"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses
Vivre parmi les monuments;"
which he changes in the text of his Fleurs du mal into:
"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses
Moisir parmi les ossements."
The change makes an enormous improvement to the stanza.
To possess this manuscript written by Baudelaire is to possess one of the most magnificent poems he ever wrote: the whole thing is copied in a kind of unholy rapture, in a kind of evil perversion.
I. AN ADVENTURE IN FIRST EDITIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS
I am, fortunately, the possessor of a copy of the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. The title-page is as follows: LES FLEURS DU MAL || par Charles Baudelaire. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de Broise: || Libraire-Éditeurs. || 4 rue de Buci. || 1857.
This copy is signed, in brown Parisian ink: "à mon ami Champfleury, Ch. Baudelaire" His signature is fantastic: the B. curled backward like a snake's tail in an Egyptian hieroglyphic, the straight line like an enchanter's wand. It is "grand-12; 252 pages." It contains one hundred poems, the perfect number. It is printed on papier vergé. It is one of the twenty copies, thus specially printed, that Baudelaire ordered for himself and for certain of his friends. The rest of the edition was printed on common white paper. Taken as a whole, this is certainly one of the most perfectly printed books done in France, or anywhere, in the past century.
Poulet-Malassis came from Alençon to Paris, and began by printing the Odes Funambulesques of Théodore de Banville early in 1857, before he completed the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in July of that year. Baudelaire wrote to him, saying that he did not want popularity, "mais un bel éreintage général qui attirera la curiosité." He asked him to be sparing in blank spaces on the pages; and to use certain archaisms and touches of red. These touches of red are given on the title-page; they have a decorative effect. He said that he had a natural horror of the over-use of inverted commas, which have a way of spoiling the text. He must have a unique system of his own. "I must have," he insists, "in this kind of production, the one admissible thing, that is, perfection." There one sees his unerring instinct; his sense of the exact value of words. Yet he writes to his publisher, underlining the phrase: "You know certain things better than I do, but whenever there is, on my part, no radical repulsion, follow your taste." He rages against de Broise's perpetual reproaches with regard to les surcharges de M. Baudelaire—the "author's corrections." He points out certain printer's mistakes, page 44 for page 45, and guères rhyming with vulgaire. There was no time to correct these errors; they remain so in the printed pages of my copy.