"Besides, it seems to me there is little enough reason why this dedication should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the writer's satisfaction, that any kind of book ought to be understood, except by him or by her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed, indispensable that it has been written for any one? I have, for my part, so little taste for the living world that, like certain sensible and stay-at-home women who send, I am told, their letters to imaginary friends by the post, I would willingly write only for the dead.
"But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it is to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who now turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a living being enjoys the privilege of being able to draw new and subtle pleasures even from sorrow, from catastrophe, and from fatality.
"You will see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped his sweating forehead and refreshed his lips parched by fever; and you will divine the gratitude of another Orestes, whose nightmares you have so often watched over, and whose unendurable slumbers you dissipated, with a light and tender hand."
I have to say that in the last sentences I have translated Baudelaire uses "tu" instead of "vous," and that he does the same in his Latin verses and in the verses next after it. The question still remains: who was the woman of the initials?
What is certainly not a solution of the unfathomable mystery of this enigmatical woman, but which is, in a certain sense, a clue, I find on pages 55-67 of the book I have referred to, a narrative that seems more than likely to have been hers. He says this to make one understand better the mixture of dreams and hallucinations in haschisch, as having been sent him by a woman: "It is a woman, rather a mature woman, curious, of an excitable spirit, who, having yielded to the temptation of using the drug, describes her visions." These are superb and fantastic visions, written by an imaginative, sensitive, and suggestive woman. She begins: "However bizarre and astonishing are these sensations that intoxicated my folly for twelve hours (twelve or twenty? I don't know which) I shall never return to them. The spiritual excitement is too vivid, the fatigue too much to endure, and, to say all, in this childish enchantment I find something criminal." She adds: "I have heard that the enthusiasm of poets and of creators is not unlike what I have experienced, in spite of the fact that I have always imagined that such men whose delight is to move us ought to be of a really calm temperament; but if poetical delirium has any resemblance with what a little teaspoon full of drugged jam has given me, I think that all such pleasures cost dear to poets, and it is not without a certain prosaic satisfaction that I return to real life."
In these sentences Baudelaire gives one a certain clue as to the identity of this woman. "But, above all, observe that in this woman's story the hallucination is of a bastard kind, and whose reason of being is to be an exterior spectacle; the mind is no more than a mirror where the surrounding environment is transformed in an extraordinary fashion. Besides, we see intervene what I must call the moral hallucination: the subject believes he is subjected to an expiation, but the feminine temperament, which is little accustomed to analysis, does not permit itself to note the singularly optimistic character of this hallucination. The benevolent regard of the Olympian Divinities is poetized by a kind of varnish essentially haschischin. I cannot say that this woman has escaped from the sense of remorse; but that her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and of regret, have returned to their former sensibility."
I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra, to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by the same woman to whom Le paradis is dedicated. Like Orestes, he might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words: "And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now, how I keep the watches of the night—how often I bewail my hapless sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J. G. F.'s?
In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed: Théophile Gautier, par Charles Baudelaire; a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant: "Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French language, even l'Argot.
Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac.
"Not for the first," he says, in his Study of Shakespeare, "and probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.