Baudelaire resumes his work on Artificial Paradises.

Charles Baudelaire (1821.1867)

Autograph letter signed to Auguste Poulet Malassis.

One page in-8° on blue paper.

Autograph address on the 4th ^leaf , also signed with Baudelaire's initials.

[Paris – May 2, 1860]

“But now, I'm not joking: a terror is seizing me. »

Baudelaire continually resumes his work on Artificial Paradises.

“After the waiter at the hotel [Hôtel de Dieppe] put my letter in the post, I felt like reading it again, and I did; I removed a misinterpretation. Did you wait for me? Now, I'm not kidding : I'm terrified of the pharmaceutical note at the end. Think about it carefully. All it takes is the malice of a bad guy, in some dirty newspaper, to create an embarrassment for us. I think of the card reader who predicted to me that I was going to meet a very tall, very thin, very dark girl, aged... but I met her. You know his other prediction. CB. It is still time. The dedication is JGF So prepare Christophe for my visit. »

The day before this letter, Baudelaire had sent Poulet Malassis the eleventh corrected sheet of Artificial Paradis . He fears here that this has already been drawn up with the misinterpretation discovered by him.

The card reader mentioned in this letter may be – according to the editors of La Pléiade – Mlle Lenormant, a famous phythonisse whom Baudelaire had seen at least once, as he had confided to Ste Beuve in January 1862.

The dedication “ to JGF ” appears twice in Baudelaire's work: the first time at the head of Artificial Paradis ; the second time in the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, L'Héautontimorouménos is addressed to this mysterious person . Who do these initials refer to, which have, until now, kept their secret?

The name of Juliette Gex-Fagon was put forward, but without providing the slightest proof of the links that the poet would have established with this Juliette, whose trace, moreover, could never be found. In 1972, in Baudelaire, Poisons and the Unknown , Christian Moncel suggested that “JGF” designated an imaginary woman: the hypothesis, however, hardly accords with the tone of the letter-preface to Artificial Paradis.

These lines from 1860, precisely, seem to allude to Jeanne Duval, who was stricken with hemiplegia in 1859 and whom Baudelaire treated for three years. But if the young woman is indeed the “dear friend” mentioned at the top of the collection of Artificial Paradises – and it hardly seems possible to doubt it – why then did Baudelaire choose to designate her by initials which do not correspond to any of the different known names of Jeanne?

Former Daniel Sickles collection.