In Baudelaire's _Femmes damnées_ there is the aching soul of the spirit's fatal malady: that sexual malady for which there is no remedy: the Lesbian sterile perilous divinisation of flesh for flesh, virginal or unvirginal flesh _with_ flesh. In vain desire, of that one desire that exists beyond all possible satisfaction, the desire of an utter annihilation of body with body in that ecstasy which can never be absolutely achieved without man's flesh, they strive, unconsumed with even the pangs of their fruitless desires. They live only with a life of desire, and that obsession has carried them beyond the wholesome bounds of nature into the violence of a perversity which is at times almost insane. And all this sorrowful and tortured flesh is consumed with that feverish desire that leaves them only a short space for their desire's fruitions. II Certain of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a serpentine girl's skin; some the odour of woman's flesh. Certain spirits are intoxicated by these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of their vices, from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a cruel imagination has fashioned these naked images of the Seven Deadly Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall; that smile not even in Hell, in whose flames they writhe. One conceives them there and between the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages; they are incapable of imagining God's justice. Baudelaire dramatizes these living images of his spirit and of his imagination, these fabulous creatures of his inspiration, these macabre ghosts, in a fashion utterly different from that of other tragedians--Shakespeare, and Aristophanes in his satirical Tragedies, his lyrical Comedies; yet in the same sense of being the writer where beauty marries unvirginally the sons of ancient Chaos.