You can arguably translate A Celle Qui Est Trop Gaie to To a Bitch Who’s Too Hot for Her Own Good. And then it goes into a particularly virulent permutation of Baudelaire’s favorite theme, the Misogynist DeathSex. I mean, seriously — I don’t even want to write about it — it’s that repulsive. Let’s just say that I was woefully underinformed when I made the sophomoric judgment [literally] that this individual was the best poet of the French language.

Media I can no longer bring myself to partake in:

 

• anything having to do with Rocky Horror
• pretty much anything by or about Charles Baudelaire the racist, sexist, classist, misogynist wonder

Okay, I’ll make exceptions for the following:

 

• Correspondances for the synaesthesia
• Spleen for the sheer Gothiness
• Le Revenant for evoking the dubious allure of the sexy vampire in just 16 lines
• Femmes Damnees because of the queer women, some actual character development, and the fact that I got word-drunk on it and wrote an exhaustive paper about it, and I AM IGNORING THE LAST FOUR STANZAS, OKAY?!
• La Chevelure for giving my French teachers a legit means of classroom introduction to the concept of sexual fetishes, as well as exoticism, and also for introducing me to a beautiful word that I really wish we had in English