Charles Baudelaire by James Huneker

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Introduction of Little Poems and Prose by Charles Beaudelaire. This
is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot org. Read by Ben Tucker, Charles Beaudelaire by
James Hunnaker one for the sentimental. No greater foe exists

(00:25):
than the iconoclast who dissipates literary legends, and he is
abroad nowadays. Those golden times when they gossiped of de
Quincey's enormous opium consumption of the gin absorbed by gentle
Charles Lamb, of color ages, dark ways, Byron's escapades, and
Shelley's atheism alas into what faded limbo? Have they vanished Poe, too,

(00:46):
whom we saw in fancy reeling from Richmond to Baltimore,
Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New York. Those familiar, fascinating
anecdotes have gone the way of all such jerrybuilt spooks.
We now know Poe to have been a man and
suffering at the time of his death from cerebral lesion,
a man who drank at intervals, and little doctor Guerriere

(01:07):
of Paris has exploded a darling superstition about Quincey's opium meeting.
He has demonstrated that no man could have lived so long.
De Quincey was nearly seventy five at his death and
worked so hard if he had consumed twelve thousand drops
of laudanum as often as he said he did. Furthermore,
the English essayist description of the drug's effects is inexact.

(01:28):
He was seldom sleepy, a sure sign, asserts doctor Guerrier
that he was not altogether enslaved by the drug habit
sprightly in old age, his powers of labor were prolonged
until past thirty score and ten. His imagination needed little
opium to produce the famous confessions. Even Gautier's revolutionary red
waistcoat wore at the premiere of Hernani was, according to Gautier,

(01:50):
a pink dublat and rousseau has been whitewashed. So they
are disappearing those literary legends. Until disheartened we cry out,
spare us dear old fashion, disreputable men of genius. But
the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This French
poet has suffered more from the friendly, malignant biographer and
chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the curves out

(02:13):
of the cemetery? Asked Beaudelaire after he had read Griswold
on Poe. A few years later, his own cemetery was invaded,
and the world was put into possession of the Beaudelaire legend,
That legend of the artribilious, irritable poet, dandy maniac, his
hair dyed green, spouting blasphemies, that grim, despairing image of
a diabolic, a libertine saint and drunkard. Maxime de Camp

(02:38):
was much to blame for the promulgation of these tales,
witness his souvenir litteraire. However, it may be confessed that
part of the Beaudelaire legend was created by Charles Baudelaire.
In the history of literature, it is difficult to parallel
such a deliberate piece of self stultification. Not Villon, who
preceded him, nor Verlaine, who imitated him, drew for the

(03:00):
astonishment or dissidification of the world a like unflattering portrait.
Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered at times
from acute courtical irritation, and notwithstanding his desperate effort to
realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, who had
said that no man can bare his heart quite naked.
There always will be something held back, something false, ostentatiously

(03:23):
thrust forward. The grimace, the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric
are so many buffers between the soul of man and
the sharp reality of published confessions. Baudelaire was no more
exception to this rule than Saint Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau or Heisman,
though he was as frank as any of them, as
we may see in the printed diary Moncieur miss Anneu,

(03:45):
posthumous works Society de Mecueur de France, and in the
journal Fuseat Letter and other fragments exhumed by devoted Baudelarians
to smash legends. Eugene Corpett's biography study, first printed in
eighteen eighty seven, has been republished with new notes by
his son Jacques Crepe. This is an exceedingly valuable contribution

(04:07):
to baudelais lore. A dispassionate life, however, has yet to
be written. A noble task for some young poet who
will disentangle the conflicting lies originated by Beaudelaire, that tragic comedian,
from the truth, and thus save him from himself. The
corpe volume is really but a series of notes. There
are some letters addressed to the poet by the distinguished

(04:28):
men of his day, supplementing the rather disappointing volume of
letters eighteen forty one to eighteen sixty six, published in
nineteen o eight. There are also documents in the legal
prosecution of Baudelaire, with memories of him by Charles Asselineau,
Leon Cladel, Camille Lemonnier, and others. In November of eighteen fifty,

(04:49):
Maxime du Camp and Gustave Flaubert found themselves at the
French ambassador's Constantinople. The two friends had taken a trip
in the Orient, which later bore fruit and salambo. General Apique,
the representative of the French government, cordially the young men received.
They were presented to his wife, Madame Opique. She was
the mother of Charles Baudelaire, and inquired rather anxiously of

(05:11):
de Camp. My son has talent? Has he not unhappy?
Because her second marriage a brilliant one had set her
son against her. The poor woman welcomed from such a
source confirmation of her eccentric boy's gifts. De Camp tells
the much discussed story of a quarrel between the youthful
Charles and his stepfather, a quarrel that began at table.
There were guests present. After some words, Charles bounded at

(05:34):
the general's throat and sought to strangle him. He was
promptly boxed on the ears and succumbed to a nervous spasm.
A delightful anecdote, one that fills with joy psychiatrists in
search of a theory of genius and degeneration. Charles was
given some money and put on board a ship sailing
to East India. He became a cattle dealer in the
British Army, and returned to France years afterward with a

(05:56):
venus noir, to whom he addressed extravagant poems. All this,
according to du Camp, Here is another tale, a comical one.
Baudelaire visited du Camp in Paris, and his hair was
violently green. Du Compe said, nothing angered by this indifference.
Baudelaire asked, you find nothing abnormal? About me. No, was
the answer. But my hair it is green. That is

(06:19):
not singular, Monchier Baudelaire. Every one has hair more or
less green. In Paris, disappointed in not creating a sensation,
Baudelaire went to a cafe, gulped down two large bottles
of burgundy, and asked the waiter to remove the water,
as water was a disagreeable sight. Then he went away
in a rage. It is a pity to doubt this
green hair legend. Presently, a man of genius will not

(06:41):
be able to enjoy an epileptic fit in peace, as
does a banker or a beggar. We are told that
Saint Paul, Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, Dostoevsky were epileptoids. Yet
we do not encounter men of this rare kind among
the inmates of asylums. Even Baudelaire had his sane moments.
The joke of the green hare has been disposed of

(07:02):
by Corpette. Baudelaire's hair thinning after an illness, he had
his head shaved and painted with salve of a green hue,
hoping thereby to escape baldness. At the time when he
had embarked for Calcutta May eighteen forty one. He was
not seventeen, but twenty years of age. Du Comp said
he was seventeen when he attacked General Opique. The dinner
could not have taken place at Lyons because the Opique

(07:23):
family had left that city six years before the date
given by du Comp. Charles was provided with five thousand
francs for his expenses instead of twenty du Comp's version,
and he never was a beef drover in the British Army.
For a good reason, he never reached India. Instead, he
disembarked at the Isle of Bourbon, and after a short stay,
suffered from homesickness and returned to France after being absent

(07:45):
about ten months. But like Flaubert, on his return home,
Beaudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the East. Over
there he had yearned for Paris. Jule Clarity recalls Baudelaire
saying to him with a grimace, I love Wagner. But
the music is that of a cat hung up by
its tail outside of a window and trying to stick
to the panes of glass with its claws. There is

(08:06):
an odd grating on the glass which I find at
the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious. Is it
necessary to add that Beaudelaire, notorious in Paris for his
love of cats, dedicating poems to cats, would never have
perpetuated such revolting cruelty. Another misconception, a critical one, is
the case of Poe and Baudelaire. The young Frenchman first

(08:28):
became infatuated with Poe's writings in eighteen forty six or
eighteen forty seven. He gave these two dates, though several
stories of Poe had been translated into French as early
as eighteen forty one or eighteen forty two. Laurent Joutaigne
was the first, which we know as the Murderers in
the Rue Morgue. Madame Muniers also adapted several post stories
for the reviews. Beaudelaire's labors as a translator lasted over

(08:51):
ten years. That he assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe
is a commonplace of literary gossip, but that Poe had
overwhelming influence in the form of his poetic genius is
not the truth. Yet we find such an acute critic
as the late Edmund Clarence Stedman, writing Poe's chief influence
upon Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry, it is precisely

(09:13):
the reverse. Poe's influence affected Beaudelaire's prose, notably in the
disjointed confessions Montceur mies Aneux, which vaguely recall the American
writer's marginalia. The bulk in the poetry in Les Fleur
de Mars was written before Beaudelaire had read Poe, though
not published in book for him until eighteen fifty seven.
But in eighteen fifty five some of the poems saw

(09:34):
the light in the Rebaue de de Monde, while many
of them had been put forth a decade or fifteen
years before as fugitive verse in various magazines. Steedman was
not the first to make this mistake. In Baird Tailor's
The Echo Club, we find on page twenty four this criticism.
There is a congenital twist about Poe. Baudelaire and Swineburn

(09:55):
after him, had been trying to suppress him by increasing
the dose, but his muse gives the natural or opithia
inheriting her convulsions. While they eat all sorts of insane
roots to produce theirs. This must have been written about
eighteen seventy two, and after reading it, one would fancy
that Poe and Baudelaire were rhapsodic wrigglers on the poetic tripod.
Whereas their poetry is often reserved, even glacial, Baudelaire, like Poe,

(10:18):
sometimes built his nests with the birds of night, and
that was enough to condemn the work of both men
by critics of the didactic school. Once, when Baudelaire heard
that an American man of letters was in Paris, he
secured an introduction and called on him, eagerly, inquiring after Poe,
he learned that he was not considered a genteel person
in America. Baudelaire withdrew muttering maledictions, enthusiastic poet, charming literary person.

(10:45):
Yet the American whoever he was, represented public opinion at
the time. Today, criticisms of Poe are vitiated by the
desire to make him an angel. It is to be
doubted whether without his barren environment and hard fortunes, we
should have had Poe at all. He had to dig
down deep into the pit of his personality to reach
the central core of his music, But every ardent, young

(11:08):
soul entering literature begins by a vindication of Poe's character.
Poe was a man, and he is now a classic.
He was a half Charlatan, as was Baudelaire. In both
the sublime and the Sickly were never far asunder. The
pair loved to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries.
Both were implacable pessimists, Both were educated in affluence, and

(11:28):
both had to face unprepared the hardships of life. The
hastiest comparison of their poetic work will show that their
only common ideal was the worship of an exotic beauty.
Their artistic methods of expression were totally dissimilar. Beaudelaire, like Poe,
had a harp like temperament which vibrated in the presence
of strange subjects. Above all, he was obsessed by sex women.

(11:50):
As Angel of Destruction is the keynote of his poems.
Poe was almost sexless. His aerial creatures never footed the
dusty highways of the world. His life lines Helen, Thy
Beauty is to Me could never have been written by Baudelaire,
while Poe would never have pardoned the vulgurant grandeur, the
beethoven like harmonies, the danteesque horrors of that deep wide

(12:13):
music of lost souls in femme domnay dascan des sent
lamentable victim, or this which might serve as a text
for one of John Martin's vast sinister meso tints jevu
pou fois aufan d'nt tiatre banal comte flamey l'rquestre sonor
ent fere a lume dan uncier inferno miracleuse aurore jevu

(12:39):
pouffet enfon de tiare banal unettra quill nete ques lumier
or eggaze daras or renomeer setan memn ceur que jamais
ne visite le stasse ellon theatre oulon attinde toujou tujeu
en veas lettre jaos el des gaze. George Saintsbury thus

(13:04):
sums up the differences between Poe and Baudelaire. Both authors
Poe and de Quincey fell short of Baudelaire himself as
regards depth and fullness of passion, but both have a
superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperament and affection
for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror. Poe
is without passion, except a passion for the macabre, what

(13:26):
Heisman calls the October of the sensations, whereas there is
a gulf of despair and terror and humanity in Baudelaire,
which shakes your nerves yet stimulates the imagination. However, profounder
as a poet, he was no match for Poe in
what might be termed intellectual prestidigitation, the mathematical Poe, the
Poe of the ingenious detective tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe

(13:49):
of the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the Poe
the prophet and mystic. In these, the American was more
versatile than his French translator. That Beaudelaire said evil, be
thou is doubtless true. He proved all things and found
them vanity. He is the poet of original sin, a
worshiper of Satan for the sake of paradox. His litanies

(14:09):
to Satan ring childish to us. In his heart he
was a believer. His was an infinite reverse aspiration, and
mixed up with His pose was a disgust for vice,
for life itself. He was the last of the Romanticists.
Saint Bouve called him the Comchotka of Romanticism, its remotest

(14:31):
hyperborean pique. Romanticism is dead today, as dead as naturalism.
But Beaudelaire is alive and read. His glistening, phosphorescent trail
is over French poetry, and he is the bagetter of
a school. Verlaine, Villiere de Lille, Adam Carducci, Arthur rimbaud Jule, LaForge,
Gabrielle d Nunzio, Aubrey, Beardsley, Verherin, and many of the

(14:55):
youthful crew he affected, Swineburne and in Heisman's who was
not a poet, his his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto
might be the obverse of Browning's lines, the devil is
in heaven. All's wrong with the world. When Gotta said
of Hugo and the Romanticists that they came from chateaubriand
he should have substituted the name of Rousseau Romanticism. It

(15:17):
is Rousseau, exclaims Pierre Lesre. But there is more of
Byron and Petrus Borel, a forgotten, half mad poet in Baudelaire,
though for a brief period in eighteen forty eight he
became a rousseau reactionary, sported the working man's blouse, cut
his hair, shouldered a musket, went to the barricades, wrote
inflammatory editorials, calling the proletarian brother, oh Baudelaire, and, as

(15:42):
the goncour recorded in their diary, had the head of
a maniac. How seriously we may take This swing of
the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of
the poets at the time of the revolution. Come he said,
let us go shoot General Opique. It was his stepfather
that he thought of, not the eternal principles of liberty.
This may be a false anecdote. Many such were foisted

(16:03):
upon Baudelaire, for example his exclamations at cafes or in
public places, such as have you ever eaten a baby?
I find it pleasing to the palate? Or the night
I killed my father. Naturally, people stared, and Baudelaire was
happy he had startled a bourgeois the cannibalistic idea. He
may have borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet For this French

(16:23):
poet knew English literature. Gautier compares the poems to a
certain tale of Hawthorns, in which there is a garden
of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his laboratory of evil,
wearing masks and gloves. He never descended into the mud
and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged
his soul, yet remained withal as anatole France says a

(16:44):
divine poet, How childish, yet how touching is his resolution.
He wrote in his Diary of prayer's dynamic force, when
he was penniless, in debt, threatened with imprisonment, sick, nauseated
with sin, to make every morning my prayer to God
the reservoir of all force and all justice, to my father,
to Mariette, and to Poe as intercessors. Evidently Maurice Beret

(17:09):
encountered here his theory of intercessors. Beaudelais loved the memory
of his father as much as Stendall hated his own.
He became reconciled with his mother after the death of
General Opique in eighteen fifty seven. He felt in eighteen
sixty two that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for
he wrote, I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and
terror to day imbecilities wing fanned me as it passed,

(17:33):
the sense of the vertiginous gulf was abiding with him.
Read his poem Pascal le Veis sen Gaufroy in preferring
the Baudelais translations of Poe to the original, and they
give the impression of being original works. Stedman agreed with
Assilinau that the French is more concise than the English.
The prose of Poe and Baudelaire is clear, sober, rhythmic.

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Baudelaire's is more lapidary, finer in contour, richer, colored or supple.
Though without the honey and tiger's blood of Barbeer Doravilli,
Beaudelaire's soul was patiently built up as a fabulous bird
might build its nest. Bits of straw, the sobbing of women, clay,
cascades of black stars, rags, leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams,

(18:17):
a spray of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a gleam
of blue sky, arabesques of incense, and verdigree, despairing hearts
and music and the abomination of desolation for its ground tones.
But this soul nest is also a cemetery of the
seven sorrows. He loves the clouds les noange labass. It

(18:39):
was labass with him, even in the tortures of his
wretched love. Life, corruption, and death were ever floating in
his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who saw everywhere the
hidden skeleton. Felesion happ has best interpreted Baudelaire, the etcher
and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin too is a Bodelarian.

(19:01):
If there could be such an anomaly as a native
wood note wildly evil, it would be the lyric and
a stringent voice of this poet. His sensibility was both
Catholic and morbid, though he could be frigid in the
face of the most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a man
for whom the invisible word existed. If Gautier was pagan,
Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from medieval days. The spirit rules,

(19:25):
and as Paul Borgay said, he saw God a Manichean
in his worship of evil. He nevertheless abased his soul.
O Lord, God, give me the force and courage to
contemplate my heart in my body without disgust. He prays. But,
as some one remarked to Rochefou, called where you end,

(19:45):
Christianity begins. Baudelais built his ivory tower on the borders
of a poetic marima, which every miasma of the spirit pervaded,
every marti light and glow worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire
painted in his altry music the profundities of abysms, the
vastness of space. He painted too, the great nocturnal silences

(20:07):
of the soul paesum sumum tenant. He never reached peace
on the heights. Let us admit that souls of his
kind are encased in sick frames. Their steel is too
shrewd for the scabbard. Yet the enigma for us is
none the less unfathomable existence for such natures as a
sort of muffled delirium. To affiliate him with Poe, de Quincey, Hoffmann,

(20:29):
James Thompson, Coleridge, and the rest of the Somber choir
does not explain him. He is perhaps near dawn and
villon than any of the others strains of the metaphysical
and sinister and super subtle are to be discovered in him.
The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bylocation, are
only too easy to diagnose. But the remedy, hypocrite, lecteur,

(20:53):
mont simble bol monfare, the subtlety force grandeur of his
poetic production to be considered together with its disquieting, nervous,
vibrating qualities. It is not surprising that Victor Hugo wrote,
to the poet, you invest the heaven of art with
We know not what deadly rays you create A new shudder.
Hugo might have said that he turned art into an inferno.

(21:17):
Beaudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry in his Heaven
of fire glass in ebony. He is the blazing lucifer,
a glorious devil, large in heart and brain, that did
love beauty only once, saying Tennyson, though not of the
Frenchman two. As long ago as eighteen sixty nine, and

(21:38):
in our barbarous gas lit country, as Beaudelaire named the
land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which this
poet was described as unique and as interesting as Hamlet.
He is that rare and unknown, being a genuine poet,
a poet in the midst of things that have disordered
his spirit, a poet excessively developed in his taste for

(22:00):
and by beauty, very responsive to the ideal, very greedy
of sensation. A better description of Beaudelaire does not exist.
The Hamlet motive particularly, is one that sounded throughout the
disordered symphony of the poet's life. He was later revealed
also reviled to American readers by Henry James, who completely
missed his significance. This was in eighteen seventy eight, when

(22:23):
appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists. Previous
to that, there had been some desultory discussion, a few
essays in the magazines, and in eighteen seventy five a
sympathetic paper by Professor James Albert Harrison of the University
of Virginia. He denounced the Frenchman for his reprehensible taste,
though he did not mention his beautiful verse nor his originality.

(22:44):
In the matter of criticism, Beaudelaire, in his eyes, was
not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of
Saint Bouve, introduced Poe as a great man to the
French Nation. See Baudelaire's letter to Saint Bouve in the
newly published Letters eighteen forty one eighteen sixty six. Perhaps
mister Dick Minim and his projected academy of criticism might

(23:04):
make clear these devious problems. The Etude cretique of Edmond
Cherer were collected in eighteen sixty three. In them we
find this unhappy, uncritical judgment Baudelaire, Louis non reen nili
cour ni leespui, nei ladie ni le mont ni, la raison,
ni la fantasie, nils la verevni la meme, la facteur

(23:28):
saint eunique titre se da vois contribu e crier le'estdq
de la de boche. It is not our intention to
dilate upon the injustice of this criticism. It is Baudelaire,
the critic of esthetics, in whom we are interested. Yet
I cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of
Cheri had been transformed into affirmations, only justice would have

(23:50):
been accorded Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet the
most original of his century, but also a critic of
the first rank one who welcomed Richard Wagner when Paris
hooted him, and his fellow composer Hector Berlious played with
the role of the envious one, who fought for Edouard Manet,
Lcent de Lille, Gustave Lebert, Eugene Delacroix, fought with pen

(24:12):
for the modern etchers illustrators Marion Dommier, felicierro Gavanni, and
Constantine d He literally identified himself with de Quincey and Poe,
translating them so wonderfully well that some unpatriotic persons like
the French better than the originals. So much was Baudelaire
absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted

(24:33):
that the translator would meet the same fate as the
American poet. A singular vigorous spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry,
with its icy ecstasies, profound and harmonious, whose criticism is
penetrated by a Catholic quality, who anticipated modern critics in
his abhorrence of schools and environments, preferring to isolate the
man and uniquely study him. He would have subscribed to

(24:55):
Swineburne's generous pronouncement I have never been able to see
what should attract man to the profession of criticism, but
the noble pleasure of praising. The Frenchman has said that
it would be impossible for a critic to become poet,
and it is impossible for a poet not to contain
a critic. Teophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition

(25:16):
of Les Ferre de mal is not only the most
sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire as man and genius, but it
is also the high water mark of Gautier's gifts as
a critical essayist. We learned therein how the young Charles,
an incorrigible Dandie, came to visit Hotel Pimodan about eighteen
forty four. In this Hotel Pimadan, a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard

(25:37):
held high revel. His fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by
the painters, poets, sculptors, romancers of the day, that is,
carefully selected ones such as Litz, George sand Merrimae, and
others whose verve or genius gave them the privilege of
saying open sesame to this cave of forty supermen. Balzac
had his pos de Chagrine pictured the same sort of

(26:00):
scenes which were supposed to occur weekly at the Pimoudan.
Gautier eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred artistic souls,
where the beautiful Jewish Merinx, who had posed for Ari
Scheffer's Mignon and for Paul de la Roche La Glois,
met the superb Madame Sabatier, the only woman that Beaudelais loved,
and the original of that extraordinary group of Clesingu's, the

(26:22):
sculptor and son in law of George sand La femme
Au serpent A salambo A la Maude in Marble Hashish
was eaten, so Gautier writes, by Bossard and Baudelaire. As
for the creator of Mademoiselle Morpin, he was too robust
for such nonsense. He had to work for his living
at journalism, and he died in harness an irreproachable father,

(26:43):
while the unhappy Baudelaire, the inheritor of an intense, unstable temperament,
soon devoured his patrimony of seventy five thousand francs, and
for the remaining years of his life was between the
devil of his dusky Genie duval and the deep sea
of hopeless debt. It was at these Pimaudan gatherings, which
were no doubt much less wicked than the participants would
have us believe, that Beaudelais encountered Emil de Roy, a

(27:06):
painter of skill, who made his portrait and encouraged the
fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We have
seen an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray
talent of about the same order as Thackeras, with a
superadded note of the horrific, that favorite epithet of the
early poe critics. Baudelaire admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman

(27:27):
praised the illustrations of Gui, he was delighted. Doroy taught
his pupil the commonplaces of a painter's technique, also how
to compose a palette, a rather meaningless phrase nowadays. At least,
he did not write of the arts without some technical experience.
Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and when the Salons
of Beaudelaire appeared in eighteen forty five, forty six, fifty

(27:49):
five and fifty nine, the praise and blame they evoked
were testimonies to the training and knowledge of their author.
A new spirit had been born. The names of Deiderot
and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor spouting the jargon
of the usual critic. The salons of Baudelaire are the
production of a humanist. Some would put them above Dedero's.

(28:09):
Mister Sainsbury, after Swinburne, the warmest advocate of Baudelais among
the English, thinks that the French poet, in his picture
criticism observed too little and imagine too much. In other words,
he adds, to read a criticism of Baudelaire's without the
title of fixed is by no means a sure method
of recognizing the picture afterward. Now, word painting was the
very thing that Beaudelaire avoided. It was his friend Gautier,

(28:32):
with the plastic style, who attempted well nighn possible feat
of competing in his verbal descriptions with the certitudes of
canvas and marble. And if he, with his verbal imagination,
did not entirely succeed, how could a less adept manipulator
of the vocabulary. We do not agree with mister Sainsbury.
No one can imagine too much when the imagination is
that of a poet. Beaudelaire divined the work of the

(28:54):
artist and set it down scrupulously in a prose of
exceeding rectitude. He did not paint pictures and prose. He
did not divocate. He did not overburden his pages with
technical terms, but the spirit of his subject he did
disengage in a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical
schools were a cross for him to bear, and he
wore his prejudices lightly. Like a true critic. He judged

(29:18):
more by form than theme. There are no types, there
is only life, he asserted, And long before Jule LaForge,
he was ever art for art. Yet having breath of comprehension,
in a hindlike capacity for seeing both sides of his
own nature with its idiosyncrasies, he could write the puerile
utopia of the school of art for art, in excluding

(29:38):
morality and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. All literature
which refuses to advance for eternally between science and philosophy
is a homicidal and suicidal literature. Beaudelaire, then, was no
less sound a critic of the plastic arts than of music.
In literature, Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror
of democracy, of the democratization of the arts, of the

(30:00):
sentimental fuss and fuddle, of a pseudo humanitarianism. During the
eighteen forty eight agitation, the former Dandie of eighteen forty
put on a blouse and spoke of barricades. Those things
were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm bells during
the Dresden Uprising. Chopin wrote for the Pianoforte a revolutionary etude.
Brave lads, poets and musicians fight their battles best in

(30:22):
the region of the ideal. Beaudelaire's little attack of the
equality measles soon vanished. He lectured his brother poets and
artists on the folly and injustice of abusing or despising
the bourgeois. Being a man of paradox, he dedicated a
volume of his salons to the bourgeois. But he would
not have contradicted mister George Moore for declaring that in

(30:42):
art the democrat is always reactionary. In eighteen thirty the
democrats were against Victor Hugo and Delacroix, and Le flor
de MARDs, that book of Opal's blood and evil swamp
flowers will never be savored by the mob. In his
Souvenir de geness Champs, Fleury speaks of the promenades in
the louver he enjoys the company with Beaudelaire. Bronzino was

(31:04):
one of the poet's preferences. He was also attracted by Elgreco,
not an unusual admiration considering the somber extravagance of his
own genius of Goya, he has written in exalted phrases.
Velasquez was his touch stone, being of a perverse nature,
his dareof ruined by abuse of drink and drugs. The
landscapes of his imagination were more beautiful than nature herself.

(31:27):
The country itself, he declared, was odious, like Whistler, whom
he often met. See the homage as de Lacroix by
Fontine Lettore, with its portraits of Whistler, Beaudelaire, Manet Bracamont,
the Etcher, Legroau, Delacroix, Cordier, Dorntid, the Critic, and de Balleroi.
He could not help showing his aversion to foolish sunsets

(31:48):
in a word, Beaudelaire, into whose brain had entered too
much moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of poetry, criticism,
and fiction. His Samuel Kramer in La Fanfarlo is the
literary progenitor of Jean duc Descinte in Heismann's Reborn. Heismann
at first modeled himself upon Beaudelaire. His Le drogois oh

(32:09):
ePIE is a continuation of petit poems and pause, and
to Baudelaire's account must be laid much artificial morbid writing.
Despite his pursuit of perfection and form, his influence has
been too often baneful to impressionable artists and Embryo. A
lover of Gallic byronism and high priest of the Satanic school,
there was no extravagance, absurd or terrible that he did

(32:32):
not commit, from etching a four part fugue on ice
to skating hymns in honor of Lucifer. In his criticism alone.
Was he the sane, logical Frenchman. And while he did
not live to see the success of the Impressionist group,
he surely would have acclaimed their theory and practice. Was
he not an Impressionist himself as Richard Wagner was his

(32:53):
God and music. So Delacroix quite overflowed his esthetic consciousness.
Read volume two of his collected works, ariasate Estetique, which
contains his silons. Also his essay de las sence do
ye worthy to be placed side by side with George
Meredith's essay on Comedy. Caricaturists French and foreign are considered

(33:13):
in two chapters at the close of the volume. Beaudelaire
was as conscientious as Gautier. He trotted around miles of
mediocre canvas, saying an encouraging word to the less talented,
boiling over with holy indignation, or indulging in glacial irony
before the rash usurpers occupying the seats of the mighty
and pouncing on new genius with promptitude. Upon Delacroix, he

(33:34):
lavished the largeness of his admiration. He smiled at the
platitudes of Horace Vernet, and only shook his head over
the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed
William Housilier, now so little known. He praised the verrier Chassiroo,
who waited years before he came into his own. His
preferred landscapists were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke

(33:57):
of arie Cheffer in the Apes of Sentiment, while his
discussions of Hogarth, Crookshenk, Pinelli and Bregel proclaims his versatility
of vision. In his essay Le Pintre de le Ville
Moden he was the first among critics to recognize the
peculiar quality called modernity, that naked vibration which informs the
novels of Goncrieur, Flaubert's Lege Conchion Sentimental and the pictures

(34:21):
of Manet, Monet, de Gas and Raffaelli, with their avocations
of a new nervous Paris. It is in his volume three,
entitled l'st Romantique, that so many things dear to the
new century were then subjects of furious quarrels. This book
contains much just and brilliant writing. It was easy for
Nietzsche to praise Wagner in Germany in eighteen seventy six,

(34:43):
but dangerous at Paris in eighteen sixty one to declare
war on Wagner's adverse critics. This Beaudelaire did the relations
of Baudelaire and Edouard Manet were exceedingly cordial. In a
letter to Teofil Dorre the Art Critic Letters, page three
sixty one, we find when Baudelaire defending his friend from
the accusation that his pictures were pastiches of Goya, he wrote,

(35:05):
Manette has never seen Goya, never el Greco. He was
never in Portalais gallery, which may have been true at
the time eighteen sixty four. Nevertheless, Manette had visited Madrid
and spent much time studying Belasquez and abusing Spanish cookery.
Consider too Goya's balcony with girls and Manet's famous balcony.
Raging at the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this

(35:27):
same epistle, they accuse even me of imitating Edgar Pout.
Do you know why I so patiently translated Poe because
he resembled me? The poet talicized these words with stupefaction. Therefore,
he admired the mysterious coincidences of Manet's work with that
of Goya and el Greco. He took Manet seriously, He
wrote to him in a paternal and severe tone, recall

(35:49):
his reproof when urging the painter to exhibit his work.
You complain about attacks, but are you the first to
endure them? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner?
They were not killed by derision, And in order not
to make you too proud, I must tell you that
they are models, each in his way and in a
very rich world, while you are only the first in
the decrepitude of your art Letters, page four thirty six.

(36:13):
Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words if he were able
to revisit the glimpses of the Champs Elysee at the
Autumn Salon? What would you think of Seizon eaulan Radon?
He would understand, for he is the transposer of Bodelianism
to terms of design and color, and perhaps the poet
whose verse is saturated with tropical hues. He, when young
sailed in southern seas, might appreciate the monstrous debauch of

(36:37):
form and color in the Tahitian canvasses of Paul Gogan.
Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his verse.
He is par excellence, the poet of esthetics. To Doumier
he inscribed a poem and to the sculptor Ernest christov
to Delacroix, sirtasen president, to Manet, to guill ref Barizia,

(36:59):
to an unknown master, unmater and watteau A watau au
rebonds is seen in u voyages citare, while in Le Faire,
this poet of the ideal spleen, music and perfume chows
adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Pouget, Goya, Delacroix, Delacroix,

(37:21):
j'ache des sands hunte des mauve anschicht and what is
more exquisite than his quatrain to Lola de Valence, a
poetic inscription for the picture of Edouard Manet, with its
last line as vaporous as subtle as verlaine de charmes
in nat indu dun bigious rose et noirs. Heine called
himself the last of the Romantics, the first of the Moderns,

(37:43):
and the last of the Romantics was the many sided
Charles Baudelaire three. He was born at Paris April ninth,
eighteen twenty one, Flaubert's birth year, and not April twenty first,
as Gautier has it. His father was Joseph Francis Beaudlaire
or Beaudelaire, who occupied a government position. A cultivated art lover,

(38:04):
his taste was apparent in the home he made for
his second wife, Caroline Aschimbeau du Fay, an orphan and
the daughter of a military officer. There was a considerable
difference in the years of this pair. The mother was
twenty seven, the father sixty two at the birth of
their only child by his first marriage. The elder Baudelaire
had one son, Claude, who, like his half brother Charles,

(38:26):
died of paralysis. Though a steady man of business, that
great modern neurosis called commerce has its mental wrecks too,
and no one pays attention. But when a poet falls
by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and
other soul hunters seeking victims. After the death of Beaudelaire's father,
the widow, within a year married the handsome, ambitious Opique,

(38:47):
then Chef Betellon, lieutenant colonel decorated with the Legion of
Honor and later general, an ambassador to Madrid Constantinople in London.
Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but unlike most children
of genius, he was a score dollar and won brilliant
honors at school. His stepfather was proud of him. From
the Royal College of Leon, Charles went to the Lyase

(39:07):
Louis le Grand Paris, but was expelled in eighteen thirty
nine on various discreditable charges. Troubles soon began at home.
He was irascible, vain, precocious, and given to dissipation. He
quarreled with General Opique and disdained his mother, but she
was to blame. She had confessed she had quite forgotten
the boy in the flush of her second love. He

(39:28):
could not forget or forgive what he called her infidelity
to the memory of his father Hamlet Like. He was inconsolable.
The good Bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said
that Charles was a little crazy. Second marriages usually bring
woe in their train. When a mother has such a son,
she doesn't remarry, said the young poet. Charles signed himself

(39:48):
Beaudelaire du Fay or sometimes de Fay. He wrote in
his journal, my ancestors, idiots or maniacs, all victims of
terrible passions, which was one of his exaggerations. His grandfather
on the paternal side was a Champagnois peasant. His mother's
family presumably Norman, but not much is known of her forebears.
Charles believed himself lost from the time his half brother

(40:10):
was stricken. He also believed that his instability of temperament,
and he studied his case as would a surgeon, was
the result of his parents disparity. In years after his
return from the East, where he did not learn English,
as has been said, his mother taught him as a
boy to converse in and write the language. He came
into his little inheritance about fifteen thousand dollars. Two years later,

(40:32):
he was so heavily in debt that his family asked
for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had
been swindled, being young and green. How had he squandered
his money, Not exactly on opera glasses, like Gerard de Nerval,
but on clothes, pictures, furniture books. The remnant was set
aside to pay his debts. Charles would be both poet

(40:53):
and dandy. He dressed expensively, but soberly in the English fashion.
His linen dazzling the prevailing hue of his habiliments. Black
in height, he was medium, his eyes brown, searching, luminous,
the eye of a nyctelops, eyes like ravens, nostrils palpitating, cleft, chin,
mouth expressive, sensual, jaw, strong and square. His hair was black, curly, glossy,

(41:16):
his forehead high, square and white. In the Deroy portrait,
he wears a beard. He is there what catul Mindez
nicknamed him, his excellence, Monseigneur Brummel. Later he was the
elegiac satan, the author of limitation de esse Le diabla,
or the Beaudelaire of George Moore, the clean shaven face

(41:37):
of the mock priest, the slow, cold eyes, and the sharp,
cunning sneer of the cynical libertine, who will be tempted
that he may better know the worthlessness of temptation. In
the heyday of his blood, he was perverse and deliberate.
Let us credit him with contradicting the byronic notion that
ennui could best be cured by dissipation. In sin, Beaudelaire
found the saddest of all consolations. Mendez laughs at the

(42:01):
legend of Beaudelaire's violence of his being given to explosive phrases.
Despite Gautier's stories about the Hotel Pimadin and its club
of Hashish eaters, Monsieur Mindez denies that Beaudelaire was a
victim of the hemp. What the majority of mankind does
not know concerning the habits of literary workers is this
prime fact. Men who work hard writing verse, and there

(42:23):
is no mental toil comparable to it, cannot drink or
indulge in opium without inevitable collapse. The old fashioned ideas
of inspiration, spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden bolt from heaven
are delusions still hugged by the world. To be told
that Chopin filed at his music for years, that Beethoven
and his smithy forged his thunderbolts by the sweat of

(42:45):
his brow, that Manet toiled like a laborer on the dock,
That Beaudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to poetic work,
that Gautier was a hard working journalist, or disillusions for
the sentimental minerva springing full fledge from Jupiter's skull to
the desk of the poet is a pretty fancy but
Balzac and Flaubert did not encourage this fancy work literally

(43:08):
killed Poe, as it literally killed Jiule de Concour, Flaubert
and d'audet. Montpassant went insane because he would work and
he would play the same day. Beaudelaire worked and worried.
His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was flawed.
Saint Beauve told him that he had worn out his
nerves from the start. He was Detraguay, but that his

(43:31):
entire life was one huge debauch, as a nightmare of
the moral police in some red cotton nightcap country. His
period of mental production was not brief nor barren. He
was a student. Du Comte's charged that he was in
ignorant man's disproved by the variety and quality of his
published work. His range of sympathies was large. His mistake,

(43:51):
in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write so
well about the Seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its
real name, which is protracted labor. Beaudelaire was one of
the elect an aristocrat who dealt with the quintessence of art,
his delicate air of a bishop, his exquisite manners, his
modulated voice aroused unusual interest and admiration. He was a

(44:12):
humanist of distinction. He has left a hymn to Saint
Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Beaudelaire, like Chopin,
made more poignant the phrase raised to a higher intensity
the expressiveness of art. Women played a commanding role in
his life. They always do with any poet worthy of
the name, though few have been so. Frank In acknowledging

(44:33):
this as Beaudelaire. Yet he was in love more with
woman than the individual. The legend of the beautiful creature
he brought from the East resolves itself into the dismal
affair with Jean Duvals. He met her in Paris after
he had been in the East. She sang at a
cafe concert in Paris. She was more brown than black.
She was not handsome, not intelligent, not good. Yet he

(44:56):
idealized her, for she was the source of half his inspiration.
To her were addressed those marvelous avocations of the orient
of perfume tresses, delicious dawns on strange faraway seas, and
superb byzant domes that devils built. Beaudelaire is the poet
of perfumes. He is also the patron saint of Anyui.

(45:17):
No one is so chanted the praise of Odors. His
soul swims on perfume, as do other souls on music.
He is sung. As he grew older, he seemed to
haunt for more acrid Odors. He often presents an elaborately
chaste vase, the carving of which transports us, but from
which the head is quickly averted. Jean, whom he never loved,

(45:37):
no matter what may be said, was a sorceress. But
she was impossible. She robbed, betrayed him. He left her
a dozen times, only to return. He was a capital
draftsman with a strong nervous line, and made many pen
and ink drawings of her. They are not prepossessing. In
her rapid decline, she was not allowed to want. Madame

(45:58):
Apique paid her expenses in the hospit assorted history. She
was a veritable flower of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry,
like music, would be colorless, scentseless if it sounded no dissonances.
Fancy art reduced to the buttific and banal chord of
C major. He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier,

(46:18):
a reigning beauty at whose salon Artistic Paris assembled. She
had been christened by Gautier Madame la Presidente, and her
sumptuous beauty was portrayed by Ricard in his La Femme
au chienne. She returned Baudelaire's love. They soon parted again,
a riddle which the published letters hardly solve. One letter, however,

(46:38):
does show that Beaudelaire had tried to be faithful and failed.
He could not extort from his exhausted soul the sentiment,
but he put its music on paper. His most seductive
lyrics were addressed to Madame Sabatier A la trou cher
a la troy belle, A hymn saturated with love, music, spleen, perfumes, color, sound, perfumes.

(46:59):
Called to be each other is deep, too deep, perfumes
like the flesh of children, softest haut boys, green as
the meadows, criminals, outcasts, the charm of childhood, the horrors
of love, pride and rebellion, Eastern landscapes, cats, soothing and faults, cats,
the true companions of lonely poets, Haunted clocks, shivering dusks,

(47:20):
and gloomier dawns Paris in a hundred phases, these and
many other themes. This strange, souled poet, this Dante Pacer
of the shore of Paris, has celebrated and finely wrought
verse and profound phrases. In a single line. He contrives
atmosphere the very shape of his sentence, the ring of
the syllables aroused the deepest emotion. A master of harmonic

(47:41):
undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in making
their music more fluid, more lyrical, more vaporous. Many young
French poets pass through their bodalarian green sickness. But he
alone knows the secrets of molding those metallic free sonnets,
which have the resistance of bronze, one of the despairing
music that flames from the mouths of lost souls trembling

(48:04):
on the wharves of hell. He is the supreme master
of irony and troubled voluptuousness. Baudelaire is a masculine poet.
He carved, rather than saying the plastic arts, spoke to
his soul. A lover and maker of images, like Poe,
his emotions transformed themselves into ideas. BOORGEI classified him as mystic,

(48:25):
libertine and analyst. He was born with a wound in
his soul, to use the phrase of Pere Lacaudaer. Curiously enough,
he actually contemplated in eighteen sixty one becoming a candidate
for Lacaudaer's vacant seat in the French Academy. Saint Beauve
dissuaded him from this folly. Recall Baudelaire's prayer, thou, O, Lord,

(48:46):
my God, grant me the grace to produce some fine
lines which will prove to myself that I am not
the last of men, that I am not inferior to
those I contemn individualists, egoist, anarchist. His only thoughts were letters.
Jules LaForge thus described Baudelaire cat Hindu Yankee, episcopal alchemist, Yes,

(49:07):
an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes he created. He
was of Gothic imagination and could have said with rolla
jesuis venu trotard dn umande tropees vieux. He had an
unassuaged thirst for the absolute. The human soul was his stage,
he its interpreting orchestra. In eighteen fifty seven, The Flowers

(49:28):
of Evil was published by Poulais Malassis, who afterward went
into bankruptcy, a warning to publishers with a taste for
fine literature. The titles contemplated were Limbs or lesbielles. Ippolyte
Babu suggested the one we know. These poems were suppressed
on account of six and poet and publishers summoned. As
the municipal government had made a particular ass of itself

(49:51):
in the prosecution of Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovarie,
the Beaudelaire matter was disposed of in haste. He was
condemned to a fine of three hundred francs bunks, a
fine which was never paid as the objectionable poems were removed.
They were printed in the Belgian edition and may be
read in the new volume Uvre Poustiume. Beaudelaire was infuriated

(50:12):
over the judgment, for he knew that his book was
dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge
from the trial with flying colors. Therefore, to be classed
as one who wrote objectionable literature was a shock. Flaubert
had the Impress back of him, he complained, which was true.
The Empress Eugenie, also the Princess Matilde. But he worked

(50:34):
as ever and put forth those polished entaglios called poems
and prose, for the form of which he had taken
a hint from Alois Bertrand's Gaspard de la nouill. He
filled his form with a new content. Not alone pictures,
but moods are to be found in those miniatures. Pity
is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject and lowly,
a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who had

(50:56):
discerned in Beaudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one
of his poems, he described a landscape of metal, of
marble and water, a babble of staircases and arcades, a
palace of infinity surrounded by the silence of eternity. This
depressing yet magical dream was utilized by Heismann in his
ah Reboor. But in the tiny landscapes of the prose

(51:17):
poems there is nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's
deliberate attitude of artificialities dropped. He is human, not that
the deep fundamental note of humanity is ever absent in
his poems. The eternal diapason is there even when least overheard.
Baudelaire is more human than Poe. His range of sympathy
is wider. In this he transcends him as a poet,

(51:39):
though his subject matter often issues from the very dregs
of life, brother to pitiable wanderers. There are nevertheless no
traces of Kant, no Russian pity ala Dostoevsky, no humanitarian
or socialistic rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist.
He hated the sentimental sapping of altruism. His prose poem Crowds,

(52:01):
with its bath of multitude, may have been suggested by Poe,
but in Charles Lamb we find the idea, are there
no solitudes out of caves in the desert? Or cannot
the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone?
His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhauser
as significant an essay in Nietzsches Richard Wagner and Beirut,
and Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in

(52:23):
Wagner's career. Wagner sent a brief, hearty letter of thanks
to the critic, and later made his acquaintance to Wagner.
Baudelaire introduced a young Wagnerian, Villiers de Lille Adams. This
Wagner letter is included in the volume of Crepet, but
there are no letters published from Baudelaire to Franz Liszt,
though they were friends in Weimar. I saw at the
Litzt Museum several from Baudelaire which should have been included

(52:46):
in the letters. The poet understood Litzt and his reforms
as he understood Wagner. The German composer admired the French
poet and his coundry. In the sultry second Act of
Parceval had a Boudellerian hugh, especially in the Temptations. The
end was at hand. Beaudelaire had been steadily, rather unsteadily,
going downhill, A desperate figure, a dandy and shabby attire.

(53:10):
He went out only after dark. He haunted the exterior boulevards,
associated with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst,
ate without hunger, as he had said, a woeful decadence
for this aristocrat of life and letters, most sorrowful of
sinners of morose delectation, scourged his nerves and extorted the
darkest music from his lear He fled to Brussels. There

(53:33):
to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes, he gave a few lectures
in metrope le Monnier, drank to forget and forgot to work,
abused Brussels. Belgium its people, a country, he cried, where
the trees are black, the flowers without odor, and where
there is no conversation. He the brilliant Conzieu, the chief
blagger of a circle in which young James mc neil

(53:55):
Whistler was reduced to the role of a listener. This
most spiritual among artists found himself a failure in the
Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind ourselves
that Beaudelais was the creator of many of the paradoxes
attributed not only to Whistler, but to an entire school,
if one may employ such a phrase. The frozen imperturbability

(54:15):
of the poet, his cutting enunciation, his power of blasphemy,
his hatred of nature, his love of the artificial, have
been copied by the esthetic blades of our day. He
it was who first taunted nature with being an imitator
of art, with always being the same, Oh the imitative sunsets,
Oh the quotidian eating and drinking. And as pessimist too,

(54:39):
he led the mode Baudelaire, like Flaubert, grasped the murky
torch of pessimism once held by chateau Burian, Benjamin Constant
and Sinecur. Doubtless, all this stemmed from Byronism, and now
it is as stale as Byronism. His health failed, and
he lacked money enough to pay for doctor's prescriptions, even
owed for the room in his hotel at Nemueure, where

(55:01):
he was visiting his father in law of Felicien Rope.
March eighteen sixty six, he suffered from an attack of paralysis.
He was removed to Brussels. His mother, who lived at
Oneaux in mourning for her husband, came to his aid.
Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia
set in. He could only ejaculate a mild oath, and
when he caught sight of himself in the mirror, he

(55:22):
would bow pleasantly, as if to a stranger. His friends rallied,
and they were among the most distinguished people in Paris.
The elite of souls ladies visited him one or two,
playing Wagner on the piano, which must have added a
fresh nuance to death, and they brought him flowers. He
expressed his love for flowers and music to the last.
He could not bear the sight of his mother. She

(55:44):
revived in him some painful memories, but that past, and
he clamored for her when she was absent. If any
one mentioned the names of Wagner or Manet, he smiled
and with a fixed stare, as if peering through some
invisible window opening upon eternity. He died August thirty first,
eighteen sixty seven, age forty six. Barbais de Revilli, himself

(56:06):
a Satanist and dandy, Oh those comical old attitudes of literature,
had prophesied that the author of Fleur de Mars would
either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the
foot of the cross. Later he said the same of Heisman.
Beaudelaire had the alternative course forced upon him by fate.
After he had attempted spiritual suicide for how many years?

(56:26):
He once tried actual suicide, but the slight cut in
his throat looked so ugly to him, that he went
no farther. His soul had been a battlefield for the
powers of good and evil, that at the end he
brought the wreck of both soul and body to his
God should not be a subject for comment. He was
an extraordinary poet with a bad conscience, who lived miserably
and was buried with honors. Then it was that his

(56:50):
worth was discovered funeral orations over a genius or a
species of public staircase. Wit. His reputation waxes with the years.
He is an exotic gem in the crown of French.
Poetry of him Swineburn has chanted ave atke Val, shall
I strew on thee rose or rule or laurel brother
on this That was the veil of the end of

(57:13):
section zero.