Explore "The Glass-Vendor" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
These are some natures purely contemplative and antipathetic to action, / who nevertheless, under a mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes / act with a rapidity of which they would have believed themselves / incapable. Such a one is 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 is he who keeps a letter / fifteen days without opening it, or only makes up his mind at 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 bow.
The novelist and the physician, who profess to know all things, yet / cannot explain whence comes this sudden and 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.