Six poems from the work were suppressed and the ban on their publication was not lifted in France until 1949. As a consequence of this prosecution, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs. The author and the publisher were prosecuted under the regime of the Second Empire as an outrage aux bonnes moeurs ('an insult to public decency'). The foreword to the volume, Au Lecteur ('To the Reader'), identifying Satan with the pseudonymous alchemist Hermes Trismegistus. La Mort (Death) Baudelaire dedicated the book to the poet Théophile Gautier, describing him as a parfait magicien des lettres françaises ('a perfect magician of French letters'). The initial publication of the book was arranged in six thematically segregated sections: 1. This Bilingual English - French edition provides the original text by Baudelaire and its English translation by Cyril Scott. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. Gangs of demons are boozing in our brain - ranked, swarming, like a million warrior-ants, they drown and choke the cistern of our wants each time we breathe, we tear our lungs with pain.Les Fleurs du mal (English: The Flowers of Evil) is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. Like the poor lush who cannot satisfy, we try to force our sex with counterfeits, die drooling on the deliquescent tits, mouthing the rotten orange we suck dry. Each day his flattery makes us eat a toad, and each step forward is a step to hell, unmoved, through previous corpses and their smell asphyxiate our progress on this road. The devil, watching by our sickbeds, hissed old smut and folk-songs to our soul, until the soft and precious metal of our will boiled off in vapor for this scientist.

Our sins are mulish, our confessions lies we play to the grandstand with our promises, we pray for tears to wash our filthiness importantly pissing hogwash through our styes. Infatuation, sadism, lust, avarice possess our souls and drain the body's force we spoonfeed our adorable remorse, like whores or beggars nourishing their lice.

The flowers of evil les fleurs du mal