Beardsley is the satirist of an age without convictions, and he can but paint hell as Baudelaire did, without pointing for contrast to any actual paradise. He employs the same rhetoric as Baudelaire--a method of emphasis which it is uncritical to think insincere. In the terrible annunciation of evil which he called _The Mysterious Rose-Garden,_ the lantern-bearing angel with winged sandals whispers, from among the falling roses, tidings of more than "pleasant sins." And in Baudelaire, as in Beardsley, the peculiar efficacy of their satire is that it is so much the satire of desire returning on itself, the mockery of desire enjoyed, the mockery of desire denied. It is because these love beauty that beauty's degradation obsesses them; it is because they are supremely conscious of virtue that vice has power to lay hold on them. And with these--unlike other satirists of our day--it is always the soul, and not the body's discontent only, which cries out of these insatiable eyes, that have looked on all their lusts; and out of these bitter mouths, that have eaten the dust of all their sweetnesses; and out of these hands, that have laboured delicately for nothing; and out of their feet, that have run after vanities. The body, in the arms of death, the soul, in the arms of the naked body: these are the strangest symbolical images of Life and of Death. So, as Flaubert's devotion to art seemed to have had about it something of the "seriousness and passion that are like a consecration," I give this one sentence on the death of Emma Bovary: "Ensuite il recita le _Misereatur_ et l'_Indulgentiam_, trempa son pouce droit dans l'huile et commença les onctions: d'abord sur les yeux, qui avaient tant convoité toutes les somptuosités terrestres; puis sur les narines, friandes de brises tièdes et de senteurs amoureuses; puis sur la bouche, qui s'était ouverte pour le mensonge, qui avait gémi d'orgueil et crié dans la luxure; puis sur les mains, qui se delectaient au contacts suaves, et enfin sur la plante des pieds, si rapides autrefois quand elle courait à l'assouvissance de ses désirs et qui maintenant ne marcheraient plus." Charles Baudelaire was born April 9th, 1821, in la rue Saint Augustin, 8; he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice. His father, François, who had married Mile Janin in 1803, married, after her death, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, born in London, September 27th, 1793. François Baudelaire's father, named Claude, married Marie-Charlotte Dieu, February 10th, 1738, at Neuville-au-Port, in the Department of Marne.