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Paris Spleen is the last major work of the French poet Charles Baudelaire. It is not as well known or as highly regarded as his first published work Les Fleurs du mal but it is the superior piece of writing. I have not ever been as taken by Les Fleurs du mal as some of my friends. The reputation as I gather it is that he was something of a French recapitulation of Edgar Allan Poe and was perhaps a little grungier and more realistic in fashioning his poems of the grotesque. To me they are simply another expression of nineteenth century decadent arts and letters, not as effectively stylized as Oscar Wilde’s work and certainly not as well made as Guy de Maupassant’s short stories.

Paris Spleen on the other hand is a very nearly perfectly realized work. His last major work, published posthumously in 1869, it contains some of his most humane writing and also some of his most fully realized portraits of day to day Paris life, which is not to say that the work is any less biting than his earlier work. Take the Dog and the Scent-Bottle for example:

Come here, my dear, good, beautiful doggie, and smell this excellent perfume which comes from the best perfumer of Paris.
And the dog, wagging his tail, which, I believe, is that poor creature’s way of laughing and smiling, came up and put his curious nose on the uncorked bottle. Then, suddenly, he backed away in terror, barking at me reproachfully.
“Ah miserable dog, if I had offered you a package of excrement you would have sniffed at it with delight and perhaps gobbled it up. In this you resemble the public, which should never be offered delicate perfumes that infuriate them, but only carefully selected garbage.”

Even as simple a thing as some of the titles of these prose poems will give you an idea of his approach, Beat up the Poor, Portraits of Mistresses, the Shooting Gallery and the Cemetery, Loss of a Halo. Titles like these should give you some idea of sentimentality and romanticism in Baudelaire’s work. Still, the net effect is not one of dyspeptic criticism, but rather, finally, one of sympathy with the world’s failure to sustain itself or its inhabitants.

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