In the same year came out _Le Gâteau des rois._ Par M. Jules Janin. Ouvrage entièrement inédit. Paris. Libraire d'Amyot, 6 rue de la Paix, 1847. I have my own copy of this edition, bound in pale yellow-paper covers.
On January 26th, 1917, there came to me from Paris an original manuscript, written by Charles Baudelaire on three pages of note-paper, concerning these two books of Champfleury and Jules Janin. Being unfinished, it may have been the beginning of an essay which he never completed. Certainly I find no trace of this prose in any of his printed books. From the brown colour of the ink that he used I think it was written in 1857, as the ink and the handwriting are absolutely the same as in his signed _Fleurs du mal_ sent to Champfleury. There are several revisions and corrections in the text of the MS. that I possess.
At the top of the first page are nearly obliterated the words: _remplacez les blancs._ It begins: "Pour donner immédiatement au lecteur non initié dans les dessous de la littérature, non instruit dans les préliminaires des réputations, une idée première de l'importance littéraire réille de ces petits livres, gros d'esprit, de poésie et d'observations, qu'il sache que le premier d'entre nous, _Chien-Caillou,_ Fantaisies d'hiver, fut publié en même temps qu'un petit livre d'un homme très célèbre, qui avait, en même temps que Champfleury, l'idée de ces publications en trimestrielles." It ends: "Où est le cœur? Où est l'âme, où est la raison?"
"To convey to the reader who has not penetrated into the back-parlours of literature, who has not been instructed in the preliminaries of reputations, an immediate idea of the real literary importance of these little books, fat in wit, poetry, and observations, it should be stated that the first among them, _Chien-Caillou._ Fantaisies d'hiver, was published at the same time as another small book by a famous man who had, simultaneously with Champfleury, started these quarterly publications.
"Now, for these people whose intelligence, daily applied to the elaboration of books, is hardest to please, Champfleury's work absorbed that of the famous man. All those of whom I speak have known _Le Gâteau des rois._ Their profession is to know everything. _Le Gâteau des rois,_ a kind of Christmas book, or 'Livre de Noël,' showed above all a clearly asserted pretention to draw from "the language, by playing infinite variations on the dictionary, all the effects which a transcendental instrumentalist draws from his chords. Shifting of forces, error of an unballasted mind! The ideas in this strange book follow each other in haste, dart with the swiftness of sound, leaning at random on infinitely tenuous connections. Their association with one another hangs by a thread according to a method of thought similar to that of people in Bedlam.