"O monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement!
O ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques."
This reading seems to me infinitely inferior to the reading of the first version.
Again, there are certain other changes, even less happy, such as "quadrature" into "nature," "divin élixir" into "comme un élixir," "Mon âme se balançait comme un ange joyeux," into "Mon cœur, comme un oiseau, voltigeant tout joyeux." Baudelaire, in sending a copy of Les fleurs du mal (1861) to Alfred de Vigny, wrote that he had marked the new poems in pencil in the list at the end of the book. In my copy—1857—he has marked, with infinite delicacy, in pencil, only three poems: "Lesbos," "Femmes Damnées," "Les Métamorphoses du Vampire." He underlines, in "Une Charogne," these words in the text: "charogne lubrique, cynique, ventre, d'exhalaisons." At one side of the prose note on "Franciscae meae laudes" he has made, on the margin, a number of arrows.
In Le Corsaire-Satan, January, 1848, Baudelaire reviewed three books of short stories by Champfleury. On the first, Chien-Caillou, he writes: "One day a quite small, quite simple volume, Chien Caillou, was printed; the history simply, clearly, crudely related, of a poor engraver, certainly original, but whose poverty was so extreme that he lived on carrots, between a rabbit and a girl of the town; and he made masterpieces," I have before me this book: "Chien-Caillou, fantaisies d'hiver. Par Champfleury. Paris, A la Libraire Pittoresque de Martinon, Rue du Coq-Saint-Martin, 1847," It is dedicated to Victor Hugo. "I dedicate to you this work, in spite of the fact that I have an absolute horror of dedications—because of the expression young man that it leaves in readers' minds. But you have been the first to signalize Chien-Caillou to your friends, and your luminous genius has suddenly recognized the reality of the second title: This is not a Story."
In the same year came out Le Gâteau des rois. Par M. Jules Janin. Ouvrage entièrement inédit. Paris. Libraire d'Amyot, 6 rue de la Paix, 1847. I have my own copy of this edition, bound in pale yellow-paper covers.
On January 26th, 1917, there came to me from Paris an original manuscript, written by Charles Baudelaire on three pages of note-paper, concerning these two books of Champfleury and Jules Janin. Being unfinished, it may have been the beginning of an essay which he never completed. Certainly I find no trace of this prose in any of his printed books. From the brown colour of the ink that he used I think it was written in 1857, as the ink and the handwriting are absolutely the same as in his signed Fleurs du mal sent to Champfleury. There are several revisions and corrections in the text of the MS. that I possess.
At the top of the first page are nearly obliterated the words: remplacez les blancs. It begins: "Pour donner immédiatement au lecteur non initié dans les dessous de la littérature, non instruit dans les préliminaires des réputations, une idée première de l'importance littéraire réille de ces petits livres, gros d'esprit, de poésie et d'observations, qu'il sache que le premier d'entre nous, Chien-Caillou, Fantaisies d'hiver, fut publié en même temps qu'un petit livre d'un homme très célèbre, qui avait, en même temps que Champfleury, l'idée de ces publications en trimestrielles." It ends: "Où est le cœur? Où est l'âme, où est la raison?"
Here is my translation:
"To convey to the reader who has not penetrated into the back-parlours of literature, who has not been instructed in the preliminaries of reputations, an immediate idea of the real literary importance of these little books, fat in wit, poetry, and observations, it should be stated that the first among them, Chien-Caillou. Fantaisies d'hiver, was published at the same time as another small book by a famous man who had, simultaneously with Champfleury, started these quarterly publications.
"Now, for these people whose intelligence, daily applied to the elaboration of books, is hardest to please, Champfleury's work absorbed that of the famous man. All those of whom I speak have known Le Gâteau des rois. Their profession is to know everything. Le Gâteau des rois, a kind of Christmas book, or 'Livre de Noël,' showed above all a clearly asserted pretention to draw from "the language, by playing infinite variations on the dictionary, all the effects which a transcendental instrumentalist draws from his chords. Shifting of forces, error of an unballasted mind! The ideas in this strange book follow each other in haste, dart with the swiftness of sound, leaning at random on infinitely tenuous connections. Their association with one another hangs by a thread according to a method of thought similar to that of people in Bedlam.