Les Fleurs du Mal

A man steps forward to address you, reader, and speaks to you at once with the intimacy of an old acquaintance: he knows you, he says, he knows your secret vices, your cowardice, your fantasies of violence you will never dare carry out, and above all he knows that you harbour within you a monster more hideous than all the rest — Ennui, that creature who would smoke the whole world away in a single yawn and swallow the earth without a second thought. Such is the book's opening: a poisoned handshake between poet and reader — brothers in wretchedness, accomplices in degradation.

Then comes the birth of the poet himself, a cursed child upon whom his mother gazes in horror, whom the world hounds with its mockery, whom the beloved woman tortures with methodical cruelty — yet who walks, through these ordeals, toward a crown of light that God alone weaves, unseen, above the tumult. For one instant the sky opens: the soul rises above the ponds, the valleys, the mountains, the clouds, beyond the sun and the ether, into those reaches where the air is so pure that no earthly miasma ascends, and up there it understands effortlessly the language of flowers and of mute things. For Nature is a temple whose living pillars sometimes let fall confused words: perfumes, colours and sounds answer one another in a dark and profound unity, and certain scents have the sweetness of children's flesh, the freshness of meadows, while others, corrupt, rich and triumphant, sing the raptures of the mind and the senses.

But the ascent does not last. The fall is the law of this world. The poet tumbles back into the city, into the mire, into the room where Ennui sits like a heavy lid upon the horizon. There are days when the low, leaden sky weighs down like a cover, when Hope, a bat, batters itself against rotting walls and damp ceilings, when the rain spreads its bars like those of a vast prison, and when bells leap with fury and hurl a hideous howl toward the sky. Funeral processions file, drumless and musicless, through the soul, and Hope lies vanquished and weeping, and Anguish plants its black flag upon the bowed skull. Four times Spleen returns to knock at the door, each time deeper, heavier, more irremediable — until the brain itself comes to resemble a vault teeming with worms, a graveyard where the moon sheds its sickly light.

Between these sieges of dejection the poet seeks remedies. There is, first of all, woman — women, rather, for they are several and must not be confused. One is dark-skinned, supple, fragrant with musk and Havana, and beside her the poet recovers distant shores where palm trees fan the warm air and ships rock to the harmonious swell of a languid sea. In her presence he travels without stirring, borne by her hair, her skin, her scent. But this idol has empty eyes and the cold cruelty of a magnificent beast, and the love she inspires resembles a descent into an abyss. There are also paler women, more learned in perversity, glacial and bitter, whose pleasure springs only from cruelty satisfied, who trample hearts beneath their pointed heels. With these, love is a battle, a duel in which the two lovers tumble into a ravine while nails and teeth scratch and bite. And then, far off and far above all this flesh, there hovers the phantom of an ideal woman, a Beatrice of light and fragrance, toward whom the poet reaches from the depths of his transgressions — but whom he never attains.

The gaze then turns to the city. Paris unfolds with its terrifying old men who loom up in sevens through the fog, all identical, sinister, hostile, as though hell were disgorging its dead in series. Little old women pass by, bent and tiny, trotting along the walls, and beneath their shawls, darned a thousand times, the poet discerns whole destinies of beauty, love and elegance ground to dust. A swan escaped from its cage drags its white plumage over the dry pavement of a street under repair, and this ridiculous, sublime swan becomes the emblem of every exile, of all who have lost what can never be recovered. A woman in deep mourning crosses the street amid the roar of traffic, and in a single flash of her gaze kindles a thunderbolt of love that the crowd instantly sweeps away — a fugitive beauty the poet knows he will never see again, unless in eternity.

Wine offers another refuge. It sings inside the bottles, promises the labourer strength and oblivion, grants the ragpicker dreams of glory, the lonely man a companion, the murderer a sleep free of remorse. But wine is merely one more artificial paradise, a lie that evaporates with the drunkenness, and the descent continues. Revolt rumbles then: prayers rise to Satan, fallen prince, most beautiful of angels, betrayed god, himself an exile, who at least understands the suffering of the vanquished. The litanies swell like a black office, and Saint Peter's denial rings out like the cry of all those whom heaven's silence has driven mad.

Death remains. The lovers lie down side by side on beds of flowers, seeking in the beyond the fulfilment that life refused them. The poor man calls to Death as a consoler who restores light to the eyes of the wretched. The artist hopes that on the other side of the tomb the designs his brain could never finish will at last blossom. And the whole book closes on a great departure: a ship weighs anchor for the only land not yet visited — Death, that old captain — and the poet cries that he would plunge to the depths of the Unknown to find something new — whether that abyss be Hell or Heaven, it matters not, so long as one discovers at last something never seen before.