This poem, “Femmes Damnées, I,” some twenty-six quatrains in length, describes rather explicitly the conquest of a feminine and passive young girl, half reluctant because still dreaming of heterosexual love, by a more aggressive feminine partner who decries the physical brutality and spiritual incompatibility of any male lover. In “Femmes Damnées, II” the poet watches a band of lesbians at a shore resort behaving much as any uninhibited heterosexual group might do, and accords them more than even his customary despairing compassion. Such love as theirs is doomed to go unsated, and they themselves, he says, will pass progressively to drink and drugs and “loveless loves that know no pity.” And yet in “Lesbos” he holds Sappho guilty of a “crime of the spirit” when, faithless to her own earlier teaching and practice, she “flung the dark roses of her love sublime To a vain churl (Phaon.)”[44] (Note: “Lesbos” had appeared in 1850 in an anthology, _Les Poètes de l’Amour_, published by Lemerre. It was omitted from the 1858 edition of that volume, but reappeared in the edition of 1865.)[45] The Catholic Baudelaire was essentially a mystic, not a romantic with that faith in Love which had been the gospel of the preceding decades. Obsessed as he was by the failure of all passion to satisfy the human craving for perfection, it is natural that homosexual passion, inevitably “unassuageable, sterile and outcast,” should seem to him the essence of pitiable futility. This negative judgment, however, is not given in terms of conventional morality.