Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/32

 feutre mou, à vestes de velours, à vareuses rouges, à barbe prolixe et à crinière échevelée. Rien de trop frais ni de trop voyant dans cette tenue rigoureuse. Charles Baudelaire appartenait à ce dandysme sobre qui râpe ses habits avec du papier de verre pour leur ôter l'éclat endimanché et tout battant neuf si cher au philistin et si désagréable pour le vrai gentleman. Plus tard même, il rasa sa moustache, trouvant que c'était un reste de vieux chic pittoresque qu'il était puéril et bourgeois de conserver."—Œuvres de Baudelaire, précédées d'une notice par Théophile Gautier, Paris, 1869.

This interesting creature, with his nose sniffing "distant perfumes," his carefully-shaven cheeks, and his general air of man-millinery, was in earnest conversation with the "model" Maryx, who, with the immobility acquired in the studio, was reclining on a couch, resting her superb head on a cushion, and attired "in a white robe, quaintly starred with red spots resembling drops of blood!" Hard by, at the window, sat another superb female, known as "La Femme au Serpent," from having sat to Clevinger when he painted his picture of that name. The latter, having thrown on a fauteuil "her mantle of black lace and the most delicious little green hood that ever covered Lucy Hocquet or Madame Baudraud, shook her yellow lioness-locks, still humid, for she came from the swimming school (L'Ecole de Natation), and from all her body, clad in muslin, exhaled like a naiad the fresh perfume of the bath!" In the same company were Jean Fenchères, the sculptor, and Jean Boissard, the latter with "his red mouth, teeth of pearl, and brilliant complexion." One scarcely knows which to admire most in this description,—the writer's fine apotheosis of the lupanar into an "artistic decameron," or the avidity with which he seizes on personal traits and on male and female millinery. He is "up" in both under and over- clothing, as worn by both sexes. He is, moreover, candour itself. He