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UNIVERSITY OF 
 _. ILLINOIS LIBRARY 
 AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 
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THE MODERN LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE WORLD’S BEST BOOKS 
 
 BAUDELAIRE: HIS PROSE AND POETRY 
 
The publishers will be pleased to send, upon re- 
 guest, an illustrated catalogue setting forth the 
 purpose and ideals of The Modern Library, and 
 describing in detail each volume in the series. 
 QLvery reader of books will find titles he has been 
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BAUDELAIRE 
 HIS PROSE AND POETRY 
 
 Pager BY vl. Ro SMITH 
 
 THE MODERN LIBRARY 
 
 PUBLISHERS i ne NEW YORK 
 
 
 
Copyright, 1919, by BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC. 
 
 Copyright, 1925, by 
 
 THE MODERN LIBRARY, INC. 
 
 Manufactured in the United States of America 
 Bound for THE MODERN LIBRARY by H. Wolff 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 AvE ATQUE VALE. A Poem by A.C. Swinburne . 
 PREFACE ’ 
 CHARLES eer iren, A Dies a PF. P. Shari - 
 
 PoEMS IN Prose. Translated by Arthur Symons 
 The Favours ofthe Moon... .... 
 MN IN I a a 
 “L’Invitation au Voyage” 
 The Eyes of the Poor, 
 
 Windows. . Pam Beton co Kee car tar tts 
 erowos 0.) ws’. W barat heen eke eiivet PF 
 The Cake . <j te EARS leas rn 2 a 
 Evening Twilight . We aiea nh cr tts 
 “Anywhere Out of the World” 
 
 A Heroic Death . i 
 
 Be Drunken . 
 
 Epilogue . Tee en nh Hanan Suny DEM, 
 PoEMS IN Prose. Translated by Joseph T. Shipley 
 
 Dedication (To Arséne coat 
 A Jester ; 
 
 The Dog and the Vial . ; 
 
 The Wild Woman and the Coquette. 
 The Old Mountebank tis 
 The Clock : 
 
 A Hemisphere in a Tress 
 
 The Plaything of the Poor . 
 
 The Gifts of the Fairies . 
 
 Solitude RV th 
 
 Projects .. Shi as tats i hate y a 
 The Lovely Dorothea Ge 
 TOMI UCFIEIL oo Ga NG) he fhe!) he 
 The Generous Player . .... . 
 
 vii 
 
 PAGE 
 
Vill CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 The Rope (To Edward mies EN A Loe 
 Calliings .. oe?) ad ies Raa ean ieee 
 A Thoroughbred. . oe SOE ae See en 
 he Mirror. 0 8.0.03, Pr 
 The Harbor 5.06) ee 
 Mistresses’ Portraits =..." 5.) 
 Soup and the Clouds. .. °°. |.) . | 2). res 
 The Loss of a Halo 2 y 2%...) 5 920 
 Mademoiselle.Bistoury .°°.  . «5 SS 
 Let us Flay the Poor . Rey a OE Fak: 
 
 Good Dogs (To Mr. Joseph Stevens) _ . ba aus Oo 
 LITTLE PoEMS IN PROSE. Translated by F. P. Sturm 
 
 Every Man His Chimera * °°...) 0) ee ee 
 Venus and the Fool’. »% . °.» 3 “S27 eee 
 Already! .. oe te te le take 
 The Double Chamber WeAS Py A ee 
 
 At One o’Clock in the Morning Mn en es 
 The Confiteor of the Artist PEP i es 
 
 The Thyrsus (To Franz Liszt) |... .) 2° eee 
 The Marksman . . ae Sco hd ie te, 
 - The Shooting-range and the Cemetery RPE) SHOR Ce: 
 ‘ne Desire to Paint os | tees o.,'- h) S URS Aana ike aaa 
 The Glass-vendor | ys: 9.) ).. 2) Si 
 The Widows . . shh ee 
 
 The Temptations; or, , Eros, Plutos, and Glory . » oe ees 
 THE FLOWERS OF Evit. Translated by F. P. Sturm 
 
 The Dance of Death ...'... 0. ©... 7) Sipe 
 The Beacons’. . Mr 
 The Sadness of the Moon MPa Peer 
 The Balcony . 2 0.) 3.) 5s | jae 
 
 The Sick’ Muse. 00000000) (sir -y )e5 OR i 
 The Venal Muse.  . 9 2) 6s ek yal ie es en 
 The Evil Monk . 600.2 ue 0 Se 
 The Temptation... « ©» i» ‘ents a (nen 
 The Irreparable . 2... 6.6) .e pe yr 
 A Former Life 9.9050 68 0 nS 
 Don Juan in Hades .. -. 5° 2. 1. Sree 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MEIER he a Polk a elise nie 8 ie  T4S 
 NN CSCO Mes Cee 6! gle Ney oir ceuiial, ie) dew eEAO 
 
 OS ee OR uy an Raa 9 Ts 
 ORIEL Oe SUSAN IE Pl gS ec ee NR es 
 meeevestOr Beauty: Sk 8 ae Heat AH 
 URE MRICS ig. gail ak oh ne, wk eR SS 
 The Remorse of the Dead . . .. . SES 
 The Ghost MPILS Watery e hh leit” We 173 
 To a Madonna arava e 154 
 The Sky one ses tiitet nk © 155 
 Spleen Mieke biden atelier euse . 156 
 Oh VES SS Sn ee Bee ee RPT PG 2. 
 SUMTER MRI OY. See RIN GN Seek gm gh gy Le ee 
 Contemplation . . Gee « Siu ele er red en Se 
 To a Brown Beggar- maid ened ote ‘ Ae tes( Hs: 
 The Swan... uk snliahi ls Ac etiney Wes . 160 
 The Seven Old Men Ma aeure)  hekit gti «vive oko? 
 Phe lattle Old Women’. . . . . 6 « We EA 
 SAE GL OOITOW n/c) ise ee we LOZ 
 SME CO MN aes ec fia ion es) eis, eis edO 
 STAR a a SURE Mtoe etal tap un sl LOR 
 EERE PEON Tg. GOL) gle het tg: Nath) eset) on LOO 
 RP EORVEE ERT ae St ele” a) ey tevin eye 
 ECE Ll Shee whe idl he te el Ne ek E98 
 aOR Re i Sh gl gi Noite tt vest he LTS 
 SREMOMANV IDO cis i et iat eee ie hel: AT4 
 The Wine of Lovers . Sneek MAN aes HU MA iy bo 
 EME ILOVOTS gi a eo ves ee der 3 ETS 
 The Death of the Poor. . .. . ein ae TO 
 Gypsies Travelling gia 5976 
 Francisce Mee Laudes . Pane Rite te by, 
 A Landscape . Aes Ts fw 
 The Voyage ANGE a ncesiannbe piel Eee + TO 
 Tue Flowers oF Evit. Translated by W. J. Robertson 
 RETIREE he yo fe a ahs yk ad a hs FeO 
 UE yee he ko Ny) Cate OA ant ts thin tte OS 
 Ce a AI a OR UU arn RAR 18 Y 
 
 aN RATE Vp Se org a gt Liv Be a lat oeie EOS 
 
x CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 Hymn to Beauty: 9 00) 0 0 a 
 Exotic Fragrance... «3 |). 5 yer 
 Sonnet XVITT 0 a a a 
 Music . UEEER 
 The Spiritual Dawn . MPM ae 
 
 The Flawed Bell. . . 2... og eee ian a ye 
 
 THREE PoEMS FROM BAUDELAIRE. Translated by Richard 
 Herne Shepherd 
 
 A Carcass. PPPS 
 Weeping and Wandering © oe ie Uke hs le an 
 Lesbos . . Na | 
 
 INTIMATE PAPERS FROM THE UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF 
 BAUDELAIRE. Translated by Joseph T. Shipley 
 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. . Meer ty 
 Rockets . . oe ee ce 
 My Heart Laid Bare 2 ss a 225 
 
FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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. 
 
 I 
 
 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 
 BF i 
 
2 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. 
 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. 
 
 Tit 
 
 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. 
 
AVE ATQUE VALE 3 
 
 V 
 
 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 cya, 
 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, 
 
4 AVE ATQUE VALE 
 
 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. 
 
AVE ATQUE VALE 
 
 x 
 
 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 scroli 
 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 
 
6 AVE ATQUE VALE 
 
 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. 
 
 XTIT 
 
 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. 
 
AVE ATQUE VALE 
 
 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 
 
8 AVE ATQUE VALE 
 
 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. 
 
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 likeli- 
 hood, live while poetry is used as a medium of expres- 
 sion, 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 
 esthetic 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 sentimental- 
 ity. -This sum totality of the power of absorbing ex- 
 ternal sensation is Baudelaire. From the effect of his 
 
 9 
 
10 PREFACE 
 
 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. 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 
 mind and art of Baudelaire in English, but the reader will 
 find the following critical appreciations to be of ines- 
 timable 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 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. 
 
 T. R. SmiruH. 
 June, roro. 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE: 
 A Stupy sy F. P. Sturm 
 
 I 
 
 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 tempk,” 
 as Mallarmé called it, that has changed the literature 
 of the world; and, especially, made of poetry the subtle 
 
 L} ee 
 
12 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 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 és 
 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.” 
 
 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 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 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 13 
 
 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 Janguidly 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 inevi- 
 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 symbols 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 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 im- 
 perishably of perishable things and their fading glory. 
 
\ 
 
 14 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 II 
 
 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-cen- 
 tury school, seems to have passed his old-world man- 
 ners 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 dis- 
 tinctions, and passed for a kind of infant prodigy; but 
 later on, when he sat for his examination as bachelier és 
 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 re- 
 spectable 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, 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 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 15 
 
 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 mat- 
 ters were concerned, to follow out his own whim. He 
 took apartments in the Hétel 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 Mallarmé 
 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 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 ques- 
 tion again; there is internal evidence in his writings that 
 shows he made good literary use of these opiate-born 
 
16 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 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 al- 
 ready 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 sup- 
 posed to be characteristic of the poetic mood. “He re- 
 calls,” wrote M. Dulamon, who knew him well, “one of 
 those beautiful Abbés of the eighteenth century, so cor- 
 rect 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 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 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 17 
 
 though retailing, d la Prudhomme, a newspaper para- 
 graph about the mildness or rigour of the weather, he 
 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. His 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”: 
 
 “You are a sky of autumn, vale 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. 
 
18 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o’er3 
 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 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 
 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 corrup- 
 tion from our eyes, and his one prose romance, Under the 
 Hill, unhappily incomplete at his death at the age of 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 19 
 
 twenty-four, beats Baudelaire on his own ground. The 
 four or five chapters which alone remain of this incom- 
 plete romance stand alone in literature. They are the ab- 
 solute attainment of what Baudelaire more or less suc- 
 cessfully 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 voca- 
 tion 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, 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 himself. The famous Eliphas 
 
20 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 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 awaken- 
 ing of new gods. The change wrought, directiy 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 A®sthetes arose to preach the gospel of 
 imagination to the unimaginative. Both Decadence and 
 /Estheticism, 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- 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 21 
 
 ing 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 De- 
 cadents and Aisthetes were weak because they had no 
 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 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 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 
 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. 
 
22 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 These doctrines hold that the visible world is the world 
 of illusion, not of reality. Colour and sound and per- 
 fume and all material and sensible things are but the 
 symbcls 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 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 ts 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 
 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 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 23 
 
 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 
 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 
 oi “The Temptation”— 
 
 “OQ mystic metamorphosis! 
 My senses into one sense flow— 
 
 Her voice makes perfume when she speaks, 
 Her breath is music faint and low!” 
 
 
 
 
24 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 as well as the last six lines of that profound sonnet “Cor- 
 respondences’— 
 
 “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 un- 
 der the influence of hashish, as recorded in The Artéfictal 
 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 roises. Hallucinations com- 
 mence. External objects take on monstrous appearances 
 and show themselves under forms hitherto unknown. 
 . The most singular equivocations, the most inex- 
 plicable 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 nor- 
 mal 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 writ- 
 ten of here. A famous sonnet by Rimbaud on the colour 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 25 
 
 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 blet, 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, poupre, sang craché, rire des lévres belles 
 
 Dans la colére ou les ivresses pénitentes; 
 
 U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides, 
 
 Paix des patis semés d’animaux, paix des rides 
 
 Que lalchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux. 
 
 O, supréme clairon, plein de strideurs étranges, 
 
 Silences traversés des mondes et des anges. 
 
 —O lOmega, 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 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 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 
 
26 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 in Prose (his masterpieces), several volumes of critical 
 essays, published under the titles of Hsthetic 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. 
 
 Tit 
 
 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 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 jeft 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.” SBaudelaire’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 modern, holding that “modern- 
 ity is one-half of art,” the other half being something 
 “eternal and immutable,” he preferred, unlike Blake and 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 29 
 
 his modern followers, to express himself in quite modern 
 terms, and so wrote his famous and much misunderstood 
 _ Eloge 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 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- 
 sert that the Eloge 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 be 
 cause Baudelaire wrote at a time when French literature, 
 in the words of M. Asselineau, “was dying of correct- 
 ness,” and needed very 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-reguiaied 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- 
 nately and fundamentally wrong and wicked. “The 
 greater number of errors relative to the beautiful date 
 from the eighteenth century’s false conceptions of mo- 
 rality. 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 
 
28 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 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 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 artifictal, 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 
 spintuality 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, 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 29 
 
 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 natu- 
 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 little artifices that shock respectability, have for 
 their end “the creation of an abstract unity in the grain 
 and colour of thé 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- 
 sarily 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 be- 
 came 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, how- 
 ever, in the Latin of classical times; that was too robust, 
 
30 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 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 su- 
 preme 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, ‘“Fran- 
 ciscee Meze 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. 
 
 IV 
 
 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 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 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 31 
 
 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 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 
 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 la- 
 bours and therefore hostile to the dreams and reveries 
 
32 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 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 com- 
 paring 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 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 moderns, along- 
 side Hugo and Verlaine. Read the sonnet entitled 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 33 
 
 “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 
 verse. I think it was Professor Saintsbury who first 
 brought The Litile 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 
 
34 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 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 elab- 
 orately wrought poems of The Flowers of Evil. Some of 
 them, as for instance ‘“Every Man His Chimera,” are 
 as Classical and as universally true as the myths and sym- 
 bolisms 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 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 
 admired, looked upon it: with the eye of a sensitive 
 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 35 
 
 spectator in some gloomy vault of the Spanish Inquisi- 
 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 
 soul of the dreamer and the poet, “‘like a vain loud mul- 
 titude”’; 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 
 
36 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 
 
 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 imagi- 
 nation 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 pas- 
 sage 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 hu- 
 manity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the 
 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 
 
NOTE 
 
 THE “Petits Poémes 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 waver- 
 ing outlines of meditation, the sudden starts of the con- 
 science?” This miracle he has achieved in these bdaga- 
 telles 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 master- 
 pieces, 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. ALS: 
 
{ 
 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 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 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 omi- 
 
 39 
 
40 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 
 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? 
 
 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 singu- 
 larly like the deceased, who trampled on the fresh soil 
 with a strange and hysterical violence, and said, shriek- 
 ing with laughter: ‘Look at me! I am the real Bene- 
 dicta! a pretty sort of baggage Iam! 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. 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 4 
 
 It 
 “LINVITATION 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- 
 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 
 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 
 
 \live; far off, where slower hours contain more thoughts, 
 
 \ 
 
42 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 where clocks strike happiness with a deeper and more 
 significant solemnity. 
 
 On shining panels, or on gilded leather of a dark rich- 
 ness, slumbers the discreet life of pictures, deep, calm,, 
 and devout as the souls of the painters 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 sym-. 
 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 
 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, re- 
 moulded. | 
 
 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 am- 
 bitious 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, 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 43 
 
 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- 
 bitious 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 pic- 
 ture 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 monotohous 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 infin- 
 ite to you. 
 
 IV 
 THE EYES OF THE POOR 
 
 Au! 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. 
 
44 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 boule- 
 vard, 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 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 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 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 45 
 
 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 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 love! 
 
 V 
 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 some- 
 thing, and who never goes out. Out of her face, out of 
 her dress, out of her attitude, out of nothing almost, i 
 
46 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 
 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? 
 
 VI 
 CROWDS 
 
 Ir 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 
 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 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 47 
 
 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 shep- 
 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. 
 
 
 
 Vil 
 THE CAKE 
 
 I was travelling. The landscape in the midst of which 
 
 I was seated was of an irresistible grandeur and sublim- 
 
 ity. 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 
 
48 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 en- 
 rapturing 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 an- 
 other 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 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 49 
 
 over on the ground together, struggling for the posses- 
 sion 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 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- 
 pelled the joyous calm in which my soul had lain bask- 
 ing; 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!”’ 
 
 
 
 Vill 
 EVENING TWILIGHT 
 
 Tue day is over. A great restfulness descends into 
 ‘poor minds that the day’s work has wearied; and 
 
50 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 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 
 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 
 
f POEMS IN PROSE 5t 
 
 ‘of imaginary distinctions. Night, which put its own dark- 
 hess 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. 
 _ Onight! O refreshing dark! for me you are the sum- 
 ‘mons to an inner feast, you are the deliverer from an- 
 lguish! In the solitude of the plains, in the stony laby- 
 tinths of a city, scintillation of stars, outburst of gas- 
 lamps, 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 in- 
 visible hand draws out of the depths of the East, mimic 
 ail 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 splen- 
 dours of a shining skirt show through a dark and trans- 
 parent 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? 
 
 IX 
 “ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD” 
 Lire 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 
 ‘bet well if he were by the window. 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 
 
52 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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? Per- 
 haps you would be happy in a country which you have 
 so often admired in pictures. What do you say to Rot- 
 terdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships an- 
 chored 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 tropi- 
 cal 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 dow 
 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, 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 53 
 
 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!” 
 
 x 
 A HEROIC DEATH 
 
 FANCIOULLE was an admirable buffoon, and almost one 
 of the friends of the Prince. But for persons profes- 
 ‘sionally 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 con: 
 spiracy 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 Fan- 
 cioulle, 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 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. 
 
54 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 ever 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. per- 
 formance in which Fancioulle 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- 
 ately 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 in- 
 finitely more probable that the Prince was wishful to 
 estimate the quality of the scenic talents of a man con- 
 demned 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 priv- 
 ileged classes of a little state with limited resources can 
 show forth, on a really solemn occasion. This was a 
 
POEMS IN PROSE oe 
 
 loub:, solemn one, both from the wonder of its display 
 ind from the mysterious moral interest attaching tu it. 
 
 _ The Sieur Fancioulle excelled especially in parts either 
 silent or little burdened with words, such as are often 
 he principal ones in those fairy plays whose object is 
 O represent symbolically the mystery of life. He came 
 ipon the stage lightly and with a perfect ease, which in 
 tself lent some support, in the minds of the noble public, 
 ‘o the idea of kindness and forgiveness. 
 
 _ When we say of an actor, “This is a good actor,” we 
 nake use of a formula which implies that under the per- 
 nage we can still distinguish the actor, that is to say, 
 tt, effort, will. J .ow, if an actor should succeed in be- 
 ‘nog, in relation to the personage whom he is appointed 
 O express, precisely what the finest statues of antiquity, 
 airaculously animated, living, walking, seeing, would be 
 a relation to the confused general idea of beauty, this 
 rould be, undoubtedly, a singular and unheard of case. 
 Tancioulle was, that evening, a perfect idealisation, 
 thich it was impossible not to suppose living, possible, 
 eal. The buffoon came and went, he laughed, wept, was 
 onvulsed with an indestructible aureole about his head, 
 n aureole invisible to all, but visible to me, and in which 
 rere blended, in a strange amalgam, the rays of Art and 
 ae martyr’s glory. Fancioulle brought, by I know not 
 that special grace, something divine and supernatural 
 ito even the most extravagant buffooneries. My pen 
 rembles, and the tears of an emotion which I cannot 
 orget rise to my eyes, as I try to describe to you this 
 ever-to-be-forgotten evening. Fancioulle proved to me, 
 1 a peremptory, an irrefutable way, that the intoxication 
 f Art is surer than all others to veil the terrors of the 
 ulf; that genius can act a comedy on the threshold of 
 he grave with a joy that hinders it from seeing the 
 
56 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 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 no’ 
 unmixed. Did he feel himself conquered in his powei 
 as despot? humiliated in his art as the striker of terro! 
 into hearts, of chill into souls? Such suppositions, no 
 exactly justified, but not absolutely unjustifiable, passec 
 through my mind as I contemplated the face of th 
 Prince, on which a new pallor gradually overspread it: 
 habitual paleness, as snow overspreads snow. His lip: 
 compressed themselves tighter and tighter, and his eye 
 lighted up with an inner fire like that of jealousy or © 
 spite, even while he applauded the talents of his ol 
 friend, the strange buffoon, who played the buffoon s 
 well in the face of death. At a certain moment, I sav 
 his Highness lean towards a little page, stationed behin 
 him, and whisper in his ear. The roguish face of th 
 pretty child lit up with a smile, and he briskly quitte 
 the Prince’s box as if to execute some urgent commis 
 sion. 
 
 A few minutes later a shrill and prolonged hiss inter 
 rupted Fancioulle in one of his finest moments, and rer 
 alike every ear and heart. And from the part of th 
 house from whence this unexpected note of disapprovs 
 had sounded, a child darted into a corridor with stifle 
 laughter. 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 57 
 
 Fancioulle, shaken, roused out of his dream, closed his 
 eyes, then re-opened them, almost at once, extraordi- 
 narily wide, opened his mouth as if to breathe convul- 
 ‘sively, 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 homi- 
 cidal 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 differ- 
 ent 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. 
 
 
 
 XI 
 BE DRUNKEN 
 
 | Br 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 
 wn room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be 
 alf or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, 
 |r of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the 
 \tlock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or 
 |peaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, 
 jpird, clock, will answer you: “It is the hour to be 
 
 
 
 
58 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 
 
 Wiru 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. 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH T. SHIPLBY 
 

 
DEDICATION 
 To 
 ARSENE HOUSSAYE 
 
 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, alter- 
 nately and reciprocally. Consider, I pray you, what con- 
 venience 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 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 painiessly. 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- 
 ing, 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 ap- 
 plied in the depicting of ancient life, so strangely pic- 
 turesque. 
 
 Which of us has not, in his moments of ambition, 
 
 &t 
 
62 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 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. 
 
1 
 H 
 
 
 
 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 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 
 
 : 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.” 
 
 And the dog, wagging its tail, which is, I think, the 
 
 ‘poor creature’s substitute for a laugh or a smile, ap- 
 
 Ba 
 Sellen 
 2 
 
64 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 proached 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 ex- 
 crement, you would have smelled it with delight, and 
 probably have devoured it. So even you, unworthy com- 
 panion 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 un- 
 pityingly; one would say, to hear you sigh, that you suf- 
 fered more than the sexagenarian gleaners or the old beg- 
 gar hags who pick up crusts at the doors of restaurants. 
 
 “Tf 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, 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 65 
 
 and he exhibits her in the suburbs on fair days—with the 
 Magistrates’ permission, of course. 
 
 “Pay close attention. See with what voracity (per- 
 haps 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 ter- 
 rible 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 ever- 
 lasting 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 
 
66 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 kil, swal- 
 low, 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 affecta- 
 tions, 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: itin- 
 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- 
 ness 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 oc- 
 cupied with spiritual tasks, with difficulty escape the in- 
 fluence 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 
 epoche. 
 
 They made, in truth, a formidable gathering: they 
 bawled, bellowed, howléd. 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 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 67 
 
 hurled forth, with the assurance of comedians certain of 
 their wares, witticisms and pleasantries of a humor solid 
 and heavy as that of Moliére. 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, 
 as if, ashamed, he had exiled himself from all these splen- 
 dors, I saw an old mountebank, stooped, decrepit, ema- 
 ciated, a ruin of a man, leaning against one of the pil- 
 Jars 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 cer- 
 tainty of the morrow’s bread; everywhere the frenetic 
 outbursts of vitality. Here, absolute misery, misery be- 
 decked, to crown the horror, in comic tatters, where ne- 
 cessity, 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 ac- 
 complished. 
 
 But what a deep, unforgettable look he cast over the 
 crowd and the lights, the moving stream of which was 
 
68 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 stemmed a few yards from his repulsive wretchedness! 
 I felt my throat clutched by the terrible hand of hys- 
 teria, 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 thread- 
 bare 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 dis- 
 turbance, 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 
 
 Tue 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: 
 “T’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 se 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 69 
 
 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 lift- 
 ing 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 Eter- 
 nity!” 
 
 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 
 
70 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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, intri- 
 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 
 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 contriv- 
 ances—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 
 
POEMS IN PROSE ns 
 
 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 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 
 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 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, 
 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 frater- 
 nally, with teeth of equal whiteness! 
 
72 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 Circum- 
 stances, were gathered at the side of the tribunal, as 
 prizes on the platform for distribution. What was pe- 
 culiar 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 misfor- 
 tune 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 ter- 
 rible 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-Pieté 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 
 
 ba 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 73 
 
 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 for- 
 tune was awarded the sole heir of a very wealthy fam- 
 ily, 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 sat- 
 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 
 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. 
 
74 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 Accordingly the good Fairy responded, with self-pos- 
 session worthy of her rank: “I give to your son... 
 Igivehim .. . 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, turn- 
 ing 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 indis- 
 putable?”’ 
 
 SOLITUDE 
 
 A PHILANTHROPIC journalist once said to me that soli- 
 tude 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 mar- 
 vellously 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 is- 
 land 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 
 
POEMS IN PROSE "8 
 
 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 
 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 Bruyére 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, recall- 
 ing 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 lan- 
 guage of my century. 
 
 PROJECTS 
 
 HE said to himself, while strolling in the great lonely 
 
 park: “How beautiful she would be in an intricate, gor- 
 
 geous court costume, descending, through the air of a 
 beauteous evening, the marble stairs of a palace, oppo- 
 site shallow pools and great greenswards. For she has 
 naturally the air of a princess.” 
 
 Passing along a street somewhat later, he stopped be- 
 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- 
 dered his drummers to play, drowning the words of Louis 
 
 XVI from the scaffold. 
 
76 POEMS IN PROSE | 
 
 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 con- 
 tinued 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 fra- 
 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 
 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 near- 
 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- 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 7 
 
 sels of Wisdom are not drowned by the hum of external 
 Iife, he said: “I have had to-day, in my revery, three 
 k wellings in which I have found equal pleasure. Why 
 {constrain my body to move about, when my soul voy- 
 sages so freely? And to what ead carry out projects, 
 | when the project itself is a sufficing joy?” 
 
 
 
 t 
 
 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 si- 
 jesta, 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 
 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- 
 
 ’ 
 
 
 
78 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 drous coquette, that the pleasure of being admired over- 
 tomes 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 
 mirrot reflecting her walk and her beauty. 
 
 At the hour when dogs moan with pain under the tor- 
 menting 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 re- 
 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, 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 ]’Opera, 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 Doro- 
 thea; the child’s master is so miserly, too miserly to 
 understand another beauty than that of gold. 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 79 
 
 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 elcquence 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 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 
 
80 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 pos- 
 sible 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 fright- 
 ened to see that his eyes shone with an undeniable can- 
 dor. I then saw clearly that he wished to combine char- 
 ity 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 ca- 
 pable! I would have thought it curious, singular, that 
 he found«t 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 irrepar- 
 able of all evils is to do wrong through stupidity. 
 
 THE GENEROUS PLAYER 
 
 YESTERDAY, in the crowd of the boulevard, I felt my- 
 self 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 lux- 
 ury that none of the better homes in Paris can nearly 
 
POEMS IN PROSE gy 
 
 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 almost 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 
 
 
 
82 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 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 
 to the subject of the academies, and my strange com- 
 panion 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 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 83 
 
 inews 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 
 Hong an audience to a piain mortal, and I was afraid 
 lof 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 whem so much ill is said, I can sometimes be a a 
 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 sha!l 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 
 ‘so vast an assemblage, I should gladly have fallen at 
 the feet of this generous player to thank him for his 
 
 
 
 / 
 
84 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 unheard of munificence. But little by little, after I had 
 left him, incurable distrust reéntered 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 Epwarp MANET 
 
 ILLUSIONS, my friend told me, are perhaps as number- 
 Jess 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 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 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- 
 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 J live, and where great grassy spaces still 
 separate the buildings, I often observed a child whose 
 
 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 85 
 
 tdent and roguish countenance, more than all the rest, 
 7on me straightway. He posed for me more than once, 
 nd I transformed him, now into a little gypsy, now inte 
 n angel, now into mythological Love. I made him 
 ear the violin of the vagabond, the Crown of Thorns 
 nd the Nails of the Passion, and the Torch of Eros. 
 at length, I took so lively a pleasure in all the drollery 
 f the youngster, that one day I begged his parents, 
 oor folk, to be kind enough to yield him to me, promis- 
 ig to clothe him well, to give him money and not to 
 npose on him any task beyond cleaning my brushes and 
 unning my errands. The child, with his face washed, 
 ‘ecame charming, and the life he led with me seemed a 
 aradise, compared to that he had undergone in the 
 arental hovel. Only I must say that the little fellow as- 
 ynished me at times by singular spells of precocious sad- 
 ess, and that he soon manifested an immoderate taste 
 or sugar and for liqueurs; so much so that one day when 
 _found that, despite my numerous warnings, he had 
 gain been doing some pilfering of that sort, I threat- 
 aed to send him back to his parents. Then I went out, 
 od my business kept me away for quite some time. 
 
 _ “What was my surprise and horror when, reéntering 
 ae house, the first object that met my eyes was my little 
 llow, the frolicsome companion of my life, hanging from 
 ae panel of the closet! His feet almost touched the 
 oor; a chair, which he had doubtless thrust back with 
 is foot, was overturned beside him; his head was bent 
 onvulsively over one shoulder; his bloated face, and his 
 \7es, quite wide open with a fearful fixity, gave at first 
 ie illusion of life. To take him down was not so easy 
 business as you might think. He was already quite 
 iff, and I had an inexplicable répugnance to letting 
 m fall heavily to the floor. It was necessary to bear 
 »S whole weight on one arm, and, with the free hand, to 
 
 
 
86 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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. 
 
 “T 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- 
 nounce 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 fright- 
 ening, 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: J 
 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 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 himsel 
 with saying with an air half brutalized, half ret | 
 ‘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 
 
 ) 
 pj 
 
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. ‘Oh no, mad- 
 im,’ I answered, ‘that would be bad for you.’ And 
 as my eyes turned involuntarily toward the fatal cup- 
 poard, 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 irresist- 
 ble 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 as the 
 nmstrument of death, and she wished to preserve it as 
 1 dear and horrible relic—And she took possession of 
 the nail and of the twine. 
 
 “At last! At last! all was accomplished. There re- 
 nained only to set myself back at work, even more stren- 
 1ously 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 
 1ext day I received a bundle of letters: some from lodg- 
 ‘rs in the house, several others from neighboring houses; 
 me from the first floor, another from the second, an- 
 yther from the third, and so throughout! some in semi- 
 tumorous style, as though seeking to disguise beneath an 
 ipparent jocularity the sincerity of the request; others, 
 rrossly shameless and without spelling; but all tending 
 jo the same goal, namely, to securing from me a bit 
 »f the fatal and beatific rope. Among the signers were, 
 . must say, more women than men; but not all, I assure 
 
88 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 you, belonged to the lowest class. I have kept the let- 
 ters. 
 
 “‘And then, suddenly, a light glowed in my brain, and J 
 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 
 gieat, 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 
 aly 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 
 WOICR. 3.4 50 5?? ! 
 
 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! 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 89 
 
 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.” 
 
 “Whore Who?” asked the others. 
 
 “God!” he answered, with the accent of perfect con- 
 viction—‘‘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 
 reich separates earth from the sky eyes in which burned 
 an inexpressible glow of ecstasy and regret. 
 
 _ “Fe 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. “J 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 
 ais comrades quite close and spoke in a lower tone. 
 ‘That was a strange performance, now! not to sleep 
 lone, and to be in bed with your maid, in the dark. As 
 il couldn’t sleep, I amused myself, while she was sleeping, 
 dy passing my hand over her arms, her neck, and her 
 shoulders. She has a much thicker neck and arm than 
 ul other women, and her skin is so soft, so soft, that 
 7ou might call it note-paper or silver paper. I liked it 
 io much that I should have kept on for a long time, if I 
 iadn’t been afraid, afraid at first of waking her, and 
 hen still afraid of I don’t know what. Then I buried 
 
 
 
 
 
90 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 amusment 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, 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. 
 
POEMS IN PROSE QI 
 
 ; 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 mois- 
 ten nothing but our gullets,’ said one of the others. 
 
 “TY 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 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- 
 rades 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 pre- 
 cocity 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 
 
g2 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 children separated, each going in ignorance, according 
 to circumstance and chance, to reap his destiny, scan- 
 dalize his relatives, and gravitate toward glory or toward 
 dishonor. | 
 
 A THOROUGHBRED 
 
 SHE is quite ill-favored. None the less she is delight- 
 ful! 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 vital- 
 ity of Southern France: Nimes, Aix, Arles, 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 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 ap- 
 proach of winter lights a new fire in her heart, and 
 the servility of her tenderness is never wearying. 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 93 
 
 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 con- 
 science.” 
 
 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 color- 
 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. 
 
ps POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 » MISTRESSES’ PORTRAITS 
 
 In a men’s boudoir, that is, in a smoking room ad- 
 joining 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 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. 
 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 conversa- 
 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 
 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 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 
 
| POEMS IN PROSE 98 
 
 h 
 
 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? 
 
 F 
 ‘it is I who am the man!’ Such were the unbearable re- 
 
 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, 
 
 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 
 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 ge-ture, she raved like a rav- 
 ished 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 
 
96 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 con- 
 fessed 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 virgim 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 per- 
 haps neglected. I mean the comical in love, and a comi- 
 cal 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 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 
 lett Mew ia: 
 
 “Yor a purveyor of provisions, undoubtedly?” 
 
 “Something of the sort, a kind of employee in the com- 
 missariat who, by some by-profit unknown to her, per- 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 97 
 
 haps 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 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- 
 ant and sedate appearance, of an almost clerical coun- 
 tenance, unhappily lighted by clear grey eyes, those 
 eyes whose glances spoke: “I wish it!” or “It is neces- 
 sary!” or indeed “I never forgive!” 
 
 “Tf, nervous as I know you to be, you, G——., sloth- 
 ful and trifling as you are, you two, K——— and J p 
 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 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 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 
 tule, 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 
 
 
 
98 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?” 
 
 “Ves, 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 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. 
 
 SOUP AND THE CLOUDS 
 
 My well-beloved little madcap was dining with me, 
 and through the open window of the dining-room I was 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 99 
 
 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 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 carri- 
 ages. 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, 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 
 asked for at the police.” 
 
 “Heavens, no! I am quite well off here. You alone 
 have recognized me. Besides, dignity was boring. Then, 
 
100 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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!” 
 
 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, Iam 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 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- 
 ways 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 un- 
 noticed by Regnier, two or three portraits of renowned 
 physicians were hung upon the wall. 
 
 How I was pampered! A great fire, warm wine, ci- 
 gars; 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 
 
POEMS IN PROSE rol 
 
 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 Jong 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, gentle- 
 men!’ Oh! I, I go everywhere! I know these people 
 
 
 
 ' weil!” 
 
 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, be- 
 sides; but I know him personally.” 
 
 “T 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 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? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
102 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 . . 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 
 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?” 
 
 “Tt’s because you are so amiable and good to women!” 
 
 “Peculiar logic,” I said to myself. 
 
 “Oh! Iam 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 
 
 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 103 
 
 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 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 
 _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? 
 
 LET US FLAY THE POOR 
 
 For a fortnight I was confined to my room, and I 
 surrounded myself with the books of the day (sixteen or 
 seventeen vears ago): I mean those volumes which treat 
 of the art of making people happy, wise and rich, in 
 
104 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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’ formule 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 impas- 
 sioned 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 wouid 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 every- 
 where. 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- 
 getP* 
 
 There is this difference between the Demon of Soc- 
 rates 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. x 
 
 * Famous Parisian alienists of the time 4 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 105 
 
 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 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 
 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 philosophet 
 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 ener- 
 getic 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 
 
106 POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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. | 
 
 GOOD DOGS 
 To Mr. Jos—EPH STEVENS 
 
 I HAVE newer, 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 coke quad- 
 ruped, Dane, King Charles, pugdog or lapdog, so en- 
 amoured of himself that he darts inconsiderately be- 
 tween the legs or an the knees of the visiter. as if he 
 vére certain of pleasing, wild as a youngster, foolish as 
 
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 
 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 
 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 
 go about their business. 
 
 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 ip. 
 
 troops, for more than five leagues, to partake of the 
 
108 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- 
 out 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 evi- 
 dence 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 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 little 
 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? 
 
POEMS IN PROSE 10g 
 
 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 
 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 jew- 
 els, or a courtly gown, in exchange for a precious son- 
 net 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. 
 | *“Officieux” was the term adopted by the Republic, to re- 
 
 place “domestique” and “valet,” and to indicate the equality 
 of all—even master and maii. 
 
a 
 
 ee ee ee ee Le 
 ag ee a ee 
 
 
 
aie 
 
 WES My Mi 
 
 ; 
 
 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 AP 6 
 
 _ Beanstatep By F. P. Sturm 
 
 
 

 
EVERY MAN HIS CHIMERA 
 
 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 Chimera 
 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 
 sasques by which ancient warriors hoped to add to the 
 ‘errors of the enemy. 
 
 I questioned one of the men, asking him why they. 
 went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he 
 tor the others, but that evidently they went somewhere, 
 ince they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to 
 valk. 
 
 Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be 
 tritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck and 
 leaving to his back: one had said that he considered it 
 $a part of himself. These grave and weary faces bore 
 ritness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of 
 he heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an 
 arth as desolate as the sky, they journeyed onwards 
 ith the resigned faces of men condemned to hope for 
 ver. So the train passed me and faded into the atmos- 
 here of the horizon at the place where the planet un- 
 eils herself to the curiosity of the human eye. 
 
 / During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to 
 mmprehend this mystery; but irresistible Indifference 
 
 113 
 
 
 
114 LITTLE POEMS IN PROS# 
 
 soon threw herself upon me, nor was I more heavily 
 dejected thereby than they by their crushing Chimeras. 
 
 VENUS AND THE FOOL — 
 
 How admirable the day! The vast park swoons be- 
 neath 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 human- 
 ity, 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 burn 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 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 | 
 frenzy.” 
 
 The implacable Venus gazed into I know not wha 
 distances wth her marble eyes. | 
 
 L 
 t 
 
 t& Y 
 
LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 115 
 
 ALREADY! 
 
 A HUNDRED times already the sun had leaped, radi- 
 ant 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 twi- 
 light. For many days we had contemplated the other 
 side of the firmament, and deciphered the celestial alpha- 
 bet 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 
 aoisy progeny. All so doted upon the image of the 
 ibsent land, that I believe they would have eaten grass 
 vith as much enthusiasm as the beasts. 
 _ At length a coast was signalled, and on approaching 
 ve saw a magnificent and dazzling land. It seemed as 
 hough the music of life flowed therefrom in a vague 
 nurmur; and the banks, rich with all kinds of growths, 
 wreathed, for leagues around, a delicious odour of flowers 
 nd fruits. 
 
 Each one therefore was joyful; his evil humour left 
 ‘im. Quarrels were forgotten, reciprocal wrongs for- 
 ‘iven, the thought of duels was blotted out of the mem- 
 ry, and rancour fled away like smoke. 
 
 I alone was sad, inconceivably sad. Like a priest 
 ‘tom whom one has torn his divinity, I could not, with- 
 
 ut heartbreaking bitterness, leave this so monstrously 
 sductive ocean, this sea so infinitely various in its ter- 
 fying simplicity, which seemed to contain in itself and 
 
116 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!” | 
 
 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 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 
 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 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 obec 
 of music. 
 
 An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice! 
 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. 
 
LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 117 
 
 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 
 wilight; the subtle and terrible mirrors that I recognize 
 vy their horrifying malice. They attract, they dominate, 
 hey devour the sight of whomsoever is imprudent 
 mough to look at them. I have often studied them; 
 hese Black Stars that compel curiosity and admiration. 
 To what benevolent demon, then, do I owe being 
 hus surrounded with mystery, with silence, with peace, 
 nd sweet odours? O beatitude! the thing we name 
 ‘fe, even in its most fortunate amplitude, has nothing in 
 Ommon with this supreme life with which I am now 
 cquainted, which I taste minute by minute, second by 
 2cond. 
 
 _ Not so! Minutes are no more; seconds are no more. 
 ‘ime has vanished, and Eternity reigns—an Eternity of 
 ielight. 
 
 » A heavy and terrible knocking reverberates upon the 
 or, and, as in a hellish dream, it seems to me as though 
 ‘had received a blow from a mattock. 
 
 Then a Spectre enters: it is an usher who comes to 
 stture me in the name of the Law; an infamous concu- 
 ne who comes to cry misery and to add the trivialities 
 her life to the sorrow of mine; or it may be the errand- 
 yy of an editor who comes to implore the remainder of 
 | manuscript. 
 
 )The Chamber of paradise, the Idol, the ruler of 
 eams, the Sylphide, as the great René said; all this 
 igic has vanished at the brutal knocking of the Spectre, 
 Horror; I remember, I remember! Yes, this kennel, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
118 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 alma- 
 nac with the sinister days marked off with a pencil! 
 
 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- 
 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- 
 tery. And he goads me, as though I were a steer 
 with his double goad: ‘Whoa, thou fool! Sweat, then 
 thou slave! Live on, thou damnéd!” 
 
 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! 
 
 i | 
 a 
 iy) 
 
 q 
 
LITTLE POEMS iv P20SE 119 
 
 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 
 and (he seemed to have an idea that Russia was am. 
 sland); I have disputed generously enough with the edi- 
 or of a review, who to each objection replied: “We take 
 he part of respectable people,” which implies that every 
 ther paper but his own is edited by a knave; I have 
 aluted some twenty people, fifteen of them unknown to 
 ne; and shaken hands with a like number, without having 
 aken the precaution of first buying gloves; I have been 
 riven to kill time, during a shower, with a mountebank, 
 vho -wanted me to design for her a costume as Venusta; 
 _have made my bow to a theatre manager, who said: 
 You will do well, perhaps, to interview Z; he is the 
 ‘eaviest, foolishest, and most celebrated of all my au- 
 hors; with him perhaps you will be able to come to 
 omething. See him, and then we'll see.” I have boasted 
 why?) of several villainous deeds I never committed, 
 nd indignantly denied certain shameful things I accom- 
 lished with joy, certain misdeeds of fanfaronade, crimes 
 f human respect; I have refused an easy favour to a 
 ‘lend and given a written recommendation to a perfect 
 901. Heavens! it’s well ended. 
 
 Discontented with myself and with everything and 
 verybody else, I should be glad enough to redeem my- 
 lf and regain my self-respect in the silence and solitude. 
 Souls of those whom I lave loved, whom I have sung, 
 
120 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 fortify me; sustain me; drive away the lies and the cor- 
 rupting 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 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 {| 
 give other than clamouring and dolorous vibrations. | 
 
 And now the profundity of the sky dismays me; it 
 limpidity exasperates me. The insensibility of the 
 the immutability of the spectacle, revolt me. Ah, m 
 one eternally suffer, for ever be a fugitive from Beauty 
 
 Nature, pitiless enchantress, ever-victorious rival, leay 
 me! Tempt my desires and my pride no more. The c 
 templation of Beauty is a duel where the artist scream 
 with terror before being vanquished. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 121 
 
 THE THYRSUS 
 To FRANz Liszt 
 
 Wnaat isathyrsus? According to the moral and poeti- 
 cal 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 vine- 
 srop; dry, straight, and hard. Around this baton, in 
 capricious meanderings, stems and flowers twine and 
 wanton; these, sinuous and fugitive; those, hanging like 
 ells or inverted cups. And an astonishing complexity 
 lisengages itself from this complexity of tender or bril- 
 iant lines and colours. Would not one suppose that the 
 curved line and the spiral pay their court to the straight 
 ine, and twine about in a mute adoration? Would not 
 me say that all these delicate corollz, all these calices, 
 ‘xplosions of odours and colours, execute a mystical 
 lance around the hieratic staff? And what imprudent 
 ‘nortal will dare to decide whether the flowers and the 
 ine branches have been made for the baton, or whether 
 be baton is not but a pretext to set forth the beauty of 
 ‘he vine branches and the flowers? 
 | The thyrsus is the symbol of your astonishing duality, 
 ) powerful and venerated master, dear bacchanal of a 
 nysterious and impassioned Beauty. Never a nymph 
 ixcited by the mysterious Dionysius shook her thyrsus 
 ver the heads of her companions with as much energy 
 3 your genius trembles in the hearts of your brothers. 
 {he baton is your will: erect, firm, unshakeable; the 
 owers are the wanderings of your fancy around it: the 
 minine element encircling the masculine with her illu- 
 ve dance. Straight line and arabesque—intention and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
122 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 your 
 
 Dear Liszt, across the fogs, beyond the flowers, in 
 towns where the pianos chant your glory, where the print- 
 ing-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, say- 
 ing 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 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 
 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: “Ob: 
 serve that doll yonder, to the right, with its nose in t 
 air, and with so haughty an appearance. Very well, dea 
 angel, J will imagine to myself that it is you!” 
 
 He closed both eyes and pulled the trigger. The doll 
 .was neatly decapitated. a | 
 
 } 
 } 
 
LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 123 
 
 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 
 
 “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 brev- 
 ity.” 
 
 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 sun- 
 _ shine. 
 
 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 
 
 
 
124 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 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 
 
 Unuappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, 
 who is torn with this desire. 
 
 I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to 
 me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some beauti- 
 ful, 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 over- 
 powering. 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 explo- 
 sion in the darkness. 
 
 I would compare her to a black sun if one could con- 
 ceive 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 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 
 Thessaly hardly constrain to dance upon the terrified” 
 grass. ri 
 Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will, 
 
 t 
 
 i 
 : 
 
LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 125 
 
 and the love of prey. And below this inquiet face, whose 
 ‘mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown and the im- 
 possible, 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 
 
 THEREeare some natures purely contemplative and an- 
 tipathetic 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 pre- 
 cipitately 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 
 
126 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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, ts 
 order to sce, 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, in- 
 vested with all the majesty of Minos, Aécus, and Rhada- 
 manthus, 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 
 TI 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 par-— 
 take, were it not for the strength of the feeling, of the 
 mood called hysterical by the physician and satanic by ~ 
 
 =) 
 a 
 
LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 127 
 
 those who think a little more profoundly than the physi- 
 cian; the mood which thrusts us unresisting to a multi- 
 tude 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 sud- 
 den and despotic hatred of this poor man that came 
 upon me. 
 “Hello, there!” I cried, and bade him ascend. Mean- 
 while 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? 
 
128 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 THE WIDOWS 
 
 VAUVENARGUES says that in public gardens there aré 
 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 
 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 
 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 com- 
 
 i 
 y 
 ? 
 : 
 
 plement of sorrow. 
 
 ¥ 
 
 ' 
 > 
 
LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 129 
 
 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 Joneli- 
 
 ness to the habits of an ancient celibacy; and the mascu- 
 
 line 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 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, 
 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 féte, of triumph, or of pleasure. The 
 dresses of the women sweep and shimmer; glances pass;' 
 
 
 
130 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 fur- 
 nace 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 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 
 myself, “this poverty, if poverty it be, ought not to ad- 
 mit 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 super- 
 fluity, a toy. 
 
 She will return on foot, dreaming and meditating—and 
 alone, always alone, for the child is turbulent and selfish, 
 
LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 131 
 
 without gentleness or patience, and cannot become, any 
 more 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 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 
 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: 
 
132 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 “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 lur- 
 ing 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 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 
 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 
 

 
 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 133 
 
 nails; there were meagre gnomes, deformed and under- 
 sized, 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: 
 
 “TI 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 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 contralii, 
 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 
 
—_ ra aac ae :S='__-——ceae - => 7, 
 
 134 LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 
 
 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 acquaint- 
 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 
 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. 
 

 
 fy 
 i 
 . 
 4 
 s 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ‘THE FLOWERS OF EVIL roan 
 _ TRANSLATED By F. P. STURBE 
 
 
 

 
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 vertebre. 
 
 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? 
 LPs 
 
138 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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, 
 
 Recks 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 Antinous, 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 139 
 
 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. 
 
140 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 The fighter’s anger, the faun’s impudence, 
 Thou makest of all these a lovely thing; 
 Proud heart, sick body, mind’s magnificence: 
 
 PucET, 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. 
 
 Gova, a nightmare full of things unknown; 
 The foetus witches broil on Sabbath night; 
 Old women at the mirror; children lone 
 Who tempt old demons with their limbs delight. 
 
 Detacrorx, 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 FLOWERS OF EVIL 141 
 
 THE SADNESS OF THE MOON 
 
 Tue 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 
 
 Moruer 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. 
 
 : ; 
 
42 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 ails 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 Minturne? 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 143 
 
 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 Pheebus 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. 
 
144 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, 
 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. 
 
 © 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 FLOWERS OF EVIL 145 
 
 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 IRREPARABLE 
 
 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. 
 
146 
 
 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 accurséd hearts? 
 
 Say, do you know the reprobate? 
 Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts 
 Make souls the targets for their hate? 
 
 Witch, do you know accurséd 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, 
 T 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! 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 147 
 
 A FORMER LIFE 
 
 Lonc 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. 
 
148 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 
 
 TuHeEy 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! 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 149 
 
 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, 
 
150 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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? 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 151 
 
 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 wrinkles 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! 
 
152 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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; 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 153 
 
 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! 
 
154 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 TO A MADONNA 
 (An Ex-Voto in the Spanish taste.) 
 
 Maponna, 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. 
 
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. 
 
 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 Creesus 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— 
 
156 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 agéd 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 157 
 
 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. 
 
158 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 159 
 
 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; 
 
160 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 
 I 
 
 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 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 FLOWERS OF EVIL 16% 
 
 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): 
 “OQ 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, 
 
162 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 . . 3 
 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 163 
 
 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. 
 
164 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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, 
 
 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 
 I 
 
 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 165 
 
 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. 
 
166 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 TIT 
 
 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 ail 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, 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 167 
 
 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 
 
 Wuat 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. 
 
168 
 
 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 damnéd 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: 
 “T 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 169 
 
 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 
 
 Farr 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!—TI 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. 
 
170 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 burn, 
 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 171 
 
 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 Belovéd, 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. 
 
17? THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 larve 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 173 
 
 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 role 
 
 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.” 
 
 ) 
 
174 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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. 
 
 “TI 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, 
 Vil 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 175 
 
 “TY 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. 
 
176 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 
 
 DeraTH 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 
 
 Tue 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 177 
 
 Laden with shining arms the men-folk tread 
 
 By the long wagons where their goods lie hidden; 
 They watch the heaven with eyes grown weariéd 
 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. 
 
 FRANCISCH MEA LAUDES 
 
 Novis te cantabo chordis, 
 O novelletum quod ludis 
 In solitudine cordis. 
 
 Esto sertis implicata, 
 O feemina delicata 
 Per quam solvuntur peccata 
 
 Sicut beneficum Lethe, 
 Hauriam oscula de te, 
 Que imbuta es magnete. 
 
 Quum vitiorum tempestas 
 Turbabat omnes semitas, 
 Apparuisti, Deitas, 
 
 Velut stella salutaris 
 In naufragiis amaris .. . 
 Suspendam cor tuis aris! 
 
r78 
 
 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 Piscina plena virtutis, 
 Fons eterne juventutis, 
 Labris vocem redde mutis! 
 
 Quod erat spurcum, cremasti; 
 Quod rudius, exzequasti; 
 Quod debile, confirmasti! 
 
 In fame mea taberna, 
 In nocte mea lucerna, 
 Recte me semper guberna, 
 
 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 woutp, 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, 
 Ill watch the singing, babbling human bands; 
 And see clock-towers like spars against the sky, 
 And heavens that bring thoughts of eternity; 
 
THE £LUWERS Or 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, shal! 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! How small 
 When memory’s eyes look back, remembering all!— 
 
180 | 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 
 
 fa 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: 
 *Jesires 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. 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 181 
 
 Our souls are wandering ships outweariéd: 
 
 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. 
 
 Fach 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. 
 
 Im 
 
 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? 
 
182 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 “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 
 Yn 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 
 ! y 
 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 »wn power, 
 ‘As foolish now as in a bygone hour, 
 
 Shouting, in presence of the tortured Christ: 
 
 “TY curse thee, mine own Image sacrificed.’ 
 
 “And silly monks in love with Lunacy, 
 Fleeing the troops herded by destiny, 
 
 Who sce’ fcr peace in opiate slumber furled— 
 Such is the pageant of the roiling world!” 
 
184 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 z 
 
 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. 
 
 Vili 
 
 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 new/ 
 

 
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 curset; 
 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; 
 189 ‘ 
 
90 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 
 “T 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 
 “T 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; 
 
THE FLOWERS OF EVIL I9I 
 
 “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:— 
 
 “Blesséd 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! 
 
 “T 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. 
 
 “TI 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. 
 
192 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 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 FLOWERS OF EVIL 103 
 
 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 
 
 Gavarni’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 A%schylus 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. 
 
194 THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 
 
 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 adoréd 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 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 patie (ts 
 
 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 charméd 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, 
 
196 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 
 /Ether 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 y 
 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 MusiqQuxE. 
 
 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 enlargéd 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 blesséd 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 Croce FELEB, 
 
be 
 ut 
 
 a ve 
 
 eS 
 i 
 
 ee 
 
 Xe 
 
 
 
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 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. 
 
 201 
 
202 
 
 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 anc. 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 
 
 Il 
 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, 
 
204 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? 
 
 Ii 
 LESBOS 
 
 WMoTHER 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. 
 
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! 
 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, 
 
206 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 boung 
 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 
 
 209 
 
210 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 un- 
 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 21F 
 
 ROCKETS 
 
 I 
 
 _ 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. 
 
212 INTIMATE PAPERS 
 II 
 
 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 ali and to be all, is a law of the human mind. 
 Mankind worships authority. Priests are the servants 
 und 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. 
 
 It 
 
 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? Whe 
 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 and 
 woman know, from birth, that in evil lies all bliss. 
 
 Vv 
 
 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 
 ‘hat’s rare. 
 
 _ Enthusiasm applied to other things than abstractions 
 S a sign of weakness and disease. 
 The thin is more naked, more indecent, than the fat. 
 
214 INTIMATE PAPERS 
 
 VII 
 
 Tragic sky. ‘Term of an abstract order applied to 4 
 material thing. 
 
 Man drinks light with the atmosphere. Thus they are 
 right who say that the night air is not healthful for iabor. 
 
 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 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? 
 
 IX 
 
 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 ais 
 
 Se 
 
 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. 
 
216 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 “Lave 
 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. 
 
 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. 
 
 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 
 
 { 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 from 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 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 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. 
 
 
 
 ! XVII 
 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 formule and 
 symbols of exchange. 
 
—-- 
 
 218 INTIMATE PAPERS 
 
 Two fundamental literary qualities: the supernaturai, 
 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 reéstablishment 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. 
 
 Or 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, 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. 
 
220 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 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 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. 
 
 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. AZ 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. 
 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 te 
 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 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 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 tdolaters. 
 
222 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 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 
 
INTIMATE PAPERS 223 
 
 or unnatural dreams of the Utopians can be compared 
 
 _ to the actual outcome. I ask every thinking man te 
 
 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 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, 
 
224 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 
 
 I 
 
 Or 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.) 
 
 II 
 
 The first comer, if he can entertain, has the right to 
 speak of himself. 
 I 
 
 I understand that some people desert a cause to dis- 
 cover what they can experience in serving another. 
 It might be pleasant to be 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 tobe... 
 
226 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 
 hinr? 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. 
 
 VII 
 
 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 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 mad- 
 
 | ness of the bourgeoisie. Natural love of crime. 
 
 My fury at the coup d’état. How many gunshots sus- 
 tained! 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 provi- 
 dentiality. 
 | VIII 
 
 To be a useful man has always seemed to me a hideous 
 thing. 
 
 1848 was amusing only because every one was build- 
 ing 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. 
 
 IX 
 
 The Revolution, by sacrifice, confirmed superstition. 
 
 x 
 
 Politique. I have no convictions, as the men of my 
 age understand the term, because I have no ambition. 
 
2280 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 solitude, 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? 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? 
 efc., 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. 
 XII 
 
 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? 
 
 XITI 
 
 My opinions on the theatre. What I have always 
 found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and 
 still to-day, is Justre,—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 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 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. 
 
230 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 
 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, 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 
 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. 
 

 
 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. 
 
 XxX 
 
 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. 
 
 XXII 
 
 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 wom- 
 
232 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 wipe out hell. 
 
 XXITIT 
 
 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. 
 
 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 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 
 
 xXXV 
 
 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 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 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. 
 
234 INTIMATE PAPERS 
 
 XXTX 
 
 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 born domesticated, 
 Belgian minds, which can think only in society. 
 
INTIMATE PAPERS 235 
 
 XXXTIT 
 
 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, por chastise my 
 
 mother because of me.—I commend to you the souls of 
 my father and Mariette——Give me each day strength to 
 
236 INTIMATE PAPERS 
 
 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 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: “Mamma! Mamma!” And the two 
 imbeciles are persuaded that they are thinking in con- 
 cert.—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 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. 
 
 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 can 
 
238 INTIMATE PAPERS 
 
 nibals, aj? can rise superior in energy, in personal dig- 
 nity, to our races of the West. We perhaps shall be de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 SALIX 
 
 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. 
 
 L 
 
 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. 
 
 LIT 
 
 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 
 
 Lit 
 
 Princes and generations. ‘There is equal injustice ia 
 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. 
 
 “T 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. 
 
240 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 Barbés!” 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. 
 
 Moliére—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. 
 
 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 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. 
 
 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. 
 
 LXITI 
 
 Commerce is, in its essence, satanic. Commerce, is the 
 Joan 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, hence it is infamous. 
 
242 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. 
 
 LXII 
 
 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 
 twagedy 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. 
 
 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 mole- 
 cules 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 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- 
 
244 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. 
 
 LXxXI 
 
 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 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 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, 
 1862, I felt a strange warning. I felt pass over me a 
 gust from the wing of imbecility. 
 
 LXXITII 
 
 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. 
 erushed 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. 
 
 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. 
 
246 INTIMALE 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 iet-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, tooo francs should be 
 divided into two parts of 500 francs each, and the sec- 
 ond 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 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 
 200, 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, 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. 
 
 Eve: 37 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 pro- 
 gressive genius, and charity. Age quod agis. 
 
 ' Fish, cold baths, showers, lichen, lozenges, occasion- 
 ally; in addition, suppression of everything exciting. 
 
248 INTIMATE PAPERS 
 
 Island: Lichen: ).)0s eee 125 grams 
 White stigar... 2... a eee 20 tue 
 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 —1 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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