THE GIFTS OF THE MOON

The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in at the window as you slept in
your cradle, and said to herself: "I am well pleased with this child."

And she softly descended her stairway of clouds and passed through the
window-pane without noise. She bent over you with the supple tenderness
of a mother and laid her colours upon your face. Therefrom your eyes
have remained green and your cheeks extraordinarily pale. From
contemplation of your visitor your eyes are so strangely wide; and she
so tenderly wounded you upon the breast that you have ever kept a
certain readiness to tears.

In the amplitude of her joy, the Moon filled all your chamber as with a
phosphorescent air, a luminous poison; and all this living radiance
thought and said: "You shall be for ever under the influence of my kiss.
You shall love all that loves me and that I love: clouds, and silence,
and night; the vast green sea; the unformed and multitudinous waters;
the place where you are not; the lover you will never know; monstrous
flowers, and perfumes that bring madness; cats that stretch themselves
swooning upon the piano and lament with the sweet, hoarse voices of
women.

"And you shall be loved of my lovers, courted of my courtesans. You
shall be the Queen of men with green eyes, whose breasts also I have
wounded in my nocturnal caress: men that love the sea, the immense green
ungovernable sea; the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where
they are not; the woman they will never know; sinister flowers that seem
to bear the incense of some unknown religion; perfumes that trouble the
will; and all savage and voluptuous animals, images of their own folly."

And that is why I am couched at your feet, O spoiled child, beloved and
accursed, seeking in all your being the reflection of that august
divinity, that prophetic godmother, that poisonous nurse of all
_lunatics_.

End of title

THE GIFTS OF THE MOON

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

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