Le Chasse Spleen

A wine shop window in Versailles. One of the two huge bottle featuring inside the window was called "Chasse spleen" which can be translated into English by "Oust the sadness". I think it's quite a good name for a wine! From a tea-total like me it is quite ironic but I know that alcohol is a well-known form of help to lift the spirit up for a while at least. I also thought that the reflection of the other side of the street was also interesting. I had taken several different pictures for todays blip but chose this one.

Another of Baudelaire's poems translated into English:

The Soul of Wine

One night, the soul of wine was singing in the flask:
"O man, dear disinherited! to you I sing
This song full of light and of brotherhood
From my prison of glass with its scarlet wax seals.

I know the cost in pain, in sweat,
And in burning sunlight on the blazing hillside,
Of creating my life, of giving me a soul:
I shall not be ungrateful or malevolent,

For I feel a boundless joy when I flow
Down the throat of a man worn out by his labor;
His warm breast is a pleasant tomb
Where I'm much happier than in my cold cellar.

Do you hear the choruses resounding on Sunday
And the hopes that warble in my fluttering breast?
With sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table,
You will glorify me and be content;

I shall light up the eyes of your enraptured wife,
And give back to your son his strength and his color;
I shall be for that frail athlete of life
The oil that hardens a wrestler's muscles.

Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered
By the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you
So that from our love there will be born poetry,
Which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!"