Fascinated by sin, Baudelaire, as I have said in these pages, is never the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as the original sin; he studies sin as he studies evil, with a stern logic; he finds in horror a kind of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; rarely in hideous things, save when his sense of what I call a moralist makes him moralise, as in his terrible poem, _Une Charogne._ Baudelaire's original manuscript, that is to say, the copy he makes for his final text, I have recently bought. It covers two and a half folio pages, folded four times across, as if he had carried it about with him; it is written on thin, half-yellow paper, yellowed with age, and on both sides; it is copied at tremendous speed with a quill pen that blots the dashes he puts under every stanza. The title is underlined; the only revision is where he obliterates "comme une vague" (which he had used in the first line) and changes it to "d'un souffle, vague." He uses a tremendous amount of capital letters; as in the first stanza: "L'Objet, Mon Cœur, Matin, Doux, Détour, d'un Sentier, Une Charogne, Cailloux." In the next: "Femme Lubrique, Les Poisons, D'une Façon Nonchalant et Cynique, Ventre, Exhalations." At the end of the last stanza but one he writes: "Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses Vivre parmi les monuments;" which he changes in the text of his _Fleurs du mal_ into: "Quand vous irez sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses Moisir parmi les ossements." The change makes an enormous improvement to the stanza. To possess this manuscript written by Baudelaire is to possess one of the most magnificent poems he ever wrote: the whole thing is copied in a kind of unholy rapture, in a kind of evil perversion. I. AN ADVENTURE IN FIRST EDITIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS I am, fortunately, the possessor of a copy of the first edition of _Les Fleurs du Mal._ The title-page is as follows: LES FLEURS DU MAL || par Charles Baudelaire. || Paris: || Poulet-Malassis et de Broise: || Libraire-Éditeurs. || 4 rue de Buci. || 1857. This copy is signed, in brown Parisian ink: _"à mon ami Champfleury, Ch. Baudelaire_" His signature is fantastic: the B. curled backward like a snake's tail in an Egyptian hieroglyphic, the straight line like an enchanter's wand. It is "grand-12; 252 pages." It contains one hundred poems, the perfect number. It is printed on _papier vergé._ It is one of the twenty copies, thus specially printed, that Baudelaire ordered for himself and for certain of his friends. The rest of the edition was printed on common white paper. Taken as a whole, this is certainly one of the most perfectly printed books done in France, or anywhere, in the past century.