabesque is the most spiritual of designs..

The man of letters rouses the capitals and conveys a taste for intellectual gymnastics.

We love women in proportion as they are strangers to us. To love intelligent women is a pleasure of the pederast. Thus bestiality excludes pederasty.

The spirit of buffoonery need not exclude charity; but that's rare.

Enthusiasm applied to other things than abstractions is a sign of weakness and disease.

The thin is more naked, more indecent, than the fat.

VII

_Tragic sky_. Term of an abstract order applied to a material thing.

Man drinks light with the atmosphere. Thus they are right who say that the night air is not healthful for labor.

Man is born a fireworshipper.

Fireworks, conflagrations, incendiaries.

If one imagine a born fireworshipper born a Parsee, one could create a story.

VIII

Misunderstanding of a countenance is the result of the eclipse of the real image by the hallucination born of it.

Know then the joys of a bitter life, and pray, pray ceaselessly. Prayer is a store-house of energy. (Altar of the will. Moral dynamics. The sorcery of the sacraments. Hygiene of the soul.)

Music deepens the sky.

Jean Jacques said that he could not enter a restaurant without a certain emotion. For a timid nature, a ticket office somewhat resembles the tribunal of hell.

Life has but one true attraction: the attraction of play. But if we care not whether we win or lose?

Nations have great men only in spite of themselves--like families. They make every effort not to have them. Therefore, the great man must, in order to exist, possess an offensive force greater than the power of resistance developed by millions of individuals.

Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we might say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.

There are tortoise-shell hides against which scorn is no longer a vengeance.

Many friends, many gloves.[1] Those who have admired me were despised, I might even say were despicable, if I sought to flatter honest men.

Girardin talk Latin! _Pecudesque locutae_.

He belongs to an infidel Society to send Robert Houdin to the Arabs to convert them from the miracles.

[Footnote 1: 'for fear of the itch' is added elsewhere.]

These great, beautiful vessels, imperceptibly swaying (rocking) on the tranquil waters, these sturdy ships, with their idle, homesick air, do they not ask us, in a silent tongue: When do we sail for happiness?

Not to forget the marvellous in drama, sorcery, romance.

The background, the atmosphere in which a whole tale should be steeped. (See the Fall of the House of Usher, and refer this to the profound sensations of hashish and of opium.)

XII

Are there mathematical insanities, and idiots who think that two and two make three? In other words, can hallucination, if the words do not cry out (at being coupled), invade the affairs of pure reason? If, when a man is sunk in habits of sloth, of revery, of idleness, to the point of constantly deferring the important thing to the morrow, another man were to wake him in the morning with biting lash, and were to whip him pitilessly until, unable to work for pleasure, he worked for fear, that man, that flogger, would he not be truly the friend, the benefactor? Besides, one might declare that pleasure would follow, much more justly than is said "Love comes after marriage."

Similarly, in politics, the true saint is he who lashes and destroys the people, for the people's good.

That which is not slightly deformed seems to lack feeling; whence it follows that irregularity, that is, the un-foreseen, surprise, astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.

XIII

Theodore de Banville is not exactly materialistic; he is luminous. His poetry represents happy hours.

For each letter from a creditor, write fifty lines on an abstract subject, and you are saved.

Translation and paraphrase of the _Passion_. To refer everything to that.

Spiritual and physical joys born of the storm, thunder and lightning, tocsin of loving, shadowy memories, of years gone by.

XVI

I have found the definition of Beauty, of my Beauty. It is something ardent and sad, something slightly vague, giving conjecture wing. I will, if you please, apply my idea to a palpable object, for instance, to the most interesting object in society, to a woman's countenance. A seductive and beautiful head, a woman's head, I mean, is a head that brings dreams at once--confusedly--of voluptuousness and of sadness; which bears a suggestion of melancholy, of weariness, even of satiety,--or perhaps an opposite emotion, an ardor, a wish to live, mingled with pent up bitterness, as springs from privation or from despair. Mystery, regret, are also characteristics of beauty.

A handsome male head need not convey, save perhaps in the eyes of a woman, that suggestion of voluptuousness, which, in a female countenance, is generally tantalizing in proportion as the face is melancholy. But that head also will bear something ardent and sad, spiritual needs, ambitions vaguely receding, the thought of a rumbling, unused power, sometimes the thought of a vengeful lack of feeling (for the ideal type of the dandy must not be neglected here), sometimes also--and that is one of the most interesting characteristics of beauty--mystery, and finally (let me have the courage to confess to what degree I feel myself modern in esthetics) _misfortune_. I do not claim that Joy cannot be associated with Beauty, but I do say that Joy is one of its most vulgar ornaments, while Melancholy is, as it were, its illustrious companion, to such a degree that I can scarcely conceive (is my brain an enchanted mirror?) a type of beauty in which is no _Misfortune_. Following--others might say: obsessed by--these ideas, you can see that it would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of manly Beauty is Satan,--as pictured by Milton.

XVII

Auto-idolatry. Poetic harmony of character. Eurhythmy of character and faculties. Of conserving all the faculties. Of augmenting all the faculties. A cult (Magianism, evocatory sorcery).

The sacrifice and the vow are the highest formulæ and symbols of exchange.

Two fundamental literary qualities: the supernatural, and irony. Individual glance, aspect in which things maintain themselves before the writer, then a Satanic turn of mind. The supernatural includes the general color and the accent, i.e., intensity, sonority, limpidity, vibration, depth and resonance in space and in time.

There are moments in life when time and space are deeper, and the intensity of life immeasurably increased.

Of magic applied to the rousing of the great dead, to the reestablishment and the perfecting of health.

Inspiration always comes, when a man _wishes_, but it does not always go, when he wishes.

Of writing and of speech, considered as magic operations, evocatory sorcery.

OF AIRS IN WOMAN

The charming airs, which constitute Beauty, are: The blasé air, the bored air, the giddy air, the impudent air, the cold air, the disdainful air, the commanding air, the willing air, the mischievous air, the sickly air, the feline air, a mingling of childishness, nonchalance and malice.

XVIII

In certain almost supernatural moods of the soul the depth of life reveals itself to the full, in the scene, ordinary as it may be, beneath one's eyes. It becomes the symbol.

As I was crossing the boulevard, and as I hurried to escape the wagons, my aureole slipped off and fell into the mire of the macadam. Fortunately, I had time to pick it up; but a moment after the unlucky idea entered my mind that it was an ill omen; after that the idea clung to me, and gave me no rest the entire day.

Of the worship of one's self in love, from the point of view of health, of hygiene, of the toilet, of eloquence and of spiritual nobility.

XIX

There is a magic operation in prayer. Prayer is one of the great forces of intellectual dynamics. It is like an electric current.

The rosary is a medium, a vehicle; it is prayer brought within reach of all.

Labor, progressive and accumulative force, bearing interest like capital, in faculties as in results.

Play, intermittent energy, even though guided by science, will be conquered, fruitful as it may be, by labor, slight as it may be, but sustained.

If a poet asked the state for the right to have a few bourgeois in his stable, there would be considerable surprise; while, if a bourgeois asked for roast poet, it would seem quite natural.

"Kitten, puss, pussy, my cat, my wolf, my little monkey, big monkey, big serpent, my little melancholy monkey." Such freaks of too often repeated terms, too frequent bestial appellations, reveal a satanic side in love. Have not the devils the forms of beasts? The Camel of Cazotte, camel, devil, and woman.

A man went to a shooting gallery, accompanied by his wife. He selected a puppet, and said to his wife: "I imagine that's you." He closed his eyes and beheaded the puppet. Then he said, kissing his companion's hand: "Dear angel, how I thank you for my skill."

When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I shall have won solitude.

This book is not made for my wives, my daughters or my sisters. I have few of such things.

God is a scandal, a scandal that rebounds.

XXI

Do not scorn any one's sensibility. One's sensibility, that is one's genius.

By an ardent concubinage, one can imagine the joys of a young household.

The precocious taste for women. I used to confuse the odor of fur with the odor of woman. I remember.... Finally, I loved my mother for her elegance. Thus I was a precocious dandy.

The Protestant countries lack two elements essential to the happiness of a well-bred man: gallantry and devotion.

The mingling of the grotesque and the tragic is pleasing to the mind, as discords to blasé ears.

What is intoxicating in bad taste, is the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing.

Germany expresses meditation by line, as England by perspective.

There is, in the birth of every sublime thought, a nervous shock that is felt in the cerebellum.

Spain puts into its religion the ferocity natural to love.

STYLE.--The eternal note, the eternal and cosmopolitan style. Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe.

Why democrats do not love cats is easy to determine. The cat is beautiful; it awakens ideas of luxury, of cleanliness, of voluptuousness, etc.

XXII

A little labor, repeated three hundred and sixty-five times, yields three hundred and sixty-five times a little money, that is, an enormous sum. _At the same time fame is won._

To create a pounced drawing is genius. I ought to create a pounced drawing.

My mother is fantastic; one must fear her and please her.

XXIII

To give one's self over to Satan, what does that mean?

What more absurd than progress since man, as is proven by everyday fact, is always like and equal to man, that is to say, always in the savage state! What are the perils of the forest and the prairie beside the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether man ensnare his dupe on the boulevard, or pierce his prey in unknown forests, is he not eternal man, i.e., the most perfect beast of pray?

They say I am thirty years of age; but if I have lived three minutes in one..., am I not ninety?

... Work, is it not the salt that preserves embalmed souls?

XXIV

I think that the infinite and mysterious charm that rests in the contemplation of a ship, especially of a vessel in motion, springs, in the first place, from regularity and symmetry (which are of the primordial needs of the human mind, as much as complexity and harmony)--and, secondly, from the successive multiplication and generation of all the curves and imaginary figures cut in space by the real elements of the object.

The poetic idea which this movement in lines produces is the hypothesis of a vast, immense, complex but eurythmic being, of a creature full of genius, suffering and sighing all human sighs and all human ambitions.

Civilized races, that always speak so stupidly of savages and barbarians, soon, as d'Aurevilly says, you will _no longer be good enough to be idolaters_. Stoicism, religion that has but one sacrament: suicide!

Conceive a canvas for a lyric or fairy buffoonery, for a pantomime, and transplant it into a serious novel. Bathe the whole in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere,--in the atmosphere of the _great days_. Let there be something soothing,--something even serene, in passion. Regions of pure poetry.

XXV

What is not a priesthood nowadays? Youth itself is a priesthood--so youth tells us.

Man, i.e., every one, is so naturally depraved that he suffers less from the universal abasement than from the establishment of a sensible hierarchy.

XXVI

The world is coming to an end. The only reason for which it can continue is that it exists. How weak that reason is, compared to all that announce the opposite, particularly to this: What has the world henceforth to do beneath the sky? For, supposing that it continue to exist materially, would it be an existence worthy of the name and of the Historical Dictionary? I do not say that the world will be reduced to the expedients and the comic disorder of the South American Republics, that perhaps we shall return to the savage state, and that we shall go, across the grassy ruins of our civilization, seeking our pasture, gun in hand. No; for these adventures presuppose a remnant of vital energy, echo of the earliest ages. New example and new victims of the inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by that through which we thought to live. The mechanical will so have Americanized us, progress will so have atrophied all our spiritual side, that naught, in the sanguine, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the Utopians can be compared to the actual outcome. I ask every thinking man to show me what of life remains. Of religion, I believe it useless to speak and to seek the remnants, since to take the trouble to deny God is the only scandal in that field. Property virtually disappeared with the suppression of the right of the first-born; but the time will come when humanity, like an avenging ogre, will snatch their last morsel from those who think they are the legitimate heirs of the revolutions. Still, that will not be the supreme ill.

The human imagination can conceive, without too much trouble, republics or other community states, worthy of some glory, if directed by consecrated men, by definite aristocrats. But it is not particularly in political institutions that there will be manifest the universal ruin, or the universal progress; for the name matters little. It will be in the debasement of the heart. Need I say that the little of the political remaining will writhe painfully in the embrace of the general bestiality, and that governments will be forced, in order to maintain themselves and to create a phantom of order, to revert to means which will make our actual humanity shudder, although so hardened? Then, the son will flee from his family not at eighteen years, but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will flee, not in search of heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner in a tower, not to immortalize a garret by sublime thoughts, but to establish a trade, to amass wealth, and to compete with his infamous papa, founder and stockholder of a journal which will spread the light and which will cause the century to be looked upon as an abettor of superstition. Then, the wanderers, the outcasts, those who have had several lovers, and who were once called angels, in recognition of the heedlessness which shines, light of luck, in their existence logical as evil--then these, I say, will be no more than a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom that will condemn all, lacking money, all, _even the faults of the senses!_ Then, that which will resemble virtue, what do I say?--all that is not ardor toward Plutus will be considered enormously ridiculous. Justice, if in that fortunate period justice can still exist, will interdict all citizens who cannot make a fortune. Your wife, O Bourgeois! your chaste partner, whose legitimacy is the poetry of your existence, thenceforth, introducing into legality an irreproachable infamy, zealous and loving guardian of your strongbox, will be no more than the ideal of the kept woman. Your daughter, with infantile hopes of marriage, will dream in her cradle of selling herself for a million, and you yourself, O Bourgeois, still less poet than you are to-day, you will see nothing amiss; you will regret naught. For there are things in men that strengthen and prosper as others weaken and decline; and, thanks to the progress of the times, you will have left of your entrails only the viscera! These times are perhaps quite near; who knows even that they have not come, and that the thickness of our skins is not the only obstacle that prevents us from appreciating the environment in which we breathe?

As for me, who sometimes feel in me the ridicule of a prophet, I know that I shall never find in myself the charity of a doctor. Lost in this vile world, jostled by the crowds, I am as a tired man who sees behind him, in the depths of the years, only disillusion and bitterness and ahead, only a storm that carries nothing new, neither knowledge nor grief. The evening that man Stole from fate a few hours of pleasure, cradled in his digestion, forgetful--as far as possible--of the past, content with the present and resigned to the future, intoxicated with his sangfroid and his dandyism, proud of being less base than those who passed, he said, watching the smoke of his cigar: "What does it matter to me where these consciences are going?"

I think I have achieved what mechanics call an extra. However, I shall retain these pages,--because I want to date my sadness.

MY HEART LAID BARE

Of the vaporization and the centralization of the ego. All lies in that.

Of a certain sensual joy in the society of extravagants.

(I plan to begin _My Heart Laid Bare_ at any point, in any way, and to continue it from day to day, following the inspiration of the occasion and the moment, provided that the inspiration be vivid.)

The first comer, if he can entertain, has the right to speak of himself.

III

I understand that some people desert a cause to discover what they can experience in serving another.

It might be pleasant to bet alternately victim and executioner.

Woman is the opposite of the dandy. Thus she must inspire horror. Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat, thirsty, and she wants to drink. She is proud, and she, wants to be....

True merit!

Woman is _natural_, that is to say, abominable.

Also, she is always vulgar, that is, the opposite of the dandy.

_In regard to the Legion of Honor_. He who seeks the cross seems to say: "If I am not decorated for having done my duty, I shall not go ahead."

If a man has merit, what is the good in decorating him? If he has not, then he can be decorated, since that will give him a lustre.

To consent to be decorated, is to recognize that the state has the right to judge you, to adorn you, et cetera.

Furthermore, if not pride, Christian humility should defend the cross.

_Calculation in favor of God._ Nothing exists without an end. Hence my existence has an end. What end? I do not know. Hence it is not I that have marked it. Hence it is some one wiser than I. Hence I must pray to some one to enlighten me. That is the wisest part.

The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.

Analysis of counter-religions; example: sacred prostitution.

What is sacred prostitution? Nervous excitation. Pagan mysticism. Mysticism, link between paganism and Christianity. Paganism and Christianity are reciprocal proofs.

Revolution and the worship of Reason prove the concept of Sacrifice.

Superstition is the reservoir of all truths.

There is in all change something at once agreeable and infamous, something that smacks of infidelity and of moving day. That is enough to explain the French Revolution.

VII

My intoxication in 1848. Of what sort was that intoxication? Desire of vengeance. Natural pleasure in demolishing. Literary drunkenness; memories of reading.

The 15th of May. Ever the desire of destruction. Legitimate desire, if all that is natural is legitimate.

The horrors of June. Madness of the people and madness of the bourgeoisie. Natural love of crime.

My fury at the coup d'état. How many gunshots sustained! Another Buonaparte! What a disgrace!

Still, all is quieted. Has not the President the right to invoke?

What Emperor Napoleon III is? What he is worth?

To find the explanation of his nature, and of his providentially.

VIII

To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.

1848 was amusing only because every one was building Utopias like castles in Spain.

1848 was charming only by the very excess of the ridiculous.

Robespierre is estimable only because he has made some fine phrases.

The Revolution, by sacrifice, confirmed superstition.

_Politique_. I have no convictions, as the men of my age understand the term, because I have no ambition.

There is no basis in me for conviction.

There is a certain cowardice, or rather a certain softness, in honest men.

The brigands alone are convinced--of what? That they must succeed. Therefore, they succeed.

Why should I succeed, when I haven't even the desire to try?

Glorious empires can be founded on crime, and noble religions on imposture.

However, I have some convictions, in a higher sense, that cannot be understood by the men of my day.

Feeling of _solitude_, from my childhood. Despite my family, and in the midst of my comrades above all,--feeling of an eternally solitary destiny.

Withal, an intense desire for life and for pleasure.

Almost all our life is spent in idle curiosity. In revenge, there are things which ought to rouse human curiosity to the highest degree, and which, to judge by their commonplace activity, inspire it in no one!

Where are our dead friends? Why are we here? Do we come from somewhere? What is liberty? Can it harmonize with providential law? Is the number of souls finite or infinite? And the number of habitable worlds? etc., etc.

Nations have great men only in spite of themselves. Hence the great man is the conqueror of all his nation.

The modern ridiculous religions: Molière, Béranger, Garibaldi.

XII

Belief in progress is a doctrine of the slothful, a doctrine of the Belgians. It is the individual who relies on his neighbors to tend to his affairs. There can be no progress (true, that is, moral) save in the individual and by the individual himself. But the world is composed of folks who can think only in common, in bands. Thus the Belgian societies. There are also folks who can amuse themselves only in droves. The true hero finds his pleasure alone.

Eternal superiority of the dandy. What is the dandy?

XIII

My opinions on the theatre. What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still to-day, is _lustre_,--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline; complex, circular, symmetrical.

However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones; finally, I should like the female parts to be played by men.

After all, lustre has always seemed to me the principal actor, seen through the large or the small end of the glass.

XIV

One must work, if not through desire, at least in despair, since, as is well established, to work is less boring than to seek amusement.

There are in every man, at every moment, two simultaneous postulations, one toward God, the other toward Satan.

The invocation of God, or spirituality, is a desire to rise; that of Satan, or bestiality, is a joy in descent. To the latter should be attributed love for women.

The joys which spring from these two loves conform to their two natures.

XVI

Intoxication of humanity; great picture to be made, in the sense of charity, in the sense of libertinage, in the literary or dramaturgic sense.

XVII

Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

      *       *       *       *       *

Capital punishment is the result of a mystic idea, totally misunderstood to-day. The death penalty has not as its object to _preserve_ society, _materially_ at least. Its object is the _preservation_ (spiritually) of society and the guilty one. In order that the sacrifice be perfect, there must be assent and joy on the part of the victim. To give chloroform to one condemned to death would be an impiety, for it would be to wipe out the consciousness of his grandeur as victim and to destroy his chance of gaining paradise.

As to torture, it is born of the infamous side of the heart of man, athirst for voluptuousness. Cruelty and voluptuousness, identical sensations, like extreme heat and extreme cold.

XVIII

A dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a dandy talking to the people, save to scoff at them?

There is no reasonable, stable government save the aristocratic.

Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd.

Immense nausea of placards.

There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.

Other men are serfs or slaves, created for the stable, that is, to exercise what are called professions.

XIX

Observe that those who advocate the abolition of capital punishment are more or less interested in its abolishment. Often, they are executioners. The matter may be summarized thus: "I wish to be able to cut off your head, but you shall not touch mine."

Those who abolish souls (materialists) necessarily abolish hell; they are, beyond all doubt, interested.

At the least, they are men that are afraid to live again, slothful ones.

Mme. de Metternich, although a princess, has forgotten to answer me, in regard to what I said of her and of Wagner. Manners of the Nineteenth Century.

XXII

The woman Sand is the Prudhomme of immorality. She has always been a moralist. Only formerly she practiced amorality. Also she has never been an artist. She has the famous _fluent style_, dear to the bourgeois.

She is stupid, she is heavy, she is a chatterbox. She has, in moral matters, the same depth of judgment and the same delicacy of feeling as innkeepers and kept women. What she has said of her mother; what she has said of poetry. Her love for the workingman.

George Sand is one of those old ingenues who do not wish to quit the boards.

See the preface to _Mlle. La Quintinie_, where she claims that true Christians do not believe in hell. Sand is for the God of good folks, the god of innkeepers and of domestic sharpers.

She has good reason to wish to wipe out hell.

XXIII

It must not be thought that the devil tempts only men of genius. He doubtless scorns imbeciles, but he does not disdain their assistance. Quite the contrary, he founds great hopes on them.

Take George Sand. She is especially, and above all things, a great _blockhead_; but she is _possessed_. It is the devil who has persuaded her to trust in her _good heart_ and her _good sense_, so that she might persuade all other great blockheads to trust in their good heart and their good sense.

I cannot think of that stupid creature without a shudder of horror. If I were to meet her, I could not keep myself from hurling a basin of holy water at her.

XXIV

I am bored in France, especially as every one resembles Voltaire.

Emerson forgot Voltaire in his "Representative Men." He could have made a fine chapter entitled Voltaire or The Antipoet, the king of boobies, the prince of the shallow, the anti-artist, the preacher of innkeepers, the father who "lived in a shoe" of the editors of the century.

XXV

In the "Ears of the Earl of Chesterfield," Voltaire jokes at the expense of that immortal soul which resided, for nine months, in the midst of excrement and urine. Voltaire, like all the slothful, hates mystery.

(At least, he might have divined in that environment the malice or satire of Providence against love, and, in the process of generation, a sign of original sin. In fact, we can make love only with excretory organs.)

Unable to suppress love, the Church wished at least to disinfect it, and created marriage.

XXVI

Portrait of the literary riff-raff. Doctor Tavernus Crapulosus Pedantissimus. His portrait in the manner of Praxiteles. His pipe, his opinions, his Hegelianism, his filth, his ideas of art, his spleen, his jealousy. A fine picture of modern youth.

XXVII

Theology. What is the fall? If it is unity become duality, it is God who has fallen. In other words, is not creation the fall of God?

Dandyism. What is the superior man? It is not the specialist. It is the man of leisure and broad education. To be rich and to love labor.

XXVIII

Why does the man of parts prefer maidens to women of the world, though they are equally stupid? Find this out.

XXIX

There are women who are like the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. They are wanted no more, because they have been sullied by certain men. Just as I would not put on the breeches of a mangy fellow.

What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice.

XXX

Study of the great disease of horror of the home. Reasons for the disease.

Indignation at the universal fatuity of all classes, of all beings, of both sexes, of every age.

Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.

XXXI

Of love, of the predilection of the French for military metaphors. Here every metaphor wears a moustache.

Militant literature.--To man the breach.--To bear the standard aloft.--To maintain the standard high and firm.--To hurl oneself into the thick of the fight.--One of the veterans. All these fine phrases apply generally to the college scouts and to the do-nothings of the coffee-house.

XXXII

To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The _littérateurs_ of the advance guard. This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated, Belgian minds, which can think only in society.

XXXIII

Desire of pleasure binds us to the present. Care for our health suspends us on the future.

He who attaches himself to pleasure, that is, to the present, is to me as one who, rolling down an incline, and trying to cling to the shrubs, uproots them and bears them away in his fall.

Before all to be a _great man_ and a saint for one's self.

XXXV

In the end, before all history and before the French people, the great glory of Napoleon III will have been to prove that the first comer, by seizing the telegraph and the national press, can govern a great nation.

Imbeciles are those who think that such things can be accomplished without the permission of the people,--and those who believe that glory can be founded only on virtue!

XXXVI

What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.

Man is an animal of worship. To worship is to sacrifice one's self and to prostitute one's self.

Thus all love is prostitution.

The most prostituted being is the being beyond compare, is. God, since he is the soul supreme for every individual, since he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.

PRAYER

Do not chastise me in my mother, you chastise my mother because of me.--I commend to you the souls of my father and Mariette.--Give me each day strength to perform the present duty and thus to become a hero and a saint.

XXXVII

A chapter on the indestructible, eternal, universal and ingenious human ferocity. Of the love of blood, of the intoxication of blood, of the intoxication of crowds. Of the intoxication of the executed criminal (Damiens).

XXXIX

I have always been astonished that women are allowed to enter church. What conversation can they have with God?

The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, whim) is one of the seductive forms of the devil.

Woman cannot separate the soul from the body. She is simple, like the animals.--A satirist would say it is because she has only a body.

XLII

Veuillot is so coarse and such an enemy of the arts that one would think all the democracy of the world was harbored in his breast.

Development of the portrait. Supremacy of the pure idea in the Christian as in the Babouvian communist.

Fanaticism of humility. Not even to aspire to understand religion.

XLIV

In love, as in almost all human affairs, the _entente cordial_ is the result of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is pleasure. The man cries: "Oh my angel!"

The woman coos: "Mamma! Mamma!" And the two imbeciles are persuaded that they are thinking in concert.--The insuperable gulf, which bars communication, remains unabridged.

XLV

Why is the spread of the sea so infinitely and so eternally agreeable?

Because the sea conveys the thought both of immensity and of movement. Six or seven leagues are for man the radius of the infinite. 'Tis a diminutive infinite. What matter, if it suffice to suggest the whole? Twelve or fourteen leagues of liquid in movement are enough to convey the highest ideal of beauty which is offered to man in his transitory habitation.

XLVI

There is naught interesting on earth save its religions.

There is a universal religion made for the alchemists of thought, a religion which is disengaged from man, considered as a heavenly reminder.

XLVII

Saint-Marc Girardin has spoken one word that will endure: "Let us be mediocre!" Set that beside this of Robespierre: "Those that do not believe in the immortality of their being, do themselves justice." The word of Saint-Marc Girardin implies a bitter hatred of the sublime.

XLVIII

Theory of true civilization. It lies not in gas, nor in steam, nor in tilting tables. It lies in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Nomad peoples, shepherds, hunters, farmers, even cannibals, _all_ can rise superior in energy, in personal dignity, to our races of the West. We perhaps shall be destroyed.

XLIX

It is through leisure, in part, that I have grown,--to my great detriment; for leisure, without wealth, increases debts; but to my great gain, in regard to sensibility, meditation, and the faculty of dandyism and of dilettantism.

The young girl of editors. The young girl of editors in chief. The young girl, scarecrow, monstrous, assassin of art.

The young girl, what she really is. A little stupid and a little slovenly; the greatest imbecility combined with the greatest depravity.

There is in the young girl all the abjection of the cad and of the school-boy.

Advice to non-communists: all is common, even God.

LII

The Frenchman is a backyard animal so domestic that he dare not leap any fences. See his tastes in art and literature.

He is an animal of the Latin race; filth does not displease him; in his home, and in literature, he is scatophagous. He dotes on excrement. The litterateurs of the coffee-house call that the _gallic salt_.

LIII

_Princes and generations._ There is equal injustice in attributing to reigning princes the virtues and the vices of the people they actually govern.

Those virtues and those vices should almost always, as statistics and logic will show, be attributed to the atmosphere of the preceding government.

Louis XIV inherits the men of Louis XIII, glory. Napoleon I inherits the men of the Republic, glory. Louis-Philippe inherits the men of Charles X, glory. Napoleon III inherits the men of Louis-Philippe, dishonor.

It is always the preceding government that is responsible for the customs of the following, in so far as a government can be responsible for anything.

The sudden suppressions that circumstances bring to a reign do not allow of absolute exactitude in this law, in regard to time. One cannot, say precisely where an influence ends, but an influence will endure in all the generation that was subjected to it in youth.

LIV

Of the hatred of youth toward those who quote. The quoter is their enemy.

"I would place spelling itself in the hands of the hangman." (Th. Gautier.)

Immovable desire of prostitution in the heart of man, whence springs his horror of solitude.--He wishes to be _two_. The genius wishes to be _one_, hence alone. Glory is in remaining _one_, and in prostituting one's self in a particular way.

It is that horror of solitude, the need of forgetting his _ego_ in the outer flesh, that man nobly calls the _need of love_.

Two fine religions, immortally planted on the mature, eternal obsessions of the people: the ancient phallus, and "Vive Barbés!" or "A bas Philippe!" or "Vive la République!"

To study, in all its moods, in the works of nature and in the works of man, the eternal and universal law of gradation, by degrees, little by little, with forces progressively increasing, like compound interest in finance.

It is the same with artistic and literary ease; it is the same with the variable treasure of the will.

LVI

The rout of little _littérateurs_ to be seen at funerals, distributing handshakes and commending themselves to the memory of the letter writer. Of the funerals of famous men.

Molière.--My opinion of Tartuffe is that it is not a comedy, but a pamphlet. An atheist, if only he is well-bred, would think, in connection with the play, that serious questions should never be betrayed to the riff-raff.

LVII

To glorify the worship of images (my great, my one, my primitive passion). To glorify vagabondage and what may be called bohemianism. Worship of sensation, multiplied and expressing itself in music. Refer this to Liszt.

Of the need of beating women.

One can chastise what one loves. Thus with children.

But that implies the misery of scorning what one loves.

Of cuckoldom and of cuckolds. The misery of the cuckold. It springs from his pride, from a false conception of honor and of happiness, and from a love foolishly turned from God to be attributed to creatures. It is ever the worshipping animal deluded with its idol.

LVIII

Music conveys the idea of space. All the arts, more or less; since they are _number_ and number is a translation of space.

Daily to wish to be the greatest of men!

LXI

Nations have great men only in spite of themselves.

Apropos of the actor and of my childish dreams, a chapter on what constitutes, in the human soul, the calling of the actor, the glory of the actor, the art of the actor and his situation in the world.

The theory of Legouvé. Is Legouvé a cold farceur, a Swift, who tried whether France would swallow a new absurdity? His choice. Good, in the sense that Samson is not an actor.

Of the true greatness of pariahs. Perhaps even, virtue harms the talents of pariahs.

LXII

Commerce is, in its essence, _satanic_. Commerce, is the loan returned, it is the loan with an understanding: Return more than I gave you.

--The spirit of everything commercial is completely depraved.

--Commerce is _natural_, hence it is _infamous_.

--The least infamous of tradesmen is he who says: "Let us be virtuous that we may gain much more money than the fools who are vicious." For the tradesman, honesty itself is a speculation. Commerce is Satanic, because it is one of the forms of egoism, the lowest, and the most vile.

LXIII

When Jesus Christ said: "Blessed are they that hunger, for they shall be filled!" Jesus Christ was gambling on probabilities.

LXIV

The world progresses only through misunderstanding. It is by universal misunderstanding that all the world agrees. For if, unfortunately, they understood one another, people could never agree.

The man of wit, he who will never agree with any one, ought to strike up a liking for the conversation of idiots and the reading of bad books. He will draw from this bitter joys that will largely compensate for his fatigue.

LXV

Any officeholder whatsoever, a minister, a manager of a theater or magazine, can sometimes be an estimable being; but he can never be admirable. He is a person lacking personality, a being without originality, born for the office, that is to say, for public domesticity.

LXVI

God and his profundity. One can be not lacking in wit and find in God the accomplice and friend who is always wanting. God is the eternal confidant in that tragedy where every one is the hero. There are perhaps usurers and assassins who say to God: "Lord, let my next operation succeed!" But the prayer of these rascally folk does not disturb the honor and the pleasure of mine.

LXVII

All idea is, in itself, endowed with immortal life, like a person. All form, even created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter, and it is not molecules that constitute form.

LXVIII

It is impossible to glance through any newspaper at all, no matter of what day, what month, what year, without finding in every line the most frightful signs of human perversity, together with the most astonishing boasts of probity, of goodness, of charity, and the most shameless affirmations in regard to the progress of civilization.

Every paper, from the first line to the last, is but a tissue of horrors. War, crime, theft, lewdness, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, crimes of individuals, a universal intoxication of atrocity.

And it is with this disgusting appetizer that civilized man accompanies his every morning meal. Everything in this world sweats crime: the magazine, the wall, the face of man. I cannot see how a pure hand can touch a paper without a convulsion of disgust.

LXIX

The strength of the amulet demonstrated by philosophy. Bored coins, talismans, every one's keepsakes. Treatise on moral dynamics. Of the power of the sacraments. Of my childhood, tendency to mysticism. My conversations with God.

LXX

Of obsession. Of Possession, of Prayer and of Faith. Moral dynamics of Jesus. (Renan thinks it ridiculous to suppose that Jesus believed in the omnipotence, even materially, of Prayer and of Faith.) The sacraments are the means of this dynamics.

Of the infamy of the printing-shop, great obstacle to the development of beauty.

LXXI

In order for the law of progress to exist, every one must wish to create it; that is, when every individual applies himself to progress, then, and only then, humanity will be in progress.

This hypothesis serves to explain the identity of two contradictory ideas, free will and predestination.--Not only is there, in the case of progress, identity of free will and predestination, but that identity has always existed. That identity is history, the history of nations and of men.

LXXII

_Hygiene. Projects._--The more one wills, the better one wills.

The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.

Morally as physically, I have always had the sensation of the gulf, not only of the gulf of sleep, but the gulf of action, of revery, of memory, of desire, of regret, of remorse, of beauty, of number, etc.

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror. Now, I always have vertigo, and to-day, January 23, 1862, I felt a strange warning. I felt pass over me a gust from the wing of imbecility.

LXXIII

How many presentiments and signs already sent by God, that it is _high time_ to act, to regard the present moment as the most important moment, and to make my _perpetual joy_ of my usual torment, that is, of work!

LXXIV

_Hygiene, Conduct, Morals._--Every moment, we are crushed by the idea and sensation of time. And there are only two means of escaping that nightmare, of forgetting it: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work fortifies us. Let us choose.

The more we make use of one of these means, the more the other fills us with repugnance.

One can forget time only by using it.

Everything is accomplished bit by bit.

De Maistre and Edgar Poe taught me to reason.

There is no long work but that which one dares not begin. It becomes a nightmare.

LXXV

_Hygiene._--By putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it. By postponing conversion, one risks being damned.

To heal everything, misery, disease and melancholy, absolutely nothing is needed but the love of work.

LXXVI

Precious Notes.--Do every day what prudence and duty dictate. If you work every day, life will be more endurable. Work six days without a let-up. To find fields, Know thyself. Always to be a poet, even in prose. Grand style (nothing is more beautiful than the commonplace). First begin, then make use of logic and analysis. Any hypothesis whatsoever tends to its conclusion. Find the daily frenzy.

LXXVII

_Hygiene, Conduct, Morals._--Debts. Friends (my mother, friends, myself). Thus, 1000 francs should be divided into two parts of 500 francs each, and the second divided into three.

LXXVIII

--To do one's duty every day and trust in God for the morrow.

The one way to make money is to work in a disinterested fashion.

--Concentrated wisdom. Toilet, prayer, labor.

Prayer: charity, wisdom and strength.

Without charity, I am but a clashing cymbal.

--My humiliations have been mercies of God.

Is my egoistical phase at an end?

The gift of responding to the moment's need, exactitude, in a word, should infallibly bring its recompense.

LXXIX

_Hygiene, Conduct, Morals._--Jean 300, my mother 200, myself 300,--800 francs a month. To work from six in the morning, on an empty stomach, till noon. To work blindly, aimlessly, like a madman. We shall see the result.

I suppose I base my destiny on a few hours' uninterrupted toil.

All is reparable. There is still time. Who knows even if new pleasure...?

I have not yet known the pleasure of a project carried out.

Power of the fixed idea, power of hope.

The habit of doing one's duty drives out fear.

One must wish to dream and know how to dream. The summoning of inspiration. The Art of Magic. To set myself immediately to writing. I reason too much.

Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.

A procession of little wishes makes a mighty end.

Every recoil of the will is a particle of lost substance. How prodigal, then, is hesitation! And judge of the greatness of the final effort needed to repair so many losses!

The man who prays in the evening, is a captain who posts his sentinels. He can sleep.

Dreams of death and warnings.

Up to now I have enjoyed my memories alone; they must be shared with another. Make a passion of the joys of the heart.

Because I comprehend a glorious existence, I believe myself capable of realizing it. O Jean-Jacques!

Work forcibly engenders good habits, sobriety and chastity, consequently health, wealth, successive and progressive genius, and charity. Age quod agis.

Fish, cold baths, showers, lichen, lozenges, occasionally; in addition, suppression of everything exciting.

   Island Lichen     125 grams
   White sugar       250   "

Steep the lichen, for twelve or fifteen hours, in a sufficient quantity of cold water, then drain the water. Boil the lichen in two liters of water, on a slow and continuous flame, until the two liters have dwindled to one, remove the scum once; then add the 250 grams of sugar and allow it to thicken to the consistency of syrup. Allow it to cool again. Take a large tablespoonful three times daily, morning, noon, and night. Do not be afraid to increase the dose, if the crises become too frequent.

LXXX

_Hygiene, Conduct, Method._--I swear to myself henceforth to take the following rules as eternal rules of my life:

Every morning to pray to God, _reservoir of all strength and all justice, to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe,_ as intercessors; to pray to them to grant me the necessary strength always to do my duty, and to grant to my mother _a life long enough_ to enjoy my transformation; to work all day, or at least _while my strength remains_; to trust in God, that is, in Justice itself, for the success of my projects; to make, every evening, a new prayer to God, asking life and strength for my mother and for myself; to divide all I earn into four parts,--one for current expenses, one for my creditors, one for my friends and one for my mother;--to obey the precepts of strictest sobriety, of which the first is the suppression of everything exciting, whatever it may be.

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Baudelaire, his prose and poetry

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Contents

Full text[1]

TOC

AVE ATQUE VALE

PREFACE

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY BY F. P. STURM.

POEMS IN PROSE Translated by Arthur Symons

POEMS IN PROSE Translated by Joseph T. Shipley

DEDICATION To ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE

Rest of the poems

MLLE. BISTOURY

LET US FLAY THE POOR [and the rest of the poems]

LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE Translated by F. P. Sturm

THE FLOWERS OF EVIL Translated by F. P. Sturm

FROM THE FLOWERS OF EVIL Translated by W. J. Robertson

THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE Translated by Richard Herne Shepherd

INTIMATE PAPERS FROM THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF BAUDELAIRE Translated by Joseph T. Shipley

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 {{Template}}
-''[[Baudelaire, his prose and poetry]]'' is a book by [[Thomas Robert Smith]] (1880-1942).
+''[[Baudelaire, his prose and poetry]]'' is a book on French poet [[Charles Baudelaire]] by [[Thomas Robert Smith]] (1880-1942). It features text and comments from [[F. P. Sturm]], [[Arthur Symons]], [[Joseph T. Shipley]] and [[W. J. Robertson]].
-==Full text==
+==Full text[https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/gutenberg.org/4/7/0/3/47032/47032-0.txt]==
-Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris,
-France, on April 9, 1821,
-and died there on Au-
-gust 31, 1867. Floicers
-of Evil was published in
-by Baudelaire's
-friend Auguste Poulet
-Malassis, who had inher-
-ited a printing business
-at Alengon. Some of
-them had already ap-
-peared in the Revue deS
-Deux Mondes. The poet,
-the publisher, and the
-printer were found
-guilty of having offended
-against public morals.
+BAUDELAIRE:
+HIS PROSE AND POETRY
+Edited by T. R. SMITH
-BAUDELAIRE:
+BONI AND LIVERIGHT
-HIS PROSE AND POETRY
+PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
+===TOC===
-Edited by T. R. SMITH
+CONTENTS
+    AVE ATQUE VALE. A Poem by A. C. Swinburne
+    PREFACE
-BONIANDLIVEIilCHTIi
+    CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. A study by F. P. Sturm
-PUBLISHERS ^^SES^I MEW YORK
+    POEMS IN PROSE. Translated by Arthur Symons
+    The Favours of the Moon
+    Which is True?
+    "L'Invitation au Voyage"
+    The Eyes of the Poor
+    Windows
+    Crowds
+    The Cake
+    Evening Twilight
+    "Anywhere Out of the World"
+    A Heroic Death
+    Be Drunken
+    Epilogue
-Copyright, 1919,
+    POEMS IN PROSE. Translated by Joseph T. Shipley
-By BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.
+    Dedication (To Arsène Houssaye)
+    A Jester
+    The Dog and the Vial
+    The Wild Woman and the Coquette
+    The Old Mountebank
+    The Clock
+    A Hemisphere in a Tress
+    The Plaything of the Poor
+    The Gifts of the Fairies
+    Solitude
+    Projects
+    The Lovely Dorothea
+    The Counterfeit
+    The Generous Player
+    The Rope (To Edward Manet)
+    Callings
+    A Thoroughbred
+    The Mirror
+    The Harbor
+    Mistresses' Portraits
+    Soup and the Clouds
+    The Loss of a Halo
+    Mademoiselle Bistoury
+    Let us Flay the Poor
+    Good Dogs (To Mr. Joseph Stevens)
+    LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE. Translated by F. P. Sturm
-Printed in the U.S,A»
+    Every Man His Chimæra
+    Venus and the Fool
+    Already!
+    The Double Chamber
+    At One o'Clock in the Morning
+    The Confiteor of the Artist
+    The Thyrsus (To Franz Liszt)
+    The Marksman
+    The Shooting-range and the Cemetery
+    The Desire to Paint
+    The Glass-vendor
+    The Widows
+    The Temptations; or, Eros, Plutos, and Glory
+    THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. Translated by F. P. Sturm
+    The Dance of Death
+    The Beacons
+    The Sadness of the Moon
+    The Balcony
+    The Sick Muse
+    The Venal Muse
+    The Evil Monk
+    The Temptation
+    The Irreparable
+    A Former Life
+    Don Juan in Hades
+    The Living Flame
+    Correspondences
+    The Flask
+    Reversibility
+    The Eyes of Beauty
+    Sonnet of Autumn
+    The Remorse of the Dead
+    The Ghost
+    To a Madonna
+    The Sky
+    Spleen
+    The Owls
+    Bien Loin d'Ici
+    Contemplation
+    To a Brown Beggar-maid
+    The Swan
+    The Seven Old Men
+    The Little Old Women
+    A Madrigal of Sorrow
+    Mist and Rain
+    Sunset
+    The Corpse
+    An Allegory
+    The Accursed
+    La Beatrice
+    The Soul of Wine
+    The Wine of Lovers
+    The Death of Lovers
+    The Death of the Poor
+    Gypsies Travelling
+    Franciscæ Meæ Laudes
+    A Landscape
+    The Voyage
-CONTENTS
+    THE FLOWERS OF EVIL. Translated by W. J. Robertson
-PAGE
+    Benediction
+    Ill Luck
+    Beauty
+    Ideal Love
+    Hymn to Beauty
+    Exotic Fragrance
+    Sonnet XVIII
+    Music
+    The Spiritual Dawn
+    The Flawed Bell
-[[Ave Atque Vale]]. A Poem by A. C. Swinburne . . . i
+    THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE. Translated by Richard Herne Shepherd
-Preface 9
+    A Carcass
+    Weeping and Wandering
+    Lesbos
-Charles Baudelaire. A study by F. P. Sturm ... 11
+    INTIMATE PAPERS FROM THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF BAUDELAIRE.
-Poems in Prose. Translated by [[Arthur Symons]]
+    Translated by Joseph T. Shipley
-The Favours of the Moon 39
+    TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
-Which is True? 40
+    Rockets
+    My Heart Laid Bare
-"L'Invitation au Voyage" 41
-The Eyes of the Poor^ 43
-Windows . . . . ;^ 45
-Crowds 46
+FLOWERS OF EVIL
-The Cake 47
+===AVE ATQUE VALE===
-Evening Twilight 49
-"Anywhere Out of the World" ....... 51
+_In Memory of Charles Baudelaire_
-A Heroic Death -53
+By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
-Be Drunken 57
-Epilogue 58
+    Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs;
+    Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
+    Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres,
+    Son vent mélancolique a l'entour de leurs marbres,
+    Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats.
+                                     Les Fleurs du Mal
-Poems in Prose. Translated by Joseph T. Shipley
-Dedication (To Arsdne Houssaye) 61
-A Jester 63
+    I
-The Dog and the Vial 63
+    Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
+      Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
+      Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea,
+    Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,
+      Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,
+      Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?
+    Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before,
+      Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat
+      And full of bitter summer, but more sweet
+    To thee than gleanings of a northern shore
+    Trod by no tropic feet?
-The Wild Woman and the Coquette 64
-The Old Mountebank 66
+    II
-The Clock . 68
+    For always thee the fervid languid glories
+      Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;
+      Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
+    Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
+      The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
+      That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
+    Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.
+      Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,
+      The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear
+    Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,
+      Blind gods that cannot spare.
-A Hemisphere in a Tress . 69
-The Plaything of the Poor 70
+    III
-The Gifts of the Fairies 72
+    Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother,
+      Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us:
+      Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous,
+    Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other
+      Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime;
+      The hidden harvest of luxurious time,
+    Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech;
+      And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep
+      Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep;
+    And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each,
+      Seeing as men sow men reap.
-Solitude 74
-Projects 75
+    IV
-The Lovely Dorothea 77
+    O sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping,
+      That were athirst for sleep and no more life
+      And no more love, for peace and no more strife!
+    Now the dim gods of death have in their keeping
+      Spirit and body and all the springs of song,
+      Is it well now where love can do not wrong,
+    Where stingless pleasure has no foam or fang
+      Behind the unopening closure of her lips?
+      It is not well where soul from body slips
+    And flesh from bone divides without a pang
+      As dew from flower-bell drips.
-The Counterfeit 79
-The Generous Player 80
+    V
-The Rope (To Edward Manet) 84
+    It is enough; the end and the beginning
+      Are one thing to thee, who are past the end.
+      O hand unclasped of unbeholden friend,
+    For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning,
+      No triumph and no labor and no lust,
+      Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust.
+    O quiet eyes wherein the light saith nought,
+      Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night
+      With obscure finger silences your sight,
+    Nor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought,
+      Sleep, and have sleep for light.
-Callings 88
-A Thoroughbred 92
+    VI
-The Mirror . ; 93
+    Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over,
+      Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet,
+      Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet
+    Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover,
+      Such as thy vision here solicited,
+      Under the shadow of her fair vast head,
+    The deep division of prodigious breasts,
+      The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep,
+      The weight of awful tresses that still keep
+    The savor and shade of old-world pine-forests
+      Where the wet hill-winds weep?
-The Harbor 93
-Mistresses' Portraits 94
+    VII
-Soup and the Clouds 98
+    Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?
+      O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom,
+      Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?
+    What of despair, of rapture, of derision,
+      What of life is there, what of ill or good?
+      Are the fruits gray like dust or bright like blood?
+    Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours,
+      The faint fields quicken any terrene root,
+      In low lands where the sun and moon are mute
+    And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers
+      At all, or any fruit?
-The Loss of a Halo 99
-Mademoiselle Bistoury 100
+    VIII
-Let us Flay the Poor 103
+    Alas, but though my flying song flies after,
+      O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet
+      Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet,
+    Some dim derision of mysterious laughter
+      From the blind tongueless warders of the dead,
+      Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine's veiled head,
+    Some little sound of unregarded tears
+      Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes,
+      And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs--
+    These only, these the hearkening spirit hears,
+      Sees only such things rise.
-Good Dogs (To Mr. Joseph Stevens) 106
-Little Poems in Prose. Translated by F. P. Sturm
+    IX
-Every Man His Chimaera 113
+    Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow,
+      Far too far off for thought or any prayer.
+      What ails us with thee, who art wind and air?
+    What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow?
+      Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,
+      Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,
+    Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find.
+      Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies,
+      The low light fails us in elusive skies,
+    Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind
+      Are still the eluded eyes.
-Venus and the Fool . > 114
-Already! 115
+    X
-The Double Chamber . . 116
+    Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes,
+      Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul,
+      The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll
+    I lay my hand on, and not death estranges
+      My spirit from communion of thy song--
+      These memories and these melodies that throng
+    Veiled porches of a Muse funereal--
+      These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold
+      As though a hand were in my hand to hold,
+    Or through mine ears a mourning musical
+      Of many mourners rolled.
-At One o'clock in the Morning 118
-The Confiteor of the Artist 120
+    XI
-The Thyrsus (To Franz Liszt) 121
+    I among these, I also, in such station
+      As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods,
+      And offering to the dead made, and their gods,
+    The old mourners had, standing to make libation,
+      I stand, and to the gods and to the dead
+      Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed
+    Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom,
+      And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear,
+      And what I may of fruits in this chilled air,
+    And lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb
+      A curl of severed hair.
-The Marksman lai
-The Shooting-range and the Cemetery 123
+    XII
-The Desire to Paint 124
+    But by no hand nor any treason stricken,
+      Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King,
+      The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing,
+    Thou liest and on this dust no tears could quicken
+      There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear
+      Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear
+    Down the opening leaves of holy poet's pages.
+      Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns;
+      But bending us-ward with memorial urns
+    The most high Muses that fulfil all ages
+      Weep, and our God's heart yearns.
-The Glass-vendor /. 125
-The Widows 128
+    XIII
-The Temptations; or, Eros, Plutos, and Glory . . .131
+    For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often
+      Among us darkling here the lord of light
+      Makes manifest his music and his might
+    In hearts that open and in lips that soften
+      With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine.
+      Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine,
+    And nourished them indeed with bitter bread;
+      Yet surely from his hand thy soul's food came,
+      The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame
+    Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed
+      Who feeds our hearts with fame.
-The Flowers of Evil. Translated by F. P. Sturm
-The Dance of Death 137
+    XIV
-The Beacons 139
+    Therefore he too now at thy soul's sunsetting,
+      God of all suns and songs, he too bends down
+      To mix his laurel with thy cypress crown
+    And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting.
+      Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art,
+      Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart,
+    Mourns thee of many his children the last dead,
+      And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs
+      Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes,
+    And over thine irrevocable head
+      Sheds light from the under skies.
-The Sadness of the Moon 141
-The Balcony 141
+    XV
-The Sick Muse . 142
+    And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,
+      And stains with tears her changing bosom chill;
+      That obscure Venus of the hollow hill,
+    That thing transformed which was the Cytherean,
+      With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine
+      Long since, and face no more called Erycine
+    A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.
+      Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell
+      Did she, a sad and second prey, compel
+    Into the footless places once more trod,
+      And shadows hot from hell.
-The Venal Muse 143
-The Evil Monk 143
+    XVI
-The Temptation 144
+    And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,
+      No choral salutation lure to light
+      A spirit with perfume and sweet night
+    And love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.
+      There is no help for these things; none to mend,
+      And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend,
+    Will make death clear or make life durable.
+      Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine
+      And with wild notes about this dust of thine
+    At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell
+      And wreathe an unseen shrine.
-The Irreparable 145
-A Former Life 147
+    XVII
-Don Juan in Hades 147
+    Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
+      If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live
+      And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.
+    Out of the mystic and the mournful garden
+      Where all day through thine hands in barren braid
+      Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade,
+    Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants gray,
+      Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted,
+      Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started,
+    Shall death not bring us all as thee one day
+      Among the days departed?
+    XVIII
-CONTENTS ix
+    For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
+      Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.
+      Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
+    And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,
+      With sadder than the Niobean womb,
+      And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb.
+    Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done:
+      There lies not any troublous thing before,
+      Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
+    For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
+      All waters as the shore.
-PAGE
-The Living Flame 148
-Correspondences 149
+[From inside-leaf: Charles Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris, France,
+on April 9,1821, and died there on August 31, 1867. Flowers of Evil was
+published in 1857 by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet Malassis, who
+had inherited a printing business at Alençon. Some of them had already
+appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The poet, the publisher, and the
+printer were found guilty of having offended against public morals.]
-The Flask 149
-Reversibility 150
-The Eyes of Beauty 151
-Sonnet of Autumn 152
+===PREFACE===
-The Remorse of the Dead 152
-The Ghost 153
+In presenting to the American public this collection in English of
+perhaps the most influential French poet of the last seventy years, I
+consider it essential to explain the conditions under which the work
+has been done.
-To a Madonna 154
+Baudelaire has written poems that will, in all likelihood, live while
+poetry is used as a medium of expression, and the great influence that
+he has exercised on English and continental literature is mainly due to
+the particular quality of his style, his way of feeling or his method
+of thought. He is a master of analytical power, and in his highest
+ecstasy of emotional expression, this power can readily be recognized.
+In his own quotation he gave forth his philosophy on this point:
-The Sky 155
+"The more art would aim at being philosophically clear, the more will
+it degrade itself and return to the childish hieroglyphic: on the other
+hand, the more art detaches itself from teaching, the more will it
+attain to pure disinterested beauty.... Poetry, under pain of death
+or decay, cannot assimilate Herself to science or ethics. She has not
+Truth for object, she has only Herself." What appears at first glance
+in the preceding phrases to be a contradiction is really a confirmation
+of Baudelaire's conception of the highest understanding of æsthetic
+principle. Baudelaire's ideal beauty is tempered with mystery and
+sadness, the real too, but never the commonplace.
-Spleen 156
+No poet has brought so many new ideas in sensation into a literary
+style. Intellectually he is all sensation, though he seldom degenerates
+into abstract sentimentality. This sum totality of the power of
+absorbing external sensation is Baudelaire. From the effect of his
+objectivity his art expresses itself as if solely subjective. This
+condition of mind and art makes him most difficult to translate into
+another language, in particular, English.
-The Owls 156
+This collection of his verse and prose is gathered from those
+experiments in translation which I think will most effectively convey
+to the English reader those qualities that made Baudelaire what he is.
+There are numerous translations from Baudelaire in English but most of
+them may be dismissed as being seldom successful. Mr. Arthur Symons'
+translation of some of the prose poems is a most beautiful adventure
+in psychological sensations, effective though not always accurate in
+interpretation. Mr. F. P. Sturm's effort with the Flowers of Evil and
+the Prose Poems is always accurate, sometimes inspired, and often a
+tour de force of translation. Mr. W. J. Robertson's translations from
+the Flowers of Evil is the most successful of all. He maintains with
+amazing facility all the subtlety, beauty and one might also say the
+perfume of Baudelaire's verse. Mr. Shipley does a most meritorious
+work in his translations from the prose poems, and the reader will be
+everlastingly grateful to him for his fine painstaking translation of
+the _Intimate Papers_ from Baudelaire's unpublished novels.
-Bien Loin d'Ici 157
+There are few interesting or valuable essays on the mind and art of
+Baudelaire in English, but the reader will find the following critical
+appreciations to be of inestimable use in the study of the poet:
-Contemplation 158
+"The Influence of Baudelaire": G. Turquet-Milnes (Constable: 1913);
+"The Baudelaire Legend": James Huneker (Egoists: Scribner's: 1909); and
+Théophile Gautier's essay on Baudelaire, of which an excellent English
+translation has been made by Prof. Sumichrast.
-To a Brown Beggar-maid 158
+I think that this anthology will give the reader an intelligent
+understanding of the mind and art of a very great French poet.
-The Swan 160
+                                                          T. R. Smith.
-The Seven Old Men 162
+June, 1919.
-The Little Old Women 164
-A Madrigal of Sorrow 167
-Mist and Rain 168
-Sunset 169
+===CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A STUDY BY F. P. STURM.===
-The Corpse 169
-An Allegory 171
+I
-The Accursed 172
-La Beatrice 173
+Charles Baudelaire was one of those who take the downward path which
+leads to salvation. There are men born to be the martyrs of the world
+and of their own time; men whose imagination carries them beyond all
+that we know or have learned to think of as law and order; who are
+so intoxicated with a vision of a beauty beyond the world that the
+world's beauty seems to them but a little paint above the face of the
+dead; who love God with a so consuming fire that they must praise evil
+for God's glory, and blaspheme His name that all sects and creeds may
+be melted away; who see beneath all there is of mortal loveliness,
+the invisible worm, feeding upon hopes and desires no less than upon
+the fair and perishable flesh; who are good and evil at the same
+time; and because the good and evil in their souls finds a so perfect
+instrument in the refined and tortured body of modern times, desire
+keener pleasure and more intolerable anguish than the world contains,
+and become materialists because the tortured heart cries out in denial
+of the soul that tortures it. Charles Baudelaire was one of these men;
+his art is the expression of his decadence; a study of his art is the
+understanding of that complex movement, that "inquietude of the Veil
+in the temple," as Mallarmé called it, that has changed the literature
+of the world; and, especially, made of poetry the subtle and delicate
+instrument of emotional expression it has become in our own day.
-The Soul of Wine 174
+We used to hear a deal about Decadence in the arts, and now we hear
+as much about Symbolism, which is a flower sprung from the old
+corruption--but Baudelaire is decadence; his art is not a mere literary
+affectation, a mask of sorrow to be thrown aside when the curtain
+falls, but the voice of an imagination plunged into the contemplation
+of all the perverse and fallen loveliness of the world; that finds
+beauty most beautiful at the moment of its passing away, and regrets
+its perishing with a so poignant grief that it must needs follow it
+even into the narrow grave where those "dark comrades the worms,
+without ears, without eyes," whisper their secrets of terror and tell
+of yet another pang--
-The Wine of Lovers 175
+    "Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts."
-The Death of Lovers 175
+All his life Baudelaire was a victim to an unutterable weariness,
+that terrible malady of the soul born out of old times to prey upon
+civilisations that have reached their zenith--weariness, not of life,
+but of living, of continuing to labour and suffer in a world that has
+exhausted all its emotions and has no new thing to offer. Being an
+artist, therefore, he took his revenge upon life by a glorification of
+all the sorrowful things that it is life's continual desire to forget.
+His poems speak sweetly of decay and death, and whisper their graveyard
+secrets into the ears of beauty. His men are men whom the moon has
+touched with her own phantasy: who love the immense ungovernable
+sea, the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where they are
+not; the woman they will never know; and all his women are enigmatic
+courtesans whose beauty is a transfiguration of sin; who hide the
+ugliness of the soul beneath the perfection of the body. He loves them
+and does not love; they are cruel and indolent and full of strange
+perversions; they are perfumed with exotic perfumes; they sleep to the
+sound of viols, or fan themselves languidly in the shadow, and only he
+sees that it is the shadow of death.
-The Death of the Poor 176
+An art like this, rooted in a so tortured perception of the beauty and
+ugliness of a world where the spirit is mingled indistinguishably with
+the flesh, almost inevitably concerns itself with material things, with
+all the subtle raptures the soul feels, not by abstract contemplation,
+for that would mean content, but through the gateway of the senses;
+the lust of the flesh, the delight of the eye. Sound, colour, odour,
+form: to him these are not the symbols that lead the soul towards
+the infinite: they are the soul; they are the infinite. He writes,
+always with a weary and laborious grace, about the abstruser and
+more enigmatic things of the flesh, colours and odours particularly;
+but, unlike those later writers who have been called realists, he
+apprehends, to borrow a phrase from Pater, "all those finer conditions
+wherein material things rise to that subtlety of operation which
+constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve and the keener
+touch can follow."
-Gypsies Travelling 176
+In one of his sonnets he says:
-Franciscae Meae Laudes 177
+    "Je hais la passion et l'esprit me fait mal!"
-A Landscape 178
+and, indeed, he is a poet in whom the spirit, as modern thought
+understands the word, had little or no part. We feel, reading his
+terrible poems, that the body is indeed acutely conscious of the soul,
+distressfully and even angrily conscious, but its motions are not yet
+subdued by the soul's prophetic voice. It was to forget this voice,
+with its eternal _Esto memor_, that Baudelaire wrote imperishabl  of
+perishable things and their fading glory.
-The Voyage 179
-[[The Flowers of Evil]]. Translated by [[W. J. Robertson]]
-Benediction 189
+II
-Luck 192
-Beauty 192
+Charles Baudelaire was born at Paris, April 21st, 1821, in an old
+turreted house in the Rue Hautefeuille. His father, a distinguished
+gentleman of the eighteenth-century school, seems to have passed his
+old-world manners on to his son, for we learn from Baudelaire's friend
+and biographer, Théophile Gautier, that the poet "always preserved the
+forms of an extreme urbanity."
-Ideal Love 193
+At school, during his childhood, he gained many distinctions, and
+passed for a kind of infant prodigy; but later on, when he sat for his
+examination as _bachelier ès lettres_, his extreme nervousness made him
+appear almost an idiot. Failing miserably, he made no second attempt.
+Then his father died, and his mother married General Aupick, afterwards
+ambassador to Constantinople, an excellent man in every respect, but
+quite incapable of sympathising with or even of understanding the love
+for literature that now began to manifest itself in the mind of his
+stepson. All possible means were tried to turn him from literature to
+some more lucrative and more respectable profession. Family quarrels
+arose over this all-important question, and young Baudelaire, who seems
+to have given some real cause for offence to the step-father whose
+aspirations and profession he despised, was at length sent away upon a
+long voyage, in the hopes that the sight of strange lands and new faces
+would perhaps cause him to forget the ambitions his relatives could but
+consider as foolish and idealistic. He sailed the Indian Seas; visited
+the islands of Mauritius, Bourbon, Madagascar, and Ceylon; saw the
+yellow waters of the sacred Ganges; stored up the memory of tropical
+sounds and colours and odours for use later on; and returned to Paris
+shortly after his twenty-first birthday, more than ever determined to
+be a man of letters.
+His parents were in despair; no doubt quite rightly so from their
+point of view. Théophile Gautier, perhaps remembering the many
+disappointments and martyrdoms of his own sad life, defends the
+attitude of General Aupick in a passage where he poignantly describes
+the hopelessness of the profession of letters. The future author
+of _The Flowers of Evil_, however, was now his own master and in a
+position, so far as monetary matters were concerned, to follow out
+his own whim. He took apartments in the Hôtel Pimodan, a kind of
+literary lodging-house where all Bohemia met; and where Gautier and
+Boissard were also at that period installed. Then began that life of
+uninterrupted labour and meditation that has given to France her most
+characteristic literature, for these poems of Baudelaire's are not
+only original in themselves but have been the cause of originality
+in others; they are the root of modern French literature and much of
+the best English literature; they were the origin of that new method
+in poetry that gave Mallarmé and Verlaine to France; Yeats and some
+others to England. It was in the Hôtel Pimodan that Baudelaire and
+Gautier first met and formed one of those unfading friendships not so
+rare among men of letters as among men of the world; there also the
+"Hashish-Eaters" held the _séances_ that have since become famous in
+the history of literature. Hashish and opium, indeed, contribute not a
+little to the odour of the strange _Flowers of Evil_; as also, perhaps,
+they contributed to Baudelaire's death from the terrible malady known
+as general paralysis, for he was a man who could not resist a so easy
+path into the world of _macabre_ visions. I shall return to this
+question again; there is internal evidence in his writings that shows
+he made good literary use of these opiate-born dreams which in the end
+dragged him into their own abyss.
+It was in 1849, when Baudelaire was twenty-eight years of age, that he
+made the acquaintance of the already famous Théophile Gautier, from
+whose admirable essay I shall presently translate a passage giving us
+an excellent pen-sketch of the famous poet and cynic--for Baudelaire
+was a cynic: he had not in the least degree the rapt expression and
+vague personality usually supposed to be characteristic of the poetic
+mood. "He recalls," wrote M. Dulamon, who knew him well, "one of
+those beautiful Abbés of the eighteenth century, so correct in their
+doctrine, so indulgent in their commerce with life--the Abbé de Bernis,
+for example. At the same time, he writes better verse, and would not
+have demanded at Rome the destruction of the Order of Jesuits."
-X CONTENTS
+That was Baudelaire exactly, suave and polished, filled with sceptical
+faith, cynical with the terrible cynicism of the scholar who is acutely
+conscious of all the morbid and gloomy secrets hidden beneath the
+fair exteriors of the world. Gautier, in the passage I have already
+mentioned, emphasises both his reserve and his cynicism: "Contrary to
+the somewhat loose manners of artists generally, Baudelaire prided
+himself upon observing the most rigid _convenances_; his courtesy,
+indeed, was excessive to the point of seeming affected. He measured his
+sentences, using only the most carefully chosen terms, and pronounced
+certain words in a particular manner, as though he wished to underline
+them and give them a mysterious importance. He had italics and capital
+letters in his voice. Exaggeration, much in honour at Pimodan's, he
+disdained as being theatrical and gross; though he himself affected
+paradox and excess. With a very simple, very natural, and perfectly
+detached air, as though retailing, _à la Prudhomme_, a newspaper
+paragraph about the mildness or rigour of the weather, he would advance
+some satanically monstrous axiom, or uphold with the coolness of ice
+some theory of a mathematical extravagance; for he always followed
+a rigorous plan in the development of his follies. His spirit was
+neither in words nor traits; he saw things from a particular point
+of view, so that their outlines were changed, as objects when one
+gets a bird's-eye view of them; he perceived analogies inappreciable
+to others, and you were struck by their fantastic logic. His rare
+gestures were slow and sober; he never threw his arms about, for he
+held southern gesticulation in horror; British coolness seemed to him
+to be good taste. One might describe him as a dandy who had strayed
+into Bohemia; though still preserving his rank, and that cult of self
+which characterises a man imbued with the principles of Brummel." At
+this time Baudelaire was practically unknown outside his own circle of
+friends, writers themselves; and it was not until eight years later, in
+, when he published his _Flowers of Evil_, that he became famous.
+Infamous would perhaps be a better word to describe the kind of fame
+he at first obtained, for every Philistine in France joined in the cry
+against a poet who dared to remind his readers that the grave awaits
+even the rich; who dared to choose the materials of his art from among
+the objects of death and decay; who exposed the mouldering secrecies of
+the grave, and painted, in the phosphorescent colours of corruption,
+frescoes of death and horror; who desecrated love in the sonnet
+entitled "Causerie":
-PAGE
+    "You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose!
+    But all the sea of sadness in my blood
+    Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lip morose
+    Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
-Hymn to Beauty , 193
+    In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er;
+    That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
+    By woman's tooth and talon: ah! no more
+    Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate!
-Exotic Fragrance 194
+    It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
+    And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay!
+    --A perfume swims about your naked breast,
+    Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
+    With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
+    Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!"
-Sonnet XVIII 195
+We can recall nothing like it in the literary history of our own
+country; the sensation caused by the appearance of the first series
+of Mr. Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads_ was mild in comparison; just
+as Mr. Swinburne's poems were but wan derivatives from Baudelaire--at
+least as far as ideas are concerned; I say nothing about their beauty
+of expression or almost absolute mastery of technique--for it is quite
+obvious that the English poet was indebted to Baudelaire for all the
+bizarre and Satanic elements in his work; as Baudelaire was indebted
+to Poe. Mr. Swinburne, however, is wild where Baudelaire is grave;
+and where Baudelaire compresses some perverse and morbid image into a
+single unforgettable line, Mr. Swinburne beats it into a froth of many
+musical lovely words, until we forget the deep sea in the shining foam.
-Music 196
+If we call to mind the reception at first given to the black-and-white
+work of Aubrey Beardsley, it will give some idea of the consternation
+caused in France by the appearance of the _Flowers of Evil_. Beardsley,
+indeed, resembles Baudelaire in many ways, for he achieved in art what
+the other achieved in literature: the apotheosis of the horrible and
+grotesque, the perfecting of symbols to shadow forth intellectual sin,
+the tearing away of the decent veil of forgetfulness that hides our own
+corruption from our eyes, and his one prose romance, _Under the Hill_,
+unhappily incomplete at his death at the age of twenty-four, beats
+Baudelaire on his own ground. The four or five chapters which alone
+remain of this incomplete romance stand alone in literature. They are
+the absolute attainment of what Baudelaire more or less successfully
+attempted--a testament of sin. Not the sin of the flesh, the gross
+faults of the body that are vulgarly known as sin; but sin which is a
+metaphysical corruption, a depravity of pure intellect, the sin of the
+fallen angels in hell who cover their anguish with the sound of harps
+and sweet odours; who are incapable of bodily impurity, and for whom
+spiritual purity is the only terror. And since mortality, which is the
+shadow of the immortal, can comprehend spiritual and abstract things
+only by the analogies and correspondences which exist between them and
+the far reflections of them that we call reality, both Baudelaire and
+Beardsley, as indeed all artists who speak with tongues of spiritual
+truth, choose more or less actual human beings to be the shadows of the
+divine or satanic beings they would invoke, and make them sin delicate
+sins of the refined bodily sense that we may get a far-off glimpse of
+the Evil that is not mortal but immortal, the Spiritual Evil that has
+set up its black throne beside the throne of Spiritual Good, and has
+equal share in the shaping of the world and man.
-The Spiritual Dawn 196
+I am not sure that Baudelaire, when he wrote this sinister poetry,
+had any clear idea that it was his vocation to be a prophet either
+of good or evil. Certainly he had no thought of founding a school of
+poetry, and if he made any conscious effort to bring a new method into
+literature, it was merely because he desired to be one of the famous
+writers of his country. An inspired thinker, however, whether his
+inspiration be mighty or small, receives his thought from a profounder
+source than his own physical reason, and writes to the dictation of
+beings outside of and greater than himself. The famous Eliphas Levi,
+like all the mystics who came before and after him, from Basilides
+the Gnostic to Blake the English visionary, taught that the poet and
+dreamer are the mediums of the Divine Word, and sole instruments
+through which the gods energise in the world of material things. The
+writing of a great book is the casting of a pebble into the pool of
+human thought; it gives rise to ever-widening circles that will reach
+we know not whither, and begins a chain of circumstances that may end
+in the destruction of kingdoms and religions and the awakening of new
+gods. The change wrought, directly or indirectly, by _The Flowers of
+Evil_ alone is almost too great to be properly understood. There is
+perhaps not a man in Europe to-day whose outlook on life would not have
+been different had _The Flowers of Evil_ never been written. The first
+thing that happens after the publication of such a book is the theft
+of its ideas and the imitation of its style by the lesser writers who
+labour for the multitude, and so its teaching goes from book to book,
+from the greater to the lesser, as the divine hierarchies emanate from
+Divinity, until ideas that were once paradoxical, or even blasphemous
+and unholy, have become mere newspaper commonplaces adopted by the
+numberless thousands who do not think for themselves, and the world's
+thought is changed completely, though by infinite slow degrees. The
+immediate result of Baudelaire's work was the Decadent School in
+French literature. Then the influence spread across the Channel, and
+the English Æsthetes arose to preach the gospel of imagination to
+the unimaginative. Both Decadence and Æstheticism, as intellectual
+movements, have fallen into the nadir of oblivion, and the dust lies
+heavy upon them, but they left a little leaven to lighten the heavy
+inertness of correct and academic literature; and now Symbolism, a
+greater movement than either, is in the ascendant, giving another
+turn to the wheel, and to all who think deeply about such matters
+it seems as though Symbolist literature is to be the literature of
+the future. The Decadents and Æsthetes were weak because they had
+no banner to fight beneath, no authority to appeal to in defence of
+their views, no definite gospel to preach. They were by turns morbid,
+hysterical, foolishly blasphemous, or weakly disgusting, but never
+anything for long, their one desire being to produce a thrill at any
+cost. If the hospital failed they went to the brothel, and when even
+obscenity failed to stimulate the jaded palates of their generation
+there was still the graveyard left. A more or less successful imitation
+of Baudelaire's awful verses entitled "The Corpse" has been the
+beginning of more than one French poet's corrupt flight across the sky
+of literature. That Baudelaire himself was one of their company is
+not an accusation, for he had genius, which his imitators, English or
+French, have not; and his book, even apart from the fact that it made
+straight the way for better things, must be admitted to be a great and
+subtly-wrought work of art by whosoever reads it with understanding.
+And, moreover, his morbidness is not at all an affectation; his
+poems inevitably prove the writer to have been quite sincere in his
+perversion and in his decadence.
-The Flawed Bell 197
+The Symbolist writers of to-day, though they are sprung from him, are
+greater than he because they are the prophets of a faith who believe
+in what they preach. They find their defence in the writings of the
+mystics, and their doctrines are at the root of every religion. They
+were held by the Gnostics and are in the books of the Kabbalists and
+the Magi. Blake preached them and Eliphas Levi taught them to his
+disciples in France, who in turn have misunderstood and perverted them,
+and formed strange religions and sects of Devil-worshippers. These
+doctrines hold that the visible world is the world of illusion, not of
+reality. Colour and sound and perfume and all material and sensible
+things are but the symbols and far-off reflections of the things that
+are alone real. Reality is hidden away from us by the five senses and
+the gates of death; and Reason, the blind and laborious servant of the
+physical brain, deludes us into believing that we can know anything of
+truth through the medium of the senses. It is through the imagination
+alone that man can obtain spiritual revelation, for imagination is the
+one window in the prison-house of the flesh through which the soul
+can see the proud images of eternity. And Blake, who is the authority
+of all English Symbolist writers, long since formulated their creed
+in words that have been quoted again and again, and must still be
+quoted by all who write in defence of modern art:--_"The world of
+imagination is the world of Eternity. It is the divine bosom into which
+we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of
+imagination is infinite and eternal, whereat the world of generation,
+or vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal
+world the permanent realities of everything which we see reflected in
+this vegetable glass of nature!"_
-Three Poems from Baudelaire. Translated by Richard
+In spite of the cry against _Flowers of Evil_, Baudelaire did not lack
-Heme Shepherd
+defenders among literary men themselves; and many enthusiastic articles
+were written in praise of his book. Thierry not unjustly compared him
+to Dante, to which Barbey d'Aurevilly replied, "Baudelaire comes from
+hell, Dante only went there"; adding at the finish of his article:
+"After the _Flowers of Evil_ there are only two possible ways for the
+poet who made them blossom: either to blow out his brains or become
+a Christian." Baudelaire did neither. And Victor Hugo, after reading
+the two poems, "The Seven Old Men" and "The Little Old Women," wrote
+to Baudelaire. "You have dowered the heaven of art with one knows not
+what deathly gleam," he said in his letter; "you have created a new
+shudder." The phrase became famous, and for many years after this the
+creation of a new shudder was the ambition of every young French writer
+worth his salt.
-A Carcass 201
+When the first great wave of public astonishment had broken and ebbed,
+Baudelaire's work began to be appreciated by others than merely
+literary men, by all in fact who cared for careful art and subtle
+thinking, and before long he was admitted to be the greatest after
+Hugo who had written French verse. He was famous and he was unhappy.
+Neither glory, nor love, nor friendship--and he knew them all--could
+minister to the disease of that fierce mind, seeking it knew not what
+and never finding it; seeking it, unhappily, in the strangest excesses.
+He took opium to quieten his nerves when they trembled, for something
+to do when they did not, and made immoderate use of hashish to produce
+visions and heighten his phantasy. His life was a haunted weariness.
+Thomas de Quincey's _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ seems to
+have fascinated him to a great extent, for besides imitating the vices
+of the author, he wrote, in imitation of his book, _The Artificial
+Paradises_, a monograph on the effects of opium and hashish, partly
+original, partly a mere translation from the _Confessions_.
-Weeping and Wandering 203
+He remembered his visions and sensations as an eater of drugs and
+made literary use of them. At the end of this book, among the "Poems
+in Prose," will be found one entitled "The Double Chamber," almost
+certainly written under the influence of opium, and the last verse of
+"The Temptation"--
-Lesbos 204
+    "O mystic metamorphosis!
+      My senses into one sense flow--
+    Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
+      Her breath is music faint and low!"
-Intimate Papers from the Unpublished Works of Baudelaire. Translated by [[Joseph T. Shipley]]
+as well as the last six lines of that profound sonnet
+"Correspondences"--
-Translator's Note 209
+    "Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
+    Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
+    Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
+    Have all the expansion of things infinite:
+    As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
+    Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight,"
-Rockets 211
+are certainly memories of a sensation he experienced under the
+influence of hashish, as recorded in _The Artificial Paradises_, where
+he has this curious passage:--"The senses become extraordinarily
+acute and fine. The eyes pierce Infinity. The ear seizes the most
+unseizable sounds in the midst of the shrillest noises. Hallucinations
+commence.... External objects take on monstrous appearances and
+show themselves under forms hitherto unknown.... The most singular
+equivocations, the most inexplicable transposition of ideas, take
+place. _Sounds are perceived to have a colour, and colour becomes
+musical._" Baudelaire need not have gone to hashish to discover this.
+The mystics of all times have taught that sounds in gross matter
+produce colour in subtle matter; and all who are subject to any
+visionary condition know that when in trance colours will produce
+words of a language whose meaning is forgotten as soon as one awakes
+to normal life; but I do not think Baudelaire was a visionary. His
+work shows too precise a method, and a too ordered appreciation of the
+artificial in beauty. There again he is comparable to Aubrey Beardsley,
+for I have read somewhere that when Beardsley was asked if ever he saw
+visions, he replied, "I do not permit myself to see them, except upon
+paper." The whole question of the colour of sound is one of supreme
+interest to the poet, but it is too difficult and abstract a question
+to be written of here. A famous sonnet by Rimbaud on the colour of the
+vowels has founded a school of symbolists in France. I will content
+myself with quoting that--in the original, since it loses too much, by
+translation:
-My Heart Laid Bare 225
+    "A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,
+    Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes,
+    A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
+    Qui bourdonnent autour des puanteurs cruelles,
+    Golfes d'ombres; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
+    Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombrelles;
+    I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
+    Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;
+    U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
+    Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides
+    Que l'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux.
-==FLOWERS OF EVIL AVE ATQUE VALE ==
+    O, suprême clairon, plein de strideurs étranges,
+    Silences traversés des mondes et des anges.
+    --O l'Oméga, rayon violet de ses yeux."
-In Memory of Charles Batidelaire
+It is to be hoped that opium and hashish rendered Baudelaire somewhat
-By Algernon Charles Swinburne
+less unhappy during his life, for they certainly contributed to hasten
+his death. Always of an extremely neurotic temperament, he began to
+break down beneath his excesses, and shortly after the publication of
+_The Artificial Paradises_, which shows a considerable deterioration in
+his style, he removed from Paris to Brussels in the hope of building
+up his health by the change. At Brussels he grew worse. His speech
+began to fail; he was unable to pronounce certain words and stumbled
+over others. Hallucinations commenced, no longer the hallucinations of
+hashish; and his disease, rapidly establishing itself, was recognised
+as "general paralysis of the insane." Gautier tells how the news of
+his death came to Paris while he yet lived. It was false news, but
+prematurely true. Baudelaire lingered on for another three months;
+motionless and inert, his eyes the only part of him alive; unable to
+speak or even to write, and so died.
-Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs;
+He left, besides _The Flowers of Evil_ and _Little Poems in Prose_
-Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
+(his masterpieces), several volumes of critical essays, published
-Et quand Octobre souffle, emondeur des vieux arbres.
+under the titles of _Æsthetic Curiosities_ and _Romantic Art; The
-Son vent melancolique a I'entour de leurs marbres,
+Artificial Paradises_, and his translations of the works of Edgar Allan
-Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats.
+Poe--admirable pieces of work by which Poe actually gains.
-Les Fleurs du MaL
+III
-Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
-Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
-Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea.
-Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,
+Baudelaire's love of the artificial has been insisted upon by all who
-Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,
+have studied his work, but to my mind never sufficiently insisted
-Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?
+upon, for it was the foundation of his method. He wrote many arguments
+in favour of the artificial, and elaborated them into a kind of
+paradoxical philosophy of art. His hatred of nature and purely natural
+things was but a perverted form of the religious ecstasy that made the
+old monk pull his cowl about his eyes when he left his cell in the
+month of May, lest he should see the blossoming trees, and his mind be
+turned towards the beautiful delusions of the world. The Egyptians and
+the earliest of the Christians looked upon nature not as the work of
+the good and benevolent spirit who is the father of our souls, but as
+the work of the rebellious "gods of generation," who fashion beautiful
+things to capture the heart of man and bind his Soul to earth. Blake,
+whom I have already quoted, hated nature in the same fashion, and held
+death to be the one way of escape from "the delusions of goddess Nature
+and her laws." Baudelaire's revolt against external things was more
+a revolt of the intellect than of the imagination; and he expresses
+it, not by desiring that the things of nature should be swept away to
+make room for the things of the spirit, but that they should be so
+changed by art that they cease to be natural. As he was of all poets
+the most intensely modern, holding that "modernity is one-half of art,"
+the other half being something "eternal and immutable," he preferred,
+unlike Blake and his modern followers, to express himself in quite
+modern terms, and so wrote his famous and much misunderstood Éloge du
+Maquillage to defend his views. As was usual with him, he pushed his
+ideas to their extreme logical sequence, and the casual reader who
+picks up that extraordinary essay is in consequence quite misled as to
+the writer's intention.
-Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before,
+It seems scarcely necessary at this time of day to assert that the
-Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat
+_Éloge du Maquillage_ is something more than a mere _Praise of
-And full of bitter summer, but more sweet
+Cosmetics_, written by a man who wished to shock his readers. It is
+the part expression of a theory of art, and if it is paradoxical and
+far-fetched it is because Baudelaire wrote at a time when French
+literature, in the words of M. Asselineau, "was dying of correctness,"
+and needed very vigorous treatment indeed. If the _Éloge du Maquillage_
+had been more restrained in manner, if it had not been something so
+entirely contrary to all accepted ideas of the well-regulated citizen
+who never thinks a thought that somebody else has not put into his
+head, it might have been passed over without notice. It was written to
+initiate the profane; to make them think, at least; and not to raise a
+smile among the initiated. And moreover, it was in a manner a defence
+of his own work that had met with so much hatred and opposition.
-To thee than gleanings of a northern shore
+He begins by attempting to prove that Nature is innately and
-Trod by no tropic feet?
+fundamentally wrong and wicked. "The greater number of errors relative
+to the beautiful date from the eighteenth century's false conceptions
+of morality. Nature was regarded in those times as the base, source,
+and type of all possible good and beauty.... If, however, we consent
+to refer simply to the visible facts,... we see that Nature teaches
+nothing, or almost nothing. That is to say, she _forces_ man to sleep,
+to drink, to eat, and to protect himself, well or ill, against the
+hostilities of the atmosphere. It is she also who moves him to kill
+and eat or imprison and torture his kind; for, as soon as we leave
+the region of necessities and needs to enter into that of luxuries
+and pleasures, we see that Nature is no better than a counsellor to
+crime.... Religion commands us to nourish our poor and infirm parents;
+Nature (the voice of our own interest) commands us to do away with
+them. Pass in review, analyse all that is natural, all the actions
+and desires of the natural man, and you will find nothing but what is
+horrible. All beautiful and noble things are the result of calculation.
+Crime, the taste for which the human animal absorbs before birth,
+is originally natural. Virtue, on the contrary, is _artificial_,
+supernatural, since there has been a necessity in all ages and among
+all nations for gods and prophets to preach virtue to humanity; since
+man alone would have been unable to discover it. Evil is done without
+effort, _naturally_ and by fatality; good is always the product of an
+art."
-II
+So far the argument is straightforward and expresses what many
+must have thought, but Baudelaire, remembering that exaggeration
+is the best way of impressing one's ideas upon the unimaginative,
+immediately carries his argument from the moral order to the order of
+the beautiful, and applies it there. The result is strange enough. "I
+am thus led to regard personal adornment as one of the signs of the
+primitive nobility of the human soul. The races that our confused and
+perverted civilisation, with a fatuity and pride entirely laughable,
+treats as savages, understand as does the child the high spirituality
+of the toilet. The savage and the child, by their naïve love of all
+brilliant things, of glittering plumage and shining stuffs, and the
+superlative majesty of artificial forms, bear witness to their distaste
+for reality, and so prove, unknown to themselves, the immateriality of
+their souls."
-For always thee the fervid languid glories
+Thus, with some appearance of logic, he carries his argument a step
-Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;
+farther, and this immediately brings him to the bizarre conclusion that
-Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
+the more beautiful a woman naturally is, the more she should hide her
+natural beauty beneath the artificial charm of rouge and powder. "She
+performs a duty in attempting to appear magical and supernatural. She
+is an idol who must adorn herself to be adored." Powder and rouge and
+kohl, all the little artifices that shock respectability, have for
+their end "the creation of an abstract unity in the grain and colour of
+the skin." This unity brings the human being nearer to the condition
+of a statue--that is to say, "a divine and superior being." Red and
+black are the symbols of "an excessive and supernatural life." A touch
+of kohl "lends to the eye a more decided appearance of a window opened
+upon infinity"; and rouge augments the brilliance of the eye, "and adds
+to a beautiful feminine face the mysterious passion of the priestess."
+But artifice cannot make ugliness any the less ugly, nor help age to
+rival youth. "Who dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating
+nature?" Deception, if it is to have any charm, must be obvious and
+unashamed; it must be displayed "if not with affectation, at least with
+a kind of candour."
+Such theories as these, if they are sincerely held, necessarily lead
+the theorist into the strangest bypaths of literature. Baudelaire, like
+many another writer whose business is with verse, pondered so long upon
+the musical and rhythmical value of words that at times words became
+meaningless to him. He thought his own language too simple to express
+the complexities of poetic reverie, and dreamed of writing his poems
+in Latin. Not, however, in the Latin of classical times; that was
+too robust, too natural, too "brutal and purely epidermic," to use
+an expression of his own; but in the corrupt Latin of the Byzantine
+decadence, which he considered as "the supreme sigh of a strong being
+already transformed and prepared for the spiritual life."
+One of these Latin poems has appeared in all editions of _The Flowers
+of Evil_. Though dozens as good are to be found in the Breviary of
+the Roman Church, "Franciscæ Meæ Laudes" has been included in this
+selection for the benefit of those curious in such matters. It is one
+of Baudelaire's many successful steps in the wrong direction.
-AVE ATQUE VALE
-Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
-The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
-That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
-Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.
+IV
-Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,
-The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear
-Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,
-Blind gods that cannot spare,
-m
+In almost every line of _The Flowers of Evil_ one can trace the
+influence of Edgar Poe, and in the many places where Baudelaire has
+attained a pure imaginative beauty as in "The Sadness of the Moon"
+or "Music" or "The Death of Lovers," it is a beauty that would have
+pleased the author of _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque_. Another
+kind of beauty, the beauty of death--for in Baudelaire's crucible
+everything is melted into loveliness--is even more directly traceable
+to Poe. In spite of the sonnet "Correspondences," and in spite of his
+Symbolist followers of the present day, Baudelaire himself made but
+an imperfect use of such symbols as he had; and these he found ready
+to his hand in the works of the American poet. The Tomb, the symbol
+of death or of an intellectual darkness inhabited by the Worm, who is
+remorse; the Abyss, which is the despair into which the mortal part of
+man's mind plunges when brought into contact with dead and perishing
+substances; all these are borrowed from Poe. The Worm, who "devours
+with a kiss," occasionally becomes Time devouring life, or the Demon,
+"the obscure Enemy who gnaws the heart"; and when it is none of these
+it is the Serpent, as in that sombre poem "To a Madonna"--the Serpent
+beneath the feet of conquering purity. Baudelaire's imagination,
+however, which continually ran upon _macabre_ images, loved remorse
+more than peace, and loved the Serpent more than the purity that would
+slay it, so he destroys purity with "Seven Knives" which are "the Seven
+Deadly Sins," that the Serpent may live to prey upon a heart that finds
+no beauty in peace. Even Love is evil, for his "ancient arrows" are
+"crime, horror, folly," and the god Eros becomes a demon lying in wait:
-Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother.
+    "Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat
+    Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
+    And I too well his ancient arrows know:
+    Crime, Horror, Folly...."
-Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us:
+Gautier pretends that the poet preserved his ideal under the form of
+"the adorable phantom of La Beatrix, the ideal ever desired, never
+attained, the divine and superior beauty incarnated in an ethereal
+woman, spiritualised, made of light and flame and perfume, a vapour, a
+dream, a reflection of the seraphical world"; but when Baudelaire has
+a vision of this same Beatrice he sees her as one of a crowd of "cruel
+and curious demons" who mock at his sorrow, and she, too, mocks him,
+and caresses the demons who are his spiritual foes.
-Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous,
+Baudelaire was too deeply in love with the artificial to care overmuch
-Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other
+for the symbols he could have found among natural objects. Only once
+in _The Flowers of Evil_ does he look upon the Moon with the eyes of a
+mystic; and that is when he remembers that all people of imagination
+are under the Moon's influence, and makes his poet hide her iridescent
+tear in his heart, "far from the eyes of the Sun," for the Sun is lord
+of material labours and therefore hostile to the dreams and reveries
+that are the activity of the poet. He sought more for bizarre analogies
+and striking metaphors than for true symbols or correspondences. He is
+happiest when comparing the vault of the heaven to "the lighted ceiling
+of a music hall," or "the black lid of the mighty pot where the human
+generations boil"; and when he thinks of the unfortunate and unhappy
+folk of the world, he does not see any hope for them in any future
+state; he sees, simply, "God's awful claw" stretched out to tear them.
+He offers pity, but no comfort.
-Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime;
+Sometimes he has a vision of a beauty unmingled with any malevolence;
+but it is always evoked by sensuous and material things; perfume or
+music; and always it is a sorrowful loveliness he mourns or praises.
+Perhaps of all his poems "The Balcony" is most full of that tender and
+reverential melancholy we look for in a poem of love; but even it tells
+of a passion that has faded out of heart and mind and become beautiful
+only with its passing away, and not of an existing love. The other love
+poems--if indeed such a name can be given to "A Madrigal of Sorrow,"
+"The Eyes of Beauty," "The Remorse of the Dead," and the like--are
+nothing but terrible confessions of satiety, or cruelty, or terror. I
+have translated "The Corpse," his most famous and most infamous poem,
+partly because it shows him at his worst as the others in the volume at
+his best, partly because it is something of the nature of a literary
+curiosity. A poem like "The Corpse," which is simply an example of
+what may happen if any writer pushes his theories to the extreme, does
+not at all detract, be it said, from Baudelaire's delicate genius; for
+though he may not be quite worthy of a place by Dante, he has written
+poems that Dante might have been proud to write, and he is worthy to
+be set among the very greatest of the moderns, alongside Hugo and
+Verlaine. Read the sonnet entitled "Beauty" and you will see how
+he has invoked in fourteen lines the image of a goddess, mysterious
+and immortal; as fair as that Aphrodite who cast the shadow of her
+loveliness upon the Golden Age; as terrible as Pallas, "the warrior
+maid invincible." And as Minerva loved mortality in the person of
+Ulysses, so Baudelaire's personification of Beauty loves the poets who
+pray before her and gaze into her eternal eyes, watching the rising and
+setting of their visionary Star in those placid mirrors.
-The hidden harvest of luxurious time.
+The explanation of most of Baudelaire's morbid imaginings is this, that
-Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech;
+he was a man haunted by terrible dream-like memories; chief among them
+the memory that the loveliness he had adored in woman--the curve of a
+perfect cheek, the lifting of a perfect arm in some gesture of imperial
+indolence, the fall of a curl across, a pale brow, all the minute
+and unforgettable things that give immortality to some movement of
+existence--all these, and the woman and her lover, must pass away from
+Time and Space; and he, unhappily, knew nothing of the philosophy that
+teaches us how all objects and events, even the most trivial--a woman's
+gesture, a rose, a sigh, a fading flame, the sound that trembles
+on a lute-string--find a place in Eternity when they pass from the
+recognition of our senses. If he believed in the deathlessness of man's
+personality he gained no comfort from his belief. He mourned the body's
+decay; he was not concerned with the soul; and no heaven less palpable
+than Mohammed's could have had any reality in his imagination.
-And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep
+His prose is as distinguished in its manner as his verse. I think it
+was Professor Saintsbury who first brought _The Little Poems in Prose_,
+a selection from which is included in this volume, before the notice
+of English readers in an essay written many years ago. I am writing
+this in France, far from the possibility of consulting any English
+books, but if my memory serves me rightly he considered the prose of
+these prose poems to be as perfect as literature can be. I think he
+said, "they go as far as prose can go." They need no other introduction
+than themselves, for they are perfect of their kind, and not different
+in thought from the more elaborately wrought poems of _The Flowers of
+Evil_. Some of them, as for instance "Every Man His Chimæra," are as
+classical and as universally true as the myths and symbolisms of the
+Old Testament; and all of them, I think, are worthy of a place in that
+book the Archangel of the Presence will consult when all is weighed
+in the balance--the book written by man himself, the record of his
+deep and shallow imaginings. Baudelaire wrote them, he said, because
+he had dreamed, "in his days of ambition," "of a miracle of poetical
+prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme." His attitude of mind
+was always so natural to him that he never thought it necessary to
+make any excuse for the spirit of his art or the drear philosophy he
+preached; unless a short notice printed in the first edition of his
+poems, but withdrawn from the second edition, explaining that "faithful
+to his dolorous programme, the author of _The Flowers of Evil_, as a
+perfect comedian, has had to mould his spirit to all sophisms as to all
+corruptions," can be considered as an excuse. From whatever point of
+view we regard him: whether we praise his art and blame his philosophy,
+or blame his art and praise his philosophy, he is as difficult to
+analyse as he is difficult to give a place to, for we have none with
+whom to compare him, or very few, too few to be of service to the
+critic. His art is like the pearl, a beautiful product of disease, and
+to blame it is like blaming the pearl.
-Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep;
+He looked upon life very much as Poe, whom he so admired, looked upon
-And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each.
+it: with the eye of a sensitive spectator in some gloomy vault of the
+Spanish Inquisition, where beauty was upon the rack; he was horrified,
+but unable to turn from a sight that fascinated him by its very terror.
+His moments of inspiration are haunted by the consciousness that evil
+beings, clothed with horror as with a shroud, are ever lingering about
+the temple of life and awaiting an opportunity to enter. He was like
+a man who awakens trembling from a nightmare, afraid of the darkness,
+and unable to believe the dawn may be less hopeless than the midnight.
+Perhaps he was haunted, as many artists and all mystics, by a fear of
+madness and of the unseen world of evil shapes that sanity hides from
+us and madness reveals. Is there a man, is there a writer, especially,
+who has not at times been conscious of a vague and terrible fear that
+the whole world of visible nature is but a comfortable illusion that
+may fade away in a moment and leave him face to face with the horror
+that has visited him in dreams? The old occult writers held that
+the evil thoughts of others beget phantoms in the air that can make
+themselves, bodies out of our fear, and haunt even our waking moments.
+These were the shapes of terror that haunted Baudelaire. Shelley, too,
+writes of them with as profound a knowledge as the magical writer of
+the Middle Ages. They come to haunt his Prometheus.
-Seeing as men sow men reap.
+    "Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
+    And hollow underneath, like death."
-IV
+They are the elemental beings who dwell beside the soul of the dreamer
+and the poet, "like a vain loud multitude"; turning life into death and
+all beautiful thoughts into poems like _The Flowers of Evil_, or into
+tales like the satanic reveries of Edgar Poe.
-O sleepless heart and sombre soul misleeping,
+    "We are the ministers of pain, and fear,
-That were athirst for sleep and no more life
+    And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate,
-And no more love, for peace and no more strife I
+    And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
+    Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn,
+    We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
+    When the great King betrays them to our will."
-Now the dim gods of death have in their keeping
+And every man gives them of the substance of his imagination to clothe
-Spirit and body and all the springs of song,
+them in prophetic shapes that are the images of his destiny:
-Is it well now where love can do not wrong,
-Where stingless pleasure has no foam or fang
+    "From our victim's destined agony
-Behind the unopening closure of her lips?
+    The shade which is our form invests us round,
-It is not well where soul from body slips
+    Else we are shapeless as our mother Night."
-And flesh from bone divides without a pang
+The greatest of all poets conquer their dreams; others, who are
-As dew from flower-bell drips.
+great, but not of the greatest, are conquered by them, and Baudelaire
+was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Poe that
+Baudelaire may well have pondered as he laboured at his translation,
+for it reveals the secret of his life: "There are moments when, even
+to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume
+the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man is no Carathis
+to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of
+sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful; but,
+like the demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the
+Oxus, they must sleep or they will devour us--they must be suffered to
+slumber or we perish."
-AVE ATQUE VALE
+===POEMS IN PROSE Translated by Arthur Symons===
-It is enough; the end and the beginning
-Are one thing to thee, who are past the end.
-O hand unclasped of unbeholden friend,
-For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning,
+NOTE
-No triumph and no labor and no lust,
-Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust.
-O quiet eyes wherein the light saith nought,
+The "Petits Poëmes en Prose" are experiments, and they are also
-Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night
+confessions. "Who of us," says Baudelaire in his dedicatory preface,
-With obscure finger silences your sight,
+"has not dreamed, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic
+prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, subtle and staccato
+enough to follow the lyric motions of the soul, the wavering outlines
+of meditation, the sudden starts of the conscience?" This miracle he
+has achieved in these _bagatelles laborieuses_, to use his own words,
+these astonishing trifles, in which the art is not more novel, precise
+and perfect than the quality of thought and of emotion. In translating
+into English a few of these little masterpieces, which have given me so
+much delight for so many years, I have tried to be absolutely faithful
+to the sense, the words, and the rhythm of the original. A. S.
-Nor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought,
-Sleep, and have sleep for light.
-VI
+I
-Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over,
+THE FAVOURS OF THE MOON
-Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet,
-Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet
-Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover.
-Such as thy vision here solicited.
-Under the shadow of her fair vast head.
-The deep division of prodigious breasts,
+The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in through the window when you
-The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep,
+lay asleep in your cradle, and said inwardly: "This is a child after my
-The weight of awful tresses that still keep
+own soul."
-The savor and shade of old-world pine-forests
+And she came softly down the staircase of the clouds, and passed
-Where the wet hill- winds weep?
+noiselessly through the window-pane. Then she laid herself upon you
+with, the supple tenderness of a mother, and she left her colours
+upon your face. That is why your eyes are green and your cheeks
+extraordinarily pale. It was when you looked at her, that your pupils
+widened so strangely; and she clasped her arms so tenderly about your
+throat that ever since you have had the longing for tears.
+Nevertheless, in the flood of her joy, the Moon filled the room like
+a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison; and all this living
+light thought and said: "My kiss shall be upon you for ever. You shall
+be beautiful as I am beautiful. You shall love that which I love and
+that by which I am loved: water and clouds, night and silence; the
+vast green sea; the formless and multiform water; the place where you
+shall never be; the lover whom you shall never know; unnatural flowers;
+odours which make men drunk; the cats that languish upon pianos and sob
+like women, with hoarse sweet voices!
+"And you shall be loved by my lovers, courted by my courtiers. You
+shall be the queen of men who have green eyes, and whose throats I have
+clasped by night in my caresses; of those that love the sea, the vast
+tumultuous green sea, formless and multiform water, the place where
+they are not, the woman whom they know not, the ominous flowers that
+are like the censers of an unknown rite, the odours that trouble the
+will, and the savage and voluptuous beasts that are the emblems of
+their folly."
-vn
+And that is why, accursed dear spoilt child, I lie now at your feet,
+seeking to find in you the image of the fearful goddess, the fateful
+god-mother, the poisonous nurse of all the moonstruck of the world.
-Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?
-O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom.
-Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?
-What of despair, of rapture, of derision,
+II
+WHICH IS TRUE?
-AVE ATQUE VALE
+I knew one Benedicta who filled earth and air with the ideal; and from
+whose eyes men learnt the desire of greatness, of beauty, of glory, and
+of all whereby we believe in immortality.
-What of life is there, what of ill or good?
+But this miraculous child was too beautiful to live long; and she died
+only a few days after I had come, to know her, and I buried her with my
+own hands, one day when Spring shook out her censer in the graveyards.
+I buried her with my own hands, shut down into a coffin of wood,
+perfumed and incorruptible like Indian caskets.
-Are the fruits gray like dust or bright like blood?
+And as I still gazed at the place where I had laid away my treasure,
-Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours,
+I saw all at once a little person singularly like the deceased, who
+trampled on the fresh soil with a strange and hysterical violence, and
+said, shrieking with laughter: "Look at me! I am the real Benedicta! a
+pretty sort of baggage I am! And to punish you for your blindness and
+folly you shall love me just as I am!"
-The faint fields quicken any terrene root,
+But I was furious, and I answered: "No! no! no!" And to add more
+emphasis to my refusal I stamped on the ground so violently with my
+foot that my leg sank up to the knee in the earth of the new grave; and
+now, like a wolf caught in a trap, I remain fastened, perhaps for ever,
+to the grave of the ideal.
-In low lands where the sun and moon are mute
-And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers
-At all, or any fruit?
+III
+"L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE"
-vin
-Alas, but though my flying song flies after,
+There is a wonderful country, a country of Cockaigne, they say, which
-O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet
+I dreamed of visiting with an old friend. It is a strange country,
-Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet.
+lost in the mists of our North, and one might call it the East of
+the West, the China of Europe, so freely does a warm and capricious
+fancy flourish there, and so patiently and persistently has that fancy
+illustrated it with a learned and delicate vegetation.
-Some dim derision of mysterious laughter
+A real country of Cockaigne, where everything is beautiful, rich,
+quiet, honest; where order is the likeness and the mirror of luxury;
+where life is fat, and sweet to breathe; where disorder, tumult, and
+the unexpected are shut out; where happiness is wedded to silence;
+where even cooking is poetic, rich and highly flavoured at once; where
+all, dear love, is made in your image.
-From the blind tongueless warders of the dead.
+You know that feverish sickness which comes over us in our cold
-Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine's veiled head,
+miseries, that nostalgia of unknown lands, that anguish of curiosity?
+There is a country made in your image, where all is beautiful, rich,
+quiet and honest; where fancy has built and decorated a western China,
+where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wedded to silence.
+It is there that we should live, it is there that we should die!
-Some little sound of unregarded tears
+Yes, it is there that we should breathe, dream, and lengthen out
-Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes,
+the hours by the infinity of sensations. A musician has written an
-And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs —
+"Invitation à la Valse": who will compose the "Invitation au Voyage"
+that we can offer to the beloved, to the chosen sister?
-These only, these the hearkening spirit hears,
+Yes, it is in this atmosphere that it would be good to live; far off,
-Sees only such things rise.
+where slower hours contain more thoughts where clocks strike happiness
+with a deeper and more significant solemnity.
+On shining panels, or on gilded leather of a dark richness, slumbers
+the discreet life of pictures, deep, calm, and devout as the souls of
+the pointers who created it. The sunsets which colour so richly the
+walls of dining-room and drawing-room, are sifted through beautiful
+hangings or through tall wrought windows leaded into many panes. The
+pieces of furniture are large, curious, and fantastic, armed with locks
+and secrets like refined souls. Mirrors, metals, hangings, goldsmith's
+work and pottery, play for the eyes a mute and mysterious symphony; and
+from all things, from every corner, from the cracks of drawers and from
+the folds of hangings, exhales a singular odour, a "forget-me-not" of
+Sumatra, which is, as it were, the soul of the abode.
+A real country of Cockaigne, I assure you, where all is beautiful,
+clean, and shining, like a clear conscience, like a bright array of
+kitchen crockery, like splendid jewellery of gold, like many-coloured
+jewellery of silver! All the treasures of the world have found their
+way there, as to the house of a hard-working man who has put the
+whole world in his debt. Singular country, excelling others as Art
+excels Nature, where Nature is refashioned by dreams, where Nature is.
+corrected, embellished, remoulded.
-IX
+Let the alchemists of horticulture seek and seek again, let them set
+ever further and further back the limits to their happiness! Let them
+offer prizes of sixty and of a hundred thousand florins to whoever will
+solve their ambitious problems! For me, I have found my "black tulip"
+and my "blue dahlia!"
-Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow,
+Incomparable flower, recaptured tulip, allegoric dahlia, it is there,
+is it not, in that beautiful country, so calm and so full of dreams,
+that you live and flourish? There, would you not be framed within your
+own analogy, and would you not see yourself again, reflected, as the
+mystics say, in your own "correspondence"?
-Far too far off for thought or any prayer.
+Dreams, dreams ever! and the more delicate and ambitious the soul, the
+further do dreams estrange it from possible things. Every man carries
+within himself his natural dose of opium, ceaselessly secreted and
+renewed, and, from birth to death, how many hours can we reckon of
+positive pleasure, of successful and decided action? Shall we ever live
+in, shall we ever pass into, that picture which my mind has painted,
+that picture made in your image?
-What ails us with thee, who art wind and air?
+These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these odours,
-What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow?
+these miraculous flowers, are you. You too are the great rivers and the
+quiet canals. The vast ships that drift down them, laden with riches,
+from whose decks comes the sound of the monotonous songs of labouring
+sailors, are my thoughts which slumber or rise and fall on your breast.
+You lead them softly towards the sea, which is the infinite, mirroring
+the depths of the sky in the crystal clearness of your soul; and when,
+weary of the surge and heavy with the spoils of the East, they return
+to the port of their birth, it is still my thoughts that come back
+enriched out of the infinite to you.
-Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,
-Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire.
-Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find.
-Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies,
+IV
-The low light fails us in elusive skies,
+THE EYES OF THE POOR
-Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind
-Are still the eluded eyes.
+Ah! you want to know why I hate you to-day. It will probably be less
+easy for you to understand than for me to explain it to you; for you
+are, I think, the most perfect example of feminine impenetrability that
+could possibly be found.
+We had spent a long day together, and it had seemed to me short. We had
+promised one another that we would think the same thoughts and that our
+two souls should become one soul; a dream which is not original, after
+all, except that, dreamed by all men, it has been realised by none.
-AVE ATQUE VALE
+In the evening you were a little tired, and you sat down outside a new
+café at the corner of a new boulevard, still littered with plaster
+and already displaying proudly its unfinished splendours. The café
+glittered. The very gas put on all the fervency of a fresh start, and
+lighted up with its full force the blinding whiteness of the walls,
+the dazzling sheets of glass in the mirrors, the gilt of cornices
+and mouldings, the chubby-cheeked pages straining back from hounds
+in leash, the ladies laughing at the falcons on their wrists, the
+nymphs and goddesses carrying fruits and pies and game on their heads,
+the Hebes and Ganymedes holding out at arm's-length little jars of
+syrups or parti-coloured obelisks of ices; the whole of history and of
+mythology brought together to make a paradise for gluttons. Exactly
+opposite to us, in the roadway, stood a man of about forty years of
+age, with a weary face and a greyish beard, holding a little boy by one
+hand and carrying on the other arm a little fellow too weak to walk.
+He was taking the nurse-maid's place, and had brought his children
+out for a walk in the evening. All were in rags. The three faces were
+extraordinarily serious, and the six eyes stared fixedly at the new
+café with an equal admiration, differentiated in each according to age.
+The father's eyes said: "How beautiful it is! how beautiful it is! One
+would think that all the gold of the poor world had found its way to
+these walls." The boy's eyes said: "How beautiful it is! how beautiful
+it is! But that is a house which only people who are not like us can
+enter." As for the little one's eyes, they were too fascinated to
+express anything but stupid and utter joy.
+Song-writers say that pleasure ennobles the soul and softens the heart.
+The song was right that evening, so far as I was concerned. Not only
+was I touched by this family of eyes, but I felt rather ashamed of
+our glasses and decanters, so much too much for our thirst. I turned
+to look at you, dear love, that I might read my own thought in you; I
+gazed deep into your eyes, so beautiful and so strangely sweet, your
+green eyes that are the home of caprice and under the sovereignty of
+the Moon; and you said to me: "Those people are insupportable to me
+with their staring saucer-eyes! Couldn't you tell the head waiter to
+send them away?"
-Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes,
+So hard is it to understand one another, dearest, and so incommunicable
-Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul,
+is thought, even between people who are in love!
-The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll
-I lay my hand on, and not death estranges
-My spirit from communion of thy song —
-These memories and these melodies that throng
-Veiled porches of a Muse funereal —
-These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold
-As though a hand were in my hand to hold,
-Or through mine ears a mourning musical
+V
-Of many mourners rolled.
-XI
+WINDOWS
-I among these, I also, in such station
-As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods,
-And offering to the dead made, and their gods,
-The old mourners had, standing to make libation,
+He who looks in through an open window never sees so many things as
-I stand, and to the gods and to the dead
+he who looks at a shut window. There is nothing more profound, more
-Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed
+mysterious, more fertile, more gloomy, or more dazzling, than a window
+lighted by a candle. What we can see in the sunlight is always less
+interesting than what goes on behind the panes of a window. In that
+dark or luminous hollow, life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
-Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom,
+Across the waves of roofs, I can see a woman of middle age, wrinkled,
-And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear,
+poor, who is always leaning over something, and who never goes out.
-And what I may of fruits in this chilled air,
+Out of her face, out of her dress, out of her attitude, out of nothing
+almost, I have made up the woman's story, and sometimes I say it over
+to myself with tears.
-And lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb
+If it had been a poor old man, I could have made up his just as easily.
-A curl of severed hair.
+And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in others.
+Perhaps you will say to me: "Are you sure that it is the real story?"
+What does it matter, what does any reality outside of myself matter, if
+it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?
-xn
-But by no hand nor any treason stricken,
-Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King,
-The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing,
-Thou liest and on this dust no tears could quicken
+VI
+CROWDS
-AVE ATQUE VALE
+It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude: to play
+upon crowds is an art; and he alone can plunge, at the expense of
+humankind, into a debauch of vitality, to whom a fairy has bequeathed
+in his cradle the love of masks and disguises, the hate of home and the
+passion of travel.
-There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear
+Multitude, solitude: equal terms mutually convertible by the active and
+begetting poet. He who does not know how to people his solitude, does
+not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd.
-Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear
+The poet enjoys this incomparable privilege, to be at once himself and
-Down the opening leaves of holy poet's pages.
+others. Like those wandering souls that go about seeking bodies, he
+enters at will the personality of every man. For him alone, every place
+is vacant; and if certain places seem to be closed against him, that is
+because in his eyes they are not worth the trouble of visiting.
-Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns;
+The solitary and thoughtful walker derives a singular intoxication
+from this universal communion. He who mates easily with the crowd knows
+feverish joys that must be for ever unknown to the egoist, shut up like
+a coffer, and to the sluggard, imprisoned like a shell-fish. He adopts
+for his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that
+circumstance sets before him.
-But bending us-ward with memorial urns
+What men call love is small indeed, narrow and weak indeed, compared
-The most high Muses that fulfil all ages
+with this ineffable orgie, this sacred prostitution of the soul which
+gives itself up wholly (poetry and charity!) to the unexpected which
+happens, to the stranger as he passes.
-Weep, and our God's heart yearns.
+It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were
+it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are
+higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs. The founders of colonies,
+the shepherds of nations, the missionary priests, exiled to the ends of
+the earth, doubtless know something of these mysterious intoxications;
+and, in the midst of the vast family that their genius has raised about
+them, they must sometimes laugh at the thought of those who pity them
+for their chaste lives and troubled fortunes.
-xni
-For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often
-Among us darkling here the lord of light
-Makes manifest his music and his might
-In hearts that open and in lips that soften
+VII
-With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine.
+THE CAKE
-Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine,
-And nourished them indeed with bitter bread;
-Yet surely from his hand thy soul's food came.
-The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame
-Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed
+I was travelling. The landscape in the midst of which I was seated
-Who feeds our hearts with fame.
+was of an irresistible grandeur and sublimity. Something no doubt at
+that moment passed from it into my soul. My thoughts fluttered with a
+lightness like that of the atmosphere; vulgar passions, such as hate
+and profane love, seemed to me now as far away as the clouds that
+floated in the gulfs beneath my feet; my soul seemed to me as vast
+and pure as the dome of the sky that enveloped me; the remembrance of
+earthly things came as faintly to my heart as the thin tinkle of the
+bells of unseen herds, browsing far, far away, on the slope of another
+mountain. Across the little motionless lake, black with the darkness
+of its immense depth, there passed from time to time the shadow of a
+cloud, like the shadow of an airy giant's cloak, flying through heaven.
+And I remember that this rare and solemn sensation, caused by a vast
+and perfectly silent movement, filled me with mingled joy and fear.
+In a word, thanks to the enrapturing beauty about me, I felt that I
+was at perfect peace with myself and with the universe; I even believe
+that, in my complete forgetfulness of all earthly evil, I had come to
+think the newspapers are right after all, and man was born good; when,
+incorrigible matter renewing its exigencies, I sought to refresh the
+fatigue and satisfy the appetite caused by so lengthy a climb. I took
+from my pocket a large piece of bread, a leathern cup, and a small
+bottle of a certain elixir which the chemists at that time sold to
+tourists, to be mixed, on occasion, with liquid snow.
-XIV
+I was quietly cutting my bread when a slight noise made me look up. I
+saw in front of me a little ragged urchin, dark and dishevelled, whose
+hollow eyes, wild and supplicating, devoured the piece of bread. And I
+heard him gasp, in a low, hoarse voice, the word: "Cake!" I could not
+help laughing at the appellation with which he thought fit to honour my
+nearly white bread, and I cut off a big slice and offered it to him.
+Slowly he came up to me, not taking his eyes from the coveted object;
+then, snatching it out of my hand, he stepped quickly back, as if he
+feared that my offer was not sincere, or that I had already repented of
+it.
-Therefore he too now at thy soul's sunsetting,
+But at the same instant he was knocked over by another little savage,
-God of all suns and songs, he too bends down
+who had sprung from I know not where, and who was so precisely like
-To mix his laurel with thy c5TDress crown
+the first that one might have taken them for twin brothers. They
+rolled over on the ground together, struggling for the possession of
+the precious booty, neither willing to share it with his brother. The
+first, exasperated, clutched the second by the hair; and the second
+seized one of the ears of the first between his teeth, and spat out
+a little bleeding morsel with a fine oath in dialect. The legitimate
+proprietor of the cake tried to hook his little claws into the
+usurper's eyes; the latter did his best to throttle his adversary with
+one hand, while with the other he endeavoured to slip the prize of war
+into his pocket. But, heartened by despair, the loser pulled himself
+together, and sent the victor sprawling with a blow of the head in his
+stomach. Why describe a hideous fight which indeed lasted longer than
+their childish strength seemed to promise? The cake travelled from hand
+to hand, and changed from pocket to pocket, at every moment; but, alas,
+it changed also in size; and when at length, exhausted, panting and
+bleeding, they stopped from the sheer impossibility of going on, there
+was no longer any cause of feud; the slice of bread had disappeared,
+and lay scattered in crumbs like the grains of sand with which it was
+mingled.
-And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting.
+The sight had darkened the landscape for me, and dispelled the joyous
-Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art,
+calm in which my soul had lain basking; I remained saddened for quite a
-Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart,
+long time, saying over and over to myself: "There is then a wonderful
+country in which bread is called cake, and is so rare a delicacy that
+it is enough in itself to give rise to a war literally fratricidal!"
-Mourns thee of many his children the last dead.
-And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs
-Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes.
-And over thine irrevocable head
-Sheds light from the under skies.
+VIII
+EVENING TWILIGHT
-AVE ATQUE VALE
+The day is over. A great restfulness descends into poor minds that the
+day's work has wearied; and thoughts take on the tender and dim colours
+of twilight.
+Nevertheless from the mountain peak there comes to my balcony, through
+the transparent clouds of evening, a great clamour, made up of a crowd
+of discordant cries, dulled by distance into a mournful harmony, like
+that of the rising tide or of a storm brewing.
-XV
+Who are the hapless ones to whom evening brings no calm; to whom, as to
+the owls, the coming of night is the signal for a witches' sabbat? The
+sinister ululation comes to me from the hospital on the mountain; and,
+in the evening, as I smoke, and look down on the quiet of the immense
+valley, bristling with houses, each of whose windows seems to say,
+"Here is peace, here is domestic happiness!" I can, when the wind blows
+from the heights, lull my astonished thought with this imitation of the
+harmonies of hell.
-Ard one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,
+Twilight excites madmen. I remember I had two friends whom twilight
-And stains with tears her changing bosom chill;
+made quite ill. One of them lost all sense of social and friendly
-Tiat obscure Venus of the hollow hill,
+amenities, and flew at the first-comer like a savage. I have seen him
+throw at the waiter's head an excellent chicken, in which he imagined
+he had discovered some insulting hieroglyph. Evening, harbinger of
+profound delights, spoilt for him the most succulent things.
-That thing transformed which was the Cytherean,
+The other, a prey to disappointed ambition, turned gradually, as the
-With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine
+daylight dwindled, sourer, more gloomy, more nettlesome. Indulgent and
-Long since, and face no more called Erycine
+sociable during the day, he was pitiless in the evening; and it was not
+only on others, but on himself, that he vented the rage of his twilight
+mania.
-A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.
+The former died mad, unable to recognise his wife and child; the
+latter still keeps the restlessness of a perpetual disquietude; and, if
+all the honours that republics and princes can confer were heaped upon
+him, I believe that the twilight would still quicken in him the burning
+envy of imaginary distinctions. Night, which put its own darkness into
+their minds, brings light to mine; and, though it is by no means rare
+for the same cause to bring about opposite results, I am always as it
+were perplexed and alarmed by it.
-Thee also with fair flesh and singing* spell
+O night! O refreshing dark! for me you are the summons to an inner
-Did she, a sad and second prey, compel
+feast, you are the deliverer from anguish! In the solitude of the
+plains, in the stony labyrinths of a city, scintillation of stars,
+outburst of gaslamps, you are the fireworks of the goddess Liberty!
-Into the footless places once more trod,
+Twilight, how gentle you are and how tender! The rosy lights that still
-And shadows hot from hell.
+linger on the horizon, like the last agony of day under the conquering
+might of its night; the flaring candle-flames that stain with dull red
+the last glories of the sunset; the heavy draperies that an invisible
+hand draws out of the depths of the East, mimic all those complex
+feelings that war on one another in the heart of man at the solemn
+moments of life.
+Would you not say that it was one of those strange costumes worn by
+dancers, in which the tempered splendours of a shining skirt show
+through a dark and transparent gauze, as, through the darkness of the
+present, pierces the delicious past? And the wavering stars of gold and
+silver with which it is shot, are they not those fires of fancy which
+take light never so well as under the deep mourning of the night?
-XVI
-And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,
+IX
-No choral salutation lure to light
-A spirit with perfume and sweet night
-And love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.
+"ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD"
-There is no help for these things; none to mend.
-And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend,
-Will make death clear or make life durable.
-Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine
-And with wild notes about this dust of thine
-At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell
+Life is a hospital, in which every patient is possessed by the desire
-And wreathe an unseen shrine.
+of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and
+another is certain that he would get well if he were by the window. It
+seems to me that I should always be happy if I were somewhere else, and
+this question of moving house is one that I am continually talking over
+with my soul.
-xvn
+"Tell me, my soul, poor chilly soul, what do you say to living in
+Lisbon? It must be very warm there, and you would bask merrily, like
+a lizard. It is by the sea; they say that it is built of marble, and
+that the people have such a horror of vegetation that they tear up all
+the trees. There is a country after your own soul; a country made up of
+light and mineral, and with liquid to reflect them."
-Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
+My soul makes no answer.
-If sweet, give thanks ; thou hast no more to live
-And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.
-Out of the mystic and the mournful garden
+"Since you love rest, and to see moving things, will you come and
+live in that heavenly land, Holland? Perhaps you would be happy in a
+country which you have so often admired in pictures. What do you say
+to Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships anchored at the
+doors of houses?"
+My soul remains silent.
+"Or perhaps Java seems to you more attractive? Well, there we shall
+find the mind of Europe married to tropical beauty."
-AVE ATQUE VALE
+Not a word. Can my soul be dead?
-Where all day through thine hands in barren brajl
+"Have you sunk then into so deep a stupor that only your own pain
-Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade, /
+gives you pleasure? If that be so, let us go to the lands that are made
+in the likeness of Death. I know exactly the place for us, poor soul!
+We will book our passage to Torneo. We will go still further, to the
+last limits of the Baltic; and, if it be possible, further still from
+life; we will make our abode at the Pole. There the sun only grazes the
+earth, and the slow alternations of light and night put out variety
+and bring in the half of nothingness, monotony. There we can take
+great baths of darkness, while, from time to time, for our pleasure,
+the Aurora Borealis shall scatter its rosy sheaves before us, like
+reflections of fireworks in hell!"
-Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants gray,
+At last my soul bursts into speech, and wisely she cries to me:
-Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearte4
+"Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world!"
-Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that
-started.
-Shall death not bring us all as thee one day
-Among the days departed?
-xvin
-For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,
+X
-Take at my hands this garland, and farewell.
-Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,
-And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother,
+A HEROIC DEATH
-With sadder than the Niobean womb.
-And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb.
-Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done:
-There lies not any troublous thing before.
-Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more,
-For whom all winds are quiet as the sim,
+Fancioulle was an admirable buffoon, and almost one of the friends
-All waters as the shore.
+of the Prince. But for persons professionally devoted to the comic,
+serious things have a fatal attraction, and, strange as it may seem
+that ideas of patriotism and liberty should seize despotically upon the
+brain of a player, one day Fancioulle joined in a conspiracy formed by
+some discontented nobles.
+There exist everywhere sensible men to denounce those individuals
+of atrabiliar disposition who seek to depose princes, and, without
+consulting it, to reconstitute society. The lords in question were
+arrested, together with Fancioulle, and condemned to death.
+I would readily believe that the Prince was almost sorry to find his
+favourite actor among the rebels. The Prince was neither better nor
+worse than any other Prince; but an excessive sensibility rendered
+him, in many cases, more cruel and more despotic than all his fellows.
+Passionately enamoured of the fine arts, an excellent connoisseur as
+well, he was truly insatiable of pleasures. Indifferent enough in
+regard to men and morals, himself a real artist, he feared no enemy but
+Ennui, and the extravagant efforts that he made to fly or to vanquish
+this tyrant of the world would certainly have brought upon him, on
+the part of a severe historian, the epithet of "monster," had it been
+permitted, in his dominions, to write anything whatever which did not
+tend exclusively to pleasure, or to astonishment, which is one of the
+most delicate forms of pleasure. The great misfortune of the Prince
+was that he had no theatre vast enough for his genius. There are young
+Neros who are stifled within too narrow limits, and whose names and
+whose intentions will never be known to future ages. An unforeseeing
+Providence had given to this man faculties greater than his dominions.
-==PREFACE ==
+Suddenly the rumour spread that the sovereign had decided to pardon all
+the conspirators; and the origin of this rumour was the announcement of
+a special performance in which Fancioulle would play one of his best
+_rôles_, and at which even the condemned nobles, it was said, were to
+be present, an evident sign, added superficial minds, of the generous
+tendencies of the Prince.
-In presenting to the American public this collection in
+On the part of a man so naturally and deliberately eccentric, anything
-English of perhaps the most influential French poet of
+was possible, even virtue, even mercy, especially if he could hope
-the last seventy years, I consider it essential to explain
+to find in it unexpected pleasures. But to those who, like myself,
-the conditions under which the work has been done.
+had succeeded in penetrating further into the depths of this sick
+and curious soul, it was infinitely more probable that the Prince
+was wishful to estimate the quality of the scenic talents of a man
+condemned to death. He would profit by the occasion to obtain a
+physiological experience of a _capital_ interest, and to verify to what
+extent the habitual faculties of an artist would be altered or modified
+by the extraordinary situation in which he found himself. Beyond this,
+did there exist in his mind an intention, more or less defined, of
+mercy? It is a point that has never been solved.
-Baudelaire has written poems that will, in all likeli-
+At last, the great day having come, the little court displayed all its
-hood, live while poetry is used as a medium of expres-
+pomps, and it would be difficult to realise, without having seen it,
-sion, and the great influence that he has exercised on
+what splendour the privileged classes of a little state with limited
-English and continental literature is mainly due to the
+resources can show forth, on a really solemn occasion. This was a
-particular quality of his style, his way of feeling or his
+doubly solemn one, both from the wonder of its display and from the
-method of thought. He is a master of analytical power,
+mysterious moral interest attaching to it.
-and in his highest ecstasy of emotional expression, this
-power can readily be recognized. In his own quotation
-he gave forth his philosophy on this point:
-"The more art would aim at being philosophically
+The Sieur Fancioulle excelled especially in parts either silent or
-clear, the more will it degrade itself and return to the
+little burdened with words, such as are often the principal ones in
-childish hieroglyphic: on the other hand, the more art
+those fairy plays whose object is to represent symbolically the mystery
-detaches itself from teaching, the more will it attain to
+of life. He came upon the stage lightly and with a perfect ease, which
-pure disinterested beauty. . . . Poetry, under pain of
+in itself lent some support, in the minds of the noble public, to the
-death or decay, cannot assimilate Herself to science or
+idea of kindness and forgiveness.
-ethics. She has not Truth for object, she has only Herself."
-What appears at first glance in the preceding
+When we say of an actor, "This is a good actor," we make use of a
-phrases to be a contradiction is really a confirmation of
+formula which implies that under the personage we can still distinguish
-Baudelaire's conception of the highest understanding of
+the actor, that is to say, art, effort, will. Now, if an actor should
-aesthetic principle. Baudelaire's ideal beauty is tempered
+succeed in being, in relation to the personage whom he is appointed to
-with mystery and sadness, the real too, but never the
+express, precisely what the finest statues of antiquity, miraculously
-commonplace.
+animated, living, walking, seeing, would be in relation to the confused
+general idea of beauty, this would be, undoubtedly, a singular and
+unheard of case. Fancioulle was, that evening, a perfect idealisation,
+which it was impossible not to suppose living, possible, real. The
+buffoon came and went, he laughed, wept, was convulsed with an
+indestructible aureole about his head, an aureole invisible to all,
+but visible to me, and in which were blended, in a strange amalgam,
+the rays of Art and the martyr's glory. Fancioulle brought, by I know
+not what special grace, something divine and supernatural into even
+the most extravagant buffooneries. My pen trembles, and the tears of
+an emotion which I cannot forget rise to my eyes, as I try to describe
+to you this never-to-be-forgotten evening. Fancioulle proved to me,
+in a peremptory, an irrefutable way, that the intoxication of Art is
+surer than all others to veil the terrors of the gulf; that genius can
+act a comedy on the threshold of the grave with a joy that binders it
+from seeing the grave, lost, as it is, in a Paradise shutting out all
+thought, of the grave and of destruction.
-No poet has brought so many new ideas in sensation
+The whole audience, _blasé_ and frivolous as it was, soon fell
-into a literary style. Intellectually he is all sensation,
+under the all-powerful sway of the artist. Not a thought was left
-though he seldom degenerates into abstract sentimental-
+of death, of mourning, or of punishment. All gave themselves up,
-ity. This sum totality of the power of absorbing ex-
+without disquietude, to the manifold delights caused by the sight of a
-ternal sensation is Baudelaire. From the effect of his
+masterpiece of living art. Explosions of joy and admiration again and
+again shook the dome of the edifice with the energy of a continuous
+thunder. The Prince himself, in an ecstasy, joined in the applause of
+his court.
+Nevertheless, to a discerning eye, his emotion was not unmixed. Did
+he feel himself conquered in his power as despot? humiliated in his
+art as the striker of terror into hearts, of chill into souls? Such
+suppositions, not exactly justified, but not absolutely unjustifiable,
+passed through my mind as I contemplated the face of the Prince, on
+which a new pallor gradually overspread its habitual paleness, as snow
+overspreads snow. His lips compressed themselves tighter and tighter,
+and his eyes lighted up with an inner fire like that of jealousy or
+of spite, even while he applauded the talents of his old friend, the
+strange buffoon, who played the buffoon so well in the face of death.
+At a certain moment, I saw his Highness lean towards a little page,
+stationed behind him, and whisper in his ear. The roguish face of the
+pretty child lit up with a smile, and he briskly quitted the Prince's
+box as if to execute some urgent commission.
+A few minutes later a shrill and prolonged hiss interrupted Fancioulle
+in one of his finest moments, and rent alike every ear and heart.
+And from the part of the house from whence this unexpected note of
+disapproval had sounded, a child darted into a corridor with stifled
+laughter.
-lo PREFACE
+Fancioulle, shaken, roused out of his dream, closed his eyes, then
+re-opened them, almost at once, extraordinarily wide, opened his mouth
+as if to breathe convulsively, staggered a little forward, a little
+backward, and then fell stark dead on the boards.
-objectivity his art expresses itself as if solely subjective.
+Had the hiss, swift as a sword, really frustrated the hangman? Had
-This condition of mind and art makes him most difficult
+the Prince himself divined all the homicidal efficacy of his ruse?
-to translate into another language, in particular, English.
+It is permitted to doubt it. Did he regret his dear and inimitable
+Fancioulle? It is sweet and legitimate to believe it.
-This collection of his verse and prose is gathered from
+The guilty nobles had enjoyed the performance of comedy for the last
-those experiments in translation which I think wiU most
+time. They were effaced from life.
-effectively convey to the English reader those qualities
-that made Baudelaire what he is. There are numerous
-translations from Baudelaire in English but most of them
-may be dismissed as being seldom successful. Mr. Ar-
-thur Symon's translation of some of the prose poems is a
-most beautiful adventure in psychological sensations, ef-
-fective though not always accurate in interpretation. Mr.
-F. P. Sturm's effort with the Flowers of Evil and the Prose
-Poems is always accurate, sometimes inspired, and often
-a tour de force of translation. Mr. W. J. Robertson's
-translations from the Flowers of Evil is the most success-
-ful of all. He maintains with amazing facility all the
-subtlety, beauty and one might also say the perfume of
-Baudelaire's verse. Mr. Shipley does a most meritorious
-work in his translations from the prose poems, and the
-reader will be everlastingly grateful to him for his fine
-painstaking translation of the Intimate Papers from
-Baudelaire's unpublished novels.
-There are few interesting or valuable essays on the
+Since then, many mimes, justly appreciated in different countries, have
-mind and art of Baudelaire in English, but the reader will
+played before the court of ----; but none of them have ever been able
-find the following critical appreciations to be of ines-
+to recall the marvellous talents of Fancioulle, or to rise to the same
-timable use in the study of the poet:
+favour.
-, "The Influence of Baudelaire": G. Turquet-Milnes
-(Constable: 1913); "The Baudelaire Legend": James
-Huneker (Egoists: Scribner's: 1909^) ; and Theophile
-Gautier's essay on Baudelaire, of which an excellent Eng-
-lish translation has been made by Prof. Sumichrast.
-I think that this anthology will give the reader an in-
-telligent understanding of the mind and art of a very
-great French poet. nr. t^ r,
-^ ^ T. R. Smith.
+XI
-June, 19 19.
+BE DRUNKEN
+Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question.
+If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your
+shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
-==CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: A Study by F. P. Stukm ==
+Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
+But be drunken.
+And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of
+a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken
+and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the
+wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock,
+of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what
+hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: "It
+is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred
+slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with
+virtue, as you will."
-Charles Baudelaire was one of those who take the
-downward path which leads to salvation. There are men
-born to be the martyrs of the world and of their own
-time; men whose imagination carries them beyond all
-that we know or have learned to think of as law and
-order; who are so intoxicated with a vision of a beauty
-beyond the world that the world's beauty seems to them
-but a little paint above the face of the dead ; who love
-God with a so consuming fire that they must praise evil
-for God's glory, and blaspheme His name that all sects
-and creeds may be melted away; who see beneath all
-there is of mortal loveliness, the invisible worm, feeding
-upon hopes and desires no less than upon the fair and
-perishable flesh; who are good and evil at the same
-time; and because the good and evil in their souls finds
-a so perfect instrument in the refined and tortured body
-of modern times, desire keener pleasure and more intol-
-erable anguish than the world contains, and become ma-
-terialists because the tortured heart cries out in denial
-of the soul that tortures it. Charles Baudelaire was one
-of these men; his art is the expression of his decadence;
-a study of his art is the understanding of that complex
-movement, that "inquietude of the Veil in the temple,"
-as Mallarme called it, that has changed the literature
-of the world; and, especially, made of poetry the subtle
-and delicate instrument of emotional expression it has
-become in our own day.
-We used to hear a deal about Decadence in the arts,
+XII
-and now we hear as much about Symbolism, which is a
-flower sprung from the old corruption — but Baudelaire is
-decadence; his art is not a mere literary affectation, a
-mask of sorrow to be thrown aside when the curtain
-falls, but the voice of an imagination plunged into the
-contemplation of all the perverse and fallen loveliness
-of the world; that finds beauty most beautiful at the
-moment of its passing away, and regrets its perishing
-with a so poignant grief that it must needs follow it even
-into the narrow grave where those "dark comrades the
-worms, without ears, without eyes," whisper their se-
-crets of terror and tell of yet another pang —
-"Pour ce vieux corps sans ame et mort parmi les morts."
+    EPILOGUE
-All his life Baudelaire was a victim to an unutterable
-weariness, that terrible malady of the soul bom out of
-old times to prey upon civilisations that have reached
-their zenith — ^weariness, not of life, but of living, of con-
-tinuing to labour and suffer in a world that has exhausted
-all its emotions and has no new thing to offer. Being an
-artist, therefore, he took his revenge upon life by a glori-
-fication of all the sorrowful things that it is life's con-
-tinual desire to forget. His poems speak sweetly of de-
-cay and death, and whisper their graveyard secrets into
-the ears of beauty. His men are men whom the moon
-has touched with her own phantasy: who love the im-
-mense ungovernable sea, the unformed and multitudinous
-waters; the place where they are not; the woman they
-will never know; and all his women are enigmatic cour-
-tesans whose beauty is a transfiguration of sin; who hide
-the ugliness of the soul beneath the perfection of the
+    With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
+    Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
+    Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,
+    Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
+    Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
+    Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 13
+    But, like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
+    To drink delight of that enormous trull
+    Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.
-body. He loves them and does not love; they are cruel
+    Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full,
-and indolent and full of strange perversions; they are
+    Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand
-perfumed with exotic perfumes; they sleep to the sound
+    In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
-of viols, or fan themselves languidly in the shadow, and
-only he sees that it is the shadow of death.
-An art like this, rooted in a so tortured perception of
+    I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
-the beauty and ugliness of a world where the spirit is
+    Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
-mingled indistinguishably with the flesh, almost inevi-
+    The vulgar herd can never understand.
-tably concerns itself with material things, with all the
-subtle raptures the soul feels, not by abstract contem-
-plation, for that would mean content, but through the
-gateway of the senses; the lust of the flesh, the delight
-of the eye. Sound, colour, odour, form: to him these
-are not the sjonbols that lead the soul towards the in-
-finite: they are the soul; they are the infinite. He writes,
-always with a weary and laborious grace, about the ab-
-struser and more enigmatic things of the flesh, colours
-and odours particularly; but, unlike those later writers
-who have been called realists, he apprehends, to borrow
-a phrase from Pater, "all those finer conditions wherein
-material things rise to that subtlety of operation which
-constitutes them spiritual, where only the finer nerve and
-the keener touch can follow."
-In one of his sonnets he says:
-"Je hais la passion et I'esprit me fait mal!**
-and, indeed, he is a poet in whom the spirit, as modern
-thought understands the word, had little or no part. We
-feel, reading his terrible poems, that the body is indeed
-acutely conscious of the soul, distressfully and even
-angrily conscious, but its motions are not yet subdued
-by the soul's prophetic voice. It was to forget this voice,
-with its eternal Esto mentor, that Baudelaire wrote im-
-perishably of perishable things and their fading glory.
+===POEMS IN PROSE Translated by Joseph T. Shipley===
+:''[[Poems in Prose]]''
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+=====DEDICATION To ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE=====
+:''[[À Arsène Houssaye (Baudelaire)]]''
+MY DEAR FRIEND:
+I send you a little work of which it cannot be said, without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail; since all of it, on the contrary, is at once head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. Consider, I pray you, what convenience this arrangement offers to all of us, to you, to me and to the reader. We can stop where we wish, I my musing, you your consideration, and the reader his perusal--for I do not hold the latter's restive will by the interminable thread of a fine-spun intrigue. Remove a vertebra, and the two parts of this tortuous fantasy rejoin painlessly. Chop it into particles, and you will see that each part can exist by itself. In the hope that some of these segments will be lively enough to please and to amuse you, I venture to dedicate to you the entire serpent.
-n
+I have a little confession to make. It was while glancing, for at least the twentieth time, through the famous _[[Gaspard de la Nuit (poetry collection)|Gaspard de la Nuit]]_, by Aloysius Bertrand (a book known to you, to me, and to a few of our
+friends, has it not the highest right to be called famous?), that
+the idea came to me to attempt an analogous plan, and to apply to
+the description of modern life, or rather of a life modern and more
+abstract, the process which he applied in the depicting of ancient
+life, so strangely picturesque.
-Charles Baudelaire was born at Paris, April 21st, 182 1,
+Which of us has not, in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle
-in an old turreted house in the Rue Hautefeuille. His
+of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rime, sufficiently supple,
-father, a distinguished gentleman of the eighteenth-cen-
+sufficiently abrupt, to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the
-tury school, seems to have passed his old-world man-
+soul, to the windings and turnings of the fancy, to the sudden starts
-ners on to his son, for we learn from Baudelaire's friend
+of the conscience?
-and biographer, Theophile Gautier, that the poet "always
-preserved the forms of an extreme urbanity."
-At school, during his childhood, he gained many dis-
+It is particularly in frequenting great cities, it is from the flux
-tinctions, and passed for a kind of infant prodigy; but
+of their innumerable streams of intercourse, that this importunate
-later on, when he sat for his examination as bachelier ^s
+ideal is born. Have not you yourself, my dear friend, tried to convey
-lettres, his extreme nervousness made him appear almost
+in a chanson the strident cry of the glazier, and to express in a
-an idiot. Failing miserably, he made no second attempt.
+lyric prose all the grievous suggestions that cry bears even to the
-Then his father died, and his mother married General
+house-tops, through the heaviest mists of the street? But, to speak
-Aupick, afterwards ambassador to Constamtinople, an
+truth, I fear that my jealousy has not brought me good fortune. As
-excellent man in every respect, but quite incapable of
+soon as I had begun the work, I saw that not only was I laboring far,
-sympathising with or even of understanding the love for
+far, from my mysterious and brilliant model, but that I was reaching
-literature that now began to manifest itself in the mind
+an accomplishment (if it can be called _an accomplishment_) peculiarly
-of his stepson. All possible means were tried to turn
+different--accident of which all others would doubtless be proud,
-him from literature to some more lucrative and more re-
+but which can but profoundly humiliate a mind which considers it the
-spectable profession. Family quarrels arose over this
+highest honor of the poet to achieve exactly what he has planned.
-all-important question, and young Baudelaire, who seems
-to have given some real cause for offence to the step-
-father whose aspirations and profession he despised, was
-at length sent away upon a long voyage, in the hopes that
-the sight of strange lands and new faces would perhaps
-cause him to forget the ambitions his relatives could but
-consider as foolish and idealistic. He sailed the Indian
-Seas; visited the islands of Mauritius, Bourbon, Mada-
-gascar, and Ceylon; saw the yellow waters of the sacred
-Ganges; stored up the memory of tropical sounds and
-colours and odours for use later on; and returned to
+Devotedly yours,
+C. B.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 15
+===== Rest of the poems=====
-Paris shortly after his twenty-first birthday, more than
+A JESTER
-ever determined to be a man of letters.
-His parents were in despair; no doubt quite rightly
-so from their point of view. Theophile Gautier, perhaps
-remembering the many disappointments and martyrdoms
-of his own sad life, defends the attitude of General
-Aupick in a passage where he poignantly describes the
-hopelessness of the profession of letters. The future
-author of The Flowers of Evil, however, was now his
-own master and in a positipn, so far as monetary mat-
-ters were concerned, to follow out his own whim. He
-took apartments in the Hotel Pimodan, a kind of literary
-lodging-house where all Bohemia met ; and where Gautier
-and Boissard were also at that period installed. Then
-began that life of uninterrupted labour and meditation
-that has given to France her most characteristic litera-
-ture, for these poems of Baudelaire's are not only origi-
-nal in themselves but have been the cause of originality
-in others; they are the root of modern French literature
-and much of the best English literature; they were the
-origin of that new method in poetry that gave Mallarme
-and Verlaine to France; Yeats and some others to Eng-
-land. It was in the Hotel Pimodan that Baudelaire and
-Gautier first met and formed one of those unfading
-friendships not so rare among men of letters as among
-men of the world; there also the "Hashish-Eaters" held
-the seances that have since become famous in the history
-of literature. Hashish and opium, indeed, contribute not
-a little to the odour of the strange Flowers of Evil; as
-also, perhaps, they contributed to Baudelaire's death
-from the terrible malady known as general paralysis, for
-he was a man who could not resist a so easy path into
-the world of macabre visions. I shall return to this ques-
-tion again; there is internal evidence in his writings that
-shows he made good literary use of these opiate-born
+It was the outburst of the New Year: chaos of mud and snow, crossed
+by a thousand coaches, sparkling with baubles and gewgaws, swarming
+with desires and with despairs, official folly of a great city made to
+weaken the fortitude of the firmest eremite.
+In the midst of this hubbub and tumult, a donkey was trotting along,
+tormented by a lout with a horsewhip.
-i6 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+As the donkey was about to turn a corner, a fine fellow, gloved,
+polished, with a merciless cravat, and imprisoned in impeccable
+garments, bowed ceremoniously before the beast; said to it, removing
+his hat: "I greet thee, good and happy one"; and turned towards some
+companions with a fatuous air, as though requesting them to add their
+approbation to his content.
-dreams which ia the end dragged him into their own
+The donkey did not see the clever jester, and continued steadily where
-abyss.
+its duty called.
-It was in 1849, when Baudelaire was twenty-eight
+As for me, I was overcome by an inordinate rage against the sublime
-years of age, that he made the acquaintance of the al-
+idiot, who seemed to me to concentrate in himself the wit of France.
-ready famous Theophile Gautier, from whose admirable
-essay I shall presently translate a passage giving us an
-excellent pen-sketch of the famous poet and cynic — for
-Baudelaire was a cynic: he had not in the least degree
-the rapt expression and vague personality usually sup-
-posed to be characteristic of the poetic mood. "He re-
-calls," wrote M. Dulamon, who knew him well, "one of
-those beautiful Abbes of the eighteenth century, so cor-
-rect in their doctrine, so indulgent in their commerce
-with life — the Abbe de Bernis, for example. At the
-same time, he writes better verse, and would not have
-demanded at Rome the destruction of the Order of
-Jesuits."
-That was Baudelaire exactly, suave and polished, filled
-with sceptical faith, cynical with the terrible cynicism of
-the scholar who is acutely conscious of all the morbid
-and gloomy secrets hidden beneath the fair exteriors of
-the world. Gautier, in the passage I have already men-
-tioned, emphasises both his reserve and his cynicism:
-"Contrary to the somewhat loose manners of artists gen-
-erally, Baudelaire prided himself upon observing the
-most rigid convenances ; his courtesy, indeed, was exces-
-sive to the point of seeming affected. He measured his
-sentences, using only the most carefully chosen terms,
-and pronounced certain words in a particular manner,
-as though he wished to underline them and give them a
-mysterious importance. He had italics and capital letters
-in his voice. Exaggeration, much in honour at Pimo-
-dan's, he disdained as being theatrical and gross; though
-he himself affected paradox and excess. With a very
-simple, very natural, and perfectly detached air, as
+THE DOG AND THE VIAL
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 17
-though retailing, a la Prudkomtne, a newspaper para-
+"My pretty dog, my good dog, my doggy dear, come and smell this
-graph about the mildness or rigour of the weather, he
+excellent perfume bought at the best scent-shop in the city."
-would advance some satanically monstrous axiom, or up-
-hold with the coolness of ice some theory of a mathe-
-matical extravagance; for he always followed a rigorous
-plan in the development of his follies. Kis spirit was
-neither in words nor traits; he saw things from a particu-
-lar point of view, so that their outlines were changed, as
-objects when one gets a bird's-eye view of them; he per-
-ceived analogies inappreciable to others, and you were
-struck by their fantastic logic. His rare gestures were
-slow and sober; he never threw his arms about, for he
-held southern gesticulation in horror; British coolness
-seemed to him to be good taste. One might describe
-him as a dandy who had strayed into Bohemia; though
-still preserving his rank, and that cult of self which char-
-acterises a man imbued with the principles of Brummel."
-At this time Baudelaire was practically unknown out-
-side his own circle of friends, writers themselves; and it
-was not until eight years later, in 1857, when he pub-
-lished his Flowers of Evil, that he became famous.
-Infamous would perhaps be a better word to describe the
-kind of fame he at first obtained, for every Philistine in
-France joined in the cry against a poet who dared to
-remind his readers that the grave awaits even the rich;
-who dared to choose the materials of his art from among
-the objects of death and decay; who exposed the moul-
-dering secrecies of the grave, and painted, in the phos-
-phorescent colours of corruption, frescoes of death and
-horror; who desecrated love in the sonnet entitled "Cau-
-serie":
+And the dog, wagging its tail, which is, I think, the poor creature's
+substitute for a laugh or a smile, approached and curiously placed its
+damp nose to the opened vial; then, recoiling with sudden fright, it
+growled at me in reproach.
+"Ah! wretched dog, if I had offered you a mass of excrement, you would
+have smelled it with delight, and probably have devoured it. So even
+you, unworthy companion of my unhappy life, resemble the public, to
+whom one must never offer delicate perfumes, which exasperate, but
+carefully raked-up mire."
-''You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose!
-But all the sea of sadness in my blood
-Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lip morose
-Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
+THE WILD WOMAN AND THE COQUETTE
-i8 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
-In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er;
+"Really, my dear, you tire me immeasurably and unpityingly; one would
-That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
+say, to hear you sigh, that you suffered more than the sexagenarian
-By woman's tooth and talon : ah ! no more
+gleaners or the old beggar hags who pick up crusts at the doors of
-Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate!
+restaurants.
-It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
+"If at least your sighs expressed remorse, they would do you some
-And rend and tear and glut themselves and slayl
+honor; but they convey merely the surfeit of well-being and the languor
-— A perfume swims about your naked breast.
+of repose. And, too, you will not stop your constant flow of needless
-Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
+words: 'Love me well! I have so much need! Comfort me thus, caress me
-With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
+so!'
-Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!"
-We can recall nothing like it in the literary history of
+"Come! I shall try to cure you; perhaps we shall find a means, for two
-our own country; the sensation caused by the appearance
+cents, in the midst of a fair, not far away.
-of the first series of Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads
-was mild in comparison; just as Mr, Swinburne's poems
-were but wan derivatives from Baudelaire — at least as
-far as ideas are concerned; I say nothing about their
-beauty of expression or almost absolute mastery of tech-
-nique — for it is quite obvious that the English poet was
-indebted to Baudelaire for all the bizarre and satanic
-elements in his work; as Baudelaire was indebted to Poe.
-Mr. Swinburne, however, is wild where Baudelaire is
-grave; and where Baudelaire compresses some perverse
-and morbid image into a single unforgettable line, Mr.
-Swinburne beats it into a froth of many musical lovely
-words, until we forget the deep sea in the shining foam.
-If we call to mind the reception at first given to the
+"Take a good look, I pray you, at this strong iron cage, within
-black-and-white work of Aubrey Beardsley, it will give
+which moves, howling like a damned soul, shaking the bars like an
-some idea of the consternation caused in France by the
+ourang-outang enraged by exile, imitating to perfection, now the
-appearance of the Flowers of Evil. Beardsley, indeed,
+circular bounds of the tiger, now the clumsy waddling of the polar
-resembles Baudelaire in many ways, for he achieved in
+bear, that hairy monster whose form vaguely resembles your own.
-art what the other achieved in literature: the apotheosis
-of the horrible and grotesque, the perfecting of symbols
-to shadow forth intellectual sin, the tearing away of the
-decent veil of forgetfulness that hides our own corrup-
-tion from our eyes, and his one prose romance, Under the
-Hill, unhappily incomplete at his death at the age of
+"That monster is one of those beasts one usually calls 'my angel'--that
+is, a woman. The other monster, he who bawls at the top of his voice,
+club in his hand, is a husband. He has chained his lawful wife like
+a beast, and he exhibits her in the suburbs on fair days--with the
+magistrates' permission, of course.
+"Pay close attention. See with what voracity (perhaps not feigned) she
+tears apart the living rabbits and the cackling fowl her keeper throws
+her. 'Come,' he says, 'one must not eat one's whole store in a day';
+and, with that wise word, he cruelly snatches the prey, the winding
+entrails of which remain a moment caught on the teeth of the ferocious
+beast--I mean, the woman.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 19
+"Come! A good blow to calm her! for she darts terrible glances of lust
+at the stolen food. Good God! The club is not a jester's slap stick!
+Did you hear the flesh resound, right through the artificial hair? Her
+eyes leap from her head now; she howls _more naturally_. In her rage
+she sparkles all over, like smitten iron.
-twenty-four, beats Baudelaire on his own ground. The
+"Such are the conjugal customs of these two children of Adam and Eve,
-four or five chapters which alone remain of this incom-
+these works of Thy hands, O my God! This woman is doubtless miserable,
-plete romance stand alone in literature. They are the ab-
+though after all, perhaps, the titillating joys of glory are not
-solute attainment of what Baudelaire more or less suc-
+unknown to her. There are misfortunes less remediable, and with no
-cessfully attempted — a testament of sin. Not the sin of
+compensation. But in the world to which she has been thrown, she has
-the flesh, the gross faults of the body that are vulgarly
+never been able to think that woman might deserve a different destiny.
-known as sin ; but sin which is a metaphysical corruption,
-a depravity of pure intellect, the sin of the fallen angels
-in hell who cover their anguish with the sound of harps
-and sweet odours; who are incapable of bodily impurity,
-and for whom spiritual purity is the only terror. And
-since mortality, which is the shadow of the immortal,
-can comprehend spiritual and abstract things only by the
-analogies and correspondences which exist between them
-and the far reflections of them that we call reality, both
-Baudelaire and Beardsley, as indeed all artists who speak
-with tongues of spiritual truth, choose more or less actual
-human beings to be the shadows of the divine or satanic
-beings they would invoke, and make them sin delicate
-sins of the refined bodily sense that we may get a far-off
-glimpse of the Evil that is not mortal but immortal, the
-Spiritual Evil that has set up its black throne beside the
-throne of Spiritual Good, and has equal share in the
-shaping of the world and man.
-I am not sure that Baudelaire, when he wrote this
+"Now, as for us two, my fine lady! Seeing the hells of which the world
-sinister poetry, had any clear idea that it was his voca-
+is made, what would you have me think of your pretty hell, you who rest
-tion to be a prophet either of good or evil. Certainly
+only on stuffs as soft as your own skin, who eat only cooked viands,
-he had no thought of founding a school of poetry, and if
+for whom a skilled domestic takes care to cut the bites?
-he made any conscious effort to bring a new method into
-literature, it was merely because he desired to be one
-of the famous writers of his country. An inspired thinker,
-however, whether his inspiration be mighty or small, re-
-ceives his thought from a profounder source than his
-own physical reason, and writes to the dictation of beings
-outside of and greater than Jiimself. The famous Eliphas
+"And what can mean to me all these soft signs which heave your perfumed
+breast, my lusty coquette? And all those affectations learned from
+books, and that everlasting melancholy, intended to arouse an emotion
+far other than pity? Indeed, I sometimes feel like teaching you what
+true misfortune means.
+"Seeing you so, my beautiful dainty one, your feet in the mire and
+your moist eyes turned to the sky, as though to demand a king, one
+would say indeed: a young frog invoking the ideal. If you scorn the log
+(which I am now, you know), beware the stork which will kill, swallow,
+devour you at its caprice.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+"Poet as I am, I am not such a fool as you may think, and if you tire
+me too often with your whining affectations, I shall treat you as a
+wild woman, or throw you through the window as an empty flask."
-Levi, like all the mystics who came before and after
-him, from Basilides the Gnostic to Blake the English
-visionary, taught that the poet and dreamer are the
-mediums of the Divine Word, and sole instruments
-through which the gods energise in the world of material
-things. The writing of a great book is the casting of ?i
-pebble into the pool of human thought; it gives rise to
-ever-widening circles that will reach we know not whither,
-and begins a chain of circumstances that may end in the
-destruction of kingdoms and religions and the awaken-
-ing of new gods. The change wrought, directly or in-
-directly, by The Flowers of Evil alone is almost too
-great to be properly understood. There is perhaps not a
-man in Europe to-day whose outlook on life would not
-have been different had The Flowers of Evil never been
-written. The first thing that happens after the publica-
-tion of such a book is the theft of its ideas and the imi-
-tation of its style by the lesser writers who labour for
-the multitude, and so its teaching goes from book to
-book, from the greater to the lesser, as the divine hier-
-archies emanate from Divinity, until ideas that were
-once paradoxical, or even blasphemous and unholy, have
-become mere newspaper commonplaces adopted by the
-numberless thousands who do not think for themselves,
-and the world's thought is changed completely, though
-by infinite slow degrees. The immediate result of Baude-
-laire's work was the Decadent School in French litera-
-ture. Then the influence spread across the Channel, and
-the English ^Esthetes arose to preach the gospel of
-imagination to the unimaginative. Both Decadence and
-^stheticism, as intellectual movements, have fallen into
-the nadir of oblivion, and the dust lies heavy upon them,
-but they left a little leaven to lighten the heavy inertness
-of correct and academic literature; and now Symbolism,
-a greater movement than either, is in the ascendant, giv-
+THE OLD MOUNTEBANK
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 21
-ing another turn to the wheel, and to all who think
+Everywhere the holiday crowd was parading, spread out, merry making.
-deeply about such matters it seems as though Symbolist
+It was one of those festivals on which mountebanks, tricksters, animal
-literature is to be the literature of the future. The De-
+trainers and itinerant merchants had long been relying, to compensate
-cadents and ^Esthetes were weak because they had no
+for the dull seasons of the year.
-banner to fight beneath, no authority to appeal to in de-
-fence of their views, no definite gospel to preach. They
-were by turns morbid, hysterical, foolishly blasphemous,
-or weakly disgusting, but never anything for long, their
-one desire being to produce a thrill at any cost.. If the
-hospital failed they went to fhe brothel, and when even
-obscenity failed to stimulate the jaded palates of their
-generation there was still the graveyard left. A more
-or less successful imitation of Baudelaire's awful verses
-entitled "The Corpse" has been the beginning of more
-than one French poet's corrupt flight across the sky of
-literature. That Baudelaire himself was one of their
-company is not an accusation, for he had genius, which
-his imitators, English or French, have not; and his book,
-even apart from the fact that it made straight the way for
-better things, must be admitted to be a great and subtly-
-wrought work of art by whosoever reads it with under-
-standing. And, moreover, his morbidness is not at all
-an affectation; his poems inevitably prove the writer to
-have been quite sincere in his perversion and in his
-decadence.
-The Symbolist writers of to-day, though they are
+On such days it seems to me the people forget all, sadness and work;
-sprung from him, are greater than he because they are
+they become children. For the little ones, it is a day of leave, the
-the prophets of a faith who believe in what they preach.
+horror of the school put off twenty-four hours. For the grown-ups,
-They find their defence in the writings of the mystics,
+it is an armistice, concluded with the malevolent forces of life, a
-and their doctrines are at the root of every religion.
+respite in the universal contention and struggle.
-They were held by the Gnostics and are in the books ol
-the Kabbalists and the Magi. Blake preached them
-and Eliphas Levi taught them to his disciples in France,
-who in turn have misunderstood and perverted them, and
-formed strange religions and sects of Devil-worshippers.
+The man of the world himself, and even he who is occupied with
+spiritual tasks, with difficulty escape the influence of this popular
+jubilee. They absorb, without volition, their part of the atmosphere
+of devil-may-care. As for me, I never fail, like a true Parisian, to
+inspect all the booths that flaunt themselves in these solemn epochæ.
+They made, in truth, a formidable gathering: they bawled, bellowed,
+howled. It was a mingling of cries, of blaring of brass and bursting of
+rockets. The clowns and the simpletons convulsed the features of their
+swarthy faces, hardened by wind, rain, and sun; they hurled forth,
+with the assurance of comedians certain of their wares, witticisms
+and pleasantries of a humor solid and heavy as that of Molière.
+The Hercules, proud of the enormousness of their limbs, without
+forehead, without cranium, stalked majestically about under fleshings
+fresh washed for the occasion. The dancers, pretty as fairies or as
+princesses, leapt and cavorted under the flare of lanterns which filled
+their skirts with sparkles.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+All was light, dust, shouting, joy, tumult; some spent, others gained,
+the one and the other equally joyful. Children clung to their mothers'
+skirts to obtain a sugar-stick, or climbed upon their fathers'
+shoulders the better to see a conjurer dazzling as a god. And spread
+over all, dominating every odor, was a smell of frying, which was the
+incense of the festival.
-These doctrines hold that the visible world is the world
+At the end, at the extreme end of the row of booths, as if, ashamed, he
-of illusion, not of reality. Colour and sound and per-
+had exiled himself from all these splendors, I saw an old mountebank,
-fume and all material and sensible things are but the
+stooped, decrepit, emaciated, a ruin of a man, leaning against one of
-symbols and far-off reflections of the things that are
+the pillars of his hut, more wretched than that of the most besotted
-alone real. ' Reality is hidden away from us by the five
+barbarian, the distress of which two candle ends, guttering and
-senses and the gates of death; and Reason, the blind and
+smoking, lighted up only too well.
-laborious servant of the physical brain, deludes us into
-believing that we can know anything of truth through
-the medium of the senses. It is through the imagination
-alone that man can obtain spiritual revelation, for imagi-
-nation is the one window in the prison-house of the flesh
-through which the soul can see the proud images of
-eternity. And Blake, who is the authority of all Eng-
-lish Symbolist writers, long since formulated their creed
-in words that have been quoted again and again, and
-must still be quoted by all who write in defence of mod-
-ern art: — "The world of imagination is the world of
-Eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall
-all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world
-of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world
-of generation, or vegetation, is finite and temporal. There
-exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of
-everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass
-of nature."
-In spite of the cry against Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire
+Everywhere was joy, gain, revelry; everywhere certainty of the morrow's
-did not lack defenders among literary men themselves;
+bread; everywhere the frenetic outbursts of vitality. Here, absolute
-and many enthusiastic articles were written in praise of
+misery, misery bedecked, to crown the horror, in comic tatters, where
-his book. Thierry not unjustly compared him to Dante,
+necessity, rather than art, produced the contrast. He was not laughing,
-to which Barbey d'Aurevilly replied, ''Baudelaire comes
+the wretched one! He was not weeping, he was not dancing, he was not
-from hell, Dante only went there"; adding at the finish
+gesticulating, he was not crying. He was singing no song, gay or
-of his article: "After the Flowers of Evil there are only
+grievous, he was imploring no one. He was mute and immobile. He had
-two possible ways for the poet who made them blossom:
+renounced, he had withdrawn. His destiny was accomplished.
-either to blow out his brains or become a Christian."
-Baudelaire did neither. And Victor Hugo, after reading
-the two poems, "The Seven Old Men" and "The Little
+But what a deep, unforgettable look he cast over the crowd and the
+lights, the moving stream of which was stemmed a few yards from his
+repulsive wretchedness! I felt my throat clutched by the terrible hand
+of hysteria, and it seemed as though glances were clouded by rebellious
+tears that would not fall.
+What was to be done? What good was there in asking the unfortunate
+what curiosity, what marvel had he to show within those barefaced
+shades, behind that threadbare curtain? In truth, I dared not; and,
+although the reason for my timidity will make you laugh, I confess that
+I was afraid of humiliating him. At length, I had resolved to drop a
+coin while passing his boards, in the hope that he would divine my
+purpose, when a great backwash of people, produced by I know not what
+disturbance, carried me far away.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 23
+And leaving, obsessed by the sight, I sought to analyze my sudden
+sadness, and I said: "I have just seen the image of the aged man of
+letters, who has survived the generation of which he was the brilliant
+entertainer; of the old poet, friendless, without family, without
+child, degraded by his misery and by public ingratitude, into whose
+booth a forgetful world no longer wants to go!"
-Old Women," wrote to Baudelaire. "You have dowered
-the heaven of art with one knows not what deathly
-gleam," he said in his letter; "you have created a new
-shudder." The phrase became famous, and for many
-years after this the creation of a new shudder was the
-ambition of every young French writer worth his salt.
-When the first great wave of public astonishment had
-broken and ebbed, Baudelaire's work began to be appre-
-ciated by others than merely literary men, by all in fact
-who cared for careful art and subtle thinking, and before
-long he was admitted to be the greatest after Hugo who
-had written French verse. He was famous and he was un-
-happy. Neither glory, nor love, nor friendship — and he
-knew them all — could minister to the disease of that fierce
-mind, seeking it knew not what and never finding it;
-seeking it, unhappily, in the strangest excesses. He took
-opium to quieten his nerves when they trembled, for
-something to do when they did not, and made immoder-
-ate use of hashish to produce visions and heighten his
-phantasy. His life was a haunted weariness. Thomas
-de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
-seems to have fascinated him to a great extent, for be-
-sides imitating the vices of the author, he wrote, in imita-
-tion of his book, The Artificial Paradises, a monograph
-on the effects of opium and hashish, partly original, partly
-a mere translation from the Confessions.
-He remembered his visions and sensations as an eater
+THE CLOCK
-of drugs and made literary use of them. At the end
-of this book, among the "Poems in Prose," will be found
+The Chinese tell the time in the eyes of cats. One day a missionary,
+walking in the suburbs of Nanking, noticed that he had forgotten his
+watch, and asked a little boy what time it was.
-one entitled "The Double Chamber," almost certainly
+The youngster of the heavenly Empire hesitated at first; then, carried
+away by his thought he answered: "I'll tell you." A few moments later
+he reappeared, bearing in his arms an immense cat, and looking, as they
+say, into the whites of its eyes, he announced without hesitation:
+"It's not quite noon." Which was the fact.
-written under the influence of opium, and the last verse
+As for me, if I turn toward the fair feline, to her so aptly named,
+who is at once the honor of her sex, the pride of my heart and the
+fragrance of my mind, be it by night or by day, in the full light or in
+the opaque shadows, in the depths of her adorable eyes I always tell
+the time distinctly, always the same, a vast, a solemn hour, large as
+space, without division of minutes or of seconds,--an immovable hour
+which is not marked on the clocks, yet is slight as a sigh, is rapid as
+the lifting of a lash.
-ol "The Temptation"—
+And if some intruder comes to disturb me while my glance rests upon
+that charming dial, if some rude and intolerant genie, some demon of
+the evil hour, comes to ask: "What are you looking at so carefully?
+What are you hunting for in the eyes of that being? Do you see the time
+there, mortal squanderer and do-nothing?" I shall answer, unhesitant:
+"Yes, I see the time, it is Eternity!"
-"O mystic metamorphosis!
+Is not this, madame, a really worth-while madrigal, just as affected
+as yourself? Indeed, I have had so much pleasure in embroidering this
+pretentious gallantry, that I shall ask you for nothing in exchange.
-My senses into one sense flow —
-Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
-Her breath is music faint and low!"
+A HEMISPHERE IN A TRESS
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
-as well as the last six lines of that profound sonnet "[[Correspondences]]" —
+Let me breathe, long, long, of the odor of your hair, let me plunge my
+whole face in its depth, as a thirsty man in the waters of a spring,
+let me flutter it with my hand as a perfumed kerchief, to shake off
+memories into the air.
-:"Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
+If you could know all that I see! all that I feel! all that I
-:Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;.
+understand in your hair! My soul journeys on perfumes as the souls of
-:Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
+other men on music.
-:Have all the expansion of things infinite :
-:As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
-:Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight,"
-are certainly memories of a sensation he experienced under the influence of hashish, as recorded in ''[[The Artificial Paradises]]'', where he has this curious passage: — "The senses become extraordinarily acute and fine. The eyes pierce Infinity. The ear seizes the most unseizable sounds in the midst of the shrillest noises. Hallucinations commence External objects talie on monstrous appearances and show themselves under forms hitherto unknown. . . . The most singular equivocations, the most inexplicable transposition of ideas, take place. Sounds are perceived to have a colour, and colour becomes musical." Baudelaire need not have gone to hashish to discover this. The mystics of all times have taught that sounds in gross matter produce colour in subtle matter; and all who are subject to any visionary condition know that when in trance colours will produce words of a language whose meaning is forgotten as soon as one awakes to normal life; but I do not think Baudelaire was a visionary. His work shows too precise a method, and a too ordered appreciation of the artificial in beauty. There again he is comparable to Aubrey Beardsley, for I have read somewhere that when Beardsley was asked if ever he saw visions, he replied, "I do not permit myself to see them, except upon paper." The whole question of the colour of sound is one of supreme interest to the poet, but it is too difficult and abstract a question to be written of here. [[Voyelles|A famous sonnet by Rimbaud on the colour of the vowels]] has founded a school of symbolists in France. I will content myself with quoting that — in the original, since it loses too much, by translation:
+Your hair meshes a full dream, crowded with sails and masts; it holds
+great seas on which monsoons bear me toward charming climes, where the
+skies are bluer and deeper, where the atmosphere is perfumed with
+fruits, with leaves, and with the human skin.
-:"A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,
+In the ocean of your hair I behold a port humming with melancholy
-:Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes,
+chants, with strong men of all nations and with ships of every form
-:A, noir corset velu des mouches eclatantes
+carving their delicate, intricate architecture on an enormous sky where
-:Qui bourdonnent autour des puanteurs cruelles,.
+lolls eternal heat.
-:Golfes d'ombres; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes.
-:Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombrelles;
-:I, poupre, sang crache, rire des levres belles
-:Dans la colere qu les ivresses penitentes;
-:U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
-:Paix des patis semes d'animaux, paix des rides
-:Que ralchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux.
-:O, supreme clairon, plein de strideurs etranges,
-:Silences traverses des mondea et des anges.
-:— O rOmega, rayon violet de ses yeux."
-It is to be hoped that opium and hashish rendered
+In the caresses of your hair, I find again the languor of long hours
-Baudelaire somewhat less unhappy during his life, for
+on a divan, in the cabin of a goodly ship, cradled by the unnoticed
-they certainly contributed to hasten his death. Always
+undulation of the port, between pots of flowers and refreshing
-of an extremely neurotic temperament, he began to break
+water-jugs.
-down beneath his excesses, and shortly after the publica-
-tion of The Artificial Paradises, which shows a consider-
-able deterioration in his style, he removed from Paris to
-Brussels in the hope of building up his health by the
-change. At Brussels he grew worse. His speech began
-to fail; he was unable to pronounce certain words and
-stumbled over others. Hallucinations commenced, no
-longer the hallucinations of hashish; and his disease,
-rapidly estabtishing itself, was recognised as "general
-paralysis of the insane." Gautier tells how the news
-of his death came to Paris while he yet lived. It was
-false news, but prematurely true. Baudelaire lingered
-on for another three months; motionless and inert, his
-eyes the only part of him alive; unable to speak or even
-to write, and so died.
-He left, besides The Flowers of Evil and Little Poems
+At the glowing hearth-stone of your hair, I breathe the odor of tobacco
+mixed with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair, I see shine
+forth the infinite of the tropic sky; on the downy bank-sides of your
+hair, I grow drunk with the mingled odors of tar and musk, and oil of
+cocoanut.
+Let me bite, long, your thick black hair. When I nibble your springy,
+rebellious hair, it seems that I am eating memories.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
-in Prose (his masterpieces), several volumes of critical
+THE PLAYTHING OF THE POOR
-essays, published under the titles of ^Esthetic Curiosities
-and Romantic Art; The Artificial Paradises, and his
-translations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe — admirable
-pieces of work by which Poe actually gains.
-in
-Baudelaire's love of the artificial has been insisted
+I should like to give you an idea for an innocent diversion. There are
-upon by all who have studied his work, but to my mind
+so few amusements that are not guilty ones!
-never sufficiently insisted upon, for it was the founda-
-tion of his method. He wrote many arguments in favour
-of the artificial, and elaborated them into a kind of para-
-doxical philosophy of art. His hatred of nature and
-purely natural things was but a perverted form of the
-religious ecstasy that made the old monk pull his cowl
-about his eyes when he left his cell in the month of May,
-lest he should see the blossoming trees, and his mind be
-turned towards the beautiful delusions of the world. The
-Egyptians and the earliest of the Christians looked
-upon nature not as the work of the good and benevolent
-spirit who is the father of our souls, but as the work of
-the rebellious "gods of generation," who fashion beauti-
-ful things to capture the heart of man and bind his
-Soul to earth. Blake, whom I have already quoted, hated
-nature in the same fashion, and held death to be the one
-way of escape from "the delusions of goddess Nature and
-her laws." Baudelaire's revolt against external things
-was more a revolt of the intellect than of the imagina-
-tion; and he expresses it, not by desiring that the things
-of nature should be swept away to make room for the
-things of the spirit, but that they should be so changed
-by art that they cease to be natural. As he was of all
-poets the most intensely modem, holding that "modern-
-ity is one-half of art," the other half being something
-"eternal and immutable," he preferred, unlike Blake and
+When you go out in the morning for a stroll along the highways, fill
+your pockets with little penny contrivances--such as the straight
+merryandrew moved by a single thread, the blacksmiths who strike the
+anvil, the rider and his horse, with a whistle for a tail--and, along
+the taverns, at the foot of the trees, make presents of them to the
+unknown poor children whom you meet. You will see their eyes grow
+beyond all measure. At first, they will not dare to take; they will
+doubt their good fortune. Then their hands will eagerly seize the
+gift, and they will flee as do the cats who go far off to eat the bit
+you have given them, having learned to distrust man.
+On a road, behind the rail of a great garden at the foot of which
+appeared the glitter of a beautiful mansion struck by the sun, stood
+a pretty, fresh child, clad in those country garments so full of
+affectation.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 27
+Luxury, freedom from care, and the habitual spectacle of wealth, make
+these children so pretty that one would think them formed of other
+paste than the sons of mediocrity or of poverty.
-his modern followers, to express himself in quite modem
+Beside him on the grass lay a splendid toy, fresh as its master,
-terms, and so wrote his famous and much misunderstood
+varnished, gilt, clad in a purple robe, covered with plumes and beads
-Eloge du Maquillage to defend his views. As was usual
+of glass. But the child was not occupied with his favored plaything,
-with him, he pushed his ideas to their extreme logical
+and this is what he was watching:
-sequence, and the casual reader who picks up that ex-
-traordinary essay is in consequence quite misled as to the
-writer's intention.
-It seems scarcely necessary at this time of day to as-
+On the other side of the rail, on the road, among the thistles and
-sert that the Eloge du Maquillage is something more than
+the thorns, was another child, puny, dirty, fuliginous, one of those
-a mere Praise of Cosmetics, written by a man who wished
+pariah-brats the beauty of which an impartial eye might discover if,
-to shock his readers. It is the part expression of a theory
+as the eye of the connoisseur divines an ideal painting beneath the
-of art, and if it is paradoxical and far-fetched it is be-
+varnish of the coach-maker, it cleansed him of the repugnant patina of
-cause Baudelaire wrote at a time when French literature,
+misery.
-in the words of M. Asselineau, "was dying of correct-
-ness," and needed y^ry vigorous treatment indeed. If
-the Eloge du Maquillage had been more restrained in
-manner, if it had not been something so entirely con-
-trary to all accepted ideas of the well-regulated citizen
-who never thinks a thought that somebody else has not
-put into his head, it might have been passed over without
-notice. It was written to initiate the profane; to make
-them think, at least ; and not to raise a smile among the
-initiated. And moreover, it was in a manner a defence
-of his own work that had met with so much hatred and
-opposition.
-He begins by attempting to prove that Nature is in-
+Across the symbolic bars which separate two worlds, the highway and
-nately and fundamentally wrong and wicked. "The
+the mansion, the poor child was showing the rich child his own toy,
-greater number of errors relative to the beautiful date
+which the latter examined eagerly, as a rare and unknown object. Now,
-from the eighteenth century's false cenceptions of mo-
+this toy, which the ragamuffin was provoking, tormenting, tossing in a
-rality. Nature was regarded in those times as the base,
+grilled box, was a live rat! His parents, doubtless for economy, had
-source, and type of all possible good and beauty. . . .
+taken the toy from life itself.
-If, however, we consent to refer simply to the visible
-facts, ... we see that Nature teaches nothing, or
-almost nothing. That is to say, she forces man to sleep,
-to drink, to eat, and to protect himself, well or ill, against
+And the two children were laughing together fraternally, with teeth of
+equal _whiteness_!
-•28 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
-the hostilities of the atmosphere. It is she also who
+THE GIFTS OF THE FAIRIES
-moves him to kill and eat or imprison and torture his
-kind; for, as soon as we leave the region of necessities
-and needs to enter into that of luxuries and pleasures,
-we see that Nature is no better than a counsellor to
-crime. . . . Religion commands us to nourish our poor
-and infirm parents; Nature (the voice of our own inter-
-est) commands us to do away with them. Pass in re-
-view, analyse all that is natural, all the actions and de-
-sires of the natural man, and you will find nothing but
-what is horrible. All beautiful and noble things are
-the result of calculation. Crime, the taste for which
-the human animal absorbs before birth, is originally natu-
-ral. Virtue, on the contrary, is artificial, supernatural,
-since there has been a necessity in all ages and among
-all nations for gods and prophets to preach virtue to hu-
-manity; since man alone would have been unable to dis-
-cover it. Evil is done without effort, naturally and by
-fatality ; good is always the product of an art."
-So far the argument is straightforward and expresses
-what many must have thought, but Baudelaire, remem-
-bering that exaggeration is the best way of impressing
-one's ideas upon the unimaginative, immediately carries
-his argument from the moral order to the order of the
-beautiful, and applies it there. The result is strange
-enough. "I am thus led to regard personal adornment
-as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the hu-
-man soul. The races that our confused and perverted
-civilisation, with a fatuity and pride entirely laughable,
-treats as savages, understand as does the child the high
-spirituality of the toilet. The savage and the child, by
-their naive love of all brilliant things, of glittering plum-
-age and shining stuffs, and the superlative majesty of
-artificial forms, bear witness to their distaste for reality,
+It was that great assembly of the fairies, to proceed with the
+repartition of gifts among the new-born who had arrived at life within
+the last twenty-four hours.
+All these antique and capricious sisters of destiny, all these bizarre
+mothers of sadness and of joy, were most diversified: some had a
+somber, crabbed air; others were wanton, mischievous; some, young, who
+had always been young; others old, who had always been old.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 29
+All the fathers who believed in fairies had come, each bearing his
+new-born in his arms.
-and so prove, unknown to then^lves, the immateriality
+Gifts, Faculties, Good Fortunes, Invincible Circumstances, were
-of their souls."
+gathered at the side of the tribunal, as prizes on the platform for
+distribution. What was peculiar here was that the gifts were not the
+reward of an effort, but, quite the contrary, a grace accorded him who
+had not yet lived, a grace with power to determine his destiny and
+become as well the source of his misfortune as of his good.
-Thus, with some appearance of logic, he carries his
+The poor fairies were kept very busy; for the crowd of solicitors
-argument a step farther, and this immediately brings
+was great, and the intermediate world, placed between man and God,
-him to the bizarre 'conclusion that the more beautiful a
+is subject, like man, to the terrible law of Time and his endless
-woman naturally is, the more she should hide her natu-
+offspring, Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds.
-ral beauty beneath the artificial charm of rouge and
-powder. "She performs a duty in attempting to appear
-magical and supernatural. She is an idol who must adorn
-herself to be adored." Powder and rouge and kohl, all
-the httle artifices that shock respectability, have for
-their end "the creation of an abstract unity in the grain
-and colour of the skin." This unity brings the human
-being nearer to the condition of a statue — that is to say,
-"a divine and superior being." Red and black are the
-symbols of "an excessive and supernatural life." A touch
-of kohl "lends to the eye a more decided appearance of
-a window opened upon infinity"; and rouge augments the
-brilliance of the eye, "and adds to a beautiful feminine
-face the mysterious passion of the priestess." But arti-
-fice cannot make ugliness any the less ugly, nor help
-age to rival youth. "Who dare assign to art the sterile
-function of imitating nature?" Deception, if it is to
-have any charm, must be obvious and unashamed; it
-must be displayed "if not with affectation, at least with
-a kind of candour."
-Such theories as these, if they are sincerely held, neces-
+In truth, they were as bewildered as ministers on an audience day,
-sarily lead the theorist into the strangest b5T)aths of
+or as guards at the Mont-de-Piété when a national holiday authorizes
-literature. Baudelaire, like many another writer whose
+gratuitous liberations. I really think that from time to time they
-business is with verse, pondered so long upon the musical
+looked at the hands of the clock with as much impatience as human
-and rhythmical value of words that at times words be-
+judges, who, sitting since morn, cannot help dreaming of dinner, of the
-came meaningless to him. He thought his own language
+family, and of their cherished slippers. If, in supernatural justice,
-too simple to express the complexities of poetic reverie,
+there is a little of haste and of luck, we should not be surprised
-and dreamed of writing his poems in Latin. Not, how-
+sometimes to find the same in human justice. We ourselves, in that
-ever, in the Latin of classical times ; that was too robust,
+case, would be unjust judges.
+So some shams were enacted that day which might be thought bizarre,
+if prudence, rather than caprice, were the distinctive, eternal
+characteristic of the fairies.
+For instance, the power of magnetically attracting fortune was awarded
+the sole heir of a very wealthy family, who, endowed with no feeling
+of charity, no more than with lust for the most visible goods of life,
+must later on find himself prodigiously embarrassed by his millions.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+Thus, love of the beautiful and poetic power were given to the son of
+a gloomy knave, a quarry-man by trade, who could in no way develop the
+faculties or satisfy the needs of his deplorable offspring.
-too natural, too "brutal and purely epidermic," to use
+All the fairies rose, thinking their task was through; for there
-an expression of his own; but in the corrupt Latin of the
+remained no gift, no bounty, to hurl at all that human fry, when one
-Byzantine decadence, which he considered as "the su-
+fine fellow, a poor little tradesman, I think, rose, and grasping by
-preme sigh of a strong being already transformed and
+her robe of multi-colored vapors the Fairy nearest at hand, cried:
-prepared for the spiritual life."
-One of these Latin poems has appeared in all editions
+"Oh, Madam! You are forgetting us! There is still my little one!
-of The Flowers of Evil. Though dozens as good are to
+I don't want to have come for nothing!" The fairy could have been
-be found in the Breviary of the Roman Church, "Fran-
+embarrassed, for there no longer was a thing. However, she recalled
-ciscae Meae Laudes" has been included in this selection
+in time a law, well known, though rarely applied, in the supernatural
-for the benefit of those curious in such matters. It is
+world, inhabited by those impalpable deities, friends, of man and
-one of Baudelaire's many successful steps in the wrong
+often constrained to mold themselves to his passions, such as Fairies,
-direction.
+Gnomes, Salamanders, Sylphides, Sylphs, Nixies, Watersprites and
+Undines--I mean the law which grants a Fairy, in a case similar to
+this, namely, in case of the exhausting of the prizes, power to give
+one more, supplementary and exceptional, provided always that she has
+sufficient imagination to create it at once.
-IV
+Accordingly the good Fairy responded, with self-possession worthy
+of her rank: "I give to your son.... I give him ... _the gift of
+pleasing!_"
-In almost every line of The Flowers of Evil one can
+"Pleasing? How? Pleasing? Why?" obstinately asked the little
-trace the influence of Edgar Poe, and in the many places
+shopkeeper, who was doubtless one of those logicians so commonly met,
-where Baudelaire has attained a pure imaginative beauty
+incapable of rising to the logic of the Absurd.
-as in "The Sadness of the Moon" or "Music" or "The
-Death of Lovers," it is a beauty that would have pleased
-the author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
-Another kind of beauty, the beauty of death — for in
-Baudelaire's crucible everything is melted into loveliness
-— is even more directly traceable to Poe. In spite of the
-sonnet "Correspondences," and in spite of his Symbolist
-followers of the present day, Baudelaire himself made
-but an imperfect use of such symbols as he had; and
-these he found ready to his hand in the works of the
-American poet. The Tomb, the symbol of death or of an
-intellectual darkness inhabited by the Worm, who is re-
-morse; the Abyss, which is the despair into which the
-mortal part of man's mind plunges when brought into
-contact with dead and perishing substances; all these are
-borrowed from Poe. The Worm, who "devours with a
-kiss," occasionally becomes Time devouring life, or the
-Demon, "the obscure Enemy who gnaws the heart" ; and
+"Because! Because!" replied the incensed Fairy, turning her back on
+him; and, rejoining the train of her companions, she said to them:
+"What do you think of this little vainglorious Frenchman, who wants to
+know everything, and who, having secured for his son the best of gifts,
+dares still to question and to dispute the indisputable?"
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 31
-when it is none of these it is the Serpent, as in that
+SOLITUDE
-sombre poem "To a Madonna" — the Serpent beneath the
-feet of conquering purity. Baudelaire's imagination,
-however, which continually ran upon macabre images,
-loved remorse more than peace, and loved the Serpent
-more than the purity that would slay it, so he destroys
-purity with "Seven Knives" which are "the Seven Deadly
-Sins," that the Serpent may live to prey upon a heart
-that finds no beauty in peace. Even Love is evil, for his
-*'ancient arrows" are "crime, horror, folly," and the god
-Eros becomes a demon lying in wait:
-"Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat
-Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
-And I too well his ancient arrows know:
-Crime, Horror, Folly. . . ."
-Gautier pretends that the poet preserved his ideal under
+A philanthropic journalist once said to me that solitude is harmful to
-the form of "the adorable phantom of La Beatrix, the
+man, and, to support his thesis, he cited--as do all unbelievers--words
-ideal ever desired, never attained, the divine and superior
+of the Christian Fathers.
-beauty incarnated in an ethereal woman, spiritualised,
-made of light and flame and perfume, a vapour, a dream,
-a reflection of the seraphical world"; but when Baude-
-laire has a vision of this same Beatrice he sees her as one
-of a crowd of "cruel and curious demons" who mock
-at his sorrow, and she, too, mocks him, and caresses the
-demons who are his spiritual foes.
-Baudelaire was too deeply in love with the artificial
+I know that the Demon gladly frequents parched places, and that the
-to care overmuch for the symbols he could have found
+spirit of murder and lechery is marvellously inflamed in solitude. But
-among natural objects. Only once in The Flowers of
+it is possible that solitude is dangerous only to the idle, rambling
-Evil does he look upon the Moon with the eyes of a
+soul, who peoples it with his passions and his chimeras.
-mystic; and that is when he remembers that all people
-of imagination are under the Moon's influence, and makes
-his poet hide her iridescent tear in his heart, "far from
-the eyes of the Sun," for the Sun is lord of material la-
-bours and therefore hostile to the dreams and reveries
+It is certain that a babbler, whose supreme pleasure consists in
+speaking from a pulpit or a rostrum, would be taking great chances
+of going stark mad on the island of Crusoe. I do not demand of my
+journalist the courageous virtues of Robinson, but I ask that he do not
+summon in accusation lovers of solitude and mystery.
+There are in our chattering races individuals who would accept the
+supreme agony with less reluctance, if they were permitted to deliver
+a copious harangue from the height of the scaffold, without fear that
+the drums of Santerre[1] would unseasonably cut short their oration.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+I do not pity them, for I guess that their oratorical effusions bring
+them delights equal to those which others draw from silence and
+seclusion; but I despise them.
-that are the activity of the poet. He sought more for
+I desire above all that my accursed journalist leave me to amuse myself
-bizarre analogies and striking metaphors than for true
+as I will. "Then you never feel," he says in a very apostolic nasal
-symbols or correspondences. He is happiest when com-
+tone, "the need of sharing your joys?" Do you see the subtle jealous
-paring the vault of the heaven to "the lighted ceiling of
+one! He knows that I scorn his, and he comes to insinuate himself into
-a music hall," or "the black lid of the mighty pot where
+mine, the horrible [[killjoy]]!
-the human generations boil"; and when he thinks of the
-imfortunate and unhappy folk of the world, he does not
-see any hope for them in any future state; he sees,
-simply, "God's awful claw" stretched out to tear them.
-He offers pity, but no comfort.
-Sometimes he has a vision of a beauty unmingled with
+"The great misfortune of not being able to be alone," La Bruyère says
-any malevolence; but it is always evoked by sensuous
+somewhere, as though to shame those who rush to forget themselves in
-and material things; perfume or music; and always it is
+the crowd, fearing, doubtless, that they will be unable to endure
-a sorrowful loveliness he mourns or praises. Perhaps of
+themselves.
-all his poems "The Balcony" is most full of that tender
-and reverential melancholy we look for in a poem of
-love; but even it tells of a passion that has faded out
-of heart and mind and become beautiful only with its
-passing away, and not of an existing love. The other
-love poems — if indeed such a name can be given to "A
-Madrigal of Sorrow," "The Eyes of Beauty," "The Re-
-morse of the Dead," and the like — are nothing but ter-
-rible confessions of satiety, or cruelty, or terror. I have
-translated "The Corpse," his most famous and most
-infamous poem, partly because it shows him at his worst
-as the others in the volume at his best, partly because
-it is something of the nature of a literary curiosity. A
-poem like "The Corpse," which is simply an example of
-what may happen if any writer pushes his theories to the
-extreme, does not at all detract, be it said, from Baude-
-laire's delicate genius; for though he may not be quite
-worthy of a place by Dante, he has written poems that
-Dante might have been proud to write, and he is worthy
-to be set among the very greatest of the modems, along-
-side Hugo and Verlaine. Read the sonnet entitled
+"Almost all our ills come to us from inability to remain in our room,"
+said another sage, Pascal, I believe, recalling thus in the cell of
+meditation the frantic ones who seek happiness in animation, and in a
+prostitution which I could call fraternary, if I wished to use the fine
+language of my century.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 33
+[Footnote 1: Santerre is the general of the French Revolution who
+ordered his drummers to play, drowning the words of Louis XVI from the
+scaffold.]
-"Beauty" and you will see how he has invoked in four-
-teen lines the image of a goddess, mysterious and immor-
-tal; as fair as that Aphrodite who cast the shadow of
-her loveliness upon the Golden Age; as terrible as Pallas,
-"the warrior maid invincible." And as Minerva loved
-mortality in the person of Ulysses, so Baudelaire's per-
-sonification of Beauty loves the poets who pray before
-her and gaze into her eternal eyes, watching the rising
-and setting of their visionary Star in those placid mir-
-rors.
-The explanation of most of Baudelaire's morbid
-imaginings is this, that he was a man haunted by terrible
-dream-like memories; chief among them the memory that
-the loveliness he had adored in woman — the curve of a
-perfect cheek, the lifting of a perfect arm in some gesture
-of imperial indolence, the fall of a curl across a pale
-brow, all the minute and unforgettable things that give
-immortality to some movement of existence — all these,
-and the woman and her lover, must pass away from Time
-and Space; and he, unhappily, knew nothing of the phi-
-losophy that teaches us how all objects and events, even
-the most trivial — a woman's gesture, a rose, a sigh, a fad-
-ing flame, the sound that trembles on a lute-string — find
-a place in Eternity when they pass from the recognition
-of our senses. If he believed in the deathlessness of
-man's personality he gained no comfort from his belief.
-He mourned the body's decay; he was not concerned
-with the soul ; and no heaven less palpable than Moham-
-med's could have had any reality in his imagination.
-His prose is as distinguished in its manner as his
+PROJECTS
-verse. I think it was Professor Saintsbury who first
-brought The Little Poems in Prose, a selection from
-which is included in this volume, before the notice of
-English readers in an essay written many years ago. I
-am writing this in France, far from the possibility of
+He said to himself, while strolling in the great lonely park: "How
+beautiful she would be in an intricate, gorgeous court costume,
+descending, through the air of a beauteous evening, the marble stairs
+of a palace, opposite shallow pools and great greenswards. For she has
+naturally the air of a princess."
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+Passing along a street somewhat later, he stopped before a print-shop,
+and finding in a portfolio an engraving of a tropical scene, he said:
+"No, it is not in a palace that I should like to be master of her
+beloved life. We would not feel at home. Besides, walls riddled with
+gold would afford no niche to hold her likeness; in those solemn
+galleries there is no intimate corner. Decidedly it is _there_ I must
+live to develop the dream of my life."
-consulting any English books, but if my memory serves
+And, analyzing the details of the engraving, he continued mentally: "At
-me rightly he considered the prose of these prose poems
+the edge of the sea, a little log cabin, surrounded by those shiny,
-to be as perfect as literature can be. I think he said,
+bizarre trees, the names of which I have forgotten ... in the air, an
-"they go as far as prose can go." They need no other
+indefinable, intoxicating perfume ... in the cabin, a potent fragrance
-introduction than thepiselves, for they are perfect of their
+of rose and of musk ... farther off, behind our little domain,
-kind, and not different in thought from the more elab-
+mast-tops swaying with the swell ... around us, beyond the room lighted
-orately wrought poems of The Flowers of Evil. Some of
+by a roseate glow sifted through the blinds, adorned with fresh matting
-them, as for instance "Every Man His Chimaera," are
+and intoxicating flowers, with rare benches of Portuguese rococo, of
-as classical and as universally true as the myths and sym-
+a heavy and shadowy wood (where she will rest, so calm, so gently
-bolisms of the Old Testament; and all of them, I think,
+fanned, smoking tobacco tinged with opium), beyond the timbers of the
-are worthy of a place in that book the Archangel of the
+ships, the racket of the birds drunk with the light, and the chattering
-Presence will consult when all is weighed in the balance
+of little negresses ... and, at night, to serve as accompaniment
-— the book written by man himself, the record of his deep
+to my musings,' the plaintive song of musical trees, of melancholy
-and shallow imaginings. Baudelaire wrote them, he
+beef-woods! Yes, in truth, there indeed is the setting that I seek.
-said, because he had dreamed, "in his days of ambition,"
+What have I to do with palaces?"
-"of a miracle of poetical prose, musical without rhythm
-and without rhyme." His attitude of mind was always
-so natural to him that he never thought it necessary to
-make any excuse for the spirit of his art or the drear
-philosophy he preached ; unless a short notice printed in
-the first edition of his poems, but withdrawn from the
-second edition, explaining that "faithful to his dolorous
-programme, the author of The Flowers of Evil, as a per-
-fect comedian, has had to mould his spirit to all sophisms
-as to all corruptions," can be considered as an excuse.
-From whatever point of view we regard him : whether we
-praise his art and blame his philosophy, or blame his art
-and praise his philosophy, he is as difficult to analyse
-as he is difficult to give a place to, for we have none with
-whom to compare him, or very few, too few to be of ser-
-vice to the critic. His art is like the pearl, a beautiful
-product of disease, and to blame it is like blaming the
-pearl.
-He looked upon life very much as Poe, whom he so
+And still farther, as he followed a great avenue, he noticed a
-admired, looked upon it: with the eye of a sensitive
+well-kept tavern, from a window of which, enlivened by curtains of
+checkered prints, two laughing heads leaned forth. And at once: "My
+fancy," he said, "must be a great vagabond to seek so far what is so
+near to me. Pleasure and good fortune are in the nearest tavern, in the
+chance tavern, so rich in happiness. A great fire, gaudy earthenware,
+a tolerable meal, rough wine, and an enormous bed with cloths somewhat
+coarse, but fresh; what more could be desired?"
+And returning home, alone, at the hour when the counsels of Wisdom are
+not drowned by the hum of external life, he said: "I have had to-day,
+in my revery, three dwellings in which I have found equal pleasure. Why
+constrain my body to move about, when my soul voyages so freely? And
+to what end carry out projects, when the project itself is a sufficing
+joy?"
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 35
-spectator in some gloomy vault of the Spanish Inquisi-
+THE LOVELY DOROTHEA
-tion, where beauty was upon the rack; he was horrified,
-but unable to turn from a sight that fascinated him
-by its very terror. His moments of inspiration are haunt-
-ed by the consciousness that evil beings, clothed with hor-
-ror as with a shroud, are ever lingering about the temple
-of life and awaiting an opportunity to enter. He was
-like a man who awakens trembling from a nightmare,
-afraid of the darkness, and unable to believe the dawn
-may be less hopeless than the midnight. Perhaps he
-was haunted, as many artists and all mystics, by a fear of
-madness and of the unseen world of evil shapes that
-sanity hides from us and madness reveals. Is there a
-man, is there a writer, especially, who has not at times
-been conscious of a vague and terrible fear that the
-whole world of visible nature is but a comfortable illu-
-sion that may fade away in a moment and leave him
-face to face with the horror that has visited him in
-dreams? The old occult writers held that the evil
-thoughts of others beget phantoms in the air that can
-make themselves bodies out of our fear, and haunt even
-our waking moments. These were the shapes of terror
-that haunted Baudelaire. Shelley, too, writes of them
-with as profound a knowledge as the magical writer of
-the Middle Ages. They come to haunt his Prometheus.
-"Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
-And hollow underneath, like death."
-They are the elemental beings who dwell beside the
+The sun pours down upon the city with its direct and terrible light;
-soul of the dreamer and the poet, "like a vain loud mul-
+the sand is dazzling, and the sea glistens. The stupefied world sinks
-titude"; turning life into death and all beautiful thoughts
+cowardly down and holds siesta, a siesta which is a sort of delightful
-into poems like The Flowers of Evil, or into tales like
+death, in which the sleeper, half-awake, enjoys the voluptuousness of
-the Satanic reveries of Edgar Poe.
+his annihilation.
-"We are the ministers of pain, and fear.
+None the less, Dorothea, strong and proud as the sun, advances along
-And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate.
+the deserted street, alone animated at that hour, under the immense
-And clinging crime; and as lean dogs pursue
+blue sky, forming a startling black spot against the light.
+She advances, lightly, balancing her slender trunk upon her so large
+hips. Her close-fitting silk dress, of a clear, roseate fashion, stands
+out vividly against the darkness of her skin and is exactly molded to
+her long figure, her rounded back and her pointed throat.
+Her red parasol, sifting the light, throws over her dark face the
+bloody disguise of its reflection.
-CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
+The weight of her enormous, blue-black hair draws back her delicate
+head and gives her a triumphant, indolent bearing. Heavy pendants
+tinkle quietly at her delicate ears.
-Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn,
+From time to time the sea-breeze lifts the hem of her flowing skirt and
-We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live,
+reveals her shining, superb limbs; and her foot, a match for the feet
-When the great King betrays them to our will."
+of the marble goddesses whom Europe locks in its museums, faithfully
+imprints its form in the fine sand. For Dorothea is such a wondrous
+coquette, that the pleasure of being admired overcomes the pride of the
+enfranchised, and, although she is free, she walks without shoes.
-And every man gives them of the substance of his imagi-
+She advances thus, harmoniously, glad to be alive, smiling an open
-nation to clothe them in prophetic shapes that are the
+smile; as if she saw, far off in space, a mirror reflecting her walk
-images of his destiny:
+and her beauty.
-"From our victim's destined agony
+At the hour when dogs moan with pain under the tormenting sun, what
-The shade which is our form invests us round,
+powerful motive can thus draw forth the indolent Dorothea, lovely, and
-Else we are shapeless as our mother Night."
+cold as bronze?
-The greatest of all poets conquer their dreams; others,
+Why had she left her little cabin, so coquettishly adorned, the flowers
-who are great, but not of the greatest, are conquered by
+and mats of which make at so little cost a perfect boudoir; where she
-them, and Baudelaire was one of these. There is a pas-
+takes such delight in combing herself, in smoking, in being fanned, or
-sage in the works of Edgar Poe that Baudelaire may well
+in regarding herself in the mirror with its great fans of plumes; while
-have pondered as he laboured at his translation, for it
+the sea, which strikes the shore a hundred steps away, shapes to her
-reveals the secret of his life: "There are moments when,
+formless reveries a mighty and monotonous accompaniment, and while the
-even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad hu-
+iron pot, in which a ragout of crabs with saffron and rice is cooking,
-manity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the
+sends after her, from the courtyard, its stimulating perfumes?
-imagination of man is no Carathis to explore with im-
-punity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepul-
-chral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful;
-but, like the demons in whose company Afrasiab made
-his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep or they will
-devour us — they must be suffered to slumber or we
-perish."
-==POEMS IN PROSE Translated by [[Arthur Symons]] ==
+Perhaps she has a rendezvous with some young officer, who, on far
-:''[[Le Spleen de Paris ]]''
+distant shores, heard his comrades talk of the renowned Dorothea.
+Infallibly she will beg him, simple creature, to describe to her the
+Bal de l'Opéra, and will ask him if one can go there barefoot, as to
+the Sunday dances, where the old Kaffir women themselves get drunk and
+mad with joy; and then, too, whether the lovely ladies of Paris are all
+lovelier than she.
+Dorothea is admired and pampered by all, and she would be perfectly
+happy if she were not obliged to amass piastre on piastre to buy back
+her little sister, who is now fully eleven, and who is already mature,
+and so lovely! She will doubtless succeed, the good Dorothea; the
+child's master is so miserly, too miserly to understand another beauty
+than that of gold.
-NOTE
-The "[[Petits Poemes en Prose]]" are experiments, and they are also confessions. "Who of us," says Baudelaire in his dedicatory preface, "has not dreamed, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, subtle and staccato enough to follow the lyric motions of the soul, the wavering outlines of meditation, the sudden starts of the conscience?" This miracle he has achieved in these bagatelles laborieuses, to use his own words, these astonishing trifles, in which the art is not more novel, precise and perfect than the qualitj- of thought and of emotion. In translating into English a few of these little masterpieces, which have given me so much delight for so many years, I have tried to be absolutely faithful to the sense, the words, and the rhythm of the original. A. S.
+THE COUNTERFEIT MONEY
-THE FAVOURS OF THE MOON
+As we were moving away from the tobacconist's, my companion carefully
+sorted his money: in the left pocket of his waistcoat he slipped little
+gold pieces; in the right, little silver pieces; in the left pocket of
+his trousers, a mass of coppers, and finally, in the right, a silver
+two-franc pieces that he had particularly examined.
-The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in through
+"Singular and minute distribution!" I said to myself.
-the window when you lay asleep in your cradle, and said
-inwardly: "This is a child after my own soul."
-And she came softly down the staircase of the clouds,
+We came across a pauper who, trembling, held forth his cap.--I know
-and passed noiselessly through the window-pane. Then
+nothing more disquieting than the dumb eloquence of those suppliant
-she laid herself upon you with the supple tenderness of a
+eyes which hold, for the sensitive man who can read within, both
-mother, and she left her colours upon your face. That is
+so great humility and so deep reproach. Something lies there which
-why your eyes are green and your cheeks extraordinarily
+approaches that depth of complex feeling in the tearful eyes of dogs
-pale. It was when you looked at her, that your pupils
+that are being flogged.
-widened so strangely; and she clasped her arms so ten-
-derly about your throat that ever since you have had
-the longing for tears.
-Nevertheless, in the flood of her joy, the Moon filled
+The offering of my friend was much more considerable than mine, and I
-the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous
+said to him: "You are right; after the pleasure of being astonished,
-poison; and all this living light thought and said: "My
+none is greater than that of creating a surprise."--"It was the
-kiss shall be upon you for ever. You shall be beautiful
+counterfeit," he answered tranquilly, as though to justify his
-as I am beautiful. You shall love that which I love and
+prodigality.
-that by which I am loved: water and clouds, night and
-silence; the vast green sea; the formless and multiform
-water; the place where you shall never be; the lover
-whom you shall never know; unnatural flowers; odours
-which make men drunk; the cats that languish upon
-pianos and sob like women, with hoarse sweet voices!
-"And you shall be loved by my lovers, courted by my
+But in my miserable brain, always busied seeking noon at two p.m. (of
-courtiers. You shall be the queen of men who have green
+such a wearying faculty has nature made me a gift!), the idea suddenly
-eyes, and whose throats I have clasped by night in my
+came that such conduct, on the part of my friend, was excusable only
-caresses; of those that love the sea, the vast tumultuous
+by the desire to produce an occasion in the life of the poor devil,
-green sea, formless and multiform water, the place where
+perhaps even to know the diverse consequences, disastrous or otherwise,
-they are not, the woman whom they know not, the omi-
+that a counterfeit in the hands of a mendicant can engender. Could it
+not multiply itself in valid pieces? Could it not also lead him to
+jail? A tavern-keeper, a baker, for example, might perhaps have him
+arrested as a forger or a spreader of counterfeits. Quite as well the
+counterfeit coin might be, for a poor little speculator, the germ of
+a several days' wealth. And so my fancy ran its course, lending wings
+to the spirit of my friend and drawing all possible deductions from all
+imaginable hypotheses.
+But he abruptly burst my revery asunder by taking up my own words:
+"Yes, you are right: there is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a
+man by giving him more than he expected."
+I looked into the whites of his eyes, and I was frightened to see that
+his eyes shone with an undeniable candor. I then saw clearly that he
+wished to combine charity and a good stroke of business; to gain forty
+sous and the heart of God; to sweep into Paradise economically; in
+short, to entrap gratis the brevet of charitable man.
+I would almost have pardoned in him the desire of the criminal joy
+of which I had just now thought him capable! I would have thought it
+curious, singular, that he found it amusing to compromise the poor;
+but I shall never pardon the ineptitude of his calculation. One is
+never to be forgiven for being wicked, but there is some merit in being
+conscious that one is;--the most irreparable of all evils is to do
+wrong through stupidity.
-POEMS IN PROSE
-nous flowers that are like the censers of an unknown rite,
-the odours that trouble the will, and the savage and
-voluptuous beasts that are the emblems of their folly."
-And that is why, accursed dear spoilt child, I lie now
+THE GENEROUS PLAYER
-at your feet, seeking to find in you the image of the fear-
-ful goddess, the fateful god-mother, the poisonous nurse
-of all the moonstruck of the world.
-II
-WHICH IS TRUE?
+Yesterday, in the crowd of the boulevard, I felt myself grazed by
+a mysterious Being whom I have always wished to know, and whom I
+recognized at once, though I had never seen him. He doubtless had a
+similar wish to make my acquaintance, for he gave me a significant
+wink in passing which I hastened to obey. I followed him attentively,
+and soon I descended behind him into a resplendent subterranean abode,
+where sparkled a luxury that none of the better homes in Paris can
+nearly approach. It seemed odd to me that I could have passed by this
+enchanting den so often without divining the entrance. There reigned
+an exquisite, though heady atmosphere, which made one forget almost
+at once all the fastidious horrors of life; there one breathed a
+somber blessedness, similar to that which the lotus-eaters experienced
+when, disembarking on an enchanted isle, bright with the glimmerings
+of eternal afternoon, they felt growing within them, to the drowsy
+sound of melodious cascades, the desire never to see again their
+hearthstones, their wives, their children, and never to remount the
+high surges of the sea.
-I KNEW one Benedicta who filled earth and air with the
+Strange visages of men and women were there, marked with a fatal
-ideal; and from whose eyes men learnt the desire of
+beauty, which it seemed to me I had already seen in epochs and in lands
-greatness, of beauty, of glory, and of all whereby we
+I could not precisely recall, and which inspired me rather with a
-believe in immortality.
+fraternal sympathy than with that fear which is usually born at sight
+of the unknown. If I wished to try to define in any way the singular
+expression of these visages, I should say that I had never seen eyes
+burning more feverishly with dread of ennui and with the immortal
+desire of feeling themselves alive.
-But this miraculous child was too beautiful to live
+My host and I were already, when we sat down, old and perfect friends.
-long; and she died only a few days after I had come,
+We ate, we drank beyond measure of all sorts of extraordinary wines,
-to know her, and I buried her with my own hands, one
+and--what was no less extraordinary--it seemed to me, after several
-day when Spring shook out her censer in the graveyards.
+hours, that I was no more drunken than he. Play, that superhuman
-I buried her with my own hands, shut down into a coffin
+pleasure, had meanwhile irregularly interrupted our frequent libations,
-of wood, perfumed and incorruptible like Indian caskets.
+and I must say that I staked and lost my soul, at the rubber, with
+heroic heedlessness and lightness. The soul is so impalpable a thing,
+so often useless and sometimes so annoying, that I experienced, at its
+loss, a little less emotion than if, on a walk, I had misplaced my
+visiting card. For a long time we smoked some cigars the incomparable
+savor and perfume of which gave the soul nostalgia for unknown lands
+and joys, and, intoxicated with all these delights, I dared, in an
+access of familiarity which seemed not to displease him, to cry, while
+mastering a cup full to the brim: "To your immortal health, old Buck!"
-And as I still gazed at the place where I had laid
+We talked, also, of the universe, of its creation and of its future
-away my treasure, I saw all at once a little person singu-
+destruction; of the great idea of the century, namely, progress and
-larly like the deceased, who trampled on the fresh soil
+perfectibility; and, in general, of all forms of human infatuation.
-with a strange and hysterical violence, and said, shriek-
+On this subject, His Highness never exhausted his fund of light and
-ing with laughter: "Look at me! I am the real Bene-
+irrefutable pleasantries, and he expressed himself with an easy flow of
-dicta! a pretty sort of baggage I am! And to punish you
+speech and a quietness in his drollery that I have found in none of the
-for your blindness and folly you shall love me just as
+most celebrated causeurs of humanity. He explained to me the absurdity
-lam!"
+of the different philosophies which have hitherto taken possession of
+the human brain, and deigned even to confide to me certain fundamental
+principles, the property and the benefits of which it does not suit
+me to share with the casual comer. He did not in any way be-moan the
+bad deputation which he enjoys in all parts of the world, assured me
+that he himself was the person most interested in the destruction
+of _superstition_, and confessed that he had never feared for his
+own power save once, on the day when he had heard a preacher, more
+subtle than his colleagues, cry from the pulpit: "My dear brethren,
+never forget, when you hear the progress of wisdom vaunted, that the
+cleverest ruse of the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist!"
-But I was furious, and I answered: "No! no! no!"
+The memory of this celebrated orator led us naturally to the subject of
-And to add more emphasis to my refusal I stamped on
+the academies, and my strange companion stated that he did not disdain,
-the ground so violently with my foot that my leg sank
+in many cases, to inspire the pen, the word, and the conscience of
-up to the knee in the earth of the new grave; and now,
+pedagogs, and that he was almost always present, though invisible, at
-like a wolf caught in a trap, I remain fastened, perhaps
+the academic sessions.
-for ever, to the grave of the ideal.
+Encouraged by so many kindnesses, I asked him for news of God, and
+whether he had recently seen Him. He answered, with a carelessness
+shaded with a certain sadness: "We greet one another when we meet, but
+as two old gentlemen, in whom an innate politeness cannot extinguish
+the memory of ancient bitterness."
+It is doubtful that His Highness had ever granted so long an audience
+to a plain mortal, and I was afraid of abusing it. Finally, as the
+shivering dawn whitened the panes, this famous personage, sung by
+so many poets and served by so many philosophers who have worked
+unknowingly for his glory, said to me: "I want to leave you with a
+pleasant memory of me, and to prove that I, of whom so much ill is
+said, I can sometimes be a _good devil_, to make use of one of your
+common phrases. In order to compensate for the irremediable loss of
+your soul, I shall give you the stakes you would have won had fate
+been with you, namely, the possibility of relieving and of conquering,
+all through your life, that odd affection of ennui which is the source
+of all your maladies and of all your wretched progress. Never shall a
+desire be framed by you which I will not aid you to realize; you shall
+reign over your vulgar fellow-men; you shall be stocked with flattery,
+even with adoration; silver, gold, diamonds, fairylike palaces, shall
+come seeking you and shall pray you to accept them, without your having
+made an effort to attain them; you shall change fatherland and country
+as often as your fancy may dictate; you shall riot in pleasures,
+unwearying, in charming countries where it is always warm and where the
+women are fragrant as the flowers--et cetera, et cetera ..." he added,
+rising and taking leave of me with a pleasant smile.
-POEMS IN PROSE 41
+If I had not been afraid of humiliating myself before so vast an
+assemblage, I should gladly have fallen at the feet of this generous
+player to thank him for his unheard of munificence. But little by
+little, after I had left him, incurable distrust reentered my breast;
+I dared no longer believe in such prodigious good fortune, and, on
+going to bed, still saying my prayers through silly force of habit, I
+repeated in semi-slumber: "My God! Lord, my God! Let it be that the
+Devil keep his word!"
-III
-'X'INVITATION AU VOYAGE"
-There is a wonderful country, a country of Cockaigne,
-they say, which I dreamed of visiting with an old friend.
-It is a strange country, lost in the mists of our North,
-and one might call it the East of the West, the China of
-Europe, so freely does a warm and capricious fancy
-flourish there, and so patiently and persistently has that
-fancy illustrated it with a learned and delicate vegeta-
-tion.
-A real country of Cockaigne, where everything is beau-
+THE ROPE
-tiful, rich, quiet, honest; where order is the likeness and
-the mirror of luxury; where life is fat, and sweet to
-breathe; where disorder, tumult, and the unexpected are
-shut out; where happiness is wedded to silence; where
-even cooking is poetic, rich and highly flavoured at once;
-where all, dear love, is made in your image.
-You know that feverish sickness which comes over
+To Edward Manet
-us in our cold miseries, that nostalgia of unknown lands,
-that anguish of curiosity? There is a country made in
-your image, where all is beautiful, rich, quiet and honest;
-where fancy has built and decorated a western China,
-where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wed-
-ded to silence. It is there that we should live, it is there
-that we should die!
-Yes, it is there that we should breathe, dream, and
-lengthen out the hours by the infinity of sensations. A
-musician has written an "Invitation a la Valse": who
-will compose the "Invitation au Voyage" that we can of-
-fer to the beloved, to the chosen sister?
-Yes, it is in this atmosphere that it would be good to
+Illusions, my friend told me, are perhaps as numberless as the
-live; far off, where slower hours contain more thought^
+relations of men with one another, or of men to things. And when the
+illusion disappears, that is, when we see the being or the fact as it
+exists outside of us, we undergo a strange feeling, a complex half of
+regret for the vanished phantom, half of agreeable surprise before
+the novelty, before the real fact. If one phenomenon exists that is
+trite, evident, always the same, concerning, the nature of which it is
+impossible to be deceived, it is maternal love. It is as difficult to
+imagine a mother without maternal love as a light without heat; is it
+not then perfectly legitimate to attribute to maternal love all the
+words and actions of a mother, relating to her child? None the less
+hear this little story, in which I was singularly mystified by the most
+natural illusion.
+"My profession of painter drives me to regard attentively the visages,
+the physiognomies, which present themselves on my way, and you know
+what joy we derive from this faculty which renders life more vivid
+and significant in our eyes than for other men. In the secluded
+section where I live, and where great grassy spaces still separate
+the buildings, I often observed a child whose ardent and roguish
+countenance, more than all the rest, won me straightway. He posed for
+me more than once, and I transformed him, now into a little gypsy, now
+into an angel, now into mythological Love. I made him bear the violin
+of the vagabond, the Crown of Thorns and the Nails of the Passion,
+and the Torch of Eros. At length, I took so lively a pleasure in all
+the drollery of the youngster, that one day I begged his parents,
+poor folk, to be kind enough to yield him to me, promising to clothe
+him well, to give him money and not to impose on him any task beyond
+cleaning my brushes and running my errands. The child, with his face
+washed, became charming, and the life he led with me seemed a paradise,
+compared to that he had undergone in the parental hovel. Only I must
+say that the little fellow astonished me at times by singular spells
+of precocious sadness, and that he soon manifested an immoderate taste
+for sugar and for liqueurs; so much so that one day when I found that,
+despite my numerous warnings, he had again been doing some pilfering of
+that sort, I threatened to send him back to his parents. Then I went
+out, and my business kept me away for quite some time.
+"What was my surprise and horror when, reëntering the house, the first
+object that met my eyes was my little fellow, the frolicsome companion
+of my life, hanging from the panel of the closet! His feet almost
+touched the floor; a chair, which he had doubtless thrust back with his
+foot, was overturned beside him; his head was bent convulsively over
+one shoulder; his bloated face, and his eyes, quite wide open with a
+fearful fixity, gave at first the illusion of life. To take him down
+was not so easy a business as you might think. He was already quite
+stiff, and I had an inexplicable repugnance to letting him fall heavily
+to the floor. It was necessary to bear his whole weight on one arm,
+and, with the free hand, to cut the rope. But that accomplished, all
+was not yet done; the little monster had made use of a very slender
+twine which had entered deep into his flesh, and I must now, with
+delicate scissors, seek the cord between the two cushions of the
+swelling, to disengage the neck.
-POEMS IN PROSE
+"I have neglected to tell you that I called vigorously for help; but
+all my neighbors refused to come to my assistance, faithful in that to
+the habits of civilized man, who never wishes, I know not why, to mix
+in the affairs of one that has been hanged. Finally a physician came,
+who said that the child had been dead several hours. When, later, we
+had to disrobe him for burial, the cadaverous rigidity was such that,
+despairing of bending his limbs, we had to tear and cut the garments to
+remove them."
-where clocks strike happiness with a deeper and more
+"The commissioner, to whom, naturally, I had to announce the casualty,
-significant solemnity.
+looked at me askew and said to me: 'Here's something suspicious,'
+moved doubtless by an inveterate desire and a professional habit of
+frightening, at all events, the innocent as well as the guilty.
-On shining panels, or on gilded leather of a dark rich-
+"There remained a supreme task to perform, the thought of which alone
-ness, slumbers the discreet life of pictures, deep, calm,,
+gave me a terrible anguish: I had to notify the parents. My feet
-and devout, as the souls of the painters who created it.
+refused to guide me to them. Finally, I had the courage. But, to my
-The sunsets which colour so richly the walls of dining-
+great astonishment, the mother was unmoved, not a tear oozed from the
-room and drawing-room, are sifted through beautiful
+corner of her eye. I attributed that strangeness to the very horror
-hangings or through tall wro^^ght windows leaded into
+she must feel, and I recalled the well-known maxim: 'The most terrible
-many panes. The pieces of furniture are large, curious,
+sorrows are silent ones.' As to the father, he contented himself with
-and fantastic, armed with, locks and secrets like refined
+saying with an air half brutalized, half pensive: 'After all, it is
-souls. Mirrors, metals, hangings, goldsmith's work and
+perhaps for the best; he would always have come to a bad end!'
-pottery, play for the eyes a mute and mysterious S5an-
-phony; and from all things, from every corner, from the
-cracks of drawers and from the folds of hangings, ex-
-hales a singular odour, a "forget-me-not" of Sumatra,
-which is, as it were, the soul of the abode.
-A real country of Cockaigne, I assure you, where all
+"However, the body was stretched out on my couch, and, assisted by a
-is beautiful, clean, and shining, like a clear conscience,
+servant, I was busying myself with the final preparations, when the
-like a bright array of kitchen crockery, like splendid
+mother entered my studio. She wished, she said, to see the body of
-jewellery of gold, like many-coloured jewellery of silver!
+her son. I could not, in truth, deny her the intoxication of her grief
-All the treasures of the world have found their way there,
+and refuse her that supreme and somber consolation. Then she begged me
-as to the house of a hard-working man who has put the
+to show her the place where her little one had hanged himself. 'Oh no,
-whole world in his debt. Singular country, excelling
+madam' I answered, 'that would be bad for you.' And as my eyes turned
-others as Art excels Nature, where Nature is refashioned
+involuntarily toward the fatal cupboard, I perceived, with disgust
-by dreams, where Nature is. corrected, embellished, re-
+mingled with horror and wrath, that the nail had remained driven in the
-moulded.
+casing, with a long rope-end still hanging. I leapt rapidly to snatch
+away the last traces of the misfortune, and as I was going to hurl them
+out through the open window, the poor woman seized my arm and said in
+an irresistible tone: 'Oh! sir! leave that for me! I beg you! I beseech
+you.' Her despair had doubtless become, it seemed to me, so frantic
+that she was now overcome with tenderness toward that which had served
+her son as the instrument of death, and she wished to preserve it as a
+dear and horrible relic.--And she took possession of the nail and of
+the twine.
-Let the alchemists of horticulture seek and seek again,
+"At last! At last! all was accomplished. There remained only to set
-let them set ever further and further back the limits to
+myself back at work, even more strenuously than usual, to drive out
-their happiness! Let them offer prizes of sixty and of a
+gradually the little corpse that haunted the recesses of my brain, the
-hundred thousand florins to whoever will solve their am-
+phantom of which wore me out with its great fixed eyes. But the next
-bitious problems! For me, I have found my "black
+day I received a bundle of letters: some from lodgers in the house,
-tulip" and my "blue dahlia!"
+several others from neighboring houses; one from the first floor,
+another from the second, another from the third, and so throughout!
+some in semi-humorous style, as though seeking to disguise beneath
+an apparent jocularity the sincerity of the request; others, grossly
+shameless and without spelling; but all tending to the same goal,
+namely, to securing from me a bit of the fatal and beatific rope. Among
+the signers were, I must say, more women than men; but not all, I
+assure you, belonged to the lowest class. I have kept the letters.
-Incomparable flower, recaptured tulip, allegoric dahlia,
+"And then, suddenly, a light glowed in my brain, and I understood why
-it is there, is it not, in that beautiful country, so calm
+the mother was so very anxious to wrest the twine from me, and by what
-and so full of dreams, that you live and flourish? There;
+traffic she meant to be consoled."
-POEMS IN PROSE 43
+CALLINGS
-would you not be framed within your own analogy, and
-would you not see yourself again, reflected, as the mystics
-say, in your own "correspondence"?
-Dreams, dreams ever! and the more delicate and am-
+In a beautiful garden where the rays of the autumnal sun seemed to
-bitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from
+linger with delight, under a sky already greenish, in which golden
-possible things. Every man carries within himself his
+clouds floated like voyaging continents, four fine children, four boys,
-natural dose of opium, ceaselessly secreted and renewed,
+doubtless tired of playing, were chatting away.
-and, from birth to death, how many hours can we reckon
-of positive pleasure, of successful and decided action?
-Shall we ever live in, shall we ever pass into, that pic-
-ture which my mind has painted, that picture made in
-your image?
-These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order,
+One said: "Yesterday I was taken to the theatre. In great, sad palaces,
-these odours, these miraculous flowers, are you. You
+where in the background spread the sea and the sky, men and women, also
-too are the great rivers and the quiet canals. The vast
+serious and sad, but much more beautiful and much better dressed than
-ships that drift down them, laden with riches, from
+any we see about, were talking with musical voices. They threatened one
-whose decks comes the sound of the monotonous songs
+another, they entreated, they were disconsolate, and often they rested
-of labouring sailors, are my thoughts which slumber or
+a hand on a dagger sunk within the sash. Ah! that is beautiful indeed!
-rise and fall on your breast. You lead them softly
+The women are much more beautiful and much greater than those that come
-towards the sea, which is the infinite, mirroring the
+to the house to visit us, and although with their great hollow eyes and
-depths of the sky in the crystal clearness of your soul;
+their fiery cheeks they have a terrible look, you can not help loving
-and when, weary of the surge and heavy with the spoils
+them. You are afraid, you want to cry, and still you are content....
-of the East, they return to the port of their birth, it is still
+And then, what is stranger still, it all makes you want to be dressed
-my thoughts that come back enriched out of the infin-
+the same, to say and to do the same things, to speak with the same
-ite to you.
+voice...."
-IV
+One of the four children, who for several moments had no longer been
+listening to his comrade's talk, and had been watching with surprising
+fixity some point or other in the sky, said all at once: "Look, look
+down there! Do you see _Him_? He is sitting on that little isolated
+cloud, that little fiery cloud, which is moving slowly. _He_ too, they
+say, He watches us."
-THE EYES OF THE POOR
+"Who? Who?" asked the others.
-Ah! you want to know why I hate you to-day. It
+"God!" he answered, with the accent of perfect conviction.--"Ah! He
-will probably be less easy for you to understand than
+is already quite far away; by and by you will not be able to see Him.
-for me to explain it to you; for you are, I think, the
+Doubtless He is traveling to visit every land. Look, He is going to
-most perfect example of feminine impenetrability that
+pass in back of that line of trees near the horizon..., and now He is
-could possibly be found.
+going down behind the steeple.... Ah! you can't see Him any longer!"
+And the child remained for some time turned in the same direction,
+fixing on the line which separates earth from the sky eyes in which
+burned an inexpressible glow of ecstasy and regret.
+"He is a fool, that one, with his good God, whom he alone can see!"
+then said the third, whose whole person was marked with a singular
+vivacity and life. "_I_ am going to tell you how something happened
+to me which has never happened to you, and which is a little more
+interesting than your theatre and your clouds.... Several days ago my
+parents took me on a trip with them, and as the inn where we stopped
+didn't have enough beds for all of us, it was decided that I should
+sleep in the same bed as my nursery maid." He drew his comrades quite
+close and spoke in a lower tone. "That was a strange performance, now!
+not to sleep alone, and to be in bed with your maid, in the dark. As I
+couldn't sleep, I amused myself, while she was sleeping, by passing my
+hand over her arms, her neck, and her shoulders. She has a much thicker
+neck and arm than all other women, and her skin is so soft, so soft,
+that you might call it note-paper or silver paper. I liked it so much
+that I should have kept on for a long time, if I hadn't been afraid,
+afraid at first of waking her, and then still afraid of I don't know
+what. Then I buried my head in the hair which lay down her back, thick
+as a mane, and it smelled just as good, I assure you, as the flowers in
+the garden, right now. Try, when you can, to do as much, and you will
+see!"
+The young author of this prodigious revelation, in telling his story,
+had his eyes wide open in a sort of stupefaction at what he still felt,
+and the rays of the setting sun, slipping across the sandy locks of his
+ruffled hair, illumined it like a sulphurous aureole of passion. It
+was easy to guess that this youngster would not lose his life seeking
+Divinity in the clouds, and that he would frequently discover it
+elsewhere.
-POEMS IN PROSE
+At last the fourth spoke: "You know that I seldom find amusement at
+home. I am never taken to a play; my tutor is too stingy; God doesn't
+bother about me and my ennui, and I haven't a pretty nurse to fondle
+me. It has often seemed to me that I should just like to go forever
+straight ahead, without knowing where, without any one's being worried,
+always to see new lands. I am never well off anywhere, and I always
+think I shall be better somewhere else. Oh well! I saw, at the last
+fair at the nearby village, three men who lived as I should like to.
+You paid no attention to them, you others. They were large, almost
+black, and very proud, although in rags, looking as though they had
+need of no one. Their great gloomy eyes became quite brilliant while
+they played their music; a music so astonishing that it made you want
+now to dance, now to cry, or to do both together, and it would almost
+make you go mad if you listened too long. One, drawing his bow across
+his violin, seemed to be whispering sorrow; another, making his hammer
+skip over the keys of a little piano hung by a strap about his neck,
+appeared to be mocking the plaint of his neighbor; while from time
+to time the third clashed his cymbals with extraordinary violence.
+They were so pleased with themselves that they went on playing their
+wild music even after the crowd had gone away. Finally they gathered
+together their sous, piled their luggage on their back, and left. I
+wanted to know where they lived, and I followed them from afar, right
+to the edge of the forest, and only then, I understood that they lived
+nowhere.
-We had spent a long day together, and it had seemed
+"Then one said: 'Must we pitch the tent?'
-to me short. We had promised one another that we
-would think the same thoughts and that our two souls
-should become one soul; a dream which is not original,
-after all, except that, dreamed by all men, it has been
-realised by none.
-In the evening you were a little tired, and you sat
+"'Goodness! No!' answered the other. 'It's such a pleasant night!'
-down outside a new cafe at the comer of a new boule-
-vard, still littered with plaster and already displaying
-proudly its unfinished splendours. The cafe glittered.
-The very gas put on all the fervency of a fresh start, and
-lighted up with its full force the blinding whiteness of
-the walls, the dazzling sheets of glass in the mirrors, the
-gilt of cornices and mouldings, the chubby-cheeked pages
-straining back from hounds in leash, the ladies laugh-
-ing at the falcons on their wrists, the nymphs and god-
-desses carrying fruits and pies and game on their heads,
-the Hebes and Ganymedes holding out at arm's-length
-little jars of syrups or parti-coloured obelisks of ices;
-the whole of history and of mythology brought together
-to make a paradise for gluttons. Exactly opposite to us,
-in the roadway, stood a man of about forty years of age,
-with a weary face and a greyish beard, holding a little
-boy by one hand and carrying on the other arm a little
-fellow too weak to walk. He was taking the nurse-maid's
-place, and had brought his children out for a walk in the
-evening. All were in rags. The three faces were ex-
-traordinarily serious, and the six eyes stared fixedly at
-the new cafe with an equal admiration, differentiated in
-each according to age.
-The father's eyes said: "How beautiful it is! how
+"The third spoke, while figuring up the collection: 'These folks do not
-beautiful it is! One would think that all the gold of the
+appreciate music, and their wives dance like bears. Fortunately, within
-poor world had found its way to these walls." The boy's
+a month we shall be in Austria, where we shall find more amiable folk.'
-eyes said: "How beautiful it is! how beautiful it is!
-But that is a house which only people who are not like
+"'Perhaps we'd do better to go toward Spain, for the season is forward;
+let us flee before the rains, and moisten nothing but our gullets,'
+said one of the others.
+"I remember everything, as you see. Then each one drank a cup of brandy
+and went to sleep, with his forehead toward the stars. At first I
+wanted to beg them to take me along with them and to teach me to play
+their instruments; but I didn't dare, doubtless because it is always
+very difficult to come to a decision about anything, and also because I
+was afraid of being recaptured before we were out of France."
-POEMS IN PROSE 45
+The slightly interested air of the three other comrades made me realize
+that this fellow was already _misunderstood_. I looked at him closely;
+there was in in his eye and on his brow that indescribable fatal
+precocity which generally repells sympathy, and which, I know not why,
+aroused my own to the point that for a moment I had the queer notion
+that I might have a brother unknown to me.
-us can enter." As for the little one's eyes, they were too
+The sun had set. The solemn night was come. The children separated,
-fascinated to express anything but stupid and utter joy.
+each going in ignorance, according to circumstance and chance, to reap
+his destiny, scandalize his relatives, and gravitate toward glory or
+toward dishonor.
-Song-writers say that pleasure ennobles the soul and
-softens the heart. The song was right that evening, so
-far as I was concerned. Not only was I touched by this
-family of eyes, but I felt rather ashamed of our glasses
-and decanters, so much too much for our thirst. I turned
-to look at you, dear love, that I might read my own
-thought in you; I gazed deep into your eyes, so beauti-
-ful and so strangely sweet, your green eyes that are the
-home of caprice and under the sovereignty of the Moon ;
-and you said to me: "Those people are insupportable to
-me with their staring saucer-eyes! Couldn't you tell
-the head waiter to send them away?"
-So hard is it to understand one another, dearest, and
-so incommunicable is thought, even between people who
-are in lovel
+A THOROUGHBRED
-V
+She is quite ill-favored. None the less she is delightful! Time and
+Love have scarred her with their claws, and have cruelly taught her
+that every moment and every kiss bears away youth and freshness.
-WINDOWS
+She is indeed ugly; she is an ant, a spider, if you insist, a very
+carcass; but she is, as well, a potion, a magistral, an enchantment! in
+short, she is exquisite!
-He who looks in through an open window never sees
+Time could not break the sparkling harmony of her walk, nor the
-so many things as he who looks at a shut window. There
+indestructible elegance of her stays. Love has not changed the
-is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more fertile,
+sweetness of her childlike breath; Time has plucked nothing of her
-more gloomy, or more dazzling, than a window lighted by
+abundant mane, from which is breathed in tawny perfumes all the
-a candle. What we can see in the sunlight is always less
+devilish vitality of Southern France: Nîmes, Aix, Arles, Avignon,
-interesting than what goes on behind the panes of a
+Narbonne, Toulouse, towns blessed by the sun, amorous and charming!
-window. In that lark or luminous hollow, life lives, life
-dreams, life suffers.
-Across the waves of roofs, I can see a woman of middle
+Time and Love have vainly nibbled with sharp teeth; they have in no way
-age, wrinkled, poor, who is always leaning over some-
+lessened the vague but eternal charm of her hoyden breast.
-thing, and who never goes out. Out of her face, out of
-her dress, out of her attitude, out of nothing almost, I
+Worn perhaps, but not wearied, and always heroic, she brings thoughts
+of those full-blooded horses which the eye of the true amateur will
+recognize, even hitched to a hackney or to a heavy truck.
+And then she is so sweet and so fervent! She loves as one loves in the
+autumn; you would say that the approach of winter lights a new fire in
+her heart, and the servility of her tenderness is never wearying.
-POEMS IN PROSE
-have made up the woman's story, and sometimes I say
-it over to myself with tears.
-If it had been a poor old man, I could have made up
+THE MIRROR
-his just as easily.
-And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered
-in others.
-Perhaps you will say to^me: "Are you sure that it is
+A frightful man enters, and looks at himself in a glass.
-the real story?" What does it matter, what does any
-reality outside of myself matter, if it has helped me to
-live, to feel that I am, and what I am?
+"Why do you look at yourself in the mirror, since you can view yourself
+only with displeasure?"
+The frightful man answers me: "Sir, in accordance with the immortal
+principles of '89, all men have equal rights; therefore I have the
+right to behold myself; with pleasure or displeasure, that concerns
+only my conscience."
-VI
+In the name of common sense, I was surely right; but, from a legal
+standpoint, he was not wrong.
-CROWDS
-It is not given to every man to take a bath of multi-
-tude: to play upon crowds is an art; and he alone can
-plunge, at the expense of humankind, into a debauch of
-vitality, to whom a fairy has bequeathed in his cradle
-the love of masks and disguises, the hate of home and
-the passion of travel.
-Multitude, solitude: equal terms mutually convertible
+THE HARBOR
-by the active and begetting poet. He who does not know
-how to people his solitude, does not know either how to
-be alone in a busy crowd.
-The poet enjoys this incomparable privilege, to be at
-once himself and others. Like those wandering souls that
-\go about seeking bodies, he enters at will the personality
-of every man. For him alone, every place is vacant ; and
-if certain places seem to be closed against him, that is
-because in his eyes they are not worth the trouble of
-visiting.
-The solitary and thoughtful walker derives a singular
+A harbor is a charming abode for a soul weary of the struggles of
-intoxication from this universal communion. He who
+life. The amplitude of the sky, the mobile architecture of the
+clouds, the changing colorations of the sea, the scintillating of the
+beacon-lights, form a prism marvellously adapted to entertain the
+eyes without tiring them. The slender forms of the ships, with their
+complicated rigging, to which the billows give harmonious oscillations,
+serve to maintain the taste for rhythm and for beauty. And, above all,
+there is a sort of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure for him who
+no longer has curiosity or ambition, in contemplating, couched in the
+turret or leaning on the pier, all the movements of those who depart
+and those who return, of those who still have the strength to will, the
+desire to travel or to acquire wealth.
-POEMS IN PROSE 47
+MISTRESSES' PORTRAITS
-mates easily with the crowd knows feverish joys that
-must be for ever unknown to the egoist, shut up like a
-coffer, and to the sluggard, imprisoned like a shell-fish.
-He adopts for his own all the occupations, all the joys
-and all the sorrows that circumstance sets before him.
-What men call love is small indeed, narrow and weak
+In a men's boudoir, that is, in a smoking room adjoining a fashionable
-indeed, compared with this ineffable orgie, this sacred
+brothel, four men were smoking and drinking. They were not exactly
-prostitution of the soul which gives itself up wholly
+either young or old, either handsome or ugly; but, old or young,
-(poetry and charity!) to the unexpected which happens,
+they bore that unmistakable distinction of veterans of joy, that
-to the stranger as he passes. '
+indescribable something-or-other, that cold and scoffing sadness that
+so clearly says: "We have lived forcefully, and we seek what we can
+love and prize."
-It is good sometimes that the happy of this world
+One of them drew the talk to the subject of women. It would have been
-should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride
+more philosophical not to have spoken of them at all; but there are men
-for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer
+of parts who, after drinking, do not disdain commonplace conversations.
-joys than theirs. The founders of colonies, the shep-
+One listens, then, to the one that speaks as to the music of a dance.
-herds of nations, the missionary priests, exiled to the
-ends of the earth, doubtless know something of these
-mysterious intoxications; and, in the midst of the vast
-family that their genius has raised about them, they
-must sometimes laugh at the thought of those who pity
-them for their chaste lives and troubled fortunes.
-VII
+"All men," said this one, "have passed through the age of the Cherub:
+that is the period when, in default of dryads, one embraces, without
+disgust, the trunks of oaks. It is the first degree of love. At the
+second degree, one begins to choose. To be able to deliberate is
+already decadence. Then it is that one makes a decided search for
+beauty. As for me, gentlemen, I take pride in having long ago reached
+the climactic period of the third degree, when beauty itself no longer
+suffices, unless it be seasoned with perfume, with finery, et cetera. I
+will even confess that I sometimes aspire, as to an unknown happiness,
+to a certain fourth degree which is marked by absolute calm. But, all
+through my life, except at the Cherub age, I have been more sensible
+than all others of the enervating folly, of the irritating mediocrity,
+of women. What I like above all in animals is their candor. Judge then
+how much I suffered at the hands of my last mistress.
-THE CAKE
+"She was a prince's bastard. Beautiful, that goes without saying;
+otherwise, why should I have taken her? But she spoiled that great
+quality by an unseemly, deformed ambition. She was a woman who wanted
+always to play the man. 'You're not a man!' 'Of the two, it is I who am
+the man! 'Such were the unbearable refrains that came from her mouth
+when I wished to see nothing but songs take wing.
-I WAS travelling. The landscape in the midst of which
+"In regard to a book, a poem, an opera, for which I let my admiration
-I was seated was of an irresistible grandeur and sublim-
+escape: 'So you think this is rather powerful?' she would say at once;
-ity. Something no doubt at that moment passed from
+'since when are you a judge of power?' and she would argue on.
-it into my soul. My thoughts fluttered with a lightness
-like that of the atmosphere ; vulgar passions, such as hate
-and profane love, seemed to me now as far away as the
-clouds that floaied in the gulfs beneath my feet ; my soul
-seemed to me as vast and pure as the dome of the sky
-that enveloped me; the remembrance of earthly things
-came as faintly to my heart as the thin tinkle of the
+"One fine day she took to chemistry; so that between her mouth and mine
+I found thenceforth-a mask of glass. With all that, quite squeamish. If
+now and then I jostled her with too amorous a gesture, she raved like a
+ravished virgin."
+"How did it end?" asked one of the three others. "I never knew you so
+patient."
-POEMS IN PROSE
+"God," he replied, "found the remedy in the ill. One day I found this
+Minerva, craving for ideal force, alone with my servant, and in a
+situation which forced me to retire discreetly, so as not to make them
+blush. That evening, I dismissed them both, giving them the arrears of
+their wages."
-bells of unseen herds, browsing far, far away, on the
+"As for me," continued the interrupter, "I have only myself to complain
-slope of another mountain. Across the little motionless
+of. Happiness came to dwell with me, and I did not know her. Fate once
-. lake, black with the darkness of its immense depth, there
+granted me the enjoyment of a woman who was indeed the sweetest, the
-passed from time to time the shadow of a cloud, like the
+most submissive, the most devoted of creatures, and always ready, and
-shadow of an airy giant's cloak, flying through heaven.
+without enthusiasm. 'I am quite willing, since it's agreeable to you.'
-And I remember that this rare and solemn sensation^
+That was her usual response. You might give a bastinado to this wall
-caused by a vast and perfectly silent movement, filled me
+or this couch and draw from it as many sighs as the most infuriate
-with mingled joy and fear. In a word, thanks to the en-
+transports of love would draw from the breast of my mistress. After a
-rapturing beauty about me, I felt that I was at perfect
+year of life together, she confessed to me that she had never known
-peace with myself and with the universe; I even believe
+pleasure. I lost taste in the unequal duel, and that incomparable girl
-that, in my complete forgetfulness of all earthly evil, I
+got married. Later I had a fancy to see her, and she said, showing me
-had come to think the newspapers are right after all, and
+six fine children: 'Well, my dear friend, the wife is still as much a
-man was bom good; when, incorrigible matter renewing
+_virgin_ as was your mistress.' Nothing had changed. Sometimes I regret
-its exigencies, I sought to refresh the fatigue and satisfy
+her; I should have married her."
-the appetite caused by so lengthy a climb. I took from
-my pocket a large piece of bread, a leathern cup, and a
-small bottle of a certain elixir which the chemists at that
-time sold to tourists, to be mixed, on occasion, with liquid
-snow.
-I was quietly cutting my bread when a slight noise
+The others burst into laughter, and a third spoke in turn:
-made me look up. I saw in front of me a little ragged
-urchin, dark and dishevelled, whose hollow eyes, wild and
-supplicating, devoured the piece of bread. And I heard
-him gasp, in a low, hoarse voice, the word: *'Cake!" I
-could not help laughing at the appellation with which he
-thought fit to honour my nearly white bread, and I cut
-off a big slice and offered it to him. Slowly he came up
-to me, not taking his eyes from the coveted object; then,
-snatching it out of my hand, he stepped quickly back, as
-if he feared that my offer was not sincere, or that I had
-already repented of it.
-But at the same instant he was knocked over by an-
+"Gentlemen, I have known joys which you have perhaps neglected. I mean
-other little savage, who had sprung from I know not
+the comical in love, and a comical which does not bar admiration. I
-where, and who was so precisely like the first that one
+admired my last mistress, I think, more than you could have loved or
-might have taken them for twin brothers. They rolled
+hated yours. And every one admired her as much as I. When we entered
+a restaurant, after a few minutes every one forgot to eat in watching
+her. The barmaid and the waiters themselves felt the contagious ecstasy
+so far as to neglect their duties. In short, I lived for some time face
+to face with a living _phenomenon_. She ate, chewed, ground, devoured,
+swallowed up, but with the lightest and most careless air imaginable.
+In this way she kept me for a long time in ecstasy. She had a soft,
+dreamy, English and romantic way of saying: 'I am hungry.' And she
+repeated these words day and night, revealing the prettiest teeth in
+the world, which would soften and enliven you together.--I could have
+made my fortune exhibiting her at fairs, as a _polyphagous monster_. I
+nourished her well, but none the less she left me...."
+"For a purveyor of provisions, undoubtedly?"
+"Something of the sort, a kind of employee in the commissariat who, by
+some by-profit unknown to her, perhaps furnished the poor child with
+the rations of several soldiers. At least, so I imagine."
-POEMS IN PROSE 49
+"As for me," said the fourth, "I have endured grievous, sufferings
+through the opposite of that with which we usually reproach the female
+egoist. You are quite unjustified, too happy mortals, in complaining of
+the imperfections of your mistresses!"
-over on the ground together, struggling for the posses-
+This was said in a very serious tone, by a man of pleasant and sedate
-sion of the precious booty, neither willing to share it with
+appearance, of an almost clerical countenance, unhappily lighted by
-his brother. The first, exasperated, clutched the second
+clear grey eyes, those eyes whose glances spoke: "I wish it!" or "It is
-by the hair; and the second seized one of the ears of the
+necessary!" or indeed "I never forgive!"
-first between his teeth, and spat out a little bleeding
-morsel with a fine oath in dialect. The legitimate propri-
-etor of the cake tried to hook his little claws into the
-usurper's eyes; the latter did his best to throttle his ad-
-versary with one hand, while with the other he en-
-deavoured to slip the prize of' war into his pocket. But,
-heartened by despair, the loser pulled himself together,
-and sent the victor sprawling with a blow of the head in
-his stomach. Why describe a hideous fight which indeed
-lasted longer than their childish strength seemed to prom-
-ise? The cake travelled from hand to hand, and changed
-from pocket to pocket, at every moment; but, alas, it
-changed also in size; and when at length, exhausted,
-panting and bleeding, they stopped from the sheer im-
-possibility of going on, there was no longer any cause
-of feud ; the slice of bread had disappeared, and lay scat-
-tered in crumbs like the grains of sand with which it was
-mingled.
-The sight had darkened the landscape for me, and dis-
+"If, nervous as I know you to be, you, G----, slothful and trifling
-pelled the joyous calm in which my soul had lain bask-
+as you are, you two, K---- and J----, if you had been matched with a
-ing; I remained saddened for quite a long time, saying
+certain woman I know, either you would have fled, or you would have
-over and over to myself: "There is then a wonderful
+died. I survived, as you see. Imagine a person incapable of making an
-country in which bread is called cake, and is so rare
+error, from feeling or from design; imagine a provoking serenity of
-a delicacy that it is enough in itself to give rise to a war
+mind, a devotion without sham and without parade, a softness without
-literally fratricidal ! "
+weakness, an energy without violence. The story of my love is like
+an endless voyage on a surface as pure and polished as a mirror,
+dizzily monotonous, reflecting all my feelings and my movements with
+the ironic exactness of my own conscience, so that I could not allow
+myself an unreasonable move or emotion without immediately beholding
+the dumb reproach of my inseparable spectre. Love seemed to me like a
+protectorate. How much nonsense she stopped me from committing, which
+I regret not having done! How many debts I paid despite myself! She
+deprived me of all the benefits I could have reaped from my personal
+folly. With a cold and impassable rule, she barred all my caprices.
+To crown the horror, she demanded no gratitude when the danger was
+passed. How many times have I not held myself from leaping at her
+throat, crying: 'Be imperfect, wretch! so that I can love you without
+uneasiness and wrath!' For several years I wondered at her, my heart
+full of hate. Finally, it was not I that died of it!"
-VIII
+"Ah!" said the others, "then she is dead?"
-EVENING TWILIGHT
+"Yes. Things could not go on like that. Love had become an overwhelming
+nightmare to me. Victory or death, as the Politics says, such was the
+alternative which destiny imposed. One evening, in a wood..., at the
+edge of a pond..., after a melancholy walk in which her eyes reflected
+the gentleness of heaven, and my heart was thrilling with hell...."
-The day is over. A great restfulness descends into
+"What!"
-poor minds that the day's work has wearied; and
+"What's that?"
+"What do you mean?"
-so POEMS IN PROSE
+"It was inevitable. I had too great a sense of justice to beat, to
+insult, or to dismiss an irreproachable servant. But I had to reconcile
+that feeling to the horror which that being inspired in me; rid myself
+of that being without losing her respect. What would you want me to do
+with her, _since she was perfect?_"
-thoughts take on the tender and dim colours of twilight.
+The three others looked at him with an uncertain and somewhat stupefied
+gaze, as though feigning not to understand and as though tacitly
+avowing that they did not feel themselves capable of so rigorous an
+act, however sufficiently accounted for in another.
-Nevertheless from the mountain peak there comes to
+Then they ordered fresh bottles, to kill time whose life is so sturdy,
-my balcony, through the transparent clouds of evening,
+and to speed life, whose movement is so slow.
-a great clamour, made up of a crowd of discordant cries,
-dulled by distance into a mournful harmony, like that
-of the rising tide or of a storm brewing.
-Who are the hapless ones to whom evening brings no
-calm; to whom, as to the owls, the coming of night is
-the signal for a witches' sabbat? The sinister ululation
-comes to me from the hospital on the mountain; and,
-in the evening, as I smoke, and look down on the quiet
-of the immense valley, bristling with houses, each of
-whose windows seems to say, "Here is peace, here is do-
-mestic happiness!" I can, when the wind blows from
-the heights, lull my astonished thought with this imita-
-tion of the harmonies of hell.
-Twilight excites madmen. I remember I had two
-friends whom twilight made quite ill. One of them lost
-all sense of social and friendly amenities, and flew at the
-first-comer like a savage. I have seen him throw at the
-waiter's head an excellent chicken, in which he imagined
-he had discovered some insulting hieroglyph. Evening,
-harbinger of profound delights, spoilt for him the most
-succulent things.
-The other, a prey to disappointed ambition, turned
+SOUP AND THE CLOUDS
-gradually, as the daylight dwindled, sourer, more gloomy,
-more nettlesome. Indulgent and sociable during the day,
-he was pitiless in the evening; and it was not only on
-others, but on himself, that he vented the rage of his
-twilight mania.
-The former died mad, unable to recognise his wife and
-child ; the latter still keeps the restlessness of a perpetual
-disquietude; and, if all the honours that republics and
-princes can confer were heaped upon him, I believe that
-the twilight would still quicken in him the burning envy
+My well-beloved little madcap was dining with me, and through the open
+window of the dining-room I was contemplating the moving architecture
+which God formed from the vapors, the marvellous constructions of the
+impalpable. And I was saying to myself, in my reflection: "All these
+phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as the eyes of my beautiful
+well-beloved, the little prodigious madcap with green eyes."
+And all at once I received a violent punch in the back, and I heard a
+hoarse and charming voice, a voice hysterical and husky as with brandy,
+which said to me: "Are you going to eat your soup, s..., b... of a
+dealer in clouds?"
-POEMS IN PROSE $1
-of imaginary distinctions. Night, which put its own dark-
-ness into their minds, brings light to mine; and, though
-it is by no means rare for the same cause to bring about
-opposite results, I am always as it were perplexed and
-alarmed by it.
-O night! O refreshing dark! for me you are the sum-
+THE LOSS OF A HALO
-mons to an inner feast, you are the deliverer from an-
-guish! In the solitude of the plains, in the stony laby-
-rinths of a city, scintillation of stars, outburst of gas-
-lamps, you are the fireworks of the goddess Liberty!
-Twilight, how gentle you are a«id how tender! The
-rosy lights that still linger on the horizon, like the last
-agony of day under the conquering might of its night;
-the flaring candle-flames that stain with dull red the last
-glories of the sunset; the heavy draperies that an in-
-visible hand draws out of the depths of the East, mimic
-all those complex feelings that war on one another in
-the heart of man at the solemn moments of life.
-Would you not say that it was one of those strange
+"Eh! What! You here, my dear? You, in a place of ill! You, the drinker
-costumes worn by dancers, in which the tempered splen-
+of quintessences! you, the eater of ambrosia! Indeed, this is something
-dours of a shining skirt show through a dark and trans-
+surprising!" "My dear, you know my dread of horses and carriages.
-parent gauze, as, through the darkness of the present,
+Just now, as I was crossing the boulevard, in great haste, and as I
-pierces the delicious past? And the wavering stars of
+was hopping about in the mud, in the midst of that moving chaos where
-gold and silver with which it is shot, are they not those
+death arrives at a gallop from all sides at once, my halo, in a sudden
-fires of fancy which take light never so well as under
+start, slipped from my head into the mire of the macadam. I did not
-the deep mourning of the night?
+have the courage to pick it up. I thought it less disagreeable to
+lose my insignia than to have my bones broken. And then, I reflected,
+it's an ill wind that blows, no good. I can now go about incognito,
+perform base actions, and give myself over to debauchery, like ordinary
+mortals. And here I am, quite like you, as you see!"
-IX
+"You ought at least have the halo advertised, or asked for at the
+police."
-"ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD"
+"Heavens, no! I am quite well off here. You alone have recognized me.
+Besides, dignity was boring. Then, too, I think with joy that some
+poor poet will pick it up, and will impudently deck himself out. To
+make some one happy, what joy! and especially a happy one that makes me
+laugh! Think of X----, or of Z----! Oh! that would be comical!"
-Life is a hospital, in which every patient is possessed
-by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to
-suffer near the fire, and another is certain that he would
-get well if he were by the window.
+=====MLLE. BISTOURY=====
-POEMS IN PROSE
-It seems to me that I should always be happy if I
+When I had reached the heart of the slums, under the gaslights, I
-were somewhere else, and this question of moving house
+felt an arm which slid softly under mine, and I heard a voice which
-is one that I am continually talking over with my soul.
+whispered: "You are a doctor, sir?"
-"Tell me, my soul, poor chilly soul, what do you say
+I looked: it was a big girl, robust, slightly rouged, her eyes wide
-to living in Lisbon? It must be very warm there, and
+open, her hair floating in the wind with her bonnet strings.
-you would bask merrily, like a lizard. It is by the sea;
-they say that it is built of marble, and that the people
-have such a horror of vegetation that they tear up all the
-trees. There is a country after your own soul ; a country
-made up of light and mineral, and with liquid to reflect
-them."
-My soul makes no answer.
+"No, I am not a doctor. Let me pass."
-"Since you love rest, and to see moving things, will
+"Oh yes! you are a doctor. I can see it well. Come to my house. You
-you come and live in that heavenly land, Holland? Per-
+will be quite satisfied, I assure you. I shall doubtless go to see you,
-haps you would be happy in a country which you have
+but later, _after the doctor, goodness me!_... Ha! Ha!" she exclaimed,
-so often admired in pictures. What do you say to Rot-
+still clinging to my arm and bursting into laughter. "You are a
-terdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships an-
+physician jokester. I have known several of that sort. Come."
-chored at the doors of houses?"
-My soul remains silent.
+I am passionately in love with mystery, because I always hope to
+unravel it. So I let myself be led by my companion, or rather, by the
+unlooked-for enigma.
-"Or perhaps Java seems to you more attractive? Well,
+I omit description of the hovel; it can be found in several well known
-there we shall find the mind of Europe married to tropi-
+old French poets. Only, detail unnoticed by Regnier, two or three
-C£il beauty."
+portraits of renowned physicians were hung upon the wall.
-Not a word. Can my soul be dead?
+How I was pampered! A great fire, warm wine, cigars; and while offering
+me these fine things and lighting a cigar for herself the comical
+creature said to me: "Make yourself at home; be quite at ease. This
+will bring back the hospital and the happy days of your youth.... Oh
+look! where did you win those white hairs? You were not like that, not
+so long ago, when you were interne at L----. I remember it was you that
+helped at the major operations. _There_ was a man that loved to cut,
+hew, lop off! It was you that handed him the instruments, the threads
+and the sponges.... And how proudly, the operation performed, he used
+to say, looking at his watch, 'Five minutes, gentlemen!' Oh! I, I go
+everywhere! I know these people well!"
-"Have you sunk then into so deep a stupor that only
+A few moments later, in more familiar tone, harping on the same theme,
-your own pain gives you pleasure? If that be so, let us
+she said: "You are a doctor, aren't you, darling?"
-go to the lands that are made in the likeness of Death.
-I know exactly the place for us, poor soul! We will
-book our passage to Torneo. We will go still further,
-to the last limits of the Baltic; and, if it be possible,
-further still from life; we will make our abode at the
-Pole. There the sun only grazes the earth, and the ^ow
-alternations of light and night put out variety and bring
-in the half of nothingness, monotony. There we can
-take great baths of darkness, while, from time to time,
+That unintelligible refrain brought me to my feet "No!" I cried,
+furious.
+"Surgeon, then?"
-POEMS IN PROSE S3
+"No! No! unless it be to cut off your head!"
-for our pleasure, the Aurora Boreal is shall scatter its rosy
+"Wait," she continued, "you shall see."
-sheaves before us, like reflections of fireworks in hell ! "
-At last my soul bursts into speech, and wisely she
+And she drew from a closet a file of papers which was nothing else
-cries to me: "Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world 1"
+than the collection of illustrious doctors of the day, lithographed by
+Maurin, that was displayed for several years on the Quay Voltaire.
-X
+"Look, do you recognize this one?"
-A HEROIC DEATH
+"Yes, it's X----. The name is at the bottom, besides; but I know him
+personally."
-Fancioulle was an admirable buffoon, and almost one
+"I should say so! Look! Here is Z----, the one who said in his course,
-of the friends of the Prince. But for persons profes-
+speaking of X----, 'this monster, bearing on his face the blackness of
-sionally devoted to the comic, serious things have a fatal
+his soul!' all because the other did not agree with him in a certain
-attraction, and, strange as it may seem that ideas of
+case! How they laughed at that in the school, at the time! Do you
-patriotism and liberty should seize despotically upon the
+remember?... Look! here is K----, who denounced to the authorities the
-brain of a player, one day Fancioulle joined in a con-
+rebels he was caring for at his hospital. That was at the time of the
-spiracy formed by some discontented nobles.
+riots. How is it possible so handsome a man can have so little heart?
+... This one is W----, a famous Englishman; I captured him on his visit
+to Paris. He looks like a girl, doesn't he?"
-There exist everywhere sensible men to denounce those
+And as I touched a little tied-up parcel, also on the table: "Wait a
-individuals of atrabiliar disposition who seek to depose
+while," she said, "In this one are the internes; and that package has
-princes, and, without consulting it, to reconstitute society.
+the dressers."
-The lords in question were arrested, together with Fan-
-cioulle, and condemned to death.
-I would readily believe that the Prince was almost
+And she spread out, fanlike, a mass of photographs, picturing much
-sorry to find his favourite actor among the rebels. The
+younger faces.
-Prince was neither better nor worse than any other
-Prince; but an excessive sensibility rendered him, in
-many cases, more cruel and more despotic than all his
-fellows. Passionately enamoured of the fine arts, an ex-
-cellent connoisseur as well, he was truly insatiable of
-pleasures. Indifferent enough in regard to men and
-morals, himself a real artist, he feared no enemy but
-Ennui, and the extravagant efforts that he made
-to fly or to vanquish this tyrant of the world would
-certainly have brought upon him, on the part of
-a severe historian, the epithet of "monster," had it
-been permitted, in his dominions, to write anything what-
+"When we see each other again, you will give me your portrait, won't
+you, deary?"
+"But," I said to her, I also following my fixed idea, "what makes you
+think I am a doctor?"
-POEMS IN PROSE
+"It's because you are so amiable and good to women!" "Peculiar logic,"
+I said to myself.
-ever which did not tend exclusively to pleasure, or to
+"Oh! I am hardly ever mistaken; I have known quite a number. I love
-astonishment, which is one of the most delicate forms of
+them so much that, even though I am not sick, I sometimes go to see
-pleasure. The great misfortune of the Prince was that
+them, only to see them. There are some who say coldly: 'You are not
-he had no theatre vast enough for his genius. There are
+sick at all!' But there are others who understand me, because I ogle
-young Neros who are stifled within too narrow limits,
+them."
-and whose names and whose intentions will never be
-known to future ages. An unforeseeing Providence had
-given to this man faculties greater than his dominions.
-Suddenly the rumour spread that the sovereign had
+"And when they do not understand?"
-decided to pardon all the conspirators; and the origin
-of this rumour was the announcement of a special per-
-formance in which Faocioulle would play one of his best
-roles, and at which even the condemned nobles, it was
-said, were to be present, an evident sign, added super-
-ficial minds, of the generous tendencies of the Prince.
-On the part of a man so naturally and deliber-
+"Well, since I have disturbed them _fruitlessly_, I leave ten francs on
-ately eccentric, anything was possible, even virtue,
+the mantel.... They are so good and so kind, these folk! I discovered
-even mercy, especially if he could hope to find in
+a little interne at the Pieté, pretty as an angel, and so refined! and
-it unexpected pleasures. But to those who, like
+a worker, the poor boy! His comrades told me he didn't have a sou,
-myself, ^had* succeeded in penetrating further into
+because his parents were poor folks who couldn't send him anything.
-the depths of this sick and curious soul, it was in-
+That gave me confidence. After all, I am a fairly good looking woman,
-finitely more probable that the Prince was wishful to
+although not too young. I said to him: 'Come to see me, come to see
-estimate the quality of the scenic talents of a man con-
+me often. With me you needn't bother: I have no need of money.' But
-demned to death. He would profit by the occasion to
+you know that I made him understand that in a host of ways, I didn't
-obtain a physiological experience of a capital interest,
+tell it to him bluntly; I was so afraid of humiliating him, the dear
-and to verify to what extent the habitual faculties of an
+child!... Oh well! would you believe that I had a queer fancy I didn't
-artist would be altered or modified by the extraordinary
+dare to tell him?... I should have liked him to come to see me with
-situation in which he found himself. Beyond this, did
+his instrument case and his apron, even with a little blood on it."
-there exist in his mind an intention, more or less defined,
-of mercy? It is a point that has never been solved.
-At last, the great day having come, the little court
+She said this in the most candid manner, as a feeling man would say to
-displayed all its pomps, and it would be difficult to
+an actress that he loved: "I want to see you dressed in the costume you
-realise, without having seen it, what splendour the priv-
+wore in this famous _rôle_ that you created...."
-ileged classes of a little state with limited resources can
-show forth, on a really solemn occasion. This was a
+I, persisting, continued: "Can you remember the time and the occasion
+when this so special passion was born in you?"
+I made her understand with difficulty; finally I succeeded. But then
+she answered in a very sad tone, and even, as well as I can recall,
+lowering her eyes: "I don't know..., I can't remember."
-POEMS IN PROSE 55
+What oddities can be found in a great city, if one knows how to walk
+about and watch. Life swarms with innocent monsters.--
-doubly solemn one, both from the wonder of its display
+Lord, my God! You, the Creator, You the Master, You who have created
-and from the mysterious moral interest attaching to it.
+Law and Liberty; You, the Sovereign that doth not interfere; You, the
+Judge that pardoneth; You who are full of motives and causes, and who
+perhaps have planted a taste for horror in my mind in order to convert
+my soul, as the recovery after a sword; Lord, have pity, have pity on
+madmen and mad women! O Creator, can monsters exist in the eyes of Him
+who alone knows why they exist, how they are made, and how they need
+not have been made?
-The Sieur Fancioulle excelled especially in parts either
-silent or little burdened with words, such as are often
-the principal ones in those fairy plays whose object is
-to represent symbolically the mystery of life. He came
-upon the stage lightly and with a perfect ease, which in
-itself lent some support, in the minds of the noble public,
-to the idea of kindness and forgiveness.
-When we say of an actor, "This is a good actor," we
-make use of a formula which implies that under the per-
-sonage we can still distinguish the actor, that is to say,
-art, effort, will. Now, if an actor should succeed in be-
-ing, in relation to the personage whom he is appointed
-to express, precisely what the finest statues of antiquity,
-miraculously animated, living, walking, seeing, would be
-in relation to the confused general idea of beauty, this
-would be, undoubtedly, a singular and unheard of case.
-Fancioulle was, that evening, a perfect idealisation,
-which it was impossible not to suppose living, possible,
-real. The buffoon came and went, he laughed, wept, was
-convulsed with an indestructible aureole about his head,
-an aureole invisible to all, but visible to me, and in which
-were blended, in a strange amalgam, the rays of Art and
-the martyr's glory. Fancioulle brought, by I know not
-what special grace, something divine and supernatural
-into even the most extravagant buffooneries. My pen
-trembles, and the tears of an emotion which I' cannot
-forget rise to my eyes, as I try to describe to you this
-never-to-be-forgotten evening. Fancioulle proved to me,
-in a peremptory, an irrefutable way, that the intoxication
-of Art is surer than all others to veil the terrors of the
-gulf; that genius can act a comedy on the threshold of
-the grave with a joy that binders it from seeing the
+=====LET US FLAY THE POOR [and the rest of the poems]=====
-$6 POEMS IN PROSE
+For a fortnight I was confined to my room, and I surrounded myself
+with the books of the day (sixteen or seventeen years ago); I mean
+those volumes which treat of the art of making people happy, wise and
+rich, in twenty-four hours. I had thus digested--swallowed, I should
+say--all the lucubrations of all those master-builders of the public
+weal, of those who advise all the poor to enslave themselves, and of
+those who persuade them they are all dethroned kings. There is, then,
+naught surprising in the fact that I was in a state of mind bordering
+on intoxication or stupidity.
-grave, lost, as it is, in a Paradise shutting out all thought,
+It seemed to me merely that I felt, imprisoned in the depths of my
-of the grave and of destruction.
+intelligence, the obscure germ of an idea superior to all the old
+wives' formulæ the cyclopedia of which I had just run through. But it
+was only the thought of a thought, a something infinitely vague.
-The whole audience, blase and frivolous as it was, soon
+And I went forth with a great thirst, for the impassioned taste of poor
-fell under the all-powerful sway of the artist. Not a
+reading engenders a proportionate need of open air and of refreshment.
-thought was left of death, of mourning, or of punishment.
-All gave themselves up, without disquietude, to the mani-
-fold delights caused by the sight of a masterpiece of
-living art. Explosions of joy and admiration again and
-again shook the dome of the edifice with the energy of a
-continuous thunder. The Prince himself, in an ecstasy,
-joined in the applause of his court.
-Nevertheless, to a discerning eye, his emotion was not
+As I was about to enter a tavern, a beggar held out his hat to me, with
-unmixed. Did he feel himself conquered in his power
+one of those unforgettable glances that would tumble down thrones, if
-as despot? humiliated in his art as the striker of terror
+the mental moved the material, and if a mesmerist's glance could ripen
-into hearts, of chill into souls? Such suppositions, not
+grapes.
-exactly justified, but not absolutely unjustifiable, passed
-through my mind as I contemplated the face of the
-Prince, on which a new pallor gradually overspread its
-habitual paleness, as snow overspreads snow. His lips
-compressed themselves tighter and tighter, and his eyes
-lighted up with an inner fire like that of jealousy or of
-spite, even while he applauded the talents of his old
-friend, the strange buffoon, who played the buffoon so
-well in the face of death. At a certain moment, I saw
-his Highness lean towards a little page, stationed behind
-him, and whisper in his ear. The roguish face of the
-pretty child lit up with a smile, and he briskly quitted
-the Prince's box as if to execute some urgent commis-
-sion.
-A few minutes later a shrill and prolonged hiss inter-
+At the same time, I heard a voice which whispered at my ear, a voice
-rupted Fancioulle in one of his finest moments, and rent
+that I knew well: it was that of a good angel, or a good Demon, who is
-alike every ear and heart. And from the part of the
+with me everywhere. Since Socrates had his good Demon, why may not I
-house from whence this unexpected note of disapproval
+have my good Angel, and why may not I have the honor, like Socrates,
-had sounded, a child darted into a corridor with stifled
+of securing my brevet in folly, signed by the subtle Lélut and the
-laughter.
+well-advised Baillar get?[1]
+There is this difference between the Demon of Socrates and my own,
+that his manifested itself only to warn, to forbid, to prevent, and
+that mine deigns to counsel, suggest, persuade. Poor Socrates had only
+a Demon prohibitor; mine is a great affirmator, mine is a Demon of
+action, or a Demon of combat.
+Now, his voice whispered to me thus: "He alone is the equal of
+another, that proves it; and he alone is worthy of liberty, that can
+secure it."
-POEMS IN PROSE 57
+Immediately I leapt upon the beggar. With one punch, I stopped an eye,
+which became in a moment large as a ball. I broke one of my nails
+shattering two of his teeth, and as I did not feel strong enough,
+having been born delicate and having had but little practice in boxing,
+to beat the old fellow to death right away, I grasped him by one hand
+by the collar of his coat, and with the other I throttled him, and I
+set to work dashing his head against a wall. I must avow that I had
+first inspected the surroundings in a glance, and had made sure that
+in that deserted suburb I should be long enough out of the reach of a
+policeman.
-Fancioulle, shaken, roused out of his dream, closed his
+Having then, with a kick in the back, hard enough to break his
-eyes, then re-opened them, almost at once, extraordi-
+shoulderblade, felled the enfeebled sexagenarian, I seized a great
-narily wide, opened his mouth as if to breathe convul-
+branch of a tree which lay along the ground, and I beat him with the
-sively, staggered a little forward, a little backward, and
+determined energy of cooks trying to make a beefsteak tender.
-then fell stark dead on the boards.
-Had the hiss, swift as a sword, really frustrated the
+All at once,--O miracle! O joy of the philosopher who proves the
-hangman? Had the Prince himself divined all the homi-
+excellence of his theory!--I saw that antique carcass turn about,
-cidal efficacy of his ruse? It is permitted to doubt it.
+straighten up with an energy I should never have suspected in so
-Did he regret his dear and inimitable Fancioulle? It is
+strangely disordered a machine--and, with a glance of hate that seemed
-sweet and legitimate to believe it.
+to me _good omen_, the decrepit ruffian hurled himself upon me,
+blackened both my eyes, broke four teeth, and with the same branch beat
+me stiff as a jelly. By my energetic medication, I had restored to him
+pride and life.
-The guilty nobles had enjoyed the performance of
+Then I made any number of signs to him to make him understand that I
-comedy for the last time. They were effaced from life.
+considered the matter closed, and, rising with the satisfaction of a
+philosopher of the Porch, I said to him: "Sir, _you are my equal!_
+Kindly do me the honor of sharing my purse; and remember, if you are
+truly philanthropic, that you must apply to all your colleagues, when
+they ask for alms, the theory that I have had the _sorrow_ of trying on
+your back."
-Since then, many mimes, justly appreciated in differ-
+He swore to me that he understood my theory, and that he would obey my
-ent countries, have played before the court of ; but
+counsels.
-none of them have ever been able to recall the marvellous
+[Footnote 1: Famous Parisian alienists of the time.]
-talents of Fancioulle, or to rise to the same javotar,
-XI
-BE DRUNKEN
-Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the
+GOOD DOGS
-only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden
-of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to
-the earth, be drunken continually.
-Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with
+TO MR. JOSEPH STEVENS
-virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
-And i£ sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the
-green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your
-own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be
-half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind,
-or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the
-clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or
-speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star,
-bird, clock, will answer you: "It is the hour to be
+I have never, even before the young writers of my century, been ashamed
+of my admiration for Buffon; but to-day it is not the spirit of that
+painter of lofty nature that I would call to my assistance. No.
+Much more willingly I call to Sterne, and I say to him: "Descend from
+heaven, or climb to me from the Elysian Fields, to inspire me in behalf
+of good dogs, of poor dogs, with a song worthy of thee, sentimental
+farceur, farceur incomparable. Come back astraddle that famous ass
+which will always accompany you in the memory of the future; and
+especially do not let that ass forget to carry, delicately hung between
+his lips, his immortal macaroons."
-S8 POEMS IN PROSE
+Away with the academic muse! I have no business with that old prude. I
+invoke the familiar muse, the citizen, the boon companion, to aid me to
+sing the good dogs, the poor dogs, the dirty dogs, those whom every one
+drives away, pestiferous and lousy, except the poor, whose associates
+they are, and the poet, who sees them with fraternal eye.
-drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred
+Fie upon the foppish dog, upon the coxcomb quadruped, Dane, King
-slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine,
+Charles, pugdog or lapdog, so enamoured of himself that he darts
-with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."
+inconsiderately between the legs or on the knees of the visitor, as
+if he were certain of pleasing, wild as a youngster, foolish as a
+flirt, often surly and insolent as a servant! Fie especially upon those
+four-pawed serpents, idle and shivering, that are called greyhounds,
+and that do not harbor in their pointed muzzle enough scent to follow
+the track of a friend, nor in their flattened head enough intelligence
+to play at dominoes!
+To the kennel with all these plaguy parasites!
+Let them slink to the kennel stuffed and sulky! I sing the dirty dog,
+the poor dog, the homeless dog, the stroller dog; the dog buffoon,
+the dog whose instinct, like that of the poor, the gypsy and the
+mountebank, is marvellously sharpened by necessity, that excellent
+mother, that true patron of intelligence!
-XII
+I sing the distressful dogs, be they those that wander, alone, in the
+winding gullies of the great cities or those who have said to the
+forsaken man, with blinking spiritual eyes: "Take me with you, and of
+two miseries we shall make a sort of joy!"
-EPILOGUE
+"Whither go the dogs?" Nestor Roquepelan once said in an immortal
+leaflet which he has doubtless forgotten, and which I alone, and
+perhaps Saint-Beuve, recall today.
-With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
+Where do the dogs go, you ask, heedless men? They go about their
-Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower.
+business.
-Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells.
+Business engagements, affairs of love. Through the fog, through the
+snow, through the mire, under the biting dogstar, under the streaming
+rain, they come, they go, they hurry, they move along under carriages,
+excited by fleas, by passion, by duty or by need. Like us, they have
+risen bright and early, and they seek their livelihood or run to their
+pleasure.
+There are some who sleep in a ruin in the suburbs and who come every
+day at a stated hour, to beg alms at the door of a Palais-Royal cook;
+others who run in troops, for more than five leagues, to partake of
+the repast which has been prepared for them through the charity of
+certain sexagenarian maids, whose unoccupied hearts are given over to
+beasts, since imbecile man wants them no more; others who, like runaway
+negroes, frantic with love, leave their province on certain days, to
+come to the city and romp for an hour with a handsome bitch, a little
+careless in her toilet, but proud and thankful.
-Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
+And they are all very precise, without notebooks, without memoranda,
-Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
+without portfolios.
-Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;
+Do you know slothful Belgium, and have you, like me, admired all those
+vigorous dogs hitched to the cart of the butcher, of the milkmaid, of
+the baker, who give evidence in their triumphant barks, of the proud
+pleasure they feel in rivalling the horse?
+And here are two that belong to a still more civilized order! Permit
+me to introduce you into the room of an absent mountebank. A bed, of
+painted wood, without curtains, with dragging covers stained with bugs;
+two cane chairs, a cast-iron stove, one or two disordered musical
+instruments. Oh, what sad furniture! But look, I pray you, at these two
+intelligent personages, clad in garments at once sumptuous and frayed,
+hooded like troubadours' or soldiers, who are guarding, with the close
+watch of a sorcerer, _the nameless something_ which simmers on the
+lighted stove, and from the center of which a long spoon stands forth,
+planted as one of those aerial masts which announce that the masonry is
+complete.
-But, like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
+Is it not just that such zealous comedians should not set out without
-To drink delight of that enormous trull
+having well lined their stomachs with a strong, sound soup? And will
-Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.
+you not forgive a little sensuality in these poor devils who all day
+have to face the indifference of the public and the injustice of a
+director who deems himself the whole show and who alone eats more soup
+than four actors?
+How often have I contemplated, touched and smiling, all these
+four-footed philosophers, compliant, submissive or devoted slaves,
+whom the republican dictionary might well call "fellows,"[1] if the
+republic, too busied with the _happiness_ of men, had time to respect
+the _honor_ of dogs!
+And how many times have I thought that perhaps there is somewhere (who
+knows, after all?), to reward so much courage, so much of patience and
+of labor, a special paradise for good dogs, for poor dogs, for dirty
+and afflicted dogs. Swedenborg affirms that there is one for the Turks
+and one for the Dutchmen!
-Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapours full.
+The shepherds of Virgil and of Theocritus expected, as prize for their
-Sodden with day, or, new apparelled, stand
+alternate songs, a good cheese, a flute from the best maker, or a
-In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
+she-goat with swelling udders. The poet who has sung the good dogs has
+received for reward a fine vest, of a color both faded and rich, which
+brings thoughts of the autumn suns, of the beauty of matured women and
+of the summers of Saint-Martin.
+None of those who were present in the tavern of Rue Villa-Hermosa will
+forget with what petulance the painter was despoiled of his vest for
+the poet, so well had he understood that it is good and seemly to sing
+of poor dogs.
+Thus a magnificent Italian tyrant, in the good old days, offered
+the divine Aretine a dagger rich with jewels, or a courtly gown, in
+exchange for a precious sonnet or a rare satiric poem.
-I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
+And whenever the poet dons the painter's vest, he is forced to think of
-Hunted have pleasures of their own to give.
+the good dogs, of the dog philosophers, of the summers of Saint-Martin
-The vulgar herd can never understand.
+and of the beauty of full-blown women.
+[Footnote 1: "Officieux" was the term adopted by the Republic, to
+replace "domestique" and "valet," and to indicate the equality of
+all--even master and man.]
-POEMS IN PROSE
+===LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE Translated by F. P. Sturm===
-Translated by Joseph T. Shipley
-DEDICATION
+EVERY MAN HIS CHIMÆRA
-To
-ARSENE HOUSSAYE
+Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty plain devoid of grass,
+and where not even a nettle or a thistle was to be seen, I met several
+men who walked bowed down to the ground.
-My dear Friend:
+Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chimæra as heavy as a sack
+of flour or coal, or as the equipment of a Roman foot-soldier.
-I send you a little work of v/hich it cannot be said,
+But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, rather she enveloped and
-without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail ; since
+oppressed the men with her powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed
-all of it, on the contrary, is at once head and tail, alter-
+with her two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her fabulous head
-nately and reciprocally. Consider, I pray you, what con-
+reposed upon the brow of the man like one of those horrible casques by
-venience this arrangement offers to all of us, to you, to
+which ancient warriors hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy.
-me and to the reader. We can stop where we wish, I my
-musing, you your consideration, and the reader his pe-
-rusal — for I do not hold the latter's restive will by the
-interminable thread of a fine-spun intrigue. Remove a
-vertebra, and the two parts of this tortuous fantasy re-
-join painlessly. Chop it into particles, and you will
-see that each part can exist by itself. In the hope that
-some of these segments will be lively enough to please
-and to amuse you, I venture to dedicate to you the entire
-serpent."
-I have a little confession to make. It was while glanc-
+I questioned one of the men, asking him why they went so. He replied
-ing, for at least the twentieth time, through the famous
+that he knew nothing, neither he nor the others, but that evidently
-Gaspard de la Nuit, by Aloysius Bertrand (a book
+they went somewhere, since they were urged on by an unconquerable
-kndwn to you, to me, and to a few of our friends, has it
+desire to walk.
-not the highest right to be called famous?), that the
-idea came to me to attempt an analogous plan, and to
-apply to the description of modern life, or rather of a
-life modern and more abstract, the process which he ap-
-plied in the depicting of ancient life, so strangely pic-
-turesque.
-Which of us has not, in his moments of ambition,
+Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be irritated by the
-i
+ferocious beast hanging at his neck and cleaving to his back: one had
+said that he considered it as a part of himself. These grave and weary
+faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of the
+heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an earth as desolate
+as the sky, they journeyed onwards with the resigned faces of men
+condemned to hope for ever. So the train passed me and faded into the
+atmosphere of the horizon at the place where the planet unveils herself
+to the curiosity of the human eye.
+During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to comprehend this
+mystery; but irresistible Indifference soon threw herself upon me,
+nor was I more heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing
+Chimæras.
-POEMS IN PROSE
-dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without
+VENUS AND THE FOOL
-rhythm or rime, sufficiently supple, sufficiently abrupt, to
-adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the
-windings and turnings of the fancy, to the sudden starts
-of the conscience?
-It is particularly in ifrequenting great cities, it is from
-the flux of their innumerable streams of intercourse, that
-this importunate ideal is born. Have not you yourself,
-my dear friend, tried to convey in a chanson the strident
-cry of the glazier, and to express in a lyric prose all the
-grievous suggestions that cry bears even to the house-
-tops, through the heaviest mists of the street?
-But, to speak truth, I fear that my jealousy has not
+How admirable the day! The vast park swoons beneath the burning eye of
-brought me good fortune. As soon as I had begun the
+the sun, as youth beneath the lordship of love.
-work, I saw that not only was I laboring far, far, from
-my mysterious and brilliant model, but that I was reach-
-ing an accomplishment (if it can be called an accomplish-
-ment) peculiarly different — accident of which all others
-would doubtless be proud, but which can but profoundly
-humiliate a mind which considers it the highest honor
-of the poet to achieve exactly what he has planned.
-Devotedly yours,
-C. B.
+There is no rumour of the universal ecstasy of all things. The waters
+themselves are as though drifting into sleep. Very different from the
+festivals of humanity, here is a silent revel.
+It seems as though an ever-waning light makes all objects glimmer more
+and more, as though the excited flowers bum with a desire to rival the
+blue of the sky by the vividness of their colours; as though the heat,
+making perfumes visible, drives them in vapour towards their star.
+Yet, in the midst of this universal joy, I have perceived one afflicted
+thing.
-A JESTER
+At the feet of a colossal Venus, one of those motley fools, those
+willing clowns whose business it is to bring laughter upon kings when
+weariness or remorse possesses them, lies wrapped in his gaudy and
+ridiculous garments, coiffed with his cap and bells, huddled against
+the pedestal, and raises towards the goddess his eyes filled with tears.
-It was the outburst of the New Year: chaos of mud
+And his eyes say: "I am the last and most alone of all mortals,
-and snow, crossed by a thousand coaches, sparkling with
+inferior to the meanest of animals in that I am denied either love or
-baubles and gewgaws, swarming with desires and with
+friendship. Yet I am made, even I, for the understanding and enjoyment
-despairs, official folly of a great city made to weaken
+of immortal Beauty. O Goddess, have pity upon my sadness and my frenzy."
-the fortitude of the firmest eremite.
-In the midst of this hubbub and tumult, a donkey was
+The implacable Venus gazed into I know not what distances with her
-trotting along, tormented by a lout with a horsewhip.
+marble eyes.
-As the donkey was about to turn a corner, a fine fellow,
-gloved, polished, with a merciless cravat, and impris-
-oned in impeccable garments, bowed ceremoniously be-
-fore the beast; said to it, removing his hat: "I greet
-thee, good and happy one"; and turned towards some
-companions with a fatuous air, as though requesting
-them to add their approbation to his content.
-The donkey did not see the clever jester, and con-
-tinued steadily where its duty called.
-As for me, I was overcome by an inordinate rage
+ALREADY!
-against the sublime idiot, who seemed to me to concen-
-trate in himself the wit of France.
-THE DOG AND THE VIAL
-"My pretty dog, my good dog, my doggy dear, come and smell this excellent perfume bought at the best scent-shop in the city."
+A hundred times already the sun had leaped, radiant or saddened, from
+the immense cup of the sea whose rim could scarcely be seen; a hundred
+times it had again sunk, glittering or morose, into its mighty bath
+of twilight. For many days we had contemplated the other side of the
+firmament, and deciphered the celestial alphabet of the antipodes. And
+each of the passengers sighed and complained. One had said that the
+approach of land only exasperated their sufferings. "When, then," they
+said, "shall we cease to sleep a sleep broken by the surge, troubled by
+a wind that snores louder than we? When shall we be able to eat at an
+unmoving table?"
-And the dog, wagging its tail, which is, I think, the poor creature's substitute for a laugh or a smile, appreached and curiously placed its damp nose to the opened vial ; then, recoiling with sudden fright, it growled at me in reproach.
+There were those who thought of their own firesides, who regretted
+their sullen, faithless wives, and their noisy progeny. All so doted
+upon the image of the absent land, that I believe they would have eaten
+grass with as much enthusiasm as the beasts.
-"Ah! wretched dog, if I had offered you a mass of excrement, you would have smelled it with delight, and probably have devoured it. So even you, unworthy companion of my unhappy life, resemble the public, to whom one must never offer delicate perfumes, which exasperate, but carefully raked-up mire."
+At length a coast was signalled, and on approaching we saw a
+magnificent and dazzling land. It seemed as though the music of life
+flowed therefrom in a vague murmur; and the banks, rich with all kinds
+of growths, breathed, for leagues around, a delicious odour of flowers
+and fruits.
-THE WILD WOMAN AND THE COQUETTE
+Each one therefore was joyful; his evil humour left him. Quarrels were
+forgotten, reciprocal wrongs forgiven, the thought of duels was blotted
+out of the memory, and rancour fled away like smoke.
-"Really, my dear, you tire me immeasurably and un-
+I alone was sad, inconceivably sad. Like a priest from whom one has
-pityingly ; one would say, to hear you sigh, that you suf-
+torn his divinity, I could not, without heartbreaking bitterness, leave
-fered more than the sexagenarian gleaners or the old beg-
+this so monstrously seductive ocean, this sea so infinitely various
-gar hags who pick up crusts at the doors of restaurants.
+in its terrifying simplicity, which seemed to contain in itself and
+represent by its joys, and attractions, and angers, and smiles, the
+moods and agonies and ecstasies of all souls that have lived, that
+live, and that shall yet live.
-"If at least your sighs expressed remorse, they would
+In saying good-bye to this incomparable beauty I felt as though I had
-do you some honor; but they convey merely the surfeit
+been smitten to death; and that is why when each of my companions said:
-of well-being and the languor of repose. And, too, you
+"At last!" I could only cry "_Already!_"
-will not stop your constant flow of needless words: 'Love
-me well! I have so much need! Comfort me thus, caress
-me so!'
-"Come! I shall try to cure you; perhaps we shall find
+Here meanwhile was the land, the land with its noises, its passions,
-a means, for two cents, in the midst of a fair, not far
+its commodities, its festivals: a land rich and magnificent, full of
-away.
+promises, that sent to us a mysterious perfume of rose and musk, and
+from whence the music of life flowed in an amorous murmuring.
-"Take a good look, I pray you, at this strong iron
-cage, within which moves, howling like a damned soul,
-shaking the bars like an ourang-outang enraged by exile,
-imitating to perfection, now the circular bounds of the
-tiger, now the clumsy waddling of the polar bear, that
-hairy monster whose form vaguely resembles your own.
-"That monster is one of those beasts one usually calls
-*my angel' — that is, a woman. The other monster, he
-who bawls at the top of his voice, club in his hand, is a
-husband. He has chained his lawful wife like a beast,
+THE DOUBLE CHAMBER
-POEMS IN PROSE 65
+A chamber that is like a reverie; a chamber truly _spiritual_, where
+the stagnant atmosphere is lightly touched with rose and blue.
-and he exhibits her in the suburbs on fair days — with the
+There the soul bathes itself in indolence made odorous with regret and
-magistrates' permission, of course.
+desire. There is some sense of the twilight, of things tinged with
+blue and rose: a dream of delight during an eclipse. The shape of the
+furniture is elongated, low, languishing; one would think it endowed
+with the somnambulistic vitality of plants and minerals.
-"Pay close attention. See with what voracity (per-
+The tapestries speak an inarticulate language, like the flowers, the
-haps not feigned) she tears apart the living rabbits and
+skies, the dropping suns.
-the cackling fowl her keeper throws her. 'Come,' he says,
-'one must not eat one's whole store in a day'; and, with
-that wise word, he cruelly snatches the prey, the winding
-entrails of which remain a moment caught on the teeth
-of the ferocious beast — I mean, the woman.
-"Come! A good blow to calm her! for she darts ter-
+There are no artistic abominations upon the walls. Compared with the
-rible glances of lust at the stolen food. Good God! The
+pure dream, with an impression unanalyzed, definite art, positive art,
-club is not a jester's slap stick! Did you hear the flesh
+is a blasphemy. Here all has the sufficing lucidity and the delicious
-resound, right through the artificial hair? Her eyes leap
+obscurity of music.
-from her head now; she howls more naturally. In her
-rage she sparkles all over, like smitten iron.
-"Such are the conjugal customs of these two children
+An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice, mingled with a
-of Adam and Eve, these works of Thy hands, O my
+floating humidity, swims in this atmosphere where the drowsing spirit
-God! This woman is doubtless miserable, though after
+is lulled by the sensations one feels in a hothouse.
-all, perhaps, the titillating joys of glory are not unknown
-to her. There are misfortunes less remediable, and with
-no compensation. But in the world to which she has
-been thrown, she has never been able to think that
-woman might deserve a different destiny.
-"Now, as for us two, my fine lady! Seeing the hells
+The abundant muslin flows before the windows and the couch, and
-of which the world is made, what would you have me
+spreads out in snowy cascades. Upon the couch lies the Idol, ruler of
-think of your pretty hell, you who rest only on stuffs
+my dreams. But why is she here?--who has brought her?--what magical
-as soft as your own skin, who eat only cooked viands,
+power has installed her upon this throne of delight and reverie? What
-for whom a skilled domestic takes care to cut the bites?,
+matter--she is there; and I recognize her.
-"And what can mean to me all these soft signs which
+These indeed are the eyes whose flame pierces the twilight; the subtle
-heave your perfumed breast, my lusty coquette? And
+and terrible mirrors that I recognize by their horrifying malice.
-all those affectations learned from books, and that ever-
+They attract, they dominate, they devour the sight of whomsoever is
-lasting melancholy, intended to arouse an emotion far
+imprudent enough to look at them. I have often studied them; these
-other than pity? Indeed, I sometimes feel like teaching
+Black Stars that compel curiosity and admiration.
-you what true misfortune means.
-"Seeing you so, my beautiful dainty one, your feet in
+To what benevolent demon, then, do I owe being thus surrounded with
+mystery, with silence, with peace, and sweet odours? O beatitude! the
+thing we name life, even in its most fortunate amplitude, has nothing
+in common with this supreme life with which I am now acquainted, which
+I taste minute by minute, second by second.
+Not so! Minutes are no more; seconds are no more. Time has vanished,
+and Eternity reigns--an Eternity of delight.
+A heavy and terrible knocking reverberates upon the door, and, as in a
+hellish dream, it seems to me as though I had received a blow from a
+mattock.
-POEMS IN PROSE
+Then a Spectre enters: it is an usher who comes to torture me in the
+name of the Law; an infamous concubine who comes to cry misery and to
+add the trivialities of her life to the sorrow of mine; or it may be
+the errand-boy of an editor who comes to implore the remainder of a
+manuscript.
-the mire and your moist eyes turned to the sky, as though
+The Chamber of paradise, the Idol, the ruler of dreams, the Sylphide,
-to demand a king, one would say indeed: a young frog
+as the great René said; all this magic has vanished at the brutal
-invoking the ideal. If you scorn the log (which I am
+knocking of the Spectre.
-now, you know), beware the stork which will kill, swal-
-low, devour you at its caprice.
-"Poet as I am, I am not such a fool as you may think,
+Horror; I remember, I remember! Yes, this kennel, this habitation of
-and if you tire me too often with your whining affecta-
+eternal weariness, is indeed my own. There is my senseless furniture,
-tions, I shall treat you as a wild woman, or throw you
+dusty and tattered; the dirty fireplace without a flame or an ember;
-through the window as an empty flask."
+the sad windows where the raindrops have traced runnels in the dust;
+the manuscripts, erased or unfinished; the almanac with the sinister
+days marked off with a pencil!
-THE OLD MOUNTEBANK
+And this perfume of another world, whereof I intoxicated myself with
+a so perfected sensitiveness; alas, Its place is taken by an odour of
+stale tobacco smoke, mingled with I know not what nauseating mustiness.
+Now one breathes here the rankness of desolation.
-Everywhere the holiday crowd was parading, spread
+In this narrow world, narrow and yet full of disgust, a single familiar
-out, merry making. It was one of those festivals on
+object smiles at me: the phial of laudanum: old and terrible love; like
-which mountebanks, tricksters, animal trainers and itin-
+all loves, alas! fruitful in caresses and treacheries.
-erant merchants had long been relying, to compensate
-for the dull seasons of the year.
-On such days it seems to me the people forget all, sad-
+Yes, Time has reappeared; Time reigns a monarch now; and with the
-ness and work; they become children. For the little
+hideous Ancient has returned all his demoniacal following of Memories,
-ones, it is a day of leave, the horror of the school put off
+Regrets, Tremors, Fears, Dolours, Nightmares, and twittering nerves.
-twenty-four hours. For the grown-ups, it is an armistice,
-concluded with the malevolent forces of life, a respite in
-the universal contention and struggle.
-The man of the world himself, and even he who is oc-
+I assure you that the seconds are strongly and solemnly accentuated
-cupied with spiritual tasks, with difficulty escape the in-
+now; and each, as it drips from the pendulum, says: "I am Life:
-fluence of this popular jubilee. They absorb, without
+intolerable, implacable Life!"
-volition, their part of the atmosphere of devil-may-care.
-As for me, I never fail, like a true Parisian, to inspect
-all the booths that flaunt themselves in these solemn
-epochae.
-They made, in truth, a formidable gathering: they
+There is not a second in mortal life whose mission it is to bear good
-bawled, bellowed, howlfed. It was a mingling of cries,
+news: the good news that brings the inexplicable tear to the eye.
-of blaring of brass and bursting of rockets. The clowns
-and the simpletons convulsed the features of their
-swarthy faces, hardened by wind, rain, and sun; they
+Yes, Time reigns; Time has regained his brutal mastery. And he goads
+me, as though I were a steer, with his double goad: "Whoa, thou fool!
+Sweat, then, thou slave! Live on, thou damnèd!"
-POEMS IN PROSE 67
-hurled forth, with the assurance of comedians certain of
+AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
-their wares, witticisms and pleasantries of a humor solid
-and heavy as that of Moliere. The Hercules, proud of
-the enormousness of their limbs, without forehead, with-
-out cranium, stalked majestically about under fleshings
-fresh washed for the occasion. The dancers, pretty as
-fairies or as princesses, leapt and cavorted under the
-flare of lanterns which filled their skirts with sparkles.
-All was light, dust, shouting, joy, tumult; some spent,
-others gained, the one and the other equally joyful. Chil-
-dren clung to their mothers' skirts to obtain a sugar-stick,
-or climbed upon their fathers' shoulders the better to see
-a conjurer dazzling as a god. And spread over all, domi-
-nating every odor, was a smell of frying, which was the
-incense of the festival.
-At the end, at the extreme end of the row of booths,
+Alone at last! Nothing is to be heard but the rattle of a few tardy
-as if, ashamed, he had exiled himself from all these splen-
+and tired-out cabs. There will be silence now, if not repose, for
-dors, I saw an old mountebank, stooped, decrepit, ema-
+several hours at least. At last the tyranny of the human face has
-ciated, a ruin of a man, leaning against one of the pil-
+disappeared--I shall not suffer except alone. At last it is permitted
-lars of his hut, more wretched than that of the most
+me to refresh myself in a bath of shadows. But first a double turn of
-besotted barbarian, the distress of which two candle
+the key in the lock. It seems to me that this turn of the key will
-ends, guttering and smoking, lighted up only too well.
+deepen my solitude and strengthen the barriers which actually separate
+me from the world.
-Everywhere was joy, gain, revelry; everywhere cer-
+A horrible life and a horrible city! Let us run over the events of the
-tainty of the morrow's bread; everywhere the frenetic
+day. I have seen several literary men; one of them wished to know if
-outbursts of vitality. Here, absolute misery, misery be-
+he could get to Russia by land (he seemed to have an idea that Russia
-decked, to crown the horror, in comic tatters, where ne-
+was an island); I have disputed generously enough with the editor of a
-cessity, rather than art, produced the contrast. He was
+review, who to each objection replied: "We take the part of respectable
-not laughing, the wretched one! He was not weeping,
+people," which implies that every other paper but his own is edited by
-he was not dancfng, he was not gesticulating, he was not
+a knave; I have saluted some twenty people, fifteen of them unknown
-crying. He was singing no song, gay or grievous, he
+to me; and shaken hands with a like number, without having taken the
-was imploring no one. He was mute and immobile. He
+precaution of first buying gloves; I have been driven to kill time,
-had renounced, he had withdrawn. His destiny was ac-
+during a shower, with a mountebank, who wanted me to design for her
-complished.
+a costume as Venusta; I have made my bow to a theatre manager, who
+said: "You will do well, perhaps, to interview Z; he is the heaviest,
+foolishest, and most celebrated of all my authors; with him perhaps
+you will be able to come to something. See him, and then we'll see."
+I have boasted (why?) of several villainous deeds I never committed,
+and indignantly denied certain shameful things I accomplished with
+joy, certain misdeeds of fanfaronade, crimes of human respect; I have
+refused an easy favour to a friend and given a written recommendation
+to a perfect fool. Heavens! it's well ended.
-But what a deep, unforgettable look he cast over the
+Discontented with myself and with everything and everybody else, I
-crowd and the li^ts, the moving stream of which was
+should be glad enough to redeem myself and regain my self-respect in
+the silence and solitude.
+Souls of those whom I have loved, whom I have sung, fortify me;
+sustain me; drive away the lies and the corrupting vapours of this
+world; and Thou, Lord my God, accord me so much grace as shall produce
+some beautiful verse to prove to myself that I am not the last of men,
+that I am not inferior to those I despise.
-POEMS IN PROSE
-stemmed a few yards from his repulsive wretchedness!
+THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST
-I felt my throat clutched by the terrible hand of hys-
-teria, and it seemed as though glajices were clouded by
-rebellious tears that would not fall.
-What was to be done? What good was there in asking
-the unfortunate what curiosity, what marvel had he to
-show within those barefaced shades, behind that thread-
-bare curtain? In truth, I dar»;d not; and, although the
-reason for my timidity will make you laugh, I confess
-that I was afraid of humiliating him. At length, I had
-resolved to drop a coin while passing his boards, in the
-hope that he would divine my purpose, when a great
-backwash of people, produced by I know not what dis-
-turbance, carried me far away.
-And leaving, obsessed by the sight, I sought to analyze
+How penetrating is the end of an autumn day! Ah, yes, penetrating
-my sudden sadness, and I said: "I have just seen the
+enough to be painful even; for there are certain delicious sensations
-image of the aged man of letters, who has survived the
+whose vagueness does not prevent them from being intense; and none more
-generation of which he was the brilliant entertainer; of
+keen than the perception of the Infinite. He has a great delight who
-the old poet, friendless, without family, without child,
+drowns his gaze in the immensity of sky and sea. Solitude, silence, the
-degraded by his misery and by public ingratitude, into
+incomparable chastity of the azure--a little sail trembling upon the
-whose booUi a forgetful world no longer wants to go!"
+horizon, by its very littleness and isolation imitating my irremediable
+existence--the melodious monotone of the surge--all these things
+thinking through me and I through them (for in the grandeur of the
+reverie the Ego is swiftly lost); they think, I say, but musically and
+picturesquely, without quibbles, without syllogisms, without deductions.
-THE CLOCK
+These thoughts, as they arise in me or spring forth from external
+objects, soon become always too intense. The energy working within
+pleasure creates an uneasiness, a positive suffering: My nerves are too
+tense to give other than clamouring and dolorous vibrations.
-The Chinese tell the time in the eyes of cats. One
+And now the profundity of the sky dismays me; its limpidity exasperates
-day a missionary, walking in the suburbs of Nanking,
+me. The insensibility of the sea, the immutability of the spectacle,
-noticed that he had forgotten his watch, and asked a little
+revolt me. Ah, must one eternally suffer, for ever be a fugitive from
-boy what time it was.
+Beauty?
-The youngster of the heavenly Empire hesitated at
+Nature, pitiless enchantress, ever-victorious rival, leave me! Tempt
-first; then, carried away by his thought he answered:
+my desires and my pride no more. The contemplation of Beauty is a duel
-"I'll tell you." A few moments later he reappeared,
+where the artist screams with terror before being vanquished.
-bearing in his arms an immense cat, and looking, as they
-say, into the whites of its eyes, he announced without
-hesitation: "It's not quite noon." Which was the fact.
-As for me, if I turn toward the fair feline, to her so
+THE THYRSUS
-POEMS IN PROSE 69
+TO FRANZ LISZT
-aptl)'^ named, who is at once the honor of her sex, the
-pride of my heart and the fragrance of my mind, be it
-by night or by day, in the full light or in the opaque
-shadows, in the depths of her adorable eyes I always tell
-the time distinctly, always the same, a vast, a solemn
-hour, large as space, without division of minutes or of
-seconds, — an immovable hour which is not marked on
-the clocks, yet is slight as a sigh, is rapid as the lift-
-ing of a lash.
-And if some intruder comes to disturb me while my
+What is a thyrsus? According to the moral and poetical sense, it is a
-glance rests upon that charming dial, if some rude and
+sacerdotal emblem in the hand of the priests or priestesses celebrating
-intolerant genie, some demon of the evil hour, comes to
+the divinity of whom they are the interpreters and servants. But
-ask: "What are you looking at so carefully? What are
+physically it is no more than a baton, a pure staff, a hop-pole, a
-you hunting for in the eyes of that being? Do you see
+vineprop; dry, straight, and hard. Around this baton, in capricious
-the time there, mortal squanderer and do-nothing?" I
+meanderings, stems and flowers twine and wanton; these, sinuous
-shall answer, unhesitant: "Yes, I see the time, it is Eter-
+and fugitive; those, hanging like bells or inverted cups. And an
-nity!"
+astonishing complexity disengages itself from this complexity of tender
+or brilliant lines and colours. Would not one suppose that the curved
+line and the spiral pay their court to the straight line, and twine
+about in a mute adoration? Would not one say that all these delicate
+corollæ, all these calices, explosions of odours and colours, execute
+a mystical dance around the hieratic staff? And what imprudent mortal
+will dare to decide whether the flowers and the vine branches have been
+made for the baton, or whether the baton is not but a pretext to set
+forth the beauty of the vine branches and the flowers?
-Is not this, madame, a really worth-while madrigal,
+The thyrsus is the symbol of your astonishing duality, O powerful
-just as affected as yourself? Indeed, I have had so much
+and venerated master, dear bacchanal of a mysterious and impassioned
-pleasure in embroidering this pretentious gallantry, that
+Beauty. Never a nymph excited by the mysterious Dionysius shook her
-I shall ask you for nothing in exchange.
+thyrsus over the heads of her companions with as much energy as your
+genius trembles in the hearts of your brothers. The baton is your
+will: erect, firm, unshakeable; the flowers are the wanderings of
+your fancy around it: the feminine element encircling the masculine
+with her illusive dance. Straight line and arabesque--intention
+and expression--the rigidity of the will and the suppleness of the
+word--a variety of means united for a single purpose--the all-powerful
+and indivisible amalgam that is genius--what analyst will have the
+detestable courage to divide or to separate you?
-A HEMISPHERE IN A TRESS
+Dear Liszt, across the fogs, beyond the flowers, in towns where the
+pianos chant your glory, where the printing-house translates your
+wisdom; in whatever place you be, in the splendour of the Eternal
+City or among the fogs of the dreamy towns that Cambrinus consoles;
+improvising rituals of delight or ineffable pain, or giving to
+paper your abstruse meditations; singer of eternal pleasure and
+pain, philosopher, poet, and artist, I offer you the salutation of
+immortality!
-Let me breathe, long, long, of the odor of your hair,
-let me plunge my whole face in its depth, as a thirsty
-man in the waters of a spring, let me flutter it with my
-hand as a perfumed kerchief, to shake off memories into
-the air.
-If you could know all that I see! all that I feel! all
-that I understand in your hair! My soul journeys on
-perfumes as the souls of other men on music.
-Your hair meshes a full dream, crowded with sails and
+THE MARKSMAN
-masts; it holds great seas on which monsoons bear me
-toward charming climes, where the skies are bluer and
+As the carriage traversed the wood he bade the driver draw up in the
+neighbourhood of a shooting gallery, saying that he would like to
+have a few shots to kill time. Is not the slaying of the monster Time
+the most ordinary and legitimate occupation of man?--So he gallantly
+offered his hand to his dear, adorable, and execrable wife; the
+mysterious woman to whom he owed so many pleasures, so many pains, and
+perhaps also a great part of his genius.
-POEMS IN PROSE
+Several bullets went wide of the proposed mark, one of them flew far
+into the heavens, and as the charming creature laughed deliriously,
+mocking the clumsiness of her husband, he turned to her brusquely and
+said: "Observe that doll yonder, to the right, with its nose in the
+air, and with so haughty an appearance. Very well, dear angel, _I will
+imagine to myself that it is you!_"
-deeper, where the atmosphere is perfumed with fruits,
+He closed both eyes and pulled the trigger. The doll was neatly
-with leaves, and with the human skin.
+decapitated.
-In the ocean of your hair I behold a port humming
+Then, bending towards his dear, adorable, and execrable wife, his
-with melancholy chants, with strong men of all nations
+inevitable and pitiless muse, he kissed her respectfully upon the hand,
-and with ships of ^ery form carving their delicate, intri-
+and added, "Ah, dear angel, how I thank you for my skill!"
-cate architecture on an enormous sky where lolls eter-
-nal heat.
-In the caresses of your hair, I find again the languor
-of long hours on a divan, in the cabin of a goodly ship,
-cradled by the unnoticed undulation of the port, between
-pots of flowers and refreshing water-jugs.
-At the glowing hearth-stone of your hair, I breathe the
-odor of tobacco mixed with opium and sugar; in the
-night of your hair, I see shine forth the infinite of the
-tropic sky; on the downy bank-sides of your hair, I
-grow drunk with the mingled odors of tar and musk,
-and oil of cocoanut.
-Let me bite, long, your thick black hair. When I
+THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE CEMETERY
-nibble your springy, rebellious hair, it seems that I am
-eating memories.
-THE PLAYTHING OF THE POOR
-I SHOULD like to give you an idea for an innocent
+"CEMETERY VIEW INN"--"A queer sign,", said our traveller to himself;
-diversion. There are so few amusements that are not
+"but it raises a thirst! Certainly the keeper of this inn appreciates
-guilty ones!
+Horace and the poet pupils of Epicurus. Perhaps he even apprehends the
+profound philosophy of those old Egyptians who had no feast without its
+skeleton, or some emblem of life's brevity."
-When you go out in the morning for a stroll along the
+He entered: drank a glass of beer in presence of the tombs; and slowly
-highways, fill your pockets with little penny contriv-
+smoked a cigar. Then, his phantasy driving him, he went down into the
-ances — such as the straight merryandrew moved by a
+cemetery, where the grass was so tall and inviting; so brilliant in the
-single thread, the blacksmiths who strike the anvil, the
+sunshine.
-rider and his horse, with a whistle for a tail — and, along
-the taverns, at the foot of the trees, make presents of
-them to the unknown poor children whom you meet.
-You will see their eyes grow beyond all measure. At
-first, they will not dare to take; they will doubt their
+The light and heat, indeed, were so furiously intense that one had said
+the drunken sun wallowed upon a carpet of flowers that had fattened
+upon the corruption beneath.
+The air was heavy with vivid rumours of life--the life of things
+infinitely small--and broken at intervals by the crackling of shots
+from a neighbouring shooting-range, that exploded with a sound as of
+champagne corks to the burden of a hollow symphony.
-POEMS IN PROSE 71
+And then, beneath a sun which scorched the brain, and in that
+atmosphere charged with the ardent perfume of death, he heard a voice
+whispering out of the tomb where he sat. And this voice said: "Accursed
+be your rifles and targets, you turbulent living ones, who care so
+little for the dead in their divine repose! Accursed be your ambitions
+and calculations, importunate mortals who study the arts of slaughter
+near the sanctuary of Death himself! Did you but know how easy the
+prize to win, how facile the end to reach, and how all save Death is
+naught, not so greatly would you fatigue yourselves, O ye laborious
+alive; nor would you so often vex the slumber of them that long ago
+reached the End--the only true end of life detestable!"
-good fortune. Then their hands will eagerly seize the
-gift, and they will flee as do the cats who go far off
-to eat the bit you have given them, having learned
-to distrust man. ^
-On a road, behind the rail of a great garden at the foot
-of which appeared the glitter of a beautiful mansion
-struck by the sun, stood a pretty, fresh child, clad in
-those country garments' so full of affectation.
-Luxury, freedom from care, and the habitual spectacle
+THE DESIRE TO PAINT
-of wealth, make these children so pretty that one would
-think them formed of other paste than the sons of me-
-diocrity or of poverty.
-Beside him on the grass lay a splendid toy, fresh as
-its master, varnished, gilt, clad in a purple robe, cov-
-ered with plumes and beads of glass. But the child was
-not occupied with his favored plaything, and this is
-what he was watching:
-On the other side of the rail, on the road, among the
+Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is tom with this
-thistles and the thorns, was another child, puny, dirty,
+desire.
-fuliginous, one of those pariah-brats the beauty of which
-an impartial eye might discover if, as the eye of the con-
-noisseur divines an ideal painting beneath the varnish of
-the coach-maker, it cleansed him of the repugnant patina
-of misery.
-Across the symbolic bars which separate two worlds,
+I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely,
-the highway and the mansion, the poor child was showing
+and so swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the
-the rich child his own toy, which the latter examined
+traveller must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since
-eagerly, as a rare and unknown object. Now, this toy,
+I saw her.
-which the ragamuffin was provoking, tormenting, tossing
-in a grilled box, was a live rat! His parents, doubtless for
-economy, had taken the toy from life itself.
-And the two children were laughing together frater-
+She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The
-nally, with teeth of equal whiteness t
+colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal
+and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and
+gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion
+in the darkness.
+I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star
+overthrowing light and happiness. But it is the moon that she makes
+one dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her
+with her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles
+a cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the
+depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet
+peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from
+the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly
+constrain to dance upon the terrified grass.
+Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of
+prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the
+unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the
+smile of a large mouth; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes
+one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic
+land.
-POEMS IN PROSE
+There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win
+them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.
-THE GIFTS OF THE FAIRIES
+THE GLASS-VENDOR
-It was that great assembly of the fairies, to proceed
-with the repartition of gifts among the new-born who
-had arrived at life within the last twenty-four hours.
-All these antique and capricious sisters of destiny, all
+There are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to
-these bizarre mothers of sadness and of joy, were most
+action, who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse,
-diversified : some had a somber, crabbed air ; others were
+sometimes act with a rapidity of which they would have believed
-wanton, mischievous; some, young, who had always been
+themselves incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing to find some new
-young; others old, who had always been old.
+vexation awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a cowardly
+fashion before the door without daring to enter; such a one is he who
+keeps a letter fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his
+mind at the end of six months to undertake a journey that has been
+a necessity for a year past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves
+precipitately thrust towards action, like an arrow from a bow.
-All the fathers who believed in fairies had come, each
+The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet
-bearing his new-bom in his arms.
+cannot explain whence comes this sudden and delirious energy to
+indolent and voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplishing the
+simplest and most necessary things, they are at some certain moment
+of time possessed by a superabundant hardihood which enables them to
+execute the most absurd and even the most dangerous acts.
-Gifts, Faculties, Good Fortunes, Invincible Circum-
+One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one
-stances, were gathered at the side of the tribunal, as
+time set fire to a forest, in order to ascertain, as he said, whether
-prizes on the platform for distribution. What was pe-
+the flames take hold with the easiness that is commonly affirmed. His
-culiar here was that the gifts were not the reward of an
+experiment failed ten times running, on the eleventh it succeeded only
-effort, but, quite the contrary, a grace accorded him
+too well.
-who had not yet lived, a grace with power to determine
-his destiny and become as well the source of his misfor-
-tune as of his good.
-The poor fairies were kept very busy; for the crowd
+Another lit a cigar by the side of a powder barrel, _in order to
-of solicitors was great, and the intermediate world, placed
+see, to know, to tempt Destiny_, for a jest, to have the pleasure of
-between man and God, is subject, like man, to the ter-
+suspense, for no reason at all, out of caprice, out of idleness. This
-rible law of Time and his endless offspring, Days, Hours,
+is a kind of energy that springs from weariness and reverie; and those
-Minutes, Seconds.
+in whom it manifests so stubbornly are in general, as I have said, the
+most indolent and dreamy beings.
-In truth, they were as bewildered as ministers on an
+Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes before the gaze of any
-audience day, or as guards at the Mont-de-Piete when
+man, and summon all his poor will before he dare enter a café or pass
-a national holiday authorizes gratuitous liberations. I
+the pay-box of a theatre, where the ticket-seller seems, in his eyes,
-really think that from time to time they looked at the
+invested with all the majesty of Minos, Æcus, and Rhadamanthus, will
-hands of the clock with as much impatience as human
+at times throw himself upon the neck of some old man whom he sees in
-judges, who, sitting since morn, cannot'help dreaming of
+the street, and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished
-dinner, of the family, and of their cherished slippers.
+crowd. Why? Because--because this countenance is irresistibly
-If, in supernatural justice, there is a little of haste and
+attractive to him? Perhaps; but it is more legitimate to suppose that
+he himself does not know why.
+I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which
+give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make
+us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. One morning
+I arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust
+as it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant
+act--and then, alas, I opened the window.
+(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification
+is not the result of labour or combination, but rather of a fortuitous
+inspiration which would partake, were it not for the strength of the
+feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic
+by those who think a little more profoundly than the physician; the
+mood which thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and
+inconvenient acts.)
-POEMS IN PROSE 73
+The first person I noticed in the street was a glass-vendor whose
+shrill and discordant cry mounted up to me through the heavy, dull
+atmosphere of Paris. It would have been else impossible to account for
+the sudden and despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.
-of luck, we should not be surprised sometimes to find
+"Hello, there!" I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile I reflected,
-the same in human justice. We ourselves, in that case,
+not without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth landing, and the
-would be unjust judges.
+stairway very narrow, the man would have some difficulty in ascending,
+and in many a place would break off the corners of his fragile
+merchandise.
-So some shams were enacted that day which might
+At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and
-be thought bizarre, if prudence, rather than caprice,
+then said to him: "What, have you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose
-were the distinctive, eternal characteristic of the fairies.
+and crimson and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You are
+insolent. You dare to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses
+that would make one see beauty in life?" And I hurried him briskly to
+the staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.
-For instance, the power of magnetically attracting for-
+I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when
-tune was awarded the sole heir of a very wealthy fam-
+the man appeared in the doorway beneath I let fall my engine of war
-ily, who, endowed with no feeling of charity, no more
+perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the
-than with lust for the most visible goods of life, must
+shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise
-later on find himself prodigiously embarrassed by his
+like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I
-millions.
+cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful!"
-Thus, love of the beautiful and poetic power were
+Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays
-given to the son of a gloomy knave, a quarry-man by
+dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who
-trade, who could in no way develop the faculties or sat-
+has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?
-isfy the needs of his deplorable offspring.
-All the fairies rose, thinking their task was through;
-for there remained no gift, no bounty, to hurl at all that
-human fry, when one fine fellow, a poor little trades-
-man, I think, rose, and grasping by her robe of multi-
-colored vapors the Fairy nearest at hand, cried:
-"Oh, Madam! You are forgetting us! There is still
-my little one! I don't want to have come for nothing!"
-The fairy could have been embarrassed, for there no
+THE WIDOWS
-longer was a thing. However, she recalled in time a
-law, well known, though rarely applied, in the super-
-natural world, inhabited by those impalpable deities,
-friends, of man and often constrained to mold them-
-selves to his passions, such as Fairies, Gnomes, Sala-
-manders, Sylphides, Sylphs, Nixies, Watersprites and Un-
-dines — I mean the law which grants a Fairy, in a case
-similar to this, namely, in case of the exhausting of the
-prizes, power to give one more, supplementary and ex-
-ceptional, provided always that she has sufficient imagi-
-nation to create it at once.
+Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there are alleys haunted
+principally by thwarted ambition, by unfortunate inventors, by aborted
+glories and broken hearts, and by all those tumultuous and contracted
+souls in whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet again, and who
+thus betake themselves far from the insolent and joyous eyes of the
+well-to-do. These shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's
+cripples.
-POEMS IN PROSE
+To such places above all others do the poet and philosopher direct
+their avid conjectures. They find there an unfailing pasturage, for
+if there is one place they disdain to visit it is, as I have already
+hinted, the place of the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the void
+has no attractions for them. On the contrary, they feel themselves
+irresistibly drawn towards all that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing, and
+bereft.
-Accordingly the good Fairy responded, with self-pos-
+An experienced eye is never deceived. In these rigid and dejected
-session worthy of her rank: ''I give to your son . . .
+lineaments; in these eyes, wan and hollow, or bright with the last
-I give him . . . the gift of pleasing/"
+fading gleams of the combat against fate; in these numerous profound
+wrinkles and in the slow and troubled gait, the eye of experience
+deciphers unnumbered legends of mistaken devotion, of unrewarded
+effort, of hunger and cold humbly and silently supported.
-"Pleasing? How? Pleasing? Why?" obstinately asked
+Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the deserted benches? Poor
-the little shopkeeper, who was doubtless one of those
+widows, I mean. Whether in mourning or not they are easily recognised.
-logicians so commonly met, incapable of rising to the
+Moreover, there is always something wanting in the mourning of the
-logic of the Absurd.
+poor; a lack of harmony which but renders it the more heart-breaking.
+It is forced to be niggardly in its show of grief. They are the rich
+who exhibit a full complement of sorrow.
-"Because! Because!" replied the incensed Fairy, turn-
+Who is the saddest and most saddening of widows: she who leads by
-ing her back on him; and, rejoining the train of her
+the hand a child who cannot share her reveries, or she who is quite
-companions, she said to them: "What do you think of
+alone? I do not know.... It happened that I once followed for several
-this little vainglorious Frenchman, who wants to know
+long hours an aged and afflicted woman of this kind: rigid and erect,
-everything, and who, having secured for his son the best
+wrapped in a little worn shawl, she carried in all her being the pride
-of gifts, dares still to question and to dispute the indis-
+of stoicism.
-putable?"
-SOLITUDE
+She was evidently condemned by her absolute loneliness to the habits of
+an ancient celibacy; and the masculine characters of her habits added
+to their austerity a piquant mysteriousness. In what miserable café she
+dines I know not, nor in what manner. I followed her to a reading-room,
+and for a long time watched her reading the papers, her active eyes,
+that once burned with tears, seeking for news of a powerful and
+personal interest.
-A PHILANTHROPIC joumalist once said to me that soli-
+At length, in the afternoon, under a charming autumnal sky, one of
-tude is harmful to man, and, to support his thesis, he
+those skies that let fall hosts of memories and regrets, she seated
-cited — as do all unbelievers — words of the Christian
+herself remotely in a garden, to listen, far from the crowd, to one of
-Fathers.
+the regimental bands whose music gratifies the people of Paris. This
+was without doubt the small debauch of the innocent old woman (or the
+purified old woman), the well-earned consolation for another of the
+burdensome days without a friend, without conversation, without joy,
+without a confidant, that God had allowed to fall upon her perhaps for
+many years past--three hundred and sixty-five times a year!
-I know that the Demon gladly frequents parched
+Yet one more:
-places, and that the spirit of murder and lechery is mar-
-vellously inflamed in solitude. But it is possible that
-solitude is dangerous only to the idle, rambhng soul, who
-peoples it with his passions and his chimeras.
-It is certain that a babbler, whose supreme pleasure
+I can never prevent myself from throwing a glance, if not sympathetic
-consists in speaking from a pulpit or a rostrum, would
+at least full of curiosity, over the crowd of outcasts who press around
-be talcing great chances of going stark mad on the is-
+the enclosure of a public concert. From the orchestra, across the
-land of Crusoe. I do not demand of my journalist the
+night, float songs of fête, of triumph, or of pleasure. The dresses of
-courageous virtues of Robinson, but I ask that he do not
+the women sweep and shimmer; glances pass; the well-to-do, tired with
-summon in accusation lovers of solitude and mystery.
+doing nothing, saunter about and make indolent pretence of listening to
+the music. Here are only the rich, the happy; here is nothing that does
+not inspire or exhale the pleasure of being alive, except the aspect of
+the mob that presses against the outer barrier yonder, catching gratis,
+at the will of the wind, a tatter of music, and watching the glittering
+furnace within.
-There are in our chattering races individuals who
+There is a reflection of the joy of the rich deep in the eyes of
-would accept the supreme agony with less reluctance, if
+the poor that is always interesting. But to-day, beyond this people
-they were permitted to deliver a copious harangue from
+dressed in blouses and calico, I saw one whose nobility was in striking
+contrast with all the surrounding triviality. She was a tall, majestic
+woman, and so imperious in all her air that I cannot remember having
+seen the like in the collections of the aristocratic beauties of the
+past. A perfume of exalted virtue emanated from all her being. Her
+face, sad and worn, was in perfect keeping with the deep mourning in
+which she was dressed. She also, like the plebeians she mingled with
+and did not see, looked upon the luminous world with a profound eye,
+and listened with a toss of her head.
+It was a strange vision. "Most certainly," I said to myself, "this
+poverty, if poverty it be, ought not to admit of any sordid economy; so
+noble a face answers for that. Why then does she remain in surroundings
+with which she is so strikingly in contrast?"
+But in curiously passing near her I was able to divine the reason. The
+tall widow held by the hand a child dressed like herself in black.
+Modest as was the price of entry, this price perhaps sufficed to
+pay for some of the needs of the little being, or even more, for a
+superfluity, a toy.
-POEMS IN PROSE 75
+She will return on foot, dreaming and meditating--and alone, always
+alone, for the child is turbulent and selfish, without gentleness or
+patience, and cannot become, anymore than another animal, a dog or a
+cat, the confidant of solitary griefs.
-the height of the scaffold, without fear that the drums of
-Santerre* would unseasonably cut short their oration.
-I do not pity them, for I guess that their oratorical ef-
-fusions bring them delights equal to those which others
-draw from silence and seclusion; but I despise them.
-I desire above all that my accursed journalist leave
+THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, PLUTUS, AND GLORY
-me to amuse myself as I will. "Then you never feel,"
-he says in a very apostolic nasal tone, "the need of shar-
-ing your joys?" Do you see the subtle jealous one! He
-knows that I scorn his, and he comes to insinuate himself
-into mine, the horrible killjoy!
-"The great misfortune of not being able to be alone,"
-La Bruyere says somewhere, as though to shame those
-who rush to forget themselves in the crowd, fearing,
-doubtless, that they will be unable to endure themselves.
-"Almost all our ills come to us from inability to remain
+Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not less extraordinary
-in our room," said another sage, Pascal, I believe, recall-
+ascended the mysterious stairway by which Hell gains access to the
-ing thus in the cell of meditation the frantic ones who
+frailty of sleeping man, and communes with him in secret. These
-seek happiness in animation, and in a prostitution which
+three postured gloriously before me, as though they had been upon a
-I could call fratemary, if I wished to use the fine lan-
+stage--and a sulphurous splendour emanated from these beings who so
-guage of mjj century.
+disengaged themselves from the opaque heart of the night. They bore
+with them so proud a presence, and so full of mastery, that at first I
+took them for three of the true Gods.
-PROJECTS
+The first Satan, by his face, was a creature of doubtful sex. The
+softness of an ancient Bacchus shone in the lines of his body. His
+beautiful languorous eyes, of a tenebrous and indefinite colour,
+were like violets still laden with the heavy tears of the storm; his
+slightly-parted lips were like heated censers, from whence exhaled
+the sweet savour of many perfumes; and each time he breathed, exotic
+insects drew, as they fluttered, strength from the ardours of his
+breath.
-He said to himself, while strolling in the great lonely
+Twined about his tunic of purple stuff, in the manner of a cincture,
-park: "How beautiful she would be in an intricate, gor-
+was an iridescent Serpent with lifted head and eyes like embers turned
-geous court costume, descending, through the air of a
+sleepily towards him. Phials full of sinister fluids, alternating
-beauteous evening, the marble stairs of a palace, oppo-
+with shining knives and instruments of surgery, hung from this living
-site shallow pools and great greenswards. For she has
+girdle. He held in his right hand a flagon containing a luminous red
-naturally the air of a princess."
+fluid, and inscribed with a legend in these singular words:
-Passing along a street somewhat later, he stopped be-
+"DRINK OF THIS MY BLOOD: A PERFECT RESTORATIVE";
-fore a print-shop, and finding in a portfolio an engrav-
-ing of a tropical scene, he said: "No, it is not in a palace
-* Santerre is the general of the French Revolution who or-
+and in his left hand held a violin that without doubt served to sing
-dered his drummers to play, drowning the words of Louis
+his pleasures and pains, and to spread abroad the contagion of his
-XVI from the scaffold.
+folly upon the nights of the Sabbath.
+From rings upon his delicate ankles trailed a broken chain of gold, and
+when the burden of this caused him to bend his eyes towards the earth,
+he would contemplate with vanity the nails of his feet, as brilliant
+and polished as well-wrought jewels.
+He looked at me with eyes inconsolably heart-broken and giving forth
+an insidious intoxication, and cried in a chanting voice: "If thou
+wilt, if thou wilt, I will make thee an overlord of souls; thou shalt
+be master of living matter more perfectly than the sculptor is master
+of his clay; thou shalt taste the pleasure, reborn without end, of
+obliterating thyself in the self of another, and of luring other souls
+to lose themselves in thine."
-POEMS IN PROSE
+But I replied to him: "I thank thee. I only gain from this venture,
+then, beings of no more worth than my poor self? Though remembrance
+brings me shame indeed, I would forget nothing; and even before I
+recognised thee, thou ancient monster, thy mysterious cutlery, thy
+equivocal phials, and the chain that imprisons thy feet, were symbols
+showing clearly enough the inconvenience of thy friendship. Keep thy
+gifts."
-that I should like to be master of her beloved life. We
+The second Satan had neither the air at once tragical and smiling, the
-would not feel at home. Besides, walls riddled with
+lovely insinuating ways, nor the delicate and scented beauty of the
-gold would afford no niche to hold her likeness; in those
+first. A gigantic man, with a coarse, eyeless face, his heavy paunch
-solemn galleries there is no intimate comer. Decidedly
+overhung his hips and was gilded and pictured, like a tattooing, with
-it is there I must live to develop the dream of my Iffe."
+a crowd of little moving figures which represented the unnumbered
+forms of universal misery. There were little sinew-shrunken men who
+hung themselves willingly from nails; there were meagre gnomes,
+deformed and undersized, whose beseeching eyes begged an alms even
+more eloquently than their trembling hands; there were old mothers who
+nursed clinging abortions at their pendent breasts. And many others,
+even more surprising.
-And, analyzing the details of the engraving, he con-
+This heavy Satan beat with his fist upon his immense belly, from
-tinued mentally: ''At the edge of the sea, a little log cabin,
+whence came a loud and resounding metallic clangour, which died away
-surrounded by those shiny, bizarre trees, the names of
+in a sighing made by many human voices. And he smiled unrestrainedly,
-which I have forgotten ... in the air, an indefinable,
+showing his broken teeth--the imbecile smile of a man who has dined too
-intoxicating perfume ... in the cabin, a potent fra-
+freely. Then the creature said to me:
-grance of rose and of musk . . . farther off, behind
-our little domain, mast-tops swaying with the swell
-around us, beyond the room lighted by a roseate glow
-sifted through the blinds, adorned with fresh matting
-and intoxicating flowers, with rare benches of Portuguese
-rococo, of a heavy and shadowy wood (where she will
-rest, so calm, so gently fanned, smoking tobacco tinged
-with opium), beyond the timbers of the ships, the racket
-of the birds drunk with the light, and the chattering of
-little negresses . . . and, at night, to serve as accom-
-paniment to my musings, the plaintive song of musical
-trees, of melancholy beef -woods! Yes, in truth, there
-indeed is the setting that I seek. What have I to do
-with palaces?
-And still farther, as he followed a great avenue, he
+"I can give thee that which gets all, which is worth all, which takes
-noticed a well-kept tavern, from a window of which,
+the place of all." And he tapped his monstrous paunch, whence came
-enlivened by curtains of checkered prints, two laughing
+a sonorous echo as the commentary to his obscene speech. I turned
-heads leaned forth. And at once: "My fancy," he said,
+away with disgust and replied: "I need no man's misery to bring me
-"must be a great vagabond to seek so far what is so
+happiness; nor will I have the sad wealth of all the misfortunes
-near to me. Pleasure and good fortune are in the near-
+pictured upon thy skin as upon a tapestry."
-est tavern, in the chance tavern, so rich in happiness. A
-great fire, gaudy earthenware, a tolerable meal, rough
-wine, and an enormous bed with cloths somewhat coarse,
-but fresh; what more could be desired?"
-And returning home, alone, at the hour when the coun-
+As for the She-devil, I should lie if I denied that at first I found
+in her a certain strange charm, which to define I can but compare to
+the charm of certain beautiful women past their first youth, who yet
+seem to age no more, whose beauty keeps something of the penetrating
+magic of ruins. She had an air at once imperious and sordid, and
+her eyes, though heavy, held a certain power of fascination. I was
+struck most by her voice, wherein I found the remembrance of the most
+delicious contralti, as well as a little of the hoarseness of a throat
+continually laved with brandy.
+"Wouldst thou know my power?" said the charming and paradoxical voice
+of the false goddess. "Then listen." And she put to her mouth a
+gigantic trumpet, enribboned, like a _mirliton_, with the titles of all
+the newspapers in the world; and through this trumpet she cried my name
+so that it rolled through space with the sound of a hundred thousand
+thunders, and came re-echoing back to me from the farthest planet.
+"Devil!" cried I, half tempted, "that at least is worth something."
+But it vaguely struck me, upon examining the seductive virago more
+attentively, that I had seen her clinking glasses with certain drolls
+of my acquaintance, and her blare of brass carried to my ears I know
+not what memory of a fanfare prostituted.
-POEMS IN PROSE 77
+So I replied, with all disdain: "Get thee hence! I know better than wed
+the light o' love of them that I will not name."
-sels of Wisdom are not drowned by the hum of external
+Truly, I had the right to be proud of a so courageous renunciation. But
-life, he said: "I have had to-day, in my revery, three
+unfortunately I awoke, and all my courage left me. "In truth," I said,
-dwellings in which I have found equal pleasure. Why
+"I must have been very deeply asleep indeed to have had such scruples.
-constrain my body to move about, when my soul voy-
+Ah, if they, would but return while I am awake, I would not be so
-ages so freely? And to what end carry out projects,
+delicate."
-when the project itself is a sufficing joy?"
-THE LOVELY DOROTHEA
+So I invoked the three in a loud voice, offering to dishonour myself as
+often as necessary to obtain their favours; but I had without doubt too
+deeply offended them, for they have never returned.
-The sun pours down upoo the city with its direct and
-terrible light; the sand is dazzling, and the sea glistens.
-The stupefied world sinks cowardly down and holds si-
-esta, a siesta which is a sort of delightful death, in which
-the sleeper, half-awake, enjoys the voluptuousness of his
-annihilation.
-None the less, Dorothea, strong and proud as the sun,
-advances along the deserted street, alone animated at
-that hour, under the immense blue sky, forming a star-
-tling black spot against the light.
-She advances, lightly, balancing her slender trunk upon
-her so large hips. Her close-fitting silk dress, of a clear,
-roseate fashion, stands out vividly against the darkness
-of her skin and is exactly molded to her long figure, her
-rounded back and her pointed throat.
-Her red parasol, sifting the light, throws over her
+===THE FLOWERS OF EVIL Translated by F. P. Sturm===
-dark face the bloody disguise of its reflection.
-The weight of her enormous, blue-black hair draws
-back her delicate head and gives her a triumphant, indo-
-lent bearing. Heavy pendants tinkle quietly at her deli-
-cate ears.
-From time to time the sea-breeze lifts the hem of her
-flowing' skirt and reveals her shining, superb limbs; and
-her foot, a match for the feet of the marble goddesses
-whom Europe locks in its museums, faithfully imprints
-its form in the fine sand. For Dorothea is such a won-
+    THE DANCE OF DEATH
-POEMS IN PROSE
-drous coquette, that the pleasure of being admired over-
+    Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
-comes the pride of the enfranchised, and, although she
+    Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
-is free, she walks without shoes.
+    With all the careless and high-stepping grace,
+    And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.
-She advances thus, harmoniously, glad to be alive,
+    Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?
-smiling an open smile; as if she saw, far off in space, a
+    Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,
-mirroi. reflecting her walk and her beauty.
+    Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod
+    With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.
-At the hour when dogs moan with pain under the tor-
+    The swarms that hum about her collar-bones
-menting sun, what powerful motive can thus draw forth
+    As the lascivious streams caress the stones,
-the indolent Dorothea, lovely, and cold as bronze?
+    Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,
+    Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes
-Why had she left her little cabin, so coquettishly
+    Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays
-adorned, the flowers and mats of which make at so little
+    Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,
-cost a perfect boudoir; where she takes such .delight in
+    Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebræ.
-combing herself, in smoking, in being fanned, or in re-
+    O charm of nothing decked in folly! they
-garding herself in the mirror with its great fans of
-plumes ; while the sea, which strikes the shore a hundred
-steps away, shapes to her formless reveries a mighty and
-monotonous accompaniment, and while the iron pot, in
-which a ragout of crabs with saffron and rice is cook-
-ing, sends after her, from the courtyard, its stimulating
-perfumes?
-Perhaps she has a rendezvous with some young officer,
+    Who laugh and name you a Caricature,
-who, on far distant shores, heard his comrades talk of the
+    They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,
-renowned Dorothea. Infallibly she will beg him, simple
+    The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone,
-creature, to describe to her the Bal de I'Opera, and will
+    That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!
-ask him if one can go there barefoot, as to the Sunday
-dances, where the old Kaffir women themselves get drunk
-and mad with joy; and then, too, whether the lovely
-ladies of Paris are all lovelier than she.
-Dorothea is admired and pampered by all, and she
+    Come you to trouble with your potent sneer
-would be perfectly happy if she were not obliged to
+    The feast of Life! or are you driven here,
-amass piastre on piastre to buy back her little sister,
+    To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir
-who is now fully eleven, and who is already mature, and
+    And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?
-so lovely! She will doubtless succeed, the good Doro-
-thea; the child's master is so miserly, too miserly to
-understand another beauty than that of gold.
+    Or do you hope, when sing the violins,
+    And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,
+    To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,
+    And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?
+    Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!
+    Eternal alembic of antique distress!
+    Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides
+    The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.
-POEMS IN PROSE 79
+    And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,
+    Among us here, no lover to your mind;
+    Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?
+    The charms of horror please none but the brave.
+    Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir,
+    Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller
+    Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath,
+    The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.
+    For he who has not folded in his arms
+    A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,
+    Reeks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,
+    When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.
-THE COUNTERFEIT MONEY
+    O irresistible, with fleshless face,
+    Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:
+    "Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,
+    Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!
-As we were moving away from the tobacconist's, my
+    Withered Antinoüs, dandies with plump faces,
-companion carefully sorted his money: in the left pocket
+    Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,
-of his waistcoat he slipped little gold pieces ; in the right,
+    Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,
-little silver pieces; in the left pocket of his trousers, a
+    Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.
-mass of coppers, and finally, in the right, a silver two-
-franc pieces that he had particularly examined.
-"Singular and minute distribution!" I said to myself.
+    From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,
+    The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;
+    They do not see, within the opened sky,
+    The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.
-We came across a pauper who, trembling, held forth
+    In every clime and under every sun,
-his cap, — I know nothing more disquieting than the
+    Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;
-dumb eloquence of those suppliant eyes which hold, for
+    And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye;
-the sensitive man who can read within, both so great
+    And mingles with your madness, irony!"
-humility and so deep reproach. Something lies there
-which approaches that depth of complex feeling in the
-tearful eyes of dogs that are being flogged.
-The offering of my friend was much more considerable
-than mine, and I said to him: "You are right; after the
-pleasure of being astonished, none is greater than that
-of creating a surprise." — "It was the counterfeit," he
-answered tranquilly, as though to justify his prodigality.
-But in my miserable brain, always busied seeking
-noon at two p.m. (of such a wearying faculty has nature
-made me a gift!), the idea suddenly came that such
-conduct, on the part of my friend, was excusable only
-by the desire to produce an occasion in the life of the
-poor devil, perhaps even to know the diverse conse-
-quences, disastrous or otherwise, that a counterfeit in
-the hands of a mendicant can engender. Could it not
-multiply itself in valid pieces? Could it not also lead
-him, to jail? A tavern-keeper, a baker, for example,
-might perhaps have him arrested as a forger or a spreader
-of counterfeits. Quite as well the counterfeit coin might
+    THE BEACONS
-o POEMS IN PROSE
-be, for a poor little speculator, the germ of a several
+    RUBENS, oblivious garden of indolence,
-days' wealth. And so my fancy ran its course, lending
+      Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,
-wings to the spirit of my friend and drawing all pos-
+    Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,
-sible deductions from all imaginable hypotheses.
+      As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move.
-But he abruptly burst my revery asunder by taking
+    LEONARD DA VINCI, sombre and fathomless glass,
-up my own words: "Yes, you are right: there is no
+      Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile,
-sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him
+    Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass,
-more than he expected."
+      Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.
-I looked into the whites of his eyes, and I was fright-
+    REMBRANDT, sad hospital that a murmuring fills,
-ened to see that his eyes shone with an undeniable can-
+      Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,
-dor. I then saw clearly that he wished to combine char-
+    Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils,
-ity and a good stroke of business; to gain forty sous and
+      And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.
-the heart of God; to sweep into Paradise economically;
-in short, to entrap gratis the brevet of charitable man.
-I would almost have pardoned in him the desire of the
+    Strong MICHELANGELO, a vague far place
-criminal joy of which I had just now thought him ca-
+      Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;
-pable! I would have thought it curious, singular, that
+    Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,
-he found«it amusing to compromise the poor; but I shall
+      And tear their Shroud with clenched hands void of ease.
-never pardon the ineptitude of his calculation. One is
-never to be forgiven for being wicked, but there is some
-merit in being conscious that one is; — the most irrepar-
-able of all evils is to do wrong through stupidity.
+    The fighter's anger, the faun's impudence,
+      Thou makest of all these a lovely thing;
+    Proud heart, sick body, mind's magnificence:
+      PUGET, the convict's melancholy king.
+    WATTEAU, the carnival of illustrious hearts,
+      Fluttering like moths upon the wings of chance;
+    Bright lustres light the silk that flames and darts,
+      And pour down folly on the whirling dance.
-THE GENEROUS PLAYER
+    GOYA, a nightmare full of things unknown;
+      The fœtus witches broil on Sabbath night;
+    Old women at the mirror; children lone
+      Who tempt old demons with their limbs delight.
-Yesterday, in the crowd of the boulevard, I felt my-
+    DELACROIX, lake of blood ill angels haunt,
-self grazed by a mysterious Being whom I have always
+      Where ever-green, o'ershadowing woods arise;
-wished to know, and whom I recognized at once, though
+    Under the surly heaven strange fanfares chaunt
-I had never seen him. He doubtless had a similar wish
+      And pass, like one of Weber's strangled sighs.
-to make my acquaintance, for he gave me a significant
-wink in passing which I hastened to obey. I followed
-him attentively, and soon I descended behind him into
-a resplendent subterranean abode, where sparkled a lux-
-ury that none of the better homes in Paris can nearly
+    And malediction, blasphemy and groan,
+      Ecstasies, cries, Te Deums, and tears of brine,
+    Are echoes through a thousand labyrinths flown;
+      For mortal hearts an opiate divine;
+    A shout cried by a thousand sentinels,
+      An order from a thousand bugles tossed,
+    A beacon o'er a thousand citadels,
+      A call to huntsmen in deep woodlands lost.
-POEMS IN PROSE 8i
+    It is the mightiest witness that could rise
+      To prove our dignity, O Lord, to Thee;
+    This sob that rolls from age to age, and dies
+      Upon the verge of Thy Eternity!
-approach. It seemed odd to me that I could have passed
-by this enchanting den so often without divining the en-
-trance. There reigned an exquisite, though heady atmos-
-phere, which made one forget ahnost at once all the fas-
-tidious horrors of life; there one breathed a somber
-blessedness, similar to that which the lotus-eaters experi-
-enced when, disembarking on an enchanted isle, bright
-with the glimmerings of eternal afternoon, they felt
-growing within them, to the drowsy sound of melodious
-cascades, the desire never to see again their hearthstones,
-their wives, their children, and never to remount the
-high surges of the sea.
-Strange visages of men and women were there, marked
-with a fatal beauty, which it seemed to me I had already
-seen in epochs and in lands I could not precisely recall,
-and which inspired me rather with a fraternal sympathy
-than with that fear which is usually born at sight of the
-unknown. If I wished to try to define in any way the
-singular expression of these visages, I should say that I
-had never seen eyes burning more feverishly with dread
-of ennui and with the immortal desire of feeling them-
-selves alive.
-My host and I were already, when we sat down, old
-and perfect friends. We ate, we drank beyond measure
-of all sorts of extraordinary wines, and — what was no
-less extraordinary — it seemed to me, after several hours,
-that I was no more drunken than he. Play, that super-
-human pleasure, had meanwhile irregularly interrupted
-our frequent libations, and I must say that I staked and
-lost my soul, at the rubber, with heroic heedlessness and
-lightness. The soul is so impalpable a thing, so often
-useless and sometimes so annoying, that I experienced,
-at its loss, a little less emotion than if, on a walk, I had
-misplaced my visiting card. For a long time we smoked
-some cigars the incomparable savor and perfume of
+    THE SADNESS OF THE MOON
-POEMS IN PROSE
+    The Moon more indolently dreams to-night
+    Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,
+    Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
+    Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.
-v/hich gave the soul nostalgia for unknown lands and
+    Upon her silken avalanche of down,
-joys, and, intoxicated with all these delights, I dared,
+    Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
-in an access of familiarity which seemed not to displease
+    And watches the white visions past her flown,
-him, to cry, while mastering a cup full to the brim: "To
+    Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.
-your immortal health, old Buck!"
-We talked, also, of the universe, of its creation
+    And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
-and of its future destruction; of the great idea of
+    Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
-the century, namely, progress and perfectibility; and,
+    Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,
-in general, of all forms of human infatuation. On this
-subject, His Highness never exhausted his fund of light
-and irrefutable pleasantries, and he expressed himself
-with an easy flow of speech and a quietness in his droll-
-ery that I have found in none of the most celebrated
-causeurs of humanity. He explained to me the absurd-
-ity of the different philosophies which have hitherto
-taken possession of the human brain, and deigned even to
-confide to me certain fundamental principles, the prop-
-erty and the benefits of which it does not suit me to
-share with the casual comer. He did not in any way be-
-moan the bad reputation which he enjoys in all parts
-of the world, assured me that he himself was the person
-most interested in the destruction of superstition, and
-confessed that he had never feared for his own power
-save once, on the day when he had heard a preacher,
-more subtle than his colleagues, cry from the pulpit:
-"My dear brethren, never forget, when you hear the
-progress of wisdom vaunted, that the cleverest ruse of
-the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist!"
-The memory of this celebrated orator led us naturally
+    Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
-to the subject of the academies, and my strange com-
+    Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,
-panion stated that he did not disdain, in many cases, to
+    And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.
-inspire the pen, the word, and the conscience of pedagogs,
-and that he was almost always present, though invisible,
-at the academic sessions.
-Encouraged by so many kindnesses, I asked him for
-POEMS IN PROSE 85
+    THE BALCONY
-news of God, and whether he had recently seen Him.
-He answered, with a carelessness shaded with a certain
-sadness: ''We greet one another when we meet, but as
-two old gentlemen, in whom an innate politeness can-
-not extinguish the memory of ancient bitterness."
-It is doubtful that His Highness had ever granted so
+    Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
-long an audience to a plain mortal, and I was afraid
+      O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,
-of abusing it. Finally, as the shivering dawn whitened
+    Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,
-the panes, this famous personage, sung by so many poets
+      The charm of evenings by the gentle fire,
-and served by so many philosophers who have worked
+    Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!
-unknowingly for his glory, said to me: "I want to leave
-you with a pleasant memory of me, and to prove that I,
-of whom so much ill is said, I can sometimes be a good
-devil, to make use of one of your common phrases. In
-order to compensate for the irremediable loss of your
-soul, I shall give you the stakes you would have won
-had fate been with you, namely, the possibility of reliev-
-ing and of conquering, all through your life, that odd af-
-fection of ennui which is the source of all your maladies
-and of all your wretched progress. Never shall a desire
-be framed by you which I will not aid you to realize;
-you shall reign over your vulgar fellow-men; you shall
-be stocked with flattery, even with adoration; silver,
-gold, diamonds, fairylike palaces, shall come seeking you
-and shall pray you to accept them, without your having
-made an effort to attain them; you shall change father-
-land and country as often as your fancy may dictate; .
-you shall riot in pleasures, unwearying, in charming coun-
-tries where it is always warm and where the women are
-fragrant as the flowers — et cetera, et cetera . . ."he
-added, rising and taking leave of me with a pleasant
-smile.
-If I had not been afraid of humiliating myself before
+    The eves illumined by the burning coal,
-so vast an assemblage, I should gladly have fallen at
+      The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings--
-the feet of this generous player to thank him for his
+    How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul!
+      Ah, and we said imperishable things,
+    Those eves illumined by the burning coal.
+    Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm,
+      And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood,
+    In bending o'er you, queen of every charm,
+      I thought I breathed the perfume in your blood.
+    The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm.
+    The film of night flowed round and over us,
+      And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet;
+    I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous,
+      And in my hands fraternal slept your feet--
+    Night, like a film, flowed round and over us.
-POEMS IN PROSE
+    I can recall those happy days forgot,
+      And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past.
+    Your languid beauties now would move me not
+      Did not your gentle heart and body cast
+    The old spell of those happy days forgot.
-unheard of munificence. But little by little, after I had
+    Can vows and perfumes, kisses infinite,
-left him, incurable distrust reentered my breast; I dared
+      Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound;
-no longer believe in such prodigious good fortune, and,
+    As rise to heaven suns once again made bright
-on going to bed, still saying my prayers through silly
+      After being plunged in deep seas and profound?
-force of habit, I repeated in semi-slumber: "My God!
+    Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!
-Lord, my God! Let it be that the Devil keep his
-word!"
-THE ROPE
-To Edward Manet
-Illusions, my friend told me, are perhaps as number-
-less as the relations of men with one another, or of men
-to things. And when the illusion disappears, that is,
-when we see the being or the fact as it exists outside
-of us, we undergo a strange feeling, a complex half of
-regret for the vanished phantom, half of agreeable sur-
-prise before the novelty, before the real fact. If one
-phenomenon exists that is trite, evident, always the
-same, concerning the nature of Vv^hich it is impossible to
-be deceived, it is maternal love. It is as difficult to
-imagine a mother without maternal love as a light with-
-out heat; is it not then perfectly legitimate to attribute
-to maternal love all the words and actions of a mother,
-relating to her child? None the less hear this little story,
-in which I was singularly mystified by the most natural
-illusion.
-"My profession of painter drives me to regard atten-
+    THE SICK MUSE
-tively the visages, the physiognomies, which present
-themselves on my way, and you know what joy we derive
-from this faculty which renders life more vivid and sig-
-nificant in our eyes than for other men. In the secluded
-section where I live, and where great grassy spaces still
-separate the buildings, I often observed a child whose
+    Poor Muse, alas, what ail's thee, then, to-day?
+    Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,
+    Upon thy brow in alternation play,
+    Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn.
-POEMS IN PROSE 85
+    Have the green lemure and the goblin red,
+    Poured on thee love and terror from their urn?
+    Or with despotic hand the nightmare dread
+    Deep plunged thee in some fabulous Mintume?
-ardent and roguish countenance, more than all the rest,
+    Would that thy breast where so deep thoughts arise,
-won me straightway. He posed for me more than once,
+    Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs;
-and I transformed him, now into a little gypsy, now into
+    Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by wave
-an angel, now into mythological Love. I made him
-bear the violin of the vagabond, the Crown of Thorns
-and the Nails of the Passion, and the Torch of Eros.
-At length, I took so lively a pleasure in all the drollery
-of the youngster, that one day I begged his parents,
-poor folk, to be kind enough to yield him to me, promis-
-ing to clothe him well, to give him money and not to
-impose on him any task beyond cleaning my brushes and
-running my errands. The child, with his face washed,
-became charming, and the life he led with me seemed a
-paradise, compared to that he had undergone in the
-parental hovel. Only I must say that the little fellow as-
-tonished me at times by singular spells of precocious sad-
-ness, and that he soon manifested an immoderate taste
-for sugar and for liqueurs; so much so that one day when
-I found that, despite my numerous warnings, he had
-again been doing some pilfering of that sort, I threat-
-ened to send him back to his parents. Then I went out,
-and my business kept me away for quite some time.
-"What was my surprise and horror when, reentering
+    In rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave,
-the house, the first object that met my eyes was my little
+    When Phœbus shared his alternating reign
-fellow, the frolicsome companion of my life, hanging from
+    With mighty Pan, lord of the ripening grain.
-the panel of the closet! His feet almost touched the
-floor; a chair, which he had doubtless thrust back with
-his foot, was overturned beside him; his head was bent
-convulsively over one shoulder; his bloated face, and his
-eyes, quite wide open with a fearful fixity, gave at first
-the illusion of life. To take him down was not so easy
-a business as you might think. He was already quite
-stiff, and I had an inexplicable repugnance to letting
-him fall heavily to the floor. It was necessary to bear
-his whole weight on one arm, and, with the free hand, to
-POEMS IN PROSE
-cut the rope. But that accomplished, all was not yet
+    THE VENAL MUSE
-done; the little monster had made use of a very slender
-twine which had entered deep into his flesh, and I must
-now, with delicate scissors, seek the cord between the two
-cushions of the swelling, to disengage the neck.
-"I have neglected to tell you that I called vigorously
-for help; but all my neighbors refused to come to my
-assistance, faithful in that to the habits of civilized man,
-who never wishes, I know not why, to mix in the affairs
-of one that has been hanged. Finally a physician came,
-who said that the child had been dead several hours.
-When, later, we had to disrobe him for burial, the cadav-
-erous rigidity was such that, despairing of bending his
-limbs, we had to tear and cut the garments to remove
-them.
-"The commissioner, to whom, naturally, I had to an-
+    Muse of my heart, lover of palaces,
-nounce the casualty, looked at me askew and said to
+      When January comes with wind and sleet,
-me: 'Here's something suspicious,' moved doubtless by
+    During the snowy eve's long wearinesses,
-an inveterate desire and a professional habit of fright-
+      Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet?
-ening, at all events, the innocent as well as the guilty.
-"There remained a supreme task to perform, the
+    Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders
-thought of which alone gave me a terrible anguish: I
+      In the moon-beams that through the window fly?
-had to notify the parents. My feet refused to guide me
+    Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders,
-to them. Finally, I had the courage. But, to rriy great
+      Reap the far star-gold of the vaulted sky?
-astonishment, the mother was unmoved, not a tear oozed
-from the corner of her eye. I attributed that strange-
-ness to the very horror she must feel, and I recalled
-the well-known maxim: 'The most terrible sorrows are
-silent ones.' As to the father, he contented himself
-with saying with an air half brutalized, half pensive:
-'After all, it is perhaps for the best; he would always
-have come to a bad end!'
-"However, the body was stretched out on my couch,
+    For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul,
-and, assisted by a servant, I was busying myself with
+    Must swing a censer, wear a holy stole,
-the final preparations, when the mother entered my
+      And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between.
+    Or, like a starving mountebank, expose
+    Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those
+      Who wait thy jests to drive away thy spleen.
-POEMS IN PROSE 87
-studio. She wished, she said, to see the body of her
-son. I could not, in truth, deny her the intoxication of
-her grief and refuse her that supreme and somber con-
-solation. Then she begged me to show her the place
-where her little one had hanged himself. *0h no, mad-
-am,' I answered, 'that would be bad for you.' And
-as my eyes turned involuntarily toward the fatal cup-
-board, I perceived, with disgust mingled with horror and
-wrath, that the nail had remained driven in the casing,
-with a long rope-end still hanging. I leapt rapidly to
-snatch away the last traces 6i the misfortune, and as I
-was going to hurl them out through the open window,
-the poor woman seized m.y arm and said in an irresist-
-ible tone: 'Oh! sir! leave that for me! I beg you!
-beseech you.' Her despair had doubtless become, it
-seemed to me, so frantic that she was now overcome with
-tenderness toward that which had served her son aa the
-instrument of death, and she wished to preserve it as
-a dear and horrible relic. — ^And she took possession of
-the nail and of the twine.
-"At last! At last! all was accomplished. There re-
+    THE EVIL MONK
-mained only to set myself back at work, even more stren-
-uously than usual, to drive out gradually the little corpse
-that haunted the recesses of my brain, the phantom of
-which wore me out with its great fixed eyes. But the
-next day I received a bundle of letters: some from lodg-
-ers in the house, several others from neighboring houses ;
-one from the first floor, another from the second, an-
-other froni the third, and so throughout! some in semi-
-humorous style, as though seeking to disguise beneath an
-apparent jocularity the sincerity of the request; others,
-grossly shameless and without spelling; but all tending
-to the same goal, namely, to securing from me a bit
-of the fatal and beatific rope. Among the signers were,
-I must say, more women than men; but not all, I assure
+    The ancient cloisters on their lofty walls
+      Had holy Truth in painted frescoes shown,
+    And, seeing these, the pious in those halls
+      Felt their cold, lone austereness less alone.
-POEMS IN PROSE
+    At that time when Christ's seed flowered all around,
+      More than one monk, forgotten in his hour,
+    Taking for studio the burial-ground,
+      Glorified Death with simple faith and power.
-you, belonged to the lowest class. I have kept the let-
+    And my soul is a sepulchre where I,
-ters.
+    Ill cenobite, have spent eternity:
+      On the vile cloister walls no pictures rise.
-''And then, suddenly, a light glowed in my brain, and I
+    O when may I cast off this weariness,
-understood why the mother was so very anxious to
+    And make the pageant of my old distress
-wrest the twine from me, and by what traffic she meant
+      For these hands labour, pleasure for these eyes?
-to be consoled."
-CALLINGS
-In a beautiful garden where the rays of the autumnal
-sun seemed to linger with delight, under a sky already
-greenish, in which golden clouds floated like voyaging
-continents, four fine children, four boys, doubtless tired
-of playing, were chatting away.
-One said: "Yesterday I was taken to the theatre. In
-great, sad palaces, where in the background spread the
-sea and the sky, men and women, also serious and sad,
-but much more beautiful and much better dressed than
-any we see about, were talking with musical voices. They
-threatened one another, they entreated, they were dis-
-consolate, and often they rested a hand on a dagger
-sunk within the sash. Ah! that is beautiful indeed!
-The women are much more beautiful and much greater
-than those that come to the house to visit us, and al-
-though with their great hollow eyes and their fiery
-cheeks they have a terrible look, you can not help lov-
-ing them. You are afraid, you want to cry, and still
-you are content. . . . And then, what is stranger still,
-it all makes you want to be dressed the same, to say
-and to do the same things, to speak with the same
-voice. . . ."
-One of the four children, who for several moments had
+    THE TEMPTATION
-no longer been listening to his comrade's talk, and had
-been watching with surprising fixity some point or other
-in the sky, said all at once: "Look, look down there!
+    The Demon, in my chamber high,
+      This morning came to visit me,
+    And, thinking he would find some fault,
+      He whispered: "I would know of thee
-POEMS IN PROSE 89
+    Among the many lovely things
+      That make the magic of her face,
+    Among the beauties, black and rose,
+      That make her body's charm and grace,
-Do you see Him? He is sitting on that little isolated
+    Which is most fair?" Thou didst reply
-cloud, that little fiery cloud, which is moving slowly.
+      To the Abhorred, O soul of mine:
-He too, they say, He watches us."
+    "No single beauty is the best
+      When she is all one flower divine.
-"Who? Who?" asked the others.
+    When all things charm me I ignore
+      Which one alone brings most delight;
+    She shines before me like the dawn,
+      And she consoles me like the night.
-"God!" he answered, with the accent of perfect con-
+    The harmony is far too great,
-viction. — "Ah! He is already quite far away; by and
+      That governs all her body fair.
-by you will not be able to see Him. Doubtless He is
+    For impotence to analyse
-traveling to visit every land. Look, He is going to pass
+      And say which note is sweetest there.
-in back of that line of trees near the horizon . . . , and
-now He is going down behind the steeple. ... Ah! you
-can't see Him any longer!" And the child remained for
-some time turned in the same direction, fixing on the line
-which separates earth from the sky eyes in which burned
-an inexpressible glow of ecstasy and regret.
-"He is a fool, that one, with his good God, whom he
+    O mystic metamorphosis!
-alone can see!" then said the third, whose whole person
+      My senses into one sense flow--
-was marked with a singular vivacity and life. "/ am
+    Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
-going to tell you how something happened to me which
+      Her breath is music faint and low!"
-has never happened to you, and which is a little more
-interesting than your theatre and your clouds . . .
-Several days ago my parents took me on a trip with
-them, and as the inn where we stopped didn't have
-enough beds for all of us, it was decided that I should
-sleep in the same bed as my nursery maid." He drew
-his comrades quite close and spoke in a lower tone.
-"That was a strange performance, now! not to sleep
-alone, and to be in bed with your maid, in the dark. As
-I couldn't sleep, I amused myself, while she was sleeping,
-by passing my hand over her arms, her neck, and her
-shoulders. She has a much thicker neck and arm than
-all other women, and her skin is so soft, so soft, that
-you might call it note-paper or silver paper. I liked it
-so much that I should have kept on for a long time, if I
-hadn't been afraid, afraid at first of waking her, and
-then still afraid of I don't know what. Then I buried
-POEMS IN PROSE
-my head in the hair which lay down her back, thick as
+    THE IRRÉPARABLE
-a mane, and it smelled just as good, I assure you, as
-the flowers in the garden, right now. Try, when you can,
-to do as much, and you will see!"
-The young author of this prodigious revelation, in
-telling his story, had his eyes wide open in a sort of
-stupefaction at what he still felt, and the rays of the
-setting sun, slipping across the sandy locks of his ruffled
-hair, illumined it like a sulphurous aureole of passion.
-It was easy to guess that this youngster would not lose
-his life seeking Divinity in the clouds, and that he would
-frequently discover it elsewhere.
-At last the fourth spoke: "You know that I seldom
+    Can we suppress the old Remorse
-find amusment at home. I am never taken to a play;
+      Who bends our heart beneath his stroke,
-my tutor is too stingy; God doesn't bother about me and
+    Who feeds, as worms feed on the corse,
-my ennui, and I haven't a pretty nurse to fondle me.
+      Or as the acorn on the oak?
-It has often seemed to me that I should just like to go
+    Can we suppress the old Remorse?
-forever straight ahead, without knowing where, without
-any one's being worried, always to see new lands. I am
-never well off anywhere, and I always think I shall be
-better somewhere else. Oh well! I saw, at the last fair
-at the nearby village, three men who lived as I should
-like to. You paid no attention to them, you others.
-They were large, almost black, and very proud, al-
-though in rags, looking as though they had need of no
-one. Their great gloomy eyes became quite brilliant
-while they played their music; a music so astonishing
-that it made you want now to dance, now to cry, or to
-do both together, and it would almost make you go mad
-if you listened too long. One, drawing his bow across
-his violin, seemed to be whispering sorrow; another,
-making his hammer skip over the keys of a little piano
-hung by a strap about his neck, appeared to be mocking
-the plaint of his neighbor; while from time to time the
-third clashed his cymbals with extraordinary violence.
+    Ah, in what philtre, wine, or spell,
+      May we drown this our ancient foe,
+    Destructive glutton, gorging well,
+      Patient as the ants, and slow?
+    What wine, what philtre, or what spell?
+    Tell it, enchantress, if you can,
+      Tell me, with anguish overcast,
+    Wounded, as a dying man,
+      Beneath the swift hoofs hurrying past.
+    Tell it, enchantress, if you can,
-POEMS IN PROSE 91
+    To him the wolf already tears
+      Who sees the carrion pinions wave
+    This broken warrior who despairs
+      To have a cross above his grave--
+    This wretch the wolf already tears.
-They were so pleased with themselves that they went on
+    Can one illume a leaden sky,
-playing their wild music even after the crowd had gone
+      Or tear apart the shadowy veil
-away. Finally they gathered together their sous, piled
+    Thicker than pitch, no star on high,
-their luggage on their back, and left. I wanted to know
+      Not one funereal glimmer pale?
-where they lived, and I followed them from afar, right
+    Can one illume a leaden sky?
-to the edge of the forest, and only then, I understood
-that they lived nowhere.
-"Then one said: 'Must we pitch the tent?'
+    Hope lit the windows of the Inn,
+      But now that shining flame is dead;
+    And how shall martyred pilgrims win
+      Along the moonless road they tread?
+    Satan has darkened all the Inn!
-"'Goodness! No!' answered the other. 'It's such a
+    Witch, do you love accursèd hearts?
-pleasant night!'
+      Say, do you know the reprobate?
+    Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts
+      Make souls the targets for their hate?
+    Witch, do you know accursèd hearts?
-"The third spoke, while figuring up the collection:
+    The Might-have-been with tooth accursed
-'These folks do not appreciate music, and their wives
+      Gnaws at the piteous souls of men,
-dance like bears. Fortunately, within a month we shall
+    The deep foundations suffer first,
-be in Austria, where we shall find more amiable folk.'
+      And all the structure crumbles then
+    Beneath the bitter tooth accursed.
-" 'Perhaps we'd do better to go toward Spain, for the
-season is forward; let us flee before the rains, and mois-
-ten nothing but our gullets,' said one of the others.
-"I remember everything, as you see. Then each one
+    II
-drank a cup of brandy and went to sleep, with his
-forehead toward the stars. At first I wanted to beg them
-to take me along with them and to teach me to play their
-instruments; but I didn't dare, doubtless because it is al-
-ways very difficult to come to a decision about any-
-thing, and also because I was afraid of being recaptured
-before we were out of France."
-The slightly interested air of the three other com-
+    Often, when seated at the play,
-rades made me realize that this fellow was already
+      And sonorous music lights the stage,
-misunderstood. I looked at him closely; there was in
+    I see the frail hand of a Fay
-in his eye and on his brow that indescribable fatal pre-
+      With magic dawn illume the rage
-cocity which generally repells sympathy, and which, I
+    Of the dark sky. Oft at the play
-know not why, aroused my own to the point that for
-a moment I had the queer notion that I might have a
-brother unknown to me.
-The sun had set. The solemn night was come. The
+    A being made of gauze and fire
+      Casts to the earth a Demon great.
+    And my heart, whence all hopes expire,
+      Is like a stage where I await,
+    In vain, the Fay with wings of fire!
-POEMS IN PROSE
-children separated, each going in ignorance, according
+    A FORMER LIFE
-to circumstance and chance, to reap his destiny, scan-
-dalize his relatives, and gravitate toward glory or toward
-dishonor.
+    Long since, I lived beneath vast porticoes,
+    By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired,
+    Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows,
+    Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired.
-A THOROUGHBRED
+    The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies
+    Mingled its music, turbulent and rich,
+    Solemn and mystic, with the colours which
+    The setting sun reflected in my eyes.
-She is quite ill-favored. None the less she is delight-
+    And there I lived amid voluptuous calms,
-ful! Time and Love have scarred her with their claws,
+    In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave,
-and have cruelly taught her that every moment and
+    Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave,
-every kiss bears away youth and freshness.
-She is indeed ugly; she is an ant, a spider, if you
+    Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms.
-insist, a very carcass; but she is, as well, a potion, a
+    They were my slaves--the only care they had
-magistral, an enchantment! in short, she is exquisite!
+    To know what secret grief had made me sad.
-Time could not break the sparkling harmony of her
-walk, nor the indestructible elegance of her stays. Love
-has not changed the sweetness of her childlike breath;
-Time has plucked nothing of her abundant mane, from
-which is breathed in tawny perfumes all the devilish vital-
-ity of Southern France: Nimes, Aix, Aries, Avignon, Nar-
-bonne, Toulouse, towns blessed by the sun, amorous and
-charming!
-Time and Love have vainly nibbled with sharp teeth;
-they have in no way lessened the vague but eternal
-charm of her hoyden breast.
-Worn perhaps, but not wearied, and always heroic,
-she brings thoughts of those full-blooded horses w^hich
-the eye of the true amateur will recognize, even hitched
-to a hackney or to a heavy truck.
-And then she is so sweet and so fervent! She loves as
+    DON JUAN IN HADES
-one loves in the autumn; you would say that the ap-
-proach of winter lights a new fire in her heart, and
-the servility of her tenderness is never wearying.
+    When Juan sought the subterranean flood,
+      And paid his obolus on the Stygian shore,
+    Charon, the proud and sombre beggar, stood
+      With one strong, vengeful hand on either oar.
-POEMS IN PROSE 93
+    With open robes and bodies agonised,
+      Lost women writhed beneath that darkling sky;
+    There were sounds as of victims sacrificed:
+      Behind him all the dark was one long cry.
+    And Sganarelle, with laughter, claimed his pledge;
+      Don Luis, with trembling finger in the air,
+    Showed to the souls who wandered in the sedge
+      The evil son who scorned his hoary hair.
+    Shivering with woe, chaste Elvira the while,
+      Near him untrue to all but her till now,
+    Seemed to beseech him for one farewell smile
+      Lit with the sweetness of the first soft vow.
-THE MIRROR
+    And clad in armour, a tall man of stone
+      Held firm the helm, and clove the gloomy flood;
+    But, staring at the vessel's track alone,
+      Bent on his sword the unmoved hero stood.
-A FRIGHTFUL man enters, and looks at himself in
-a glass.
-"Why do you look at yourself in the mirror, since you
-can view yourself only with displeasure?"
-The frightful man answers me: "Sir, in accordance
-with the immortal principles pf '89, all men have equal
-rights; therefore I have the right to behold myself; with
-pleasure or displeasure, that concerns only my con-
-science."
-In the name of common sense, I was surely right;
+    THE LIVING FLAME
-but, from a legal standpoint, he was not wrong.
+    They pass before me, these Eyes full of light,
+    Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise;
+    The holy brothers pass before my sight,
+    And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes.
-THE HARBOR
+    They keep me from all sin and error grave,
+    They set me in the path whence Beauty came;
+    They are my servants, and I am their slave,
+    And all my soul obeys the living flame.
-A HARBOR is a charming abode for a soul weary of
+    Beautiful Eyes that gleam with mystic light
-the struggles of life. The amplitude of the *sky, the
+    As candles lighted at full noon; the sun
-mobile architecture of the clouds, the changing color-
+    Dims not your flame phantastical and bright.
-ations of the sea, the scintillating of the beacon-lights,
-form a prism marvellously adapted to entertain the eyes
-without tiring them. The slender forms of the ships,
-with their complicated rigging, to which the billows give
-harmonious oscillations, serve to maintain the taste for
-rhythm and for beauty. And, above all, there is a sort
-of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure for him who no
-longer has curiosity or ambition, in contemplating,
-couched in the turret or leaning on the pier, all the move-
-ments of those who depart and those who return, of
-those who still have the strength to will, the desire to
-travel or to acquire wealth.
+    You sing the dawn; they celebrate life done;
+    Marching you chaunt my soul's awakening hymn,
+    Stars that no sun has ever made grow dim!
-POEMS IN PROSE
+    CORRESPONDENCES
-MISTRESSES' PORTRAITS
-In a men's boudoir, that is, in a smoking room ad-
+    In Nature's temple living pillars rise,
-joining a fashionable brothel, four men were smoking
+      And words are murmured none have understood,
-and drinking. They were not exactly either young or
+      And man must wander through a tangled wood
-old, either handsome or ugly; but, old or young, they
+    Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.
-bore that unmistakable distinction of veterans of joy,
-that indescribable something-or-other, that cold and scoff-
-ing sadness that so clearly says: "We have lived force-
-fully, and we seek what we can love and prize."
-One of them drew the talk to the subject of women.
+    As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
-It would have been more philosophical not to have
+      Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;
-spoken of them at all; but there are men of parts who,
+      Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
-after drinking, do not disdain commonplace conversa-
+    Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.
-tions. One listens, then, to the one that speaks as to
-the music of a dance.
-"All men," said this one, "have passed through the
+    Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
-age of the Cherub: that is the period when, in default
+      Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
-of dryads, one embraces, without disgust, the trunks of
+    Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
-oaks. It is the first degree of love. At the second de-
-gree, one begins to choose. To be able to deliberate is
-already decadence. Then it is that one makes a decided
-search for beauty. As for me, gentlemen, I take pride
-in having long ago reached the climactic period of the
-third degree, when beauty itself no longer suffices, unless
-it be seasoned with perfume, with finery, et cetera. I
-will even confess that I sometimes aspire, as to an un-
-known happiness, to a certain fourth degree which is
-marked by absolute calm. But, all through my life, ex-
-cept at the Cherub age, I have been more sensible than
-all others of the enervating folly, of the irritating medi-
-ocrity, of women. What I like above all in animals is
+    Have all the expansion of things infinite:
+      As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
+    Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight.
-POEMS IN PROSE 9^
-their candor. Judge then how much I suffered at the
-hands of my last mistress.
-"She was a prince's bastard. Beautiful, that goes
+    THE FLASK
-without saying; otherwise, why should I have taken her?
-But she spoiled that great quality by an unseemly, de-
-formed ambition. She was a woman who wanted al-
-ways to play the man. 'You're not a man! ' 'Of the two,
-it is I who am the man!' Such were the unbearable re-
-frains that came from her mouth when I wished to see
-nothing but songs take wing.
-"In regard to a book, a poem, an opera, for which I
-let my admiration escape: 'So you think this is rather
-powerful?' she would say at once; 'since when are you
-a judge of power?' and she would argue on.
-"One fine day she took to chemistry; so that between
+    There are some powerful odours that can pass
-her mouth and mine I found thenceforth a mask of glass.
+    Out of the stoppered flagon; even glass
-V^ith all that, quite squeamish. If now and then I jostled
+    To them is porous. Oft when some old box
-her with too amorous a ge:ture, she raved like a rav-
+    Brought from the East is opened and the locks
-ished virgin."
+    And hinges creak and cry; or in a press
+    In some deserted house, where the sharp stress
+    Of odours old and dusty fills the brain;
+    An ancient flask is brought to light again,
+    And forth the ghosts of long-dead odours creep.
+    There, softly trembling in the shadows, sleep
+    A thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalides,
+    Phantoms of old the folding darkness hides,
+    Who make faint flutterings as their wings unfold,
+    Rose-washed and azure-tinted, shot with gold.
-"How did it end?" asked one of the three others. "I
+    A memory that brings languor flutters here:
-never knew you so patient."
+    The fainting eyelids droop, and giddy Fear
+    Thrusts with both hands the soul towards the pit
+    Where, like a Lazarus from his winding-sheet,
+    Arises from the gulf of sleep a ghost
+    Of an old passion, long since loved and lost.
+    So I, when vanished from man's memory
+    Deep in some dark and sombre chest I lie,
+    An empty flagon they have cast aside,
+    Broken and soiled, the dust upon my pride,
+    Will be your shroud, beloved pestilence!
+    The witness of your might and virulence,
+    Sweet poison mixed by angels; bitter cup
+    Of life and death my heart has drunken up!
-"God," he replied, "found the remedy in the ill.
-One day I found this Minerva, craving for ideal force,
-alone with my servant, and in a situation which forced
-me to retire discreetly, so as not to make them blush.
-That evening, I dismissed them both, giving them the
-arrears of their wages."
-"As for me," continued the interrupter, "I have only
-myself to complain of. Happiness came to dwell with
-me, and I did not know her. Fate once granted me the
-enjoyment of a woman who was indeed the sweetest, the
-most submissive, the most devoted of creatures, and
-always ready, and without enthusiasm. 'I am quite
-willing, since it's agreeable to you.' That was her usual
-response. You might give a bastinado to this wall or
+    REVERSIBILITY
-POEMS IN PROSE
-this couch and draw from it as many sighs as the most
+    Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
-infuriate transports of love would draw from the breast
+      Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite,
-of my mistress. After a year of life together, she con-
+      And the vague terrors of the fearful night
-fessed to me that she had never known pleasure. I lost
+    That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?
-taste in the unequal duel, and that incomparable girl
+    Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
-got married. Later I had a fancy to see her, and she
-said, showing me six fine children: 'Well, my dear friend,
-the wife is still as much a virgin as was your mistress.'
-Nothing had changed. Sometimes I regret her ; I should
-have married her."
-The others burst into laughter, and a third spoke in
+    Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
-turn:
+      With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,
+      When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,
+    And makes herself the captain of our fate,
+    Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
-"Gentlemen, I have known joys which you have per-
+    Angel of health, did ever you know pain,
-haps neglected. I mean the comical in love, and a comi-
+      Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls
-cal which does not bar admiration. I admired my last
+      The cold length of the white infirmary walls,
-mistress, I think, more than you could have loved or
+    With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?
-hated yours. And every one admired her as much as I.
+    Angel of health, did ever you know pain?
-When we entered a restaurant, after a few minutes every
-one forgot to eat in watching her. The barmaid and
-the waiters themselves felt the contagious ecstasy so
-far as to neglect their duties. In short, I lived for some
-time face to face with a living phenomenon. She ate,
-chewed, ground, devoured, swallowed up, but with the
-lightest and most careless air imaginable. In this way
-she kept me for a long time in ecstasy. She had a soft,
-dreamy, English and romantic way of saying: *I am hun-
-gry.' And she repeated these words day and night,
-revealing the prettiest teeth in the world, which would
-soften and enliven you together. — I could have made
-my fortune exhibiting her at fairs, as a polyphagous
-monster. I nourished her well, but none the less she
-left me. ..."
-"For a purveyor of provisions, undoubtedly?"
+    Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
+      Know you the fear of age, the torment vile
+      Of reading secret horror in the smile
+    Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago?
+    Angel of beauty, do you crinkles know?
-"Something of the sort, a kind of employee in the com-
+    Angel of happiness, and joy, and light,
-missariat who, by some by-profit unknown to her, per-
+      Old David would have asked for youth afresh
+      From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh;
+    I but implore your prayers to aid my plight,
+    Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.
-POEMS IN PROSE 97
-haps furnished the poor child with the rations of several
+    THE EYES OF BEAUTY
-soldiers. At least, so I imagine."
-"As for me," said the fourth, "I have endured grievous,
-sufferings through the opposite of that with which we
-usually reproach the female egoist. You are quite un-
-justified, too happy mortals, in complaining of the im-
-perfections of your mistresses!"
-This was said in a very serious tone, by a man of pleas-
+    You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
-ant and sedate appearance, of an almost clerical coim-
+    But all the sea of sadness in my blood
-tenance, unhappily lighted ,by clear grey eyes, those
+    Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
-eyes whose glances spoke: "I wish it!" or "It is neces-
+    Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
-sary!" or indeed "I never forgive!"
-"If, nervous as I know you to be, you, G , sloth-
+    In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
-ful and trifling as you are, you two, K and J ,
+    That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
+    By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more
+    Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.
-if you had been matched with a certain woman I know,
+    It is a ruin where the jackals rest,
-either you would have fled, or you would have died.
+    And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay--
-I survived, as you see. Imagine a person incapable of
+    A perfume swims about your naked breast!
-making an error, from feeling or from design; imagine
-a provoking serenity of mind, a devotion without sham
-and without parade, a softness without weakness, an
-energy without violence. The story of my love is like
-an endless voyage on a surface as pure and polished as
-a mirror, dizzily monotonous, reflecting all my feelings
-and my movements with the ironic exactness of my own
-conscience, so that I could not allow myself an unrea-
-sonable move or emotion without immediately beholding
-the dumb reproach of my inseparable spectre. Love
-seemed to me like a protectorate. How much nonsense
-she stopped me from committing, which I regret not
-having done! How m.any debts I paid despite myself!
-She deprived me of all the benefits I could have reaped
-from my personal folly. With a cold and impassable
-rule, she barred all my caprices. To crown the horror,
-she demanded no gratitude when the danger was passed.
-How many times have I not held myself from leaping at
+    Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
+    With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
+    Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!
-POEMS IN PROSE
-her throat, crying: 'Be imperfect, wretch! so that I can
-love you without uneasiness and wrath!' For several
-years I wondered at her, my heart full of hate. Finally,
-it was not I that died of it!"
-"Ah!" said the others, "then she is dead?"
+    SONNET OF AUTUMN
-"Yes. Things could not go on like that. Love had
-become an overwhelming nightmare to me. Victory or
-death, as the Politics says, such was the alternative
-which destiny imposed. One evening, in a wood . . .,
-at the edge of a pond . . . , after a melancholy walk in
-which her eyes reflected the gentleness of heaven, and
-my heart was thrilling with hell ..."
-"What!"
+    They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes:
+      "Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine?"
+    Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise
+      All save that antique brute-like faith of thine;
-"What's that?"
+    And will not bare the secret of their shame
+      To thee whose hand soothes me to slumbers long,
+    Nor their black legend write for thee in flame!
+      Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong.
-"What do you mean?"
+    Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat,
+    Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
+    And I too well his ancient arrows know:
-"It was inevitable. I had too great a sense of justice
+    Crime, horror, folly. O pale Marguerite,
-to beat, to insult, or to dismiss an irreproachable servant.
+    Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low,
-But I had to reconcile that feeling to the horror which
+    O my so white, my so cold Marguerite.
-that being inspired in me; rid myself of that being with-
-out losing her respect. What would you want me to do
-with her, since she was perfect?"
-The three others looked at him with an uncertain and
-somewhat stupefied gaze, as though feigning not to under-
-stand and as though tacitly avowing that they did not
-feel themselves capable of so rigorous an act, however
-sufficiently accounted for in another.
-Then they ordered fresh bottles, to kill time whose
-life is so sturdy, and to speed life, whose movement is
-so slow.
+    THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD
-SOUP AND THE CLOUDS
-My well-beloved little madcap was dining with me,
+    O shadowy Beauty mine, when thou shalt sleep
-and through the open window of the dining-room I was
+      In the deep heart of a black marble tomb;
+    When thou for mansion and for bower shalt keep
+      Only one rainy cave of hollow gloom;
+    And when the stone upon thy trembling breast,
+      And on thy straight sweet body's supple grace,
+    Crushes thy will and keeps thy heart at rest,
+      And holds those feet from their adventurous race;
+    Then the deep grave, who shares my reverie,
+    (For the deep grave is aye the poet's friend)
+    During long nights when sleep is far from thee,
-POEMS IN PROSE 99
+    Shall whisper: "Ah, thou didst not comprehend
+    The dead wept thus, thou woman frail and weak"--
+    And like remorse the worm shall gnaw thy cheek.
-contemplating the moving architecture which God formed
-from the vapors, the marvellous constructions of the im-
-palpable. And I was saying to myself, in my reflection:
-"All these phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as the
-eyes of my beautiful well-beloved, the little prodigious
-madcap with green eyes."
-And all at once I received a violent punch in the
-back, and I heard a hoarse and charming voice, a voice
-hysterical and husky as with brandy, which said to
-me: "Are you going to eat your soup, s . . ., b . . . of
-a dealer in clouds?"
+    THE GHOST
-THE LOSS OF A HALO
-"Eh! What! You here, my dear? You, in a place of
+    Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove
-ill! You, the drinker of quintessences! you, the eater
+    I will return to thy alcove,
-of ambrosia! Indeed, this is something surprising!"
+    And glide upon the night to thee,
+    Treading the shadows silently.
-"My dear, you know my dread of horses^ and carri-
+    And I will give to thee, my own,
-ages. Just now, as I was crossing the boulevard, in
+    Kisses as icy as the moon,
-great haste, and as I was hopping about in the mud, in
+    And the caresses of a snake
-the midst of that moving chaos where death arrives at a
+    Cold gliding in the thorny brake.
-gallop from all sides at once, my halo, in a sudden start,
-slipped from my head into the mire of the macadam.
-I did not have the courage to pick it up. I thought
-it less disagreeable to lose my insignia than to have my
-bones broken. And then, I reflected, it's an ill wind
-that blowL no good. I can now go about incognito, per-
-form base actions, and give myself over to debauchery,
-like ordinary mortals. And here I am, quite like you,
-as you see!"
-"You ought at least have the halo advertised, or
+    And when returns the livid morn
-asked for at the police."
+    Thou shalt find all my place forlorn
+    And chilly, till the falling night.
-"Heavens, no! I am quite well off here. You alone
+    Others would rule by tenderness
-have recognized me. Besides, dignity was boring. Then,
+    Over thy life and youthfulness,
+    But I would conquer thee by fright!
-POEMS IN PROSE
-too, I think with joy that some poor poet will pick it
+    TO A MADONNA
-up, and will impudently deck himself out. To make
-some one happy, what joy! and especially a happy one
-that makes me laugh! Think of X , or of Z 1
+    (An Ex-Voto in the Spanish taste.)
-Oh! that would be comical!"
+    Madonna, mistress, I would build for thee
+    An altar deep in the sad soul of me;
+    And in the darkest corner of my heart,
+    From mortal hopes and mocking eyes apart,
+    Carve of enamelled blue and gold a shrine
+    For thee to stand erect in, Image divine!
+    And with a mighty Crown thou shalt be crowned
+    Wrought of the gold of my smooth Verse, set round
+    With starry crystal rhymes; and I will make,
+    O mortal maid, a Mantle for thy sake!
+    And weave it of my jealousy, a gown
+    Heavy, barbaric, stiff, and weighted down
+    With my distrust, and broider round the hem
+    Not pearls, but all my tears in place of them.
+    And then thy wavering, trembling robe shall be
+    All the desires that rise and fall in me
+    From mountain-peaks to valleys of repose,
+    Kissing thy lovely body's white and rose.
+    For thy humiliated feet divine,
+    Of my Respect I'll make thee Slippers fine
+    Which, prisoning them within a gentle fold,
+    Shall keep their imprint like a faithful mould.
+    And if my art, unwearying and discreet,
+    Can make no Moon of Silver for thy feet
+    To have for Footstool, then thy heel shall rest
+    Upon the snake that gnaws within my breast,
+    Victorious Queen of whom our hope is born!
+    And thou shalt trample down and make a scorn
+    Of the vile reptile swollen up with hate.
+    And thou shalt see my thoughts, all consecrate,
+    Like candles set before thy flower-strewn shrine,
+    O Queen of Virgins, and the taper-shine
+    Shall glimmer star-like in the vault of blue,
+    With eyes of flame for ever watching you.
+    While all the love and worship in my sense
+    Will be sweet smoke of myrrh and frankincense.
+    Ceaselessly up to thee, white peak of snow,
+    My stormy spirit will in vapours go!
+    And last, to make thy drama all complete,
+    That love and cruelty may mix and meet,
+    I, thy remorseful-torturer, will take
+    All the Seven Deadly Sins, and from them make
+    In darkest joy, Seven Knives, cruel-edged and keen,
+    And like a juggler choosing, O my Queen,
+    That spot profound whence love and mercy start,
+    I'll plunge them all within thy panting heart!
-MLLE. BISTOURY
-When I had reached the heart of the slums, under the
-gaslights, I felt an arm which slid softly under mine,
-and I heard a voice which whispered: ''You are a doctor,
-sir?"
-I looked: it was a big girl, robust, slightly rouged, her
-eyes wide open, her hair iioating in the wind with her
-bonnet strings.
-"No, I am not a doctor. Let me pass."
+    THE SKY
-"Oh yes! you are a doctor. I can see it well. Come
-to my house. You will be quite satisfied, I assure you.
-I shall doubtless go to see you, but later, after the doc-
-tor, goodness me! . . . Ha! Ha!" she exclaimed, still
-clinging to my arm and bursting into laughter. "You
-are a physician jokster. I have known several of that
-sort. Come."
-I am passionately in love with mystery, because I al-
+    Where'er he be, on water or on land,
-ways hope to unravel it. So I let myself be led by my
+      Under pale suns or climes that flames enfold;
-companion, or rather, by the unlooked-for enigma.
+    One of Christ's own, or of Cythera's band,
+      Shadowy beggar or Crœsus rich with gold;
-I omit description of the hovel; it can be found in
+    Citizen, peasant, student, tramp; whate'er
-several well known old French poets. Only, detail un-
+      His little brain may be, alive or dead;
-noticed by Regnier, two or three portraits of renowned
+    Man knows the fear of mystery everywhere,
-physicians were hung upon the wall.
+      And peeps, with trembling glances, overhead.
-How I was pampered! A great fire, warm wine, ci-
+    The heaven above? A strangling cavern wall;
-gars; and while offering me these fine things and lighting
+    The lighted ceiling of a music-hall
-a cigar for herself the comical creature said to me:
+      Where every actor treads a bloody soil--
-"Make yourself at home; be quite at ease. This will
+    The hermit's hope; the terror of the sot;
+    The sky: the black lid of the mighty pot
+      Where the vast human generations boil!
-POEMS IN PROSE loi
-bring back the hospital and the happy days of your
-youth ... Oh look! where did you win those white
-hairs? You were not like that, not so long ago, when
-you were interne at L . I remember it was you that
+    SPLEEN
-helped at the major operations. There was a man that
-loved to cut, hew, lop off! It was you that handed him
-the instruments, the threads and the sponges. . . .
-And how proudly, the operation performed, he used
-to say, looking at his watch, 'Five minutes, gentle-
-men!' Oh! I, I go everywhere! I know these people
-well!"
-A few moments later, in more familiar tone, harping on
+    I'm like some king in whose corrupted veins
-the same theme, she said: "You are a doctor, aren't you,
+    Flows agèd blood; who rules a land of rains;
-darling?"
+    Who, young in years, is old in all distress;
+    Who flees good counsel to find weariness
+    Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred
+    Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird;
+    Whose weary face emotion moves no more
+    E'en when his people die before his door.
+    His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile
+    Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile;
+    The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good,
+    Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood
+    No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom
+    Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb.
+    The sage who takes his gold essays in vain
+    To purge away the old corrupted strain,
+    His baths of blood, that in the days of old
+    The Romans used when their hot blood grew cold,
+    Will never warm this dead man's bloodless pains,
+    For green Lethean water fills his veins.
-That unintelligible refrain brought me to my feeL
-"No!" I cried, furious.
-^'Surgeon, then?"
-"No! No! unless it be to cut off your head!"
-"Wait," she continued, "you shall see."
+    THE OWLS
-And she drew from a closet a file of papers which
-was nothing else than the collection of illustrious doctors
-of the day, lithographed by Maurin, that was displayed
-for several years on the Quay Voltaire.
-"Look, do you recognize this one?"
+    Under the overhanging yews,
+    The dark owls sit in solemn state,
+    Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
+    Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.
-"Yes, it's X . The name is at the bottom, be-
+    Motionless thus they sit and dream
-sides; but I know him personally."
+    Until that melancholy hour
+    When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
+    The nightly shades assume their power.
-"I should say so! Look! Here is Z , the one who
+    From their still attitude the wise
+    Will learn with terror to despise
+    All tumult, movement, and unrest;
-said in "his course, speaking of X , 'this monster,
+    For he who follows every shade,
+    Carries the memory in his breast,
+    Of each unhappy journey made.
-bearing on his face the blackness of his soul!' all be-
-cause the other did not agree with him in a certain case!
-How they laughed at that in the school, at the time!
-Do you remember? . . . Look! here is K , who de-
-nounced to the authorities the rebels he was caring for
-at his hospital. That was at the time of the riots. How
-is it possible so handsome a man can have so little heart?
-POEMS IN PROSE
+    BIEN LOIN D'ICI
-. . . This one is W , a famous Englishman; I cap-
-tured him on his visit to Paris. He looks like a girl,
-doesn't he?"
-And as I touched a little tied-up parcel, also on the
+    Here is the chamber consecrate,
-table: "Wait a while," she said, "In this one are the
+    Wherein this maiden delicate,
-internes; and that package has the dressers."
+    And enigmatically sedate,
-And she spread out, fanlike, a mass of photographs,
+    Fans herself while the moments creep,
-picturing much younger faces.
+    Upon her cushions half-asleep,
+    And hears the fountains plash and weep.
-"When we see each other again, you will give me your
+    Dorothy's chamber undefiled.
-portrait, won't you, deary?"
+    The winds and waters sing afar
+    Their song of sighing strange and wild
+    To lull to sleep the petted child.
-"But," I said to her, I also following my fixed idea,
+    From head to foot with subtle care,
-"what makes you think I am a doctor?"
+    Slaves have perfumed her delicate skin
+    With odorous oils and benzoin.
+    And flowers faint in a corner there.
-"It's because you are so amiable and good to women!"
-"Peculiar logic," I said to myself.
-"Oh! I am hardly ever mistaken; I have known quite
-a number. I love them so much that, even though I am
-not sick, I sometimes go to see them, only to see them.
-There are some who say coldly: 'You are not sick at all!'
-But there are others who understand me, because I ogle
-them."
-"And when they do not understand?"
+    CONTEMPLATION
-"Well, since I have disturbed them fruitlessly, I leave
-ten francs on the mantel. . . . They are so good and
-so kind, these folk! I discovered a little interne at the
-Piete, pretty as an angel, and so refined! and a worker,
-the poor boy! His comrades told me he didn't have a
-sou, because his parents were poor folks who couldn't
-send him anything. That gave me confidence. After all, I
-am a fairly good looking woman, although not too young.
-I said to him: 'Come to see me, come to see me often.
-With me you needn't bother: I have no need of money.'
-But you know that I made him understand that in a host
-of ways, I didn't tell it to him bluntly; I was so afraid
-of humiliating him, the dear child ! ... Oh well ! would
-you believe that I had a queer fancy I didn't dare to tell
+    Thou, O my Grief, be wise and tranquil still,
+    The eve is thine which even now drops down,
+    To carry peace or care to human will,
+    And in a misty veil enfolds the town.
+    While the vile mortals of the multitude,
+    By pleasure, cruel tormentor, goaded on,
+    Gather remorseful blossoms in light mood--
+    Grief, place thy hand in mine, let us be gone
-POEMS IN PROSE 105
+    Far from them. Lo, see how the vanished years,
+    In robes outworn lean over heaven's rim;
+    And from the water, smiling through her tears,
-him? ... I should have liked him to come to see me
+    Remorse arises, and the sun grows dim;
-with Jiis instrument case and his apron, even with a
+    And in the east, her long shroud trailing light,
-little blood on it."
+    List, O my grief, the gentle steps of Night.
-She said this in the most candid manner, as a feel-
-ing man would say to an actress that he loved: "I want
-to see you dressed in the costume you wore in this famous
-role that you created . . . . "
-I, persisting, continued: "Can you remember the time
-and the occasion when this so special passion was born
-in you?"
-I made her understand with difficulty; finally I suc-
-ceeded. But then she answered in a very sad tone, and
-even, as well as I can recall, lowering her eyes: "I don't
-know . . ., I can't remember."
-What oddities can be found in a great city, if one
+    TO A BROWN BEGGAR-MAID
-knows how to walk about and watch. Life swarms with
-innocent monsters, —
-Lord, my God! You, the Creator, You the Master,
-You who have created Law and Liberty; You, the Sov-
-ereign that doth not interfere; You, the Judge that par-
-doneth; You who are full of motives and causes, and
-who perhaps have planted a taste for horror in my mind
-in order to convert my soul, as the recovery after a
-sword; Lord, have pity, have pity on madmen and mad
-women! O Creator, can monsters exist in the eyes of
-Him who alone knows why they exist, how they are
-made, and how they need not have been made?
+    White maiden with the russet hair,
+    Whose garments, through their holes, declare
+    That poverty is part of you,
+      And beauty too.
+    To me, a sorry bard and mean,
+    Your youthful beauty, frail and lean,
+    With summer freckles here and there,
+      Is sweet and fair.
-LET US FLAY THE POOR
+    Your sabots tread the roads of chance,
+    And not one queen of old romance
+    Carried her velvet shoes and lace
+      With half your grace.
-For a fortnight I was confined to my room, and I
+    In place of tatters far too short
-surrounded myself with the books of the day (sixteen or
+    Let the proud garments worn at Court
-seventeen years ago) ; I mean those volumes which treat
+    Fall down with rustling fold and pleat
-of the art of making people happy, wise and rich, in
+      About your feet;
+    In place of stockings, worn and old,
+    Let a keen dagger all of gold
+    Gleam in your garter for the eyes
+      Of roués wise;
+    Let ribbons carelessly untied
+    Reveal to us the radiant pride
+    Of your white bosom purer far
+      Than any star;
-POEMS IN PROSE
+    Let your white arms uncovered shine,
+    Polished and smooth and half divine;
+    And let your elfish fingers chase
+      With riotous grace
-twenty-four hours. I had thus digested — swallowed, I
+    The purest pearls that softly glow,
-should say — all the lucubrations of all those master-
+    The sweetest sonnets of Belleau,
-builders of the public weal, of those who advise all the
+    Offered by gallants ere they fight
-poor to enslave themselves, and of those who persuade
+      For your delight;
-them they are all dethroned kings. There is, then,
-naught surprising in the fact that I was in a state of
-mind bordering on intoxication or stupidity.
-It seemed to me merely that I felt, imprisoned in the
+    And many fawning rhymers who
-depths of my intelligence, the obscure germ of an idea
+    Inscribe their first thin book to you
-superior to all the old wives' formulae the cyclopedia of
+    Will contemplate upon the stair
-which I had just run through. But it was only the
+      Your slipper fair;
-thought of a thought, a something infinitely vague.
-And I went forth with a great thirst, for the impas-
+    And many a page who plays at cards,
-sioned taste of poor reading engenders a proportionate
+    And many lords and many bards,
-need of open air and of refreshment.
+    Will watch your going forth, and burn
+      For your return;
-As I was about to enter a tavern, a beggar held out
+    And you will count before your glass
-his hat to me, with one of those unforgettable glances
+    More kisses than the lily has;
-that would tumble down thrones, if the mental moved
+    And more than one Valois will sigh
-the material, and if a mesmerist's glance could ripen
+      When you pass by.
-grapes.
-At the same time, I heard a voice which whispered
+    But meanwhile you are on the tramp,
-at my ear, a voice that I knew well: it was that of a
+    Begging your living in the damp,
-good angel, or a good Demon, who is with me every-
+    Wandering mean streets and alleys o'er,
-where. Since Socrates had his good Demon, why may
+      From door to door;
-not I have my good Angel, and why may not I have the
-'honor, like Socrates, of securing my brevet in folly,
-signed by the subtle Lelut and the well-advised Baillar-
-get?*
-There is this difference between the Demon of Soc-
+    And shilling bangles in a shop
-rates and my own, that his manifested itself only to
+    Cause you with eager eyes to stop,
-warn, to forbid, to prevent, and that mine deigns to
+    And I, alas, have not a sou
-counsel, suggest, persuade. Poor Socrates had only a
+      To give to you.
-Demon prohibitor; mine is a great affirmator, mine is a
-Demon of action, or a Demon of combat.
-* Famous Parisian alienists of the time.
+    Then go, with no more ornament,
+    Pearl, diamond, or subtle scent,
+    Than your own fragile naked grace
+      And lovely face.
-POEMS IN PROSE 105
-Now, his voice whispered to me thus: "He alone is the
+    THE SWAN
-equal of another, that proves it; and he alone is worthy
-of liberty, that can secure it."
-Immediately I leapt upon the beggar. With one
-punch, I stopped an eye, which became in a moment
-large as a ball. I broke one of my nails shattering two
-of his teeth, and as I did not feel strong enough, having
-been born delicate and having had but little practice in
-boxing, to beat the old fellow to death right away, I
-grasped him by one hand by the collar of his coat, and
-with the other I throttled him, and I set to work dash-
-ing his head against a wall. I must avow that I had first
-inspected the surroundings in a glance, and had made
-sure that in that deserted suburb I should be long
-enough out of the reach of a policeman.
-Having then, with a kick in the back, hard enough to
+    I
-break his shoulderblade, felled the enfeebled sexage-
-narian, I seized a great branch of a tree which lay along
-the ground, and I beat him with the determined energy
-of cooks trying to make a beefsteak tender.
-All at once, — O miracle! O joy of the philosopher
+    Andromache, I think of you! The stream,
-who proves the excellence of his theory! — I saw that
+    The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days
-antiqve carcass turn about, straighten up with an energy
+    Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,
-I should never have suspected in so strangely disordered
+    The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears,
-a madv'ne — and, with a glance of hate that seemed to
+    Made all my fertile memory blossom forth
-me gr-d omen, the decrepit ruffian hurled himself upon
+    As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.
-me, blackened both my eyes, broke four teeth, and with
+    Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,
-the same branch beat me stiff as a jelly. By my ener-
+    Changes more quickly than man's heart may change);
-getic medication, I had restored to him pride and life.
+    Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
+    The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
+    The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
+    The _débris_, and the square-set heaps of tiles.
-Then I made any number of signs to him to make
+    There a menagerie was once outspread;
-him understand that I considered the matter closed, and,
+    And there I saw, one morning at the hour
-rising with the satisfaction of a philosopher of the Porch,
+    When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
-I said to him: "Sir, you are- my equal/ Kindly do me
+    And the road roars upon the silent air,
-the honor of sharing my purse; and remember, if you
+    A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
-are truly philanthropic, that you must apply to all your
+    On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
+    And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.
+    And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
+    Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
+    His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
+    Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):
+    "O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
+    Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?"
+                                     Sometimes yet
+    I see the hapless bird--strange, fatal myth--
+    Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up
+    Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens,
+    With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face,
+    As though he sent reproaches up to God!
+    II
-io6 POEMS IN PROSE
+    Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.
+    New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,
+    And suburbs old, are symbols all to me
+    Whose memories are as heavy as a stone.
+    And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul,
+    The image came of my majestic swan
+    With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime,
+    As of an exile whom one great desire
+    Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you,
+    Andromache! torn from your hero's arms;
+    Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride;
+    Bent o'er an empty tomb in ecstasy;
+    Widow of Hector--wife of Helenus!
+    And of the negress, wan and phthisical,
+    Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes
+    Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog
+    The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;
+    Of all who lose that which they never find;
+    Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief
+    Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;
+    Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.
+    And one old Memory like a crying horn
+    Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost....
+    I think of sailors on some isle forgotten;
+    Of captives; vanquished ... and of many more.
-colleagues, when they ask for alms, the theory that I
-have had the sorrow of trying on your back."
-Hq swore to me that he understood my theory, and
-that he would obey my counsels.
+    THE SEVEN OLD MEN
-GOOD DOGS
-To Mr. Joseph Stevens
-I HAVE nearer, even before the young writers of my
+    O swarming city, city full of dreams,
-century, been ashamed of my admiration for Buffon;
+    Where in full day the spectre walks and speaks;
-but to-day it is not the spirit of that painter of lofty
+    Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins
-nature that I would call to my assistance. No.
+    My story flows as flows the rising sap.
-Much more willingly I call to Sterne, and I say to
+    One morn, disputing with my tired soul,
-him: "Descend from heaven, or climb to me from the
+    And like a hero stiffening all my nerves,
-Elysian Fields, to inspire me in behalf of good dogs,
+    I trod a suburb shaken by the jar
-of poor dogs, with a song worthy of thee, sentimental
+    Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified
-farceur, farceur incomparable. Come back astraddle that-
+    The houses either side of that sad street,
-famous ass which will always accompany you in the
+    So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood
-memory of the future; and especially do not let that
+    Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist,
-ass forget to carry, delicately hung between his lips,
+    Unclean and yellow, inundated space--
-his immortal macaroons."
+    A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul.
+    Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags
+    Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks
+    Should have brought alms in floods upon his head.
+    Without the misery gleaming in his eye,
+    Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed
+    To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost
+    Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard
+    Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth.
+    He was not bent but broken: his backbone
+    Made a so true right angle with his legs,
+    That, as he walked, the tapping stick which gave
+    The finish to the picture, made him seem
+    Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped
+    Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud
+    He walked with troubled and uncertain gait,
+    As though his sabots trod upon the dead,
+    Indifferent and hostile to the world.
-Away with the academic muse! I have no business
+    His double followed him: tatters and stick
-with that old prude. I invoke the familiar m.vre, the
+    And back and eye and beard, all were the same;
-citizen, the boon companion, to aid me to sing tl '^ good
+    Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable,
-dogs, the poor dogs, the dirty dogs, those whom every
+    These centenarian twins, these spectres odd,
-one drives away, pestiferous and lousy, except the poor,
+    Trod the same pace toward some end unknown.
-whose associates they are, and the poet, who sees them
+    To what fell complot was I then exposed?
-with fraternal eye.
+    Humiliated by what evil chance?
+    For as the minutes one by one went by
+    Seven times I saw this sinister old man
+    Repeat his image there before my eyes!
-Fie upon the foppish dog, upon the coxcomb quad-
+    Let him who smiles at my inquietude,
-ruped, Dane, King Charles, pugdog or lapdog, so en-
+    Who never trembled at a fear like mine,
-amoured of himself that he darts inconsiderately be-
+    Know that in their decrepitude's despite
-tween the legs or on the knees of the visitor, as if he
+    These seven old hideous monsters had the mien
-were certain of pleasing, wild as a youngster, foolish as
+    Of beings immortal.
+                     Then, I thought, must I,
+    Undying, contemplate the awful eighth;
+    Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double;
+    Disgusting Phœnix, father of himself
+    And his own son? In terror then I turned
+    My back upon the infernal band, and fled
+    To my own place, and closed my door; distraught
+    And like a drunkard who sees all things twice,
+    With feverish troubled spirit, chilly and sick,
+    Wounded by mystery and absurdity!
+    In vain my reason tried to cross the bar,
+    The whirling storm but drove her back again;
+    And my soul tossed, and tossed, an outworn wreck,
+    Mastless, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea.
-POEMS IN PROSE 107
-a flirt, often surly and insolent as a servant! Fie es-
-pecially upon those four-pawed serpents, idle and shiv-
-ering, that are called greyhounds, and that do not har-
-bor in their pointed muzzle enough scent to follow the
-track of a friend, nor in their flattened head enough in-
-telligence to play at dominoes!
-To the kennel with all these plaguy parasites!
-Let them slink to the kennel stuffed and sulky! I
+    THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN
-sing the dirty dog, the poor dog, the homeless dog, the
-stroller dog, the dog buffoon, the dog whose instinct, like
-that of the poor, the gypsy and the mountebank, is mar-
-vellously sharpened by necessity, that excellent mother,
-that true patron of intelligence !
-I sing the distressful dogs, be they those that wander,
-alone, in the winding gullies of the great cities or those
-who have said to the forsaken man, with blinking spir-
-itual eyes: "Take me with you, and of two miseries we
-shall make a sort of joy!"
-"Whither go the dogs?" Nestor Roquepelan once said
+    I
-in an immortal leaflet which he has doubtless forgotten,
-and which I alone, and perhaps Saint-Beuve, recall to-
-day.
-Where do the dogs go, you ask, heedless men? They
+    Deep in the tortuous folds of ancient towns,
-go about their business.
+    Where all, even horror, to enchantment turns,
+    I watch, obedient to my fatal mood,
+    For the decrepit, strange and charming beings,
+    The dislocated monsters that of old
+    Were lovely women--Lais or Eponine!
+    Hunchbacked and broken, crooked though they be,
+    Let us still love them, for they still have souls.
+    They creep along wrapped in their chilly rags,
+    Beneath the whipping of the wicked wind,
+    They tremble when an omnibus rolls by,
+    And at their sides, a relic of the past,
+    A little flower-embroidered satchel hangs.
+    They trot about, most like to marionettes;
+    They drag themselves, as does a wounded beast;
+    Or dance unwillingly as a clapping bell
+    Where hangs and swings a demon without pity.
+    Though they be broken they have piercing eyes,
+    That shine like pools where water sleeps at night;
+    The astonished and divine eyes of a child
+    who laughs at all that glitters in the world.
+    Have you not seen that most old women's shrouds
+    Are little like the shroud of a dead child?
+    Wise Death, in token of his happy whim,
+    Wraps old and young in one enfolding sheet.
+    And when I see a phantom, frail and wan,
+    Traverse the swarming picture that is Paris,
+    It ever seems as though the delicate thing
+    Trod with soft steps towards a cradle new.
+    And then I wonder, seeing the twisted form,
+    How many times must workmen change the shape
+    Of boxes where at length such limbs are laid?
+    These eyes are wells brimmed with a million tears;
+    Crucibles where the cooling metal pales--
+    Mysterious eyes that are strong charms to him
+    Whose life-long nurse has been austere Disaster.
-Business engagements, affairs of love. Through the
-fog, through the snow, through the mire, under the bit-
-ing dogstar, under the streaming rain, they come, they
-go, they hurry, they move along under carriages, ex-
-cited by fleas, by passion, by duty or by need. Like us,
-they have risen bright and early, and they seek their
-livelihood or run to their pleasure.
-There are some who sleep in a ruin in the suburbs
-and who come every day at a stated hour, to beg alms
-at the door of a Palais- Royal cook; others who run in
-troops, for more than five leagues, to partake of the
+    II
+    The love-sick vestal of the old "Frasciti";
+    Priestess of Thalia, alas! whose name
+    Only the prompter knows and he is dead;
+    Bygone celebrities that in bygone days
+    The Tivoli o'ershadowed in their bloom;
+    All charm me; yet among these beings frail
+    Three, turning pain to honey-sweetness, said
+    To the Devotion that had lent them wings:
+    "Lift me, O powerful Hippogriffe, to the skies"--
+    One by her country to despair was driven;
+    One by her husband overwhelmed with grief;
+    One wounded by her child, Madonna-like;
+    Each could have made a river with her tears.
-io8 POEMS IN PROSE
-repast which has been prepared for them through the
-charity of certain sexagenarian maids, whose unoccupied
-hearts are given over to beasts, since imbecile man wants
-them no more; others who, like runaway negroes, fran-
-tic with love, leave their province on certain days, to
-come to the city and romp for an hour with a handsome
-bitch, a little careless in her toilet, but proud and thank-
-ful.
-And they are all very precise, without notebooks, with-
+    III
-out memoranda, without portfolios.
-Do you know slothful Belgium, and have you, like me,
+    Oft have I followed one of these old women,
-admired all those vigorous dogs hitched to the cart of
+    One among others, when the falling sun
-the butcher, of the milkmaid, of the baker, who give evi-
+    Reddened the heavens with a crimson wound--
-dence in their triumphant barks, of the proud pleasure
+    Pensive, apart, she rested on a bench
-they feel in rivalling the horse?
+    To hear the brazen music of the band,
+    Played by the soldiers in the public park
+    To pour some courage into citizens' hearts,
+    On golden eves when all the world revives.
+    Proud and erect she drank the music in,
+    The lively and the warlike call to arms;
+    Her eyes blinked like an ancient eagle's eyes;
+    Her forehead seemed to await the laurel crown!
-And here are two that belong to a still more civilized
-order! Permit me to introduce you into the room of an
-absent mountebank. A bed, of painted wood, without
-curtains, with dragging covers stained with bugs; two
-cane chairs, a cast-iron stove, one or two disordered
-musical instruments. Oh, what sad furniture! But
-look, I pray you, at these two intelligent personages, clad
-in garments at once sumptuous and frayed, hooded like
-troubadours or soldiers, who are guarding, with the close
-watch of a sorcerer, the nameless something which sim-
-mers on the lighted stove, and from the center of which a
-long spoon stands forth, planted as one of those aerial
-masts which announce that the masonry is complete.
-Is it not just that such zealous comedians should not
-set out without having well lined their stomachs with a
-strong, sound soup? And will you not forgive a littles
-sensuality in these poor devils who all day have to face
-the indifference of the public and the injustice of a di-
-rector who deems himself the whole show and who alone
-eats more soup than four actors?
+    IV
+    Thus you do wander, uncomplaining Stoics,
+    Through all the chaos of the living town:
+    Mothers with bleeding hearts, saints, courtesans,
+    Whose names of yore were on the lips of all;
+    Who were all glory and all grace, and now
+    None know you; and the brutish drunkard stops,
+    Insulting you with his derisive love;
+    And cowardly urchins call behind your back.
+    Ashamed of living, withered shadows all,
+    With fear-bowed backs you creep beside the walls,
+    And none salute you, destined to loneliness!
+    Refuse of Time ripe for Eternity!
+    But I, who watch you tenderly afar,
+    With unquiet eyes on your uncertain steps,
+    As though I were your father, I--O wonder!--
+    Unknown to you taste secret, hidden joy.
+    I see your maiden passions bud and bloom,
+    Sombre or luminous, and your lost days
+    Unroll before me while my heart enjoys
+    All your old vices, and my soul expands
+    To all the virtues that have once been yours.
+    Ruined! and my sisters! O congenerate hearts,
+    Octogenarian Eves o'er whom is stretched
+    God's awful claw, where will you be to-morrow?
-POEMS IN PROSE 109
-How often have I contemplated, touched and smiling,
-all these four-footed philosophers, compliant, submissive
-or devoted slaves, whom the republican dictionary might
-well call ''fellows," * if the republic, too busied with the
-happiness of men, had time to respect the honor of dogs !
-And how many times have I thought that perhaps
-there is somewhere (who knows, after all?), to reward so
-much courage, so much of patience and of labor, a special
-paradise for good dogs, for poor dogs, for dirty and af-
-flicted dogs. Swedenborg affirms that there is one for
-the Turks and one for the Dutchmen !
-The shepherds of Virgil and of Theocritus expected, as
+    A MADRIGAL OF SORROW
-prize for their alternate songs, a good cheese, a flute
-from the best maker, or a she-goat with swelling udders.
-The poet who has sung the good dogs has received for
-reward a fine vest, of a color both faded and rich, which
-brings thoughts of the autumn suns, of the beauty of
-matured women and of the summers of Saint-Martin,
-None of those who were present in the tavern of Rue
-Villa-Hermosa will forget with what petulance the
-painter was despoiled of his vest for the poet, so well had
-he understood that it is good and seemly to sing of poor
-dogs.
-Thus a magnificent Italian tyrant, in the good old
+    What do I care though you be wise?
-days, offered the divine Aretine a dagger rich with jew-
+      Be sad, be beautiful; your tears
-els, or a courtly gown, in exchange for a precious son-
+    But add one more charm to your eyes,
-net or a rare satiric poem.
+    As streams to valleys where they rise;
+      And fairer every flower appears
-And whenever the poet dons the painter's vest, he is
+    After the storm. I love you most
-forced to think of the good dogs, of the dog philosophers,
+      When joy has fled your brow downcast;
-of the summers of Saint-Martin and of the beauty of
+    When your heart is in horror lost,
-full-blown women.
+    And o'er your present like a ghost
+      Floats the dark shadow of the past.
-* "Officieux" was the term adopted by the Republic, to re-
+    I love you when the teardrop flows,
-place "domestique" and "valet," and to indicate the equality
+      Hotter than blood, from your large eye;
-of all — even master and man.
+    When I would hush you to repose
+    Your heavy pain breaks forth and grows
+      Into a loud and tortured cry.
+    And then, voluptuousness divine!
+      Delicious ritual and profound!
+    I drink in every sob like wine,
+    And dream that in your deep heart shine
+      The pearls wherein your eyes were drowned.
+    I know your heart, which overflows
+      With outworn loves long cast aside,
+    Still like a furnace flames and glows,
+    And you within your breast enclose
+      A damnèd soul's unbending pride;
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
+    But till your dreams without release
-Translated by F. P. Stxjeim
+      Reflect the leaping flames of hell;
+    Till in a nightmare without cease
+    You dream of poison to bring peace,
+      And love cold steel and powder well;
+    And tremble at each opened door,
+      And feel for every man distrust,
+    And shudder at the striking hour--
+    Till then you have not felt the power
+      Of Irresistible Disgust.
+    My queen, my slave, whose love is fear,
+      When you awaken shuddering,
+    Until that awful hour be here,
+    You cannot say at midnight drear:
+      "I am your equal, O my King!"
-EVERY MAN HIS CHIM^ERA
-Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty
-plain devoid of grass, and where not even a nettle or a
-thistle was to be seen, I met several men who walked
-bowed down to the ground.
-Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chimaera
-as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or as the equipment of
-a Roman foot-soldier.
-But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, rather
+    MIST AND RAIN
-she enveloped and oppressed the men with her powerful
-and elastic muscles, and clawed with her two vast talons
-at the breast of her mount. Her fabulous head reposed
-upon the brow of the man like one of those horrible
-casques by which ancient warriors hoped to add to the
-terrors of the enemy.
-I questioned one of the men, asking him why they
-went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he
-nor the others, but that evidently they went somewhere,
-since they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to
-walk.
-Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be
+    Autumns and winters, springs of mire and rain,
-irritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck and
+    Seasons of sleep, I sing your praises loud,
-cleaving to his back: one had said that he considered it
+    For thus I love to wrap my heart and brain
-as a part of himself. These grave and weary faces bore
+    In some dim tomb beneath a vapoury shroud
-witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of
-the heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an
-earth as desolate as the sky, they journeyed onwards
-with the resigned faces of men condemned to hope for
-ever. So the train passed me and faded intO' the atmos-
-phere of the horizon at the place where the planet un-
-veils herself to the curiosity of the human eye.
-During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to
+    In the wide plain where revels the cold wind,
-comprehend this mystery; but irresistible Indifference
+    Through long nights when the weathercock whirls round,
+    More free than in warm summer day my mind
+    Lifts wide her raven pinions from the ground.
-"3
+    Unto a heart filled with funereal things
+    That since old days hoar frosts have gathered on,
+    Naught is more sweet, O pallid, queenly springs,
+    Than the long pageant of your shadows wan,
+    Unless it be on moonless eves to weep
+    On some chance bed and rock our griefs to sleep.
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
-soon threw herself upon me, nor was I more heavily
-dejected thereby than they by their crushing Chimaeras.
+    SUNSET
-VENUS AND THE FOOL
+    Fair is the sun when first he flames above,
+    Flinging his joy down in a happy beam;
+    And happy he who can salute with love
+    The sunset far more glorious than a dream.
-How admirable the day! The vast park swoons be-
+    Flower, stream, and furrow!--I have seen them all
-neath the burning eye of the sun, as youth beneath the
+    In the sun's eye swoon like one trembling heart--
-lordship of love.
+    Though it be late let us with speed depart
+    To catch at least one last ray ere it fall!
-There is no rumour of the universal ecstasy of all
+    But I pursue the fading god in vain,
-things. The waters themselves are as though drifting
+    For conquering Night makes firm her dark domain,
-into sleep. Very different from the festivals of human-
+    Mist and gloom fall, and terrors glide between,
-ity, here is a silent revel.
-It seems as though an ever-waning light makes all
+    And graveyard odours in the shadow swim,
-objects glimmer more and more, as though the excited
+    And my faint footsteps on the marsh's rim,
-fiowers bum with a desire to rival the blue of the sky
+    Bruise the cold snail and crawling toad unseen.
-by the vividness of their colours; as though the heat,
-making perfumes visible, drives them in vapour towards
-their star.
-Yet, in the midst of this universal joy, I have perceived
-one afflicted thing.
-At the feet of a colossal Venus, one of those motley
-fools, those willing clowns whose business it is to bring
-laughter upon kings when weariness or remorse pos-
-sesses them, lies wrapped in his gaudy and ridiculous
-garments, coiffed with his cap and bells, huddled against
-the pedestal, and raises towards the goddess his eyes
-filled with tears.
-And his eyes say: "I am the last and most alone of all
-mortals, inferior to the meanest of animals in that I am
-denied either love or friendship. Yet I am made, even
-I, for the understanding and enjoyment of immortal
-Beauty. O Goddess, have pity upon my sadness and my
-frenzy."
-The implacable Venus gazed into I know not what
+    THE CORPSE
-distances with her marble eyes.
+    Remember, my Beloved, what thing we met
+      By the roadside on that sweet summer day;
+    There on a grassy couch with pebbles set,
+        A loathsome body lay.
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 115
+    The wanton limbs stiff-stretched into the air,
+      Steaming with exhalations vile and dank,
+    In ruthless cynic fashion had laid bare
+        The swollen side and flank.
+    On this decay the sun shone hot from heaven
+      As though with chemic heat to broil and bum,
+    And unto Nature all that she had given
+        A hundredfold return.
+    The sky smiled down upon the horror there
+      As on a flower that opens to the day;
+    So awful an infection smote the air,
+        Almost you swooned away.
-ALREADY!
+    The swarming flies hummed on the putrid side,
+      Whence poured the maggots in a darkling stream,
+    That ran along these tatters of life's pride
+        With a liquescent gleam.
-A HUNDRED times already the sun had leaped, radi-
+    And like a wave the maggots rose and fell,
-ant or saddened, from the immense cup of the sea whose
+      The murmuring flies swirled round in busy strife:
-rim could scarcely be seen ; a hundred times it had again
+    It seemed as though a vague breath came to swell
-sunk, glittering or morose, into its mighty bath of twi-
+        And multiply with life
-light. For many days we had contemplated the other
-side of the firmament, and deciphered the celestial alpha-
-bet of the antipodes. And e^ch of the passengers sighed
-and complained. One had said that the approach of
-land only exasperated their sufferings. "When, then,"
-they said, "shall we cease to sleep a sleep broken by the
-surge, troubled by a wind that snores louder than we?
-When shall we be able to eat at an unmoving table?"
-There were those who thought of their own firesides,
+    The hideous corpse. From all this living world
-who regretted their sullen, faithless wives, and their
+      A music as of wind and water ran,
-noisy progeny. All so doted upon the image of the
+    Or as of grain in rhythmic motion swirled
-absent land, that I believe they would have eaten grass
+        By the swift winnower's fan.
-with as much enthusiasm as the beasts.
-At length a coast was signalled, and on approaching
+    And then the vague forms like a dream died out,
-we saw a magnificent and dazzling land. It seemed as
+      Or like some distant scene that slowly falls
-though the music of life flowed therefrom in a vague
+    Upon the artist's canvas, that with doubt
-murmur; and the banks, rich with all kinds of growths,
+        He only half recalls.
-breathed, for leagues around, a delicious odour of flowers
-and fruits.
-Each one therefore was joyful; his evil humour left
+    A homeless dog behind the boulders lay
-him. Quarrels were forgotten, reciprocal wrongs for-
+      And watched us both with angry eyes forlorn,
-given, the thought of duels was blotted out of the mem-
+    Waiting a chance to come and take away
-ory, and rancour fled away like smoke.
+        The morsel she had torn.
-I alone was sad, inconceivably sad. Like a priest
+    And you, even you, will be like this drear thing,
-from whom one has torn his divinity, I could not, with-
+      A vile infection man may not endure;
-out heartbreaking bitterness, leave this so monstrously
+    Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring!
-seductive ocean, this sea so infinitely various in its ter-
+        O passionate and pure!
-rifying simplicity, which seemed to contain in itself and
+    Yes, such will you be, Queen of every grace!
+      When the last sacramental words are said;
+    And beneath grass and flowers that lovely face
+        Moulders among the dead.
+    Then, O Belovèd, whisper to the worm
+      That crawls up to devour you with a kiss,
+    That I still guard in memory the dear form
+        Of love that comes to this!
-ii6 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
-represent by its joys, and attractions, and angers, and
-smiles, the moods and agonies and ecstasies of all souls
-that have lived, that live, and that shall yet live.
-In saying good-bye to this incomparable beauty I felt
-as though I had been smitten to death; and that is why
-when each of my companions said: "At last!" I could
-only cry ^^ Already 1'*
-Here meanwhile was the land, the land with its noises,
+    AN ALLEGORY
-its passions, its commodities, its festivals: a land rich
-and magnificent, full of promises, that sent to us a mys-
-terious perfume of rose and musk, and from whence the
-music of life flowed in an amorous murmuring.
-THE DOUBLE CHAMBER
-A CHAMBER that is like a reverie; a chamber truly
+    Here is a woman, richly clad and fair,
-spiritual, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly
+    Who in her wine dips her long, heavy hair;
-touched with rose and blue.
+    Love's claws, and that sharp poison which is sin,
+    Are dulled against the granite of her skin.
+    Death she defies, Debauch she smiles upon,
+    For their sharp scythe-like talons every one
+    Pass by her in their all-destructive play;
+    Leaving her beauty till a later day.
+    Goddess she walks; sultana in her leisure;
+    She has Mohammed's faith that heaven is pleasure,
+    And bids all men forget the world's alarms
+    Upon her breast, between her open arms.
+    She knows, and she believes, this sterile maid,
+    Without whom the world's onward dream would fade,
+    That bodily beauty is the supreme gift
+    Which may from every sin the terror lift.
+    Hell she ignores, and Purgatory defies;
+    And when black Night shall roll before her eyes,
+    She will look straight in Death's grim face forlorn,
+    Without remorse or hate--as one new-born.
-There the soul bathes itself in indolence made odorous
-with regret and desire. There is some sense of the twi-
-light, of things tinged with blue and rose: a dream of
-delight during an eclipse. The shape of the furniture is
-elongated, low, languishing; one would think it endowed
-with the somnambulistic vitality of plants and minerals.
-The tapestries speak an inarticulate language, like the
-flowers, the skies, the dropping suns.
-There are no artistic abominations upon the walls.
-Compared with the pure dream, with an impression un-
-analyzed, definite art, positive art, is a blasphemy. Here
-all has the sufficing lucidity and the delicious obscurity
-of music, ,
-An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice,
+    THE ACCURSED
-mingled with a floating humidity, swims in this atmos-
-phere where the drowsing spirit is lulled by the sensa-
-tions one feels in a hothouse.
+    Like pensive herds at rest upon the sands,
+      These to the sea-horizons turn their eyes;
+    Out of their folded feet and clinging hands
+      Bitter sharp tremblings and soft languors rise.
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 117
+    Some tread the thicket by the babbling stream,
+      Their hearts with untold secrets ill at ease;
+    Calling the lover of their childhood's dream,
+      They wound the green bark of the shooting trees.
-The abundant muslin flows before the windows and
+    Others like sisters wander, grave and slow,
-the couch, and spreads out in snowy cascades. Upon
+      Among the rocks haunted by spectres thin,
-the couch lies the Idol, ruler of my dreams. But why is
+    Where Antony saw as larvæ surge and flow
-she here? — who has brought her? — what magical power
+      The veined bare breasts that tempted him to sin.
-has installed her upon this throne of delight and reverie?
-What matter — she is there; and I recognize her.
-These indeed are the eyes whose flame pierces the
+    Some, when the resinous torch of burning wood
-twilight; the subtle and terrible mirrors that I recognize
+      Flares in lost pagan caverns dark and deep,
-by their horrifying malice. They attract, they dominate,
+    Call thee to quench the fever in their blood,
-they devour the sight of whomsoever is imprudent
+      Bacchus, who singest old remorse to sleep!
-enough to look at them. I have often studied them;
-these Black Stars that compel curiosity and admiration.
-To what benevolent demon, then, do I owe being
+    Then there are those the scapular bedights,
-thus surrounded with mystery, with silence, with peace,
+      Whose long white vestments hide the whip's red stain,
-and sweet odours? O beatitude! the thing we name
+    Who mix, in sombre woods on lonely nights,
-life, even in its most fortunate amplitude, has nothing in
+      The foam of pleasure with the tears of pain.
-common with this supreme life with which I am now
-acquainted, which I taste minute by minute, second by
-second.
-Not so! Minutes are no more; seconds are no more.
+    O virgins, demons, monsters, martyrs! ye
-Time has vanished, and Eternity reigns — an Eternity of
+      Who scorn whatever actual appears;
-delight.
+    Saints, satyrs, seekers of Infinity,
+      So full of cries, so full of bitter tears;
-A heavy and terrible knocking reverberates upon the
+    Ye whom my soul has followed into hell,
-door, and, as in a hellish dream, it seems to me as though
+      I love and pity, O sad sisters mine,
-I had received a blow from a mattock.
+    Your thirsts unquenched, your pains no tongue can tell,
+      And your great hearts, those urns of love divine!
-Then a Spectre enters: it is an usher who comes to
-torture me in the name of the Law; an infamous concu-
-bine who. comes to cry misery and to add the trivialities
-of her life to the sorrow of mine ; or it may be the errand-
-boy of an editor who comes to implore the remainder of
-a manuscript.
-The Chamber of paradise, the Idol, the ruler of
-dreams, the Sylphide, as the great Rene said; all this
-magic has vanished at the brutal knocking of the Spectre.
-Horror; I remember, I remember! Yes, this kennel,
+    LA BEATRICE
-ii8 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
+    In a burnt, ashen land, where no herb grew,
+    I to the winds my cries of anguish threw;
+    And in my thoughts, in that sad place apart,
+    Pricked gently with the poignard o'er my heart.
+    Then in full noon above my head a cloud
+    Descended tempest-swollen, and a crowd
+    Of wild, lascivious spirits huddled there,
+    The cruel and curious demons of the air,
+    Who coldly to consider me began;
+    Then, as a crowd jeers some unhappy man,
+    Exchanging gestures, winking with their eyes--
+    I heard a laughing and a whispering rise:
-this habitation of eternal weariness, is indeed my own.
+    "Let us at leisure contemplate this clown,
-There is my senseless furniture, dusty and tattered;
+    This shadow of Hamlet aping Hamlet's frown,
-the dirty fireplace without a flame or an ember; the sad
+    With wandering eyes and hair upon the wind.
-windows where the raindrops have traced runnels in the
+    Is't not a pity that this empty mind,
-dust; the manuscripts, erased or unfinished; the alma-
+    This tramp, this actor out of work, this droll,
-nac with the sinister days marked off with a pencil!
+    Because he knows how to assume a rôle
+    Should dream that eagles and insects, streams and woods,
+    Stand still to hear him chaunt his dolorous moods?
+    Even unto us, who made these ancient things,
+    The fool his public lamentation sings."
+    With pride as lofty as the towering cloud,
+    I would have stilled these clamouring demons loud,
+    And turned in scorn my sovereign head away
+    Had I not seen--O sight to dim the day!--
+    There in the middle of the troupe obscene
+    The proud and peerless beauty of my Queen!
+    She laughed with them at all my dark distress,
+    And gave to each in turn a vile caress.
-And this perfume of another world, whereof I intoxi-
-cated myself with a so perfected sensitiveness; alas, Its
-place is taken by an odour of stale tobacco smoke,
-mingled with I know not what nauseating mustiness.
-Now one breathes here the rankness of desolation.
-In this narrow world, narrow and yet full of disgust,
-a single familiar object smiles at me: the phial of lauda-
-num: old and terrible love; like all loves, alas! fruitful
-in caresses and treacheries.
-Yes, Time has reappeared; Time reigns a monarch
-now; and with the hideous Ancient has returned all his
-demoniacal following of Memories, Regrets, Tremors,
-Fears, Dolours, Nightmares, and twittering nerves.
-I assure you that the seconds are strongly and sol-
+    THE SOUL OF WINE.
-emnly accentuated now; and each, as it drips from the
-pendulum, says: ''I am Life: intolerable, implacable
-Life!"
-There is not a second in mortal life whose mission it
-is to bear good news: the good news that brings the
-inexplicable tear to the eye.
-Yes, Time reigns; Time has regained his brutal mas-
+    One eve in the bottle sang the soul of wine:
-tery. And he goads me, as though I were a steer,
+      "Man, unto thee, dear disinherited,
-with his double goad: "Whoa, thou fool! Sweat, then,
+    I sing a song of love and light divine--
-thou slave! Live on, thou damned!"
+      Prisoned in glass beneath my seals of red.
-AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
+    "I know thou labourest on the hill of fire,
+      In sweat and pain beneath a flaming sun,
+    To give the life and soul my vines desire,
+      And I am grateful for thy labours done.
-Alone at last! Nothing is to be heard but the rattle
+    "For I find joys unnumbered when I lave
-of a few tardy and tired-out cabs. There will be silence
+      The throat of man by travail long outworn,
+    And his hot bosom is a sweeter grave
+      Of sounder sleep than my cold caves forlorn.
+    "Hearest thou not the echoing Sabbath sound?
+      The hope that whispers in my trembling breast?
+    Thy elbows on the table! gaze around;
+      Glorify me with joy and be at rest.
+    "To thy wife's eyes I'll bring their long-lost gleam,
+      I'll bring back to thy child his strength and light,
+    To him, life's fragile athlete I will seem
+      Rare oil that firms his muscles for the fight.
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 119
+    "I flow in man's heart as ambrosia flows;
+      The grain the eternal Sower casts in the sod--
+    From our first loves the first fair verse arose,
+      Flower-like aspiring to the heavens and God!"
-now, if not repose, for several hours at least. At last the
-tyranny of the human face has disappeared — I shall
-not suffer except alone. At last it is permitted me to
-refresh myself in a bath of shadows. But first a double
-turn of the key in the lock. It seems to me that this turn
-of the key will deepen my solitude and strengthen the
-barriers which actually separate me from the world.
-A horrible life and a horrible city! Let us run over
-the events of the day. I have seen several literary men;
-one of them wished to know if he could get to Russia by
-land (he seemed to have an idea that Russia was an
-island) ; I have disputed generously enough with the edi-
-tor of a review, who to each objection replied: "We take
-the part of respectable people," which implies that every
-other paper but his own is edited by a knave; I have
-saluted some twenty people, fifteen of them unknown to
-me; and shaken hands with a like number, without having
-taken the precaution of first buying gloves; I have been
-driven to kill* time, during a shower, with a mountebank,
-who wanted me to design for^her a costume as Venusta;
-I have made my bow to a theatre manager, who said:
-"You will do well, perhaps, to interview Z; he is the
-heaviest, foolishest, and most celebrated of all my au-
-thors; with him perhaps you will be able to come to
-something. See him, and then we'll see." I have boasted
-(why?) of several villainous deeds I never committed,
-and indignantly denied certain shameful things I accom-
-plished with joy, certain misdeeds of fanfaronade, crimes
-of human respect; I have refused an easy favour to a
-friend and given a written recommendation to a perfect
-fool. Heavens! it's well ended.
-Discontented with myself and with everything and
-everybody else, I should be glad enough to redeem my-
-self and regain my self-respect in the silence and solitude.
-Souls of those whom I have loved, whom I have sung,
+    THE WINE OF LOVERS
+    Space rolls to-day her splendour round!
+    Unbridled, spurless, without bound,
+    Mount we upon the wings of wine
+    For skies fantastic and divine!
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
+    Let us, like angels tortured by
+    Some wild delirious phantasy,
+    Follow the far-off mirage born
+    In the blue crystal of the morn.
-fortify me; sustain me; drive away the lies and the cor-
+    And gently balanced on the wing
-rupting vapours of this worid ; and Thou, Lord my God,
+    Of the wild whirlwind we will, ride,
-accord me so much grace as shall produce some beautiful
+    Rejoicing with the joyous thing.
-verse to prove to myself that I am not the last of men,
-that I am not inferior to those I despise.
-THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST
+    My sister, floating side by side,
+    Fly we unceasing whither gleams
+    The distant heaven of my dreams.
-How penetrating is the end of an autumn day! Ah,
-yes, penetrating enough to be painful even ; for there are
-certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does not
-prevent them from being intense; and none more keen
-than the perception of the Infinite. He has a great de-
-light who drowns his gaze in the immensity of sky and
-sea. Solitude, silence, the incomparable chastity of the
-azure — a little sail trembling upon the horizon, by its
-very littleness and isolation imitating my irremediable
-existence — the melodious monotone of the surge — all
-these things thinking through me and I through them
-(for in the grandeur of the reverie the Ego is swiftly
-lost) ; they think, I say, but musically and picturesquely,
-without quibbles, without syllogisms, without deductions.
-These thoughts, as they arise in me or spring forth
-from external objects, soon become always too intense.
-The energy working within pleasure creates an uneasi-
-ness, a positive suffering. My nerves are too tense to
-give other than clamouring and dolorous vibrations.
-And now the profundity of the sky dismays me; its
-limpidity exasperates me. The insensibility of the sea,
-the immutability of the spectacle, revolt me. Ah, must
-one eternally suffer, for ever be a fugitive from Beauty?
-Nature, pitiless enchantress, ever-victorious rival, leave
+    THE DEATH OF LOVERS
-me! Tempt my desires and my pride no more. The con-
-templation of Beauty is a duel where the artist screams
-with terror before being vanquished.
+    There shall be couches whence faint odours rise,
+    Divans like sepulchres, deep and profound;
+    Strange flowers that bloomed beneath diviner skies
+    The death-bed of our love shall breathe around.
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 121
+    And guarding their last embers till the end,
+    Our hearts shall be the torches of the shrine,
+    And their two leaping flames shall fade and blend
+    In the twin mirrors of your soul and mine.
-THE THYRSUS
+    And through the eve of rose and mystic blue
-To Franz Liszt
+    A beam of love shall pass from me to you,
+    Like a long sigh charged with a last farewell;
-What is a thyrsus? According to the moral and poeti-
+    And later still an angel, flinging wide
-cal sense, it is a sacerdotal emblem in the hand of the
+    The gates, shall bring to life with joyful spell
-priests or priestesses celebrating the divinity of whom
+    The tarnished mirrors and the flames that died.
-they are the interpreters and servants. But physically it
-is no more than a baton, a purp staff, a hop-pole, a vine-
-prop; dry, straight, and hard. Around this baton, in
-capricious meanderings, stems and flowers twine and
-wanton; these, sinuous and fugitive; those, hanging like
-bells or inverted cups. And an astonishing complexity
-disengages itself from this complexity of tender or bril-
-liant lines and colours. Would not one suppose that the
-curved line and the spiral pay their court to the straight
-line, and twine about in a mute adoration? Would not
-one say that all these delicate corollae, all these calices,
-explosions of odours and colours, execute a mystical
-dance around the hieratic staff? And what imprudent
-mortal will dare to decide whether the flowers and the
-vine branches have been made for the baton, or whether
-the baton is not but a pretext to set forth the beauty of
-the vine branches and the flowers?
-The thyrsus is the symbol of your astonishing duality,
-O powerful and venerated master, dear bacchanal of a
-mysterious- and impassioned Beauty. ' Never a nymph
-excited by the mysterious Dionysius shook her thyrsus
-over the heads of her companions with as much energy
-as your genius trembles in the hearts of your brothers.
-The baton is your will: erect, firm, unshakeable; the
-flowers are the wanderings of your fancy around it: the
-feminine element encircling the masculine with her illu-
-sive dance. Straight line and arabesque — intention and
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
+    THE DEATH OF THE POOR
-expression — the rigidity of the will and the suppleness
-of the word — a variety of means united for a single pur-
-pose — the all-powerful and indivisible amalgam that is
-genius — what analyst will have the detestable courage to
-divide or to separate you?
-Dear Liszt, across the fogs, beyond the flowers, in
+    Death is consoler and Death brings to life;
-towns where the pianos chant your glory, where the print-
+      The end of all, the solitary hope;
-ing-house translates your wisdom; in whatever place
+    We, drunk with Death's elixir, face the strife,
-you be, in the splendour of the Eternal City or among
+      Take heart, and mount till eve the weary slope.
-the fogs of the dreamy towns that Cambrinus consoles;
-improvising rituals of delight or ineffable pain, or giving
-to paper your abstruse meditations; singer of eternal
-pleasure and pain, philosopher, poet, and artist, I offer
-you the salutation of immortality!
-THE MARKSMAN
+    Across the storm, the hoar-frost, and the snow,
+      Death on our dark horizon pulses clear;
+    Death is the famous hostel we all know,
+      Where we may rest and sleep and have good cheer.
-As the carriage traversed the wood he bade the driver
+    Death is an angel whose magnetic palms
-draw up in the neighbourhood of a shooting gallery, say-
+    Bring dreams of ecstasy and slumberous calms
-ing that he would like to have a few shots to kill time.
+    To smooth the beds of naked men and poor.
-Is not the slaying of the monster Time the most ordinary
-and legitimate occupation of man? — So he gallantly of-
-fered his hand to his dear, adorable, and execrable wife;
-the mysterious woman to whom he owed so many pleas-
-ures, so many pains, and perhaps also a great part of his
-genius.
-Several bullets went wide of the proposed mark, one
+    Death is the mystic granary of God;
-of them flew far into the heavens, and as the charming
+    The poor man's purse; his fatherland of yore;
-creature laughed deliriously, mocking the clumsiness of
+    The Gate that opens into heavens untrod!
-her husband, he turned to her brusquely and said: "Ob-
-serve that doll yonder, to the right, with its nose in the
-air, and with so haughty an appearance. Very well, dear
-angel, / will imagine to myself that it is you!"
-He closed both eyes and pulled the trigger. The doll
--was neatly decapitated.
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 123
+    GYPSIES TRAVELLING
-Then, bending towards his dear, adorable, and ex-
-ecrable wife, his inevitable and pitiless muse, he kissed
-her respectfully upon the hand, and added, "Ah, dear
-angel, how I thank you for my skill!"
-THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE CEMETERY
+    The tribe prophetic with the eyes of fire
+    Went forth last night; their little ones at rest
+    Each on his mother's back, with his desire
+    Set on the ready treasure of her breast.
-"Cemetery View Inn" — "A queer sign," said our
+    Laden with shining arms the men-folk tread
-traveller to himself; "but it raises a thirst! Certainly
+    By the long wagons where their goods lie hidden;
-the keeper of this inn appreciates Horace and the poet
+    They watch the heaven with eyes grown weariëd
-pupils of Epicurus. Perhaps he even apprehends the
+    Of hopeless dreams that come to them unbidden.
-profound philosophy of those old Egyptians who had no
-feast without its skeleton, or some emblem of life's brev-
-ity."
-He entered: drank a glass of beer in presence of the
+    The grasshopper, from out his sandy screen,
-tombs; and slowly smoked a cigar. Then, his phantasy
+    Watching them pass redoubles his shrill song;
-driving him, he went down into the cemetery, where the
+    Dian, who loves them, makes the grass more green,
-grass was so tall and inviting; so brilliant in the sun-
-shine.
-The light and heat, indeed, were so furiously intense
+    And makes the rock run water for this throng
-that one had said the drunken sun wallowed upon a
+    Of ever-wandering ones Whose calm eyes see
-carpet of flowers that had fattened upon the corruption
+    Familiar realms of darkness yet to be.
-beneath.
-The air was heavy with vivid rumours of life — the life
-of things infinitely small — and broken at intervals by
-the crackling of shots from a neighbouring shooting-
-range, that exploded with a sound as of champagne corks
-to the burden of a hollow symphony.
-And then, beneath a sun which scorched the brain,
-and in that atmosphere charged with the ardent perfume
-of death, he heard a voice whispering out of the tomb
-where he sat. And this voice said: "Accursed be your
-rifles and targets, you turbulent living ones, who care
-so little for the dead in their divine repose! Accursed be
-your ambitions and calculations, importunate mortals
+    FRANCISCÆ MEÆ LAUDES
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
-who study the arts of slaughter near the sanctuary of
+    Novis te cantabo chordis,
-Death himself! Did you but know how easy the prize
+    O novelletum quod ludis
-to win, how facile the end to reach, and how all save
+    In solitudine cordis.
-Death is naught, not so greatly would you fatigue your-
-selves, O ye laborious alive; nor would you so often vex
-the slumber of them that long ago reached the End — the
-only true end of life detestable! "
-THE DESIRE TO PAINT
+    Esto sertis implicata,
+    O fœmina delicata
+    Per quam solvuntur peccata
-Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist,
+    Sicut beneficum Lethe,
-who is torn with this desire.
+    Hauriam oscula de te,
+    Quæ imbuta es magnete.
-I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to
+    Quum vitiorum tempestas
-me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some beauti-
+    Turbabat omnes semitas,
-ful, regrettable thing the traveller must leave behind him
+    Apparuisti, Deitas,
-in the night. It is already long since I saw hep.
-She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is over-
+    Velut stella salutaris
-powering. The colour black preponderates in her; all
+    In naufragiis amaris....
-that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes
+    Suspendam cor tuis aris!
-are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams ;
-her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explo-
-sion in the darkness.
-I would compare her to a black sun if one could con-
+    Piscina plena virtutis,
-ceive of a dark star overthrowing light and happiness.
+    Fons æternæ juventutis,
-But it is the moon that she makes one dream of most
+    Labris vocem redde mutis!
-readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her
-with her own influence ; not the white moon of the idylls,
-who resembles a cold bride, but the sinister and intoxi-
-cating moon suspended in the depths of a stormy night,
-among the driven clouds; not the discreet peaceful moon
-who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn
-from the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of
-ThessaJy hardly constrain to dance upon the terrified
-grass.
-Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will
+    Quod erat spurcum, cremasti;
+    Quod rudius, exæquasti;
+    Quod debile, confirmasti!
+    In fame mea tabema,
+    In nocte mea lucerna,
+    Recte me semper gubema.
+    Adde nunc vires viribus,
+    Dulce balneum suavibus,
+    Unguentatum odoribus!
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 125
+    Meos circa lumbos mica,
+    O castitatis lorica,
+    Aqua tincta seraphica;
-and the love of prey. And below this inquiet face, whose
+    Patera gemmis corusca,
-mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown and the im-
+    Panis salsus, mollis esca,
-possible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the smile
+    Divinum vinum, Francisca!
-of a large mouth; white, red, and delicious; a mouth
-that makes one dream of the miracle of some superb
-flower unclosing in a volcanic land.
-There are women who inspire one with the desire to
-woo them and win them ; but she makes one wish to die
-slowly beneath her steady gaze.
-===THE GLASS-VENDOR ===
-:''[[The Bad Glazier]]''
-There are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action, who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes act with a rapidity of which they would have believed themselves incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing to find some new vexation awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a cowardly fashion before the door without daring to enter; such a one is he who keeps a letter fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his mind at the end of six months to undertake a journey that has been a necessity for a year past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves precipitately thrust towards action, like an arrow from a bow.
-The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet cannot explain whence comes this sudden and delirious energy to indolent and voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplishing the simplest and most necessary things, they are at some certain moment of time possessed by a superabundant hardihood which enables them to execute the most absurd and even the most dangerous acts.
-One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one time set fire to a forest, in order to ascertain, as he said, whether the flames take hold with the easiness that is commonly affirmed. His experiment failed ten times running, on the eleventh it succeeded only too well.
-Another lit a cigar by the side of a powder barrel, in order to see, to know, to tempt Destwiy, for a jest, to have the pleasure of suspense, for no reason at all, out of caprice, out of idleness. This is a kind of energy that springs from weariness and reverie; and those in whom it manifests so stubbornly are in general, as I have said, the most indolent and dreamy beings.
+    A LANDSCAPE
-Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes before the gaze of any man, and summon all his poor will before he dare enter a cafe" or pass the pay-box of a theatre, where the ticket-seller seems, in his eyes, invested with all the majesty of Minos, Ecus, and Rhadamanthus, will at times throw himself upon the neck of some old man whom he sees in the street, and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished crowd. Why? Because because this countenance is irresistibly attractive to him? Perhaps; but it is more legitimate to suppose that he himself does not know why.
-I have been more than once a victim to these crises and outbreaks which give us cause to believe that evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires.
+    I would, when I compose my solemn verse,
+    Sleep near the heaven as do astrologers,
+    Near the high bells, and with a dreaming mind
+    Hear their calm hymns blown to me on the wind.
-One morning I arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and tired of idleness, and thrust as it seemed to me to the doing of some great thing, some brilliant act - and then, alas, I opened the window.
+    Out of my tower, with chin upon my hands,
+    I'll watch the singing, babbling human bands;
+    And see clock-towers like spars against the sky,
+    And heavens that bring thoughts of eternity;
-(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification is not the result of labour or combination, but rather of a fortuitous inspiration which would partake, were it not for the strength of the feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic by those who think a little more profoundly than the physician; the mood which thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and inconvenient acts.)
+    And softly, through the mist, will watch the birth
+    Of stars in heaven and lamplight on the earth;
+    The threads of smoke that rise above the town;
+    The moon that pours her pale enchantment down.
-The first person I noticed in the street was a glassvendor whose shrill and discordant cry mounted up to me through the heavy, dull atmosphere of Paris.
+    Seasons will pass till Autumn fades the rose;
+    And when comes Winter with his weary snows,
+    I'll shut the doors and window-casements tight,
+    And build my faery palace in the night.
-It would have been else impossible to account for the sudden and despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.
+    Then I will dream of blue horizons deep;
-"Hello, there!" I cried, and bade him ascend.
+    Of gardens where the marble fountains weep;
+    Of kisses, and of ever-singing birds--
+    A sinless Idyll built of innocent words.
-Meanwhile I reflected, not without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth landing, and the stairway very narrow, the man would have some difficulty in ascending, and in many a place would break off the corners of his fragile merchandise.
+    And Trouble, knocking at my window-pane
+    And at my closet door, shall knock in vain;
+    I will not heed him with his stealthy tread,
+    Nor from my reverie uplift my head;
-At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and then said to him: "What, have you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose and crimson and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You are insolent. You d'are to walk in mean streets when you have no glasses that would make one see beauty in life? " And I hurried him briskly to the staircase, which he staggered down, grumbling.
+    For I will plunge deep in the pleasure still
+    Of summoning the spring-time with my will,
+    Drawing the sun out of my heart, and there
+    With burning thoughts making a summer air.
-I went on to the balcony and caught up a little flower-pot, and when the man appeared in the doorway beneath I let fall my engine of war perpendicularly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset by the shock and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It made a noise like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I cried furiously after him: "The life beautiful! the life beautiful!"
-Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; often enough one pays dearly for them. But what matters an eternity of damnation to him who has found in one second an eternity of enjoyment?
-===Rest of poems===
-THE WIDOWS
+    THE VOYAGE
-Vauvenargues says that in public gardens there axe
-alleys haunted principally by thwarted ambition, by un-
-fortunate inventors, by aborted glories and broken hearts,
-and by all those tumultuous and contracted souls in
-whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet again, and
-who thus betake themselves far from the insolent and
-joyous eyes of the well-to-do. These shadowy retreats
-are the rendezvous of life's cripples.
-To such places above all others do the poet and philos-
-opher direct their avid conjectures. They find there an
-unfailing pasturage, for if there is one place they dis-
-dain to visit it is, as I have already hinted, the place of
-the joy of the rich, A turmoil in the void has no attrac-
-tions for them. On the contrary, they feel themselves
-irresistibly drawn towards all that is feeble, ruined, sor-
-rowing, and bereft.
-An experienced eye is never deceived. In these rigid
+    I
-and dejected lineaments; in these eyes, wan and hollow,
-or bright with the last fading gleams of the combat
-against fate ; in these numerous profound wrinkles and in
-the slow and troubled gait, the eye of experience de-
-ciphers unnumbered legends of mistaken devotion, of un-
-rewarded effort, of hunger and cold humbly and silently
-supported.
-Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the
+    The world is equal to the child's desire
-deserted benches? Poor widows, I mean. Whether in
+    Who plays with pictures by his nursery fire--
-mourning or not they are easily recognised. Moreover,
+    How vast the world by lamplight seems! How small
-there is always something wanting in the mourning of
+    When memory's eyes look back, remembering all!--
-the poor; a lack of harmony which but renders it the
-more heart-breaking. It is forced to be niggardly in its
-show of grief. They are the rich who exhibit a full com-
-plement of sorrow.
+    One morning we set forth with thoughts aflame,
+    Or heart o'erladen with desire or shame;
+    And cradle, to the song of surge and breeze,
+    Our own infinity on the finite seas.
+    Some flee the memory of their childhood's home;
+    And others flee their fatherland; and some,
+    Star-gazers drowned within a woman's eyes,
+    Flee from the tyrant Circe's witcheries;
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE , 129
+    And, lest they still be changed to beasts, take flight
+    For the embrasured heavens, and space, and light,
+    Till one by one the stains her kisses made
+    In biting cold and burning sunlight fade.
-Who is the saddest and most saddening of widows:
+    But the true voyagers are they who part
-she who leads by the hand a child who cannot share her
+    From all they love because a wandering heart
-reveries, or she who is quite alone? I do not know. . . .
+    Drives them to fly the Fate they cannot fly;
-It happened that I once followed for several long hours
+    Whose call is ever "On!"--they know not why.
-an aged and afflicted woman of this kind: rigid and
-erect, wrapped in a little worn shawl, she carried in all
-her being the pride of stoicism.
-She was evidently condemned by her absolute loneli-
+    Their thoughts are like the clouds that veil a star
-ness to the habits of an ancient celibacy; and the mascu-
+    They dream of change as warriors dream of war;
-line characters of her habits added to their austerity a
+    And strange wild wishes never twice the same:
-piquant mysteriousness. In what miserable cafe she
+    Desires no mortal man can give a name.
-dines I know not, nor in what manner. I followed her
-to a reading-room, and for a long time watched her read-
-ing the papers, her active eyes, that once burned with
-tears, seeking for news of a powerful and personal in-
-terest.
-At length, in the afternoon, under a charming au-
-tumnal sky, one of those skies that let fall hosts of
-memories and regrets, she seated herself remotely in a
-garden, to listen, far from the crowd, to one of the
-regimental bands whose music gratifies the people of
-Paris. This was without doubt the small debauch of the
-innocent old woman (or the purified old woman), the
-well-earned consolation for another of the burdensome
-days without a friend, without conversation, without joy,
-without a confidant, that God had allowed to fall upon
-her perhaps for many years past — three hundred and
-sixty-five times a year!
-Yet one more:
-I can .never prevent myself from throwing a glance,
+    II
-if not sympathetic at least full of curiosity, over the
-crowd of outcasts who press around the enclosure of a
-public concert. From the orchestra, across the night,
-float songs of fete, of triumph, or of pleasure. The
-dresses of the women sweep and shimmer; glances pass;
+    We are like whirling tops and rolling balls--
+    For even when the sleepy night-time falls,
+    Old Curiosity still thrusts us on,
+    Like the cruel Angel who goads forth the sun.
+    The end of fate fades ever through the air,
+    And, being nowhere, may be anywhere
+    Where a man runs, hope waking in his breast,
+    For ever like a madman, seeking rest.
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
+    Our souls are wandering ships outweariëd;
+    And one upon the bridge asks: "What's ahead?"
+    The topman's voice with an exultant sound
+    Cries: "Love and Glory!"--then we run aground.
-the well-to-do, tired with doing nothing, saunter about
+    Each isle the pilot signals when 'tis late,
-and make indolent pretence of listening to the music.
+    Is El Dorado, promised us by fate--
-Here are only the rich, the happy; here is nothing that
+    Imagination, spite of her belief,
-does not inspire or exhale the pleasure of being alive,
+    Finds, in the light of dawn, a barren reef.
-except the aspect of the mob that presses against the
-outer barrier yonder, catching gratis, at the will of the
-wind, a tatter of music, and watching the glittering fur-
-nace within.
-There is a reflection of the joy of the rich deep in the
+    Oh the poor seeker after lands that flee!
-eyes of the poor that is always interesting. But to-day,
+    Shall we not bind and cast into the sea
-beyond this people dressed in blouses and calico, I saw
+    This drunken sailor whose ecstatic mood
-one whose nobility was in striking contrast with all the
+    Makes bitterer still the water's weary flood?
-surrounding triviality. She was a tall, majestic woman,
-and so imperious in all her air that I cannot remember
-having seen the like in the collections of the aristocratic
-beauties of the past. A perfume of exalted virtue eman-
-ated from all her being. Her face, sad and worn, was
-in perfect keeping with the deep mourning in which
-she was dressed. She also, like the plebeians she mingled
-with and did not see, looked upon the luminous world
-with a profound eye, and listened with a toss of her
-head.
-It was a strange vision. "Most certainly," I said to
+    Such is an old tramp wandering in the mire,
-myself, "this poverty, if poverty it be, ought not to ad-
+    Dreaming the paradise of his own desire,
-mit of any sordid economy; so noble a face answers for
+    Discovering cities of enchanted sleep
-that. Why then does she remain in surroundings with
+    Where'er the light shines on a rubbish heap.
-which she is so strikingly in contrast?"
-But in curiously passing near her I was able to divine
-the reason. The tall widow held by the hand a child
-dressed like herself in black. Modest as was the price
-of entry, this price perhaps sufficed to pay for some of
-the needs of the little being, or even more, for a super-
-fluity, a toy.
-She will return on foot, dreaming and meditating — and
-alone, always alone, for the child is turbulent and selfish,
+    III
+    Strange voyagers, what tales of noble deeds
+    Deep in your dim sea-weary eyes one reads!
+    Open the casket where your memories are,
+    And show each jewel, fashioned from a star;
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 131
+    For I would travel without sail or wind,
+    And so, to lift the sorrow from my mind,
+    Let your long memories of sea-days far fled
+    Pass o'er my spirit like a sail outspread.
-without gentleness or patience, and cannot become, any
+    What have you seen?
-more than another animal, a dog or a cat, the confidant
-of solitary griefs.
+    IV
-THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, PLUTUS, AND
+                          "We have seen waves and stars,
-GLORY
+    And lost sea-beaches, and known many wars,
+    And notwithstanding war and hope and fear,
+    We were as weary there as we are here.
-Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not less
+    "The lights that on the violet sea poured down,
-extraordinary ascended the mysterious stairway by which
+    The suns that set behind some far-off town,
-Hell gains access to the frailty of sleeping man, and
+    Lit in our hearts the unquiet wish to fly
-communes with him in secret. These three postured
+    Deep in the glimmering distance of the sky;
-gloriously before me, as though they had been upon a
-stage — and a sulphurous splendour emanated from these
-beings who so disengaged themselves from the opaque
-heart of the night. They bore with them so proud a
-presence, and so full of mastery, that at first I took
-them for three of the true Gods.
-The first Satan, by his face, was a creature of doubtful
+    "The loveliest countries that rich cities bless,
-sex. The softness of an ancient Bacchus shone in the
+    Never contained the strange wild loveliness
-lines of his body. His beautiful languorous eyes, of a
+    By fate and chance shaped from the floating cloud--
-tenebrous and indefinite colour, were like violets still
+    And we were always sorrowful and proud!
-laden with the heavy tears of the storm; his slightly-
-parted lips were like heated censers, from whence ex-
-haled the sweet savour of many perfumes; and each time
-he breathed, exotic insects drew, as they fluttered,
-strength from the ardours of his breath.
-Twined about his tunic of purple stuff, in the manner
+    "Desire from joy gains strength in weightier measure.
-of a cincture, was an iridescent Serpent with lifted head
+    Desire, old tree who draw'st thy sap from pleasure,
-and eyes like embers turned sleepily towards him. Phials
+    Though thy bark thickens as the years pass by,
-full of sinister fluids, alternating with shining knives and
+    Thine arduous branches rise towards the sky;
-instruments of surgery, hung from this living girdle. He
-held in his right hand a flagon containing a luminous red
-fluid, and inscribed with a legend in these singular words:
+    "And wilt thou still grow taller, tree more fair
+    Than the tall cypress?
+                           --Thus have we, with care,
+    "Gathered some flowers to please your eager mood,
+    Brothers who dream that distant things are good!
+    "We have seen many a jewel-glimmering throne;
+    And bowed to Idols when wild horns were blown
+    In palaces whose faery pomp and gleam
+    To your rich men would be a ruinous dream;
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
+    "And robes that were a madness to the eyes;
+    Women whose teeth and nails were stained with dyes;
+    Wise jugglers round whose neck the serpent winds----"
-'''drink of this my blood: a perfect restorative";
-and in his left hand held a violin that without doubt
+    V
-served to sing his pleasures and pains, and to spread
-abroad the contagion of his folly upon the nights of the
-Sabbath.
-From rings upon his delicate ankles trailed a broken
+    And then, and then what more?
-chain of gold, and when the burden of this caused him
-to bend his eyes towards the earth, he would contemplate
-with vanity the nails of his feet, as brilliant and polished
-as well-wrought jewels.
-He looked at me with eyes inconsolably heart-broken
-and giving forth an insidious intoxication, and cried in a
-chanting voice: "If thou wilt, if thou wilt, I will make
-thee an overlord of souls; thou shalt be master of living
-matter more perfectly than the sculptor is master of his
-clay; thou shalt taste the pleasure, reborn without end,
-of obliterating thyself in the self of another, and of lur-
-ing other souls to lose themselves in thine."
-But I replied to him: "I thank thee. I only gain
+    VI
-from this venture, then, beings of no more worth than
-my poor self? Though remembrance brings me shame
-indeed, I would forget nothing; and even before I rec-
-ognised thee, thou ancient monster, thy mysterious cut-
-lery, thy equivocal phials, and the chain that imprisons
-thy feet, were symbols showing clearly enough the in-
-convenience of thy friendship. Keep thy gifts."
-The second Satan had neither the air at once tragical
+                                  "O childish minds!
-and smiling, the lovely insinuating ways, nor the delicate
-and scented beauty of the first. A gigantic man, with a
-coarse, eyeless face, his heavy paunch overhung his hips
-and was gilded and pictured, like a tattooing, with a
-crowd of little moving figures which represented the un-
-numbered forms of universal misery. There were little
-sinew-shrunken men who hung themselves willingly from
+    "Forget not that which we found everywhere,
+    From top to bottom of the fatal stair,
+    Above, beneath, around us and within,
+    The weary pageant of immortal sin.
+    "We have seen woman, stupid slave and proud,
+    Before her own frail, foolish beauty bowed;
+    And man, a greedy, cruel, lascivious fool,
+    Slave of the slave, a ripple in a pool;
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 133
+    "The martyrs groan, the headsman's merry mood;
+    And banquets seasoned and perfumed with blood;
+    Poison, that gives the tyrant's power the slip;
+    And nations amorous of the brutal whip;
-nails; there were meagre gnomes, deformed and under-
+    "Many religions not unlike our own,
-sized, whose beseeching eyes begged an alms even more
+    All in full flight for heaven's resplendent throne;
-eloquently than their trembling hands; there were old
+    And Sanctity, seeking delight in pain,
-mothers who nursed clinging abortions at their pendent
+    Like a sick man of his own sickness vain;
-breasts. And many others, even more surprising.
-This heavy Satan beat with his fist upon his immense
+    "And mad mortality, drunk with its own power,
-belly, from whence came a loud and resounding metallic
+    As foolish now as in a bygone hour,
-clangour, which died away in a sighing made by many
+    Shouting, in presence of the tortured Christ:
-human voices. And he smiled unrestrainedly, showing
+    'I curse thee, mine own Image sacrificed.'
-his broken teeth — the imbecile smile of a man who has
-dined too freely. Then the creature said to me:
-"I can give thee that which gets all, which is worth
+    "And silly monks in love with Lunacy,
-all, which takes the place of all." And he tapped his
+    Fleeing the troops herded by destiny,
-monstrous paunch, whence came a sonorous echo as the
+    Who seek for peace in opiate slumber furled--
-commentary to his obscene speech. I turned away with
+    Such is the pageant of the rolling world!"
-disgust and replied: "I need no man's misery to bring
-me happiness; nor will I have the sad wealth of all the
-misfortunes pictured upon thy skin as upon a tapestry."
-As for the She-devil, I should lie if I denied that at
-first I found in her a certain strange charm, which to
-define I can but compare to the charm of certain beauti-
-ful women past their first youth, who yet seem to age no
-more, whose beauty keeps something of the penetrating
-magic of ruins. She had an air at once imperious and
-sordid, and her eyes, though heavy, held a certain power
-of fascination. I was struck most by her voice, wherein
-I found the remembrance of the most delicious contralti,
-as well as a little of the hoarseness of a throat continually
-laved with brandy.
-"Wouldst thou know my power?" said the charming
-and paradoxical voice of the false goddess. "Then
-listen." And she put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet,
-enribboned, like a mirliton, with the titles of all the
-newspapers in the world; and through this trumpet she
-cried my name so that it rolled through space with the
+    VII
+    O bitter knowledge that the wanderers gain!
+    The world says our own age is little and vain;
+    For ever, yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,
+    'Tis horror's oasis in the sands of sorrow.
-LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE
+    Must we depart? If you can rest, remain;
+    Part, if you must. Some fly, some cower in vain,
+    Hoping that Time, the grim and eager foe,
+    Will pass them by; and some run to and fro
-sound of a hundred thousand thunders, and came re-
+    Like the Apostles or the Wandering Jew;
-echoing back to me from the farthest planet.
+    Go where they will, the Slayer goes there too!
+    And there are some, and these are of the wise,
+    Who die as soon as birth has lit their eyes.
-"Devil!" cried I, half tempted, "that at least is worth
+    But when at length the Slayer treads us low,
-something." But it vaguely struck me, upon examining
+    We will have hope and cry, "'Tis time to go!"
-the seductive virago more attentively, that I had seen
+    As when of old we parted for Cathay
-her clinking glasses with certain drolls of my acquaint-
+    With wind-blown hair and eyes upon the bay.
-ance, and her blare of brass carried to my ears I know
-not what memory of a fanfare prostituted.
-So I replied, with all disdain: "Get thee hence! I
+    We will embark upon the Shadowy Sea,
-know better than wed the light o' love of them that I
+    Like youthful wanderers for the first time free--
-will not name."
+    Hear you the lovely and funereal voice
+    That sings: _O come all ye whose wandering joys_
+    _Are set upon the scented Lotus flower,_
+    _For here we sell the fruit's miraculous boon;_
+    _Come ye and drink the sweet and sleepy power_
+    _Of the enchanted, endless afternoon._
-Truly, I had the right to be proud of a so courageous
-renunciation. But unfortunately I awoke, and all my
-courage left me. "In truth," I said, "I must have been
-very deeply asleep indeed to have had such scruples. Ah,
-if they would but return while I am awake, I would not
-be so delicate."
-So I invoked the three in a loud voice, offering to
-dishonour myself as often as necessary to obtain their
-favours; but I had without doubt too deeply offended
-them, for they have never returned.
+    VIII
+    O Death, old Captain, it is time, put forth!
+    We have grown weary of the gloomy north;
+    Though sea and sky are black as ink, lift sail!
+    Our hearts are full of light and will not fail.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+    O pour thy sleepy poison in the cup!
-Translated by F. P. Sturm
+    The fire within the heart so burns us up
+    That we would wander Hell and Heaven through,
+    Deep in the Unknown seeking something _new_!
-THE DANCE OF DEATH
-Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
+===FROM THE FLOWERS OF EVIL Translated by W. J. Robertson===
-Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
-With all the careless and high-stepping grace.
-And the extravagant courtesan's thin face.
-Was slimmer waist e'er in a ball-room wooed?
-Her floating robe, in royal amplitude.
-Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod
-With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.
-The swarms that hum about her collar-bones
-As the lascivious streams caress the stones.
-Conceal from every scornful jest that flies.
-Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes
-Are made of shade and void ; with flowery sprays
+    BENEDICTION
-Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways.
-Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebrae.
-O charm of nothing decked in folly! they
-Who laugh and name you a Caricature,
-They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,
-The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone,
-That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!
-Come you to trouble with your potent sneer
+    When, by the sovran will of Powers Eternal,
-The feast of Life! or are you driven here,
+      The poet passed into this weary world,
-To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir
+    His mother, filled with fears and doubts infernal,
-And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?
+      Clenching her hands towards Heaven these curses hurled.
+    --"Why rather did I not within me treasure
+      "A knot of serpents than this thing of scorn?
+    "Accursed be the night of fleeting pleasure
+      "Whence in my womb this chastisement was borne!
+    "Since thou hast chosen me to be the woman
+      "Whose loathsome fruitfulness her husband shames,
+    "Who may not cast aside this birth inhuman,
+      "As one that flings love-tokens to the flames,
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+    "The hatred that on me thy vengeance launches
+      "On this thwart creature I will pour in flood:
+    "So twist the sapling that its withered branches
+      "Shall never once put forth a cankered bud!"
-Or do you hope, when sing the violins,
+    Regorging thus the venom of her malice,
-And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,
+      And misconceiving thy decrees sublime,
-To drive some mocking nightmare far apart.
+    In deep Gehenna's gulf she fills the chalice
-And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?.
+      Of torments destined to maternal crime.
-Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!
+    Yet, safely sheltered by his viewless angel,
-Eternal alembic of antique distress!
+      The Childe forsaken revels in the Sun;
-Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides
+    And all his food and drink is an evangel
-The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.
+      Of nectared sweets, sent by the Heavenly One.
-And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,
+    He communes with the clouds, knows the wind's voices,
-Among us here, no lover to your mind ;
+      And on his pilgrimage enchanted sings;
-Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?
+    Seeing how like the wild bird he rejoices
-The charms of horror please none but the brave.
+      The hovering Spirit weeps and folds his wings.
-Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir,
+    All those he fain would love shrink back in terror,
-Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller
+      Or, boldened by his fearlessness elate,
-Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath.
+    Seek to seduce him into sin and error,
-The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.
+      And flesh on him the fierceness of their hate.
-For he who has not folded in his arms
+    In bread and wine, wherewith his soul is nourished,
-A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,
+      They mix their ashes and foul spume impure;
-Recks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,
+    Lying they cast aside the things he cherished,
-When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.
+      And curse the chance that made his steps their lure.
-O irresistible, with fleshless face.
+    His spouse goes crying in the public places:
-Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:
+      "Since he doth choose my beauty to adore,
-"Proud lovers with the paint above your bones.
+    "Aping those ancient idols Time defaces
-Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!
+      "I would regild my glory as of yore.
-Withered Antinous, dandies with plump faces,
+    "Nard, balm and myrrh shall tempt till he desires me
-Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,
+      "With blandishments, with dainties and with wine,
-Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,
+    "Laughing if in a heart that so admires me
-Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.
+      "I may usurp the sovranty divine!
+    "Until aweary of love's impious orgies,
+      "Fastening on him my fingers firm and frail,
+    "These claws, keen as the harpy's when she gorges,
+      "Shall in the secret of his heart prevail.
+    "Then, thrilled and trembling like a young bird captured,
+      "The bleeding heart shall from his breast be torn;
+    "To glut his maw my wanton hound, enraptured,
+      "Shall see me fling it to the earth in scorn."
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 139
+    Heavenward, where he beholds a throne resplendent,
+      The poet lifts his hands, devout and proud,
+    And the vast lightnings of a soul transcendent
+      Veil from his gaze awhile the furious crowd:--
-From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,
+    "Blessed be thou, my God, that givest sorrow,
-The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;
+      "Sole remedy divine for things unclean,
-They do not see, within the opened sky,
+    "Whence souls robust a healing virtue borrow,
-The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.
+      "That tempers them for sacred joys serene!
-In every clime and under every sun,
+    "I know thou hast ordained in blissful regions
-Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;
+      "A place, a welcome in the festal bowers,
-And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye;
+    "To call the poet with thy holy Legions,
-And mingles with your madness, irony 1"
+      "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers.
+    "I know that Sorrow is the strength of Heaven,
+      "'Gainst which in vain strive ravenous Earth and Hell,
+    "And that his crown must be of mysteries woven
+      "Whereof all worlds and ages hold the spell.
+    "But not antique Palmyra's buried treasure,
+      "Pearls of the sea, rare metal, precious gem,
+    "Though set by thine own hand could fill the measure
+      "Of beauty for his radiant diadem;
-THE BEACONS
+    "For this thy light alone, intense and tender,
+      "Flows from the primal source of effluence pure,
+    "Whereof all mortal eyes, though bright their splendour,
+      "Are but the broken glass and glimpse obscure."
+                                       SPLEEN ET IDEAL.
-Rubens, oblivious garden of indolence.
-Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,
-Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,
-As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move.
-Leonard da Vinci, sombre and fathomless glass,
+    ILL LUCK
-Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile.
-Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass.
-Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.
-Rembrandt, sad hospital that a murmuring fills.
+    To bear so vast a load of grief
-Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,
+      Thy courage, Sisyphus, I crave!
+      My heart against the task is brave,
+    But Art is long and Time is brief.
-Where every tear-drowlned prayer some woe distils,
+    For from Fame's proud sepulchral arches,
-And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.
+      Towards a graveyard lone and dumb,
+      My sad heart, like a muffled drum,
+    Goes beating slow funereal marches.
-Strong Michelangelo, a vague far place
+    --Full many a shrouded jewel sleeps
-Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;
+    In dark oblivion, lost in deeps
+        Unknown to pick or plummet's sound:
-Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,
+    Full many a weeping blossom flings
-And tear their ^roud with clenched hands void of
+    Her perfume, sweet as secret things,
-ease.
+        In silent solitudes profound.
+                                     LE GUIGNON.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-The fighter's anger, the faun's impudence,
+    BEAUTY
-Thou makest of all these a lovely thing;
-Proud heart, sick body, mind's magnificence:
-PuGET, the convict's melancholy king.
-Watteau, the carnival of illustrious hearts.
+    My face is a marmoreal dream, O mortals!
+      And on my breast all men are bruised in turn,
+      So moulded that the poet's love may burn
+    Mute and eternal as the earth's cold portals.
-Fluttering like moths upon the wings of chance;
+    Throned like a Sphinx unveiled in the blue deep,
+      A heart of snow my swan-white beauty muffles;
+      I hate the line that undulates and ruffles:
+    And never do I laugh and never weep.
-Bright lustres light the silk that flames and darts.
+    The poets, prone beneath my presence towering
-And pour down folly on the whirling dance.
+    With stately port of proudest obelisks,
+    Worship with rites austere, their days devouring;
-Goya, a nightmare full of things unknown;
+    For I have charms to keep their love, pure disks
+    That make all things more beautiful and tender:
+    My large eyes, radiant with eternal splendour!
+                                      LA BEAUTÉ.
-The foetus witches broil on Sabbath night;
-Old women at the mirror; children lone
-Who tempt old demons with their limbs delight.
-Delacroix, lake of blood ill angels haunt.
-Where ever-green, o'ershadowing woods arise;
-Under the surly heaven strange fanfares chaunt
+    IDEAL LOVE
-And pass, like one of Weber's strangled sighs.
-And malediction, blasphemy and groan,
-Ecstasies, cries, Te Deums, and tears of brine,
+    No, never can these frail ephemeral creatures,
+      The withered offspring of a worthless age,
+    These buskined limbs, these false and painted features,
+      The hunger of a heart like mine assuage.
-Are echoes through a thousand labyrinths flown;
+    Leave to the laureate of sickly posies
-For mortal hearts an opiate divine;
+      Gavami's hospital sylphs, a simpering choir!
+    Vainly I seek among those pallid roses
+      One blossom that allures my red desire.
-A shout cried by a thousand sentinels.
+    Thou with my soul's abysmal dreams be blended,
-An order from a thousand bugles tossed,
+    Lady Macbeth, in crime superb and splendid,
+      A dream of Æschylus flowered in cold eclipse
-A beacon o'er a thousand citadels,
+    Of Northern suns! Thou, Night, inspire my passion,
+    Calm child of Angelo, coiling in strange fashion
+      Thy large limbs moulded for a Titan's lips!
+                                       L'IDÉAL.
-A call to huntsmen in deep woodlands lost.
-It is the mightiest witness that could rise
-To prove our dignity, O Lord, to .Thee;
-This sob that rolls from age to age, and dies
-Upon the verge of Thy Eternity!
+    HYMN TO BEAUTY
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 141
+    Be thou from Hell upsprung or Heaven descended,
+      Beauty! thy look demoniac and divine
+    Pours good and evil things confusedly blended,
+      And therefore art thou likened unto wine.
-THE SADNESS OF THE MOON
+    Thine eye with dawn is filled, with twilight dwindles,
+      Like winds of night thou sprinklest perfumes mild;
+    Thy kiss, that is a spell, the child's heart kindles,
+      Thy mouth, a chalice, makes the man a child.
-The Moon more indolently dreams to-night
+    Fallen from the stars or risen from gulfs of error,
-Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,
+      Fate dogs thy glamoured garments like a slave;
-Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
+    With wanton hands thou scatterest joy and terror,
-Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.
+      And rulest over all, cold as the grave.
-Upon her silken avalanche of down.
+    Thou tramplest on the dead, scornful and cruel,
-Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
+      Horror coils like an amulet round thine arms,
-And watches the white visions past her flown.
+    Crime on thy superb bosom is a jewel
-Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.
+      That dances amorously among its charms.
-And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
+    The dazzled moth that flies to thee, the candle,
-Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
+      Shrivels and burns, blessing thy fatal flame;
-Some pious poet, enemy of sleep.
+    The lover that dies fawning o'er thy sandal
+      Fondles his tomb and breathes the adored name.
-Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
+    What if from Heaven or Hell thou com'st, immortal
-Whence gleams of iris and of opal start.
+      Beauty? O sphinx-like monster, since alone
-And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.
+    Thine eye, thy smile, thy hand opens the portal
+      Of the Infinite I love and have not known.
+    What if from God or Satan be the evangel?
+      Thou my sole Queen! Witch of the velvet eyes!
+    Since with thy fragrance, rhythm and light, O Angel!
+      In a less hideous world time swiftlier flies.
+                                       HYMNE À LA BEAUTÉ.
-THE BALCONY
-Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
-O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,
-Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,
+    EXOTIC FRAGRANCE
-The charm of evenings by the gentle fire.
-Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses I
-The eves illumined by the burning coal.
+    When, with closed eyes in the warm autumn night,
+      I breathe the fragrance of thy bosom bare,
+      My dream unfurls a clime of loveliest air,
+    Drenched in the fiery sun's unclouded light.
-The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings —
+    An indolent island dowered with heaven's delight,
+      Trees singular and fruits of savour rare,
+      Men having sinewy frames robust and spare,
+    And women whose clear eyes are wondrous bright.
-How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul I
+    Led by thy fragrance to those shores I hail
-Ah, and we said imperishable things.
+      A charmed harbour thronged with mast and sail,
+    Still wearied with the quivering sea's unrest;
-Those eves illumined by the burning coal.
+    What time the scent of the green tamarinds
+      That thrills the air and fills my swelling breast
+    Blends with the mariners' song and the sea-winds.
+                                       PARFUM EXOTIQUE.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm,
+    XXVIII SONNET
-And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood,
-In bending o'er you, queen of every charm,
+    In undulant robes with nacreous sheen impearled
+      She walks as in some stately saraband;
+    Or like lithe snakes by sacred charmers curled
+      In cadence wreathing on the slender wand.
-I thought I breathed the perfume in your blood.
+    Calm as blue wastes of sky and desert sand
+      That watch unmoved the sorrows of this world;
+    With slow regardless sweep as on the strand
+      The long swell of the woven sea-waves swirled.
-The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm.
+    Her polished orbs are like a mystic gem,
+      And, while this strange and symbolled being links
+      The inviolate angel and the antique sphinx,
-The film of night flowed round and over us,
+    Insphered in gold, steel, light and diadem
-And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet;
+      The splendour of a lifeless star endows
+      With clear cold majesty the barren spouse.
-I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous,
-And in my hands fraternal slept your feet —
-Night, like a film, flowed round and over us.
-I can recall those happy days forgot.
-And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past.
+    MUSIC
-Your languid beauties now would move me not
-Did not your gentle heart and body cast
-The old spell of those happy days forgot.
-Can vows and perfumes, kisses infinite.
+    Launch me, O music, whither on the soundless
-Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound;
+             Sea my star gleams pale!
+    I beneath cloudy cope or rapt in boundless
+             Æther set my sail;
-As rise to heaven suns once again made bright
+    With breast outblown, swollen by the wind that urges
-After being plunged in deep seas and profound?
+             Swelling sheets, I scale
+    The summit of the wave whose vexed surges
+             Night from me doth veil;
-Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!
+    A labouring vessel's passions in my pulses
+             Thrill the shuddering sense;
+    The wind that wafts, the tempest that convulses,
+             O'er the gulf immense
+    Swing me.--Anon flat calm and clearer air
+             Glass my soul's despair!
+                                       LA MUSIQUE.
-THE SICK MUSE
-Poor Muse, alas, what ail's thee, then, to-day?
-Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions bum,
-Upon thy brow in alternation play.
-Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn.
-Have the green lemure and the goblin red,
-Poured on thee love and terror from their urn?
-Or with despotic hand the nightmare dread
-Deep plunged thee in some fabulous Mintume?
+    THE SPIRITUAL DAWN
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 143
+    When on some wallowing soul the roseate East
+      Dawns with the Ideal that awakes and gnaws,
+      By vengeful working of mysterious laws
+    An angel rises in the drowsed beast.
-Would that thy breast where so deep thoughts arise,
+    The inaccessible blue of the soul-sphere
-Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs ;
+      To him whose grovelling dream remorse doth gall
-Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by wave
+      Yawns wide as when the gulfs of space enthral.
+    So, heavenly Goddess, Spirit pure and clear,
-In rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave,
+    Even on the reeking ruins of vile shame
-When Phoebus shared his alternating reign
+      Thy rosy vision, beautiful and bright,
-With mighty Pan, lord of the ripening grain.
+      For ever floats on my enlargëd sight.
-THE VENAL MUSE
+    Thus sunlight blackens the pale taper-flame;
+      And thus is thy victorious phantom one,
+      O soul of splendour, with the immortal Sun!
+                                       L'AUBE SPIRITUELLE.
-Muse of my heart, lover of palaces,
-When January comes with wind and sleet,
-During the snowy eve's long wearinesses,
-Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet?
-Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders
+    THE FLAWED BELL
-In the moon-beams that through the window fly?
-Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders,
+    Bitter and sweet it is, in winter night,
-Reap the far star-gold of the vaulted sky?
+      Hard by the flickering fire that smokes, to list
+    While far-off memories rise in sad slow flight,
+      With chimes that echo singing through the mist.
-For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul.
+    O blessëd be the bell whose vigorous throat,
-Must swing a censer, wear a holy stole.
+      In spite of age alert, with strength unspent,
-And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between.
+    Utters religiously his faithful note,
+      Like an old warrior watching near the tent!
-Or, like a starving mountebank, expose
+    My soul, alas! is flawed, and when despair
-Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those
+    Would people with her songs the chill night-air
-Who wait thy jests to drive away thy spleen.
+      Too oft they faint in hoarse enfeebled tones,
-THE EVIL MONK
+      As when a wounded man forgotten moans
+    By the red pool, beneath a heap of dead,
+    And dying writhes in frenzy on his bed.
+                                       LA CLOCHE FÉLÉE.
-The ancient cloisters on their lofty walls
-Had holy Truth in painted frescoes shown,
-And, seeing these, the pious in those halls
-Felt their cold, lone austereness less alone.
+===THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE Translated by Richard Herne Shepherd===
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-At that time when Christ's seed flowered all around,
-More than one monk, forgotten in his hour,
-Taking for studio the burial-ground.
+    I
-Glorified Death with simple faith and power.
+    A CARCASS
-And my soul is a sepulchre where I,
-cenobite, have spent eternity:
-On the vile cloister walls no pictures rise.
+    Recall to mind the sight we saw, my soul,
+        That soft, sweet summer day:
+    Upon a bed of flints a carrion foul,
+        Just as we turn'd the way
-O when may I cast off this weariness,
+    Its legs erected, wanton-like, in air,
-And make the pageant of my old distress
+        Burning and sweating past,
+    In unconcern'd and cynic sort laid bare
+        To view its noisome breast.
-For these hands labour, pleasure for these eyes?
+    The sun lit up the rottenness with gold,
+        To bake it well inclined,
+    And give great Nature back a hundredfold
+        All she together join'd.
+    The sky regarded as the carcass proud
+        Oped flower-like to the day;
+    So strong the odour, on the grass you vow'd
+        You thought to faint away.
+    The flies the putrid belly buzz'd about,
+        Whence black battalions throng
+    Of maggots, like thick liquid flowing out
+        The living rags along.
-THE TEMPTATION
+    And as a wave they mounted and went down,
+        Or darted sparkling wide:
+    As if the body, by a wild breath blown,
+        Lived as it multiplied.
-The Demon, in my chamber high.
+    From all this life a music strange there ran,
-This morning came to visit me.
+        Like wind and running burns:
+    Or like the wheat a winnower in his fan
+        With rhythmic movement turns.
-And, thinking he would find some fault,
+    The forms wore off, and as a dream grew faint,
-He whispered: "I would know of thee
+        An outline dimly shown,
+    And which the artist finishes to paint
+        From memory alone.
-Among the many lovely things
+    Behind the rocks watch'd us with angry eye
-That make the magic of her face.
+        A bitch disturb'd in theft,
+    Waiting to take, till we had pass'd her by
+        The morsel she had left.
-Among the beauties, black and rose.
+    Yet you will be like that corruption too,
-That make her body's charm and grace.
+        Like that infection prove--
+    Star of my eyes, sun of my nature, you,
+        My angel and my love!
-Which is most fair?" Thou didst reply
+    Queen of the graces, you will even be so,
-To the Abhorred, O soul of mine:
+        When, the last ritual said,
+    Beneath the grass and the fat flowers you go,
+        To mould among the dead.
-"No single beauty is the best
+    Then, O my beauty, tell the insatiate worm,
-When she is all one flower divine.
+        Who wastes you with his kiss,
+    I have kept the godlike essence and the form
+        Of perishable bliss!
-When all things charm me I ignore
-Which one alone brings most delight;
-She shines before me like the dawn.
-And she consoles me like the night.
+    II
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 145
+    WEEPING AND WANDERING
-The harmony is far too great,
-That governs all her body fair.
+    Say, Agatha, if at times your spirit turns
-For impotence to analyse
+    Far from the black sea of the city's mud,
+    To another ocean, where the splendour burns
+    All blue, and clear, and deep as maidenhood?
+    Say, Agatha, if your spirit thither turns?
-And say which note is sweetest there.
+    The boundless sea consoles the weary mind!
+    What demon gave the sea--that chantress hoarse
+    To the huge organ of the chiding wind--
+    The function grand to rock us like a nurse?
+    The boundless ocean soothes the jaded mind!
-O mystic metamorphosis!
+    O car and frigate, bear me far away,
+    For here our tears moisten the very clay.
+    Is't true that Agatha's sad heart at times
+    Says, far from sorrows, from remorse, from crimes,
+    Remove me, car, and, frigate, bear away?
-My senses into one sense flow —
+    O perfumed paradise, how far removed,
-Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,
+    Where 'neath a clear sky all is love and joy,
+    Where all we love is worthy to be loved,
+    And pleasure drowns the heart, but does not cloy.
+    O perfumed paradise, so far removed!
-Her breath is music faint and low! "
+    But the green paradise of childlike loves,
+    The walks, the songs, the kisses, and the flowers,
+    The violins dying behind the hills, the hours
+    Of evening and the wine-flasks in the groves.
+    But the green paradise of early loves,
+    The innocent paradise, full of stolen joys,
+    Is't farther off than ev'n the Indian main?
+    Can we recall it with our plaintive cries,
+    Or give it life, with silvery voice, again,
+    The innocent paradise, full of furtive joys?
-THE IRREPARABLE
-Can we suppress the old Remorse
-Who bends our heart beneath his stroke,
+    III
-Who feeds, as worms feed on the corse,
-Or as the acorn on the oak?
+    LESBOS
-Can we suppress the old Remorse?
-Ah, in what philtre, wine, or spell,
-May we drown this our ancient foe,
-Destructive glutton, .gorging well,
+    Mother of Latin sports and Greek delights,
-Patient as the ants, and slow?
+      Where kisses languishing or pleasureful,
+      Warm as the suns, as the water-melons cool,
+    Adorn the glorious days and sleepless nights,
+    Mother of Latin sports and Greek delights.
-What wine, what philtre, or what spell?
+    Lesbos, where kisses are as waterfalls
+      That fearless into gulfs unfathom'd leap,
+    Now run with sobs, now slip with gentle brawls,
+      Stormy and secret, manifold and deep;
+    Lesbos, where kisses are as waterfalls!
-Tell it, enchantress, if you can,
+    Lesbos, where Phryne Phryne to her draws,
+      Where ne'er a sigh did echoless expire,
+      As Paphos' equal thee the stars admire,
+    Nor Venus envies Sappho without cause!
+    Lesbos, where Phryne Phryne to her draws,
-Tell me, with anguish overcast,
+    Lesbos, the land of warm and languorous nights,
-Wounded, as a dying man.
+      Where by their mirrors seeking sterile good,
+    The girls with hollow eyes, in soft delights,
+      Caress the ripe fruits of their womanhood,
+    Lesbos, the land of warm and languorous nights.
-Beneath the swift hoofs hurrjdng past.
+    Leave, leave old Plato's austere eye to frown;
-Tell it, enchantress, if you can,
+      Pardon is thine for kisses' sweet excess,
+    Queen of the land of amiable renown,
+      And for exhaustless subtleties of bliss,
+    Leave, leave old Plato's austere eye to frown.
-To him the wolf already tears
+    Pardon is thine for the eternal pain
+      That on the ambitious hearts for ever lies,
+    Whom far from us the radiant smile could gain,
+      Seen dimly on the verge of other skies;
+    Pardon is thine for the eternal pain!
-Who sees the carrion pinions wave
+    Which of the gods will dare thy judge to be,
+      And to condemn thy brow with labour pale,
+      Not having balanced in his golden scale
+    The flood of tears thy brooks pour'd in the sea?
+    Which of the gods will dare thy judge to be?
-This broken warrior who despairs
+    What boot the laws of just and of unjust?
-To have a cross above his grave —
+      Great-hearted virgins, honour of the isles,
+    Lo, your religion also is august,
+      And love at hell and heaven together smiles!
+    What boot the laws of just and of unjust?
-This wretch the wolf already tears.
+    For Lesbos chose me out from all my peers,
+      To sing the secret of her maids in flower,
+      Opening the mystery dark from childhood's hour
+    Of frantic laughters, mix'd with sombre tears;
+    For Lesbos chose me out from all my peers.
+    And since I from Leucate's top survey,
+      Like a sentinel with piercing eye and true,
+    Watching for brig and frigate night and day,
+      Whose distant outlines quiver in the blue,
+    And since I from Leucate's top survey,
+    To learn if kind and merciful the sea,
+      And midst the sobs that make the rock resound,
+    Brings back some eve to pardoning Lesbos, free
+      The worshipp'd corpse of Sappho, who made her bound
+    To learn if kind and merciful the sea!
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+    Of her the man-like lover-poetess,
+      In her sad pallor more than Venus fair!
+      The azure eye yields to that black eye, where
+    The cloudy circle tells of the distress
+    Of her the man-like lover-poetess!
-Can one illume a leaden sky,
+    Fairer than Venus risen on the world,
-Or tear apart the shadowy veil
+      Pouring the treasures of her aspect mild,
+    The radiance of her fair white youth unfurl'd
+      On Ocean old enchanted with his child;
+    Fairer than Venus risen on the world.
-Thicker than pitch, no star on high,
+    Of Sappho, who, blaspheming, died that day
-Not one funereal glimmer pale?
+      When trampling on the rite and sacred creed,
+    She made her body fair the supreme prey
+      Of one whose pride punish'd the impious deed
+    Of Sappho who, blaspheming, died that day.
-Can one illume a leaden sky?
+    And since that time it is that Lesbos moans,
+      And, spite the homage which the whole world pays,
+    Is drunk each night with cries of pain and groans,
+      Her desert shores unto the heavens do raise,
+    And since that time it is that Lesbos moans!
-Hope lit the windows of the Inn,
-But now that shining flame is dead;
-And how shall martyred pilgrims win
-Along the moonless road they tread?
-Satan has darkened all the Inn!
-Witch, do you love accursed hearts?
+===INTIMATE PAPERS FROM THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF BAUDELAIRE Translated by Joseph T. Shipley===
-Say, do you know the reprobate?
-Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts
-Make souls the targets for their hate?
-Witch, do you know accursed hearts?
-The Might-have-been with tooth accursed
+ROCKETS
-Gnaws at the piteous souls of men.
-The deep foundations suffer first.
+MY HEART LAID BARE
-And all the structure crumbles then
-Beneath the bitter tooth accursed.
+The following pages (not included in the "complete" French edition)
+contain notes found after the death of Baudelaire; disconnected
+fragments; echoes; pistils of ideas, promising wondrous blossom, to
+which no pollen came. They epitomize the moral and intellectual life of
+the artist. In his own art, Baudelaire is the creator of a new mood, in
+which Maeterlinck and Verlaine are among his disciples, where Swinburne
+and Wilde have followed him; in painting and in music, his criticism
+was seeking in 1850 all that the later development of these arts has
+brought forth. The reflection of that brilliant mind glows in these
+intimate pages.
+In the almost absolute isolation in which he confined himself more and
+more, Baudelaire, who had so loved to expand in conversation, felt the
+need of a confidant that would not importune him with useless counsels,
+nor with expressions of sympathy he would have repulsed, if only
+through dandyism. Paper alone could be that confidant.
-n
+The poet is wholly within these journals, with his religious,
+political, moral and literary theories, above all, with the explicit
+evidence of his weaknesses and his griefs. What skilled theologian has
+made a more haughty confession than this: "There are none great among
+men save the poet, the priest and the soldier; the man who sings, the
+man who blesses, the man who sacrifices others and himself. The rest is
+made for the whip"? What political economist has made a more absolute
+declaration of principles than this: "There is no reasonable, stable
+government save the aristocratic. Monarchy and republic, based on
+democracy, are equally weak and absurd"?
+His ideal of the greatness of the individual is derived logically from
+his conception of an aristocratic society under the triumvirate of the
+poet, the priest and the soldier. "Before all, to be a great man and
+a saint for one's self;" that, for Baudelaire, is the one ambition
+worthy of a superior nature. He has indicated the principal traits of
+the ideal "dandy" that he has sought unceasingly. The dandy is not
+only the most elegant of men, of the most original and discriminating
+tastes, which he exercises in his habits, in the choice of his books
+or his mistress; he is armed with a will superior to all obstacles,
+opposing caprice with invincible energy, and correcting in himself the
+inevitable faults of nature with all the resources of art.
+The two manuscripts in which these ideals are scattered differ so
+slightly that it might seem impossible to decide which should be read
+first. A closer examination, however, indicates that _Rockets_ is of
+the period about ten years before the author's death, while _My Heart
+Laid Bare_ belongs entirely to the days when he felt the first attacks
+of the illness that was to bear him off. No effort has been made to
+group the paragraphs according to topic; they are printed as they
+appear in the manuscript (the page divisions of which are indicated
+by the successive numbers). The documents furnish an interesting
+supplement to the more formal works of the poet, and a valuable
+contribution to literature.
-Often, when seated at the play.
-And sonorous music lights the stage,
-I see the frail hand of a Fay
+INTIMATE PAPERS
-With magic dawn illume the rage
-Of the dark sky. Oft at the play
+ROCKETS
-A being made of gauze and fire
-Casts to the earth a Demon great.
-And my heart, whence all hopes expire,
+I
-Is like a stage where I await,
-In vain, the Fay with wings of fire!
+Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine.
+God is the only being who, to govern, need not even exist.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 147
+That which is created by the mind lives more truly than matter.
+Love is the desire of prostitution. There is not even one noble
+pleasure which cannot be reduced to prostitution.
+At a play, at a ball, each one finds pleasure in all. What is art?
+Prostitution.
-A FORMER LIFE
+The pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious expression of joy in
+the multiplication of number.
-Long since, I lived beneath vast porticoes,
+_All_ is number. Number is in _all_. Number is in the individual.
-By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired,
+Intoxication is a number.
-Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows,
-Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired.
-The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies
+The desire of productive concentration ought to replace, in a mature
-Mingled its music, turbulent and rich,
+being, the desire of deperdition.
-Solemn and mystic, with the colours which
-The setting sun reflected in my eyes.
-And there I lived amid voluptuous calms,
+Love may spring from a generous emotion: desire of prostitution; but it
+is soon corrupted by the desire of possession.
-In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave.
+Love would like to come out of itself, to merge itself in its victim,
+as the victor in the vanquished, while still preserving the privileges
+of the conqueror.
-Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave.
+The delights of whoso keeps a mistress partake at once of the angel and
+of the proprietor. Charity and ferocity. They are even independent of
+sex, of beauty, of the animal kind.
-Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms.
+Immense depth of thought in popular phrases, hollowed out by
-They were my slaves — the only care they had
+generations of ants.
-To know what secret grief had made me sad.
+II
-DON JUAN IN HADES
-When Juan sought the subterranean flood,
+Of the femininity of the Church, as the reason for its omnipotence.
-And paid his obolus on the Stygian shore,
-Charon, the proud and sombre beggar, stood
+Of the color violet (restrained, mysterious, veiled love, color of
-With one strong, vengeful hand on either oar.
+canoness).
-With open robes and bodies agonised.
+The priest is immense, because he makes one believe in a host of
+astounding matters. That the Church wants to do all and to be all, is
+a law of the human mind. Mankind worships authority. Priests are the
+servants and sectaries of the imagination. The throne and the altar,
+revolutionary maxim. Religious intoxication of great cities. Pantheism.
+I, that is all; all, that is I. Vortex.
-Lost women writhed beneath that darkling sky;
-There were sounds as of victims sacrificed:
+III
-Behind him all the dark was one long cry.
+I think I have already written in my notes that love is very like
+torture or a surgical operation. But that idea can be developed in the
+bitterest way. Even though two lovers are deeply smitten and filled
+with reciprocal desire, one of the two will always be more calm, or
+less enraptured than the other. He or she is the surgeon, or the
+hangman; the other is the patient, the victim. Do you hear those sighs,
+preludes of a tragedy of shame, those groanings, those cries, those
+throat-rattlings? Who has not breathed them, who has not irresistibly
+summoned them forth? And what worse do you find in the torments applied
+by painstaking torturers? Those faraway eyes of the somnambulist, those
+limbs the muscles of which twitch and grow taut as under the action
+of a galvanic battery; drunkenness, delirium, opium, in their most
+infuriate consequences, surely yield no such frightful, no such curious
+examples. And the human countenance, which Ovid thought fashioned to
+reflect the stars, behold! it speaks only of insane ferocity, or is
+spread in a species of death. For, certainly, I believe it would be
+sacrilege to apply the word "ecstasy" to that sort of decomposition.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+Frightful play, in which one of the players must lose control of
+himself!
-And Sganarelle, with laughter, claimed his pledge;
+Once, in my presence, it was asked in what lay the greatest pleasure
+of love. Some one answered naturally: in receiving, and another: in
+giving one's self. The former said: pleasure of pride; and the latter:
+delight of humility! All these blackguards spoke like the Imitation of
+Christ.--Finally, an impudent Utopian came forward to affirm that the
+greatest pleasure of love is to create citizens for the fatherland.
-Don Luis, with trembling finger in the air,
+As for me, I said: The one and the supreme bliss of love rests in the
-Showed to the souls who wandered in the sedge
+certainty of doing _evil_. Both man and woman know, from birth, that in
+evil lies all bliss.
-The evil son who scorned his hoary hair.
-Shivering with woe, chaste Elvira the while,
+V
-Near him untrue to all but her till now.
-Seemed to beseech him for one farewell smile
-Lit with the sweetness of the first soft vow.
-And clad in armour, a tall man of stone
+When a man takes to his bed, almost all his friends have a secret
+desire to see him die; some, to establish the fact that his health is
+inferior to theirs; others, in the disinterested hope of studying an
+agony.
-Held firm the helm, and clove the gloomy flood ;
+The arabesque is the most spiritual of designs..
-But, staring at the vessel's track alone.
-Bent on his sword the unmoved hero stood.
+VI
-THE LIVING FLAME
+The man of letters rouses the capitals and conveys a taste for
+intellectual gymnastics.
-They pass before me, these Eyes full of light.
+We love women in proportion as they are strangers to us. To love
-Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise;
+intelligent women is a pleasure of the pederast. Thus bestiality
-The holy brothers pass before my sight.
+excludes pederasty.
-And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes.
-They keep me from all sin and error grave.
+The spirit of buffoonery need not exclude charity; but that's rare.
-They set me in the path whence Beauty came;
-They are my servants, and I am their slave,
-And all my soul obeys the living flame.
-Beautiful Eyes that gleam with mystic light
+Enthusiasm applied to other things than abstractions is a sign of
-As candles lighted at full noon ; the sun
+weakness and disease.
-Dims not your flame phantastical and bright.
-You sing the dawn; they celebrate life done;
+The thin is more naked, more indecent, than the fat.
-Marching you chaunt my soul's awakening hymn,
-Stars that no sun has ever made grow dim!
+VII
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 149
-CORRESPONDENCES
+_Tragic sky_. Term of an abstract order applied to a material thing.
-In Nature's temple living pillars rise,
+Man drinks light with the atmosphere. Thus they are right who say that
+the night air is not healthful for labor.
-And words are murmured none have understood,
+Man is born a fireworshipper.
-And man must wander through a tangled wood
-Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.
+Fireworks, conflagrations, incendiaries.
-As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
+If one imagine a born fireworshipper born a Parsee, one could create a
-Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;
+story.
-Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
-Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.
-Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
+VIII
-Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
-Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild.
-Have all the expansion of things infinite :
+Misunderstanding of a countenance is the result of the eclipse of the
-As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
+real image by the hallucination born of it.
-Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight.
+Know then the joys of a bitter life, and pray, pray ceaselessly. Prayer
+is a store-house of energy. (Altar of the will. Moral dynamics. The
+sorcery of the sacraments. Hygiene of the soul.)
+Music deepens the sky.
-THE FLASK
+Jean Jacques said that he could not enter a restaurant without a
+certain emotion. For a timid nature, a ticket office somewhat resembles
+the tribunal of hell.
-There are some powerful odours that can pass
+Life has but one true attraction: the attraction of play. But if we
+care not whether we win or lose?
-Out of the stoppered flagon; even glass
-To them is porous. Oft when some old box
+IX
-Brought from the East is opened and the locks
-And hinges creak and cry; or in a press
+Nations have great men only in spite of themselves--like families.
+They make every effort not to have them. Therefore, the great man must,
+in order to exist, possess an offensive force greater than the power of
+resistance developed by millions of individuals.
-In some deserted house, where the sharp stress
+Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we
+might say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be
+incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance
+of the danger.
-Of odours old and dusty fills the brain ;
-An ancient flask is brought to light again.
+X
-And forth the ghosts of long-dead odours creep.
-There, softly trembling in the shadows, sleep
+There are tortoise-shell hides against which scorn is no longer a
+vengeance.
-A thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalides.
+Many friends, many gloves.[1] Those who have admired me were despised,
+I might even say were despicable, if I sought to flatter honest men.
+Girardin talk Latin! _Pecudesque locutae_.
+He belongs to an infidel Society to send Robert Houdin to the Arabs to
+convert them from the miracles.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+[Footnote 1: 'for fear of the itch' is added elsewhere.]
-Phantoms of old the folding darkness hides,
-Who make faint flutterings as their wings unfold,
+XI
-Rose-washed and azure-tinted, shot with gold.
+These great, beautiful vessels, imperceptibly swaying (rocking) on the
+tranquil waters, these sturdy ships, with their idle, homesick air, do
+they not ask us, in a silent tongue: When do we sail for happiness?
+Not to forget the marvellous in drama, sorcery, romance.
-A memory that brings languor flutters here:
+The background, the atmosphere in which a whole tale should be steeped.
-The fainting eyelids droop, and giddy Fear
+(See the Fall of the House of Usher, and refer this to the profound
-Thrusts with both hands the soul towards the pit
+sensations of hashish and of opium.)
-Where, like a Lazarus from his winding-sheet.
-Arises from the gulf of sleep a ghost
-Of an old passion, long since loved and lost.
-So I, when vanished from man's memory
-Deep in some dark and sombre chest I lie,
-An empty flagon they have cast aside,
-Broken and soiled, the dust upon my pride,
-Will be your shroud, beloved pestilence!
-The witness of your might and virulence.
-Sweet poison mixed by angels ; bitter cup
-Of life and death my heart has drunken up!
+XII
-REVERSIBILITY
-Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
+Are there mathematical insanities, and idiots who think that two and
+two make three? In other words, can hallucination, if the words do not
+cry out (at being coupled), invade the affairs of pure reason? If, when
+a man is sunk in habits of sloth, of revery, of idleness, to the point
+of constantly deferring the important thing to the morrow, another
+man were to wake him in the morning with biting lash, and were to
+whip him pitilessly until, unable to work for pleasure, he worked for
+fear, that man, that flogger, would he not be truly the friend, the
+benefactor? Besides, one might declare that pleasure would follow, much
+more justly than is said "Love comes after marriage."
-Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite.
+Similarly, in politics, the true saint is he who lashes and destroys
-And the vague terrors of the fearful night
+the people, for the people's good.
-That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?
+That which is not slightly deformed seems to lack feeling; whence
+it follows that irregularity, that is, the un-foreseen, surprise,
+astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.
-Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?
-Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
+XIII
-With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,
-When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,
-And makes herself the captain of our fate,
+Theodore de Banville is not exactly materialistic; he is luminous. His
+poetry represents happy hours.
-Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?
+For each letter from a creditor, write fifty lines on an abstract
+subject, and you are saved.
+XV
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 151
-Angel of health, did ever you know pain,
+Translation and paraphrase of the _Passion_. To refer everything to
-Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls
+that.
-The cold length of the white infirmary walls,
-With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?
+Spiritual and physical joys born of the storm, thunder and lightning,
+tocsin of loving, shadowy memories, of years gone by.
-Angel of health, did ever you know pain?
-Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
+XVI
-Know you the fear of age, the torment vile
-Of reading secret horror in the smile
+I have found the definition of Beauty, of my Beauty. It is something
-Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago?
+ardent and sad, something slightly vague, giving conjecture wing. I
-Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?
+will, if you please, apply my idea to a palpable object, for instance,
+to the most interesting object in society, to a woman's countenance.
+A seductive and beautiful head, a woman's head, I mean, is a head
+that brings dreams at once--confusedly--of voluptuousness and of
+sadness; which bears a suggestion of melancholy, of weariness, even of
+satiety,--or perhaps an opposite emotion, an ardor, a wish to live,
+mingled with pent up bitterness, as springs from privation or from
+despair. Mystery, regret, are also characteristics of beauty.
-Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.
+A handsome male head need not convey, save perhaps in the eyes of
+a woman, that suggestion of voluptuousness, which, in a female
+countenance, is generally tantalizing in proportion as the face is
+melancholy. But that head also will bear something ardent and sad,
+spiritual needs, ambitions vaguely receding, the thought of a rumbling,
+unused power, sometimes the thought of a vengeful lack of feeling (for
+the ideal type of the dandy must not be neglected here), sometimes
+also--and that is one of the most interesting characteristics of
+beauty--mystery, and finally (let me have the courage to confess to
+what degree I feel myself modern in esthetics) _misfortune_. I do not
+claim that Joy cannot be associated with Beauty, but I do say that
+Joy is one of its most vulgar ornaments, while Melancholy is, as it
+were, its illustrious companion, to such a degree that I can scarcely
+conceive (is my brain an enchanted mirror?) a type of beauty in which
+is no _Misfortune_. Following--others might say: obsessed by--these
+ideas, you can see that it would be difficult for me not to conclude
+that the most perfect type of manly Beauty is Satan,--as pictured by
+Milton.
-Old David would have asked for youth afresh
-From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh;
-I but implore your prayers to aid my plight,
+XVII
-Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.
+Auto-idolatry. Poetic harmony of character. Eurhythmy of character
+and faculties. Of conserving all the faculties. Of augmenting all the
+faculties. A cult (Magianism, evocatory sorcery).
+The sacrifice and the vow are the highest formulæ and symbols of
+exchange.
-THE EYES OF BEAUTY
+Two fundamental literary qualities: the supernatural, and irony.
+Individual glance, aspect in which things maintain themselves before
+the writer, then a Satanic turn of mind. The supernatural includes the
+general color and the accent, i.e., intensity, sonority, limpidity,
+vibration, depth and resonance in space and in time.
-You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
+There are moments in life when time and space are deeper, and the
-But all the sea of sadness in my blood
+intensity of life immeasurably increased.
-Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
-Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
-In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er,
+Of magic applied to the rousing of the great dead, to the
-That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate
+reestablishment and the perfecting of health.
-By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more
-Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate.
-It is a ruin where the jackals rest.
+Inspiration always comes, when a man _wishes_, but it does not always
+go, when he wishes.
-And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay-
+Of writing and of speech, considered as magic operations, evocatory
+sorcery.
-A perfume swims about your naked breast!
+OF AIRS IN WOMAN
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+The charming airs, which constitute Beauty, are: The blasé air,
+the bored air, the giddy air, the impudent air, the cold air, the
+disdainful air, the commanding air, the willing air, the mischievous
+air, the sickly air, the feline air, a mingling of childishness,
+nonchalance and malice.
-Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way!
-With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared
-Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared!
+XVIII
-SONNET OF AUTUMN
+In certain almost supernatural moods of the soul the depth of life
+reveals itself to the full, in the scene, ordinary as it may be,
+beneath one's eyes. It becomes the symbol.
-They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes:
+As I was crossing the boulevard, and as I hurried to escape the
+wagons, my aureole slipped off and fell into the mire of the macadam.
+Fortunately, I had time to pick it up; but a moment after the unlucky
+idea entered my mind that it was an ill omen; after that the idea clung
+to me, and gave me no rest the entire day.
-"Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine?"
+Of the worship of one's self in love, from the point of view of
+health, of hygiene, of the toilet, of eloquence and of spiritual
+nobility.
-Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise
-All save that antique brute-like faith of thine;
-And will not bare the secret of their shame
+XIX
-To thee whose hand soothes me to slumbers long,
-Nor their black legend write for thee in flame!
-Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong.
+There is a magic operation in prayer. Prayer is one of the great forces
+of intellectual dynamics. It is like an electric current.
+The rosary is a medium, a vehicle; it is prayer brought within reach of
+all.
-Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat.
+Labor, progressive and accumulative force, bearing interest like
-Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow,
+capital, in faculties as in results.
-And I too well his ancient arrows know:
+Play, intermittent energy, even though guided by science, will be
+conquered, fruitful as it may be, by labor, slight as it may be, but
+sustained.
+If a poet asked the state for the right to have a few bourgeois in his
+stable, there would be considerable surprise; while, if a bourgeois
+asked for roast poet, it would seem quite natural.
-Crime, horror, folly, O pale Marguerite,
+"Kitten, puss, pussy, my cat, my wolf, my little monkey, big monkey,
-Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low,
+big serpent, my little melancholy monkey." Such freaks of too often
-O my so white, my so cold Marguerite.
+repeated terms, too frequent bestial appellations, reveal a satanic
+side in love. Have not the devils the forms of beasts? The Camel of
+Cazotte, camel, devil, and woman.
+XX
-THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD
-O SHADOWY Beauty mine, when thou shalt sleep
+A man went to a shooting gallery, accompanied by his wife. He selected
-In the deep heart of a black marble tomb;
+a puppet, and said to his wife: "I imagine that's you." He closed his
+eyes and beheaded the puppet. Then he said, kissing his companion's
+hand: "Dear angel, how I thank you for my skill."
-When thou for mansion and for bower shalt keep
+When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I shall have won
-Only one rainy cave of hollow gloom;
+solitude.
+This book is not made for my wives, my daughters or my sisters. I have
+few of such things.
+God is a scandal, a scandal that rebounds.
-THE FLOWERS OF. EVIL 153
-And when the stone upon thy trembling breast,
+XXI
-And on thy straight sweet body's supple grace,
-Crushes thy will and keeps thy heart at rest,
-And holds those feet from their adventurous race;
-Then the deep grave, who shares my reverie,
+Do not scorn any one's sensibility. One's sensibility, that is one's
-(For the deep grave is aye the poet's friend)
+genius.
-During long nights when sleep is far from thee,
-Shall whisper: "Ah, thou didst not comprehend
+By an ardent concubinage, one can imagine the joys of a young household.
-The dead wept thus, thou woman frail and weak" — •
-And like remorse the worm shall gnaw thy cheek.
+The precocious taste for women. I used to confuse the odor of fur with
+the odor of woman. I remember.... Finally, I loved my mother for her
+elegance. Thus I was a precocious dandy.
+The Protestant countries lack two elements essential to the happiness
+of a well-bred man: gallantry and devotion.
-THE GHOST
+The mingling of the grotesque and the tragic is pleasing to the mind,
+as discords to blasé ears.
-Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove
+What is intoxicating in bad taste, is the aristocratic pleasure of
-I will return to thy alcove.
+displeasing.
-And glide upon the night to thee.
-Treading the shadows silently.
-And I will give to thee, my own,
+Germany expresses meditation by line, as England by perspective.
-Kisses as icy as the moon.
-And the caresses of a snake
-Cold gliding in the thorny brake.
-And when returns the livid morn
+There is, in the birth of every sublime thought, a nervous shock that
-Thou shalt find all my place forlorn
+is felt in the cerebellum.
-And chilly, till the falling night.
-Others would rule by tenderness
+Spain puts into its religion the ferocity natural to love.
-Over thy life and youthfulness,
+STYLE.--The eternal note, the eternal and cosmopolitan style.
+Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe.
-But I would conquer thee by fright!
+Why democrats do not love cats is easy to determine. The cat
+is beautiful; it awakens ideas of luxury, of cleanliness, of
+voluptuousness, etc.
+XXII
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-TO A MADONNA
+A little labor, repeated three hundred and sixty-five times, yields
+three hundred and sixty-five times a little money, that is, an enormous
+sum. _At the same time fame is won._
-(An Ex-Voto in the Spanish taste.)
+To create a pounced drawing is genius. I ought to create a pounced
+drawing.
-Madonna, mistress, I would build for thee
+My mother is fantastic; one must fear her and please her.
-An altar deep in the sad soul of me;
-And in the darkest corner of my heart,
+XXIII
-From mortal hop)es and mocking eyes apart,
-Carve of enamelled blue and gold a shrine
+To give one's self over to Satan, what does that mean?
-For thee to .stand erect in, Image divine!
+What more absurd than progress since man, as is proven by everyday
+fact, is always like and equal to man, that is to say, always in the
+savage state! What are the perils of the forest and the prairie beside
+the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether man ensnare his
+dupe on the boulevard, or pierce his prey in unknown forests, is he not
+eternal man, i.e., the most perfect beast of pray?
-And with a mighty Crown thou shalt be crowned
+They say I am thirty years of age; but if I have lived three minutes in
+one..., am I not ninety?
-Wrought of the gold of my smooth Verse, set round
+... Work, is it not the salt that preserves embalmed souls?
-With starry crystal rhymes; and I will make,
-O mortal maid, a Mantle for thy sake,-
+XXIV
-And weave it of my jealousy, a gown
-Heavy, barbaric, stiff, and weighted down
+I think that the infinite and mysterious charm that rests in the
+contemplation of a ship, especially of a vessel in motion, springs,
+in the first place, from regularity and symmetry (which are of
+the primordial needs of the human mind, as much as complexity and
+harmony)--and, secondly, from the successive multiplication and
+generation of all the curves and imaginary figures cut in space by the
+real elements of the object.
-With my distrust, and broider round the hem
+The poetic idea which this movement in lines produces is the hypothesis
+of a vast, immense, complex but eurythmic being, of a creature full of
+genius, suffering and sighing all human sighs and all human ambitions.
-Not pearls, but all my tears in place of them.
+Civilized races, that always speak so stupidly of savages and
+barbarians, soon, as d'Aurevilly says, you will _no longer be good
+enough to be idolaters_. Stoicism, religion that has but one
+sacrament: suicide!
-And then thy wavering, trembling robe shall be
+Conceive a canvas for a lyric or fairy buffoonery, for a pantomime, and
+transplant it into a serious novel. Bathe the whole in an abnormal,
+dreamy atmosphere,--in the atmosphere of the _great days_. Let there be
+something soothing,--something even serene, in passion. Regions of pure
+poetry.
-All the desires that rise and fall in me
-From mountain-peaks to valleys of repose.
+XXV
-Kissing thy lovely body's white and rose.
-For thy humiliated feet divine,
+What is not a priesthood nowadays? Youth itself is a priesthood--so
+youth tells us.
-Of my Respect I'll make thee Slippers fine
+Man, i.e., every one, is so naturally depraved that he suffers less
+from the universal abasement than from the establishment of a sensible
+hierarchy.
-Which, prisoning them within a gentle fold.
-Shall keep their imprint like a faithful mould.
+XXVI
-And if my art, unwearying and discreet.
-Can make no Moon of Silver for thy feet
+The world is coming to an end. The only reason for which it can
+continue is that it exists. How weak that reason is, compared to all
+that announce the opposite, particularly to this: What has the world
+henceforth to do beneath the sky? For, supposing that it continue to
+exist materially, would it be an existence worthy of the name and
+of the Historical Dictionary? I do not say that the world will be
+reduced to the expedients and the comic disorder of the South American
+Republics, that perhaps we shall return to the savage state, and that
+we shall go, across the grassy ruins of our civilization, seeking our
+pasture, gun in hand. No; for these adventures presuppose a remnant of
+vital energy, echo of the earliest ages. New example and new victims
+of the inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by that through which we
+thought to live. The mechanical will so have Americanized us, progress
+will so have atrophied all our spiritual side, that naught, in the
+sanguine, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the Utopians can be
+compared to the actual outcome. I ask every thinking man to show me
+what of life remains. Of religion, I believe it useless to speak and
+to seek the remnants, since to take the trouble to deny God is the
+only scandal in that field. Property virtually disappeared with the
+suppression of the right of the first-born; but the time will come
+when humanity, like an avenging ogre, will snatch their last morsel
+from those who think they are the legitimate heirs of the revolutions.
+Still, that will not be the supreme ill.
-To have for Footstool, then thy heel shall rest
+The human imagination can conceive, without too much trouble, republics
+or other community states, worthy of some glory, if directed by
+consecrated men, by definite aristocrats. But it is not particularly
+in political institutions that there will be manifest the universal
+ruin, or the universal progress; for the name matters little. It will
+be in the debasement of the heart. Need I say that the little of the
+political remaining will writhe painfully in the embrace of the general
+bestiality, and that governments will be forced, in order to maintain
+themselves and to create a phantom of order, to revert to means which
+will make our actual humanity shudder, although so hardened? Then, the
+son will flee from his family not at eighteen years, but at twelve,
+emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will flee, not in search
+of heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner in a tower,
+not to immortalize a garret by sublime thoughts, but to establish a
+trade, to amass wealth, and to compete with his infamous papa, founder
+and stockholder of a journal which will spread the light and which will
+cause the century to be looked upon as an abettor of superstition.
+Then, the wanderers, the outcasts, those who have had several lovers,
+and who were once called angels, in recognition of the heedlessness
+which shines, light of luck, in their existence logical as evil--then
+these, I say, will be no more than a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom that
+will condemn all, lacking money, all, _even the faults of the senses!_
+Then, that which will resemble virtue, what do I say?--all that is not
+ardor toward Plutus will be considered enormously ridiculous. Justice,
+if in that fortunate period justice can still exist, will interdict all
+citizens who cannot make a fortune. Your wife, O Bourgeois! your chaste
+partner, whose legitimacy is the poetry of your existence, thenceforth,
+introducing into legality an irreproachable infamy, zealous and loving
+guardian of your strongbox, will be no more than the ideal of the kept
+woman. Your daughter, with infantile hopes of marriage, will dream
+in her cradle of selling herself for a million, and you yourself, O
+Bourgeois, still less poet than you are to-day, you will see nothing
+amiss; you will regret naught. For there are things in men that
+strengthen and prosper as others weaken and decline; and, thanks to
+the progress of the times, you will have left of your entrails only
+the viscera! These times are perhaps quite near; who knows even that
+they have not come, and that the thickness of our skins is not the only
+obstacle that prevents us from appreciating the environment in which we
+breathe?
-Upon the snake that gnaws within my breast.
+As for me, who sometimes feel in me the ridicule of a prophet, I know
+that I shall never find in myself the charity of a doctor. Lost in this
+vile world, jostled by the crowds, I am as a tired man who sees behind
+him, in the depths of the years, only disillusion and bitterness and
+ahead, only a storm that carries nothing new, neither knowledge nor
+grief. The evening that man Stole from fate a few hours of pleasure,
+cradled in his digestion, forgetful--as far as possible--of the past,
+content with the present and resigned to the future, intoxicated with
+his sangfroid and his dandyism, proud of being less base than those
+who passed, he said, watching the smoke of his cigar: "What does it
+matter to me where these consciences are going?"
-Victorious Queen of whom our hope is bom !
+I think I have achieved what mechanics call an extra. However, I shall
+retain these pages,--because I want to date my sadness.
-And thou shalt trample down and make a scorn
-Of the vile reptile swollen up with hate.
+MY HEART LAID BARE
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 155
-And thou shalt see my thoughts, all consecrate,
-Like candles set before thy flower-strewn shrine,
-O Queen of Virgins, and the taper-shine
-Shall glimmer star-like in the vault of blue,
-With eyes of flame for ever watching you.
-While all the love and worship in my sense
-Will be sweet smoke of myrrh and frankincense.
-Ceaselesely up to thee, white peak of snow,
-My stormy spirit will in vapours go!
-And last, to make thy drama^ all complete,
-That love and cruelty may mix and meet,
+I
-I, thy remorseful torturer, will take
-All the Seven Deadly Sins, and from them make
+Of the vaporization and the centralization of the ego. All lies in that.
-In darkest joy. Seven Knives, cruel-edged and keen,
+Of a certain sensual joy in the society of extravagants.
-And like a juggler choosing, O my Queen,
+(I plan to begin _My Heart Laid Bare_ at any point, in any way, and to
+continue it from day to day, following the inspiration of the occasion
+and the moment, provided that the inspiration be vivid.)
-That spot profound whence love and mercy start,
-I'll plunge them all within thy panting heart!
+II
+The first comer, if he can entertain, has the right to speak of himself.
-THE SKY
-Where'er he be, on water or on land,
+III
-Under pale suns or climes that flames enfold;
-One of Christ's own, or of Cythera's band,
-Shadowy beggar or Croesus rich with gold;
-Citizen, peasant, student, tramp; whate'er
+I understand that some people desert a cause to discover what they can
+experience in serving another.
-His little brain may be, alive or dead ;
+It might be pleasant to bet alternately victim and executioner.
-Man knows the fear of mystery ever)rwhere,
-» And peeps, with trembling glances, overhead.
-The heaven above? A strangling cavern wall;
-The lighted ceiling of a music-hall
-Where every actor treads a bloody soil —
+IV
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+Woman is the opposite of the dandy. Thus she must inspire horror. Woman
+is hungry, and she wants to eat, thirsty, and she wants to drink. She
+is proud, and she, wants to be....
-The hermit's hope; the terror of the sot;
+True merit!
-The sky: the black lid of the mighty pot
-Where the vast human generations boill
+Woman is _natural_, that is to say, abominable.
+Also, she is always vulgar, that is, the opposite of the dandy.
-SPLEEN
+_In regard to the Legion of Honor_. He who seeks the cross seems to
+say: "If I am not decorated for having done my duty, I shall not go
+ahead."
-I'm like some king in whose corrupted veins
+If a man has merit, what is the good in decorating him? If he has not,
+then he can be decorated, since that will give him a lustre.
-Flows aged blood; who rules a land of rains;
+To consent to be decorated, is to recognize that the state has the
+right to judge you, to adorn you, et cetera.
-Who, young in years, is old in all distress;
+Furthermore, if not pride, Christian humility should defend the cross.
-Who flees good counsel to find weariness
+_Calculation in favor of God._ Nothing exists without an end. Hence my
+existence has an end. What end? I do not know. Hence it is not I that
+have marked it. Hence it is some one wiser than I. Hence I must pray to
+some one to enlighten me. That is the wisest part.
-Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred
+The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sublime. He should live
+and sleep before a mirror.
-Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird;
-Whose weary face emotion moves no more
+V
-E'en when his people die before his door.
-His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile
+Analysis of counter-religions; example: sacred prostitution.
-Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile ;
+What is sacred prostitution? Nervous excitation. Pagan mysticism.
+Mysticism, link between paganism and Christianity. Paganism and
+Christianity are reciprocal proofs.
-The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good,
+Revolution and the worship of Reason prove the concept of Sacrifice.
-Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood
+Superstition is the reservoir of all truths.
-No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom
-Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb.
+VI
-The sage who takes his gold essays in vain
-To purge away the old corrupted strain,
+There is in all change something at once agreeable and infamous,
+something that smacks of infidelity and of moving day. That is enough
+to explain the French Revolution.
-His baths of blood, that in the days of old
-The Romans used when their hot blood grew cold,
+VII
-Will never warm this dead man's bloodless pains,
-For green Lethean water fills his veins.
+My intoxication in 1848. Of what sort was that intoxication? Desire
+of vengeance. Natural pleasure in demolishing. Literary drunkenness;
+memories of reading.
+The 15th of May. Ever the desire of destruction. Legitimate desire, if
+all that is natural is legitimate.
+The horrors of June. Madness of the people and madness of the
+bourgeoisie. Natural love of crime.
-THE OWLS
+My fury at the coup d'état. How many gunshots sustained! Another
+Buonaparte! What a disgrace!
-Under the overhanging yews.
+Still, all is quieted. Has not the President the right to invoke?
-The dark owls sit in solemn state.
-Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
-Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.
+What Emperor Napoleon III is? What he is worth?
+To find the explanation of his nature, and of his providentially.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 157
-Motionless thus they sit and dream
+VIII
-Until that melancholy hour
-When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
-The nightly shades assume their power.
+To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous thing.
-From their still attitude the wise
+was amusing only because every one was building Utopias like
-Will learn with terror to despise
+castles in Spain.
-All tumult, movement, and unrest;
-For he who follows eVery shade,
+was charming only by the very excess of the ridiculous.
-Carries the memory in his breast.
-Of each unhappy journey made.
+Robespierre is estimable only because he has made some fine phrases.
-BIEN LOIN DTCI
+IX
-Here is the chamber consecrate.
-Wherein this maiden delicate,
-And enigmatically sedate,
-Fans herself while the moments creep.
+The Revolution, by sacrifice, confirmed superstition.
-Upon her cushions half-asleep,
-And hears the fountains plash and weep.
+X
-Dorothy's chamber undefiled.
-The winds and waters sing afar
-Their song of sighing strange and wild
-To lull to sleep the petted child.
-From head to foot with subtle care,
+_Politique_. I have no convictions, as the men of my age understand the
-Slaves have perfumed her delicate skin
+term, because I have no ambition.
-With odorous oils and benzoin.
-And flowers faint in a corner there.
+There is no basis in me for conviction.
+There is a certain cowardice, or rather a certain softness, in honest
+men.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+The brigands alone are convinced--of what? That they must succeed.
+Therefore, they succeed.
+Why should I succeed, when I haven't even the desire to try?
+Glorious empires can be founded on crime, and noble religions on
+imposture.
-CONTEMPLATION
+However, I have some convictions, in a higher sense, that cannot be
+understood by the men of my day.
-Thou, O my Grief, be wise and tranquil still,
+Feeling of _solitude_, from my childhood. Despite my family, and in
-The eve is thine which even now drops down,
+the midst of my comrades above all,--feeling of an eternally solitary
-To carry peace or care to human will,
+destiny.
-And in a misty veil enfolds the town.
-While the vile mortals of the multitude,
+Withal, an intense desire for life and for pleasure.
-By pleasure, cruel tormentor, goaded on,
-Gather remorseful blossoms in light mood —
-Grief, place thy hand in mine, let us be gone
-Far from them. Lo, see how the vanished years,
+Almost all our life is spent in idle curiosity. In revenge, there are
-In robes outworn lean over heaven's rim;
+things which ought to rouse human curiosity to the highest degree, and
-And from the water, smiling through her tears.
+which, to judge by their commonplace activity, inspire it in no one!
-Remorse arises, and the sun grows dim;
+Where are our dead friends? Why are we here? Do we come from somewhere?
-And in the east, her long shroud trailing light,
+What is liberty? Can it harmonize with providential law? Is the number
-List, O my grief, the gentle steps of Night.
+of souls finite or infinite? And the number of habitable worlds? etc.,
+etc.
+XI
-TO A BROWN BEGGAR-MAID
-White maiden with the russet hair,
+Nations have great men only in spite of themselves. Hence the great man
-Whose garments, through their holes, declare
+is the conqueror of all his nation.
-That poverty is part of you.
-And beauty too.
-To me, a sorry bard and mean.
+The modern ridiculous religions: Molière, Béranger, Garibaldi.
-Your youthful beauty, frail and lean.
-With summer freckles here and there,
-Is sweet and fair.
+XII
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 159
-Your sabots tread the roads of chance,
+Belief in progress is a doctrine of the slothful, a doctrine of the
-And not one queen of old romance
+Belgians. It is the individual who relies on his neighbors to tend
-Carried her velvet shoes and lace
+to his affairs. There can be no progress (true, that is, moral) save
-With half your grace.
+in the individual and by the individual himself. But the world is
+composed of folks who can think only in common, in bands. Thus the
+Belgian societies. There are also folks who can amuse themselves only
+in droves. The true hero finds his pleasure alone.
-In place of tatters far too short
+Eternal superiority of the dandy. What is the dandy?
-Let the proud garments worn at Court
-Fall down with rustling fold and pleat
-About your feet;
-In place of stockings, worn and old,
-Let a keen dagger all of gold
-Gleam in your garter for the eyes
-Of roues wise;
-Let ribbons carelessly untied
+XIII
-Reveal to us the radiant pride
-Of your white bosom purer far
-Than any star;
-Let your white arms uncovered shine,
-Polished and smooth and half divine;
-And let your elfish fingers chase
-With riotous grace
-The purest pearls that softly glow.
+My opinions on the theatre. What I have always found most beautiful
-The sweetest sonnets of Belleau,
+in the theatre, in my childhood, and still to-day, is _lustre_,--a
-Offered by gallants ere they fight
+beautiful object, luminous, crystalline; complex, circular, symmetrical.
-For your delight;
-And many fawning rhymers who
+However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature.
-Inscribe their first thin book to you
+Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to
-Will contemplate upon the stair
+wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through
-Your slipper fair;
+megaphones; finally, I should like the female parts to be played by men.
+After all, lustre has always seemed to me the principal actor, seen
+through the large or the small end of the glass.
-i6o THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+XIV
-And many a page who plays at cards,
-And many lords and many bards,
-Will watch your going forth, and bum
-For your return;
-And you will count before your glass
+One must work, if not through desire, at least in despair, since, as is
-More kisses than the lily has;
+well established, to work is less boring than to seek amusement.
-And more than one Valois will sigh
-When you pass by.
-But meanwhile you are on the tramp.
-Begging your living in the damp,
-Wandering mean streets and alleys o'er,
-From door to door;
-And shilling bangles in a shop
+XV
-Cause you with eager eyes to stop.
-And I, alas, have not a sou
-To give to you.
-Then go, with no more ornament.
-Pearl, diamond, or subtle scent,
-Than your own fragile naked grace
-And lovely face. /
-THE SWAN
+There are in every man, at every moment, two simultaneous postulations,
-I
+one toward God, the other toward Satan.
-Andromache, I think of you! The stream.
+The invocation of God, or spirituality, is a desire to rise; that of
-The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days
+Satan, or bestiality, is a joy in descent. To the latter should be
-Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,
+attributed love for women.
-The lying Simois flooded by your tears.
-Made all my fertile memory blossom forth
-As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.
-Old Paris is no more (a town, alas.
+The joys which spring from these two loves conform to their two natures.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL i6i
+XVI
-Changes more quickly than man's heart may change);
-Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
-The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
-The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
-The debris, and the square-set heaps of tiles.
-There a menagerie was once outspread;
+Intoxication of humanity; great picture to be made, in the sense of
-And there I saw, one morning at the hour
+charity, in the sense of libertinage, in the literary or dramaturgic
-When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
+sense.
-And the road roars upon the silent air,
-A swan who had escaped his- cage, and walked
-On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
-And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.
-And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
-Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
-His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
-Filled with a vision of his own fair lake) :
-"O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
-Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?"
-Sometimes yet
-I see the hapless bird — strange, fatal myth —
-Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up
-Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens.
-With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face,
-As though he sent reproaches up to God!
-f
+XVII
-n
-Paris may change ; my melancholy is fixed.
+Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it
-New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,
+is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.
-And suburbs old, are symbols all to me
-Whose memories are as heavy as a stone.
-And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul,
-The image came of my majestic swan
-With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime,
+       *       *       *       *       *
+Capital punishment is the result of a mystic idea, totally
+misunderstood to-day. The death penalty has not as its object
+to _preserve_ society, _materially_ at least. Its object is the
+_preservation_ (spiritually) of society and the guilty one. In order
+that the sacrifice be perfect, there must be assent and joy on the part
+of the victim. To give chloroform to one condemned to death would be an
+impiety, for it would be to wipe out the consciousness of his grandeur
+as victim and to destroy his chance of gaining paradise.
-i62 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+As to torture, it is born of the infamous side of the heart of man,
+athirst for voluptuousness. Cruelty and voluptuousness, identical
+sensations, like extreme heat and extreme cold.
-As of an exile whom one great desire
-Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you,
+XVIII
-Andromache! torn from your hero's arms;
-Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride;
+A dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a dandy talking to the people,
+save to scoff at them?
-Bent o'er an empty tomb in ecstasy;
+There is no reasonable, stable government save the aristocratic.
-Widow of Hector — wife of Helenus!
+Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd.
-And of the negress, wan and phthisical,
+Immense nausea of placards.
-Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes
+There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the
+poet. To know, to kill, and to create.
-Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog
+Other men are serfs or slaves, created for the stable, that is, to
+exercise what are called professions.
-The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;
-Of all who lose that which they never find;
+XIX
-Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief
-Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;
+Observe that those who advocate the abolition of capital punishment
+are more or less interested in its abolishment. Often, they are
+executioners. The matter may be summarized thus: "I wish to be able to
+cut off your head, but you shall not touch mine."
-Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.
+Those who abolish souls (materialists) necessarily abolish hell; they
+are, beyond all doubt, interested.
-And one old Memory like a crying horn
+At the least, they are men that are afraid to live again, slothful ones.
-Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost . s
-I think of sailors on some isle forgotten;
+XX
-Of captives; vanquished . . . and of many more.
-THE SEVEN OLD MEN
+Mme. de Metternich, although a princess, has forgotten to answer me, in
+regard to what I said of her and of Wagner. Manners of the Nineteenth
+Century.
-SWARMING city, city full of dreams,
-Where in full day the spectre walks and speaks;
-Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins
-My story flows as flows the rising sap.
+XXII
-One morn, disputing with my tired soul,
-And like a hero stiffening all my nerves,
-trod a suburb shaken by the jar
+The woman Sand is the Prudhomme of immorality. She has always been
+a moralist. Only formerly she practiced amorality. Also she has
+never been an artist. She has the famous _fluent style_, dear to the
+bourgeois.
-Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified
+She is stupid, she is heavy, she is a chatterbox. She has, in moral
+matters, the same depth of judgment and the same delicacy of feeling as
+innkeepers and kept women. What she has said of her mother; what she
+has said of poetry. Her love for the workingman.
-The houses either side of that sad street,
+George Sand is one of those old ingenues who do not wish to quit the
+boards.
-So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood
+See the preface to _Mlle. La Quintinie_, where she claims that true
+Christians do not believe in hell. Sand is for the God of good folks,
+the god of innkeepers and of domestic sharpers.
-Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist.
+She has good reason to wish to wipe out hell.
-Unclean and yellow, inundated space —
-A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul.
+XXIII
+It must not be thought that the devil tempts only men of genius. He
+doubtless scorns imbeciles, but he does not disdain their assistance.
+Quite the contrary, he founds great hopes on them.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 163
+Take George Sand. She is especially, and above all things, a great
+_blockhead_; but she is _possessed_. It is the devil who has persuaded
+her to trust in her _good heart_ and her _good sense_, so that she
+might persuade all other great blockheads to trust in their good heart
+and their good sense.
-Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags
+I cannot think of that stupid creature without a shudder of horror. If
-Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks
+I were to meet her, I could not keep myself from hurling a basin of
-Should have brought alms in floods upon his head.
+holy water at her.
-Without the misery gleaming in his eye.
-Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed
-To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost
-Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard
-Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth.
-He was not bent but broken: his backbone
-Made a so true right angle with his legs,
-That, as he walked, the ta,pping stick which gave
-The finish to the picture, made him seem
-Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped
-Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud
-He walked with troubled and uncertain gait,
-As though his sabots trod upon the dead.
-Indifferent and hostile to the world.
+XXIV
-His double followed him: tatters and stick
-And back and eye and beard, all were the same;
-Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable,
-These centenarian twins, these spectres odd.
-Trod the same pace toward some end unknown.
-To what fell complot was I then exposed?
-Humiliated by what evil chance?
-For as the minutes one by one went by
-Seven times I saw this sinister old man
-Repeat his image there before my eyes!
-Let him who smiles at my inquietude,
+I am bored in France, especially as every one resembles Voltaire.
-Who never trembled at a fear like mine,
-Know that in their decrepitude's despite
-These seven old hideous monsters had the mien
-Of beings immortal.
+Emerson forgot Voltaire in his "Representative Men." He could have made
+a fine chapter entitled Voltaire or The Antipoet, the king of boobies,
+the prince of the shallow, the anti-artist, the preacher of innkeepers,
+the father who "lived in a shoe" of the editors of the century.
-i64 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+XXV
-Then, I thought, must I,
-Undying, contemplate the awful eighth;
-Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double;
-Disgusting Phoenix, father of himself
-And his own son? In terror then I turned
-My back upon the infernal band, and fled
-To my own place, and closed my door; distraught
-And like a drunkard who sees all things twice,
-With feverish troubled spirit, chilly and sick,
-Wounded by mystery and absurdity!
-In vain my reason tried to cross the bar,
+In the "Ears of the Earl of Chesterfield," Voltaire jokes at the
-The whirling storm but drove her back again;
+expense of that immortal soul which resided, for nine months, in the
-And my soul tossed, and tossed, an outworn wreck,
+midst of excrement and urine. Voltaire, like all the slothful, hates
-Mastless, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea.
+mystery.
-THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN
+(At least, he might have divined in that environment the malice or
+satire of Providence against love, and, in the process of generation,
+a sign of original sin. In fact, we can make love only with excretory
+organs.)
+Unable to suppress love, the Church wished at least to disinfect it,
+and created marriage.
-Deep in the tortuous folds of ancient towns.
+XXVI
-Where all, even horror, to enchantment turns,
-I watch, obedient to my fatal mood,
+Portrait of the literary riff-raff. Doctor Tavernus Crapulosus
+Pedantissimus. His portrait in the manner of Praxiteles. His pipe, his
+opinions, his Hegelianism, his filth, his ideas of art, his spleen, his
+jealousy. A fine picture of modern youth.
-For the decrepit, strange and charming beings,
-The dislocated monsters that of old
+XXVII
-Were lovely women — Lais or Eponine!
-Hunchbacked and broken, crooked though they be,
+Theology. What is the fall? If it is unity become duality, it is God
+who has fallen. In other words, is not creation the fall of God?
-Let us still love them, for they still have souls.
+Dandyism. What is the superior man? It is not the specialist. It is the
+man of leisure and broad education. To be rich and to love labor.
-They creep along wrapped in their chilly rags,
-Beneath the whipping of the wicked wind,
+XXVIII
-They tremble when an omnibus rolls by.
-And at their sides, a relic of the past,
+Why does the man of parts prefer maidens to women of the world, though
+they are equally stupid? Find this out.
-A little flower-embroidered satchel hangs.
-They trot about, most like to marionettes;
+XXIX
-They drag themselves, as does a wounded beast;
-Or dance unwillingly as a clapping bell
+There are women who are like the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. They
+are wanted no more, because they have been sullied by certain men. Just
+as I would not put on the breeches of a mangy fellow.
-Where hangs and swings a demon without pity.
+What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do
+without an accomplice.
+XXX
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 165
-Though they be broken they have piercing eyes,
+Study of the great disease of horror of the home. Reasons for the
-That shine like pools where water sleeps at night;
+disease.
-The astonished and divine eyes of a child
-Who laughs at all that glitters in the world.
-Have you not seen that most old women's shrouds
-Are little like the shroud of a dead child?
-Wise Death, in token of his happy whim.
-Wraps old and young in one enfolding sheet.
-And when I see a phantom, frail and wan.
-Traverse the swarming picture that is Paris,
-It ever seems as though the delicate thing
-Trod with soft steps towards a cradle new.
-And then I wonder, seeing the twisted form.
-How many times must workmen change the shape
-Of boxes where at length such limbs are laid?
-These eyes are wells brimmed with a million tears;
-Crucibles where the cooling metal pales —
-Mysterious eyes that are strong charms to him
-Whose life-long nurse has been austere Disaster.
-n
+Indignation at the universal fatuity of all classes, of all beings, of
+both sexes, of every age.
-The love-sick vestal of the old "Frasciti";
+Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek
-Priestess of Thalia, alas! whose name
+the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.
-Only the prompter knows and he is dead;
-Bygone celebrities that in bygone days
-The Tivoli o'ershadowed in their bloom;
-All charm me; yet among these beings frail '
-Three, turning pain to honey-sweetness, said
-To the Devotion that had lent them wings:
-"Lift me, O powerful Hippogriffe, to the skies" —
-One by her country to despair was driven;
-One by her husband overwhelmed with grief;
-One wounded by her child. Madonna-like;
-Each could have made a river with her tears.
+XXXI
-i66 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+Of love, of the predilection of the French for military metaphors. Here
+every metaphor wears a moustache.
+Militant literature.--To man the breach.--To bear the standard
+aloft.--To maintain the standard high and firm.--To hurl oneself into
+the thick of the fight.--One of the veterans. All these fine phrases
+apply generally to the college scouts and to the do-nothings of the
+coffee-house.
-in
-Oft have I followed one of these old women,
+XXXII
-One among others, when the falling sun
-Reddened the heavens with a crimson wound —
-Pensive, apart, she rested on a bench
-To hear the brazen music of the band,
-Played by the soldiers in the public park
-To pour some courage into citizens' hearts,
-On golden eves when all the world revives.
-Proud and erect she drank the music in.
-The lively and the warlike call to arms;
-Her eyes blinked like an ancient eagle's eyes;
-Her forehead seemed to await the laurel crown I
+To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the judicial press
+(Bertin). The poets of strife. The _littérateurs_ of the advance guard.
+This habitude of military metaphors denotes minds not military, but
+made for discipline, that is, for conformity, minds born domesticated,
+Belgian minds, which can think only in society.
-IV
-Thus you do wander, uncomplaining Stoics,
+XXXIII
-Through all the chaos of the living town:
-Mothers with bleeding hearts, saints, courtesans,
+Desire of pleasure binds us to the present. Care for our health
+suspends us on the future.
-Whose names of yore were on the lips of all;
+He who attaches himself to pleasure, that is, to the present, is to me
+as one who, rolling down an incline, and trying to cling to the shrubs,
+uproots them and bears them away in his fall.
-Who were all glory and all grace, and now
+Before all to be a _great man_ and a saint for one's self.
-None know you; and the brutish drunkard stops,
-Insulting you with his derisive love;
+XXXV
-And cowardly urchins call behind your back.
-Ashamed of living, withered shadows all.
+In the end, before all history and before the French people, the great
+glory of Napoleon III will have been to prove that the first comer, by
+seizing the telegraph and the national press, can govern a great nation.
-With fear-bowed backs you creep beside the walls,
+Imbeciles are those who think that such things can be accomplished
+without the permission of the people,--and those who believe that
+glory can be founded only on virtue!
-And none salute you, destined to loneliness!
-Refuse of Time ripe for Eternity!
+XXXVI
-But I, who watch you tenderly afar.
-With unquiet eyes on your uncertain steps.
+What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.
-As though I were your father, I — O wonder! —
+Man is an animal of worship. To worship is to sacrifice one's self and
+to prostitute one's self.
-Unknown to you taste secret, hidden joy.
+Thus all love is prostitution.
-I see your maiden passions bud and bloom.
+The most prostituted being is the being beyond compare, is. God, since
+he is the soul supreme for every individual, since he is the common,
+inexhaustible reservoir of love.
+PRAYER
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 167
-Sombre or luminous, and your lost days
+Do not chastise me in my mother, you chastise my mother because of
+me.--I commend to you the souls of my father and Mariette.--Give me
+each day strength to perform the present duty and thus to become a
+hero and a saint.
-Unroll before me while my heart enjoys
-All your old vices, and my soul expands
+XXXVII
-To all the virtues that have once been yours.
-Ruined! and my sisters! O congenerate hearts,
+A chapter on the indestructible, eternal, universal and ingenious human
+ferocity. Of the love of blood, of the intoxication of blood, of the
+intoxication of crowds. Of the intoxication of the executed criminal
+(Damiens).
-Octogenarian Eves o'er whom is stretched
-God's awful claw, where will you be to-morrow?
+XXXIX
+I have always been astonished that women are allowed to enter church.
+What conversation can they have with God?
-A MADRIGAL OF SORROW
+The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, whim) is one of the seductive
+forms of the devil.
-What do I care though you be wise?
-Be sad, be beautiful; your tears
+XL
-But add one more charm to your eyes,
-As streams to valleys where they rise;
-And fairer every flower appears
-After the storm. I love you most
+Woman cannot separate the soul from the body. She is simple, like the
-When joy has fled your brow downcast;
+animals.--A satirist would say it is because she has only a body.
-When your heart is in horror lost.
-And o'er your present like a ghost
+XLII
-Floats the dark shadow of the past.
-I love you when the teardrop flows,
-Hotter than blood, from your large eye;
+Veuillot is so coarse and such an enemy of the arts that one would
-When I would hush you to repose
+think all the democracy of the world was harbored in his breast.
-Your heavy pain breaks forth and grows
-Into a loud and tortured cry.
-And then, voluptuousness divine!
+Development of the portrait. Supremacy of the pure idea in the
+Christian as in the Babouvian communist.
-Delicious ritual and profound!
+Fanaticism of humility. Not even to aspire to understand religion.
-I drink in every sob like wine,
-And dream that in your deep heart shine
-The pearls wherein your eyes were drowned.
+XLIV
-i68 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+In love, as in almost all human affairs, the _entente cordial_ is the
+result of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is pleasure. The man
+cries: "Oh my angel!"
-I know your heart, which overflows
+The woman coos: "Mamma! Mamma!" And the two imbeciles are persuaded
-With outworn loves long cast aside,
+that they are thinking in concert.--The insuperable gulf, which bars
+communication, remains unabridged.
-Still like a furnace flames and glows,
-. And you within your breast enclose
-A damned soul's unbending pride;
-But till your dreams without release
+XLV
-Reflect the leaping flames of hell;
-Till in a nightmare without cease
-You dream of poison to bring peace,
-And love cold steel and powder well;
+Why is the spread of the sea so infinitely and so eternally agreeable?
-And tremble at each opened door,
+Because the sea conveys the thought both of immensity and of movement.
+Six or seven leagues are for man the radius of the infinite. 'Tis a
+diminutive infinite. What matter, if it suffice to suggest the whole?
+Twelve or fourteen leagues of liquid in movement are enough to convey
+the highest ideal of beauty which is offered to man in his transitory
+habitation.
-And feel for every man distrust,
-And shudder at the striking hour —
-Till then you have not felt the power
-Of Irresistible Disgust.
+XLVI
-My queen, my slave, whose love is fear,
-When you awaken shuddering.
+There is naught interesting on earth save its religions.
-Until that awful hour be here,
-You cannot say at midnight drear:
-"I am your equal, O my King!"
+There is a universal religion made for the alchemists of thought,
+a religion which is disengaged from man, considered as a heavenly
+reminder.
-MIST AND RAIN
-Autumns and winters, springs of mire and rain,
+XLVII
-Seasons of sleep, I sing your praises loud.
-For thus I love to wrap my heart and brain
-In some dim tomb beneath a vapoury shroud
-In the wide plain where revels the cold wind.
-Through long nights when the weathercock whirls round.
-More free than in warm summer day my mind
-Lifts wide her raven pinions from the ground.
+Saint-Marc Girardin has spoken one word that will endure: "Let us be
+mediocre!" Set that beside this of Robespierre: "Those that do not
+believe in the immortality of their being, do themselves justice." The
+word of Saint-Marc Girardin implies a bitter hatred of the sublime.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 169
+XLVIII
-Unto a heart filled with funereal things
-That since old days hoar frosts have gathered on, .
+Theory of true civilization. It lies not in gas, nor in steam, nor in
+tilting tables. It lies in the diminution of the traces of original sin.
-Naught is more sweet, O pallid, queenly springs,
+Nomad peoples, shepherds, hunters, farmers, even cannibals, _all_ can
+rise superior in energy, in personal dignity, to our races of the West.
+We perhaps shall be destroyed.
-Than the long pageant of your shadows wan,
-Unless it be on moonless eves to weep
+XLIX
-On some chance bed and rock our griefs to sleep.
+It is through leisure, in part, that I have grown,--to my great
+detriment; for leisure, without wealth, increases debts; but to my
+great gain, in regard to sensibility, meditation, and the faculty of
+dandyism and of dilettantism.
-SUNSET
+L
-Fair is the sun when first he flames above,
-Flinging his joy down in a happy beam ;
-And happy he who can salute with love
+The young girl of editors. The young girl of editors in chief. The
-The sunset far more glorious than a dream.
+young girl, scarecrow, monstrous, assassin of art.
-Flower, stream, and furrow! — I have seen them all
+The young girl, what she really is. A little stupid and a little
-In the sun's eye swoon like one trembling heart-
+slovenly; the greatest imbecility combined with the greatest depravity.
-Though it be late let us with speed depart
-To catch at least one last ray ere it fall I
-But I pursue the fading god in vain,
+There is in the young girl all the abjection of the cad and of the
-For conquering Night makes firm her dark domain.
+school-boy.
-Mist and gloom fall, and terrors glide between.
-And graveyard odours in the shadow swim,
-And my faint footsteps on the marsh's rim,
-Bruise the cold snail and crawling toad unseen.
-THE CORPSE
+LI
-Remember, my Beloved, what thing we met
-By the roadside on that sweet summer day;
+Advice to non-communists: all is common, even God.
-There on a grassy couch with pebbles set,
-A loathsome body lay.
+LII
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-The wanton limbs stiff-stretched into the air,
+The Frenchman is a backyard animal so domestic that he dare not leap
+any fences. See his tastes in art and literature.
-Steaming with exhalations vile and dank,
+He is an animal of the Latin race; filth does not displease him; in his
-In ruthless cynic fashion had laid bare
+home, and in literature, he is scatophagous. He dotes on excrement. The
-The swollen side and flank.
+litterateurs of the coffee-house call that the _gallic salt_.
+LIII
-On this decay the sun shone hot from heaven
-As though with chemic heat to broil and bum.
+_Princes and generations._ There is equal injustice in attributing to
-And unto Nature all that she had given
+reigning princes the virtues and the vices of the people they actually
-A hundredfold return.
+govern.
-The sky smiled down upon the horror there
+Those virtues and those vices should almost always, as statistics and
+logic will show, be attributed to the atmosphere of the preceding
+government.
-As on a flower that opens to the day;
+Louis XIV inherits the men of Louis XIII, glory. Napoleon I inherits
-So awful an infection smote the air,
+the men of the Republic, glory. Louis-Philippe inherits the men of
-Almost you swooned away.
+Charles X, glory. Napoleon III inherits the men of Louis-Philippe,
+dishonor.
-The swarming flies hummed on the putrid side,
+It is always the preceding government that is responsible for the
+customs of the following, in so far as a government can be responsible
+for anything.
-Whence poured the maggots in a darkling stream.
+The sudden suppressions that circumstances bring to a reign do not
-That ran along these tatters of life's pride
+allow of absolute exactitude in this law, in regard to time. One
-With a liquescent gleam.
+cannot, say precisely where an influence ends, but an influence will
+endure in all the generation that was subjected to it in youth.
-And like a wave the maggots rose and fell,
-The murmuring flies swirled round in busy strife:
+LIV
-It seemed as though a vague breath came to swell
-And multiply with life
-The hideous corpse. From all this living world
-A music as of wind and water ran,
+Of the hatred of youth toward those who quote. The quoter is their
-Or as of grain in rhythmic motion swirled
+enemy.
-By the swift winnower's fan.
-And then the vague forms like a dream died out.
+"I would place spelling itself in the hands of the hangman." (Th.
+Gautier.)
-Or like some distant scene that slowly falls
+Immovable desire of prostitution in the heart of man, whence springs
-Upon the artist's canvas, that with doubt
+his horror of solitude.--He wishes to be _two_. The genius wishes to be
-He only half recalls.
+_one_, hence alone. Glory is in remaining _one_, and in prostituting
+one's self in a particular way.
+It is that horror of solitude, the need of forgetting his _ego_ in the
+outer flesh, that man nobly calls the _need of love_.
+Two fine religions, immortally planted on the mature, eternal
+obsessions of the people: the ancient phallus, and "Vive Barbés!" or "A
+bas Philippe!" or "Vive la République!"
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 171
-A homeless dog behind the boulders lay
+LV
-And watched us both with angry eyes forlorn,
-Waiting a chance to come and take away
-The morsel she had torn.
-And you, even you, will be like this drear thing,
+To study, in all its moods, in the works of nature and in the works of
+man, the eternal and universal law of gradation, by degrees, little by
+little, with forces progressively increasing, like compound interest in
+finance.
-A vile infection man may not endure;
+It is the same with artistic and literary ease; it is the same with the
-Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring!
+variable treasure of the will.
-O passionate and pure!
-Yes, such will you be, Queen of every grace!
-When the last sacramental words are said;
-And beneath grass and flowers that lovely face
-Moulders among the dead.
-Then, O Beloved, whisper to the worm
+LVI
-That crawls up to devour you with a kiss,
-That I still guard in memory the dear form
-Of love that comes to this!
+The rout of little _littérateurs_ to be seen at funerals, distributing
+handshakes and commending themselves to the memory of the letter
+writer. Of the funerals of famous men.
+Molière.--My opinion of Tartuffe is that it is not a comedy, but
+a pamphlet. An atheist, if only he is well-bred, would think, in
+connection with the play, that serious questions should never be
+betrayed to the riff-raff.
-AN ALLEGORY
-Here is a woman, richly clad and fair,
+LVII
-Who in her wine dips her long, heavy hair;
-Love's claws, and that sharp poison which is sin,'
+To glorify the worship of images (my great, my one, my primitive
+passion). To glorify vagabondage and what may be called bohemianism.
+Worship of sensation, multiplied and expressing itself in music. Refer
+this to Liszt.
-Are dulled against the granite of her skin.
+Of the need of beating women.
-Death she defies, Debauch she smiles upon,
+One can chastise what one loves. Thus with children.
-For their sharp scythe-like talons every one
+But that implies the misery of scorning what one loves.
-Pass by her in their all-destructive play;
+Of cuckoldom and of cuckolds. The misery of the cuckold. It springs
+from his pride, from a false conception of honor and of happiness, and
+from a love foolishly turned from God to be attributed to creatures. It
+is ever the worshipping animal deluded with its idol.
-Leaving her beauty till a later day.
-Goddess she walks; sultana in her leisure;
+LVIII
-She has Mohammed's faith that heaven is pleasure,
-And bids all men forget the world's alaVms
+Music conveys the idea of space. All the arts, more or less; since they
+are _number_ and number is a translation of space.
-Upon her breast, between her open arms.
+Daily to wish to be the greatest of men!
+LXI
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-She knows, and she believes, this sterile maid,
+Nations have great men only in spite of themselves.
-Without whom the world's onward dream would fade,
-That bodily beauty is the supreme gift
-Which may from every sin the terror lift.
-Hell she ignores, and Purgatory defies ;
-And when black Night shall roll before her eyes,
-She will look straight in Death's grim face forlorn,
-Without remorse or hate — as one new-born.
-THE ACCURSED
+Apropos of the actor and of my childish dreams, a chapter on what
+constitutes, in the human soul, the calling of the actor, the glory of
+the actor, the art of the actor and his situation in the world.
-Like pensive herds at rest upon the sands,
+The theory of Legouvé. Is Legouvé a cold farceur, a Swift, who tried
-These to the sea-horizons turn their eyes;
+whether France would swallow a new absurdity? His choice. Good, in the
+sense that Samson is not an actor.
-Out of their folded feet and clinging hands
+Of the true greatness of pariahs. Perhaps even, virtue harms the
-Bitter sharp tremblings and soft languors rise.
+talents of pariahs.
-Some tread the thicket by the babbling stream.
-Their hearts with untold secrets ill at ease;
-Calling the lover of their childhood's dream,
+LXII
-They wound the green bark of the shooting trees.
-Others like sisters wander, grave and slow,
-Among the rocks haunted by spectres thin.
-Where Antony saw as larvae surge and flow
+Commerce is, in its essence, _satanic_. Commerce, is the loan returned,
-The veined bare breasts that tempted him to sin.
+it is the loan with an understanding: Return more than I gave you.
-Some, when the resinous torch of burning wood
+--The spirit of everything commercial is completely depraved.
-Flares in lost pagan caverns dark and deep.
-Call thee to quench the fever in their blood,
+--Commerce is _natural_, hence it is _infamous_.
-Bacchus, who singest old remorse to sleep!
-Then there are those the scapular bedights,
+--The least infamous of tradesmen is he who says: "Let us be virtuous
+that we may gain much more money than the fools who are vicious." For
+the tradesman, honesty itself is a speculation. Commerce is Satanic,
+because it is one of the forms of egoism, the lowest, and the most vile.
-Whose long white vestments hide the whip's red stain,
-Who mix, in sombre woods on lonely nights.
+LXIII
-The foam of pleasure with the tears of pain.
+When Jesus Christ said: "Blessed are they that hunger, for they shall
+be filled!" Jesus Christ was gambling on probabilities.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 173
-O virgins, demons, monsters, martyrs! ye
+LXIV
-Who scorn whatever actual appears;
-Saints, satyrs, seekers of Infinity,
-So full of cries, so full of bitter tears;
+The world progresses only through misunderstanding. It is by universal
+misunderstanding that all the world agrees. For if, unfortunately, they
+understood one another, people could never agree.
-Ye whom my soul has followed into hell,
+The man of wit, he who will never agree with any one, ought to strike
+up a liking for the conversation of idiots and the reading of bad
+books. He will draw from this bitter joys that will largely compensate
+for his fatigue.
-I love and pity, O sad sisters mine,
-Your thirsts unquenched, your pains no tongue can tell,
-And your great hearts, those urns of love divine!
+LXV
+Any officeholder whatsoever, a minister, a manager of a theater or
+magazine, can sometimes be an estimable being; but he can never
+be admirable. He is a person lacking personality, a being without
+originality, born for the office, that is to say, for public
+domesticity.
-LA BEATRICE
-In a burnt, ashen land, where no herb grew,
+LXVI
-I to the winds my cries of anguish threw;
-And in my thoughts, in that sad place apart,
-Pricked gently with the poignard o'er my heart.
-Then in full noon above my head a cloud
-Descended tempest-swollen, and a crowd
-Of wild, lascivious spirits huddled there.
-The cruel and curious demons of the air,
-Who coldly to consider me began;
-Then, as a crowd jeers some unhappy man,
-Exchanging gestures, winking with their eyes — •
-I heard a laughing and a whispering rise:
-"Let us at leisure contemplate this clown.
-This shadow of Hamlet aping Hamlet's frown.
+God and his profundity. One can be not lacking in wit and find in God
+the accomplice and friend who is always wanting. God is the eternal
+confidant in that tragedy where every one is the hero. There are
+perhaps usurers and assassins who say to God: "Lord, let my next
+operation succeed!" But the prayer of these rascally folk does not
+disturb the honor and the pleasure of mine.
-With wandering eyes and hair upon the wind.
-Is't not a pity that this empty mind.
+LXVII
-This tramp, this actor out of work, this droll.
-Because he knows how to assume a role
+All idea is, in itself, endowed with immortal life, like a person. All
+form, even created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of
+matter, and it is not molecules that constitute form.
-Should dream that eagles and insects, streams and woods,
-Stand still to hear him chaunt his dolorous moods?
+LXVIII
-Even unto us, who made these ancient things.
-The fool his public lamentation sings."
+It is impossible to glance through any newspaper at all, no matter of
+what day, what month, what year, without finding in every line the most
+frightful signs of human perversity, together with the most astonishing
+boasts of probity, of goodness, of charity, and the most shameless
+affirmations in regard to the progress of civilization.
+Every paper, from the first line to the last, is but a tissue of
+horrors. War, crime, theft, lewdness, crimes of princes, crimes of
+nations, crimes of individuals, a universal intoxication of atrocity.
+And it is with this disgusting appetizer that civilized man accompanies
+his every morning meal. Everything in this world sweats crime: the
+magazine, the wall, the face of man. I cannot see how a pure hand can
+touch a paper without a convulsion of disgust.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-With pride as lofty as the towering cloud,
+LXIX
-I would have stilled these clamouring demons loud,
-And turned in scorn my sovereign head away
-Had I not seen — O sight to dim the day! —
-There in the middle of the troupe obscene
-The proud and peerless beauty of my Queen 1
-She laughed with them at all my dark distress,
-And gave to each in turn a vile caress.
+The strength of the amulet demonstrated by philosophy. Bored coins,
+talismans, every one's keepsakes. Treatise on moral dynamics. Of the
+power of the sacraments. Of my childhood, tendency to mysticism. My
+conversations with God.
-THE SOUL OF WINE
-One eve in the bottle sang the soul of wine:
+LXX
-"Man, unto thee, dear disinherited,
-I sing a song of love and light divine —
-Prisoned in glass beneath my seals of red.
+Of obsession. Of Possession, of Prayer and of Faith. Moral dynamics
+of Jesus. (Renan thinks it ridiculous to suppose that Jesus believed
+in the omnipotence, even materially, of Prayer and of Faith.) The
+sacraments are the means of this dynamics.
-"I know thou labourest on the hill of fire.
+Of the infamy of the printing-shop, great obstacle to the development
-In sweat and pain beneath a flaming sun.
+of beauty.
-To give the life and soul my vines desire,
-And I am grateful for thy labours done.
-"For I find joys unnumbered when I lave
+LXXI
-The throat of man by travail long outworn.
-And his hot bosom is a sweeter grave
-Of sounder sleep than my cold caves forlorn.
+In order for the law of progress to exist, every one must wish to
+create it; that is, when every individual applies himself to progress,
+then, and only then, humanity will be in progress.
-"Hearest thou not the echoing Sabbath sound?
+This hypothesis serves to explain the identity of two contradictory
+ideas, free will and predestination.--Not only is there, in the case of
+progress, identity of free will and predestination, but that identity
+has always existed. That identity is history, the history of nations
+and of men.
-The hope that whispers in my trembling breast?
-Thy elbows on the table! gaze around;
-Glorify me with joy and be at rest.
+LXXII
-"To thy wife's eyes I'll bring their long-lost gleam,
-I'll bring back to thy child his strength and light,
-To him, life's fragile athlete I will seem ^
+_Hygiene. Projects._--The more one wills, the better one wills.
-Rare oil that firms his muscles for the fight.
+The more one works, the better one works, and the more one wants to
+work. The more one produces, the more fertile one grows.
+Morally as physically, I have always had the sensation of the gulf,
+not only of the gulf of sleep, but the gulf of action, of revery, of
+memory, of desire, of regret, of remorse, of beauty, of number, etc.
+I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror. Now, I always have
+vertigo, and to-day, January 23, 1862, I felt a strange warning. I felt
+pass over me a gust from the wing of imbecility.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 175
-"I flow in man's heart as ambrosia flows;
+LXXIII
-The grain the eternal Sower casts in the sod —
-From our first loves the first fair verse arose,
-Flower-like aspiring to the heavens and God!"
+How many presentiments and signs already sent by God, that it is _high
+time_ to act, to regard the present moment as the most important
+moment, and to make my _perpetual joy_ of my usual torment, that is, of
+work!
-THE WINE OF LOVERS
-Space rolls to-day her splendour round!
+LXXIV
-Unbridled, spurless, without bound,
-Mount we upon the wings of wine
-For skies fantastic and divine!
-Let us, like angels tortured by
-Some wild delirious phantasy,
-Follow the far-off mirage bom
-In the blue crystal of the mom.
-And gently balanced on the wing
+_Hygiene, Conduct, Morals._--Every moment, we are crushed by the idea
-Of the wild whirlwind we will ride,
+and sensation of time. And there are only two means of escaping that
-Rejoicing with the joyous thing.
+nightmare, of forgetting it: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us.
+Work fortifies us. Let us choose.
-My sister, floating side by side.
+The more we make use of one of these means, the more the other fills us
-Fly we unceasing whither gleams
+with repugnance.
-The distant heaven of my dreams.
-THE DEATH OF LOVERS
+One can forget time only by using it.
-There shall be couches whence faint odours rise,
+Everything is accomplished bit by bit.
-Divans like sepulchres, deep and profound;
-Strange flowers that bloomed beneath diviner skies
+De Maistre and Edgar Poe taught me to reason.
-The death-bed of our love shall breathe around.
-And guarding their last embers till the end,
+There is no long work but that which one dares not begin. It becomes a
-Our hearts shall be the torches of the shrine,
+nightmare.
-And their two leaping flames shall fade and blend
-In the twin mirrors of your soul and mine.
+LXXV
-;i76 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+_Hygiene._--By putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of
+never being able to do it. By postponing conversion, one risks being
+damned.
-And through the eve of rose and mystic blue
+To heal everything, misery, disease and melancholy, absolutely nothing
-A beam of love shall pass from me to you,
+is needed but the love of work.
-Like a long sigh charged with a last farewell;
-And later still an angel, flinging wide
-The gates, shall bring to life with joyful spell
+LXXVI
-The tarnished mirrors and the flames that died.
+Precious Notes.--Do every day what prudence and duty dictate. If you
+work every day, life will be more endurable. Work six days without a
+let-up. To find fields, Know thyself. Always to be a poet, even in
+prose. Grand style (nothing is more beautiful than the commonplace).
+First begin, then make use of logic and analysis. Any hypothesis
+whatsoever tends to its conclusion. Find the daily frenzy.
-THE DEATH OF THE POOR
+LXXVII
-Death is consoler and Death brings to life;
-The end of all, the solitary hope;
+_Hygiene, Conduct, Morals._--Debts. Friends (my mother, friends,
-We, drunk with Death's elixir, face the strife.
+myself). Thus, 1000 francs should be divided into two parts of 500
+francs each, and the second divided into three.
-Take heart, and mount till eve the weary slope.
-Across the storm, the hoar-frost, and the snow.
+LXXVIII
-Death on our dark horizon pulses clear;
-Death is the famous hostel we all know.
-Where we may rest and sleep and have good cheer.
-Death is an angel whose magnetic palms
+--To do one's duty every day and trust in God for the morrow.
-Bring dreams of ecstasy and slumberous calms
-To smooth the beds of naked men and poor.
-Death is the mystic granary of God;
+The one way to make money is to work in a disinterested fashion.
-The poor man's purse; his fatherland of yore;
+--Concentrated wisdom. Toilet, prayer, labor.
-The Gate that opens into heavens untrodl
+Prayer: charity, wisdom and strength.
-GYPSIES TRAVELLING
+Without charity, I am but a clashing cymbal.
-The tribe prophetic with the eyes of fire
+--My humiliations have been mercies of God.
-Went forth last night; their little ones at rest
-Each on his mother's back, with his desire
-Set on the ready treasure of her breast.
+Is my egoistical phase at an end?
+The gift of responding to the moment's need, exactitude, in a word,
+should infallibly bring its recompense.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 177
-Laden with shining arms the men-folk tread
+LXXIX
-By the long wagons where their goods lie hidden;
-They watch the heaven with eyes grown wearied
-Of hopeless dreams that come to them unbidden.
-The grasshopper, from out his sandy screen,
-Watching them pass redoubles his shrill song;
-Dian, who loves them, makes the grass more green.
-And makes the rock run water for this throng
+_Hygiene, Conduct, Morals._--Jean 300, my mother 200, myself 300,--800
-Of ever-wandering ones Xvhose calm eyes see
+francs a month. To work from six in the morning, on an empty stomach,
-Familiar realms of darkness yet to be.
+till noon. To work blindly, aimlessly, like a madman. We shall see the
+result.
+I suppose I base my destiny on a few hours' uninterrupted toil.
+All is reparable. There is still time. Who knows even if new
+pleasure...?
-FRANCISCO ME^ LAUDES
+I have not yet known the pleasure of a project carried out.
-Novis te cantabo chordis,
+Power of the fixed idea, power of hope.
-O novelletum quod ludis
-In solitudine cordis.
-Esto sertis implicata,
+The habit of doing one's duty drives out fear.
-O fcemina delicata
+One must wish to dream and know how to dream. The summoning of
+inspiration. The Art of Magic. To set myself immediately to writing. I
+reason too much.
-Per quam solvuntur peccata
+Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams.
-Sicut beneficum Lethe,
+A procession of little wishes makes a mighty end.
-Hauriam oscula de te,
-Quae imbuta es magnete.
-Quum vitiorum tempestas
+Every recoil of the will is a particle of lost substance. How prodigal,
-Turbabat omnes semitas,
+then, is hesitation! And judge of the greatness of the final effort
-Apparuisti, Deltas,
+needed to repair so many losses!
-Velut Stella salutaris
+The man who prays in the evening, is a captain who posts his sentinels.
+He can sleep.
-In naufragiis amaris . . .
+Dreams of death and warnings.
-Suspendam cor tuis aris!
+Up to now I have enjoyed my memories alone; they must be shared with
+another. Make a passion of the joys of the heart.
+Because I comprehend a glorious existence, I believe myself capable of
+realizing it. O Jean-Jacques!
+Work forcibly engenders good habits, sobriety and chastity,
+consequently health, wealth, successive and progressive genius, and
+charity. Age quod agis.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
+Fish, cold baths, showers, lichen, lozenges, occasionally; in addition,
+suppression of everything exciting.
-Piscina plena virtutis,
+    Island Lichen     125 grams
-Fons aeternae juventutis,
+    White sugar       250   "
-Labris vocem redde mutis!
-Quod erat spurcum, cremasti;
+Steep the lichen, for twelve or fifteen hours, in a sufficient quantity
-Quod rudius, exaequasti;
+of cold water, then drain the water. Boil the lichen in two liters
-Quod debile, confirmastil
+of water, on a slow and continuous flame, until the two liters have
+dwindled to one, remove the scum once; then add the 250 grams of sugar
+and allow it to thicken to the consistency of syrup. Allow it to cool
+again. Take a large tablespoonful three times daily, morning, noon, and
+night. Do not be afraid to increase the dose, if the crises become too
+frequent.
-In fame mea taberaa,
-In nocte mea lucema,
-Recte me semper guberna.
-Adde nunc vires viribus,
+LXXX
-Duke balneum suavibus,
-Unguentatum odoribus!
-Meos circa lumbos mica,
-O castitatis lorica,
-Aqua tincta seraphica;
-Patera gemmis corusca,
+_Hygiene, Conduct, Method._--I swear to myself henceforth to take the
-Panis salsus, mollis esca,
+following rules as eternal rules of my life:
-Divinum vinum, Francisca!
-A LANDSCAPE
+Every morning to pray to God, _reservoir of all strength and all
+justice, to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe,_ as intercessors;
-I WOULD, when I compose my solemn verse,
+to pray to them to grant me the necessary strength always to do my
-Sleep near the heaven as do astrologers.
+duty, and to grant to my mother _a life long enough_ to enjoy my
-Near the high bells, and with a dreaming mind
+transformation; to work all day, or at least _while my strength
-Hear their calm hymns blown to me on the wind.
+remains_; to trust in God, that is, in Justice itself, for the success
+of my projects; to make, every evening, a new prayer to God, asking
-Out of my tower, with chin upon my hands,
+life and strength for my mother and for myself; to divide all I earn
-I'll watch the singing, babbling humEin bands;
+into four parts,--one for current expenses, one for my creditors,
-And see clock-towers like spars against the sky,
+one for my friends and one for my mother;--to obey the precepts of
-And heavens that bring thoughts of eternity;
+strictest sobriety, of which the first is the suppression of everything
+exciting, whatever it may be.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 179
-And softly, through the mist, will watch the birth
-Of stars in heaven and lamplight on the earth;
-The threads of smoke that rise above the town;
-The moon that pours her pale enchantment down.
-Seasons will pass till Autumn fades the rose;
-And when comes Winter with his weary snows,
-I'll shut the doors and window-casements tight,
-And build my faery palace in the night.
-Then I will dream of blue horizons deep;
-Of gardens where the marble fountains weep;
-Of kisses, and of ever-singing birds —
-A sinless Idyll built of innocent words.
-And Trouble, knocking at my window-pane
-And at my closet door, shall knock in vain;
-I will not heed him with his stealthy tread,
-Nor from my reverie uplift my head;
-For I will plunge deep in the pleasure still
-Of summoning the spring-time with my will,
-Drawing the sun out of my heart, and there
-With burning thoughts making a summer air.
-THE VOYAGE
-I
-The world is equal to the child's desire
-Who plays with pictures by his nursery fire —
-How vast the world by lamplight seems 1 How small
-When memory's eyes look back, remembering all! —
-i8o THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-One morning we set forth with thoughts aflame,
-Or heart o'erladen with desire or shame;
-And cradle, to the song of surge and breeze,
-Our own infinity on the finite seas.
-Some flee the memory of their childhood's home;'
-And others flee their fatherland; and some,
-Star-gazers drowned within a woman's eyes,
-Flee from the tyrant Circe's witcheries;
-And, lest they still be changed to beasts, take flight
-For the embrasured heavens, and space, and light.
-Till one by one the stains her kisses made
-In biting cold and burning sunlight fade.
-But the true voyagers are they who part
-From all they love because a wandering heart
-Drives them to fly the Fate they cannot fly;
-Whose call is ever "On! " — they know not why.
-Their thoughts are like the clouds that veil a star;"
-They dream of change as warriors dream of war;
-And strange wild wishes never twice the same:
-Desires no mortal man can give a name.
-n
-We are like whirling tops and rolling balls — '
-For even when the sleepy night-time falls.
-Old Curiosity still thrusts us on.
-Like the cruel Angel who goads forth the sun.
-The end of fate fades ever through the air,
-And, being nowhere, may be anywhere
-Where a man runs, hope waking in his breast,
-For ever like a madman, seeking rest.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL i8i
-Our souls are wandering ships outwearied ;
-And one upon the bridge asks: "What's ahead?'*
-The topman's voice with an exultant sound
-Cries: "Love and Glory!" — then we run aground.
-Each isle the pilot signals when 'tis late,
-Is El Dorado, promised us by fate —
-Imagination, spite of her belief.
-Finds, in the light of dawn, a barren reef.
-Oh the poor seeker after lands that fleel
-Shall we not bind and cast into the sea
-This drunken sailor whose ecstatic mood
-Makes bitterer still the water's weary flood?
-Such is an old tramp wandering in the mire,
-Dreaming the paradise of his own desire,
-Discovering cities of enchanted sleep
-Where'er the light shines on a rubbish heap.
-in
-r
-Strange voyagers, what tales of noble deeds
-Deep in your dim sea- weary eyes one reads!
-Open the casket where your memories are,
-And show each jewel, fashioned from a star;
-For I would travel without sail or wind,
-And so, to lift the sorrow from my mind,
-Let your long memories of sea-days far fled
-Pass o'er my spirit like a sail outspread.
-What have you seen?
-i82 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-IV
-"We have seen waves and stars,
-And lost sea-beaches, and known many wars.
-And notwithstanding war and hope and fear,
-We were as weary there as we are here.
-"The lights that on the violet sea poured down,
-The suns that set behind some far-off town.
-Lit in our hearts the unquiet wish to fly
-Deep in the glimmering distance of the sky;
-"The loveliest countries that rich cities bless.
-Never contained the strange wild loveliness
-By fate and chance shaped from the floating cloud — ■
-And we were always sorrowful and proud!
-"Desire from joy gains strength in weightier measure.
-Desire, old tree who draw'st thy sap from pleasure.
-Though thy bark thickens as the years pass by,
-Thine arduous branches rise towards the sky;
-"And wilt thou still grow taller, tree more fair
-Than the tall cypress?
-— ^Thus have we, with care,
-"Gathered some flowers to please your eager mood.
-Brothers who dream that distant things are good!
-"We have seen many a jewel-glimmering throne;
-And bowed to Idols when wild horns were blown
-In palaces whose faery pomp and gleam
-To your rich men would be a ruinous dream;
-"And robes that were a madness to the eyes;
-Women whose teeth and nails were stained with dyes;
-Wise jugglers round whose neck the serpent winds "
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 183
-V
-And then, and then what more?
-VI
-"0 childish minds!
-"Forget not that which we found everywhere,
-From top to bottom of the fatal stair,
-Above, beneath, around us and within.
-The weary pageant of immortal sin.
-"We have seen woman, stupid slave and proud,
-Before her own frail, foolish beauty bowed;
-And man, a greedy, cruel, lascivious fool,
-Slave of the slave, a ripple in a pool ;
-I
-"The martyrs groan, the headsman's merry mood;
-And banquets seasoned and perfumed with blood;
-Poison, that gives the tyrant's power the slip;
-And nations amorous of the brutal whip;
-"Many religions not unlike our own,
-All in full flight for heaven's resplendent throne;
-And Sanctity, seeking delight in pain.
-Like a sick man of his own sickness vain;
-"And mad mortality, drunk with its own power,
-As foolish now as in a bygone hour,
-Shouting, in presence of the tortured Christ:
-*I curse thee, mine own Image sacrificed.'
-"And silly monks in love with Lunacy,
-Fleeing the troops herded by destiny,
-Who seek for peace in opiate slumber furled —
-Such is the pageant of the rolling world!"
-i84 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-vn
-O bitter knowledge that the wanderers gainl
-The world says our own age is little and vain ;
-For ever, yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,
-'Tis horror's oasis in the sands of sorrow.
-Must we depart? If you can rest, remain;
-Part, if you must. Some fly, some cower in vain,
-Hoping that Time, the grim and eager foe,
-Will pass them by; and some run to and fro
-Like the Apostles or the Wandering Jew;
-Go where they will, the Slayer goes there too!
-And there are some, and these are of the wise,
-Who die as soon as birth has lit their eyes.
-But when at length the Slayer treads us low.
-We will have hope and cry, " 'Tis time to go!"
-As when of old we parted for Cathay
-With wind-blown hair and eyes upon the bay.
-We will embark upon the Shadowy Sea,
-Like youthful wanderers for the first time free —
-Hear you the lovely and funereal voice
-That sings: O come all ye whose wandering joys
-Are set upon the scented Lotus flower,
-For here we sell the fruit's miraculous boon;
-Come ye and drink the sweet and sleepy power
-Of the enchanted, endless afternoon.
-vm
-O Death, old Captain, it is time, put forth!
-We have grown weary of the gloomy north;
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 185
-Though sea and sky are black as ink, lift saill
-Our hearts are full of light and will not fail.
-O pour thy sleepy poison in the cup!
-The fire within the heart so burns us up
-That we would wander Hell and Heaven through,
-Deep in the Unknown seeking something newt
-==FROM THE FLOWERS OF EVIL Translated by W. J. Robertson ==
-BENEDICTION
-When, by the sovran will of Powers Eternal,
-The poet passed into this weary world,
-His mother, filled with fears and doubts infernal,
-Clenching her hands towards Heaven these curses
-hurled.
-— ^"Why rather did I not within me treasure
-"A knot of serpents than this thing of scorn?
-"Accursed be the night of fleeting pleasure
-"Whence in my womb this chastisement was borne!
-"Since thou hast chosen me to be the woman
-"Whose loathsome fruitfulness her husband shames,
-"Who may not cast aside this birth inhuman,
-"As one that flings love-tokens to the flames,
-"The hatred that on me thy vengeance launches
-"On this thwart creature I will pour in flood:
-"So twist the sapling that its withered branches
-"Shall never once put forth a cankered budt"
-Regorging thus the venom of her malice.
-And misconceiving thy decrees sublime.
-In deep Gehenna's gulf she fills the chalice
-Of torments destined to maternal crime.
-Yet, safely sheltered by his viewless angel.
-The Childe forsaken revels in the Sun;
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-And all his food and drink is an evangel
-Of nectared sweets, sent by the Heavenly One.
-He communes with the clouds, knows the wind's voices,
-And on his pilgrimage enchanted sings;
-Seeing how like the wild bird he rejoices
-The hovering Spirit weeps and folds his wings.
-All those he fain would love shrink back in terror,
-Or, boldened by his fearlessness elate.
-Seek to seduce him into sin and error,
-And flesh on him the fierceness of their hate.
-In bread and wine, wherewith his soul is nourished.
-They mix their ashes and foul spume impure;
-Lying they cast aside the things he cherished,
-And curse the chance that made his steps their lure.
-His spouse goes crying in the public places:
-"Since he doth choose my beauty to adore,
-"Aping those ancient idols Time defaces
-"I would regild my glory as of yore.
-"Nard, balm and myrrh shall tempt till he desires me
-"With blandishments, with dainties and with wine,
-"Laughing if in a heart that so admires me
-"I may usurp the sovranty divine 1
-"Until aweary of love's impious orgies,
-"Fastening on him my fingers firm and frail,
-"These claws, keen as the harpy's when she gorges,
-"Shall in the secret of his heart prevail.
-"Then, thrilled and trembling like a young bird captured,
-"The bleeding heart shall from his breast be torn;
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 191
-"To glut his maw my wanton hound, enraptured,
-"Shall see me fling it to the earth in scorn."
-Heavenward, where he beholds a throne resplendent,
-The poet lifts his hands, devout and proud,
-And the vast lightnings of a soul transcendent
-Veil from his gaze awhile the furious crowd: —
-"Blessed be thou, my God, that givest sorrow,
-"Sole remedy divine for things unclean,
-"Whence souls robust a healing virtue borrow,
-"That tempers them for sacred joys serene!
-"I know thou hast ordained in blissful regions
-"A place, a welcome in the festal bowers,
-"To call the poet with thy holy Legions,
-"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers.
-"I know that Sorrow is the strength of Heaven,
-" 'Gainst which in vain strive ravenous Earth and Hell,
-"And that his crown must be of mysteries woven
-"Whereof all worlds and ages hold the spell.
-"But not antique Palmyra's buried treasure,
-"Pearls of the sea, rare metal, precious gem,
-"Though set by thine own hand could fill the measure
-"Of bieauty for his radiant diadem;
-"For this thy light alone, intense and tender,
-"Flows from the primal source of effluence pure,
-"Whereof all mortal eyes, though bright their splendour,
-"Are but the broken glass and glimpse obscure."
-Spleen et Ideal.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-ILL LUCK
-To bear so vast a load of grief
-Thy courage, Sisyphus, I crave!
-My heart against the task is brave,
-But Art is long and Time is brief.
-Far from Fame's proud sepulchral arches,
-Towards a graveyard lone and dumb.
-My sad heart, like a muffled drum.
-Goes beating slow funereal marches.
-— Full many a shrouded jewel sleeps
-In dark oblivion, lost in deeps
-Unknown to pick or plummet's sound:
-Full many a weeping blossom flings
-Her perfume, sweet as secret things,
-In silent solitudes profound.
-Le Guignon.
-. " BEAUTY
-My face is a marmoreal dream, O mortals!
-And on my breast all men are bruised in turn.
-So moulded that the poet's love may bum
-Mute and eternal as the earth's cold portals.
-Throned like a Sphinx unveiled in the blue deep,
-A heart of snow my swan- white beauty muffles;
-I hate the line that undulates and ruffles:
-And never do I laugh and never weep.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 193
-The poets, prone beneath my presence towering
-With stately port of proudest obelisks,
-Worship with rites austere, their days devouring;
-For I have charms to keep their love, pure disks
-That make all things more beautiful and tender:
-My large eyes, radiant with eternal splendour!
-La Beaute.
-IDEAL LOVE
-No, never can these frail ephemeral creatures.
-The withered offspring of a worthless age,
-These buskined limbs, these false and painted features,
-The hunger of a heart like mine assuage.
-Leave to the laureate of sickly posies
-Gavami's hospital sylphs, a simpering choir 1
-Vainly I seek among those pallid roses
-One blossom that allures my red desire.
-Thou with my soul's abysmal dreams be blended,
-Lady Macbeth, in crime superb and splendid,
-A dream of ^Eschylus flowered in cold eclipse
-Of Northern suns! Thou, Night, inspire my passion,
-Calm child of Angelo, coiling in strange fashion
-Thy large limbs moulded for a Titan's lips!
-L'Ideal.
-HYMN TO BEAUTY
-Be thou from Hell upsprung or Heaven descended.
-Beauty! thy look demoniac and divine
-Pours good and evil things confusedly blended,
-And therefore art thou likened unto wine.
-' THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-Thine eye with dawii is filled, with twilight dwindles,
-Like winds of night thou sprinklest perfumes mild;
-Thy kiss, that is a spell, the child's heart kindles,
-Thy mouth, a chalice, makes the man a child.
-Fallen from the stars or risen from gulfs of error,
-Fate dogs thy glamoured garments like a slave;
-With wanton hands thou scatterest joy and terror,
-And rulest over all, cold as the grave.
-Thou tramplest on the dead, scornful and cruel.
-Horror coils like an amulet round thine arms,
-Crime on thy superb bosom is a jewel
-That dances amorously among its charms.
-The dazzled moth that flies to thee, the candle.
-Shrivels and burns, blessing thy fatal flame;
-The lover that dies fawning o'er thy sandal
-Fondles his tomb and breathes the adored name.
-What if from Heaven or Hell thou com'st, immortal
-Beauty? O sphinx-like monster, since alone
-Thine eye, thy smile, thy hand opens the portal
-Of the Infinite I love and have not known.
-What if from God or Satan be the evangel?
-Thou my sole Queen! Witch of the velvet eyes!
-Since with thy fragrance, rhythm and light, O Angel I
-In a less hideous world time swiftlier flies.
-Hymne a la Beaute.
-EXOTIC FRAGRANCE
-When, with closed eyes in the warm autumn night,
-I breathe the fragrance of thy bosom bare,
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 195
-My dream unfurls a clime of loveliest air,
-Drenched in the fiery sun's unclouded light.
-An indolent island dowered with heaven's delight,
-Trees singular and fruits of savour rare,
-Men having sinewy frames robust and spare.
-And women whose clear eyes are wondrous bright.
-Led by thy fragrance to those shores I hail
-A charmed harbour thronged with mast and sail,
-Still wearied with the quivering sea's unrest;
-What time the scent of the green tamarinds
-That thrills the air and fills my swelling breast
-Blends with the mariners' song and the sea-winds.
-Parfum Exotique.
-XXVIII SONNET
-In undulant robes with nacreous sheen impearled
-She walks as in some stately saraband;
-Or like lithe snakes by sacred charmers curled
-In cadence wreathing on the slender wand.
-Calm as blue wastes of sky and desert sand
-That watch unmoved the sorrows of this world;
-With slow regardless sweep as on the strand
-The long swell of the woven sea-waves swirled.
-Her polished orbs are like a mystic gem,
-And, while this strange and symbolled being links
-The inviolate angel and the antique sphinx.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
-Insphered in gold, steel, light and diadem
-The splendour of a lifeless star endows
-With clear cold majesty the barren spouse.
-MUSIC
-Launch me, O music, whither on the soundless
-Sea my star gleams pale!
-I beneath cloudy cope or rapt in boundless
-iEther set my sail;
-With breast outblown, swollen by the wind that urges
-Swelling sheets, I scale
-The summit of the wave whose vexed surges
-Night from me doth veil;
-A labouring vessel's passions in my pulses
-Thrill the shuddering sense;
-The wind that wafts, the tempest that convulses,
-O'er the gulf immense
-Swing me. — ^Anon flat calm and clearer air
-Glass my soul's despair!
-La Musique.
-THE SPIRITUAL DAWN
-When on some wallowing soul the roseate East
-Dawns with the Ideal that awakes and gnaws,
-By vengeful working of mysterious laws
-An angel rises in the drowsed beast.
-The inaccessible blue of the soul-sphere
-To him whose grovelling dream remorse doth gall
-Yawns wide as when the gulfs of space enthral.
-So, heavenly Goddess, Spirit pure and clear.
-THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 197
-Even on the reeking ruins of vile shame
-Thy rosy vision, beautiful and bright,
-For ever floats on my enlarged sight.
-Thus sunlight blackens the pale taper-flame;
-And thus is thy victorious phantom one,
-O soul of splendour, with the immortal Sun!
-L'AuBE Spirituelle.
-THE FLAWED BELL
-Bitter and sweet it is, in winter night,
-Hard by the flickering fire that smokes, to list
-While far-off memories rise in sad slow flight,
-With chimes that echo singing through the mist.
-O blessed be the bell whose vigorous throat,
-In spite of age alert, with strength unspent.
-Utters religiously his faithful note.
-Like an old warrior watching near the tent I
-My soul, alEis! is flawed, and when despair
-Would people with her songs the chill night-air
-Too oft they faint in hoarse enfeebled tones,
-As when a wounded man forgotten moans
-By the red pool, beneath a heap of dead.
-And dyiiig writhes in frenzy on his bed.
-La Cloche Felee.
-THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE
-Translated by Richard Herne Shepherd
-I
-A CARCASS
-Recall to mind the sight we saw, my soul,
-That soft, sweet summer day:
-Upon a bed of flints a carrion foul,
-Just as we tura'd the way
-Its legs erected, wanton-like, in air,
-Burning and sweating past.
-In unconcem'd and cynic sort laid bare
-To view its noisome breast.
-The sun lit up the rottenness with gold,
-To bake it well inclined,
-And give great Nature back a hundredfold
-All she together join'd.
-The sky regarded as the carcass proud
-Oped flower-like to the day;
-So strong the odour, on the grass you vow'd
-You thought to faint away.
-The flies the putrid belly buzz'd about,
-Whence black battalions throng
-Of maggots, like thick liquid flowing out
-The living rags along.
-THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE
-And as a wave they mounted and went down,
-Or darted sparkling wide:
-As if the body, by a wild breath blown,
-Lived as it multiplied.
-From all this life a music strange there ran,
-Like wind and running burns:
-Or like the wheat a winnower in his fan
-With rhythmic movement turns.
-The forms wore off, and as a dream grew faint,
-An outline dimly shown.
-And which the artist finishes to paint
-From memory alone.
-Behind the rocks watch'd us with angry eye
-A bitch disturb 'd in theft.
-Waiting to take, till we had pass'd her by
-The morsel she had left.
-Yet you will be like that corruption too,
-Like that infection prove —
-Star of my eyes, sun of my nature, you,
-My angel and my love!
-Queen of the graces, you will even be so.
-When, the last ritual said,
-Beneath the grass and the fat flowers you go,
-To mould among the dead.
-Then, O my beauty, tell the insatiate worm,
-Who wastes you with his kiss,
-I have kept the godlike essence and the form
-Of perishable bliss!
-THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE 203
-II
-WEEPING AND WANDERING
-Say, Agatha, if at times your spirit turns
-Far from the black sea of the city's mud.
-To another ocean, where the splendour bums
-All blue, and clear, and deep as maidenhood?
-Say, Agatha, if your spirit thither turns?
-The boundless sea consoles the weary mind!
-What demon gave the sea — that chantress hoarse
-To the huge organ of the chiding wind —
-The function grand to rock us like a nurse?
-The boundless ocean soothes the jaded mindl
-O car and frigate, bear me far away.
-For here our tears moisten the very day.
-Is't true that Agatha's sad heart at times
-Says, far from sorrows, from remorse, from crimes,
-Remove me, car, and, frigate, bear away?
-O perfumed paradise, how far removed.
-Where 'neath a clear sky all is love and joy,
-Where all we love is worthy to be loved,
-And pleasure drowns the heart, but does not cloy.
-O perfumed paradise, so far removed!
-But the green paradise of childlike loves.
-The walks, the songs, the kisses, and the flowers,
-The violins dying behind the hills, the hours
-Of evening and the wine-flasks in the groves.
-But the green paradise of early loves,
-THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE
-The innocent paradise, full of stolen Joys,
-Is't farther off than ev'n the Indian main?
-Can we recall it with our plaintive cries,
-Or give it life, with silvery voice, again,
-The innocent paradise, full of furtive joys?
-in
-LESBOS
-Mother of Latin sports and Greek delights,
-Where kisses languishing or pleasureful,
-Warm as the suns, as the water-melons cool,
-Adorn the glorious days and sleepless nights.
-Mother of Latin sports and Greek delights.
-Lesbos, where kisses are as waterfalls
-That fearless into gulfs unfathom'd leap,
-Now run with sobs, now slip with gentle brawls,
-Stormy and secret, manifold and deep;
-Lesbos, where kisses are as waterfalls!
-Lesbos, where Phryne Phryne to her draws.
-Where ne'er a sigh did echoless expire.
-As Paphos' equal thee the stars admire.
-Nor Venus envies Sappho without cause!
-Lesbos, where Phryne Phr3nie to her draws,
-Lesbos, the land of warm and languorous nights,
-Where by their mirrors seeking sterile good,
-The girls with hollow eyes, in soft delights.
-Caress the ripe fruits of their womanhood,
-Lesbos, the land of warm and languorous nights.
-THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE 205
-Leave, leave old Plato's austere eye to frown;
-Pardon is thine for kisses' sweet excess,
-Queen of the land of amiable renown,
-And for exhaustless subtleties of bliss,
-Leave, leave old Plato's austere eye to frown.
-Pardon is' thine for the eternal pain
-That on the ambitious hearts for ever lies,
-Whom far from us the radiant smile could gain.
-Seen dimly on the verge of other skies;
-Pardon is thine for the eternal pain!
-Which of the gods will dare thy judge to be,
-And to condemn thy brow with labour pale.
-Not having balanced in his golden scale
-The flood of tears thy brooks pour'd in the sea?
-Which of the gods will dare thy judge to be?
-What boot the laws of just and of unjust?
-Great-hearted virgins, honour of the isles,
-Lo, your religion also is august.
-And love at hell and heaven together smiles I
-What boot the laws oof just and of unjust?
-For Lesbos chose me out from all my peers,
-To sing the secret of her maids in flower,
-Opening the mystery dark from childhood's hour
-Of frantic laughters, mix'd with sombre tears;
-For Lesbos chose me out from all my peers.
-And since I from Leucate's top survey,
-Like a sentinel with piercing eye and true.
-Watching for brig and frigate night and day.
-Whose distant outlines quiver in the blue,
-And since I from Leucate's top survey,
-o6 THREE POEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE
-To learn if kind and merciful the sea,
-And midst the sobs that make the rock resound,
-Brings back some eve to pardoning Lesbos, free
-The worshipp'd corpse of Sappho, who made her bound
-To learn if kind and merciful the sea!
-Of her the man-like lover-poetess.
-In her sad pallor more than Venus fair!
-The azure eye yields to that black eye, where
-The cloudy circle tells of the distress
-Of her the man-like lover-poetess!
-Fairer than Venus risen on the world,
-Pouring the treasures of her aspect mild,
-The radiance of her fair white youth unfurl'd
-On Ocean old enchanted with his child;
-Fairer than Venus risen on the world.
-Of Sappho, who, blaspheming, died that day
-When trampling on the rite and sacred creed,
-She made her body fair the supreme prey
-Of one whose pride punish 'd the impious deed
-Of Sappho who, blaspheming, died that day.
-And since that time it is that Lesbos moans.
-And, spite the homage which the whole world pays.
-Is drunk each night with cries of pain and groans,
-Her desert shores unto the heavens do raise.
-And since that time it is that Lesbos moans!
-== INTIMATE PAPERS FROM THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF BAUDELAIRE ==
-Translated by Joseph T. Shipley
-ROCKETS
-MY HEART LAID BARE
-The following pages (not included in the "complete"
-French edition) contain notes found after the death of
-Baudelaire; disconnected fragments; echoes; pistils of
-ideas, promising wondrous blossom, to which no pollen
-came. They epitomize the moral and intellectual life
-of the artist. In his own art, Baudelaire is the creator
-of a new mood, in which Maeterlinck and Verlaine are
-among his disciples, where Swinburne and Wilde have
-followed him ; in painting and in music, his criticism was
-seeking in 1850 all that the later development of these
-arts has brought forth. The reflection of that brilliant
-mind glows in these intimate pages.
-In the almost absolute isolation in which he confined
-himself more and more, Baudelaire, who had so loved to
-expand in conversation, felt the need of a confidant that
-would not importune him with useless counsels, nor with
-expressions of sympathy he would have repulsed, if only
-through dandyism. Paper alone could be that confidant.
-The poet is wholly within these journals, with his reli-
-gious, political, moral and literary theories, above all,
-with the explicit evidence of his weaknesses and his
-griefs. What skilled theologian has made a more haughty
-confession than this: "There are none great among men
-save the poet, the priest and the soldier; the man who
-sings, the man who blesses, the man who sacrifices others
-and himself. The rest is made for the whip"? What
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-political economist has made a more absolute declaration
-of principles than this: "There is no reasonable, stable
-government save the aristocratic. Monarchy and repub-
-lic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd"?
-His ideal of the greatness of the individual is derived
-logically from his conception of an aristocratic society
-under the triumvirate of the poet, the priest and the
-soldier, "Before all, to be a great man and a saint for
-one's self;" that, for Baudelaire, is the one ambition
-worthy of a superior nature. He has indicated the prin-
-cipal traits of the ideal "dandy" that he has sought im-
-ceasingly. The dandy is not only the most elegant of
-men, of the most original and discriminating tastes, which
-he exercises in his habits, in the choice of his books or his
-mistress; he is armed with a will superior to all obstacles,
-opposing caprice with invincible energy, and correcting
-in himself the inevitable faults of nature with all the
-resources of art.
-The two manuscripts in which these ideals are scat-
-tered differ so slightly that it might seem impossible to
-decide which should be read first. A closer examination,
-however, indicates that Rockets is of the period about
-ten years before the author's death, while My Heart
-Laid Bare belongs entirely to the days when he felt the
-first attacks of the illness that was to bear him off. No
-effort has been made to group the paragraphs according
-to topic; they are printed as they appear in the manu-
-script (the page divisions ot which are indicated by
-the successive numbers) . The documents furnish an in-
-teresting supplement to the more formal works of the
-poet, and a valuable contribution to literature.
-INTIMATE PAPERS 2H
-ROCKETS
-Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy
-and divine,
-God is the only being who, to govern, need not even
-exist.
-That which is created by the mind lives more truly
-than matter.
-Love is the desire of prostitution. There is not even
-one noble pleasure which cannot be reduced to prosti-
-tution.
-At a play, at a ball, each one finds pleasure in all.
-What is art? Prostitution.
-The pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious ex-
-pression of joy in the multiplication of number.
-All is number. Number is in all. Number is in the
-individual. Intoxication is a number.
-The -desire of productive concentration ought to re-
-place, in a mature being, the desire of deperdition.
-Love may spring from a generous emotion: desire of
-prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by the desire of
-possession.
-Love would like to come out of itself, to merge itself
-in its victim, as the victor in the vanquished, while still
-preserving the privileges of the conqueror.
-The delights of whoso keeps a mistress partake at once
-of the angel and of the proprietor. Charity and ferocity.
-They are even independent of sex, of beauty, of the ani-
-mal kind.
-Immense depth of thought in popular phrases, hol-
-lowed out by generations of ants.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-n
-Of the femininity of the Church, as the reason for its
-omnipotence.
-Of the color violet (restrained, mysterious, veiled love,
-color of canoness).
-The priest is immense, because he makes one believe in
-a host of astounding matters. That the Church wants
-to do all and to be all, is a law of the human mind.
-Mankind worships authority. Priests are the servants
-and sectaries of the imagination. The throne and the
-altar, revolutionary maxim. Religious intoxication of
-great cities. Pantheism. I, that is all; all, that is I.
-Vortex.
-m
-I think I have already written in my notes that love
-is very like torture or a surgical operation. But that
-idea can be developed in the bitterest way. Even though
-two lovers are deeply smitten and filled with reciprocal
-desire, one of the two will always be more calm, or less
-enraptured than the other. He or she is the surgeon, or
-the hangman; the other is the patient, the victim. Do
-you hear those sighs, preludes of a tragedy of shame,
-those groanings, those cries, those throat-rattlings? Who
-has not breathed them, who has not irresistibly sum-
-moned them forth? And what worse do you find in the
-torments applied by painstaking torturers? Those far-
-away eyes of the somnambulist, those limbs the muscles
-of which twitch and grow taut as under the action of a
-galvanic battery; drunkenness, delirium, opium, in their
-most infuriate consequences, surely yield no such fright-
-ful, no such curious examples. And the human counte-
-nance," which Ovid thought fashioned to reflect the stars,
-behold! it speaks only of insane ferocity, or is spread in
-INTIMATE PAPERS 213
-a species of death. For, certainly, I believe it would be
-sacrilege to apply the word "ecstasy" to that sort of de-
-composition.
-Frightful play, in which one of the players must
-lose control of himself!
-Once, in my presence, it was asked in what lay the
-greatest pleasure of love. Some one answered naturally:
-in receiving, and another: in giving one's self. The
-former said: pleasure of pride; and the latter: delight of
-humility! All these blackguards spoke like the Imitation
-of Christ. — Finally, an impudent Utopian came forward
-to affirm that the greatest pleasure of love is to create
-citizens for the fatherland.
-As for me, I said: The one and the supreme bliss of
-love rests in the certainty of doing evil. Both man a;nd
-woman know, from birth, that in evil lies all bliss.
-When a man takes to his bed, almost all his friends
-have a secret desire to see him die; some, to establish the
-fact that his health is inferior to theirs; others, in the
-disinterested hope of studying an agony.
-The arabesque is the most spiritual of designs.
-VI
-The man of letters rouses the capitals and conveys a
-taste for intellectual gymnastics.
-We love women in proportion as they are strangers to
-us. To love intelligent women is a pleasure of the peder-
-ast. Thus bestiality excludes pederasty.
-The spirit of buffoonery need not exclude charity; but
-that's rare.
-Enthusiasm applied to other things than abstractions
-is a sign of weakness and disease.
-The thin is more naked, more indecent, than the fat.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-vn
-Tragic sky. Term of an abstract order applied to a
-material thing.
-Man drinks light with the atmosphere. Thus they are
-right who say that the night air is not healthful for labor.
-Man is bom a fireworshipper.
-Fireworks, conflagrations, incendiaries.
-If one imagine a born fireworshipper bom a Parsee,
-one could create a story.
-vni
-Misunderstanding of a countenance is the result of
-the eclipse of the real image by the hallucination bom
-of it.
-Know then the joys of a bitter life, and pray, pray
-ceaselessly. Prayer is a store-house of energy. (Altar
-of the will. Moral dynamics. The sorcery of the sacra-
-ments. Hygiene of the soul.)
-Music deepens the sky.
-Jean Jacques said that he could not enter a restaurant
-without a certain emotion. For a timid nature, a ticket
-office somewhat resembles the tribunal of hell.
-Life has but one true attraction: the attraction of
-play. But if we care not whether we win or lose?
-DC
-Nations have great men only in spite of themselves —
-like families. They make every effort not to have them.
-Therefore, the great man must, in order to exist, possess
-an offensive force greater than the power of resistance
-developed by millions of individuals.
-Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our
-nights, we might say that men go to bed daily with an
-audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not
-know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.
-INTIMATE PAPERS . 217
-There are tortoise-shell, hides against which scorn is
-no longer a vengeance.
-Many friends, many gloves.* Those who have ad-
-mired me were despised, I might even say were despic-
-able, if I sought to flatter honest men.
-Girardin talk Latin! Pecudesque locutae.
-He belongs to an infidel Society to send Robert Hou-
-din to the Arabs to convert them from the miracles.
-XI
-These great, beautiful vessels, imperceptibly swaying
-(rocking) on the tranquil waters, these sturdy ships, with
-their idle, homesick air, do they not ask us, in a silent
-tongue: When do we sail for happiness?
-Not to forget the marvellous in drama, sorcery, ro-
-mance.
-The background, the atmosphere in which a whole tale
-should be steeped. (See the Fall of the House of Usher,
-and refer this to the profound sensations of hashish and
-of opium.)
-XII
-Are there mathematical insanities, and idiots who
-think that two and two make three? In other words, can
-hallucination, if the words do not cry out (at being
-coupled), invade the affairs of pure reason? If, when a
-man is sunk in habits of sloth, of revery, of idleness, to
-the point of constantly deferring the important thing to
-the morrow, another man were to wake him in the morn-
-ing with biting lash, and were to whip him pitilessly
-until, unable to work for pleasure, he worked for fear,
-* 'for fear of the itch' is added elsewhere.
-i6 INTIMATE PAPERS
-that man, that flogger, would he not be truly the friend,
-the benefactor? Besides, one might declare that pleas-
-ure would follow, much more justly than is said "Love
-comes after marriage."
-Similarly, in politics, the true saint is he who lashes
-and destroys the people, for the people's good.
-That which is not slightly deformed seems to lack feel-
-ing; whence it follows that irregularity, that is, the un-
-foreseen, surprise, astonishment, are an essential part
-and characteristic of beauty.
-xin
-Theodore de Banville is not exactly materialistic; he
-is luminous. His poetry represents happy hours.
-For each letter from a creditor, write fifty lines on
-an abstract subject, and you are saved.
-XV
-Translation and paraphrase of the Passion. To refer
-everything to that.
-Spiritual and physical joys born of the storm, thunder
-and lightning, tocsin of loving, shadowy memories, of
-years gone by.
-XVI
-I have found the definition of Beauty, of my Beauty.
-It is something ardent and sad, something slightly vague,
-giving conjecture wing. I will, if you please, apply my
-idea to a palpable object, for instance, to the most in-
-teresting object in society, to a woman's countenance. A
-seductive and beautiful head, a woman's head, I mean,
-is a head that brings dreams at once — confusedly — of
-voluptuousness and of sadness; which bears a suggestion
-of melancholy, of weariness, even of satiety, — or per-
-INTIMATE PAPERS 217
-haps an opposite emotion, an ardor, a wish to live,
-mingled with pent up bitterness, as springs frohi priva-
-tion or from despair. Mystery, regret, are also charac-
-teristics of beauty.
-A handsome male head need not convey, save per-
-haps in the eyes of a woman, that suggestion of voluptu-
-ousness, which, in a female countenance, is generally tan-
-talizing in proportion as the face is melancholy. But
-that head also will bear something ardent and sad, spirit-
-ual needs, ambitions vaguely receding, the thought of a
-rumbling, unused power, sometimes the thought of a
-vengeful lack of feeling (for the ideal tj^je of the dandy
-must not be neglected here) , sometimes also — and that is
-one of the most interesting characteristics of beauty —
-mystery, and finally (let me have the courage to con-
-fess to what degree I feel myself modern in esthetics)
-misfortune. I do not claim that Joy cannot be associat-
-ed with Beauty, but I do say that Joy is one of its most
-vulgar ornaments, while Melancholy is, as it were, its
-illustrious companion, to such a degree that I can scarcely
-conceive (is my brain an enchanted mirror?) a type of
-beauty in which is no Misfortune. Following — others
-might say: obsessed by — these ideas, you can see that it
-would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most
-perfect type of manly Beauty is Satan, — as pictured by
-Milton.
-xvn
-Auto-idolatry. Poetic harmony of character. Eu-
-rhythmy of character and faculties. Of conserving all
-the faculties. Of augmenting all the faculties. A cult
-(Magianism, evocatory sorcery).
-The sacrifice and the vow are the highest formulae and
-symbols of exchange.
-i8 INTIMATE PAPERS
-Two fundamental literary qualities: the supernatural,
-and irony. Individual glance, aspect in which things
-maintain themselves before the writer, then a Satanic
-turn of mind. The supernatural includes the general
-color and the accent, i. e., intensity, sonority, limpidity,
-vibration, depth and resonance in space and in time.
-There are moments in life when time and space are
-deeper, and the intensity of life immeasurably increased.
-Of magic applied to the rousing of the great dead, to
-the reestablishment and the perfecting of health.
-Inspiration always comes, when a man wishes, but it
-does not always go, when he wishes.
-Of writing and of speech, considered as magic opera-
-tions, evocatory sorcery.
-Of Airs in Woman
-The charming airs, which constitute Beauty, are: The
-blase air, the bored air, the giddy air, the impudent air,
-the cold air, the disdainful air, the commanding air, the
-willing air, the mischievous air, the sickly air, the feline
-air, a mingling of childishness, nonchalance and malice.
-xvm
-In certain almost supernatural moods of the soul the
-depth of life reveals itself to the full, in the scene, ordi-
-nary as it may be, beneath one's eyes. It becomes the
-symbol.
-As I was crossing the boulevard, and as I hurried to
-escape the wagons, my aureole slipped off and fell into
-the mire of the macadam. Fortunately, I had time to
-pick it up; but a moment after the unlucky idea en-
-tered my mind that it was an ill omen ; after that the idea
-clung to me, and gave me no rest the entire day.
-Of the worship of one's self in love, from the point of
-INTIMATE PAPERS 219
-view of health, of hygiene, of the toilet, of eloquence
-and of spiritual nobility.
-XIX
-There is a magic operation in prayer. Prayer is one
-of the great forces of intellectual dynamics. It is like an
-electric current.
-The rosary is a medium, a vehicle; it is prayer brought
-within reach of all.
-Labor, progressive and accumulative force, bearing in-
-terest like capital, in faculties as in results.
-Play, intermittent energy, even though guided by
-science, will be conquered, fruitful as it may be, by labor,
-slight as it may be, but sustained.
-If a poet asked the state for the right to have a few
-bourgeois in his stable, there would be considerable sur-
-prise; while, if a bourgeois asked for roast poet, it would
-seem quite natural.
-"Kitten, puss, pussy, my cat, my wolf, my little mon-
-key, big monkey, big serpent, my little melancholy mon-
-key." Such freaks of too often repeated terms, too fre-
-quent bestial appellations, reveal a satanic side in love.
-Have not the devils the forms of beasts? The Camel of
-Cazotte, camel, devil, and woman.
-XX
-A man went to a shooting gallery, accompanied by his
-wife. He selected a puppet, and said to his wife: "I
-imagine that's you." He closed his eyes and beheaded
-the puppet. Then he said, kissing his companion's
-hand: "Dear angel, how I thank you for my skill."
-When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I
-shall have won solitude.
-This book is not made for my wives, my daughters
-or my sisters. I have few of such things.
-God is a scandal, a scandal that rebounds.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-XXI
-Do not scorn any one's sensibility. One's sensibility,
-that is one's genius.
-By an ardent concubinage, one can imagine the joys
-of a young household.
-The precocious taste for women. I used to confuse
-the odor of fur with the odor of woman. I remember.
-. . . Finally, I loved my mother for her elegance. Thus
-I was a precocious dandy.
-The Protestant countries lack two elements essential
-to the happiness of a well-bred man: gallantry and de-
-votion.
-The mingling of the grotesque and the tragic is pleas-
-ing to the mind, as discords to blase ears.
-What is vintoxicating in bad taste, is the aristocratic
-pleasure of displeasing.
-Germany expresses meditation by line, as England
-by perspective.
-There is, in the birth of every sublime thought, a ner-
-vous shock that is felt in the cerebellum.
-Spain puts into its religion the ferocity natural to
-love.
-STYLE. — ^The eternal note, the eternal and cosmo-
-politan style. Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe.
-Why democrats do not love cats is easy to determine.
-The cat is beautiful; it awakens ideas of luxury, of
-cleanliness, of voluptuousness, etc.
-xxn
-A little labor, repeated three hundred and sixty-five
-times, yields three hundred and sixty-five times a little
-money, that is, an enormous sum. At the same time
-fame is won.
-INTIMATE PAPERS 221
-To create a pounced drawing is genius. I ought to
-create a pounced drawing.
-My mother is fantastic; one must fear her and please
-her.
-xxm
-To give one's self over to Satan, what does that mean?
-What more absurd than progress since man, as is*
-proven by everyday fact, is always like and equal to
-man, that is to say, always in the savage state! What
-are the perils of the forest and the prairie beside the daily
-shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether man en-
-snare his dupe on the boulevard, or pierce his prey in
-unknown forests, is he not eternal man, i. e., the most
-perfect beast of pray?
-They say I am thirty years of age ; but if I have lived
-three minutes in one . . ., am I not ninety?
-. . . Work, is it not the salt that preserves embalmed
-souls?
-XXIV
-I think that the infinite and mysterious charm that
-rests in the contemplation of a ship, especially of a ves-
-sel in n^otion, springs, in the first place, from regularity
-and symmetry (which are of the primordial needs of the
-human mind, as much as complexity and harmony) —
-and, secondly, from the successive multiplication and
-generation of all the curves and imaginary figures cut
-in space by the real elements of the object.
-The poetic idea which this movement in lines produces
-is the hypothesis of a vast, immense, complex but euryth-
-mic being, of a creature full of genius, suffering and
-sighing all human sighs and all human ambitions.
-Civilized races, that always speak so stupidly of sav-
-ages and barbarians, soon, as d'Aurevilly says, you will
-no longer be good enough to be idolaters.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-Stoicism, religion that has but one sacrament: suicide!
-Conceive a canvas for a lyric or fairy buffoonery, for a
-pantomime, and transplant it into a serious novel. Bathe
-the whole in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, — in the
-atmosphere of the great days. Let there be something
-soothing, — something even serene, in passion. Regions
-of pure poetry.
-XXV
-What is not a priesthood nowadays? Youth itself is a
-priesthood — so youth tells us.
-Man, i. e., every one, is so naturally depraved that he
-suffers less from the universal abasement than from
-the establishment of a sensible hierarchy.
-XXVI
-The world is coming to an end. The only reason for
-which it can continue is that it exists. How weak that
-reason is, compared to all that announce the opposite,
-particularly to this: What has the world henceforth to
-do beneath the sky? For, supposing that it continue to
-exist materially, would it be an existence worthy of the
-name and of the Historical Dictionary? I do not say
-that the world will be reduced to the expedients and
-the comic disorder of the South American Republics,
-that perhaps we shall return to the savage state, and
-that we shall go, across the grassy ruins of our civiliza-
-tion, seeking our pasture, gun in hand. No; for these
-adventures presuppose a remnant of vital energy, echo
-of the earliest ages. New example and new victims of
-the inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by that throu^
-which we thought to live. The mechanical will so have
-Americanized us, progress will so have atrophied all our
-spiritual side, that naught, in the sanguine, sacrilegious
-INTIMATE PAPERS 223
-or unnatural dreams of the Utopians can be compared
-to the actual outcome. I ask every thinking man to
-show me what of life remains. Of religion, I believe it
-useless to speak, and to seek the remnants, since to take
-the trouble to deny God is the only scandal in that field.
-Property virtually disappeared with the suppression of
-the right of the first-bom; but the time will come when
-humanity, like an avenging ogre, will snatch their last
-morsel from those who think they are the legitimate
-heirs of the revolutions. Still, that will not be the su-
-preme ill.
-The human imagination can conceive, without too
-much trouble, republics or other community states,
-worthy of some glory, if directed by consecrated men, by
-definite aristocrats. But it is not particularly in politi-
-cal institutions that there will be manifest the universal
-ruin, or the universal progress; for the name matters
-little. It will be in the debasement of the heart. Need I
-say that the little of the political remaining will writhe
-painfully in the embrace of the general bestiality, and
-that governments will be forced, in order to maintain
-themselves and to create a phantom of order, to revert to
-means which will make our actual humanity shudder,
-although so hardened? Then, the son will flee from his
-family not at eighteen years, but at twelve, emancipated
-by his gluttonous precocity; he will flee, not in search of
-heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner in a
-tower, not to immortalize a garret by sublime thoughts,
-but to establish a trade, to amass wealth, and to compete
-with his infamous papa, founder and stockholder of a
-journal which will spread the light and which will cause
-the century to be looked upon as an abettor of supersti-
-tion. Then, the wanderers, the outcasts, those who have
-had several lovers, and who were once called angels, in
-recognition of the heedlessness which shines, light of luck,
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-in their existence logical as evil — then these, I say, will
-be no more than a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom that will
-condemn all, lacking money, all, even the faults of the
-senses! Then, that which will resemble virtue, what do
-I say? — all that is not ardor toward Plutus will be con-
-sidered enormously ridiculous. Justice, if in that fortu-
-nate period justice can still exist, will interdict all citi-
-zens who cannot make a fortune. Your wife, O Bourgeois!
-your chaste partner, whose legitimacy is the poetry of
-your existence, thenceforth, introducing into legality an
-irreproachable infamy, zealous and loving guardian of
-your strongbox, will be no more than the ideal of the.
-kept woman. Your daughter, with infantile hopes of
-marriage, will dream in her cradle of selling herself for a
-million, and you yourself, O Bourgeois, still less poet
-than you are to-day, you will see nothing amiss; you will
-regret naught. For there are things in men that strength-
-en and prosper as others weaken and decline ; and, thanks
-to the progress of the times, you will have left of your
-entrails only the viscera! These times are perhaps quite
-near; who knows even that they have not come, and
-that the thickness of oui skins is not the only obstacle
-that prevents us from appreciating the environment in
-which we breathe?
-As for me, who sometimes feel in me the ridicule of a
-prophet, I know that I shall never find in myself the
-charity of a doctor. Lost in this vile world, jostled by
-the crowds, I am as a tired man who sees behind him,
-in the depths of the years, only disillusion and bitterness^
-and ahead, only a storm that carries nothing new, neither
-knowledge nor grief. The evening that man stole from
-fate a few hours of pleasure, cradled in his digestion,
-forgetful — as far as possible — of the past, content with
-the present and resigned to the future, intoxicated with
-his sangfroid and his dandyism, proud of being less base
-INTIMATE PAPERS , 225
-than those who passed, he said, watching the smoke of
-his cigar: ''What does it matter to me where these con-
-sciences are going?"
-I think I have achieved what mechanics call an extra.
-However, I shall retain these pages, — because I want to
-date my sadness.
-MY HEART LAID BARE
-Of the vaporization and the centralization of the ego.
-All lies in that.
-Of a certain sensual joy in the society of extrava-
-gants.
-(I plan to begin My Heart Laid Bare at any point, in
-any way, and to continue it from day to day, following
-the inspiration of the occasion and the moment, provided
-that the inspiration be vivid.)
-n
-The first comer, if he can entertain, has the right to
-speak of himself.
-m
-I understand that some people desert a cause to dis-
-cover what they can experience in serving another.
-It might be pleasant to bei alternately victim and exe-
-cutioner.
-IV
-•
-Woman is the opposite of the dandy, Thus she must
-inspire horror. Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat,
-thirsty, and she wants to drink. She is proud, and she
-wants to be . . .
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-True merit!
-Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.
-Also, she is always vulgar, that is, the opposite of the
-dandy.
-In regard to the Legion of Honor. He who seeks the
-cross seems to say: "If I am not decorated for having
-done my duty, I shall not go ahead,"
-If a man has merit, what is the good in decorating
-him? If he has not, then he can be decorated, since
-that will give him a lustre.
-To consent to be decorated, is to recognize that the
-state has the right to judge you, to adorn you, et cetera.
-Furthermore, if not pride. Christian humility should
-defend the cross.
-Calculation in favor of God. Nothing exists without
-an end. Hence my existence has- an end. What end? I
-do not know. Hence it is not I that have marked it.
-Hence it is some one wiser than I. Hence I must pray to
-some one to enlighten me. That is the wisest part.
-The dandy ought to aspire uninterruptedly to be sub-
-lime. He should live and sleep before a mirror.
-Analysis of counter-religions; example: sacred prosti-
-tution.
-What is sacred prostitution? Nervous excitation. Pagan
-mysticism. Mysticism, link between paganism and Chris-
-tianity, Paganism and Christianity are reciprocal proofs.
-Revolution and the worship of Reason prove the con-
-cept of Sacrifice.
-Superstition is the reservoir of all truths.
-VI
-There is in all change something. at once agreeable and
-infamous, something that smacks of infidelity and of
-INTIMATE PAPERS 227
-moving day. That is enough to explain the French
-Revolution.
-vn
-My intoxication in 1848. Of what sort was that in-
-toxication? Desire of vengeance. Natural pleasure in
-demolishing. Literary drunkenness; memories of read-
-ing.
-The isth of May. Ever the desire of destruction-
-Legitimate desire, if all that is natural is legitimate.
-The horrors of June. Madness of the people and mad-
-ness of the bourgeoisie. Natural love of crime.
-My fury at the coup d'etat. How many gunshots sus-
-tained! Another Buonaparte! What a disgrace!
-Still, all is quieted. Has not the President the ri^t
-to invoke?
-What Emperor Napoleon III is? What he is worth?
-To find the explanation of his nature, and of his provi-
-dentiality.
-vni
-To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous
-thing.
-was amusing only because every one was build-
-ing Utopias like castles in Spain.
-was charming only by the very excess of the
-ridiculous.
-Robespierre is estimable only because he has made
-some fine phrases.
-IX
-The Revolution, by sacrifice, confirmed superstition.
-X
-Politiqice. I have no convictions, as the men of my
-age understand the term, because I have no ambition.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-There is no basis in me for conviction.
-There is a certain cowardice, or rather a certain soft-
-ness, in honest men.
-The brigands alone are convinced — of what? That
-they must succeed. Therefore, they succeed.
-Why should I succeed, when I haven't even the de-
-sire to try?
-Glorious empires can be founded on crime, and noble
-religions on imposture.
-However, I have some convictions, in a higher sense,
-that cannot be understood by the men of my day.
-Feeling of solitiide, from my childhood. Despite my
-family, and in the midst of my comrades above all, — feel-
-ing of an eternally solitary destiny.
-Withal, an intense desire for life and for pleasure.
-Almost all our life is spent in idle curiosity. In re-
-venge, there are things which ought to rouse human curi-
-osity to the highest degree, and which, to judge by their
-commonplace activity, inspire it in no one!
-Where are our dead friends? WTiy are we here? Do
-we come from somewhere? What is liberty? Can it
-harmonize with providential law? Is the number of souls
-finite or infinite? And the number of habitable worlds?
-etc., etc.
-XI
-Nations have great men only in spite of themselves.
-Hence the great man is the conqueror of all his nation.
-The modern ridiculous religions: Moliere, Beranger,
-Garibaldi.
-xn
-Belief in progress is a doctrine of the slothful, a doc-
-trine of the Belgians. It is the individual who relies on
-his neighbors to tend to his affairs. There can be no
-progress (true, that is, moral) save in the individual
-INTIMATE PAPERS 229
-and by the individual himself. But the world is com-
-posed of folks who can think only in common, in bands.
-Thus the Belgian societies. There are also folks who can
-amuse themselves only in droves. The true hero finds
-his pleasure alone.
-Eternal superiority of the dandy. What is the dandy?
-XIII
-My opinions on the theatre. What I have alvfays
-found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and
-still to-day, is lustre, — a beautiful object, luminous, crys-
-talline, complex, circular, symmetrical.
-However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dra-
-matic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be
-mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive
-than the human face, and to speak through megaphones;
-finally, I should like the female parts to be played bx
-men. '
-After all, lustre has always seemed to me the principal
-actor, seen through the large or the small end of the
-glass.
-XIV
-One must work, if not through desire, at least in de-
-pair, since, as is well established, to work is less boring
-than to seek amusement.
-XV
-There are in every man, at every moment, two simul-
-taneous postulations, one toward God, the other toward
-Satan.
-The invocation of God, or spirituality, is a desire to
-rise; that of Satan, or bestiality, is a joy in descent. To
-the latter should be attributed love for women.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-The joys which spring from these two loves conform to
-their two natures.
-XVI
-Intoxication of humanity; great picture to be made, in
-the sense of charity, in the sense of libertinage, in the
-Kterary or dramaturgic sense.
-xvn
-Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric
-nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a
-spiritual end.
-Capital punishment is the result of a mystic idea, to-
-tally misunderstood to-day. The death penalty has not
-as its object to preserve society, materially at least. Its
-object is the preservation (spiritually) of society and the
-g:uilty one. In order that the sacrifice be perfect, there
-must be assent and joy on the part of the victim. To
-give chloroform to one condemned to death would be an
-impiety, for it would be to wipe out the consciousness
-of his grandeur as victim and to destroy his chance of
-gaining paradise.
-As to torture, it is bom of the infamous side of the
-heart of man, athirst for voluptuousness. Cruelty and
-voluptuousness, identical sensations, like extreme heat
-and extreme cold.
-xvni .
-A dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a dandy
-talking to the people, save to scoff at them?
-There is no reasonable, stable government save the
-aristocratic.
-INTIMATE PAPERS 231
-Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are
-equally weak and absurd.
-Immense nausea of placards.
-There exist but three respectable beings: the priest,
-the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.
-Other men are serfs or slaves, created for the stable,
-that is, to exercise what are called professions.
-XIX
-Observe that those who advocate the abolition of capi-
-tal punishment are more or less interested in its abolish-
-ment. Often, they are executioners. The matter may
-be summarized thus: "I wish to be able to cut off your
-head, but you shall not touch mine."
-Those who abolish souls (materialists) necessarily
-abolish hell; they are, beyond all doubt, interested.
-At the least, they are men that are afraid to live again,
-slothful ones.
-XX
-Mme. de Metternich, although a princess, has forgot-
-ten to answer me, in regard to what I said of her and of
-Wagner. Manners of the Nineteenth Century.
-xxn
-The woman Sand is the Prudhomme of immorality.
-She has always been a moralist. Only formerly she prac-
-ticed amorality. Also she has never been an artist. She
-has the famous fluent style, dear to the bourgeois.
-She is stupid, she is heavy, she is a chatterbox. She
-has, in moral matters, the same depth of judgment and
-the same delicacy of feeling as innkeepers and kept worn-
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-en. What she has said of her mother; what she has said
-of poetry. Her love for the workingman.
-George Sand is one of those old ingenues who do not
-wish to quit the boards.
-See the preface to Mile. La Quintinie, where she claims
-that true Christians do not believe in hell. Sand is for
-the God of good folks, the god of innkeepers and of do-
-mestic sharpers.
-She has good reason to wish to wif)e out hell.
-xxni
-It must not be thought that the devil tempts only men
-of genius. He doubtless scorns imbeciles, but he does
-not disdain their assistance. Quite the contrary, he
-founds great hopes on them.
-Take George Sand. She is especially, and above all
-things, a great blockhead; but she is possessed. It is the
-devil who has persuaded her to trust in her good heart
-and her good sense, so that she might persuade all other
-great blockheads to trust in their good heart and their
-good sense.
-I cannot think of that stupid creature without a shud-
-der of horror. If I were to meet her, I could not keep
-myself from hurling a basin of holy water at her.
-xxrv
-I am bored in France, especially as every one resembles
-Voltaire.
-Emerson forgot Voltaire in his "Representative Men."
-He could have made a fine chapter entitled Voltaire or
-The Antipoet, the king of boobies, the prince of the shal-
-low, the anti-artist, the preacher of innkeepers, the father
-who "lived in a shoe" of the editors of the century.
-INTIMATE PAPERS 233
-XXV
-In the "Ears of the Earl of Chesterfield," Voltaire jokes
-at the expense of that immortal soul which resided, for
-nine months, in the midst of excrement and urine. Vol-
-taire, like all the slothful, hates mystery,
-(At least, he might have divined in that environment
-the malice or satire of Providence against love, and, in
-the process of generation, a sign of original sin. In fact,
-we can make love only with excretory organs.)
-Unable to suppress love, the Church wished at least
-to disinfect it, and created marriage.
-XXVI
-Portrait of the literary riff-raff. Doctor Tavemus
-Crapulosus Pedantissimus. His portrait in the manner of
-Praxiteles. His pipe, his opinions, his Hegelianism, his
-filth, his ideas of art, his spleen, his jealousy. A fine
-picture of modem youth.
-xxvn
-Theology. What is the fall? If it is unity become
-duality, it is God who has fallen. In other words, is not
-creation the fall of God?
-Dandyism. What is the superior man? It is not the
-specialist. It is the man of leisure and broad educa-
-tion. To be rich and to love labor.
-xxviii
-Why does the man of parts prefer maidens to women
-of the world, though they are equally stupid? Find this
-out.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-xxrx
-There are women who are like the ribbon of the Legion
-of Honor. They are wanted no more, because they have
-been sullied by certain men. Just as I would not put on
-the breeches of a mangy fellow.
-What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which
-one cannot do without an accomplice.
-XXX
-Study of the great disease of horror of the home. Rea-
-sons for the disease.
-Indignation at the universal fatuity of all classes, of
-all beings, of both sexes, of every age,
-Man loves man so much that when he flees the city,
-it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in
-the country.
-XXXI
-Of love, of the predilection of the French for military
-metaphors. Here every metaphor wears a moustache.
-Militant literature. — To man the breach, — To bear the
-standard aloft, — To maintain the standard high and firm.
-— To hurl oneself into the thick of the fight, — One of
-the veterans. All these fine phrases apply generally to
-the college scouts and to the do-nothings of the coffee-
-house.
-XXXII
-To add to the military metaphors: Soldier of the ju-
-dicial press (Bertin). The poets of strife. The littera-
-teurs of the advance guard. This habitude of military
-metaphors denotes minds not military, but made for dis-
-cipline, that is, for conformity, minds bom domesticated,
-Belgian minds, which can think only in society.
-INTIMATE PAPERS 235
-xxxm
-Desire of pleasure binds us to the present. Care for
-our health suspends us on the future.
-He who attaches himself to pleasure, that is, to the
-present, is to me as one who, rolling down an incline,
-and trying to cling to the shrubs, uproots them and
-bears them away in his fall.
-Before all to be a great man and a saint for one's
-self.
-XXXV
-In the end, before all history and before the French
-people, the great glory of Napoleon III will have been
-to prove that the first comer, by seizing the telegraph
-and the national press, can govern a great nation.
-Imbeciles are those who think that such things can
-be accomplished without the permission of the people, —
-and those who believe that glory can be founded only on
-virtue!
-xxxvi
-What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.
-Man is an animal of worship. To worship is to sacri-
-fice one's self and to prostitute one's self.
-Thus all love is prostitution.
-The most prostituted being is the being beyond com-
-pare, is. God, since he is the soul supreme for every in-
-dividual, since he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir
-of love.
-Prayer
-Do not chastise me in my mother, yor chastise my
-mother because of me. — I commend to you the souls of
-my father and Mariette. — Give me each day strength to
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-perform the present duty and thus to become a hero and
-a saint.
-xxxvn
-A chapter on the indestructible, eternal, universal and
-ingenious human ferocity. Of the love of blood, of the
-intoxication of blood, of the intoxication of crowds. Of
-the intoxication of the executed criminal (Damiens).
-XXXIX
-I have always been astonished that women are al-
-lowed to enter church. What conversation can they
-have with God?
-The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, whim) is one of
-the seductive forms of the devil.
-XL
-Woman cannot separate the soul from the body. She
-is simple, like the animals. — A satirist would say it is be-
-cause she has only a body.
-XLII '
-Veuillot is so coarse and such an enemy of the arts
-that one would think all the democracy of the world
-was harbored in his breast.
-Development of the portrait. Supremacy of the pure
-idea in the Christian as in the Babouvian communist.
-Fanaticism of humility. Not even to aspire to under-
-stand religion.
-XLIV
-In love, as in almost all human affairs, the entente
-cordial is the result of misunderstanding. The misunder-
-standing is pleasure. The man cries: "Oh my angel!"
-INTIMATE PAPERS 237
-The woman coos: "Mammal Mammal" And the two
-imbeciles are persuaded that they are thinking in con-
-cert. — The insuperable gulf, whidh bars communication,
-remains unabridged.
-XLV
-Why is the spread of the sea so infinitely and so
-eternally agreeable?
-Because the sea conveys the thought both of immens-
-ity and of movement. Six or seven leagues are for man
-the radius of the infinite. ■ 'Tis a diminutive infinite.
-What matter, if it suffice to suggest the whole? Twelve
-or fourteen leagues of liquid in movement are enough to
-convey the highest ideal of beauty which is offered to
-man in his transitory habitation.
-XLVI
-There is naught interesting on earth save its religions.
-There is a universal religion made for the alchemists
-of thought, a religion which is disengaged from man, con-
-sidered as a heavenly reminder.
-XLVII
-Saint-Marc Girardin has spoken one word that will
-endure: "Let us be mediocre!" Set that beside this of
-Robespierre: "Those that do not believe in the immor-
-tality of their being, do themselves justice." The word
-of Saint-Marc Girardin implies a bitter hatred of the
-sublime.
-XLVin
-Theory of true civilization. It lies not in gas, nor in
-steam, nor in tilting tables. It lies in the diminution of
-the traces of original sin.
-Nomad peoples, shepherds, hunters, farmers, even can-
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-nibals, all can rise superior in energy, in personal dig-
-nity, to our races of the West. We perhaps shall be de-
-stroyed.
-XLIX
-It is through leisure, in part, that I have grown, — to
-my great detriment; for leisure, without wealth, increases
-debts; but to my great gain, in regard to sensibility,
-meditation, and the faculty of dandyism and of dilet-
-tantism.
-The young girl of editors. The young girl of editors in
-chief. The young girl, scarecrow, monstrous, assassin
-of art.
-The young girl, what she really is. A little stupid and
-a little slovenly; the greatest imbecility combined with
-the greatest depravity.
-There is in the young girl all the abjection of the cad
-and of the school-boy.
-LI
-Advice to non-communists: all is common, even God.
-Ln
-The Frenchman is a backyard animal so domestic that
-he dare not leap any fences. See his tastes in art and
-literature.
-He is an animal of the Latin race; filth does not dis-
-please him; in his home, and in literature, he is sca-
-tophagous. He dotes on excrement. The litterateurs of
-the coffee-house call that the gallic salt.
-INTIMATE PAPERS 239
-Lin
-Princes and generations. There is equal injustice in
-attributing to reigning princes the virtues and the vices
-of the people they actually govern.
-Those virtues and those vices should almost always,
-as statistics and logic will show, be attributed to the
-atmosphere of the preceding government.
-Louis XIV inherits the men of Louis XIII, glory.
-Napoleon I inherits the men of the Republic, glory.
-Louis-Philippe inherits the men of Charles X, glory.
-Napoleon III inherits the men of Louis-Philippe, dis-
-honor.
-It is always the preceding government that is respon-
-sible for the customs of the following, in so far as a
-government can be responsible for anything.
-The sudden suppressions that circumstances bring to
-a reign do not allow of absolute exactitude, in this law,
-in regard to time. One cannot, say precisely where an in-
-fluence ends, but an influence will endure in all the gen-
-eration that was subjected to it in youth.
-LIV
-Of the hatred of youth toward those who quote. The
-quoter is their enemy.
-"I would place spelling itself in the hands of the hang-
-man." . (Th. Gautier.)
-Immovable desire of prostitution in the heart of man,
-whence springs his horror of solitude. — He wishes to be
-two. The genius wishes to be one, hence alone. Glory
-is in remaining one, and in prostituting one's self in a
-particular way.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-It is that horror of solitude, the need of forgetting his
-ego in the outer flesh, that man nobly calls the need of
-love.
-Two fine religions, immortally planted on the mature,
-eternal obsessions of the people: the ancient phallus, and
-"Vive Barbes!" or "A bas Philippe!" or "Vive la Re-
-publique!"
-LV
-To study, in all its moods, in the works of nature and
-in the works of man, the eternal and universal law of
-gradation, by degrees, little by little, with forces progres-
-sively increasing, like compound interest in finance.
-It is the same with artistic and literary ease; it is the
-same with the variable treasure of the will.
-LVI
-The rout of little litterateurs to be seen at funerals, dis-
-tributing handshakes and commending themselves to the
-memory of the letter writer. Of the funerals of famous
-men.
-Moliere. — My opinion of Tartuffe is that it is not a
-comedy, but a pamphlet. An atheist, if only he is well-
-bred, would think, in connection with the play, that seri-
-ous questions should never be betrayed to the riff-raff.
-Lvn
-To glorify the worship of images (my great, my one,
-my primitive passion). To glorify vagabondage and
-what may be called bohemianism. Worship of sensa-
-tion, multiplied and expressing itself in music. Refer this
-to Liszt.
-Of the need of beating women.
-One can chastise what one loves. Thus with children.
-INTIMATE PAPERS 241
-But that implies the misery of scorning what one loves.
-Of cuckoldom and of cuckolds. The misery of the
-cuckold. It springs from his pride, from a false concep-
-tion of honor and of happiness, and from a love foolishly
-turned from God to be attributed to creatures. It is ever
-the worshipping animal deluded with its idol.
-Lvm
-Music conveys the idea of space. All the arts, more or
-less; since they are number and number is a translation
-of space.
-Daily to wish to be the greatest of men I
-LXI
-Nations have great men only in spite of themselves.
-Apropos of the actor and of my childish dreams, a
-chapter on what constitutes, in the human soul, the
-calling of the actor, the glory of the actor, the art of the
-actor and his situation in the world.
-The theory of Legouve. Is Legouve a cold farceur, a
-Swift, who tried whether France would swallow a new
-absurdity? His choice. Good, in the sense that Samson
-is not an actor.
-Of the true greatness of pariahs. Perhaps even, virtue
-harms the talents of pariahs.
-LXII
-Commerce is, in its essence, satanic. Commerce, is the
-loan returned, it is the loan with an understanding: Re-
-turn more than I gave you.
-— The spirit of everything commercial is completely
-depraved.
-— Commerce is natural, htnce it is infamous.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-— ^The least infamous of tradesmen is he who says:
-"Let us be virtuous that we may gain much more money
-than the fools who are vicious." For the tradesman,
-honesty itself is a speculation. Commerce is satanic, be-
-cause it is one of the forms of egoism, the lowest, and
-the most vile.
-Lxrn
-When Jesus Christ said: "Blessed are they that
-hunger, for they shall be filled!" Jesus Christ was gam-
-bling on probabilities.
-LXIV
-The world progresses only through misunderstanding.
-It is by universal misunderstanding that all the world
-agrees. For if, unfortunately, they understood one an-
-other, people could never agree.
-The man of wit, he who will never agree with any one,
-ought to strike up a liking for the conversation of idiots
-and the reading of bad books. He will draw from this
-bitter joys that will largely compensate for his fatigue.
-LXV
-Any officeholder whatsoever, a minister, a. manager of
-a theater or magazine, can sometimes be an estimable
-being; but he can never be admirable. He is a person
-lacking personality, a being without originality, born for
-the office, that is to say, for public domesticity.
-LXVI
-God and his profundity. One can be not lacking in
-wit and find in God the accomplice and friend who is al-
-ways wanting. God is the eternal confidant in that
-tragedy where every one is the hero. There are per-
-INTIMATE PAPERS 243
-haps usurers and assassins who say to God: "Lord, let
-my next operation succeed!" But the prayer of these
-rascally folk does not disturb the honor and the pleasure
-of mine.
-Lxvn
-All idea is, in itself, endowed with immortal life, like a
-person. All form, even created by man, is immortal.
-For form is independent of matter, and it is not mole-
-cules that constitute form.
-Lxvm
-It is impossible to glance through any newspaper at
-all, no matter of what day, what month, what year,
-without finding in every line the most frightful signs of
-human perversity, together with the most astonishing
-boasts of probity, of goodness, of charity, and the most
-shameless affirmations in regard to the progress of civil-
-ization.
-Every paper, from the first line to the last, is but a
-tissue of horrors. War, crime, theft, lewdness, crimes of
-princes, crimes of nations, crimes of individuals, a uni-
-versal intoxication of atrocity.
-And it is with this disgusting appetizer that civilized
-man accompanies his every morning meal. Everything in
-this world sweats crime: the magazine, the wall, the face
-of man. I cannot see how a pure hand can touch a
-paper without a convulsion of disgust.
-LXIX
-The strength of the amulet demonstrated by philos-
-ophy. Bored coins, talismans, every one's keepsakes.
-Treatise on moral dynamics. Of the power of the sacra-
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-ments. Of my childhood, tendency to mysticism. My
-conversations with God.
-LXX
-Of obsession. Of Possession, of Prayer and of Faith.
-Moral dynamics of Jesus. (Renan thinks it ridiculous
-to suppose that Jesus believed in the omnipotence, even
-materially, of Prayer and of Faith.) The sacraments
-are the means of this dynamics.
-Of the infamy of the printing-shop, great obstacle to
-the development of beauty.
-LXXI
-In order for the law of progress to exist, every one
-must wish to create it; that is, when every individual
-applies himself to progress, then, and only then, human-
-ity will be in progress.
-This hj^othesis serves to explain the identity of two
-contradictory ideas, free will and predestination. — ^Not
-only is there, in the case of progress, identity of free will
-and predestination, but that identity has always existed.
-That identity is history, the history of nations and of
-men.
-Lxxn
-Hygiene. Projects. — The more one wills, the better
-one wills.
-The more one works, the better one works, and the
-more one wants to work. The more one produces, the
-more fertile one grows.
-Morally as physically, I have always had the sensa-
-tion of the gulf, not only of the gulf of sleep, but the
-gulf of action, of revery, of memory, of desire, of regret,
-of remorse, of beauty, of number, etc.
-INTIMATE PAPERS 245
-I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
-Now, I always have vertigo, and to-day, January 23,
-, I felt a strange warning. I felt pass over me a
-gust from the wing of imbecility.
-Lxxin
-How many presentiments and signs already sent by
-God, that it is high time to act, to regard the present
-moment as the most important moment, and to make
-my perpetual joy of my usual torment, that is, of workl
-LXXIV
-Hygiene, Conduct, Morals. — Every moment, we are
-crushed by the idea and sensation of time. And there
-are only two means of escaping that nightmare, of forget-
-ting it: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work
-fortifies us. Let us choose.
-The more we make use of one of these means, the more
-the other fills us with repugnance.
-One can forget time only by using it.
-Everything is accomplished bit by bit.
-De Maistre and Edgar Poe taught me to reason.
-There is no long work but that which one dares not
-begin. It becomes a nightmare.
-I
-LXXV
-Hygiene. — By putting off what one has to do, one
-runs the risk of never being able to do it. By postponing
-conversion, one risks being damned.
-To heal everything, misery, disease and melancholy,
-absolutely nothing is needed but the love of work.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-LXXVI
-Precious Notes. — Do every day what prudence and
-duty dictate. If you work every day, life will be more
-endurable. Work six days without a let-up. To find
-fields, Know thyself. Always to be a poet, even in prose.
-Grand style (nothing is more beautiful than the com-
-monplace). First begin, then make use of logic and
-analysis. Any hypothesis whatsoever tends to its con-
-clusion. Find the daily frenzy.
-LXXVII
-Hygiene, Conduct, Morals. — Debts. Friends (my
-mother, friends, myself). Thus, looo francs should be
-divided into two parts of 500 francs each, and the sec-
-ond divided into three.
-Lxxvni
-— To do one's duty every day and trust in God for the
-morrow.
-The one way to make money is to work in a disinter-
-ested fashion.
-— Concentrated wisdom. Toilet, prayer, labor.
-Prayer: charity, wisdom and strength.
-Without charity, I am but a clashing cymbal.
-— My humiliations have been mercies of God.
-Is my egoistical phase at an end?
-The gift of responding to the moment's need, exacti-
-tude, in a word, should infallibly bring its recompense.
-LXXIX
-Hygiene, Conduct, Morals. — Jean 300, my mother
-, myself 300, — 800 francs a month. To work from
-INTIMATE PAPERS 247
-six in the morning, on an empty stomach, till noon. To
-work blindly, aimlessly, like a madman. We shall see
-the result.
-I suppose I base my destiny on a few hours' uninter-
-rupted toil.
-All is reparable. There is still time. Who knows even
-if new pleasure . . . ?
-I have not yet known the pleasure of a project carried
-out.
-Power of the fixed idea, po\yer of hope.
-The habit of doing one's duty drives out fear.
-One must wish to dream and know how to dream.
-The summoning of inspiration. The Art of Magic. To
-set myself immediately to writing, I reason too much.
-Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than
-dreams.
-A procession of little wishes makes a mighty end.
-Every recoil of the will is a particle of lost substance.
-How prodigal, then, is hesitation! And judge of the
-greatness of the final effort needed to repair so many
-losses 1
-The man who prays in the evening, is a captain who
-posts his sentinels. He can sleep.
-Dreams of death and warnings.
-Up to now I have enjoyed my memories alone; they
-must be shared with another. Make a passion of the
-joys of the heart.
-Because I comprehend a glorious existence, I believe
-myself capable of realizing it, O Jean- Jacques!
-Work forcibly engenders good habits, sobriety and
-chastity, consequently health, wealth, successive and pro-
-gressive genius, and charity. Age quod agis.
-Fish, cold baths, showers, lichen, lozenges, occasion-
-ally; in addition, suppression of everything exciting.
-INTIMATE PAPERS
-Island Lichen 125 grams
-White sugar 2 50 "
-Steep the lichen, for twelve or fifteen hours, in a suffi-
-cient quantity of cold water, then drain the water. Boil
-the lichen in two liters of water, on a slow and continuous
-flame, until the two liters have dwindled to one, re-
-move the scum once; then add the 250 grams of sugar
-and allow it to thicken to the consistency of syrup. Al-
-low it to cool again. Take a large tablespoonful three
-times daily, morning, noon, and night. Do not be afraid
-to increase the dose, if the crises become too frequent.
-LXXX
-Hygiene, Conduct, Method. — I swear to myself hence-
-forth to take the following rules as eternal rules of my
-life:
-Every morning to pray to God, reservoir of all strength
-and all justice, to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe,
-as intercessors; to pray to them to grant me the neces-
-sary strength always to do my duty, and to grant to my
-mother a life long enough to enjoy my transformation;
-to work all day, or at least while my strength remains;
-to trust in God, that is, in Justice itself, for the success
-of my projects ; to make, every evening, a new prayer to
-God, asking life and strength for my mother and for my-
-self; to divide all I earn into four parts, — one for current
-expenses, one for my creditors, one for my friends and
-one for my mother; — to obey the precepts of strictest so-
-briety, of which the first is the suppression of everything
-exciting, whatever it may be.
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