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 THE GENEROUS GAMBLER

BY CHARLES PIERRE BAUDELAIRE

This worshipper and singer of Satan shared his American confrère's predilection for the devil. He found his models in the diabolical scenes of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he interpreted to the Latin world. "Baudelaire," said Théophile Gautier, his master and friend, "had a singular prepossession for the devil as a tempter, in whom he saw a dragon who hurried him into sin, infamy, crime, and perversity." To Baudelaire, the trier of men's souls, the Tempter, was as real a person as he was to Job. He believed that the devil had a great deal to do with the direction of human destinies. "C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!" Men are mere puppets in the hands of the devil. "Baudelaire's motto," as Mr. James Huneker has well remarked, "might be the reverse of Browning's lines: The Devil is in his heaven. All's wrong with the world."

Baudelaire's devil is a dandy and a boulevardier with wings. Each author, it has been said, creates the devil in his own image.

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 [303]