A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (49 page)

I developed into an incredible opera: I came to see that all beings feel an invincible necessity for happiness; that action is not life, but a way of making a mess of some force, an enervation. Morality is cerebral weakness.

It seemed to me that to every being several other lives were due. This man doesn't know what he is doing: he is an angel. That family is a litter of dogs. In the presence of several men I conversed aloud with a moment of their other lives. And thus I loved a pig.

None of the sophisms of insanity - the insanity which is put under restraint - have been forgotten by me. I can repeat them all. I possess the system.

My health was threatened. Terror set in. I fell into slumbers lasting several days, and continued the saddest dreams on rising. I was ripe for death, and along the road full of dangers, weakness led me to the boundaries of the world and the Cimmerian land of darkness and whirlwinds.

To divert the enchantments which had settled on my brain, travel was obligatory. And on the sea, which I loved as though it might cleanse me of defilement, the consolatory cross arose before my eyes. I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my torment: my life would ever be too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty.

Happiness! Its tooth, sweet at the point of death, warned me by the crowing of the cock - ad matutinum, to Christus venit - in the darkest cities:

That is all over now. The power to greet beauty is now within my ken.

From Petit poemes en prose

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

THE TEMPTATIONS, OR EROS AND PLUTO AND GLORY

Two superb Satans and a She-Devil, not less extraordinary, mounted last night the mysterious staircase by which Hell assaults man's weakness when he sleeps, and communicates with him secretly. So they came and posed before me gloriously upright as if on a platform. A sulphurous splendour emanated from these three personages who detached themselves against the opaque darkness of the night. They looked so proud and so full of domination, that at first sight I took the three of them for real Gods.

The face of the first Satan was of an ambiguous sex; he had also, in the lines of his body, the softness of the ancient Bacchus. His large languishing eyes, whose colour was tenebrous and uncertain, were like scented violets still wet with the rain of the storm, and his half-opened lips were like warm perfume boxes - from which exhaled strange odours; and whenever he sighed, musty insects took fire, as they flew from the ardours of his breath.

Around his purple tunic was corded, like a girdle, a caressing serpent who, with lifted head, turned languorously towards him his eyes that were like living embers. To this living girdle were suspended, alternating with phials with sinister liquours, shining knives and surgical instruments. In his right hand he held another phial which contained something luminously red, and which had for label these bizarre words: "Drink, this is my blood, a perfect cordial." In the left hand he held a violin which one supposes served him as an instrument on whose strings he could make vibrate his sorrows and his pleasures, and so spread abroad the contagion of his folly over midnight Sabbats. Around his delicate ankles trailed several rings of a broken chain of gold, and when the trouble which came from them made him lower his eyes, he gazed with intense vanity on the nails of his feet, brilliant and polished like precious stones. He gazed on me with his inconsolably broken-hearted eyes from which flowed an insidious intoxication, and he said to me in a singing voice: "If you desire, I can make you lord of souls, and you shall be the master of living matter, even more than the sculptor can be with his beings of clay: and you shall know the pleasure, forever reborn, of escaping yourself so as to forget yourself in others, and to attract other souls until they are conjoint with you."

And I answered him: "Many thanks, but I don't know what I would do with this precious pack of beings who, no doubt, are of no more value than my own little self. In spite of the fact that I have some shame in remembering myself, I don't want to forget anything. And even if I couldn't recognize you, old monster, your mysterious cutlery, equivocal phials, and the chains around your feet, are symbols which explain clearly enough the inconveniences of your friendship. Please keep your presents."

The second Satan had none of this tragic and smiling aspect, none of this fine insinuating manner, none of this delicate and precious beauty. He was large, with a fat, eyeless head, and his heavy stomach weighed down his thights. Every inch of his skin was gilded and illuminated, as if it were tattooed, with a crowd of moving figures representing the myriad forms of universal misery. There were little emaciated men who were writhing, suspended from a nail. Deformed gnomes with supplicating eyes asked for alms with outstretched hands. There were even little mothers, who wore round their waists the remnants of abortions. And these were not all.