I am, fortunately, the possessor of a copy of the first edition of _Les
Fleurs du Mal._ The title-page is as follows: LES FLEURS DU MAL ||
par Charles Baudelaire. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de Broise: ||
Libraire-Éditeurs. || 4 rue de Buci. || 1857.
This copy is signed, in brown Parisian ink: _"à mon ami Champfleury,
Ch. Baudelaire_" His signature is fantastic: the B. curled backward
like a snake's tail in an Egyptian hieroglyphic, the straight line
like an enchanter's wand. It is "grand-12; 252 pages." It contains one
hundred poems, the perfect number. It is printed on _papier vergé._ It
is one of the twenty copies, thus specially printed, that Baudelaire
ordered for himself and for certain of his friends. The rest of the
edition was printed on common white paper. Taken as a whole, this is
certainly one of the most perfectly printed books done in France, or
anywhere, in the past century.
Poulet-Malassis came from Alençon to Paris, and began by printing the
_Odes Funambulesques_ of Théodore de Banville early in 1857, before he
completed the publication of _Les Fleurs du Mal_ in July of that year.
Baudelaire wrote to him, saying that he did not want popularity, "_mais
un bel éreintage général qui attirera la curiosité."_ He asked him to
be sparing in blank spaces on the pages; and to use certain archaisms
and touches of red. These touches of red are given on the title-page;
they have a decorative effect. He said that he had a natural horror
of the over-use of inverted commas, which have a way of spoiling the
text. He must have a unique system of his own. "I must have," he
insists, "in this kind of production, the one admissible thing, that
is, perfection." There one sees his unerring instinct; his sense of the
exact value of words. Yet he writes to his publisher, underlining the
phrase: "You know certain things better than I do, but whenever there
is, on my part, no radical repulsion, follow your taste." He rages
against de Broise's perpetual reproaches with regard to _les surcharges
de M. Baudelaire--_the "author's corrections." He points out certain
printer's mistakes, page 44 for page 45, and _guères_ rhyming with
_vulgaire._ There was no time to correct these errors; they remain so
in the printed pages of my copy.
It is interesting, in regard to this question, to find in the first
text of _Le Vin de l'Assassin_ these lines:
"Ma femme est morte, je suis libre!
Je puis donc boire tout mon saoul"
In the second edition one reads "soûl." I find in Brachet's
_Dictionnaire Étymologique_ this definition of the word "_soûl,_ ancien
français, _saoul._ Latin _satallus,_ d'où l'ancien français _saoul._"
Therefore Baudelaire was right, traditionally, in using the original
form of the word.
His worst trouble is in getting the famous dedication to Gautier
printed and spaced as it had to be. It must be composed in a certain
solemn style. Then he writes: "The magician has made me abbreviate the
dedication; it must not be a profession of faith, which might have the
fault of attracting people's eyes '_sur le côté scabreux du volume._'"
As it is, strangely enough for him, Baudelaire made a mistake in
syntax, using "_au magicien ès-langue française"_ instead of "_au
parfait magicien ès-lettres françaises_," which he corrected in the
edition of 1861.
On July 11, 1857, he writes to Malassis: "Quick, hide the edition,
the whole edition. I have saved fifty here. The mistake was in having
sent a copy to _Le Figaro_! As the edition was sold out in three weeks
we may have the glory of a trial, from which we can easily escape."
The trial came; he was obliged to suppress six poems (supposed to
contain "obscene and immoral passages"). Baudelaire never ceased to
protest against the infamy of this trial. A copy of the second edition
(not nearly so well printed as the first) is before me: LES FLEURS
DU MAL. || Par Charles Baudelaire. || Seconde Edition. || Augmentée
de trente-cinq poèmes nouveaux || et ornée d'un portrait de l'auteur
dessiné et gravé par Bracquemont. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de
Broise. || Editeurs. || 97. Rue de Richelieu, et Beaux-Arts, 56. ||
1861. || Tout droits réservés. || Paris: Imp. Simon Raçon et Comp. ||
Rue d'Erfurth.
In comparing the text of 1857 with that of 1861 I find several
revisions of certain verses, not always, I think, for the best. For
instance, in the _Préface,_ the first edition is as follows:
"Dans nos cervaux malsains, comme un million d'helminthes,
Grouille, chante et ripaille un peuple de Démons."
He changes this into "verre fourmillant;" "dans nos cervaux ribote." On
page 22, he writes:
"Sent un froid ténébreux envelopper son âme
A l'aspect du tableau plein d'épouvantement
Des monstruosités, que voile un vêtement;
Des visages masqués et plus laids que des masques."
In the later text he puts a full stop after "épouvantement," and
continues:
"O monstruosités pleurant leur vêtement!
O ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques."
This reading seems to me infinitely inferior to the reading of the
first version.
Again, there are certain other changes, even less happy, such as
"_quadrature_" into "_nature_," "_divin élixir_" into "_comme un
élixir,_" "_Mon âme se balançait comme un ange joyeux,_" into "_Mon
cœur, comme un oiseau, voltigeant tout joyeux."_ Baudelaire, in sending
a copy of _Les fleurs du mal_ (1861) to Alfred de Vigny, wrote that he
had marked the new poems in pencil in the list at the end of the book.
In my copy--1857--he has marked, with infinite delicacy, in pencil,
only three poems: "Lesbos," "Femmes Damnées," "Les Métamorphoses du
Vampire." He underlines, in "Une Charogne," these words in the text:
"_charogne lubrique, cynique, ventre, d'exhalaisons."_ At one side of
the prose note on "Franciscae meae laudes" he has made, on the margin,
a number of arrows.
In _Le Corsaire-Satan,_ January, 1848, Baudelaire reviewed three books
of short stories by Champfleury. On the first, _Chien-Caillou,_ he
writes: "One day a quite small, quite simple volume, _Chien Caillou,_
was printed; the history simply, clearly, crudely related, of a poor
engraver, certainly original, but whose poverty was so extreme that
he lived on carrots, between a rabbit and a girl of the town; and
he made masterpieces," I have before me this book: "_Chien-Caillou,
fantaisies d'hiver._ Par Champfleury. Paris, A la Libraire Pittoresque
de Martinon, Rue du Coq-Saint-Martin, 1847," It is dedicated to Victor
Hugo. "I dedicate to you this work, in spite of the fact that I have
an absolute horror of dedications--because of the expression _young
man_ that it leaves in readers' minds. But you have been the first to
signalize _Chien-Caillou_ to your friends, and your luminous genius has
suddenly recognized the reality of the second title: _This is not a
Story."_
In the same year came out _Le Gâteau des rois._ Par M. Jules Janin.
Ouvrage entièrement inédit. Paris. Libraire d'Amyot, 6 rue de la Paix,
1847. I have my own copy of this edition, bound in pale yellow-paper
covers.
On January 26th, 1917, there came to me from Paris an original
manuscript, written by Charles Baudelaire on three pages of note-paper,
concerning these two books of Champfleury and Jules Janin. Being
unfinished, it may have been the beginning of an essay which he never
completed. Certainly I find no trace of this prose in any of his
printed books. From the brown colour of the ink that he used I think it
was written in 1857, as the ink and the handwriting are absolutely the
same as in his signed _Fleurs du mal_ sent to Champfleury. There are
several revisions and corrections in the text of the MS. that I possess.
At the top of the first page are nearly obliterated the words:
_remplacez les blancs._ It begins: "Pour donner immédiatement au
lecteur non initié dans les dessous de la littérature, non instruit
dans les préliminaires des réputations, une idée première de
l'importance littéraire réille de ces petits livres, gros d'esprit,
de poésie et d'observations, qu'il sache que le premier d'entre nous,
_Chien-Caillou,_ Fantaisies d'hiver, fut publié en même temps qu'un
petit livre d'un homme très célèbre, qui avait, en même temps que
Champfleury, l'idée de ces publications en trimestrielles." It ends:
"Où est le cœur? Où est l'âme, où est la raison?"
Here is my translation:
"To convey to the reader who has not penetrated into the back-parlours
of literature, who has not been instructed in the preliminaries of
reputations, an immediate idea of the real literary importance of
these little books, fat in wit, poetry, and observations, it should be
stated that the first among them, _Chien-Caillou._ Fantaisies d'hiver,
was published at the same time as another small book by a famous man
who had, simultaneously with Champfleury, started these quarterly
publications.
"Now, for these people whose intelligence, daily applied to the
elaboration of books, is hardest to please, Champfleury's work absorbed
that of the famous man. All those of whom I speak have known _Le
Gâteau des rois._ Their profession is to know everything. _Le Gâteau
des rois,_ a kind of Christmas book, or 'Livre de Noël,' showed above
all a clearly asserted pretention to draw from "the language, by
playing infinite variations on the dictionary, all the effects which
a transcendental instrumentalist draws from his chords. Shifting of
forces, error of an unballasted mind! The ideas in this strange book
follow each other in haste, dart with the swiftness of sound, leaning
at random on infinitely tenuous connections. Their association with one
another hangs by a thread according to a method of thought similar to
that of people in Bedlam.
"Vast current of involuntary ideas, wild-goose chase, abnegation of
will! This singular feat of dexterity was accomplished by the man you
know, whose sole and special faculty consists in not being master of
himself, the man of encounters and good fortunes.
"Assuredly there was talent. But what abuse! What debauchery! And,
besides, what fatigue and what pain!
"No doubt some respect is due or, at least, some grateful compassion,
for the tireless writhing of an old dancing girl. But, alas! worn-out
attitudes, weak methods, boresome seductivities!
"The ideas of our man are but old women driven crazy with too much
dancing, too much kicking off the ground. _Sustalerunt sæpius pedes._
"Where is the heart? Where the soul? Where reason?"
Here the manuscript comes to an abrupt end, and one is left to wonder
how much more Baudelaire had written; perhaps only one more page, as
he had a peculiar fashion of writing fragments on bits of note-paper.
Certainly this prose has the refinement, the satire, the exquisite use
of words, the inimitable charm and unerring instinct of a faultless
writer. Not only is there his passion for _les danseuses_ and for the
exotic, but a sinister touch in _l'abdication de la volonté_ which
recurs finally in a letter written February 8, 1865; for, when one
imagines himself capable of an absolute abdication of the will, it
means that something of the man has gone out of him.