Among contemporary proprietary preparations reputed to have amatory value is aphrodisin. This is a compound of yohimbine, a substance indigenous to Central Africa and derived from the bark of the yohimbe tree, along with extract of miura pauma, aronacein, and other ingredients. * * * * * There are many instances of women, concubines, mistresses, and harlots, who have become historically famous or notorious through their own personal practices, or for the influence they have exerted socially and politically. A French courtesan who rose from minor and humble circumstances was Céleste Mogador, who was born in 1824 and who died in 1909. She was a dancer, an actress, and an equestrienne: and ultimately became the Comtesse Lionel de Moreton de Chabrillan. She gained some additional réclame by the publication of her Memoirs. * * * * * Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), the French poet, in his _Les Fleurs du Mal_, has a sequence of poems on passion, macabre, violent, distorted, filled with fantastic imagery, touched with the symbol of death, and putrefaction, and unsated human longings. There are hymns to beauty that border on disaster and cruelty, on ugliness and inhumanity. There is a paean to exotic perfumes, a laudation of a woman’s dark tresses. But these poetic effusions are stamped with bitterness and a sense of reality aghast, unholy revelations. There appears an entire distant, remote world, far-flung and almost extinct, where the poet sees an aromatic forest, where he dwells in the woman’s depths. She pleads with her lover, for she is unsated and insatiable. He peers through those two dark eyes, the windows of your soul. O ruthless demon, he clamors, pour less flame upon me. I am not the dread and furtive Styx, capable of embracing you nine times. A putresent carcass, seen on a summer morning, is a poetic memento mori, like an Egyptian skeleton at the feast, a warning that lust and beauty and passion have their brief day and are grimly evanescent, and an indirect injunction, on the poet’s part, to adhere to the Roman poet Horace’s hedonistic _carpe diem_. In _The Vampire_ Baudelaire exclaims at being enslaved by a hateful but alluring woman, while in another piece he stresses the potency of perfumes. These poems, then, symbolize, in a comprehensive sense, the intrusions of lust and passion in human relationships, and the intimate contacts and associations of these lusts with malefic forces and ominous impacts. * * * * *