Paris Spleen. Charles Baudelaire
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These thoughts, whether from inside me or from external things, soon become too intense. Voluptuous energy creates uneasiness and positive suffering. My overtense nerves then give out only peevish and painful vibrations.
And now the depth of sky is appalling; its clarity exasperates me. I find the indifference of the sea, the immutability of the spectacle, revolting . . . Ah! must I suffer eternally, or else eternally flee the beautiful? Nature, pitiless enchantress, always victorious rival, let me go! Tempt no more my desires and my pride! Study of the beautiful is a duel in which the artist cries out in fear, before being bested.
2. The confiteor is a liturgical form (beginning, literally, I confess) acknowledging sinfulness and requesting mercy.
IV
A Joker
Explosive New Year’s Day: chaos of mud and snow, criss-crossed by a thousand carriages, sparkling with toys and toffee, crawling with greed and despair, standard delirium of a metropolis, made to disturb the brain of the sturdiest solitary.
In the midst of bohu and din, a donkey trotted briskly, hard pressed by a rascal with a whip.
As the donkey came to turn a corner, a gentleman, gloved, polished, imprisoned in cruel necktie and spanking new duds, bowed ceremoniously to the humble beast and, doffing his hat, addressed it, “All the best for you in the new year,” turning then to I know not what companions with a fatuous air, as if praying them to approve his own satisfaction.
The donkey, oblivious to this high-class joker, continued its trek as duty directed.
For my part, I was taken suddenly with an incommensurate rage against this ostentatious imbecile, who seemed to me to concentrate in himself the whole spirit of France.
V
Double Bedroom
A room resembling a reverie, a room truly spiritual, stagnant atmosphere in soft pink and blue tints.
There the soul bathes idly, scented with regret and desire. — Something crepuscular, bluish and rose pink; voluptuous dream during an eclipse.
The furnishings are elongated, prostrate, languid. The furniture seems to dream; suggesting somnambulistic life, vegetable or mineral. The upholstery speaks a mute language, like flowers, like skies, like setting suns.
On the wall, no artistic abomination. Compared to pure dream, unanalyzed impression, an art made definite — positive art — is blasphemy. Here, everything has just enough clarity, and the delicious obscurity of harmony.
Hints of a choice and exquisite scent mingled with air lightly humid swim in this atmosphere, where slumbering spirit is rocked by hot-house sensations.
Muslin rains down abundantly over the windows and around the bed in snowy cascade. Within this bed is ensconced the Idol, queen of dreams. But how did she come there? Who brought her? what magic potency set her upon this throne of voluptuous reverie? Well never mind: there she is! I recognize her.
There indeed, those eyes whose flame travels the twilight; subtle and terrible organs of sight familiar to me from their fearsome malice. They call to, they beat down, they devour foolhardy focus fixed on them. I have made long study of those dark stars which excite curiosity and admiration.
To what benevolent demon do I owe being thus set about with mystery, silence, peace and perfumes? What beatitude! what we ordinarily call life, even when it expands most happily, has nothing in common with this supreme life that I now know and that I savor, minute by minute, second by second.
But no! there are no longer minutes, no longer seconds. Time has disappeared; it is Eternity that reigns, an eternity of delight!
But then there’s a terrible loud knock at the door and, as in hellish dreams, I feel a pickax in my gut.
Then enter a Specter: a bailiff come to torture me with legal matters; a notorious trollop bitching about money and loading her life’s trivialities on top of my own troubles; or maybe even an editorial guttersnipe demanding another installment of some manuscript.
The paradisal room, the idol, the queen of dreams, the Sylphide, as the great René calls her,3 all this magic has vanished with the Specter’s brutal blow.
Horrors! I remember. I remember! Yes! this hole-in-the-wall, this abode of eternal ennui, is mine. Pieces of furniture, stupid, musty, broken down; the fire unlit, emberless, fouled with spit; sad windows where rain has cut furrows in the dirt; manuscripts crossed out or unfinished; an almanac with a penciled check on dates to be careful of.
The other-worldly scent, in which I tippled with a practiced sensibility, is, alas! replaced by the fetid odor of tobacco mixed with a species of evil-smelling mildew. One breathes in rancid desolation.
In this shrunken world, so full of disgust, a single object attracts me: the vial of laudanum; old and terrible lover; like all lovers, alas, fertile in caresses and betrayal.
Oh! yes! Time has reappeared; Time reigns absolute now; and with that hideous old character has come his devilish retinue of Memories, Regrets, Convulsions, Fears, Anguish, Nightmare, Rage, Neurosis.
I swear that now the seconds are strongly, solemnly accentuated and each, flying off the clock, cries, “I am Life insupportable. I am implacable Life.”
There is only one single Second in human life with the mission of announcing good news, the good news that causes for each of us an inexplicable fear.
Yes! Time reigns, recovering his brutal dictatorship. And he drives me as if I were an ox, with his double goad. — “Gee up! ass! sweat, you slave! damn you! Live!”
3. The elemental called a sylphide is a spirit of air. The reference here is to a loved adolescent girl imagined by Chateaubriand (the ‘great René’).
VI
To Each His Chimæra
Under a wide gray sky, in a great dusty plain, pathless, grassless, without so much as a thistle or a nettle, I came across some men walking, their shoulders bent.
Each carried on his back an enormous Chimæra, heavy as a sack of flour or charcoal, or a Roman foot-soldier’s pack.
But the monstrous beast was no dead weight; on the contrary, it enveloped and mauled its man with supple and powerful muscles; scratching with two enormous claws the chest of its mount. And its fabulous head surmounted the man’s, like one of those horrible helmets ancient warriors wore, hoping to increase the terror of their foes.
I questioned one of these men and asked him where they were going. He told me he didn’t know, nor did the others; but obviously they were going somewhere, since they were driven by an invincible need to go.
Curious to note: none of these travelers seemed annoyed by the fierce beast hanging at his neck and attached to his back; one must suppose he considered it a part of himself. All these faces, tired and serious, betrayed no despair; under the splenetic cupola of sky, feet sunk in the dust of a soil every bit as desolate as the sky, they trudged on, with the resigned faces of those condemned forever to hope.
And the cortege passed by me and sank into the atmosphere at the horizon, where the planet’s rounded surface renders it unavailable to human curiosity.
And for a few moments I persisted in trying to solve the mystery; but soon irresistible Indifference came over me, and I was more heavily burdened with it than they by their crushing Chimæras.
VII
The Fool and Venus
What a fine day! The vast park swoons under the burning eye of the sun, like youth