Baudelaire, Charles

English

University of Montana

CutBank Volume 1 Issue 7 CutBank 7 Article 26 Fall 1976 Crowds translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel Charles Baudelaire Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cutbank  Part of the Creative Writing Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Baudelaire, Charles (1976) "Crowds translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel," CutBank: Vol. 1 : Iss. 7 , Article 26. Available at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cutbank/vol1/iss7/26 This Prose is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in CutBank by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact scholarworks@mso.umt.edu. Charles BaudelaireCROWDSIt is not granted to everyone to bathe in the multitude: to enjoy the crowd is an art; and he alone, at the expense of the hum an  race, can have a drinking bout of vitality, into whom  a fairy has blown in his cradle the taste for disguise and mask, hatred for his dwelling place and passion for travel.Multitude, solitude: equal and convertible expressions for the active and prolific poet. He who doesn’t know how to people his solitude, doesn’t know either how to be alone in a bustling crowd.The poet enjoys this incom parable privilege, that  he can be himself and other people, as he pleases. Like those wandering souls who search for a body, he enters, when he wishes, the character of everyone. For him alone, everything is tenantless; and if certain places seem to be closed to him, it’s that in his eyes they aren’t w orth the trouble of being visited.The solitary and pensive stroller draws a singular intoxication from this universal communion. He who easily embraces the crowd knows feverish enjoyments, of which the egoist, closed like a coffer, and the sluggard, confined like a mollusk, will be eternally deprived. He adopts as his own all the professions, all the joys and all the miseries that circumstance presents him.What men call love is quite small, quite restrained and quite feeble, compared with this ineffable orgy, this blessed prostitu tion of the soul that gives its entire self wholly, poetry and charity, to the unforeseen that appears, to the unknow n that passes on.It is good sometimes to teach the happy people of this world, were it only to humiliate for one instant their foolish pride, that there are felicities superior to theirs, more vast and more exquisite. Founders  of colonies, pastors of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the end of the world, doubtlessly know something of these mysterious intoxications; and, in the bosom  of the vast family that their genius has made for itself, they must laugh sometimes a t those who pity them for their so unsettled fortunes and for their so chaste lives.Translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel62

Crowds translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel

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Crowds translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel

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