On Love

Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

4.1

Word count: 215K words
Chapters: 22

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.De l'amour by Charles BaudelaireAuthor: Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867,Language: French, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Mar 29, 2017

Editor's review

Baudelaire's De l'amour examines the psychology of love, its social disguises, and its spiritual predicaments in aphoristic essays, continuous with the cold-eyed insight of his poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal. This is no saccharine romance guide: it treats desire as a mirror reflecting the contradictions of human nature, where passion and weariness, devotion and possession, idealization and disillusionment intertwine. The French original preserves the rhythm and ironic tone of nineteenth-century essays and suits readers willing to read slowly and savor the layers of rhetoric. As a public-domain eBook, it is easy to search and cross-reference, suitable for fragmented reading on a commute or before bed, and equally suited to reading alongside Baudelaire's poetry to see how his view of love spills from prose into verse. Note that this is the French original; readers without French should keep a dictionary or a parallel translation at hand.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers studying French or French literature who want to read Baudelaire's prose in the original
Essay readers interested in reflecting on the psychology of love and the contradictions of human nature
Enthusiasts of nineteenth-century French literature and intellectual history
Slow readers who enjoy aphorisms and reading in fragments

Not a good fit for

Readers with no French and no willingness to use reference tools
Those seeking only practical romance tips or emotional comfort
Readers who prefer continuous narrative and dislike jumpy essays

Reading tips

Read through once to feel the tone, then go paragraph by paragraph with a dictionary, marking recurring keywords.
Read alongside the love poems in Les Fleurs du mal and compare how prose and poetry treat the same theme.
Read one short section at a time and write two or three annotations, avoiding superficial understanding from swallowing it all at once.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a treatise?

It is Baudelaire's treatise on love written in essays and aphorisms, not a work of fiction, nor a systematic philosophical monograph. The book consists of fragmentary observations and reflections with a strong personal voice and irony; it is better read as intellectual essays than as a plot-driven work.

Can I read this book without knowing French?

This is the French original, and without French it will be very hard to understand directly. A bilingual edition or dictionary tools are recommended; if you only want to grasp Baudelaire's view of love, you could first read a reliable Chinese translation, then return to the original to appreciate the rhetoric and tone.

Do I need to read Les Fleurs du mal first?

Not necessarily. The two can be read independently, but reading Les Fleurs du mal first or alongside makes it easier to see Baudelaire's consistent concern with love, desire, and disillusionment. If time is limited, read this book first, then pick a few love poems to compare for a fuller understanding.

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About the author

Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867 Author

Charles Baudelaire (Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867) was a nineteenth-century French poet best known for his collection Les Fleurs du Mal, also translated as The Flowers of Evil. He also wrote the prose poems collected in Poems in Prose, the diary-like Journaux intimes, and De l'amour, a work of reflections on love and feeling. The library holds eight of his works, including Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry and Les épaves de Charles Baudelaire. Because public information is limited, biographical details are omitted here; as for his writing, he often took city life, love, melancholy and death as his subjects, with concise language and intense imagery, and his influence on poetry's transition from tradition to modernity has been profound.