Paris Spleen

By Charles Baudelaire

First published posthumously in 1869, “Paris Spleen” is a collection of 51 short prose poems by Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire was inspired by Aloysius Bertrand’s “Gaspard de la Nuit—Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot” or “Gaspard of the Night—Fantasies in the Manner of Rembrandt and Callot”, commenting that he had read Bertrand’s work at least twenty times for starting “Paris Spleen”. A commentary on Parisian contemporary life, Baudelaire remarked on his work that “These are the flowers of evil again, but with more freedom, much more detail, and much more mockery.” The themes present in “Paris Spleen” are wide-ranging. In a stream of consciousness style Baudelaire discusses pleasure, intoxication, artistry, women, poverty and social status, city life, religion, and morality. These little snapshots of daily life in the city of Paris capture the tumultuous time in which they were written, the middle of the 19th century, and establish “Paris Spleen” as a classic of the modernist literary movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Dec 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781420979411

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited from Romantics, but are based on observations of real life. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in the rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-nineteenth century. Baudelaire’s highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited as the first Modernist and believed to have coined the term modernity (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.

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PARIS SPLEEN

By CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Paris Spleen

By Charles Baudelaire

Translated by James Huneker, Joseph T. Shipley, and Arthur Symons

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7803-2

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7941-1

This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of a photographic portrait of Charles Baudelaire, by Étienne Carjat, c. 1862.

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CONTENTS

Paris Spleen

TO ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE

THE STRANGER

THE OLD WOMAN’S DESPAIR

THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST

A JESTER

THE DOUBLE CHAMBER

EVERY MAN HIS CHIMÆRA

VENUS AND THE FOOL

THE DOG AND THE VIAL

THE GLASS-VENDOR

AT ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

THE WILD WOMAN AND THE COQUETTE

CROWDS

THE WIDOWS

THE OLD MOUNTEBANK

THE CAKE

THE CLOCK

A HEMISPHERE IN A TRESS

THE INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE

THE PLAYTHING OF THE POOR

THE GIFTS OF THE FAIRIES

THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, PLUTUS, AND GLORY

EVENING TWILIGHT

SOLITUDE

PROJECTS

THE LOVELY DOROTHEA

THE EYES OF THE POOR

A HEROIC DEATH

THE COUNTERFEIT MONEY

THE GENEROUS PLAYER

THE ROPE

CALLINGS

THE THYRSUS

BE DRUNKEN

ALREADY!

WINDOWS

THE DESIRE TO PAINT

THE FAVOURS OF THE MOON

WHAT IS TRUTH?

A THOROUGHBRED

THE MIRROR

THE HARBOR

MISTRESSES’ PORTRAITS

THE MARKSMAN

SOUP AND THE CLOUDS

THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE CEMETERY

THE LOSS OF A HALO

MLLE. BISTOURY

ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD

LET US FLAY THE POOR

GOOD DOGS

EPILOGUE

Paris Spleen

TO ARSÈNE HOUSSAYE

MY DEAR FRIEND:

I send you a little work of which it cannot be said, without injustice, that it has neither head nor tail; since all of it, on the contrary, is at once head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. Consider, I pray you, what convenience this arrangement offers to all of us, to you, to me and to the reader. We can stop where we wish, I my musing, you your consideration, and the reader his perusal—for I do not hold the latter’s restive will by the interminable thread of a fine-spun intrigue. Remove a vertebra, and the two parts of this tortuous fantasy rejoin painlessly. Chop it into particles, and you will see that each part can exist by itself. In the hope that some of these segments will be lively enough to please and to amuse you, I venture to dedicate to you the entire serpent.

I have a little confession to make. It was while glancing, for at least the twentieth time, through the famous Gaspard de la Nuit, by Aloysius Bertrand (a book known to you, to me, and to a few of our friends, has it not the highest right to be called famous?), that the idea came to me to attempt an analogous plan, and to apply to the description of modern life, or rather of a life modern and more abstract, the process which he applied in the depicting of ancient life, so strangely picturesque.

Which of us has not, in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rime, sufficiently supple, sufficiently abrupt, to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the windings and turnings of the fancy, to the sudden starts of the conscience?

It is particularly in frequenting great cities, it is from the flux of their innumerable streams of intercourse, that this importunate ideal is born. Have not you yourself, my dear friend, tried to convey in a chanson the strident cry of the glazier, and to express in a lyric prose all the grievous suggestions that cry bears even to the housetops, through the heaviest mists of the street?

But, to speak truth, I fear that my jealousy has not brought me good fortune. As soon as I had begun the work, I saw that not only was I laboring far, far, from my mysterious and brilliant model, but that I was reaching an accomplishment (if it can be called an accomplishment) peculiarly different—accident of which all others would doubtless be proud, but which can but profoundly humiliate a mind which considers it the highest honor of the poet to achieve exactly what he has planned.

Devotedly yours,

C. B.

THE STRANGER

Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best? Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?

I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

Your friends, then?

You use a word that until now has had no meaning for me.

Your country?

I am ignorant of the latitude in which it is situated.

Then Beauty?

Her I would love willingly, goddess and immortal.

Gold?

I hate it as you hate your God.

What, then, extraordinary stranger, do you love?

I love the clouds—the clouds that pass—yonder—the marvellous clouds.

THE OLD WOMAN’S DESPAIR

The wizened old woman welcomed the sight of this beautiful child to which everyone was so delighted, and to whom everyone wanted to please; be this child pretty, as fragile as the old woman, and also, like her, without teeth or hair.

She approached him, wishing him smiles and pleasant mimes.

But the frightened child was struggling under the caresses of the decrepit woman, and filled the house with his yelping.

The old woman returned to her eternal solitude, as she was crying in a corner, saying, Ah for us, unfortunate old females, passed the age of pleasure, even to the innocent; we are a horror to the little children that we love!

THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST

How penetrating is the end of an autumn day! Ah, yes, penetrating enough to be painful even; for there are certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does not prevent them from being intense; and none more keen than the perception of the Infinite. He has a great delight who drowns his gaze in the immensity of sky and sea. Solitude, silence, the incomparable chastity of the azure—a little sail trembling upon the horizon, by its very littleness and isolation imitating my irremediable existence—the melodious monotone of the surge—all these things thinking through me and I through them (for in the grandeur of the reverie the Ego is swiftly lost); they think, I say, but musically and picturesquely, without quibbles, without syllogisms, without deductions.

These thoughts, as they arise in me or spring forth from external objects, soon become always too intense. The energy working within pleasure creates an uneasiness, a positive suffering: My nerves are too tense to give other than clamouring and dolorous vibrations.

And now the profundity of the sky dismays me; its limpidity exasperates me. The insensibility of the sea, the immutability of the spectacle, revolt me. Ah, must one eternally suffer, for ever be a fugitive from Beauty?

Nature, pitiless enchantress, ever-victorious rival, leave me! Tempt my desires and my pride no more. The contemplation of Beauty is a duel where the artist screams with terror before being vanquished.

A JESTER

It was the outburst of the New Year: chaos of mud and snow, crossed by a thousand coaches, sparkling with baubles and gewgaws, swarming with desires and with despairs, official folly of a great city made to weaken the fortitude of the firmest eremite.

In the midst of this hubbub and tumult, a donkey was trotting along, tormented by a lout with a horsewhip.

As the donkey was about to turn a corner, a fine fellow, gloved, polished, with a merciless cravat, and imprisoned in impeccable garments, bowed ceremoniously before the beast; said to it, removing his hat: I greet thee, good and happy one; and turned towards some companions with a fatuous air, as though requesting them to add their approbation to his content.

The donkey did not see the clever jester, and continued steadily where its duty called.

As for me, I was overcome by an inordinate rage against the sublime idiot, who seemed to me to concentrate in himself the wit of France.

THE DOUBLE CHAMBER

Reviews for Paris Spleen

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.

Contrary to popular belief, I had never read Baudelaire until now. I've trusted Walter Benjamin and lately Calasso to provide me with a well informed ethos about this central figure. There are many concerns that this is the literature of the young, to which I shout, absurd. This is the lettres of the Absolute, the eternally curious.

Below the bile, there is a hum of sensitivity. Behind the debris are the tears of the sensitive. Is it forgiving, likely not? There is a buzzing pulse at play, a hum and a forgiving glance.

[jimmychanga · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I never really understood the appeal of Les Fleurs du Mal, but so many people love it that I started to feel bad. What was I missing? Along comes this book, Paris Spleen, which is full of prose poems made of equal parts humor, cynicism, and insight (and often all three within a paragraph). I like these poems because reading it, I feel like I have a sense of who Baudelaire might have been as a person...

Plus, his humor is so odd:

Soup and Clouds

My adorable little minx was serving me supper; through the dining room's open window I was contemplating the shifting architectures God creates from vapour, those marvellous constructions of the evanescent. As I watched, I thought: "Those apparitions are nearly as beautiful as my sweet lady's eyes, the mad little green-eyed monster."

Suddenly a violent fist landed in my back and I heard a charming, raw voice hysterical and brandy-damaged, the voice of my little darling, saying: "Get on with your bloody soup, cloud merchant."

[thebooknerd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a good book for anyone new to Baudelaire or prose poems. Several great poems are included.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Korte schetsen, over eenzaamheid, oudworden. Soms sterk gelijkend op Poe
meesterlijk observatievermogen, voorafspiegeling van de Maupassant, soms fijn, soms grof. Techniek van de onverwachte wending die het voorafgaande in een heel ander perspectief plaatst. Op het geniale af

[poetontheone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the the earliest examples of prose poetry, Baudelaire's Paris Spleen is a tribute to the city of Paris and its pleasures: poetry, wine, women and the drunkenness brought about by these pursuits. Let's not forget Baudelaire's old pal Satan, he rears his head here more than once. Also present here is Baudelaire's witty political commentaries, presented in perhaps a more discernible form here than in The Flowers of Evil.
Paris Spleen is not as consistent in regards to 'quality' (Rather a bad choice of words here, I do not want to mislead any ignorant reader into thinking Baudelaire is any less than great) or as urgent in tone as its more wide read predecessor. Overall though, this an indispensable for all students of poetry as well as those "moon-mad men." We couldn't forget them, now could we?

[porius_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

heavy and elastic honeybrown hair. you can almost hear it?!

[misirlou_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Inspired by Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit Baudelaire borrowed the idea of turning french poetry on its head by releasing this collection of prose poems. The real virtues of the poetry, the play with language, internal rhyme, and grammar, don't come through very strongly in translation.

Luckily for Baudelaire's english speaking audience, the subjects of his poems were so rich and his imagery was so vivid that even after all of those elements are lost, his poetry still stands up under scrutiny. The only downside of this collection is that it's not a dual language version-- even if you don't speak a foreign language you can still get a sense for its rythym by comparing the original and the translation side by side.

The prose poems in this collection (and the ones in Les Fleurs du Mal) focus on the internal life of the city. Ina time when Paris was being systematically destroyed and rebuilt, Baudelaire looks past the veneer of the city to the heart of its citizens. While British poets from the same time lose themselves in the architecture of the city and in the city's natural elements, Baudelaire and his contemporaries focused specifically on the people that make up the city.

Paris Spleen gives you an outsider's look into Parisian life. As the narrator of these pieces moves through the city, he shares his assumptions about life as seen through windows, as passed on corners, as watched but not necessarily participated in. When the narrator actually does take part in the world around him, he does so with gestures so grand that they exist only for the sake of metaphor. In one instance, the narrator berates a glass dealer for harassing the poor and tosses a flower pot at him. In another, men are described as carrying chimeras on their backs as they go through their daily routines.

Although at times the narrative leans towards the surreal, the images are accessable and each poem flows quickly. If you can't read the poems in their original language, this is a great translation to pick up.