Baudelaire Literary Lexicon

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. 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.

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. The reading edition contains 117 numbered sections and 104 translator notes.

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. 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The supplied French governs the attestations; this reading companion does not constitute a new manuscript collation or a full independent rechecking of the historical printing.

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.

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 lexicon uses ‘the supplied translation’ when discussing the reading edition.

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 104 numbered translator notes. 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 identifies Baudelaire and Van Bever and gives access to the digitized printing. The BnF catalogue record 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 (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

French attestations follow the supplied French source at the stated sections, with typographical spacing and equivalent quotation-mark forms normalized where necessary. Section labels and historical page spans follow the source headings.

This companion does not constitute a new manuscript collation or a complete independent rechecking of all 108 historical printed pages. Local interpretive uncertainties are identified at the relevant entries.

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.