Thanks very much for your kind words. I am certainly taking a closer look at Les paradis artificiels. In the 1993 thesis that serves as the basis of this work, I contented myself with using Thomas de Quincey’s notion of the palimpsest of memory, as the means for explaining the notion of infinity exploited in the final question (ἐρώτημα) that is commonly taken as an emblem of resistance to interpretative closure. To the contrary, I take it as a sound and adequate Cartesian response to the argument of Pascal’s Wager. As many a respondent to Romanticism, Baudelaire was a clandestine rationalist. I shall post the results both here and in your fine community, as soon as I can process the relevant literature, both recently published (The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire) and previously overlooked (G.T. Clapton, Baudelaire et De Quincey). This matter really calls for writing grants and writer’s assistants. Got any leads?