Flowers of Evil and Other Works: A Dual-Language Book

Flowers of Evil

and Other Works

Les Fleurs du Mal

et Oeuvres Choisies

A Dual-Language Book

Charles Baudelaire

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY WALLACE FOWLIE

James B. Duke Professor of French

Duke University

WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION, NOTES AND

GLOSSARY BY THE EDITOR

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

New York

Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Bantam Books, Inc.

All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.

This Dover edition, first published in 1992, is a slightly altered republication of Flowers of Evil and Other Works / Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies: A Bantam Dual-Language Book, published by Bantam Books, Inc., New York, in 1964. In the present edition, the original Publisher’s Note has been omitted.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867.

[Fleurs du mal. English & French]

Flowers of evil and other works = Les fleurs du mal et oeuvres choisies / Charles Baudelaire; edited and translated by Wallace Fowlie ; with an introduction, notes, and glossary by. the editor. — Dover ed.

p. cm. — (A Dual-language book)

Originally published: New York : Bantam Books, 1964.

English and French.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0–486–27092–0 (pbk.)

1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867—Translations into English. I. Fowlie, Wallace, 1908-II. Title. III. Title: Fleurs du mal et oeuvres choisies. IV Series.

PQ2191.A2244 1992

CIP

CONTENTS

Introduction

Les Fleurs du Mal / Flowers of Evil

Au lecteur / To the Reader

Bénédiction / The Blessing

L’Albatros / The Albatross

Elévation / Elevation

Correspondances / Correspondences

Les Phares / Beacons

L’Ennemi / The Enemy

Le Guignon / III Luck

La Vie Antérieure / Former Life

L’Homme et la Меr / Man and the Sea

Don Juan aux Enfers / Don Juan in Hell

La Beauté / Beauty

La Géante / The Giantess

Le Masque / The Mask

Hymne à la Beauté / Hymn to Beauty

La Chevelure / Her Hair

Je t’adore à l’égal / I Worship You

Une Charogne / A Carrion

De profundis clamavi / De Profundis Clamavi

Duellum / Duellum

Le Balcon / The Balcony

Je te donne ces vers / I Give You These Verses

Semper Eadem / Semper Eadem

Que diras-tu? / "What Will You Say?

L’Aube spirituelle / Dawn of the Spirit

Harmonie du Soir / Evening Harmony

L’Invitation au Voyage / An Invitation to Voyage

L’Irréparable / Irreparable

Chant d’Automne / Song of Autumn

Moesta et Errabunda / Moesta et Errabunda

Les Chats / Cats

La Cloche fêlée / The Broken Bell

Spleen / Spleen

L’Héautontimorouménos / Heautontimoroumenos

L’Irrémédiable / The Irremediable

Le Cygne / The Swan

La servante au grand coeur / The Warm-Hearted Servant

Rêve parisien / Parisian Dream

Le Crépuscule du Matin / Morning Twilight

La Destruction / Destruction

Une Martyre / A Martyr

Un Voyage à Cythère / A Voyage to Cythera

La Mort des Amants / Death of the Lovers

La Mort des Artistes / Death of the Artists

Le Voyage / The Voyage

Lesbos / Lesbos

Le Jet d’Eau / The Fountain

À une Malabaraise / To a Malabar Girl

Epigraphe pour un livre condamné / Epigraph for a Condemned Book

Recueillement / Meditation

Le Gouffre / The Abyss

Les Plaintes d’un Icare / Complaints of an Icarus

Le Spleen de Paris / Spleen of Paris

L’Étranger / The Stranger

Le Confiteor de I’Artiste / The Artist’s Confiteor

Le Chambre double / The Double Room

Chacun sa Chimère / Each of Us Has His Chimera

Le Mauvais Vitrier / The Wicked Maker of Window Glass

Les Foules / Crowds

Le Vieux Saltimbanque / The Old Clown

Le Joujou du Pauvre / The Poor Boy’s Toy

La Corde / The Rope

Le Thyrse / The Thyrsus

Enivrez-vous / Intoxication

Le Miroir / The Mirror

Le Port / The Harbor

Any Where Out of the World / Any Where Out of the World

Curiosités Esthétiques / Critical Writings

A quoi bon la critique? / What Is the Use of Criticism?

Qu’est-ce que le romantisme? / What Is Romanticism?

Du chic et du poncif / On the Chic and the Poncif

De l’Héroïsme de la Vie moderne / On the Heroism of Modern Life

De I’Essence du Rire / On the Essence of Laughter

L’Art mnémonique / Mnemonic Art

Le Dandy / The Dandy

Eloge du Maquillage / In Praise of Make-Up

Critique d’Art / Art Criticism

L’Oeuvre et la Vie d’Eugène Delacroix / The Work and the Life of Eugène Delacroix

Critique Musicale / Music Criticism

Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris / Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris

Critique Littéraire / Literary Criticism

Pétrus Borel (L’Art Romantiqué) / Pétrus Borel (Romantic Art)

Edgar Poe: sa vie, ses oeuvres / Edgar Poe: His Life and Works

Mon coeur mis à nu / My Heart Laid Bare

Lettres / Letters

à Madame Marie Daubrun / To Madame Marie Daubrun

à Madame Aupick / To Madame Aupick

à Madame Sabatier / To Madame Sabatier

Notes

Glossary

Bibiography

INTRODUCTION

It has been claimed, notably by A. E. Housman in a Cambridge conversation with André Gide in 1917, that there is no tradition of French poetry comparable to that of England or Germany or Italy. Housman stated that between Villon and Baudelaire, during four hundred years, French poetry was given over to rhymed discourse, in which there was eloquence, wit, vituperation, pathos, but no poetry. Even the romantics, in their abundant lyricism, were denied a place among the legitimate poets.

Gide’s first answer to this challenge was to acknowledge that perhaps the French as a nation do have a deficiency in lyric sentiment, but that this very deficiency accounts for the elaborate system of French prosody which developed during those four hundred years. The strict rules of versification, acting as constraints on the poets’ spontaneity, caused poetry to be looked upon in France as a difficult art form, more rigorously perfected there than in other countries.

In answer to Housman’s second point, After all, what is poetry? Gide turned to a definition of Baudelaire which is found in notes for a preface to the poet’s own Fleurs du Mal. Rhythm and rhyme, Baudelaire wrote, answer man’s immortal need for monotony and symmetry, as opposed to the vanity and danger of inspiration. This theory of Baudelaire, indicating that poetry is related to music in its prosody, which comes from the deepest and most primitive part of man’s nature, is a theory bearing not only on the entire history of French poetry, but also on Baudelaire’s own revolution in this history, on the significance of Les Fleurs du Mal.

The fate of the artist, the difficulty of existing as an artist in the modern world, the inevitable clash between the artistic temperament and the conventions of society, all are aspects of the same problem which the entire nineteenth century raised to a degree of eminence and which has continued to flourish in the twentieth century. Far more than a subject of mere sociological speculation, it has grown into a literary theme, a literary study of high importance. Baudelaire’s name heads a distinguished list of writers who have incorporated this problem into their work: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Henry James, Eliot. The list could easily be prolonged because almost no major writer of recent times has omitted discussion of the artist’s role and his dilemma.

To Baudelaire’s name is attached the exceptional degree of boldness with which he castigated the French under Louis-Philippe for the injustices they showed the artist. He protested with the same vehemence against the Americans for their treatment of Poe. It is in spite of themselves, he writes in his Journaux Intimes, that the nations of the world produce geniuses. The great man, in order to exist at all, has to possess strength and will power far greater than the strength and will power of the countless inhabitants of his country who are aligned against him.

After a century, Baudelaire appears to us today as a classical writer—classical not simply in the sense that he is established and recognized and studied in school programs, but classical in a far deeper sense. Readers of poetry and poets today admire many aspects of Baudelaire’s poetry, but especially perhaps his lucidity, his power of analysis. In his poem Bénédiction, which is about the modern poet one hundred years ago, Baudelaire speaks of this poet’s lucidity of thought, his esprit lucide. He is classical in his taste for a kind of analysis which offered him sources of poetry richer than a more purely romantic interest in nature and exoticism. Les Fleurs du Mal occupies such a central position in the history of modern poetry because it satisfies this need of analysis and exploration of man’s consciousness which the Frenchman has always demanded of his writers and even of his poets.

Baudelaire is classical also in the importance he places on the sense of order and architecture of a poem, as well as of a book of poems. One of the principal passions of the poet, according to Baudelaire, is the passion for order, for symmetry and structure. The writing of a poem is the discipline of form imposed upon emotion and experience and ideas. In this sense, the lyrics of Baudelaire are comparable to the speeches of a Racinian character, in which the formalized rhymed alexandrines impose a discipline and a clarification on sentiments and passions and action. Baudelaire professed an exalted belief in the will power of the artist. He practiced his will power, not in his personal life, but in the writing of his poems. Il n’y a pas de hasard dans l’oeuvre d’art (There is no chance in a work of art), he wrote in 1846. He admired Delacroix as the type of painter who joined to tremendous feeling and passion a willed consecration to work. The rules and constraints of art Baudelaire believed to be necessary for the full development and expression of originality. His famous definition of beauty is a classical precept. Beauty, he says, is the infinite in the finite. C’est l’infini dans le fini.

The influence of this basic or essential classicism of Baudelaire did not diminish during the symbolist period and during the past fifty years. If the term classicism is not used very much in the symbolist theories and treatises, it is there, somewhat disguised under newer and perhaps more psychological terms. Modern poetry presupposes a system of metaphysics. It affirms, first with the example of Baudelaire and later with the philosophy of Bergson, that the poet should place himself in the very center of what is real and merge his consciousness and his sensibility with the universe. Whereas the Parnassian poet, in his descriptions of the phenomena of the world, stays within the domain of the relative, the symbolist poet, taking Baudelaire as guide, tries to penetrate beyond the physical phenomena and reach what he calls the heart of reality. The goal of symbolist poets—and here they repeat the classical ideal as redefined by Baudelaire—is the creation of beauty.

Valéry’s temperament, and Baudelaire’s before his, were exceptionally sensitive to formal beauty, to the plastic beauty of the human body, to the mysterious beauty of the sea, to the harmony of architectural forms. Both Baudelaire and Valéry argued that the poet’s drama is the struggle that is constantly going on between his sensuality and his critical mind. Valéry, more cautiously than Baudelaire, admits such a term as inspiration, but his aesthetics is based upon a study of those relationships implied in the opposite term, calculation. He claimed that the great discovery of symbolism was the concept of pure poetry and ascribed this discovery to Baudelaire. The greatest poems of the past, the Aeneid, De Natura Rerum, La Divina Commedia, he would say, are contaminated with elements foreign to poetry. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in the work of Baudelaire and Poe, an effort was made to isolate poetry from all essences other than itself.

The three terms—classicism, romanticism and symbolism—have become, through the diligence of theorists and professors, almost too complex to be of much use. All three, in their basic meanings, have always existed, and often side by side, in far greater harmony than literary scholars would lead us to believe. All three terms have been applied to the art of Baudelaire. The particularly striking aspect of this achievement is the profound meaning, and not the cliché definition, of each school as it finds its justification in the author of Les Fleurs du Mal. The classical trait of this poet is his longing for perfection, his lifelong striving to discover the ideal form of art and beauty. Romanticism in Baudelaire is a revolt of those inner psychological potentialities which the classical ideal in its historical sense had seemingly repressed. This resurgence of the psyche was favored at the same time by a wave of idealism in Europe which was more or less mystical by nature. Romanticism was, at its beginnings and in the personal drama of Baude laire, a longing for the infinite, and lyricism was the natural form in which it expressed itself. Symbolism was already for Baudelaire what it was to be for the subsequent poets, a longing to reach the essence of poetry, to reach the subconscious and thus to enter into communication with supreme Reality.

Baudelairism has become a frequently used term in modern criticism. It involves many matters which are difficult to define briefly: attitudes of the dandy and the dilettante, an attraction to the unhealthy and the morbid, habits of provocation and scorn. Rimbaud’s celebrated claim, in his Lettre du Voyant, that Baudelaire was the "first voyant, the king of poets, a true god," has been steadily offset in recent years by the more human and perhaps more profound judgment that Baudelaire was essentially a man who felt the contradictions of his nature more acutely than most, who waged a spiritual struggle between the opposing forces of his greatness and his weakness, and who engaged his entire being in what may be called the adventure of poetry. In asking of poetry a solution to his personal dilemmas, he was forging a union between poetry and philosophy which has grown into the principal ambition of modern poetry.

Long before the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, Baudelaire had been looked upon in Paris as a dandy, and, more than that, as a mystifier, and, more even than that, as a poet who wrote about vermin, rotting bodies, assassins and worms. Two years earlier, in 1855, eighteen of his most remarkable poems were published in La Revue des Deux Mondes and called forth virulent and vituperative attacks. At the poet’s death, in 1867, his obituaries stressed sensational details in his life, his eccentricities, his diabolism, his dandyism. It is true that Baudelaire lived the role of dandy in the Hôtel Lauzun on the He-Saint-Louis, that he often shocked the French bourgeoisie with his immorality and cynicism, that he cultivated an attitude toward Satanism and the Gothic tale or roman noir. But today, thanks to the accessibility of all of his writings, we know that far more important than the exterior dandyism of his appearance and behavior was the inner dandyism of his spirit, his feelings of horror and ecstasy which made him into an instrument of supernatural forces, both good and evil. Baudelaire is the first modern poet, not because of his behavior and dress, but because of his awareness of disorder in the world and in himself. Satanism is at the center of his work, not by histrionic black-magic values, but by the poet’s horror of man’s fate and his obsession over guilt. The pathology of Baudelaire’s sado-masochism has been elaborately studied in recent years, but it reveals very little unless it is considered in terms of his entire spiritual drama.

The official academic criticism, as late as 1885, looked upon Baudelaire essentially as a monster. The essay of Paul Bourget in that year was one of the first to try to understand the poet’s character and the particular qualities of his art. Since that time, the scrupulous investigations of Eugène and Jacques Crépet and of other scholars have gradually corrected the legends of a satanic and perverted Baudelaire. The first unjust criticism of Baudelaire named him the leading exponent of sacrilege and blasphemy, as easily as it named Poe a dipsomaniac, Verlaine a vagabond, Mallarmé an incomprehensible poet. Today we know that Baudelaire the sarcastic dandy, as he appeared to so many of his contemporaries —he in fact did a great deal to encourage this opinion, it must be said—was in reality an object of compassion.

Today we know something of the remarkable lineage of poets founded by Baudelaire: Rimbaud, Lautréamont and the surrealists, for whom true reality is in dreams— not the ordinary dream, but the hieroglyphic dream, which is a way of knowledge and a mode of perception. Limbus was one of the early titles for Les Fleurs du Mal. It is the state of Baudelaire’s intense nostalgia, a fourth state, outside the suffering of hell, the hope of purgatory and the joy of paradise. For the psychologist, such a place could easily represent a memory of the womb, a desire to know again that kind of peacefulness. Yet Baudelaire’s own lesson about the poet has taught the modern reader how to consider his own work. Out of all his complex of experience, of longing, of voyage and suffering, Baudelaire created the very positive, the very real poems. He was courageously and uninterruptedly the poet, convinced of his vocation. In fact, he was so unswervingly the poet that he was never concerned with formulating a system or a philosophy.

During the 1920s Baudelaire was praised with great fervor for the first time by a large number of men of letters, by creative writers and thinkers such as Gide in his Journal and essays, Suarès in a study of the poet’s personal drama, Du Bos in his celebrated Meditation on the Life of Baudelaire, and Valéry in an essay ultimately printed in Variété. This attention carried over through the 1930s in France and America, where T. S. Eliot’s two essays called attention to the French poet. The decade of the 1940s was extraordinarily dominated in France by Mallarmé; a semi-official biography appeared at that time, as well as critical monographs and exegeses. The public in France who would normally have been reading Baudelaire turned to Mallarmé and the strange fascination of deciphering the difficult sonnets. In the 1950s three or four newer poets have been closely read: Eluard, Char, Ponge, Saint-John Perse, but in company with them Baudelaire seems to have been reinstated after having passed through a slight eclipse. The renewed and continued interest in Baudelaire parallels the new interest, both historical and philosophical, in the origins and meanings of the romantic movement in Europe.

When Baudelaire was writing his earliest poems, about 1845, his principal references and directions came from romanticism. He felt a close affinity with the enthusiasms of Gautier and Banville, with the esoteric interests of Nerval, with the macabre audacities of Pétrus Borel. These men, more than the so-called leaders of the romantic movement—Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny— helped Baudelaire to define modern art by its secrecy, its spirituality, its aspiration toward the infinite. He was among the first to define romanticism as a way of feeling (une manière de sentir). The examples of Delacroix, Poe and Wagner, as well as the more philosophical Swedenborg and Joseph de Maistre, confirmed the intuitions of Baudelaire concerning the modern form of melancholy and nostalgia. In his search for beauty through the forests of symbols, where every element is hieroglyph, he practiced the art of symbolism instinctively long before it reached its consecration in theory and manifesto.

For many Americans, Baudelaire is still the French poet who was influenced by Poe and who exaggerated the importance of Poe. On a recent visit to the United States, Mme Simone de Beauvoir had many literary conversations with American writers; she said that the same names kept recurring in these conversations—Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, James, Faulkner. Never was Poe mentioned, and Mme de Beauvoir finally concluded that Americans now consider Poe a French writer! Recent discoveries of Professor W. T. Bandy, of the University of Wisconsin, have confirmed beliefs of French scholars that Poe exerted no influence on Baudelaire’s poetry. In fact, Baudelaire had written most of his poetry before he began reading and translating Poe. Henry James’ unjust attack on Poe established to a considerable degree the fate of Poe in American letters. But in the recent criticism of Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate, the attitudes of Baudelaire on Poe have been revindicated. Baudelaire recognized himself in the American poet. He translated Poe because of their common traits: hysteria, which often replaced the free functioning of the will; a lack of harmony between the nervous tensions and the intellect; a scorn for the concept of progress and for the materialism of their century; a love for the secrecy and the suggestiveness of dreams. The psychological analyses of Laclos, the prose style of Chateaubriand, the philosophy of Joseph de Maistre probably exerted a far deeper influence on Baudelaire than any aspect of Poe’s writing. But the American poet had for the Frenchman the power of a myth, and the particular significance which Baudelaire found in Poe was to play an important role in the development of Mallarmé’s genius and Valéry’s.

In France today—and this is generally true for the past quarter of a century—the most persistent problem in Baudelaire criticism concerns the poet’s spirituality and religious drama. Many of the Catholic writers—Stanislas Fumet, Charles Du Bos, Jean Massin—have pointed out that Baudelaire addresses the fundamental part of his message to Christians and that without Catholic dogma Les Fleurs du Mal would not have been written. Contradictions which obscure every phase of the study of Baudelaire are particularly forceful in the problem of his religious experience. His Christianity is constantly being contradicted by his eroticism, his pride, his blasphemies. Passages in letters to his mother reveal even a doubt concerning the existence of a personal God.

Baudelaire’s theory about the beautiful and about the distinction between art and morality have often been discussed but have never received the extensive critical treatment they deserve. He was always struck by the very special privilege given to beauty to survive moral deficiencies. He certainly believed, with many modern aestheticians, that a blasphemous idea in a line of poetry did not necessarily diminish the formal beauty of the line. He would accept the belief that beauty may continue within the realm of evil. Baudelaire’s theory may one day be studied in its relationship to Plato and the doctrine exposed especially in the Phaedrus that beauty is a mark left on the soul which the soul never loses no matter how low it may sink.

At the time of Les Fleurs du Mal, philosophers had been quite humbled in the presence of the positivistic scientists. Baudelaire’s revelation of poetry revindicated belief in the spiritual destiny of man. His example and his art convinced his readers that man has the right to ask of poetry the solution to the problems of human destiny. The poets of his day, the Parnassians, were creating a purely descriptive art of exterior concrete objects. Baudelaire’s revelation was to provide a metaphysical conception of the same universe. His famous sonnet on synesthesia and symbolism, Les Correspondances, reassigned to the poet his ancient role of vates, of soothsayer, who by his intuition of the concrete, of immediately perceived things, is led to the idea of those things, to the intricate system of correspondences The sonnet was to become the principal key to symbolism as defined by subsequent poets. Already, for Baudelaire, nature is a word, an allegory. To the poet is revealed the dark deep unison (une ténébreuse et profonde unité) which is the unison of the sensible and spiritual universes. The experience of the poet is the participation of all things invading him, with their harmonies and analogies. They bear the sign of the First Word, of their original Unity.

Baudelaire was obsessed by a small number of problems to which he returned ceaselessly. They were all present in him at the beginning of his career and all present in his earliest poems. Baudelaire is not one of those writers who evolve drastically