The Arcades Project - Operi

'"The dandy, Baudelaire has said, 'should aspire to be sublime, continually. He
should live and sleep in front of a mirror. "'66 Louis Thomas, Curiosites sur Baudelaire
(Paris, 1912), pp. 33-34. [JIG,S]
Two stanzas by Baudelaire, found on the page of an album:
Noble strong-armed woman, who sleep and dream
throughout long days with no thought of good or evil,
who wear robes proudly slung in Grecian style;
you whom for many years (which seem slow to me now)
my lips, well versed in luscious kisses,
cherished with all the devotion of a monk;
priestess of debauch, my sister in lust,
who disdained to carry and nourish
a male child in your hallowed urn,
hut fear and flee the appalling stigmata
which virtue carved with its degrading blade
in pregnant matrons' flanks.67
Louis Thomas, Cur-iosites sur Baudelaire (Paris, 1912), p. 37. [JIG,9]
"He was thefirst to write about himself in a moderate confessional manner, and to
leave off the inspired tone. I He was the first to speak of Paris from the point of
view of one of her daily damned (the lighted gas jets flickering with the wind of
Prostitution, the restaurants and their air vents, the hospitals, the gambling, the
logs resounding as they are sawn and then dropped on the paved courtyards, and
the chimney corner, and the cats, beds, stockings, drunkards, and modern perfumes)-all
in a noble, remote, and superior fashion . ... The first also who accuses
himself rather than appearing triumphant, who shows his wounds, his
laziness, his bored uselessness at the heart of this dedicated, workaday century. I
The first to bring to our literature the boredom implicit in sensuality, together with
its strange decor: the sad alcove, ... and to take pleasure in duing so . ... The
Painted Mask of Woman and its heavenly extension in sunset . . . Spleen and
illness (not the poetic aspects of consumption but rather neurosis) without ever
once using the word." Laforgue, Melanges posthumes (Paris, 1903), pp. 111-
112.611 [JIGa,l]
'"From the mysterious darkness in which they had germinated, sent out secret
roots, and reared their fecund stalks, Les Flew's du mal have gone on to blossom
magnificently, opening up their somber jagged corollas veined with the colors of
life and, under an endless sky of glory and scandal, scattering their heady perfumes
of love, of sorrow, and of death." Henri de Regnier,