In a balloon over Paris

The brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier were scientists interested in exploring manned flight. On 19 September 1783, they launched  a hot air balloon attached to a large basket containing: a sheep, a duck and a rooster. The sheep was selected because its anatomy somewhat resembled that of a human. The duck because it could fly and the rooster because it could not. The flight lasted eight minutes, the passengers traveled eleven miles and landed safely. The brothers Montgolfier concluded that their balloon could safely carry human passengers. 

On September 24, 1860 the details of this experiment were explained to Charles Darwin as he climbed into the basket of a Montgolfier and prepared for a balloon tour of Paris.  He had been invited on this tour by Baron Haussmann, the chief city planner of Paris. It was Haussman who had redesigned the city, tearing down much of the medieval city, building wide boulevards that could not be barricaded by revolutionaries, and creating a transit system that for the first time caused the rich, the middle class, and the poor to pass by each other daily.

A third passenger, the poet Charles Baudelaire, arrived late. Darwin observed that in England this man would be called a “dandy.” He reeked of alcohol and opium smoke. He seemed to be in a permanent dark mood - a spleen. As the balloon floated over the city, the sullen Baudelaire commented on the location of each “maison close” and pointed out every opium den they passed over. His tone, his gestures were permeated with aggression, and an animal lust.   

Darwin thought to himself, "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin,” and continued his conversation with Haussmann, who had read Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Darwin explained, “The main conclusion I arrived at, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly organized form.”

Haussmann was about to comment when Baudelaire interjected, "There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'."

Darwin continued,”We have seen that man incessantly presents individual differences in all parts of his body and in his mental faculties. These differences or variations seem to be induced by the same general causes, and to obey the same laws as with the lower animals. In both cases similar laws of inheritance prevail.”

Baudelaire pointed out a favorite “maison close” and said, "The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes... Only the brute is good at coupling, copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another–and the artist never emerges from himself."

Trying to ignore the drunken poet, Haussmann asked Darwin if his book had not encountered violent criticism from the church. Before Darwin could answer, Baudelaire turned a contorted face toward them and shouted, "Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil. But what matters an eternity of damnation to one who has found an infinity of joy in a single second?"

Darwin responded, “A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals.”

For a moment Baudelaire seemed almost sober, his face reflective, he responded, “The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof -- if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature -- of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.”

“There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet.” continued Baudelaire. “ To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable..."

“The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.” Darwin responded. “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”