Much as I like the Poetry of Charles Baudelaire--

It has always seemed obvious to me that his prose bespeaks the ridiculous, and quite negligible, idiot-dandy.  His adulation of the very 3rd-rate Edgar Poë, and its solemn acceptance by his unfortunate countrymen, would make one scornful if it did not, embarrassingly, evoke a sort of pity--English, after all, was not Baudelaire's first language, and he makes just the sort of silly mistake about what is worthy of note in the writing of English that a rash and impressionable foreigner might be expected to make.  His translations of Poe go wrong precisely at those points where a faithful rendering would belie the "Poe was a misunderstood Genius" pose.  And pose it certainly was.  Moreover, Baudelaire's own attempts at exotic prose-poetry are, to my taste, remarkably nasty and unpleasant, like Chateaubriand (never good) gone bad.  

Imagine my surprise, therefore, at finding something of interest, and not altogether dismissable, in Baudelaire's prose.  I refer to l'Ecole Païenne.  Not that I agree--not in the least--but I see what he means:

     "To repudiate the efforts of the society that came before us, its philosophy and Christianity, would be to commit suicide, to reject the impulse and tools of improvement.  To surround oneself exclusively with the seductions of physical art would mean in all probability to lose oneself.  In the long run, the very long run, you will see, love, feel only what is beautiful, you will be unable to see anything but beauty.  I use the word in its narrow sense.  The world will appear to you as merely material.  The mechanisms that govern its movement will long remain hidden.

      "Religion and philosophy will return one day, forced into being by the cry of desperate men. Such will ever be the destiny of those fools who see nothing in nature but rhythms and shapes. Yet at first philosophy will appear to them as no more than an  interesting game, an amusing form of gymnastics, a fencing in the void.  But how they will be punished for that!  Every child whose poetic spirit is overexcited and who is not immediately presented with the stimulating spectacle of a healthy, industrious way of life, who constantly hears tell of glory and of sensual pleasure, whose senses are every day caressed, inflamed, frightened, aroused, and satisfied by works of art, will become the unhappiest of men and make others unhappy too.  At twelve he will be pulling up his nanny's skirts, and if some special skill in crime or art does not raise him above the crowd, by thirty he will be dying in hospital.  Forever inflamed and dissatisfied, his spirit will go abroad in the world, the busy, industrious world; it will go abroad, I tell you, like a whore, yelling: Plasticity!  Plasticity!  Plasticity, that horrible word makes my flesh creep, plasticity has poisoned him, yet he can't live without his poison now.  He has banished reason from his heart and, as a just punishment for his crime, reason refuses to return.  The happiest thing that can happen to him is that nature strike him with a terrifying call to order.  And such, in fact, is the law of life: he who refuses the pure joys of honest activity can feel nothing but the terrible joys of vice.  Sin contains its own hell, and from time to time nature says to pain and misery: go and destroy those rebels!

     "The useful, the true, the good, all that is really lovable, these things will be unknown to him.  Infatuated by his exhausting dream, he will seek to exhaust others with it.  He will have no time for his mother, his nanny; he will pull his friends to pieces or love them only for their form; his wife too, if he has one, he will despise and debase.

     "The immoderate pleasure he takes in form will drive him to monstrous and unprecedented excesses.  Swallowed up by this ferocious passion for the beautiful and the bizarre, the pretty and the picturesque, for the gradations are many, the notions of the true and just will disappear.  The frenetic passion for art is a cancer that eats up everything else; and since the drastic absence of the true and just is tantamount to the absence of art, man in his entirety will disappear; excessive specialization in a single faculty can only end in emptiness...."

     This, by no means the friendliest, is simply the best and most perceptive description of male homosexuality by a heterosexual male that I have ever read. It portrays to the life, with astonishing clairvoyance, what it would be like, fully a century later, to be young and gay in those few, glorious decades before AIDS, when we were winning.