To Théodore de Banville

4. Prayer of a Pagan

5. The Pot Lid

6. Midnight Examination

7. Sad Madrigal

8. The Cautioner

9. The Rebel

10. Very Far From France

11. The Gulf

12. Lament of an Icarus

13. Meditation

14. The Insulted Moon

Explanatory Notes

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

INTRODUCTION

I

Les Fleurs du Mal, the most celebrated collection of verse in the history of modern poetry, first appeared on the horizon in 1845 in an advertisement on a book cover: ‘To be published shortly: The Lesbians by Baudelaire-Dufaÿs’. Charles Baudelaire, who was trying out different versions of his name (Dufaÿs was his mother’s name), was a 24-year-old man of letters who had published only one poem. The announcement of The Lesbians was repeated on several book covers in 1846 and 1847, including that of Baudelaire’s own substantial pamphlet reviewing the annual art exhibit, The Salon of 1846. By 1848 the title had changed to Limbo, whose publication was announced as imminent, and in 1850 and 1851 some poems from the future Flowers of Evil were published as extracts from Limbo. Finally in 1855 the Revue des deux mondes printed eighteen poems under the title, Les Fleurs du Mal, and the complete collection appeared in 1857.

The evolution of titles is certainly intriguing. Why ‘The Lesbians’?1 The Flowers of Evil contains only three poems that obviously fit this title: ‘Lesbos’ and the two ‘Condemned Women’. It is very unlikely that Baudelaire had written others which were then abandoned, though of course he might have planned a substantial sequence. Marcel Proust, a great admirer of Baudelaire’s poetry, wondered ‘how he could have been so especially interested in lesbians to go as far as wanting to use their name as the title of his whole splendid collection’.

Baudelaire’s three lesbian poems offer some answers. His lovers are presented as adventurers into the unknown, explorers of forbidden love, ‘seekers of the infinite’, driven by overwhelming passion: ‘This fierce and moaning monster nothing can assuage’, declares Hippolyta (‘Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta’). They suffer the condemnation of men and God and, more than that, the lacerations of passion itself. Their island, Lesbos, is a land of exotic, often masochistic sensuality:

Lesbos, where love is like the wild cascades

That throw themselves into the deepest gulfs,

And twist and run with gurglings and with sobs

Stormy and secret, swarming underground.

(‘Lesbos’)

Baudelaire, who wrote in his Intimate Journals that ‘the unique and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude of doing evil’, identifies with this transgressive eroticism and with the experience of torment.

O maidens, demons, monsters—martyrs all,

Spirits disdainful of reality,

Satyrs and seekers of the infinite

With rain of tears or cries of ecstasy,

You whom my soul has followed to your hell,

Poor sisters, let me pity and approve—

For all your leaden griefs, for slakeless thirsts,

And for your hearts, great urns that ache with love!

(‘Condemned Women’)

‘Disdainful of reality’ in that they refuse to accept what is permitted but seek the unknown, Baudelaire’s lesbians are imagined as ineluctably damned—and in this, soul-mates of his speaker. The patron of this love, Sappho, is ‘Fairer than Venus’ because her dark beauty is tinged with the melancholy of an insatiable passion. Delphine and Hippolyta, in the harshest poem of this group, suffer the torment and damnation of those who ‘run at [the] limits of desire’:

The harsh sterility of all your acts of lust

Will bring a dreadful thirst and stiffen out your skin,

And your concupiscence become a furious wind

To snap your feeble flesh like an old, weathered flag.

The critic Pierre Emmanuel writes that ‘beneath the cover of female homosexuality, all the themes dear to Baudelaire, difficult to treat in the form in which he lived them, are systematically exacerbated to the furthest extreme of their dizzying logic’.2 As willing victims of a passion held in horror by Baudelaire’s world, his lesbians make plausible this powerful representation of passion as a sought-for hell. Baudelaire imagines lesbians as the most compelling embodiments of lust and desire because for him desire is always defeated, and acts of desire are in this sense sterile. Male lovers delude themselves that they desire something they may actually get from women (at least, they often seem to think that they can get what they are after if the woman yields); lesbians, however, may seem to a male imagination driven by insatiable longing, by passions which can find no satisfaction but only provoke further desire. They are thus embodiments of what in fact is the general character of passion in The Flowers of Evil: provoked by something intangible and intensified by the very impossibility of fulfilment.

Calling his volume of poetry The Lesbians was also Baudelaire’s challenge to the discourses of his day about women. A friend, Louis Veuillot, wrote that the century that followed the Age of Voltaire could be called the Age of the Virgin Mary. In 1854 the Catholic Church proclaimed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which maintained not just that Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus but that she herself had been born free of the taint of original sin. This was only the climax of a movement of mariolatry which sought to make the Virgin Mother, the supreme example of the purity of women, the feminine ideal.