"Now, for these people whose intelligence, daily applied to the elaboration of books, is hardest to please, Champfleury's work absorbed that of the famous man. All those of whom I speak have known _Le Gâteau des rois._ Their profession is to know everything. _Le Gâteau des rois,_ a kind of Christmas book, or 'Livre de Noël,' showed above all a clearly asserted pretention to draw from "the language, by playing infinite variations on the dictionary, all the effects which a transcendental instrumentalist draws from his chords. Shifting of forces, error of an unballasted mind! The ideas in this strange book follow each other in haste, dart with the swiftness of sound, leaning at random on infinitely tenuous connections. Their association with one another hangs by a thread according to a method of thought similar to that of people in Bedlam. "Vast current of involuntary ideas, wild-goose chase, abnegation of will! This singular feat of dexterity was accomplished by the man you know, whose sole and special faculty consists in not being master of himself, the man of encounters and good fortunes. "Assuredly there was talent. But what abuse! What debauchery! And, besides, what fatigue and what pain! "No doubt some respect is due or, at least, some grateful compassion, for the tireless writhing of an old dancing girl. But, alas! worn-out attitudes, weak methods, boresome seductivities! "The ideas of our man are but old women driven crazy with too much dancing, too much kicking off the ground. _Sustalerunt sæpius pedes._ "Where is the heart? Where the soul? Where reason?" Here the manuscript comes to an abrupt end, and one is left to wonder how much more Baudelaire had written; perhaps only one more page, as he had a peculiar fashion of writing fragments on bits of note-paper. Certainly this prose has the refinement, the satire, the exquisite use of words, the inimitable charm and unerring instinct of a faultless writer. Not only is there his passion for _les danseuses_ and for the exotic, but a sinister touch in _l'abdication de la volonté_ which recurs finally in a letter written February 8, 1865; for, when one imagines himself capable of an absolute abdication of the will, it means that something of the man has gone out of him. III. AN ADVENTURE IN IMAGES