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Page 1 of 31928 · PDF PAGE 20
…- storms. I swear to you that the seconds now tick off like a mighty and a solemn bell, and each one leaping from the clock cries: I am Life, Life in- tolerable, Life implacable, Life! There is only one second in human life whose mission it is to announce good news the good news which breathes into every heart an inexplicable fear. Yea, Time reigns; he has resumed his brutal dictatorship, and he drives me on, as if I were an ox, with his double goad. On, then, thick- head!Sweat, slave! live, damnèd wretch!
1928 · PDF PAGE 151
…themselves capable of so stern an action, ex- plicable enough as it was. Then they sent the waiter for fresh bottles to kill time, whose life is so hard; and quicken life, which flows so slowly.
1928 · PDF PAGE 155
…ps even he knows the refinement of the old Egyptians, who held no festival without a skeleton or some other emblem of the short- ness of life. In he went, drank a glass of beer opposite the tombstones, and slowly smoked a cigar. Then the fancy took him to go into the ceme- tery whose grass was so tall and so inviting, and where so rich a sun held sway. In effect, the light and the heat were revel- ling there, and one would have said that the drunken sun was wallowing at all its length upon a carpet of magnificent flowers nourished upon destruc…
1928 · PDF PAGE 131
…y a candle. What one may see in sunlight is always less interesting than what passes behind the glass. In this black or shin- ing cavity life lives, life dreams, life suffers. Beyond the waves of roof I see a woman, middle-aged, already wrinkled, poor, always bending over something, who never goes out. With her face, her clothing, her gesture, almost nothing, I have re-constructed the story of this woman;or rather, her legend. And some- times I tell it to myself, and weep. If it had been a poor old man, I could have reconstructed his history j…
1928 · PDF PAGE 30
…sses of Paradise! You impudent fellow; you dare to walk about in the poor quarters of the town, and you have not even glasses which make life look beautiful! And I pushed him vigorously towards the staircase, where he stumbled and swore. I went to the balcony and seized a little flower-pot; and when the man reappeared in the doorway I let fall my engine of war on the back edge of his shoulder straps, and the shock overthrowing him, he broke beneath his back all his poor walking stock-in-trade, which uttered the crashing cry of a glass palace s…
1928 · PDF PAGE 181
Infamous capital, I love thee! Drain Whose thieves and whores give me to ease lifes itch Pleasures inscrutable to the profane!
1928 · PDF PAGE 66
chosen his toy from life itself, and the two chil- dren laughed together brotherly, and their teeth shone white, the ones no whiter than the others.
1928 · PDF PAGE 130
…ull of fair promise, which sent to us a mysterious perfume of rose and musk, and whence in an amorous murmur came to us all the music of life.
1928 · PDF PAGE 5
…er all, a mis- take!of feeding on poison because he recog- nized the banality of food; of experimenting with death because he had tried life, and found it fail him. The thought of Baudelaire has thus been universally recognized as highly unsuitable for the suburbs, as incompatible with any view of life which advocates spiritual complacency, mental and physical contentment. His writings are indeed the deadliest poison for the idle, the optimistic, the overfed: they must fill every really human spirit with that intense and insuf- ferable yearnin…
1928 · PDF PAGE 18
… I owe it that I am thus surrounded with mystery, with si- lence, with peace and with perfume? Oh bless- edness! what we ordinarily call Life, even in its happiest expansion, has nothing in common with this supreme life which I now hold, and which I taste minute by minute, second by second. No, there are no more minutes, there are no more seconds. Time has disappeared; it is Eternity which reigns, an eternity of delight.
1928 · PDF PAGE 61
…land which resembles you, where all is beautiful, rich, quiet, straightforward; where Fancy has built and adorned a Western China; where life may be softly breathed, where happiness is wedded to silence. It is there that we much go and live, it is there that we must go and die. Yes, it is there that we must go and breathe, dream, make long the hours by rea- son of the infinity of sensations that they hold; a musician has written, Will you dance with me?; who will compose Will you come with me? That one may offer it to the beloved one, the s…
1928 · PDF PAGE 182
…o some long since forgotten poetasters of his day. L. The incident of the Villa Hermosa seems to refer to some incidents in Baudelaires life.
1928 · PDF PAGE 111
…ntively at every face which I see in the course of the day, and you know well what en- joyment we draw from this faculty which ren- ders life more living and significant to our eyes than it is for other men. In the retired district where I dwelt, and where broad brass-covered spaces still separate the buildings, I often saw a child whose eager and merry face attracted me at the first glance more than did that of anyone else. He had posed more than once for me, and I have turned him at one time into a little gipsy, at another into an angel, at a…
1928 · PDF PAGE 172
sistency of wet plaster. By me energetic treat- ment I had given him back pride and life. Then I made a number of signs to make him understand that I considered the discus- sion at an end; and rising with the satisfaction of a sophist of the Portico I said to him, Sir, you are my equal. Do me the honour to share my purse with me, and remember, if you are really a philanthropist, that you must apply to all your brothers when they ask alms of you the theory which I have had the pain of trying upon your back! He swore emphatically that he had un…
1928 · PDF PAGE 99
…ant and admissible to be- lieve it. The guilty nobles had enjoyed the comedy for the last time; in the same night they were wiped out of life. Since then many a mime, justly appreciated in divers countries, has come to play before the Court of His Highness, but not one has been able to equal the marvellous talent of Fanciullo, nor to obtain the same degree of fa- vour.
1928 · PDF PAGE 26
… I had offered you a parcel of ordure you would have sniffed it with delight and very likely eaten it up! Unworthy companion of this sad life of mine, how you re- semble the public, to whom one must never present the delicate perfumes which only ex- asperate it, but carefully selected scraps of nastiness!
1928 · PDF PAGE 143
XLI THE HARBOUR A HARBOUR is a charming resting-place for a soul weary of the struggles of life. The ampli- tude of the sky, the mobile architecture of the clouds, the changing hues of the sea, the spar- kling of the lighthouses, are a prism, marvel- lously fitted to amuse the eyes without ever tiring them. The slender shapes of the ships with their complicated rigging on which the swell imprints its harmonious oscillations, serve to banquet the pleasure of rhythm and beauty in the soul. And above all, there is a sort of mysterious and aristocr…
1928 · PDF PAGE 166
XLVIII ANYWHERE, ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD THIS life is a hospital where every sick man is possessed with the desire to bear his suffer- ings in front of the stove, and another thinks that he will get better beside the window. It seems to me that I should always be well wherever I am not; and this question of re- moval is one which I ceaselessly discuss with my soul. Say, my soul,poor deluded soul, what do you think of going and living in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you would become as lively as a lizard. It is on the waterside; they sa…
1928 · PDF PAGE 17
…e long, low, lan- guid shapes; one would say that they dream; they seem endowed, as vegetables and miner- als are, with a somnambulistic life. The cover- ings speak with the same silent language as flowers, skies, and sunsets. On the walls no artistic abomination; as compared with pure dream, unanalysed im- pression, definite and positive art is a blas- phemy. Here everything has the suffering clearness and the delicious obscurity of har- mony. An infinitesimal scent of the most exquisite kind, in which is mingled a very slight mois- ture, swim…
1928 · PDF PAGE 42
…t sighs of a tempest, and who recoil from the insolent gaze of the joyful and the idle: these shadowy retreats are the meeting-places of lifes cripples. It is above all to these places that the poet and the philosopher love to direct their eager guesses, which find there an assured pasture. For is there is a place which they disdain to visit, as I insinuated in the last story, it is above all the gaiety of the rich. That turbu- lence of emptiness has nothing to attract them. On the contrary, they feel themselves irresistibly drawn towards all …