TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Paul Bourget (1852–1935) played a crucial role in the

intellectual and literary scene in France at the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth as a novelist, poet, and literary critic; he was elected to the
Académie française at the age of forty-two (in the same year Émile Zola received not a
single a vote). A number of Bourget’s contemporaries credited him with “discovering”
Stendhal and Baudelaire, whose works had not received wide recognition during their
author’s lifetimes; deeply interested in psychology, he similarly helped to introduce
Freud to his contemporaries. Early in his career Bourget was a frequent contributor to
numerous periodicals devoted to literature and the arts, including La Revue des deux
mondes, Le Globe, L’Illustration, and La Nouvelle Revue. Having abandoned literary
criticism for the psychological novel and novella, he had a determinative influence on
an entire generation of young writers and readers, who eagerly awaited each of his
books; many critics felt that he was destined to be remembered as one of the great
novelists of the turn of the last century. His return to Catholicism in 1901 contributed
to an increasingly moralizing tone in his writing and nascent reactionary views that
did not always sit well with his erstwhile admirers, and his sympathies late in life with
the emerging Action Française further discredited him. Today Paul Bourget is
remembered, if at all, as a critic and theorist, and in particular for the Essais de
psychologie contemporaine (1883–85), in which he defines and analyzes the influence
of the authors and literary movements that marked his generation, while drawing
attention to the precursors of modernity and the mal du siècle to be found in
romanticism, and to the profound pessimism that asserts itself in the writings of the
seventeenth-century moralists. Also of possible interest to American readers today
is Outre-Mer, journals of his 1893 visit to the United States, a work derided in
inimitable fashion by Mark Twain.
The ten essays that make up the Essais de psychologie contemporaine first appeared
in La Nouvelle Revue between 1881 and 1885 as “Psychologie contemporaine—Notes
et portraits.” A first volume—containing this study of Baudelaire, as well as essays on
Renan, Flaubert, Taine, and Stendhal—was published in 1883 (Paris, Lemerre); the
second, containing studies of Alexandre Dumas fils, Leconte de Lisle, the Goncourt
brothers, Turgenev, and Amiel, appeared in 1885 as Nouveaux Essais de psychologie
contemporaine (Paris, Lemerre). Bourget’s piece on Baudelaire is remarkable for its
analysis of the psychological origins of the spleen to which the poet gives expression
in Les Fleurs du mal, and for the critic’s compelling definition of decadence, a literary
movement which had yet to be codified. As will soon become clear, for Bourget
neither social nor personal corruption excludes the possibility of the highest aesthetic
achievement.
Included below, in addition to the pages on Baudelaire, is a study of Benjamin
Constant’s Adolphe, first appended to the essay in the 1899 edition of
Bourget’s Œuvres complètes (Paris, Plon), that sheds light on what Bourget
characterizes as Baudelaire’s “moral malady." —Nancy O'Connor

Paul Bourget
_____

The Example of Baudelaire

To read Les Fleurs du mal when one is seventeen, when one cannot recognize the
element of mystification that transforms ideas in and of themselves merely
exceptional into provocative paradoxes, is to enter a world of impressions previously
unknown. There are spiritual guides more precise in their teachings than Baudelaire:
Taine, for instance, and Henri Beyle [Stendhal]. There is none more suggestive or
more fascinating.
And your eyes as alluring as those of a portrait . . . he wrote of one of those guilty
women whose magic seduced him. Something of that magnetism and of that gaze
permeates his verse, caressing and mysterious, half-ironic, half-plaintive. His stanzas
haunt the imagination, nag at it with an almost painful persistency. He excels at
beginning a piece with words at once tragically and sentimentally solemn, words one
will not forget:

What matters it to me if you be good!

Be beautiful and be sad . . .

And elsewhere:

You who, like the stab of a knife,

Entered my plaintive heart . . .

And yet elsewhere:

Like pensive cattle stretched out on the sand

They turn their gaze toward the infinite seas . . .

Through temperament and rhetoric, Charles Baudelaire floats a hazy halo of

strangeness about his poems, convinced as he is, like the aesthete of “The Raven,” that
beauty is always singular, and that surprise is the condition of the poetic spell. And a
spell it is, for those not put off by this art’s complexities. The effect is comparable to
what one feels in the presence of faces painted by Leonardo, owing to the relief and
shading of the tones that cast a veil of mystery over the shape of a smile. A dangerous
curiosity requires one’s attention and invites one to endless daydreams before the
enigmas of this painter or poet. In time, the enigma gives up its secret, and
Baudelaire’s is a secret shared by more than one of us. There is a good chance it will
become that of any young man who revels in these texts, so ripe with revelations.

1. LOVE AND THE ANALYTICAL MIND

In Baudelaire there is first of all a particular conception of love. It might be

characterized fairly precisely with three adjectives, as disparate as our society:
Baudelaire, in his love poetry, is at one and the same time mystical, libertine, and
analytical. He is mystical, and a face as ideal as that of a Madonna constantly pervades
the dark or bright hours of his days, recalling the presence, in some other universe of
which ours would be only a rough and tattered sketch, of a woman’s spirit, “lucid and
pure,” of an ever-desirable and ever-beneficent soul:

She suffuses my life

Like salt-fragrant air,
And into my parched soul
She pours the taste of the Eternal . . .

He is libertine, and images depraved to the point of sadism disturb the same man
who has just worshiped his Madonna’s raised finger. The dreary intoxication of the
ordinary Venus, the heady ardors of the black Venus, the refined pleasures of the wise
Venus, the criminal daring of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their mark on his most
spiritual poems. A squalid hovel’s nauseous fumes seep from these two lines of the
magnificent “Crépuscule du matin”:

The ladies of the night, livid of lid,

Open-mouthed, slept their unthinking sleep . . .

The burnished ebony face of a friend with teeth of ivory and wiry hair, appears to
have inspired this tender litany:

I worship you as I worship night’s canopy,

Oh fount of sadness, oh silent one . . .

Pagan priestesses would have recognized a follower of their clandestine festivities

in the description of the bedchamber—shut down by the authorities—where
Hippolyte wearily rests:

In the livid light of the dwindling lamp,

On the deep redolent cushions . . .

And the most powerful poem in the collection—in my opinion, at least—“Une

Martyre,” could carry as its epigraph the sinister sentence with which the author of La
Philosophie dans le boudoir proposed to label one of the rooms of his little dream-
house: Here there is torture! . . .

Alive, in spite of all your love,

You could not satisfy the vindictive one;
Did he then sate his immense desire
On your inert and acquiescing flesh?

Throughout such madness, in which the thirst for an infinite purity mingles with
the all-consuming hunger for the most voluptuous carnal pleasure, the analyst’s
intellect is still cruelly in control. He is an Adolphe, as incapable of forgetfulness as his
model. His mind encodes both mysticism and debauchery into formulae, breaking
down its sensations with the precision of a prism separating light. His thought process
remains unimpaired, affected neither by the fever that burns in the blood nor the
ecstasy that spawns demons. Three men live as one in him, combining their feelings
better to express from the heart the last drop of red-hot lymph. These three men are
very modern, and more modern yet is their union. The crisis of religious faith, Parisian
life, and the scientific mind of the period combined to fashion, then to meld, these
three types of sensitivity, long thought to be so distinct as to have nothing whatsoever
in common. Yet here they are, linked to the point of seeming inseparable, at least in
this unprecedented creature that was Baudelaire.
The origins, or rather the successive layers, that made up this soul are therefore
easy to determine, simply by looking around us. Can one not still find, in our impious
century, enough Catholicism for a child’s soul to become imbued with mystical love of
an unforgettable intensity? Faith will fade, but mysticism, even once expelled from the
conscious mind, will persist in sensation. The trappings of the sacred surge up for
Baudelaire in dusk’s obscure moments, with a subtlety that shows how deeply the
first tremor of prayer had taken possession of his heart.* The memory never
disappeared. For him the fragrance of flowers very naturally dissipates as “incense.” A
beautiful sky is an “altar.” The setting sun is a “monstrance.” If man no longer feels the
same intellectual need to believe, he has kept the need to feel as he did when he
believed. Doctors of mysticism had remarked on this persistence of religious
sensibility in the midst of the collapse of religious thought. They termed this the cult
of latria—idololatry, whence idolatry—identifying the passionate surge by which man
transfers to some creature or other, to some object or other, the exalted ardor that he
has turned away from God. One can find in Baudelaire strange examples of this cult;
thus the usage of liturgical terminology to address a mistress and celebrate a
voluptuous pleasure:

I wish to build for you Madonna, my mistress,

An underground altar in the depths of my misery . . .

Or yet again that curious “prose,” wrought in the style of the Latin decadence, that
he called “Franciscae meae laudes,” and dedicated to “an erudite and devout fashion
designer.” What would for anyone else be blasphemy, or exploitation, is in Baudelaire
an operation that I would term instinctive, if the word “instinctive” could be applied to
subtleties apparently so far removed from instinct. But is not complexity innate in
certain beings, just as simplicity is in others?
His libertine tastes, on the other hand, were developed in Paris. One finds all the
accoutrements of Parisian vice in most of his poems, just as one finds all the
accoutrements of Catholic ritual. One can see that he frequented some of the most
sordid lairs in the shameless city, one can only guess in pursuit of what risky
adventures. He supped with painted women, their mouths scarlet gashes in ceruse
masks. He slept in brothels, and knew the rancor of broad daylight that revealed the
faded curtains and the even more faded face of the bought woman. In search of the
most intense sensations, with a lubricious ruthlessness that verges on mania, he
pursued the visceral, mindless spasm that rises from the nerve endings to the brain
and, for a brief moment, relieves the pain of thought. And at the same time he engaged
in conversations on every street corner in this intellectual and depraved city. He led
the life of the literary figure who is always observing, and he kept—but what am I
saying?—he honed the edge of his mind where others would have dulled theirs
forever. Out of this triple effort was born, along with the conception of a love at once
mystical, sensual, and supremely intelligent, the bitterest and most corrosive surge of
spleen to have sprung from a human soul in a very long time.

II. BAUDELAIRE'S PESSIMISM

It was Lamennais who exclaimed one day: “My soul was born wounded.” Baudelaire
could have applied the observation to himself: he belonged to a race condemned to
misfortune. He is perhaps the author to whose name the term “unhealthy” has most
often been attached. The term is appropriate, if by it one means that passions of the
kind we have just mentioned are hard-put to find circumstances matching their
extreme demands: there is a dissonance between the man and his setting, a
dissonance that produces a moral crisis and a tortured heart. But the term “unhealthy”
is inaccurate and becomes unjustified if it implies a total and irrevocable
condemnation of the poet. His sensitivity was unfortunate, but it was not the arbitrary
and willful complacency in the presence of corruption that his enemies have claimed
to recognize. Baudelaire endures his temperament, he does not choose it. It is
appropriate here to quote Faust’s compelling remark “even Hell has its laws,”
understood in its fundamental Goethean sense: that the greatest revolts against
nature are bound up in nature. They have causes that determine them, they have an
evolution, they have a limit. In this sense, every anomaly has its norm, every artifice
its spontaneous aspect. The simple intoxications of Daphnis and Chloe in their vale
were no more natural to them than his dreams of love were to Baudelaire, as we have
defined and situated him, in the boudoir he describes as furnished with such a need
for melancholy sensuality:

The ornate ceilings,

The deep mirrors,
Oriental splendor
All would speak
Secretly to the soul
Its sweet native tongue . . .

It can be said that in the psychological as in the physiological order sickness is as

logical, as necessary, and consequently as natural as is health. It is different in that it
leads to suffering and to instability as inevitably as health leads to harmony and to joy.
But it can also be said—so as not to make well-being the ultimate test in matters of the
soul—that there is sometimes more idealism in such suffering than in happiness. In all
likelihood combinations of complex ideas will not encounter the circumstances
favorable to their complication, but does that prove that circumstances are always
right? One whose habits have led to a dream of happiness made up of many excluded
possibilities suffers from a reality he cannot shape to his liking: “The force whereby a
man persists in existing is limited, it is infinitely surpassed by the power of external
causes.” This proposition from the Ethics certainly does not justify the aberrations of
the senses to which Baudelaire was impelled, like so many others, by the desire to
achieve his inner dream. It does, on the other hand, explain the poet’s sadness and his
intrinsic humanity. He himself was all too conscious of it, since he called an entire
section of his book “Spleen et Idéal.” He knew all too well that a highly civilized
creature must not ask that things be as his heart wishes them to be, a concurrence all
the rarer when the heart is unusually refined. If he did not attempt to struggle to cure
himself, it is because he saw in his misery an irresistible and universal order of things;
and in the face of such evidence he sank into what the Ancients had already termed
taedium vitae.
Of course this taedium vitae—?this ennui, to give it its modern name—in its tragic
sense, has always been the secret maggot of fulfilled lives. But how is it that this
“delicate monster”* has never howled its woe more forcefully than in the literature of
our century, when there are so many improvements to living conditions, unless those
very improvements, as they add complexity to our souls, make us incapable of
happiness? Those who believe in progress have been unwilling to take note of the
terrible price we pay for our greater security and our better education. They have
thought they detected in the darkening of our literature a passing effect of our age’s
social upheavals, as if other, more severe upheavals in our private destinies had not,
for all our generation’s leaders, resulted in the same inability to attain happiness. Did
not Baudelaire see things more clearly when he considered a certain brand of
melancholy the inevitable product of a divide between our needs as civilized beings
and the reality of external causes and conditions? Proof that he did is that, from one
end of Europe to the other, contemporary society exhibits the same symptoms,
varying according to race, of this melancholy and this dissonance. A universal nausea
provoked by the world’s inadequacies affects the heart of Slavs, Germans, and Latins.
It takes the form of nihilism in the first, of pessimism in the second, of solitary and
unaccountable neuroses in ourselves. Do not the murderous rage of the Saint
Petersburg conspirators, the works of Schopenhauer, the wrathful fires of the
Commune, and the driven misanthropy of naturalist novelists—I have purposely
chosen the most disparate examples—share the same negative attitude towards life
that each day casts more darkness over Western civilization? Granted, we are far from
the planet’s suicide, that fondest desire of doomsayers. But slowly, surely, the
conviction is growing that nature is bankrupt, a conviction that threatens to become
the sinister faith of the twentieth century if no renewal comes about to save over-
thinking humanity from its own thought—a renewal that could only take the form of a
religious upsurge.
It would make a most interesting and unprecedented chapter in comparative
psychology to trace, stage by stage, the course taken by the various European races
towards this definitive negation of all human effort over the centuries. One would
have to believe that from the half-Asiatic blood of the Slavs a deadly vapor rises to
their brain that impels them towards destruction, as towards a kind of sacred orgy.
Turgenev said of militant nihilists: “They believe in nothing, but they seek martyrdom
. . .” Germans, in spite of their practical positivism, need a long series of metaphysical
speculations on the unconscious causes of phenomena to articulate the sorry inanity
of the totality of these same phenomena. For the French—and this in spite of the
extraordinary change in our national temperament in the last one hundred years—
pessimism is but a painful exception, in truth more and more frequent, but always
arising from the sense of an exceptional destiny. Only individual reflection leads some
of us, in spite of our hereditary optimism, to the highest level of negativity; Baudelaire
is one of the most outstanding cases of this individual endeavor: he can be cited as the
perfect exemplar of the Parisian pessimist, two terms that would at one time have
seemed strangely mismatched. Critics today link them together constantly.
To begin with, he is a pessimist, which distinguishes him sharply from sensitive
skeptics such as Alfred de Vigny. He has the deadly thrust, the satanic lightning-bolt,
as Christians would say: a horror of Being, and a taste—indeed a voracious appetite—
for Nothingness. One finds in Baudelaire the Hindu Nirvana, rediscovered at the root
of modern neuroses and then summoned forth, with the bursts of irritability of one
whose ancestors were men of action, instead of being contemplated with the solemn
serenity of a son of the torrid sun:

Unhappy soul, once so fond of battle,

Hope, whose spur once urged you on,
Will no longer mount you. Lie down without shame,
Old horse who stumbles at every obstruction.
Resign yourself, my heart, give in to brutish sleep . . .

One must most particularly read, and closely, the pieces in the Fleurs du mal
numbered lxxviii [I have more memories than if I were a thousand . . .], lxxix [I am like
the king of a rainy land . . .], lxxx [When the lowering sky weighs down like a lid . . .],
and all entitled “Spleen”; the penultimate stanza of the piece numbered xc entitled
“Madrigal triste”; and the whole of the text that appears at the end of the collection,
“Le Voyage”:

Lest we forget the most important thing,

We have seen everywhere, and without searching,
From the top to the bottom of the fateful scale,
The tedious spectacle of immortal sin . . .

From these lines no longer emanate the rueful plaint that mourns happiness lost,
nor desire’s lament for a happiness that is unattainable, but the bitter and definitive
imprecation the vanquished spirit spits out at existence as he sinks into irrevocable
nihilism, here in the French sense of the term. And one need only revisit one by one
the psychological elements we have identified as having influenced the poet’s concept
of love to retrace the history of the “will to nothingness” of the rebellious Catholic,
who has become an analyzing libertine.
Baudelaire was raised a Catholic, and the world of spiritual truths was revealed to
him. For many, this revelation is of no consequence. They believed in God in their
youth, but superficially. They did not know Him as a personal and living God. For
them, intellectual faith is sufficient, an abstract faith that lends itself to all sorts of
transformations. They need a set of beliefs, not a vision. For the initial belief in God
they substitute a belief in Liberty, or Revolution, or Socialism, or Science. Every day
each one of us can recognize this kind of transformation in himself and in others. Such
is not the case for the mystical soul—and Baudelaire’s was one of these. For this soul,
when it believed, was not satisfied with faith in an idea. It saw God. God was, for
Baudelaire, not a word, not a symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being in whose
company the soul lived as we live with a loving father who knows us, who
understands us. This emotion was so precious and so strong that when it vanished it
left no room for lesser substitutes. When one has known the intoxication of opium,
that of wine seems nauseating and trivial. Disappearing in contact with the times, faith
left in souls like these a breach through which all pleasures escaped. Such was
Baudelaire’s fate. Only consider the contempt with which he treats the second-rank
faithful, those who make Humanity or Progress their God. What could be more natural
than his feeling of emptiness in the face of a world where he searches in vain for a
concrete Ideal that corresponds to what is left of his dream of transcendence? A
frantic quest for stimulants is then the only means to fill or to deceive this emptiness.
Stimulants such as the writings, exalting and fanciful as hashish, of authors such as
Proclus, Swedenborg, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas de Quincey, all those who have
celebrated the flight of the soul “anywhere, out of this world”; stimulants such as
hashish, with the exalting effect of such writings. One who thirsts for lost infinity
needs an “artificial paradise” for lack of faith in a real one; or, in his darkest hours, he
endeavors to return to the mystical world by way of horror. But the unbelieving soul
comes back drained from these excursions, more persuaded than ever that religion is
nothing but the individual and misleading dream of one who contemplates his own
desire in nature’s void. No anxiety is greater for a mystic than to arrive at the
recognition that his need to believe is entirely subjective, that his long-ago faith arose
from within him and was of his own making! And against the sky’s empty backdrop
appears the fearsome and consoling figure that will free him of all forms of servitude
and deliver him from all doubts: Death,

Who wanders, like a prince inspecting his dwelling,

The immense, cold, endless graveyard,
Where lie, in the light of a wan, dull sun,
The denizens of ancient and modern times.

This same nihilism is the final stage in Baudelaire’s particular form of analytical
dissolution. A handful of poets, Musset first and foremost, have recounted how
destructive of love debauchery is. Baudelaire delved further into the darkness of the
human soul when he exposed how destructive debauchery is of pleasure. Granted,
painful and distressing pleas for an unachievable sentimental emotion rise up from
the core of any creature born for nobility and who has misused his senses: In the sated
beast an angel awakes . . .
There is, moreover, the ominous inability to procure for those overwrought senses
even a single complete throb of pleasure. An indescribable nuance of spleen, here a
physical spleen, as if stemming from blood’s exhaustion, settles over the libertine who
is no longer capable of arousal. His imagination grows febrile, he dreams of pain, and
of causing pain, to obtain that intimate tremor that would be absolute and total
ecstasy. The strange madness that produced Nero and Heliogabalus tears at his heart.
“Destruction’s bloody machine”* is all that can briefly revive the fever of a sensuality
that will never be sated. This is the man of decadence, who has held fast to an
incurable nostalgia for his ancestors’ beautiful dreams, and who by precocious
excesses has destroyed in himself the roots of life. And because we see the world only
through the prism of our own secret needs, he casts a still-lucid eye on the incurable
misery of his destiny, and so judges all destinies to be incurably miserable.

III. A THEORY OF DECADENCE

If a very particular shade of love, if a new manner of articulating pessimism, makes

Baudelaire’s mind a rare psychological instrument, what sets him apart in the
literature of our own time is that he fully perceived that particularity and that
newness and daringly exaggerated them. He realized that he had come late to a
senescent civilization, and, instead of bemoaning his belatedness, as did La Bruyère
and Musset*, he reveled in it—I was about to say he wore it as a badge of honor. He
was a man of decadence; he chose to become a theorist of decadence. This is perhaps
the most troubling aspect of this troubling being, and the aspect that has proven to be
perhaps the most disturbingly seductive for the spirit.**
The word “decadence” is often used to designate the state of a society that produces
too few individuals suited to the labors of communal life. A society is comparable to a
living organism: like an organism, it consists of a collection of lesser organisms, which
in turn consist of a collection of cells. The individual is the social cell. For the whole
organism to function energetically, the lesser organisms must function energetically,
but with a lesser energy; and, for these lesser organisms to function energetically,
their component cells must function energetically, but with a lesser energy. If the cells’
energy becomes independent, the organisms that make up the total organism
similarly cease subordinating their energy to the total energy, and the subsequent
anarchy leads to the decadence of the whole. The social organism does not escape this
law: it succumbs to decadence as soon as the individual has begun to thrive under the
influence of acquired well-being and heredity. The very same rule governs the
development and the decadence of another organism, language. A decadent style is
one in which the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the
page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence,
and the sentence makes way for the word. There are innumerable examples in current
literature to corroborate this hypothesis and justify this analogy.
In order to evaluate decadence, the critic can adopt two perspectives, so different as
to be antithetical. In the presence of a society that is disintegrating—the Roman
Empire, for instance—he can, from the first of these perspectives, consider the social
effort as a whole and bear witness to its inadequacy. A society can subsist only
provided it remains capable of struggling vigorously for survival in the rivalry among
the races. It must produce many sturdy children and muster many brave soldiers. If
analyzed, these two formulae encompass all virtues, both private and public. Roman
society produced few children; consequently it could no longer muster soldiers for the
nation. Citizens had little use for the vexations of paternity, and they hated the
crudeness of military life. Linking effects to causes, the critic who examines this
society from a general point of view concludes that a discriminating pursuit of
pleasure, a subtle skepticism, the exacerbation of the senses, the inconstancy of
dilettantism, were the social wounds of the Roman Empire, and will in any other
circumstance be the social wounds destined to destroy the entire organism. So reason
politicians and moralists, who take an interest in the amount of energy the social
machine can produce. The point of view of the pure psychologist will be different, for
he will consider the machine in detail, and not in its overall operation. He will find that
this individual independence rewards his curiosity with more interesting examples
and more strikingly singular “cases.” His line of reasoning will be approximately the
following: “If the citizens of decadence are inferior contributors to the greatness of the
country, are they not, on the other hand, very superior artists within their own souls?
If they are ill-suited to private or public action, is that not owing to their being too
accomplished as solitary thinkers? If they are poor procreators of future generations,
is it not because the abundance of delicate sensations and exquisitely rare sentiments
have made of them sterile but refined masters of voluptuousness and pain? If they are
incapable of the sacrifices of deep faith, is it not because their overly-cultivated
intelligence has rid them of prejudices, and that after having reviewed all ideas they
have attained that supreme equity that legitimates all doctrines by excluding all
fanaticisms? Certainly, an eleventh-century Germanic leader was more capable of
invading the Empire than a Roman patrician was of defending it; but the erudite and
perceptive Roman, curious and without illusions—someone like the emperor Hadrian,
for instance, the Caesar who loved Tibur—represented a richer treasure of human
accomplishment. The great argument against decadences is that they have no future,
and that barbarity crushes them. But is it not the inevitable fate of what is exquisite
and rare to succumb to brutality? One might well prize such a failing, and prefer the
defeat of decadent Athens to the triumph of the sanguinary Macedonian.”
My imaginary psychologist would reason similarly concerning decadent literature.
He would say: “These literatures have no future either. They lead to alterations of
vocabulary, and subtleties of terminology, that will make this style unintelligible to
coming generations. In fifty years the language of the Goncourt brothers, for instance,
will be incomprehensible to anyone but experts. What matter? Is the aim of the writer
to be a perpetual candidate for the universal suffrage of the ages? We delight in what
you call our corrupt style, and we delight all those who belong to our refined race and
to our time. It remains to be seen whether our exceptionality is not a form of
aristocracy, and whether, in matters of esthetics, the plurality of voices represents
anything but a victory of ignorance. Besides the fact that it seems ingenuous to believe
in immortality, when the time is drawing near that man’s memory, overburdened by
the prodigious number of books, will no longer honor glory, it is a fraud not to have
the courage of one’s intellectual pleasure. Let us therefore indulge our peculiarities of
ideal and of form, though they become our solitary prison, shunned by visitors. Those
who are drawn to us will truly be our brothers, and what use is it to sacrifice to others
what is most intimate, most special, most personal to us?”
Both points of view, as one can see, have their logic, at least at first glance, for the
study of history and life’s experience teach us that there is a reciprocal action of
society on the individual, and that when we isolate our energy we deprive ourselves of
the benefit of that action. Family, not the individual, is the real social cell. For the
individual, to subordinate his needs is not only to serve society, it is to serve himself.
This is the great truth discovered and put into practice by Goethe. A young artist
rarely grasps it; ordinarily he will hesitate between the revolt of his individuality and
adaptation to his surroundings—but in this very hesitation one can foresee the
prudence of future renunciations. Yet some have the courage to adhere resolutely to
the second of the perspectives we have set forth, even though they might regret it
later. As for Baudelaire, he had the courage in his youth to adopt this attitude, and the
temerity to hold to it until the end. He declared himself decadent, he sought out—and
with what swaggering determination!—everything in life and in art that seems
morbid and artificial to simpler souls. His favorite sensations are those aroused by
smells, because more than any other they stir up that sensually gloomy and sorrowful
je ne sais quoi we all carry within us. His preferred season is the end of autumn, when
a melancholy charm casts its spell on the muddled sky and the anxious heart. The
hours of his predilection are the evening hours, when the sky, like the background in
Lombard paintings, takes on tints of faded pink and dying green. A woman is beautiful
to him only when immature and almost repellently thin, as elegant as a skeleton
revealed beneath adolescent flesh, or else overripe and sinking into a raddled
maturity:

And your heart, like a bruised peach,

Is ripe, as is your body, for skillful love.

Caressing and languid music, unusual furnishings, singular paintings, are the
necessary accompaniment to his dejected or harshly illuminating thoughts, “morbid
or petulant,” as he puts it. His bedside readings are the authors I cited earlier,
exceptional writers who, like Edgar Poe, placed such demands on their nerves that
they became demented, declaimers of a shadow-filled life, their tongue “already
marbled with the iridescences of decomposition.”* Wherever there shimmers what he
terms, with an unavoidable strangeness, “the phosphorescence of decay,” he feels
himself drawn by an irresistible attraction. At the same time, his intense contempt for
the plebeian explodes in outrageous paradoxes and far-fetched mystifications. In this
latter connection, those who knew him tell extraordinary stories. All allowances made
for myth, still it is undeniable that this superior individual had something disturbing
and enigmatic about him, even for his closest friends. His painful irony excoriated
stupidity and naïveté, the foolishness of innocence and the folly of sin, with the same
scorn. A hint of this irony is detectable in some of the finest pieces in Les Fleurs du
mal; and for many readers, even the shrewdest, the fear of being duped by a charlatan
of Satanism prevents whole-hearted admiration.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the difficulties that make his work virtually
inaccessible to many, Baudelaire remains one of the favorite guides of the coming
generation. It is not enough to deplore his influence, as some critics, including
luminaries like Edmond Scherer, have done. One must acknowledge that influence,
and explain it. It is not as easily recognizable as that of a Balzac or a Musset, because it
acts on a small group. But the members of that group are highly distinguished minds:
poets of tomorrow, novelists already dreaming of glory, promising essayists.
Indirectly and through them some of the psychological singularities that we have tried
to identify here penetrate to a wider public; and is the moral atmosphere of a period
not made up of just such penetrations as these?

1881

APPENDIX: ON LOVE AND THE ANALYTICAL MIND: Adolphe

“In the midst of so much madness, the analyzer’s intelligence remains cruelly self-
aware. . . .” This coexistence, in one and the same being, of the most ineffective lucidity
of mind and the worst sensual disorder or disorder of feeling, is Baudelaire’s most
distinctive trait. This deserves to be emphasized, and the best way to do so is to
juxtapose with the author of Les Fleurs du mal an exemplar of the same moral
sickness, albeit developed under entirely different conditions of milieu, circumstances,
and temperament. And so, after having read Les Fleurs du mal, one will be well
advised to reread Adolphe, and discover in their resemblances and their differences
the distinctive set of symptoms and an identical diagnosis of this malady.
At the outset let us point out something that proves to what extent the abuse of the
analytical mind, the very basis of Les Fleurs du mal, is indeed one of the
characteristics of this period: of all the books of the beginning of the century, Adolphe
continues to be the most vital, the most riveting, the most relevant. For my own part I
read the slim volume with passionate interest when it fell into my hands, years ago
now. Even today there is no book that moves me more, though I know by heart almost
every sentence of this masterpiece of the genre; and I can name twenty others who
share this feeling. The indestructible sense of contemporaneity of the brief work does
not owe to its composition; the modern effects of style we value most are missing
from this short narrative. Physical description, setting, dialogue, are almost totally
lacking in this drama, so simple as to be bare, told so straightforwardly that it appears
dry, so devoid of color that it is gray and gaunt. The contrast with Baudelaire’s skillful
rhetoric could not be more striking. But the tone of human truth is so poignant, the
accuracy of the psychological analysis so total, the mental suffering so real, so lifelike,
that any aesthetic reservations seem contemptible quibbles, and there is nothing to
modify, nothing to add to this Adolphe, whose very gracelessness and harshness are a
necessary component.
Since the publication of Benjamin Constant’s Journal intime and his Lettres à sa
famille we have known that the magic of the novel resides first and foremost in its
being the most unusual and the most courageous of self-portraits. He is at one and the
same time so sensitive that he cannot bear his mistress’s suffering, so anxious that he
cannot trust her love, so selfish that he cannot conceal from her his most transient
moods, so lucid that he cannot overlook a single one of his personal failings. This
simultaneously superior and maimed creature, in whom the most appalling
indecisiveness combines with the most mature self-knowledge, and who seems to
have retained of sensitivity all that tortures while losing everything that is appealing,
this arrogant young man with no illusions, this passionate being with no hope, this
lover without joy, is Constant himself, as his diary and letters reveal him. There is not
a sentence in his book that does not reveal a secret wound in his soul, one of the most
tormented of our time. He pushed the candor of his confession so far as to deny his
Adolphe every excuse that circumstances afford our worst failings, and sought the
explanation for his sorry hero’s actions solely in a character that is none other than his
own. It is worth noting that Ellénore is not described at all: Benjamin Constant, that
gifted observer, refused systematically to give her any individual traits. She represents
the pain of a woman in love, and that alone. The author wanted all of the light to fall on
the face of the one who so resembles him, and whose deplorable story is contained in
Mme de Beaumont’s analysis of Constant: “Even he cannot love himself.”
“I despise” says Adolphe’s author on the last page of the book, “I despise that kind
of conceit that dwells on itself by recounting its misdeeds, that has the
pretentiousness of soliciting our sympathy by describing itself, and that analyzes itself
instead of feeling remorse as it hovers indestructibly over the ruins . . .” No one has
ever uttered a harsher indictment of the abuse of self-analysis; and no one has ever
abused self-analysis more than Constant. He even went so far in this dangerous
undertaking as to become—as did Baudelaire, and Amiel—a type. That is why
Adolphe, even as it represents the most distinctive of self-portraits, is also the most
universal of portrayals. Yet in terms of excessive analysis the difference between
Benjamin and his two modern brothers is great. The latter, totally lacking any ability
to act, continue to be imprisoned in the sphere of pure thought. Their analysis
functioned to no purpose, whereas Constant was a seducer and a duelist, a gambler
and a politician. But all three had this in common, that all of life’s events provided
them with an occasion for a dissection of their feelings, so delicate, so subtle, that
those feelings vanished from their hearts to leave only a painful emptiness. Adolphe
truly loves Ellénore when first he wins her. To convey the ecstasy he feels in
possessing her this least lyrical of men becomes lyrical: “Woe to him who in the first
moments of a love affair is not convinced that it will last forever! . . .” he exclaims. And
“Who could describe love’s thrall? . . .” Yet ten lines further on—ten short lines—we
find mention of the first flaws this soul so ingenious at self-dissection detects in his
happiness. The consuming and liquescent joy of shared passion cannot dull the odious
acuity of consciousness. One could even consider this the entire drama of Adolphe: the
continual destruction of love by thought in the heart of this young man, and the
mistress’s continual effort, by dint of passion and affection, to reconstruct the feelings
she sees collapsing. When he is with her his love for her returns; when he is away
from her he renews his efforts to extinguish that love, until Ellénore, at the end of this
singular and, for her, nearly unintelligible struggle, succumbs to an infinite weariness
that makes her long for death. She has spent years intoxicated by her own love,
thinking all the while that it was theirs. Adolphe uses almost the same terms. She
understands it, she feels it, and she writes her heart-breaking letter: “Why do you
persecute me? What have I done? . . .” Alas! It is not she that the unfortunate Adolphe
has persecuted, but himself; and so it will always be.
If the novel’s only quality were the rigorous character analysis it develops, and in
that character a very contemporary malady, it would be admirable. But it would not
have, as it does, the charm of a profoundly poetic work, as strange as the term may
seem applied to a sort of literary anatomy—yes, poetic, to the same degree as the
most beautiful sonnets in Les Fleurs du mal. In these pages one finds more than the
withering flame of a mind tearing at an emotion. One finds the vast melancholy of the
soul’s solitude. Ellénore loves Adolphe, he loves her; they are both free, close, in each
other’s arms, yet separated by an abyss, an abyss whose depth they each plumb in
their own way: he, by his inability to find happiness; she, by her inability to make him
happy. Not only Baudelaire, in his finest pieces, but also Alfred de Vigny, in texts of
transcendent beauty like “Éloa,” like “La Colère de Samson,” like “Moïse,” gave
expression to the sadness of this moral solitude that reminds us of a forever
incommunicable secret recess within us. How much more bitter Adolphe seems,
deprived as he is of the distinction of verse, voluntarily deprived of eloquence, so near
to us and to our everyday existence by the simplicity—I was going to say the
ordinariness—of his story! Not enough attention has been drawn to how
uncomplicated and almost down-to-earth is the plot of this famous novel. A young
man from a good family falls in love with a kept woman older than he is and struggles
with this impossible relationship: this is what Constant had to work with. And here
resides the power of an art form long neglected in France, the psychological novel.
Where a social novelist would of necessity have produced something pedestrian and
common, the author of Adolphe, by distilling the psychological dimensions of the
situation, has succeeded in revealing the tragic aspect of this run-of the-mill
adventure. And those of us who read it today find a symbol of our most exquisite
anguish in what is after all the most banal sentimental calamity. All of us who have felt
our hearts chilled by a misunderstood confidence, those who have loved without
being capable of revealing themselves entirely to their beloved, those who in their
families, in their friendships, even in their camaraderie have confronted absolute,
constant, insurmountable incomprehension, and who have nonetheless not lost their
need to pour out their feelings, nor rid themselves of the imprudent spontaneity of
attachment, all those—and their name is legion—can return to Adolphe time and time
again. They will never tire of this book that lays bare their misery, without a single
sentence, a single word, that betokens an author.
For it cannot be overemphasized that this unique masterpiece illustrates perfectly
the appropriateness of Stendhal’s remark to the effect that “when one writes, one
must find turns of style so precise, and so simple, that upon reflection they admit of no
modification.” Had Benjamin Constant, like Stendhal, pondered the rules of literary
composition? It is not likely, in his multifaceted career, that he attached much
importance to the art of novel writing. But he had lived, he had experienced a great
deal, and he harbored an instinctive distaste for the brand of virtuosity that displays
the skill of the artist without revealing the heart of the man. He knew that a sincere
emotion, expressed without overstatement, will always involve the reader—that is,
the reader worthy of consideration—more than any ornaments of style or picturesque
quirks. But to find those turns of phrase that no amount of reflection could modify one
needs first to have reflected long and hard, and reflected without vanity, not in order
to show off one’s strength of mind, but to learn the truth about oneself and others.
This is so rare that there are very few works like this one, which contains not one iota
of rhetoric. It was the immense virtue of Benjamin Constant’s nature—a nature
otherwise so incoherent and so distressed—that he succeeded in remaining totally
honest with others and, even more astonishingly, with himself. Baudelaire left in his
papers a few singular notes, the poignant fragments of a book he wished to write with
the title, borrowed from Poe’s Marginalia, Mon Cœur mis à nu. This painful title could
very well be that of Benjamin’s masterpiece, and of his personal diary; that is why not
a single one of its pages has aged. I wished to propose an example to illustrate a study
of the sensitivity of a man who turned twenty more than a quarter century
after Adolphe was written, and Adolphe came naturally to mind. As it will for all those
who might be inspired to write about the psychological illness whose definitive
monograph this novel is—a monograph as immortal as the human heart.

—translated from the French by Nancy O’Connor