Au lecteur [English translation]

Folly and error, sin and avarice,

Labor our minds and bodies in their course,

Blithely we nourish pleasurable remorse

As beggars feed their parasitic lice.

Our sins are stubborn, our repentance faint,

We sell our weak confessions at high price,

Returning gaily to the bogs of vice,

Thinking base tears can cleanse our every taint.

Pillowed on evil, Satan Trismegist

Ceaselessly cradles our enchanted mind,

The flawless metal of our will we find

Volatilized by this rare alchemist.

The Devil holds the puppet threads; and swayed

By noisome things and their repugnant spell,

Daily we take one further step toward Hell,

Suffering no horror in the olid shade.

As an impoverished rake will kiss and bite

The bruised blue nipples of an ancient whore,

We steal clandestine pleasures by the score,

Which, like dried orange rinds, we pressure tight.

Serried, aswarm, like million maggots, so

Demons carouse in us with fetid breath,

And, when we breathe, the unseen stream of death

Flows down our lungs with muffled wads of woe.

If poison, knife, rape, arson, have not dared

Yet stamp the pleasing pattern of their gyves

On the dull canvas of our sorry lives,

It is because our torpid souls are scared.

But side by side with our monstrosities —

Jackals and bitch hounds, scorpions, vultures, apes,

Panthers and serpents whose repulsive shapes

Pollute our vice's dank menageries,

There is one viler and more wicked spawn,

Which never makes great gestures or loud cries

Yet would turn earth to wastes of sumps and sties

And swallow all creation in a yawn:

Ennui! Moist-eyed perforce, worse than all other,

Dreaming of stakes, he smokes his hookah pipe.

Reader, you know this fiend, refined and ripe,

Reader, O hypocrite — my like! — my brother!

• Artist:Charles Baudelaire
• Album:Les fleurs du mal