In deep cushions redolent of perfume

Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), and in particular to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857). Along with every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal (each with its multiple English translations, most of which are exclusive to the site and are now available in digital form for the first time ever), the site contains audio recordings of the poems read in their original French.

This wonderful site also contains Les Épaves (1866). Les Épaves is a collection of miscellaneous poetry along with the six of his poems censored from the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. These poems were illegal to publish in France until the 1940s.

One of my favorites of the censored six is Femmes damnés (À la pâle clarté). There have been several translations of it but the below is my favorite -- and all because of the line,In deep cushions redolent of perfume". It just feels best.

Damned Women

Delphine and Hippolyta

In the pallid light of languishing lamps,
In deep cushions redolent of perfume,
Hippolyta dreamed of the potent caresses
That drew aside the veil of her young innocence.

She was seeking, with an eye disturbed by the storm,
The already distant skies of her naiveté,
Like a voyager who turns to look back
Toward the blue horizons passed early in the day.

The listless tears from her lacklustrous eyes,
The beaten, bewildered look, the dulled delight,
Her defeated arms thrown wide like futile weapons,
All served, all adorned her fragile beauty.

Lying at her feet, calm and filled with joy,
Delphine gazed at her hungrily, with burning eyes,
Like a strong animal watching a prey
Which it has already marked with its teeth.

The strong beauty kneeling before the frail beauty,
Superb, she savored voluptuously
The wine of her triumph and stretched out toward the girl
As if to reap her reward of sweet thankfulness.

She was seeking in the eyes of her pale victim
The silent canticle that pleasure sings
And that gratitude, sublime and infinite,
Which the eyes give forth like a long drawn sigh.

"Hippolyta, sweet, what do you think of our love?
Do you understand now that you need not offer
The sacred burnt-offering of your first roses
To a violent breath which could make them wither?

My kisses are as light as the touch of May flies
That caress in the evening the great limpid lakes,
But those of your lover will dig furrows
As a wagon does, or a tearing ploughshare;

They will pass over you like heavy teams
Of horses or oxen, with cruel iron-shod hooves...
Hippolyta, sister! please turn your face to me,
You, my heart and soul, my all, half of my own self,

Turn toward me your eyes brimming with azure and stars!
For one of those bewitching looks, O divine balm,
I will lift the veil of the more subtle pleasures
And lull you to sleep in an endless dream!"

Hippolyta then raised her youthful head:
"I am not ungrateful and I do not repent,
Delphine darling; I feel restless and ill,
As I do after a rich midnight feast.

I feel heavy terrors pouncing on me
And black battalions of scattered phantoms
Who wish to lead me onto shifting roads
That a bloody horizon shuts in on all sides.

Is there something strange in what we have done?
Explain if you can my confusion and my fright:
I shudder with fear when you say: 'My angel!'
And yet I feel my mouth moving toward you.

Do not look at me that way, you, my dearest thought:
The sister of my choice whom I'd love forever
Even if you were an ambush prepared for me
And the beginning of my perdition."

Delphine, shaking her tragic mane and stamping her foot
As if she were stamping on the iron Tripod,
Her eyes fatal, replied in a despotic voice:
"Who dares to speak of hell in the presence of love?

May he be cursed forever, that idle dreamer,
The first one who in his stupidity
Entranced by a sterile, insoluble problem,
Wished to mix honesty with what belongs to love!

He who would unite in a mystic harmony
Coolness with warmth and the night with the day
Will never warm his palsied flesh
With that red sun whose name is love!

Go if you wish and find a stupid sweetheart, run
To offer your virgin heart to his cruel kisses;
Full of remorse and horror, and livid,
You will bring back to me your stigmatized breasts...

Woman here below can serve only one master!"
But the girl pouring out the vast grief in her heart,
Suddenly cried: "I feel opening within me
A yawning abyss; that abyss is my heart!

Burning like a volcano and deep as the void!
Nothing will satiate that wailing monster
Nor cool the thirst of the Eumenides
Who with torch in hand burn his very blood.

Let our drawn curtains separate us from the world
And let lassitude bring to us repose!
I want to bury my head in your deep bosom
And find in your breast the cool of the tomb!"

— Go down, go down, lamentable victims,
Go down the pathway to eternal hell!
Plunge to the bottom of the abyss where all crime
Whipped by a wind that comes not from heaven,

Boil pell-mell with the sound of a tempest.
Mad shades, run to the goal of your desires;
You will never be able to sate your passion
And your punishment will be born of your pleasures.

Never will a cool ray light your caverns;
Through the chinks in the walls feverish miasmas
Filter through, burst into flame like lanterns
And permeate your bodies with frightful odors.

The bleak sterility of your pleasures
Increases your thirst and makes your skin taut
And the raging wind of carnal desire
Makes your flesh snap like an old flag.

Damned, wandering, far from living people,
Roam like the wolves across the desert waste;
Fulfill your destinies, dissolute souls,
And flee the infinite you carry in your hearts!

-- William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)


Should this poem not move you to click and visit fleursdumal.org for more of the Charles Baudelaire's works, here's a seductive snippet of the poet's biography:

One of the greatest French poets of the 19th century, called 'the father of modern criticism,' who shocked his contemporaries with his visions of lust and decay. Baudelaire formed with Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine the so-called Decadents. Baudelaire was the first to equate modern, artificial, and decadent. In LE PEINTRE DE LA VIE MODERNE (1863, The Painter of Modern Life) Baudelaire argued in favor of artificiality, stating that vice is natural in that it is selfish, while virtue is artificial because we must restrain our natural impulses in order to be good. The snobbish aesthete, the dandy, was for Baudelaire the ultimate hero and the best proof of an absolutely purposeless existence. He is a gentleman who never becomes vulgar and always preserves the cool smile of the stoic.

Still not fascinated? (What's wrong with you?!)

How about this: Baudelaire was a translator of Poe's works, an opium addict, an art critic, sympathetic of prostitutes, and a man who worshipped his mother.

While Baudelaire never married, his long-time relationship with Jeanne Duval (a Creole woman, actress, and dancer) suggests that even if he didn't love her -- that he only viewed her as "the archetype of the sexually exciting exotic woman" and could only regard "her as the personification of the animal-like, of the natural" -- he was intensely devoted to his muse, his "Black Venus".



(Though the authors of the above link may be operating off of faulty information. The painting by Edouard Manet may not be of Jeanne Duval but rather of "an unidentified "Adele" referred to in Baudelaire's journal, or one of the casual acquaintances the poet encountered after he terminated his relationship with his long-time mulatto mistress in 1861." Others argue the 'odd' painting style was the style Baudelaire preferred -- he was not sympathetic to realism) It is clear, however, that the two spent over two stormy decades with one another -- before each died of syphilis.


Baudelaire viewed himself as a fallen angel, so perhaps it's no surprise that he died in his mother's arms on August 31, 1867, in a Paris clinic.

Sketches by Charles Baudelaire via Art.com.


Baudelaire's grave and cenotaph are at the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.