The Glass-Vendor

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section sixteen of Little Poems in Prose by Charles Beaudelaire.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain the Glass Vendor.
These are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action, who, nevertheless,
under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes act with a

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rapidity of which they would have believed themselves incapable. Such
a one as he, who, fearing to find some new
vexation awaiting him at his lodgings, prowls about in a
cowardly fashion before the door without daring to enter. Such
a one as he who keeps a letter fifteen days
without opening it, or only makes up his mind at

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the end of six months to undertake a journey that
has been a necessity for a year past. Such beings
sometimes feel themselves precipitately thrust towards action, like an arrow
from a beaulist. And the physician, who profess to know
all things, yet cannot explain whence comes this sudden and

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delirious energy to indolent and voluptuous souls, nor how incapable
of accomplishing the simplest and most necessary things they are,
at some certain moment of time, possessed by a superabundant hardihood,
which enables them to execute the most absurd and even
the most dangerous acts. One of my friends, the most

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harmless dreamer that ever lived, at one time, set fire
to a forest in order to ascertain, as he said,
whether the flames take hold with the easiness that is
commonly affirmed. His experiment failed ten times running. On the
eleventh it succeeded only too well. Another lit a cigar
by the side of a powder beryl, in order to see,

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to know, to tempt destiny for a jest, to have
the pleasure of suspense, for no reason at all, out
of caprice, out of idleness. This is a kind of
energy that springs from weariness and revery. And those in
whom it manifests so stubbornly are, in general, as I
have said, the most indolent and dreamy beings. Another so

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timid that he must cast down his eyes before the
gaze of any man, and summon all his poor will
before he dare enter a cafe or past the pay
box of a theater, where the ticket seller seems in
his eyes invested with all the majesty of minos Acus
and rhadamantus will at times throw himself upon the neck

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of some old man whom he sees in the street,
and embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an astonished crowd.
Why because because this countenance is irresistibly attractive to him. Perhaps,
But it is more legitimate to suppose that he himself

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does not know why. I have been more than once
a victim to these crises and outbreaks, which give us
cause to believe that evil meaning demons slip into us
to make us the ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires.
One morning I arose in a sullen mood, very sad
and tired of idleness, and thrust as it seemed to

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me the doing of some great thing, some brilliant act.
And then alas I opened the window, I beg you
to observe that in some people the spirit of mystification
is not the result of labor or combination, but rather
of a fortuitous inspiration, which would partake were it not
for the strength of the feeling of the mood called

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hysterical by the physician and satanic by those who think
a little more profoundly than the physician. The mood which
thrusts us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and inconvenient acts.
The first person I noticed in the street was a
glass vendor, whose shrill and discordant cry mounted up to

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me through the heavy, dull atmosphere of Paris. It would
have been else impossible to account for the sudden and
despotic hatred of this poor man that came upon me.
Hello there, I cried, and bade him ascend. Meanwhile, I reflected,
not without gayety, that as my room was on the
sixth landing, and the stairway very narrow, the man would

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have some difficulty in ascending, and in many a place
would break off the corners of his fragile merchandise. At
length he appeared. I examined all his glasses with curiosity,
and then said to him, what have you no colored glasses,
glasses of rose and crimson, and blue, magical glasses, glasses

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of paradise. You are insolent. You dare to walk in
mean streets when you have no glasses that would make
one see beauty in life? And I hurried him briskly
to the staircase, which he staggered down grumbling. I went
on to the balcony, and caught up a little flower pot.
And when the man appeared in the doorway beneath, I

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let fall my engine of war perpendicularly upon the edge
of his pack, so that it was upset by the shock,
and all his poor walking fortune broke into bits. It
made a noise like a palace of crystal shattered by lightning.
Mad with my folly, I cried furiously after him, The
life beautiful, The life beautiful. Such nervous pleasantries are not

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without peril. Often enough one pays dearly for them. But
what matters an eternity of damnation to him who was
found in one second an eternity of enjoyment. End of
Section sixteen.