Les Fleurs du mal

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1. 01

   The most feared demon is not spectacular vice but ennui — the emptiness that lives in each of us, reader included.

   Les Fleurs du mal · 1857

   The worst demon devours not through deeds but through emptiness: boredom that wants nothing and therefore wants everything.

   Baudelaire inventories the vices that devour man — stupidity, sin, avarice — but declares them small beside the final monster: Ennui, boredom that wants nothing and therefore wants everything. Its mechanism is inertia: it destroys not through deeds but through spite, through the refusal to feel any longer. The final blow is aimed at the reader: you, watching these pictures from outside, are made of the same stuff. The poem does not condemn from above; it includes the reader in the diagnosis.

   “Ennui!... He would gladly turn the earth into a waste and swallow the whole globe in a yawn; hypocrite reader, — my likeness, — my brother!”

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