There was too much of the woman in the making of Poe, manly as he was in every sense. He had no strength of will, was drawn from seduction to seduction; had not enough grip on his constitution to live wisely, to live well. He drifted, let himself be drifted. He had no intention of ruining himself, yet ruined he was, and there was nothing that could have saved him. Call it his fate or his evil star, he was doomed inevitably to an early death. _Pas de chance!_ Yes--let one suppose--had he himself chosen the form of his death, he might have desired to die like the sick women in his pages--_mourant de maux bizarres._ Baudelaire, the most scrupulous of the men of letters of our age, spent his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a marvellous original. Often an enigma to himself, much of his life and of his adventures and of his experiences remain enigmatical. I shall choose one instance out of many; that is to say, what was the original of his dedication of _L'Heautimoromenos_ in _Les Fleurs du Mal_, and of his dedication of _Les paradis artificiels_ to a woman whose initials are J. G. F.? The poem was first printed in _L 'Artiste_, May 10, 1857, together with two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical: _Franciscae Meae Laudes,_ and _L'Irrémédiable._ The Latin verses, composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the Dedication: _Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote._ The verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its name, on the comedy of Terence, _The Self-Tormentor,_ where, in fact, the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare's _Timon of Athens._ Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women. He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror. He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal laughter.