From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordThe cat condenses a cluster of qualities: beauty, luxury, cleanliness and sensual pleasure.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées XIX pretends that the democrats' dislike of cats is easy to explain.
- 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.
- A place to readPourquoi les démocrates n’aiment pas les chats — The opening takes an unproved preference as a premise for polemical wit.
Meaning
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.
Use in the book
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 Fusées 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.
Places to read
- Fusées XIXPourquoi les démocrates n’aiment pas les chats — The opening takes an unproved preference as a premise for polemical wit.
- Fusées XIXdes idées de luxe, de propreté, de volupté — The animal condenses an aesthetic value-cluster.
- Fusées XVIIL’air chat, enfantillage, nonchalance et malice mêlés. — The feminine air is attractive through a mixture of dispositions.
- Mon cœur mis à nu XLIles conversations intimes avec les animaux, chiens, chats — A later moral schema assigns intimate animal relations a downward tendency.
Translation 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 Fusées 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.