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Crisis Chronicles Cyber Litmag (2008-2015)

~ Contemporary Poetry and Literary Classics from Cleveland to Infinity

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Category Archives: Baudelaire (Charles)

Intimate Journals (by Charles Baudelaire) – second half

05 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, Banned Books, Baudelaire (Charles), French

≈ 1 Comment

Charles Baudelaire
1821-1867

Intimate Journals [second half]
by Charles Baudelaire

translated by Christopher Isherwood, introduction by W. H. Auden
translation originally published in a limited edition by Blackamore Press in 1930

preface originally published in 1947 in an edition by Marcel Rodd, Hollywood

[This is the second half of Intimate Journals
—
consisting of Baudelaire’s
“My Heat Laid Bare” and “A Selection of Consoling Maxims upon Love.” 
  To read the first half — consisting of Isherwood’s preface, Auden’s introduction and
Baudelaire’s “Squibs,” please click here.
]

MY HEART LAID BARE

XXIII

Of the vaporization and centralization of the Ego.
Everything depends on that.

Of a certain sensual pleasure in the company of
those who behave extravagantly.

(I intend to begin My Heart laid bare, no matter
where or how, and to continue it from day to day,
following the inspiration of the day and the circumstances,
provided that the inspiration is vital.)

XXIV

Anyone, provided that he can be amusing, has the
right to talk of himself.

XXV

I understand how one can desert a cause in order
to experience the sensation of serving another.

It would perhaps be pleasant to be alternately
victim and executioner.

XXVI

Stupidities of Girardin:

`We are accustomed to take the bull by the horns.
Let us therefore take the speech by its conclusion’
(November 7, 1861).

Then Girardin believes that the horns of bulls are
set in their behinds. He confounds the horns with
the tail.

`Before imitating the Ptolemies of French journalism, the
Belgian journalists have taken the trouble to meditate upon
the problem which I have been studying for the last thirty
years in all its aspects—as the volume which will shortly
appear, entitled “Questions de presse”, will prove—with
the result that they are in no hurry to treat as a matter for
superlative ridicule
*
an opinion which is as indisputable as
the statement that the earth revolves and that the sun does
not revolve.’

                                                           EMILE DE GIRARDIN

XXVII

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy. Therefore
she should inspire horror.

Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat; thirsty,
and she wants to drink.

She is in rut and she wants to be possessed.

What admirable qualities!

Woman is natural, that is to say abominable.

Thus she is always vulgar; the opposite, in fact, of
the Dandy.

Concerning the Legion of Honour. The man who
solicits the Cross has the air of saying: If I am not
decorated for having done my duty, I shall cease to
do it.

If a man has merit, what is the good of decorating
him? If he has none, he can be decorated, since it
will give him distinction.

To consent to being decorated is to recognize that
the State or a prince has the right to judge of your
merits, to dignify you, etc. . . .

Besides, Christian humility forbids the Cross, even
if pride does not.

Calculation in favour of God. Nothing exists without
purpose.

Therefore my existence has a purpose.

What purpose? I do not know.

Therefore, it is not I who have appointed that
purpose. It is someone wiser than I.

It is therefore necessary to pray to this someone to
enlighten me. That is the wisest course.

The Dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly
sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.

XXVIII

Analysis of the counter-religions. Example: sacred
prostitution.

What is sacred prostitution?

Nervous excitement.

The mystery of Paganism. Mysticism: the common
feature of Paganism and Christianity.

Paganism and Christianity confirm each other.

The Revolution and the Cult of Reason confirm
the doctrine of Sacrifice.

Superstition is the well of all truths.

XXIX

There is in all Change something at once sordid
and agreeable, which smacks of infidelity and household
removals. This is sufficient to explain the
French Revolution.

XXX

My wild excitement in 1848.

What was the nature of that excitement?

The taste for revenge. Natural pleasure in destruction.
Literary excitement; memories of my reading.

The 15th of May. Still the pleasure in destruction.
A legitimate pleasure, if what is natural be legitimate.

The horrors of June. Madness of the People and
madness of the Bourgeoisie. Natural delight in crime.

My fury at the Coup d’Etat. How many gunshots
have I endured! Another Bonaparte! What infamy!

And, meanwhile, all is quiet. Has not the President
some right to invoke?

What Napoleon III is. What he is worth. To find
the explanation of his nature and of his mission
under Providence.

XXXI

To be a useful person has always appeared to me
something particularly horrible.

1848 was amusing only because of those castles in
the air which each man built for his Utopia.

1848 was charming only through an excess of the
ridiculous.

Robespierre can only be admired because he has
made several beautiful phrases.

XXXII

Revolution confirms Superstition, by offering
sacrifice.

XXXIII

Politics. I have no convictions, as men of my century
understand the word, because I have no ambition.
There is no basis in me for a conviction.

There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness,
rather, among respectable folk.

Only brigands are convinced—of what? That they
must succeed. And so they do succeed.

How should I succeed, since I have not even the
desire to make the attempt?

Glorious empires may be founded upon crime and
noble religions upon imposture.

Nevertheless, I have some convictions, in a higher
sense, which could not be understood by the people
of my time.

XXXIV

The sense of solitude, since my childhood. In spite
of my family, above all when surrounded by my
comrades—the sense of a destiny eternally solitary.

Yet a taste for life and for pleasure which is very
keen.

XXXV

Nearly our whole lives are employed in foolish
inquiries. Nevertheless, there are questions which
should excite man’s curiosity in the highest degree,
and which, to judge from his customary mode of life,
do not inspire him with any.

Where are our dead friends?

Why are we here?

Do we come from some other place?

What is free will?

Can it be reconciled with the laws of Providence?

Is there a finite or an infinite number of souls?

What of the number of habitable lands? Etc.,
etc. . . .

XXXVI

Nations only produce great men in spite of themselves.
Thus the great man is the conqueror of his
whole nation.

The ridiculous modern comic religions:

Molière.

Béranger.

Garibaldi.

XXXVII

Belief in Progress is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians.
It is the individual relying upon his neighbours
to do his work.

There cannot be any Progress (true progress, that
is to say, moral) except within the individual and by
the individual himself.

But the world is composed of people who can think
only in common, in the herd. Like the Sociétés belges.

There are also people who can only take their
pleasures in a flock. The true hero takes his pleasure
alone.

XXXVIII

Eternal superiority of the Dandy.

What is the Dandy?

XXXIX

My views on the theatre. In childhood and still
today, the thing which I have always thought most
beautiful about the theatre is the chandelier—a fine,
luminous, crystalline object with a complex spherical
symmetry.

Meanwhile, I do not entirely deny the value of
dramatic literature. Only I should like the actors
mounted on very high pattens, wearing masks more
expressive than the human face and speaking
through megaphones; also the female parts should
be played by men.

But, after all, whether seen through the big or the
little end of the opera glass, the chandelier has always
appeared to me to be the protagonist.

XL

One must work, if not from inclination at least
from despair, since, as I have fully proved, to work
is less wearisome than to amuse oneself.

XLI

There are in every man, always, two simultaneous
allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan.

Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to
climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight
in descent. It is to this last that love for woman and
intimate conversations with animals, dogs, cats,
etc. . . . must be ascribed. The joys which derive
from these two loves are appropriate to the nature
of these two loves.

XLII

Intoxication of humanity: a great picture to paint:

From the aspect of Charity.

From the aspect of licentiousness.

From the aspect of literature or of the actor.

XLIII

The Question (torture), when considered as the
art of discovering the truth, is a barbarous stupidity;
it is the application of a material means to a spiritual
end.

The penalty of death is the expression of a mystical
idea, totally misunderstood today. The penalty of
death does not attempt to save Society, that is, in the
material sense. It attempts to save spiritually Society
and the guilty person. That the sacrifice may be
perfect there should be joy and consent on the part
of the victim. To give chloroform to a person condemned
to death would be impious, for he would
thereby be deprived of his consciousness of grandeur
as a victim and of his hopes of attaining Paradise.

As for torture, it has been devised by the evil half
of man’s nature, which is thirsty for voluptuous
pleasures. Cruelty and sensual pleasure are identical,
like extreme heat and extreme cold.

XLIV

My opinion of the vote and of the right of election.
Of the rights of man.

The element of baseness in any sort of government
employment.

A Dandy does nothing. Can you imagine a dandy
addressing the common herd, except to make game
of them?

There is no form of rational and assured government
save an aristocracy.

A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy,
are equally absurd and feeble.

The immense nausea of advertisements.

There are but three beings worthy of respect: the
priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill
and to create.

The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged,
they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise
what they call professions.

XLV

We should observe that the abolishers of the death
penalty must be more or less interested in its abolition.

Often they are guillotiners. Their attitude may be
thus expressed: `I want to be able to cut off your
head, but you shan’t touch mine’.

The abolishers of the Soul (materialists) are necessarily
abolishers of hell; they, certainly, are interested.

At all events, they are people who fear to live again
—lazy people.

XLVI

Madame de Metternich, although she is a princess,
has forgotten to answer me, regarding what I said
about her and Wagner.

Nineteenth-century manners.

XLVII

The story of my translation of Edgar Poe.

The story of the Fleurs du Mal. The humiliation of
being misunderstood and my lawsuit.

The story of my relations with all the celebrated
men of the age.

Some amusing portraits of certain imbeciles:

Clément de Ris.

Castagnary.

Portraits of magistrates, officials, newspaper editors,
etc.

Portraits of artists in general.

Of the chief editor and of the rank and file. The
immense pleasure which the French people take in
being regimented. It is the If I were King!

Portraits and Anecdotes.

François Buloz—Houssaye—the precious Rouy—
de Calonne—Charpentier, who corrects his authors,
by virtue of the equality bestowed on all men by the
immortal principles of (17)89—Chevalier, a really
typical editor-in-chief under the Empire.

XLVIII

On George Sand. The woman Sand is the Prudhomme
of immorality.

She has always been a moralist.

Only she used to work as an anti-moralist.

She has never been an artist. She has that celebrated
flowing style, so dear to the bourgeois.

She is stupid, she is clumsy, and she is a chatterbox.
She has, in her moral concepts, the same profundity
of judgement and delicacy of feeling as a concierge
or a kept woman.

What she says about her mother.

What she says about Poetry.

Her love for the working classes.

It is indeed a proof of the degradation of the men
of this century that several have been capable of
falling in love with this latrine.

See the preface to Mademoiselle La Quintinie, in
which she pretends that true Christians do not
believe in Hell.

Sand represents the God of decent folk, the god of
concierges and thieving servants.

She has good reasons for wishing to abolish Hell.

XLIX

The Devil and George Sand. It must not be supposed
that the Devil only tempts men of genius. Doubtless,
he despises imbeciles, but he does not disdain their
co-operation. Quite the reverse; it is upon them that
he builds his greatest hopes.

Consider George Sand. She is, first and last, a
prodigious blockhead, but she is possessed. It is the Devil
who has persuaded her to trust in her good-nature and
common-sense, that she may persuade all other prodigious
blockheads to trust in their good-nature and
common-sense.

I cannot think of this stupid creature without a
certain shudder of horror. If I were to meet her, I
should not be able to resist throwing a stoup of holy
water at her head.

L

George Sand is one of those decayed ingénues who
will never leave the boards. I have lately read a
preface (the preface to Mademoiselle La Quintinie) in
which she pretends that the true Christian cannot
believe in Hell. She has good reasons for wishing to
abolish Hell.

LI

I am sick of France; chiefly because everybody is
like Voltaire.

Emerson has forgotten Voltaire in his Representative
Men.
He could have written a fine chapter entitled
Voltaire, or the Anti-Poet, the king of loungers, the
prince of triflers, the anti-artist, the preacher to concierges,
the Father Gigogne of the Editors of Le Siècle.

LII

In Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield, Voltaire jests
about our immortal soul, which has dwelt for nine
months amidst excrement and urine. Voltaire, like
all loafers, hates mystery.

Being unable to abolish Love, the Church has
desired at least to disinfect it, and has invented
marriage.

Note.—He might, at least, have traced, in this localization, a
malicious and satirical intent of Providence against Love, and,
in the mode of generation, a symbol of original sin, since we
can only make love with our excretory organs.

LIII

Portrait of the literary rabble.

Doctor Estaminetus Crapulosus Pedantissimus.
His portrait executed in the manner of Praxiteles.

His pipe.

His opinions.

His Hegelism.

His foulness.

His ideas on art.

His spleen.

His jealousy.

A fine portrait of modern youth.

LIV

Φαρμαχοτρίδης, ἀνήρ καὶ τῶν τούς όψεις ες τα
δαυματα τρεψοντων.

AELIAN (?)

LV

Theology. What is the Fall?

If it is unity become duality, it is God who has
fallen.

In other words, would not creation be the fall of
God?

Dandyism. What is the superior man?

He is not a specialist.

He is a man of leisure and of liberal education.

To be rich and to love work.

LVI

Why does the man of parts prefer harlots to
Society women, although they are equally stupid?

To discover this.

LVII

There are certain women who are like the red
ribbon of the Legion of Honour. They are no longer
desired because they have been contaminated by
certain men.

It is for the same reason that I would not put on
the breeches of a man with the itch.

What is annoying about Love is that it is a crime
in which one cannot do without an accomplice.

LVIII

Study of the great malady, horror of one’s home.
Causes of the malady. Progressive growth of the
malady.

Indignation aroused by the universal fatuity of all
classes, all persons, of both sexes, at all ages.

Man loves man so much that, even when he flees
from the town, he is still in search of the mob; he
wishes, in fact, to rebuild the town in the country.

LIX

Lecture by Durandeau on the Japanese. (`I am,
before all else, a Frenchman.’) The Japanese are
monkeys, Darjon it was who told me so.

Lecture by a doctor, a friend of Mathieu, on the
art of not having children, Moses, and the immortality
of the Soul. Art is a civilizing influence
(Castagnary).

LX

The faces of a sage man and his family, who live
on the sixth floor, drinking café au lait.

Lord Nacquart senior and Lord Nacquart junior.

How the Nacquart son has come to be a counsel
in the Court of Appeal.

LXI

Of the delight in and preference for military metaphors
shown by the French. Here every metaphor
wears moustaches.

Militant literature.

To hold the breach.

To keep the flag flying.

To emerge with flying colours.

To plunge into the fray.

One of the old brigade.

All these glorious phrases are commonly applied
to drunkards and bar-flies.

LXII

French metaphors.

A soldier of the judicial press (Bertin).

The militant press.

LXIII

To be added to the military metaphors:

The fighting poets.

The literary vanguard.

This use of military metaphor reveals minds not
militant but formed for discipline, that is, for compliance;
minds born servile, Belgian minds, which
can think only collectively.

LXIV

Desire for Pleasure attaches us to the Present. Care
for our safety makes us dependent upon the Future.

He who clings to Pleasure, that is, to the Present,
makes me think of a man rolling down a slope who,
in trying to grasp hold of some bushes, tears them up
and carries them with him in his fall.

To be, before all else, a great man and a saint according
to one’s own standards.

LXV

Of the People’s hatred of Beauty. Examples:
Jeanne and Mme. Muller.

LXVI

Political. After all, the supreme glory of Napoleon
III, in the eyes of History and of the French people,
will have been to prove that anybody can govern a
great nation as soon as they have got control of the
telegraph and the national press.

They are imbeciles who believe that such things
can be accomplished without the permission of the
People—and that glory can only be founded upon
virtue!

Dictators are the servants of the People—nothing
more; a damnable job, the glory and the result of
adapting a brain to the requirements of the national
idiocy.

LXVII

What is Love?

The need to emerge from oneself.

Man is an animal which adores.

To adore is to sacrifice and prostitute onself.

Thus all Love is prostitution.

LXVIII

The most prostitute of all beings is the Supreme
Being, God Himself, since for each man he is the
friend above all others; since he is the common,
inexhaustible fount of Love.

PRAYER

Do not punish me through my Mother and do not
punish my Mother on my behalf—I entrust to your
keeping the souls of my father and of Mariette—
Give me the strength immediately to perform my
daily task and thus to become a hero and a saint.

LXIX

A chapter on the indestructible, eternal, universal,
and ingenious ferocity of Men.

Of delight in bloodshed.

Of the intoxication of bloodshed.

Of the intoxication of the mob.

Of the intoxication of the tortured (Damiens).

LXX

There are no great men save the poet, the priest,
and the soldier.

The man who sings, the man who offers up sacrifice,
and the man who sacrifices himself.

The rest are born for the whip.

Let us beware of the rabble, of common-sense,
good-nature, inspiration, and evidence.

LXXI

I have always been astonished that women are
allowed to enter churches. What conversation can
they have with God?

The Eternal Venus (capricious, hysterical, full of
whims) is one of the seductive shapes of the Devil.

On the day when a young writer corrects his first
proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has
just got his first dose of pox.

Do not forget a long chapter on the art of divination
by water, by the cards, by chiromancy, etc.

LXXII

Woman cannot distinguish between her soul and
her body. She simplifies things, like an animal. A
cynic would say that it is because she has nothing
but a body.

A chapter on The Toilet.

Morality of the toilet, the delights of the toilet.

LXXIII

Of nincompoops.

Of professors.

Of judges.

Of priests.

And of Cabinet Ministers.

The precious little great men of the day.

Renan.

Feydeau.

Octave Feuillet.

Scholl.

The editors of newspapers, François Buloz, Houssaye,
Rouy, Girardin, Texier, de Calonne, Solar,
Turgan, Dalloz.

A list of guttersnipes. Solar first of all.

LXXIV

To be a great man and a saint by one’s own standards,
that is all that matters.

LXXV

Nadar is the most astounding example of vitality.
Adrien used to tell me that this brother Felix had all
his viscera double. I have been jealous of him, seeing
him succeed so well in everything which is not
abstract.

Veuillot is so uncouth and such an enemy of the
arts that one might suppose the whole democracy
of the world had taken refuge in his breast.

Development of the portrait. Supremacy of the
pure idea over the Christian and the babouviste communist.

The fanaticism of humility. Not even to aspire to
understand religion.

LXXVI

Music.

Of slavery.

Of Society women.

Of prostitutes.

Of magistrates.

Of the sacraments.

The man of letters is the enemy of the world.

Of bureaucrats.

LXXVII

In Love, as in nearly all human affairs, a satisfactory
relationship is the result of a misunderstanding.
This misunderstanding constitutes pleasure. The
man cries: Oh, my angel. The woman coos: Mamma!
Mamma! And these two imbeciles are persuaded that
they think alike. The unbridgeable gulf—the cause
of their failure in communication remains—unbridged.

LXXVIII

Why is the spectacle of the sea so infinitely and
eternally agreeable?

Because the sea presents at once the idea of immensity
and of movement. Six or seven leagues
represent for man the radius of the infinite. An
infinite in little. What matter, if it suffices to suggest
the idea of all infinity? Twelve or fourteen leagues
of liquid in movement are enough to convey to man
the highest expression of beauty which he can
encounter in his transient abode.

LXXIX

Nothing upon the earth is interesting except
religions.

What is the universal religion? (Chateaubriand,
de Maistre, the Alexandrines, Capé.)

There is a universal religion devised for the alchemists
of thought, a religion which has nothing to do
with Man, considered as a divine memento.

LXXX

Saint-Marc Girardin has uttered one phrase which
will endure: `Let us be mediocre!’

Let us put this beside the words of Robespierre:
`Those who do not believe in the immortality of their
being pass judgement upon themselves’.

This phrase of Saint-Marc Girardin implies an
immense hatred of the sublime.

Whoever sees Saint-Marc Girardin walking in the
street is reminded immediately of a fat goose, full of
self-conceit, but bewildered and waddling along the
high road in front of the stage-coach.

LXXXI

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found
in gas or steam or table-turning. It consists in the
diminution of the traces of original sin.

Nomad peoples, shepherds, hunters, farmers and
even cannibals, may all, by virtue of energy and
personal dignity, be the superiors of our races of the
West.

These will perhaps be destroyed.

Theocracy and communism.

LXXXII

I have grown, for the most part, by means of
leisure.

To my great detriment; for leisure without fortune
breeds debts and the insults which result from debts.

But to my great profit also, so far as sensibility is
concerned and meditation and the faculty of dandyism
and dilletantism.

Other men of letters are, for the most part, common,
ignorant earth-grubbers.

LXXXIII

The modern girl according to the publishers.

The modern girl according to the editors-in-chief.

The modern girl as a bugbear, a monster, an
assassin of art.

The modern girl as she is in reality.

A little blockhead and a little slut. The extreme of
imbecility combined with the extreme of depravity.

There are in the modern girl all the despicable
qualities of the footpad and the schoolboy.

LXXXIV

Warning to non-communists:

All is common property, even God.

LXXXV

The Frenchman is a farmyard animal, so well
domesticated that he dares not jump over any fence.
Witness his tastes in art and literature.

He is an animal of the Latin race; he does not
object to filth in his place of abode; and in literature
he is scatophagous. He dotes on excrements. That is
what pothouse men of letters call the Gallic salt.

A choice example of French depravity: of the nation
which pretends to be independent above all others.

(Here a paragraph cut out from a newspaper is
fastened to the manuscript.)

    The following extract from M. de Vaulabelle’s fine book
    
will suffice to give an idea of the impression made by Lavalette’s
    
escape upon the least enlightened section of the Royalist party:

    `The tide of Royalism, at this period of the Second Restoration,
    
was rising almost to the point of madness. The young
    
Josephine de Lavalette was receiving her education at one of
    
the principal convents of Paris
(l’Abbaye-au-Bois). She had
    
left it merely to come to kiss her father. When she returned
    
after the escape, and when the very modest part she had played
    
in it was known, an immense outcry was raised against the
    
child; the nuns and her companions avoided her and a number
    
of the parents declared that they would remove their daughters
    
if she were allowed to remain there. They did not wish, they
    
said, to allow their daughters to come into contact with a
    
young person who had been guilty of such conduct and such
    
an example. When Madame de Lavalette recovered her liberty,
    
six weeks later, she was obliged to take away her daughter.’

LXXXVI

Princes and generations. It is equally unjust to attribute
to reigning princes the merits or the vices of
those whom they actually govern.

These merits and these vices are almost always, as
statistics and logic can prove, attributable to the
influence of the preceding government. Louis XIV
inherits from the men of Louis XIII: glory. Napoleon
I inherits from the men of the Republic: glory.
Louis-Philippe inherits from the men of Charles X:
glory. Napoleon inherits from the men of Louis-Philippe:
dishonour.

It is always the preceding government which is
responsible for the morals of its successor, in so far as
a government can be responsible for anything.

The sudden cutting short of a reign by circumstance
prevents this law from being quite exact as
regards time. One cannot mark exactly where an
influence ends, but this influence will survive
throughout the whole generation which has undergone
it in youth.

LXXXVII

Of youth’s hatred of the quoters of precedents.
The quoter is its enemy.

`Even spelling I would hand over to the hangman.’
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.

A fine picture to paint: the literary riff-raff.

Not to forget a portrait of Forgues, the plagiarist,
the cream-skinner of letters.

Ineradicable desire for prostitution in the heart
of man, whence is born his horror of solitude. He
wants to be two. The man of genius wants to be one,
and therefore solitary. Glory is to remain one, and to
prostitute oneself in an individual manner.

It is this horror of solitude, this need to lose his
ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need
for love.

Two fine religions, immortalized upon walls, the
eternal obsessions of the People: a p—(the antique
phallus) and `Long live Barbès!’ or `Down with
Philippe!’ or `Long live the Republic!’

LXXXVIII

To study in all its modes, in the works of nature and
in the works of man, the universal and eternal law
of gradation, of the little by little, of the by degrees,
with forces progressively increasing, like compound
interest in money matters.

It is the same with literary and artistic talents; it is
the same with the variable treasures of the will.

LXXXIX

The crush of minor literary men whom one sees
at funerals, distributing handshakes and trying to
catch the eye of the writer of the obituary notice.

Of the funerals of famous men.

XC

Molière. My opinion of Tartuffe is that it is not a
comedy but a pamphlet. An atheist, if he is simply
a well-educated man, would reflect, in thinking
about this piece, that there are certain serious
questions which must never be referred to the rabble.

XCI

To glorify the cult of pictures (my great, my
unique, my primitive passion).

To glorify vagabondage and what may be called
bohemianism. Cult of the multiple sensations expressed
by music. Refer here to Liszt.

Of the necessity of thrashing women.

One can chastise those whom one loves. As in the
case of children. But that implies the sorrow of
despising those whom one loves.

Of cuckolds and cuckoldom.

The sorrows of the cuckold.

They are born of his pride, of false reasoning concerning
honour and happiness, and of a love which
has been foolishly withdrawn from God to be
bestowed upon his fellow-creatures. It is always the
animal idolator being deceived in his idol.

XCII

Analysis of insolent imbecility. Clément de Ris and
Paul Pérignon.

XCIII

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he
fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage
occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Only the brute is really potent. Sexuality is the
lyricism of the masses.

To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another; the
artist never emerges from himself.

I have forgotten the name of that slut. Bah! I shall
remember it at the last judgement.

Music conveys the idea of space.

So do all the arts, more or less; since they are
number and since number is a translation of space.

To will every day to be the greatest of men!

XCIV

When I was a child I wanted sometimes to be pope,
but a military pope, and sometimes to be an actor.

The pleasures that I derived from these two
phantasies.

XCV

Even when quite a child I felt two conflicting
sensations in my heart: the horror of life and the
ecstasy of life. That, indeed, was the mark of a
neurasthenic idler.

XCVI

Nations produce great men only in spite of themselves.

Speaking of the actor and of my childish dreams,
a chapter upon what constitutes, in the human soul,
the vocation 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 dispassionate
joker, a Swift, who has tried to make France swallow
a new absurdity?

His choice. Good, in the sense that Samson is not
an actor.

Of the true grandeur of pariahs.

It is possible, indeed, that virtue would injure the
talents of pariahs.

XCVII

Commerce is, in its very essence, satanic. Commerce
is return of the loan, a loan in which there is
the understanding: give me more than I give you.

The spirit of every business-man is completely
depraved.

Commerce is natural, therefore shameful.

The least vile of all merchants is he who says: `Let
us be virtuous, since, thus, we shall gain much more
money than the fools who are dishonest’.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial
speculation.

Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and
vilest form of egoism.

XCVIII

When Jesus Christ says, `Blessed are they that
hunger, for they shall be filled,” Jesus Christ is
calculating on probabilities.

XCIX

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree.

For if, by ill luck, people understood each other,
they would never agree.

The man of intelligence, who will never agree with
anyone, should cultivate a pleasure in the conversation
of imbeciles and the study of worthless books.
From these he will derive a sardonic amusement
which will largely repay him for his pains.

C

Any official, whether a minister, a theatre manager
or a newspaper editor, can sometimes be an
estimable individual, but he is never a man of distinction.
They are persons without personality,
unoriginal, born for office, that is, for domestic
service to the public.

CI

God and His profundity. It is possible even for the
intelligent man to seek in God that helper and friend
whom he can never find. God is the eternal confidant
in that tragedy of which each man is hero. Perhaps
there are usurers and assassins who say to God:
`Lord, grant that my next enterprise may be successful!’
But the prayers of these vile persons do not mar
the virtue and joy of my own.

CII

Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life,
like a human being. All created form, even that
which is created by man, is immortal. For form is
independent of matter: molecules do not constitute
form.

Anecdotes of Emile Douay and Constantin Guys,
and how they destroyed, or believed that they
destroyed, their works.

CIII

It is impossible to glance through any newspaper,
no matter what the day, the month or the year,
without finding on every line the most frightful
traces of human perversity, together with the most
astonishing boasts of probity, charity, and benevolence
and the most brazen statements regarding the
progress of civilization.

Every journal, from the first line to the last, is
nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts,
lecheries, tortures, the evil deeds of princes, of
nations, of private individuals; an orgy of universal
atrocity.

And it is with this loathsome appetizer that civilized
man daily washes down his morning repast.
Everything in this world oozes crime: the newspaper,
the street wall, and the human countenance.

I am unable to comprehend how a man of honour
could take a newspaper in his hands without a
shudder of disgust.

CIV

The power of the amulet as displayed by philosophy.
The sous with holes bored in them, the
talismans, each man’s souvenirs.

Dissertation on the moral dynamic. Of the virtue
of the sacraments.

A tendency to mysticism since my childhood. My
conversations with God.

CV

Of Obsession, of Possession, of Prayer and Faith.

The dynamic Ethic of Jesus.

Renan finds it ridiculous that Jesus should believe
in the omnipotence, even over matter, of Prayer and
Faith.

The sacraments are the modes of this dynamic.

Of the infamy of the press, a great obstacle to the
development of the Beautiful.

The Jews who are librarians and bear witness to
the Redemption.

CVI

All these imbecile bourgeois who ceaselessly utter
the words: immoral, immorality, morality in art,
and other idiotic phrases, make me think of Louise
Villedieu, the five-franc whore, who, having accompanied
me one day to the Louvre, where she had
never been before, began blushing and covering her
face with her hands. And as we stood before the
immortal statues and pictures she kept plucking me
by the sleeve and asking how they could exhibit such
indecencies in public.

The fig-leaves of Mr. Nieuwerkerke.

CVII

In order that the law of Progress could exist each
man would have to be willing to enforce it; for it is
only when every individual has made up his mind
to move forward that humanity will be in a state of
progress.

This hypothesis may serve to show that two contradictory
ideas—free-will and destiny—are identical.
Not only will there be identity between free-will and
destiny in Progress, but this identity has always
existed. This identity is history—the history of
nations and individuals.

CVIII

A sonnet to be quoted in My Heart Laid Bare.
Quote also the poem on Roland:

    I dreamt that night that Philis had returned
    
Fair as she was in the brightness of day,
    
And I desired once again to possess her as ghost
    
And, like Ixion, to embrace a cloud.
    
Her naked shadow stole into my bed,
    
Saying, `Dear Damon, see, I have come back;
    
Only grown fairer in my sad abode
    
Where fate has held me since my departure.
    
`I am come to kiss again the most beautiful of lovers;
    
I am come to die again within thine embrace.’
    
Then, when my idol had abused my flame,
    
She said, `Adieu. I must return to the dead.
    
As thou hast bragged of having — my body,
    
So also canst thou boast of having — my soul.’

                                                           Parnasse Satyrique

I believe that this sonnet is by Maynard.
Malassis pretends that it is by Théophile.

CIX

Hygiene. Projects. The more one desires, the stronger
one’s will.

The more one works, the better one works and
the more one wants to work.

The more one produces, the more fecund one
becomes.

After a debauch, one feels oneself always to be
more solitary, more abandoned.

In the moral as in the physical world, I have been
conscious always of an abyss, not only of the abyss
of sleep, but of the abyss of action, of day-dreaming,
of recollection, of desire, of regret, of remorse, of the
beautiful, of number . . . etc.

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and
terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and
today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a
singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of
madness pass over me.

CX

Hygiene. Morality. To Honfleur! as soon as possible,
before I sink further.

How many have been the presentiments and signs
sent me already by God that it is high time to act, to
consider the present moment as the most important
of all moments and to take for my everlasting delight
my accustomed torment, that is to say, my work!

CXI

Hygiene. Conduct. Morality. We are weighed down,
every moment, by the conception and the sensation
of Time. And there are but two means of escaping
and forgetting this nightmare: Pleasure and work.
Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us
choose.

The more we employ one of these means, the
more the other will inspire us with repugnance.

One can only forget Time by making use of it.

Nothing can be accomplished save by degrees.

De Maistre and Edgar Poe have taught me to
reason.

No task seems long but that which one dares not
begin. It becomes a nightmare.

CXII

Hygiene. In putting off what one has to do, one
runs the risk of never being able to do it. In refusing
instant conversion one risks damnation.

To heal all things, wretchedness, disease or melancholy,
absolutely nothing is required but an inclination
for work.

CXIII

Precious notes. Do, every day, what duty and prudence
dictate.

If you worked every day your life would be more
supportable. Work six days without relaxing.

To find subjects, Γνωδί σεαυτόν.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

The grand style (nothing more beautiful than the
commonplace).

First make a start, then apply logic and analysis.
Every hypothesis demands a conclusion.

To achieve a daily madness.

CXIV

Hygiene. Conduct. Morality. Two parts. Debts.

(Ancelle.)

Friends (my mother, friends, myself).

Thus, 1,000 francs should be divided into two
parts of 500 francs each, and the second divided into
three parts.

At Honfleur. To go through and classify all my
letters (two days) and all my debts (two days). (Four
categories: notes of hand, large debts, small debts, friends.)
A classification of my engravings (two days). A
classification of my notes (two days).

CXV

Hygiene. Morality. Conduct. Too late, perhaps!—
My mother and Jeanne—My health, for pity’s, for
duty’s sake!—The maladies of Jeanne. My mother’s
infirmities and loneliness.

To do one’s duty every day and trust in God for
the morrow.

The only method of earning money is to work in
a disinterested manner.

A summary of wisdom. Toilet. Prayer. Work.

Prayer: charity, wisdom and strength.

Without charity I am no more than a resounding
cymbal.

My humiliations have been the graces of God.

My phase of egoism—is it passed?

The faculty of being able to meet the need of the
moment; exactitude, in other words, must infallibly
obtain its reward.

    Prolonged unhappiness has upon the soul the same
    
effect as old age upon the body: one cannot stir, one
    
takes to one’s bed. . . .

    Extreme youth, on the other hand, finds reasons for
    
procrastination; when there is plenty of time to spare,

    one is persuaded that years may be allowed to pass
    
before one need play one’s part.

                                                           CHATEAUBRIAND

CXVI

Hygiene. Conduct. Morality. Jeanne 300, my mother
200, myself 300—800 francs a month. To work from
six o’clock in the morning, fasting at midday. To
work blindly, without aim, like a madman. We shall
see the result.

I believe that I stake my destiny upon hours of
uninterrupted work.

All may be redeemed. There is still time. Who
knows, even, if some new pleasure . . . ?

Fame, payment of my debts. Wealth of Jeanne
and my mother.

I have never yet tasted the pleasure of an accomplished
design.

Power of the fixed idea, power of hope.

The habit of doing one’s duty drives out fear.

One must desire to dream and know how to dream.
The evocation of inspiration. A magic art. To sit
down at once and write. I reason too much.

Immediate work, even when it is bad, is better
than day-dreaming.

A succession of small acts of will achieves a large
result.

Every defeat of the will forms a portion of lost
matter. How wasteful, then, is hesitation! One may
judge this by the immensity of the final effort necessary
to repair so many losses.

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain
posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

Dreams and warnings of death.

Up to the present I have only enjoyed my
memories alone; I must enjoy them in the company
of another. To make the pleasures of the spirit one’s
passion.

Because I can understand the nature of a glorious
existence, I believe myself capable of its realization.
Oh, Jean-Jacques!

Work engenders good habits, sobriety and chastity,
from which result health, riches, continuous and
strengthening inspiration and charity. Age quod agis.

Fish, cold baths, showers, moss, pastilles occasionally,
together with the abstinence from all stimulants.

Iceland moss . . . 125 grammes.

White sugar . . . 250 grammes.

Soak the moss for twelve to fifteen hours in a
sufficient quantity of cold water, then pour off the
water. Boil the moss in two litres of water upon a
slow and constant fire until these two litres are
reduced to one, skim the froth off once, then add the
250 grammes of sugar and let it thicken to the consistency
of syrup. Let it cool off. Take three very large
tablespoonfuls daily, in the morning, at midday and
in the evening. One need not be afraid to increase the
doses if the crises are too frequent.

CXVII

Hygiene. Conduct. Method. I swear to observe henceforth
the following rules as immutable rules of my
life:

To pray every morning to God, the source of all
power and all justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe,

as intercessors; that they may give me the necessary
strength to fulfil all my appointed tasks and that
they may grant my mother a sufficient span of life in
which to enjoy my transformation; to work all day
long, or as long, at any rate, as my strength allows me;
to put my trust in God, that is, in Justice itself, for the
success of my plans; to offer, every evening, a further
prayer, asking God for life and strength for my
mother and myself; to divide all my earnings into
four parts—one for current expenses, one for my
creditors, one for my friends and one for my mother
—to obey the strictest principles of sobriety, the first
being the abstinence from all stimulants whatsoever.

A SELECTION OF CONSOLING
MAXIMS UPON LOVE

Whoever writes maxims likes to exaggerate his
character—the young pretend to be old, the old
paint their faces.

Since the world, this vast system of contradictions,
holds all forms of decay in great esteem—quick, let
us darken our wrinkles; let us garland our hearts like
a frontispiece, for sentiment is widely fashionable.

To what purpose? If you are no true men, be at
least true animals. Be unaffected, and you will, of
necessity, be useful or agreeable to somebody. Were
my heart on my right side, it would find at least a
thousand co-pariahs among the three thousand
millions of beings who browse upon the nettles of
sentiment.

If I begin with Love, it is because Love is for
everyone—and they will deny it in vain—the greatest
thing in life!

All you who feed some insatiable vulture—you
Hoffmannesque poets, whom the harmonica sends
dancing through crystal regions, whom the violin
lacerates like a blade searching the heart—you eager
and embittered onlookers in whom the spectacle of
nature herself promotes dangerous ecstasies; let Love
be your calmative.

You tranquil, you objective poets, the noble partisans
of technique, architects of style—you prudent ones
who have a daily task to accomplish; let Love be
your stimulant, an exhilarating and strengthening
potion, and the gymnastic of pleasure your perpetual
encouragement to action! To those the soporifics, to
these the alcohols.

You for whom nature is cruel and time precious;
let Love be a burning draught which inspires the
soul.

It is necessary, therefore, to choose one’s loves.

Without denying the coups de foudre, which is impossible—see
Stendhal (De l’Amour—book one,
chapter XXIII)—one must suppose that fate possesses
a certain elasticity, which is called human liberty.

In the same way as, for theologians, liberty consists
in avoiding occasions of temptation rather than
in resisting it; so, in Love, liberty consists in avoiding
women of a dangerous category—dangerous, that is
to say, for yourself.

Your mistress, the woman of your paradise, will
be sufficiently indicated to you by your natural
sympathies, verified by Lavater and by a study of
painting and statuary.

The physiognomical signs would be infallible if
one knew them all, and well. I cannot here set down
all the physiognomical signs of the woman eternally
suitable to such and such a man. Perhaps one day I
shall accomplish this enormous task in a book which
will be entitled: the catechism of the beloved woman; but
I am certain that every man, assisted by his imperious
and vague desires and guided by observation,
can discover, after a time, the woman necessary to
himself. Further, our sympathies are not, in general,
dangerous; nature, whether in cookery or in love,
rarely gives us a taste for what is bad for us.

As I understand the word Love in its fullest sense,
I am here obliged to set down some special maxims
upon delicate questions.

You man of the North, you eager navigator lost in
the mists, seeker of auroras more beautiful than the
sunlight, untiring in your thirst for the ideal; love
cold women. Love them well, for the toil is greater
and more bitter and you will find one day more
honour at the tribunal of Love, who is seated over
there in the blue of the infinite!

You man of the South, you whose open nature can
have no taste for secrets and mysteries—light-hearted
man—of Bordeaux, of Marseilles or of Italy—let
passionate women suffice you; their mobility and
their animation are your natural empire, an empire
of beguilement.

Young man, you who wish to become a great poet,
beware of the paradoxical in Love; let schoolboys
excited by their first pipe sing at the top of their
voice the praises of the fat women; leave these falsehoods
to the neophytes of the pseudo-romantic
school. If the fat woman is sometimes a charming
caprice, the thin woman is a well of sombre delights!

Never slander great Nature; if she has bestowed
upon you a mistress without a bosom, say: `I have a
love—with such hips!’ and go to the temple to render
thanks to the Gods.

You must know how to make the best of ugliness
itself—of your own, that is too easy—everyone
knows how Trenk (la gueule brûlée) was adored by
women;*
of hers! that is a rarer and more beautiful
art, but the association of ideas will render it easy and
natural. Let us suppose that your idol is ill. Her
beauty has disappeared under the frightful crust of
small-pox, like verdure beneath the heavy winter
ice. Still shaken by long hours of anguish and the
fluctuations of the disease, you are regarding sorrowfully
the ineffaceable stigmata upon the body of the
dear convalescent; then suddenly there vibrates in
your ears a dying air executed by the rapturous bow
of Paganini, and this air speaks to you with sympathy
of yourself, seeming to reiterate the whole poem of
your dearest abandoned hopes. Thenceforward, the
traces of the small-pox will form a part of your
happiness, beneath your tender gaze there will
always echo the mysterious air of Paganini. Henceforth
they will be the objects, not only of sweet
sympathy but even of physical desire—if, that is, you
are one of those sensitive spirits for whom beauty is
the promise of happiness. Above all, it is an association
of ideas which makes one love ugly women—so
much so that you run a grave risk, if your pock-marked
mistress betrays you, of being able to console
yourself only with pock-marked women.

For certain spirits, more precious and more jaded,
delight in ugliness proceeds from a still more obscure
sentiment—the thirst for the unknown and the
taste for the horrible. It is this sentiment, whose germ,
more or less developed, is carried within each one
of us, which drives certain poets into the dissecting
room or the clinic and women to public executions.
I am sincerely sorry for the man who cannot understand
this—he is a harp who lacks a bass string!

As for illiteracy, which forms (according to some
blockheads) a part of moral ugliness—is it not superfluous
to explain to you how this may be a whole
naïve poem of memories and delights? The charming
Alcibiades lisped so well; childhood has such a divine
jargon. Then beware, young adept of pleasure, of
teaching your love French—unless it is necessary to
become her French master that you may be her lover.

There are those who blush to have loved a woman
as soon as they perceive that she is stupid. These are
vainglorious jackasses, born to crop the foulest
thistles in creation or enjoy the favours of a bluestocking.
Stupidity is often an ornament of beauty;
it gives the eyes that mournful limpidity of dusky
pools, and that oily calm of tropical seas. Stupidity
always preserves beauty, it keeps away the wrinkles,
it is the divine cosmetic which preserves our idols
from the gnawings of thought which we must suffer,
miserable scholars that we are.

There are those who begrudge their mistress’s
extravagance. These are the misers, republicans
ignorant of the first principles of political economy.
The vices of a great nation are its greatest wealth.

There are others, the sedate, the reasonable,
moderate deists, followers of the middle path in
dogma, who are furious when their wives become
devout. Oh! the fumblers, who will never learn to
play any instrument! Oh, the thrice-foolish ones,
who do not perceive that the most adorable form
religion can take—is that of their wife! A husband
to be converted, what a delicious apple! The beautiful
fruit forbidden like some huge impiety—on a
stormy winter night, in a corner by the fire, with
wine and truffles—mute hymn of domestic bliss,
victory over harsh Nature, who seems herself to be
blaspheming the gods!

I should not have finished so soon had I wished to
enumerate all the beautiful and noble aspects of
what is called vice and moral ugliness, but there is
one problem which often presents itself to men of
feeling and understanding, a problem as vexed and
painful as a tragic drama; it is when they are caught
between the hereditary moral impulse implanted by
their parents and the tyrannical desire for a woman
whom they ought to despise. Numerous and ignoble
infidelities, habits which betray their evil haunts,
shameful secrets unseasonably laid bare, inspire you
with horror for your idol, and it sometimes comes to
pass that your joy makes you shudder. Here you are
much embarrassed in your platonic reasonings.
Virtue and Pride cry: Fly from her. Nature speaks
in your ear: whither can I fly? These are terrible
alternatives, in face of which even the strongest souls
reveal the insufficiency of all our philosophic education.
The more cunning, seeing themselves constrained
by nature to play the eternal drama of
Manon Lescaut and Leone Leoni, make their retreat,
saying that contempt goes well with love. I am
going to give you a very simple formula which will
not only save you from these shameful self-justifications
but will make it possible for you even to leave
your idol undisfigured, without injury to your
crystallization.*

We will suppose that the heroine of your heart has
abused the fas and nefas and is come to the limits of
perdition, after having—final infidelity! supreme
torture!—tried the power of her charms upon her
gaolers and executioners.*
Are you going to abjure
your ideal so lightly, or, if nature throws you, faithful
and weeping, into the arms of this pale victim of the
guillotine, will you say, with the mortified accents
of resignation: Contempt and Love are cousins-german?
Not at all. These are the paradoxes of a
timid nature and a clouded intelligence. Say boldly
and with the candour of the true philosopher: `Had
she been less criminal my ideal had been less complete.
I contemplate her and I submit; great Nature
alone knows what she intends to make of such a
glorious hussy. Supreme happiness and supreme
absolute reason! product of contrary forces. Ormuz
and Ahriman, you are one!’

And thus, thanks to a more synthetic outlook upon
things, your admiration will lead you quite naturally
towards chaste love, that sunlight in whose intensity
all stains are swallowed up.

Remember this, that one must beware above all
of the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which
saves, it is simplicity which brings happiness, though
your mistress be as ugly as old Mab, the queen of
terrors. In general, for men of the world, a subtle
moralist has said, Love is but love of gambling, love
of fighting. That is altogether wrong. Love should
be love, fighting and gambling are permissible only
as the politics of love.

The gravest mistake of modern youth is that they
force their emotions. A great number of lovers are
imaginary invalids who spend large sums on nostrums
and pay M. Fleurant and M. Purgon heavily,
without enjoying the pleasures and privileges of a
genuine malady. Observe how they irritate their
stomachs with absurd drugs, wearing out the digestive
faculties of Love. It may be necessary to belong
to one’s century, but beware of apeing the illustrious
Don Juan, who was, according to Molière, at first
nothing more than a rude rascal, well trained and
versed in love, crime and cunning, but who has since
become, thanks to MM. Alfred de Musset and
Théophile Gautier, an artistic lounger, chasing perfection
through the bawdy-houses, and who is finally
only an old dandy worn out by his travels, the
stupidest creature in the world when he is in the
company of an honest woman who loves her husband.

A last, general rule: in love, beware of the moon
and the stars, beware of the Venus de Milo, of lakes,
guitars, rope-ladders, and of all love stories—yes,
even the most beautiful in the world, were it written
by Apollo himself! But love dearly, vigorously, fearlessly,
orientally, ferociously the woman you love;
so that your love—harmony being included—does
not torment the love of another; so that your choice
does not cause disturbance to the community.
Among the Incas a man could make love to his
sister; be content with your cousin. Do not climb
balconies or give trouble to the public authorities;
do not on any account deprive your mistress of the
happiness of belief in the gods; and when you accompany
her to the temple remember to dip your fingers
in orthodox fashion in the pure, refreshing water of
the stoup.

Since all morality testifies to the good will of its
legislators—since all religion is a supreme consolation
for the afflicted—since every woman is a part of
essential Woman—since love is the sole thing which
merits the turning of a sonnet and the putting-on of
fine linen: I revere these things above all else and
denounce as a slanderer the man who sees in this
fragment of a morality an occasion for crossing himself
and a cause for scandal. Morality wrapped in
tinsel, is it not? Coloured glass which tints too
brightly, perhaps, the eternal lamp of truth shining
within? No, no. Had I wished to prove that all is for
the best in the best of all possible worlds, the reader
would have the right to tell me, like the ape of genius:
you are naughty! But I have desired to prove that
all is for the best in the worst of all possible worlds.
Much therefore will be forgiven me because I have
loved much—my male, or female reader!

   

Intimate Journals (by Charles Baudelaire) – first half

05 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Auden (W.H), Autobiography, Banned Books, Baudelaire (Charles), French

≈ 1 Comment

Charles Baudelaire
1821-1867

Intimate Journals [first half]
by Charles Baudelaire

translated by Christopher Isherwood, introduction by W. H. Auden
translation originally published in a limited edition by Blackamore Press in 1930

preface originally published in 1947 in an edition by Marcel Rodd, Hollywood

[This is the first half of Intimate Journals — consisting of Isherwood’s preface, Auden’s introduction and Baudelaire’s “Squibs”.  To read the second half — consisting of Baudelaire’s “My Heat Laid Bare” and “A Selection of Consoling Maxims upon Love — please click here.]

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

What kind of a man wrote this book?

A deeply religious man, whose blasphemies horrified the
orthodox. An ex-dandy, who dressed like a condemned
convict. A philosopher of love, who was ill at ease with
women. A revolutionary, who despised the masses. An
aristocrat, who loathed the ruling class. A minority of one.
A great lyric poet.

By nature, Baudelaire was a city-dweller. He was born
(1821) and died (1867) in Paris. He loved luxury and
fashionable splendour, the endless cavalcade of the boulevards,
the midnight brilliance of talk in the artists’ cafés.
Paris taught him his vices, absinthe and opium, and the
extravagant dandyism of his early manhood which involved
him in debt for the rest of his life. Even in extreme
poverty, he preferred the bohemian freedom of the Latin
Quarter to the sheltered respectability of his family home.
The atmosphere of Paris was the native element of his inspiration.
He speaks of the `religious intoxication of the great
cities’. `The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression
of sensual joy in the multiplication of Number.’

Brussels, in the eighteen-sixties, was not a great city. It
was a provincial town. Baudelaire hated it. Expressing his
contempt for a man, he calls him `a Belgian spirit’. But
no doubt this attitude was also due to the state of his affairs
and his health. Baudelaire did not come to Brussels until
1864, when he was already ruined, financially and physically.
He was miserably poor. His work had failed to obtain
proper recognition. Six of the poems in Les Fleurs du Mal
had been judged obscene and suppressed by court order.
His publisher had gone bankrupt. He was slowly dying of
syphilis. Violent nervous crises made him dread insanity.
`Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today,
23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning.
I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.’

Baudelaire was one of the first writers of `the poetry of
departure’. His longing for escape—from the nineteenth
century and himself—fastened nostalgically upon ships.
`When’, he imagines them asking, `shall we set sail for
happiness?’

When Baudelaire was a boy of twenty, his parents became
alarmed by the wildness of the life he was leading.
They persuaded him to take a long ocean voyage, hoping
that it would change his tastes and ideas. The ship was
bound for Calcutta. Baudelaire insisted on leaving it at the
island of Réunion and being sent back to France. He detested
the sea and his fellow-passengers, but he never forgot
this glimpse of the tropics. It is characteristic of him, and
of the romantic attitude in general, that he later pretended
to have been in India, told fantastic lies about his adventures,
and always regretted the opportunity he had missed.

Shy men of extreme sensibility are the born victims of,
the prostitute. Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress, Jeanne
Duval, was a beautiful, indolent animal. She squandered
his money and slept with his friends. The biographers
usually condemn her; most unjustly. Few of us would really
enjoy a love-affair with a geni. Jeanne had to endure
Baudelaire’s moods and listen to his poems; she understood
neither. But, in some mysterious manner, these two human
beings needed each other. They stayed together, on and
off, for twenty years. Baudelaire always loved and pitied
her, and tried to help her. Hideous and diseased, she limps
out of his history on crutches and disappears.

Like many lesser writers before and after him, Baudelaire
suffered constantly from Acedia, `the malady of monks’,
that deadly weakness of the will which is the root of all evil.
He fought against it with fury and horror. `If, when a man
has fallen into habits of idleness, of day-dreaming and of
sloth, putting off his most important duties continually till
the morrow, another man were to wake him up one
morning with heavy blows of a whip and were to whip
him unmercifully, until he who was unable to work for
pleasure worked now for fear—would not that man, the
chastiser, be his benefactor and truest friend?’ The Intimate
Journals
are full of such exclamations, coupled with resolves
to work—`to work from six o’clock in the morning, fasting
at midday. To work blindly, without aim, like a madman.
. . . I believe that I stake my destiny upon hours of
uninterrupted work.’ It is terribly moving to read these
passages, knowing that the time is close at hand when
Baudelaire will be lying dazed and half-paralysed; when
he will no longer be able to remember his name and have
to copy it, with tedious care, from the cover of one of his
books; when he will not recognize his own face in the
mirror, and will bow to it gravely, as if to a stranger.

In his lifetime, Baudelaire witnessed the dawn of the
Steam Age—a false, gaslit dawn, loud with engines and
advertisement, faithless, superstitious and blandly corrupt.
Baudelaire foresees the future with dismay and denounces
it in the magnificent outburst which opens with the words:
`The world is about to end. . . .’ Elsewhere he writes:
`Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas,
or steam, or table-turning. It consists in the diminution of
the traces of original sin.’ After two world-wars and the
atomic bomb, we of today should understand him better
than his contemporaries.

Baudelaire’s nervous, unstable temperament, his contempt
for bourgeois ethics and his impatience of mediocrity
led him into a series of quarrels—with his family, his friends
and his business associates. For his mother—the only
important woman in his life except Jeanne Duval—he
experienced mingled feelings of love, exasperation, pity, rebellion
and hatred. He sincerely admired his distinguished
stepfather, General Aupick; but the two men were worlds
apart, they spoke different languages and could never
understand each other. He could appreciate the honesty
and good-faith of Ancelle, his legal guardian; but the
elderly lawyer’s primness and caution drove him frantic.
Even in middle age, Baudelaire often seems touchingly
immature, like a defiant schoolboy surrounded by disapproving
grown-ups.

His passionate outbursts and bitter words hurt nobody
so much as himself. His rage was immediately followed
by remorse. His last years were darkened with regrets—
regrets for deeds done and undone, for
health and vigour
lost, for time irretrievably wasted. Yet Baudelaire never
gave way finally to despair. He struggled with himself to
the very end, striving and praying to do better. His life is
not the dreary tale of a talented weakling, it is the heroic
tragedy of a strong man beset by great failings. Even its
horrible closing scenes should not disgust or depress us.
They represent a kind of victory. Baudelaire died undefeated—a
warning and an inspiration to us all.

The Intimate Journals consist of papers which were not
collected and published until after Baudelaire’s death. The
section called Squibs was probably written before 1857;
My Heart Laid Bare belongs, more or less, to the Brussels
period. This latter title is taken from the writings of Edgar
Allan Poe, who says that if any man dared to write such a
book, with complete frankness, it would necessarily be
a masterpiece. Baudelaire certainly dared, but he did not
live to carry out his project. What we have here is an
assortment of wonderful fragments, cryptic memoranda,
literary notes, quotations, rough drafts of prose poems,
explosions of political anger and personal spleen.

After some thought, I have decided not to attempt
annotation. I have neither the time nor the scholarship
for such a task—and, anyway, what does it matter to the
average reader who Moun was, or Castagnary, or Rabbe?
Read this book as you might read an old diary found in
the drawer of a desk in a deserted house. Substitute—if
you like—names from your own life and world, names of
friends and enemies, of band-wagon journalists and phoney
politicians. Much of the obscurity is unimportant or on the
surface. The more you study these Intimate Journals, the
better you will understand them.

This translation was made from the French text published
by Georges Grès. It first appeared in England, in a
limited edition, in 1930. Professor Myron Barker of
U.C.L.A. has very kindly helped me to make the work of
revision as accurate as possible. Where the reference is so
often uncertain, it is hard to avoid some mistakes.

Mr. T. S. Eliot wrote an admirable introduction to the
original edition. We have decided not to ask permission to
reprint this, however, since it is already available in his
Selected Essays, 1917-1932, published by Faber and Faber.

Except for the frontispiece, all the illustrations reproduced
in this book are from drawings by Baudelaire himself.
Baudelaire was not only an art-critic of the first rank, he
had remarkable artistic talent. Daumier, whose portrait he
once drew, said of him that he might have become a great
draughtsman, if he had not preferred to be a great poet.

The first three drawings are, of course, self-portraits. Next
comes a portrait of Jeanne Duval—the only authenticated
one we have. The last two drawings are of unidentified or
imaginary women. On the first of these, Baudelaire has
written: `A specimen of Antique Beauty, dedicated to
Chenavard’. Chenavard, whose name also appears in the
text of the Intimate Journals, was a painter and philosopher
of the period. Baudelaire evidently intended a caricature
of his style.

                                                           CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

INTRODUCTION

The important and complicated relation between an
artist and the age in which he lives has been the downfall
of many an excellent critic. Some, denying its importance,
have regarded works of art as if artists—and critics too—
lived exclusively in the timeless and spaceless world of the
spirit; others, denying its complexity, have assumed that
a work of art is a purely natural product, like a pebble on a
beach, totally explicable in terms of its physical causes.
(Such critics, however, are usually reluctant to apply the
same hypothesis to their own judgements.)

Since Man is neither pure spirit nor pure nature—if he
were purely either he would have no history—but exists in
and as a tension between their two opposing polarities,
both approaches lead to misunderstanding. Thus, among
literary critics, the first type is correct in maintaining that
aesthetic values are spiritual, to be recognized intuitively,
and that, for example, no comparative study of Elizabethan
and Victorian society can explain why Shakespeare’s
poetry is better than Browning’s. The second type is right
is maintaining that aesthetic character is, to a great degree,
natural, and that a study of their respective milieus is
essential if one is to understand why Shakespeare’s poetry
is different from Browning’s.

The former critic, pledged to appreciation, would, if he
were consistent, contract criticism to the making of translations
and anthologies; the latter, pledged to causal relations,
would expand it into an investigation of every word ever
printed, including menus and telephone-books.

Few of the entries in Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals are
concerned with the art of poetry; most of them are reflections
on subjects which concern all men at all times, love,
religion, politics, etc.; at the same time they are the
reflections of a poet living in Paris in the middle of
the nineteenth century.

They require, therefore—and this is a great part of their
fascination—to be read in four different ways at once: as
the observations of a human spirit irrespective of time
or place; as the observations of a poet irrespective of
time or place but as distinguished from men with other
gifts and professions; as the observations of a Frenchman
of the nineteenth century; and as the observations of a
French poet of the nineteenth century.

Random jottings though they are, most of the entries
revolve around one central preoccupation of Baudelaire’s,
namely: what makes a man a hero, i.e. an individual; or,
conversely, what makes him a churl, i.e. a mere unit in
human society without any real individual significance
of his own?

The term `individual’ has two senses, and one must be
careful in discussion to find out in which sense it is being
used. In the realm of nature, `individual’ means to be
something that others are not, to have uniqueness:
in the realm
of spirit, it means to become what one wills, to have a self-determined
history.

In the first sense, individuality is a gift of fortune, as
when this dog is white and that one black, or this man
intelligent and that man stupid; it is objectively manifest,
for an impartial observer has only to compare one with the
other to recognize it; and, since it applies to being, not
becoming, time is either irrelevant or, in so far as time is
the dimension of change, the enemy. In the second sense,
fortune is either the enemy—for to will to become something
usually implies that what one is by fortune is other
than one wills—or irrelevant, as in the exceptional case
when one wills to become by duplication what one already
is—for, in this case, the point is that one wills it, and the
fact that it is already granted one is an accident. This kind
of individuality is not manifest to an outsider since the
comparison by which it is recog
nized is not between one
object and another object but between what the subject
thinks he is and what he wills to become, and this comparison
no outsider can see; he can only take the subject’s word
for it. Further, since it applies to becoming, time is its
necessary dimension, without which it cannot come into
existence.

Since Man is both nature and spirit, he possesses both
kinds of individuality, and one of his major problems in
understanding himself is to determine what relative importance
to assign to each, and how to reconcile them.

As a European, Baudelaire inherited three main concepts
of the human individual, two of them Greek and one
Jewish. The Greek poets thought of the hero in terms of
nature, i.e. as the exceptional man, endowed by fate with
areté, recognized by the exceptional public deeds he performs,
and in the end publicly humiliated and destroyed
by fate. The spirit could only enter into their work in
disguise, as the hubris by which the hero offends the Gods—
for what is this hubris really but the will of the hero to
become the fortunate man he already is? It is not the same
as the Christian sin of pride which disobeys the commands
of God; for, if it were, one would be able to say of the tragic
hero—at such and such a point in his life he made the
wrong choice. And one can never say this. No, what his
arrogance really consists in is saying `I am exceptional by
choice, not by fate’.

The Greek philosophers, particularly Plato, took the
opposite course and thought of the hero in terms of spirit,
i.e. as the knower of the Divine Ideas who by fate was a
churl, imprisoned in the body and its temporal flux of
passions, but who, by his own will, has transcended his
fate and lifted himself into the timeless realm of the Good.
This transcendence is not manifest to others, except in so
far as they are willing to accept him as their teacher, but
is only known directly to the hero himself as a freedom
from passion and a knowledge of the Good; and once he
has attained this state he cannot lose it, for his knowledge
of the Good determines his will. This time it is nature that
enters in disguise as the heavenly eros, i.e. the desire to
know the Good before one knows it. This is really a gift of
fortune and sets one apart as an exception to the brutish
mass: that is to say, the hero and the churl are still recognizable
by comparison—only, instead of the poet’s comparison
between the strong and nobly born and the weak
and ill-bred, the contrast is now between the sage and the
ignorant.

The third concept of the hero, which does justice both
to human nature and to human spirit, is found in the Old
Testament, and, in a more consciously developed form,
in orthodox Christianity.

Abraham is not a hero in the poetic sense, for he has no
exceptional gifts, only the human nature that any man has.
What makes him exceptional is that he, outwardly an
average man, is called by God to an exceptional task and
obeys. Adam, on the other hand, loses his true self—not
because he is overconfident of his powers or ignorant, but
because he diobeys. While Agamemnon sacrifices his
daughter for the sake of the Greek Army, and suffers,
Abraham is ordered to sacrifice his son as a test of faith
and—because, without saying a word to anyone, he proceeds
to obey—Isaac is saved and he is blessed. Job suffers
a reversal of fortune which, to the Greeks, would have been
a sign of divine disfavour, but actually it is nothing of the
kind: the catastrophes which befall him are not the sentence
pronounced on one who is guilty, but the trial by
which he proves himself innocent.

Nor, on the other hand, are Abraham and Job philosophical
heroes: they keep on insisting that it is impossible
to know the mind of God in the way the philosopher can
know ideas, and that it is presumption to try to know it:
one can only obey or disobey his commands. In this
capacity, however, lies a spiritual freedom which is lacking
in both the tragic and the philosophic hero. The hero of
poetry necessarily becomes guilty of hubris—otherwise
there would be some who remain fortunate forever; and
there are none. The churl of poetry necessarily remains
innocent, because fortune does not give him a chance to
become anything else. The hero of philosophy necessarily
remains a hero—once he has attained his vision, to which
he can no more refuse assent than the mind can refuse
assent to the truths of arithmetic. The churl of philosophy
necessarily remains a churl because he lacks the prerequisite
endowment of eros which could start him off on
the ascent from ignorance to knowledge. But when what
distinguishes the hero from the churl is the choice of
obedience or disobedience, then it is open to anyone at
any time to become either. Thus the heroes of poetry and
philosophy have only a temporary interval of personal
history—the former during his downfall from greatness to
death, the latter during his ascent from nature to spirit.
Only the religious hero is an historical individual at every
moment of his existence.

In so far as Abraham and Job are recognizable as heroes
by being in the end rewarded by worldly success, there
are traces in the Old Testament of the poetic concept of
individuality—but these disappear in the Prophets and the
New Testament, where the religious hero is revealed to
the eye of faith as the suffering servant, the despised and
rejected of men, whose individuality is invisible to the eyes
of poetry and philosophy—by whose standards, indeed, he
seems both weak and ignorant.

Confronted with his own nature and the society of the
nineteenth century, Baudelaire devised and maintained,
until just before he went mad, his own pair of opposites.
The Dandy, or the heroic individual, on the one hand;
and, on the other, as the churlish mass, Woman, the man
of commerce, l’esprit belge.

     The Dandy:

    Is a great man and a saint, for his own sake
    Lives and sleeps in front of a mirror.
    Is a man of leisure and general education.
    Is rich and loves work.
    Works in a disinterested manner.
    Does nothing useful.
    Is either a poet, a priest, or a soldier.
    Is solitary.
    Is unhappy.
    Has as many gloves as he has friends—for fear of the itch.
    Is proud that he is less base than the passers-by.
    Never speaks to the masses except to insult them.
    Never touches a newspaper.

    His anti-types:

    Are natural—when they are hungry, they want to eat.
    Run away from home at twelve—not in search of heroic adventures, but to found a business.
    Dream in their cradles that they sell themselves for a million.
    Want, each of them, to be two people.
    Believe in progress—that is, count on their neighbours to do their duties for them.
   &n
bsp;Are like Voltaire.

The Dandy, it will be seen, is like the hero of poetry, in
that he requires certain gifts of fortune, such as money and
leisure, and like the hero of philosophy, in that he must be
endowed with the will to make himself into a dandy out
of the corrupt nature into which he, like everyone else, is
born. On the other hand, the Dandy is neither a man of
action nor a seeker after wisdom; his ambition is neither to
be admired by men nor to know God, but simply to become
subjectively conscious of being uniquely himself, and unlike
anyone else. He is, in fact, the religious hero turned upside
down—that is, Lucifer, the rebel, the defiant one who
asserts his freedom by disobeying all commands, whether
given by God, society, or his own nature. The truly dandyish
act is the acte gratuile, because only an act which is quite
unnecessary, unmotivated by any given requiredness, can
be an absolutely freely self-chosen individual act.

Logically, the Dandy should remain chaste: if, like
Baudelaire, he lacks the will-power to do so, he can at least
partially assert his freedom from natural desire by choosing
to be debauched, i.e. by yielding deliberately to what he
despises and making it as despicable as possible, until every
pleasure in love has been eliminated except the knowledge
that he is deliberately doing evil. Again, the Dandy should,
logically, become a hermit: if, like Baudelaire, he cannot
endure the loneliness which lack of relation to others
entails, then at least he can assert his freedom from social
relations by deliberately making them negative, i.e. by
giving offence. `When’, Baudelaire says, `I have inspired
universal horror and disgust, I shall have conquered
solitude.’

Even when one has allowed for the love of exaggeration
which every writer has, Baudelaire’s conclusions would
have seemed, to any earlier age, rather extreme: if they do
not seem so to us, it is because we experience for ourselves
the extreme situation which provoked them. Poe and
Baudelaire are the fathers of modern poetry in that they
were the first poets (with the possible exception of Blake)
who, born into the modern age—that is to say, after the
mutation of the closed society of tradition and inheritance
into the open society of fashion and choice—realized what
a decisive change this was. This change was not instantaneous,
and even now it is still incomplete; it does not
proceed uniformly in all fields of activity and at all levels
of experience: traditional beliefs may break down before
traditional morals, or vice versa; an artistic style, a
rhetoric, may persist when the habitual pattern of ideas
and emotions which made its interest has dissolved; poetry
may have reached modernity while music is still unreflective;
but, sooner or later, the change comes to all and,
once this happens, it is decisive and irrevocable—for,
whatever the field, once the mind becomes conscious of
alternatives, retreat into habit is cut off; either a man must
make a deliberate choice (that is to say, become a critic as
well as an actor) or become paralysed. Reliance on others
is only possible in so far as their authority can be recognized,
i.e. chosen. Reliance upon public opinion—on numbers of
people in general—is impossible, because they too are in
the same position as oneself, and the inevitable result is a
mutual destruction of individuality.

Viewed objectively, there may seem little difference
between living by tradition and living by public opinion;
in both cases the observer sees a number of people believing
the same thing or acting in the same way—without having
individually examined the evidence or made a personal
act of faith. Subjectively, however, the difference is infinite:
the believer by tradition is unconscious of any possible
alternative, and therefore cannot doubt—for, even if his
real reason for believing what he believes is that his
neighbours believe it, he cannot know this and must
imagine his reason is that the belief is true. The believer
through force of public opinion, on the other hand, is
conscious both of the fact that alternatives exist, or might
exist, and of the fact that he does not choose to consider
them—so that, even if what he believes happens to be true,
he cannot escape knowing that he does not believe it for
this reason but because his neighbours do; to whom, as he
also knows, the same applies. The danger of losing one’s
individuality is, therefore, greater in modern times than it
has ever been before.

The members of a traditional society—say, a Chinese
peasant village—are not fully developed individually, but
they have not lost their potential capacity to become so,
and one can therefore say that, as far as they have gone and
as far as one knows, they are individuals. The members of a
public—say, the evening crowds on Times Square—have
been offered the possibility of full development but have
rejected it, and by this rejection have lost the right to be
called individuals. Though neither is capable of fatherhood,
a boy who has not yet reached puberty is considered
masculine, a eunuch is not.

In a society which has become a public, a gifted man like
Baudelaire is placed in a peculiar position: his gifts enforce
a clarity of consciousness which makes it impossible for
him to join the crowd; they compel him to raise those
questions which the public by tacit consent represses. He
is bound, for example, to ask, as Baudelaire does:

    Why are we here?
    Do we come from some other place?
    What is free-will?
    Can it be reconciled with the laws of Providence?

Above all, he is bound to ask: What do I, or ought I, to
will to become? That is, how am I to become an individual?

At the same time nothing—neither his gift, nor nature,
nor God, nor society—can give an answer which compels
certainty; he must choose his answer and choice is a matter
of will, not of gifts. It is not surprising, then, if the gifted
man of our times so often is caught in the snare of reflection
in which his will prevents itself from willing anything
in particular, so that, like Baudelaire, he suffers from
`Acedia: the malady of monks’, and is desperately homesick
for a pre-conscious state—

    un vrai pays de Cocagne . . . où le luxe a plaisir à se mirer
    dans l’ordre . . . d’où le désordre, la turbulence et l’impré-vu
    sont exclus . . . où la cuisine elle-même est poétique,
    grasse et excitante à la fois.

He seeks to compel nature and society to provide his spirit
gratis with a history which it is not in their power to give,
either by making a god out of a novelty—

    Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?
    Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau—

or a devil out of the characterless public.

The unselfconscious man can rest in his natural individuality,
in the fact that he is what others are not—but,
once he becomes self-conscious, this is not enough; he must
immediately set about becoming a spiritual individual.
His danger now is that he will make the Dandy’s mistake,
and try to transform the former kind of individuality into
the latter—that is, to think of becoming a
spiritual individual
not as becoming what one wills, but as becoming
what others are not.

Running through the Journals, however, even from the
start, is a thread of thought which is completely contrary
to the Dandy, with his pride in his uniqueness:

     There is no exalted pleasure which cannot be related to
    prostitution. At the play, in the ball-room, each one
    enjoys possession of all. God is the most prostituted of all
    beings, because he is the closest friend of every individual,
    because he is the common inexhaustible reservoir of love.

Thus, in deliberately provoking paradoxical terms, Baudelaire
recognizes the Christian concept of love as agapé, in
contrast to the Platonic concept of love as eros which is held
by the Dandy. He admits that to love is not to desire,
however noble the object desired—even self-perfection—
but to give oneself; that indeed the only way in which one
can will to become oneself is by willing to give oneself in
answer to the needs of one’s neighbour.

Such thoughts seem to have occurred to Baudelaire only
occasionally until the crisis of January 23rd, 1862, when he
writes: `I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and
terror . . . and today I have received a singular warning. I
have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.’
The last few pages in My Heart Laid Bare which follow this
entry are some of the most terrifying and pathetic passages
in literature. They present a man fighting against time to
eradicate a lifetime’s habits of thought and feeling, and set
himself in order and acquire a history.

The man who wrote:

     Whenever you receive a letter from a creditor write fifty
    lines upon some extra-terrestrial subject, and you will be
    saved—

now writes:

     Jeanne 300, my mother 200, myself 300—800 francs a
    month. . . . Immediate work, even when it is bad, is better
    than day-dreaming.

     To pray to God . . . for life and strength for my mother
    and myself; to divide all my earnings into four parts—
    one for current expenses, one for my creditors, one for my
    friends and one for my mother—to obey the strictest
    principles of sobriety, the first being the abstinence from
    all stimulants whatsoever.

Between the Dandy and this lies a real change of heart
which is lacking, I think, in that subsequent and more
spectacular decision by which Rimbaud the poet became
Rimbaud the trader. In the latter, it only seems as if one
kind of Dandy were exchanged for another; the same
pride, the same desire to be unique, emanates from both.
In Baudelaire’s case, what makes the note of humility
sound true is that he does not propose to make any outwardly
spectacular change in his career, to vanish from
poetry in a cloud of publicity: no—he merely prays that
he may use his talents better and acknowledges that, gifted
though he may be, he, the Dandy, is as weak as a woman,
M. Prudhomme, or the Belgians.

To the eye of nature, he was too late. As he spoke, the
bird stooped and struck. But, to the eye of the spirit, we
are entitled to believe he was in time—for, though the
spirit needs time, an instant of it is enough.

W. H. AUDEN

SQUIBS

Even though God did not exist, Religion would be
none the less holy and divine.

God is the sole being who has no need to exist in
order to reign.

That which is created by the Mind is more living
than Matter.

Love is the desire to prostitute oneself. There is,
indeed, no exalted pleasure which cannot be related
to prostitution.

At the play, in the ball-room, each one enjoys
possession of all.

What is Art? Prostitution.

The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious
expression of sensual joy in the multiplication of
Number.

All is Number. Number is in all. Number is in the
individual. Ecstasy is a Number.

Inclinations to wastefulness ought, when a man is
mature, to be replaced by a wish to concentrate and
to produce.

Love may spring from a generous sentiment, the
desire for prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by
the desire for ownership.

Love wishes to emerge from itself, to become, like
the conqueror with the conquered, a part of its victim,
yet to preserve, at the same time, the privileges
of the conqueror.

The sensual delights of one who keeps a mistress
are at once those of an angel and a landlord. Charity
and cruelty. Indeed, they are independent of sex, of
beauty and of the animal species.

The green shadows in the moist evenings of summer.

Immense depths of thought in expressions of
common speech; holes dug by generations of ants.

The story of the Hunter, concerning the intimate
relation between cruelty and love.

II

Squibs. Of the feminine nature of the Church, as a
reason for her omnipotence.

Of violet (love repressed, mysterious, veiled;
canoness colour).

The priest is a tremendous figure, because he
makes the crowd believe marvellous things.

That the Church should wish to do all things and
be all things is a law of human nature.

The People adore authority.

Priests are the servants and sectaries of the imagination.

Revolutionary maxim: the throne and the altar.

E. G. or The Seductive Adventuress.

Religious intoxication of the great cities.

Pantheism. I am all things. All things are myself.

Whirlwind.

III

Squibs. I believe I have already set down in my
notes that Love greatly resembles an application of
torture or a surgical operation. But this idea can be
developed, and in the most ironic manner. For even
when two lovers love passionately and are full of
mutual desire, one of the two will always be cooler
or less self-abandoned than the other. He or she is
the surgeon or executioner; the other, the patient or
victim. Do you hear these sighs—preludes to a
shameful tragedy—these groans, these screams, these
rattling gasps? Who has not uttered them, who has
not inexorably wrung them forth? What worse sights
than these could you encounter at an inquisition
conducted by adept torturers? These eyes, rolled
back like the sleepwalker’s, these limbs whose muscles
burst and stiffen as though subject to the action of a
galvanic battery—such frightful, such curious phenomena
are undoubtedly never obtained from even the
most extreme cases of intoxication, of delirium, of
opium-taking. The human face, which Ovid believed
fashioned to reflect the stars, speaks here only of an
insane ferocity, relaxing into a kind of death. For I
should consider it
indeed a sacrilege to apply the
word `ecstasy’ to this species of decomposition.

A terrible pastime, in which one of the players
must forfeit possession of himself!

It was once asked, in my hearing, what was the
greatest pleasure in Love? Someone, of course,
answered: To receive, and someone else: To give
oneself— The former said: The pleasure of pride,
and the latter: The voluptuousness of humility. All
these swine talked like The Imitation of Jesus Christ.
Finally, there was a shameless Utopian who affirmed
that the greatest pleasure in Love was to beget citizens
for the State. For my part, I say: the sole and
supreme pleasure in Love lies in the absolute knowledge
of doing evil. And man and woman know, from
birth, that in Evil is to be found all voluptuousness.

IV

Schemes. Squibs. Projects. Comedy à la Silvestre.
Barbora and the sheep.

Chenavard has created a superhuman type.

My homage to Levaillant.

The Preface, a blend of mysteriousness and drollery.

Dreams and the theory of dreams, in the manner
of Swedenborg.

The thought of Campbell (The conduct of life).

Concentration.

Power of the fixed idea.

Absolute frankness, the means of originality.

To relate pompously things which are comic. . . .

V

Squibs. Suggestions. When a man takes to his bed,
nearly all his friends have a secret desire to see him
die; some to prove that his health is inferior to their
own, others in the disinterested hope of being able to
study a death-agony.

The Arabesque is the most spiritualistic of designs.

VI

Squibs. Suggestions. The man of letters shakes
foundations. He promotes the taste for intellectual
gymnastics.

The Arabesque is the most ideal of all designs.

We love women in so far as they are strangers to
us. To love intelligent women is a pleasure of the
pederast. Thus it follows that bestiality excludes
pederasty.

The spirit of buffoonery does not necessarily
exclude Charity, but this is rare.

Enthusiasm applied to things other than abstractions
is a sign of weakness and disease.

Thinness is more naked, more indecent than
corpulence.

VII

Tragic Sky. An abstract epithet applied to a
material entity.

Man drinks in light with the atmosphere. Thus the
masses are right in saying that the night air is unhealthy
for work.

The masses are born fire-worshippers.

Fireworks, conflagrations, incendiaries.

If one imagined a born fire-worshipper, a born
Parsee, one could write a story . . .

VIII

Mistakes made about people’s faces are due to an
eclipse of the real image by some hallucination to
which it gives rise.

Know therefore the pleasures of an austere life and
pray, pray without ceasing. Prayer is the fountain
of strength. (Altar of the Will. Moral dynamic. The
Sorcery of the Sacraments. Hygiene of the Soul.
)

Music excavates Heaven.

Jean-Jacques said that he always entered a café
with a certain emotional disturbance. For a timid
nature, the ticket-office in a theatre is rather like the
tribunal of Hell.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of gambling.
But what if we are indifferent to gain or loss?

IX

Suggestions. Squibs. Nations—like families—only
produce great men in spite of themselves. They make
every effort not to produce them. And thus the great
man has need, if he is to exist, of a power of attack
greater than the power of resistance developed by
several millions of individuals.

Of sleep, every evening’s sinister adventure, it may
be observed that men go daily to their beds with an
audacity which would be beyond comprehension
did we not know that it is the result of their ignorance
of danger.

X

There are some skins as hard as tortoise shell
against which scorn has no power.

Many friends, many gloves. Those who loved me
have been despised persons; worthy of being despised,
I might even say, if I were determined to
flatter the respectable.

For Girardin to speak Latin! Pecudesque locutae

It was typical of a Society without faith to send
Robert Houdin to the Arabs to convert them from
belief in miracles.

XI

These great and beautiful ships, imperceptibly
poised (swayed) on calm waters; these stout ships,
with their out-of-work, home-sick air—are they not
saying to us in dumb show: When shall we set sail
for happiness?

Do not neglect the marvellous element in drama—
the magical and the romanesque.

The surroundings, the atmospheres in which the
whole narrative must be steeped. (See Usher, and
compare this with the most intense sensations of
hashish and opium.)

XII

Are there mathematical lunacies and madmen
who believe that two and two make three? In other
words, can hallucination invade the realms of pure
reason—if the words do not cry out (at being joined
together)? If, when a man has fallen into habits of
idleness, of day-dreaming and of sloth, putting off
his most important duties continually till the morrow,
another man were to wake him up one morning
with heavy blows of a whip and were to whip him
unmercifully, until he who was unable to work for
pleasure worked now for fear—would not that man,
the chastiser, be his benefactor and truest friend?
Moreover, one may go so far as to affirm that
pleasure itself would follow, and this with much
better reason than when it is said: love comes after
marriage.

Similarly, in politics, the real saint is he who
chastises and massacres the People, for the good of
the People.

                                                           Tuesday, May 13, 1856

Take some copies to Michel.

Write to Moun,
to Urriès.
to Maria Clemm.

Send to Madame Dumay to know if Mirès . . .

That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible
appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that
is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment,
are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.

XIII

Notes. Squibs. Théodore de Banville is not precisely
a materialist; he gives forth light.

His poetry represents happy hours.

Whenever you receive a letter from a creditor
write fifty lines upon some extra-terrestrial subject,
and you will be saved.

A great smile on the beautiful face of a giant.

XIV

Of suicide and suicidal mania considered in their bearings
upon sta
tistics, medicine, and philosophy.
                                                           
BRIERE DE BOISMONT

Look up the passage: To live with someone who feels
towards you nothing but aversion. . . .

The portrait of Serenus by Seneca. That of Stagirus
by St. John Chrysostom. Acedia, the malady of
Monks.

Taedium Vitae.

XV

Squibs. Translation and paraphrase of La Passion
rapporte tout à elle.

Spiritual and physical pleasures caused by the
storm, electricity and the thunderbolt, tocsin of dark
amorous memories, from the distant years.

XVI

Squibs. I have found a definition of the Beautiful,
of my own conception of the Beautiful. It is something
intense and sad, something a little vague,
leaving scope for conjecture. I am ready, if you will,
to apply my ideas to a sentient object, to that object,
for example, which Society finds the most interesting
of all, a woman’s face. A beautiful and seductive
head, a woman’s head, I mean, makes one dream,
but in a confused fashion, at once of pleasure and of
sadness; conveys an idea of melancholy, of lassitude,
even of satiety—a contradictory impression, of an
ardour, that is to say, and a desire for life together
with a bitterness which flows back upon them as
if from a sense of deprivation and hopelessness.
Mystery and regret are also characteristics of the
Beautiful.

A beautiful male head has no need to convey, to
the eyes of man, at any rate—though perhaps to
those of a woman—this impression of voluptuousness
which, in a woman’s face, is a provocation all the
more attractive the more the face is generally melancholy.
But this head also will suggest ardours and
passions—spiritual longings—ambitions darkly repressed—powers
turned to bitterness through lack
of employment—traces, sometimes, of a revengeful
colnss (for the archetype of the dandy must not be
forgten here), sometimes, also—and this is one of
the most interesting characteristics of Beauty—of
mystery, and last of all (let me admit the exact point
to which I am a modern in my aesthetics) of Unhappiness.
I do not pretend that Joy cannot associate
with Beauty, but I will maintain that Joy is one of
her most vulgar adornments, while Melancholy may
be called her illustrious spouse—so much so that I
can scarcely conceive (is my brain become a witch’s
mirror?) a type of Beauty which has nothing to do
with Sorrow. In pursuit of—others might say obsessed
by—these ideas, it may be supposed that I
have difficulty in not concluding from them that the
most perfect type of manly beauty is Satan—as
Milton saw him.

XVII

Squibs. Auto-Idolatry. Poetic harmony of charactter.
Eurhythrnic of the character and the faculties.
To preserve all the faculties. To augment all the
faculties.

A cult (Magianism, evocatory magic).

The sacrifice and the act of dedication are the
supreme formulae and symbols of barter.

Two fundamental literary qualities, supernaturalism
and irony. The individual ocular impression, the
aspect in which things present themselves to the
writer—then the turn of satanic wit. The supernatural
comprises the general colour and accent—
that is to say, the intensity, sonority, limpidity,
vibrancy, depth and reverberation in Space and
Time.

There are moments of existence at which Time
and Duration are more profound, and the Sense of
Being is enormously quickened.

Of magic as applied to the evocation of the great
dead, to the restoration and perfection of health.

Inspiration comes always when man wills it, but it
does not always depart when he wishes.

Of language and writing, considered as magical
operations, evocatory magic.

Of airs in Woman.

The charming airs, those in which beauty consists,
are:

    The blasé,
    The bored,
    The empty-headed,
    The impudent,
    The frigid,
    The introspective,
    The imperious,
    The capricious,
    The naughty,
    The ailing,
    The feline—a blend of childishness, nonchalance and malice.

In certain semi-supernatural conditions of the
spirit, the whole depths of life are revealed within
the scene—no matter how commonplace—which
one has before one’s eyes. This becomes its symbol.

As I was crossing the boulevard, hurrying a little
to avoid the carriages, my halo was dislodged and
fell into the filth of the macadam. Fortunately, I had
time to recover it, but a moment later the unhappy
thought slipped into my brain that this was an ill
omen; and from that instant the idea would not let
me alone; it has given me no peace all day.

Of the cult of oneself as a lover—from the point
of view of health, hygiene, the toilet, spiritual
nobility, eloquence.

Self-purification and anti-humanity

There is, in the act of love, a great resemblance to
torture or to a surgical operation.

There is, in prayer, a magical operation. Prayer
is one of the great forces of intellectual dynamism.
There is, as it were, an electric current.

The rosary is a medium, a vehicle. It is Prayer
brought within the reach of all.

Work—a progressive and accumulative force,
yielding interest like capital, in the faculties just as
much as by its fruits.

Gambling, even when it is conducted scientifically,
is an intermittent force and will be overcome, however
fruitful it may be, by continuous work, however
little.

If a poet demanded from the State the right to
have a few bourgeois in his stable, people would be
very much astonished, but if a bourgeois asked for
some roast poet, people would think it quite natural.

That would not scandalize our wives, our daughters
or our sisters.

Presently he asked permission to kiss her leg, and,
profiting by the occasion, he kissed that beautiful
limb in such a position that her figure was sharply
outlined against the setting sun!

`Pussy, kitty, catkin, my cat, my wolf, my little
monkey, big monkey, great big serpent, my little
melancholy monkey.’

Such caprices of language, too often repeated,
such excessive use of animal nicknames, testify to a
satanic aspect in love. Have not demons the forms of
beasts? The camel of Cazotte—camel, devil and
woman.

A man goes pistol-shooting, accompanied by his
wife. He sets up a doll and says to his wife: `I shall
imagine that this is you’. He closes his eyes and
shatters the doll. Then he says, as he kisses his companion’s
hand, `Dear angel, let me thank you for
my skill!’

When I have inspired universal horror and disgust,
I shall hav
e conquered solitude.

This book is not for our wives, our daughters and
our sisters. I have little to do with such things.

There are some tortoise-like carapaces against
which contempt ceases to be a pleasure.

Many friends, many gloves—for fear of the itch.

Those who have loved me were despised people, I
might even say worthy of being despised, if I were
determined to flatter the respectable.

God is a scandal—a scandal which pays.

XVIII

Squibs. Despise the sensibility of nobody. Each
man’s sensibility is his genius.

There are only two places where one pays for the
right to spend: women and public latrines.

From a passionate concubinage one may guess at
the joys of a young married couple.

The precocious taste for women. I used to confuse
the smell of women with the smell of furs. I remember
. . . Indeed, I loved my mother for her elegance.
I was a precocious dandy.

My ancestors, idiots or maniacs, in their solemn
houses, all victims of terrible passions.

The protestant countries lack two elements indispensable
to the happiness of a well-bred man;
gallantry and devotion.

The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is
agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic
pleasure of giving offence.

Germany expresses her dreams by means of line,
England by means of perspective.

There is, in the creation of all sublime thought, a
nervous concussion which can be felt in the cerebellum.

Spain brings to religion the natural ferocity of
Love.

Style. The eternal touch, eternal and cosmo-polite.
Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe.

XIX

Squibs. Suggestions. It is easy to guess why the rabble
dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of
luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures . . . etc.

XX

Squibs. A small amount of work, repeated three
hundred and sixty-five times, gives three hundred
and sixty-five times a small sum of money—that is to
say, an enormous sum. At the same time, glory is
achieved. [In the margin] Similarly, a crowd of small
pleasures compose happiness.

To write a pot-boiler, that is genius. I ought to
write a pot-boiler.

A really clever remark is a masterpiece.

The tone of Alphonse Rabbe.

The tone of a kept woman (My beautifullest! Oh,
you fickle sex!
)

The eternal tone.

The colouring crude, the design profoundly simplified.

The prima donna and the butcher boy.

My mother is fantastic; one must fear and propitiate
her.

Hildebrand the arrogant.

Caesarism of Napoleon III (Letter to Edgar Ney),
Pope and Emperor.

XXI

Squibs. Suggestions. To give oneself to Satan. What
does this mean?

What can be more absurd than Progress, since
man, as the event of each day proves, is for ever the
double and equal of man—is for ever, that is to say,
in the state of primitive nature! What perils have the
forest and the prairie to compare with the daily
shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether man
ensnares his dupe upon the boulevard or pierces his
victim within the trackless forests, is he not everlasting
man, the most perfect of the beasts of prey?

People tell me that I am thirty, but if I have lived
three minutes in one . . . am I not ninety years old?

Is not work the salt which preserves mummified
souls?

At the beginning of a story attack the subject, no
matter where, and open with some very beautiful
phrases which will arouse the desire to complete it.

XXII

I believe that the infinite and mysterious charm
which lies in the contemplation of a ship, especially
of a ship in motion, depends firstly upon its order
and symmetry—primal needs of the human spirit as
great as those of intricacy and harmony—and,
secondly, upon the successive multiplication and
generation of all the curves and imaginary figures
described in space by the real elements of the object.

The poetic idea which emerges from this operation
of line in motion is an hypothesis of an immeasurably
vast, complex, yet perfectly harmonized entity, of an
animal being possessed of a spirit, suffering all
human ambition and sighing all the sighs of men.

You civilized peoples, who are for ever speaking
foolishly about Savages and Barbarians—soon, as
d’Aurevilly says, you will have become too worthless
even to be idolaters.

Stoicism, a religion which has but one sacrament:
suicide!

To conceive a sketch for a lyrical or fairy extravagance
for a pantomime and to translate it into a
serious romance. To plunge the whole into a supernatural,
dreamlike atmosphere—the atmosphere of
the great days. That there should be something lulling,
even screne, in passion. Regions of pure poetry.

Moved by contact with those pleasures which were
themselves like memories, softened by the thought
of a past ill spent, of so many faults, so many quarrels,
of so many things which each must hide from
the other, he began to weep; and his tears fell warm,
in the darkness, upon the bare shoulder of his beloved
and still charming mistress. She trembled. She, also,
felt moved and softened. The darkness shielded her
vanity, her elegant affectation of coldness. These
two fallen creatures, who could still suffer, since a
vestige of nobility remained with them, embraced
impulsively, mingling, in the rain of their tears and
kisses, regrets for the past with hopes, all too uncertain,
for the future. Never, perhaps, for them, as
upon that night of melancholy and forgiveness, had
pleasure been so sweet—a pleasure steeped in sorrow
and remorse.

Through the night’s blackness, he had looked
behind him into the depths of the years, then he had
thrown himself into the arms of his guilty lover, to
recover there the pardon he was granting her.

Hugo often thinks of Prometheus. He applies an
imaginary vulture to his breast, which is scared only
by the moxas of vanity. Then, as the hallucination
becomes more complex and varied, following always,
however, the progressive stages which medical men
describe, he believes that a fiat of Providence has
substituted Jersey for St. Helena.

This man is so little of a poet, so little spiritual,
that he would disgust even a solicitor.

Hugo, like a priest, always has his head bowed—
bowed so low that he can see nothing except his own
navel.

What is not a priesthood nowadays? Youth itself
is a priesthood—according to the young.

And what is not a prayer? To sh—is a prayer—
according to the rabble, when they sh—

M. de Pontmartin—a man who has always the air
of having just arrived from the provinces.

Man—all mankind, that is to say—is so naturally
depraved that he suffers less from universal degradation
than
from the establishment of a reasonable
hierarchy.

The world is about to end. Its sole reason for continuance
is that it exists. And how feeble is this
reason, compared with those which announce the
contrary, particularly the following: What, under
Heaven, has this world henceforth to do? Even
supposing that it continued materially to exist,
would this existence be worthy of the name or the
Historical Dictionary? I do not say that the world
will be reduced to the clownish shifts and disorders
of a South American republic, or even that we shall
perhaps return to a state of nature and roam the
grassy ruins of our civilization, gun in hand, seeking
our food. No; for these adventures would require a
certain remnant of vital energy, echo of earlier ages.
As a new example, as fresh victims of the inexorable
moral laws, we shall perish by that which we have
believed to be our means of existence. So far will
machinery have Americanized us, so far will Progress
have atrophied in us all that is spiritual, that no
dream of the Utopians, however bloody, sacrilegious
or unnatural, will be comparable to the result. I
appeal to every thinking man to show me what remains
of Life. As for religion, I believe it useless to
speak of it or to search for its relics, since to give
oneself the trouble of denying God is the sole disgrace
in these matters. Ownership virtually disappeared
with the suppression of the rights of the eldest son;
but the time will come when humanity, like an
avenging ogre, will tear their last morsel from those
who believe themselves to be the legitimate heirs of
revolution. And even that will not be the worst.

Human imagination can conceive, without undue
difficulty, of republics or other communal states
worthy of a certain glory, if they are directed by
holy men, by certain aristocrats. It is not, however,
specifically in political institutions that the universal
ruin, or the universal progress—for the name matters
little—will be manifested. That will appear in the
degradation of the human heart. Need I describe
how the last vestiges of statesmanship will struggle
painfully in the clutches of universal bestiality, how
the governors will be forced—in maintaining themselves
and erecting a phantom of order—to resort to
measures which would make our men of today shudder,
hardened as they are? Then the son will run
away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve,
emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly
not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful
prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a
garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business,
to enrich himself and to compete with his
infamous papa, to be founder and shareholder of a
journal which will spread enlightenment and cause
Le Siècle of that time to be considered as an instrument
of superstition. Then the erring, the déclassées,
those women who have had several lovers and who
are sometimes called Angels, by virtue of and in gratitude
for the empty-headed frivolity which illumines,
with its fortuitous light, their existences logical as
evil—then these women, I say, will be nothing but
a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom which condemns everything
except money, everything, even the crimes of the
senses.
Then, any shadow of virtue, everything indeed
which is not worship of Plutus, will be brought into
utter ridicule. Justice, if, at that fortunate epoch,
Justice can still exist, will deprive of their civil rights
those citizens who are unable to make a fortune. Thy
spouse, O bourgeois! Thy chaste better half, whose
legitimacy seems to thee poetic—making legality to
be henceforth a baseness beneath reproach—vigilant
and loving guardian of thy strong-box, will be no
more than the absolute type of the kept woman. Thy
daughter, with an infantile wantonness, will dream
in her cradle that she sells herself for a million—and
thou, thyself, O bourgeois—less of a poet even than
thou art today—thou wilt find no fault in that, thou
wilt regret nothing. For there are some qualities in
a man which grow strong and prosper only as others
diminish and grow less; thanks to the progress of that
age, of thy bowels of compassion nothing will remain
but the guts!—That age is perhaps very near; who
knows if it is not already come and if the coarseness
of our perceptions is not the sole obstacle which prevents
us from appreciating the nature of the atmosphere
in which we breathe?

For myself, who feel within me sometimes the
absurdity of a prophet, I know that I shall never
achieve the charity of a physician. Lost in this vile
world, elbowed by the crowd, I am like a worn-out
man, whose eyes see, in the depths of the years behind
him, only disillusionment and bitterness, ahead
only a tumult in which there is nothing new, whether
of enlightenment or of suffering. In the evening
when this man has filched from his destiny a few
hours of pleasure, when he is lulled by the process
of digestion, forgetful—as far as possible—of the past,
content with the present and resigned to the future,
exhilarated by his own nonchalance and dandyism,
proud that he is less base than the passers-by, he says
to himself, as he contemplates the smoke of his cigar:
What does it matter to me what becomes of these
perceptions?

I believe I have wandered into what those of the
trade call a hors-d’œuvre. Nevertheless, I will let
these pages stand—since I wish to record my days
of anger.

   

I Love the Thought… (by Charles Baudelaire)

10 Wednesday Dec 2008

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Baudelaire (Charles), French, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire


V. [from Les Fleurs de Mal]


J’aime le souvenir de ces époques nues,
Dont Phoebus se plaisait à dorer les statues.
Alors l’homme et la femme en leur agilité
Jouissaient sans mensonge et sans anxiété,
Et, le ciel amoureux leur caressant l’échine,
Exerçaient la santé de leur noble machine.
Cybèle alors, fertile en produits généreux,
Ne trouvait point ses fils un poids trop onéreux,
Mais, louve au coeur gonflé de tendresses communes
Abreuvait l’univers à ses tétines brunes.
L’homme, élégant, robuste et fort, avait le droit
D’être fier des beautés qui le nommaient leur roi;
Fruits purs de tout outrage et vierges de gerçures,
Dont la chair lisse et ferme appelait les morsures!

Le Poète aujourd’hui, quand il veut concevoir
Ces natives grandeurs, aux lieux où se font voir
La nudité de l’homme et celle de la femme,
Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme
Devant ce noir tableau plein d’épouvantement.
O monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement!
O ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques!
O pauvres corps tordus, maigres, ventrus ou flasques,
Que le dieu de l’Utile, implacable et serein,
Enfants, emmaillota dans ses langes d’airain!
Et vous, femmes, hélas! pâles comme des cierges,
Que ronge et que nourrit la débauche, et vous, vierges,
Du vice maternel traînant l’hérédité
Et toutes les hideurs de la fécondité!

Nous avons, il est vrai, nations corrompues,
Aux peuples anciens des beautés inconnues:
Des visages rongés par les chancres du coeur,
Et comme qui dirait des beautés de langueur;
Mais ces inventions de nos muses tardives
N’empêcheront jamais les races maladives
De rendre à la jeunesse un hommage profond,
– A la sainte jeunesse, à l’air simple, au doux front,
A l’oeil limpide et clair ainsi qu’une eau courante,
Et qui va répandant sur tout, insouciante
Comme l’azur du ciel, les oiseaux et les fleurs,
Ses parfums, ses chansons et ses douces chaleurs!


— Charles Baudelaire



Below is an English translation by James McGowan


I Love the Thought… [from The Flowers of Evil]


I love the thought of ancient, naked days
When Phoebus gilded statues with his rays.
Then women, men in their agility
Played without guile, without anxiety,
And, while the sky stroked lovingly their skin,
They tuned to health their excellent machine.
Cybele, in offering her bounty there,
Found mortals not a heavy weight to bear,
But, she-wolf full of common tenderness,
From her brown nipples fed the universe.
Man had the right, robust and flourishing,
Of pride in beauties who proclaimed him king;
Pure fruit unsullied, lovely to the sight,
Whose smooth, firm flesh went asking for the bite!

Today, the Poet, when he would conceive
These native grandeurs, where can now be seen
Women and men in all their nakedness,
Feels in his soul a chill of hopelessness
Before this terrible and bleak tableau.
Monstrosities that cry out to be clothed!
Bodies grotesque and only fit for masques!
Poor twisted trunks, scrawny or gone to flab,
Whose god, implacable Utility,
In brazen wraps, swaddles his progeny!
And pale as tapers, all you women too
Corruption gnaws and nourishes, and you
O virgins, heir to all matemal vice
And all the squalor of the fecund life!

lt’s true, we have in our corrupted states
Beauties unknown to ancient people’s tastes:
Visages gnawed by sores of syphilis,
And one might say, beauties of listlessness;
But these inventions of our tardy muse
Never avert the sickly modem crew
From rendering to youth their deepest bow,
– To holy youth, to smooth, untroubled brow,
To limpid eye, to air of innocence,
Who pours out on us all, indifferent
As flowers, birds, the blue of sky or sea,
His perfumes, songs, his sweet vitality!


* * *

   

The Sunset of Romanticism (by Charles Baudelaire)

01 Tuesday Jul 2008

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Baudelaire (Charles), French, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire



Le Coucher du Soleil Romantique


Que le soleil est beau quand tout frais il se lève,
Comme une explosion nous lançant son bonjour!
— Bienheureux celui-là qui peut avec amour
Saluer son coucher plus glorieux qu’un rêve!


Je me souviens!… J’ai vu tout, fleur, source, sillon,
Se pâmer sous son oeil comme un coeur qui palpite…
— Courons vers l’horizon, il est tard, courons vite,
Pour attraper au moins un oblique rayon!


Mais je poursuis en vain le Dieu qui se retire;
L’irrésistible Nuit établit son empire,
Noire, humide, funeste et pleine de frissons;


Une odeur de tombeau dans les ténèbres nage,
Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du marécage,
Des crapauds imprévus et de froids limaçons.


— Charles Baudelaire



Below are four English translations


The Sunset of Romanticism


How beautiful the Sun is when newly risen
He hurls his morning greetings like an explosion!
— Fortunate the one who can lovingly salute
His setting, more glorious than a dream!


I remember!… I have seen all, flower, stream, furrow,
Swoon under his gaze like a palpitating heart…
— Let us run to the horizon, it’s late,
Let us run fast, to catch at least a slanting ray!


But I pursue in vain the sinking god;
Irresistible Night, black, damp, deadly,
Full of shudders, establishes his reign;


The odor of the tomb swims in the shadows
And at the marsh’s edge my timid foot
Treads upon slimy snails and unexpected toads.


— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)



Romantic Sunset


How lovely is the sun, when, freshly soaring,
Like an explosion, first he bids “Good-Day.”
Happy the man, on gorgeous sunsets poring,
Who can salute with love its parting ray.


I’ve seen all things, flower, furrow, pond, and rill,
Swoon in his gaze like a poor heart that dies.
Run to the skyline. It is late. We still
May catch one parting ray before it flies.


But it’s in vain I chase my God receding.
Night irresistible, damp, black, unheeding
Establishes her empire, full of fear.


Amongst the shades a grave-like odour trails.
My naked feet walk into chilly snails
And bullfrogs unforeseen along the mere.


— Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)



Sundown of Romanticism


How beautiful the sun when his new-risen beams
Hurl forth his morning greetings as huge guns might shoot,
— Thrice-happy he whose loving heart can still salute
His setting glow which is more beautiful than dreams.
I remember. I have seen all — flower, stream, furrow — sway
Under his gaze like swooning hearts that palpitate.
Let us run to the sky-rim, it is all too late,
Lot us run fast to catch at least one slanting ray!


But I pursue this sinking deity in vain,
Night irresistibly resumes her baleful reign,
Black, humid, full of shudderings as sharp as flails.
The stench of tombs swims over shadows thick as soot,
And at the marsh’s edge my apprehensive foot
Treads upon slimy toads and unexpected snails.


— Jacques LeClercq, Flowers of Evil (Mt Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1958)



The Romantic Sunset


How beautiful is the sun when it rises, fresh
Like an explosion sending us its greeting!
— Grateful is the one who can salute with love
Its setting, more glorious than a dream!


I remember!… I have seen all, flower, spring, furrow,
Faint under its watch like a palpitating heart.
— Let us run toward the horizon, it is late, let us run fast,
So we can at least catch an oblique ray!


But in vain I pursued a retreating God
The irresistible night cast its empire,
Dark, humid, morbid and full of shudders;


An odor of a tomb lurks, tenebrous,
And my anguished, frightened, and cold foot,
At a marsh’s edge, treads unpredictable toads along the way.


— Said Leghlid (poet and writer)

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