“To admit Love into the bedroom, into carnal consummation, is to escort a corpse into Heaven itself–a foul zombie strutting past St. Peter’s Gate. It is to kill Love and make Love, Death. The corporeal deforms and falls to rot–the constancy, fidelity, and ecstasy of true Love participates in the eternal and ethereal alone and is itself immortal. Any manifestation of this limitless perfection on hinky Earth has the unexpected quality of a fortunate accident, a felix accidens, as it were, and should not have its pristine sheen pounced upon and prodded by an importuning prick.”
Charles was at his bastard best that first Sunday. Replete in a silver-grey suit of silk, neither black nor white, he stood beyond all those in the room. None contested his outpourings. Save one–Mme. Sabatier–and she only subtly, more by her accent and her glance than her speech.
“There is something… persuasive… in the absolutism of your ideal, M. Baudelaire. But, I hesitate to ask, where can we find the proof of your theorums?” Mme. Sabatier sipped at her cigarette, perfect in a white frock stitched entirely of frills, her head crowned with her airy blond curls and a spiking white comb.
“Can one sullied in the coffee grounds of earthy existence touch the hem of an angel, or molest the sacred precincts of a saint? No, no! I insist! Such impious impurity implies the utter destruction of the Ideal–the inevitable dissolution of a perfect snowflake upon the simmering sinews of a too-hot tongue. Who could survive the negative proof of such a dirty universe? Only a man composed entirely of mud–a mud-man unbaptized by either the holy lotions of Love or the divine fires of Hate!”
“Hate and Love, then, are equals in your contest of Ideals? I confess, you have me… a tad… bemused.”
Baudelaire cocked his head, like a hound listening to a whistle in an unknowable key. The faces around the table went back and forth as at a tennis match between Baudelaire and Mme. Sabatier–so compelling was their dialog to us. A smile–or was it a grimace–possessed his face entirely for an instant, and then he spoke.
“Pure Hate and actual Love, in this imperfect piss-hole of a world, register to us purblind beings, coiled in the confining chains of our senses, as a single experience–intensity. Beyond that, our ignorance engulfs us.”
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