From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordAnimal names in love are forms of address as well as comparisons.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées XVII gives the reader the pet names before explaining them.
- In this editionThe edition's ‘Kitty, puss, puss-puss’ recreates a run of familiar sounds for Minette, minoutte, minouille rather than pretending there are exact lexical equivalents.
- A place to readmon petit singe mélancolique — The endearment combines diminutive affection, animality and sadness.
Meaning
Animal names in love are forms of address as well as comparisons. Calling a beloved a cat, wolf, monkey or snake gives an intimate relation a miniature vocabulary of play, possession and imagined nature. The tenderness of a diminutive does not cancel the animalization, and the animal form does not always abolish tenderness.
The notebook's concern falls on repetition: such verbal whims, too often repeated, are said to reveal a satanic side of love. It is not merely one name but a pattern of naming that becomes evidence for an interpretation. The conclusion tells us as much about the interpreting voice as about the couple's language.
Use in the book
Fusées XVII gives the reader the pet names before explaining them. ‘My melancholy little monkey’ mixes emotional depth with diminutive animality; the list is more varied than a neutral category like endearments would suggest. The subsequent question about satans having animal shapes converts familiar erotic speech into a scene of possible demonic disguise.
Cazotte's camel supplies the explicit literary allusion. In Le Diable amoureux the summoned being first appears through a monstrous camel's head and later returns to that frightening form after seductive transformations. Baudelaire compresses the chain into ‘camel, devil and woman’. That compression is his interpretation of the fiction; it is not evidence that women literally belong to a demonic species.
The following pistol-range anecdote ends with the husband calling his companion a dear angel after imagining her as the doll he shoots. Angelic and animal language can thus serve related evasions: an affectionate name sits beside an act of imagined violence. Mon cœur mis à nu XLI brings love of women and intimate conversation with animals together under animal descent, while Fusées XIX associates the cat with beauty and luxury. The vocabulary is unstable enough to require attention to each scene. ‘Animal’ can demean, entice, dignify or expose an intimate contradiction.
Places to read
- Fusées XVIImon petit singe mélancolique — The endearment combines diminutive affection, animality and sadness.
- Fusées XVIIde trop fréquentes appellations bestiales — The alleged evidence is a repeated practice of naming.
- Fusées XVIIchameau, diable et femme — The compressed Cazotte allusion joins transformation to erotic suspicion.
- Fusées XVIICher ange, que je te remercie de mon adresse ! — Angelic address masks the pistol anecdote’s imagined aggression.
Translation in this edition
The edition's ‘Kitty, puss, puss-puss’ recreates a run of familiar sounds for Minette, minoutte, minouille rather than pretending there are exact lexical equivalents. ‘Animal names’ is relatively neutral for appellations bestiales; readers should remember the French adjective's capacity to sound degrading. Lowercase ‘satans’ preserves the unusual plural instead of replacing it with a single proper-named Satan. The distinctions between tender address, hostile interpretation and literary allusion remain necessary in English.
Source note
Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux, the initial evocation and the later reappearance of the camel’s head: Le Diable amoureux. The narrative supplies the transformation to which the notebook alludes; Baudelaire’s three-word compression is not a neutral summary of all its ambiguities.