Le Chat is a sonnet by , published here Tuesday, December 09, 2003. It is part of Poems.
An ode to feline beauty.
My favorite excerpt from Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil):
Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.
Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,
Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête,
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,
Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.
A literal (and thus a-poetic) translation:
Come, my pretty pussy, on my loving heart;
Retract the claws of your paws
And let me plunge into your beautiful eyes,
A mix of metal and agate.
And then my fingers caress at leisure
Your head and your elastic back,
And my hands come alive with the pleasure
Of massaging your body electric
I see my woman in spirit. Her look,
How like yours, lovable beast,
Profound and cold, cutting like a dart
And, from head to toe,
A subtle air, a dangerous perfume
Swims around her brown body.
Baudelaire’s mistress of twenty-one years was a creole woman called Jeanne Duval for whom he wrote the poem cycle Black Venus — still regarded as the finest anthology of erotic verse in the French language.