In these pages swarm (in his words) all the corruptions and all the scepticisms; ignoble criminals without convictions, detestable hags that gamble, the cats that are like men's mistresses; Harpagon; the exquisite, barbarous, divine, implacable, mysterious Madonna of the Spanish style; the old men; the drunkards, the assassins, the lovers (their deaths and lives); the owls; the vampires whose kisses raise from the grave the corpse of its own self; the Irremediable that assails its origin: Conscience in Evil! There is an almost Christ-like poem on his Passion, _Le reniement de Saint-Pierre,_ an almost Satanic denunciation of God in _Abel and Cain,_ and with them the Evil Monk, an enigmatical symbol of Baudelaire's soul, of his work, of all that his eyes love and hate. Certain of these creatures play in travesties, dance in ballets. For all the Arts are transformed, transfigured, transplanted out of their natural forms to pass in magnificent state across the stage: the stage with the abyss of Hell in front of it. "Sensualist" (I quote a critic), "but the most profound of sensualists, and, furious of being no more than that, he goes, in his sensation, to the extreme limit, to the mysterious gate of infinity against which he knocks, yet knows not how to open, with rage he contracts his tongue in the vain effort." Yet centuries before him Dante entered Hell, traversed it in imagination from its endless beginning to its endless end; returned to earth to write, for the spirit of Beatrice and for the world, that _Divina Commedia,_ of which in Verona certain women said: "Lo, he that strolls to Hell and back At will I Behold him, how Hell's reek Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek." It is Baudelaire who, in Hell as in earth, finds a certain Satan in such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essentially demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily, as if the Devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets. Here in such satanic and romantic atmosphere one hears dissonances, the discords of the instruments in the Sabbats, the howlings of irony, the vengeance of the vanquished.