Fascinated by sin, Baudelaire, as I have said in these pages, is never
the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as the original sin; he studies
sin as he studies evil, with a stern logic; he finds in horror a kind
of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; rarely in hideous things, save
when his sense of what I call a moralist makes him moralise, as in his
terrible poem, _Une Charogne._
Baudelaire's original manuscript, that is to say, the copy he makes for
his final text, I have recently bought. It covers two and a half folio
pages, folded four times across, as if he had carried it about with
him; it is written on thin, half-yellow paper, yellowed with age, and
on both sides; it is copied at tremendous speed with a quill pen that
blots the dashes he puts under every stanza. The title is underlined;
the only revision is where he obliterates "comme une vague" (which he
had used in the first line) and changes it to "d'un souffle, vague." He
uses a tremendous amount of capital letters; as in the first stanza:
"L'Objet, Mon Cœur, Matin, Doux, Détour, d'un Sentier, Une Charogne,
Cailloux." In the next: "Femme Lubrique, Les Poisons, D'une Façon
Nonchalant et Cynique, Ventre, Exhalations." At the end of the last
stanza but one he writes:
"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses
Vivre parmi les monuments;"
which he changes in the text of his _Fleurs du mal_ into:
"Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses
Moisir parmi les ossements."
The change makes an enormous improvement to the stanza.
To possess this manuscript written by Baudelaire is to possess one of
the most magnificent poems he ever wrote: the whole thing is copied in
a kind of unholy rapture, in a kind of evil perversion.