In his preface Baudelaire compares Murger with Musset, both Bohemian classics, only one spoke of Bohemia with a bitter bantering, and the poet, when he was not in his noble moods, had crises of fatuity. "All this evil society, with its vile habits, its adventurous morals, was painted by the vivid pencil-strokes of Murger; only he jested in his relations of miserable things." Yes, Murger is a veracious historian; believe him, if you do not know or have forgotten, that such are the annals of Bohemia. There, people laugh just so lightly and sincerely, weep and laugh just as freely, are really hungry, really have their ambitions, and at times die of all these maladies. It is the gayest and most melancholy country in the world. To have lived there too long, is to find all the rest of the world in exile. But if you have been there or not, read Murger's pages; there, perhaps, you will see more of the country than anything less than a lifetime spent in it will show you. IX In April, 1864, Baudelaire left Paris for Brussels, where he stayed in the Hôtel du Grand-Miroir, rue de la Montagne. Before then his nerves had begun to torment him; they played tricks with his very system; he wrote very little prose and no verse. It was with a kind of desperate obstination--a more than desperate obstinacy--that he strove to prevent himself from giving way to his pessimistic conceptions of life, to his morbid over-sensibility that ached as his flesh ached. Unsatiated, unsatisfied, for once in his existence irresolute in regard to what he wanted to do, watching himself with an almost casuistical casuistry, alone and yet not alone in the streets of Paris, he wandered, a _noctambule,_ night after night, sombre and sinister. So a ghost self-obsessed might wander in desolate cities seeing ever before him the Angel of Destruction. Did he then know that he was becoming more and more abnormal? This I ignore. This, I suppose, he alone knew; and hated too much knowledge of his precarious condition. He was veritably more alone than ever, before he plunged--as one who might see shipwreck before him--into that gulf that is no gulf, that extends not between hell and heaven, but that one names Brussels. [Illustration: manuscript] Still he frequented his favourite haunts, the Moulin-Rouge, the Casino de la rue Cadet, and other cabarets. He saw then, as I saw many years afterwards, pass some of his Flowers of Evil--some who knew him and had read his verses, most of whom he ignored--macabre, with hectic cheeks and tortured eyes and painted faces; these strange nocturnal birds of passage that flit to and fro, the dancers and the hired women; always--so Latin an attitude of their traditional trade!--with enquiring and sidelong glances at men and at women.