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Updated: June 9, 2025
Oh, Hilary" with the tips of her fingers she brushed my hair "you really are a simple old dear!" "All the same " I began. "All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy conversation. I didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy of Baudelaire, if you have one." She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down Les Fleurs du Mal.
How to be happy! not to read Baudelaire and Verlaine, not to enter the Nouvelle Athènes, unless perhaps to play dominoes like the bourgeois over there, not to do anything that would awake a too intense consciousness of life, to live in a sleepy country side, to have a garden to work in, to have a wife and children, to chatter quietly every evening over the details of existence.
Yet, it is because he saw them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in his own strange corner of the world with such an intensity of experience, that he is Baudelaire. Like him or not, his name is "made." A queer kind of man, indeed, but not "only a pen." Certain writers have made a cult of "impersonality" in literature.
"It is really curious that it should be the four men the most free from all taint of handicraft and all base commercialism, the four pens the most entirely devoted to art, that were arraigned before the public prosecutor: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and ourselves." Yes it is indeed curious, and I will not spoil the piquancy of the moral by a comment.
'Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! What times! What memories! the old Frenchman would cry at last, fairly re-transported to the world of his youth, and, springing up, he would run to the little cupboard by his bed head, where he kept a score or so of little paper volumes volumes which the tradesman David soon discovered, from a curious study of French catalogues, to have a fast-rising money value and out would come Alfred de Musset's 'Nuit de Mai, or an outrageous verse from Baudelaire, or an harmonious nothing from Gautier.
It is just like your drawings, Aubrey; it gets on one's nerves and is cruel. "Baudelaire called his poems "Fleurs du Mal," I shall call your drawings "Fleurs du Peche" flowers of sin.
But I shan't tell you what it is, as though I had been so impertinent as to inquire. 'I am not sure that it wholly satisfies me. But it is the best I can find. It suggests something of the quality of the poems.... Strange growths, natural and wild, yet exquisite, he added, 'and many-hued, and full of poisons. I asked him what he thought of Baudelaire.
This orang-outang assassinated two women, a mother and daughter. Et moi aussi, j'ai assassiné moralement deux femmes, la mère et sa fille. I have always taken this story as an allusion to my misfortunes. You, M. Baudelaire, would do me a great favour if you could find the date when Edgar Poe, supposing he was not assisted by any one, wrote his tale.
There is a charm in their motion, be the wind ever so light, that is indescribable. The rustle they make is not "sad" or "uncertain," but cheerful and forceful. The garments of some young giantess, such as Baudelaire sings of, might make that rustling as she would run past one in a land of colossal persons and things. I have been surprised to find so little about the tulip-tree in our literature.
In form the Leper is old English, the colouring is Baudelaire, but the rude industry of the dustmen and the comestible glories of the market-place shall be mine. A bas "Les Roses de Minuit"! I felt the "naturalisation" of the "Roses of Midnight" would prove a difficult task.
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