Note 279 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Paul Bourget, op. cit., p. 6: ‘He is a libertine, and depraved visions amounting to Sadism disturb the very man who comes to worship the raised finger of his Madonna. The morose orgies of the vulgar Venus, the heady fumes of the black Venus, the refined delights of the learned Venus, the criminal audacity of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their memories in the most spiritualized of his poems. An offensive odour of vile alcoves escapes from these ... verses....’ And p. 19: ‘... It is not so with the mystic soul—and that of Baudelaire’s was one. For this soul did not content itself with a faith in an idea. It saw God. He was for it not a word, not a symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being, in whose company the soul lived as we live with a father who loves us.’