"Imagine my perpetual laziness, which I hate profoundly, and the impossibility of going out on account of my perpetual want of money. After I had been seeking money for three days, on Monday night, exhausted with fatigue, with weariness and with hunger, I went into the first hotel I came on, and since then I have had to remain there, and for certain reasons. I am nearly devoured, eaten by this enforced idleness." In a letter written in Brussels, March 9, 1868, he says: "I have announced the publication of three fragments: _Chateaubriand et le Dandysme littéraire, La Peinture didactique,_ and _Les fleurs du mal jugées par l'auteur lui-même._ I shall add to these a refutation of an article of Janin, one on _Henri Heine et la jeunesse des poètes,_ and the refutation of _La Préface de la vie de Jules César par Napoléon III._" Besides these, on the cover of his _Salon de_ 1848 are announced: "_De la poésie moderne; David, Guérin et Gerodet; Les Limbes, poésies; Catéchisme de la femme aimée._" On the paper cover of my copy of his _Théophile Gautier_ (1861), under the title of "_Sous Presse,_" are announced: _Opium et Haschisch, ou l'Idéal Artificiel_ (which was printed in 1860 as _Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch), Curiosités esthétiques_ (which were printed in 1868); _Notices littéraires;_ and _Machiavel et Condorcet, dialogue philosophique._ Of these, _Les Limbes_ appeared as _Les fleurs du mal_ (1857); _Les Notices littéraires_ at the end of _L'Art Romantique_ (1868); none of the others were printed, nor do I suppose he had even the time to begin them. He might have written on Machiavelli a prose dialogue as original, from the French point of view, as one of Landor's Imaginary Conversations, such as those between Plato and Diogenes, the two Ciceros, Leonora d'Este with Father Panigarole. Both had that satirical touch which can embody the spirit of an age or of two men in conversation. Both had a creative power and insight equal to that of the very greatest masters; both had the power of using prose with a perfection which no stress of emotion is allowed to discompose. Only it seems to me that Baudelaire might have made the sinister genius, the calculating, cold observation of Machiavelli, who wrote so splendidly on Cesare Borgia, give vent to a tremendous satire on priests and Kings and Popes after the manner of Rabelais or of Aristophanes; certainly not in the base and ignoble manner of Aretino.