From 1838 to 1842 (when Baudelaire attains his majority) there is a family crisis in a certainly impossible family circle. These years he spends in vagabonding at his own will: living a deliciously depraved life; diving, perhaps, into depths of impurity; haunting the night resorts that one finds in the most curious quarters of Paris--the cafés, the theatres, la Rue de Bréda. He amuses himself enormously: even in "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame;" he lives then, as always, by his sensitive nerves, by his inexhaustible curiosity. He is devoured then, as always, by the inner fires of his genius and of his sensuality; and is, certainly, a quite naturally immoral man in his relations with women. He lives, as I have said; he feeds himself on his nerves: "The modern malady of love is nerves." It is an incurable, a world-old malady; and, from Catullus, one of the greatest of all poets, century after century, from the Latin poets of the Middle Ages, from the poets of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan Age, down to the modern Romantic Movement, no poet who was a passionate lover of Woman has ever failed to sing for her and against her: "I hate and I love: you ask me how I can do it? I know not: I know that it hurts: I am going through it." _Odi et amo; quari id faciam, fortasse requiris._ _Nescio; sed fiere sentio, et excrucior._ "Caelius, Lesbia mine, that Lesbia, that Lesbia whom Catullus for love did rate Higher than all himself and than all things, stands Now at the cross-roads and the alleys to wait For the lords of Rome, with public lips and hands." _Cœli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia,_ _Ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam_ _Plus, quàm se, atque suos amavit omnes._ Need I quote more than these three fines? These fines, and those quoted above, are enough to show, for all time, that Catullus was as passionate a lover and as passionate a hater of flesh as Villon. Yet, if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even _le grosse Margot_ from her place in his life; who, to a certainty, had not for one instant the place in his life that Lesbia had in the life of Catullus. Villon was no dabbler in infamy, but one who liked infamous things for their own sake. Nor must I forget John Donne, whose quality of passion is unique in English poetry--a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a pitch of actual violence: his senses speak with unparalleled directness: he can exemplify every motion with an unluxurious explicitness which leaves no doubt of his intentions. He suffers from all the fevers and colds of love; and, in his finest poem--a hate poem--he gives expression to a whole region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out of Catullus, with such intolerable truth: