On an Original Manuscript of Charles Baudelaire

ARTHUR SYMONS

IN Le Corsaire-Saten, 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. ChienCaillou, Fantasies d'Hiver. Par Champfleury. Paris. A la libraire Pittoresque de Martinon. Rue du CoqSaint-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 ChienCaillou to your friends and your luminous genius has suddenly recognized the reality of the second title: This is not. a story."

Nor is it much of a story; it has the merit of being youthful writing, of being singular, of giving an idea of Bohemian life. It begins: "Chien-Caillou lived in the rue des Noyers, near the place Maubert, a quarter where one is often hungry. He took on the seventh floor a small room at the price of 40 francs a year." The tragic end I give in French: "Le pauvre ChienCaillou n'est plus aujourd'hui un homme, un artiste, ni un graveur; il est le numero 13 de la Clinique."

IN the same year came out Le Gateau des Rois. Par M. Jules Janin. Ouvrage entierement inedit. Paris. Libraire d'Amyot, 6 rue de la Paix, 1847. It begins: "Ami Fabius, je t'ai bien entendu, l'autre soir, que tu te plaignais doucement, au coin du feu, que la poésie était morte." Then comes George Sand, "who shows to the sobbing ocean the pale image of Lelio who relates his sorrows." Then: "Where goes Diderot? Diderot said when alive: 'There is no God,' and Diderot, dead, still denies." It ends thus: "This is how, in this happy feast of the Kings of the poor people, there were no more left but happy people and that no one was a King!"

Can one conceive anything more unutterably bad, more intensely stupid, than such sentences as I have quoted? Janin was a formidable journalist, who dispraised the greatest of his contemporaries, praised the lesser ones; and was cursed by his inordinate fluency. I am glad to say that he raised the rage of Baudelaire by a venomous attack on Heine, in which he mixed up the names of living writers in an incoherent manner.

ON January 26th there came to me from Paris an original manuscript, written by Charles Baudelaire on three pages of notepaper, 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 Mai 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 reputations, une idee premiere de l'importance littéraire réille deces petits livres gros d'esprit, de poésie et d'observations, qu'il sache que le premier d'entre nous, Chien-Caillou, Fantasies d'Hiver, fut publie en meme temps qu'un petit livre d'un homme tres célèbre, qui avait, en meme temps que Champfleury l'idée de ces publications en trimestrielles " It ends: "Où est le coeur? Oil est Pâme, oil est la raison?"

Here is my translation:

"To give immediately to the reader uninitiated in the underclothes (les dessous) of Literature, uninstructed in the preliminaries of reputations, a direct idea of the literary importance of these little books pregnant with spirit, with poetry and with observations, let him know that the first of them, Chien-Caillou, Fantasies d'Hiver, was published at the same time as a little book of a very celebrated man, who had, at the same time as Champfleury, the idea of these quarterly publications. Now among men whose intelligence daily applied to the fabrication of books is more difficult to define than any other, .the book of Champfleury absorbed that of the celebrated man. All those of whom I speak know Le Gateau des Rois; they know it because they are obliged to know everything. Le Gateau des Rois, a kind of Christmas book {un livre de Noel) was certainly a clearly affirmed way of drawing from the tongue all the effects that a transcendent instrumentalist draws from his instrument—to play infinite variations on the dictionaries! Displacement of forces! error of a weak mind! For in this strange book, the ideas followed each other too hastily, spun with the rapidity of sound, relying on hazard for infinitely minute statements. They were connected together by an exquisitely thin string, after a method of thinking exactly analogous with that of people whom one shuts up for reasons of mental alienation; vast overflowing of involuntary ideas, steeple-chase {course au clocher), abnegation of the Will! This singular exploit was executed by the man you know of, whose unique and special fault is to be no more master of himself, the man of adventures and of good fortunes! No doubt, there was a certain talent in it; but what abuse! but what debauch! And besides, what fatigue and what misery! No doubt one must show some respect or at least some grateful compassion for that indefatigable writhing of the limbs of an old dancing woman; but alas! threadbare means! debased proceedings! wearisome coaxings! The ideas of our man are those of old mad girls who have danced too much, who have too much shown and too much lifted the leg! Sustalerunt Soepius pedes. Where is the heart: Where is the soul, the reason, in this—"

HERE the manuscript comes to an abrupt end, and one is left to wonder how much more he had written; perhaps only one more page; as his wont was to write fragments on bits of notepaper. Certainly this prose has the refinement, the satire, the exquisite use of words, the inimitable charm and unerring instinct of an almost faultless writer. Not only is there his passion for les danseuses, and for the exotic, but a sinister touch in Vabdication de la volonté which recurs finally in a letter written February 8, 1865; for, when one imagines himself capable of an absolute abdication of the will, it means that something of the man has gone out of him.