In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

The line frames “love” less as an exalted ideal than as a psychological compulsion: a response to the terror of being alone and trapped within the self. By calling it a “need to lose his ego in exterior flesh,” the speaker suggests that desire seeks self-forgetfulness—an escape from interiority through the body of another. The phrasing also carries Baudelaire’s characteristic irony (“man calls grandly”), puncturing romantic rhetoric and exposing what he sees as the bodily, even desperate, underside of sentimental language. In this view, love is entwined with alienation: it is sought not from fullness but from lack, and it risks reducing the other person to a means of dissolving one’s own solitude.