--- title: "Baudelaire Literary Lexicon" subtitle: "Words Images and Contradictions in Intimate Journals" author: [] lang: en-GB date: "October 2026" --- # Contents {#contents} [Introduction and reading map](#introduction) · [Full articles](#lexicon) · [Defined vocabulary register](#defined-register) · [Contextual phrase glosses](#contextual-glosses) · [Lexical index](#lexical-index) · [Passage index](#passage-index) · [Thematic index](#thematic-index) · [Source guide](#source-guide) - [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) - [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) - [Animal names](#entry-animal-names) (p. 17) - [Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition](#entry-antisemitism) (p. 19) - [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) - [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) - [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) - [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) - [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) - [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) - [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) - [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) - [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) - [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) - [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) - [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) - [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) - [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) - [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) - [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) - [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) - [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) - [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) - [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) - [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) - [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) - [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) - [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) - [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) - [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) - [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) - [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) - [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) - [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) - [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) - [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) - [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) - [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) - [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) - [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) - [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) - [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) - [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) - [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) - [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) - [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) - [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) - [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) - [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) - [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) - [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) - [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) - [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) - [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) - [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) - [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) - [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) - [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) - [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) - [Sea and Infinity](#entry-sea-infinity) (p. 118) - [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) - [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) - [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) - [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) - [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) - [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) - [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) - [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) - [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) - [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) - [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) - [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) - [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) - [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) - [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) - [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) - [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) - [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) - [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) # Introduction and reading map {#introduction} Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals make a word change its allegiance. Prostitution can name the desire to leave oneself, the practice of art, a compromised relation to an audience, or God’s inexhaustible availability to others. Work can sound like a punishment, a spiritual exercise, an accumulating investment, or the practical means of supporting a mother and a companion. Charity appears beside ferocity before it becomes an urgent obligation. These changes are the subject of this lexicon. Its purpose is to make the notebooks’ French vocabulary, images, people, allusions and difficult arguments available to a reader of the supplied bilingual edition, without making the fragments agree more neatly than they do. The reading text is the 2026 translation prepared for Diotimos, titled Flares and My Heart Laid Bare. It contains Fusées I–XXII and Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII–CXVII, including the Hygiène fragments. The numbering follows the supplied edition’s 1920 French source and continues across the two works. These 117 sections contain 604 aligned bilingual text rows. The supplied volume also has an introduction and 104 numbered translator notes. The separate Choix de maximes consolantes sur l’amour, the historical volume’s editorial notes and its index are outside this lexicon’s source corpus.[^guide-corpus] ## How to use the book The full articles are alphabetical reading essays. Each begins with a headword and French terms, then moves through five recurring parts. **The word** defines a term or establishes a critical topic. **In Intimate Journals** follows its particular work in these fragments. **The places annotated** gives short French attestations and explains their local force. **In this edition** considers the supplied English translation, a marked restoration or a textual distinction. **See also** connects related arguments rather than merely multiplying labels. The defined vocabulary register provides shorter but independent explanations of secondary terms, idioms, objects and names. Its definitions are local: a dictionary may list several senses of a word, but the entry explains the sense at the cited passage. The contextual phrase glosses give more room to a construction, a compressed image or an allusion that cannot be understood by translating its words separately. The same French family can appear in all three forms of discussion. Their separate counts describe records, not a claim to that many nonoverlapping French lemmas. Three indexes provide complementary routes. The lexical index includes English headwords and French terms; the passage index follows the source sections; the thematic index brings together essays otherwise separated by alphabetical order. A cross-reference or index line is navigation, never an additional definition. The passage index records discussion, not every occurrence of every word. ## References and textual layers A reference such as “Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20” identifies a section and its historical printed page span in the 1920 source. It does not mean pages 18–20 of the supplied 99-page PDF, or of this lexicon. The source edition groups some long sections across several pages; when a quotation has not been independently pinned to one historical page, the full verified section span is retained. The Roman numeral and short quotation together locate the passage.[^guide-locators] The page numbers next to this lexicon’s internal links refer instead to its own PDF. DOCX pagination can change with fonts or editing; EPUB reflows. Internal links remain a route to each article, register record and gloss in those formats. The French attestations reproduce the supplied text, with typographical spacing normalized where necessary. A lemma above an entry may be singular, infinitive or otherwise dictionary-like; the attestation is the actual occurrence. Some English headings name an interpretive topic, such as autobiography, rather than a single French word in the notebook. Their French terms identify the language that supports the reading. At least four voices require attention: Baudelaire’s fragment, material he quotes, the historical edition’s arrangement or editorial indications, and the modern translator’s explanation. The lexicon adds another interpretive layer. Thus the Ptolemy passage attached to XXVI is a note in the historical source, while the modern discussion of its Greek and Latin belongs to the translator. The newspaper clipping in LXXXV remains a quotation embedded in the notebook. The sonnet in CVIII is introduced as something to cite, with an attribution disputed on the page; it is not silently converted into a poem by Baudelaire. Bracketed editorial indications and restored obscenities likewise retain their different statuses. ## A reading map ### Fusées I to VIII The opening moves from the possibility of a God who need not exist in order to reign to art, prostitution, crowds and number. These are linked by the movement of giving oneself away, multiplying oneself and wanting to possess what one loves. The fragments interrupt their general claims with green darkness, ordinary phrases, violet clothing, surgical torture, an arabesque, fire and a sky called tragic. The changes of register are part of the writing: not every image is the illustration of a preceding thesis. Prayer appears early as a reservoir of force; music excavates the sky; play acquires value precisely where indifference to winning and losing threatens it. ### Fusées IX to XVI The great person struggles against the nation; sleep becomes a nightly danger; contempt, friendship and journalism produce brief barbs. Ships seem to ask when they will depart for happiness, and the atmosphere of Poe’s Usher supplies a model for a narrative steeped in a single environment. A dated list of errands interrupts reflections on discipline, hallucination and irregular beauty. Reading reminders on melancholy lead to the highly personal definition of “my Beautiful”: ardour, sadness, mystery, thwarted power and misfortune. The declaration is powerful partly because it admits its own preference. It is not presented as a neutral law that every beautiful object must obey. ### Fusées XVII to XXII An extended assemblage connects self-cultivation, magic, language, symbolism, a recovered halo, prayer, capital and labour. Erotic pet names and a scene of a husband shooting a doll bring intimacy close to animalization and violence. Sensibility, bad taste, cats, work and the invention of a commonplace lead into the final large section. Here ships become moving configurations of lines; two unhappy lovers experience reciprocal pardon; literary satire passes into a forecast of spiritual impoverishment under mechanized, commercial civilization. The ending does not resolve its anger into humane prophecy. The speaker doubts the physician’s charity in himself and preserves the pages in order to date his anger. ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII to XLV The second notebook begins with the self’s vaporization and concentration, followed by a plan to start anywhere and continue according to circumstance. The dandy, political reversals, the excitement of 1848, professed lack of convictions, early solitude and unanswered metaphysical questions share the sequence. Collective progress is attacked, but individual moral improvement is retained. The theatre’s chandelier displaces the actors as the chief attraction. The famous two simultaneous aspirations toward God and Satan are followed by a sharp distinction between torture as an absurd way to discover truth and a death penalty defended as spiritual sacrifice. That disturbing distinction must remain visible; it cannot be replaced by a vague account of Baudelaire’s love of violence. ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLVI to LXIII Requests for portraits and recollections expose the literary world as a place of patronage, humiliation, journalism and power. George Sand and Voltaire become targets of attacks on moral confidence, fluent prose and hostility to mystery. The theology of creation is posed as a question about the fall of unity into duality. Idleness, sexual rivalry, flight from home, national prejudice and ordinary professional careers then reappear in brief notes. The sequence culminates in an attack on the military metaphors by which writers advertise independence while revealing a taste for discipline and conformity. ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXIV to LXXXVIII Pleasure binds the self to the present, salvation to the future. Political domination is recast as dependence on the people. Adoration, sacrifice and prostitution become related ways of leaving oneself; God is called the supreme common reservoir of love. Prayer for the mother and the dead stands beside plans to study bloodlust. Misogynistic assertions, literary lists, Nadar’s energy, musical and religious reminders, erotic misunderstanding and the sea’s diminutive infinity follow. Civilization is measured by the reduction of original sin rather than technical devices. Leisure has produced both debt and cultivated perception. Public respectability, national self-congratulation and literary fame are then tested through invective, quotation and the paradox of remaining one while giving oneself to others. The law of gradual accumulation reaches artistic skill and, in the governing reading of LXXXVIII, voluptuousness. ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIX to CVIII Funerals become scenes of professional networking; the treatment of religion in Tartuffe becomes a question of audience. Images, music, art and the body are repeatedly set against one another. Childhood aspirations and the actor’s vocation complicate the posture of solitary genius. Commerce is condemned as reciprocal calculation, and social agreement is said to depend on misunderstanding. God is also an intimate confidant; created forms are imagined to outlast their material components. The newspaper’s daily catalogue of violence disputes the reader’s comfortable language of civilization. Amulets, sacraments and prayer appear near an explicit antisemitic proposal in CV. Its violence is named here rather than softened into general misanthropy. The adjacent theological description of Jews does not undo it. Moral censorship, the possibility of individual progress and a quoted erotic sonnet complete this group.[^guide-hostility] ### Hygiène CIX to CXVII The last group turns repeatedly to will, action, bodily regimen, debt, time and support for other people. It contains no simple assurance that discipline has already succeeded. “Too late perhaps” and “It is still time” coexist; projected budgets change; a vow is a vow rather than proof of its fulfilment. Work is imagined as a cure for poverty, illness and melancholy, while a medical recipe sits beside moral exhortation. The regimen is historical material, not health advice. Prayer, washing or dressing, and work form a brief practical programme, and the final rules reserve earnings for living, creditors, friends and the mother. These concrete obligations complicate any reading that treats the notebooks only as an exercise in cultivated isolation. ## Reading contradictions without dissolving them A repeated term need not keep one stable moral value. “Nature” is invoked against complacent claims that what is natural must be legitimate, yet the sea supplies one of the highest experiences of beauty. Prostitution is both a startling name for relation and an instrument of insult. A dandy is said to do nothing, while work is urged with desperate persistence. The same notes distrust common feeling and ask whether a phase of egoism is finished. Such collisions invite comparison, not a forced chronology of conversion that the printed arrangement does not establish. Nor does fragmentary form neutralize an assertion. An unfinished reminder can be a serious instruction, a cruel fantasy, an open question or an abandoned project; its grammar and surroundings matter. “A chapter on” does not tell us what every conclusion of that unwritten chapter would have been. Conversely, an explicit demand for violence does not become harmless merely because it is short. The lexicon distinguishes what is actually said from the systematic doctrine, biographical diagnosis or eventual work a reader might be tempted to supply. This method is especially important for the notebooks’ sexual, political, religious and racial provocations. Their explanatory language can be illuminating, coercive, self-contradictory or plainly hostile. The aim is neither to domesticate that hostility nor to imitate it. Close reading asks who is speaking, what is being compared, which claims are hypothetical, and what an adjacent passage makes harder to sustain. ## A companion to this translation The articles attend to the supplied English as a particular translation. Flares chooses one force of Fusées; My Heart Laid Bare gives the exposure in Mon cœur mis à nu. Words such as volupté, esprit, jouissance, charité and hygiène do not have one English equivalent that can be applied mechanically everywhere. Likewise, an abbreviated French obscenity and an English word restored inside angle brackets are different textual objects. The lexicon’s edition paragraphs explain such choices where they matter instead of replacing the bilingual text with a new translation. The recovered source names Steven Neff as reviewer and editor and marks that review pending. Its earlier assertions about complete French checking and independent AI review are claims in that edition, not a new guarantee supplied by this book. The source guide records the verification boundary once; individual entries retain local uncertainties where they affect meaning. The lexicon is a substantial reading companion, not a replacement for the primary notebooks or a new critical edition.[^guide-review] [^guide-corpus]: The source title and scope paragraphs identify a new translation prepared for Diotimos, 2026, based on Adolphe van Bever’s 1920 Journaux intimes, printed pp. 3–42 and 45–112. Counts here were checked against the recovered DOCX and PDF: 117 section tables, 604 bilingual text rows after excluding their column and numeral headers, 104 numbered translator notes, and 99 PDF pages. [^guide-locators]: The 1920 historical page spans are carried by the headings of the supplied edition. The facsimile links in that edition begin at Gallica image f12 for printed p. 3. The source guide links the historical volume. The modern PDF’s pagination is separate from these historical page numbers. [^guide-hostility]: Compare CV with the claims about religion, love and prayer in LXVII–LXVIII and CI–CIV. The juxtaposition does not establish a reconciled system. The antisemitic sentence proposes the extermination of a people; the adjacent “witnesses of the Redemption” phrase belongs to a distinct Christian theological register, itself requiring critical attention. [^guide-review]: The recovered file’s title page says “Reviewer and editor: Steven Neff — review pending.” This lexicon verifies its attestations against the supplied French and distinguishes that task from a new manuscript collation, a full independent rechecking of the historical printing or human scholarly review. This volume contains 79 full articles, 273 separately defined register records and 50 contextual phrase glosses. These are different kinds of record, not a nonoverlapping count of unique French words. Index entries, aliases and repeated cross-references are not additional definitions. # Lexicon {#lexicon} ## Acedia and weariness of life {#entry-acedia} *acedia; Tædium vitæ; folie-suicide; aversion* **The word.** Acedia enters as the monks' illness, beside the Latin Tædium vitæ, weariness of life. The terms bring a spiritual and moral history of despondency into contact with a modern medical reading list. They should not be treated as exact synonyms for any single present-day diagnosis, nor does their appearance establish a diagnosis of Baudelaire. The fragment's form is bibliographical and investigative. It names a treatise, asks for a passage to be found, and juxtaposes portraits from Seneca and Chrysostom. It supplies resources for thinking about a condition before it supplies a sustained account of that condition. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XIV begins with the title of Brierre de Boismont's treatise on suicide and suicidal madness in relation to statistics, medicine and philosophy, then asks for a passage about living with someone who feels only aversion. The requested passage is not located within the notebook. The movement from a statistical-medical title to an intimate relation suggests several scales of inquiry, but the missing connection should not be invented. The named portraits of Serenus and Stagirius place distress beside ancient philosophical and Christian consolatory writing. Acedia then makes monastic weariness explicit. As contextual comparison, Cassian's Institutes X describes distress that produces dislike of one's place, restlessness, impaired reading and work, and a wish to escape. Cassian is not named in the fragment; his account helps explain the historical term without proving that Baudelaire used that particular book. This vocabulary illuminates, without diagnosing, related notebook problems: the horror of home in Mon cœur mis à nu LVIII, the indifference to winning or losing in Fusées VIII, the exhausting sense of time in CXI, and the urgent appeal to work in CXII. These passages do not all report the same episode or condition. Their kinship lies in the failure of an activity, place or future to retain its claim on the self. The lexicon should preserve that range rather than turn every instance of boredom, despair and paralysis into one explanatory label. XXII's epigram about Stoicism having suicide as its sole sacrament is a different rhetorical object. It compresses a tradition into an antagonistic religious analogy; it is not a reliable survey of Stoic philosophy or a practical injunction. Keeping the epigram separate from XIV's research plan allows the reader to register both the seriousness of the inquiry and the violence of the wit. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XIV, source pp. 17–18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item).** L’acedia, maladie des moines. — The historical term is supplied with a monastic gloss. - **[Fusées XIV, source pp. 17–18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item).** Le Tædium vitæ. — The Latin label broadens the field to weariness of life. - **[Fusées XIV, source pp. 17–18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item).** Chercher le passage — The inquiry remains incomplete at this point. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LVIII, source pp. 69](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f78.item).** la grande maladie de l’horreur du domicile — A later projected study offers a related, not identical, problem of place and aversion. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** Le stoïcisme, religion qui n’a qu’un sacrement — The separate epigram uses religious compression rather than historical exposition. **In this edition.** The edition retains ‘Acedia’ and renders Tædium vitæ as ‘Weariness of life’, preserving the historical term while making the Latin accessible. Its ‘suicidal madness’ follows the treatise's historical category; it is not a contemporary clinical diagnosis. Translator's notes 27–28 identify the works and clearly state that the requested aversion passage has not been independently located. The printed spelling Briere is retained in the body, distinguished from the author's fuller bibliographical name.[^f-acedia-cassian] **See also.** [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) · [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) ## Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics {#entry-amulets-sacraments} *amulette; sols percés; talismans; sacrements; dynamique morale* **The word.** Dynamique morale conceives inward life through forces, instruments, reservoirs, and effects. Morale is not restricted to a list of commandments; it concerns the operations by which strength can be gathered and conduct changed. The repeated language of power makes prayer and ritual practices rather than merely propositions. An amulet, a pierced coin, and a personal keepsake can all mediate attachment. Their juxtaposition in CIV places ordinary private objects near explicitly religious instruments without proving that their functions are identical. **In Intimate Journals.** CIV proposes a philosophical demonstration of the amulet's force, then a treatise on moral dynamics and the power of sacraments. These are programme headings, not completed demonstrations. The final recollection of childhood conversations with God anchors the speculative labels in an autobiographical practice. CV brings the question to Jesus, faith, and prayer. Baudelaire characterizes Renan as finding material efficacy ridiculous, while the note insists on sacraments as instruments. The translator's comparison with Renan's Vie de Jésus distinguishes that hostile characterization from an exact quotation. The disagreement concerns how belief can be related to action on the world. Fusées XVII's rosary as vehicle and its image of electrical recurrence supply a related model: a repeatable form makes force available. The Hygiène rules then ask for strength in order to work and care for others. The reader need not accept supernatural causation to recognize the text's practical concern with mediation, habit, and effective attention; nor should that recognition erase its actual religious claims. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIV, source pp. 98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f107.item).** Les sols percés, les talismans, les souvenirs de chacun. — Shared and private objects are listed as carriers of power. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIV, source pp. 98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f107.item).** Traité de dynamique morale. — The title announces a proposed study, not a finished treatise. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CV, source pp. 99](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item).** Les sacrements sont des moyens de cette dynamique. — Ritual is defined instrumentally. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** Le chapelet est un médium, un véhicule — The rosary gives the general account a concrete device. **In this edition.** ‘Power’ for vertu avoids the modern narrowing to moral goodness; ‘pierced coins’ makes sols percés legible. In this religious context, obsession and possession concern demonic influence rather than modern diagnostic categories. Note 91 explains the historical distinction, and note 92 cautions that Baudelaire's summary of Renan is not a located verbatim statement. **See also.** [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) ## Animal names {#entry-animal-names} *appellations bestiales; formes de bêtes; mon petit singe; ange* **The word.** 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. **In Intimate Journals.** 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. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** mon petit singe mélancolique — The endearment combines diminutive affection, animality and sadness. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** de trop fréquentes appellations bestiales — The alleged evidence is a repeated practice of naming. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** chameau, diable et femme — The compressed Cazotte allusion joins transformation to erotic suspicion. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** Cher ange, que je te remercie de mon adresse ! — Angelic address masks the pistol anecdote’s imagined aggression. **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.[^f-cazotte-camel] **See also.** [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) · [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) ## Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition {#entry-antisemitism} *extermination; race juive; Bibliothécaires; témoins de la Rédemption* **The word.** CV contains an explicit antisemitic proposal to organize a conspiracy for the extermination of Jews. Its imperative project-form does not turn it into a neutral historical observation, and its shortness does not reduce its violence. The phrase must be named accurately rather than euphemized as mere irreverence or generalized misanthropy. The next sentence calls Jews librarians and witnesses of Redemption. That theological role is also assigned from a Christian perspective; it is not a description of Judaism in its own terms. **In Intimate Journals.** The two sentences appear after notes on sacraments and the infamy of printing. Their adjacency supplies no demonstrated causal argument. It would be unjustified to invent an economic theory, a particular political organization, or an implemented plot behind the fragment. It would be equally unjustified to claim that the surrounding discontinuity makes the extermination proposal harmless. The image of Jewish custodians of scriptural books has a Christian precedent in Augustine. In City of God XVIII.46, their preservation and dispersion are made witnesses to Christian prophecy. This is a subordinating and anti-Jewish framework, but its preservation argument is distinct from extermination. The parallel clarifies the following line without reconciling the two claims or establishing Baudelaire's immediate source. The fragment therefore matters to the notebook's larger contradictions. A writer can defend spiritual depth against materialist simplification while producing dehumanizing hatred. The language of universal religion, charity, or divine justice elsewhere does not absolve this sentence. Conversely, the sentence should be read in its exact historical textual form rather than used to fabricate a detailed programme that the surviving note does not contain. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CV, source pp. 99](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item).** pour l’extermination de la race juive. — The violent aim is explicit and directed at Jews as a group. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CV, source pp. 99](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item).** Les juifs Bibliothécaires et témoins de la Rédemption. — The next line invokes a separate Christian witness image. **In this edition.** The 2026 translation preserves ‘extermination’ and the historical phrase ‘Jewish race’, without substituting softer vocabulary. Translator note 93 distinguishes the extermination call from the witness tradition and marks the immediate source as unestablished. Clear translation is indispensable here: the reader needs neither protective omission nor speculative amplification.[^antisemitism-1] **See also.** [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) ## Arabesque {#entry-arabesque} *dessin arabesque; ligne; dessin* **The word.** Arabesque here names drawing organized through patterned, elaborated line rather than a narrated incident. Baudelaire's two superlatives make the relation between visible form and spirit unusually sharp: the most spiritualist drawing can also be the most ideal. The terse notes do not identify a particular artwork or prescribe a complete decorative style. ‘Spiritualist’ is an opposition to the sufficiency of matter in this context, not evidence that the drawing communicates with spirits. Nor should ‘ideal’ be taken to mean merely attractive. Both claims ask what a line can do beyond copying the external appearance of an object. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées V and VI repeat the same subject while changing its predicate. The first calls arabesque drawing spiritualist; the second calls it ideal. Repetition is evidence of an idea being tried in neighbouring formulations, rather than a reason to discard one as redundant. Because neither fragment supplies an argument, the reader must keep the claim compact while testing it against other entries. XXII's ship supplies a related operation: real elements in motion generate imaginary curves and figures. These produce the idea of an immense, harmonious animal expressing human ambition. The connection is interpretive, not an explicit equation made by Baudelaire. It nevertheless helps show how visible lines might activate imagination without representing a pre-existing spiritual being. XVIII contrasts German reverie expressed through line with English reverie expressed through perspective. The national generalization is undeveloped, but its formal distinction prevents a reduction of all imaginative drawing to one device. XX's instruction for raw colouring and deeply recut drawing is another compact practical note. Across these passages, line is not subordinate illustration; it can be the means by which reverie acquires an intelligible movement of its own. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées V, source pp. 9–10](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item).** Le dessin arabesque est le plus spiritualiste des dessins. — The first superlative concerns drawing’s relation to spirit. - **[Fusées VI, source pp. 10–11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f19.item).** Le dessin arabesque est le plus idéal de tous. — A neighbouring reformulation changes spiritualist to ideal. - **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** L’Allemagne exprime la rêverie par la ligne — Line is treated as a means of expressing reverie. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** mouvement dans les lignes — The ship’s geometry becomes the source of a poetic idea. **In this edition.** The 2026 translation retains ‘spiritualist’, explicitly explained in translator's note 7, rather than flattening it to ‘spiritual’. ‘Drawing’ for dessin works both as activity and as formed design; ‘picture’ would encourage a more narrowly representational reading. The separate English superlatives preserve the two notebook trials. The phrase ‘drawing deeply recut’ in XX is similarly left material and practical rather than converted into a general compliment about strong composition. **See also.** [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) · [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) ## Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude {#entry-aristocracy-office} *aristocratique; fonction; domesticité publique; prêtre; guerrier; poète* **The word.** Aristocratie is both a claim about political government and a language of exceptional worth. Fonction, by contrast, suggests a role that uses up its occupant's personality. These categories are not identical with inherited class: a dictator can be a servant, and a socially marginal artist can embody greatness. The priest, warrior, and poet form an emphatic threefold exception. Their verbs in XLIV are to know, kill, and create. The list dignifies power and sacrifice while exposing how violently the text devalues ordinary work. **In Intimate Journals.** XLIV openly declares aristocratic government the only reasonable and secure form, dismissing democratic monarchy and republic together. It then assigns other people to taxes, compulsory labour, and the stable. The animalizing hierarchy is part of the proposition, not decorative language that can be discarded while retaining an innocuous defence of excellence. Yet LXVI calls dictators the people's servants: they adapt their minds to national stupidity. C allows that officials and directors may be estimable but denies them divinity or originality. The target is not simply low social status; it is dependence on public demand and institutional function. The satire of editorial schoolmastering in XLVII puts newspapers in the same chain as government and administration. XXVII's refusal of decorations adds another difficulty. Accepting a medal acknowledges the state's right to judge and confer distinction; pride and Christian humility can independently forbid it. Thus the notebook can demand hierarchy while refusing the actual hierarchies that certify merit. Its aristocracy of self-valuation remains in tension with its wish for ordered collective rule. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIV, source pp. 59–60](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f68.item).** Savoir, tuer et créer. — Three verbs define the exceptional roles with startling economy. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIV, source pp. 59–60](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f68.item).** taillables et corvéables — The hierarchy invokes compulsory fiscal and labour obligations. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVI, source pp. 73](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f82.item).** Les dictateurs sont les domestiques du peuple — Apparent sovereignty is reclassified as service. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu C, source pp. 95–96](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f104.item).** des personnes sans personnalité — The wordplay makes office a threat to individuality. **In this edition.** ‘Subject to taxes and compulsory labour’ unfolds taillables et corvéables without losing its historical dependence, while ‘made for the stable’ preserves the insult. ‘Public servitude’ translates domesticité publique rather than neutral civil service. ‘Schoolmastering’ for pionnerie names the contemptuous supervision of writers. These choices keep the social violence and the linguistic pattern together. **See also.** [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) · [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) ## Atmosphere {#entry-atmosphere} *atmosphères; milieux; trempé; songeuse* **The word.** Atmosphere is not merely the background against which a narrative happens. It is the medium in which the whole account must be steeped, giving disparate details a shared pressure and tone. Milieu can name a setting, but Baudelaire's soaking verbs make the relation reciprocal: objects and events are saturated by the environment in which they become perceptible. The term also joins physical air to an emotional or imaginative climate. This does not require every landscape to mirror a character's mood. A carefully sustained atmosphere can act upon a character and reader before either can explain it. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XI places an instruction about atmosphere beside reminders about drama's marvellous element, sorcery and romance. Its explicit example is Poe's Usher, and its further point of reference is the deep sensations of hashish and opium. The direction is toward a narrative-wide effect, not simply an inventory of Gothic furnishings or an instruction to write while intoxicated. Poe's tale makes its oppressive air both an experienced force and a conjecture entertained by distressed observers. The house, tarn, interior and family appear connected through that climate. This primary-text parallel supports Baudelaire's choice of model without authorizing a claim that every notebook image derives from Poe. It also shows why atmosphere can organize uncertainty: the reader feels a relation before its cause becomes decidable. XXII proposes transforming a lyrical or fairy farce into a serious novel and drowning the whole in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere. Genre transformation depends on treatment rather than merely changing the story's incidents. The request that the result be lulling and even serene in passion further separates atmospheric unity from a single loud emotion. An invented world can sustain an altered state with very few declarations about what the reader ought to feel. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XI, source pp. 14–15](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f23.item).** Les milieux, les atmosphères, dont tout un récit doit être trempé. — The whole narrative is to be saturated, not merely decorated. - **[Fusées XI, source pp. 14–15](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f23.item).** Voir Usher — Poe’s tale is an explicit point of comparison. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** Noyer le tout dans une atmosphère anormale et songeuse — A later project makes immersion central to a change of genre. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** même de serein dans la passion — Atmosphere can hold passion without becoming uniformly agitated. **In this edition.** ‘Steeped’ in XI and ‘Immerse the whole’ in XXII preserve related soaking metaphors, although noyer is stronger than the latter English choice and can mean drown. ‘Dreamy’ for songeuse gives the projected atmosphere a receptive, suspended quality; it is not the same as simply inserting a dream episode. The edition correctly retains ‘Usher’ as a brief working reference and supplies the title in a note rather than expanding the fragment into a finished citation.[^f-atmosphere-poe] **See also.** [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) · [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) ## Autobiography and Self-Examination {#entry-autobiography} *Mon cœur mis à nu; parler de lui-même; Γνωθί σεαυτόν; Liste de mes goûts* **The word.** To lay the heart bare is to promise access to inward life. Here the promise takes the form of notes for a book rather than a completed continuous confession. First-person testimony, insults, remembered scenes, quotations, prayers, and practical lists all participate in the self-portrait; none alone establishes a transparent or exhaustive identity. Self-examination is also a literary activity. XXIV grants anyone the right to speak of himself if he can entertain. This qualification places style and an imagined reader beside sincerity from the outset. **In Intimate Journals.** XXIII proposes beginning anywhere and continuing according to the day's occasion, provided inspiration is intense. The proposed form accommodates discontinuity without treating everything written as equally finished. XLVII lists histories still to be told: translating Poe, publishing Les Fleurs du Mal, the trial, and relations with famous contemporaries. These headings name missing narratives; they are not their substitutes. CXIII converts the Delphic injunction to know oneself into a method of finding subjects, followed by the parenthesis ‘List of my tastes’. The self becomes a source of material, selected and analysed. The injunction to remain a poet even in prose explicitly prevents reading this scrutiny as merely documentary. The comic permission to entertain and the solemn language of duty pull in different directions. A frightening recollection may be shaped into an image; a profession of conviction may be immediately qualified. The reader therefore asks not only whether the notebook records a belief but what work that formulation performs: rehearsal, accusation, self-command, or provocation. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII, source pp. 45](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f54.item).** Je pense commencer Mon cœur mis à nu n’importe où — The beginning is projected rather than established retrospectively. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXIV, source pp. 46](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item).** pourvu qu’il sache amuser — An audience-facing condition complicates naked confession. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVII, source pp. 61–62](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f70.item).** Histoire de ma traduction d’Edgar Poe. — A heading advertises unwritten autobiographical development. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII, source pp. 105](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** Γνωθί σεαυτόν. (Liste de mes goûts.) — Self-knowledge is made a source of literary subjects. **In this edition.** The edition translates the title as ‘My Heart Laid Bare’ and follows the printed Je pense, ‘I think I shall begin’, rather than the comparison witness's Je peux. Intention is different from ability. ‘Know yourself’ translates the Greek without silently correcting its accents in the French column. These local choices preserve both the projected book and the material incompleteness of its witness. **See also.** [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) · [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) · [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) ## Bad taste {#entry-bad-taste} *mauvais goût; déplaire; grotesque; discordances* **The word.** Bad taste becomes attractive when it can be willed as a breach of expected approval. The phrase ‘aristocratic pleasure of displeasing’ makes taste relational: what delights the speaker includes another person's dissatisfaction. This is more pointed than enjoying an unconventional object in private. The aristocracy here is a claim to distinction, not proof that the speaker's judgment is independently superior. If the pleasure needs an offended audience, defiance remains tied to the very public from which it seeks separation. The paradox is part of the aphorism's pressure. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XVIII places bad taste beside the mixture of grotesque and tragic, compared to dissonances enjoyed by jaded ears. The comparison supplies a physiology of reception: familiarity can dull response, making discordance newly stimulating. It does not say that any ugly or offensive object is automatically good art. The pleasure comes through a relation between the mixture and a particular state of sensibility. XVII gives the wish to displease a more aggressive aim: universal disgust and horror would finally conquer solitude. Antagonism becomes a method of producing distance. Yet that strategy risks making the self dependent on others' reactions. The announcement of a book not written for ‘my women, my daughters and my sisters’ similarly manufactures a hostile imagined readership while refusing its authority. The taste for surprise in XII supplies a related aesthetic criterion, but surprise and displeasure should not be equated. One can awaken attention without humiliating an audience, and VI admits that buffoonery rarely remains charitable. These neighbouring passages allow the reader to recognize the energy of deliberate offence while asking what it costs. The notebook's attacks on persons and groups are not absolved because displeasure is sometimes an aesthetic resource. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire — The maxim defines pleasure through a deliberately adverse response. - **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** comme les discordances aux oreilles blasées — Mixed registers answer a state of jaded reception. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** j’aurai conquis la solitude — Universal disgust is imagined as a route to separation. - **[Fusées VI, source pp. 10–11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f19.item).** mais c’est rare — The qualification in the buffoonery-and-charity sentence checks easy celebration of offence. **In this edition.** ‘Bad taste’ and ‘displeasing’ retain the verbal opposition between goût and déplaire without replacing it with the more approving ‘transgression’. ‘Jaded’ for blasées matters: the analogy concerns a dulled appetite, not a timeless rule of artistic judgment. The edition's ‘intoxicating’ also keeps the aphorism within the wider vocabulary of ivresse, so the claimed aristocratic coolness is inseparable from a sought excitement. **See also.** [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) ## Beauty {#entry-beauty} *Beau; Beauté; beauté; mon Beau* **The word.** Beau can become a substantive, the Beautiful, whereas beauté can name beauty as quality or experience. Fusées XVI makes an even more consequential distinction: the speaker has found a definition of the Beautiful, then immediately qualifies it as ‘my Beautiful’. The possessive claims a personal aesthetic without wholly abandoning the ambition to define. This beauty is ardent and sad, somewhat vague and hospitable to conjecture. Its attraction depends on tensions rather than on one pure mood: desire with satiety, power with frustration, seduction with distress. The visible surface matters because it suggests more than it conclusively discloses. **In Intimate Journals.** XVI first applies the definition to a woman's face, read as the most interesting sensible object in society. That framing reveals the position of a desiring observer and objectifies its subject; it is not a gender-neutral account of perception. The face may suggest exhaustion after pleasure or, oppositely, an eagerness for life embittered by deprivation. Beauty can sustain contradictory inferred histories. The male face is then allowed spiritual needs, repressed ambitions and a rumbling unused power. The asymmetry is part of the argument: the speaker gives himself permission to read men through power and women through erotic provocation, while briefly admitting the possibility of a woman's different gaze. His conclusion in favour of Milton's Satan follows from this deliberately situated account of virile beauty, not from a demonstrated universal hierarchy of all beautiful things. Other fragments prevent ‘my Beautiful’ from becoming the notebook's only aesthetic formula. XII finds surprise essential; XXII admires ships through regularity and symmetry; XIII describes Banville's poetry as luminous and happy. XVI itself does not exclude joy but calls it a vulgar ornament beside melancholy's illustrious companionship. Most importantly, the parenthesis about a bewitched mirror lets the observer wonder whether his preference has become an obsession. The definition is forceful enough to organize perception and self-questioning enough to disclose its cost. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** J’ai trouvé la définition du Beau, de mon Beau. — The possessive immediately qualifies the scope of the apparent discovery. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** quelque chose d’un peu vague, laissant carrière à la conjecture — Beauty gives interpretation room to move. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** l’idée d’une puissance grondante et sans emploi — Frustrated capacity enters the reading of masculine beauty. - **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item).** une partie essentielle et la caractéristique de la beauté — The irregularity note supplies a related but distinct criterion. **In this edition.** The edition distinguishes ‘the Beautiful’ from ‘Beauty’ where French form and capitalization call for it, and keeps the awkwardly emphatic ‘my Beautiful’. This is preferable to smoothing the whole opening into ‘my idea of beauty’, which would erase the little drama of discovery and qualification. ‘Misfortune’ for malheur resists narrowing it to sadness alone. The translation's ‘an object perceived by the senses’ also prevents objet sensible from being misread as an emotionally sensitive object. **See also.** [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) · [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) · [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) · [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) ## Cats {#entry-cats} *chat; chats; air chat; luxe; propreté* **The word.** The cat condenses a cluster of qualities: beauty, luxury, cleanliness and sensual pleasure. It also supplies an ‘air’ that combines childishness, nonchalance and mischief. These are selected traits in an aesthetic and polemical construction, not a natural history of the animal. As an image, the cat moves between independence and intimacy. It can stand against utilitarian or collective expectations while entering the lover's private language. That double availability helps explain why its animality is attractive in some passages even though animal descent is condemned elsewhere. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XIX pretends that the democrats' dislike of cats is easy to explain. The reasons given are the cat's aesthetic and luxurious qualities, so a political opponent is defined through an assumed incapacity for pleasure in beauty. This is an aphoristic caricature, not evidence of actual preferences among democrats. Its force depends on treating aesthetic distinction as an implicit political challenge. In XVII, the catlike air is the last item in a catalogue of appealing feminine appearances. The explanation gives it a mixture rather than one stable expression. Childishness, nonchalance and malice can attract because they leave motive uncertain. The catalogue as a whole belongs to a male observer's erotic typology; it should not be accepted as an account of women's essential character. The same section's intimate animal names include ‘my cat’, then subjects frequent animal naming to a satanic interpretation. Mon cœur mis à nu XLI includes conversations with dogs and cats among the pleasures associated with the downward aspiration. The cat therefore cannot be assigned a single moral sign. It is beautiful, intimate, aristocratically imagined and suspect within different arguments. Its mobility shows how an image may exceed the hierarchy in which an isolated maxim tries to place it. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XIX, source pp. 29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item).** Pourquoi les démocrates n’aiment pas les chats — The opening takes an unproved preference as a premise for polemical wit. - **[Fusées XIX, source pp. 29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item).** des idées de luxe, de propreté, de volupté — The animal condenses an aesthetic value-cluster. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** L’air chat, enfantillage, nonchalance et malice mêlés. — The feminine air is attractive through a mixture of dispositions. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLI, source pp. 57–58](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f66.item).** les conversations intimes avec les animaux, chiens, chats — A later moral schema assigns intimate animal relations a downward tendency. **In this edition.** ‘Catlike air’ for l’air chat turns the compressed French noun into an English adjective but keeps air as an appearance or manner. ‘Mischief’ in the list softens one possible force of malice; readers should retain its capacity for ill will as well as play. In XIX the edition's ‘reveals ideas of’ preserves the act of interpretation: the cat makes certain qualities imaginable to the speaker rather than simply embodying an objective political allegiance. **See also.** [Animal names](#entry-animal-names) (p. 17) · [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) · [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) ## Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl {#entry-censorship-young-girl} *jeune fille; épouvantail; immoralité; indécences; feuilles de vigne* **The word.** The jeune fille of LXXXIII first appears as the young girl ‘of’ publishers and editors: an imagined reader used to police what art may show. Calling her a scarecrow makes the protective figure an instrument of intimidation. The passage then turns that criticism into misogynistic abuse of young women themselves. These two objects must be distinguished. An argument against a censor's idealized audience does not substantiate the ensuing claims about actual girls' intelligence or sexuality. **In Intimate Journals.** LXXXIII calls the figure a murderer of art. Its compressed sequence suggests that the supposed innocence of a reader can be used to justify suppressing artistic knowledge. Yet the attack does not remain directed at publishers. By asserting depravity as the young girl's reality, Baudelaire reproduces the reductive typemaking he is exposing. CVI stages a parallel scandal at the Louvre: Louise Villedieu, described by Baudelaire through the price of prostitution, blushes at immortal paintings and sculpture. He uses the anecdote against bourgeois moral commentary, treating expressed modesty as a poor judge of art. The woman's reaction is reported only through his narration; it does not establish either her hypocrisy or a reliable biographical portrait. The fig-leaf reminder extends the dispute into museum display, but names no particular work or order. XC's attack on Tartuffe complicates any simple defence of unlimited public exposure: Baudelaire himself says serious questions should not be handed to the rabble. He opposes certain censoring audiences while imagining restrictions of his own. Artistic autonomy here remains entangled with hierarchy. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIII, source pp. 83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f92.item).** La jeune fille des éditeurs. — The initial figure belongs to the publishers’ apparatus. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIII, source pp. 83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f92.item).** assassin de l’art. — Protection of an audience is framed as destruction of art. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVI, source pp. 99–100](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item).** comment on pouvait étaler publiquement de pareilles indécences. — The Louvre anecdote turns modesty into an aesthetic problem. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XC, source pp. 89–90](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f98.item).** certaines questions graves à la canaille. — Baudelaire also imposes a restriction of audience. **In this edition.** ‘Little slut’ retains the offensive force of salope beside ‘depravity’; it does not identify the imagined girl as a professional prostitute. ‘Fig leaves’ translates feuilles de vigne idiomatically in the context of covering nudity. Notes 76, 82, and 94 distinguish the polemical judgments from verifiable facts about Molière and the museum administrator Nieuwerkerke. **See also.** [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) · [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) · [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) ## Charity {#entry-charity} *charité; pardon; se sacrifier; devoir* **The word.** Charité is broader than almsgiving. It can name active concern for another person, a religious virtue, mutual mercy or the humane impulse to heal. The notebooks test it against possession, theatrical benevolence, mockery and egoism. Giving assistance is not automatically charity if the giver preserves a conqueror's rights over the recipient. The word also supplies a criterion the speaking self sometimes admits it cannot meet. This makes charity more than a decorative sacred term. It can expose the limits of aesthetic intensity and prophetic anger from within the notebook itself. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées I gives the keeper of a mistress pleasures compounded of angel and proprietor, charity and ferocity. The nominal pair refuses to purify support of its power relation. VI then allows buffoonery and charity to coexist, but rarely. These early statements question the moral innocence of generosity and of wit without claiming that concern for others is impossible. XXII's lovers offer a fuller scene. Their past contains fault, concealment and quarrels; the darkness permits a cold woman's defences to soften, and their remaining nobility makes their fallen condition painful. The embrace does not erase guilt. The second paragraph makes pardon reciprocal: he seeks the forgiveness he grants her. Charity here can change the structure of an encounter, replacing the earlier model in which one player must lose self-government with an exchange in which both acknowledge injury and dependence. The same section later denies the speaker a physician's charity. His diagnosis of universal degradation is not a promise to treat it. The final cigar-smoke indifference reveals how far a morally lucid denunciation can stand from practical concern. This qualification prevents the apocalypse from being read simply as compassionate warning. Mon cœur mis à nu CXV gives charity an immediate obligation: preserve one's health for mother and Jeanne, attend to duty, ask whether the phase of egoism is over. The biblical cymbal image judges eloquence without love as empty noise. CXVI imagines sustained work producing charity, and CXVII divides earnings among everyday life, creditors, friends and mother. The notebook does not prove that the program was fulfilled, but it gives the virtue a material test. Concern must become available time, strength and money. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** Charité et férocité. — The compact pair makes benevolence and domination coexist. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** pour y retrouver le pardon qu’il lui accordait — The lovers’ encounter turns on reciprocal forgiveness. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** je n’y trouverai jamais la charité d’un médecin — The prophetic speaker distinguishes his anger from a healer’s concern. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item).** Ma santé par charité, par devoir ! — Care of the self is made answerable to obligations to others. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item).** Sans la charité, je ne suis qu’une cymbale retentissante. — The biblical comparison measures eloquence against love. **In this edition.** The edition retains ‘charity’, whose modern association with donations is too narrow without context. ‘Forgiveness’ for pardon makes the reciprocal action of the love scene plain. The phrase ‘a physician’s charity’ remains a moral lack acknowledged by the speaker, not a judgment that medical care in general is absent. Translator's note 101 identifies the cymbal's scriptural resonance; the important distinction is between an allusion the writer adopts and evidence that he has already attained the virtue invoked. **See also.** [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) · [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) · [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) ## Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions {#entry-childhood} *enfance; enfant; horreur de la vie; extase de la vie; hallucinations* **The word.** Enfance functions as a claimed origin for solitude, devotion, images, role-playing, and contradictory feelings. These retrospective statements organize an adult self-portrait; they are not unmediated records written by the child. The insistence on ‘from childhood’ gives present traits a long history and sometimes the appearance of destiny. The child is also a maker of possible selves. Fantasies of pope and actor are remembered for the pleasure they produced, not offered as vocational facts. **In Intimate Journals.** XXXIV recalls solitude even among companions, then immediately affirms a taste for life and pleasure. XCV condenses the same doubleness into horror and ecstasy of life. The dismissive self-description ‘nervous idler’ does not explain the contradiction away; it gives the divided feeling another sharply drawn persona. XCIV remembers wishing to be a military pope and an actor. Spiritual authority, organized force, spectacle, and transformation already meet in the imagined roles. XCVI proposes turning the actor-memory into a chapter about vocation and marginal greatness, showing recollection becoming a literary research subject. CIV traces mystical feeling to childhood conversations with God. Fusées XVIII recalls confusion between the smells of fur and woman and love for the mother's elegance, retrospectively naming an early dandy. The senses, the mother, and religion thus supply different origins for the same adult writer. No single anecdote cancels the others; their coexistence is the portrait's organizing multiplicity. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIV, source pp. 53](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f62.item).** Sentiment de solitude, dès mon enfance. — A present self-understanding is projected back to childhood. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIV, source pp. 92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item).** Jouissances que je tirais de ces deux hallucinations. — Imagined identities are remembered through their pleasures. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCV, source pp. 92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item).** l’horreur de la vie et l’extase de la vie. — Opposite affects are held together in one heart. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIV, source pp. 98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f107.item).** Mes conversations avec Dieu. — Religious intimacy becomes another remembered origin. **In this edition.** ‘Hallucinations’ in XCIV preserves Baudelaire's term for these fantasies but does not establish a clinical symptom. ‘Nervous idler’ likewise renders a historical self-description, not a diagnosis. ‘First passion’ for primitive passion in XCI helps connect the image-cult to the retrospective pattern without assigning an exact age or event that the notebook does not give. **See also.** [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) · [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) ## Civilization and Original Sin {#entry-civilization} *civilisation; péché originel; énergie; dignité personnelle* **The word.** Civilisation is a moral achievement in LXXXI, not a synonym for the latest machinery or for belonging to the West. Its criterion is the reduction of original sin's traces, a theological formulation that asks how people act rather than what instruments they possess. The pairing of energy with personal dignity makes superiority qualitative. No technological inventory can by itself establish it. **In Intimate Journals.** The fragment excludes gas, steam, and table turning from its criterion. The list joins industrial powers with a fashionable way of seeking spirit communication; Baudelaire is not simply opposing material science to any practice labelled spiritual. The test is what happens to moral life. The comparison with nomads, herders, hunters, agricultural peoples, and even the category he calls anthropophages reverses the assumption that Western societies necessarily stand highest. It remains framed in broad historical classifications and the vocabulary of races. Its challenge to Western self-congratulation should not be modernized into a complete anthropology the fragment never provides. CIII makes the morning newspaper a practical contradiction of civilized complacency: crime and torture sit beside boasts of goodness and progress. But CXV's charitable responsibilities suggest an alternative scale at which civilization might be enacted. The notebook's most sweeping judgments return to minute conduct, expenditure, attention, and restraint. Whether those duties are fulfilled is another question, which its anxious imperatives leave open. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXI, source pp. 82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item).** Elle n’est pas dans le gaz, ni dans la vapeur — Technical capacity is rejected as a sufficient measure. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXI, source pp. 82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item).** la diminution des traces du péché originel. — The positive criterion is explicitly moral and theological. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXI, source pp. 82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item).** par l’énergie, par la dignité personnelle — The counter-comparison uses attributes of persons. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIII, source pp. 97–98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f106.item).** ce dégoûtant apéritif — The newspaper makes supposed civilization a habit of consuming horrors. **In this edition.** The edition translates pasteurs as ‘herders’, avoiding the misleading religious sense ‘pastors’. ‘Western races’ retains the historical language without identifying a specific contemporary population. ‘Table turning’ names the period practice; it is not ordinary moving furniture. These clarifications in note 75 prevent both anachronistic softening and accidental obscurity. **See also.** [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) · [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) ## Cliché and poncif {#entry-cliche-and-poncif} *poncif; concetto; lieu commun; locutions vulgaires* **The word.** Poncif brings together a reproducible design and a conventional formula. Its visual sense is a drawing prepared so that its outline can be transferred; its figurative sense includes the commonplace or cliché. The paradox of creating a poncif depends on both originality and repeatability: someone must first produce what later users find ready-made. The neighbouring concetto points toward an ingenious turn or conceit. Commonplace and ingenuity need not be enemies if a striking invention becomes a durable form. But the notebook does not simply authorize copying existing formulas. Its imperative is to create one. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XX announces that creating a cliché is genius, then converts the judgment into a personal obligation. The distinction between invention and repetition is easy to miss in English, where cliché usually names only the exhausted result. The fragment values the capacity to establish a pattern strong enough to circulate beyond its first occasion. Fusées I supplies another account of shared language: common expressions have an immense depth of thought, like holes dug by generations of ants. Their ordinariness is collective labour, not necessarily spiritual emptiness. The image asks the writer to excavate inherited speech rather than judge it solely by freshness of surface. Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII likewise places the grand style beside the claim that nothing is more beautiful than the commonplace. This does not contradict every attack on formula. The military metaphors catalogued in LXI–LXIII expose conformity disguised as boldness: literary fighters speak in an army's ready-made idiom while imagining themselves independent. The difference is not simply old versus new language. It concerns whether a form can still organize perception or has become a social costume. XX's adjacent reminders about Rabbe's tone, the kept-woman tone and the eternal tone similarly treat manner as something to hear, test and transform, not a generic badge of originality. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XX, source pp. 29–30](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item).** Créer un poncif, c’est le génie. Je dois créer un poncif. — The maxim becomes a personal task of invention. - **[Fusées XX, source pp. 29–30](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item).** Le concetto est un chef-d’œuvre. — Ingenuity sits beside the repeatable formula rather than excluding it. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** trous creusés par des générations de fourmis — Common speech is imagined as the product of accumulated labour. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII, source pp. 105](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** rien de plus beau que le lieu commun — The later note gives the commonplace a place in grand style. **In this edition.** The 2026 English chooses ‘cliché’ and uses translator's note 37 to recover the technical drawing-template sense of poncif. That division is readable but makes the sentence initially more paradoxical than French readers aware of the visual meaning may find it. Concetto remains in Italian, while ‘commonplace’ renders lieu commun elsewhere. These should be read as a connected problem of form and reuse, not standardized into a single pejorative word.[^f-poncif-dictionary] **See also.** [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) · [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) · [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) ## Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest {#entry-commerce} *commerce; prêté-rendu; lucre; égoïsme; désintéressée* **The word.** Commerce in XCVII is exchange governed by the expectation of receiving more than one gives. The fragment does not offer an economic description of every market operation. It constructs a moral definition in which apparent reciprocity masks an unequal demand. Lucre makes profit an appetite, while égoïsme supplies the explicit reason for calling commerce satanic. The accusation concerns the end served by the transaction, including transactions that wear the appearance of virtue. **In Intimate Journals.** The repeated declarations in XCVII tighten a polemical circle: commerce is natural, therefore infamous; honesty itself becomes speculation for gain. The comparatively least infamous merchant admits using virtue to out-earn the vicious. Candour about self-interest is a small distinction within the condemnation, not absolution. The notebooks nevertheless rely constantly on financial models. Work bears interest in Fusées XVII; gradual skill grows like compound interest in LXXXVIII; the Hygiène plans divide income among dependants and creditors. The coexistence matters. Financial language can clarify accumulation even when the pursuit of gain as an ultimate motive is condemned. CXV's instruction to earn money by working without self-interest is deliberately paradoxical. The hoped-for income serves duties, yet attention to immediate gain threatens the quality of the work that could produce it. This is not a practical guarantee that disinterested labour will be paid. It is an attempted reorientation of motive within material necessity, shadowed by the same debts that make money unavoidable. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII, source pp. 93–94](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f102.item).** Rends-moi plus que je ne te donne. — The unspoken demand reveals the supposed reciprocity. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII, source pp. 93–94](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f102.item).** l’honnêteté elle-même est une spéculation de lucre. — Virtue becomes an instrument of gain. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII, source pp. 88–89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f97.item).** comme les intérêts composés — Financial language remains available for a positive account of growth. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item).** travailler d’une manière désintéressée. — The late rule separates earning from immediate self-interest. **In this edition.** ‘Lending and repayment’ unfolds prêté-rendu; the following ‘Give me back more’ keeps the hidden surplus demand visible. ‘Without self-interest’ for désintéressée is preferable here to the modern mistaken sense of disinterested as bored. ‘Satanic’ should remain attributed to Baudelaire's moral polemic, not adopted as a factual classification of merchants. **See also.** [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) ## Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy {#entry-convictions} *convictions; ambition; cause; réussir* **The word.** Conviction might mean a reasoned commitment, but XXXIII suspects that its public meaning has become the determination to succeed. The fragment distinguishes intensity of attachment from truth or moral worth. Brigands can be perfectly convinced because they know what they want. The plural convictions therefore cannot be read as a transparent inventory of beliefs. It is a contested word whose worldly sense the speaker rejects while retaining a possible higher sense. **In Intimate Journals.** XXV imagines deserting a cause to discover the feeling of serving another. Alternation between victim and executioner extends the experiment into a disturbing fantasy of exchanging positions. Political constancy is tested against curiosity about experience, with no supplied conclusion about whether such curiosity is permissible. XXXIII's sequence performs the difficulty. The opening denial of convictions is qualified by ‘as the people of my century understand them’; its final sentence claims convictions in a higher sense. Between these limits, the speaker admits a lack of ambition and even of the desire to try. This is not merely heroic refusal: fatigue and incapacity are visible within the disdain. The Hygiène notes later demand repeated willing and immediate work. They do not resolve the earlier political question, but they shift the test of conviction from declarations to habits. What one can sustain becomes more consequential than what one can announce. The notebooks' self-accusation prevents their catalogue of other people's failures from being the whole story. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXV, source pp. 46](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item).** pour savoir ce qu’on éprouvera à en servir une autre. — Changing cause is imagined as an experiment in feeling. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIII, source pp. 52–53](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f61.item).** parce que je n’ai pas d’ambition. — Disavowal of conviction is tied to desire, not only intellectual judgment. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIII, source pp. 52–53](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f61.item).** Cependant j’ai quelques convictions, dans un sens plus élevé — The fragment’s close limits the opening negation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** Plus on veut, mieux on veut. — Later practice supplies a different model of sustained commitment. **In this edition.** ‘Executioner’ for bourreau retains the literal violence of XXV, while the translator notes that ‘tormentor’ is another possible sense; no scene is specified. ‘Convictions’ remains the same word at the beginning and end of XXXIII, making the internal qualification audible. ‘Respectable people’ for honnêtes gens preserves a social category whose softness is under attack, rather than certifying their goodness. **See also.** [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) ## Created Form and Immortality {#entry-form-immortality} *forme; matière; idée; immortelle; Constantin Guys* **The word.** Forme is distinguished from its material embodiment in CII. Paper, pigment, or molecules may be destroyed, but the created form is asserted to have an immortality independent of them. The fragment extends that claim to human making, granting artistic creation an extraordinary ontological weight. The opening comparison gives an idea immortal life ‘like a person’. It is not merely saying that artworks may be remembered for a long time; it claims a mode of existence not exhausted by an object's present survival. **In Intimate Journals.** The argument proceeds rapidly from idea to form to the insufficiency of molecules. Its evidence is then deferred to anecdotes about Émile Douay and Constantin Guys, who destroyed—or believed they destroyed—their works. The correcting phrase is decisive: physical destruction is granted while final annihilation is denied. The anecdotes themselves are not supplied. Fusées I's claim that what mind creates is more alive than matter provides a companion proposition. Both resist judging created things by material durability alone. Yet the notes do not explain whether immortality means divine preservation, memory, repeatable pattern, or another mode of persistence. Choosing one would falsely complete their metaphysics. The material notebook itself creates a productive difficulty for the claim. Its uncertain readings, abbreviations, and disputed attributions require editorial care even if form is philosophically indestructible. Immortality does not release readers from the task of preserving and distinguishing particular witnesses. The 2026 edition's visible repairs let that tension remain legible. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CII, source pp. 96–97](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f105.item).** Toute idée est, par elle-même, douée d’une vie immortelle — Ideas are assigned an intrinsic, person-like life. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CII, source pp. 96–97](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f105.item).** la forme est indépendante de la matière — The distinction is the argument’s explicit premise. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CII, source pp. 96–97](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f105.item).** détruisant ou plutôt croyant détruire leurs œuvres. — Self-correction denies that material destruction settles the matter. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** Ce qui est créé par l’esprit est plus vivant que la matière. — Fusées gives created mind-work a heightened life. **In this edition.** ‘Form’, ‘matter’, and ‘molecules’ preserve the conceptual distinctions instead of translating the claim into the weaker idiom of artistic influence. Note 89 records a parallel in Les Paradis artificiels and identifies Guys while leaving Douay unresolved. The French semicolon after l’homme becomes a comma in English; that grammatical adjustment does not supply the missing anecdotes. **See also.** [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) ## Crowd {#entry-crowd} *foule; foules; tous; tourbillon* **The word.** Foule names a physical gathering and an opportunity for the individual to cease feeling merely singular. Its pleasures are not necessarily the same as affection for a political people. Baudelaire can desire the crowd's multiplication while despising collective judgment, shared slogans or democratic self-congratulation. The different targets should not be flattened into one attitude toward ‘the masses’. The word also changes the scale of intimacy. A performance or ball lets everyone take pleasure in everyone else without forming an exclusive couple. Such circulation may promise an enlargement of life, but the self's surrender can become dependence on stimulation or an escape from solitude. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées I calls the pleasure of crowds a mysterious expression of numerical multiplication. II intensifies this with the religious intoxication of great cities and the reciprocal formula ‘I am everyone; everyone is me’. The isolated ‘Whirlwind’ is both an image of movement and a warning against reducing the sequence to a stable creed of universal fellowship. These are notes testing an experience of expansion. The same Fusées ends with a man jostled by crowds who turns away from the destinies of passing consciences. XXII converts collective proximity into fatigue, then into the dandy's pride in separation. Its ending does not simply cancel the earlier pleasure: the speaker knows that composure itself is intoxicating. Withdrawal and immersion can each be modes of enjoyment. Mon cœur mis à nu LVIII jokes that the man fleeing the city seeks a crowd in the country and so rebuilds the city there. LXIX lists the intoxications of blood, crowds and a man under torture; crowd feeling can participate in ferocity, not just sympathetic expansion. LXXXVII makes horror of solitude the motive for losing the self in exterior flesh. Taken together, these fragments show why the crowd is an aesthetic resource and an ethical hazard. No durable public or reciprocal obligation necessarily follows from the intensity of feeling many lives at once. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** Le plaisir d’être dans les foules — Crowd experience begins as a pleasure to be interpreted. - **[Fusées II, source pp. 5–6](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f14.item).** Moi, c’est tous ; tous, c’est moi. — A reciprocal formula gives collective immersion a pantheistic cast. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** Perdu dans ce vilain monde, coudoyé par les foules — The final prophecy returns the crowd as bodily pressure and exhaustion. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LVIII, source pp. 69](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f78.item).** refaire la ville à la campagne — Flight from urban life reproduces its collective arrangement. **In this edition.** ‘Crowds’ is preferable here to a uniform ‘masses’, which would politicize every occurrence. The 2026 edition renders tous as ‘everyone’ in II, preserving persons rather than an abstract totality. ‘Whirlwind’ gives tourbillon its unsettled physical motion. At the end of XXII, ‘jostled’ keeps the bodily friction that a paraphrase such as ‘alienated by society’ would lose. **See also.** [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) ## Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette {#entry-dandyism} *Dandy; dandysme; miroir; Toilette* **The word.** The dandy is an exemplary manufactured self, answerable to an exacting standard of distinction. Clothing matters because bodily presentation can bear spiritual form; dandysme is not exhausted by fashion. The command to live and sleep before a mirror makes self-surveillance continuous, extending it beyond occasions when an actual public is present. Toilette includes washing, dressing, grooming, and adornment. Its ‘morality’ and its pleasures are therefore not competing definitions: care of appearance can itself become an exercise of will. **In Intimate Journals.** XXVII constructs the dandy against a violently misogynistic caricature of woman as immediate appetite. The contrast reveals the argument's cost: cultivation is assigned to a privileged male ideal while women are denied inward discipline. Explaining that structure does not validate the exclusion. XLIV declares that a dandy does nothing; LV identifies the superior person with leisure and general education, then adds the wish to be rich and love work. The apparent inconsistency partly concerns the difference between a profession imposed for subsistence and a self-chosen activity. It remains unresolved, especially when LXXXII admits that leisure without wealth has generated humiliating debt. The mirror's unbroken sublimity finds a humbler counterpart in CXV's daily rule of grooming, prayer, and work. Both make the self an object of repeated practice. Baudelaire's published ‘Le Dandy’ likewise describes external discipline as training the will and soul; that parallel clarifies the notebook's economy without turning every late prayer into disguised dandyism. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII, source pp. 48–49](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f57.item).** Il doit vivre et dormir devant un miroir. — The ideal requires a vigilance that even sleep cannot suspend. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIV, source pp. 59–60](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f68.item).** Un Dandy ne fait rien. — Social non-function becomes a provocative mark of independence. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LV, source pp. 67–68](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f76.item).** l’homme de loisir et d’Éducation générale. — The superior person is opposed to narrow specialization. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXII, source pp. 77](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f86.item).** Moralité de la toilette, les bonheurs de la toilette. — Self-presentation joins duty to pleasure. **In this edition.** The 2026 edition retains ‘Dandy’ where the particular source passage capitalizes it; capitalization is not uniform throughout the corpus. ‘Toilette’ is retained for the broad chapter heading in LXXII, while the compressed rule in CXV uses ‘Grooming’. Neither means the modern English lavatory. See translator notes 39, 67, and 101.[^dandyism-1] **See also.** [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) ## Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk {#entry-debt-honfleur} *dettes; Ancelle; Honfleur; billets; classement* **The word.** Debt brings time, dependence, and humiliation into the vocabulary of inward life. It is not merely an incidental circumstance behind the writing. The notebook makes it a practical test of whether hopes and talents can become completed acts. Honfleur appears as a destination for repair and ordering. The imperative to go there precedes lists of letters, debts, engravings, and notes, each allotted time. Spatial retreat is supposed to make an executable sequence possible. **In Intimate Journals.** LXXXII acknowledges that leisure without wealth increases debt and its humiliations. CX answers with the urgent call to reach Honfleur before falling further. The location does not magically promise a cure; the later schedule specifies work to be done there. CXIV plans two 500-franc shares from 1,000 francs and a further division of the second share. Its classification separates promissory notes, large debts, small debts, and friends, then gives two days each to several kinds of sorting. Artistic and financial papers occupy the same ordered world. The project imagines clearing obligations and recovering usable materials as related forms of attention. CXVI's monthly allocation and CXVII's four shares are different plans, not revisions whose chronology can be reconstructed from their printed order. The admission that a realized plan's pleasure remains unknown checks the apparent assurance of the figures. Their precision measures desire for control rather than verified solvency. The imagined budget also names people whose welfare depends on the self's transformation, making arithmetic part of affection. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CX, source pp. 103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item).** A Honfleur ! le plus tôt possible — The place is cast as an urgent destination. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV, source pp. 105–106](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** Dettes (Ancelle). — Financial administration is attached to a named person. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV, source pp. 105–106](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** Quatre catégories, billets, grosses dettes, petites dettes, amis. — The list distinguishes types of obligation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** quatre parts — The final vow proposes a separate distributive scheme. **In this edition.** Note 100 identifies Ancelle as the notary administering Baudelaire's finances and supplies the mother's connection to Honfleur. ‘Promissory notes’ gives billets its financial sense, avoiding confusion with ordinary letters. The edition preserves the two-share, monthly 800-franc, and four-share plans independently. No reconstructed account of actual payment should be built from these proposals. **See also.** [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) ## End of the world {#entry-end-of-the-world} *Le monde va finir; américanisés; avilissement des cœurs; entrailles; viscères* **The word.** The world's end in Fusées XXII is primarily an end of meaningful spiritual and moral life, even if material existence continues. The speaker explicitly asks whether continued existence would deserve the name. Catastrophe is therefore not chiefly the destruction of cities or a return to a vivid wilderness. Those adventures would still contain an energy his projected future lacks. The prophecy's vocabulary is deliberately inflammatory and often prejudicial: Americanization, animality, degraded money-wisdom and bodily coarsening. These belong to Baudelaire's polemical construction, not to an objective ranking of nations or a demonstrated prediction. Its central diagnostic claim is that people may lose the capacity to perceive their own impoverishment. **In Intimate Journals.** XXII first rejects a colourful survival narrative among the ruins. The decisive danger is that machinery and the celebrated progress of civilization atrophy the spiritual part of life. The process is ironic: humanity perishes by what it thought sustained it. The paragraph thus attacks the criteria by which success is measured, rather than merely predicting technological failure. The imagined family makes the argument concrete. A son leaves early to compete in business with his father; respectable marriage becomes an impeccable financial arrangement; even sexual wandering loses its stray generosity and submits to money. The disturbing cradle image of a daughter pricing herself compresses the fantasy that calculation will precede experience. These are satirical projections of a world wholly measured by gain, not sociological descriptions to be accepted without qualification. The distinction between entrailles and viscères concentrates the prophecy. The first word can carry tenderness or compassion as well as bodily interiority; the second leaves only the organs. Material survival is compatible with the loss of the humane meaning formerly lodged in the body. The reader is then asked whether the predicted time has already arrived and whether coarsened perception prevents recognition. Futurity turns into an accusation about the present. Yet the prophecy undermines its own secure authority. The speaker feels the ridiculousness of a prophet and lacks the charity of a physician. He withdraws into composure and a cigar, indifferent to passing consciences. Finally he identifies the pages as a digression and retains them to date his anger. This is a record of a situated anger with real critical force, not an impersonal revelation. The ships at the section's opening also prevent a simple equation of constructed objects with spiritual death: an artefact there had generated imaginative depth. What matters is the form of life organized around things. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** serait-ce une existence digne de ce nom — Material persistence is distinguished from meaningful life. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** nous périrons par où nous avons cru vivre — The catastrophe reverses civilization’s own account of its means of survival. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** Ce sera par l’avilissement des cœurs. — The decisive ruin is moral rather than a particular constitutional arrangement. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** il ne te restera de tes entrailles que des viscères — The wordplay strips bodily existence of its compassionate meaning. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** parce que je veux dater ma colère — The ending identifies the pages as a retained record of anger. **In this edition.** The edition's ‘actual results’ for résultats positifs prevents positive from sounding approving. ‘Declared legally incapable’ preserves the legal threat contained in faire interdire; merely ‘forbidden’ would lose it. ‘Entrails’ and ‘viscera’ retain the bodily opposition, but English does not naturally carry all the compassion in entrailles, which translator's note 45 supplies. ‘Americanized’ and the hostile national references are preserved as the author's terms. Their presence calls for attribution and interpretation, not endorsement. **See also.** [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) · [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) · [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) ## Evocative magic {#entry-evocative-magic} *sorcellerie évocatoire; opérations magiques; évocation; magisme* **The word.** Evocative magic makes absent beings, past experience or latent powers present through an operation. In Fusées XVII it names language and writing, but also the imagined summoning of the great dead and the restoration of health. The same vocabulary crosses aesthetic, devotional and practical domains without explaining whether their powers are identical. Evocation is stronger here than a casual reminder. Writing is imagined as doing something to perception and to the writer's capacities. Yet the magical term does not exempt the operation from technique, will or repetition; those are among the forces the notebooks repeatedly seek to organize. **In Intimate Journals.** XVII begins with self-idolatry and the preservation and augmentation of faculties, then moves into a form of worship and evocatory sorcery. This sequence links the desired work on the self to the desired work of language. The statements are project-like and exploratory. They do not provide evidence of a fully specified occult practice behind every poem. The section's sentence about inspiration is double-edged: it comes when a man wills it, but does not always leave when he wills it. What is summoned may exceed its operator's control. The nearby halo episode gives an image of that excess, since an interpretation as omen continues to possess the speaker after the physical object has been recovered. Prayer, meanwhile, is described through magical operation and electrical recurrence, translating devotion into a language of force without reducing it to merely decorative imagery. The late work program in Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI returns to evocation of inspiration and ‘Art magique’, immediately followed by an instruction to write at once. The juxtaposition is crucial. Magic is not only an excuse to wait for an exceptional visitation; it can be a name for deliberately entering the act that brings inspiration into being. CXVII's prayer to the father, Mariette and Poe as intercessors likewise makes the dead part of a present demand for strength and duty. The imaginary community is intended to support action. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** De la langue et de l’écriture, prises comme opérations magiques, sorcellerie évocatoire. — Language and writing are explicitly treated as operations. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** elle ne s’en va pas toujours, quand il le veut — Inspiration exceeds the will that claims to summon it. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Evocation de l’inspiration. Art magique. Se mettre tout de suite à écrire. — The late program joins magic to immediate practice. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** comme intercesseurs — The dead are invoked within a practical devotional resolution. **In this edition.** In XVII the edition uses ‘evocatory sorcery’ and ‘evocation’, preserving the kinship of the French words. In CXVI, however, Evocation de l’inspiration becomes ‘Summoning inspiration’, an active English phrase for the same lexical family. ‘Magism’ is retained for magisme and explained separately in translator's note 34; it should not be confused with a modern label invented for the author's entire aesthetic. The already-English ‘Self-purification and anti-humanity’ in XVII is left as such. Its language switch is part of the notebook's texture, not the translator's interpretive addition. **See also.** [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) ## Fire {#entry-fire} *feu; feux d’artifice; incendies; incendiaires; foudre* **The word.** Fire joins illumination, spectacle and destruction. Fusées VII moves from worship to fireworks, fires and arsonists without supplying transitions. The compressed series makes fascination with light contiguous with the wish to consume or destroy, but it does not establish that every spectator is an arsonist. Foudre and electricity extend the field from visible flame to atmospheric force. In these notebooks such forces can become images for thought, prayer and memory. The recurrence is a language of intensity and transmission, not a scientific explanation of spiritual life. **In Intimate Journals.** VII proposes an inborn worshipper of fire and then a ‘born Parsi’ as the basis of a short story. The last phrase is an imaginative shorthand, not a careful account of a religious community. It converts a purported innate disposition into a possible narrative character. The ellipsis leaves the story unwritten: no plot or doctrine should be inferred from the label alone. XV makes storms, electricity and lightning the alarm bell of old erotic memories. The force does not simply symbolize passion; it recalls earlier passion through present bodily and spiritual delights. Weather becomes a temporal mechanism, ringing out a past that ordinary recollection has not summoned in the same way. The electrical recurrence imagined in prayer in XVII gives a related force-language a disciplinary purpose. In III a galvanic battery had supplied a horrifying comparison for erotic muscular contractions. The same broad vocabulary can therefore characterize religious renewal and bodily disintegration. Its value comes from the operation being described, not from electricity carrying an intrinsically redemptive or destructive meaning. VII's ‘fireworks, fires, arsonists’ makes this instability especially economical. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées VII, source pp. 11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f20.item).** Feux d’artifice, incendies, incendiaires. — A sequence crosses from organized spectacle to destruction and its agents. - **[Fusées VII, source pp. 11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f20.item).** un Parsis-né — The phrase is a sketch for an imagined protagonist. - **[Fusées XV, source pp. 18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** tocsin des souvenirs amoureux, ténébreux — Storm and lightning become an alarm that recalls dark erotic memories. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** une récurrence électrique — Prayer borrows a force-image also used in very different bodily contexts. **In this edition.** ‘Fireworks, fires, arsonists’ preserves the threefold structure while distinguishing accidental or destructive fire from its deliberate agents. Translator's note 16 explains the religious allusion and the source spelling Parsis-né; the English singular ‘a born Parsi’ is grammatical normalization, not a change of identity. ‘Alarm bell’ for tocsin matters in XV because the recollection is urgent and public-sounding, not merely a gentle chime of nostalgia. **See also.** [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) ## Fragment and project {#entry-fragment-and-project} *Fusées; Suggestions; Projets; Plan; à trouver; n’importe où* **The word.** The notebook's language repeatedly announces its unfinished status: plans, suggestions, titles, questions, reminders and future chapters. A fragment may be a sharpened assertion, but it may also be a prompt whose missing argument remains genuinely missing. Its compactness does not automatically make it a complete doctrine. Fusées gives the collection a name of sudden trajectories or illuminations; the present edition chooses ‘Flares’. The word is useful as a reading image, provided it does not romanticize every incomplete item as a deliberate miniature masterpiece. Practical errands and rough bibliographical labels share the page with highly worked prose. **In Intimate Journals.** IV begins ‘Plan. Fusées. Projets’ and accumulates named references, vows, a possible preface, a theory of dreams and instructions for manner. XIV is essentially a reading-and-search list. XXII, by contrast, contains an extended prophecy and a self-conscious decision to keep a digression. These forms require different kinds of confidence from the reader. An unfinished title cannot support the same claims as a developed paragraph. XII places the dated business of collecting copies and writing to correspondents between speculation, coercive moral analogy and a statement about beauty. The task list is not noise to remove in search of the real literary text: it shows writing embedded in a day of obligations. But its printed position does not by itself supply a causal link between all the surrounding statements, or a date for every neighbouring fragment. Repetition also has interpretive value. Arabesque drawing changes from spiritualist to ideal; the armour-like skins passage changes revenge to pleasure; love's resemblance to surgery returns in a shorter form. Such repetitions can preserve variation rather than mere redundancy. They let us see a thought's pressure points without inventing a finished sequence of revision. Fusées XXI proposes beginning a novel anywhere with beautiful sentences so as to want to finish it. Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII similarly proposes beginning anywhere and continuing with the day's inspiration. The form accommodates contingent starts, while the later work resolutions insist on continuous execution. The tension between the brilliant beginning and the completed undertaking is one of the collection's own practical subjects, not only a problem imposed by its editors. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item).** Plan. Fusées. Projets. — The opening labels announce work to be attempted. - **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item).** Mardi, 13 mai 1856. — A local date anchors the following errands without automatically dating everything nearby. - **[Fusées XIV, source pp. 17–18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item).** Chercher le passage — The reading note openly records something still to be located. - **[Fusées XXI, source pp. 30–31](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f39.item).** commencer un sujet n’importe où — The writer treats a compelling beginning as a means of generating continuation. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** je laisserai ces pages — Retention itself becomes a conscious decision within the text. **In this edition.** The 2026 edition translates Fusées as ‘Flares’ while preserving the French title in the bilingual work's structure. It keeps unfinished syntax and project labels rather than expanding them into explanatory prose. Translator's note 5 explicitly leaves several IV references unidentified. The source's numbered sections and historical page ranges are navigational evidence, not assurances that Baudelaire composed every group as a finished unit. Accordingly, this lexicon cites ranges and section numbers rather than fabricating an exact page for a line it has not individually located. **See also.** [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) · [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) · [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) · [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) ## George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell {#entry-george-sand} *George Sand; bon cœur; bon sens; Enfer; contre-morale* **The word.** George Sand is a named writer turned into a polemical figure in XLVIII–L. The sustained attack joins aesthetic judgment, theological disagreement, misogynistic abuse, and fantasies of personal aggression. A lexicon must separate these strands rather than repeat the abuse as a reliable description of Sand's intelligence or work. Bon cœur and bon sens, ordinarily reassuring phrases, become suspect because trusting them can conceal unexamined self-approval. Contre-morale suggests that reversing accepted precepts may still leave a writer merely moralizing. **In Intimate Journals.** XLVIII accuses Sand of having been a moralist even when she practised counter-morality. Its argument about her flowing style makes ease of reading a symptom of bourgeois complacency. The mock identification with Prudhomme shifts her from a supposedly rebellious novelist to a caricature of conventional opinion. The specific dispute concerns her preface to Mademoiselle La Quintinie. Sand questions eternal punishment and argues that good Christians recoil from it; she also claims a place for serious religious inquiry within the novel. Baudelaire's repeated allegation that she has personal reasons to abolish Hell substitutes suspicion of motive for engagement with those arguments. His summaries are hostile paraphrases, not quotations from her preface. XLIX makes the Devil depend on ordinary stupidity as well as genius. Sand's trust in heart and sense becomes demonic possession, and a holy-water basin becomes an imagined weapon. The staging is revealing: religious objects and language can serve cruelty in the very fragments that appeal to spiritual depth. These passages test the ethical limits of Baudelaire's polemical intelligence. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVIII, source pp. 63–64](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f72.item).** Elle a toujours été moraliste. — The aesthetic charge survives an apparent change in moral position. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVIII, source pp. 63–64](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f72.item).** le fameux style coulant, cher aux bourgeois. — Fluency is converted from praise into accusation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIX, source pp. 64–65](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f73.item).** se fier à son bon cœur et à son bon sens — Ordinary virtues are recast as instruments of temptation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu L, source pp. 65](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f74.item).** Elle a de bonnes raisons pour vouloir supprimer l’Enfer. — An allegation of self-interest replaces a reasoned answer. **In this edition.** The translation retains ‘counter-morality’, ‘flowing style’, and the repeated ‘good heart’ and ‘common sense’, so the argument's reversals remain audible. ‘Holy-water basin’ gives bénitier its physical size and use; ‘old ingénues’ preserves the theatrical taunt. Notes 50–52 distinguish the Prudhomme caricature and inferred Béranger echo from Sand's own statements.[^george-sand-1] **See also.** [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) ## Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning {#entry-girardin} *Girardin; Ptolémées; souverainement ridicule; Pecudesque locutæ* **The word.** Girardin in Fusées X and Mon cœur XXVI is Émile de Girardin, the journalist targeted by the notebook’s quoted ridicule. He must be distinguished from Saint-Marc Girardin, the separately named target in LXXX. The passages make the handling of language a test of intellectual authority: a mixed metaphor, an astronomical analogy and an uncertain Latin sequence become materials for satire. **In Intimate Journals.** XXVI begins with the proverb about taking the bull by the horns, followed by Girardin’s proposed act of taking a speech from its end. Baudelaire literalizes the comparison and pretends that Girardin locates the bull’s horns behind it, where the tail belongs. This is an aggressive reading of an awkward transition, not a zoological error independently reported about the journalist. The joke makes the incongruity of the phrases visible by insisting that their figurative objects share one body. The longer quotation invokes journalistic ‘Ptolemies’ while defending an opinion as certainly true as the earth’s rotation and the sun’s non-rotation. The attached historical source note quotes Ptolemy calling a rotating earth supremely ridiculous. The structure reverses the authority of a confident judgement: what sounds certain can be exposed as mistaken by the very scientific history recruited for the analogy. The lexicon need not treat the notebook as a modern astronomy lesson to explain the rhetorical trap. Its concern here is the relation between confidence, analogy and the retrospective appearance of error. Fusées X had already turned Girardin’s Latin into a prodigy by appending the Virgilian cattle-speaking phrase. That allusion presents the journalist’s attempt at learned speech as an unnatural event. XXVI’s later Latin is less recoverable: the governing print’s sequence cannot be securely construed. Its attribution to Girardin does not make an invented English joke legitimate. Preserving the difficulty is more exact than silently repairing words until a plausible meaning appears. These barbs sit within a larger hostility toward editors and newspapers, but they have distinct evidentiary statuses. The attack on printed absurdity differs from an unexpanded list of people to portray, and both differ from the generalized indictment of the newspaper’s daily violence in CIII. Saint-Marc Girardin’s ‘Let us be mediocre’ in LXXX is a separate attributed remark directed toward the sublime. Keeping the two Girardins apart prevents the force of several attacks from collapsing into a fictitious single portrait. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées X, source pp. 13–14](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f22.item).** Girardin parler latin ! Pecudesque locutæ. — A classical prodigy is redeployed as a journalistic insult. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI, source pp. 46–47](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item).** Il confond les cornes avec la queue. — The joke literalizes the relation of horns, tail and the end of a speech. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI, source pp. 46–47](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item).** Et habet mea mentrita mentum. — The supplied governing Latin is retained without a confident reconstruction. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXX, source pp. 81–82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f90.item).** Saint-Marc Girardin a dit un mot qui restera — This is a separately named person and a separate attributed saying. **In this edition.** Translator notes 11 and 12 distinguish the historical Ptolemy source note from the modern explanation and preserve the uncertain Latin without a fabricated translation. Note 18 identifies the Virgil phrase in Georgics I.478, while the English body translates it. The source’s unclosed date parenthesis in XXVI is also retained. These choices matter: a lexicon can explain the satire without turning the edition’s unresolved textual details into established facts. **See also.** [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) · [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) · [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) · [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) ## Glory and Solitude {#entry-glory-solitude} *gloire; solitude; rester un; grand homme; parias* **The word.** Gloire means public renown or glory, but its ideal in LXXXVII is paradoxical: to remain one while prostituting oneself in a particular way. The artist must circulate among others without being reduced to their interchangeable expectations. Solitude protects singularity yet cannot by itself produce recognition. The notebook also distinguishes felt isolation from deliberately chosen independence. A childhood sense of solitary destiny is not identical with a mature strategy of withholding oneself from the crowd. **In Intimate Journals.** XXXIV places solitude amid family and companions, then counters it with an intense taste for life and pleasure. It is therefore not merely a report of physical seclusion. XXXVI and XCVI make greatness a victory over the nation that resists it; the opposition can dignify the pariah while intensifying the need to be acknowledged. LXXXVII answers the tension with its formula for fame. Ordinary love supposedly wants to be two to escape the self, while genius wants to remain one. Yet the form of prostitution appropriate to glory still implies giving something of oneself to others. The formula is a problem posed with epigrammatic confidence, not an explanation of how success can avoid compromise. LXXXIX brings fame down to the funeral, where minor writers distribute handshakes and court the journalist's memory. Public commemoration becomes private self-advertisement. The Hygiène wish for glory then joins payment of debts and provision for loved people. Fame's imagined uses range from supreme distinction to material repair; that plurality keeps the cult of solitude from being wholly self-contained. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIV, source pp. 53](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f62.item).** au milieu des camarades, surtout — Isolation is felt within company. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII, source pp. 87–88](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f96.item).** rester un, et se prostituer d’une manière particulière. — The central formula joins self-preservation to public availability. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIX, source pp. 89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f98.item).** se recommandant à la mémoire du faiseur de courriers. — Funeral sociability becomes a bid for coverage. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Gloire, payement de mes dettes. — Public success is imagined alongside financial restitution. **In this edition.** The 2026 English uses ‘Fame’ in the formula of LXXXVII, bringing its public circulation forward; elsewhere ‘glory’ preserves the more elevated aspiration. ‘Writer of newspaper columns’ for faiseur de courriers identifies whose memory the minor writers solicit. It is not the dead writer's memory. The translation therefore helps expose the social transaction hidden inside commemoration. **See also.** [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) · [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) ## God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant {#entry-god} *Dieu; réservoir; confident; complice; Justice* **The word.** Dieu occupies incompatible-seeming positions: sovereign without needing to exist, inexhaustible common reservoir, possibly fallen creator, personal confidant, and Justice itself. These formulations have different rhetorical occasions. Their coexistence should neither be tidied into a catechism nor dismissed as proof that every devotional word is a joke. God's depth is partly relational. The divine addressee can be shared by everyone while remaining the intimate companion each person lacks. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées I separates religious value and divine reign from the simple question of existence. XXVII offers a different, tentative calculation: since the speaker cannot assign his own purpose, he should ask a wiser being for illumination. The argument ends in a practical course—prayer—rather than an exhaustive proof. LXVIII calls God the most prostituted being because he is available as supreme friend to every individual. The shocking term develops generosity and common availability rather than simply degrading divinity. LXXXIV's notice that everything is common, even God, repeats the challenge to exclusive possession. These propositions connect divine love with the notebook's broader suspicion of ownership. CI turns toward the eternal confidant of each person's tragedy. Yet ‘accomplice’ complicates ‘friend’: even murderers may pray for success. The writer insists their petitions do not spoil his own prayer's honour and pleasure, a claim of personal distinction within universal access. CXVII finally identifies God with Justice while asking for enough strength to fulfil duties. The notebook thus tests divine intimacy against moral accountability without resolving every contradiction. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** n’ait même pas besoin d’exister — The opening paradox concerns the force of divine reign. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII, source pp. 48–49](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f57.item).** Il faut donc prier ce quelqu’un de m’éclairer. — A tentative reasoning culminates in a practical request. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII, source pp. 74–75](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item).** le réservoir commun, inépuisable de l’amour. — Divine availability gives the shocking metaphor its explanatory force. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CI, source pp. 96](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f105.item).** Dieu est l’éternel confident — Each person’s drama seeks a listener beyond ordinary society. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** c’est-à-dire à la Justice même — The final vow attaches trust to justice. **In this edition.** ‘The most prostituted being’ preserves a deliberately provocative superlative that ‘most generous’ would explain away. ‘Confidant’ and ‘accomplice’ retain CI's intimacy and danger. In XCVIII the shortened Beatitude is translated as Baudelaire writes it, not replaced with an exact Bible version; calling it a calculation of probabilities is his comment. Note 88 keeps quotation, allusion, and commentary distinct. **See also.** [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) · [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) · [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · [Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition](#entry-antisemitism) (p. 19) ## Gradation and Compound Interest {#entry-gradation} *gradation; peu à peu; petit à petit; intérêts composés; volupté* **The word.** Gradation is ordered change by degrees. In LXXXVIII, the repeated ‘little by little’ makes an abstract law sound like the patient accumulation it describes. Compound interest supplies the comparison: an increment changes the base on which subsequent increments act. The vocabulary is shared by natural processes, artistic skill, pleasure, and the will. It is not identical with the political doctrine of automatic progress, because its moral value depends on what accumulates and how. **In Intimate Journals.** LXXXVIII asks for a study of the law in both natural and human works. The imperative ‘Study’ announces a research programme rather than a demonstrated universal theorem. Its applications to artistic and literary skill are readily connected to repeated practice, but the governing print also applies it to a fluctuating treasury of sensual pleasure. That last clause makes growth neither exclusively moral nor exclusively productive. CXI insists everything occurs gradually, while CXVI says a succession of small acts of will yields a large result. The inverse process is equally important: every retreat of the will loses a particle of substance, so hesitation can create an enormous future repair bill. Accumulation becomes a way to understand both hope and fear. This logic explains why the smallest immediate action matters in the late regimen. A completed act is supposed to make the next one more possible; delay is never quite neutral. But repeated exhortation is not evidence that the process worked as promised. The notebooks preserve attempts to activate the law, alongside admissions of plans not realized. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII, source pp. 88–89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f97.item).** l’universelle et éternelle loi de la gradation — The projected inquiry makes an expansive claim. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII, source pp. 88–89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f97.item).** comme les intérêts composés — Financial growth provides a model for cumulative force. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII, source pp. 88–89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f97.item).** le trésor variable de la volupté. — The printed application concerns pleasure, not will. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Une suite de petites volontés fait un gros résultat. — The late regimen translates accumulation into acts. **In this edition.** This entry depends on a consequential witness difference. The governing 1920 print has volupté in LXXXVIII, translated ‘sensual pleasure’; the comparison transcription has volonté. The 2026 edition follows the print and discloses the variant in note 80. Replacing pleasure with will would make the argument more tidily ascetic while erasing its actual complexity in this edition. **See also.** [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) · [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) ## Hallucination {#entry-hallucination} *hallucination; image réelle; miroir ensorcelé* **The word.** Hallucination is the imagined image's power to eclipse what is actually before the eyes. Fusées VIII gives it a specifically relational structure: the hallucination arises from the real image and then obscures its source. The notebook is therefore interested in a transformation of perception, not only in visions without an external object. The word moves among observation, polemical caricature and remembered childhood fantasy. These uses should not be converted into a retrospective medical diagnosis. Baudelaire also asks where the power stops: can what confounds a face invade pure reasoning itself? **In Intimate Journals.** VIII explains mistakes about faces through the eclipse of reality by a derivative image. The image is both dependent and usurping. That model helps illuminate the conjectural reading of faces in XVI: a beautiful face makes the observer dream of hidden desires and frustrated power. Yet the beauty passage also asks whether the speaker's brain is a bewitched mirror. His preferred interpretation may be an illuminating perception or an obsession projected back upon its object. XII tests the boundary with the question of mathematical madness. Could a person really hold that two and two make three? The phrase ‘if these words do not shriek’ registers resistance within language before any answer is reached. It is a question about the relation between reasoning and disturbed experience, left as a question. Its proximity to the demand for a disciplinary whipper does not make the whip an established treatment for hallucination. In XXII the word is turned against Hugo, whose imagined Promethean suffering allegedly develops into identification with Napoleon's exile. This is hostile satire using medical language, not an independently evidenced case history. Mon cœur mis à nu XCIV applies hallucinations to the child's fantasies of becoming a military pope or actor, emphasizing their pleasures. The repeated word joins invention and error without making them indistinguishable; the difficult task is to judge how an image governs the person who entertains it. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées VIII, source pp. 12](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f21.item).** l’éclipse de l’image réelle par l’hallucination qui en tire sa naissance — The derivative image obscures the perception that generated it. - **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item).** envahir les choses de pur raisonnement — The mathematical question probes a possible limit. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** mon cerveau serait-il un miroir ensorcelé ? — The aesthetic observer raises doubt about his own instrument of judgment. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIV, source pp. 92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item).** Jouissances que je tirais de ces deux hallucinations. — Childhood fantasies are recalled through their pleasures. **In this edition.** The edition keeps ‘hallucination’, including in the childhood passage, instead of retrospectively distinguishing healthy imagination from clinical hallucination. It renders image réelle as ‘real image’, preserving the initial image rather than replacing it with bare reality. ‘Bewitched mirror’ retains the question mark and magical qualification. Those choices let readers hear Baudelaire's shifting usage while withholding a diagnostic uniformity that the French does not provide. **See also.** [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) · [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) ## Halo {#entry-halo} *auréole; boue du macadam; mauvais présage* **The word.** The halo gives sacred or poetic distinction the comic vulnerability of a detachable object. It can fall in the mud while its bearer negotiates traffic. The disproportion between a luminous insignia and the ordinary demands of crossing a boulevard produces the scene's force without explaining in advance whether that distinction is genuine, theatrical or both. In the notebook, the object is recovered but the speaker's peace is not. The decisive loss is therefore not material possession of the halo. It is the confidence that possession had seemed to secure, once an accidental fall is interpreted as a bad omen. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XVII narrates the event in the first person, between a note on the Symbol and a note on the worship of oneself in love. That placement gives the little incident a rich neighbourhood, though it does not prove a planned sequence. A visible accident is converted into significance; self-idolatry becomes exposed to a sign it cannot control. The speaker says that he fortunately had time to pick up the halo, then finds himself unable to dismiss the ominous thought all day. This version must be distinguished from the prose poem Perte d’auréole. In that text the speaker does not retrieve the halo and welcomes the freedom of anonymity, even imagining a bad poet wearing it. The shared traffic, mud and fallen insignia lead to different outcomes. One version dramatizes anxious attachment to recovered distinction; the other makes non-recovery an occasion of relief and mockery. The prose poem should not be silently substituted for the notebook. The difference clarifies what a working note can preserve: not merely an embryonic text waiting for improvement, but a distinct arrangement of motives. Here interpretation itself becomes the pursuer. Even after the practical problem is solved, an idea ‘will not let go’, echoing XVII's warning that inspiration does not always leave when willed. The halo therefore joins the vocabulary of imaginative power to a comic narrative of being overpowered by meaning. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** mon auréole s’est détachée et est tombée dans la boue du macadam — Sacred distinction enters the physical hazard of an urban crossing. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** J’eus heureusement le temps de la ramasser — The notebook explicitly records retrieval. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** c’était un mauvais présage — An accident is converted into an omen. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** l’idée n’a plus voulu me lâcher — The persistent interpretation, not the missing object, supplies the aftermath. **In this edition.** ‘Fortunately I had time to pick it up’ is a decisive reading in the 2026 translation, correctly preserving the notebook against the more familiar prose poem. ‘Macadam’ keeps the material specificity of the modern street rather than dissolving it into generic dirt. ‘Bad omen’ for mauvais présage also preserves the event's subjective interpretation. The English does not certify that the fall actually predicts anything.[^f-halo-poem] **See also.** [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) ## Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care {#entry-hygiene} *Hygiène; Conduite; Morale; Méthode; sobriété; lichen* **The word.** Hygiène names the preservation of health, but the final group extends its regimen into conduct, method, prayer, writing, money, and care for others. The body is neither discarded nor sufficient on its own: cold baths and food stand beside daily duties and invocations. The repeated headings are working labels. They organize attempts to make a life sustainable; they do not attest that a coherent programme was adopted or that its promised cures occurred. **In Intimate Journals.** CIX begins with rules of increasing will and productivity, then records loneliness after debauchery and a frightening sensation dated 23 January 1862. The move from self-command to vulnerability prevents the regimen from reading as assured mastery. CXII's claim that a taste for work would cure everything is an exhortation under pressure, not a medical proposition the reader should adopt. CXV makes personal health a charitable duty because Jeanne and the mother need him. CXVI then combines writing hours, hoped-for income, prayer, and a detailed lichen syrup recipe. This heterogeneous sequence is not a fall from sublime spirituality into trivial medicine: it exposes how spiritual projects depend on an embodied day. CXVII promises eternal rules while allowing work only as long as strength permits. That qualification matters beside more severe demands to work blindly or without respite. The regimen needs both persistence and a recognition of limits. Its repeated fresh starts should be read as evidence of continuing struggle, not retrospectively ironed into success. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** Hygiène. Projets — The group begins with plans rather than a report of cure. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item).** Toilette, prière, travail. — Bodily care, devotion, and production form one abbreviated rule. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Lichen d’Islande. . . . 125 grammes. — The moral notebook incorporates a historical bodily preparation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** tant que mes forces ne le permettront — The final vow includes a limit of available strength. **In this edition.** ‘Hygiene’ retains the historical heading, broader than cleanliness alone. Notes 98 and 104 distinguish Baudelaire's historical self-descriptions from modern diagnoses and identify Iceland lichen botanically without identifying the condition treated. ‘Attacks’ translates crises precisely because the condition is unnamed. The recipe is historical evidence, not current treatment advice, and the date in CIX does not date the whole group. **See also.** [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) ## Images, Worship, and Looking {#entry-images} *images; culte; primitive passion; idole; gravures* **The word.** Image can designate a visible work, a mental picture, or a figure charged with devotion. XCI's cult of images makes looking a primary passion rather than a secondary illustration of thought. The repeated possessives—great, only, first—give this attachment the character of a retrospective self-definition. Culte and idole make the vocabulary double-edged. A picture can intensify attention; an idol can misdirect worship. The same power of attachment is available to artistic perception and erotic error. **In Intimate Journals.** The call to glorify images is immediately joined to wandering and multiplied sensation expressed through music. These are headings for development, not a finished aesthetic system. Their juxtaposition suggests that experience becomes richest when one medium or encounter opens onto others. Later in XCI, the cuckold's suffering is traced to pride, mistaken reasoning, and love diverted from God to creatures. The worshipping animal has chosen the wrong idol. This diagnosis exposes possessive attachment but remains within a passage that also calls for violence against women; the aesthetic celebration cannot sanitize that adjacent cruelty. XXXIX makes the theatre's chandelier a leading actor, showing that the eye may organize the event around brilliance, pattern, and changing scale. CXIV's plan to classify engravings gives the image-cult a material counterpart: collection and arrangement. Vision is both excited receptivity and work of ordering. Neither the lyrical declaration nor the practical list alone defines the relation. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, source pp. 90–91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f99.item).** Glorifier le culte des images — A projected celebration treats visual attachment as devotion. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, source pp. 90–91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f99.item).** ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion — The passion is made a marker of personal origin. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIX, source pp. 56–57](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f65.item).** lumineux, cristallin, compliqué, circulaire et symétrique. — The chandelier concentrates distinct visual properties. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV, source pp. 105–106](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** Classement de gravures (deux jours). — Images also require patient material organization. **In this edition.** ‘Worship of images’ brings culte into the same religious field as adorer and idole elsewhere. ‘First passion’ chooses a temporal sense for primitive, avoiding an implication of crude or undeveloped taste. The edition keeps the separate sentences about wandering and multiplied sensation; note 83 does not turn their proximity into a named doctrine of Liszt. **See also.** [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) · [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) ## Intoxication {#entry-intoxication} *ivresse; enivrant; enivré* **The word.** Ivresse names a condition of heightened, altered or overflowing experience. Its literal association with drunkenness remains available, but the notebooks repeatedly give it nonchemical causes: crowds, religion, literary memories, blood, bad taste and even sang-froid. It is therefore a mistake to treat every occurrence as a report of drinking or drug use. The word evaluates intensity ambiguously. It may enlarge perception and supply a poetic state; it may also expose the self to suggestion, cruelty or vanity. What intoxicates matters, and so does the aftermath. A heightened feeling is not automatically an increased understanding. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées I calls intoxication a number, joining it to the individual's multiplication. II makes great cities religiously intoxicating. In III, by contrast, intoxication, delirium and opium are comparisons used to measure the more dreadful bodily spectacle of love. The passage does not simply celebrate altered consciousness; it uses its most violent effects as a scale of disintegration. XVIII locates intoxication in the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing. The intoxicant is a social reversal: what others reject becomes evidence of the speaker's distinction. The ending of XXII makes the reversal more intricate still. The supposedly cool dandy is intoxicated with his own composure. Ivresse can attach to mastery as well as to loss of mastery, making self-command another possible object of self-enchantment. Mon cœur mis à nu XXX revisits the writer's intoxication in 1848 and asks of what kind it was. Vengeance, demolition and literary recollection replace an uncomplicated story of political conviction. LXIX's list of intoxications includes blood and crowds, so the vocabulary also maps shared ferocity. The late injunction to suppress excitants in CXVII is a practical resolution, not proof that the earlier experiences were unreal. It proposes a different management of the energies that those fragments alternately seek and mistrust. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées II, source pp. 5–6](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f14.item).** Ivresse religieuse des grandes villes. — Urban expansion is given a sacred and altered intensity. - **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** Ce qu’il y a d’enivrant dans le mauvais goût — Displeasing others becomes a source of heightened pleasure. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** enivré de son sang-froid et de son dandysme — Even cool self-possession is susceptible to intoxication. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXX, source pp. 50–51](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item).** Ivresse littéraire ; souvenir des lectures. — Political excitement is retrospectively traced to literary memory. **In this edition.** The edition consistently preserves ‘intoxication’ in the main metaphorical clusters, including ‘literary intoxication’ and ‘religious intoxication’. ‘Drunkenness’ would be too specific for many of them. The final ‘intoxicated with his composure’ retains the deliberate contradiction between excitement and sang-froid. The translation therefore leaves readers to judge the object of the intoxication instead of marking the state uniformly as either inspiration or impairment. **See also.** [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) · [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) ## Irony {#entry-irony} *ironie; tournure d’esprit satanique; bouffonnerie; enjouement* **The word.** Irony is named as a fundamental literary quality, but its work is not confined to saying the opposite of what one means. It can expose a contradiction in respectable language, let an aphorism undermine itself, or turn the writer's own posture into an object of suspicion. The ‘satanic turn of mind’ places pressure on accepted pieties without guaranteeing that every provocative assertion is secretly harmless. Buffoonery and playfulness occupy neighbouring ground, though they are not exact synonyms. A pompous manner applied to comic things, or a grotesque image inserted into a solemn claim, can change the reader's distance from what is said. The ethical cost of that distance remains open. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XVII pairs irony with supernaturalism. One heightens the perceived depth of things; the other can disturb the claims made on behalf of that heightening. The notebook enacts their friction in its sanctified images and abrupt deflations: a halo falls into road mud, God becomes a profitable scandal, and the poet–bourgeois hierarchy is imagined through a stable and a roast body. Fusées IV's instruction to recount comic things pompously makes manner itself an experiment. XXII's attack on Hugo's priesthood then inflates and punctures a public literary role. But the conclusion redirects the danger inward: the speaker recognizes the ridiculousness of a prophet in himself and admits that his final pages are anger he wishes to date. Self-implication prevents him from occupying an entirely secure position above the figures he mocks. VI warns that the spirit of buffoonery rarely coexists with charity. That warning is essential when reading the collection's cruelty. The existence of irony does not cancel a hostile statement's force, and an interpreter should not label every offensive passage ironic simply to rescue its author. XVIII's mixture of grotesque and tragic instead identifies a formal pleasure in discordance, one capable of sharpening perception or gratifying a jaded appetite. Irony is thus a literary resource whose use can itself need judgment. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** puis tournure d’esprit satanique — The literary program gives irony a deliberately disturbing cast. - **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item).** Raconter pompeusement des choses comiques — The mismatch between manner and matter is a practical instruction. - **[Fusées VI, source pp. 10–11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f19.item).** L’esprit de bouffonnerie peut ne pas exclure la charité, mais c’est rare. — The notebook acknowledges the ethical difficulty of comic distance. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** le ridicule d’un prophète — The speaker applies a deflating judgment to his own posture. **In this edition.** ‘Irony’ is retained as a named quality, but the edition also keeps ‘buffoonery’, ‘playfulness’ and ‘farcical’ where the French changes terms. These are useful distinctions rather than synonyms to standardize away. ‘A satanic turn of mind’ preserves tournure as a disposition or inflection, not necessarily an explicit creed. The grotesque concreteness of ‘roast poet’ and the stable should likewise be read before imposing a decorous abstract paraphrase. **See also.** [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) · [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) · [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) ## Irregularity {#entry-irregularity} *difforme; irrégularité; inattendu; surprise; étonnement* **The word.** Irrégularité is explained through an appositional chain: the unexpected, surprise, astonishment. Its significance is perceptual as well as formal. A deviation interrupts an easy recognition and makes the object seem capable of feeling or of awakening feeling. Difforme places a sharper word beside it, but the qualifier légèrement keeps the claim from becoming an indiscriminate celebration of damage. The opposite term in the fragment is insensible, not ugly. The contrast is therefore between a seemingly unfeeling form and a form that engages sensibility. Beauty cannot be judged by conformity alone, because a completely predictable object may leave nothing for the viewer to discover. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XII concludes with the proposition after a sequence that includes mathematical madness, whipping as discipline, a date and a practical task list. That irregular neighbourhood is itself a reminder of the notebook's mixed forms, though it would be too neat to say the page deliberately demonstrates the maxim. The aesthetic assertion has its own compact reasoning: whatever lacks slight deformation seems unfeeling; therefore surprise is essential to beauty. The claim does not abolish symmetry. XXII names regularity and symmetry among the mind's primary needs, alongside complexity and harmony, when analyzing the charm of ships. The two passages can coexist if regularity supplies intelligible order while an unexpected inflection prevents dead predictability. The notebook does not formulate that synthesis explicitly; it gives the reader grounds for it without guaranteeing that every tension has been resolved. XVI's beautiful face similarly leaves room for conjecture. Its attraction depends on obscure feeling and contrary possibilities, such as satiety or frustrated desire. XVIII's pleasure in a mixture of the grotesque and tragic adds a different kind of dissonance. Across these passages beauty is an active encounter with a form, rather than the recognition of a checklist of correct proportions. This also means that ‘irregular’ cannot serve as a universal shortcut to artistic success. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item).** Ce qui n’est pas légèrement difforme a l’air insensible — A limited departure from regularity is related to the appearance of feeling. - **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item).** l’inattendu, la surprise, l’étonnement — The fragment interprets irregularity through the beholder’s experience. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** la régularité et à la symétrie — The ship passage preserves a positive need for ordered form. - **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** Le mélange du grotesque et du tragique — Mixed registers offer another source of perceptual disturbance. **In this edition.** ‘Slightly misshapen’ preserves the modest but material force of légèrement difforme. ‘Seems unfeeling’ for a l’air insensible keeps the judgment at the level of appearance; it does not assert that a regular object literally has no sensation. The translation also retains all three terms in the explanatory sequence rather than reducing them to ‘novelty’. The distinguishing mark of beauty is an experienced surprise, not simply newness in historical time. **See also.** [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) · [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) ## Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt {#entry-leisure} *loisir; dilettantisme; piocheurs; fortune* **The word.** Loisir is time available for cultivation outside compulsory professional labour. It can nourish meditation and sensibility, but its material condition is wealth or credit. LXXXII refuses to hide that cost. Leisure without fortune grows debts as well as faculties. Dilettantisme here is not adequately translated by simple laziness. It belongs to a capacity for cultivated attention whose value the speaker defends, even while despising other writers as drudges. **In Intimate Journals.** LV defines the superior man as one of leisure and general education rather than a specialist. The short wish ‘To be rich and love work’ imagines independence from necessity joined to chosen effort. It is not a rejection of all sustained activity. LXXXII supplies the autobiographical reckoning missing from that ideal. Baudelaire says leisure has helped him grow and harmed him greatly. The balanced phrases separate financial humiliation from gains in sensitivity, meditation, and dandyism. Neither side is cancelled by the other: the benefit does not pay the creditor, and the debt does not prove the inward benefit imaginary. The later commands to work urgently are therefore more complex than conversion from a wholly worthless past. They seek an activity that can preserve cultivated powers while making care and repayment possible. The insult piocheurs attacks other writers' supposedly ignorant toil, yet the daily writing regimen risks looking mechanically similar from outside. Its difference must lie in the quality and ends of attention, a distinction the notebook repeatedly demands but cannot guarantee. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LV, source pp. 67–68](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f76.item).** Être riche et aimer le travail. — The desired combination separates chosen work from economic compulsion. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII, source pp. 82–83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item).** C’est par le loisir que j’ai, en partie, grandi. — The personal account claims real cultivation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII, source pp. 82–83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item).** le loisir, sans fortune, augmente les dettes — Material limits qualify the ideal from within. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII, source pp. 82–83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item).** de vils piocheurs très ignorants. — The rival model of labour is attacked as degrading drudgery. **In this edition.** ‘Leisure’ preserves the neutral possibility of cultivated time; ‘idleness’ throughout would prejudge the argument. ‘Drudges’ renders piocheurs contemptuously, while note 76 explains its connection to strenuous digging and assiduous labour. ‘Fortune’ is wealth in this context, not merely luck. The careful division of gains and losses is more important than a blanket defence of inactivity. **See also.** [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) ## Love and torture {#entry-love-and-torture} *torture; opération chirurgicale; bourreau; victime; question* **The word.** The comparison of love with torture or surgery combines unequal power, bodily exposure and an observer's control. The operator and executioner are not identical professions, but both stand over a subjected body. Their conjunction strips erotic reciprocity of its reassuring vocabulary and asks who retains command while another loses it. Question here has its historical meaning of judicial torture. Its presence makes the passage more than a loose claim that love hurts. Pain is administered carefully by an agent, and the suffering body is inspected as if it supplied evidence. Baudelaire's language is intentionally coercive; it should not be softened into an account of consensual intensity. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées III begins by remembering an earlier note and announcing that the idea can be developed ‘in the bitterest way’. This framing matters: the paragraph performs a chosen development of a comparison. Even when desire is reciprocal, one lover is said to be less possessed and therefore to become operator or executioner. The grammatical alternatives ‘he or she’ do not erase the collection's misogyny, but here either sex can occupy the dominant position. The catalogue of sighs, muscular contractions, cries and apparent death deprives erotic exaltation of the sacred name ecstasy. An appeal to the elevated human face intensifies the fall into grimace. The observer is implicated by the question asking who has not both uttered and extracted such sounds. The result is a scene of contaminated participation, not a dispassionate theory supplied from outside desire. The formula returns in XVII, while Mon cœur mis à nu XXV entertains alternating between victim and executioner. XLIII then rejects torture as a foolish material means of discovering spiritual truth, even while equating cruelty and sensual pleasure. These passages do not form a coherent defence of torture. They expose a recurring fascination with its structure and distinguish that fascination from the argument about judicial usefulness. The lovers' reciprocal pardon in Fusées XXII remains a substantial counter-scene to the earlier model of necessary defeat. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item).** l’opérateur ou le bourreau ; l’autre, c’est le sujet, la victime — The erotic pair is redescribed through asymmetrical roles. - **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item).** je croirais faire un sacrilège en appliquant le mot « extase » — The speaker refuses a sacred name for bodily disintegration. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXV, source pp. 46](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item).** alternativement victime et bourreau — The later fragment imagines exchanging the positions. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIII, source pp. 58–59](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f67.item).** l’application d’un moyen matériel à un but spirituel — A separate argument condemns torture as an instrument of truth. **In this edition.** ‘Executioner’, ‘judicial torture’ and ‘subject’ preserve distinct French terms instead of collapsing them into torment. The edition's ‘less possessed’ retains the ambiguity between erotic absorption and a quasi-demonic loss of self. ‘Disintegration’ for décomposition carries the bodily and structural force of the closing judgment; it is more destructive than mere relaxation. The English also preserves the speaker's announced bitterness, which marks the paragraph as an exercise in interpretation rather than an unqualified description of every encounter. **See also.** [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) · [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) ## Melancholy {#entry-melancholy} *mélancolie; tristesse; lassitude; satiété; malheur* **The word.** Melancholy is neither simply a synonym for sadness nor uniformly an illness in these notebooks. It may be an inferred depth in a face, a condition of remembered love, an aesthetic companion or a misery the writer hopes work will cure. Tristesse, lassitude, satiété and malheur surround it without losing their differences: sorrow, weariness, satiety and misfortune make distinct contributions to the same affective field. The word's aesthetic prestige does not guarantee that the person who bears it benefits. Melancholy can make a face attractive to a spectator while marking the subject's exhaustion or deprivation. The notebook repeatedly risks turning another person's suffering into the material of an intensified gaze. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XVI gives melancholy an illustrious place beside beauty. The imagined woman's face can bear traces of pleasure already exhausted or of desire continually frustrated. Both are attractive within the speaker's definition, which indicates that he values the unresolved story and emotional depth more than any one biographical cause. Yet he interrupts himself to ask whether his mind is a bewitched mirror; the value may reveal his own governing preoccupation. XXII's lovers supply a less detached use. Their night of melancholy and charity joins tears, bodily sweetness and uncertain hope. The past is neither repaired nor merely contemplated as a beautiful wound. Each seeks the pardon that each also gives. Melancholy becomes shareable without becoming a sentimental assurance that the future will turn out well. At the end of XXII, however, the deep years yield disillusionment and bitterness, while the imagined future storm promises nothing new. The same retrospective depth can support mutual tenderness or exhausted separation. Mon cœur mis à nu CXII calls for a taste for work to cure melancholy along with illness and poverty. This is an urgent self-directed maxim, not a medically reliable cure and not proof that aesthetic melancholy has suddenly become meaningless. It shows the difference between finding sadness expressive and finding it livable. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** la Mélancolie en est pour ainsi dire l’illustre compagne — Melancholy receives aesthetic prestige in the speaker’s qualified personal definition. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** de mélancolie, de lassitude, même de satiété — Neighbouring terms keep emotional exhaustion from becoming one undifferentiated state. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** cette nuit de mélancolie et de charité — Shared sadness participates in a scene of reciprocal tenderness. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXII, source pp. 104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f113.item).** de la maladie et de la mélancolie — A later imperative places melancholy among conditions the writer wishes to overcome. **In this edition.** The 2026 version usually retains ‘melancholy’, while distinguishing ‘sadness’, ‘weariness’, ‘satiety’ and ‘misfortune’. Those choices matter because translating all of them as unhappiness would flatten XVI's exploratory accumulation. The capitalized ‘Melancholy’ near its end preserves the personifying comparison with an illustrious companion. In XXII the lowercase word remains part of an experienced night rather than becoming an allegorical visitor. **See also.** [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) ## Military Metaphor and Conformity {#entry-military-metaphor} *métaphores militaires; militante; avant-garde; discipline; moustaches* **The word.** The military metaphor makes literary activity resemble a campaign: writers hold flags, defend breaches, enter the fray, become veterans, and claim an advanced position. Baudelaire's objection is not simply that these expressions are figurative. It is that the claim to independent combat can hide obedience to a collective formation. The moustache is the diagnostic joke. By making every metaphor wear one, LXI exposes a supposedly heroic vocabulary as a repeated costume. **In Intimate Journals.** LXI–LXIII build a small dossier rather than a single maxim. Examples accumulate before the judgment arrives: such minds are made for discipline, conformity, and domestic service. The phrase ‘avant-garde writers’ is included among the incriminating habits. It should not be read here as Baudelaire's endorsement of an artistic movement bearing that later or broader label. The national insult ‘Belgian minds’ reiterates XXXVII's attack on people who can think only in groups. The polemic's general argument concerns dependence; the nationality is an abusive generalization, not evidence. The self-styled combatant turns out to need an army. Yet the notebook honours the warrior in XLIV and LXX, imagines a military pope in childhood, and likens evening prayer to a captain posting sentries in CXVI. These uses show why a ban on all martial imagery would misread the dossier. He rejects the automatic rhetoric of collective literary prestige while retaining particular images of force, vigilance, and sacrifice. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXI, source pp. 70–71](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f79.item).** Toute métaphore ici porte des moustaches. — Personification exposes the uniformity of the rhetoric. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIII, source pp. 71–72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f80.item).** Les littérateurs d’avant-garde. — The familiar label is one of the satirical exhibits. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIII, source pp. 71–72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f80.item).** faits pour la discipline, c’est-à-dire pour la conformité — The promised combat is redescribed as obedience. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** un capitaine qui pose des sentinelles. — The late prayer note uses a military figure affirmatively. **In this edition.** ‘Stay at the breach’ retains the siege image rather than replacing it with a bland expression of perseverance. ‘Militant’ is kept in its combative sense, so LXIII's explicit negation can answer the earlier examples. Note 60 appropriately leaves the surname Bertin unresolved; identifying a specific newspaper or person would falsely complete a shorthand reminder. **See also.** [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) · [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) ## Misunderstanding and Incommunicability {#entry-misunderstanding} *malentendu; entente cordiale; incommunicabilité; gouffre* **The word.** Malentendu is not only a failure interrupting communication; in LXXVII and XCIX it becomes the condition that makes apparent agreement possible. People can act together because each supplies a different meaning to the shared scene. The notebook reverses the usual assumption that understanding necessarily reconciles. Incommunicabilité is figured as an unbridgeable gulf. The spatial language emphasizes a distance that mutual excitement has not actually crossed. **In Intimate Journals.** LXXVII gives an erotic miniature. The lovers' different cries accompany a shared pleasure that persuades them they think in unison. The scene's gender caricature belongs to Baudelaire's construction; it is not empirical evidence about how men and women experience intimacy. Its central device is the discrepancy between apparent accord and unlike inward addresses. XCIX generalizes the paradox to the world. Perfect understanding would destroy agreement, it claims. The universal wording is an aphoristic provocation rather than a demonstrated sociology. Its sequel tells the person of wit to extract bitter enjoyment from foolish conversation and bad books, making failed communion into an aesthetic resource. XLVII's projected history of Les Fleurs du Mal names humiliation through misunderstanding and the trial. There the gap is costly, not merely entertaining. The three loci keep distinct the pleasure that masks difference, the irony that survives it, and the public harm it can cause. The desire to share memories in CXVI consequently remains difficult without being declared meaningless. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVII, source pp. 79–80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f88.item).** l’entente cordiale est le résultat d’un malentendu. — Agreement is presented as an effect of incompatible meanings. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVII, source pp. 79–80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f88.item).** Le gouffre infranchissable — The apparent union has not eliminated distance. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIX, source pp. 95](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f104.item).** C’est par le malentendu universel que tout le monde s’accorde. — The erotic paradox is extended to collective life. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVII, source pp. 61–62](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f70.item).** Humiliation par le malentendu, et mon procès. — Misreading also has concrete personal and public consequences. **In this edition.** The edition's ‘cordial understanding’ answers ‘misunderstanding’, while ‘in unison’ keeps the sound of de concert. ‘Unbridgeable’ and ‘unbridged’ preserve the final lexical repetition instead of explaining it away. Note 71 correctly declines to invent a particular diplomatic allusion from entente cordiale alone. **See also.** [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) ## Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation {#entry-music-space} *musique; espace; nombre; sensation multipliée; Liszt* **The word.** Music is not confined to temporal succession in these notes. XCIII says it gives the idea of space, then extends that power to all the arts through number. The claim concerns an apprehended relation or form, not the assertion that music literally becomes a visible object. Nombre remains abstract. Reducing it to counted beats or numbered compositions would prematurely specify a fragment that ranges across media. **In Intimate Journals.** XCIII places its reflection on space after an aggressive opposition between art and sexual animality. The transition is abrupt: artistic cultivation, self-containment, number, and space stand together without a supplied chain of proof. The aphorism about all arts suggests shared formal powers, but the notebook names no philosophical authority for it. XCI joins wandering to the cult of multiplied sensation expressing itself in music and says to refer to Liszt. The reminder gives a direction for inquiry, not the title of a quoted work. The translator's note offers Liszt's writing about Romani music as context while leaving the intended reference open. Fusées VIII's music digging into heaven gives a more imagistic companion to the abstract space-claim. One phrase produces depth by a physical action; the other describes an idea mediated by number. Read together, they present musical experience as an enlargement of perceived dimensions. They do not require collapsing each formulation into a single metaphysical scheme. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII, source pp. 91–92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f100.item).** La musique donne l’idée de l’espace. — The principal statement concerns an idea produced by music. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII, source pp. 91–92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f100.item).** le nombre est une traduction de l’espace. — Translation becomes a metaphor for relations among forms. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, source pp. 90–91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f99.item).** Culte de la sensation multipliée — Musical expression is placed beside intensified experience. - **[Fusées VIII, source pp. 12](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f21.item).** La Musique creuse le ciel. — A spatial action figures music’s power in Fusées. **In this edition.** ‘Number’ retains the source's abstraction; the edition notes that its first occurrence in XCIII is italicized and its repetition is not. ‘Bohemianism’ leaves open the relation of artistic wandering to the historical image invoked around Liszt. No theory of musical harmony or named school is added to fill the fragment's gaps. See notes 83 and 86. **See also.** [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Sea and Infinity](#entry-sea-infinity) (p. 118) · [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) ## Mystery {#entry-mystery} *mystère; mystérieux; conjecture; voilé* **The word.** Mystery can name an attraction that remains partly withheld, a religious depth resistant to dismissal, or a quality of experience not exhausted by its explanation. It is not always a puzzle with a concealed factual answer. The vague, veiled and conjectural may be productive conditions of attention rather than obstacles to be eliminated. Conjecture is important because it allows more than one meaning to remain possible. A beautiful face can suggest contrary histories; the ship can be analyzed without losing its mysterious charm. Mystery and thought are therefore not simple opposites in the notebooks. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées II condenses violet into restrained, mysterious, veiled love and the colour of a canoness. No single person or religious order is identified. The colour draws emotional and institutional associations together without unfolding them into an allegory. Its withheld quality is part of the note's usefulness as a future poetic resource. XVI expressly leaves room for conjecture and counts mystery and regret among the qualities of the Beautiful. The male head receives mystery too, so the word crosses the passage's gendered division between erotic suggestion and frustrated power. But the bewitched-mirror parenthesis also warns that suggestiveness can become projection. To value mystery is not to certify every secret the observer imagines. XXII begins by explaining the ship's infinite and mysterious charm through symmetry and moving lines. An explanation of the operation does not abolish the resulting sense of depth. Mon cœur mis à nu LII, by contrast, accuses Voltaire of hating mystery because he is lazy. That polemical judgment reverses the familiar idea that only explanation requires intellectual effort: here reduction may be the shortcut, while sustaining difficult relations between body, creation and spirit asks more of thought. The insult remains Baudelaire's evaluation, not an impartial portrait of Voltaire. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées II, source pp. 5–6](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f14.item).** amour contenu, mystérieux, voilé — The violet colour gathers associations without resolving them. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** Le mystère, le regret sont aussi des caractères du Beau. — Mystery becomes a positive aesthetic quality. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** le charme infini et mystérieux — The ship retains mystery even while the notebook analyzes its effects. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LII, source pp. 66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item).** Voltaire, comme tous les paresseux, haïssait le mystère. — The polemic treats reduction of mystery as an intellectual failure. **In this edition.** The edition retains ‘mystery’ rather than repeatedly substituting enigma, which would overpromise a solution. ‘Leaving room for conjecture’ gives laisser carrière its sense of freedom for interpretive movement. ‘Canoness’, explained in translator's note 2, preserves a specific religious title; replacing it with ‘nun’ would narrow the associations of the violet fragment. The edition's ‘veiled’ likewise keeps concealment material as well as figurative. **See also.** [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) · [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) ## Nature and the Natural {#entry-nature} *naturel; naturelle; animalité; péché originel* **The word.** Naturel repeatedly operates as an accusation rather than a recommendation. A spontaneous impulse does not become legitimate merely because it arises without deliberation. The notebook attacks a moral shortcut that would infer goodness from naturalness; it does not consistently deny the beauty or instructive power of the natural world. Animalité often names surrender to appetite, yet the sea can suggest infinity and nature can exemplify gradual accumulation. The same lexicon divides instinct from cultivated form without imposing one stable value on everything outside artifice. **In Intimate Journals.** XXVII's identification of woman with nature and therefore with the abominable is a misogynistic syllogism, not an impartial account of human biology. XCVII repeats its logic about commerce: commerce is natural and therefore infamous. By treating market self-interest as spontaneous, Baudelaire turns a supposed justification into evidence against it. XXX subjects revolutionary destruction to a conditional test: it is legitimate if everything natural is legitimate. The condition is a trap, since the surrounding notes repeatedly refuse that premise. His remembered intoxication exposes his own participation in the instincts he condemns rather than placing him safely above them. LXXXI defines true civilization as diminishing the traces of original sin. Cultural advance consequently depends on transformed conduct, not technical equipment or Western identity. LXXXVIII complicates any absolute antithesis by asking for the same law of gradual growth in works of nature and works of humanity. Nature is at once an ethical problem and a field in which form becomes intelligible. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII, source pp. 48–49](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f57.item).** La femme est naturelle, c’est-à-dire abominable. — The opposition is built through an explicitly hostile gender claim. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXX, source pp. 50–51](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item).** Goût légitime, si tout ce qui est naturel est légitime. — The conditional challenges rather than simply ratifies the natural impulse. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII, source pp. 93–94](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f102.item).** Le commerce est naturel, donc il est infâme. — The same reversal attacks economic self-interest. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII, source pp. 88–89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f97.item).** dans les œuvres de la nature et dans les œuvres de l’homme — Nature and making are jointly placed under gradation. **In this edition.** ‘Natural’ is retained even where English might be tempted to soften it to ‘instinctive’. That consistency allows the repeated argument to be heard. In XLI ‘animality’ preserves the abstraction, while XXVII's ‘in heat’ preserves the animalizing violence of en rut. These are Baudelaire's classifications, not categories endorsed by the translator or lexicon. **See also.** [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) · [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) · [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) ## Number {#entry-number} *nombre; multiplication; nombre des âmes* **The word.** Nombre is countable quantity, but in Fusées I it also becomes a way of imagining expanded existence. Number can be within the individual as well as in a multitude. The declaration that everything is number is less an explained mathematical doctrine than a verbal opening through which crowds, art and intoxication are brought into relation. Multiplication names an increase that need not destroy form. A person can experience more perspectives, a moving ship can generate more imagined curves, and a repeated small effort can yield a substantial result. These uses make quantity a bridge between sensation and disciplined accumulation, rather than the enemy of inward life. **In Intimate Journals.** The sequence in Fusées I moves from reciprocal enjoyment at a performance or ball to crowds and then to the maxim ‘Intoxication is a number’. The placement suggests an experience of being more than a single bounded self. It does not explain which arithmetic operation intoxication would literally be. Nor does the passage itself name a philosophical school; assigning a complete numerical metaphysics would supply what the note withholds. XXII provides a more concrete model. The actual parts of a ship in motion generate successive imaginary figures in space, and from that multiplication emerges the hypothesis of a living, expressive being. Perception works on real elements but exceeds the inventory of what is physically present. Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII makes the connection explicit in another medium: the arts are number, and number translates space. Number can also become frightening. CIX includes it among the abysses felt in action, desire, memory and beauty. XXXV asks whether the number of souls is finite or infinite, leaving the cosmological question unanswered. Thus multiplication can enlarge experience without making its limits secure. The practical addition of daily work and small pleasures in Fusées XX offers another use of counting: repetition contains magnitude in manageable acts, even while the visionary passages expose the self to it. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** Le nombre est dans l’individu. L’ivresse est un nombre. — The individual is imagined as internally multiple. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** la multiplication successive et à la génération de toutes les courbes et figures imaginaires — The moving ship turns real elements into an expanding geometry of perception. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII, source pp. 91–92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f100.item).** le nombre est une traduction de l’espace — The later account of the arts gives number a spatial function. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** du beau, du nombre — Number belongs among the experienced abysses. **In this edition.** The edition preserves the odd singular ‘a number’ in ‘Intoxication is a number’, instead of explaining it as multitude or infinity. That restraint leaves the aphorism's unfinished force intact. ‘Multiplication of number’ likewise sounds less natural than ‘growing numbers’, but keeps the conceptual rather than merely demographic register. In XXXV, ‘the number of souls’ remains a question, and the translation does not turn possibly habitable worlds into worlds known to be inhabited. **See also.** [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) ## Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet {#entry-obscenity} *f...; b..de; fouterie; nue; Parnasse satyrique* **The word.** Obscenity works through bodily vocabulary, aggressive social distinction, and sudden collisions with spiritual language. In this edition it also has a material history: some sexual words appear abbreviated in the governing French print while others remain complete. The pattern is not a consistent authorial code whose omissions can simply be ignored. The distinction between a word printed in full and a restored abbreviation matters because the reader must know which language is present in the witness and which has been supplied editorially. **In Intimate Journals.** XXVII's reduced sexual verb belongs to the attack on woman as appetite. XCIII uses abbreviated verbs around a claim that artistic cultivation diminishes sexual potency, but prints fouterie without abbreviation. These forms participate in an antithesis between mind and brute that is itself polemical, gendered, and classed. They are not physiological findings. CVIII is different in authorship and form. Baudelaire copies a sonnet to be cited in Mon cœur mis à nu, then records uncertainty over whether it is by Maynard or Théophile. It is not his own poem. Its dead lover returns as a seductive shade; the turn from body to soul gives the final obscene boast a metaphysical sting. The cloud embraced like Ixion and the naked shade create a verbal play on nue. Bodily absence does not prevent erotic fantasy from claiming possession. The poem thus resonates with the notebook's interest in mistaken idols, imagined union, and the gulf between persons, while its uncertain attribution remains a separate textual problem. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII, source pp. 91–92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f100.item).** La brute seule b..de bien et la fouterie est le lyrisme du peuple. — Abbreviated and unabbreviated sexual language coexist in one sentence. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII, source pp. 101–102](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f110.item).** Sonnet à citer dans Mon cœur mis à nu. — The poem is material chosen for quotation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII, source pp. 101–102](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f110.item).** Et que, comme Ixion, j’embrassasse une nue. — The myth and cloud introduce deceptive embodiment. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII, source pp. 101–102](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f110.item).** Je crois que ce sonnet est de Maynard. — The notebook itself records attribution as uncertain. **In this edition.** Angle brackets in the English—such as ⟨gets hard⟩, ⟨To fuck⟩, and ⟨fucked⟩—mark restorations made with the comparison transcription. French abbreviations remain as printed. Notes 85 and 96 disclose the procedure, while note 97 explains nue as cloud versus naked. The edition follows Maynard/Théophile in its governing witness and does not silently replace Théophile with Racan from the comparison. **See also.** [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) · [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) ## Ownership {#entry-ownership} *propriété; propriétaire; entreteneur* **The word.** Propriété moves between possession in love and a historically defended institution of inheritance. Its intimate sense is the claim to retain exclusive privileges over another person, even while imagining a generous surrender of the self. Propriétaire gives that desire an ordinary social face; the lover becomes an owner rather than an exceptional creature beyond economic relations. The entreteneur joins maintenance to mastery. He supports a mistress materially, so his pleasure can resemble charity, yet support can authorize a proprietary claim. The phrase ‘angel and property owner’ does not offer two neatly separate kinds of lover. It locates opposed motives in the same act of giving. **In Intimate Journals.** In Fusées I, love wishes to go out of itself and merge with a victim while preserving a conqueror's privileges. Union and domination are thus simultaneous, not successive stages. The claim that ownership corrupts a generous taste for prostitution makes exclusivity ethically suspect: what appears to protect love may turn another person into territory. The later prophecy in XXII reverses the political valuation. Baudelaire claims that property has already disappeared in principle with the abolition of primogeniture and imagines revolutionary heirs losing their last morsel. This is his polemical judgment, not a neutral history of property law. The notebook does not reconcile its distrust of intimate ownership with its attachment to inherited hierarchy. Reading the two together discloses a tension between generosity as a relation and property as a structure of continuity. XXII also makes a respectable bourgeois wife the ideal kept woman: legality has perfected the financial transaction it supposedly excludes. The target is less the unmarried woman's status than a world in which money supplies the final criterion of worth. Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII's attack on commerce develops the same suspicion that apparently virtuous exchange may conceal a demand for more in return. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** mais il est bientôt corrompu par le goût de la propriété — Ownership is named as a corruption of love’s initial generosity. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** à la fois de l’ange et du propriétaire — The supported mistress’s keeper combines benevolence and mastery. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** La propriété avait disparu virtuellement avec la suppression du droit d’aînesse — A polemical institutional claim gives property a different value. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** l’idéal parfait de la femme entretenue — The prophecy turns legal respectability into perfected financial dependence. **In this edition.** The edition uses ‘ownership’ in the erotic argument and ‘property’ in the institutional argument, a productive contextual distinction within the same French word. It follows the printed entreteneur as ‘the man who keeps a mistress’; the translator's note explicitly rejects an online reading entrepreneur. This matters because the immediate figure is a sexual patron, even though commercial imagery surrounds him. ‘In principle’ for virtuellement avoids treating the historical assertion as a claim that all property literally ceased to exist. **See also.** [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) ## Play and gambling {#entry-play-and-gambling} *Jeu; jeu; joueurs; gagner; perdre* **The word.** Jeu ranges from play or a game to gambling. The surrounding verbs of winning and losing supply stakes without determining one fixed kind of contest. The notebooks exploit that breadth: life, erotic struggle and the comparison between intermittent gain and steady work can all be described through the same lexical field. A game promises suspense because its result matters without being certain. Indifference to that result threatens its charm. Yet taking the result too seriously can surrender the self to risk or make another person a necessary loser. The word therefore tests both attachment and self-command. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées VIII declares that life's only true charm is the charm of the Game, then immediately asks what happens if winning or losing leaves us indifferent. The question prevents the maxim from settling into a cheerful philosophy of play. It suggests an exhaustion deeper than simple defeat: the structure that made outcomes desirable may itself cease to grip us. III offers a different game, dreadful because one player must lose command of himself. Here the stakes are not tokens or money but self-government. The comparison makes unequal erotic possession resemble a contest with a predetermined kind of casualty, although it does not say in advance which sex must lose. The lovers' reciprocal forgiveness in XXII supplies an encounter whose value is not obviously organized by a victor and a vanquished. XVII explicitly contrasts gambling with work. Gambling remains intermittent even when guided by science and temporarily fruitful; slight but continuous work eventually wins because it accumulates. This is a moral and practical comparison, not a proof about every possible wager or a financial recommendation. The important change is in the model of time. Suspense concentrates attention in exceptional outcomes, while labour builds faculties as well as results. The notebook's own flashes coexist uneasily with its demand for sustained effort. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées VIII, source pp. 12](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f21.item).** le charme du Jeu — Capitalization gives the ordinary activity the breadth of a life analogy. - **[Fusées VIII, source pp. 12](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f21.item).** s’il nous est indifférent de gagner ou de perdre — The following question undermines the stability of the maxim. - **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item).** l’un des joueurs perde le gouvernement de soi-même — The erotic game stakes the capacity to govern oneself. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** Le jeu, même dirigé par la science, force intermittente — Gambling’s intermittence is contrasted with cumulative work. **In this edition.** The 2026 translation deliberately distinguishes capitalized ‘Game’ in VIII from ‘Gambling’ in XVII. This is a contextual choice within one French word, not evidence that Baudelaire used unrelated concepts. ‘Players’ in III preserves the extension into erotic conflict. Readers should keep these English choices connected while resisting the temptation to translate all three passages as either harmless play or literal betting. **See also.** [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) ## Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present {#entry-pleasure-salvation} *plaisir; salut; présent; avenir; saint pour soi-même* **The word.** Salut means spiritual salvation in LXIV, where the final aspiration is to sainthood. The competing attachments are figured in time: pleasure binds one to the present, while concern for salvation suspends one from the future. Neither state is described as simple freedom from attachment. Plaisir and volupté can name destructive consumption, an intensity sought in art, or the hoped-for satisfaction of accomplished work. The notebook's moral division is therefore not adequately stated as pleasure versus its total abolition. **In Intimate Journals.** The falling man of LXIV tries to save himself by gripping bushes, only to uproot them. The image turns the resources of the present into things carried away by the very momentum they should resist. It makes the danger cumulative and active: the attempt at rescue can become part of the fall. The repeated wish to be a great man and a saint for oneself in LXIV and LXXIV removes public applause as the final court of judgment. It does not necessarily remove others from moral concern. LXVIII asks that the mother not be punished through the son, and the late budgets give material form to attachment. CXI presents pleasure and work as two ways to forget time, opposing their effects on strength. CX then tries to make work a perpetual volupté, and CXVI admits never yet having known the pleasure of a fulfilled plan. Work is supposed to transform the economy of enjoyment, not leave life without any. These commands record an aspiration, with the unfulfilled plan marking the distance between prescription and achievement. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIV, source pp. 72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f81.item).** Le soin de notre salut nous suspend à l’avenir. — The future has its own binding power. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIV, source pp. 78](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f87.item).** un grand homme et un saint pour soi-même — Inner judgment is privileged over celebrity. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CX, source pp. 103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item).** ma perpétuelle volupté de mon tourment ordinaire — Work is asked to change its affective value. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** le plaisir d’un plan réalisé. — The desired pleasure remains explicitly unexperienced. **In this edition.** The edition keeps ‘binds’ and ‘holds us suspended’, preserving the bodily relation to time. ‘Salvation’ avoids the merely practical sense of safety. ‘Pleasure’ and ‘sensual pleasure’ vary with the French words and context; the lexical variation should not be erased by assuming all enjoyment has one moral value. The final infinitive in LXIV remains an aspiration rather than a new categorical command. **See also.** [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) ## Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities {#entry-poe-maistre} *Edgar Poe; de Maistre; raisonner; intercesseurs; Jean-Jacques* **The word.** Poe and de Maistre form an arresting pair in CXI: Baudelaire says they taught him to reason. The statement identifies chosen teachers, but does not specify a common system or authorize deriving every notebook proposition from one of them. Reasoning is presented as a learned practice within an intimate history of reading. A named writer can function in several ways here: source to translate, model of style, authority to consult, imagined witness, or spiritual intercessor. These relations should not be collapsed into the vague label influence. **In Intimate Journals.** XLVII projects a history of translating Poe; Fusées XVIII includes him among writers of an eternal, cosmopolitan style. These references concern literary labour and form. CXVII then names Poe with the father and Mariette as an intercessor in the morning prayer, placing literary kinship inside a private devotional constellation. De Maistre appears among the names attached to universal religion in LXXIX and returns beside Poe in the work-note. That association makes sense as a record of intellectual allegiance without proving that Baudelaire repeats de Maistre faithfully. The speculative question whether creation could be God's fall and the notebook's incompatible judgments caution against assigning it a coherent borrowed theology. Other authorities can become checks on self-deception. CXVI's invocation of Jean-Jacques follows the dangerous inference that understanding a glorious existence means being capable of realizing it. The note does not supply a Rousseau quotation. CXV, by contrast, explicitly attributes copied reflections on misfortune and delay to Chateaubriand. Reading the different signals of borrowing is part of understanding the notebook's thinking. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXI, source pp. 103–104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item).** De Maistre et Edgar Poe m’ont appris à raisonner. — A personal claim of apprenticeship joins unlike writers. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVII, source pp. 61–62](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f70.item).** Histoire de ma traduction d’Edgar Poe. — Translation is a projected autobiographical subject. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** à Poe, comme intercesseurs — Literary attachment becomes part of private prayer. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** O Jean-Jacques ! — An invocation marks a recognition without furnishing its exact source. **In this edition.** The 2026 translation keeps the personal ‘taught me’ and does not expand the claim into a philosophical genealogy. Note 102 identifies the shortened Chateaubriand passage and distinguishes notebook compression from the fuller source. Note 103 leaves the appeal to Jean-Jacques an invocation. Such distinctions are more trustworthy than invented quotations attached to familiar names. **See also.** [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) · [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) · [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) ## Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule {#entry-prayer} *prière; prier; force; devoir; réservoir* **The word.** Prière is an address to another being and a practice intended to change the person who prays. The notebook repeatedly treats it as a source, store, or circuit of force. That instrumental language does not make devotion merely insincere; it expresses the hope that belief can become an ability to act. The practice is intimate but not simply solitary. God, the dead, mother, friends, and dependants enter its field, even when only the writer's voice is audible. **In Intimate Journals.** LXVIII combines the provocative description of God as universally prostituted with a prayer for the mother, father, and Mariette. The movement from paradox to petition matters: speculative language about boundless divine availability leads into a specific need for daily duty. The wish to become a hero and saint is tied to immediate conduct. CXV reduces wisdom to grooming, prayer, and work, and gives prayer three ends: charity, wisdom, strength. CXVI compares the evening worshipper to a captain posting sentries, a figure of delegated vigilance that makes rest possible. Prayer protects the interval in which active command ceases. CXVII turns those ends into morning and evening rules. The requests concern strength, the mother's continued life, the success of projects, and justice. Work is to continue as strength permits, while income is distributed among obligations. These details distinguish the prayer from vague uplift. At the same time, CI admits that usurers and murderers may ask God to assist their enterprises. Addressing God does not itself guarantee a petition's moral quality. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII, source pp. 74–75](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item).** faire immédiatement mon devoir tous les jours — The petition asks for capacity expressed in immediate habit. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item).** Prière : charité, sagesse et force. — The condensed rule gives prayer several ethical ends. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Il peut dormir. — The sentry metaphor makes prayer a condition of rest. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** réservoir de toute force et de toute justice — The final vow joins effective strength to a moral source. **In this edition.** The single pair of source brackets around LXVIII encloses the reflection on God, the heading, and the prayer together; it does not mark a passage newly supplied by the 2026 translator. ‘Intercessors’ in CXVII retains the distinct role of the father, Mariette, and Poe. The translated routine is a vow, not evidence that Baudelaire followed it every day. **See also.** [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) ## Progress, Freedom, and Fate {#entry-progress} *progrès; liberté; fatalité; individu* **The word.** Progrès divides into an automatic collective promise and an effort of individual moral change. Confusing these senses makes Baudelaire's position less discriminating than the fragments themselves. He attacks reliance on a historical mechanism that would improve us without our participation, yet explicitly allows and demands improvement. Fatalité is the inevitability or necessity of fate; it is not merely bad luck. Its pairing with freedom in CVII asks how willing actions belong to a history that, once enacted, has the force of an accomplished sequence. **In Intimate Journals.** XXXVII defines true progress parenthetically as moral and insists that it occur within and through the individual. The taunt at Belgians is part of Baudelaire's national invective, not evidence that any national population possesses a uniform moral character. Its argument is about delegating one's responsibility to neighbours. CVII makes the law conditional: humanity progresses when all individuals apply themselves to progressing. The paragraph then proposes an identity of freedom and fate in history. It sketches a hypothesis rather than demonstrating a philosophy of history; the reader should preserve the leap from individual effort to universal identity. The work-notes supply a practical analogue. Skills accumulate through small acts, while idleness accumulates losses. CIII's newspaper indicts the simultaneous display of atrocity and boasts of civilization. The problem is not that change never happens, but that technological or rhetorical evidence of change is mistaken for moral transformation. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXVII, source pp. 55](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f64.item).** Il ne peut y avoir de progrès — The sentence immediately specifies true progress as individual and moral. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVII, source pp. 100–101](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f109.item).** il faudrait que chacun voulût la créer — The law depends on willing action rather than independent machinery. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVII, source pp. 100–101](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f109.item).** Cette identité c’est l’histoire — The proposed reconciliation is named, not fully argued. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIII, source pp. 97–98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f106.item).** relatives au progrès et à la civilisation. — Newspaper claims supply a contrary test of the rhetoric. **In this edition.** The 2026 translation renders fatalité as ‘fate’ and preserves the conditional ‘would have to’. These choices matter: an inevitable law is being tested, not simply affirmed. The source's irregular stop and dash after progrès in CVII remain in French but become an ordinary English period; that punctuation repair adds no missing argument. See translator notes 32 and 95. **See also.** [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) · [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) ## Prostitution {#entry-prostitution} *prostitution; se prostituer* **The word.** Prostitution is an aggressively transferable word in these notebooks. It can name the sale of sexual access, but it also names the self's availability to others: the actor before a public, the lover leaving himself, the artist circulating among readers, even God as the inexhaustible recipient of individual appeals. These are connected uses, not interchangeable moral verdicts. The word deliberately carries the social disgrace of its literal sense into activities conventionally called noble. Its decisive ambiguity concerns giving. To offer oneself may be generous, a surrender of possessiveness; it may also dissipate the self or submit it to an audience's appetite. Neither ‘commercialization’ nor ‘self-sacrifice’ covers this entire field. Baudelaire makes the scandal of the word do work that a neutral term for communication could not do. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées I places the question ‘What is art?’ beside an answer of one word. The nearby performance and ball offer an explanation through mutual enjoyment: everyone takes pleasure in everyone else. The artist's relation to others enters the same economy as erotic desire. Yet the section calls the taste for prostitution generous and declares it corrupted by ownership. Here the apparently disreputable term judges respectable possession, rather than merely condemning love. Mon cœur mis à nu LXVII makes the relation explicit: love is the need to leave oneself; worship involves both sacrifice and prostitution. LXVIII then calls God the most prostituted being because he is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love. The theological extension prevents a reading in which prostitution invariably means degradation. It also prevents the comforting claim that Baudelaire has simply replaced the literal meaning with a harmless metaphor: the offence depends on the literal word remaining audible. LXXXVII pulls the concept in another direction. Ordinary desire to be two is opposed to the genius's wish to remain one; glory nevertheless requires remaining one while prostituting oneself in a particular manner. This is a problem of artistic exposure, not a solved rule of withdrawal. The notebook itself addresses an imagined readership while trying to preserve an inassimilable speaker. Its provocative formulation participates in the danger it describes. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** Qu’est-ce que l’art ? Prostitution. — The abrupt definition puts artistic communication inside an erotic and social economy. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** un sentiment généreux : le goût de la prostitution — Generosity reverses the expected valuation of the word. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII, source pp. 74–75](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item).** le réservoir commun, inépuisable de l’amour — God supplies the most extreme extension of availability to others. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII, source pp. 87–88](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f96.item).** La gloire, c’est rester un, et se prostituer d’une manière particulière. — Fame combines singularity with a distinctive form of public exposure. **In this edition.** The 2026 English retains ‘prostitution’ and ‘prostitute oneself’ rather than substituting promiscuity, publicity or self-abasement. This is essential to the repeated collisions between art, love and divinity. In I, ‘ownership’ for propriété also helps distinguish the generosity of availability from the desire to own its recipient. The heading does not imply that every use refers to sex work as an institution. **See also.** [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) · [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) ## Pure poetry {#entry-pure-poetry} *Poésie pure; bouffonnerie lyrique; pantomime; roman sérieux* **The word.** ‘Pure Poetry’ appears as the imagined region reached by a transformation of media and tone. A lyrical or fairy farce, perhaps a pantomime, is to become a serious novel, immersed in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere. Purity here cannot simply mean verse uncontaminated by prose, since the projected vehicle is explicitly a novel. Nor is purity defined as the absence of feeling or bodily life. The desired work is lulling and serene even in passion. Its unity seems to depend on the quality of its imaginative treatment rather than on excluding heterogeneous material at the outset. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XXII uses working imperatives: devise a scenario, translate it into another form, immerse the whole, let it become something. ‘Regions of pure Poetry’ is the destination named after those operations. The note does not furnish a completed theory, still less a manifesto for a later literary school. Its interest lies in the practical passage from one kind of art to another. XI's demand for atmosphere throughout a narrative provides a close companion. An entire work can share a pressure or dream-state even when its incidents belong to another genre. IV's mixture of mysticism and playfulness, and its instruction to recount comic things pompously, likewise separate subject from manner. The artist can change the affective and imaginative status of material by changing how it is organized and sounded. The love scene immediately following the project in XXII offers a possible instance of transformed seriousness: bodily pleasure is joined to darkness, memory, remorse and reciprocal pardon. The printed adjacency invites that reading, but does not explicitly say that the scene belongs to the planned novel. Keeping the relation tentative respects the notebook's assembled form. Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII's injunction to remain a poet even in prose makes the larger principle explicit: poetic activity is not reducible to a metrical container. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** pour pantomime, et traduire cela en un roman sérieux — The project is a transformation of form and tone. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** Régions de la Poésie pure. — Purity names an envisaged imaginative destination, not a stated set of exclusions. - **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item).** mélange de mysticité et d’enjouement — An earlier project also depends on combining unlike registers. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII, source pp. 105](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** Sois toujours poète, même en prose. — The later imperative separates poetic activity from verse form. **In this edition.** ‘Turn it into a serious novel’ gives traduire its cross-media sense rather than suggesting translation between national languages. ‘Scenario’ for canevas likewise identifies a working outline. The edition retains ‘pure Poetry’ with the source's capitalization, but the word pure should not be silently supplied with a later doctrinal definition. The English maintains the fragment as an instruction and desired effect, not a report that this work was completed. **See also.** [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) · [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) · [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) ## Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État {#entry-revolution-1848} *Révolution; 1848; vengeance; démolition; coup d’Etat* **The word.** Révolution names both historical upheaval and an emotionally charged change of attachment. The notebook refuses to separate political allegiance from the pleasures of vengeance, novelty, reading, and destruction. That suspicion does not produce a single stable party position; it produces recurrent revisions of the speaker's own excitement. The comparison of change to infidelity and moving house deliberately reduces grand historical language to intimate and domestic sensations. Its explanatory extravagance is part of its force. **In Intimate Journals.** XXX begins with ‘my intoxication’ in 1848, then asks what kind it was. The answers are motives rather than programmes. Literary intoxication suggests that previous reading supplied scripts for experience. The horrors of June implicate people and bourgeoisie together; the remembered fury at the later coup gives way to questions about the ruler's right and providential character. XXXI calls 1848 charming through its excess of ridiculousness. Such aesthetic appraisal can demote convictions to entertaining performances, but XXXIII also reserves a higher sense in which convictions remain. The notebook oscillates between participation, embarrassment, and judgment rather than narrating a clean conversion. LXVI interprets Napoleon III's success through seizure of communication systems and accommodation to national stupidity. LXXXVI offers another explanation: rulers inherit generations shaped by earlier governments. Its qualifications about influence and chronology are unusually cautious beside the coup fragment's contempt. Political causality remains plural: passion, institutions, collective consent, and inherited habits all appear. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXIX, source pp. 50](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item).** quelque chose qui tient de l’infidélité et du déménagement. — Historical change is compared with private disloyalty and relocation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXX, source pp. 50–51](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item).** Ivresse littéraire ; souvenir des lectures. — Memory of reading is proposed as a political motive. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVI, source pp. 73](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f82.item).** en s’emparant du télégraphe et de l’Imprimerie nationale — Control of communication replaces heroic legitimacy. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVI, source pp. 86–87](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f95.item).** On ne peut pas marquer exactement où finit une influence — Generational explanation acknowledges uncertain boundaries. **In this edition.** The edition's ‘came under’ rifle fire does not claim that Baudelaire was wounded. Its notes distinguish the events of 1848 from the coup of December 1851 and the subsequent imperial title. ‘Providential character’ preserves a theological question, not praise for lucky success. ‘Castles in the air’ translates châteaux en Espagne idiomatically, while ‘moving house’ keeps déménagement concrete. **See also.** [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) · [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) · [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) ## Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment {#entry-sacrifice-punishment} *sacrifice; victime; question; peine de mort; assentiment* **The word.** Sacrifice can name a ritual offering, self-surrender, or a theological explanation of punitive violence. Victime consequently does double work: a person harmed and a sacrificial offering. Keeping both senses in view is necessary to understand XLIII without mistaking its rejection of one violence for rejection of all violence. Question, in its historical judicial use, means torture intended to extract truth. The notebook supplies that meaning in parentheses and condemns the method as a material instrument applied to a spiritual end. **In Intimate Journals.** XLIII immediately distinguishes the death penalty from this interrogation. It claims that execution can save society and the offender spiritually, requiring the victim's assent and joy for a perfect sacrifice. The refusal of chloroform follows from this reasoning: consciousness of suffering is imagined as salvific. This is Baudelaire's disturbing defence, not a demonstration that condemned people consented or that killing produces salvation. The final comparison of cruelty with sensual pleasure locates torture in human appetite. LXIX then projects an inquiry into the intoxication of blood, crowds, and the tortured Damiens. It does not supply the promised account, and its interest in the sufferer's intoxication must not be turned into evidence of his actual feelings. XXVIII and XXXII read revolutionary ritual through sacrifice, while LXX elevates the man who sacrifices and sacrifices himself. The range crosses political camps. XLV's claim that abolitionists have a personal stake attacks motives instead of answering their arguments. The lexicon must therefore distinguish ritual analogy, psychological suspicion, and normative approval rather than merging them into a single theory. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIII, source pp. 58–59](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f67.item).** une niaiserie barbare — Judicial torture is explicitly rejected as a way of finding truth. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIII, source pp. 58–59](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f67.item).** il faut qu’il y ait assentiment et joie — The death-penalty argument imposes its sacrificial condition. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXII, source pp. 52](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f61.item).** La Révolution, par le sacrifice, confirme la Superstition. — Revolutionary practice is interpreted as ritual continuity. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIX, source pp. 75](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f84.item).** De l’ivresse du supplicié (Damiens). — A projected topic remains distinct from historical testimony. **In this edition.** The English ‘judicial interrogation (torture)’ makes question legible and retains material versus spiritual saving. ‘Personal interest’ translates intéressés in XLV, which alleges a stake rather than intellectual interest. In LXX the governing print lacks the additional man who blesses found in a comparison text; the 2026 edition does not insert him. See notes 46, 64, and 65. **See also.** [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) · [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) ## Satanic beauty {#entry-satanic-beauty} *Satan; Beauté virile; insensibilité vengeresse; malheur* **The word.** Satan is not used in only one way across the Journals. The figure can signify downward appetite, a satanic turn of mind, commercial egoism or a literary image of ruined magnificence. The specific Satan of Fusées XVI is qualified ‘in Milton’s manner’. That restriction is indispensable: the argument concerns a represented form of masculine beauty, not an unambiguous profession of allegiance. Virile beauty gathers power that cannot freely act, pride wounded by misfortune, mystery and the suggestion of revenge. Its splendour is not innocent of danger. The face is compelling partly because capacity survives within damage. **In Intimate Journals.** XVI arrives at Satan after the speaker has made sadness and frustrated ardour central to his own Beautiful. The dandy's vengeful absence of feeling enters the sequence before the final literary example. The logic is therefore aesthetic and psychological: given this chosen set of features, the speaker finds it difficult not to favour such a figure. His ‘others would say: obsessed’ supplies an alternative account of the same conviction. Milton's Book I offers a precise comparison: Satan retains traces of former radiance beneath wounds, care and pride, with revenge and remorse visible in his bearing. This supports the notebook's cluster of ruin, power and sorrow. It does not establish that Milton himself endorses Satan's judgments, or that Baudelaire reproduces the poem's full theological frame. The notebook extracts a model of appearance from a much larger narrative. Fusées XXI asks what it means to give oneself to Satan, leaving the question open. Mon cœur mis à nu XLI describes simultaneous aspirations toward God and Satan in every person, associating the latter with animal descent. These passages keep the attractive literary figure within a divided moral vocabulary. Admiring satanic beauty cannot by itself settle the writer's religion, and calling the passage merely decorative would ignore how intimately aesthetics and moral danger are connected. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** le plus parfait type de Beauté virile est Satan, — à la manière de Milton — The literary qualification fixes the scope of the example. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** une insensibilité vengeresse — The dandy’s threatening reserve is one element in the aesthetic sequence. - **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** d’autres diraient : obsédé par — The writer lets obsession become an alternative reading of his chosen principles. - **[Fusées XXI, source pp. 30–31](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f39.item).** Se livrer à Satan, qu’est-ce que c’est ? — A later question distinguishes surrender from an already settled declaration. **In this edition.** The edition's ‘virile Beauty’ retains the masculine claim instead of broadening it to beauty in general. ‘Misfortune’ keeps malheur as an experienced condition of ruin, while ‘vengeful absence of feeling’ avoids making insensibilité merely lack of artistic taste. Most importantly, ‘in Milton’s manner’ stays attached to the conclusion. The translator's note 33 directs readers to a literary model, not to a biographical verdict about the author's beliefs.[^f-milton-satan] **See also.** [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) ## Sea and Infinity {#entry-sea-infinity} *mer; immensité; mouvement; infini diminutif; habitacle transitoire* **The word.** Infini diminutif is a deliberately paradoxical phrase: a reduced or miniature infinity. Diminutif does not assert that the infinite is mathematically finite. It identifies a limited perceptual field capable of suggesting what exceeds it. Mer, immensité and mouvement bring that idea into the experience of looking at the sea. **In Intimate Journals.** LXXVIII begins with a question about why the sea is infinitely and eternally pleasing. Its answer joins two qualities: immensity and movement. The passage then measures the apparent reach of the sea in leagues. What matters is not an exhaustive view of an actually infinite space, but a span sufficient for a human observer to receive the idea of infinity. The rhetorical question ‘What does it matter?’ makes adequacy of suggestion more important than literal equivalence between visible object and conceived totality. The change from a radius of six or seven leagues to twelve or fourteen leagues of moving liquid gives the thought a concrete spatial scale. The notebook does not supply a survey or an optical calculation to be verified as if it were a scientific claim. The numbers dramatize the disproportion between a bounded visual encounter and the immense idea it can awaken. The final description of earth as a transitory dwelling places the observer’s bodily residence inside a larger temporal limit. Beauty is offered to a passing inhabitant, not possessed without limit. This argument belongs beside the ships of Fusées XI and XXII. The first ships seem nostalgically to ask about departure for happiness; the later moving ship generates imaginary curves from real elements. In each case perception goes beyond a static inventory of physical parts. Yet the sea is not merely another ship image: its movement and expanse allow a thought about infinity without requiring an anthropomorphic animal or a destination. The distinction keeps the notebook’s separate visual experiments legible. The passage also places pressure on the claim that nature is abominable. The notebooks can attack natural appetite as a supposed moral justification while finding a supreme beauty in the sea. Calling this a contradiction need not mean that one fragment simply refutes the other; naturel has different argumentative functions. A moral attack on spontaneity and an account of perceptual suggestion are not the same claim. The lexicon therefore neither expels nature from Baudelaire’s aesthetics nor uses one seascape to make his polemical vocabulary uniformly benign. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII, source pp. 80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f89.item).** Parce que la mer offre à la fois l’idée de l’immensité et du mouvement. — Expanse and movement cooperate in the pleasure of the view. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII, source pp. 80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f89.item).** Voilà un infini diminutif. — The visible field is a sufficient suggestion, not the total infinite. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII, source pp. 80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f89.item).** sur son habitacle transitoire. — The human observer’s dwelling is expressly temporary. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** les éléments réels de l’objet. — The related ship passage distinguishes physical elements from the imaginary forms their movement generates. **In this edition.** The English ‘a diminutive infinity’ retains the paradox and its smallness rather than replacing it with an unqualified infinity. ‘Leagues’ preserves the source unit without inserting a falsely exact modern measurement into this phenomenological thought. ‘Transient dwelling’ gives habitacle transitoire a spatial and temporal force; it does not explicitly identify a named afterlife. **See also.** [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) ## Self: Vaporization and Centralization {#entry-self} *Moi; vaporisation; centralisation; sortir de soi* **The word.** Moi, made into a noun, is the self that can be gathered, dispersed, preserved, or forgotten. Vaporisation imagines the loss of a fixed boundary as a change of state; centralisation imagines forces collected around a centre. The pair is dynamic rather than a choice between a good substance and a bad one. Each movement offers a pleasure and incurs a risk. The emphatic ‘Tout est là’ in XXIII announces an organizing opposition without supplying a system. Many later fragments can be read through it, but the phrase does not authorize making every contradiction a solved dialectic. **In Intimate Journals.** In LXVII, love is a need to leave oneself. The worshipping animal sacrifices and prostitutes itself, so dispersion includes devotion as well as appetite. LXVIII then makes God an inexhaustible common source of love. A simple rule that all outgoing feeling degrades the self cannot accommodate this divine availability. LXXXVII says the man of genius wants to be one, whereas ordinary love seeks escape in another body. Fame nevertheless demands a special prostitution that leaves the artist one. The self must reach others without surrendering its organizing singularity. XCIII sharpens the contrary extreme: the artist never leaves himself. This is a deliberately absolute claim in a fragment that also opposes art to sexual potency, not a complete account of artistic sympathy. The late instruction to enjoy memories ‘à deux’ in CXVI challenges the privilege of solitary experience. It imagines sharing as a task still to be learned. Taken together, these notes make the problem ethical as well as aesthetic: how can a person preserve form while becoming capable of attachment? **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII, source pp. 45](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f54.item).** De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. — The initial pair makes dispersion and concentration mutually intelligible. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVII, source pp. 74](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item).** Le besoin de sortir de soi. — Love is defined by an outward movement. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII, source pp. 87–88](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f96.item).** La gloire, c’est rester un — Fame poses the problem of public circulation without dissolution. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** il faut en jouir à deux. — The final regimen asks for shared memory. **In this edition.** The 2026 English retains ‘vaporization and centralization of the Self’, preserving the physical and organizational metaphors and the capital on Self. ‘Concentration’ is a useful related concept but should not silently replace centralisation. Elsewhere ‘get outside oneself’ and ‘leaves himself’ keep the spatial language visible, allowing readers to recognize its changes of value. **See also.** [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) ## Sensibility {#entry-sensibility} *sensibilité; génie; sensible; secousse nerveuse* **The word.** Sensibilité is a capacity to receive, feel and respond. In Fusées XVIII it belongs to each person and is called that person's genius. Genius here can therefore mean an individual principle of perception or responsiveness, rather than only the rare public achievement of a great artist. The word should not be confused with sensible in objet sensible, where the adjective means accessible to the senses. One names a perceiving capacity; the other describes an object of perception. The notebooks are interested in both sides of that encounter and repeatedly ask how much depends on the particular observer. **In Intimate Journals.** XVIII opens with a prohibition: do not despise anyone's sensibility. This gives an ethical consequence to aesthetic individuality. If another person's way of feeling is that person's genius, contempt may discard something irreducible before understanding it. The instruction is striking in a collection full of contemptuous portraits; it is neither erased by them nor enough to neutralize their violence. It establishes an internal standard against which they can be read. The same section locates a nervous shock in the birth of sublime thought. This is the notebook's physiological speculation, not a verified account of the brain. Its presence nevertheless prevents sensibility from being treated as wholly detached from the body. Sublime thinking and sensory disturbance are imagined together, even while other fragments oppose spirit and brute appetite. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII credits leisure with developing sensibility, meditation and the capacity for dandyism, while acknowledging its financial cost. Sensibility is thus both singular and cultivated. Fusées XII's apparently unfeeling regular object provides the complementary aesthetic problem: art must engage a response rather than merely satisfy correctness. The honour given to individual feeling in XVIII does not mean every response is infallible; the hallucination and bewitched-mirror passages make that impossible. It means that judgment must begin by recognizing the existence of distinct perceivers. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** Ne méprisez la sensibilité de personne. — The maxim places a limit on contempt. - **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** La sensibilité de chacun, c’est son génie. — Genius is distributed as individual responsiveness rather than restricted to celebrity. - **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** une secousse nerveuse qui se fait sentir dans le cervelet — Sublime thought is associated with a bodily event in a speculative assertion. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII, source pp. 82–83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item).** relativement à la sensibilité, à la méditation — Leisure is credited with developing capacities even while increasing debt. **In this edition.** In XVIII the edition retains ‘sensibility’, avoiding the narrower modern sense of easily hurt feelings that ‘sensitivity’ might suggest. In LXXXII, however, the same French noun becomes ‘sensitivity’; readers tracing the faculty should keep the two English words connected. ‘Object perceived by the senses’ in XVI correctly distinguishes the other use of sensible. ‘Each person’s sensibility is his genius’ preserves the force and universality of the claim, rather than changing it into the weaker idea that gifted people are sensitive. The translation does not add a scientific endorsement to the cerebellum statement. **See also.** [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) · [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) ## Ships {#entry-ships} *navire; navires; courbes; eurythmique* **The word.** The ship is both a constructed object and a being imagined through its movement. Its real elements admit symmetry, complexity and proportion; their changing position generates curves that the spectator mentally follows. Baudelaire does not have to choose between formal beauty and human expression. The second grows from the first. The ship's apparent idleness is especially charged. A robust object built for travel rocks without departing and seems to contain an unused capacity. Its nostalgia can then become the spectator's own wish for elsewhere, while its orderly structure gives that wish a visible body. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XI makes tranquil ships speak a silent question: when do we set out for happiness? The plural ‘we’ recruits the viewer into their suspended voyage. No destination is named, and happiness is not a geographical discovery already waiting on a map. The image gives longing a departure-time rather than a place. XXII returns to the subject analytically. Contemplation of the ship satisfies needs for symmetry and regularity; motion adds the successive generation of imaginary figures from real components. The poetic idea is then called a hypothesis: an immense, complicated, eurythmic animal, full of genius and all human ambitions. That word matters. The paragraph describes how perception produces an expressive being, not how the observer literally discovers an organism hidden in machinery. The two fragments enrich each other without becoming duplicates. XI begins with animation and speech; XXII reconstructs the formal operation that can make such animation imaginable. Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII's sea similarly joins immensity to movement and lets a finite visible extent suggest the infinite. The ship is a concentrated instance of this larger poetics: material limits can support an experience that exceeds them. It also complicates the nearby denunciation of machinery, since an artefact here stimulates spiritual and imaginative life rather than necessarily atrophying it. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XI, source pp. 14–15](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f23.item).** Quand partons-nous pour le bonheur ? — The silently voiced question makes departure itself the form of longing. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** les éléments réels de l’objet — The imaginary curves remain generated by an actual object. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** l’hypothèse d’un être vaste, immense, compliqué, mais eurythmique — The expressive creature is explicitly proposed as a poetic hypothesis. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII, source pp. 80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f89.item).** l’idée de l’immensité et du mouvement — The sea passage supplies a related account of finite spectacle and expansive thought. **In this edition.** The edition keeps the parenthetical ‘rocked (swayed)’ in XI, rather than smoothing away the double experiment in movement. ‘Eurythmic’ in XXII preserves the technical word for harmonious order or proportion, explained by the translator, instead of replacing it with vaguely graceful. ‘Poetic idea’ and ‘hypothesis’ preserve the stages of the explanation. The translation does not turn the human ambitions attributed to the ship into a literal claim about its consciousness. **See also.** [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) ## Supernaturalism {#entry-supernaturalism} *surnaturalisme; surnaturel; accent; retentissement* **The word.** Surnaturalisme is one of the two fundamental literary qualities named in Fusées XVII, paired with irony. The note supplies its own explanation: an individual way of seeing, a general colour and accent, intensity, sonority, clarity, vibratory power, depth and resonance in space and time. This is a poetics of heightened relation and effect, not simply a demand to introduce ghosts. The vocabulary crosses senses. Colour and accent join sound, vibration and depth, so no single medium owns the supernatural. The word concerns the strength and range with which things stand before a writer and become present in language. **In Intimate Journals.** The definition in XVII proceeds from an individual view to qualities of expression. Its syntax does not provide a finished taxonomy, but the explicit list keeps the entry from becoming a loose synonym for fantasy. A familiar scene may reveal the whole depth of life in an almost supernatural state of the soul. Nothing spectacular needs to happen in the visible scene; the transformation is in the intensity with which its relations become apparent. The nearby claim that time and space sometimes deepen extends the account beyond heightened colour. Existence itself can feel enlarged. This can illuminate the movement of ships, music's excavation of the sky, and the demand for a whole narrative's atmosphere. These parallels are readings across fragments, not a theory that Baudelaire has systematically deduced. Irony is indispensable to the pairing. The same notebook that seeks intensified vision repeatedly deflates inspired prophets, self-important writers and its own claims to grandeur. Supernaturalism without that counterforce could turn every heightened impression into unquestionable revelation. Irony without intensity could become mere dismissiveness. The notebook does not announce this balance in so many words, but placing the two qualities together makes their friction part of its literary program. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** Deux qualités littéraires fondamentales : surnaturalisme et ironie. — The two qualities are paired rather than offered as alternatives. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** intensité, sonorité, limpidité, vibrativité, profondeur et retentissement — The note’s own list defines the field of heightened effects. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** le temps et l’étendue sont plus profonds — Intensity alters the felt dimensions of existence. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** si ordinaire qu’il soit — Even an ordinary spectacle can become the scene of disclosure. **In this edition.** ‘Supernaturalism’ preserves the term that the note immediately defines, while ‘the supernatural’ renders the following substantive. The edition's ‘vibratory power’ makes the uncommon vibrativité intelligible without deleting vibration from the sensory sequence. ‘Resonance’ for retentissement keeps extension through space and time audible; a purely social ‘impact’ would shift the argument. The wording ‘almost supernatural states’ retains presque, an important qualification of the later claim. **See also.** [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) · [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) ## Symbol {#entry-symbol} *Symbole; symboles; spectacle; profondeur* **The word.** A symbol in these notes is a perceptible form through which a larger depth becomes available. The ordinary scene does not need to disappear in order to signify. It becomes the Symbol of life's depth precisely as something seen before the eyes, under particular conditions of the soul. The capitalized singular should not be mistaken for a ready-made decoding system. The fragment does not assign one permanent meaning to every object. Elsewhere symbols belong to sacrifice and the vow as forms of exchange. The word names a relation and an operation before it names a catalogue of emblems. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées XVII locates the disclosure in ‘certain almost supernatural states’. Both certain and almost restrict the claim. A spectacle, however ordinary, may reveal the whole depth of life, and ‘it’ becomes its Symbol. The ordinariness matters: significance need not depend on rare scenery or a supernatural event. The altered relation between state and scene is enough. This can be read beside the ship of XXII, whose real components generate an imagined living totality. That paragraph makes the stages of the poetic operation visible rather than simply announcing a hidden meaning. The tragic sky in VII is another useful comparison, although it is named as a transfer of epithet rather than as a symbol. Different figures can deepen perception without belonging to one undifferentiated theory. XVII also calls sacrifice and the vow supreme formulas and symbols of exchange. In that case an act concentrates a relation of giving and return. The connection to the visual scene lies in condensation: something limited carries a wider structure. But no uniform doctrine is elaborated. The notebook invites readers to connect these moments while leaving room for differences between a ritual sign, a poetic image and a privately intensified perception. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** Dans certains états de l’âme presque surnaturels — The experience is conditioned and qualified, not claimed as constant. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** Il en devient le Symbole. — A perceived spectacle becomes the sign of revealed depth. - **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** les formules suprêmes et les symboles de l’échange — Symbolic force also belongs to acts of sacrifice and promise. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** L’idée poétique, qui se dégage de cette opération — The ship passage exposes a related process of forming significance. **In this edition.** The 2026 edition expands the compact ‘Il en devient le Symbole’ into ‘The scene becomes the Symbol of that depth of life’. This is an explanatory resolution of the French pronouns, not an additional sentence by Baudelaire. It makes a plausible relation explicit while reducing the original's compression. Capitalized ‘Symbol’ is preserved. The expansion is helpful, provided readers remember that the French itself lets the pronouns bind spectacle and depth more tightly and less discursively. **See also.** [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) · [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) ## The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing {#entry-abyss-vertigo} *gouffre; vertige; hystérie; imbécillité; jouissance et terreur* **The word.** Gouffre names an abyss rather than a single object of fear. CIX distributes it across sleep, action, dreams, memory, desire, regret, remorse, beauty, and number. Both suffering and the most valued intensities can become bottomless. The figure concerns the scale of experience as much as its content. Vertige makes depth bodily. The self does not merely contemplate an abyss at a safe distance; its capacity to stand, act, or think seems endangered by it. **In Intimate Journals.** The list in CIX is unusually comprehensive, crossing supposed opposites. Action is not a simple cure for dreams, since each has its own abyss. Beauty and number, elsewhere sources of form and intensity, can likewise destabilize. This prevents a reductive equation of the gouffre with sadness alone. The following sentence says the speaker has cultivated his hysteria with delight and terror. Cultivation suggests participation in intensification, but the next declaration of constant dizziness marks a loss of command. On 23 January 1862 he feels the wind of imbecility's wing pass over him. The image stages an approach or warning, not a completed diagnosis or a clinical account of cause. LXXVII gives the gulf another use, as the distance between lovers that shared pleasure does not bridge. The same spatial noun can mark inward excess or interpersonal separation. The late work regimen responds to threatened disintegration by prescribing immediate, finite acts, yet its many renewed promises preserve uncertainty about their power. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** la sensation du gouffre — The abyss is stated as an enduring mode of experience. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** du beau, du nombre — Aesthetic and formal values belong to the destabilizing list. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** avec jouissance et terreur — Delight and fear accompany the claimed self-cultivation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** le vent de l’aile de l’imbécillité. — The threatening limit is rendered as a passing bodily image. **In this edition.** The edition keeps ‘hysteria’, ‘dizzy’, and ‘imbecility’ as translations of historical self-description. They should not be silently converted into present-day diagnostic labels. ‘Mentally as well as physically’ renders au moral comme au physique without narrowing moral to ethical guilt. The dated sentence is evidence for what the notebook says that day, not a medical inference about Baudelaire's later life. **See also.** [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) ## The Fall, Creation, and Duality {#entry-fall-creation} *chute; unité; dualité; création; péché originel* **The word.** Chute can signify the theological Fall and an actual downward movement. The notebook exploits both. Original sin describes an inherited moral predicament, while falling bodies give that predicament a felt direction. In LV, however, the word is turned upon God rather than only upon fallen humanity. The key sentence is conditional: if the Fall means unity becoming duality, then creation might itself be God's fall. The force lies in testing a definition to an unsettling conclusion, not in presenting a settled creed. **In Intimate Journals.** LV begins under the heading ‘Theology’ and proceeds through questions. It first asks what the Fall is, then considers the consequence of a proposed definition. Creation introduces otherness or multiplicity; under that hypothesis, the creator cannot remain outside the change he effects. Nothing in the brief note identifies a complete cosmology or a particular philosophical source. LII's source annotation locates a sign of original sin in the organs of generation. LXXXI, by contrast, gives the doctrine a practical measure: civilization diminishes its traces. These uses move from speculative origin, through bodily embodiment, to possible moral correction. They cannot be flattened into the claim that all created existence is equally worthless. LXIV's man rolling down a slope supplies an experiential version. He tears out the bushes meant to arrest his fall, making grasped pleasures participate in his descent. The image connects desire to momentum without proving that every pleasure is damnable. Elsewhere beauty and discipline are themselves desired. The notebook repeatedly asks how motion might be redirected. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LV, source pp. 67–68](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f76.item).** Si c’est l’unité devenue dualité — The hypothesis must remain visible in any summary. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LV, source pp. 67–68](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f76.item).** la création ne serait-elle pas la chute de Dieu — The question turns a theological vocabulary toward its source. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXI, source pp. 82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item).** la diminution des traces du péché originel. — Civilization is defined as ethical transformation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIV, source pp. 72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f81.item).** les emporterait dans sa chute. — The physical figure makes failed rescue accelerate descent. **In this edition.** The English keeps ‘If’ and the question ‘would creation not be’, resisting conversion into a doctrinal assertion. ‘Fall’ carries the religious and physical senses where French chute does. ‘Traces’ in LXXXI is also important: the fragment speaks of diminishing effects, not abolishing a theological event. No named school is supplied where the notebook gives none. **See also.** [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) · [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) ## The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love {#entry-mother-jeanne} *ma mère; Jeanne; Mariette; devoir; intercesseurs* **The word.** The recurring mother and Jeanne give the late notebook a network of obligations that resists its assertions of absolute self-sufficiency. These figures are named through the writer's relation to them: worry, provision, guilt, remembered attachment, and hope for recognition. Their own voices are not supplied by the fragments. The 2026 notes identify the mother as Caroline Aupick and the Jeanne of the household plans as Jeanne Duval. That identification does not authorize expanding every isolated Jeanne reminder into a documented episode. **In Intimate Journals.** LXV lists Jeanne and Mme Muller as examples for a projected study of the people's hatred of beauty. No anecdote follows, so the entry cannot explain what either supposedly did. By CXV, Jeanne's illnesses and the mother's infirmity and solitude are reasons to preserve the writer's own health. Self-care becomes a duty owed to others. LXVIII asks God not to punish son and mother through one another. The prayer acknowledges an intimacy in which another person's suffering can be experienced as one's own judgment; it also asks that this feared economy be interrupted. CXVII wishes the mother to live long enough to enjoy his transformation. Moral reform requires time not only for the reforming self but for its witness. The allocations in CXIV, CXVI, and CXVII imagine income distributed among living expenses, creditors, friends, mother, and Jeanne in different arrangements. These are proposed plans, not evidence of payments. Their shifting detail makes care practical without proving it accomplished. Alongside them, the wish to enjoy memories with another person names a form of companionship the writer still has to learn. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII, source pp. 74–75](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item).** Ne me châtiez pas dans ma mère — The prayer seeks release from punishment through the loved person. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item).** Ma santé par charité, par devoir — Preserving the self is made an obligation to others. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Jeanne 300, ma mère 200, moi 300 — Affection enters a concrete proposed monthly allocation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** une vie assez longue pour jouir de ma transformation — The imagined reform needs a surviving maternal witness. **In this edition.** The English preserves ‘my mother’ rather than replacing the intimate designation with a proper name in the body. It keeps the distinct budgets separate. Translator note 64 presents the identification of Mariette with the remembered servant as scholarly identification; the final prayer itself names her and Poe as intercessors without supplying biographies. These differences of evidence should remain legible. **See also.** [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) ## The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite {#entry-newspaper} *journal; gazette; apéritif; main pure; imprimerie* **The word.** Journal and gazette mean the newspaper here, not the private notebook suggested by the English title Intimate Journals. CIII makes the newspaper both a surface of representation and an object consumed at breakfast. Its atrocity is therefore social: readers make a habit of taking in what they profess to condemn. Apéritif turns information into appetite. The metaphor is deliberately disgusting because it makes ordinary civilized routine appear nourished by violence. **In Intimate Journals.** CIII juxtaposes crimes with assertions of goodness, charity, progress, and civilization. The issue is not merely that bad events occur. It is the ease with which accounts of them coexist with a flattering narrative of collective improvement. Princes, nations, and individuals all contribute to the fabric; responsibility is not assigned to one class alone. The last sentence imagines a pure hand convulsed by touching the paper. Moral contact becomes bodily contamination, extending the critique from what is read to the act of handling it. Yet LXXXV incorporates an actual clipping to expose the treatment of Lavalette's daughter. The condemned medium can also supply evidence against respectable cruelty. The dossier of editors, pedantry, and military rhetoric explains another aspect of distrust: journalism administers reputations and disciplines authors. LXVI shows printing and telegraphy as instruments of rule. The press is thus an appetite, a workplace hierarchy, a machinery of power, and an archive from which the notebook itself borrows. Its reliance does not cancel the attack, but prevents a simple fantasy of uncontaminated exteriority. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIII, source pp. 97–98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f106.item).** une ivresse d’atrocité universelle. — The catalogue of crimes becomes an intoxicating collective state. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIII, source pp. 97–98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f106.item).** ce dégoûtant apéritif — Reading is made a preparation for daily consumption. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIII, source pp. 97–98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f106.item).** une main pure — The governing witness intensifies the contact metaphor. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXV, source pp. 84–85](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f93.item).** cet entrefilet découpé dans un journal — The notebook also uses the newspaper as documentary evidence. **In this edition.** The 2026 English retains ‘pure hand’, following the print where the comparison transcription omits pure. ‘Apéritif’ preserves the odd placement of a pre-meal stimulant at the breakfast table. The bracketed introduction to the clipping belongs to the source's editorial account of the manuscript, not to Baudelaire's quoted article. These layers should not be merged. **See also.** [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) · [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) · [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) · [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) ## The Two Simultaneous Aspirations {#entry-two-aspirations} *deux postulations simultanées; spiritualité; animalité; monter en grade* **The word.** Postulations are directed movements or aspirations, not logical postulates. XLI locates two of them in every person at every hour: toward God and toward Satan. Simultaneity is crucial. The fragment does not divide humanity into permanently pure and impure classes, nor does it narrate a simple succession from temptation to conversion. Its vertical metaphor is unevenly valued. Spirituality desires to rise in rank; animality enjoys descending. Aspiration and pleasure are already distributed differently within the sentence. **In Intimate Journals.** The elaboration assigns erotic love for women and affectionate conversation with animals to the descending movement. This is an explicitly gendered and hierarchical polemic. It neither proves women lack spirit nor gives a neutral description of human intimacy. The cruelty of the classification should remain visible beside the attractions that make descent pleasurable. Elsewhere the same field is less stable. LXVII identifies humanity as a worshipping animal, while LXVIII makes God the being most available to every individual. What looked like animal self-loss can participate in a language of divine giving. XCI calls misplaced erotic devotion an error of idol-selection rather than an absence of the power to worship. The late prayers ask for strength to perform ordinary duties, not immunity from contradiction. The wish to become a saint for oneself can coexist with concern for one's mother and Jeanne. Read across these passages, the two aspirations identify a struggle in motivation; they cannot serve as a master key that predetermines the value of each action. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLI, source pp. 57–58](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f66.item).** deux postulations simultanées — The two directions are concurrent within the person. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLI, source pp. 57–58](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f66.item).** un désir de monter en grade — Spiritual ascent borrows a worldly hierarchy of rank. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVII, source pp. 74](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item).** L’homme est un animal adorateur. — Animal existence includes, rather than excludes, worship. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, source pp. 90–91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f99.item).** l’animal adorateur se trompant d’idole. — Devotion can fail through its chosen object. **In this edition.** ‘Aspirations’ makes the historical literary sense of postulations available without importing a proof or axiom. ‘Rise in rank’ preserves the odd military or bureaucratic flavour of monter en grade. The parallel ‘invocation’ toward God and Satan is retained, as are ‘spirituality’ and ‘animality’; smoothing the latter into mere bodily pleasure would conceal the fragment's aggressive hierarchy. **See also.** [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) ## Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier {#entry-theatre-actor} *théâtre; comédien; lustre; masques; parias* **The word.** Comédien means a theatrical actor, not specifically a comedian. Acting interests the notebook as a vocation, an art of assumed persons, a social position, and an expansion of possible experience. The chandelier, by contrast, is an object whose symmetrical brilliance can displace the human performer as the theatre's chief attraction. The two interests coexist. Baudelaire can prefer a luminous structure to ordinary dramatic representation while imagining his own life as an actor. **In Intimate Journals.** XXXIX moves from a childhood preference for the chandelier to a programme of artificial performance: raised footwear, expressive masks, amplified voices, and men in women's roles. These devices do not abolish expression; they seek expression more forceful than the unmodified human face or voice. The opera glass further turns the theatre into a field of altered scale. XLII includes the Actor among the senses in which an intoxication with humanity might be explored. XCIV's paired fantasies of military pope and actor join authority to spectacle without explaining them away as one desire. XCVI requests an account of the actor's calling and the true greatness of pariahs, then wonders whether virtue may even damage their talents. These reminders do not justify reconstructing a completed theory of acting. In particular, the dismissal of Samson as not an actor is an evaluative provocation, not a denial of his documented profession. What emerges is a sustained interest in artifice and marginality: the performer may achieve imaginative power precisely where respectable social classifications fail. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIX, source pp. 56–57](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f65.item).** c’est le lustre — The theatre’s appeal begins with an illuminated object. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIX, source pp. 56–57](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f65.item).** des masques plus expressifs que le visage humain — Artifice intensifies rather than simply conceals expression. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIV, source pp. 92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item).** tantôt pape, mais pape militaire, tantôt comédien. — Two childhood roles combine sovereignty and performance. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVI, source pp. 92–93](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item).** De la vraie grandeur des parias. — The projected actor-study turns toward excluded social figures. **In this edition.** ‘Platform shoes’, ‘speaking trumpets’, and ‘opera glass’ distinguish three separate apparatuses in XXXIX; masks are not said to be the amplifying device. The English ‘Actor’ in XLII follows the source capital. ‘Deadpan joker’ for farceur froid in XCVI makes the comparison to Swift intelligible without inventing a particular Swift text. Translator notes 39, 40, and 87 retain the unresolved theory attributed to Legouvé. **See also.** [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) · [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) ## Time and Memory {#entry-time-memory} *temps; souvenir; années profondes; regret; avenir* **The word.** Temps is both time experienced and time available for use. Souvenir can be a remembered event, the activity of recollection or an object that carries memory. These fragments repeatedly turn duration into pressure, depth, capital or opportunity. Memory is not simply a store of facts; it changes the present sensation and can become either a private indulgence or a shared relation. **In Intimate Journals.** The claim in Fusées XXI to have lived three minutes in one separates experiential density from chronological age. Thirty years could become ninety by this arithmetic of intensity. The comparison with XVII’s moments when time and extension grow deeper makes clear that the notebook is measuring felt existence, not making a literal biographical correction. Expanded duration can enrich perception, while the gulf of memory in CIX makes remembered life another source of vertigo. The same depth offers a poetic resource and a danger to the self. Fusées XV makes the storm a tocsin of earlier erotic memories; a present physical force calls past passions into renewed sensation. In XXII the lovers experience pleasures that resemble memories before they cry over an inadequately lived past and an uncertain future. Their reconciliation does not repair the past factually. It changes the relation in which regret is experienced, bringing reciprocal pardon into the present. Later in that section, however, the disillusioned observer sees only bitterness behind and a storm ahead that contains nothing new. A vocabulary of deep years supports opposed experiences rather than one secure philosophy of recollection. LXIV divides the temporal field morally: pleasure fastens the self to the present, concern for salvation suspends it toward the future. Yet the Hygiène fragments insist that deferral is itself perilous. CX makes the present minute the most important; CXII compares postponing action with postponing conversion. In CXI the way to forget oppressive time is to use it. This is no simple recommendation to live only for the future. The imagined future demands a present act, and the pleasure that consumes time is distinguished from work that strengthens the capacity to act again. The late notebooks also question possession of the past. CXVI says that he has enjoyed his memories only alone and must enjoy them in company with one other person. That small proposed change is significant beside the declarations of essential solitude. Memory need not function exclusively as self-enclosed aesthetic wealth. It might become one of the heart’s shared pleasures. The sentence remains a project, not evidence that the project occurred. Likewise, the changing work schedules and budgets describe ways to organize future time, not an accomplished transformation established by the printed sequence. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées XXI, source pp. 30–31](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f39.item).** si j’ai vécu trois minutes en une — Intensity produces a figurative age different from the calendar. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** les tristesses de leur passé avec leurs espérances bien incertaines d’avenir — Past grief and uncertain hope coexist in the lovers’ embrace. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIV, source pp. 72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f81.item).** Le goût du plaisir nous attache au présent. — The temporal attachment is presented as an ethical problem. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXI, source pp. 103–104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item).** On ne peut oublier le temps qu’en s’en servant. — Use, rather than mere distraction, becomes the means of escape. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Je n’ai jusqu’à présent joui de mes souvenirs que tout seul ; il faut en jouir à deux. — Recollection is proposed as a shared pleasure. **In this edition.** The supplied English keeps ‘deep years’ and ‘three minutes in one’, preserving figurative pressure instead of explaining it away. In CXI ‘using’ time carries the verbal return between forgetting and serving oneself with it. The future forms and self-directed imperatives of the late fragments are especially important: an exhortation to work or share memories must not become a translator’s assertion that the work or sharing has already happened. **See also.** [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) ## Tragic sky {#entry-tragic-sky} *ciel tragique; ténèbres vertes; lumineux; lumière* **The word.** ‘Tragic sky’ is a miniature act of criticism as well as an image. An adjective belonging to an abstract or dramatic order is applied to a material being. Baudelaire points to the transfer himself, making a two-word phrase a specimen of poetic language under examination. The sky need not literally feel or enact tragedy for the phrase to work. Its visible configuration can solicit an emotional reading while remaining material. That double status is central to nearby images of green darkness and swallowed light: sensory description is already capable of more than neutral inventory. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées VII immediately follows the phrase with its grammatical explanation. The fragment is unusually useful because it does not merely ask readers to admire a metaphor; it identifies the category crossing that makes it possible. The next statement, that a man drinks light with the atmosphere, changes the relation again: light enters the body as nourishment. The folk claim about night air and work is then attached as a mock-logical or speculative consequence, not a medical recommendation. Fusées I's green darkness gives obscurity a colour rather than treating darkness as the absence of all sensation. VIII makes music hollow out the sky, so an auditory event seems to alter spatial depth. These brief images operate differently, but all make the world available to experience through a surprising relation between qualities or senses. XIII calls Banville luminous rather than precisely materialist and associates his poetry with happy hours. Luminosity here becomes a discriminating critical term, avoiding a philosophical label that the notebook finds inexact. It also limits the claim that Baudelaire can perceive beauty only through darkness and distress. The ‘tragic sky’ belongs to a broader repertoire in which light, happiness, sadness and abstraction take different forms without becoming a single atmospheric formula. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées VII, source pp. 11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f20.item).** Ciel tragique. — Épithète d’un ordre abstrait appliquée à un être matériel. — The notebook offers its own grammatical explanation of the image. - **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** Les ténèbres vertes dans les soirs humides de la belle saison. — Colour and darkness are held together in a compact sensory notation. - **[Fusées VII, source pp. 11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f20.item).** L’homme boit la lumière avec l’atmosphère. — The relation between body and light becomes an act of drinking. - **[Fusées XIII, source pp. 17](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item).** n’est pas précisément matérialiste ; il est lumineux — A judgment about Banville separates luminous art from a materialist label. **In this edition.** ‘Tragic sky’ keeps the two-word compression, and ‘material being’ preserves the strangeness of treating the sky as an être. The edition's ‘green darkness’ is equally direct. Its ‘Music hollows out the sky’ gives creuse an active spatial effect; a softer phrase such as ‘music evokes heaven’ would introduce a religious explanation and remove the physical operation. ‘Luminous’ retains the critical precision of the Banville note without deciding that the adjective is merely figurative. **See also.** [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) · [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) · [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) ## Universal Religion and Superstition {#entry-religion-universal} *religion universelle; superstition; contre-religions; mémento divin* **The word.** Religion in the notebook includes organized traditions, rites, powers of imagination, acts of worship, and ironic modern cults. This breadth is deliberate, but it does not make all usages equivalent. Calling political graffiti a religion is different from proposing an inquiry into universal religion. Superstition reverses its usual dismissive force in XXVIII: it is a reservoir of truths. The note values the persistence of symbolic and ritual forms where rational self-descriptions claim to have left them behind. **In Intimate Journals.** XXVIII places sacred prostitution, pagan mystical experience, Christianity, and revolutionary sacrifice in one exploratory sequence. Its question about sacred prostitution specifies no ancient institution. The point is a proposed continuity of nervous intensity and ritual mediation, not an established anthropological history. XXXII makes the Revolution confirm Superstition through sacrifice. LXXXVII calls both sexual markings and republican slogans on walls religions, exposing collective fixation without offering an account of an organized cult. XXXVI's list of Molière, Béranger, and Garibaldi similarly turns public admiration into devotional behaviour. LXXIX is more affirmative. It imagines a universal religion for ‘alchemists of thought’, emerging from humanity regarded as a divine mémento. The metaphor suggests transforming dispersed evidence into a concentrated spiritual meaning. Yet the named references do not identify a precise Alexandrian school, a secure Capé, or a finished doctrine. The projected universality belongs to an inquiry, not to a confession that can simply be assigned a denominational label. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIII, source pp. 49–50](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f58.item).** La superstition est le réservoir de toutes les vérités. — The dismissed category becomes a source of possible knowledge. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXII, source pp. 52](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f61.item).** confirme la Superstition. — Political rupture is read as ritual continuity. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIX, source pp. 81](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f90.item).** les alchimistes de la pensée — Religious inquiry is imagined as a transformative art. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIX, source pp. 81](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f90.item).** l’homme, considéré comme mémento divin. — Humanity becomes a compact bearer of divine meaning. **In this edition.** ‘Mystical quality’ for mysticité differs from ‘mysticism’ for mysticisme in XXVIII. The English supplies reciprocal sense in ‘prove one another’ where the French is elliptical. ‘Divine compendium’ selects the summary sense of mémento rather than its sense as a reminder; note 73 keeps that choice visible and does not invent the missing identities. **See also.** [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) · [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) · [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) ## Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery {#entry-voltaire} *Voltaire; anti-poète; mystère; désinfecter* **The word.** Voltaire serves in LI–LII less as an exhaustively read historical author than as the name of an intellectual manner Baudelaire rejects: the brisk exposure of sacred claims as bodily absurdities. ‘Anti-poet’ and ‘anti-artist’ condemn a mode of attention, not merely a political allegiance. The opposed faculty is the capacity to remain with mystery. For Baudelaire, an unsettling conjunction of body and soul can invite interpretation instead of being settled by laughter. **In Intimate Journals.** LI invents a missing Voltaire chapter for Emerson's Representative Men. The imagined title multiplies hostile offices, from king of gawkers to father of newspaper editors. This is a satirical proposal by Baudelaire, not an omitted chapter that Emerson planned. The figure becomes an ancestor of a whole culture of shallow public explanation. LII focuses on the joke about an immortal soul lodged near excrement during gestation. The source annotation answers by treating sexual embodiment as a possible sign of original sin or a satire by Providence. Both readings notice the same bodily facts; they differ over what the facts can mean. Baudelaire therefore contests the inference rather than disproving the anatomy. The adjacent sentence about the Church ‘disinfecting’ love through marriage makes the opposition unstable. He too can turn religious institutions into a sardonic medical metaphor. The notebook does not contrast a wholly reverent writer with a wholly irreverent enemy. Its hostility concerns the kind of irreverence that closes inquiry, while its own jokes seek, or claim to seek, darker implications. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LI, source pp. 65–66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f74.item).** Voltaire, ou l’anti-poète — The imaginary chapter title announces an aesthetic judgment. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LII, source pp. 66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item).** Voltaire, comme tous les paresseux, haïssait le mystère. — Incuriosity is redescribed as spiritual laziness. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LII, source pp. 66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item).** l’Eglise a voulu au moins le désinfecter — The medical joke complicates any simple division between reverence and mockery. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LII, source pp. 66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item).** un signe du péché originel — The same bodily arrangement receives a contrary theological reading. **In this edition.** ‘Disinfect’ preserves the deliberately clinical metaphor rather than substituting ‘purify’. The paragraph labelled ‘[In a note]’ belongs to the printed source's annotation layer; it is not a new translator's objection. Note 54 locates the Voltaire passage in the speech of the anatomist Sidrac, an important distinction between a fictional speaker and a direct authorial proposition. **See also.** [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) · [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) · [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) ## Voluptuousness {#entry-voluptuousness} *volupté; voluptés; jouissance; plaisir* **The word.** Volupté names intense, often sensual enjoyment; it need not mean one bodily act. Jouissance and plaisir overlap with it without becoming a fixed technical hierarchy. The notebooks place sensuality in faces, weather, cats, memory, language, work and wrongdoing. Pleasure is therefore a mobile energy whose object and moral direction have to be read each time. The plural voluptés can gather several felt delights, whereas the singular can make enjoyment appear an absolute principle. This difference is especially important when the speaker announces a ‘sole and supreme’ pleasure. The sweep of the claim belongs to the rhetoric of the fragment, not to a stable dictionary definition. **In Intimate Journals.** Fusées III ends by locating love's supreme sensual pleasure in the certainty of doing evil. The assertion follows a comic competition among answers: receiving, giving, pride, humility and patriotic reproduction. Its emphatic ‘I say’ stakes out the speaker's own answer against the others. It is a provocative moral genealogy of desire, not an empirical finding about what all men and women know at birth. XVI places volupté beside sadness in the interpretation of a woman's face; here it can be suggested rather than immediately experienced. XV makes a storm arouse spiritual and physical delights through remembered love. These passages complicate any simple identification of the word with present bodily gratification: imagined and recalled pleasure can be as powerful as contact. XXII offers the decisive internal counterweight. The sweetness of the lovers' night is saturated with pain and remorse, but it also arises from charity and reciprocal forgiveness. Evil remains part of their shared past; it is no longer the only intelligible cause of delight. In Mon cœur mis à nu CX, the writer even commands himself to make work his perpetual volupté. The vocabulary is not renounced when discipline becomes urgent. It is redirected, suggesting that the problem is how enjoyment is formed and sustained as much as whether one should enjoy. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item).** la certitude de faire le mal — The emphatic conclusion ties sexual enjoyment to a consciousness of wrongdoing. - **[Fusées XV, source pp. 18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** Jouissances spirituelles et physiques causées par l’orage — Enjoyment crosses the spiritual–physical division through weather and memory. - **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** volupté saturée de douleur et de remords — The lovers’ sweetness includes suffering rather than abolishing it. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CX, source pp. 103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item).** ma perpétuelle volupté de mon tourment ordinaire — The later discipline of work appropriates the language of pleasure. **In this edition.** The 2026 translation often gives volupté as ‘sensual pleasure’, while using ‘delight’ for the humility exchange in III and ‘pleasure’ for work in CX. This makes local sense but distributes one recurring French word across several English expressions. A reader following the moral transformation of enjoyment should therefore return to the French. The headword ‘Voluptuousness’ gathers the lexical family; it does not replace the edition's more idiomatic choices or impose a purely sexual meaning on every occurrence. **See also.** [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) ## Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea {#entry-will} *volonté; vouloir; idée fixe; habitude; petites volontés* **The word.** Volonté is represented as a capacity that acts can strengthen or diminish. The plural petites volontés makes will countable at the scale of small decisions. It is not merely an inner possession one either has or lacks; it exists through exercise. Idée fixe can name an idea powerful enough to organize persistence. Its value here is contextual: fixation may concentrate effort, while elsewhere an omen or hallucination can seize the mind against its wishes. **In Intimate Journals.** CIX's repeated ‘the more’ constructs a feedback loop: willing improves willing, working improves work, producing increases fertility. CXVI makes the inverse equally vivid, as each retreat loses a particle of substance. Hesitation is prodigal because repeated small losses accumulate into an immense demand for repair. The same section proposes attaching destiny to uninterrupted hours of work and invokes the power of hope. Its military figure for evening prayer gives vigilance a routine form: post sentries, then sleep. Habit is meant to reduce fear by replacing a fresh crisis of decision with a performed duty. But absolute self-command is checked by the need to ask for strength. CXVII directs prayer toward God and intercessors, and limits work by available powers. The notebook's will is therefore neither simply autonomous heroism nor mere passive dependence. It seeks help in order to act. Its renewed vows are utterances intended to make a future possible, not evidence that the future has already been secured. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** Plus on veut, mieux on veut. — Will is described as improved through use. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Puissance de l’idée fixe, puissance de l’espérance. — Fixation is paired with hope as a source of continuity. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Tout recul de la volonté est une parcelle de substance perdue. — Inaction becomes a cumulative material loss. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** la force nécessaire pour accomplir tous mes devoirs — The final vow asks for the power required by agency. **In this edition.** ‘A succession of small acts of will’ expands petites volontés enough to show its practical units. ‘Will to dream’ in CXVI preserves the unusual transitive force of vouloir and distinguishes deliberate imaginative practice from drifting rêverie. The repaired Latin imperative ⟨Do⟩ in the same section is disclosed in note 103: French retains the printed Aye rather than silently replacing it with Age. **See also.** [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) ## Women and Misogyny {#entry-women-misogyny} *la femme; les femmes; animalité; ma mère; Jeanne* **The word.** Femme can designate a particular woman, women as a group, or the polemical abstraction ‘Woman.’ The distinction matters because many notebook assertions replace the variety of actual people with an allegedly natural female essence. Misogyny names the contempt, exclusion and approval of coercion in those assertions; it is an interpretive description of their force, not a French headword that the fragments themselves offer. **In Intimate Journals.** XXVII constructs Woman as the dandy’s contrary. Hunger, thirst and sexual desire are listed as if ordinary bodily needs were a conclusive indictment, then ‘natural’ becomes equivalent to abominable and vulgar. The argument depends on assigning embodied appetite to women and disciplined self-fashioning to a masculine ideal. It does not examine actual women before reaching its verdict. The abrupt ‘Therefore’ is the display of a polemical deduction, not sufficient evidence that the premise is true. Other fragments repeat or sharpen the division. LXXI questions women’s admission to churches and describes Venus through caprice, hysteria and fantasy. LXXII claims that women cannot separate soul from body, then gives an imagined satirist the further assertion that they possess only a body. The phrase ‘A satirist would say’ marks a shift of rhetorical attribution, but it also introduces and preserves the insult. XCI is more directly coercive: an instruction concerning the supposed necessity of beating women is followed by a comparison with punishing children and by an admission of pain at despising what one loves. Naming that pain does not withdraw the approval of violence. The erotic fragments complicate this gender map without making it harmless. Fusées III allows either lover to occupy the operator’s role: ‘celui-là ou celle-là’ can be male or female. Fusées VI treats liking intelligent women as a charged form of male same-sex desire; its insult assumes that intelligence distances a woman from the desired category. Such constructions reveal what the speaker’s distinctions require, rather than establishing a reliable account of sexual orientation or women’s capacities. The final section of Fusées even speaks of a cold woman’s dandysme, transferring a term that XXVII declares to be her contrary. Actual relations also resist the abstraction. The mother is recalled through elegance, dependence, fear, remorse and duty; Jeanne appears as a person whose illness and material support make claims on the speaker. In CXV, care for his own health is to become charity and duty because these women need him. CXVI assigns them projected income, and CXVII prays that the mother live to enjoy his transformation. None of this cancels the misogynistic assertions. It does show why a lexicon must not turn every occurrence of femme, mère or Jeanne into one interchangeable emblem. The contradiction between an essentializing insult and a concrete obligation remains part of the notebooks’ ethical difficulty. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII, source pp. 48–49](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f57.item).** La femme est le contraire du Dandy. Donc elle doit faire horreur. — The deduction makes the generalized woman an exclusionary category. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXI, source pp. 76](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f85.item).** Quelle conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu ? — The rhetorical question denies a spiritual relation rather than reporting an observed fact. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXII, source pp. 77](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f86.item).** Un satirique dirait que c’est parce qu’elle n’a que le corps. — The additional insult is assigned to a hypothetical satirist. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, source pp. 90–91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f99.item).** De la nécessité de battre les femmes. — The projected heading explicitly endorses gendered violence. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item).** Ma santé par charité, par devoir ! — The late self-command gives bodily care a relational purpose. **In this edition.** The translation preserves the bluntness of XXVII and XCI rather than replacing it with a neutral paraphrase. In XXVII its restored English obscenity is marked by angle brackets while the French retains the printed abbreviation; that editorial sign must not disappear in quotation. In LXXII ‘A satirist would say’ keeps the attribution shift visible. The individual names and the maternal prayer remain concrete, so their differences from the generalized ‘woman’ should survive interpretation as well as translation. **See also.** [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) ## Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning {#entry-work} *travail; travailler; Goût du travail; désespoir; frénésie journalière* **The word.** Travail ranges from literary making to disciplined activity as a way of inhabiting time. The notebook repeatedly tries to change its felt value: work should become less tedious than amusement, a source of strength, even a lasting pleasure. Those repetitions imply that the desired taste cannot simply be assumed. It is crucial to distinguish the injunction to work from proof that work cures poverty, illness, or melancholy. The Hygiène voice often promises too much because it is trying to move a resistant self. **In Intimate Journals.** XL begins from despair rather than inspiration: if inclination is unavailable, work may still be less boring than entertainment. CXI then opposes pleasure's wearing effect to work's strengthening effect. Its sharp binary is complicated by CX's wish to make work itself voluptuous and by CXVI's confession that a fulfilled plan remains an unknown pleasure. CXIII tells the writer to begin before deploying logic and analysis; CXVI prefers immediate bad work to daydreaming. These directions make the first imperfect act more valuable than an ideal project preserved untouched. Yet they coexist with the ambition always to be a poet, even in prose. The notebook does not authorize careless publication; it is addressing the paralysis before composition. The economic and ethical ends become explicit in plans to pay debts and support mother and Jeanne. CXV asks for disinterested labour as the way to earn money. This aspiration contrasts with contempt for mere drudges and the hideousness of being socially useful in XXXI. Work becomes acceptable when it protects artistic attention and fulfils particular duties, but the boundaries remain under negotiation. **The places annotated.** Exact source wording with local interpretation. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu XL, source pp. 57](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f66.item).** sinon par goût, au moins par désespoir — Work may begin without pleasure in it. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXI, source pp. 103–104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item).** On ne peut oublier le temps qu’en s’en servant. — Using time is proposed as the only effective way of forgetting it. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII, source pp. 105](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** Commence d’abord — Beginning precedes the elaboration of method. - **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** Travail immédiat, même mauvais, vaut mieux que la rêverie. — An imperfect act is preferred to deferred possibility. **In this edition.** The English alternates ‘inclination’ and ‘Taste’ where goût names a desired disposition, retaining the unusual capital in CXII. ‘Work blindly, without a goal’ in CXVI translates a local instruction to suspend overplanning; the same section plainly lists larger aims. It should not be detached into evidence that Baudelaire valued purposelessness in every sense. **See also.** [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) · [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) # Defined vocabulary register {#defined-register} These shorter records explain secondary vocabulary and constructions in their local setting. The French heading identifies a lemma or phrase; the attestation gives exact source wording. A record is a substantive explanation, not an alias to a full article. Different contextual senses can receive separate records, so the record count is not a count of unique lemmas. ### A born Parsi {#reg-parsi} *Parsis-né* The imagined fire-worshipper at the centre of a possible short story. The supplied edition identifies the Parsis with the Zoroastrian tradition and their association with sacred fire. Baudelaire makes that association serve a fictional hypothesis, not a careful account of religious practice. The printed final s in Parsis-né is retained in the French; the English appropriately uses the singular form Parsi. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VII, source pp. 11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f20.item):** un Parsis-né. ### A definition still to be written {#reg-definitional-fragment} *Qu’est-ce que le Dandy* The question follows an assertion of the dandy’s eternal superiority, but no definition is supplied in this section. Its notebook form matters: the reader encounters a subject to develop, not a complete argument whose missing steps can be confidently recovered. Other passages provide traits such as uninterrupted sublimity, self-observation and cultivated leisure. Those parallels illuminate the question while remaining distinct from an answer actually written here. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXVIII, source pp. 56](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f65.item):** Qu’est-ce que le Dandy ? ### A dramatic outline {#reg-scenario} *canevas; pantomime* Canevas is the outline or scenario on which a work can be built. Baudelaire proposes starting from lyrical or fairy buffoonery and pantomime, then translating that structure into a serious novel. The word does not name the final prose texture. It identifies a transferable pattern of action, while the subsequent instructions about a dreamlike, lulling atmosphere specify how the finished narrative should transform its initial theatrical material. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** Concevoir un canevas. ### A fiat of Providence {#reg-fiat} *fiat* A decree expressed through the Latin let it be done. Hugo is satirically imagined believing that Providence has substituted Saint Helena for Jersey, magnifying his own exile through Napoleon’s. The term gives that fantasy the authority of a creative divine command. Its force is the extravagant power supposedly required to make history match vanity. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** par un fiat de la Providence. ### A harsh life {#reg-harsh-life} *âpre* Austere, rough and difficult rather than comfortably agreeable. Baudelaire nevertheless commands the reader to know its enjoyments, linking hardship to prayer as a reservoir of strength. The apparent contradiction is purposeful: pleasure can arise from discipline and exertion. The word describes the texture of a life, not a particular recommended deprivation, and the sentence belongs to the notebook’s developing language of moral energy. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VIII, source pp. 12](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f21.item):** une vie âpre. ### A projected gallery of editors {#reg-editorial-names} *Buloz; Houssaye; Rouy; de Calonne; Charpentier; Chevalier* A list of people to be treated through portraits and anecdotes, with a specific barb at Charpentier and another at Chevalier. The supplied edition deliberately avoids conjectural biographies for uncertain surname-only references. The list matters as the professional world against which the author defines artistic independence. It should not be mistaken for an already completed set of accusations with established incidents attached to every name. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVII, source pp. 61–62](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f70.item):** Portraits et anecdotes. ### A short newspaper item {#reg-entrefilet} *entrefilet* A brief item or paragraph in a newspaper. The editorial note describes it as cut out and pasted into the manuscript, so the notebook includes a material act of collection as well as original prose. Its presence contrasts with the broader attacks on journalism elsewhere. A newspaper can be treated as repellent in general while a selected report is preserved as evidence useful to the author’s own argument. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXV, source pp. 84–85](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f93.item):** cet entrefilet découpé dans un journal. ### A transient dwelling {#reg-transient-dwelling} *habitacle transitoire* The temporary place inhabited by human beings, here the earthly world upon which the sea offers beauty. Habitacle gives the world the character of a dwelling rather than an ultimate destination. Transitoire places finite human residence beside the idea of infinity generated by the marine horizon. The expression is existential and spatial; it is not a reference to a vehicle’s passenger compartment in its modern technical sense. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII, source pp. 80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f89.item):** son habitacle transitoire. ### Abbreviated sexual verbs {#reg-abbreviated-verbs} *b..de; F.....; fouterie* The governing print abbreviates forms restored in the supplied English as gets hard and to fuck, while fouterie is printed fully. The restorations are marked editorially and checked against a comparison transcription. These distinctions matter because the reader otherwise cannot tell inherited abbreviations from a translator’s euphemism. The passage’s opposition of artistic cultivation and sexual potency is Baudelaire’s polemical claim, not a medically established relation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII, source pp. 91–92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f100.item):** la fouterie est le lyrisme du peuple. ### Acedia {#reg-acedia} *acedia* A traditional monastic name for spiritual lassitude, despondency and weariness with one’s vocation. The supplied edition places it beside Cassian’s treatment in Institutes X. Baudelaire lists it alongside ancient and Christian portraits of affliction and a nineteenth-century study of suicide. The term belongs to that comparative reading programme; it should not be collapsed into a retrospective clinical diagnosis of the author or every person mentioned. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XIV, source pp. 17–18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item):** L’acedia, maladie des moines. ### Adaptation to national stupidity {#reg-adaptation-stupidity} *adaptation* A fitting between a ruler’s mind and what Baudelaire calls national stupidity. The phrase diminishes the dictator’s supposed independent greatness by making success depend upon meeting the public’s level. It belongs to the claim that dictators are servants of the people. The supplied translation repairs the printed et in the preceding clause with a marked is; that grammatical clarification should not be confused with new historical evidence supporting the judgment. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVI, source pp. 73](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f82.item):** l’adaptation d’un esprit avec la sottise nationale. ### Address as marksmanship {#reg-shooting-skill} *adresse* Adresse means the shooter’s skill or accuracy, not his postal address or a speech. He hits a doll after imagining it is his wife, then thanks her with ceremonious tenderness. The word completes the disturbing conversion of affection into imagined aggression. As the supplied edition notes, the scene has a counterpart in Le Galant Tireur, but the notebook’s particular wording remains its own. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** que je te remercie de mon adresse. ### Alphonse Rabbe’s tone {#reg-rabbe} *Alph. Rabbe* Rabbe appears among models for an eternal and cosmopolitan style, then reappears as a tone to pursue in XX. The supplied edition notes his posthumous Album d’un pessimiste but establishes no single intended passage. His name functions as shorthand for a recognizable literary manner. That shorthand invites comparison while withholding enough detail to make a precise reconstruction of the imagined style uncertain. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item):** Chateaubriand, Alph. Rabbe, Edgar Poe. ### An eternally solitary destiny {#reg-solitary-destiny} *destinée* The course or condition of a life felt as assigned or inescapable. The speaker remembers solitude even within family and companionship, making it more than a lack of physical company. Yet the final sentence preserves a keen appetite for life and pleasure. Destiny here names a felt continuity of inward isolation; it is not independently established fate, nor does it eliminate the contradictory desire to live among pleasures. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIV, source pp. 53](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f62.item):** destinée éternellement solitaire. ### An unfinished correspondence list {#reg-clemm-dumay-mires} *Maria Clemm; Mme Dumay; Mirès* A reminder to send someone to Mme Dumay’s to discover whether something concerning Mirès is the case. The ellipsis leaves the intended question incomplete; it should not be completed from a presumed biography. Maria Clemm occurs separately among people to write to. These names establish the practical, relational texture of the page, but the entry records prospective tasks rather than proving that any message was sent. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item):** Envoyer chez Mme Dumay savoir si Mirès... ### An untranslatable printed Latin sequence {#reg-uncertain-latin} *Et habet mea mentrita mentum* The supplied edition reproduces this sequence without a confident English meaning. Mentrita is especially problematic, and the comparison transcription has meatum where the governing print gives mentum. A lexicon must retain that textual difficulty rather than produce a fluent translation from a silent conjecture. Its placement and attribution to Girardin make it part of the satirical dossier, but they do not resolve the words’ grammatical or intended sense. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI, source pp. 46–47](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item):** Et habet mea mentrita mentum. ### Ancelle and the debt share {#reg-ancelle} *Ancelle* The supplied edition identifies Narcisse Ancelle, the notary appointed to administer Baudelaire’s finances. His name anchors the debt portion of a proposed allocation. The note plans two shares of 500 francs from 1,000, with the second subdivided among mother, friends and self. These are prospective arrangements, not verified payments. Recognizing the administrative role explains the parenthesis without treating the notary as the sole creditor. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV, source pp. 105–106](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item):** Dettes (Ancelle). ### And the cattle spoke {#reg-speaking-cattle} *Pecudesque locutæ* Virgil’s phrase from Georgics I.478, meaning and the cattle spoke, belongs to a catalogue of prodigies. Baudelaire turns it into a sarcastic response to Girardin speaking Latin: the apparently learned performance is treated as a marvel of animal speech. The reference lends classical authority to an insult. Its point is not that Girardin is quoting Virgil, but that Baudelaire frames Girardin’s Latin through Virgil’s portent. **Attestation.** **[Fusées X, source pp. 13–14](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f22.item):** Pecudesque locutæ. ### Animal pet names {#reg-pet-names} *appellations bestiales* Terms of endearment drawn from animals: cat, wolf, monkey and serpent among them. The adjective bestiales makes ordinary intimate naming carry a threatening second register. Baudelaire qualifies his judgment through repetition and excessive frequency, then connects animal shapes with devils. The names need not each have an individually coded symbolic meaning; the accumulation is what turns affectionate play into evidence for a satanic dimension of love. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** de trop fréquentes appellations bestiales. ### Anyone who comes along {#reg-first-comer} *Le premier venu* An unspecified person, regardless of distinguished rank or prior entitlement. The limiting condition is an ability to entertain. Baudelaire makes autobiographical speech depend upon its effect on listeners rather than the speaker’s social importance alone. The idiom is consequently not a chronological description of the earliest arrival; it tests the claim that speaking about oneself requires an exceptional life or formally earned authority. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXIV, source pp. 46](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item):** Le premier venu, pourvu qu’il sache amuser. ### Armoured skins {#reg-armoured-skins} *peaux carapaces* A compressed compound comparing certain people’s skin to protective shells. Such people are imagined as impervious to contempt, so contempt ceases to function as revenge. The later recurrence in XVII substitutes pleasure for vengeance, shifting emphasis from injury inflicted to satisfaction enjoyed. In either case the image concerns the failure of a social weapon, not a literal bodily feature or a securely identified individual. **Attestation.** **[Fusées X, source pp. 13–14](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f22.item):** Il y a des peaux carapaces. ### Assent of the sacrificial victim {#reg-assent-victim} *assentiment* Agreement or willing acceptance, coupled with joy as the conditions for Baudelaire’s imagined perfect sacrifice. In this argument about execution, the demand gives the condemned person a spiritual role while refusing anaesthesia that might remove consciousness. These are the notebook’s disturbing theological assertions, not practical guidance or an accepted account of criminal justice. The lexical distinction explains why mere outward compliance would not satisfy the argument’s stated terms. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIII, source pp. 58–59](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f67.item):** assentiment et joie. ### Atermoiement: delaying {#reg-delay-pretexts} *atermoiement* Delay or postponement, here justified by the abundance of time that extreme youth imagines it possesses. The passage is an abbreviated borrowing from Chateaubriand, as the supplied edition establishes, rather than an unmarked autobiographical statement newly coined by Baudelaire. The term connects youthful confidence to the notebook’s repeated fear of deferred action. It names the excuse-making temporal habit, not merely a neutral rescheduling of one task. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item):** des raisons d’atermoiement. ### Babouvist communist {#reg-babouvist} *communiste babouviste* A follower of Babeuf’s egalitarian social and political doctrine, associated in the supplied edition with community of goods and state action towards equality. Baudelaire compares the supremacy of the pure idea in such a communist with its supremacy in a Christian. The point is a formal affinity of abstraction, not the claim that the two beliefs have identical content or that all Christians share a communist programme. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXV, source pp. 78–79](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f87.item):** le communiste babouviste. ### Badauds {#reg-gawkers} *badauds* Gawkers or undiscriminating spectators, here the imagined public over whom Voltaire reigns. The term combines idle curiosity with limited judgment. It supports the sarcastic sequence anti-poet, superficial prince and anti-artist, making popularity a symptom of lowered expectations rather than proof of greatness. The lexicon explains the role of the insult; it does not accept the sentence as a fair account of Voltaire’s readership or intellectual achievement. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LI, source pp. 65–66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f74.item):** le roi des badauds. ### Banville’s luminosity {#reg-luminous-banville} *Théodore de Banville; lumineux* Luminous names the affirmative brightness Baudelaire finds in Banville’s poetry. The contrast is with matérialiste, and the next sentence specifies that the poetry represents happy hours. The adjective is therefore an aesthetic distinction, not a straightforward classification of Banville’s philosophical beliefs. It permits an art of visible brilliance to escape an accusation of mere materialism, while leaving the brief portrait intentionally undeveloped. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XIII, source pp. 17](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item):** il est lumineux. ### Belgian Societies {#reg-belgian-societies} *Sociétés belges* An unspecified collective example of people who can think only in groups, within Baudelaire’s hostile generalization about Belgium. The supplied edition identifies no particular institution behind the capitalized phrase. Its rhetorical function is clear even where the referent is not: it opposes shared conformity to the individual’s own moral work. The language should not be treated as a factual description of all Belgians or silently converted into a named association. The closing true hero who amuses himself alone extends the contrast from collective thinking to collective recreation: independence must survive even in pleasure. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXVII, source pp. 55](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f64.item):** Ainsi les Sociétés belges. ### Beyond this world {#reg-extraterrestrial} *extra-terrestre* A subject outside earthly or immediate worldly concerns. Modern associations with space aliens are inappropriate here. The command to write fifty lines whenever a creditor’s letter arrives converts financial pressure into imaginative production. Salvation remains provocatively double: writing may rescue the mind from debt’s humiliation while also producing work with possible practical value. The sentence proposes a response to distress, not a claim that a supernatural subject cancels a legal obligation. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XIII, source pp. 17](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item):** un sujet extra-terrestre. ### Bile {#reg-bile} *fiel* Literally bile, figuratively bitterness, rancour or malicious feeling. In the projected portrait it appears beside jealousy, so the emotional sense is foregrounded even while the word contributes bodily disgust. It belongs to a list, not a narrative explaining the target’s motives. The medical and moral registers reinforce one another, making an intellectual opponent seem saturated with an unpleasant physical secretion. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LIII, source pp. 66–67](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item):** Son fiel. ### Billets as promissory notes {#reg-promissory-notes} *billets* Written financial promises or instruments, placed among debt categories. Billets does not mean theatre tickets or short personal messages here. The surrounding timetable separately assigns two days to correspondence and two to debts, then to engravings and notes. This practical classification translates an aspiration to order into distinct kinds of material work. It does not provide the amounts or terms of any individual promissory obligation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV, source pp. 105–106](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item):** billets, grosses dettes, petites dettes, amis. ### Bitter pleasures {#reg-bitter-pleasures} *jouissances amères* Enjoyments that retain the unpleasantness of their source, here foolish conversation and bad writing. They compensate for fatigue without turning the material itself into something good. The phrase is important to the notebook’s mixed emotional vocabulary: pleasure can coexist with contempt, irritation or sadness. The reader need not infer a hidden admiration for bad books; the enjoyment may come from the activity of lucidly recognizing their faults. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIX, source pp. 95](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f104.item):** Il en tirera des jouissances amères. ### Bitterness flowing back {#reg-reflux-bitterness} *amertume refluante* A bitterness that returns or washes back like a receding and returning current. The adjective makes emotional experience move within the face’s apparent ardour. It comes as though from deprivation or despair, so its source is presented conjecturally. The phrase helps explain why a seductive expression is not transparent: visible desire may carry the pressure of an inaccessible past whose loss can only be imagined. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item):** une amertume refluante. ### Boasts of probity {#reg-probity} *probité* Honesty and upright dealing, placed among the virtues that newspapers loudly claim while displaying terrible human acts. Vanteries gives the professions of goodness a self-congratulatory and suspect tone. The opposition is central: the newspaper does not merely report crime, but combines it with assertions of civilization and progress. The word therefore belongs to a critique of moral self-description rather than a neutral list of admirable qualities. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIII, source pp. 97–98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f106.item):** les vanteries les plus surprenantes de probité. ### Bohemianism and wandering {#reg-bohemianism} *bohémianisme; vagabondage* An exploratory name for a wandering mode of life, placed beside the multiplication of sensation through music. The supplied edition offers Liszt’s writing on Romani music as context but notes that no book is named in the fragment. The relation between artistic vagabondage and historical representations of Romani people should remain open. Equating the term with a single modern lifestyle would flatten its unsettled nineteenth-century associations. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, source pp. 90–91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f99.item):** ce qu’on peut appeler le bohémianisme. ### Brierre de Boismont’s study {#reg-boismont} *Briere de Boismont* The preceding title identifies the 1856 treatise on suicide and suicidal madness by Alexandre Brierre de Boismont. The notebook’s Briere spelling is retained. Baudelaire asks to locate a passage beginning with living beside someone who feels only aversion; the supplied edition has not independently located that passage. The reference therefore supports the identity of a reading project, while the intended quotation’s exact context remains unresolved. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XIV, source pp. 17–18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item):** Briere de Boismont. ### Caesarism and the Ney letter {#reg-caesarism} *Césarisme; Edgar Ney* Césarisme denotes personal authoritarian rule. The supplied edition identifies the letter as Louis-Napoléon’s letter to Edgar Ney of 18 August 1849, when he was still President, about restoring papal government with amnesty and liberal administrative reforms. The notebook calls him Napoleon III retrospectively. This dating distinction keeps the allusion from being automatically assigned to the later imperial period merely because his imperial title is used. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XX, source pp. 29–30](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item):** Césarisme de Napoléon III. (Lettre à Edgar Ney.) ### Campbell’s thought {#reg-campbell} *Campbell; The conduct of Life* The Conduct of Life is Emerson’s work. The supplied edition notes that its essay Power quotes Campbell on steady work and determination close to a discussion of concentration, making that a strong contextual match for this reminder. The precise sentence Baudelaire intended remains uncertain. Campbell should therefore not be silently replaced by Emerson: the note may name the quoted poet within the named book. Primary context: [Emerson, Power](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/39827/pg39827-images.html). **Attestation.** **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item):** La pensée de Campbell (The conduct of Life). ### Canoness {#reg-canoness} *chanoinesse* A member of a female religious chapter. As the supplied edition notes, some historical canonesses held a prebend without monastic vows, so the broader English word nun loses a distinction. Baudelaire invokes the figure through violet, restrained love and veiling. The fragment identifies neither a particular religious order nor an actual woman; the ecclesiastical association serves his condensed meditation on mystery and the Church’s femininity. **Attestation.** **[Fusées II, source pp. 5–6](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f14.item):** couleur de chanoinesse. ### Castles in the air {#reg-castles-spain} *châteaux en Espagne* Unrealizable or fanciful projects. The established French idiom corresponds to English castles in the air and does not require an actual Spanish setting. Here it characterizes the abundance of utopias in 1848, whose imaginative excess Baudelaire finds amusing and ridiculous. The comparison judges a mode of political fantasy while also acknowledging its charm, so it carries more ambiguity than a flat dismissal of every hopeful plan. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXI, source pp. 51–52](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f60.item):** des châteaux en Espagne. ### Cazotte’s camel {#reg-cazotte-camel} *Le chameau de Cazotte* The supplied edition identifies the monstrous camel’s head in Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux, connected with the seductive Biondetta and the revelation of the devil. Baudelaire compresses changing forms into a three-part chain. The allusion gives a literary example to the preceding claim that animal endearments can reveal a satanic side of love. It does not imply a zoological camel episode detached from that narrative of seduction. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** Le chameau de Cazotte, — chameau, diable et femme. ### Chloroform and consciousness {#reg-chloroform} *chloroforme* An anaesthetic substance invoked to test the relation between bodily suffering and spiritual awareness. Baudelaire claims that anaesthetizing the condemned would remove consciousness of sacrificial greatness and possible salvation. The lexicon records that argument without endorsing its account of pain or punishment. The example’s purpose is to separate merely physical preservation from the spiritual salvation he claims to be discussing. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIII, source pp. 58–59](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f67.item):** Donner du chloroforme à un condamné à mort. ### Clément de Ris and Castagnary {#reg-ris-castagnary} *Clément de Ris; Castagnary* The supplied edition identifies Louis Clément de Ris and the critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary among the targets of projected portraits. Their names do not furnish the absent arguments against them. Clément de Ris returns in XCII; his earlier occurrence is this section, XLVII, not the neighbouring Metternich section. The epithet imbéciles and the mockingly pleasant jolis belong to Baudelaire’s polemical framing, not to the lexicon’s own appraisal. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVII, source pp. 61–62](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f70.item):** Jolis portraits de quelques imbéciles. ### Coming under rifle fire {#reg-rifle-fire} *essuyé de coups de fusil* Essuyer here means to undergo or sustain exposure to something hostile. Baudelaire says he came under rifle fire; the phrase does not by itself claim that he was physically wounded. Keeping that distinction prevents a rhetorical autobiographical exclamation from becoming a fabricated injury record. It occurs amid memories of revolutionary intoxication and fury at the coup d’état, where remembered emotion and retrospective interpretation coexist. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXX, source pp. 50–51](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item):** Combien j’ai essuyé de coups de fusil. ### Commending souls to God {#reg-recommend-souls} *recommande* To entrust or commend to divine care, not to provide a job reference or recommend a book. The prayer places the souls of the dead beside a request for strength to perform present duties. That mixture makes remembrance active and relational. The text’s bracketed presentation belongs to the governing printed witness and should be preserved as a textual feature rather than treated as evidence that the prayer is merely hypothetical. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII, source pp. 74–75](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item):** Je vous recommande les âmes de mon père et de Mariette. ### Common expressions {#reg-common-expressions} *locutions vulgaires* Everyday phrases shared by ordinary speakers. Vulgaires here means common or generally current, not necessarily obscene or tasteless. Baudelaire finds unsuspected thought in them and pictures generations as ants digging their accumulated channels. The phrase therefore gives familiar language a collective depth: expressions apparently beneath literary refinement may store more intellectual labour than the individual speaker recognizes. **Attestation.** **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item):** locutions vulgaires. ### Compound interest {#reg-compound-interest} *intérêts composés* Interest added to capital so that subsequent growth operates on an enlarged amount, used as a model for gradually increasing natural, artistic and sensual powers. The comparison stresses cumulative acceleration rather than a mere sum of isolated efforts. The passage’s printed final term is volupté, sensual pleasure; substituting volonté, will, from another witness would change the field to which the final comparison is applied. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII, source pp. 88–89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f97.item):** comme les intérêts composés, en matière de finances. ### Concetto {#reg-concetto} *concetto* An ingenious literary turn or conceit: a thought whose striking wit and shaped expression give it concentrated value. Baudelaire calls it a masterpiece in a very brief directive rather than explaining an example. The Italian term emphasizes a crafted intellectual effect. Beside the instruction to create a poncif and the list of tones, it belongs to experiments in repeatable forms of literary distinction. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XX, source pp. 29–30](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item):** Le concetto est un chef-d’œuvre. ### Concierges {#reg-concierge} *concierges* Building porters or caretakers, used as a disparaging social comparison for Sand’s moral judgment. The term does not mean a modern luxury-hotel service alone. It carries the author’s class contempt as well as his charge of commonplace thinking. The comparison is rhetorical and hostile; the occupational group’s supposed limitations are not facts established by the passage or endorsed by this definition. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVIII, source pp. 63–64](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f72.item):** les concierges et les filles entretenues. ### Concubinage {#reg-concubinage} *concubinage* Living together in an intimate relationship outside marriage. The term contrasts with jeune ménage, a young married household or couple, whose pleasures can supposedly be guessed through such ardent cohabitation. The juxtaposition carries social and legal distinctions without supplying the identities or history of a particular pair. It places lived erotic experience beside recognized domestic form rather than using ménage simply to mean housekeeping. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item):** Par un concubinage ardent. ### Confirmation through sacrifice {#reg-revolution-confirms} *confirme; Superstition* Confirme means corroborates or strengthens the apparent truth of something. Baudelaire claims that revolution’s dependence on sacrifice validates what it may call superstition. The sentence is a compressed structural comparison, not an assertion that every revolutionary professes religious belief. Capitalization follows the governing print and makes Superstition an emphatic polemical category; the precise mechanism of the confirmation is left to be developed elsewhere. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXII, source pp. 52](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f61.item):** La Révolution, par le sacrifice, confirme la Superstition. ### Copies and the dated errands {#reg-task-copies} *exemplaires; Michel; Moun; Urriès* Exemplaires means copies of a printed work, not examples to imitate. The instruction is part of the practical list dated Tuesday, 13 May 1856, together with names to write to and an inquiry to make. The supplied edition preserves Michel, Moun and Urriès without conjectural replacements. The notebook moves directly from extreme moral speculation to ordinary publishing and correspondence tasks; that change of register is itself significant. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item):** Prendre des exemplaires à Michel. ### Counsellor in a Court of Appeal {#reg-court-counsellor} *conseiller; Cour d’appel* A judicial office: conseiller in this setting means a judge, not merely an adviser, therapist or elected local councillor. Baudelaire announces an account of how Nacquart fils obtained it but leaves the account unwritten. The supplied edition has not securely identified father and son or the circumstances. Thus the institutional vocabulary can be explained while the implied biographical story remains an open reminder. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LX, source pp. 70](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f79.item):** conseiller en Cour d’appel. ### Counter-religions {#reg-counter-religions} *contre-religions* An exploratory label for religious practices that appear to oppose an established religious system while still sharing forms of excitement, mysticism or sacrifice. Sacred prostitution is introduced as an example and immediately made a question. The fragment identifies no particular ancient institution, so it cannot serve as evidence that such a practice existed universally. Its local argument seeks connections across pagan, Christian and revolutionary forms of belief. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIII, source pp. 49–50](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f58.item):** Analyse des contre-religions. ### Created beings as mistaken idols {#reg-creatures} *créatures* Created beings, especially human beloveds in this context, contrasted with God. The term does not primarily mean monsters or nonhuman animals. By describing love as wrongly assigned to creatures, Baudelaire explains jealousy through a theological misdirection of worship. The final animal adorateur phrase returns to his broader claim that human beings need to adore, while insisting that their chosen object can be mistaken. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, source pp. 90–91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f99.item):** pour être attribué aux créatures. ### Cuckoldry {#reg-cuckoldry} *cocuage; cocus; cocu* The condition and humiliation of a husband whose wife is unfaithful. Baudelaire attributes the pain to pride, mistaken ideas of honour and happiness, and worship wrongly directed from God towards creatures. These are his polemical explanations rather than a general psychological law. The surrounding advocacy of violence against women is explicit and troubling; its presence should not be softened into merely affectionate discipline by a definition of the vocabulary. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCI, source pp. 90–91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f99.item):** La douleur du cocu. ### Daily frenzy {#reg-daily-frenzy} *frénésie journalière* An intensity to be found as part of daily work, not merely an uncontrollable rare inspiration. Journalière makes repetition central to what appears an exceptional state. The preceding commands put beginning before analysis and insist upon poetry even in prose. The phrase therefore proposes a disciplined search for energetic creation, without offering a medical category or a specific technique guaranteed to induce it. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII, source pp. 105](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item):** Trouver la frénésie journalière. ### Death agony {#reg-death-agony} *agonie* The terminal struggle of someone dying, not simply severe pain in the broad modern English sense. Friends are imagined secretly hoping for the opportunity to study it. The adjective désintéressé makes their curiosity sound free of selfish advantage while exposing its moral coldness. A deathbed becomes an observational occasion, and the language of disinterested inquiry does not redeem the wish that makes the inquiry possible. **Attestation.** **[Fusées V, source pp. 9–10](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item):** d’étudier une agonie. ### Death rattles {#reg-death-rattle} *râles* Harsh breathing associated with extreme distress or dying. In the sequence of sighs, moans, cries and rattles, the word brings the apparent language of pleasure close to a death scene. Its force exceeds an ordinary groan. The lover’s sounds become evidence in the argument that erotic surrender resembles torture, bodily disintegration and the loss of self-command rather than a serene mystical union. **Attestation.** **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item):** ces râles. ### Delayed conversion {#reg-conversion-delay} *convertissant; damné* Turning towards religious reform, used in parallel with undertaking postponed work. The shared danger is that a supposedly available future may disappear. Damné retains the gravity of spiritual damnation; the analogy deliberately exceeds the scale of an ordinary missed deadline. The passage is an exhortation to immediate action, not a statement that employment itself is a religious sacrament or a clinically sufficient cure for every illness. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXII, source pp. 104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f113.item):** En ne se convertissant pas tout de suite. ### Deserting a cause {#reg-desert-cause} *déserte; cause* To abandon allegiance to a political, moral or other cause. Baudelaire imagines doing so to learn what serving another cause will feel like, shifting the motive from conviction to experiment. The following attraction to alternating between victim and executioner sharpens the moral danger of this curiosity. The sentence expresses understanding of that impulse, not evidence that a particular documented change of allegiance occurred here. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXV, source pp. 46](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item):** qu’on déserte une cause. ### Disinfecting love {#reg-disinfect-love} *désinfecter* To remove contamination, transferred from a hygienic operation to the institution of marriage. Baudelaire says the Church could not suppress love and therefore tried to disinfect it. The medical metaphor does not simply call marriage romantic purification: it keeps a residue of bodily impurity within sexuality. The source annotation’s reference to excremental organs and original sin develops the same deliberately unidealized view of generation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LII, source pp. 66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item):** l’Eglise a voulu au moins le désinfecter. ### Dissipation of the self {#reg-dissipation} *déperdition* A wasting or dispersal of one’s energies. Its opposite in this sentence is concentration productive, the gathering of powers into productive activity. The mature man is supposed to exchange a taste for expenditure for a taste for accumulation. This is not a simple warning against spending money: erotic, social and imaginative self-dispersal all belong to the surrounding meditation on pleasure and multiplicity. **Attestation.** **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item):** le goût de la déperdition. ### Divination’s proposed media {#reg-divination} *divination* Methods of seeking hidden or future knowledge through water, cards and examination of the hand. These are media named for a chapter yet to be written. The note gives neither procedures nor a conclusion about their efficacy. Its relevance is to the notebook’s recurring interest in unseen connections and the power of signs, not proof that the author performed each method or possessed an established divinatory system. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXI, source pp. 76](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f85.item):** l’art de la divination par l’eau, les cartes, l’inspection de la main. ### Divine mémento {#reg-divine-compendium} *mémento divin* Mémento can be a reminder or a compact summary or manual. The supplied English chooses divine compendium, reading humanity as something in which divine significance is condensed. The fragment offers the phrase as a way to approach universal religion, not as its complete definition. The other possible resonance of reminder remains useful, but a lexicon should not pretend the author has resolved every implication of this compact term. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIX, source pp. 81](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f90.item):** l’homme, considéré comme mémento divin. ### Doctor Estaminetus Crapulosus Pedantissimus {#reg-comic-doctor} *Doctor Estaminetus Crapulosus Pedantissimus* A mock-learned Latinized name combining the café or drinking-place, debauchery and superlative pedantry. The supplied edition finds no securely identified individual behind it. The following inventory of pipe, opinions, Hegelianism, dirt, bile and jealousy constructs a satirical type of modern literary youth. Its ostentatious scholarly shape already performs the criticism: vulgar habits and pretensions dress themselves in the authority of academic Latin. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LIII, source pp. 66–67](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item):** Doctor Estaminetus Crapulosus Pedantissimus. ### Dupe and prey {#reg-dupe-prey} *dupe; proie* The dupe is the person deceived or ensnared; the proie is the prey pierced in the forest. Their pairing makes urban deception a continuation of predation rather than evidence that civilization has abolished savagery. Enlace adds an image of entanglement to the social encounter. The comparison is structural: different settings and techniques express the same aggressive relation between hunter and vulnerable target. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXI, source pp. 30–31](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f39.item):** l’homme enlace sa dupe sur le boulevard. ### Durandeau, Darjon and the doctor {#reg-unresolved-discourses} *Durandeau; Darjon; Mathieu* Names and reported speech attached to projected discourses, with identities and occasions left unresolved in the supplied edition. Darjon is the governing spelling and should not be silently changed to Darjou. The derogatory comparison of Japanese people to monkeys is reported within this hostile notebook sketch, not a fact. The remembered doctor’s topics are also only listed; no complete argument about reproduction, Moses or immortality follows. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LIX, source pp. 69–70](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f78.item):** c’est Darjon qui me l’a dit. ### E. G., an unresolved label {#reg-eg} *E. G.* Initials attached to the alternative title or description the Seductive Adventuress. The fragment supplies no secure expansion of the initials, no plot and no explanation of its relation to the neighbouring religious observations. Treating it as a notebook reminder preserves that uncertainty. A reader can recognize the literary possibilities of seduction and adventure without converting the initials into an undocumented personal identification. **Attestation.** **[Fusées II, source pp. 5–6](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f14.item):** E. G. ou la séduisante Aventurière. ### Eccentrics {#reg-eccentrics} *extravagants* People whose conduct, character or ideas depart strikingly from ordinary expectations. Extravagants does not primarily mean financially extravagant spenders here. Their company produces a particular sensual enjoyment, placed immediately beside the centralization and vaporization of the self. The notebook does not identify these people or explain whether their strangeness disperses the speaker or gives him a more concentrated sense of individuality; it preserves the attraction as a subject to explore. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII, source pp. 45](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f54.item):** la société des extravagants. ### Entente cordiale {#reg-cordial-understanding} *entente cordiale* An apparently warm or harmonious understanding. The supplied translation preserves the opposition between understanding and misunderstanding, which is the paragraph’s argument about lovers. No particular diplomatic treaty or political allusion is established here. The lovers’ pleasure allows each to believe the other shares the same thought, while their different cries dramatize the gap. The phrase describes perceived accord, not successful communication already achieved. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVII, source pp. 79–80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f88.item):** l’entente cordiale est le résultat d’un malentendu. ### Entrails and viscera {#reg-entrails-viscera} *entrailles; viscères* Entrailles can designate the internal organs and, figuratively, tenderness or compassion; viscères names the bodily organs more narrowly. The sentence imagines humanity retaining its anatomy while losing its capacity to feel. A literal English rendering needs this double sense explained. The wordplay gives the prophecy’s moral impoverishment a bodily form: nothing need disappear physically for an essential human dimension to have been lost. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** il ne te restera de tes entrailles que des viscères. ### Eurythmy {#reg-eurythmy} *Eurythmie* Harmonious proportion and order, applied here to character and the human faculties. Baudelaire’s list immediately calls for preserving and increasing all those faculties, so harmony is an active ideal of self-formation rather than a decorative bodily grace. In XXII the related adjective describes the complex ship. The shared term links the arrangement of a person’s powers with the moving coherence of an imagined living form. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** Eurythmie du caractère et des facultés. ### Evocatory sorcery {#reg-evocatory} *sorcellerie évocatoire* Sorcery capable of calling something into presence. Applied to language and writing, the phrase gives representation an active force rather than treating words as neutral labels. The section also names the evocation of the great dead and the improvement of health. The literary claim grows from this broader field of summoning and transformation, without establishing that every use of writing is a literal occult ceremony. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** De la langue et de l’écriture, prises comme opérations magiques, sorcellerie évocatoire. ### Exactitude {#reg-punctuality} *exactitude* Punctual and regular responsiveness to duty. The fragment itself defines it as answering the necessity of each minute, so mere numerical precision is too narrow. The promised reward belongs to a moral regimen built from small acts rather than grand intentions alone. The term links everyday timing to reliability, making reform observable through conduct without specifying a completed record of such reliability. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item):** l’exactitude, en un mot. ### Except {#reg-fors} *fors* An elevated or archaic word meaning except. The projected women’s pitiless wisdom condemns everything apart from money, including sensual errors that might once have interrupted calculation. The compact exclusion gives the sentence its governing value system. Recognizing fors prevents the reader from mistaking it for a form of force or an obscure noun, and reveals how absolutely enrichment dominates the imagined moral order. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** tout, fors l’argent. ### Excitants {#reg-stimulants} *excitants* Substances or agents taken for their stimulating effect, prohibited broadly within the speaker’s proposed sobriety. The fragment does not enumerate them, so the reader should not silently build an exact pharmacological list. The term’s importance is the attempt to replace externally induced stimulation with disciplined prayer and work. Its prospective vow establishes an intended rule, not proof of completed abstinence or a clinically validated regimen. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item):** la suppression de tous les excitants. ### Father Gigogne {#reg-gigogne} *père Gigogne* A comic recasting of Mother Gigogne, the theatrical figure associated with numerous children. Voltaire becomes the prolific progenitor of the newspaper’s editors. The supplied edition explains the underlying figure, allowing the reader to understand the bodily and familial metaphor rather than treating Gigogne as an otherwise unknown editor. The phrase makes superficial journalism appear to descend from a shared intellectual parent. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LI, source pp. 65–66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f74.item):** le père Gigogne des rédacteurs du Siècle. ### Filles and society women {#reg-filles} *filles; femmes du monde* Filles here means prostitutes, not daughters or girls in general; femmes du monde are women of fashionable society. Their opposition creates a question about the intelligent man’s preference, but the final À trouver leaves the answer to be found. The fragment’s assertion that both groups are stupid is its own misogynistic premise. Explaining the nouns must not convert the unfinished provocation into a documented sociological conclusion. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LVI, source pp. 68](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f77.item):** les filles plus que les femmes du monde. ### Fire and the incendiary {#reg-incendiary} *incendies; incendiaires* A sequence moving from displayed fireworks to destructive fires and then to people who deliberately set them. The noun incendiaire gives the preceding delight in fire an active and dangerous agent. Because the three items stand without connective explanation, the reader should keep the movement exploratory. The list is a seed for narrative about fascination and destruction rather than a description of one recorded conflagration. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VII, source pp. 11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f20.item):** Feux d’artifice, incendies, incendiaires. ### First printer’s proof {#reg-printers-proof} *épreuve* A preliminary printed version checked for corrections, not a trial, ordeal or school examination. Baudelaire compares the young writer’s pride in correcting it to a schoolboy’s pride in catching a venereal disease. The industrial-literary milestone becomes a dubious initiation into adult status. Recognizing the printing sense makes the comparison legible and prevents the sentence from becoming a generic assertion about overcoming hardship. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXI, source pp. 76](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f85.item):** corrige sa première épreuve. ### Forgues, literary pirate {#reg-forgues-pirate} *Forgues; écumeur de lettres* The supplied edition reads Forgues as Paul-Émile Daurand-Forgues, the journalist and translator known as Old-Nick. Pirate and écumeur de lettres make literary activity resemble raiding and plunder. No particular borrowing or infringement is specified, however. The lexicon must distinguish the person’s contextual identification from the unproved charge in Baudelaire’s projected portrait, rather than supplying an incident to make the insult seem documented. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII, source pp. 87–88](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f96.item):** Forgues, le pirate, l’écumeur de lettres. ### Four shares of earnings {#reg-four-shares} *quatre parts* A proposed division of all future earnings among daily living, creditors, friends and mother. The text does not supply unequal percentages or report completed transfers. This arrangement differs from the two-share plan of CXIV and the 800-franc monthly allocation of CXVI. The distinctions should be preserved: the notebook records changing attempts to make work sustain obligations, not a single budget that all three schemes restate identically. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item):** faire, de tout ce que je gagnerai, quatre parts. ### Freedom and fate {#reg-fatality} *liberté; fatalité* Liberté is freedom; fatalité is inevitable fate or necessity, not merely a fatal accident. Baudelaire proposes that individual willing and historical necessity can coincide, using the possibility of collectively achieved progress as a route into that thought. The passage is conditional before becoming more sweeping. A definition should preserve the movement of the argument rather than substituting the simpler belief that progress happens automatically or that freedom is simply denied. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVII, source pp. 100–101](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f109.item):** liberté et fatalité. ### Gallantry and devotion {#reg-gallantry-devotion} *galanterie; dévotion* Two practices Baudelaire declares indispensable to the happiness of a well-bred man: cultivated attentions to women and religious devotion. Neither should be flattened into generic kindness. Their pairing matters because erotic refinement and religious observance are presented as complementary requirements. The judgment about Protestant countries is his sweeping cultural polemic, not a reliable factual inventory of what their populations did or did not possess. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item):** la galanterie et la dévotion. ### Galvanic battery {#reg-galvanic} *pile galvanique* An apparatus producing an electric current. Here it supplies a comparison for muscles that stand out and stiffen involuntarily, as though an external force had taken over the body. The electrical image joins sleepwalking, intoxication, delirium and opium as ways of describing the lover’s altered state. Nothing in the fragment establishes an actual experiment or medical treatment; the battery belongs to its violent physiological analogy. **Attestation.** **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item):** une pile galvanique. ### General education and leisure {#reg-general-education} *Éducation générale; loisir* A broadly cultivated person with time available for developing many powers, opposed to the specialist. The final injunction to be rich and love work prevents leisure from meaning simple inactivity. The distinction concerns the range and independence of cultivation. It also acquires a practical tension later, when Baudelaire recognizes that leisure without wealth has increased his debts even while enlarging sensibility and meditation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LV, source pp. 67–68](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f76.item):** l’homme de loisir et d’Éducation générale. ### Greatness and sainthood for oneself {#reg-for-oneself} *pour soi-même* An inward criterion of achievement, repeated from LXIV. Pour soi-même distinguishes the aim from public medals, professional office or popular fame. It does not mean that the person has no duties to others: later prayers and budgets explicitly make mother, friends and creditors beneficiaries of reform. The phrase concerns where the standard of greatness is located, rather than granting selfishness an unqualified moral exemption. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIV, source pp. 78](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f87.item):** Etre un grand homme et un saint pour soi-même. ### Guillotiners {#reg-guillotiners} *guillotineurs* People who use or support the guillotine, cast here as hypocritical advocates of abolishing death penalties that might be turned against them. The term keeps the violence concrete. Baudelaire summarizes the accusation as wanting permission to cut off another person’s head while protecting one’s own. The fragment names no individual case, so the generalized charge should not be expanded into a verified historical identification. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLV, source pp. 60–61](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f69.item):** ce sont des guillotineurs. ### Guys and Douay’s unwritten anecdotes {#reg-guys-douay} *Constantin Guys; Émile Douay* Constantin Guys is the artist identified in the supplied edition; Émile Douay remains insecurely identified there. The projected anecdotes concern attempts to destroy works, immediately qualified as merely believing in their destruction. That correction illustrates the argument that created form is independent of its material embodiment. Since the anecdotes are not supplied, no particular burning, drawing or manuscript should be invented to complete the proof. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CII, source pp. 96–97](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f105.item):** détruisant ou plutôt croyant détruire leurs œuvres. ### Habitable worlds {#reg-habitable-worlds} *terres habitables* Worlds capable of sustaining inhabitants, literally habitable earths. The plural opens the notebook’s questions towards a cosmos beyond this one earthly home. Habitable does not assert that these worlds are actually inhabited, and the fragment provides no answer about their number. The supplied translation preserves that modal distinction, placing the question beside the finite or infinite number of souls without inventing a cosmological doctrine. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXV, source pp. 54](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f63.item):** le nombre des terres habitables. ### Having a personal stake {#reg-personal-stake} *intéressés* Interested in the sense of benefiting personally, not merely paying intellectual attention. Baudelaire insinuates that opponents of capital punishment or Hell wish to avoid consequences for themselves. This is an argumentative accusation, not evidence about their actual motives. The word is essential to the parallel between political abolition and materialist denial of souls: both are represented as advantageous calculations concealed beneath apparently principled positions. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLV, source pp. 60–61](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f69.item):** intéressés à l’abolir. ### Held in common {#reg-common-god} *commun* Shared or available to all. The adjective supports a sharp address to non-communists, using God as the strongest example of something that cannot be exclusively possessed. The sentence is too compressed to constitute a developed programme of economic communism. Its relation to God as a common reservoir of love in LXVIII illuminates the joke while preserving the difference between spiritual availability and a literal property arrangement. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIV, source pp. 84](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f93.item):** Tout est commun, même Dieu. ### Hildebrand {#reg-hildebrand} *Hildebrand* Hildebrand is Pope Gregory VII, according to the supplied edition. His pride is named without narrative elaboration and is followed by the relation of pope and emperor. The allusion consequently belongs to a cluster about spiritual and temporal power. Its brevity matters: the notebook does not provide a balanced historical assessment of his pontificate, nor explain which particular action is to illustrate the named pride. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XX, source pp. 29–30](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item):** L’orgueilleux Hildebrand. ### Historical self-descriptions {#reg-hysteria-imbecility} *hystérie; imbécillité* Baudelaire describes cultivating hysteria with pleasure and terror, then records a warning on 23 January 1862 as the passing wing of imbecility. These are his historically situated words for threatened powers and frightening sensation. They do not authorize a retrospective clinical diagnosis. The date belongs to this self-report, not automatically to every adjacent note in the final regimen or the collection as a whole. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item):** J’ai cultivé mon hystérie avec jouissance et terreur. ### Historical sexual terminology {#reg-pederasty} *pédéraste; pédérastie; bestialité* The supplied edition warns that pédérastie can historically designate male homosexuality more broadly and that this fragment specifies no age. Bestialité can likewise mean animal-like behaviour rather than a particular sexual act involving animals. The sentence is a hostile paradox built on the preceding opposition between women’s strangeness and intelligence. Its charged vocabulary should be explained as Baudelaire’s rhetoric, not converted into a diagnostic or factual account of sexuality. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VI, source pp. 10–11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f19.item):** Ainsi la bestialité exclut la pédérastie. ### Horror of home {#reg-horror-home} *horreur du domicile* An aversion to remaining in one’s dwelling, proposed as a malady whose reasons and progressive worsening need study. Domicile gives the aversion a concrete domestic place. The fragment supplies no finished diagnosis, and its subsequent observation that people recreate city crowds in the country complicates a simple desire for solitude. The problem concerns the difficulty of being at home, not merely disliking one particular address. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LVIII, source pp. 69](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f78.item):** la grande maladie de l’horreur du domicile. ### Hors-d’œuvre {#reg-digression} *hors-d’œuvre* Material outside a work’s main design, here a digression rather than an appetizer. Baudelaire uses the professional literary term after the extended prophecy, then decides to retain the pages because he wants to date his anger. The self-description changes how the outburst is read: it is acknowledged as a departure, yet valued as a record of a particular emotional and historical position. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** ce que les gens du métier appellent un hors-d’œuvre. ### Humiliations from debt {#reg-avanies} *avanies* Insults, humiliating treatment or affronts, here the social consequences of owing money. The term names more than an account balance: it marks the injuries to independence and dignity that follow indebtedness. Baudelaire balances this cost against the real gains he attributes to leisure in sensibility and meditation. The word thus gives financial dependency a felt social texture without reducing his entire account of leisure to simple regret. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII, source pp. 82–83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item):** les avanies résultant des dettes. ### Hunger and promised satisfaction {#reg-beatitude} *affamés; rassasiés* A shortened Gospel-like saying that the supplied edition relates to Luke’s hungry and Matthew’s hunger and thirst for righteousness. Baudelaire gives his own wording and calls it a calculation of probabilities. The entry should preserve that distance from an exact modern Bible quotation. Rassasiés means filled or satisfied, keeping the bodily movement from hunger to fullness that allows the religious promise to be recast as a calculation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVIII, source pp. 94](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f103.item):** Heureux ceux qui sont affamés, car ils seront rassasiés. ### Hygiène as a regimen {#reg-hygiene} *Hygiène* Care for preserving health, extended by the final notebook headings into a regimen of work, conduct, prayer and bodily habits. It is broader than cleanliness alone. The instructions aim to reorganize the conditions of living and producing, while the source’s placement of these fragments remains part of Mon cœur mis à nu. They should not be silently reclassified as an independently titled third work simply because some editions arrange them differently. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item):** Hygiène. Projets. ### Iceland lichen {#reg-lichen} *Lichen d’Islande* The supplied edition identifies Iceland moss, the lichen Cetraria islandica, in a historical syrup recipe. The note gives quantities and preparation but does not name the condition behind the crises or attacks. The recipe is evidence of the notebook’s practical health concerns, not present-day treatment guidance. Neither the botanical identification nor the instruction to increase doses justifies a retrospective diagnosis or a recommendation that modern readers follow it. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item):** Lichen d’Islande. ### Imposture as a foundation {#reg-imposture} *imposture* Deception or fraudulent pretence, proposed as the possible foundation of noble religions. The sentence pairs this with glorious empires founded on crime, separating the apparent grandeur of a result from the moral quality of its origin. It does not identify a particular religion as a proven fraud. The possibility unsettles easy moral accounting within the fragment’s argument about ambition, conviction and worldly success. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIII, source pp. 52–53](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f61.item):** de nobles religions sur l’imposture. ### In heat {#reg-in-heat} *en rut* A phrase used of an animal’s sexual condition, deliberately applied to woman in this misogynistic argument. The reduction to bodily appetite supports the passage’s contrast between the supposedly natural woman and the self-fashioning Dandy. It is the author’s animalizing rhetoric, not a neutral description of women. The adjacent abbreviated verb is an obscenity restored with editorial marks in the supplied English, rather than fully printed in the governing French. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII, source pp. 48–49](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f57.item):** Elle est en rut. ### In Praxiteles’ manner {#reg-praxitelean} *Praxitèle* The classical sculptor is invoked as the manner in which the grotesquely named doctor’s portrait should be made. The supplied edition identifies Praxiteles but no particular statue. The elevated artistic reference jars with pipe, dirt and jealousy, suggesting another high-style treatment of low material. A reader should preserve this incongruity rather than invent a precise sculptural pose or a model not specified in the notebook. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LIII, source pp. 66–67](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item):** à la manière de Praxitèle. ### In spite of themselves {#reg-despite-themselves} *malgré elles* Against their own resistance or wishes. The sentence’s restrictive ne…que makes the claim emphatic: nations possess great individuals only through a resistance those individuals overcome. The immediately added comparison with families extends the same structure to intimate life. It is not a claim that achievement happens accidentally; the following sentence explicitly requires the great man’s attacking force to exceed the resistance of millions. **Attestation.** **[Fusées IX, source pp. 13](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f22.item):** Les nations n’ont de grands hommes que malgré elles. ### In Swedenborg’s manner {#reg-swedenborg} *Swedenborg* A projected treatment of dreams with Swedenborg as its point of comparison. The construction à la means in the manner of, not a claim that the following words quote him. The reminder names no book, passage or fully developed doctrine. Its significance is the wish to give dreaming an organized interpretation; the notebook supplies the direction of inquiry while leaving its eventual theory unwritten. **Attestation.** **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item):** Rêves et théorie du Rêve à la Swedenborg. ### Infant nubility {#reg-nubility} *nubilité* Fitness or readiness for marriage, used in a deliberately disturbing combination with infancy and the cradle. The prophecy makes even the bourgeois daughter imagine her own financial sale from the beginning of life. The phrase should neither be naturalized as a biological observation nor softened into ordinary precocity. It is the extreme endpoint of Baudelaire’s image of familial and sexual relations wholly reorganized by money. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** une nubilité enfantine. ### Ixion and the cloud {#reg-ixion} *Ixion; nue* The supplied edition relates Ixion’s embrace to the cloud made in Hera’s likeness in Pindar. The allusion makes the dreamed beloved both desirable and deceptive. Nue means cloud here, while toute nue in the next line means entirely naked; the same sound links insubstantiality and erotic exposure. The myth clarifies the sonnet’s action without proving that the notebook quotes directly from Pindar or intends every detail of Ixion’s story. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII, source pp. 101–102](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f110.item):** comme Ixion, j’embrassasse une nue. ### Jaded ears {#reg-jaded-ears} *oreilles blasées* Ears dulled by familiarity and requiring unusual combinations to feel pleasure. Blasé names a worn or satiated sensibility, not mere fashionable nonchalance. The comparison explains why grotesque and tragic elements may mingle agreeably: discordance can refresh an exhausted appetite. It remains an analogy of taste, rather than a technical claim about every musical dissonance or a clinical description of the listener’s hearing. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item):** les discordances aux oreilles blasées. ### Jeanne and Mme Muller as examples {#reg-jeanne-muller} *Jeanne; Mme Muller* Names offered as examples for a projected discussion of popular hatred of beauty. The incidents that would make them examples are absent, and the supplied edition leaves the references locally unexpanded. This prevents a proposed heading from becoming a fabricated anecdote. Even where Jeanne can be identified in the late household plans, that knowledge does not supply the missing circumstances or prove what particular treatment of beauty is meant here. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXV, source pp. 72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f81.item):** Des exemples : Jeanne et Mme Muller. ### Know yourself {#reg-know-yourself} *Γνωθί σεαυτόν* The Delphic maxim, recorded in Plato’s Protagoras, pressed into service as a method for finding subjects. The parenthesis specifies a list of personal tastes, turning a large philosophical command into a concrete literary exercise. The supplied edition preserves the governing print’s Greek accents and distinguishes them from the conventional form. Its local function is inventive self-inquiry, not a promise that introspection yields transparent or complete self-knowledge. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII, source pp. 105](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item):** Γνωθί σεαυτόν. ### Le Siècle {#reg-siecle} *Siècle* The Paris newspaper first published in 1836, as identified by the supplied edition. In Baudelaire’s projected future even this newspaper would seem an agent of superstition beside a still more aggressively enlightening press. The comparison is a scale of intensification within his satire on progress. Elsewhere he makes Voltaire the progenitor of its editors, connecting the paper with what he attacks as superficial rationalism. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** le Siècle d’alors. ### Leagues and radius {#reg-league} *lieues; rayon* An old unit of distance with varying land and sea values, as the supplied edition cautions. The passage’s key mathematical relation is between a radius of six or seven leagues and an extent of twelve or fourteen. Imposing one exact modern conversion would add precision the text does not supply. The visible finite span matters because it is sufficient to suggest total infinity, not because the calculation measures infinity itself. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII, source pp. 80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f89.item):** Six ou sept lieues. ### Legouvé, Samson and the deadpan joke {#reg-legouve-samson} *Legouvé; Samson; Swift* The supplied edition identifies Ernest Legouvé and, contextually, the actor Joseph-Isidore Samson. Saying Samson is not an actor is Baudelaire’s aesthetic judgment, not a denial of his recorded profession. Swift supplies a model of apparently straight-faced satire, but no particular work is named. The exact theory and selection under attack remain unestablished, so the reference cannot be expanded into a fully reconstructed theatrical controversy. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVI, source pp. 92–93](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item):** Legouvé est-il un farceur froid, un Swift. ### Lent and returned {#reg-lent-returned} *prêté-rendu* A compressed formula of lending and repayment, immediately sharpened into the demand to receive more than one gives. Baudelaire defines commerce through that concealed surplus claim. The ordinary exchange vocabulary becomes part of his moral accusation against selfishness. It is a deliberately reductive account, not a technical analysis of every commercial transaction; the lexicon should explain its terms without presenting the polemic as neutral economics. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII, source pp. 93–94](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f102.item):** le prêté-rendu. ### Libertinism among humanity’s intoxications {#reg-libertinism} *libertinage* Sensual or sexual licence, distinguished here from charity and the literary or actorly mode of entering humanity. The projected grand tableau would explore the same general intoxication along these different paths. The word should not be reduced to a philosophical doctrine of freethinking without contextual evidence. The fragment’s structure is a list of directions for investigation, with no completed scene assigning specific people to each category. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLII, source pp. 58](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f67.item):** Dans le sens du libertinage. ### Librarians and witnesses of Redemption {#reg-jewish-witnesses} *Bibliothécaires; témoins de la Rédemption* An image of Jews as preservers of scriptural books that Christian readers treat as testimony to redemption. The supplied edition gives Augustinian parallels while not establishing a direct source. This theological context does not soften the preceding explicit call for extermination, which is antisemitic genocidal language. The two adjacent statements must remain visible together: explanatory context is not an excuse or a translation of hatred into an innocuous religious abstraction. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CV, source pp. 99](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item):** Les juifs Bibliothécaires et témoins de la Rédemption. ### Little by little {#reg-gradation} *gradation; peu à peu; petit à petit* A proposed universal process of gradual development through small stages. The ordinary repeated phrases peu à peu and petit à petit make the abstract law accessible. Their force is active and cumulative, not a promise that history will improve without effort. The financial analogy and reference to artistic skill invite attention to the way repeated increments alter a capacity, rather than merely fill an unchanged container. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII, source pp. 88–89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f97.item):** loi de la gradation. ### Louise Villedieu’s Louvre visit {#reg-louise-villedieu} *Louise Villedieu* A woman described through the notebook’s degrading five-franc characterization and presented as scandalized by nudity in the Louvre. The supplied edition has not established her identity beyond this anecdote. Baudelaire uses her reaction as an analogy for bourgeois moralizing about art. The entry should identify that rhetorical function without treating his description as a complete verified biography or assuming that her response fairly represents an entire social group. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVI, source pp. 99–100](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item):** Louise Villedieu, putain à cinq francs. ### Macadam and the fallen halo {#reg-macadam} *macadam; auréole* The road surface upon which the speaker’s halo falls while he avoids carriages. The concrete urban material gives a sacred attribute an undignified setting. In this notebook version he retrieves the halo and becomes troubled by an omen. The supplied edition distinguishes the prose poem Perte d’auréole, where the lost halo is left behind: importing that later scene would reverse this passage’s emotional outcome. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** la boue du macadam. ### Magism {#reg-magism} *magisme* The supplied edition identifies magisme as a historical name for the doctrine of the Magi. In this parenthesis it stands beside evocatory sorcery under the heading of a cult. The notebook does not explain a specific ritual system. Its local importance is the connection between directed spiritual practice and the capacity to summon, preserve or intensify powers, a connection extended to language, prayer and inspiration elsewhere in the section. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** magisme, sorcellerie évocatoire. ### May, June and the coup {#reg-1848-markers} *Le 15 mai; Les horreurs de Juin; coup d’Etat* The supplied edition identifies 15 May with the 1848 invasion of the National Assembly and June with the June Days after the closure of the National Workshops. The coup d’état is that of 2 December 1851, leading to the later Empire. These are different moments compressed into one retrospective sequence. The entry should not date the entire passage to 1848 merely because it opens with that year. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXX, source pp. 50–51](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item):** Les horreurs de Juin. ### Memories enjoyed by two {#reg-shared-memory} *à deux* Together with another person. The desire to share remembered pleasures interrupts the notebook’s exaltation of solitude and makes the heart’s enjoyments a prospective passion. The second participant is not specified, so no lover or family member should be inserted. The phrase is important precisely as an open relational wish: memory, once enjoyed alone, might acquire a different quality through another person’s presence. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item):** il faut en jouir à deux. ### Militant literary language {#reg-militant-language} *militante; militaires* Military metaphor turns writers into fighters, flag-bearers and veterans. Militant retains that combative force, rather than merely meaning active in a modern organization. The moustache personifies the language itself as a soldier. The final description of pedants and tavern idlers exposes the gap between heroic vocabulary and ordinary behaviour, preparing LXIII’s argument that such phrases may betray obedience rather than courage. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXI, source pp. 70–71](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f79.item):** Toute métaphore ici porte des moustaches. ### Minds born to serve {#reg-born-servants} *domestiques* Minds innately adapted, in the speaker’s insult, to dependence and obedience. Domestiques is not restricted to the literal household occupation here. The phrase interprets apparently combative literary rhetoric as a sign of submission to group discipline. Its recurrence in political and institutional criticism helps distinguish independence of spirit from socially celebrated positions; the contemptuous claim itself remains Baudelaire’s polemical judgment. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIII, source pp. 71–72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f80.item):** des esprits nés domestiques. ### Modern personal cults {#reg-modern-cults} *religions modernes* Metaphorical religions organized around celebrated secular figures: Molière, Béranger and Garibaldi. The supplied edition identifies a dramatist, a songwriter and a political leader, respectively. What unites them here is the veneration Baudelaire derides, not a shared profession or a documented formal church. Since no explanation follows the list, the entry should distinguish his implied attack on cultural hero-worship from any detailed argument about each figure’s work. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXVI, source pp. 54–55](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f63.item):** Les religions modernes ridicules. ### Moving house {#reg-moving-house} *déménagement* A literal change of dwelling, paired with infidelity as one of the experiences contained in every change. The prosaic domestic word reduces the French Revolution to familiar appetites for novelty and displacement. Its effect depends upon keeping that concrete sense instead of expanding it into general transformation. The explanation is deliberately disproportionate: a vast historical event is approached through small, mixed pleasures that can be both agreeable and shameful. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXIX, source pp. 50](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item):** l’infidélité et du déménagement. ### Mummified souls {#reg-mummified-souls} *âmes momies* Souls imagined as mummies, with work compared to preservative salt. The formulation is a question and should retain its unease: preservation may maintain existence without restoring vitality. It complicates the many exhortations to work by allowing discipline to conserve something already lifeless. The bodily image holds together usefulness and spiritual exhaustion rather than offering an uncomplicated celebration of industriousness. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXI, source pp. 30–31](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f39.item):** le sel qui conserve les âmes momies. ### Mystical quality and mysticism {#reg-mysticite} *Mysticité; mysticisme* Mysticité names a mystical character or inclination; mysticisme names the larger spiritual mode that can connect paganism with Christianity. The supplied translation distinguishes the two rather than forcing both into the same English word. This nuance matters because the section moves from a quality found in one tradition to a possible relation between traditions. Neither word here supplies a fully defined philosophical system or a single specified mystical experience. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIII, source pp. 49–50](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f58.item):** Mysticité du paganisme. Le mysticisme. ### Mœurs across generations {#reg-mores} *mœurs* The habits, customs and moral character of the people living under the following government. Mœurs does not mean only sexual conduct or superficial etiquette. The fragment separates these slowly formed characteristics from abrupt changes in political rule. Its examples of inherited glory and dishonour illustrate the thesis but do not remove the final caution that influence cannot be timed with complete precision. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVI, source pp. 86–87](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f95.item):** des mœurs du suivant. ### Nadar’s doubled organs {#reg-nadar} *Nadar; Adrien; Félix* The supplied edition identifies Nadar as Gaspard-Félix Tournachon and Adrien as his brother. The doubled organs are Adrien’s reported exaggeration of Félix’s extraordinary vitality, not an anatomical fact. Baudelaire acknowledges jealousy at his success outside the abstract. The bodily figure makes energy vividly visible and exposes an ambivalent admiration that is more personal and complicated than the notebook’s many uncomplicated insults. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXV, source pp. 78–79](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f87.item):** son frère Félix avait tous les viscères en double. ### Nausea at posters {#reg-posters} *affiches* Public notices and posters, inserted among reflections on voting, offices and government. The surrounding context makes their public and political address important, though the fragment does not name a particular election or campaign. Nausée converts rejection of public rhetoric into bodily revulsion. The tiny sentence exemplifies how these notebooks can register a reaction without supplying the explicit reasoning that a finished political essay would require. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIV, source pp. 59–60](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f68.item):** Immense nausée des affiches. ### Nieuwerkerke’s leaves {#reg-fig-leaves} *feuilles de vigne; Nieuwerkerke* Literally vine leaves, rendered fig leaves in the supplied English because they refer to coverings for artistic nudity. Nieuwerkerke is identified there as Director General of the Imperial Museums. The phrase condenses an attack on institutional prudery, following the Louvre anecdote. No particular statue or museum order is named, so the allusion should not be developed into a specific censorship incident without further evidence. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVI, source pp. 99–100](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item):** Les feuilles de vigne du sieur Nieuwerkerke. ### Obsession and possession {#reg-obsession-possession} *Obsession; Possession* Terms of religious or demonic influence in this context. The supplied edition notes a historical distinction between pressure acting from outside and a demon’s presence acting within. Their pairing with prayer, faith and sacraments gives the relevant register. They should not be silently translated into modern psychiatric categories, though their ordinary modern meanings may tempt that reading. The fragment names a subject without narrating a particular case. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CV, source pp. 99](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item):** De l’Obsession, de la Possession, de la Prière et de la Foi. ### Operator and subject {#reg-operator} *opérateur; sujet* The opérateur is the person performing the surgical procedure; the sujet is the person upon whom it is performed. These terms assign unequally active and passive positions to lovers who may nevertheless feel mutual desire. Coupling the operator with an executioner and the subject with a victim makes erotic calm a form of power. Subject here is neither the grammatical topic nor the sovereign self of a philosophical system. **Attestation.** **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item):** l’opérateur ou le bourreau. ### Ordinary way of life {#reg-ordinary-life} *train de vie* The customary manner in which people conduct their lives. Although train de vie can concern spending or social scale in other settings, the context here judges what people’s habits reveal about their curiosity. Their ordinary behaviour shows little concern for dead friends, origins, freedom or the number of souls. The phrase makes a contrast between preoccupations visible in practice and the questions the speaker thinks deserve attention. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXV, source pp. 54](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f63.item):** leur train de vie ordinaire. ### Ovid and the upward face {#reg-ovid-face} *Ovide; astres* The supplied edition relates this recollection to Metamorphoses I.84–86, where the human face is raised towards heaven and the stars. Baudelaire freely recasts the image as reflecting the stars, then opposes that elevated destiny to the face distorted by erotic ferocity. The allusion makes degradation visible: a body imagined as capable of heavenly orientation appears instead convulsed, animalized or nearly dead. **Attestation.** **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item):** qu’Ovide croyait façonné pour refléter les astres. ### Pamphlet as polemical attack {#reg-pamphlet} *pamphlet* A satirical and potentially vehement attack, not merely a short printed booklet. Baudelaire classifies Tartuffe this way to object to serious religious questions being delivered to a popular audience. The supplied edition notes that Molière’s own preface calls it a comedy and distinguishes hypocrisy from sincere devotion. The generic reclassification is therefore Baudelaire’s judgment, not an uncontested bibliographical fact about the work. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XC, source pp. 89–90](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f98.item):** ce n’est pas une comédie, mais un pamphlet. ### Pariahs and the actor {#reg-pariahs} *parias* People excluded or despised by respectable society, considered here alongside the actor’s calling, art and worldly position. The passage asks whether conventional virtue might actually impair their talents. Pariah is thus a social and moral position from which a different greatness can emerge. The fragment does not supply a complete historical account of performers’ legal status, and the question remains exploratory rather than a settled defence of every transgression. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVI, source pp. 92–93](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item):** De la vraie grandeur des parias. ### Passion refers everything to itself {#reg-passion-refers} *rapporte* Rapporter à means to relate or refer something to a centre of interpretation. Passion makes everything concern itself. The supplied edition notes a parallel formulation in Le Poème du haschisch, where intoxication enlarges the self’s centrality, but does not identify the foreign original implied by the heading translation and paraphrase. The phrase is about appropriating meaning, not about bringing financial returns or reporting information to another person. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XV, source pp. 18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item):** La Passion rapporte tout à elle. ### Pastoral peoples {#reg-herding-peoples} *pasteurs* People who tend herds, not Christian pastors. The list compares forms of life that Western self-congratulation may label less civilized, suggesting they can exceed the West in energy and dignity. The broader historical vocabulary is generalizing and should be attributed to the text. Explaining pasteurs correctly preserves the sequence of subsistence or social forms instead of inserting a religious profession among them. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXI, source pp. 82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item):** Peuples nomades, pasteurs, chasseurs, agricoles. ### Paul Pérignon, unresolved {#reg-perignon} *Paul Pérignon* An unexpanded name attached to the proposed analysis of insolent imbecility. The supplied edition has not securely identified Paul Pérignon, and the analysis itself is unwritten. Clément de Ris is already named in XLVII, but that recurrence does not supply either man’s missing case. The useful lexical fact is the incompleteness of the reference, not a conjectured biography fitted to the insulting heading. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCII, source pp. 91](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f100.item):** Clément de Ris et Paul Pérignon. ### Pedantic officiousness {#reg-cuistrerie} *cuistrerie* A display of narrow, presumptuous learning or authority. The headings extend it across professors, judges, priests and ministers before moving to named literary figures. The word attacks a mode of exercising knowledge rather than disproving expertise as such. It also creates tension with the idealized priest elsewhere: an elevated office does not keep its holder from entering the satirical catalogue of petty, self-important behaviour. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIII, source pp. 77–78](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f86.item):** De la cuistrerie. ### Personal intercessors {#reg-intercessors} *intercesseurs* People asked to mediate or plead for the speaker’s strength and obligations. The prayer names the father, Mariette and Poe alongside God, giving the devotional pattern a personal memory-world. The supplied edition relates Mariette to the remembered servant in a poem, while the text itself specifies her role here through intercession. It does not claim formal ecclesiastical recognition of these figures as saints. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item):** à mon père, à Mariette et à Poe, comme intercesseurs. ### Philis and Damon {#reg-philis-damon} *Philis; Damon* Names within the quoted sonnet’s erotic dream, belonging to its speaking figures rather than securely identified people in Baudelaire’s life. Philis returns as a beautiful shade and addresses Damon before the final obscene reversal. The excerpt is borrowed verse, not a newly composed autobiographical confession by Baudelaire. The precise author remains disputed in the notebook, so even the literary speaker should not be casually equated with a named poet. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII, source pp. 101–102](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f110.item):** Cher Damon, me voici de retour. ### Pierced coins and keepsakes {#reg-pierced-coins} *sols percés; souvenirs* Sols is an older form of sous, coins; percés describes their being pierced for carrying or wearing. Souvenirs here includes objects kept as mementos, not only mental memories. The list places ordinary cherished things beside talismans, extending the question of an amulet’s force into familiar personal attachments. It does not identify the particular objects owned by the speaker or assert a demonstrated modern mechanism of supernatural protection. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIV, source pp. 98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f107.item):** Les sols percés, les talismans, les souvenirs de chacun. ### Piocheurs {#reg-drudges} *piocheurs* Literally people working with a pick, figuratively laborious plodders or drudges. The contempt is sharpened by vile and very ignorant, making abundant effort compatible with poor cultivation. This differs from the notebook’s praise of disciplined work that enlarges faculties. The distinction matters: Baudelaire does not consistently oppose work to idleness, but asks what kind of person and what kind of capacities the work produces. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII, source pp. 82–83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item):** de vils piocheurs très ignorants. ### Plutus and money-worship {#reg-plutus} *Plutus* Plutus is the wealth-bringing god, identified in the supplied edition through Hesiod’s Theogony. His name personifies money as the future world’s sole object of ardour. The surrounding prophecy imagines even apparent virtue becoming ridiculous unless it serves enrichment. This is more than a decorative classical name: religious language is transferred to the pursuit of wealth, exposing commerce as a rival devotion in the passage’s moral scheme. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** l’ardeur vers Plutus. ### Poe and de Maistre as teachers {#reg-reasoning-teachers} *De Maistre; Edgar Poe* An explicit acknowledgment of two writers’ influence on the capacity to reason. The notebook names the effect but supplies no particular book, proposition or sequence of lessons. Its place among exhortations to work and begin makes reasoning a practical faculty as well as an intellectual inheritance. The two names should not be treated as evidence that Baudelaire accepted every position held by either writer. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXI, source pp. 103–104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item):** De Maistre et Edgar Poe m’ont appris à raisonner. ### Pompous narration {#reg-pompous-comic} *pompeusement; comiques* To tell comic things with ceremonial grandeur or inflated dignity. The proposed style depends on a deliberate mismatch between manner and matter. Pompeusement is not an unqualified compliment to the prose: it specifies the elevated register that could make the incongruity work. Placed among brief plans, it records a technique rather than an existing finished scene, and belongs with the adjacent mixture of mysticism and playfulness. **Attestation.** **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item):** Raconter pompeusement des choses comiques... ### Postulations as aspirations {#reg-postulations} *postulations* Movements or aspirations of the soul towards God and towards Satan. It is not a pair of formal logical assumptions to be proved. Simultanées makes both active at every moment in each person, resisting a simple division between exclusively good and bad kinds of people. The following vocabulary of ascent and descent gives those impulses a direction, though the erotic associations are expressed in the author’s polemical terms. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLI, source pp. 57–58](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f66.item):** deux postulations simultanées. ### Power without employment {#reg-unused-power} *sans emploi* A latent force imagined as growling but unable to find an outlet. Sans emploi does not reduce the man to a modern employment status. In the proposed beautiful male head, the phrase accompanies spiritual needs and darkly repressed ambitions. Its unresolved energy is attractive because it suggests more than the surface reveals, preparing the later image of Miltonic Satan’s power persisting within defeat. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item):** une puissance grondante et sans emploi. ### Prayer’s sentinels {#reg-guarded-sleep} *sentinelles* Guards posted by a captain, used as the image of evening prayer. The person who prays can sleep because protection has been arranged. This answers the earlier image of sleep as a sinister nightly adventure without claiming that prayer literally abolishes physical danger. The military language functions positively as disciplined preparedness here, even though elsewhere similar language is mocked when used to inflate literary self-importance. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item):** un capitaine qui pose des sentinelles. ### Priesthood everywhere {#reg-priestly-office} *sacerdoce* The priestly office or sacred calling, inflated here into a fashionable description of nearly any role. Baudelaire’s abrupt Hugo, sacerdoce comically turns the writer into priesthood personified. The repeated question exposes self-sanctification, especially when youth grants itself the same dignity. It is important to distinguish this satirical deployment from other fragments that treat the actual priest as one of the few genuinely respectable figures. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** Qu’est-ce qui n’est pas un sacerdoce aujourd’hui. ### Prima donna and butcher’s boy {#reg-prima-donna} *prima dona; garçon boucher* The leading female singer is paired with the butcher’s young employee in an unexplained reminder. The print’s prima dona is retained, while the supplied translation uses the usual spelling prima donna. The contrast suggests a possible encounter between elevated performance and ordinary bodily commerce, but no plot follows. Reading it as a completed anecdote or identifying real individuals would exceed what the notebook gives. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XX, source pp. 29–30](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item):** La prima dona et le garçon boucher. ### Primogeniture {#reg-primogeniture} *droit d’aînesse* The eldest son’s privileged right of inheritance. Baudelaire claims that property had already disappeared in principle with its suppression. The supplied edition stresses that virtuellement means latently or in principle here, not in an electronic environment or necessarily almost. The sentence expresses his polemical theory of inheritance and social continuity; it should not be repeated as a neutral statement that legal ownership had ceased to exist. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** la suppression du droit d’aînesse. ### Princess Metternich’s unanswered reply {#reg-metternich} *Madame de Metternich* The supplied edition identifies Pauline de Metternich, who helped secure the Paris Tannhäuser production defended by Baudelaire in his Wagner essay. The notebook complains that she has not answered him. Quoique princesse makes aristocratic rank an expectation of better manners, not the cause of the alleged neglect. The precise correspondence occasion remains unestablished; the entry should not invent a letter date or a deliberate refusal on her part. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVI, source pp. 61](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f70.item):** Madame de Metternich, quoique princesse. ### Prodigal hesitation {#reg-wasteful-hesitation} *prodigue* Wasteful or lavishly spending something away. Here hesitation squanders substance or force rather than money alone. Each retreat of the will creates a loss that later effort must repair. The vocabulary of expenditure links moral energy to the notebook’s financial concerns without making the metaphor a measurable scientific law. It explains why the entry values a sequence of small acts over the imagined grandeur of one future effort. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item):** Combien donc l’hésitation est prodigue. ### Profit-seeking {#reg-lucre} *lucre* Gain pursued for its own advantage, with an already disparaging tone. The merchant’s honesty is called a speculation in profit, so apparent virtue becomes an investment strategy. Spéculation here is calculation for advantage rather than abstract philosophical speculation. The phrase exposes the claimed instrumental motive behind good conduct; it does not demonstrate that every honest merchant actually holds the thought the fragment attributes to the type. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII, source pp. 93–94](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f102.item):** une spéculation de lucre. ### Providential character {#reg-providentiality} *providentialité* The relation of Napoleon III’s role or existence to Providence. The noun is stronger and more theological than simple good fortune, and it does not automatically praise the ruler. Baudelaire writes a directive to find an explanation, after moving from shame and fury to the recognition of restored calm. The incomplete inquiry preserves a tension between political disgust and the possibility that history has an intelligible providential meaning. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXX, source pp. 50–51](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item):** sa providentialité. ### Prudhomme of immorality {#reg-prudhomme} *Prudhomme* Joseph Prudhomme, Henri Monnier’s caricature of bourgeois complacency, transferred to George Sand. The apparent contradiction is central: Baudelaire treats the novelist’s supposedly unconventional morality as another species of conventional moralizing. The supplied edition identifies the allusion, but the judgment about Sand’s art remains his hostile assertion. The phrase is a satirical type-name, not a reference to a person actually named Prudhomme who wrote a doctrine of immorality. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVIII, source pp. 63–64](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f72.item):** le Prudhomme de l’immoralité. ### Ptolemies of journalism {#reg-ptolemies} *Ptolémées* Girardin’s disparaging comparison casts other journalists as defenders of an outmoded intellectual system. The source then supplies a passage attributed to Ptolemy rejecting the earth’s rotation as supremely ridiculous. The juxtaposition exposes the risks of claiming obvious scientific authority. It is a staged encounter between quotations, not permission to treat every astronomical statement in Girardin’s analogy as a careful account of ancient cosmology. Primary context: [Ptolemy, Almagest I.6, Halma translation](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Almageste/Livre_I/06). **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI, source pp. 46–47](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item):** les Ptolémées du journalisme français. ### Public servitude {#reg-public-domesticity} *domesticité publique* Service to public institutions imagined through the dependent condition of a servant. Baudelaire applies it to officials and directors who may be estimable yet lack the originality he calls divine. Publique prevents domesticité from referring simply to employment in a private home. The distinction is evaluative and polemical: social usefulness and decent character do not confer the autonomous personal stature the speaker reserves for exceptional beings. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu C, source pp. 95–96](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f104.item):** c’est-à-dire pour la domesticité publique. ### Punishment through a loved person {#reg-punishment-through} *dans ma mère; à cause de moi* To be punished in or through one’s mother means to suffer through harm that befalls her. The paired plea asks that she also not be punished because of the speaker. The wording makes their vulnerability reciprocal while distinguishing who suffers and why. It expresses a fearful prayer for protection; it should not be read as proof that an actual misfortune has a divinely imposed cause. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII, source pp. 74–75](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item):** Ne me châtiez pas dans ma mère. ### Raised shoes and speaking trumpets {#reg-platform-shoes} *patins; porte-voix* Patins here are shoes with very thick raised soles, not ice skates. Porte-voix are speaking trumpets or devices that amplify the voice. Along with exaggerated masks and male performers in women’s roles, they form a wish for heightened theatrical artifice. The devices are separate: the text does not say the masks themselves act as amplifiers. The imaginary theatre privileges constructed expression over ordinary naturalistic appearance. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIX, source pp. 56–57](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f65.item):** des patins très hauts. ### Reducing and skimming the syrup {#reg-skim-reduce} *écumer; se réduisent* To remove the foam or scum that rises during cooking. The instruction appears after boiling has reduced two litres to one and before sugar is added. These concrete verbs distinguish the historical recipe from the surrounding figurative language of concentration and accumulation. Explaining them clarifies what the source says without endorsing the dosage, establishing its safety or treating the practical directions as a metaphor only. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item):** écumer une seule fois. ### Religions on the walls {#reg-wall-slogans} *Barbès; Philippe; phallus* Sexual graffiti and political slogans are presented as two persistent popular religions. The supplied edition identifies Barbès as Armand Barbès and understands Philippe as Louis-Philippe in this context. The phallic abbreviation remains abbreviated in the French, with its parenthesis giving the reference. Religion is metaphorical here: repeated public signs reveal obsessive collective attachments rather than proving the existence of an organized cult for every inscription. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII, source pp. 87–88](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f96.item):** Deux belles religions. ### Renan, Feydeau, Feuillet and Scholl {#reg-writers-targets} *Renan; Feydeau; Octave Feuillet; Scholl* The supplied edition identifies Ernest Renan, Ernest Feydeau, Octave Feuillet and Aurélien Scholl as the contemporary writers named here. Jolis is mockingly approving, while grands hommes du jour diminishes greatness as a fashion of the moment. No particular book or incident explains the attack. In particular Feydeau should not be automatically understood as a later, more familiar bearer of that surname. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIII, source pp. 77–78](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f86.item):** Les jolis grands hommes du jour. ### Respectability and softness {#reg-respectable-softness} *honnêtes gens; mollesse* Honnêtes gens are respectable people, not simply those who always tell the truth. Mollesse modifies the initial charge of cowardice towards softness or lack of resolve. The fragment opposes their weak commitment to brigands’ determination to succeed. Its uncomfortable judgment separates moral respectability from effective will, then distinguishes the speaker’s higher convictions from the ambition that he associates with contemporary political certainty. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIII, source pp. 52–53](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f61.item):** une certaine mollesse chez les honnêtes gens. ### Review and classification {#reg-sorting} *revue; classement* To examine and put into order. Revue in this phrase is a review or survey, not a periodical to publish. The repeated two-day allocations make the activity finite and schedulable. Letters, debts, engravings and notes are different accumulations awaiting organization, and their adjacency shows how intellectual preparation, finances and personal relations share the same practical problem of neglected material that must be sorted. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV, source pp. 105–106](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item):** Faire une revue et un classement. ### Rising in rank {#reg-rise-rank} *monter en grade* An idiom of promotion transferred to spiritual ascent. By describing invocation of God in this way, the passage lets an institutional or military vocabulary touch the apparently inward life. The counter-movement towards Satan is a joy in descending. Both are desires rather than achieved final positions, so the image presents spiritual existence as a continuing tension rather than a settled rank already possessed. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLI, source pp. 57–58](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f66.item):** un désir de monter en grade. ### Robert-Houdin and miracles {#reg-robert-houdin} *Robert Houdin* The conjurer whose memoir describes a French government mission to Algeria in 1856, intended to undermine marabouts’ reputed miracles through demonstrations of illusion. The supplied edition identifies that account as Robert-Houdin’s own colonial narrative. Baudelaire juxtaposes an unbelieving society and its use of theatrical marvels against religious marvels. Capitalized Société does not securely name a particular organization; the sentence concerns a cultural and political paradox. Primary context: [Robert-Houdin, Memoirs, chapter XX](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42916/42916-h/42916-h.htm). **Attestation.** **[Fusées X, source pp. 13–14](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f22.item):** Robert Houdin chez les Arabes. ### Rosary as vehicle {#reg-rosary-medium} *chapelet; médium; véhicule* The rosary is presented as a means of carrying or enabling prayer, especially by making it accessible to everyone. Médium here names mediation, not necessarily a person conducting a séance. The adjoining electrical analogy and language of intellectual dynamics make devotional practice a way of organizing force. Its repeated material form serves spiritual activity rather than standing as an opposed, merely mechanical substitute for it. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** Le chapelet est un médium, un véhicule. ### Sacrificing and sacrificing oneself {#reg-sacrifice-active} *sacrifie; se sacrifie* The transitive verb can refer to performing sacrifice, while its reflexive form adds self-offering. The line connects greatness with both the act and the personal cost of sacred or martial service. Its compact structure should not be expanded into an exact one-to-one assignment of every clause to a profession without caution. The governing edition omits a blessing clause found elsewhere, so that wording must not be silently imported. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXX, source pp. 75–76](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f84.item):** L’homme qui chante, l’homme qui sacrifie et se sacrifie. ### Saint-Marc Girardin {#reg-saint-marc} *Saint-Marc Girardin* Marc Girardin, the critic, professor and politician known as Saint-Marc Girardin, distinct from Émile de Girardin mocked in X and XXVI. The supplied edition keeps the call to mediocrity as Baudelaire’s attribution, with its original occasion unverified. This distinction prevents two separate targets from collapsing into one. The subsequent goose portrait converts the alleged hatred of the sublime into a comic image of bodily self-importance and alarm. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXX, source pp. 81–82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f90.item):** Saint-Marc Girardin a dit un mot qui restera. ### Salvation {#reg-salvation} *salut* Spiritual salvation, not a greeting or simply bodily rescue. The section contrasts concern for it with pleasure’s attachment to the present and ends with the aspiration to become a saint for oneself. The physical verb suspend makes the future seem a support from which one hangs. Salvation therefore provides both a temporal orientation and an alternative object of care within the image of a life otherwise rolling downhill. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIV, source pp. 72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f81.item):** Le soin de notre salut. ### Satiety {#reg-satiety} *satiété* The condition of having had enough, even an excess, of pleasure or experience. It extends lassitude beyond mere tiredness. Baudelaire allows the beautiful woman’s face to suggest either exhaustion and satiation or their opposite, a desire to live marked by deprivation. Both routes lead to beauty through a mixed emotional expression. Satiety is therefore one possible component in his model, not a required biography for every beautiful face. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item):** même de satiété. ### Scarecrow of art {#reg-scarecrow} *épouvantail* Something held up to frighten others, here the supposedly vulnerable young reader used to intimidate artistic expression. The noun is figurative, not a literal agricultural object. Its sequence with monster and assassin shifts the reader from innocent person to threatening construction. The image makes the publisher’s concern appear coercive, though that rhetorical effect is separate from the degrading generalizations about young women that follow. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIII, source pp. 83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f92.item):** La jeune fille épouvantail, monstre, assassin de l’art. ### Scatophagy and Gallic wit {#reg-scatophagy} *scatophage; sel gaulois* Literally eating excrement, a violent metaphor for literary taste that delights in filth. Baudelaire says tavern writers dignify this appetite as sel gaulois, traditional Gallic wit or bawdy humour. Sel ordinarily suggests piquancy, but the surrounding disgust turns that praise inside out. The entry describes the attack’s vocabulary, not a literal eating behaviour or a reliable general account of French literature. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXV, source pp. 84–85](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f93.item):** il est scatophage. ### Schoolmastering {#reg-pionnerie} *pionnerie* Pedantic, dogmatic supervision, derived from the school monitor or supervisor. Baudelaire links the editor in chief with the French appetite for petty dictatorship. The word concerns officious control, not the pioneering implied by a misleading resemblance to pioneer. It allows editorial corrections to become a social type: a small authority figure acts as though occupying a throne and policing every expression of another person’s independence. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVII, source pp. 61–62](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f70.item):** Du rédacteur en chef et de la pionnerie. ### Sectaries of imagination {#reg-sectaries} *sectaires* Committed adherents or partisan devotees. Beside serviteurs, the word makes priests both servants and zealous followers of imagination. It need not identify membership in a named sect. The claim reassigns religious authority to the imaginative faculty without making priests merely fraudulent: elsewhere in the same section their greatness consists in their power to induce belief in astonishing things. **Attestation.** **[Fusées II, source pp. 5–6](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f14.item):** les sectaires de l’imagination. ### Serenus and Stagirius {#reg-serenus-stagirius} *Sérène; Stagire* Two comparative portraits of affliction: Serenus’s unsettled mind in Seneca’s On Tranquillity of Mind, and the troubled ascetic addressed in Chrysostom’s Consolations to Stagirius. These identifications come from the supplied edition. Baudelaire sets classical moral reflection beside Christian consolation and modern medicine. He does not reproduce either portrait, so their presence establishes a reading constellation rather than a finished theory explaining their subjects’ suffering. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XIV, source pp. 17–18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item):** Le portrait de Sérène, par Sénèque. Celui de Stagire, par saint Jean Chrysostome. ### Setting capital in motion {#reg-capital-circulation} *capitaux* The writer activates financial resources and transactions, while also stimulating intellectual exercise. Remue does not mean merely that he possesses wealth. The sentence presents literary work as producing movement outside the author’s mind, joining economic capital to intellectual gymnastics. It complicates any picture of the man of letters as entirely outside commerce, even though later fragments attack commercial self-interest and institutional literary life. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VI, source pp. 10–11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f19.item):** L’homme de lettres remue des capitaux. ### Sleep as nightly adventure {#reg-night-adventure} *aventure sinistre* A sinister event entered again each evening. Aventure preserves the uncertainty of an experience normally treated as routine, while sinistre gives that uncertainty an ominous colour. Baudelaire attributes the sleeper’s apparent courage to ignorance of danger. The fragment offers no medical explanation or named threat: its force comes from making a familiar surrender of consciousness strange, exposing the fragility of ordinary confidence. **Attestation.** **[Fusées IX, source pp. 13](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f22.item):** aventure sinistre de tous les soirs. ### Slightly misshapen {#reg-slightly-deformed} *difforme; insensible* An irregularity of form that gives beauty the appearance of sensibility. Légèrement is crucial: the sentence does not simply praise the grotesque or maximal distortion. Insensible means apparently unfeeling, not invisible or too small to perceive. Baudelaire immediately glosses irregularity through the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, making the deviation a source of expressive life rather than a defect to be corrected. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item):** Ce qui n’est pas légèrement difforme a l’air insensible. ### Soldier of the judicial press {#reg-judicial-press} *presse judiciaire; Bertin* A press worker described through military service. Judiciaire marks the legal or judicial field, but the fragment supplies no securely identified Bertin or particular newspaper. The parenthesis is an attribution within a collection of rhetorical specimens, not enough for a biography. The phrase’s purpose is to show how even specialized journalistic activity borrows the prestige of the battlefield. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXII, source pp. 71](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f80.item):** Soldat de la presse judiciaire (Bertin). ### Spiritualist drawing {#reg-spiritualist} *spiritualiste* Drawing understood as especially aligned with spirit rather than material representation. The supplied translation deliberately retains spiritualist instead of smoothing it into spiritual. The notebook gives no developed demonstration and no claim about communicating with spirits. Its immediate subject is arabesque line, whose ordering and movement can privilege the imagination; the next section’s description of it as ideal clarifies the aesthetic direction of the claim. **Attestation.** **[Fusées V, source pp. 9–10](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item):** Le dessin arabesque est le plus spiritualiste des dessins. ### Staying at the breach {#reg-breach} *brèche* A siege image for remaining at an exposed and active post. Used of literary activity, it makes persistence sound like embattled service. Baudelaire includes it among inflated military formulas whose users may be neither courageous nor hardworking. The idiom’s normal approving force must be recognized before its satirical reversal becomes clear: the fragment is collecting inherited expressions in order to expose their pretensions. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXI, source pp. 70–71](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f79.item):** Rester sur la brèche. ### Subject to taxes and compulsory labour {#reg-taillable} *taillables; corvéables* Liable to the taille and to compulsory labour, terms recalling dependence under a feudal order. Baudelaire applies them contemptuously to nearly everyone outside his privileged priest-warrior-poet triad. The accompanying stable image animalizes ordinary professional life. These are not proposed job titles or a literal enumeration of contemporary tax law; the historical vocabulary helps stage a radical hierarchy of human functions and supposed dignity. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIV, source pp. 59–60](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f68.item):** taillables et corvéables. ### Supremely ridiculous {#reg-ridiculous-greek} *πάνυ γελοιότατον* The Greek phrase means very or supremely ridiculous and appears within the source edition’s note attributing a passage to Ptolemy. Its role is evidentiary and satirical: the same dismissive confidence can accompany what later readers regard as error. It should be distinguished from Baudelaire’s own surrounding French mockery. The printed attribution belongs to the supplied historical witness rather than to a newly inserted modern translator’s footnote. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI, source pp. 46–47](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item):** πάνυ γελοιότατον. ### Swayed, almost idle {#reg-swaying-ships} *dandinés; désœuvré* The parenthetical dandinés gives the stately ships a gently swaying, almost bodily movement. Their désœuvré air suggests idleness or being without an occupation, not mechanical failure. These personifying details allow the vessels to ask when they will depart for happiness. The fantasy depends upon activity held in reserve: robust objects capable of travel seem suspended between present stillness and a desired destination. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XI, source pp. 14–15](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f23.item):** imperceptiblement balancés (dandinés). ### Table turning {#reg-table-turning} *tables tournantes* The nineteenth-century practice of seeking communications from spirits through the movement of a table. It stands beside gas and steam among phenomena denied the status of true civilization. The grouping juxtaposes technology and spiritualist fashion under a moral critique. The fragment does not prove or disprove the practice; it says that civilization should be measured by diminishing the traces of original sin rather than by such conspicuous novelties. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXI, source pp. 82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f91.item):** ni dans les tables tournantes. ### Taking the bull by the horns {#reg-bull-horns} *prendre le taureau par les cornes* The idiom means confronting a difficulty directly and decisively. Baudelaire attacks Girardin’s transition from it to taking a speech by its end, as though that analogy placed the horns behind the bull. The joke deliberately literalizes a figure of speech. Understanding the normal idiom explains the ridicule without requiring the reader to accept every premise of Baudelaire’s aggressively pedantic interpretation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI, source pp. 46–47](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f55.item):** prendre le taureau par les cornes. ### Tavern or café {#reg-estaminet} *estaminet* A café or drinking-place, associated in the supplied edition with drinking and smoking. It is the unheroic setting of the idlers to whom military literary rhetoric is applied. The word also underlies the mock doctor’s name Estaminetus in LIII and the tavern literati of LXXXV. Its recurrence makes a social environment into a satirical source of posturing, while not proving that every café writer fits the caricature. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXI, source pp. 70–71](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f79.item):** des fainéants d’estaminet. ### Telegraph and National Printing Office {#reg-communication-power} *télégraphe; Imprimerie nationale* Two instruments of public communication whose seizure is presented as the key to governing a nation. The supplied edition links the printing office to surviving proclamations of the 1851 coup. Baudelaire’s argument is that control of transmission and printed authority can elevate the first person who comes along. The following insistence upon popular permission prevents the machines alone from becoming a sufficient explanation of political power. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVI, source pp. 73](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f82.item):** en s’emparant du télégraphe et de l’Imprimerie nationale. ### The ageing ingénue {#reg-old-ingenue} *ingénues; planches* Ingénue names a theatrical role associated with a naïve young woman; planches are the stage boards. Applied to Sand, the phrase depicts an older writer continuing to perform a youthful innocence. The theatrical vocabulary matters more than a literal allegation about stage employment. It recasts her moral posture as an exhausted role, reinforcing the notebook’s attack without supplying a neutral description of her views. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu L, source pp. 65](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f74.item):** vieilles ingénues qui ne veulent jamais quitter les planches. ### The alarm bell of memory {#reg-tocsin} *tocsin* A bell rung as an alarm, transferred here to storms, electricity and lightning. Their physical disturbance summons dark memories of earlier love. The word gives recollection an urgent, involuntary character: the past is sounded rather than calmly retrieved. Spiritual and bodily enjoyment remain coupled, so the storm is neither a purely meteorological event nor merely a symbolic decoration separated from nervous sensation. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XV, source pp. 18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item):** tocsin des souvenirs amoureux. ### The Alexandrians and Capé {#reg-alexandrians-cape} *les Alexandrins; Capé* Unexpanded references within the parenthesis about universal religion. The supplied edition does not identify a particular Alexandrian school or establish who Capé is. Chateaubriand and de Maistre make the intellectual setting clearer, but they cannot fill those gaps. The names should therefore remain prompts to an unfinished inquiry, without silently assigning a specific philosophical lineage or inventing a securely identified companion source. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIX, source pp. 81](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f90.item):** les Alexandrins, Capé. ### The apparently obvious {#reg-evidence} *évidence* Évidence here is what appears self-evident or immediately clear. English evidence, meaning the body of facts supporting a claim, can mislead. Baudelaire includes obviousness among sources of judgment to distrust, beside the heart, inspiration and common sense. The list challenges unexamined assurance; it need not mean that all inquiry or supporting facts are worthless. Its scepticism also complicates passages that appear to praise inspiration without qualification. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXX, source pp. 75–76](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f84.item):** Défions-nous du peuple, du bon sens, du cœur, de l’inspiration et de l’évidence. ### The beautiful commonplace {#reg-commonplace} *lieu commun* A common or widely available thought or expression, surprisingly praised as material for grand style. The phrase should not automatically be read as dismissal of stale writing. Alongside the earlier ambition to create a poncif, it asks how a shared formula can acquire commanding form. The notebook gives no example here; the admiration concerns a possible artistic achievement, not a rule that every banality is beautiful. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII, source pp. 105](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item):** rien de plus beau que le lieu commun. ### The canaille {#reg-rabble} *canaille* The populace or rabble viewed contemptuously as unfit to judge serious matters. The term also appears in attacks on literary people, so it is not a stable neutral sociological class. Here it expresses the speaker’s distrust of a broad audience’s handling of religious questions. The lexicon records that exclusionary claim without adopting the assumption that ordinary readers are incapable of understanding comedy or theology. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XC, source pp. 89–90](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f98.item):** livrer certaines questions graves à la canaille. ### The cat’s cleanliness {#reg-cleanliness-cat} *propreté* Cleanliness and careful bodily presentation, placed between luxury and sensual pleasure in the cat’s suggestive attributes. The word does not mean property, despite the important proprietary vocabulary elsewhere. Baudelaire’s provocation imagines the beautiful cat as an aristocratic rebuke to democrats. This is a polemical association made by the fragment, not evidence about the actual animal preferences of people holding democratic political views. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XIX, source pp. 29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item):** luxe, de propreté, de volupté. ### The cerebellum {#reg-cerebellum} *cervelet* A bodily location assigned to the nervous shock accompanying the birth of a sublime thought. The specificity makes intellectual creation feel physiological. The sentence records Baudelaire’s speculative description of sensation; it should not be treated as a verified neurological account. Its importance in context is the insistence that thought’s apparent spiritual height can have an immediate bodily tremor. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item):** une secousse nerveuse qui se fait sentir dans le cervelet. ### The chandelier {#reg-chandelier} *lustre* The suspended lighting fixture, not lustre in the abstract sense of splendour. Baudelaire describes its luminosity, crystalline material, complexity, circularity and symmetry, then makes it the theatre’s principal actor. The preference displaces dramatic characters with an object of visual order. Knowing the noun’s concrete meaning is essential: the passage values a particular theatrical object rather than simply praising a production’s brilliance or social prestige. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIX, source pp. 56–57](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f65.item):** c’est le lustre. ### The cross as decoration {#reg-decoration-cross} *croix; Légion d’Honneur* The cross is the insignia of the Legion of Honour under discussion, rather than the cross borne as a Christian spiritual trial. Asking for it is interpreted as demanding reward for one’s duty. The fragment then questions whether the state or prince should have authority to confer distinction at all. Christian humility enters as a second argument against accepting the honour, giving croix a pointed religious resonance without changing its immediate referent. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII, source pp. 48–49](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f57.item):** Celui qui demande la croix. ### The cult of Reason {#reg-cult-reason} *culte de la Raison* The revolutionary cult associated with the ceremonies of 1793. Baudelaire invokes it to argue that even an apparent rejection of religious superstition confirms the idea of sacrifice. The supplied edition supplies contemporary ceremonial context, but does not claim he consulted that particular record. The juxtaposition concerns structural persistence across opposing beliefs, not a straightforward identification of revolutionary Reason with traditional Christian worship. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIII, source pp. 49–50](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f58.item):** La Révolution et le culte de la Raison. ### The day and the occasion {#reg-daily-occasion} *circonstance* The particular circumstances furnishing an immediate occasion for writing. The projected book can begin anywhere and proceed day by day, provided inspiration is intense. Circonstance therefore names a source of form as well as material: external occasions and changing states of mind govern the sequence. The supplied edition follows Je pense commencer, an intention, rather than the comparison text’s Je peux, a statement of possibility. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII, source pp. 45](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f54.item):** l’inspiration du jour et de la circonstance. ### The designation sieur {#reg-sieur} *sieur* A designation before a man’s name, familiar from legal language and capable of a distancing or disparaging tone. The supplied English uses Mr. In this satirical family sketch, repeated sieur makes the naming stiffly formal while the coffee-with-milk scene is ordinary and domestic. The word does not by itself establish nobility, and its tone should not be turned into a factual statement about the Nacquarts’ social rank. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LX, source pp. 70](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f79.item):** Le sieur Nacquart père. ### The flighty air {#reg-flighty-air} *évaporé* A scattered, frivolous or flighty manner, one of the appearances listed as charming in a woman. Évaporé is not a report of literal evaporation, nor exactly the central philosophical vaporisation du Moi of XXIII. It belongs to an observed or imagined style of bearing. Its place among jaded, bored, impudent and cold expressions shows that the catalogue values suggestive manner rather than conventional cheerful attractiveness. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item):** L’air évaporé. ### The flowing style {#reg-flowing-style} *style coulant* Easy, fluent prose praised by the readership Baudelaire attacks as bourgeois. Coulant could be complimentary in another context; here fameux and the surrounding insults make smoothness suspect. The attack implies that facility can conceal a lack of artistic distinction or intellectual depth. A lexicon must recover that local evaluative force without adopting his sweeping assertion that Sand was never an artist. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVIII, source pp. 63–64](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f72.item):** le fameux style coulant. ### The funeral throng {#reg-throng} *cohue* A milling or disorderly crowd, with petits littérateurs diminishing the writers’ stature rather than measuring their physical size. The distribution of handshakes makes the funeral into a scene of self-advertisement. The fragment records a type of social behaviour without naming a particular funeral or writer. Its brevity allows a whole criticism of literary publicity to emerge from posture, crowding and a strategic gesture. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIX, source pp. 89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f98.item):** La cohue des petits littérateurs. ### The Game {#reg-game} *Jeu* The attraction of play or gambling, enlarged into an analogy for life. Winning and losing suggest stakes, but capitalization does not establish one named game. The final question asks what happens when neither outcome matters, threatening the very charm just proclaimed. The term consequently connects pleasure to investment in an uncertain result, rather than declaring that any playful activity will make existence worthwhile. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VIII, source pp. 12](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f21.item):** le charme du Jeu. ### The garret {#reg-galetas} *galetas* A poor attic room or garret, imagined as a setting that sublime thought can make immortal. The ambitious child of the projected commercial future refuses this literary poverty in favour of founding a business. The word gathers a social contrast: cramped material circumstances may harbour imaginative greatness, whereas increasing wealth may coincide with spiritual diminution. No particular room or biographical residence is identified. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** immortaliser un galetas par de sublimes pensées. ### The Greek drug-grinder {#reg-drug-grinder} *Φαρμακοτρίβης* A compounder or grinder of drugs, described alongside people who rear snakes for displays. The supplied edition locates the passage in Aelian’s On Animals IX.62 and notes that the print’s δαυματα is apparently corrupt for θαύματα, shows or spectacles. The Greek and questioned attribution are retained in the governing text. A fluent interpretation depends on that disclosed correction; it should not disguise the difference between the printed witness and the parallel text. Primary context: [Aelian, On Animals IX.62](https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%A0%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%AF_%CE%B6%CF%8E%CF%89%CE%BD_%CE%B9%CE%B4%CE%B9%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%82/%CE%B8). **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LIV, source pp. 67](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f76.item):** Φαρμακοτρίβης. ### The habitual quoter {#reg-quoters} *citateur* A person accustomed to quoting in conversation or writing. The young are said to treat such a person as an enemy, suggesting conflict between present self-assertion and inherited authority. The attributed Gautier remark about spelling under the executioner’s hand intensifies fidelity to verbal standards. The supplied edition has not verified a separate original occasion for that saying, so it remains an attribution made by the notebook. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII, source pp. 87–88](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f96.item):** Le citateur est pour eux un ennemi. ### The holy-water basin {#reg-holy-water-basin} *bénitier* A vessel containing holy water. Baudelaire’s imagined act against Sand turns a religious object into a weapon while presenting her trust in good heart and common sense as diabolical. The collision of devotional function and aggressive use supplies the sentence’s outrageous comic violence. It is a narrated wish within the polemic, not evidence that he carried out such an assault. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLIX, source pp. 64–65](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f73.item):** lui jeter un bénitier à la tête. ### The homme d’esprit {#reg-wit} *homme d’esprit* A person of intelligence and wit, here assumed incapable of easy accord with others. Esprit should not be mechanically translated spirit in this social expression. The proposed remedy is paradoxical: cultivate bitter pleasure in fools’ conversation and bad books. The category is not identical to someone who is merely entertaining, since its defining feature here is the critical perception that prevents comfortable mutual understanding. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIX, source pp. 95](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f104.item):** L’homme d’esprit. ### The Imitation of Christ {#reg-imitation} *l’Imitation de Jésus-Christ* The devotional work traditionally attributed to Thomas à Kempis, invoked for its language of pride, humility and self-giving. The speakers are discussing receiving and giving sexual pleasure; Baudelaire says they sound like a religious manual. This is a deliberately irreverent comparison, not evidence that they are quoting a specific passage. Their elevated moral vocabulary is undercut by his contemptuous name for them, orduriers. **Attestation.** **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item):** Tous ces orduriers parlaient comme l’Imitation de Jésus-Christ. ### The Last Judgment as memory’s deadline {#reg-judgment-last} *jugement dernier* The ultimate divine judgment becomes a jokingly deferred occasion for remembering an unnamed woman’s name. The temporal exaggeration makes a trivial lapse share the scale of eternity. Its casual tone and surrounding sexual insults prevent the phrase from functioning as a straightforward doctrinal exposition. The notebook supplies neither the woman’s identity nor a reason to recover it beyond the speaker’s throwaway assertion. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII, source pp. 91–92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f100.item):** je le retrouverai au jugement dernier. ### The Latin maxim of attention {#reg-attention-maxim} *Aye quod agis* The governing print has Aye, probably a typographical error for Age in the maxim Age quod agis: do what you are doing, with full attention to the present task. The supplied English marks the repaired imperative rather than hiding it. The historical witness does not establish whether the error was authorial. The maxim concentrates the surrounding discipline of immediate work, sustained will and practical responsibility. Primary context: [Larousse, Age quod agis](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3ALarousse_-_Grand_dictionnaire_universel_du_XIXe_si%C3%A8cle_-_Tome_1%2C_part._1%2C_A-Am.djvu/212). **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item):** Aye quod agis. ### The Lavalette clipping {#reg-lavalette-clipping} *Lavalette; Vaulabelle* A newspaper extract pasted into the manuscript, reporting royalist hostility towards Lavalette’s daughter after his escape. The supplied edition traces its inner passage to Vaulabelle’s Histoire des deux restaurations and identifies the escape as occurring in December 1815. The newspaper and its date remain unknown. Its separate quoted voice matters: Baudelaire adopts documentary material for his attack on national baseness instead of personally narrating every detail as an eyewitness. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXV, source pp. 84–85](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f93.item):** l’évasion de Lavalette. ### The literary advance guard {#reg-avant-garde} *avant-garde* Originally the advance guard of an army, transferred to writers claiming an advanced position. Baudelaire lists it with poets of combat, then interprets the habit as evidence of discipline and conformity. This reverses the modern reader’s likely expectation that avant-garde automatically implies independence. The entry concerns the military structure of the metaphor and its local criticism, not a comprehensive history of later artistic movements bearing the name. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIII, source pp. 71–72](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f80.item):** Les littérateurs d’avant-garde. ### The man who keeps a mistress {#reg-entertained-mistress} *entreteneur* An entreteneur is the man who financially maintains a mistress. The word ties the passage’s apparent generosity to possession: his pleasures participate in both angelic charity and the property owner’s ferocity. It does not mean an entertainer or an entrepreneur. The supplied edition follows the printed entreteneur rather than a comparison transcription’s entrepreneur, a difference essential to understanding this mixture of benefaction, dependency and domination. **Attestation.** **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item):** Les voluptés de l’entreteneur. ### The man with the itch {#reg-galeux} *galeux* Someone afflicted with scabies, historically called the itch. The speaker refuses to put on that person’s breeches, extending the preceding notion that certain women or an honour’s ribbon become soiled by association. The contamination analogy supplies disgust with a bodily model. No individual’s illness is identified, and the women’s supposed pollution remains the author’s degrading figure rather than a factual medical claim. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LVII, source pp. 68–69](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f77.item):** les culottes d’un galeux. ### The military pope {#reg-military-pope} *pape militaire* A childhood fantasy combining spiritual office with military command, paired with the desire to become an actor. The qualifying but sharpens the imagined pope’s special form of power. Baudelaire calls both images hallucinations and records the pleasures he drew from them. That language describes the remembered intensity of fantasy; it does not by itself establish clinical hallucinations or a real plan to pursue either vocation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCIV, source pp. 92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item):** mais pape militaire. ### The morning apéritif {#reg-aperitif} *apéritif* A pre-meal stimulant or appetizing accompaniment, grotesquely applied to the newspaper’s daily horrors. The morning reader consumes atrocity with breakfast, so moral information becomes part of appetite. The adjective dégoûtant overturns the ordinary promise of an appetizing preparation. This is figurative consumption, not a claim about a particular drink; it makes the respectable routine of reading the news feel bodily contaminating. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIII, source pp. 97–98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f106.item):** ce dégoûtant apéritif. ### The necessary accomplice {#reg-complice} *complice* An accomplice is a participant in wrongdoing. Describing love as a crime makes the need for another person its inconvenience: even an intensely private transgression cannot be performed in complete self-sufficiency. The word also recurs more tenderly when God is sought as the missing accomplice and friend in CI. Its meaning shifts with the relation being imagined; here the emphasis is on dependence within erotic conduct. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LVII, source pp. 68–69](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f77.item):** un crime où l’on ne peut pas se passer d’un complice. ### The nervous idler {#reg-nervous-idler} *paresseux nerveux* A compressed self-characterization joining inactivity to heightened nervous sensitivity. It follows the recollection that horror and ecstasy of life coexisted from childhood. The apparent contradiction matters: a person may be intensely affected without converting that intensity into action. The phrase belongs to historical self-description, not a modern diagnosis, and its sardonic conclusion should not erase the seriousness of the opposed feelings just named. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XCV, source pp. 92](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f101.item):** C’est bien le fait d’un paresseux nerveux. ### The newspaper directors’ list {#reg-press-list} *Texier; Solar; Turgan; Dalloz* A continuation of the notebook’s projected press portraits, ending with Solar assigned first place among its scoundrels. The names establish a polemical field without supplying individual dossiers. The supplied edition does not expand every surname into a conjectural identity or infer misconduct beyond the author’s insult. A useful reading preserves both the professional setting and the difference between an announced attack and evidence that would substantiate it. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIII, source pp. 77–78](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f86.item):** Liste de canailles, Solar en tête. ### The next undertaking {#reg-operation} *opération* An undertaking whose nature depends upon the hypothetical speaker, an usurer or murderer. The word can therefore cover a financial deal or a criminal act without naming one exact procedure. It differs from the explicitly surgical operation in Fusées III. Keeping the breadth is important to the grim joke: the same apparently ordinary petition for success can conceal incompatible and morally appalling projects. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CI, source pp. 96](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f105.item):** ma prochaine opération. ### The opera glass {#reg-opera-glass} *lorgnette* A small optical instrument used to view the stage. Baudelaire imagines looking at the chandelier through either end, enlarging or diminishing the apparent scale. The mundane accessory becomes part of his refusal to accept the human performers as the necessary centre of theatre. The phrase does not describe short-sightedness as a medical condition; it records a deliberate freedom to arrange what counts as the main spectacle. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIX, source pp. 56–57](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f65.item):** la lorgnette. ### The person subjected to punishment {#reg-supplicie} *supplicié* A person undergoing torture or an extreme bodily punishment, here linked to the name Damiens. The supplied edition identifies Robert-François Damiens, executed after his attack on Louis XV. The fragment proposes studying the intoxication of the victim alongside that of blood and crowds. It offers no account of his inner experience, so the proposed topic must not be converted into evidence that he actually felt pleasure or intoxication. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXIX, source pp. 75](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f84.item):** l’ivresse du supplicié. ### The previous government’s atmosphere {#reg-inherited-atmosphere} *atmosphère* The social and moral conditions formed under an earlier regime and inherited by the next. Atmosphère is causal and historical here, rather than the felt setting of a fictional tale. Baudelaire argues that a generation retains the influence experienced in youth, so the merits or faults of a reigning prince cannot be inferred directly from the population under him. He also qualifies the theory: reign boundaries do not exactly delimit influence. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVI, source pp. 86–87](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f95.item):** l’atmosphère du gouvernement précédent. ### The principles of 1789 {#reg-eighty-nine} *[17]89* The equality principle associated with the French Revolution, invoked sarcastically to explain Charpentier’s practice of correcting his authors. The brackets around 17 belong to the printed witness. Baudelaire treats an editor’s intervention as a presumptuous levelling of artistic distinction. This does not prove that the editor explicitly cited the Declaration of Rights; it shows how the notebook recasts a literary grievance through a political slogan. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XLVII, source pp. 61–62](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f70.item):** les immortels principes de [17]89. ### The publishers’ young girl {#reg-young-reader} *jeune fille* The imagined young female reader invoked by publishers and editors as a reason to restrict art. Calling her a scarecrow, monster and murderer of art attacks that censorious function before the passage turns to misogynistic insults about actual young women. The two moves should be distinguished rather than allowing the institutional criticism to excuse the abuse. No particular girl is named, and the passage does not establish an individual biography. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIII, source pp. 83](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f92.item):** La jeune fille des éditeurs. ### The question: judicial torture {#reg-judicial-question} *question* The historical interrogation of a suspect through bodily torture. It is not merely a difficult question or a subject under discussion. Baudelaire compares the cries and convulsions of sexual pleasure with what careful torturers extract from a victim. The later parenthetical equation question (torture) in XLIII confirms the technical sense and helps distinguish judicial cruelty from his broader metaphors of suffering. **Attestation.** **[Fusées III, source pp. 6–8](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f15.item):** la question appliquée par de soigneux tortionnaires. ### The resounding cymbal {#reg-resounding-cymbal} *cymbale retentissante* An allusion to 1 Corinthians 13:1, where impressive expression without love becomes empty noise. Charité includes Christian love rather than almsgiving alone. Within the regimen, the sentence tests eloquence and productivity against duties to other people. The allusion should not be reduced to a general dislike of loud speech: it asks whether outwardly powerful performance possesses the inward and relational quality that makes it meaningful. Primary context: [1 Corinthians 13:1](https://www.aelf.org/bible/1Co/13). **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item):** Sans la charité, je ne suis qu’une cymbale retentissante. ### The romanesque {#reg-romanesque} *romanesque* The adventurous, extraordinary or romance-like quality of a narrative. It should not automatically be equated with the historical Romantic movement. Here it stands beside the marvellous and sorcery among elements not to neglect in drama. The adjoining concern with atmosphere suggests how improbable events may acquire imaginative coherence: their setting must be felt throughout the work rather than supplied as isolated decorative incidents. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XI, source pp. 14–15](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f23.item):** le côté merveilleux, la sorcellerie, et le romanesque. ### The sonnet’s disputed attribution {#reg-sonnet-attribution} *Maynard; Théophile; Malassis* Baudelaire tentatively assigns the sonnet to Maynard, while Malassis, his publisher Poulet-Malassis, assigns it to Théophile. The supplied edition identifies the latter as Théophile de Viau in related correspondence and notes competing attributions elsewhere. The uncertainty is part of the notebook. A reader should not print one name as settled authorship, and should not replace the governing Théophile with Racan merely because another transcription differs. Primary context: [Baudelaire’s question to Sainte-Beuve](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3ABaudelaire_-_Lettres_1841-1866.djvu/358). **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII, source pp. 101–102](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f110.item):** Malassis prétend qu’il est de Théophile. ### The spirit of buffoonery {#reg-buffoonery} *bouffonnerie* A disposition towards clowning, comic exaggeration or mockery. Baudelaire concedes that it can coexist with charity but immediately calls that coexistence rare. The qualification matters: humour is not automatically condemned, yet its enjoyment may detach the joker from another person’s suffering. The phrase names a mental disposition rather than a theatrical genre alone, and measures comedy against a demanding ethical capacity for love. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VI, source pp. 10–11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f19.item):** L’esprit de bouffonnerie. ### The stagecoach {#reg-diligence} *diligence* A stagecoach travelling along the highway, not the abstract virtue of conscientious effort. In the animal caricature, the self-important goose becomes frightened and runs before it. The concrete vehicle is essential to the comedy of the moving scene. Baudelaire shifts from an attributed maxim about mediocrity to the critic’s appearance in the street, making intellectual judgment and personal mockery collide. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXX, source pp. 81–82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f90.item):** devant la diligence. ### The theatre’s contrôle {#reg-ticket-desk} *contrôle* The place where theatre tickets are inspected. It is not theatre criticism or an abstract command over theatrical affairs. For a timid person the desk resembles the tribunal of the Underworld, transforming an ordinary social threshold into a frightening judgment. The scale of the comparison helps explain why Rousseau’s unease upon entering a café can belong beside notes on hallucination and the force of the imagination. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VIII, source pp. 12](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f21.item):** un contrôle de théâtre. ### The unidentified Roland poem {#reg-roland} *Roland* A reminder to quote a poem about Roland, with no text or secure identification provided in the supplied edition. Pièce means a poem or literary piece in this setting, not necessarily a stage play. The familiar name may invite epic associations, but those associations do not identify the intended work. Preserving this limit is more informative than supplying a plausible title that the source never gives. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII, source pp. 101–102](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f110.item):** Citer également la pièce sur Roland. ### The useful man {#reg-useful-man} *homme utile* A person valued for practical service or social utility, an ideal Baudelaire declares hideous. The force lies in his refusal of a standard public measure of worth. This is not identical to saying that he never values productive work: the notebook repeatedly urges work as private discipline and obligation. The distinction is between serving an approved social function and cultivating powers or meeting duties on one’s own terms. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXI, source pp. 51–52](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f60.item):** Être un homme utile. ### The wandering and declassed women {#reg-outcast-women} *errantes; déclassées* Women imagined as wandering and outside their accepted social class or position. Déclassées concerns displacement from social standing, not a modern downgrade in product quality. The paragraph credits their heedlessness with occasional flashes of generosity, then predicts a future in which they too become relentlessly calculating. The terms belong to the author’s social and sexual taxonomy, not to an adequately documented biography of particular women. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** les errantes, les déclassées. ### The warm season {#reg-warm-season} *belle saison* The pleasant or warmer part of the year, rather than one precisely named season. In this tiny colour-note its damp evenings produce green darkness. Belle is part of an ordinary seasonal expression, but the setting is neither simply sunny nor cheerful. The entry records the coexistence of warmth, humidity and obscure colour, showing how a familiar phrase can introduce an unusually charged sensory impression. **Attestation.** **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item):** les soirs humides de la belle saison. ### The writer of newspaper columns {#reg-column-writer} *faiseur de courriers* Courriers are recurring newspaper reports or columns, not postal letters in this setting. The person who produces them is courted by minor writers at famous funerals. They want him to remember and publicize their presence. The memory is therefore his prospective memory of the living opportunists, not simply respectful commemoration of the deceased, a distinction essential to the passage’s satirical social observation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIX, source pp. 89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f98.item):** la mémoire du faiseur de courriers. ### The writer’s enemy, the world {#reg-world-enemy} *monde* Monde here concerns ordinary social existence and its institutions, not simply the physical planet. The sentence interrupts a bare list including society women, prostitutes, judges, sacraments and bureaucrats. Those surroundings give the opposition a broad social reach. The fragment declares a hostile relation without establishing that every literary act must reject all company; elsewhere the notebooks recognize the writer’s circulation of capital and the pleasure of shared experience. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVI, source pp. 79](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f88.item):** L’homme de lettres est l’ennemi du monde. ### Thinking in concert {#reg-in-unison} *de concert* Together or in unison. The lovers believe that their simultaneous pleasure means their minds agree. Baudelaire calls this belief a misunderstanding and insists that the gulf remains unbridged. The idiom does not establish literal singing or attendance at a concert, though the man’s cry and woman’s coo give the exchange an audible dimension. Its importance is the false inference from coordinated feeling to shared meaning. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVII, source pp. 79–80](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f88.item):** ils pensent de concert. ### Throne and altar {#reg-throne-altar} *Le trône et l’autel* A compressed pairing of political sovereignty and religious authority. Calling this familiar alliance a revolutionary maxim reverses the expectation that revolution must oppose both. The fragment offers no further explanation, so it should remain a provocative conjunction rather than be expanded into a complete historical thesis. The surrounding notes concern authority, the Church’s desire to be everything, and the human appetite for worship. **Attestation.** **[Fusées II, source pp. 5–6](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f14.item):** Le trône et l’autel, maxime révolutionnaire. ### To adore or worship {#reg-adorer} *Adorer* Adorer brings religious worship and passionate love into the same semantic field. Its reflexive consequences, sacrificing and prostituting oneself, make love a movement out of self-possession. The following conclusion that all love is prostitution depends upon this widened metaphorical meaning. It is not an assertion that every relationship involves a literal commercial sexual transaction; the paragraph defines the provocative extension for itself. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVII, source pp. 74](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f83.item):** Adorer, c’est se sacrifier et se prostituer. ### To confer distinction {#reg-illustrer} *illustrer* To make illustrious or publicly distinguished. It does not mean drawing an illustration of someone or merely explaining that person by example. Consent to decoration recognizes the authority of a state or ruler to assign value. The verb consequently names a transaction in public status, against which the Dandy’s internally maintained sublimity and the Christian’s humility provide different grounds of resistance. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII, source pp. 48–49](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f57.item):** le droit de vous juger, de vous illustrer. ### To have someone declared incapable {#reg-civil-incapacity} *faire interdire* The old legal sense of interdire is to declare a person incapable of managing person or property. It does not mean simply to forbid citizens to exist or bar them from a building. Baudelaire imagines the law using financial failure itself as grounds for incapacity. The grotesque future reverses moral priorities: inability to make a fortune becomes a defect requiring institutional intervention. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** fera interdire les citoyens. ### To Honfleur {#reg-honfleur} *Honfleur* The destination of an urgent wish to change circumstances before sinking further. The supplied edition notes that Baudelaire’s mother lived there after 1857. Place is consequently tied to family and hoped-for reform, not an interchangeable scenic backdrop. The exclamation announces an intended move or retreat; by itself it does not establish that the journey occurred or that all subsequent projected work was completed there. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CX, source pp. 103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item):** A Honfleur ! ### To merge with another {#reg-merge} *se confondre* To mingle or fuse so completely that separate identities seem to disappear. It does not mean being confused about the other person. Love seeks this fusion while still wishing to retain the privileges of a conqueror. The verb consequently names an unstable aspiration: the lover desires union with the victim without surrendering the unequal position that made that person a victim. **Attestation.** **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item):** se confondre avec sa victime. ### Toilette {#reg-toilette} *Toilette; toilette* Washing, grooming, adornment and dress, including the preparation of the outward person. It is not the modern English toilet as a sanitary fixture. Baudelaire proposes studying both its morality and its pleasures, making self-presentation part of conduct. In the final regimen it appears beside prayer and work. The same term can thus designate aesthetic cultivation and everyday bodily order without those uses becoming identical. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXII, source pp. 77](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f86.item):** Moralité de la toilette, les bonheurs de la toilette. ### Transferred epithet {#reg-epithet} *Épithète; Ciel tragique* A descriptive adjective belonging to an abstract register transferred to a physical thing. Tragic sky is the example Baudelaire supplies. The note identifies its own poetic operation: the sky is made expressive of a human or dramatic condition without ceasing to be material. It is therefore a small piece of working poetics, useful for reading other moments when atmosphere seems to carry moral or emotional life. **Attestation.** **[Fusées VII, source pp. 11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f20.item):** Épithète d’un ordre abstrait appliquée à un être matériel. ### Unity becoming duality {#reg-unity-duality} *unité; dualité* A proposed definition of the Fall that turns theological blame towards creation itself: if falling means unity becoming two, then the act of creating may be God’s fall. The conditional if is essential. Baudelaire poses a speculative challenge rather than supplying a finished doctrine or an orthodox explanation. The vocabulary lets the reader track the logical provocation without silently treating the hypothesis as an established premise. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LV, source pp. 67–68](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f76.item):** l’unité devenue dualité. ### Universal conceit {#reg-fatuitous} *fatuité* Self-satisfied vanity or conceit, extended across classes, genders and ages in the speaker’s exasperation. The word does not primarily mean fate or fatality. Its sweeping distribution makes retreat from social irritation seem nearly impossible. The fragment’s generality is itself expressive of disgust; it should be read as an indictment from a particular irritated perspective rather than an independently verified psychological description of everyone. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LVIII, source pp. 69](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f78.item):** la fatuité universelle. ### Unresolved project names {#reg-unfinished-projects} *Silvestre; Barbora; Levaillant* Silvestre, Barbora and Levaillant occur as very short reminders whose underlying projects or identities the supplied edition has not securely established. The unusual comédia and the name Barbora follow the governing print. A lexicon should make the fragments legible without supplying missing anecdotes. The neighbouring directives suggest plans for literary treatment, but they do not authorize a single reconstructed story joining all three names. **Attestation.** **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item):** Mon vœu à Levaillant. ### Usher and narrative atmosphere {#reg-usher} *Usher* Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, invoked as a model for a story steeped in its surroundings. The supplied edition points to the tale’s oppressive atmosphere and its apparent effect on the inhabitants. The reference is compressed because the notebook is giving a working instruction, not summarizing the story. Hashish and opium enter beside it as comparisons for the depth of sensations, not as proof of a single compositional source. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XI, source pp. 14–15](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f23.item):** Voir Usher. ### Using time {#reg-using-time} *s’en servant* The pronoun en refers back to time: one can forget it only by making use of it. The claim follows a comparison between pleasure that consumes strength and work that strengthens it. It does not promise that work stops chronological passage. Instead, purposeful occupation alters the felt pressure of time, turning the same resource that overwhelms the person into something actively employed. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXI, source pp. 103–104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item):** On ne peut oublier le temps qu’en s’en servant. ### Usurers and divine complicity {#reg-usurer} *usuriers* People who lend at oppressive or excessive interest, paired with murderers as morally compromised petitioners. Their possible prayers test whether God’s availability to everyone diminishes the speaker’s own prayer. He says it does not. The hypothetical peut-être matters: the fragment invents an example rather than reporting a particular lender’s confession. God as accomplice is a troubling relational metaphor, not proof of divine endorsement of criminal aims. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CI, source pp. 96](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f105.item):** Il y a peut-être des usuriers et des assassins. ### Vanity’s moxas {#reg-moxa} *moxas* Moxas are combustible medicinal materials burned in cautery. In the satire on Hugo they replace the grand mythical wound inflicted upon Prometheus: what torments the poet is vanity’s comparatively self-regarding irritation. The unfamiliar medical noun makes the mockery materially sharp. It describes a figurative source of suffering, not a claim that Hugo underwent a documented medical procedure or suffered the mythic punishment literally. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item):** les moxas de la vanité. ### Veuillot and hostility to art {#reg-veuillot} *Veuillot* Louis Veuillot, identified by the supplied edition as the journalist, becomes an example of religious commitment joined to hostility towards art. The following claims about the pure idea and extreme humility may develop this problem, though the reminder does not securely name the portrait to be expanded. The definition keeps that limit visible rather than turning adjacent fragments into a fully continuous biographical analysis. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXV, source pp. 78–79](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f87.item):** Veuillot est si grossier et si ennemi des arts. ### Virtue as efficacy {#reg-virtue-power} *vertu* The effective power or efficacy of the sacraments, not only moral goodness. The heading follows a projected philosophical demonstration of amulets and a treatise on moral dynamics. Its question concerns what practices and objects can do to or through the person. Recognizing this historical sense prevents the discussion from collapsing into a simple declaration that sacraments are morally virtuous acts. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIV, source pp. 98](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f107.item):** De la vertu des sacrements. ### Voltaire’s Chesterfield tale {#reg-chesterfield} *Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield* The supplied edition identifies Voltaire’s tale, in which an anatomist mocks an immaterial soul’s supposed residence in the womb. Baudelaire answers that bodily location through Providence’s satire and original sin. The notebook is therefore not simply reproducing Voltaire’s thought approvingly. It takes a materialist joke and redirects its evidence, claiming that the same bodily facts can support an opposite theological interpretation. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LII, source pp. 66](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f75.item):** Dans Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield. ### Vérole {#reg-verole} *vérole* The historical unqualified term for syphilis, as distinguished in the supplied edition from petite vérole, smallpox. The adjective première makes the acquisition sound like an achievement in the grotesque comparison with a writer’s first proof. The lexicon explains a period term and a satirical analogy; the passage does not diagnose the unnamed schoolboy or provide medical instruction about the disease. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXI, source pp. 76](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f85.item):** sa première vérole. ### Weariness of life {#reg-taedium} *Tædium vitæ* The Latin expression means weariness or disgust with life. As a separate final line, it condenses the preceding references to suicide, troubled minds and monastic acedia without making them identical. The supplied English chooses weariness of life, retaining the existential scope. It is a topic for reflection and reading in the notebook, not an explicit statement of immediate intention or a precise medical category. **Attestation.** **[Fusées XIV, source pp. 17–18](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item):** Le Tædium vitæ. ### Work from inclination or despair {#reg-inclination-despair} *par goût; par désespoir* Goût means an inclination or taste for the activity. The alternative motive, despair, makes work available even when spontaneous pleasure is absent. The concluding comparison is deliberately modest: work is less boring than amusement. This is a practical hierarchy of discomfort rather than the claim that every task will be enjoyable, and it anticipates later efforts to produce a taste for work by repeatedly beginning it. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XL, source pp. 57](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f66.item):** sinon par goût, au moins par désespoir. ### Work left to the neighbours {#reg-besogne} *besogne* The work or task one ought to do oneself. Baudelaire defines belief in progress as relying on neighbours to perform it, making an abstract historical doctrine into a domestic excuse for laziness. Besogne is more ordinary and workmanlike than a heroic mission. The word helps reveal why the paragraph insists that true progress must happen in and through each individual’s activity. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXVII, source pp. 55](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f64.item):** faire sa besogne. ### Working without self-interest {#reg-disinterested-work} *désintéressée* Working without making immediate gain the controlling motive, paradoxically presented as the only way to earn money. It does not mean unpaid work in every case, nor indifference to the needs of mother and Jeanne that open the section. The phrase tries to separate sustained productive attention from anxious calculation. Its paradox belongs beside the earlier critique of commerce, while preserving the practical necessity of income. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item):** travailler d’une manière désintéressée. ### À jeun {#reg-empty-stomach} *à jeun* On an empty stomach. The phrase belongs to a projected morning working schedule from six until noon. It should not be generalized into medical advice or treated as proof that this regimen was followed. Its local role is practical and ascetic: the speaker wants to place an uninterrupted block of work before competing bodily or social demands, amid plans for income and responsibility to loved people. **Attestation.** **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item):** de six heures du matin, à jeun, à midi. # Contextual phrase glosses {#contextual-glosses} The glosses explain selected constructions, images and idioms in source order. They complement the articles and register; their reuse of familiar words does not create additional unique lexical families. ### The Hunter’s missing anecdote {#gloss-hunter-reminder} **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** *Anecdote du Chasseur, relative à la liaison intime de la férocité et de l’amour.* Supplied translation: “Anecdote of the Hunter, concerning the intimate connection between ferocity and love.” Chasseur names the Hunter, capitalized in the governing print, while relative à specifies the connection the anecdote is meant to illuminate. The proposed story would make violence and affection appear closely related rather than neatly opposed. The anecdote itself is absent, and neither the capitalization nor the thematic resemblance to later scenes securely identifies its source. It should therefore not be replaced by the pistol-doll incident or a conjectural story. What the note does establish is a desired use of narrative: an example is to give experiential force to the earlier aphorisms about generosity, possession and conquest. ### Even if God did not exist {#gloss-even-if-god} **[Fusées I, source pp. 3–5](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f12.item).** *Quand même Dieu n’existerait pas, la religion serait encore sainte et divine.* Supplied translation: “Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine.” Quand même introduces a concessive hypothesis; the conditional forms keep nonexistence within an imagined situation. The sentence does not straightforwardly assert that God does not exist. Its claim is that religion’s sacred character survives even the strongest imagined objection to its supernatural ground. The next aphorism makes God the one being who need not exist in order to reign, developing the distinction between existence and efficacy. Both sentences invite attention to powers of imagination, authority and human devotion. Their paradox should remain active: replacing them with either a simple profession of faith or a simple atheistic declaration removes the relation they are testing. ### The Church’s femininity as power {#gloss-feminine-church} **[Fusées II, source pp. 5–6](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f14.item).** *De la féminité de l’Église, comme raison de son omni-puissance.* Supplied translation: “On the femininity of the Church as the reason for its omnipotence.” The heading proposes an explanatory relationship, not merely a decorative comparison. Something designated feminine would account for the Church’s capacity to act upon people and encompass their lives. The following violet, veiled love, imagination and adored authority supply possible elements, but the promised argument is not written out. The proposition should remain in tension with LXXI’s question about how women could converse with God. Femininity can be credited with institutional religious power while actual women are excluded by a misogynistic claim elsewhere. Harmonizing the two into a single consistent doctrine would conceal how differently the notebooks deploy gender across images and arguments. ### Chenavard’s superhuman type {#gloss-chenavard-type} **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item).** *Chenavard a créé un type surhumain.* Supplied translation: “Chenavard has created a superhuman type.” Type means a formed model or characteristic embodiment; surhumain places it above ordinary human scale or capacity. The sentence credits artistic creation rather than announcing the biological existence of a new kind of person. It is an evaluative judgment in the midst of project reminders. No particular work, figure or visual feature is identified in the sentence. A reader can see that the author values the possibility of constructing an exceptional form, but cannot responsibly supply its anatomy, symbolism or relation to a later theory from this note alone. The compressed compliment is an aesthetic prompt with its evidential limits still intact. ### Frankness as a means of originality {#gloss-frankness-originality} **[Fusées IV, source pp. 9](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f18.item).** *La franchise absolue, moyen d’originalité.* Supplied translation: “Absolute frankness, a means to originality.” Franchise means candour, the refusal to conceal what one thinks or feels. The claim is instrumental: candour can produce a distinctive voice. It does not simply say that an already original person happens to be honest, nor does it promise that everything confessed will be factually accurate. The notebook form is well suited to testing the proposal, because assertions can be recorded before they are made acceptable to an audience. Yet the phrasing also makes frankness a literary technique. A candid performance may aim at an artistic effect, so the fragment need not force a choice between unmediated sincerity and deliberate self-fashioning. ### Enthusiasm reserved for abstractions {#gloss-enthusiasm-abstraction} **[Fusées VI, source pp. 10–11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f19.item).** *L’enthousiasme qui s’applique à autre chose que les abstractions, est un signe de faiblesse et de maladie.* Supplied translation: “Enthusiasm directed at anything other than abstractions is a sign of weakness and disease.” The restrictive autre chose que excludes concrete objects of attachment from legitimate enthusiasm. The sentence privileges devotion to ideas while pathologizing the emotional investment that ordinary life often celebrates. This remains a polemical assertion in a notebook, not a psychological finding. Its extremity becomes clearer beside the numerous sensuous pleasures the surrounding fragments describe. The text repeatedly values bodily and imaginative intensity while also seeking an ideal standpoint uncontaminated by particular objects. The contradiction should be read rather than cured by making enthusiasm mean only an already disapproved excess. ### More naked than nakedness {#gloss-thinness-nudity} **[Fusées VI, source pp. 10–11](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f19.item).** *La maigreur est plus nue, plus indécente que la graisse.* Supplied translation: “Thinness is more naked, more indecent than fatness.” Nudity is ordinarily an absence of clothing, not a quality that increases or decreases with bodily size. The comparative makes the body’s own substance function like a covering: flesh can conceal the structure that leanness exposes. The fragment gives an aesthetic perception and a provocative hierarchy of exposure, not nutritional advice or a universal standard of bodily worth. Indecency intensifies the effect of visibility into discomfort. Its proximity to notes about erotic estrangement and abstraction encourages attention to how seeing a body can become a judgment, while no particular person or scene is named. ### The real face eclipsed by its own image {#gloss-eclipsed-real-face} **[Fusées VIII, source pp. 12](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f21.item).** *l’éclipse de l’image réelle par l’hallucination qui en tire sa naissance* Supplied translation: “the real image being eclipsed by the hallucination born of it.” The pronoun en refers to the actual image from which the hallucination arises. The error is therefore not entirely independent of perception: something seen generates an imaginative image that then hides its source. The sentence explains mistakes about faces through that reversal of dependence. A face may become less recognizable precisely because it has stirred a powerful response. The word eclipse keeps an underlying reality in place while describing its obstruction. It does not require the reader to diagnose a particular clinical disorder or identify the unnamed person whose face prompted the reflection. ### Many friends, many gloves {#gloss-friends-gloves} **[Fusées X, source pp. 13–14](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f22.item).** *Beaucoup d’amis, beaucoup de gants.* Supplied translation: “Many friends, many gloves.” The balanced phrase initially resembles a worldly maxim: greater sociability requires more equipment for its formal gestures. XVII’s recurrence adds fear of scabies, disclosing a hostile hygiene beneath the apparent elegance. Gloves become barriers against the contact that friendship normally invites. The bodily contagion is a metaphor for the danger or disgust of association, not a report that the named friends had a disease. Its relation to the armoured skins nearby is revealing. One image prevents contempt from entering another person; the other prevents touch from reaching the speaker. Social relations are imagined through defensive surfaces on both sides. ### Despised versus despicable {#gloss-despised-respectable} **[Fusées X, source pp. 13–14](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f22.item).** *je dirais même méprisables, si je tenais à flatter les honnêtes gens.* Supplied translation: “I would even say despicable, if I cared to flatter respectable people.” Méprisés means held in contempt; méprisables means deserving contempt. Baudelaire first says that those who loved him were despised and then makes the stronger moral judgment conditional upon flattering the respectable. The distinction prevents a common misreading. He is not straightforwardly endorsing society’s condemnation of his friends. He stages the language he would have to adopt in order to please a socially approved audience. Respectability consequently becomes suspect, because its favour requires turning an observed condition, being despised, into an assertion about the victim’s intrinsic worth. ### The whipper as benefactor {#gloss-coercive-benefactor} **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item).** *cet homme, le fouetteur, ne serait-il pas vraiment son ami, son bienfaiteur* Supplied translation: “would that man, the whipper, not truly be his friend, his benefactor?” The hypothetical tormentor forces the procrastinating man to work through fear until pleasure might arrive afterward. Benefactor is a deliberate moral reversal: violence is evaluated through the improvement it supposedly produces rather than the suffering it immediately causes. The following political analogy explicitly calls the man who whips and kills the people a true saint acting for their good. That lethal extension must remain visible; reducing the passage to cheerful advice about discipline would falsify its force. The lexicon describes the coercive argument and its extremity without endorsing abuse as friendship or political violence as salvation. ### Words that shriek when joined {#gloss-words-shriek} **[Fusées XII, source pp. 15–16](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f24.item).** *si ces mots ne hurlent pas [d’être accouplés ensemble]* Supplied translation: “if these words do not shriek [at being coupled together]” The source brackets belong to the printed French, and the supplied English carries their supplementary status. The words in question bring hallucination into contact with pure reasoning. Their imagined cry marks the possibility that the combination violates ordinary conceptual boundaries. Baudelaire does not stop at the apparent contradiction. The parenthetical objection lets him state the difficulty while still asking whether hallucination could invade mathematics. Personifying language makes logical resistance audible. This is a useful example of the notebooks thinking through a strained formulation rather than presenting each unusual pairing as a doctrine already resolved. ### The giant’s broad smile {#gloss-giant-smile} **[Fusées XIII, source pp. 17](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f26.item).** *Grand sourire dans un beau visage de géant.* Supplied translation: “Broad smile on a giant’s beautiful face.” The note records an image without identifying the face, a setting or a finished story. Grand modifies the smile, while beau grants the immense figure beauty rather than automatically making the giant monstrous. The fragment’s effect depends on the concentration of expression and scale. Its position after Banville’s luminosity and the command to write beyond earthly concerns makes a happy or enlarging visual possibility available, but does not prove that it portrays Banville. The entry should preserve the image’s openness. It belongs to the notebooks’ store of perceived or imagined forms, which cannot all be reduced to an explicit philosophical proposition. ### Leaving room for conjecture {#gloss-scope-conjecture} **[Fusées XVI, source pp. 18–20](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f27.item).** *laissant carrière à la conjecture* Supplied translation: “leaving room for conjecture.” Donner or laisser carrière grants room to move, originally suggestive of an open course; carrière does not mean a professional career here. The beauty described is a little vague and therefore allows the observer’s speculation to continue beyond what is directly visible. That openness is not a defect awaiting a final factual answer. It helps make the face seductive, because sadness, desire, regret or frustrated power can be imagined without being fully disclosed. The phrase connects aesthetic richness to incomplete knowledge. It should not be replaced by certainty about the beautiful person’s actual experiences or by a fixed symbolic code for each facial feature. ### A leg outlined against sunset {#gloss-sunset-leg} **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** *qu’elle dessinât nettement son contour sur le soleil couchant* Supplied translation: “in such a position that it would clearly trace its outline against the setting sun!” The lover asks permission to kiss the woman’s leg and uses the situation to arrange a visible contour. Dessinât gives the body the action of drawing its own line; nettement values sharpness and clarity against the luminous background. The scene combines tenderness, opportunity and artistic positioning. The beloved’s body is not only touched but composed as a visual effect, while the narrator’s phrase profitait de la circonstance makes the manoeuvre calculated. No named person or completed narrative context is supplied. Its local importance lies in the transformation of an intimate act into a deliberately framed image. ### An air of looking inward {#gloss-looking-inward} **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** *L’air de regarder en dedans* Supplied translation: “The air of looking inward,” Air means appearance or bearing: the observer sees a look suggestive of interior absorption, not the mind itself. En dedans supplies the direction of an attention that appears withdrawn from the surrounding world. The phrase stands among jaded, cold, domineering, malicious and sickly airs, making beauty a reading of expressive surfaces. It is important not to convert that catalogue into reliable personality assessment. A manner can provoke an imaginative response without transparently revealing an inner state. The charming effect may arise precisely from the distance between what is visible and what cannot be known. ### A catalogue of feminine airs {#gloss-feminine-airs-catalogue} **[Fusées XVII, source pp. 21–27](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f30.item).** *Les airs charmants, et qui font la beauté, sont :* Supplied translation: “The charming airs that make beauty are:” The catalogue proceeds through the jaded, bored, flighty, impudent and cold, then the inward-looking, dominating, determined, malicious and sickly. It ends with the catlike, which mixes childishness, nonchalance and mischief. These are manners or perceived expressions, not a list of verified biographies. The pattern refuses to equate beauty with agreeable innocence or cheerful availability. Withdrawal, hostility, power and vulnerability can all stir attraction, while the final mixture shows that an air may combine apparently incompatible qualities. Because air designates appearance, the list also preserves uncertainty about whether the person possesses the inward condition suggested. The observer’s imaginative response helps constitute the beauty being classified. ### Ancestors as victims of passion {#gloss-ancestral-passions} **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** *Mes ancêtres, idiots ou maniaques, dans des appartements solennels, tous victimes de terribles passions.* Supplied translation: “My ancestors, idiots or maniacs, in solemn apartments, all victims of terrible passions.” The image joins family ancestry to imposing interiors and mental or emotional extremity. The solemnity of the rooms gives the group a dignified frame, while victims undermines any easy celebration of inherited grandeur. This is an imaginative family tableau, not a verified medical genealogy. The historical labels idiots and maniaques should not become diagnoses of identified relatives. What is securely present is the speaker’s view of inheritance as exposure to overpowering passions. The room’s grave formality and the individuals’ vulnerability coexist, making lineage both theatrical and troubling. ### Reverie through line and perspective {#gloss-national-visual-modes} **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** *L’Allemagne exprime la rêverie par la ligne, comme l’Angleterre par la perspective.* Supplied translation: “Germany expresses reverie through line, as England does through perspective.” Two visual resources are assigned to national artistic temperaments: the contour or movement of line, and the depth or recession supplied by perspective. The common subject, reverie, matters as much as the contrast between means. The note supplies no artist or particular work, so it should not be expanded into a comprehensive national art history. Its useful proposition is that a comparable inward experience may take different formal shapes. It also links dreaming to graphic construction, preparing the reader to notice how ships, arabesques and the sea make mental states intelligible through visible relations. ### Paying for permission to spend {#gloss-pay-to-spend} **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** *où l’on paye pour avoir le droit de dépenser* Supplied translation: “where one pays for the right to spend” Public latrines and women are coupled through a degrading joke about payment followed by bodily expenditure. Dépenser keeps the financial sense active while allowing the body’s evacuation or sexual spending to enter the comparison. The play of meanings depends on distinguishing the entrance payment from the subsequent act; otherwise the remark becomes a banal observation that both things can cost money. Its reduction of women to a purchasable bodily outlet is part of the author’s misogynistic rhetoric. The lexicon explains the pun without presenting its classification of women as a neutral account of intimacy. ### Spain’s religious ferocity {#gloss-spain-love-religion} **[Fusées XVIII, source pp. 27–29](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f36.item).** *L’Espagne met dans la religion la férocité naturelle de l’amour.* Supplied translation: “Spain puts the natural ferocity of love into religion.” The sentence transfers an intensity from erotic life to religious life, making ferocity a bridge between domains often opposed as bodily and spiritual. Nature is not an automatic recommendation here: elsewhere what is natural is repeatedly implicated in cruelty and selfishness. The national claim is a broad cultural characterization, with no particular practice, artwork or event supplied as evidence. Its value for reading is the proposed structure of feeling, not its reliability as a description of every Spanish believer. It belongs beside the linkage of love with torture and the Church’s association with imagination, while remaining a separate, sharply compressed proposition. ### The mother called fantastique {#gloss-fantastic-mother} **[Fusées XX, source pp. 29–30](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item).** *Ma mère est fantastique ; il faut la craindre et lui plaire.* Supplied translation: “My mother is capricious; she must be feared and pleased.” Fantastique here concerns changeability or whimsical unpredictability, as the two practical consequences show. Translating it as simply wonderful, or assigning the sentence to the supernatural genre of the fantastic, would miss the interpersonal difficulty. The balanced verbs craindre and plaire make the relationship a double demand: anticipate possible displeasure while seeking approval. The phrase is the speaker’s compressed appraisal, not a complete account of his mother’s character. The later prayers and financial plans complicate it with devotion and responsibility, so the isolated sentence should not be allowed to stand as the whole relationship. ### Raw colouring and deeply recut drawing {#gloss-raw-colouring} **[Fusées XX, source pp. 29–30](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f38.item).** *Coloriage cru, dessin profondément retaillé.* Supplied translation: “Raw colouring, drawing deeply recut.” Cru suggests colour left strong, unsoftened or harsh rather than delicately moderated. Retaillé gives drawing the pressure of cutting again or cutting deeply into a contour. The two compressed instructions privilege force of effect over smoothness. No painting, print or specific technique is named, so the line should not be converted into a finished art-historical programme. Its usefulness is as a pair of sensory and formal directives placed among literary tones. Visual qualities can become resources for thinking about style, but the reader must distinguish that possible transfer from an explicit claim that the author has already made it. ### Too depleted even for idolatry {#gloss-unworthy-idolaters} **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** *vous ne vaudrez même plus assez pour être idolâtres.* Supplied translation: “you will no longer be worthy even of being idolaters.” Addressed to supposedly civilized peoples and attributed to d’Aurevilly, the prediction reverses a hierarchy in which idolatry is automatically inferior to modern enlightenment. The ability to worship an idol becomes evidence of a remaining imaginative or spiritual energy that civilization may lose. The passage does not endorse every historical practice of idolatry or supply the exact external source of d’Aurevilly’s saying. Its target is complacent contempt for peoples called savage or barbarian. In the later prophecy, even catastrophic adventure would retain more life than commercial spiritual atrophy; this short taunt establishes a comparable distinction between erroneous vitality and exhausted self-satisfaction. ### Pontmartin arriving from the provinces {#gloss-provincial-pontmartin} **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** *un homme qui a toujours l’air d’arriver de sa province* Supplied translation: “M. de Pontmartin—a man who always looks as though he has just arrived from his province…” The repeated freshness of arrival makes provinciality a permanent air or manner rather than a single journey. Baudelaire attacks an appearance of cultural displacement, as though the person never quite ceased to be newly out of place. The note names the critic Armand de Pontmartin but supplies no occasion, article or behaviour beyond this impression. It is consequently a social caricature, not evidence of a verified travel itinerary. The distinction between a visible air and the individual’s actual origins matters: the sentence’s force lies in the cultivated observer’s judgment and its deliberately reducing economy. ### Resenting a reasonable hierarchy {#gloss-hierarchy-resentment} **[Fusées XXII, source pp. 32–42](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f41.item).** *il souffre moins de l’abaissement universel que de l’établissement d’une hiérarchie raisonnable.* Supplied translation: “he suffers less from universal abasement than from the establishment of a reasonable hierarchy.” The comparison says that people would rather share degradation than accept an order that places some above others. Reasonable is the speaker’s evaluative word: the sentence assumes a justified ranking, then reads resentment of it as evidence of depravity. The claim concerns comparative suffering, not the assertion that universal abasement is painless. It belongs to the attack on levelling social impulses, but offers no concrete test by which the proposed hierarchy could be recognized as reasonable. Preserving that unproved premise allows the reader to understand the polemic without turning its preferred rank order into an objective fact. ### Christian humility forbids the cross {#gloss-humility-forbids} **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII, source pp. 48–49](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f57.item).** *l’humilité chrétienne défend la croix* Supplied translation: “Besides, if pride does not forbid the cross, Christian humility does.” Défendre can mean forbid as well as defend. In the present argument it prohibits accepting the decoration, rather than protecting the Christian cross against attack. The surrounding sentences have established that the cross is the Legion of Honour insignia. The logic offers two routes to refusal. Pride may reject another authority’s right to assign the individual’s value; humility may reject an outward distinction that elevates the self. The sentence is striking because apparently opposed dispositions converge on the same action. Translating défend as defends would invert that action and dissolve the argument’s carefully staged paradox. ### Paganism and Christianity prove one another {#gloss-prove-reciprocally} **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIII, source pp. 49–50](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f58.item).** *Le paganisme et le christianisme prouvent réciproquement.* Supplied translation: “Paganism and Christianity prove one another.” The governing print omits the reflexive se that might make the reciprocal construction more explicit. The supplied English makes its elliptical relation intelligible without changing the French witness. What each tradition proves is not itemized. The neighbouring mysticism, sacrifice and superstition suggest that forms rejected as incompatible may support a shared underlying religious capacity or truth. That is a contextual inference, not an established comprehensive doctrine. The sentence should therefore remain a compressed proposal about reciprocity, rather than be expanded into the claim that every pagan and Christian proposition is logically identical. ### If everything natural is legitimate {#gloss-natural-legitimate} **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXX, source pp. 50–51](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f59.item).** *Goût légitime, si tout ce qui est naturel est légitime.* Supplied translation: “A legitimate taste, if everything natural is legitimate.” The condition controls the apparent approval. Baudelaire has just named the taste for destruction; he now tests the premise that naturalness supplies moral authorization. Without the if-clause the line could misleadingly sound like an uncomplicated endorsement of destructive pleasure. The surrounding descriptions of vengeance, crime and the madness of both people and bourgeoisie put pressure on that premise. The sentence can expose the difficulty in praising nature indiscriminately, without requiring a fully elaborated philosophical argument. Its usefulness is logical as much as lexical: an apparently affirmative adjective can become a challenge when the condition supporting it is made explicit. ### Robespierre’s fine phrases {#gloss-robespierre-phrases} **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXI, source pp. 51–52](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f60.item).** *Robespierre n’est estimable que parce qu’il a fait quelques belles phrases.* Supplied translation: “Robespierre is worthy of esteem only because he produced a few fine phrases.” The restrictive ne…que reduces political esteem to the quality of expression, and quelques limits even that concession. Baudelaire makes rhetorical achievement the surviving value of a figure ordinarily judged through revolutionary action and principle. The aphorism does not name the phrases or offer an overall historical defence. Its place after the ridicule of 1848’s utopias sharpens the detachment from public usefulness. Language can receive praise while political accomplishment is withheld. The sentence therefore demonstrates an aesthetic redistribution of value, rather than providing evidence that the author endorses Robespierre’s entire programme. ### Having no convictions, then some {#gloss-convictions-qualified} **[Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIII, source pp. 52–53](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f61.item).** *Cependant j’ai quelques convictions, dans un sens plus élevé* Supplied translation: “Yet I have some convictions, in a higher sense, one that cannot be understood by the people of my time.” Cependant qualifies the earlier declaration that the speaker has no convictions in his contemporaries’ sense. The apparent reversal depends on a change in what the word conviction means, from ambition-driven certainty to a form the speaker claims his age cannot understand. The fragment does not enumerate those higher convictions. It distinguishes kinds of commitment while making worldly success depend on the brigand’s determination. A reader should resist simplifying the passage into either total nihilism or a complete positive creed. The self-protective claim of being misunderstood is part of its rhetorical posture as well as its stated intellectual distinction. ### Art as a civilizing agent {#gloss-civilizing-art} **[Mon cœur mis à nu LIX, source pp. 69–70](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f78.item).** *L’art est un agent civilisateur (Castagnary).* Supplied translation: “Art is a civilizing agent (Castagnary).” Agent means an active means or force producing change, so the proposition gives art an instrumental social role. Castagnary is the printed attribution; the supplied edition has not established its exact original occasion. The notebook records the phrase beside remembered discourses and their claims. It would be misleading to repeat it as Baudelaire’s settled aesthetic doctrine. Elsewhere he rejects the ideal of the useful man and challenges automatic progress, making this attributed slogan a potential object of scrutiny. The one-line reminder does not specify whether he plans to ridicule, qualify or develop it, so the gloss preserves both its intelligible claim and its unresolved treatment. ### A marked repair in the dictator sentence {#gloss-glory-repair} **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXVI, source pp. 73](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f82.item).** *et la gloire et le résultat* The governing French prints “and glory and the result” at this point. The supplied English reads “and glory ⟨is⟩ the result”, marking its replacement of the second et by the copula needed for a coherent proposition. The French witness remains unchanged. The repaired sense makes political glory arise from the fit between an individual mind and national stupidity. That interpretation is persuasive in context, but the edition appropriately distinguishes a readable correction from an authorial text securely established by the witness. A lexicon should carry the claim and the textual caution together, rather than reproduce the error as meaningful syntax or conceal the intervention. ### Humility that refuses understanding {#gloss-fanatic-humility} **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXV, source pp. 78–79](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f87.item).** *Fanatisme de l’humilité. Ne pas même aspirer à comprendre la religion.* Supplied translation: “Fanaticism of humility. Not even to aspire to understand religion.” Humility is intensified until the very wish to understand appears presumptuous. The fragment moves beyond obedience in conduct towards renunciation of intellectual aspiration, making a traditionally virtuous disposition potentially extreme. Its juxtaposition with Veuillot’s hostility to art and the supremacy of the pure idea gives it a critical pressure, but the brief note does not explicitly identify every target or complete a settled judgment. It matters because other passages seek religious reasoning, dynamic prayer and an expansive universal religion. The notebook therefore contains competing forms of religious discipline rather than a uniform preference for unquestioning submission. ### Judging oneself by denying immortality {#gloss-justice-immortality} **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXX, source pp. 81–82](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f90.item).** *Ceux qui ne croient pas à l’immortalité de leur être se rendent justice.* Supplied translation: “Those who do not believe in the immortality of their being pass a just judgment on themselves.” Se rendre justice can mean accurately appraising one’s worth. The sting is that disbelief becomes an unwitting acknowledgment of being unworthy of immortality, rather than an impersonal conclusion about all souls. The saying is attributed to Robespierre by Baudelaire; the supplied edition has not verified its original occasion. Placed beside Saint-Marc Girardin’s supposed call to mediocrity, it creates a contrast between aspiration towards enduring greatness and a self-limiting estimate. The lexicon can explain that irony without adding an explicit divine punishment or treating the attribution as independently settled. ### The domesticated farmyard animal {#gloss-barnyard-france} **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXV, source pp. 84–85](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f93.item).** *Le Français est un animal de basse-cour si bien domestiqué qu’il n’ose franchir aucune palissade.* Supplied translation: “The Frenchman is a farmyard animal so thoroughly domesticated that he dares not cross any fence.” Domestiqué suggests being tamed into habitual dependence; the palisade becomes the limit that convention has taught the creature not to challenge. The next instruction directs the reader to artistic and literary taste as the evidence. The image attacks the contradiction between proclaimed national independence and frightened conformity. It is a generalizing insult, not an empirical description of every French reader. The following scatological attack extends the farmyard’s degradation in a different direction: obedience and appetite for filth coexist, so conventional boundaries do not amount to refinement or moral discrimination. ### Spelling under the executioner’s hand {#gloss-spelling-executioner} **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII, source pp. 87–88](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f96.item).** *Je mettrais l’orthographe même sous la main du bourreau.* Translation in the supplied edition: “I would spell correctly even under the executioner’s hand.” Mettre l’orthographe concerns observing correct spelling, not physically placing a dictionary beside a torturer. Même and the extreme setting make fidelity to verbal form survive the strongest imagined pressure. The notebook attributes the remark to Théophile Gautier, but the supplied edition has not independently verified its original occasion. In context it appears beside hostility to people who quote, making care for language part of a resistance to the literary present. It is an attributed maxim of stylistic tenacity, not a documented account of Gautier undergoing execution or torture. ### The treasury of pleasure, not a silent variant {#gloss-volupte-witness} **[Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII, source pp. 88–89](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f97.item).** *le trésor variable de la volupté* Supplied translation: “the fluctuating treasury of sensual pleasure.” The governing print reads volupté, whereas the comparison transcription has volonté, will. Both would connect readily with the notebook’s interest in cumulative powers, which makes the difference especially easy to overlook. This edition follows volupté and therefore extends the law of gradual development to enjoyment as well as artistic skill. Variable prevents the treasure from appearing a permanently fixed possession; its richness can alter. Importing volonté would replace this erotic or sensuous application with a moral faculty. The variant should be acknowledged without pretending the present witness permits its authorial history to be settled. ### Printing as an obstacle to beauty {#gloss-printing-beauty} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CV, source pp. 99](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f108.item).** *De l’infamie de l’imprimerie, grand obstacle au développement du Beau.* Supplied translation: “On the infamy of printing, a great obstacle to the development of the Beautiful.” Imprimerie names the practice or institution of printing, not merely the particular National Printing Office mentioned in LXVI. The proposition treats a means of circulating literature as something capable of hindering artistic value. The note supplies no causal argument, so it should not be completed with a confidently attributed theory of mass production, commercial taste or typographical ugliness. Those may be questions a reader explores beside the press polemics, but the present fragment remains a heading. Its extremity also exposes the writer’s dependence on an instrument he can denounce, an unresolved tension rather than a solved contradiction. ### The phantom abuses the flame {#gloss-deceived-passion} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII, source pp. 101–102](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f110.item).** *quand cette idole eut abusé ma flamme* Supplied translation: “Then, when this idol had deceived my passion,” Flamme is the lover’s ardour; idole is the adored figure. Abuser here concerns misleading or deceiving that desire. Reading the phrase only through modern English abuse would obscure the way the returned shade first invites belief and then overturns it. The final boast moves from possession of a body to the supposed possession of a soul, completing the deception begun by the dream. The diction briefly gives the ghost the elevated status of an idol before the coarse ending deflates it. Because these are lines of a borrowed, disputed sonnet, the speaker’s experience must remain distinct from Baudelaire’s biographical life. ### Mentally as well as physically {#gloss-moral-physical} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CIX, source pp. 102–103](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f111.item).** *Au moral comme au physique* Supplied translation: “Mentally as well as physically, I have always felt the abyss” Au moral names the inward or psychological plane, not exclusively moral goodness or guilt. Baudelaire applies the sensation of the abyss to both planes, then extends it through sleep, action, dream, memory, desire, regret, remorse, beauty and number. This opening distinction is important because the later list crosses experiences of very different value. Remorse is not the same kind of thing as beauty, yet both can provoke vertigo. The phrase allows a bodily feeling to organize an inward landscape without requiring that each named experience be a sin or an independently diagnosed physical illness. ### The work that is long because unbegun {#gloss-long-unbegun-work} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXI, source pp. 103–104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f112.item).** *Il n’y a de long ouvrage que celui qu’on n’ose pas commencer. Il devient cauchemar.* Supplied translation: “The only long task is the one we dare not begin. It becomes a nightmare.” Ne…que makes the aphorism provocatively absolute. Long no longer measures pages or hours alone; it describes the oppressive extension created by avoidance. Commencer identifies the action that can break that imagined interminability. The sentence does not deny that finished works require considerable time. It redirects attention from the intimidating total to the first available act. In the surrounding regimen, time is forgotten by being used and everything proceeds little by little. The nightmare is thus an effect of relation to the task, not a reliable estimate of its real scale. ### Nothing is lacking except work’s taste {#gloss-nothing-lacking} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXII, source pp. 104](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f113.item).** *il ne manque absolument que le Goût du travail* Supplied translation: “nothing at all is lacking except a Taste for work.” Ne…que is restrictive: the apparently negative wording identifies one supposedly sufficient missing condition. The preceding list ranges across poverty, illness and melancholy, making the assertion deliberately sweeping. The phrase should be read as a self-exhortation rather than modern medical or financial guidance. Goût concerns an acquired disposition towards work, not the mere availability of a job or an instruction to ignore bodily limits. Its exaggeration is part of an attempt to gather scattered difficulties beneath one actionable principle, whose hoped-for efficacy the notebook has not yet demonstrated. ### A hypothesis demands its conclusion {#gloss-hypothesis-demands} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII, source pp. 105](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** *N’importe quelle hypothèse veut sa conclusion.* Supplied translation: “Any hypothesis whatever calls for its conclusion.” Veut personifies the hypothesis as demanding to be carried through. N’importe quelle makes the initial starting point less important than following its implications. The sentence comes after the instruction to begin first and use logic and analysis afterward. This is a method for overcoming paralysis at the threshold of composition. It does not guarantee that every starting assumption is true or that all conclusions will be equally valuable. The obligation is to develop an initiated thought far enough to discover what it entails, allowing reasoning to work on material already begun rather than delaying action until a perfect premise appears. ### Eight days of sorting {#gloss-sorting-eight-days} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV, source pp. 105–106](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f114.item).** *Classement de gravures (deux jours). Classement de notes (deux jours).* Supplied translation: “Sort engravings (two days). Sort notes (two days).” These two allotments follow two days for letters and two for debts. Taken together, the four stated blocks amount to eight days of planned organization, although the notebook does not assign calendar dates or record completion. The specificity matters beside the larger rhetoric of transformation. Reform requires handling accumulated objects and records, not only generating intense resolve. Gravures are prints or engravings, while notes are the materials of writing and thought. The schedule gives practical form to a life in which artistic resources, correspondence and financial obligations must all become usable again. ### Humiliations as divine graces {#gloss-humiliation-grace} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXV, source pp. 106–108](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f115.item).** *Mes humiliations ont été des grâces de Dieu.* Supplied translation: “My humiliations have been graces from God.” Grâces names freely bestowed divine benefits, while humiliations names experiences that lower pride or social standing. Their identification is a retrospective act of interpretation: what felt degrading is redescribed as aid to moral transformation. The surrounding questions about the end of selfishness and the demands of each minute explain the possible benefit. Humiliation might dismantle self-importance and direct the speaker towards duty and charity. The sentence does not prove that every act of humiliation is good or that mistreatment should be sought. It records the speaker’s effort to give his own suffering a providential use. ### Everything can still be repaired {#gloss-still-repairable} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** *Tout est réparable. Il est encore temps.* Supplied translation: “Everything can be repaired. There is still time.” The two assertions reopen a future that CXV’s “Too late, perhaps!” had nearly closed. Réparable treats damage as something that action may make good; encore insists that the opportunity has not entirely passed. The confidence is immediately limited by the unfinished question about new pleasures and by the admission that a fulfilled plan has not yet been enjoyed. The entry is an effort to generate hope, not an announcement that debts, health or work have already been restored. Reading both confidence and qualification preserves the unstable energy of reform rather than turning the regimen into a completed success story. ### The 800-franc monthly plan {#gloss-monthly-plan} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** *Jeanne 300, ma mère 200, moi 300, — 800 fr. par mois.* Supplied translation: “Jeanne 300, my mother 200, myself 300,—800 fr. a month.” The amounts sum to the stated monthly total. They belong to a proposed allocation, not a verified bank record, income statement or report of money already distributed. The plan directs work towards named dependencies and personal maintenance, then immediately schedules uninterrupted morning labour. It is distinct from CXIV’s division of 1,000 francs and CXVII’s four shares of whatever is earned. Keeping the schemes separate shows the notebook trying different practical forms for duty, rather than treating numerical inconsistency as something that an editor should silently normalize. ### The recipe’s repeated unit {#gloss-syrup-units} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI, source pp. 108–111](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f117.item).** *Sucre blanc. . . . . . 250 —* The dash repeats the unit in the preceding ingredient line: 250 grams of white sugar, after 125 grams of Iceland lichen. It is not a missing price, a subtraction sign or an unspecified additional ingredient. The following prose gives soaking, reduction, skimming, sweetening and cooling in that order. The record is a historical preparation within a personal regimen. Its mention of crises does not name the illness, and its instruction about increasing doses should not become present-day advice. Explaining the abbreviated unit and sequence makes the document readable while preserving the distinction between reporting a recipe and establishing its safety, origin or medical purpose. ### The clause limiting daily work {#gloss-strength-limit} **[Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII, source pp. 111–112](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d/f120.item).** *travailler toute la journée, ou du moins tant que mes forces ne le permettront* The supplied English reads: “work all day, or at least as long as my strength allows”. Its practical sense is a limit upon the aspiration to work throughout the day: effort must remain within available strength. That qualification matters beside the vow’s otherwise uncompromising language of eternal rules. The supplied French includes ne before le permettront, a wording that does not transparently match the English’s affirmative sense. This gloss flags the divergence without silently deleting ne or deciding whether the difficulty arose in composition, printing or transmission. The governing witness remains the basis of quotation; the English’s intended practical reading must be distinguished from a claim that every element of the French syntax has been resolved. # Lexical index {#lexical-index} ## English headwords Each destination is labelled by kind. The printed locators refer to this lexicon’s PDF, not the historical source pages. - [A born Parsi](#reg-parsi) (p. 154) · Register - [A catalogue of feminine airs](#gloss-feminine-airs-catalogue) (p. 293) · Phrase gloss - [A definition still to be written](#reg-definitional-fragment) (p. 154) · Register - [A dramatic outline](#reg-scenario) (p. 155) · Register - [A fiat of Providence](#reg-fiat) (p. 155) · Register - [A harsh life](#reg-harsh-life) (p. 155) · Register - [A hypothesis demands its conclusion](#gloss-hypothesis-demands) (p. 306) · Phrase gloss - [A leg outlined against sunset](#gloss-sunset-leg) (p. 292) · Phrase gloss - [A marked repair in the dictator sentence](#gloss-glory-repair) (p. 301) · Phrase gloss - [A projected gallery of editors](#reg-editorial-names) (p. 156) · Register - [A short newspaper item](#reg-entrefilet) (p. 156) · Register - [A transient dwelling](#reg-transient-dwelling) (p. 157) · Register - [Abbreviated sexual verbs](#reg-abbreviated-verbs) (p. 157) · Register - [Acedia](#reg-acedia) (p. 158) · Register - [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) · Full article - [Adaptation to national stupidity](#reg-adaptation-stupidity) (p. 158) · Register - [Address as marksmanship](#reg-shooting-skill) (p. 159) · Register - [Alphonse Rabbe’s tone](#reg-rabbe) (p. 159) · Register - [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) · Full article - [An air of looking inward](#gloss-looking-inward) (p. 292) · Phrase gloss - [An eternally solitary destiny](#reg-solitary-destiny) (p. 160) · Register - [An unfinished correspondence list](#reg-clemm-dumay-mires) (p. 160) · Register - [An untranslatable printed Latin sequence](#reg-uncertain-latin) (p. 161) · Register - [Ancelle and the debt share](#reg-ancelle) (p. 161) · Register - [Ancestors as victims of passion](#gloss-ancestral-passions) (p. 293) · Phrase gloss - [And the cattle spoke](#reg-speaking-cattle) (p. 162) · Register - [Animal names](#entry-animal-names) (p. 17) · Full article - [Animal pet names](#reg-pet-names) (p. 162) · Register - [Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition](#entry-antisemitism) (p. 19) · Full article - [Anyone who comes along](#reg-first-comer) (p. 163) · Register - [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) · Full article - [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · Full article - [Armoured skins](#reg-armoured-skins) (p. 163) · Register - [Art as a civilizing agent](#gloss-civilizing-art) (p. 300) · Phrase gloss - [Assent of the sacrificial victim](#reg-assent-victim) (p. 164) · Register - [Atermoiement: delaying](#reg-delay-pretexts) (p. 164) · Register - [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) · Full article - [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) · Full article - [Babouvist communist](#reg-babouvist) (p. 165) · Register - [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) · Full article - [Badauds](#reg-gawkers) (p. 165) · Register - [Banville’s luminosity](#reg-luminous-banville) (p. 166) · Register - [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · Full article - [Belgian Societies](#reg-belgian-societies) (p. 166) · Register - [Beyond this world](#reg-extraterrestrial) (p. 167) · Register - [Bile](#reg-bile) (p. 167) · Register - [Billets as promissory notes](#reg-promissory-notes) (p. 168) · Register - [Bitter pleasures](#reg-bitter-pleasures) (p. 168) · Register - [Bitterness flowing back](#reg-reflux-bitterness) (p. 169) · Register - [Boasts of probity](#reg-probity) (p. 169) · Register - [Bohemianism and wandering](#reg-bohemianism) (p. 170) · Register - [Brierre de Boismont’s study](#reg-boismont) (p. 170) · Register - [Caesarism and the Ney letter](#reg-caesarism) (p. 171) · Register - [Campbell’s thought](#reg-campbell) (p. 171) · Register - [Canoness](#reg-canoness) (p. 172) · Register - [Castles in the air](#reg-castles-spain) (p. 172) · Register - [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) · Full article - [Cazotte’s camel](#reg-cazotte-camel) (p. 173) · Register - [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) · Full article - [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · Full article - [Chenavard’s superhuman type](#gloss-chenavard-type) (p. 286) · Phrase gloss - [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) · Full article - [Chloroform and consciousness](#reg-chloroform) (p. 173) · Register - [Christian humility forbids the cross](#gloss-humility-forbids) (p. 298) · Phrase gloss - [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) · Full article - [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) · Full article - [Clément de Ris and Castagnary](#reg-ris-castagnary) (p. 174) · Register - [Coming under rifle fire](#reg-rifle-fire) (p. 174) · Register - [Commending souls to God](#reg-recommend-souls) (p. 175) · Register - [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · Full article - [Common expressions](#reg-common-expressions) (p. 175) · Register - [Compound interest](#reg-compound-interest) (p. 175) · Register - [Concetto](#reg-concetto) (p. 176) · Register - [Concierges](#reg-concierge) (p. 176) · Register - [Concubinage](#reg-concubinage) (p. 177) · Register - [Confirmation through sacrifice](#reg-revolution-confirms) (p. 177) · Register - [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) · Full article - [Copies and the dated errands](#reg-task-copies) (p. 178) · Register - [Counsellor in a Court of Appeal](#reg-court-counsellor) (p. 178) · Register - [Counter-religions](#reg-counter-religions) (p. 179) · Register - [Created beings as mistaken idols](#reg-creatures) (p. 179) · Register - [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) · Full article - [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) · Full article - [Cuckoldry](#reg-cuckoldry) (p. 180) · Register - [Daily frenzy](#reg-daily-frenzy) (p. 180) · Register - [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · Full article - [Death agony](#reg-death-agony) (p. 181) · Register - [Death rattles](#reg-death-rattle) (p. 181) · Register - [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · Full article - [Delayed conversion](#reg-conversion-delay) (p. 181) · Register - [Deserting a cause](#reg-desert-cause) (p. 182) · Register - [Despised versus despicable](#gloss-despised-respectable) (p. 289) · Phrase gloss - [Disinfecting love](#reg-disinfect-love) (p. 182) · Register - [Dissipation of the self](#reg-dissipation) (p. 182) · Register - [Divination’s proposed media](#reg-divination) (p. 183) · Register - [Divine mémento](#reg-divine-compendium) (p. 183) · Register - [Doctor Estaminetus Crapulosus Pedantissimus](#reg-comic-doctor) (p. 184) · Register - [Dupe and prey](#reg-dupe-prey) (p. 184) · Register - [Durandeau, Darjon and the doctor](#reg-unresolved-discourses) (p. 185) · Register - [E. G., an unresolved label](#reg-eg) (p. 185) · Register - [Eccentrics](#reg-eccentrics) (p. 186) · Register - [Eight days of sorting](#gloss-sorting-eight-days) (p. 307) · Phrase gloss - [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) · Full article - [Entente cordiale](#reg-cordial-understanding) (p. 186) · Register - [Enthusiasm reserved for abstractions](#gloss-enthusiasm-abstraction) (p. 287) · Phrase gloss - [Entrails and viscera](#reg-entrails-viscera) (p. 187) · Register - [Eurythmy](#reg-eurythmy) (p. 187) · Register - [Even if God did not exist](#gloss-even-if-god) (p. 285) · Phrase gloss - [Everything can still be repaired](#gloss-still-repairable) (p. 308) · Phrase gloss - [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · Full article - [Evocatory sorcery](#reg-evocatory) (p. 188) · Register - [Exactitude](#reg-punctuality) (p. 188) · Register - [Except](#reg-fors) (p. 189) · Register - [Excitants](#reg-stimulants) (p. 189) · Register - [Father Gigogne](#reg-gigogne) (p. 190) · Register - [Filles and society women](#reg-filles) (p. 190) · Register - [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) · Full article - [Fire and the incendiary](#reg-incendiary) (p. 191) · Register - [First printer’s proof](#reg-printers-proof) (p. 191) · Register - [Forgues, literary pirate](#reg-forgues-pirate) (p. 192) · Register - [Four shares of earnings](#reg-four-shares) (p. 192) · Register - [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) · Full article - [Frankness as a means of originality](#gloss-frankness-originality) (p. 287) · Phrase gloss - [Freedom and fate](#reg-fatality) (p. 193) · Register - [Gallantry and devotion](#reg-gallantry-devotion) (p. 193) · Register - [Galvanic battery](#reg-galvanic) (p. 194) · Register - [General education and leisure](#reg-general-education) (p. 194) · Register - [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) · Full article - [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) · Full article - [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · Full article - [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · Full article - [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · Full article - [Greatness and sainthood for oneself](#reg-for-oneself) (p. 194) · Register - [Guillotiners](#reg-guillotiners) (p. 195) · Register - [Guys and Douay’s unwritten anecdotes](#reg-guys-douay) (p. 195) · Register - [Habitable worlds](#reg-habitable-worlds) (p. 196) · Register - [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · Full article - [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) · Full article - [Having a personal stake](#reg-personal-stake) (p. 196) · Register - [Having no convictions, then some](#gloss-convictions-qualified) (p. 300) · Phrase gloss - [Held in common](#reg-common-god) (p. 197) · Register - [Hildebrand](#reg-hildebrand) (p. 197) · Register - [Historical self-descriptions](#reg-hysteria-imbecility) (p. 198) · Register - [Historical sexual terminology](#reg-pederasty) (p. 198) · Register - [Horror of home](#reg-horror-home) (p. 199) · Register - [Hors-d’œuvre](#reg-digression) (p. 199) · Register - [Humiliations as divine graces](#gloss-humiliation-grace) (p. 307) · Phrase gloss - [Humiliations from debt](#reg-avanies) (p. 200) · Register - [Humility that refuses understanding](#gloss-fanatic-humility) (p. 301) · Phrase gloss - [Hunger and promised satisfaction](#reg-beatitude) (p. 200) · Register - [Hygiène as a regimen](#reg-hygiene) (p. 201) · Register - [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · Full article - [Iceland lichen](#reg-lichen) (p. 201) · Register - [If everything natural is legitimate](#gloss-natural-legitimate) (p. 299) · Phrase gloss - [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · Full article - [Imposture as a foundation](#reg-imposture) (p. 202) · Register - [In heat](#reg-in-heat) (p. 202) · Register - [In Praxiteles’ manner](#reg-praxitelean) (p. 203) · Register - [In spite of themselves](#reg-despite-themselves) (p. 203) · Register - [In Swedenborg’s manner](#reg-swedenborg) (p. 204) · Register - [Infant nubility](#reg-nubility) (p. 204) · Register - [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · Full article - [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · Full article - [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) · Full article - [Ixion and the cloud](#reg-ixion) (p. 205) · Register - [Jaded ears](#reg-jaded-ears) (p. 205) · Register - [Jeanne and Mme Muller as examples](#reg-jeanne-muller) (p. 206) · Register - [Judging oneself by denying immortality](#gloss-justice-immortality) (p. 302) · Phrase gloss - [Know yourself](#reg-know-yourself) (p. 206) · Register - [Le Siècle](#reg-siecle) (p. 207) · Register - [Leagues and radius](#reg-league) (p. 207) · Register - [Leaving room for conjecture](#gloss-scope-conjecture) (p. 291) · Phrase gloss - [Legouvé, Samson and the deadpan joke](#reg-legouve-samson) (p. 208) · Register - [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) · Full article - [Lent and returned](#reg-lent-returned) (p. 208) · Register - [Libertinism among humanity’s intoxications](#reg-libertinism) (p. 209) · Register - [Librarians and witnesses of Redemption](#reg-jewish-witnesses) (p. 209) · Register - [Little by little](#reg-gradation) (p. 210) · Register - [Louise Villedieu’s Louvre visit](#reg-louise-villedieu) (p. 210) · Register - [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · Full article - [Macadam and the fallen halo](#reg-macadam) (p. 211) · Register - [Magism](#reg-magism) (p. 211) · Register - [Many friends, many gloves](#gloss-friends-gloves) (p. 289) · Phrase gloss - [May, June and the coup](#reg-1848-markers) (p. 212) · Register - [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · Full article - [Memories enjoyed by two](#reg-shared-memory) (p. 212) · Register - [Mentally as well as physically](#gloss-moral-physical) (p. 305) · Phrase gloss - [Militant literary language](#reg-militant-language) (p. 213) · Register - [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) · Full article - [Minds born to serve](#reg-born-servants) (p. 213) · Register - [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) · Full article - [Modern personal cults](#reg-modern-cults) (p. 214) · Register - [More naked than nakedness](#gloss-thinness-nudity) (p. 288) · Phrase gloss - [Moving house](#reg-moving-house) (p. 214) · Register - [Mummified souls](#reg-mummified-souls) (p. 215) · Register - [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · Full article - [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · Full article - [Mystical quality and mysticism](#reg-mysticite) (p. 215) · Register - [Mœurs across generations](#reg-mores) (p. 216) · Register - [Nadar’s doubled organs](#reg-nadar) (p. 216) · Register - [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · Full article - [Nausea at posters](#reg-posters) (p. 217) · Register - [Nieuwerkerke’s leaves](#reg-fig-leaves) (p. 217) · Register - [Nothing is lacking except work’s taste](#gloss-nothing-lacking) (p. 306) · Phrase gloss - [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · Full article - [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) · Full article - [Obsession and possession](#reg-obsession-possession) (p. 218) · Register - [Operator and subject](#reg-operator) (p. 218) · Register - [Ordinary way of life](#reg-ordinary-life) (p. 219) · Register - [Ovid and the upward face](#reg-ovid-face) (p. 219) · Register - [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) · Full article - [Paganism and Christianity prove one another](#gloss-prove-reciprocally) (p. 298) · Phrase gloss - [Pamphlet as polemical attack](#reg-pamphlet) (p. 220) · Register - [Pariahs and the actor](#reg-pariahs) (p. 220) · Register - [Passion refers everything to itself](#reg-passion-refers) (p. 221) · Register - [Pastoral peoples](#reg-herding-peoples) (p. 221) · Register - [Paul Pérignon, unresolved](#reg-perignon) (p. 222) · Register - [Paying for permission to spend](#gloss-pay-to-spend) (p. 294) · Phrase gloss - [Pedantic officiousness](#reg-cuistrerie) (p. 222) · Register - [Personal intercessors](#reg-intercessors) (p. 223) · Register - [Philis and Damon](#reg-philis-damon) (p. 223) · Register - [Pierced coins and keepsakes](#reg-pierced-coins) (p. 224) · Register - [Piocheurs](#reg-drudges) (p. 224) · Register - [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) · Full article - [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · Full article - [Plutus and money-worship](#reg-plutus) (p. 225) · Register - [Poe and de Maistre as teachers](#reg-reasoning-teachers) (p. 225) · Register - [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) · Full article - [Pompous narration](#reg-pompous-comic) (p. 226) · Register - [Pontmartin arriving from the provinces](#gloss-provincial-pontmartin) (p. 297) · Phrase gloss - [Postulations as aspirations](#reg-postulations) (p. 226) · Register - [Power without employment](#reg-unused-power) (p. 227) · Register - [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · Full article - [Prayer’s sentinels](#reg-guarded-sleep) (p. 227) · Register - [Priesthood everywhere](#reg-priestly-office) (p. 228) · Register - [Prima donna and butcher’s boy](#reg-prima-donna) (p. 228) · Register - [Primogeniture](#reg-primogeniture) (p. 229) · Register - [Princess Metternich’s unanswered reply](#reg-metternich) (p. 229) · Register - [Printing as an obstacle to beauty](#gloss-printing-beauty) (p. 304) · Phrase gloss - [Prodigal hesitation](#reg-wasteful-hesitation) (p. 230) · Register - [Profit-seeking](#reg-lucre) (p. 230) · Register - [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) · Full article - [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · Full article - [Providential character](#reg-providentiality) (p. 231) · Register - [Prudhomme of immorality](#reg-prudhomme) (p. 231) · Register - [Ptolemies of journalism](#reg-ptolemies) (p. 232) · Register - [Public servitude](#reg-public-domesticity) (p. 232) · Register - [Punishment through a loved person](#reg-punishment-through) (p. 233) · Register - [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) · Full article - [Raised shoes and speaking trumpets](#reg-platform-shoes) (p. 233) · Register - [Raw colouring and deeply recut drawing](#gloss-raw-colouring) (p. 296) · Phrase gloss - [Reducing and skimming the syrup](#reg-skim-reduce) (p. 234) · Register - [Religions on the walls](#reg-wall-slogans) (p. 234) · Register - [Renan, Feydeau, Feuillet and Scholl](#reg-writers-targets) (p. 235) · Register - [Resenting a reasonable hierarchy](#gloss-hierarchy-resentment) (p. 297) · Phrase gloss - [Respectability and softness](#reg-respectable-softness) (p. 235) · Register - [Reverie through line and perspective](#gloss-national-visual-modes) (p. 294) · Phrase gloss - [Review and classification](#reg-sorting) (p. 236) · Register - [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) · Full article - [Rising in rank](#reg-rise-rank) (p. 236) · Register - [Robert-Houdin and miracles](#reg-robert-houdin) (p. 237) · Register - [Robespierre’s fine phrases](#gloss-robespierre-phrases) (p. 299) · Phrase gloss - [Rosary as vehicle](#reg-rosary-medium) (p. 237) · Register - [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) · Full article - [Sacrificing and sacrificing oneself](#reg-sacrifice-active) (p. 238) · Register - [Saint-Marc Girardin](#reg-saint-marc) (p. 238) · Register - [Salvation](#reg-salvation) (p. 239) · Register - [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) · Full article - [Satiety](#reg-satiety) (p. 239) · Register - [Scarecrow of art](#reg-scarecrow) (p. 240) · Register - [Scatophagy and Gallic wit](#reg-scatophagy) (p. 240) · Register - [Schoolmastering](#reg-pionnerie) (p. 241) · Register - [Sea and Infinity](#entry-sea-infinity) (p. 118) · Full article - [Sectaries of imagination](#reg-sectaries) (p. 241) · Register - [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · Full article - [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) · Full article - [Serenus and Stagirius](#reg-serenus-stagirius) (p. 242) · Register - [Setting capital in motion](#reg-capital-circulation) (p. 242) · Register - [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · Full article - [Sleep as nightly adventure](#reg-night-adventure) (p. 243) · Register - [Slightly misshapen](#reg-slightly-deformed) (p. 243) · Register - [Soldier of the judicial press](#reg-judicial-press) (p. 244) · Register - [Spain’s religious ferocity](#gloss-spain-love-religion) (p. 295) · Phrase gloss - [Spelling under the executioner’s hand](#gloss-spelling-executioner) (p. 303) · Phrase gloss - [Spiritualist drawing](#reg-spiritualist) (p. 244) · Register - [Staying at the breach](#reg-breach) (p. 245) · Register - [Subject to taxes and compulsory labour](#reg-taillable) (p. 245) · Register - [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · Full article - [Supremely ridiculous](#reg-ridiculous-greek) (p. 246) · Register - [Swayed, almost idle](#reg-swaying-ships) (p. 246) · Register - [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · Full article - [Table turning](#reg-table-turning) (p. 247) · Register - [Taking the bull by the horns](#reg-bull-horns) (p. 247) · Register - [Tavern or café](#reg-estaminet) (p. 248) · Register - [Telegraph and National Printing Office](#reg-communication-power) (p. 248) · Register - [The 800-franc monthly plan](#gloss-monthly-plan) (p. 308) · Phrase gloss - [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) · Full article - [The ageing ingénue](#reg-old-ingenue) (p. 249) · Register - [The alarm bell of memory](#reg-tocsin) (p. 249) · Register - [The Alexandrians and Capé](#reg-alexandrians-cape) (p. 250) · Register - [The apparently obvious](#reg-evidence) (p. 250) · Register - [The beautiful commonplace](#reg-commonplace) (p. 251) · Register - [The canaille](#reg-rabble) (p. 251) · Register - [The cat’s cleanliness](#reg-cleanliness-cat) (p. 252) · Register - [The cerebellum](#reg-cerebellum) (p. 252) · Register - [The chandelier](#reg-chandelier) (p. 253) · Register - [The Church’s femininity as power](#gloss-feminine-church) (p. 286) · Phrase gloss - [The clause limiting daily work](#gloss-strength-limit) (p. 309) · Phrase gloss - [The cross as decoration](#reg-decoration-cross) (p. 253) · Register - [The cult of Reason](#reg-cult-reason) (p. 254) · Register - [The day and the occasion](#reg-daily-occasion) (p. 254) · Register - [The designation sieur](#reg-sieur) (p. 255) · Register - [The domesticated farmyard animal](#gloss-barnyard-france) (p. 302) · Phrase gloss - [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) · Full article - [The flighty air](#reg-flighty-air) (p. 255) · Register - [The flowing style](#reg-flowing-style) (p. 255) · Register - [The funeral throng](#reg-throng) (p. 256) · Register - [The Game](#reg-game) (p. 256) · Register - [The garret](#reg-galetas) (p. 257) · Register - [The giant’s broad smile](#gloss-giant-smile) (p. 291) · Phrase gloss - [The Greek drug-grinder](#reg-drug-grinder) (p. 257) · Register - [The habitual quoter](#reg-quoters) (p. 258) · Register - [The holy-water basin](#reg-holy-water-basin) (p. 258) · Register - [The homme d’esprit](#reg-wit) (p. 258) · Register - [The Hunter’s missing anecdote](#gloss-hunter-reminder) (p. 285) · Phrase gloss - [The Imitation of Christ](#reg-imitation) (p. 259) · Register - [The Last Judgment as memory’s deadline](#reg-judgment-last) (p. 259) · Register - [The Latin maxim of attention](#reg-attention-maxim) (p. 260) · Register - [The Lavalette clipping](#reg-lavalette-clipping) (p. 260) · Register - [The literary advance guard](#reg-avant-garde) (p. 261) · Register - [The man who keeps a mistress](#reg-entertained-mistress) (p. 261) · Register - [The man with the itch](#reg-galeux) (p. 262) · Register - [The military pope](#reg-military-pope) (p. 262) · Register - [The morning apéritif](#reg-aperitif) (p. 263) · Register - [The mother called fantastique](#gloss-fantastic-mother) (p. 295) · Phrase gloss - [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · Full article - [The necessary accomplice](#reg-complice) (p. 263) · Register - [The nervous idler](#reg-nervous-idler) (p. 264) · Register - [The newspaper directors’ list](#reg-press-list) (p. 264) · Register - [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) · Full article - [The next undertaking](#reg-operation) (p. 265) · Register - [The opera glass](#reg-opera-glass) (p. 265) · Register - [The person subjected to punishment](#reg-supplicie) (p. 266) · Register - [The phantom abuses the flame](#gloss-deceived-passion) (p. 304) · Phrase gloss - [The previous government’s atmosphere](#reg-inherited-atmosphere) (p. 266) · Register - [The principles of 1789](#reg-eighty-nine) (p. 267) · Register - [The publishers’ young girl](#reg-young-reader) (p. 267) · Register - [The question: judicial torture](#reg-judicial-question) (p. 268) · Register - [The real face eclipsed by its own image](#gloss-eclipsed-real-face) (p. 288) · Phrase gloss - [The recipe’s repeated unit](#gloss-syrup-units) (p. 309) · Phrase gloss - [The resounding cymbal](#reg-resounding-cymbal) (p. 268) · Register - [The romanesque](#reg-romanesque) (p. 269) · Register - [The sonnet’s disputed attribution](#reg-sonnet-attribution) (p. 269) · Register - [The spirit of buffoonery](#reg-buffoonery) (p. 270) · Register - [The stagecoach](#reg-diligence) (p. 270) · Register - [The theatre’s contrôle](#reg-ticket-desk) (p. 271) · Register - [The treasury of pleasure, not a silent variant](#gloss-volupte-witness) (p. 303) · Phrase gloss - [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · Full article - [The unidentified Roland poem](#reg-roland) (p. 271) · Register - [The useful man](#reg-useful-man) (p. 271) · Register - [The wandering and declassed women](#reg-outcast-women) (p. 272) · Register - [The warm season](#reg-warm-season) (p. 272) · Register - [The whipper as benefactor](#gloss-coercive-benefactor) (p. 290) · Phrase gloss - [The work that is long because unbegun](#gloss-long-unbegun-work) (p. 305) · Phrase gloss - [The writer of newspaper columns](#reg-column-writer) (p. 273) · Register - [The writer’s enemy, the world](#reg-world-enemy) (p. 273) · Register - [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) · Full article - [Thinking in concert](#reg-in-unison) (p. 274) · Register - [Throne and altar](#reg-throne-altar) (p. 274) · Register - [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) · Full article - [To adore or worship](#reg-adorer) (p. 275) · Register - [To confer distinction](#reg-illustrer) (p. 275) · Register - [To have someone declared incapable](#reg-civil-incapacity) (p. 276) · Register - [To Honfleur](#reg-honfleur) (p. 276) · Register - [To merge with another](#reg-merge) (p. 276) · Register - [Toilette](#reg-toilette) (p. 277) · Register - [Too depleted even for idolatry](#gloss-unworthy-idolaters) (p. 296) · Phrase gloss - [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) · Full article - [Transferred epithet](#reg-epithet) (p. 277) · Register - [Unity becoming duality](#reg-unity-duality) (p. 278) · Register - [Universal conceit](#reg-fatuitous) (p. 278) · Register - [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) · Full article - [Unresolved project names](#reg-unfinished-projects) (p. 279) · Register - [Usher and narrative atmosphere](#reg-usher) (p. 279) · Register - [Using time](#reg-using-time) (p. 279) · Register - [Usurers and divine complicity](#reg-usurer) (p. 280) · Register - [Vanity’s moxas](#reg-moxa) (p. 280) · Register - [Veuillot and hostility to art](#reg-veuillot) (p. 281) · Register - [Virtue as efficacy](#reg-virtue-power) (p. 281) · Register - [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) · Full article - [Voltaire’s Chesterfield tale](#reg-chesterfield) (p. 282) · Register - [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) · Full article - [Vérole](#reg-verole) (p. 282) · Register - [Weariness of life](#reg-taedium) (p. 282) · Register - [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · Full article - [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) · Full article - [Words that shriek when joined](#gloss-words-shriek) (p. 290) · Phrase gloss - [Work from inclination or despair](#reg-inclination-despair) (p. 283) · Register - [Work left to the neighbours](#reg-besogne) (p. 283) · Register - [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) · Full article - [Working without self-interest](#reg-disinterested-work) (p. 284) · Register - [À jeun](#reg-empty-stomach) (p. 284) · Register ## French words and phrases Headwords and source phrases are sorted without accents for ease of lookup. A heading may group related forms; its article distinguishes their actual uses. - Γνωθί σεαυτόν — [Know yourself](#reg-know-yourself) (p. 206) - πάνυ γελοιότατον — [Supremely ridiculous](#reg-ridiculous-greek) (p. 246) - Φαρμακοτρίβης — [The Greek drug-grinder](#reg-drug-grinder) (p. 257) - [17]89 — [The principles of 1789](#reg-eighty-nine) (p. 267) - à deux — [Memories enjoyed by two](#reg-shared-memory) (p. 212) - à jeun — [À jeun](#reg-empty-stomach) (p. 284) - acedia — [Acedia](#reg-acedia) (p. 158) - acedia; Tædium vitæ; folie-suicide; aversion — [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) - adaptation — [Adaptation to national stupidity](#reg-adaptation-stupidity) (p. 158) - Adorer — [To adore or worship](#reg-adorer) (p. 275) - adresse — [Address as marksmanship](#reg-shooting-skill) (p. 159) - affamés; rassasiés — [Hunger and promised satisfaction](#reg-beatitude) (p. 200) - affiches — [Nausea at posters](#reg-posters) (p. 217) - agonie — [Death agony](#reg-death-agony) (p. 181) - Alph. Rabbe — [Alphonse Rabbe’s tone](#reg-rabbe) (p. 159) - amertume refluante — [Bitterness flowing back](#reg-reflux-bitterness) (p. 169) - âmes momies — [Mummified souls](#reg-mummified-souls) (p. 215) - amulette; sols percés; talismans; sacrements; dynamique morale — [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) - Ancelle — [Ancelle and the debt share](#reg-ancelle) (p. 161) - apéritif — [The morning apéritif](#reg-aperitif) (p. 263) - appellations bestiales — [Animal pet names](#reg-pet-names) (p. 162) - appellations bestiales; formes de bêtes; mon petit singe; ange — [Animal names](#entry-animal-names) (p. 17) - âpre — [A harsh life](#reg-harsh-life) (p. 155) - aristocratique; fonction; domesticité publique; prêtre; guerrier; poète — [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) - assentiment — [Assent of the sacrificial victim](#reg-assent-victim) (p. 164) - atermoiement — [Atermoiement: delaying](#reg-delay-pretexts) (p. 164) - atmosphère — [The previous government’s atmosphere](#reg-inherited-atmosphere) (p. 266) - atmosphères; milieux; trempé; songeuse — [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) - auréole; boue du macadam; mauvais présage — [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) - avanies — [Humiliations from debt](#reg-avanies) (p. 200) - avant-garde — [The literary advance guard](#reg-avant-garde) (p. 261) - aventure sinistre — [Sleep as nightly adventure](#reg-night-adventure) (p. 243) - Aye quod agis — [The Latin maxim of attention](#reg-attention-maxim) (p. 260) - b..de; F.....; fouterie — [Abbreviated sexual verbs](#reg-abbreviated-verbs) (p. 157) - badauds — [Badauds](#reg-gawkers) (p. 165) - Barbès; Philippe; phallus — [Religions on the walls](#reg-wall-slogans) (p. 234) - Beau; Beauté; beauté; mon Beau — [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) - belle saison — [The warm season](#reg-warm-season) (p. 272) - bénitier — [The holy-water basin](#reg-holy-water-basin) (p. 258) - besogne — [Work left to the neighbours](#reg-besogne) (p. 283) - Bibliothécaires; témoins de la Rédemption — [Librarians and witnesses of Redemption](#reg-jewish-witnesses) (p. 209) - billets — [Billets as promissory notes](#reg-promissory-notes) (p. 168) - bohémianisme; vagabondage — [Bohemianism and wandering](#reg-bohemianism) (p. 170) - bouffonnerie — [The spirit of buffoonery](#reg-buffoonery) (p. 270) - brèche — [Staying at the breach](#reg-breach) (p. 245) - Briere de Boismont — [Brierre de Boismont’s study](#reg-boismont) (p. 170) - Buloz; Houssaye; Rouy; de Calonne; Charpentier; Chevalier — [A projected gallery of editors](#reg-editorial-names) (p. 156) - Campbell; The conduct of Life — [Campbell’s thought](#reg-campbell) (p. 171) - canaille — [The canaille](#reg-rabble) (p. 251) - canevas; pantomime — [A dramatic outline](#reg-scenario) (p. 155) - capitaux — [Setting capital in motion](#reg-capital-circulation) (p. 242) - cervelet — [The cerebellum](#reg-cerebellum) (p. 252) - Césarisme; Edgar Ney — [Caesarism and the Ney letter](#reg-caesarism) (p. 171) - chanoinesse — [Canoness](#reg-canoness) (p. 172) - chapelet; médium; véhicule — [Rosary as vehicle](#reg-rosary-medium) (p. 237) - charité; pardon; se sacrifier; devoir — [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) - chat; chats; air chat; luxe; propreté — [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) - châteaux en Espagne — [Castles in the air](#reg-castles-spain) (p. 172) - chloroforme — [Chloroform and consciousness](#reg-chloroform) (p. 173) - chute; unité; dualité; création; péché originel — [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) - ciel tragique; ténèbres vertes; lumineux; lumière — [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) - circonstance — [The day and the occasion](#reg-daily-occasion) (p. 254) - citateur — [The habitual quoter](#reg-quoters) (p. 258) - civilisation; péché originel; énergie; dignité personnelle — [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) - Clément de Ris; Castagnary — [Clément de Ris and Castagnary](#reg-ris-castagnary) (p. 174) - cocuage; cocus; cocu — [Cuckoldry](#reg-cuckoldry) (p. 180) - cohue — [The funeral throng](#reg-throng) (p. 256) - commerce; prêté-rendu; lucre; égoïsme; désintéressée — [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) - commun — [Held in common](#reg-common-god) (p. 197) - communiste babouviste — [Babouvist communist](#reg-babouvist) (p. 165) - complice — [The necessary accomplice](#reg-complice) (p. 263) - concetto — [Concetto](#reg-concetto) (p. 176) - concierges — [Concierges](#reg-concierge) (p. 176) - concubinage — [Concubinage](#reg-concubinage) (p. 177) - confirme; Superstition — [Confirmation through sacrifice](#reg-revolution-confirms) (p. 177) - conseiller; Cour d’appel — [Counsellor in a Court of Appeal](#reg-court-counsellor) (p. 178) - Constantin Guys; Émile Douay — [Guys and Douay’s unwritten anecdotes](#reg-guys-douay) (p. 195) - contre-religions — [Counter-religions](#reg-counter-religions) (p. 179) - contrôle — [The theatre’s contrôle](#reg-ticket-desk) (p. 271) - convertissant; damné — [Delayed conversion](#reg-conversion-delay) (p. 181) - convictions; ambition; cause; réussir — [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) - créatures — [Created beings as mistaken idols](#reg-creatures) (p. 179) - croix; Légion d’Honneur — [The cross as decoration](#reg-decoration-cross) (p. 253) - cuistrerie — [Pedantic officiousness](#reg-cuistrerie) (p. 222) - culte de la Raison — [The cult of Reason](#reg-cult-reason) (p. 254) - cymbale retentissante — [The resounding cymbal](#reg-resounding-cymbal) (p. 268) - dandinés; désœuvré — [Swayed, almost idle](#reg-swaying-ships) (p. 246) - Dandy; dandysme; miroir; Toilette — [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) - dans ma mère; à cause de moi — [Punishment through a loved person](#reg-punishment-through) (p. 233) - de concert — [Thinking in concert](#reg-in-unison) (p. 274) - De Maistre; Edgar Poe — [Poe and de Maistre as teachers](#reg-reasoning-teachers) (p. 225) - déménagement — [Moving house](#reg-moving-house) (p. 214) - déperdition — [Dissipation of the self](#reg-dissipation) (p. 182) - déserte; cause — [Deserting a cause](#reg-desert-cause) (p. 182) - désinfecter — [Disinfecting love](#reg-disinfect-love) (p. 182) - désintéressée — [Working without self-interest](#reg-disinterested-work) (p. 284) - dessin arabesque; ligne; dessin — [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) - destinée — [An eternally solitary destiny](#reg-solitary-destiny) (p. 160) - dettes; Ancelle; Honfleur; billets; classement — [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) - deux postulations simultanées; spiritualité; animalité; monter en grade — [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) - Dieu; réservoir; confident; complice; Justice — [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) - difforme; insensible — [Slightly misshapen](#reg-slightly-deformed) (p. 243) - difforme; irrégularité; inattendu; surprise; étonnement — [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) - diligence — [The stagecoach](#reg-diligence) (p. 270) - divination — [Divination’s proposed media](#reg-divination) (p. 183) - Doctor Estaminetus Crapulosus Pedantissimus — [Doctor Estaminetus Crapulosus Pedantissimus](#reg-comic-doctor) (p. 184) - domesticité publique — [Public servitude](#reg-public-domesticity) (p. 232) - domestiques — [Minds born to serve](#reg-born-servants) (p. 213) - droit d’aînesse — [Primogeniture](#reg-primogeniture) (p. 229) - dupe; proie — [Dupe and prey](#reg-dupe-prey) (p. 184) - Durandeau; Darjon; Mathieu — [Durandeau, Darjon and the doctor](#reg-unresolved-discourses) (p. 185) - E. G. — [E. G., an unresolved label](#reg-eg) (p. 185) - écumer; se réduisent — [Reducing and skimming the syrup](#reg-skim-reduce) (p. 234) - Edgar Poe; de Maistre; raisonner; intercesseurs; Jean-Jacques — [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) - Éducation générale; loisir — [General education and leisure](#reg-general-education) (p. 194) - en rut — [In heat](#reg-in-heat) (p. 202) - enfance; enfant; horreur de la vie; extase de la vie; hallucinations — [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) - entente cordiale — [Entente cordiale](#reg-cordial-understanding) (p. 186) - entrailles; viscères — [Entrails and viscera](#reg-entrails-viscera) (p. 187) - entrefilet — [A short newspaper item](#reg-entrefilet) (p. 156) - entreteneur — [The man who keeps a mistress](#reg-entertained-mistress) (p. 261) - Épithète; Ciel tragique — [Transferred epithet](#reg-epithet) (p. 277) - épouvantail — [Scarecrow of art](#reg-scarecrow) (p. 240) - épreuve — [First printer’s proof](#reg-printers-proof) (p. 191) - errantes; déclassées — [The wandering and declassed women](#reg-outcast-women) (p. 272) - essuyé de coups de fusil — [Coming under rifle fire](#reg-rifle-fire) (p. 174) - estaminet — [Tavern or café](#reg-estaminet) (p. 248) - Et habet mea mentrita mentum — [An untranslatable printed Latin sequence](#reg-uncertain-latin) (p. 161) - Eurythmie — [Eurythmy](#reg-eurythmy) (p. 187) - évaporé — [The flighty air](#reg-flighty-air) (p. 255) - évidence — [The apparently obvious](#reg-evidence) (p. 250) - exactitude — [Exactitude](#reg-punctuality) (p. 188) - excitants — [Excitants](#reg-stimulants) (p. 189) - exemplaires; Michel; Moun; Urriès — [Copies and the dated errands](#reg-task-copies) (p. 178) - extermination; race juive; Bibliothécaires; témoins de la Rédemption — [Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition](#entry-antisemitism) (p. 19) - extra-terrestre — [Beyond this world](#reg-extraterrestrial) (p. 167) - extravagants — [Eccentrics](#reg-eccentrics) (p. 186) - f...; b..de; fouterie; nue; Parnasse satyrique — [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) - faire interdire — [To have someone declared incapable](#reg-civil-incapacity) (p. 276) - faiseur de courriers — [The writer of newspaper columns](#reg-column-writer) (p. 273) - fatuité — [Universal conceit](#reg-fatuitous) (p. 278) - feu; feux d’artifice; incendies; incendiaires; foudre — [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) - feuilles de vigne; Nieuwerkerke — [Nieuwerkerke’s leaves](#reg-fig-leaves) (p. 217) - fiat — [A fiat of Providence](#reg-fiat) (p. 155) - fiel — [Bile](#reg-bile) (p. 167) - filles; femmes du monde — [Filles and society women](#reg-filles) (p. 190) - Forgues; écumeur de lettres — [Forgues, literary pirate](#reg-forgues-pirate) (p. 192) - forme; matière; idée; immortelle; Constantin Guys — [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) - fors — [Except](#reg-fors) (p. 189) - foule; foules; tous; tourbillon — [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) - frénésie journalière — [Daily frenzy](#reg-daily-frenzy) (p. 180) - Fusées; Suggestions; Projets; Plan; à trouver; n’importe où — [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) - galanterie; dévotion — [Gallantry and devotion](#reg-gallantry-devotion) (p. 193) - galetas — [The garret](#reg-galetas) (p. 257) - galeux — [The man with the itch](#reg-galeux) (p. 262) - George Sand; bon cœur; bon sens; Enfer; contre-morale — [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) - Girardin; Ptolémées; souverainement ridicule; Pecudesque locutæ — [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) - gloire; solitude; rester un; grand homme; parias — [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) - gouffre; vertige; hystérie; imbécillité; jouissance et terreur — [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) - gradation; peu à peu; petit à petit — [Little by little](#reg-gradation) (p. 210) - gradation; peu à peu; petit à petit; intérêts composés; volupté — [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) - guillotineurs — [Guillotiners](#reg-guillotiners) (p. 195) - habitacle transitoire — [A transient dwelling](#reg-transient-dwelling) (p. 157) - hallucination; image réelle; miroir ensorcelé — [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) - Hildebrand — [Hildebrand](#reg-hildebrand) (p. 197) - homme d’esprit — [The homme d’esprit](#reg-wit) (p. 258) - homme utile — [The useful man](#reg-useful-man) (p. 271) - Honfleur — [To Honfleur](#reg-honfleur) (p. 276) - honnêtes gens; mollesse — [Respectability and softness](#reg-respectable-softness) (p. 235) - horreur du domicile — [Horror of home](#reg-horror-home) (p. 199) - hors-d’œuvre — [Hors-d’œuvre](#reg-digression) (p. 199) - Hygiène — [Hygiène as a regimen](#reg-hygiene) (p. 201) - Hygiène; Conduite; Morale; Méthode; sobriété; lichen — [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) - hystérie; imbécillité — [Historical self-descriptions](#reg-hysteria-imbecility) (p. 198) - illustrer — [To confer distinction](#reg-illustrer) (p. 275) - images; culte; primitive passion; idole; gravures — [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) - imposture — [Imposture as a foundation](#reg-imposture) (p. 202) - incendies; incendiaires — [Fire and the incendiary](#reg-incendiary) (p. 191) - ingénues; planches — [The ageing ingénue](#reg-old-ingenue) (p. 249) - intercesseurs — [Personal intercessors](#reg-intercessors) (p. 223) - intéressés — [Having a personal stake](#reg-personal-stake) (p. 196) - intérêts composés — [Compound interest](#reg-compound-interest) (p. 175) - ironie; tournure d’esprit satanique; bouffonnerie; enjouement — [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) - ivresse; enivrant; enivré — [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) - Ixion; nue — [Ixion and the cloud](#reg-ixion) (p. 205) - Jeanne; Mme Muller — [Jeanne and Mme Muller as examples](#reg-jeanne-muller) (p. 206) - Jeu — [The Game](#reg-game) (p. 256) - Jeu; jeu; joueurs; gagner; perdre — [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) - jeune fille — [The publishers’ young girl](#reg-young-reader) (p. 267) - jeune fille; épouvantail; immoralité; indécences; feuilles de vigne — [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) - jouissances amères — [Bitter pleasures](#reg-bitter-pleasures) (p. 168) - journal; gazette; apéritif; main pure; imprimerie — [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) - jugement dernier — [The Last Judgment as memory’s deadline](#reg-judgment-last) (p. 259) - la femme; les femmes; animalité; ma mère; Jeanne — [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) - Lavalette; Vaulabelle — [The Lavalette clipping](#reg-lavalette-clipping) (p. 260) - Le 15 mai; Les horreurs de Juin; coup d’Etat — [May, June and the coup](#reg-1848-markers) (p. 212) - Le chameau de Cazotte — [Cazotte’s camel](#reg-cazotte-camel) (p. 173) - Le monde va finir; américanisés; avilissement des cœurs; entrailles; viscères — [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) - Le premier venu — [Anyone who comes along](#reg-first-comer) (p. 163) - Le trône et l’autel — [Throne and altar](#reg-throne-altar) (p. 274) - Legouvé; Samson; Swift — [Legouvé, Samson and the deadpan joke](#reg-legouve-samson) (p. 208) - les Alexandrins; Capé — [The Alexandrians and Capé](#reg-alexandrians-cape) (p. 250) - Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield — [Voltaire’s Chesterfield tale](#reg-chesterfield) (p. 282) - liberté; fatalité — [Freedom and fate](#reg-fatality) (p. 193) - libertinage — [Libertinism among humanity’s intoxications](#reg-libertinism) (p. 209) - Lichen d’Islande — [Iceland lichen](#reg-lichen) (p. 201) - lieu commun — [The beautiful commonplace](#reg-commonplace) (p. 251) - lieues; rayon — [Leagues and radius](#reg-league) (p. 207) - l’Imitation de Jésus-Christ — [The Imitation of Christ](#reg-imitation) (p. 259) - locutions vulgaires — [Common expressions](#reg-common-expressions) (p. 175) - loisir; dilettantisme; piocheurs; fortune — [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) - lorgnette — [The opera glass](#reg-opera-glass) (p. 265) - Louise Villedieu — [Louise Villedieu’s Louvre visit](#reg-louise-villedieu) (p. 210) - lucre — [Profit-seeking](#reg-lucre) (p. 230) - lustre — [The chandelier](#reg-chandelier) (p. 253) - ma mère; Jeanne; Mariette; devoir; intercesseurs — [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) - macadam; auréole — [Macadam and the fallen halo](#reg-macadam) (p. 211) - Madame de Metternich — [Princess Metternich’s unanswered reply](#reg-metternich) (p. 229) - magisme — [Magism](#reg-magism) (p. 211) - malentendu; entente cordiale; incommunicabilité; gouffre — [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) - malgré elles — [In spite of themselves](#reg-despite-themselves) (p. 203) - Maria Clemm; Mme Dumay; Mirès — [An unfinished correspondence list](#reg-clemm-dumay-mires) (p. 160) - mauvais goût; déplaire; grotesque; discordances — [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) - Maynard; Théophile; Malassis — [The sonnet’s disputed attribution](#reg-sonnet-attribution) (p. 269) - mélancolie; tristesse; lassitude; satiété; malheur — [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) - mémento divin — [Divine mémento](#reg-divine-compendium) (p. 183) - mer; immensité; mouvement; infini diminutif; habitacle transitoire — [Sea and Infinity](#entry-sea-infinity) (p. 118) - métaphores militaires; militante; avant-garde; discipline; moustaches — [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) - militante; militaires — [Militant literary language](#reg-militant-language) (p. 213) - Moi; vaporisation; centralisation; sortir de soi — [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) - Mon cœur mis à nu; parler de lui-même; Γνωθί σεαυτόν; Liste de mes goûts — [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) - monde — [The writer’s enemy, the world](#reg-world-enemy) (p. 273) - monter en grade — [Rising in rank](#reg-rise-rank) (p. 236) - moxas — [Vanity’s moxas](#reg-moxa) (p. 280) - mœurs — [Mœurs across generations](#reg-mores) (p. 216) - musique; espace; nombre; sensation multipliée; Liszt — [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) - mystère; mystérieux; conjecture; voilé — [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) - Mysticité; mysticisme — [Mystical quality and mysticism](#reg-mysticite) (p. 215) - Nadar; Adrien; Félix — [Nadar’s doubled organs](#reg-nadar) (p. 216) - naturel; naturelle; animalité; péché originel — [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) - navire; navires; courbes; eurythmique — [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) - nombre; multiplication; nombre des âmes — [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) - nubilité — [Infant nubility](#reg-nubility) (p. 204) - Obsession; Possession — [Obsession and possession](#reg-obsession-possession) (p. 218) - opérateur; sujet — [Operator and subject](#reg-operator) (p. 218) - opération — [The next undertaking](#reg-operation) (p. 265) - oreilles blasées — [Jaded ears](#reg-jaded-ears) (p. 205) - Ovide; astres — [Ovid and the upward face](#reg-ovid-face) (p. 219) - pamphlet — [Pamphlet as polemical attack](#reg-pamphlet) (p. 220) - pape militaire — [The military pope](#reg-military-pope) (p. 262) - par goût; par désespoir — [Work from inclination or despair](#reg-inclination-despair) (p. 283) - paresseux nerveux — [The nervous idler](#reg-nervous-idler) (p. 264) - parias — [Pariahs and the actor](#reg-pariahs) (p. 220) - Parsis-né — [A born Parsi](#reg-parsi) (p. 154) - pasteurs — [Pastoral peoples](#reg-herding-peoples) (p. 221) - patins; porte-voix — [Raised shoes and speaking trumpets](#reg-platform-shoes) (p. 233) - Paul Pérignon — [Paul Pérignon, unresolved](#reg-perignon) (p. 222) - peaux carapaces — [Armoured skins](#reg-armoured-skins) (p. 163) - Pecudesque locutæ — [And the cattle spoke](#reg-speaking-cattle) (p. 162) - pédéraste; pédérastie; bestialité — [Historical sexual terminology](#reg-pederasty) (p. 198) - père Gigogne — [Father Gigogne](#reg-gigogne) (p. 190) - Philis; Damon — [Philis and Damon](#reg-philis-damon) (p. 223) - pile galvanique — [Galvanic battery](#reg-galvanic) (p. 194) - piocheurs — [Piocheurs](#reg-drudges) (p. 224) - pionnerie — [Schoolmastering](#reg-pionnerie) (p. 241) - plaisir; salut; présent; avenir; saint pour soi-même — [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) - Plutus — [Plutus and money-worship](#reg-plutus) (p. 225) - Poésie pure; bouffonnerie lyrique; pantomime; roman sérieux — [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) - pompeusement; comiques — [Pompous narration](#reg-pompous-comic) (p. 226) - poncif; concetto; lieu commun; locutions vulgaires — [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) - postulations — [Postulations as aspirations](#reg-postulations) (p. 226) - pour soi-même — [Greatness and sainthood for oneself](#reg-for-oneself) (p. 194) - Praxitèle — [In Praxiteles’ manner](#reg-praxitelean) (p. 203) - prendre le taureau par les cornes — [Taking the bull by the horns](#reg-bull-horns) (p. 247) - presse judiciaire; Bertin — [Soldier of the judicial press](#reg-judicial-press) (p. 244) - prêté-rendu — [Lent and returned](#reg-lent-returned) (p. 208) - prière; prier; force; devoir; réservoir — [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) - prima dona; garçon boucher — [Prima donna and butcher’s boy](#reg-prima-donna) (p. 228) - probité — [Boasts of probity](#reg-probity) (p. 169) - prodigue — [Prodigal hesitation](#reg-wasteful-hesitation) (p. 230) - progrès; liberté; fatalité; individu — [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) - propreté — [The cat’s cleanliness](#reg-cleanliness-cat) (p. 252) - propriété; propriétaire; entreteneur — [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) - prostitution; se prostituer — [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) - providentialité — [Providential character](#reg-providentiality) (p. 231) - Prudhomme — [Prudhomme of immorality](#reg-prudhomme) (p. 231) - Ptolémées — [Ptolemies of journalism](#reg-ptolemies) (p. 232) - quatre parts — [Four shares of earnings](#reg-four-shares) (p. 192) - Qu’est-ce que le Dandy — [A definition still to be written](#reg-definitional-fragment) (p. 154) - question — [The question: judicial torture](#reg-judicial-question) (p. 268) - râles — [Death rattles](#reg-death-rattle) (p. 181) - rapporte — [Passion refers everything to itself](#reg-passion-refers) (p. 221) - recommande — [Commending souls to God](#reg-recommend-souls) (p. 175) - religion universelle; superstition; contre-religions; mémento divin — [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) - religions modernes — [Modern personal cults](#reg-modern-cults) (p. 214) - Renan; Feydeau; Octave Feuillet; Scholl — [Renan, Feydeau, Feuillet and Scholl](#reg-writers-targets) (p. 235) - Révolution; 1848; vengeance; démolition; coup d’Etat — [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) - revue; classement — [Review and classification](#reg-sorting) (p. 236) - Robert Houdin — [Robert-Houdin and miracles](#reg-robert-houdin) (p. 237) - Roland — [The unidentified Roland poem](#reg-roland) (p. 271) - romanesque — [The romanesque](#reg-romanesque) (p. 269) - sacerdoce — [Priesthood everywhere](#reg-priestly-office) (p. 228) - sacrifice; victime; question; peine de mort; assentiment — [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) - sacrifie; se sacrifie — [Sacrificing and sacrificing oneself](#reg-sacrifice-active) (p. 238) - Saint-Marc Girardin — [Saint-Marc Girardin](#reg-saint-marc) (p. 238) - salut — [Salvation](#reg-salvation) (p. 239) - sans emploi — [Power without employment](#reg-unused-power) (p. 227) - Satan; Beauté virile; insensibilité vengeresse; malheur — [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) - satiété — [Satiety](#reg-satiety) (p. 239) - scatophage; sel gaulois — [Scatophagy and Gallic wit](#reg-scatophagy) (p. 240) - se confondre — [To merge with another](#reg-merge) (p. 276) - sectaires — [Sectaries of imagination](#reg-sectaries) (p. 241) - s’en servant — [Using time](#reg-using-time) (p. 279) - sensibilité; génie; sensible; secousse nerveuse — [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) - sentinelles — [Prayer’s sentinels](#reg-guarded-sleep) (p. 227) - Sérène; Stagire — [Serenus and Stagirius](#reg-serenus-stagirius) (p. 242) - Siècle — [Le Siècle](#reg-siecle) (p. 207) - sieur — [The designation sieur](#reg-sieur) (p. 255) - Silvestre; Barbora; Levaillant — [Unresolved project names](#reg-unfinished-projects) (p. 279) - Sociétés belges — [Belgian Societies](#reg-belgian-societies) (p. 166) - sols percés; souvenirs — [Pierced coins and keepsakes](#reg-pierced-coins) (p. 224) - sorcellerie évocatoire — [Evocatory sorcery](#reg-evocatory) (p. 188) - sorcellerie évocatoire; opérations magiques; évocation; magisme — [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) - spiritualiste — [Spiritualist drawing](#reg-spiritualist) (p. 244) - style coulant — [The flowing style](#reg-flowing-style) (p. 255) - supplicié — [The person subjected to punishment](#reg-supplicie) (p. 266) - surnaturalisme; surnaturel; accent; retentissement — [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) - Swedenborg — [In Swedenborg’s manner](#reg-swedenborg) (p. 204) - Symbole; symboles; spectacle; profondeur — [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) - tables tournantes — [Table turning](#reg-table-turning) (p. 247) - taillables; corvéables — [Subject to taxes and compulsory labour](#reg-taillable) (p. 245) - Tædium vitæ — [Weariness of life](#reg-taedium) (p. 282) - télégraphe; Imprimerie nationale — [Telegraph and National Printing Office](#reg-communication-power) (p. 248) - temps; souvenir; années profondes; regret; avenir — [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) - terres habitables — [Habitable worlds](#reg-habitable-worlds) (p. 196) - Texier; Solar; Turgan; Dalloz — [The newspaper directors’ list](#reg-press-list) (p. 264) - théâtre; comédien; lustre; masques; parias — [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) - Théodore de Banville; lumineux — [Banville’s luminosity](#reg-luminous-banville) (p. 166) - tocsin — [The alarm bell of memory](#reg-tocsin) (p. 249) - Toilette; toilette — [Toilette](#reg-toilette) (p. 277) - torture; opération chirurgicale; bourreau; victime; question — [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) - train de vie — [Ordinary way of life](#reg-ordinary-life) (p. 219) - travail; travailler; Goût du travail; désespoir; frénésie journalière — [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) - unité; dualité — [Unity becoming duality](#reg-unity-duality) (p. 278) - Usher — [Usher and narrative atmosphere](#reg-usher) (p. 279) - usuriers — [Usurers and divine complicity](#reg-usurer) (p. 280) - vérole — [Vérole](#reg-verole) (p. 282) - vertu — [Virtue as efficacy](#reg-virtue-power) (p. 281) - Veuillot — [Veuillot and hostility to art](#reg-veuillot) (p. 281) - volonté; vouloir; idée fixe; habitude; petites volontés — [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) - Voltaire; anti-poète; mystère; désinfecter — [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) - volupté; voluptés; jouissance; plaisir — [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) # Passage index {#passage-index} The order follows the 117 sections of the supplied edition. The page spans are historical source pages reported by that edition; the linked print locators point to this lexicon. This is an index of the places discussed, not a concordance of every occurrence. ### Fusées I · source pp. 3–5 {#passage-1} **Full articles.** [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) · [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) · [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) **Register.** [Common expressions](#reg-common-expressions) (p. 175) · [Dissipation of the self](#reg-dissipation) (p. 182) · [The man who keeps a mistress](#reg-entertained-mistress) (p. 261) · [The warm season](#reg-warm-season) (p. 272) · [To merge with another](#reg-merge) (p. 276) **Phrase glosses.** [The Hunter’s missing anecdote](#gloss-hunter-reminder) (p. 285) · [Even if God did not exist](#gloss-even-if-god) (p. 285) ### Fusées II · source pp. 5–6 {#passage-2} **Full articles.** [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) **Register.** [Canoness](#reg-canoness) (p. 172) · [E. G., an unresolved label](#reg-eg) (p. 185) · [Sectaries of imagination](#reg-sectaries) (p. 241) · [Throne and altar](#reg-throne-altar) (p. 274) **Phrase glosses.** [The Church’s femininity as power](#gloss-feminine-church) (p. 286) ### Fusées III · source pp. 6–8 {#passage-3} **Full articles.** [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) **Register.** [Death rattles](#reg-death-rattle) (p. 181) · [Galvanic battery](#reg-galvanic) (p. 194) · [Operator and subject](#reg-operator) (p. 218) · [Ovid and the upward face](#reg-ovid-face) (p. 219) · [The Imitation of Christ](#reg-imitation) (p. 259) · [The question: judicial torture](#reg-judicial-question) (p. 268) ### Fusées IV · source pp. 9 {#passage-4} **Full articles.** [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) **Register.** [Campbell’s thought](#reg-campbell) (p. 171) · [In Swedenborg’s manner](#reg-swedenborg) (p. 204) · [Pompous narration](#reg-pompous-comic) (p. 226) · [Unresolved project names](#reg-unfinished-projects) (p. 279) **Phrase glosses.** [Chenavard’s superhuman type](#gloss-chenavard-type) (p. 286) · [Frankness as a means of originality](#gloss-frankness-originality) (p. 287) ### Fusées V · source pp. 9–10 {#passage-5} **Full articles.** [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) **Register.** [Death agony](#reg-death-agony) (p. 181) · [Spiritualist drawing](#reg-spiritualist) (p. 244) ### Fusées VI · source pp. 10–11 {#passage-6} **Full articles.** [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) · [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) **Register.** [Historical sexual terminology](#reg-pederasty) (p. 198) · [Setting capital in motion](#reg-capital-circulation) (p. 242) · [The spirit of buffoonery](#reg-buffoonery) (p. 270) **Phrase glosses.** [Enthusiasm reserved for abstractions](#gloss-enthusiasm-abstraction) (p. 287) · [More naked than nakedness](#gloss-thinness-nudity) (p. 288) ### Fusées VII · source pp. 11 {#passage-7} **Full articles.** [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) · [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) **Register.** [A born Parsi](#reg-parsi) (p. 154) · [Fire and the incendiary](#reg-incendiary) (p. 191) · [Transferred epithet](#reg-epithet) (p. 277) ### Fusées VIII · source pp. 12 {#passage-8} **Full articles.** [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) **Register.** [A harsh life](#reg-harsh-life) (p. 155) · [The Game](#reg-game) (p. 256) · [The theatre’s contrôle](#reg-ticket-desk) (p. 271) **Phrase glosses.** [The real face eclipsed by its own image](#gloss-eclipsed-real-face) (p. 288) ### Fusées IX · source pp. 13 {#passage-9} **Register.** [In spite of themselves](#reg-despite-themselves) (p. 203) · [Sleep as nightly adventure](#reg-night-adventure) (p. 243) ### Fusées X · source pp. 13–14 {#passage-10} **Full articles.** [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) **Register.** [And the cattle spoke](#reg-speaking-cattle) (p. 162) · [Armoured skins](#reg-armoured-skins) (p. 163) · [Robert-Houdin and miracles](#reg-robert-houdin) (p. 237) **Phrase glosses.** [Many friends, many gloves](#gloss-friends-gloves) (p. 289) · [Despised versus despicable](#gloss-despised-respectable) (p. 289) ### Fusées XI · source pp. 14–15 {#passage-11} **Full articles.** [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) **Register.** [Swayed, almost idle](#reg-swaying-ships) (p. 246) · [The romanesque](#reg-romanesque) (p. 269) · [Usher and narrative atmosphere](#reg-usher) (p. 279) ### Fusées XII · source pp. 15–16 {#passage-12} **Full articles.** [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) **Register.** [An unfinished correspondence list](#reg-clemm-dumay-mires) (p. 160) · [Copies and the dated errands](#reg-task-copies) (p. 178) · [Slightly misshapen](#reg-slightly-deformed) (p. 243) **Phrase glosses.** [The whipper as benefactor](#gloss-coercive-benefactor) (p. 290) · [Words that shriek when joined](#gloss-words-shriek) (p. 290) ### Fusées XIII · source pp. 17 {#passage-13} **Full articles.** [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) **Register.** [Banville’s luminosity](#reg-luminous-banville) (p. 166) · [Beyond this world](#reg-extraterrestrial) (p. 167) **Phrase glosses.** [The giant’s broad smile](#gloss-giant-smile) (p. 291) ### Fusées XIV · source pp. 17–18 {#passage-14} **Full articles.** [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) · [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) **Register.** [Acedia](#reg-acedia) (p. 158) · [Brierre de Boismont’s study](#reg-boismont) (p. 170) · [Serenus and Stagirius](#reg-serenus-stagirius) (p. 242) · [Weariness of life](#reg-taedium) (p. 282) ### Fusées XV · source pp. 18 {#passage-15} **Full articles.** [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) **Register.** [Passion refers everything to itself](#reg-passion-refers) (p. 221) · [The alarm bell of memory](#reg-tocsin) (p. 249) ### Fusées XVI · source pp. 18–20 {#passage-16} **Full articles.** [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) **Register.** [Bitterness flowing back](#reg-reflux-bitterness) (p. 169) · [Power without employment](#reg-unused-power) (p. 227) · [Satiety](#reg-satiety) (p. 239) **Phrase glosses.** [Leaving room for conjecture](#gloss-scope-conjecture) (p. 291) ### Fusées XVII · source pp. 21–27 {#passage-17} **Full articles.** [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) · [Animal names](#entry-animal-names) (p. 17) · [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) · [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) · [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) · [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) **Register.** [Address as marksmanship](#reg-shooting-skill) (p. 159) · [Animal pet names](#reg-pet-names) (p. 162) · [Cazotte’s camel](#reg-cazotte-camel) (p. 173) · [Eurythmy](#reg-eurythmy) (p. 187) · [Evocatory sorcery](#reg-evocatory) (p. 188) · [Macadam and the fallen halo](#reg-macadam) (p. 211) · [Magism](#reg-magism) (p. 211) · [Rosary as vehicle](#reg-rosary-medium) (p. 237) · [The flighty air](#reg-flighty-air) (p. 255) **Phrase glosses.** [A leg outlined against sunset](#gloss-sunset-leg) (p. 292) · [An air of looking inward](#gloss-looking-inward) (p. 292) · [A catalogue of feminine airs](#gloss-feminine-airs-catalogue) (p. 293) ### Fusées XVIII · source pp. 27–29 {#passage-18} **Full articles.** [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) · [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) · [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) **Register.** [Alphonse Rabbe’s tone](#reg-rabbe) (p. 159) · [Concubinage](#reg-concubinage) (p. 177) · [Gallantry and devotion](#reg-gallantry-devotion) (p. 193) · [Jaded ears](#reg-jaded-ears) (p. 205) · [The cerebellum](#reg-cerebellum) (p. 252) **Phrase glosses.** [Ancestors as victims of passion](#gloss-ancestral-passions) (p. 293) · [Reverie through line and perspective](#gloss-national-visual-modes) (p. 294) · [Paying for permission to spend](#gloss-pay-to-spend) (p. 294) · [Spain’s religious ferocity](#gloss-spain-love-religion) (p. 295) ### Fusées XIX · source pp. 29 {#passage-19} **Full articles.** [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) **Register.** [The cat’s cleanliness](#reg-cleanliness-cat) (p. 252) ### Fusées XX · source pp. 29–30 {#passage-20} **Full articles.** [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) **Register.** [Caesarism and the Ney letter](#reg-caesarism) (p. 171) · [Concetto](#reg-concetto) (p. 176) · [Hildebrand](#reg-hildebrand) (p. 197) · [Prima donna and butcher’s boy](#reg-prima-donna) (p. 228) **Phrase glosses.** [The mother called fantastique](#gloss-fantastic-mother) (p. 295) · [Raw colouring and deeply recut drawing](#gloss-raw-colouring) (p. 296) ### Fusées XXI · source pp. 30–31 {#passage-21} **Full articles.** [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) · [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) · [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) **Register.** [Dupe and prey](#reg-dupe-prey) (p. 184) · [Mummified souls](#reg-mummified-souls) (p. 215) ### Fusées XXII · source pp. 32–42 {#passage-22} **Full articles.** [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) · [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) · [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) · [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) · [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) · [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) · [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) · [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) · [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) · [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) · [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) · [Sea and Infinity](#entry-sea-infinity) (p. 118) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) · [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) · [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) **Register.** [A dramatic outline](#reg-scenario) (p. 155) · [A fiat of Providence](#reg-fiat) (p. 155) · [Entrails and viscera](#reg-entrails-viscera) (p. 187) · [Except](#reg-fors) (p. 189) · [Hors-d’œuvre](#reg-digression) (p. 199) · [Infant nubility](#reg-nubility) (p. 204) · [Le Siècle](#reg-siecle) (p. 207) · [Plutus and money-worship](#reg-plutus) (p. 225) · [Priesthood everywhere](#reg-priestly-office) (p. 228) · [Primogeniture](#reg-primogeniture) (p. 229) · [The garret](#reg-galetas) (p. 257) · [The wandering and declassed women](#reg-outcast-women) (p. 272) · [To have someone declared incapable](#reg-civil-incapacity) (p. 276) · [Vanity’s moxas](#reg-moxa) (p. 280) **Phrase glosses.** [Too depleted even for idolatry](#gloss-unworthy-idolaters) (p. 296) · [Pontmartin arriving from the provinces](#gloss-provincial-pontmartin) (p. 297) · [Resenting a reasonable hierarchy](#gloss-hierarchy-resentment) (p. 297) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII · source pp. 45 {#passage-23} **Full articles.** [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) **Register.** [Eccentrics](#reg-eccentrics) (p. 186) · [The day and the occasion](#reg-daily-occasion) (p. 254) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXIV · source pp. 46 {#passage-24} **Full articles.** [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) **Register.** [Anyone who comes along](#reg-first-comer) (p. 163) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXV · source pp. 46 {#passage-25} **Full articles.** [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) · [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) **Register.** [Deserting a cause](#reg-desert-cause) (p. 182) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXVI · source pp. 46–47 {#passage-26} **Full articles.** [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) **Register.** [An untranslatable printed Latin sequence](#reg-uncertain-latin) (p. 161) · [Ptolemies of journalism](#reg-ptolemies) (p. 232) · [Supremely ridiculous](#reg-ridiculous-greek) (p. 246) · [Taking the bull by the horns](#reg-bull-horns) (p. 247) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXVII · source pp. 48–49 {#passage-27} **Full articles.** [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) **Register.** [In heat](#reg-in-heat) (p. 202) · [The cross as decoration](#reg-decoration-cross) (p. 253) · [To confer distinction](#reg-illustrer) (p. 275) **Phrase glosses.** [Christian humility forbids the cross](#gloss-humility-forbids) (p. 298) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXVIII · source pp. 49–50 {#passage-28} **Full articles.** [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) **Register.** [Counter-religions](#reg-counter-religions) (p. 179) · [Mystical quality and mysticism](#reg-mysticite) (p. 215) · [The cult of Reason](#reg-cult-reason) (p. 254) **Phrase glosses.** [Paganism and Christianity prove one another](#gloss-prove-reciprocally) (p. 298) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXIX · source pp. 50 {#passage-29} **Full articles.** [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) **Register.** [Moving house](#reg-moving-house) (p. 214) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXX · source pp. 50–51 {#passage-30} **Full articles.** [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) · [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) **Register.** [Coming under rifle fire](#reg-rifle-fire) (p. 174) · [May, June and the coup](#reg-1848-markers) (p. 212) · [Providential character](#reg-providentiality) (p. 231) **Phrase glosses.** [If everything natural is legitimate](#gloss-natural-legitimate) (p. 299) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXI · source pp. 51–52 {#passage-31} **Register.** [Castles in the air](#reg-castles-spain) (p. 172) · [The useful man](#reg-useful-man) (p. 271) **Phrase glosses.** [Robespierre’s fine phrases](#gloss-robespierre-phrases) (p. 299) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXII · source pp. 52 {#passage-32} **Full articles.** [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) · [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) **Register.** [Confirmation through sacrifice](#reg-revolution-confirms) (p. 177) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIII · source pp. 52–53 {#passage-33} **Full articles.** [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) **Register.** [Imposture as a foundation](#reg-imposture) (p. 202) · [Respectability and softness](#reg-respectable-softness) (p. 235) **Phrase glosses.** [Having no convictions, then some](#gloss-convictions-qualified) (p. 300) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIV · source pp. 53 {#passage-34} **Full articles.** [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) **Register.** [An eternally solitary destiny](#reg-solitary-destiny) (p. 160) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXV · source pp. 54 {#passage-35} **Register.** [Habitable worlds](#reg-habitable-worlds) (p. 196) · [Ordinary way of life](#reg-ordinary-life) (p. 219) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXVI · source pp. 54–55 {#passage-36} **Register.** [Modern personal cults](#reg-modern-cults) (p. 214) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXVII · source pp. 55 {#passage-37} **Full articles.** [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) **Register.** [Belgian Societies](#reg-belgian-societies) (p. 166) · [Work left to the neighbours](#reg-besogne) (p. 283) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXVIII · source pp. 56 {#passage-38} **Register.** [A definition still to be written](#reg-definitional-fragment) (p. 154) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XXXIX · source pp. 56–57 {#passage-39} **Full articles.** [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) **Register.** [Raised shoes and speaking trumpets](#reg-platform-shoes) (p. 233) · [The chandelier](#reg-chandelier) (p. 253) · [The opera glass](#reg-opera-glass) (p. 265) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XL · source pp. 57 {#passage-40} **Full articles.** [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) **Register.** [Work from inclination or despair](#reg-inclination-despair) (p. 283) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLI · source pp. 57–58 {#passage-41} **Full articles.** [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) **Register.** [Postulations as aspirations](#reg-postulations) (p. 226) · [Rising in rank](#reg-rise-rank) (p. 236) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLII · source pp. 58 {#passage-42} **Register.** [Libertinism among humanity’s intoxications](#reg-libertinism) (p. 209) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLIII · source pp. 58–59 {#passage-43} **Full articles.** [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) · [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) **Register.** [Assent of the sacrificial victim](#reg-assent-victim) (p. 164) · [Chloroform and consciousness](#reg-chloroform) (p. 173) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLIV · source pp. 59–60 {#passage-44} **Full articles.** [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) **Register.** [Nausea at posters](#reg-posters) (p. 217) · [Subject to taxes and compulsory labour](#reg-taillable) (p. 245) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLV · source pp. 60–61 {#passage-45} **Register.** [Guillotiners](#reg-guillotiners) (p. 195) · [Having a personal stake](#reg-personal-stake) (p. 196) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLVI · source pp. 61 {#passage-46} **Register.** [Princess Metternich’s unanswered reply](#reg-metternich) (p. 229) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLVII · source pp. 61–62 {#passage-47} **Full articles.** [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) · [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) · [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) **Register.** [A projected gallery of editors](#reg-editorial-names) (p. 156) · [Clément de Ris and Castagnary](#reg-ris-castagnary) (p. 174) · [Schoolmastering](#reg-pionnerie) (p. 241) · [The principles of 1789](#reg-eighty-nine) (p. 267) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLVIII · source pp. 63–64 {#passage-48} **Full articles.** [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) **Register.** [Concierges](#reg-concierge) (p. 176) · [Prudhomme of immorality](#reg-prudhomme) (p. 231) · [The flowing style](#reg-flowing-style) (p. 255) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XLIX · source pp. 64–65 {#passage-49} **Full articles.** [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) **Register.** [The holy-water basin](#reg-holy-water-basin) (p. 258) ### Mon cœur mis à nu L · source pp. 65 {#passage-50} **Full articles.** [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) **Register.** [The ageing ingénue](#reg-old-ingenue) (p. 249) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LI · source pp. 65–66 {#passage-51} **Full articles.** [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) **Register.** [Badauds](#reg-gawkers) (p. 165) · [Father Gigogne](#reg-gigogne) (p. 190) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LII · source pp. 66 {#passage-52} **Full articles.** [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) · [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) **Register.** [Disinfecting love](#reg-disinfect-love) (p. 182) · [Voltaire’s Chesterfield tale](#reg-chesterfield) (p. 282) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LIII · source pp. 66–67 {#passage-53} **Register.** [Bile](#reg-bile) (p. 167) · [Doctor Estaminetus Crapulosus Pedantissimus](#reg-comic-doctor) (p. 184) · [In Praxiteles’ manner](#reg-praxitelean) (p. 203) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LIV · source pp. 67 {#passage-54} **Register.** [The Greek drug-grinder](#reg-drug-grinder) (p. 257) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LV · source pp. 67–68 {#passage-55} **Full articles.** [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) · [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) **Register.** [General education and leisure](#reg-general-education) (p. 194) · [Unity becoming duality](#reg-unity-duality) (p. 278) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LVI · source pp. 68 {#passage-56} **Register.** [Filles and society women](#reg-filles) (p. 190) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LVII · source pp. 68–69 {#passage-57} **Register.** [The man with the itch](#reg-galeux) (p. 262) · [The necessary accomplice](#reg-complice) (p. 263) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LVIII · source pp. 69 {#passage-58} **Full articles.** [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) · [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) **Register.** [Horror of home](#reg-horror-home) (p. 199) · [Universal conceit](#reg-fatuitous) (p. 278) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LIX · source pp. 69–70 {#passage-59} **Register.** [Durandeau, Darjon and the doctor](#reg-unresolved-discourses) (p. 185) **Phrase glosses.** [Art as a civilizing agent](#gloss-civilizing-art) (p. 300) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LX · source pp. 70 {#passage-60} **Register.** [Counsellor in a Court of Appeal](#reg-court-counsellor) (p. 178) · [The designation sieur](#reg-sieur) (p. 255) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXI · source pp. 70–71 {#passage-61} **Full articles.** [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) **Register.** [Militant literary language](#reg-militant-language) (p. 213) · [Staying at the breach](#reg-breach) (p. 245) · [Tavern or café](#reg-estaminet) (p. 248) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXII · source pp. 71 {#passage-62} **Register.** [Soldier of the judicial press](#reg-judicial-press) (p. 244) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXIII · source pp. 71–72 {#passage-63} **Full articles.** [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) **Register.** [Minds born to serve](#reg-born-servants) (p. 213) · [The literary advance guard](#reg-avant-garde) (p. 261) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXIV · source pp. 72 {#passage-64} **Full articles.** [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) · [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) **Register.** [Salvation](#reg-salvation) (p. 239) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXV · source pp. 72 {#passage-65} **Register.** [Jeanne and Mme Muller as examples](#reg-jeanne-muller) (p. 206) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXVI · source pp. 73 {#passage-66} **Full articles.** [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) · [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) **Register.** [Adaptation to national stupidity](#reg-adaptation-stupidity) (p. 158) · [Telegraph and National Printing Office](#reg-communication-power) (p. 248) **Phrase glosses.** [A marked repair in the dictator sentence](#gloss-glory-repair) (p. 301) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXVII · source pp. 74 {#passage-67} **Full articles.** [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) **Register.** [To adore or worship](#reg-adorer) (p. 275) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXVIII · source pp. 74–75 {#passage-68} **Full articles.** [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) **Register.** [Commending souls to God](#reg-recommend-souls) (p. 175) · [Punishment through a loved person](#reg-punishment-through) (p. 233) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXIX · source pp. 75 {#passage-69} **Full articles.** [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) **Register.** [The person subjected to punishment](#reg-supplicie) (p. 266) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXX · source pp. 75–76 {#passage-70} **Register.** [Sacrificing and sacrificing oneself](#reg-sacrifice-active) (p. 238) · [The apparently obvious](#reg-evidence) (p. 250) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXI · source pp. 76 {#passage-71} **Full articles.** [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) **Register.** [Divination’s proposed media](#reg-divination) (p. 183) · [First printer’s proof](#reg-printers-proof) (p. 191) · [Vérole](#reg-verole) (p. 282) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXII · source pp. 77 {#passage-72} **Full articles.** [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) **Register.** [Toilette](#reg-toilette) (p. 277) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIII · source pp. 77–78 {#passage-73} **Register.** [Pedantic officiousness](#reg-cuistrerie) (p. 222) · [Renan, Feydeau, Feuillet and Scholl](#reg-writers-targets) (p. 235) · [The newspaper directors’ list](#reg-press-list) (p. 264) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIV · source pp. 78 {#passage-74} **Full articles.** [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) **Register.** [Greatness and sainthood for oneself](#reg-for-oneself) (p. 194) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXV · source pp. 78–79 {#passage-75} **Register.** [Babouvist communist](#reg-babouvist) (p. 165) · [Nadar’s doubled organs](#reg-nadar) (p. 216) · [Veuillot and hostility to art](#reg-veuillot) (p. 281) **Phrase glosses.** [Humility that refuses understanding](#gloss-fanatic-humility) (p. 301) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVI · source pp. 79 {#passage-76} **Register.** [The writer’s enemy, the world](#reg-world-enemy) (p. 273) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVII · source pp. 79–80 {#passage-77} **Full articles.** [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) **Register.** [Entente cordiale](#reg-cordial-understanding) (p. 186) · [Thinking in concert](#reg-in-unison) (p. 274) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXVIII · source pp. 80 {#passage-78} **Full articles.** [Sea and Infinity](#entry-sea-infinity) (p. 118) · [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) **Register.** [A transient dwelling](#reg-transient-dwelling) (p. 157) · [Leagues and radius](#reg-league) (p. 207) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXIX · source pp. 81 {#passage-79} **Full articles.** [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) **Register.** [Divine mémento](#reg-divine-compendium) (p. 183) · [The Alexandrians and Capé](#reg-alexandrians-cape) (p. 250) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXX · source pp. 81–82 {#passage-80} **Full articles.** [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) **Register.** [Saint-Marc Girardin](#reg-saint-marc) (p. 238) · [The stagecoach](#reg-diligence) (p. 270) **Phrase glosses.** [Judging oneself by denying immortality](#gloss-justice-immortality) (p. 302) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXI · source pp. 82 {#passage-81} **Full articles.** [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) · [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) **Register.** [Pastoral peoples](#reg-herding-peoples) (p. 221) · [Table turning](#reg-table-turning) (p. 247) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXII · source pp. 82–83 {#passage-82} **Full articles.** [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) · [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) **Register.** [Humiliations from debt](#reg-avanies) (p. 200) · [Piocheurs](#reg-drudges) (p. 224) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIII · source pp. 83 {#passage-83} **Full articles.** [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) **Register.** [Scarecrow of art](#reg-scarecrow) (p. 240) · [The publishers’ young girl](#reg-young-reader) (p. 267) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIV · source pp. 84 {#passage-84} **Register.** [Held in common](#reg-common-god) (p. 197) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXV · source pp. 84–85 {#passage-85} **Full articles.** [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) **Register.** [A short newspaper item](#reg-entrefilet) (p. 156) · [Scatophagy and Gallic wit](#reg-scatophagy) (p. 240) · [The Lavalette clipping](#reg-lavalette-clipping) (p. 260) **Phrase glosses.** [The domesticated farmyard animal](#gloss-barnyard-france) (p. 302) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVI · source pp. 86–87 {#passage-86} **Full articles.** [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) **Register.** [Mœurs across generations](#reg-mores) (p. 216) · [The previous government’s atmosphere](#reg-inherited-atmosphere) (p. 266) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVII · source pp. 87–88 {#passage-87} **Full articles.** [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) **Register.** [Forgues, literary pirate](#reg-forgues-pirate) (p. 192) · [Religions on the walls](#reg-wall-slogans) (p. 234) · [The habitual quoter](#reg-quoters) (p. 258) **Phrase glosses.** [Spelling under the executioner’s hand](#gloss-spelling-executioner) (p. 303) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXVIII · source pp. 88–89 {#passage-88} **Full articles.** [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) **Register.** [Compound interest](#reg-compound-interest) (p. 175) · [Little by little](#reg-gradation) (p. 210) **Phrase glosses.** [The treasury of pleasure, not a silent variant](#gloss-volupte-witness) (p. 303) ### Mon cœur mis à nu LXXXIX · source pp. 89 {#passage-89} **Full articles.** [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) **Register.** [The funeral throng](#reg-throng) (p. 256) · [The writer of newspaper columns](#reg-column-writer) (p. 273) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XC · source pp. 89–90 {#passage-90} **Full articles.** [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) **Register.** [Pamphlet as polemical attack](#reg-pamphlet) (p. 220) · [The canaille](#reg-rabble) (p. 251) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCI · source pp. 90–91 {#passage-91} **Full articles.** [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) · [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) **Register.** [Bohemianism and wandering](#reg-bohemianism) (p. 170) · [Created beings as mistaken idols](#reg-creatures) (p. 179) · [Cuckoldry](#reg-cuckoldry) (p. 180) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCII · source pp. 91 {#passage-92} **Register.** [Paul Pérignon, unresolved](#reg-perignon) (p. 222) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCIII · source pp. 91–92 {#passage-93} **Full articles.** [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) **Register.** [Abbreviated sexual verbs](#reg-abbreviated-verbs) (p. 157) · [The Last Judgment as memory’s deadline](#reg-judgment-last) (p. 259) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCIV · source pp. 92 {#passage-94} **Full articles.** [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) · [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) · [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) **Register.** [The military pope](#reg-military-pope) (p. 262) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCV · source pp. 92 {#passage-95} **Full articles.** [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) **Register.** [The nervous idler](#reg-nervous-idler) (p. 264) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCVI · source pp. 92–93 {#passage-96} **Full articles.** [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) **Register.** [Legouvé, Samson and the deadpan joke](#reg-legouve-samson) (p. 208) · [Pariahs and the actor](#reg-pariahs) (p. 220) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCVII · source pp. 93–94 {#passage-97} **Full articles.** [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) **Register.** [Lent and returned](#reg-lent-returned) (p. 208) · [Profit-seeking](#reg-lucre) (p. 230) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCVIII · source pp. 94 {#passage-98} **Register.** [Hunger and promised satisfaction](#reg-beatitude) (p. 200) ### Mon cœur mis à nu XCIX · source pp. 95 {#passage-99} **Full articles.** [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) **Register.** [Bitter pleasures](#reg-bitter-pleasures) (p. 168) · [The homme d’esprit](#reg-wit) (p. 258) ### Mon cœur mis à nu C · source pp. 95–96 {#passage-100} **Full articles.** [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) **Register.** [Public servitude](#reg-public-domesticity) (p. 232) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CI · source pp. 96 {#passage-101} **Full articles.** [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) **Register.** [The next undertaking](#reg-operation) (p. 265) · [Usurers and divine complicity](#reg-usurer) (p. 280) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CII · source pp. 96–97 {#passage-102} **Full articles.** [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) **Register.** [Guys and Douay’s unwritten anecdotes](#reg-guys-douay) (p. 195) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CIII · source pp. 97–98 {#passage-103} **Full articles.** [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) · [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) · [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) **Register.** [Boasts of probity](#reg-probity) (p. 169) · [The morning apéritif](#reg-aperitif) (p. 263) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CIV · source pp. 98 {#passage-104} **Full articles.** [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) · [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) **Register.** [Pierced coins and keepsakes](#reg-pierced-coins) (p. 224) · [Virtue as efficacy](#reg-virtue-power) (p. 281) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CV · source pp. 99 {#passage-105} **Full articles.** [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) · [Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition](#entry-antisemitism) (p. 19) **Register.** [Librarians and witnesses of Redemption](#reg-jewish-witnesses) (p. 209) · [Obsession and possession](#reg-obsession-possession) (p. 218) **Phrase glosses.** [Printing as an obstacle to beauty](#gloss-printing-beauty) (p. 304) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CVI · source pp. 99–100 {#passage-106} **Full articles.** [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) **Register.** [Louise Villedieu’s Louvre visit](#reg-louise-villedieu) (p. 210) · [Nieuwerkerke’s leaves](#reg-fig-leaves) (p. 217) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CVII · source pp. 100–101 {#passage-107} **Full articles.** [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) **Register.** [Freedom and fate](#reg-fatality) (p. 193) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CVIII · source pp. 101–102 {#passage-108} **Full articles.** [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) **Register.** [Ixion and the cloud](#reg-ixion) (p. 205) · [Philis and Damon](#reg-philis-damon) (p. 223) · [The sonnet’s disputed attribution](#reg-sonnet-attribution) (p. 269) · [The unidentified Roland poem](#reg-roland) (p. 271) **Phrase glosses.** [The phantom abuses the flame](#gloss-deceived-passion) (p. 304) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CIX · source pp. 102–103 {#passage-109} **Full articles.** [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) · [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) **Register.** [Historical self-descriptions](#reg-hysteria-imbecility) (p. 198) · [Hygiène as a regimen](#reg-hygiene) (p. 201) **Phrase glosses.** [Mentally as well as physically](#gloss-moral-physical) (p. 305) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CX · source pp. 103 {#passage-110} **Full articles.** [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) **Register.** [To Honfleur](#reg-honfleur) (p. 276) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CXI · source pp. 103–104 {#passage-111} **Full articles.** [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) · [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) **Register.** [Poe and de Maistre as teachers](#reg-reasoning-teachers) (p. 225) · [Using time](#reg-using-time) (p. 279) **Phrase glosses.** [The work that is long because unbegun](#gloss-long-unbegun-work) (p. 305) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CXII · source pp. 104 {#passage-112} **Full articles.** [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) **Register.** [Delayed conversion](#reg-conversion-delay) (p. 181) **Phrase glosses.** [Nothing is lacking except work’s taste](#gloss-nothing-lacking) (p. 306) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CXIII · source pp. 105 {#passage-113} **Full articles.** [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) · [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) · [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) **Register.** [Daily frenzy](#reg-daily-frenzy) (p. 180) · [Know yourself](#reg-know-yourself) (p. 206) · [The beautiful commonplace](#reg-commonplace) (p. 251) **Phrase glosses.** [A hypothesis demands its conclusion](#gloss-hypothesis-demands) (p. 306) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CXIV · source pp. 105–106 {#passage-114} **Full articles.** [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) **Register.** [Ancelle and the debt share](#reg-ancelle) (p. 161) · [Billets as promissory notes](#reg-promissory-notes) (p. 168) · [Review and classification](#reg-sorting) (p. 236) **Phrase glosses.** [Eight days of sorting](#gloss-sorting-eight-days) (p. 307) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CXV · source pp. 106–108 {#passage-115} **Full articles.** [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) · [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) **Register.** [Atermoiement: delaying](#reg-delay-pretexts) (p. 164) · [Exactitude](#reg-punctuality) (p. 188) · [The resounding cymbal](#reg-resounding-cymbal) (p. 268) · [Working without self-interest](#reg-disinterested-work) (p. 284) **Phrase glosses.** [Humiliations as divine graces](#gloss-humiliation-grace) (p. 307) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CXVI · source pp. 108–111 {#passage-116} **Full articles.** [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) · [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) · [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) · [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) · [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) **Register.** [Iceland lichen](#reg-lichen) (p. 201) · [Memories enjoyed by two](#reg-shared-memory) (p. 212) · [Prayer’s sentinels](#reg-guarded-sleep) (p. 227) · [Prodigal hesitation](#reg-wasteful-hesitation) (p. 230) · [Reducing and skimming the syrup](#reg-skim-reduce) (p. 234) · [The Latin maxim of attention](#reg-attention-maxim) (p. 260) · [À jeun](#reg-empty-stomach) (p. 284) **Phrase glosses.** [Everything can still be repaired](#gloss-still-repairable) (p. 308) · [The 800-franc monthly plan](#gloss-monthly-plan) (p. 308) · [The recipe’s repeated unit](#gloss-syrup-units) (p. 309) ### Mon cœur mis à nu CXVII · source pp. 111–112 {#passage-117} **Full articles.** [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) · [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) · [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) · [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) · [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) · [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) · [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) · [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) **Register.** [Excitants](#reg-stimulants) (p. 189) · [Four shares of earnings](#reg-four-shares) (p. 192) · [Personal intercessors](#reg-intercessors) (p. 223) **Phrase glosses.** [The clause limiting daily work](#gloss-strength-limit) (p. 309) # Thematic index {#thematic-index} These routes compare related articles across the alphabetical arrangement. A topic can appear in more than one route without being counted as another article. ## Art and language - [Arabesque](#entry-arabesque) (p. 20) - [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) - [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) - [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) - [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) - [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) - [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) - [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) - [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) - [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) - [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) - [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) - [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) - [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) - [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) - [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) - [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) - [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) - [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) - [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) - [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) - [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) - [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) - [Irregularity](#entry-irregularity) (p. 79) - [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) - [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) - [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) - [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) - [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) - [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) - [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) - [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) - [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) - [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) - [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) - [Sea and Infinity](#entry-sea-infinity) (p. 118) - [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) - [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) - [Ships](#entry-ships) (p. 123) - [Supernaturalism](#entry-supernaturalism) (p. 125) - [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) - [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) - [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) - [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) - [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) - [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) ## Discipline and daily life - [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) - [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) - [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) - [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) - [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) - [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) - [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) - [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) - [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) - [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) - [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) - [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) - [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) - [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) - [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) - [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) - [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) - [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) - [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) - [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) - [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) - [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) - [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) - [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) ## Editorial questions - [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) - [Animal names](#entry-animal-names) (p. 17) - [Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition](#entry-antisemitism) (p. 19) - [Atmosphere](#entry-atmosphere) (p. 24) - [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) - [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) - [Cliché and poncif](#entry-cliche-and-poncif) (p. 40) - [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) - [Fragment and project](#entry-fragment-and-project) (p. 58) - [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) - [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) - [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) - [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) - [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) - [Pure poetry](#entry-pure-poetry) (p. 111) - [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) - [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) - [Tragic sky](#entry-tragic-sky) (p. 141) ## People and relationships - [Animal names](#entry-animal-names) (p. 17) - [Beauty](#entry-beauty) (p. 29) - [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) - [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) - [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) - [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) - [Debt, Honfleur, and the Ordered Desk](#entry-debt-honfleur) (p. 50) - [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) - [Girardin and Journalistic Reasoning](#entry-girardin) (p. 62) - [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) - [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) - [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) - [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) - [Play and gambling](#entry-play-and-gambling) (p. 100) - [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) - [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) - [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) - [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) - [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) - [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) - [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) - [Voluptuousness](#entry-voluptuousness) (p. 146) - [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) ## Religion and moral action - [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) - [Amulets, Sacraments, and Moral Dynamics](#entry-amulets-sacraments) (p. 15) - [Animal names](#entry-animal-names) (p. 17) - [Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition](#entry-antisemitism) (p. 19) - [Charity](#entry-charity) (p. 34) - [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) - [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) - [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) - [Created Form and Immortality](#entry-form-immortality) (p. 45) - [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) - [Evocative magic](#entry-evocative-magic) (p. 54) - [Fire](#entry-fire) (p. 56) - [George Sand, Good Sense, and Hell](#entry-george-sand) (p. 60) - [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) - [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) - [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) - [Love and torture](#entry-love-and-torture) (p. 83) - [Mystery](#entry-mystery) (p. 91) - [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) - [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) - [Poe, de Maistre, and Chosen Authorities](#entry-poe-maistre) (p. 104) - [Prayer, Strength, and the Daily Rule](#entry-prayer) (p. 105) - [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) - [Prostitution](#entry-prostitution) (p. 109) - [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) - [Satanic beauty](#entry-satanic-beauty) (p. 116) - [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) - [Symbol](#entry-symbol) (p. 127) - [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) - [The Mother, Jeanne, and Dependent Love](#entry-mother-jeanne) (p. 132) - [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) - [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) - [Voltaire and the Refusal of Mystery](#entry-voltaire) (p. 144) - [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) - [Work, Vocation, and Immediate Beginning](#entry-work) (p. 152) ## Self and sensation - [Acedia and weariness of life](#entry-acedia) (p. 13) - [Autobiography and Self-Examination](#entry-autobiography) (p. 26) - [Childhood, Contradiction, and First Passions](#entry-childhood) (p. 36) - [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) - [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) - [Dandyism, the Mirror, and the Toilette](#entry-dandyism) (p. 48) - [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) - [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) - [God: Sovereignty, Availability, and the Confidant](#entry-god) (p. 65) - [Gradation and Compound Interest](#entry-gradation) (p. 67) - [Hallucination](#entry-hallucination) (p. 69) - [Hygiène: Regimen and Moral Care](#entry-hygiene) (p. 73) - [Images, Worship, and Looking](#entry-images) (p. 74) - [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) - [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) - [Melancholy](#entry-melancholy) (p. 85) - [Misunderstanding and Incommunicability](#entry-misunderstanding) (p. 88) - [Music, Space, and Multiplied Sensation](#entry-music-space) (p. 90) - [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) - [Number](#entry-number) (p. 95) - [Obscenity, Abbreviation, and the Borrowed Sonnet](#entry-obscenity) (p. 97) - [Pleasure, Salvation, and the Present](#entry-pleasure-salvation) (p. 102) - [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) - [Sea and Infinity](#entry-sea-infinity) (p. 118) - [Self: Vaporization and Centralization](#entry-self) (p. 120) - [Sensibility](#entry-sensibility) (p. 122) - [The Abyss, Vertigo, and the Wing](#entry-abyss-vertigo) (p. 129) - [The Fall, Creation, and Duality](#entry-fall-creation) (p. 131) - [The Two Simultaneous Aspirations](#entry-two-aspirations) (p. 135) - [Theatre, the Actor, and the Chandelier](#entry-theatre-actor) (p. 137) - [Time and Memory](#entry-time-memory) (p. 139) - [Will, Habit, and the Fixed Idea](#entry-will) (p. 148) - [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) ## Society and history - [Antisemitism and the Witness Tradition](#entry-antisemitism) (p. 19) - [Aristocracy, Office, and Servitude](#entry-aristocracy-office) (p. 22) - [Bad taste](#entry-bad-taste) (p. 27) - [Cats](#entry-cats) (p. 31) - [Censorship and the Imagined Young Girl](#entry-censorship-young-girl) (p. 33) - [Civilization and Original Sin](#entry-civilization) (p. 38) - [Commerce, Profit, and Self-Interest](#entry-commerce) (p. 42) - [Conviction, Ambition, and Inconstancy](#entry-convictions) (p. 43) - [Crowd](#entry-crowd) (p. 46) - [End of the world](#entry-end-of-the-world) (p. 52) - [Glory and Solitude](#entry-glory-solitude) (p. 64) - [Halo](#entry-halo) (p. 71) - [Intoxication](#entry-intoxication) (p. 76) - [Irony](#entry-irony) (p. 78) - [Leisure, Dilettantism, and Debt](#entry-leisure) (p. 81) - [Military Metaphor and Conformity](#entry-military-metaphor) (p. 87) - [Nature and the Natural](#entry-nature) (p. 93) - [Ownership](#entry-ownership) (p. 98) - [Progress, Freedom, and Fate](#entry-progress) (p. 107) - [Revolution, 1848, and the Coup d’État](#entry-revolution-1848) (p. 112) - [Sacrifice, Torture, and Punishment](#entry-sacrifice-punishment) (p. 114) - [The Newspaper, Atrocity, and Public Appetite](#entry-newspaper) (p. 134) - [Universal Religion and Superstition](#entry-religion-universal) (p. 143) - [Women and Misogyny](#entry-women-misogyny) (p. 149) # Source guide {#source-guide} ## The reading edition Charles Baudelaire, Fusées and Mon cœur mis à nu, titled in English Flares and My Heart Laid Bare. French and English; new translation prepared for Diotimos, 2026. The recovered source files are Baudelaire_Expanded_Edition_V12.docx and Baudelaire_Expanded_Edition_V12.pdf. The title page names Steven Neff as reviewer and editor and marks review pending. No individual translator is named there, so the lexicon uses “the supplied translation” rather than inventing an attribution. The files contain the two notebooks in 117 continuously numbered sections: Fusées I–XXII and Mon cœur mis à nu XXIII–CXVII, including the later Hygiène fragments. There are 604 aligned bilingual text rows and 104 numbered translator notes. The PDF has 99 pages. These counts describe different structures; they are not interchangeable page or fragment totals. The separate Choix de maximes consolantes sur l’amour and the historical source’s editorial notes and index are excluded from the reading corpus. The lexicon is a separate work; the recovered source files remain unchanged. ## The governing French witness The supplied edition identifies its French source as Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes. Fusées. Mon cœur mis à nu, edited by Adolphe van Bever (Paris: G. Crès, 1920), printed pp. 3–42 and 45–112. The [Gallica historical volume](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206339d) identifies Baudelaire and Van Bever and gives access to the digitized printing. The [BnF catalogue record](https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb31774008w) is the catalogue route supplied with the edition. The supplied French, rather than an unannounced composite of modern online texts, governs the lexicon’s attestations. Its note on XXIII distinguishes Je pense from a comparison text’s Je peux. Its note on LXXXVIII distinguishes volupté from volonté. Its treatment of the short Latin sequence in XXVI leaves the uncertain print unreconstructed. These examples show why a familiar quotation from another edition cannot silently override the recovered source. The Roman numerals and section boundaries identify the 1920 arrangement as reproduced in the reading edition. They are not diary dates. A local date, such as 13 May 1856 in Fusées XII or 23 January 1862 in CIX, anchors that passage but does not date every nearby fragment. The sequence is useful for navigation without establishing a continuous chronology of thought. ## What belongs to which layer - Baudelaire’s notes include aphorisms, questions, instructions, quotations, projected chapters, drafts of scenes and practical lists - Quoted material within those notes retains its attributed or uncertain authorship, including the source note after Girardin in XXVI, the clipping in LXXXV and the sonnet in CVIII - The historical printing contributes arrangement, printed abbreviations, brackets, marginal indications and source editorial matter - The modern English is the translation prepared for Diotimos; restorations marked with angle brackets are editorially supplied English, not an uncensored transcription of the governing French print - The 104 modern translator notes explain vocabulary, history, variants and uncertainty; they are not all footnotes by Baudelaire - The lexicon’s articles, definitions and glosses offer new interpretation of the supplied bilingual material Square brackets do not all have one function. The contextual entry identifies whether a particular bracket belongs to the source text, a historical editorial indication or a modern explanatory convention. Capitalization and italic emphasis can likewise matter without turning every capitalized noun into the name of a formal philosophical doctrine. ## Names and allusions An explicitly named work is stronger evidence than a plausible echo. Poe’s Usher is named in Fusées XI; Milton supplies the model for Satan in XVI; the note in CXI expressly names De Maistre and Poe as teachers of reasoning. Such references can support focused comparison. They do not license importing every doctrine of the named author into Baudelaire’s notebooks. Other allusions remain unresolved. The exact Rousseau passage behind the café recollection in VIII is not securely identified in the supplied notes. The excerpt requested from Brierre de Boismont in XIV is not independently located there. The attribution to Aelian in LIV already carries a question mark. The source sonnet in CVIII is assigned by Baudelaire to Maynard tentatively, while Malassis is reported to prefer Théophile. The lichen recipe in CXVI names no diagnosis. Entries retain these limits rather than supply reassuring but unsupported answers. The article notes provide selective links to primary works where an external comparison is useful. A parallel can clarify a metaphor, establish the wording of an allusion or correct a common conflation; it does not automatically prove a direct source or settle an attribution. A historical person’s identification is also kept separate from an unverified claim about why Baudelaire mentioned that person. For the identification of the critic Pontmartin, see Edmond Biré, [Armand de Pontmartin sa vie et ses œuvres](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50930/50930-h/50930-h.htm) (Paris: Garnier frères, 1904). Biré acknowledges his friendship with the subject; his biographical account is not adopted as an impartial verdict on Baudelaire’s caricature. ## Verification and use Every displayed French attestation in the articles, register and phrase glosses was checked against the recovered French source at its stated section, allowing only typographical spacing and equivalent quotation-mark forms. Section labels and historical page spans were checked against the source headings. The four formats carry the same substantive articles, definitions, glosses and notes, with electronic navigation and the PDF’s stable printed locators. These checks do not constitute a new manuscript collation or a complete independent rechecking of all 108 historical printed pages. The reading edition’s own account of earlier AI checks is not treated as evidence of human scholarly review. Human editorial review of that translation remains pending. Local interpretive uncertainties are identified at the relevant entries rather than concealed by an overall claim of definitive accuracy. The vocabulary register is selective and substantial, not a word-by-word dictionary of the entire French text. The passage index is an index to the discussion, not a complete concordance. Medical practices are explained as historical text, never offered as a regimen for the reader. Violent, misogynistic and antisemitic assertions are quoted or described for critical interpretation, with their force and authorship kept clear. [^f-acedia-cassian]: John Cassian, Institutes X, especially chapters 1–3, describes the monastic condition and its effects on place, reading and work: [Institutes X](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/350710.htm). Cassian is a contextual primary witness for the term, not an author named in Fusées XIV or a demonstrated direct source for this note. [^f-cazotte-camel]: Cazotte, Le Diable amoureux, the initial evocation and the later reappearance of the camel’s head: [Le Diable amoureux](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Diable_amoureux/Texte_entier). The narrative supplies the transformation to which the notebook alludes; Baudelaire’s three-word compression is not a neutral summary of all its ambiguities. [^antisemitism-1]: Primary comparison: Augustine, City of God XVIII.46, [City of God XVIII 46](https://www.logoslibrary.org/augustine/city/1846.html). The chapter argues for the preservation of Jews as scriptural witnesses within a Christian supersessionist framework. That preservation claim must not be confused with the extermination proposal in CV. [^f-atmosphere-poe]: Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, first publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1839), especially the narrator’s conjecture about an atmosphere belonging to the house and the later account of its influence: [The Fall of the House of Usher](https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/ushera.htm). The comparison concerns the tale’s narrated perceptions, not an endorsed physical explanation. [^f-poncif-dictionary]: The Académie française’s dictionary records the perforated transferable drawing and the figurative conventional model under poncif: [Académie française dictionary](https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/academie9/poncif/). This lexical range supports the distinction between inventing a reusable form and merely repeating an exhausted formula. [^dandyism-1]: For the published parallel, see Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, IX, Le Dandy: [Le Dandy](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Art_romantique/Le_Peintre_de_la_vie_moderne/IX). The essay distinguishes material elegance from the cultivation of spiritual distinction. [^george-sand-1]: Sand’s own argument should be consulted alongside the hostile summary: Mademoiselle La Quintinie, Préface, [Mademoiselle La Quintinie preface](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Mademoiselle_La_Quintinie/Pr%C3%A9face). She challenges eternal punishment and defends the novel’s treatment of religious and moral questions. [^f-halo-poem]: Compare Baudelaire, Perte d’auréole, in the 1869 collected Petits Poèmes en prose: [Perte d’auréole](https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Perte_d%E2%80%99aur%C3%A9ole). The speaker leaves the halo, accepts anonymity and rejects a suggestion that it be reclaimed. These are substantive differences from Fusées XVII, not interchangeable versions of the same outcome. [^f-milton-satan]: Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, especially lines 589–609: surviving radiance, thunder-scars, care, pride, revenge and remorse appear together in Satan’s portrait. Primary text: [Paradise Lost I](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/paradise-lost-book-i). Baudelaire’s use is selective; this portrait does not settle the poem’s judgment of its character.