[273] Paul Bourget, Essais de Psychologie contemporaine. Paris, 1883, p. 28.
[274] Ibid., pp. 12, 13.
[275] Verworn employs the word ‘chemotropism.’
[276] Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. xiv., p. 70. Article on the complete poems of Théodore de Banville. October 12th, 1857.
[277] Barbey d’Aurevilly, Goethe et Diderot. Paris, 1882.
[278] J. K. Huysmans, A Rebours. 4ème mille. Paris, 1892, p. 251.
[279] Paul Bourget, op. cit., p. 6: ‘He is a libertine, and depraved visions amounting to Sadism disturb the very man who comes to worship the raised finger of his Madonna. The morose orgies of the vulgar Venus, the heady fumes of the black Venus, the refined delights of the learned Venus, the criminal audacity of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their memories in the most spiritualized of his poems. An offensive odour of vile alcoves escapes from these ... verses....’ And p. 19: ‘... It is not so with the mystic soul—and that of Baudelaire’s was one. For this soul did not content itself with a faith in an idea. It saw God. He was for it not a word, not a symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being, in whose company the soul lived as we live with a father who loves us.’
[280] Théophile Gautier, who was himself a member of a hashish club, tries to make us believe (Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 57 et seq.), that Baudelaire was addicted to the use of narcotic poisons only with the object of ‘physiological experiment’; but we know the tendency of the degenerate to represent the impulsions of which they are ashamed as acts of free will, for which they have all sorts of palliating explanations.
[281] Dr. E. Régis, Manuel pratique de Médecine mentale. 2e édition. Paris, 1892, p. 279.
[282] Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 5—‘le culte de soi-même.’ This is Théophile Gautier’s own term.