Explore "Crowds" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude: to / play upon crowds is an art; and he alone can plunge, at the / expense of humankind, into a debauch of vitality, to whom / a fairy has bequeathed in his cradle the love of masks and / disguises, the hate of home and the passion of travel.
Multitude, solitude: equal terms mutually convertible by the / active and begetting poet. He who does not know how to people / his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy / crowd.