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Little Poems in Prose-Charles Baudelaire · Edgar Allan Poe Poems

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  Speaker 1: Introduction of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Beaudelaire. This
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  Speaker 1: is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
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  Speaker 1: public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
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  Speaker 1: LibriVox dot org. Read by Ben Tucker, Charles Beaudelaire by
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  Speaker 1: James Hunnaker one for the sentimental. No greater foe exists
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  Speaker 1: than the iconoclast who dissipates literary legends, and he is
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  Speaker 1: abroad nowadays. Those golden times when they gossiped of de
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  Speaker 1: Quincey's enormous opium consumption of the gin absorbed by gentle
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  Speaker 1: Charles Lamb, of color ages, dark ways, Byron's escapades, and
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  Speaker 1: Shelley's atheism alas into what faded limbo? Have they vanished Poe, too,
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  Speaker 1: whom we saw in fancy reeling from Richmond to Baltimore,
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  Speaker 1: Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New York. Those familiar, fascinating
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  Speaker 1: anecdotes have gone the way of all such jerrybuilt spooks.
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  Speaker 1: We now know Poe to have been a man and
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  Speaker 1: suffering at the time of his death from cerebral lesion,
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  Speaker 1: a man who drank at intervals, and little doctor Guerriere
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  Speaker 1: of Paris has exploded a darling superstition about Quincey's opium meeting.
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  Speaker 1: He has demonstrated that no man could have lived so long.
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  Speaker 1: De Quincey was nearly seventy five at his death and
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  Speaker 1: worked so hard if he had consumed twelve thousand drops
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  Speaker 1: of laudanum as often as he said he did. Furthermore,
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  Speaker 1: the English essayist description of the drug's effects is inexact.
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  Speaker 1: He was seldom sleepy, a sure sign, asserts doctor Guerrier
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  Speaker 1: that he was not altogether enslaved by the drug habit
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  Speaker 1: sprightly in old age, his powers of labor were prolonged
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  Speaker 1: until past thirty score and ten. His imagination needed little
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  Speaker 1: opium to produce the famous confessions. Even Gautier's revolutionary red
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  Speaker 1: waistcoat wore at the premiere of Hernani was, according to Gautier,
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  Speaker 1: a pink dublat and rousseau has been whitewashed. So they
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  Speaker 1: are disappearing those literary legends. Until disheartened we cry out,
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  Speaker 1: spare us dear old fashion, disreputable men of genius. But
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  Speaker 1: the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This French
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  Speaker 1: poet has suffered more from the friendly, malignant biographer and
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  Speaker 1: chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the curves out
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  Speaker 1: of the cemetery? Asked Beaudelaire after he had read Griswold
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  Speaker 1: on Poe. A few years later, his own cemetery was invaded,
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  Speaker 1: and the world was put into possession of the Beaudelaire legend,
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  Speaker 1: That legend of the artribilious, irritable poet, dandy maniac, his
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  Speaker 1: hair dyed green, spouting blasphemies, that grim, despairing image of
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  Speaker 1: a diabolic, a libertine saint and drunkard. Maxime de Camp
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  Speaker 1: was much to blame for the promulgation of these tales,
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  Speaker 1: witness his souvenir litteraire. However, it may be confessed that
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  Speaker 1: part of the Beaudelaire legend was created by Charles Baudelaire.
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  Speaker 1: In the history of literature, it is difficult to parallel
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  Speaker 1: such a deliberate piece of self stultification. Not Villon, who
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  Speaker 1: preceded him, nor Verlaine, who imitated him, drew for the
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  Speaker 1: astonishment or dissidification of the world a like unflattering portrait.
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  Speaker 1: Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered at times
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  Speaker 1: from acute courtical irritation, and notwithstanding his desperate effort to
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  Speaker 1: realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, who had
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  Speaker 1: said that no man can bare his heart quite naked.
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  Speaker 1: There always will be something held back, something false, ostentatiously
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  Speaker 1: thrust forward. The grimace, the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric
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  Speaker 1: are so many buffers between the soul of man and
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  Speaker 1: the sharp reality of published confessions. Baudelaire was no more
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  Speaker 1: exception to this rule than Saint Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau or Heisman,
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  Speaker 1: though he was as frank as any of them, as
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  Speaker 1: we may see in the printed diary Moncieur miss Anneu,
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  Speaker 1: posthumous works Society de Mecueur de France, and in the
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  Speaker 1: journal Fuseat Letter and other fragments exhumed by devoted Baudelarians
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  Speaker 1: to smash legends. Eugene Corpett's biography study, first printed in
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  Speaker 1: eighteen eighty seven, has been republished with new notes by
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  Speaker 1: his son Jacques Crepe. This is an exceedingly valuable contribution
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  Speaker 1: to baudelais lore. A dispassionate life, however, has yet to
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  Speaker 1: be written. A noble task for some young poet who
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  Speaker 1: will disentangle the conflicting lies originated by Beaudelaire, that tragic comedian,
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  Speaker 1: from the truth, and thus save him from himself. The
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  Speaker 1: corpe volume is really but a series of notes. There
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  Speaker 1: are some letters addressed to the poet by the distinguished
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  Speaker 1: men of his day, supplementing the rather disappointing volume of
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  Speaker 1: letters eighteen forty one to eighteen sixty six published in
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  Speaker 1: nineteen o eight. There are also documents in the legal
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  Speaker 1: prosecution of Baudelaire, with memories of him by Charles Asselineau,
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  Speaker 1: Leon Claudell, Camille Lemonnier, and others. In November of eighteen fifty,
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  Speaker 1: Maxime du Camp and Gustave Flaubert found themselves at the
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  Speaker 1: French ambassador's Constantinople. The two friends had taken a trip
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  Speaker 1: in the Orient, which later bore fruit and salambo. General Aupique,
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  Speaker 1: the representative of the French government, cordially the young men received.
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  Speaker 1: They were presented to his wife, Madame Opique. She was
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  Speaker 1: the mother of Charles Baudelaire, and inquired rather anxiously of
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  Speaker 1: de Camp. My son has talent? Has he not unhappy?
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  Speaker 1: Because her second marriage. A brilliant one had set her
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  Speaker 1: son against her. The poor woman welcomed from such a
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  Speaker 1: source confirmation of her eccentric boy's gifts. De Camp tells
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  Speaker 1: the much discussed story of a quarrel between the youthful
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  Speaker 1: Charles and his stepfather, a quarrel that began at table.
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  Speaker 1: There were guests present. After some words, Charles bounded at
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  Speaker 1: the general's throat and sought to strangle him. He was
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  Speaker 1: promptly boxed on the ears and succumbed to a nervous spasm.
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  Speaker 1: A delightful anecdote, one that fills with joy psychiatrists in
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  Speaker 1: search of a theory of genius and degeneration. Charles was
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  Speaker 1: given some money and put on board a ship sailing
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  Speaker 1: to East India. He became a cattle dealer in the
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  Speaker 1: British army, and returned to France years afterward with a
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  Speaker 1: venus noir, to whom he addressed extravagant poems. All this,
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  Speaker 1: according to du Camp, Here is another tale, a comical one.
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  Speaker 1: Baudelaire visited du Camp in Paris, and his hair was
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  Speaker 1: violently green. Du Compe said nothing angered by this indifference.
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  Speaker 1: Baudelaire asked, you find nothing abnormal about me. No, was
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  Speaker 1: the answer. But my hair it is green. That is
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  Speaker 1: not singular, Monchier Baudelaire. Every one has hair more or
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  Speaker 1: less green. In Paris, disappointed in not creating a sensation,
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  Speaker 1: Baudelaire went to a cafe, gulped down two large bottles
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  Speaker 1: of burgundy, and asked the waiter to remove the water,
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  Speaker 1: as water was a disagreeable sight. Then he went away
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  Speaker 1: in a rage. It is a pity to doubt this
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  Speaker 1: green hair legend. Presently, a man of genius will not
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  Speaker 1: be able to enjoy an epileptic fit in peace, as
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  Speaker 1: does a banker or a beggar. We are told that
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  Speaker 1: Saint Paul, Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert Dostoevsky were epileptoids. Yet
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  Speaker 1: we do not encounter men of this rare kind among
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  Speaker 1: the inmates of asylums. Even Baudelaire had his sane moments.
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  Speaker 1: The joke of the green hare has been disposed of
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  Speaker 1: by Corpette. Baudelaire's hair thinning after an illness, he had
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  Speaker 1: his head shaved and painted with salve of a green hue,
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  Speaker 1: hoping thereby to escape baldness. At the time when he
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  Speaker 1: had embarked for Calcutta May eighteen forty one. He was
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  Speaker 1: not seventeen, but twenty years of age. Du Comp said
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  Speaker 1: he was seventeen when he attacked General Opique. The dinner
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  Speaker 1: could not have taken place at Lyons because the Opique
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  Speaker 1: family had left that city six years before the date
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  Speaker 1: given by du Comp. Charles was provided with five thousand
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  Speaker 1: francs for his expenses instead of twenty du Comp's version,
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  Speaker 1: and he never was a beef drover in the British Army.
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  Speaker 1: For a good reason, he never reached India. Instead, he
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  Speaker 1: disembarked at the Isle of Bourbon, and after a short stay,
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  Speaker 1: suffered from homesickness and returned to France after being absent
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  Speaker 1: about ten months. But like Flaubert, on his return home,
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  Speaker 1: Beaudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the East. Over
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  Speaker 1: there he had yearned for Paris. Jule Clarity recalls Baudelaire
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  Speaker 1: saying to him with a grimace, I love Wagner. But
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  Speaker 1: the music is that of a cat hung up by
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  Speaker 1: its tail outside of a window and trying to stick
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  Speaker 1: to the panes of glass with its claws. There is
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  Speaker 1: an odd grating on the glass which I find at
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  Speaker 1: the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious. Is it
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  Speaker 1: necessary to add that Beaudelaire, notorious in Paris for his
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  Speaker 1: love of cats, dedicating poems to cats, would never have
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  Speaker 1: perpetuated such revolting cruelty. Another misconception, a critical one, is
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  Speaker 1: the case of Poe and Baudelaire. The young Frenchman first
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  Speaker 1: became infatuated with Poe's writings in eighteen forty six or
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  Speaker 1: eighteen forty seven. He gave these two dates, though several
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  Speaker 1: stories of Poe had been translated into French as early
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  Speaker 1: as eighteen forty one or eighteen forty two. Laurent Joutaigne
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  Speaker 1: was the first, which we know as the Murderers in
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  Speaker 1: the Rue Morgue. Madame Muniers also adapted several post stories
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  Speaker 1: for the reviews. Beaudelaire's labors as a translator lasted over
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  Speaker 1: ten years. That he assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe
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  Speaker 1: is a commonplace of literary gossip, but that Poe had
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  Speaker 1: overwhelming influence in the form of his poetic genius is
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  Speaker 1: not the truth. Yet we find such an acute critic
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  Speaker 1: as the late Edmund Clarence Stedman, writing Poe's chief influence
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  Speaker 1: upon Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry, it is precisely
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  Speaker 1: the reverse. Poe's influence affected Beaudelaire's prose, notably in the
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  Speaker 1: disjointed confessions Montceur mies Aneux, which vaguely recall the American
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  Speaker 1: writer's marginalia. The bulk in the poetry in Les Fleur
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  Speaker 1: de Mars was written before Baudelaire had read Poe, though
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  Speaker 1: not published in book for him until eighteen fifty seven.
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  Speaker 1: But in eighteen fifty five some of the poems saw
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  Speaker 1: the light in the Rebaue de de Monde, while many
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  Speaker 1: of them had been put forth a decade or fifteen
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  Speaker 1: years before as fugitive verse in various magazines. Steedman was
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  Speaker 1: not the first to make this mistake. In Baird Tailor's
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  Speaker 1: The Echo Club, we find on page twenty four this criticism.
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  Speaker 1: There is a congenital twist about Poe. Baudelaire and Swineburn
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  Speaker 1: after him, had been trying to suppress him by increasing
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  Speaker 1: the dose, but his muse gives the natural or opithia
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  Speaker 1: inheriting her convulsions. While they eat all sorts of insane
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  Speaker 1: roots to produce theirs. This must have been written about
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  Speaker 1: eighteen seventy two, and after reading it, one would fancy
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  Speaker 1: that Poe and Baudelaire were rhapsodic wrigglers on the poetic tripod.
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  Speaker 1: Whereas their poetry is often reserved, even glacial, Baudelaire, like Poe,
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  Speaker 1: sometimes built his nests with the birds of night, and
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  Speaker 1: that was enough to condemn the work of both men
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  Speaker 1: by critics of the didactic school. Once, when Baudelaire heard
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  Speaker 1: that an American man of letters was in Paris, he
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  Speaker 1: secured an introduction and called on him, eagerly, inquiring after Poe,
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  Speaker 1: he learned that he was not considered a genteel person
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  Speaker 1: in America. Baudelaire withdrew muttering maledictions, enthusiastic poet, charming literary person.
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  Speaker 1: Yet the American whoever he was, represented public opinion at
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  Speaker 1: the time. Today, criticisms of Poe are vitiated by the
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  Speaker 1: desire to make him an angel. It is to be
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  Speaker 1: doubted whether without his barren environment and hard fortunes, we
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  Speaker 1: should have had Poe at all. He had to dig
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  Speaker 1: down deep into the pit of his personality to reach
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  Speaker 1: the central core of his music, But every ardent, young
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  Speaker 1: soul entering literature begins by a vindication of Poe's character.
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  Speaker 1: Poe was a man, and he is now a classic.
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  Speaker 1: He was a half Charlatan, as was Baudelaire. In both
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  Speaker 1: the sublime and the Sickly were never far asunder. The
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  Speaker 1: pair loved to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries.
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  Speaker 1: Both were implacable pessimists, Both were educated in affluence, and
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  Speaker 1: both had to face unprepared the hardships of life. The
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  Speaker 1: hastiest comparison of their poetic work will show that their
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  Speaker 1: only common ideal was the worship of an exotic beauty.
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  Speaker 1: Their artistic methods of expression were totally dissimilar. Beaudelaire, like Poe,
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  Speaker 1: had a harp like temperament which vibrated in the presence
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  Speaker 1: of strange subjects. Above all, he was obsessed by sex women.
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  Speaker 1: As Angel of Destruction is the keynote of his poems.
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  Speaker 1: Poe was almost sexless. His aerial creatures never footed the
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  Speaker 1: dusty highways of the world. His life lines Helen, Thy
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  Speaker 1: Beauty is to Me could never have been written by Baudelaire,
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  Speaker 1: while Poe would never have pardoned the vulgurant grandeur, the
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  Speaker 1: beethoven like harmonies, the danteesque horrors of that deep wide
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  Speaker 1: music of lost souls in femme domnai dascan des sent
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  Speaker 1: lamentable victim, or this which might serve as a text
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  Speaker 1: for one of John Martin's vast sinister meso tints jevu
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  Speaker 1: pou fois aufan d'nt tiatre banal comte flamey l'rquestre sonor
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  Speaker 1: ent fere a lume dan uncier inferno miracleus aurore jevu
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  Speaker 1: pouffart enfon de tiare banal unettra quill nete ques lumier
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  Speaker 1: or eggaze daras or renomeer setan memn ceur que jama
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  Speaker 1: ne visite le stasse eon theatre oulon attinde toujou tujeu
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  Speaker 1: en ves lettre jaos el des gaze. George Saintsbury thus
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  Speaker 1: sums up the differences between Poe and Baudelaire. Both authors
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  Speaker 1: Poe and de Quincey fell short of Baudelaire himself as
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  Speaker 1: regards depth and fullness of passion, but both have a
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  Speaker 1: superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperament and affection
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  Speaker 1: for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror. Poe
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  Speaker 1: is without passion, except a passion for the macabre, what
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  Speaker 1: Heisman calls the October of the sensations, whereas there is
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  Speaker 1: a gulf of despair and terror and humanity in Baudelaire,
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  Speaker 1: which shakes your nerves yet stimulates the imagination. However, profounder
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  Speaker 1: as a poet, he was no match for Poe in
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  Speaker 1: what might be termed intellectual prestidigitation. The mathematical Poe, the
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  Speaker 1: Poe of the ingenious detective tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe
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  Speaker 1: of the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the Poe
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  Speaker 1: the prophet and mystic. In these, the American was more
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  Speaker 1: versatile than his French translator. That Beaudelaire said evil, be
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  Speaker 1: thou is doubtless true. He proved all things and found
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  Speaker 1: them vanity. He is the poet of original sin, a
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  Speaker 1: worshiper of Satan for the sake of paradox. His litanies
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  Speaker 1: to Satan ring childish to us. In his heart he
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  Speaker 1: was a believer. His was an infinite reverse aspiration, and
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  Speaker 1: mixed up with his pose, was a disgust for vice,
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  Speaker 1: for life itself. He was the last of the Romanticists.
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  Speaker 1: Saint Bouve called him the Comchatka of Romanticism, its remotest
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  Speaker 1: hyperborean pique. Romanticism is dead today, as dead as naturalism.
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  Speaker 1: But Beaudelaire is alive and read. His glistening, phosphorescent trail
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  Speaker 1: is over French poetry, and he is the begetter of
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  Speaker 1: a school. Verlaine, Villiere de Lille, Adam Carducci, Arthur rimbaud Jule, LaForge,
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  Speaker 1: Gabrielle d Nunzio, Aubrey, Beardsley, Verherin, and many of the
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  Speaker 1: youthful crew he affected, Swineburne and in Heisman's who was
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  Speaker 1: not a poet, his his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto
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  Speaker 1: might be the obverse of Browning's lines, the devil is
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  Speaker 1: in heaven. All's wrong with the world. When Gotta said
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  Speaker 1: of Hugo and the Romanticists that they came from chateaubriand
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  Speaker 1: he should have substituted the name of Rousseau Romanticism. It
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  Speaker 1: is Rousseau, exclaims Pierre Lesre. But there is more of
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  Speaker 1: Byron and Petrus Borel, a forgotten, half mad poet in Baudelaire,
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  Speaker 1: though for a brief period in eighteen forty eight he
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  Speaker 1: became a rousseau reactionary, sported the working man's blouse, cut
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  Speaker 1: his hair, shouldered a musket, went to the barricades, wrote
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  Speaker 1: inflammatory editorials, calling the proletarian brother, oh Baudelaire, and, as
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  Speaker 1: the Goncour recorded in their diary, had the head of
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  Speaker 1: a maniac. How seriously we may take this swing of
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  Speaker 1: the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of
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  Speaker 1: the poets at the time of the revolution. Come, he said,
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  Speaker 1: let us go shoot General Opique. It was his stepfather
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  Speaker 1: that he thought of, not the eternal principles of liberty.
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  Speaker 1: This may be a false anecdote. Many such were foisted
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  Speaker 1: upon Baudelaire, for example his exclamations at cafes or in
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  Speaker 1: public places such as have you ever eaten a baby?
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  Speaker 1: I find it pleasing to the palate? Or the night
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  Speaker 1: I killed my father. Naturally, people stared, and Baudelaire was
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  Speaker 1: happy he had startled a bourgeois The cannibalistic idea he
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  Speaker 1: may have borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet. For this French
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  Speaker 1: poet knew English literature. Gautier compares the poems to a
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  Speaker 1: certain tale of Hawthorns, in which there is a garden
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  Speaker 1: of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his laboratory of evil,
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  Speaker 1: wearing masks and gloves. He never descended into the mud
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  Speaker 1: and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged
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  Speaker 1: his soul, yet remained withal as anatole France says a
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  Speaker 1: divine poet, How childish, yet how touching is his resolution.
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  Speaker 1: He wrote in his Diary of prayer's dynamic force, when
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  Speaker 1: he was penniless, in debt, threatened with imprisonment, sick, nauseated
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  Speaker 1: with sin, to make every morning my prayer to God
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  Speaker 1: the reservoir of all force and all justice, to my father,
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  Speaker 1: to Mariette, and to Poe as intercessors. Evidently Maurice Beret
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  Speaker 1: encountered here his theory of intercessors. Beaudelais loved the memory
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  Speaker 1: of his father as much as Stendall hated his own.
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  Speaker 1: He became reconciled with his mother after the death of
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  Speaker 1: General Opique in eighteen fifty seven. He felt in eighteen
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  Speaker 1: sixty two that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for
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  Speaker 1: he wrote, I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and
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  Speaker 1: terror to day imbecilities wing fanned me as it passed,
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  Speaker 1: the sense of the vertiginous gulf was abiding with him.
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  Speaker 1: Read his poem Pascal le Veis sen Gaufroy in preferring
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  Speaker 1: the Baudelais translations of Poe to the original, and they
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  Speaker 1: give the impression of being original works. Stedman agreed with
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  Speaker 1: Assilinau that the French is more concise than the English.
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  Speaker 1: The prose of Poe and be Baudelaire is clear, sober, rhythmic.
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  Speaker 1: Baudelaire's is more lapidary, finer in contour, richer, colored or supple,
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  Speaker 1: Though without the honey and tiger's blood of Barbeer Doravilli,
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  Speaker 1: Beaudelaire's soul was patiently built up as a fabulous bird
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  Speaker 1: might build its nest. Bits of straw, the sobbing of women, clay,
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  Speaker 1: cascades of black stars, rags, leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams,
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  Speaker 1: a spray of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a gleam
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  Speaker 1: of blue sky, arabesques of incense, and verdigree, despairing hearts
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  Speaker 1: and music, and the abomination of desolation for its ground tones.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: But this soul nest is also a cemetery of the
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: seven sorrows. He loves the clouds les noange labass. It
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: was labass with him, even in the tortures of his
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: wretched love. Life, corruption, and death were ever floating in
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who saw everywhere the
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: hidden skeleton. Felesion Happe has best interpreted Baudelaire, the etcher
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin too is a Bodelarian.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: If there could be such an anomaly as a native
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: wood note wildly evil, it would be the lyric and
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: a stringent voice of this poet. His sensibility was both
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Catholic and morbid, though he could be frigid in the
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a man
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: for whom the invisible word existed. If Gautier was pagan,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from medieval days. The spirit rules,
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: and as Paul Borgay said, he saw God a Manichean
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: in his worship of evil. He nevertheless abased his soul.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: O Lord, God, give me the force and courage to
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: contemplate my heart in my body without disgust. He prays. But,
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: as some one remarked to Rouchefou, called where you end,
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: Christianity begins. Baudelais built his ivory tower on the borders
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: of a poetic marima, which every miasma of the spirit pervaded,
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: every marti light and glow worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: painted in his altry music the profundities of abysms, the
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: vastness of space. He painted too, the great nocturnal silences
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: of the soul paesum sumum tenant. He never reached peace
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: on the heights. Let us admit that souls of his
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: kind are encased in sick frames. Their steel is too
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: shrewd for the scabbard. Yet the enigma for us is
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: none the less unfathomable existence for such natures as a
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: sort of muffled delirium. To affiliate him with Poe, de Quincey, Hoffmann,
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: James Thompson, Coleridge, and the rest of the Somber choir
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: does not explain him. He is perhaps near dawn and
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: villon than any of the others strains of the metaphysical
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: and sinister and super subtle are to be discovered in him.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bylocation, are
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: only too easy to diagnose. But the remedy, hypocrite, lecteur,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: mont simble bol monfare, the subtlety force grandeur of his
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: poetic production to be considered together with its disquieting, nervous,
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: vibrating qualities. It is not surprising that Victor Hugo wrote,
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: to the poet, you invest the heaven of art with
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: We know not what deadly rays you create A new shudder.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Hugo might have said that he turned art into an inferno.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: Beaudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry in his Heaven
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: of fire glass in ebony. He is the blazing lucifer,
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: a glorious devil, large in heart and brain, that did
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: love beauty only once, saying Tennyson, though not of the
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: Frenchman two. As long ago as eighteen sixty nine, and
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: in our barbarous gas lit country, as Beaudelaire named the
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which this
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: poet was described as unique and as interesting as Hamlet.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: He is that rare and unknown, being a genuine poet,
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: a poet in the midst of things that have disordered
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: his spirit, a poet excessively developed in his taste for
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: and by beauty, very responsive to the ideal, very greedy
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: of sensation. A better description of Beaudelaire does not exist.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: The Hamlet motive particularly, is one that sounded throughout the
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: disordered symphony of the poet's life. He was later revealed
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: also reviled to American readers by Henry James, who completely
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: missed his significance. This was in eighteen seventy eight, when
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists. Previous
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: to that, there had been some desultory discussion, a few
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: essays in the magazines, and in eighteen seventy five a
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: sympathetic paper by Professor James Albert Harrison of the University
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: of Virginia. He denounced the Frenchman for his reprehensible taste,
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: though he did not mention his beautiful verse nor his originality.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: In the matter of criticism, Beaudelaire, in his eyes, was
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: Saint Bouve, introduced Poe as a great man to the
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: French Nation. See Baudelaire's letter to Saint Bouve in the
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: newly published Letters eighteen forty one eighteen sixty six. Perhaps
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: mister Dick Minim and his projected academy of criticism might
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: make clear these devious problems. The Etude cretique of Edmond
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: Cherer were collected in eighteen sixty three. In them we
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: find this unhappy, uncritical judgment Baudelaire, Louis non reen nili
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: cur ni leespui, nei ladie ni le mont ni, la raison,
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: ni la fantasie, nils la verev nei la meme, la facteur,
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: saint eunique titre se da vois contribu e crier le'estdq
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: de la de boche. It is not our intention to
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: dilate upon the injustice of this criticism. It is Baudelaire,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: the critic of esthetics, in whom we are interested. Yet
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: I cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Cheri had been transformed into affirmations, only justice would have
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: been accorded Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet the
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: most original of his century, but also a critic of
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: the first rank one who welcomed Richard Wagner when Paris
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: hooted him, and his fellow composer Hector Berlious played with
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: the role of the envious one who fought for Edouard Manet,
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: Lcent de Lille, Gustave Lebert, Eugene Delacroix, fought with pen
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: for the modern etchers illustrators Marion Dommier, felicierro Gavanni, and
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: Constantine d He literally identified himself with de Quincey and Poe,
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: translating them so wonderfully well that some unpatriotic persons like
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: the French better than the originals. So much was Baudelaire
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: that the translator would meet the same fate as the
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: American poet. A singular vigorous spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: with its icy ecstasies, profound and harmonious, whose criticism is
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: penetrated by a Catholic quality, who anticipated modern critics in
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: his abhorrence of schools and environments, preferring to isolate the
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: man and uniquely study him. He would have subscribed to
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: Swineburne's generous pronouncement. I have never been able to see
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: what should attract man to the profession of criticism, but
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: the noble pleasure of praising. The Frenchman has said that
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: it would be impossible for a critic to become poet,
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: and it is impossible for a poet not to contain
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: a critic. Teophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: of Les Ferre de mal is not only the most
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire as man and genius, but it
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: is also the high water mark of Gautier's gifts as
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: a critical essayist. We learned therein how the young Charles,
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: an incorrigible Dandie, came to visit Hotel Pimodan about eighteen
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: forty four. In this Hotel Pimadan, a dilettante Ferdinand Boissard
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: held high revel. His fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: the painters, poets, sculptors, romancers of the day, that is,
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: carefully selected ones such as Litz, George sand Merrimae, and
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: others whose verve or genius gave them the privilege of
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: saying open sesame to this cave of forty supermen. Balzac
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: had his pos de Chagrine pictured the same sort of
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: scenes which were supposed to occur weekly at the Pimoudan.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: Gauthier eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred artistic souls,
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: where the beautiful Jewish Merinx, who had posed for Ari
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: Scheffer's Mignon and for Paul de la Roche La Glois,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: met the superb Madame Sabatier, the only woman that Beaudelais loved,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: and the original of that extraordinary group of Clesingu's, the
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: sculptor and son in law of George sand La femme
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Au serpent A salambo A la Maude in Marble Hashish
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: was eaten, so Gautier writes, by Bossard and Baudelaire. As
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: for the creator of Mademoiselle Morpin, he was too robust
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: for such nonsense. He had to work for his living
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: at journalism, and he died in harness an irreproachable father,
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: while the unhappy Baudelaire, the inheritor of an intense, unstable temperament,
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: soon devoured his patrimony of seventy five thousand francs, and
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: for the remaining years of his life was between the
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: devil of his dusky Genie duval, and the deep sea
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: of hopeless debt. It was at these Pimaudan gatherings, which
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: were no doubt much less wicked than the participants would
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: have us believe, that Beaudelais encountered Emil de Roy, a
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: painter of skill, who made his portrait and encouraged the
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We have
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: seen an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: talent of about the same order as Thackeras, with a
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: superadded note of the horrific, that favorite epithet of the
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: early poe critics. Baudelaire admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: praised the illustrations of Gui, he was delighted. Doroy taught
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: his pupil the commonplaces of a painter's technique, also how
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: to compose a palette, a rather meaningless phrase nowadays. At least,
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: he did not write of the arts without some technical experience.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and when the Salons
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: of Beaudelaire appeared in eighteen forty five, forty six, fifty
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: five and fifty nine, the praise and blame they evoked
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: were testimonies to the training and knowledge of their author.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: A new spirit had been born. The names of Deiderot
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor spouting the jargon
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: of the usual critic. The salons of Baudelaire are the
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: production of a humanist. Some would put them above Dedero's.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: Mister Sainsbury, after Swinburne, the warmest advocate of Baudelais among
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: the English, thinks that the French poet, in his picture
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: criticism observed too little and imagine too much. In other words,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: he adds, to read a criticism of Baudelaire's without the
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: title of fixed is by no means a sure method
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: of recognizing the picture afterward. Now, word painting was the
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: very thing that Beaudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier,
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: with the plastic style, who attempted well nighn possible feat
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: of competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: canvas and marble. And if he, with his verbal imagination,
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: did not entirely succeed, how could a less adept manipulator
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: of the vocabulary. We do not agree with mister Sainsbury,
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: no one can imagine too much when the imagination is
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: that of a poet. Beaudelaire divined the work of the
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: artist and set it down scrupulously in a prose of
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: exceeding rectitude. He did not paint pictures and prose. He
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: did not divocate. He did not overburden his pages with
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: technical terms, but the spirit of his subject he did
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: disengage in a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: schools were a cross for him to bear, and he
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: wore his prejudices lightly. Like a true critic. He judged
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: more by form than theme. There are no types, there
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: is only life, he asserted, And long before Jule LaForge,
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: he was ever art for art, Yet having breath of comprehension,
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: in a hindlike capacity for seeing both sides of his
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: own nature, with its idiosyncrasies, he could write the puerile
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: utopia of the school of art for art, in excluding
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: morality and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. All literature
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: which refuses to advance for eternally between science and philosophy
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: is a homicidal and suicidal literature. Beaudelaire, then, was no
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: less sound, a critic of the plastic arts than of music.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: In literature, like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: of democracy, of the democratization of the arts, of the
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: sentimental fuss and fuddle, of a pseudo humanitarianism. During the
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: eighteen forty eight agitation, the former Dandie of eighteen forty
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those things
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm bells during
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: the Dresden Uprising. Chopin wrote for the Pianoforte a revolutionary etude.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: Brave lads, poets and musicians fight their battles best in
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: the region of the ideal. Beaudelaire's little attack of the
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: equality measles soon vanished. He lectured his brother poets and
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: artists on the folly and injustice of abusing or despising
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: the bourgeois. Being a man of paradox, he dedicated a
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: volume of his salons to the bourgeois. But he would
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: not have contradicted mister George Moore for declaring that in
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: art the democrat is always reactionary. In eighteen thirty the
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: democrats were against Victor Hugo and Delacroix and Le Flor
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: de MARDs, that book of Opal's blood and evil swamp
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: flowers will never be savored by the mob. In his
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: Souvenir de Geness Champs, Fleury speaks of the promenades in
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: the louver he enjoys the company with Beaudelaire. Bronzino was
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: one of the poet's preferences. He was also attracted by Elgreco,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: not an unusual admiration considering the somber extravagance of his
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: own genius. Of Goya, he has written in exalted phrases.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: Velasquez was his touch stone, Being of a perverse nature,
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: his dareof ruined by abuse of drink and drugs. The
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: landscapes of his imagination were more beautiful than nature herself.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: The country itself, he declared, was odious, like Whistler, whom
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: he often met. See the homage as de Lacroix by
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: Fontine Lettore, with its portraits of Whistler, Beaudelaire, Manet Bracamont,
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: the Etcher, Legroau, Delacroix, Cordier, Dornti, the Critic, and de Balleroi.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: He could not help showing his aversion to foolish sunsets.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: In a word, Beaudelaire, into whose brain had entered too
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: much moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of poetry, criticism,
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: and fiction. His Samuel Kramer in La fanfarlo is the
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: literary progenitor of Jean duc Descinte in Heismann's Reborn. Heismann
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: at first modeled himself upon Beaudelaire. His Le drogois oh
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: ePIE is a continuation of petit poems and pause, and
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: to Baudelaire's account must be laid much artificial morbid writing.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: Despite his pursuit of perfection and form, his influence has
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: been too often baneful to Impressionable artists and Embryo. A
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: lover of Gallic Byronism and high priest of the Satanic school,
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: there was no extravagance, absurd or terrible that he did
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: not commit, from etching a four part fugue on ice
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: to skating hymns in honor of Lucifer. In his criticism alone,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: was he the sane, logical Frenchman, And while he did
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: not live to see the success of the Impressionist group,
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: he surely would have acclaimed their theory and practice. Was
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: he not an impressionist himself, as Richard Wagner was his
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: God and music. So Delacroix quite overflowed his esthetic consciousness.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: Read volume two of his collected works, ariasate Estetique, which
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: contains his silons. Also his essay de las sence do
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: ye worthy to be placed side by side with George
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: Meredith's essay on Comedy. Caricaturists French and Foreign, are considered
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: in two chapters at the close of the volume. Beaudelaire
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: was as conscientious as Gautier. He trotted around miles of
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: mediocre canvas, saying an encouraging word to the less talented,
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: boiling over with holy indignation, or indulging in glacial irony
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: before the rash usurpers occupying the seats of the mighty
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: and pouncing on new genius with promptitude. Upon Delacroix, he
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: lavished the largeness of his admiration. He smiled at the
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: platitudes of Horace Vernet, and only shook his head over
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: William Housilier, now so little known. He praised the Verrier Chassiroo,
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: who waited years before he came into his own His
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: preferred landscapists were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: of Arie Scheffer in the Apes of Sentiment, while his
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: discussions of Hogarth, Crookshenk, Pinelli and Bregel proclaims his versatility
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: of vision. In his essay Le Pintre de le Ville
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: Moden he was the first among critics to recognize the
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: peculiar quality called modernity, that naked vibration which informs the
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: novels of Goncrieur, Flaubert's Lege Conchion Sentimental and the pictures
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: of Manet, Monet, de Gas and Raffaelli with their avocations
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: of a new nervous Paris. It is in his volume three,
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: entitled l'st Romantique, that so many things dear to the
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: new century were then subjects of furious quarrels. This book
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: contains much just and brilliant writing. It was easy for
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: Nietzsche to praise Wagner in Germany in eighteen seventy six,
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: but dangerous at Paris in eighteen sixty one to declare
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: war on Wagner's adverse critics. This Beaudelaire did the relations
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: of Baudelaire and Edouard Manet were exceedingly cordial. In a
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: letter to teofil Dorre the Art Critic Letters, page three
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: sixty one, we find when Baudelaire defending his friend from
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: the accusation that his pictures were pastiches of Goya, he wrote,
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: Manette has never seen Goya, never el Greco. He was
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: never in Portalais gallery, which may have been true at
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: the time eighteen sixty four. Nevertheless, Manette had visited Madrid
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: and spent much time studying Belasquez and abusing Spanish cookery.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: Consider too Goya's Balcony with girls and Manet's famous balcony.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: Raging at the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: same epistle, they accuse even me of imitating Edgar Pout.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: Do you know why I so patiently translated Poe because
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: he resembled me. The poet talicized these words with stupefaction. Therefore,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: he admired the mysterious coincidences of Manet's work with that
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: of Goya and el Greco. He took Manet seriously, He
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: wrote to him in a paternal and severe tone, recall
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: his reproof when urging the painter to exhibit his work.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: You complain about attacks, but are you the first to
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: endure them? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner?
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: They were not killed by derision, And in order not
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: to make you too proud, I must tell you that
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: they are models, each in his way and in a
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: very rich world, while you are only the first in
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: the decrepitude of your art Letters, page four thirty six.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words if he were able
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: to revisit the glimpses of the Champs Elysee at the
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Autumn Salon? What would you think of Seizon Eaulan Radon?
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: He would understand, for he is the transposer of Bodelianism
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: to terms of design and color, and perhaps the poet
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: whose verse is saturated with tropical hues. He, when young
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: sailed in southern seas, might appreciate the monstrous debauch of
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: form and color in the Tahitian canvasses of Paul Gogan.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his verse.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: He is par excellence, the poet of esthetics to Doumier.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: He inscribed a poem and to the sculptor Ernest Christov
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: to Delacroix, sirtasen president, to Manet, to guill ref Barizia,
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: to an unknown master, unmater and wattau a watau a
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: rebonds is seen in u voyages citare, while in Le Faire,
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: this poet of the ideal spleen, music and perfume chows
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Pouget, Goya, Delacroix, Delacroix,
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: j'ache des sans hunte des mauve enschicht. And what is
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: more exquisite than his quatrain to Lola de Valens, a
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: poetic inscription for the picture of Edouard Manet, with its
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: last line as vaporous as subtle as Verlaine de charmes
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: in nat indu dun bijou rose et noirs. Heine called
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: himself the last of the Romantics, the first of the Moderns,
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: and the last of the Romantics was the many sided
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: Charles Baudelaire three. He was born at Paris April ninth,
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: eighteen twenty one, Flaubert's birth year and not April twenty first.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: As Gautier has it, his father was Joseph Francis Beaudlaire
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: or Baudelaire, who occupied a government position. A cultivated art lover,
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: his taste was apparent in the home he made for
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: his second wife, Caroline Auschimbeau du Fay, an orphan and
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: the daughter of a military officer. There was a considerable
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: difference in the years of this pair. The mother was
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: twenty seven, the father sixty two at the birth of
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: their only child by his first marriage. The elder Baudelaire
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: had one son, Claude, who, like his half brother Charles,
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: died of paralysis. Though a steady man of business, that
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: great modern neurosis called commerce has its mental wrecks too,
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: and no one pays attention. But when a poet falls
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: other soul hunters seeking victims. After the death of Beaudelaire's father,
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: the widow, within a year married the handsome, ambitious Opique,
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: then Chef Betellon, lieutenant colonel decorated with the Legion of
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Honor and later general an ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople In London.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but unlike most children
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: of genius, he was a score dollar and won brilliant
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: honors at school. His stepfather was proud of him. From
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: the Royal College of Leon, Charles went to the Lyase
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: Louis le Grand, Paris, but was expelled in eighteen thirty
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: nine on various discreditable charges. Troubles soon began at home.
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: He was irascible, vain, precocious, and given to dissipation. He
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: quarreled with general Opique and disdained his mother, but she
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: was to blame. She had confessed she had quite forgotten
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: the boy in the flush of her second love. He
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: could not forget or forgive what he called her infidelity
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: to the memory of his father Hamlet Like. He was inconsolable.
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: The good Bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: that Charles was a little crazy. Second marriages usually bring
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: woe in their train. When a mother has such a son,
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: she doesn't remarry, said the young poet. Charles signed himself
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: Beaudelaire du Fay or sometimes de Fay. He wrote in
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: his journal, My ancestors, idiots or maniacs, all victims of
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: terrible passions, which was one of his exaggerations. His grandfather
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: on the paternal side was a Champagnois peasant. His mother's
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: family presumably Norman, but not much is known of her forebears.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: Charles believed himself lost from the time his half brother
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: was stricken. He also believed that his instability of temperament,
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: and he studied his case as would a surgeon, was
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: the result of his parents disparity. In years after his
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: return from the East, where he did not learn English,
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: as has been said, his mother taught him as a
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: boy to converse in and write the language. He came
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: into his little inheritance about fifteen thousand dollars. Two years later.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: He was so heavily in debt that his family asked
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: been swindled, being young and green. How had he squandered
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: his money, not exactly on opera glasses like Gerard de Nerval,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: but on clothes, pictures, furniture books. The remnant was set
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: aside to pay his debts. Charles would be both poet
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: and dandy. He dressed expensively but soberly in the English fashion,
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: his linen dazzling, the prevailing hue of his habiliments. Black
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: In height, he was medium, his eyes brown, searching, luminous,
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: the eye of a nyctelops, eyes like ravens, nostrils palpitating,
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: cleft chin mouth expressive, sensual, jaw, strong and square. His
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: hair was black, curly, glossy, his forehead high, square and white.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: In the Deroy portrait, he wears a beard. He is
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: there what catul Mindez nicknamed him, his excellence, Monseigneur brummel.
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: Later he was the elegiac satan, the author of limitation
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: de esse le diabla, or the Beaudelaire of George Moore,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: the clean shaven face of the mock priest, the slow,
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: cold eyes, and the sharp, cunning sneer of the cynical libertine,
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: who will be tempted that he may better know the
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: worthlessness of temptation. In the heyday of his blood, he
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: was perverse and deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: the byronic notion that ennui could best be cured by dissipation.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: In sin Beaudelaire found the saddest of all consolations. Mendez
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: laughs at the legend of Beaudelaire's violence, of his being
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: given to explosive phrases. Despite Gautier's stories about the Hotel
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: Pimadin and its club of Hashish eaters, Monsieur Mindez denies
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: that Beaudelaire was a victim of the hemp. What the
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits of
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: literary workers is this prime fact. Men who work hard
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: writing verse, and there is no mental toil comparable to it,
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: cannot drink or indulge in opium without inevitable collapse. The
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: old fashioned ideas of inspiration, spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: bolt from heaven are delusions still hugged by the world.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: To be told that Chopin filed at his music for years,
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: that Beethoven and his smithy forged his thunderbolts by the
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: sweat of his brow, That Manet toiled like a laborer
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: on the dock, That Beaudelaire was a mechanic in his
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: devotion to poetic work, that Gautier was a hard working journalist,
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: or disillusions for the sentimental minerva springing full fledge from
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: Jupiter's skull to the desk of the poet is a
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: pretty fancy but Balzac and Flaubert did not encourage this fancy.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: Work literally killed Poe, as it literally killed Jiule de Concour.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: Flaubert and d'audet. Montpassant went insane because he would work
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: and he would play the same day. Beaudelaire worked and worried.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was flawed.
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: Saint Beauve told him that he had worn out his
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: nerves from the start. He was Detraguay, but that his
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: entire life was one huge debauch, as a nightmare of
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: the moral police in some red cotton nightcap country. His
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: period of mental production was not brief nor barren. He
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: was a student. Du Comte's charged that he was in
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: ignorant man's disproved by the variety and quality of his
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: published work. His range of sympathies was large. His mistake,
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write so
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: well about the Seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: real name, which is protracted labor. Beaudelaire was one of
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: the elect an aristocrat who dealt with the quintessence of art.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: His delicate air of a bishop, his exquisite manners. His
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: modulated voice aroused unusual interest and admiration. He was a
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: humanist of distinction. He has left a hymn to Saint
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: Francis in the Latin of the Decadence. Baudelaire, like Chopin,
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: made more poignant the phrase raised to a higher intensity
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: the expressiveness of art. Women played a commanding role in
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: his life. They always do with any poet worthy of
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: the name, though few have been so. Frank In acknowledging
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: this as Beaudelaire. Yet he was in love more with
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: woman than the individual. The legend of the beautiful creature
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: he brought from the East resolves itself into the dismal
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: affair with Jean Duvals. He met her in Paris after
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: he had been in the East. She sang at a
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: cafe concert in Paris. She was more brown than black.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: She was not handsome, not intelligent, not good. Yet he
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: idealized her, for she was the source of half his inspiration.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: To her were addressed those marvelous avocations of the orient
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: of perfume tresses, delicious dawns on strange faraway seas, and
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: superb byzant domes that devils built Beaudelaire is the poet
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: of perfumes. He is also the patron saint of anyui.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: No one is so chanted the praise of odors. His
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: soul swims on perfume, as do other souls on music.
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: He is sung. As he grew older, he seemed to
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: haunt for more acrid odors. He often presents an elaborately
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: chaste vase, the carving of which transports us, but from
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: which the head is quickly averted. Jean, whom he never loved,
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: no matter what may be said, was a sorceress. But
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: she was impossible. She robbed, betrayed him. He left her
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: a dozen times, only to return. He was a capital
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: draftsman with a strong nervous line, and made many pen
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: and ink drawings of her. They are not prepossessing. In
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: her rapid decline, she was not allowed to want. Madame
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: Apique paid her expenses in the Hospit assorted history. She
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: was a veritable flower of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry,
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: like music, would be colorless, scentseless if it sounded no dissonances.
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: Fancy art reduced to the buttific and banal chord of
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: C major. He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier,
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: a reigning beauty at whose Salon Artistic Paris assembled. She
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: had been christened by Gautier Madame la Presidente, and her
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: sumptuous beauty was portrayed by Ricard in his La Femme
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: au chienne. She returned Baudelaire's love. They soon parted again,
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: a riddle which the published letters hardly solve. One letter, however,
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: does show that Beaudelaire had tried to be faithful and failed.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: He could not extort from his exhausted soul the sentiment,
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: but he put its music on paper. His most seductive
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: lyrics were addressed to Madame Sabatier A la trou cher
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: a la troy belle, a hymn saturated with love, music, spleen, perfumes, color, sound, perfumes.
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: Called to be each other is deep, too deep, perfumes
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: like the flesh of children, softest haut boys, green as
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: the meadows, criminals, outcasts, the charm of childhood, the horrors
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: of love, pride and rebellion, Eastern landscapes, cats, soothing and faults, cats,
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: the true companions of lonely poets, Haunted clocks, shivering dusks,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: and gloomier dawns Paris. In a hundred phases, these and
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: many other themes, this strange, souled poet, this Dante Pacer
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: of the shore of Paris, has celebrated and finely wrought
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: verse and profound phrases in a single line. He contrives
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: atmosphere the very shape of his sentence, the ring of
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: the syllables aroused the deepest emotion. A master of harmonic
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in making
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: their music more fluid, more lyrical, more vaporous. Many young
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: French poets pass through their bodalarian green sickness. But he
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: alone knows the secrets of molding those metallic free sonnets,
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: which have the resistance of bronze, one of the despairing
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: music that flames from the mouths of lost souls, trembling
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: on the wharves of hell. He is the supreme master
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: of irony and troubled voluptuousness. Baudelaire is a masculine poet.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: He carved, rather than saying, the plastic arts, spoke to
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: his soul. A lover and maker of images like Poe,
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: his emotions transformed themselves into ideas. BOORGEI classified him as mystic, libertine,
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul,
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: to use the phrase of Pere Lacaudaer. Curiously enough, he
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: actually contemplated in eighteen sixty one becoming a candidate for
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: Lacaudaer's vacant seat in the French Academy. Saint Beauve dissuaded
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: him from this folly. Recall Baudelaire's prayer, thou, O, Lord,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: my God, grant me the grace to produce some fine
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: lines which will prove to myself that I am not
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: the last of men, that I am not inferior to
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: those I contemn individualists, egoist, anarchist. His only thoughts were letters.
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: Jules LaForge thus described Baudelaire cat Hindu Yankee, episcopal alchemist, Yes,
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes he created. He
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: was of Gothic imagination and could have said with rolla
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: jesuis venu trotard dn umande tropees vill. He had an
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: unassuaged thirst for the absolute. The human soul was his stage.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: He its interpreting orchestra. In eighteen fifty seven, the Flowers
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: of Evil was published by Puleais Malassis, who afterward went
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: into bankruptcy. A warning to publishers with a taste for
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: fine literature. The titles contemplated were Limbs or Lesbielles. Ippolyte
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: Babu suggested the one we know. These poems were suppressed
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: on account of six and poet and publishers summoned. As
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: the municipal government had made a particular ass of itself
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: in the prosecution of Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovarie,
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: the Beaudelaire matter was disposed of in haste. He was
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: condemned to a fine of three hundred francs bunks, a
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: fine which was never paid. As the objectionable poems were removed.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: They were printed in the Belgian edition and may be
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: read in the new volume Uvre Poustiume. Beaudelaire was infuriated
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: over the judgment, for he knew that his book was
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: from the trial with flying colors. Therefore, to be classed
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: as one who wrote objectionable literature was a shock. Flaubert
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: had the impress back of him. He complained which was
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: true the Empress Eugenie, also the Princess Matilde. But he
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: worked as ever and put forth those polished entaglios called
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: poems and prose, for the form of which he had
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: taken a hint from Alois Bertrand's Gaspard de la nouill.
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: He filled his form with a new content, not alone pictures,
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: but moods are to be found in those miniatures. Pity
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject and lowly,
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who had
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: discerned in Beaudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: of his poems, he described a landscape of metal, of
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: marble and water, a babble of staircases and arcades, a
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: palace of infinity surrounded by the silence of eternity. This
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: depressing yet magical dream was utilized by Heismann in his
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: ah Reboor. But in the tiny landscapes of the prose
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: poems there is nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: deliberate attitude of artificialities dropped. He is human, not that
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: the deep fundamental note of humanity is ever absent in
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: his poems. The eternal diapason is there even when least overheard.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: Baudelaire is more human than Poe. His range of sympathy
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: is wider. In this he transcends him as a poet,
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: though his subject matter often issues from the very dregs
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: of life, brother to pitiable wanderers. There are nevertheless no
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: traces of Kant, no Russian pity ala Dostoevsky, no humanitarian
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: or socialistic rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: He hated the sentimental sapping of altruism. His prose poem Crowds,
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: with its bath of multitude, may have been suggested by Poe,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: but in Charles Lamb we find the idea, are there
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: no solitudes out of caves in the desert? Or cannot
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone?
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhauser
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: as significant an essay in Nietzsches Richard Wagner and Beirut,
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: and Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: Wagner's career. Wagner sent a brief, hearty letter of thanks
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: to the critic, and later made his acquaintance to Wagner.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: Baudelaire introduced a young Wagnerian, Villiers de Lille Adams. This
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: Wagner letter is included in the volume of Crepet, but
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: there are no letters published from Baudelaire to Franz Liszt,
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: though they were friends in Weimar. I saw at the
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: Litzt Museum several from Baudelaire which should have been included
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: in the letters. The poet understood Litzt and his reforms
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: as he understood Wagner. The German composer admired the French
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: poet and his coundry. In the sultry second act of
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: Parceval had a Boudellerian hugh, especially in the Temptations. The
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: end was at hand, Beaudelaire had been steadily, rather unsteadily,
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: going downhill, a desperate figure, a dandy and shabby attire.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: He went out only after dark. He haunted the exterior
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: boulevards associated with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst,
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: ate without hunger, as he had said, a woeful decadence
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: for this aristocrat of life and letters most sorrowful of sinners,
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: of morose delectation, scourged his nerves and extorted the darkest
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: music from his lear He fled to Brussels. There to
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. He gave a few lectures in
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: metrope le Monnier, drank to forget and forgot to work,
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: abused Brussels. Belgium its people, a country, he cried, where
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: the trees are black, the flowers without odor, and where
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: there is no conversation. He the brilliant Conzieu, the chief
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: blagger of a circle in which young James mc neil
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: Whistler was reduced to the role of a listener. This
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: most spiritual among artists found himself a failure in the
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind ourselves
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: that Beaudelais was the creator of many of the paradoxes
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: attributed not only to Whistler, but to an entire school,
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: if one may employ such a phrase. The frozen imperturbability
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: of the poet, his cutting enunciation, his power of blasphemy,
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: his hatred of nature, his love of the artificial, have
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: been copied by the esthetic blades of our day. He
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: it was who first taunted nature with being an imitator
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: of art, with always being the same, Oh, the imitative sunsets,
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: Oh the quotidian eating and drinking. And as pessimist too,
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: he led the mode Baudelaire, like Flaubert, grasped the murky
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: torch of pessimism once held by chateau Burian, Benjamin Constant
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: and Sinecur. Doubtless, all this stemmed from Byronism, and now
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: it is as stale as Byronism. His health failed, and
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: he lacked money enough to pay for doctor's prescriptions, even
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: owed for the room in his hotel at Nemueure, where
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: he was visiting his father in law of Felicien Rope.
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: March eighteen sixty six, he suffered from an attack of paralysis.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: He was removed to Brussels. His mother, who lived at
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: Oneaux in mourning for her husband, came to his aid.
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: set in. He could only ejaculate a mild oath, and
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: when he caught sight of himself in the mirror, he
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: would bow pleasantly, as if to a stranger. His friends rallied,
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: and they were among the most distinguished people in Paris.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: The elite of souls. Ladies visited him one or two,
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: playing Wagner on the piano, which must have added a
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: fresh nuance to death, and they brought him flowers. He
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: expressed his love for flowers and music to the last.
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: He could not bear the sight of his mother. She
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: revived in him some painful memories, but that past, and
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: he clamored for her when she was absent. If any
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: one mentioned the names of Wagner or Manet, he smiled
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: and with a fixed stare as if peering through some
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: invisible window opening upon eternity. He died August thirty first,
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: eighteen sixty seven, age forty six. Barbais de Revilli, himself
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: a Satanist and dandy, Oh those comical old attitudes of literature,
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: had prophesied that the author of Fleur de Mars would
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: foot of the cross. Later he said the same of Heisman.
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: Beaudelaire had the alternative course forced upon him by fate.
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: After he had attempted spiritual suicide for how many years?
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: He once tried actual suicide, but the slight cut in
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: his throat looked so ugly to him that he went
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: no farther. His soul had been a battlefield for the
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: powers of good and evil, that at the end he
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: brought the wreck of both soul and body to his
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: God should not be a subject for comment. He was
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: an extraordinary poet with a bad conscience, who lived miserably
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: and was buried with honors. Then it was that his
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: worth was discovered funeral orations over a genius or a
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: species of public staircase wit. His reputation waxes with the years.
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: He is an exotic gem in the crown of French
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: poetry of him Swineburne is chanted ave atke Valdes. Shall
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: I strew on thee rose or rule or laurel brother
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: on this? That was the veil of the end of
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: section zero, Section one of Little Poems and Prose by
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: Charles Baudelaire, the LibriVox recordings in the public domain. The
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: stranger tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best?
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother. I
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother your friends.
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: Then you use a word that until now has had
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: no meaning for me. Your country. I am ignorant of
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: the latitude in which it is situated. Then beauty her
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: I would love willingly God and immortal gold. I hate
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: it as you hate your God. What, then, extraordinary stranger,
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: do you love. I love the clouds, the clouds that
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: pass yonder, the marvelous clouds. End of Section one, Section
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: two of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: librivance recording is in the public domain. Every man his chimera.
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: Beneath a broad gray sky, upon a vast and dusty plain,
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: devoid of grass, and where not even a nettle or
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: a thistle was to be seen. I met several men
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: who walked bowed down to the ground. Each one carried
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: upon his back an enormous chimera, as heavy as a
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: sack of flower or coal, where as the equipment of
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: a Roman foots soldier. But the monstrous beast was not
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: a dead weight. Rather, she enveloped and oppressed the men
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: with her powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed with her
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: fabulous head reposed upon the brow of the man, like
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: one of those horrible casks by which ancient warriors hoped
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: to add to the terrors of the enemy. I questioned
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: one of the men, asking him why they went so.
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: He replied that he knew nothing, neither he nor the others,
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: but that evidently they went somewhere, since they were urged
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: on by an unconquerable desire to walk very curiously. None
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: of the wayfarers seemed to be irritated by the ferocious
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: beast hanging at his neck and cleaving to his back.
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: One had said that he considered it as a part
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: of himself. These grave and weary faces bore witness to
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: no despair beneath the splenetic cupola of the heavens, their
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: feet trudging through the dust of an earth as desolate
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: as the sky. They journeyed onwards with the resigned faces
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: of men condemned to hope forever. So the train passed
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: me and faded into the atmosphere of the horizon, at
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: the place where the planet unveils herself to the curiosity
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: of the human eye. During several moments, I obstinately endeavored
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: to comprehend this mystery, but irresistible indifference soon threw herself
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: upon me. Nor was I more heavily dejected thereby than
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: they by their crushing chimeras end of section two, Section
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: three of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Venus and the Fool,
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: how admirable of the day. The vast park swoons beneath
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: the burning eye of the sun, as youth beneath the
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: lordship of love. There is no rumor of the universal
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: ecstasy of all things. The waters themselves are as though
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: drifting into sleep. Very different from the festivals of humanity.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: Here is a silent revel. It seems as though an
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: ever waning light makes all objects glimmer more and more,
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: as though the excited flowers burn with a desire to
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: rival the blue of the sky by the vividness of
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: their colors, as though the heat making perfumes visible drives
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: them in vapor towards their star. Yet in the midst
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: of this universal joy, I have perceived one afflicted thing
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: at the feet of a colossal venus. One of those
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: motley fools, those willing clowns whose business it is to
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: bring laughter upon kings, when weariness or remorse possesses them,
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: lies wrapped in his gaudy and ridiculous garments, coined with
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: his cap and bells, huddled against the pedestal, and raises
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: towards the Goddess, his eyes filled with tears, and his
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: eyes say, I am the last and most alone of
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: all mortals, inferior to the meanest of animals, in that
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: I am denied either love or friendship. Yet I am
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: made even I for the understanding and enjoyment of immortal beauty.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: Oh Goddess, have pity upon my sadness and my frenzy.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: The implacable venus gazed into I know not what distances
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: with her marble eyes. End of section three, Section four
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: reporting is in the public domain. Intoxication, one must be
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: forever drunken. That is the sole question of importance. If
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: you would not feel the horrible burden of time that
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: must be drunken without cease. But how with wine, with poetry,
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: with virtue, with what you please, But be drunken. And
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: if sometimes on the steps of a palace, on the
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: green grass, by a moat or in the dull, loneliness
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: of your chamber. You should waken up your intoxication, already
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: lessened or gone. Ask of the wind, of the wave,
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: of the star, of the bird, of the time piece.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: Ask of all that flees, all that sighs, all that revolves,
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: all that sings, all that speaks. Ask of these The hour,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: and wind and wave, and star, and bird and time
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: piece will answer you. It is the hour to be drunken.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: Lest you be the martyred slaves of time. Intoxicate yourselves.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: Be drunken without cease, with wine, with poetry, with virtue,
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: or with what you will. End of section four, Section
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: five of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Gifts of
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: the Moon. The moon, who as Caprice itself, looked in
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: at the window as you slept in your cradle, and
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: said to herself, I am well pleased with this child.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: And she softly descended her stairway of clouds and passed
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: through the window pane without noise. She bent over you
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: with the supple tenderness of a mother, and laid her
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: colors upon your face, therefrom your eyes have remained green,
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: and your cheeks extraordinarily pale from contemplation of your visitor.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: Your eyes are so strangely wide, and she is so
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: tender wounded you upon the breast that you have ever
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: kept a certain readiness to tears. In the amplitude of
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: her joy. The moon filled all your chamber as with
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: a phosphorescent air, a luminous poison, and all this living radiance,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: thought and said, you shall be forever under the influence
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: of my kiss. You shall love all that loves me,
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: and that I love. Clouds and silence and night, the
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: vast green sea, the unformed and multitudinous waters, the place
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: where you are not the lover. You will never know,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: monstrous flowers and perfumes that bring madness, cats that stretch
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: themselves swooning upon the piano, and lament with the sweet,
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: hoarse voices of women. And you shall be loved of
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: my lovers, courted of my courtizans. You shall be the
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: queen of men with green eyes, whose breasts also I
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: have wounded in my nocturnal caress. Men that love the sea,
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: the immense, green, ungovernable sea, the unformed and multitudinous waters,
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: the place where they are not the woman they will
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: never know, Sinister flowers that seem to bear the incense
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: of some unknown religion, perfumes that trouble the will, and
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: all savage and voluptuous animals images of their own folly.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: And that is why I am couched at your feet,
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: O spoiled child, beloved and accursed, seeking in all your
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: being the reflection of that august Divinity, that prophetic Godmother,
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: that poisonous nurse of all lunatics. End of section five,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: Section six of Little Poems in Prose by Charles Beaudelaire.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain the invitation
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: to the voyage. It is a superb land, a country
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: of Kokanya, as they say that I dream of visiting
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: with an old friend, A strange land drowned in our
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: northern fogs, that one might call the East of the West,
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: the China of Europe, A land patiently and luxuriously decorated
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: with the wise, delicate vegetations of a warm and capricious fantasy.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: A true land of Kocanya, where all is beautiful, rich,
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: tranquil and honest, where luxury is pleased to mirror itself
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: in order, where life is opulent and sweet to breathe from.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: Whence disorder, turbulence, and the unforeseen are excluded. Where happiness
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: is married to silence, Where even the food is poetic, rich,
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: and exciting at the same time, where all things my
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: beloved are like you. Do you know that feverish malady
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: that seizes hold of us in our cold miseries, that
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: nostalgia of a land unknown, that anguish of curiosity. It
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: is a land which resembles you, where all is beautiful, rich,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: tranquil and honest, where fantasy has built and decorated and
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: occidental China, where life is sweet to breathe, and happiness
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: married to silence. It is there that one would live,
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: There that one would die. Yes, it is there that
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: one must go to breathe, to dream, and to lengthen
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: one's hours by an infinity of sensations. A musician has
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: written the invitation to the waltz. Where is he who
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: will write the invitation to the voyage? That one may
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: offer it to his beloved, to the sister of his election. Yes,
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: it is in this atmosphere that it would be good
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: to live. Yonder, where slower hours contain more thoughts, where
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: the clocks strike the hours of happiness with a more
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: profound and significant solemnity, upon the shining panels, or upon
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: skins gilded with a somber opulence. Beautified paintings have a
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: discreet life, as calm and profound as the souls of
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: the artists who created them. The setting sons that color
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: the rooms and salons with so rich a light shine
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: through veils of rich tapestry or through high leaden worked
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: windows of many compartments. The furniture is massive, curious, and bizarre,
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: armed with locks and secrets, like profound and refined souls.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: The mirrors, the metals, the ale vair work, and the
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: china play a mute and mysterious symphony for the eyes,
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: and from all things, from the corners, from the cheeks,
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: and the drawers, from the folds of drapery, a singular
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: perfume escapes a sumatran revenezee, which is like the soul
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: of the apartment. A true country of Cocanya, I have said,
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: where all is rich, correct and shining, like a beautiful conscience,
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: or a splendid set of silver, or a medley of jewels.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: The treasures of the world flow there, as in the
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: house of a laborious man who has well merited the
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: entire world, a singular land, as superior to others, as
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: art is superior to nature. Where nature is made over
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: again by dream, where she is corrected, embellished, refashioned. Let
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: them seek and seek again. Let them extend the limits
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: of their happiness forever. These alchemists who work with flowers,
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: Let them offer a prize of sixty or a hundred
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: thousand florins to whosoever can solve their ambitious problems. As
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: for me, I have found my black tulip and my
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: blue dahlia incomparable flower tulip found at last symboli cal dahlia.
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: It is there, Is it not in this so calm
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: and dreamy land that you blome? Will you not there
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: be framed in your proper analogy? And will you not
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: be mirrored to speak like the mystics in your own correspondence?
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: Dreams always dreams, And the more ambitious and delicate the soul,
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: the farther from possibility is the dream every man carries
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: within him his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed.
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: And from birth to death, how many hours can we
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: account that have been filled with positive joy, with successful
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: and decided action, Shall we ever live in and become
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: a part of the picture. My spirit has painted the
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: picture that resembles you. These treasures, furnishings, luxury, order, perfumes,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: and miraculous flowers are you You again, are the great
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: rivers and calm canals. The enormous ships drifting beneath their
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: loads of riches, and musical with the sailor's monotonous song.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: Are my thoughts that sleep and stir upon your breast.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: You take them gently to the sea that is infinity,
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: reflecting the profundities of the sky in the limpid waters
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: of your lovely soul. And when outworn by the surge
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: and gorged with the products of the orient, the ships
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: come back to the ports of home. They are still
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: my thoughts, grown rich, that have returned to you from Infinity.
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: End of section six Section seven of Little Poems and
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox recording is in the
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: public domain. What is truth? I once knew a certain
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: Benedicta whose presence ailed the air with the ideal, and
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: whose eyes spread abroad the desire of grandeur, of beauty,
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: of glory, and of all that makes man believe in immortality.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: But this miraculous maiden was too beautiful for long life.
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: So she died soon after I knew her first, And
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: it was I myself who entombed her. Upon a day
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: when spring swung her censer even in the burial ground.
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: It was I myself who entombed her, fast closed in
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: a coffin of perfumed wood, as uncorruptible as the coffers
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: of India. And as my eyes rested upon the spot
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: where my treasure lay hidden, I became suddenly aware of
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: a little being who singularly resembled the dead, and who,
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: stamping the newly turned earth with a curious and hysterical violence,
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: burst into laughter, and said, it is I the true Benedicta.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: It is I, the notorious drab. As the punishment of
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: your folly and blindness, you shall love me as I
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: truly am. But I furious replight, no. The better to
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: emphasize my refusal, I struck the ground so violently with
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: my foot that my leg was thrust up to the
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: knee in the recent grave, and I, like a wolf
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: in a trap, was caught, perhaps forever, in the grave
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: of the ideal end of section seven Section eight of
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox recordings
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: in the public domain. Already a hundred times, already the
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: sun had leaped, radiant or saddened from the immense cup
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: of the sea, whose rim could scarcely be seen. A
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: hundred times it had again sunk, glittering or morose, into
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: its mighty bath of twilight. For many days we had
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: contemplated the other side of the firmament and deciphered the
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: celestial alphabet of the Antipodes. And each of the passengers
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: sighed and complained. One had said that the approach of
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: land only exasperated their sufferings. When then they said, shall
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: we cease to sleep asleep broken by the surge, troubled
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: by a wind that snores louder than we? When shall
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: we be able to eat at an unmoving table? There
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: were those who thought of their own firesides, who regretted
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: their sullen, faithless wives, and their noisy progeny. All so
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: doted upon the image of the absent land that I
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: believe they would have eaten grass with as much enthusiasm
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: as the beasts. At length, the coast was signaled, and
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: on approaching we saw a magnificent and dazzling land. It
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: seemed as though the music of life flowed therefrom in
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: a vague murmur, and the banks, rich with all kinds
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: of growths, breathed for leagues around a delicious odor of
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: flowers and fruits. Each one therefore was joyful. His evil
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: humor left him. Quarrels were forgotten, reciprocal wrongs forgiven, the
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: thought of duels was blotted out of the memory, and
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: rancor fled away like smoke. I alone was sad, inconceivably sad,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: like a priest from whom one has torn his divinity.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: I could not, without heart breaking bitterness, leave this so
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: monstrously seductive ocean, the sea, so infinitely various in its
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: terrifying simplicity, which seemed to contain in itself, and represent
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: by its joys and attractions and angers and smiles, the
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: moods and agonies and ecstasies of all souls that have lived,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: that live, and that shall yet live. In saying good
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: bye to this incomparable beauty, I felt as though I
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: had been smitten to death. And that is why, when
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: each of my companions, said, at last, I could only cry.
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: Already here meanwhile was the land, the land with its noises,
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: its passions, its commodities, its festivals, a land rich and magnificent,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: full of promises, that sent to us a mysterious perfume
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: of rose and musk. And from whence the music of
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: life flowed in an amorous murmuring end of section eight
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: Section nine of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Beaudelaire.
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recordings in the public domain. The double chamber
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: a chamber that is like a reverie, a chamber truly spiritual,
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly touched with rose and blue.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: There the soul bathes itself in indolence, made odorous with
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: regret and desire. There is some sense of the twilight
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: of things ten with blue and rose, a dream of
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: delight during an eclipse. The shape of the furniture is elongated, low, languishing.
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: One would think it endowed with the somnambulistic vitality of
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: plants and minerals. The tapestries speak an inarticulate language, like
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: the flowers, the skies, the dropping suns. There are no
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: artistic abominations upon the walls, compared with the pure dream,
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: with an impression unanalyzed, definite art, positive art is a blasphemy.
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: Here all has the sufficing lucidity and the delicious obscurity
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: of music. An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: mingled with the floating humidity, swims in this atmosphere where
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: the drowsing spirit is lulled by the sensations one fills
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: in a hot house. The abundant muslin flows before the
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: windows and the couch and spreads out in snowy cascades.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: Upon the couch lies the idle ruler of my dreams.
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: But why is she here? Who has brought her? What
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: magical power has installed her upon this throne of delight
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: and revery? What matter? She is there? And I recognize her. These, indeed,
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: are the eyes whose flame pierces the twilight, The subtle
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: and terrible mirrors that I recognize by their horrifying malice.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: They attract, they dominate, they devour the sight of whomsoever
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: is imprudent enough to look at them. I have often
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: studied them, these black stars that compel curiosity and admiration
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: to what benevolent daemon. Then do I, oh, being thus
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: surrounded with mystery, with silence, with peace and sweet odors,
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: Oh beatitude, the thing we name life, even in its
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: most fortunate am amplitude, has nothing in common with this
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: supreme life with which I am now acquainted, which I
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: taste minute by minute, second by second. Not so minutes
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: are no more, seconds are no more. Time has vanished,
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: and eternity reigns, an eternity of delight. A heavy and
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: terrible knocking reverberates upon the door, and as in a
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: hellish dream, it seems to me as though I had
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: received a blow from a mattock. Then a specter enters.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: It is an usher who comes to torture me in
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: the name of the law, an infamous concubine who comes
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: to cry misery and to add the trivialities of her
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: life to the sorrow of mine. Or it may be
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: the errand boy of an editor who comes to implore
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: the remainder of a manuscript, the chamber of Paradise, the idol,
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: the ruler of dreams, the sylphide. As the Great Renee said,
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: all this match vanished at the brutal knocking of the
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: specter horror. I remember, I remember, Yes, this kennel, this
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: habitation of eternal weariness, is indeed my own. Here is
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: my senseless furniture, dusty and tattered, the dirty fireplace without
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: a flame or an ember, the sad windows where the
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: rain drops have traced runnels in the dust, the manuscripts
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: erased or unfinished, the almanac with the sinister days marked
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: off with a pencil. And this perfume of another world,
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: whereof I intoxicated myself with a so perfected sensitiveness, alas
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: its place is taken by the odor of stale tobacco smoke,
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: mingled with I know not what nauseating mustiness. Now one
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: breathes here the rankness of desolation, in this narrow world,
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: narrow and yet full of disgust. A single familiar object
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: smiles at me, the file of laudanum old and terrible love,
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: like all loves alas fruitful in caresses and treacheries. Yes,
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: time has reappeared. Time reigns a monarch now, and with
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: the hideous ancient has returned all his demoniacal following of memories, regrets, tremors, fears, dolors, nightmares,
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: and twittering nerves. I assure you that the seconds are
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: strongly and solemnly accentuated now, and each as it drips
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: from the pendulum, says I am life, intolerable, implacable life.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: There is not a second in mortal life whose mission
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: it is to bear good news, the good news that
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: brings the inexplicable tear to the eye. Yes, time reigns.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: Time has regained his brutal mastery, and he goads me
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: as though I were a steer with his double goad.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: Woe thou fool sweat, then thou slave, live on thou
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: damnd end of section nine, Section ten of Little Poems
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. The LibriVox recording is in
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: the public domain. At one o'clock in the morning, alone,
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: at last, nothing is to be heard but the rattle
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: of a few tardy and tired out cabs. There will
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: be silence now if not repose for several hours. At least,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: at last, the tyranny of the human face has disappeared.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: I shall not suffer except alone. At last it has
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: permitted me to refresh myself in a bath of shadows.
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: But first a double turn of the key in the lock.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: It seems to me that the turn of the key
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: will deepen my solitude and strengthen the barriers which actually
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: separate me from the world. A horrible life and a
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: horrible city. Let us run over the events of the day.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: I have seen several literary men. One of them wished
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: to know if he could get to Russia by land.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: He seemed to have an idea that Russia was an island.
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: I have disputed generously enough with the editor of a review, who,
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: to each objection, replied, we take the part of respectable people,
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: which implies that every other paper but his own is
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: edited by a knave. I have saluted some twenty people,
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: fifteen of them unknown to me, and shaken hands with
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: a like number, without having taken the precaution of first
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: buying gloves. I have been driven to kill time during
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: a shower with a montebank who wanted me to design
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: for her a costume as Venusta. I have made my
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: bow to a theater manager who said, you will do
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: well perhaps to interview z. He is the heaviest, foolishest,
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: and most celebrated of all my authors. With him, perhaps
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: you will be able to come to something. See him,
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: and then will see I have boasted, why of several
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: villainous deeds I never committed, and indignantly denied, certain shameful
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: things I accomplished with joy, certain misdeeds of fanfarined crimes
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: of human respect. I have refused an easy favor to
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: a friend and given a written recommendation to a perfect fool. Heavens,
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: it's well ended. Discontented with myself and with everything in
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: everybody else, I should be glad enough to redeem myself
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: and regain my self respect In the silence and solitude
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: souls of those whom I have loved, whom I have sung,
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: Fortify me, sustain me, drive away the lies and the
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: corrupting vapors of this world. And Thou Lord, my God God,
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: accord me so much grace as shall produce some beautiful verse,
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: to prove to myself that I am not the last
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: of men, that I am not inferior to those I despise.
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: End of section ten, Section eleven of Little Poems in
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox recording is in the
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: public domain the confiture of the artist. How penetrating is
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: the end of an autumn day ah yes, penetrating enough
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: to be painful, even for there are certain delicious sensations
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: whose vagueness does not prevent them from being intense. And
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: none more keen than the perception of the infinite. He
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: has a great delight who drowns his gaze in the
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: immensity of sky and sea, solitude, silence, the incomparable chility
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: of the azure, a little sail trembling upon the horizon
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: by its very littleness and isolation, imitating my irremediable existence,
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: the melodious monotone of the surge, all these things thinking
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: through me, and I through them. For in the grandeur
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: of the reverie, the ego is swiftly lost. They think,
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: I say, but musically and picturesquely, without quibbles, without syllogisms,
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: without deductions. These thoughts, as they arise in me or
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: spring forth from external objects, soon become always too intense.
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: The energy working within pleasure creates an uneasiness, a positive suffering.
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: My nerves are too tense to give another than clamoring
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: and dolorous vibrations. And now the profundity of the sky
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: dismays me, its limpidity exasperates me. The insensibility of the sea,
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: the immutability of the spectacle revolt me ah, must one
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: eternally suffer for ever be a fugitive from beauty, nature,
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: pitiless enchantress, ever victorious rival, leave me tempt my desires
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: in my pride no more. The contemplation of beauty is
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: a duel where the artist screams with terror before being vanquished.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: End of Section eleven, Section twelve of Little Poems and
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: Prose by Charles Beaudelaire. This LibriVox recording is in the
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: public domain the thersus to Fran's list. What is a thesis?
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: According to the moral and poetical sense, it is a
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: sarcidotal emblem in the hand of the priests or priestesses,
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: celebrating the divinity of whom they are the interpreters and servants.
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: But physically it is no more than a baton, a
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: pure staff, a hop pole, a vine prop dry, straight
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: and hard around this baton in capricious meanderings, stems and flowers,
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: twine and wanton, these sinuous and fugitive, those hanging like
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: bells or inverted cups, and an astonishing complexity disengages itself
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: from this complexity of tender or brilliant lines and colors.
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: Would not one suppose that the curved line in the
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: spiral pay their court to the straight line and twine
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: about it in a mute adoration. Would not one say
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: that all these delicate corolee, all these calises, explosions of
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: odors and colors, execute a mystical dance around the hieratic staff.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: And what imprudent mortal will dare to decide whether the
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: flowers and the vine branches have been made for the baton,
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: or whether the baton is not but a pretext to
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: set forth the beauty of the vine branches and the flowers.
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: The thesis is the symbol of your astonishing duality, though
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: powerful and venerated, Master, dear Bacchanal, of a mysterious and
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: impassioned beauty. Never a nymph excited by the mysterious Dionysus
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: shook her thersis over the heads of her companions with
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: as much energy as your genius trembles in the hearts
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: of your brothers. The baton is your will, erect, firm, unshakable.
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: The flowers are the wanderings of your fancy around it,
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: the feminine element encircling the masculine with her elusive dance,
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: straight line and Arabesque intention and expression. The rigidity of
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: the will and the suppleness of the word, a variety
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: of means, you know for a single purpose, the all
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: powerful and indivisible amalgam that is genius. What analyst will
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: have the detestable courage to divide or to separate you,
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: dear list, across the fogs beyond the flowers, in towns
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: where the pianos chant your glory, where the printing house
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: translates your wisdom. In whatever place you be, in the
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: splendor of the eternal city, or among the fogs of
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: the dreamy towns that Cambrinus consoles improvising rituals of delight
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: or ineffable pain, or giving to paper your abstruse meditations.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: Singer of eternal pleasure and pain, philosopher, poet and artist,
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: I offer you this salutation of immortality. End of section twelve,
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: Section thirteen of Little Poems in Prose by Charles Bowden.
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The marksman,
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: as the carriage traversed the wood, he bade the driver
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: draw up in the neighborhood of a shooting gallery saying
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: that he would like to have a few shots to kill.
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: Time is not the slaying of the monster. Time the
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: most ordinary and legitimate occupation of man. So he gallantly
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: offered his hand to his dear, adorable and execrable wife,
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: the mysterious woman to whom he owed so many pleasures,
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: so many pains, and perhaps also a great part of
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: his genius. Several bullets went wide of the proposed mark.
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: One of them flew far into the heavens, and as
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: the charming creature laughed deliriously mocking the clumsiness of her husband,
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: he turned to her brusquely and said, observe that dull
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: yonder to the right, with its nose in the air,
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: and with so haughty an appearance. Very well, dear angel,
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: I will imagine to myself that it is you. He
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: closed both eyes and pulled the trigger. The doll was
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: neatly decapitated. Then, bending towards his dear, adorable and execrable wife,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: his inevitable and pitiless muse, he kissed her respectfully upon
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: the hand and added, ah, dear angel, how I thank
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: you for my skill. Into Section thirteen Section fourteen of
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox recording
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: is in the public domain. The shooting range and the
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: cemetary symmetary view inn a queer sign, said our traveler
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: to himself. But it raises a thirst. Certainly the keeper
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: of this inn appreciates Horace and poet pupils of Epicurus,
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: perhaps even apprehends the profound philosophy of those old Egyptians
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: who had no feast without its skeleton or some emblem
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: of life's brevity. He entered, drank a glass of beer
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: in presence of the tombs, and slowly smoked a cigar. Then,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: his fantasy driving him, he went down into the cemetery,
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: where the grass was so tall and inviting, so brilliant
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: in the sunshine. The light and heat, indeed, were so
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: furiously intense that one had said the drunken sun wallowed
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: upon a carpet of flowers that had fattened upon the
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: corruption beneath. The air was heavy with vivid rumors of life,
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: the life of things infinitely small, and broken at intervals
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: by the crackling of shots from a neighboring shooting range
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: that exploded with a sound as of Champagne. Corks to
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: the burden of a hollow symphony, and then beneath the
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: sun which scorched the brain, and in that atmosphere charged
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: with the ardent perfume of death, he heard a voice
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: whispering out of the tomb where he sat, and the
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: this voice said, Accursed be your rifles and targets, you
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: turbulent living ones who care so little for the dead
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: in their divine repose. Accursed be your ambitions and calculations,
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: importunate mortals who study the arts of slaughter near the
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: sanctuary of death himself. Did you but know how easy
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: the prize to win, how facile the end to reach,
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: and how all save death is not not so greatly?
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: Would you fatigue yourselves, oh ye, laborious alive, Nor would
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: you so often vex the slumber of them that long
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: ago reached the end, the only true end of life,
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: detestable end of section fourteen Section fifteen of Little Poems
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox recordings in the
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: public domain. The desire to paint unhappy perhaps is the man,
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: but happy the artist who is torn with this desire.
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: to me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveler must leave behind him
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: in the night. It is already long since I saw her.
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: She is beautiful and more beautiful. She is overpowering. The
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: color of black preponderates in her. All that she inspires
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns, where
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: mystery vaguely stirs and gleams. Her glance illuminates like a
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: ray of light. It is an explosion in the darkness.
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: I would compare her to a black sun, if one
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: could conceive of a dark star, overthrowing light and happiness.
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: But it is the moon that she makes one dream
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: of most readily, the moon who has without doubt touched
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: her with her own influence. Not the white moon of
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: the idols, who resembles a cold bride, but the sinister
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: and intoxicating moon, suspended in the depths of a stormy night,
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: among the driven clouds. Not the discreet, peaceful moon who
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: from the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: Thessaly hardly constrained to dance upon the terrified grass. Her
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: the love of prey. And below this, in quiet face,
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: whose mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown, and the impossible
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: glitters with an unspeakable grace, the smile of a large mouth,
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: white red and delicious, a mouth that makes one dream
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: volcanic land. There are women who inspire one with a
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: desire to woo them and win them. But she makes
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 1: one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze. End
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: of section fifteen, Section sixteen of Little Poems in Prose
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox recording is in the public
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: domain the Glass Vendor. These are some natures purely contemplative
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: and antipathetic to action, who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: inexplicable impulse, sometimes act with a rapidity of which they
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: would have believed themselves incapable. Such a one as he, who,
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: fearing to find some new vexation awaiting him at his lodgings,
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: prowls about in a cowardly fashion before the door, without
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: daring to enter such a one as he who keeps
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: a letter fifteen days without opening it, or only makes
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: up his mind at the end of six months to
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: undertake a journey that has been a necessity for a
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: year past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves precipitately thrust towards action,
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: like an arrow from a beau. The novelist and the physician,
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: who profess to know all things, yet cannot explain whence
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: comes this sudden and delirious energy to indolent and voluptuous souls,
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: nor how incapable of accomplishing the simplest and most necessary things.
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: They are, at some certain moment of time, possessed by
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: a superabundant hardihood, which enables them to execute the most
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: absurd and even the most dangerous acts. One of my friends,
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: the most harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one time,
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: set fire to a forest in order to ascertain, as
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: he said, whether the flames take hold with the easiness
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: that is commonly affirmed. His experiment failed ten times running.
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: On the eleventh it succeeded only too well. Another lit
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: a cigar by the side of a powder beryl in
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: order to see to know to tempt destiny for a
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: jest to have the pleasure of suspense for no reason
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: at all, out of caprice, out of idleness. This is
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: a kind of energy that springs from weariness and revery.
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: And those in whom it manifests so stubbornly are, in general,
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: as I have said, the most indolent and dreamy beings.
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: before the gaze of any man, and summon all his
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: poor will before he dare enter a cafe, or past
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: the pay box of a theater where the ticket seller seems,
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: and his eyes invested with all the majesty of minos
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: Acus and Rhadamantus will at times throw himself upon the
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: neck of some old man whom he sees in the street,
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished crowd.
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: Why because because this countenance is irresistibly attractive to him. Perhaps,
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: But it is more legitimate to suppose that he himself
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: does not know why. I have been more than once
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: a victim to these crises and outbreaks, which give us
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: cause to believe that evil meaning demons slip into us
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: to make us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires.
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: One morning I arose in a sullen mood, very sad
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: and tired of idleness, and thrust as it seemed to
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: me the doing of some great thing, some brilliant act.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: And then alas I opened the window, I beg you
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: is not the result of labor or combination, but rather
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: of a fortuitous inspiration, which would partake were it not
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: for the strength of the feeling of the mood called
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: hysterical by the physician, and satanic by those who think
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: a little more profoundly than the physician, the mood which
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and inconvenient axe.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: The first person I noticed in the street was a
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: glass vender, whose shrill and discordant cry mounted up to
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: me through the heavy, dull atmosphere of Paris. It would
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: have been else impossible to account for the sudden and
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me. Hello, there,
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile, I reflected, not
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: without gaiety, that as my room was on the sixth
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: landing and the stairway very narrow, the man would have
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: some difficulty in ascending, and in many a place would
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: break off the corners of his fragile merchandise. At length
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: he appeared, I examined all his glasses with curiosity, and
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: then said to him, what have you no colored glasses,
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: glasses of rose and crimson, and blue, magical glasses, glasses
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: of paradise. You are insolent. You dare to walk in
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: mean streets when you have no glasses that would make
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: one see beauty in life? And I hurried him briskly
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: to the staircase, which he staggered down grumbling. I went
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: on to the balcony and caught up a little flower pot,
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: And when the man appeared in the doorway beneath, I
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: let fall my engine of war perpendicularly upon the edge
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: of his pack, so that it was upset by the shock,
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: and all his poor walking fortune broken to bits. It
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: made a noise like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning.
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: Mad with my folly, I cried furiously after him, The
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: life beautiful, the life beautiful. Such nervous pleasantries are not
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: without peril. Often enough one pays dearly for them. But
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: what matters, an eternity of damnation to him who is
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: found fund in one second an eternity of enjoyment. End
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: of section sixteen, Section seventeen of Little Poems and Prose
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: The widows Vauvenard says that in public gardens there are
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: alleys haunted principally by thwarted ambition, by unfortunate inventors, by
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: aborted glories and broken hearts, and by all those tumultuous
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: and contracted souls in whom the last size of the
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: storm mutter yet again, and who thus betake themselves far
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: from the insolent and joyous eyes of the well to do.
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: These shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's cripples. To
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: such places above all others do the poet and philosopher
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: direct their avid conjectures. They find and there an unfailing pasturage.
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: For if there is one place they disdain to visit,
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: it is, as I have already hinted, the place of
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the void
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: has no attractions for them. On the contrary, they feel
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: themselves irresistibly drawn towards all that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing,
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: and bereft. An experienced eye is never deceived in these
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: rigid and dejected lineaments. In these eyes wan and hollow,
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: or bright with the last fading gleams of the combat
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: against fate, In these numerous profound wrinkles, and in the
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: slow and troubled gait, the eye of experienced decipher's unnumbered
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: legends of mistaken devotion, of unrewarded effort, of hunger, and cold,
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: humbly and silently supported. Have you not at times seen
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: widows sitting on the deserted benches? Poor widows, I mean,
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: whether in mourning or not, they are easily recognized. Moreover,
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: there is always something wanting in the mourning of the poor,
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: a lack of harmony, which but renders it the more
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: heart breaking. It is forced to be niggardly in its
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: show of grief. They are the rich who exhibit a
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: full complement of sorrow. Who is the saddest and most
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: saddening of widows, She who leads by the hand a
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: child who cannot share her reveries, or she who is
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: quite alone? I do not know it happened that I
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: once followed for several long hours, an aged and afflicted
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: woman of this kind, rigid and erect Wrapped in a
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: little worn shawl, she carried in all her being the
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: pride of stoicism. She was evidently condemned by her absolute
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: loneliness to the habits of an ancient celibacy, and the
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: masculine characters of her habits added to their austerity of
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: piquant mysteriousness. In what miserable cafe she dines, I know not,
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: nor in what manner. I followed her to a reading room,
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: and for a long time watched her reading the papers,
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: her active eyes that once burned with tears, seeking for
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: news of a powerful and personal interest. At length, in
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: the afternoon, under a charming autumnal sky, one of those
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: skies that let fall hosts of memories and regrets, she
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: seated herself remotely in a garden to listen, far from
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: the crowd, to one of the regimental bands whose music
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: gratifies the people of Paris. This was, without doubt, the
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: small debauch of the innocent old woman, or the purified
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: old woman, the well earned consolation for another of the
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: burdensome days without a friend, without conversation, without joy, without
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: a confidant that God had allowed to fall upon her,
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: perhaps for many years past, three hundred and sixty five
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: times a year, yet one more. I can never prevent
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: myself from throwing a glance, if not sympathetic, at least
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: full of curiosity, over the crowd of outcasts who press
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: around the enclosure of a public concert. From the orchestra
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: across the night float songs of fete, of triumph, or
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: of pleasure. The dresses of the women sweep and shimmer.
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: Glances pass the well to do, tired with doing nothing,
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: saunter about and make indolent pretense of listening to the music.
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: Here are only the rich, the happy. Here is nothing
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: that does not inspire or exhale the pleasure of being alive,
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: except the aspect of the mob that presses against the
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: outer barrier, yonder, catching gratis at the will of the wind,
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: a tatter of music, and watching the glittering furnace within.
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: There is a reflection of the joy of the rich
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: deep in the eyes of the poor. That is always interesting.
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: But to day, beyond this, people dressed in blouses and calico.
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: I one whose nobility was in striking contrast with all
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: the surrounding triviality. She was a tall, majestic woman, and
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: so imperious in all her air that I cannot remember
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: having seen the like in the collections of the aristocratic
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: beauties of the past. A perfume of exalted virtue emanated
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 1: from all her being. Her face, sad and worn, was
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: in perfect keeping with the deep mourning in which she
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: was dressed. She also, like the plebeians she mingled with
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: and did not see, looked upon the luminous world with
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: a profound eye, and listened with a toss of her head.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: It was a strange vision, most certainly, I said to myself,
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: this poverty. If poverty it be ought not to admit
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: of any sordid economy, so noble a face answers for that.
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: Why then, does she remain in surroundings with which she
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: is so strikingly in contrast, but in curiously passing near her,
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: I was able to divine and the reason. The tall
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: widow held by the hand a child dressed like herself
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: in black modest as was the price of entry. This
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: price perhaps suffice to pay for some of the needs
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: of the little being, or even more for a superfluity,
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: a toy. She will return on foot, dreaming and meditating,
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: and alone, always alone. For the child is turbulent and selfish,
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: without gentleness or patience, and cannot become any more than
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: another animal, a dog or a cat. The Confidant of
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: Solitary griefs end of Section seventeen, Section eighteen of The
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: Little Poems and Prose by Charles Baudelaire. This LibriVox recording
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: is in the public domain. The Temptations or Eros, Plutus
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: and Glory. Last night, two superb Satans and a she
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: devil not less extraordinary, ascended the mysterious stairway by which
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: Hell gains access to the frailty of sleeping man and
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: communes with him in secret. These three postured gloriously before me,
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: as though they had been upon a stage, And a
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: sulfurous splendor emanated from these beings, who so disengaged themselves
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: from the opaque heart of the night. They bore with them,
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: so proud a presence and so full of mastery, that
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: at first I took them for three of the true gods.
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: The first Satan, by his face, was a creature of
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: doubtful sex, the softness of an ancient Bacchus shone in
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: the lines of his body. His beautiful, languorous eyes of
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: a tenebrous and indefinite color were like violets, still laden
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: with the heavy tears of the storm. His slightly parted
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: lips were like heated censers from Whence exhaled the sweet
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: savor of many perfumes, And each time he breathed, exotic
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: insects drew as they fluttered strength from the ardors of
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: his breath, twined about his tunic of purple stuff in
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: the manner of a cincture, was an iridescent serpent, with
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 1: lifted head and eyes like embers, turned sleepily towards him.
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: Files full of sinister fluids, alternating with shining knives and
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: instruments of surgery hung from this living girdle. He held
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: in his right hand a flagon containing a luminous red fluid,
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: and inscribed with a legend in these singular words, drink
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: of this my blood, a perfect restorative. And in his
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: left hand held a violin that, without doubt served to
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: sing his pleasures and pains, and to spread abroad the
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: contagion of his folly upon the knights of the Sabbath.
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: From rings. Upon his delicate ankles trailed a broken chain
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: of gold, And when the burden of this caused him
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: to bend his eyes towards the earth, he would contemplate
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: with vanity the nails of his feet as brilliant and
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: polished as well wrought jewels. He looked at me with
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: eyes inconsolably heart broken and giving forth an insidious intoxication,
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: and cried in a chanting voice, if thou wilt, if
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: thou wilt, I will make THEE an overlord of souls.
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: Thou shalt be master of living matter more perfectly than
• 1:53:21
  Speaker 1: the sculptor is master of his clay. Thou shalt taste
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: the pleasure reborn without end of obliterating thyself in the
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: self of another, and of luring other souls to lose
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: themselves in thine. But I replied to him, I think
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: THEE I only gain from this venture, then, beings of
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: no more worth than my poor self. Though remembrance brings
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: me shame, Indeed, I would forget nothing. And even before
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: I recognized THEE, thou ancient monster, thy mysterious cutlery, thy
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: equivocal files, and the chain that imprisons thy feet were symbols,
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: showing clearly enough the inconvenientans of thy friendship, keep thy gifts.
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: The second Satan had neither the air at once tragical
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: and smiling, the lovely insinuating ways, nor the delicate and
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: scented beauty of the first. A gigantic man with a coarse,
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: eyeless face, his heavy paunch overhung his hips and was
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 1: gilded and pictured like a tattooing with a crowd of
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: little moving figures, which represented the unnumbered forms of universal misery.
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: There were little, sinew shrunken men who hung themselves willingly
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: from nails. There were meager gnomes, deformed and undersized, whose
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: beseeching eyes begged in alms even more eloquently than their
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: trembling hands. There were old mothers who nursed clinging abortions
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: at their pendent breasts, and many others even more surprising.
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: This heavy Satan beat with his fist upon his immense belly,
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: from whence came a loud and resounding metallic clangor, which
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: died away in a sighing made by many human voices.
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: And he smiled unrestrainedly, showing his broken teeth, the imbecile
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: smile of a man who has dined too freely. Then
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: the creature said to me, I can give thee that
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: which gets all, which is worth all, which takes the
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: place of all. And he tapped his monstrous paunch. Whence
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: came a sonorous echo as the commentary to his obscene speech.
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: I turned away with disgust and replied, I need no
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: man's misery to bring me happiness, nor will I have
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: the sad wealth of all the misfortunes pictured upon thy skin,
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: as upon a tapestry. As for the she devil I
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: should lie, I denied that at first I've found in
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: her a certain strange charm, which to define I can
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: but compare to the charm of certain beautiful women past
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: their first youth, who yet seemed to age no more,
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: whose beauty keeps something of the penetrating magic of ruins.
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: She had an air at once imperious and sordid, and
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 1: her eyes, though heavy, held a certain power of fascination.
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: I was struck most by her voice, wherein I found
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: the remembrance of the most delicious contralti, as well as
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: a little of the hoarseness of a throat continually laved
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: with brandy. Wouldst thou know my power, said the charming
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: and paradoxical voice of the false goddess. Then listen, and
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 1: she put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet in ribband
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: like a merliton, with the titles of all the newspapers
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: in the world. And through this trumpet she cried my name,
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: so that it rolled through space with the sound of
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: a hundred thousand thunders and came re echoing back to
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: me from the farthest planet. Devil cried, I half tempted
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: that at least is worth something, but it vaguely struck
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: me upon examining the seductive virago more attentively, that I
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 1: had seen her clinking glasses with certain drolls of my acquaintance,
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: and her blare of brass carried to my ears. I
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: know not what memory of a fanfare prostituted, so I replied,
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: with all disdain, get thee Hence I know better than
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: wed the light O love of them that I will
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: not name. Truly, I had the right to be proud
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: of a so courageous renunciation, but unfortunately I awoke and
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: all my courage left me. In truth, I said, I
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: must have been very deeply asleep. Indeed, to have had
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: such scruples, Ah, they would but return while I am awake.
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: I would not be so delicate, So I invoked the
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: three in a loud voice, offering to dishonor myself as
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 1: often as necessary to obtain their favors. But I had,
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: without doubt too deeply offended them, for they have never returned.
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: End of Section eighteen and end of Little Poems and
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: Prose by Charles Beaudelaire, read by Ben Tucker,