The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes with satanical glances and is: _La conscience dans le mal!_ In _Les fleurs du mal_ (1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages 123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" with _Piscina plena virtutis;_ "Dans un Styx bourbeux" with _Sicat beneficum Lethe;_ "Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" with _Labris vocem redde mutis!_ "Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication of _Les paradis,_ "une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough: a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry. One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words, taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution: _In nocte mea taberna._ _Flambeau des grâces sataniques._ I return to my copy of _Les paradis artificiels_ (1860). The dedication to J. G. F. begins: "_Ma chère amie,_ Common-sense tells us that terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the imaginations that she haunts. [Illustration: Frontpage Les paradis artificiels]