Baudelaire to Sainte-Beuve
15th January, 1866.
My dear friend, I do not know how to thank you enough for your good letters. It is really all the kinder of you because I know you are very busy. If I am sometimes long in replying it is on the score of health, which prevents me and even sends me to bed for many days.
I shall follow your advice: I shall go to Paris and I shall see the G...s myself. Then, perhaps, I shall commit the indiscretion of asking you to give me a helping hand. But when? For six weeks I have been immersed in a chemist’s shop. If it should be necessary to give up beer, I do not ask anything better. Tea and coffee, that is more serious; but will pass. Wine? the devil! it is cruel. But here is a still harder creature who says I must neither read nor study. What a strange medicine is that which prohibits the principal function! Another tells me for all consolation that I am hysterical. Do you admire, like me, the elastic usage of these fine words, well chosen to cloak our ignorance of everything?
I have tried to plunge again into the “Spleen de Paris” [“Poems in Prose”], for that was not finished. Finally, I hope to be able to show, one of these days, a new Joseph Delorme, grappling with his rhapsodic thought at each incident in his stroll and drawing from each object a disagreeable moral. But how difficult it is to make nonsense when one wishes to express it in a manner at the same time impressive and light!
Joseph Delorme has arrived there quite naturally. I have taken up the reading of your poems again ab ovo. I saw with pleasure that at each turn of the page I recognised verses which are old friends. It appears that, when I was a boy, I had not such very bad taste. (The same thing happened to me in December with Lucain. “Pharsale,” always glittering, melancholy, lacerating, stoical, has consoled my neuralgia. And this pleasure has led me to think that in reality we change very little. That is to say, that there is something invariable in us.)
Since you own that it does not displease you to hear your works spoken of, I am much tempted to write you thirty pages of confidences on this subject; but I think I should do better to write them first in good French for myself, and then to send them to a paper, if there still exists a journal in which one can talk poetry.
However, here are some suggestions of the book which came to me by chance.
I have understood, much better than heretofore, the “Consolations” and the “Pensées d’août.”
I have noted as more brilliant the following pieces: “Sonnet à Mad. G...,” page 225.
Then you knew Mme. Grimblot, that tall and elegant Russian for whom the word “désinvolture” was made and who had the hoarse, or rather the deep and sympathetic voice of some Parisian comediennes? I have often had the pleasure of hearing Mme. de Mirbel lecture her and it was very comical. (After all, perhaps I am deceiving myself; perhaps it is another Mme. G.... These collections of poetry are not only of poetry and psychology, but are also annals.) “Tu te révoltes”... “Dans ce cabriolet”... “En revenant du Convoi”... “La voilà.”...
Page 235, I was a little shocked to see you desiring the approbation of MM. Thiers, Berryer, Thierry, Villemain. Do these gentlemen really feel the thunderclap or the enchantment of an object of art? And are you then very much afraid of not being appreciated to have accumulated so many justificatory documents? To admire you, do I need the permission of M. de Béranger?
Good Heavens! I nearly forgot the “Joueur d’orgue,” page 242. I have grasped much better than formerly the object and the art of narratives such as “Doudun,” “Marèze,” “Ramon,” “M. Jean,” etc. The word “analytical energy” applies to you much more than to André Chénier.
There is still one piece that I find marvellous: it is the account of a watch-night, by the side of an unknown corpse, addressed to Victor Hugo at the time of the birth of one of his sons.
What I call the decoration (landscape or furniture) is always perfect.
In certain places of “Joseph Delorme” I find a little too much of lutes, lyres, harps, and Jehovahs. This is a blemish in the Parisian poems. Besides, you have come to destroy all that.
Indeed, pardon me! I ramble on! I should never have dared to talk to you so long about it.
I have found the pieces that I know by heart again. (Why should one reread, with pleasure, in printed characters, that which memory could recite?)
“Dans l’île de Saint-Louis” (Consolations).
“Le Creux de la Vallée,” p. 113. Here is much of Delorme!
And “Rose” (Charming), p. 127.
“Stances de Kirke White” p. 139.
“La Plaine” (beautiful October landscape), p. 138.
Heavens! I must stop. I seem to pay you compliments, and I have no right. It is impertinent.