And, in a sense, he is our modern Catullus; in his furies, his negations, his outcries, his Paganism, his inconceivable passion for woman's flesh; yet Lesbia is for ever Lesbia. Still, Baudelaire in his _Franciscae meae_ _Laudes,_ and with less sting but with as much sensual sense of the splendour of sex, gives a magnificent Latin eulogy of a learned and pious modiste, that ends: "Patera gemmis corusca, Panis salsus, mollis esca, Divinum vinum, Francisca." And he praises the Decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre les négligences forcés d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des règles." _Don Juan aux enfers_ is a perfect Delacroix. In _Danse macabre_ there is the universal swing of the dancers who dance the Dance of Death. Death herself, in her extreme horror, ghastly, perfumed with myrrh, mixes her irony with men's insanity as she dances the Sabbat of Pleasure. He shows us the infamous menagerie of the vices in the guise of reptiles; our chief enemy Ennui is _ce monstre délicat._ There are Vampires, agonies of the damned alive; _Le possédé_ with his excruciating cry out of all his fibres: _O mon cher Belzébuth! je t'adore!_ And there are some, subtler and silent, that seem to move, softly, as the feet of Night, to the sound of faint music, or under the shroud of a sunset. _Les fleurs du mal_ are grown in Parisian soil, exotics that have the strange, secretive, haunting touch and taint of the earth's or of the body's corruption. In his sense of beauty there is a certain revolt, a spiritual malady, which may bring with it the heated air of an alcove or the intoxicating atmosphere of the East. Never since Villon has the flesh of woman been more adored and abhorred. Both aware of the original sin of _l'unique animál_--the seed of our moral degradation--Villon creates his _Grosse Margot_ and Baudelaire _Delphine et Hippolyte._ Villon's is a scullion-wench, and in the Ballad a Brothel as infamous, as foul, as abominable as a Roman Lupanar surges before one's astonished vision. And this comes after his supreme, his consummate praise of ruinous old age on a harlot's body: _Les regrets de la Belle Heaulmière._ It is one of the immortal things that exist in the world, that I can compare only with Rodin's statue in bronze: both equal incarnations of the symbolical conception that sin brought shame into the first woman's flesh. "Que m'en reste-il? Honte et Péché:" cries each mouth, cries to the end of earth's eternity.