Both often went to the Café de la Belle-Poule; and, one night, when Cladel was waiting for Baudelaire, a very beautiful woman seated opposite him asked him to present her to Baudelaire. He laughed and they waited, and Baudelaire was presented, who, after giving them the usual drinks, at the end of an hour went away. This went on for a whole month; when Baudelaire, after her incessant assiduities to him, brought her home with him, Cladel also. They talk. The woman becomes lascivious. Baudelaire answers that he has a passion for beautiful forms and does not wish to expose himself to a deception. She undresses slowly. She is magnificent, and her tresses are so long that, with leaning over a little, she could put her naked feet on the ends of them. She assumes, being probably aware of it, the exact pose of Mademoiselle de Maupin when she stands naked before d'Albert. Cladel goes out. He has not quite closed the door when he hears Baudelaire, prematurely old and worn out, say: "Rhabille-toi." Still vital, he has no more the abstract heat of rapture of the passionate lover in Gautier's famous self-confessions; for, in that wonderful book, there is nothing besides a delicately depraved imagination and an extreme ecstasy over the flesh and the senses. And he also realized, as Baudelaire did not always, that the beauty of life was what he wanted, and not the body, that frail and perishable thing, that has to be pitied, that so many desire to perpetuate. Yet never in Baudelaire, as in Gautier, did the five senses become articulate, as if they were made specially for him; for he speaks for them with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are--never Baudelaire's--in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have no recollection. Yet neither were absolutely content with the beauty of a woman's body: for the body must finally dwindle and expand to some ignoble physical condition, and on certain women's necks wrinkles will crawl, and the fire in one's blood sometimes loses some of its heat; only, one wants to perpetuate the beauty of life itself, imperishable at least in its recurrence.