From the book
Intimate Journals
Charles Baudelaire · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordGouffre names an abyss rather than a single object of fear.
- In Intimate JournalsThe list in Mon cœur mis à nu CIX is unusually comprehensive, crossing supposed opposites.
- In this editionThe edition keeps ‘hysteria’, ‘dizzy’, and ‘imbecility’ as translations of historical self-description.
- A place to readla sensation du gouffre — The abyss is stated as an enduring mode of experience.
Meaning
Gouffre names an abyss rather than a single object of fear. Mon cœur mis à nu 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.
Use in the book
The list in Mon cœur mis à nu 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.
Mon cœur mis à nu 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.
Places to read
- Mon cœur mis à nu CIXla sensation du gouffre — The abyss is stated as an enduring mode of experience.
- Mon cœur mis à nu CIXdu beau, du nombre — Aesthetic and formal values belong to the destabilizing list.
- Mon cœur mis à nu CIXavec jouissance et terreur — Delight and fear accompany the claimed self-cultivation.
- Mon cœur mis à nu CIXle vent de l’aile de l’imbécillité. — The threatening limit is rendered as a passing bodily image.
Translation 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.