And he praises the Decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre les négligences forcés d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des règles."
Don Juan aux enfers is a perfect Delacroix. In Danse macabre there is the universal swing of the dancers who dance the Dance of Death. Death herself, in her extreme horror, ghastly, perfumed with myrrh, mixes her irony with men's insanity as she dances the Sabbat of Pleasure. He shows us the infamous menagerie of the vices in the guise of reptiles; our chief enemy Ennui is ce monstre délicat. There are Vampires, agonies of the damned alive; Le possédé with his excruciating cry out of all his fibres: O mon cher Belzébuth! je t'adore! And there are some, subtler and silent, that seem to move, softly, as the feet of Night, to the sound of faint music, or under the shroud of a sunset.
Les fleurs du mal are grown in Parisian soil, exotics that have the strange, secretive, haunting touch and taint of the earth's or of the body's corruption. In his sense of beauty there is a certain revolt, a spiritual malady, which may bring with it the heated air of an alcove or the intoxicating atmosphere of the East. Never since Villon has the flesh of woman been more adored and abhorred. Both aware of the original sin of l'unique animál—the seed of our moral degradation—Villon creates his Grosse Margot and Baudelaire Delphine et Hippolyte. Villon's is a scullion-wench, and in the Ballad a Brothel as infamous, as foul, as abominable as a Roman Lupanar surges before one's astonished vision. And this comes after his supreme, his consummate praise of ruinous old age on a harlot's body: Les regrets de la Belle Heaulmière. It is one of the immortal things that exist in the world, that I can compare only with Rodin's statue in bronze: both equal incarnations of the symbolical conception that sin brought shame into the first woman's flesh.
"Que m'en reste-il? Honte et Péché:"
cries each mouth, cries to the end of earth's eternity.
In Baudelaire's Femmes damnées there is the aching soul of the spirit's fatal malady: that sexual malady for which there is no remedy: the Lesbian sterile perilous divinisation of flesh for flesh, virginal or unvirginal flesh with flesh. In vain desire, of that one desire that exists beyond all possible satisfaction, the desire of an utter annihilation of body with body in that ecstasy which can never be absolutely achieved without man's flesh, they strive, unconsumed with even the pangs of their fruitless desires. They live only with a life of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome bounds of nature into the violence of a perversity which is at times almost insane. And all this sorrowful and tortured flesh is consumed with that feverish desire that leaves them only a short space for their desire's fruitions.
Les fleurs du mal, 1857.
II
Certain of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a serpentine girl's skin; some the odour of woman's flesh. Certain spirits are intoxicated by these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of their vices, from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a cruel imagination has fashioned these naked images of the Seven Deadly Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall; that smile not even in Hell, in whose flames they writhe. One conceives them there and between the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages; they are incapable of imagining God's justice.