THE DESIRE TO PAINT

Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this
desire.

I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so
swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller
must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her.

She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The
colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal
and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and
gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion
in the darkness.

I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star
overthrowing light and happiness. But it is the moon that she makes one
dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with
her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a
cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the
depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet
peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from
the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly
constrain to dance upon the terrified grass.

Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of
prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the
unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the
smile of a large mouth; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes
one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic
land.

There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win
them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.

End of title

THE DESIRE TO PAINT

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

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