The greatest boon which Satan could offer Baudelaire was to free him from that great modern monster, _Ennui_, which selects as its prey the most highly gifted natures. The boredom of life--this was, indeed, as this unhappy poet admits, the source of all his maladies and of all his miseries. He called it the “foulest of vices” and hoped to escape from it “by dreaming of the superlative emotional adventure, by indulging in infinite, indeterminate desire” (Irving Babbit). His preface to the _Flowers of Evil_, in which he addresses the reader, ends with the following statement in regard to the nature of this modern beast of prey: “Among the jackals, the panthers, the hounds, the apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents--the yelling, howling, growling, grovelling monsters which form the foul menagerie of our vices--there is one which is the most foul, the most wicked, the most unclean of all. This vice, although it uses neither extravagant gestures nor makes a great outcry, would willingly make a ruin of the earth, and swallow up all the world in a yawn. This is _Ennui!_ who, with his eye moistened by an involuntary tear, dreams of scaffolds while smoking his hookah. Thou knowest him, this delicate monster, hypocritical reader, my like, my brother!” In Gorky’s story “The Devil” the devil himself suffers from _ennui_. But Baudelaire believed he had good reason to doubt Satan’s word, and, therefore, prayed to the Lord to make the devil keep his promise to him. He had little faith in the father of lies. In his book called _Artificial Paradises_ (1860) Baudelaire expressed the thought that the devil would say to the eaters of hashish, the smokers of opium, as he did in the olden days to our first parents, “If you taste of the fruit, you will be as the gods,” and that the devil no more kept his word with them than he did with Adam and Eve, for the next day, the god, tempted, weakened, enervated, descended even lower than the beast. The representation of the devil in the shape of a he-goat goes back to far antiquity. Goat-formed deities and spirits of the woods existed in the religions of India, Assyria, Greece and Egypt. The Assyrian god was often associated with the goat, which was supposed to possess the qualities for which he was worshipped. The he-goat was also the sacred beast of Donar or Thor, who was brought to Scandinavia by the Phoenicians. (On the relation of satyrs to goats see also James G. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, vol. VIII, pp. 1 _sqq._) At the revels on the Blocksberg Satan always appeared as a black buck. _Le bon diable_, which is a favourite phrase in France, points to his simplicity of mind rather than generosity of spirit. It generally expresses the half-contemptuous pity with which the giants, these huge beings with weak minds, were regarded.