The Arcades Project - Operi

women give suck . .. , in their psychology ('Always the companion whose heart is
untrue'), it is easy to see why, in his frustrated and jealous passion, he could write:
"Woman will have Gomorrah, and Man will have Sodom.' But he does, at least, see
the two sexes at odds, facing each other as enemies across a great gulf . ... But this
did not hold true of Baudelaire . ... This "connection' between Sodom and Gomorrah
is what, in the final section of my novel, . .. I have shown in the person of
a brutish creature, Charles Morel (it is usually to brutish creatures that this part
is allotted). But it would seem that Baudelaire cast himself for it, and looked on the
role as a privilege. It would be intensely interesting to know why he chose to
assume it, and how well he acquitted himself. What is comprehensible in a Charles
Morel becomes profoundly mysterious in the author of Les Fleurs du mal. " Marcel
Proust, ""A Propos de Baudelaire," Nouvelle RevueJram;aise, 16 (June 1, 1921),
pp. 655-656.229 [J44a,3]
Louis Menard-who, under the pseudonym Louis de Senneville, had published
Promethee delivre -in La Revue philosophique et religieuse
of September 1857 (cited in Les Fleurs du mal, ed. Crepet [Paris, 1930],
pp. 362-363): I.·Though he talks incessantly of the vermin and scorpions in his soul
and takes himself for the avatar of all vices, it is easy to see that his principal
defect is an overly libertine imagination-a defect all too common among those
erudite persons who have passed their youth in seclusion . ... Let him enter into
the community of human life, and he will be able to find a characteristically elevated
form for vihrant, wholesome creations. He will he a paterfamilias and will
publish books of the sort that could be read to his children. Until then, he will
remain a schoolboy of 1828, suffering from what Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire calls arrested
development." [J45,l]
From the summation delivered by M. Pinard: ""I portray evil with its intoxications,
you say, but also with its miseries and shames. So be it. But what of all those
many readers for whom you write (for you publish thousands of copies of your
book, and at a low price) those numerous readers of every class, age, and condition?
Will they take the antidote of which you speak with such complacency?"
Cited in Les Fleurs du mal, cd. Crepet (Paris, 1930), p. 334. [J45,2]
An article by Louis Coudal] in Le Figaro of November 4, 1855, opens the way for
criticisms of "university pedants." Coudal] writes, after the publication of poems
in La Revue des deux mondes: "After the fading of his surprise celebrity, Baudelaire
will be associated exclusively with the withered fruits of contemporary poetry:'
Cited in Les Fleurs du mal, ed. Crepet (paris, 1930), p. 306. [J45,3]
In 1850, Asselineau saw Baudelaire with a copy of the poems inscribed by a calligrapher
and bound in two gilded quarto volumes. [.J45,4]
Crepet (Fleurs du mal, ed. Crepet, p. 300) says that, around 184,6, many of
Baudelaire's friends knew his poems by heart. Only three of the poems had been
published at that point.. [J45,S]