From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordThe notebook's language repeatedly announces its unfinished status: plans, suggestions, titles, questions, reminders and future chapters.
- In Intimate JournalsFusées IV begins ‘Plan.
- In this editionThe 2026 edition translates Fusées as ‘Flares’ while preserving the French title in the bilingual work's structure.
- A place to readPlan.
Meaning
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.
Use in the book
Fusées IV begins ‘Plan. Fusées. Projets’ and accumulates named references, vows, a possible preface, a theory of dreams and instructions for manner. Fusées XIV is essentially a reading-and-search list. Fusées 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.
Fusées 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.
Places to read
- Fusées IVPlan. Fusées. Projets. — The opening labels announce work to be attempted.
- Fusées XIIMardi, 13 mai 1856. — A local date anchors the following errands without automatically dating everything nearby.
- Fusées XIVChercher le passage — The reading note openly records something still to be located.
- Fusées XXIcommencer un sujet n’importe où — The writer treats a compelling beginning as a means of generating continuation.
- Fusées XXIIje laisserai ces pages — Retention itself becomes a conscious decision within the text.
Translation 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 Fusées 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.