Baudelaire, whose acquaintance with English was perfect, was thrilled in 1846 when he read certain pages of Poe; he seemed to see in his prose a certain similarity in words and thoughts, even in ideas, as if he himself had written some of them; these pages of a prose-writer whom he named "the master of the horrible, the prince of mystery." For four years he set himself to the arduous task of translating the prose of a man of genius, whom he certainly discovered for France and for French readers. And his translation is so wonderful that it is far and away finer than a marvellous original. His first translation was printed in _Le Liberté de Pensée_ in July, 1848, and he only finished his translations at the end of sixteen years. In 1852 the _Revue de Paris_ printed his _Edgar Allan Poe; sa vie et ses ouvrages._ His translations came in this order: _Histoires extraordinaires_ (1856, which I have before me); _Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires_ (1857, which I also possess); _Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym_ (1858); _Euréka_ (1864); _Histoires grotesques et sérieuses_ (1865). One knows the fury with which (in 1855) he set himself the prodigious task of translating one of Poe's stories every day; which, to one's amazement, he actually did. Always he rages over his proofs, over those printers' devils, an accursed race; every proof is sent back to the printing press, revised; underlined, covered in the margins with imperative objurgations, written with an angry hand and accentuated with notes of exclamation. Swinburne shared the same fate. He writes to Chatto a violent letter on the incompetence of printers: "their scandalous negligence," "ruinous and really disgraceful blunders," "numberless wilful errors," written in a state of perfect frenzy. "These damned printers," he cries at them, as Baudelaire did; "who have done their utmost to disfigure my book. The appearance of the pages is disgraceful--a chaos." And he actually writes one letter to complain of a dropped comma! The _Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe_ of 1857 are infinitely finer than those of 1856. He begins with: _Littérature de décadence!_ and with a paradox, of his invention, of the Sphynx without an enigma. _Genus irritabile vatum!_ a Latin phrase for the irritable race of artists, is irrefutable, and certainly irrefutable are all Baudelaire's arguments, divinations, revelations of Poe's genius and of Poe's defects.