Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE WIDOWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet one more:

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

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

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

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

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

THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, PLUTUS, AND GLORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FLOWERS OF EVIL

Translated by F. P. Sturm

THE DANCE OF DEATH

Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,Proud of her height as when she lived, she movesWith 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, shodWith a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.The swarms that hum about her collar-bonesAs the lascivious streams caress the stones,Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyesAre made of shade and void; with flowery spraysHer skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebræ.O charm of nothing decked in folly! theyWho 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 sneerThe feast of Life! or are you driven here,To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stirAnd goad your moving corpse on with a spur?Or do you hope, when sing the violins,And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!Eternal alembic of antique distress!Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sidesThe 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 revellerSees, while a horror grips him from beneath,The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.For he who has not folded in his armsA skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,Reeks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.O irresistible, with fleshless face,Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:"Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!Withered Antinoüs, dandies with plump faces,Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream,The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;They do not see, within the opened sky,The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high.In every clime and under every sun,Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye;And mingles with your madness, irony!"

THE BEACONS

RUBENS, oblivious garden of indolence,Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love,Where life flows forth in troubled opulence,As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move.LEONARD DA VINCI, sombre and fathomless glass,Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile,Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass,Among the ice and pines that guard some isle.REMBRANDT, sad hospital that a murmuring fills,Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls,Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils,And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls.Strong MICHELANGELO, a vague far placeWhere mingle Christs with pagan Hercules;Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace,And tear their Shroud with clenched hands void of ease.The fighter's anger, the faun's impudence,Thou makest of all these a lovely thing;Proud heart, sick body, mind's magnificence:PUGET, the convict's melancholy king.WATTEAU, the carnival of illustrious hearts,Fluttering like moths upon the wings of chance;Bright lustres light the silk that flames and darts,And pour down folly on the whirling dance.GOYA, a nightmare full of things unknown;The fœtus witches broil on Sabbath night;Old women at the mirror; children loneWho tempt old demons with their limbs delight.DELACROIX, lake of blood ill angels haunt,Where ever-green, o'ershadowing woods arise;Under the surly heaven strange fanfares chauntAnd 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 riseTo prove our dignity, O Lord, to Thee;This sob that rolls from age to age, and diesUpon the verge of Thy Eternity!

THE SADNESS OF THE MOON

The Moon more indolently dreams to-nightThan 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 snowWhence gleams of iris and of opal start,And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.

THE BALCONY

Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,O thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire,Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses,The charm of evenings by the gentle fire,Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses!The eves illumined by the burning coal,The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings —How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul!Ah, and we said imperishable things,Those eves illumined by the burning coal.Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm,And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood,In bending o'er you, queen of every charm,I thought I breathed the perfume in your blood.The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm.The film of night flowed round and over us,And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet;I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous,And in my hands fraternal slept your feet —Night, like a film, flowed round and over us.I can recall those happy days forgot,And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past.Your languid beauties now would move me notDid not your gentle heart and body castThe 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 brightAfter being plunged in deep seas and profound?Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite!

THE SICK MUSE

Poor Muse, alas, what ail's thee, then, to-day?Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,Upon thy brow in alternation play,Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn.Have the green lemure and the goblin red,Poured on thee love and terror from their urn?Or with despotic hand the nightmare dreadDeep plunged thee in some fabulous Mintume?Would that thy breast where so deep thoughts arise,Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs;Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by waveIn rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave,When Phœbus shared his alternating reignWith 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 shouldersIn 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, exposeThy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to thoseWho wait thy jests to drive away thy spleen.

THE EVIL MONK

The ancient cloisters on their lofty wallsHad holy Truth in painted frescoes shown,And, seeing these, the pious in those hallsFelt their cold, lone austereness less alone.At that time when Christ's seed flowered all around,More than one monk, forgotten in his hour,Taking for studio the burial-ground,Glorified Death with simple faith and power.And my soul is a sepulchre where I,Ill cenobite, have spent eternity:On the vile cloister walls no pictures rise.O when may I cast off this weariness,And make the pageant of my old distressFor 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 theeAmong the many lovely thingsThat 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 replyTo the Abhorred, O soul of mine:"No single beauty is the bestWhen she is all one flower divine.When all things charm me I ignoreWhich one alone brings most delight;She shines before me like the dawn,And she consoles me like the night.The harmony is far too great,That governs all her body fair.For impotence to analyseAnd say which note is sweetest there.O mystic metamorphosis!My senses into one sense flow —Her voice makes perfume when she speaks,Her breath is music faint and low!"

THE IRRÉPARABLE

Can we suppress the old RemorseWho 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 tearsWho sees the carrion pinions waveThis broken warrior who despairsTo have a cross above his grave —This wretch the wolf already tears.Can one illume a leaden sky,Or tear apart the shadowy veilThicker 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 winAlong the moonless road they tread?Satan has darkened all the Inn!Witch, do you love accursèd hearts?Say, do you know the reprobate?Know you Remorse, whose venomed dartsMake souls the targets for their hate?Witch, do you know accursèd hearts?The Might-have-been with tooth accursedGnaws at the piteous souls of men,The deep foundations suffer first,And all the structure crumbles thenBeneath the bitter tooth accursed.IIOften, when seated at the play,And sonorous music lights the stage,I see the frail hand of a FayWith magic dawn illume the rageOf the dark sky. Oft at the playA being made of gauze and fireCasts 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!