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Les Fleurs du Mal – Charles Baudelaire

A room which resembles a dream, a truly spiritual room, in which an atmosphere of stagnation is slightly tinted with rose and blue.

There the soul takes a bath of idleness, with the pungent odours of regret and desire.  It is something crepuscular, bluish and rosy; a dream of pleasure during an eclipse.

The furniture has elongated, prostrated and languishing forms.  The furniture seems to be dreaming.  You might say it is endowed with a somnambulist life, like the vegetable and the mineral.  The fabrics speak a mute language, like flowers, skies and setting suns.

On the walls there is no artistic abomination.  In its relationship to a pure dream, to an unanalysed impression, definite art, positive art is a blasphemy.  Here, everything has a sufficient light and the charming darkness of harmony.

An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice, to which is joined a very slight humidity floats in this atmosphere, where the slumbering spirit is rocked by sensations of a greenhouse.

Muslin falls abundantly in front of the windows and the bed; it drops in snowy cascades.  On the bed is lying the Idol, the goddess of dreams.  But how is she here?  Who has brought her?  What magic power placed her on this throne of dreams and pleasure?  What difference does it make?  She is here and I recognise her....................

What kindly demon has seen to it that I am thus surrounded by mystery, silence, peace and perfumes?  O beatitude!  What we generally call life, even in its happiest expansion, has nothing in common with this supreme life I now know and savour minute by minute, second by second...

In this world... a single known object smiles at me; the vial of laudunum; an old and fearful friend; and like all friends, alas, fertile its caresses and betrayals..............