I am writing to you beforehand, for precaution, because I have so
strong a presentiment that I shall not have the pleasure of finding you.
I wrote recently to M. Dalloz a letter couched as nearly as possible
like the following:
"Render account of the 'Paradis artificiels'! I know Messrs. So-and-so,
So-and-so, etc., on the 'Moniteur.'"
Reply of Dalloz:
"The book is worthy of Sainte-Beuve. (It is not I speaking.) Pay a
visit to M. Sainte-Beuve about it."
I should not have dared to think so. Numerous reasons, of which I guess
part, perhaps estrange you from it, and perhaps also the book does not
please you.
However, I have more than ever need of being upheld, and I ought to
have given you an account of my perplexity.
All that has been said about this essay has not any common sense,
absolutely none.
P.S.--A few days ago, but then for the pure need of seeing you, as
Antæus had need of the Earth, I went to the rue Montparnasse. On the
way I passed a gingerbread shop, and the fixed idea took hold of me
that you must like gingerbread. Note that nothing is better in wine at
dessert; and I felt that I was going to drop in on you at dinner-time.
I sincerely hope that you will not have taken the piece of gingerbread,
encrusted with angelica, for an idle joke, and that you will have eaten
it in all simplicity.
If you share my taste, I recommend you, when you can get it, English
gingerbread, very thick, very black, so close that it has neither holes
nor pores, full of ginger and aniseed. It is cut in slices as thin as
roast beef, and can be spread with butter or preserve. Yours always.
Love me well.... I am passing through a great crisis.
_Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve_
_End of January_, 1862.
Still another service that I owe you! When will this end? And how shall
I thank you?
The article had escaped me. That explains to you the delay before
beginning to write to you.
A few words, my dear friend, to paint for you the peculiar kind of
pleasure that you have obtained for me. Many years ago I was very much
wounded (but I said nothing) to hear myself spoken of as a churl, an
impossible and crabbed man. Once, in a wicked journal, I read some
lines about my repulsive ugliness, well designed to alienate all
sympathy (it was hard for a man who has loved the perfume of woman
so well). One day a woman said to me: "It is curious, you are very
presentable; I thought that you were always drunk and that you smelt
evilly." She spoke according to the tale.
Now, my friend, you have put all that right, and I am very grateful to
you for it--I, who have always said that it was not sufficient to be
wise, but that above all it was necessary to be agreeable.
As for what you call my Kamtschatka, if I often received encouragements
as vigorous as that, I believe that I should have the strength to
make an immense Siberia of it, but a warm and populous one. When I
see your activity, your vitality, I am quite ashamed; happily, I have
sudden leaps and crises in my character which replace, though very
inadequately, the action of sustained willingness.
Must I, the incorrigible lover of the "Rayons jaunes" and of "Volupté,"
of Sainte-Beuve the poet and novelist, now compliment the journalist?
How do you arrive at this certainty of pen which allows you to say
everything and makes a game of every difficulty for you? This article
is not a pamphlet, for it is a righteousness. One thing struck me, and
that is that I found again there all your eloquence in conversation,
with its good sense and its petulances.
Really, I should have liked to collaborate in it a little--forgive this
pride--I should have been able to give you two or three enormities that
you have omitted through ignorance. I will tell you all this in a good
gossip.
Ah, and your Utopia! the great way of driving the "vague, so dear to
great nobles," from elections! Your Utopia has given me a new pride.
I, also, have done it, Utopia, reform;--is it an old revolutionary
movement that drove me, also, long ago, to make schemes for a
constitution? There is this great difference, that yours is quite
viable and that perhaps the day is not far off when it will be adopted.
Poulet-Malassis is burning to make a pamphlet of your admirable
article....