Part 7

The life of Baudelaire, like the lives of Balzac and of Villiers and of Verlaine, was one long labour, in which time, money, and circumstances were all against him. "Sometimes," Balzac cries, "it seems to me that my brain is on fire. I shall die in the trenches of the intellect." It is his genius, his imagination, that are on fire, not so much as his sleepless brain. This certainly Baudelaire never felt. Yet, in one sentence written in 1861, I find an agony not unlike Balzac's, but more material, more morbid: "La plupart des temps je me dis: si je vis, je vivrai toujours de même, en damné, et quand la mort naturelle viendra, je serai vieux, usé, passé de mode, criblé de dettes; ajoute à cela que je trouve souvent qu'on ne me rend pas justice, et que je vois que tout réussit à souhait pour les sots." This, with his perpetual nervous terrors, his hallucinations, his drugs, his miseries, his women, his wine, his good and bad nights, his sense of poisonous people, his disorders, his excitability, his imagination that rarely leaves him, his inspiration that often varies, his phrase, after a certain despair: "Je me suis précipité dans le travail: alors j'ai reconnu que je n'avais perdu aucune faculté;" his discouragements, his sudden rages, not only against fame, but when he just refrains from hitting a man's face with his stick; after all this, and after much more than this, I have to take his word, when he says--not thinking of these impediments in his way--"What poets ought to do is to know how to escape from themselves." In 1861 he writes: "As my literary situation is more than good, I can do all I want, I can get all my books printed; yet, as I have the misfortune in possessing a kind of unpopular spirit, I shall not make much money, but I shall leave a great fame behind me--provided I have the courage to live." "Provided "That word sounds a note of nervous distress. He continues: "I have made a certain amount of money; if I had not had so many debts, _and if I had had more fortune, I might have been rich"_ The last five words he writes in small capitals. And this lamentable refrain is part of his obsession; wondering, as we all do, why we have never been rich. Then comes this curious statement: "What exasperates me is when I think of what I have received this year; it is enormous; certainly I have lived on this money like a ferocious beast; and yet how often I spend much less than that in sheer waste!"

VIII

In 1861 Poulet-Malassis showed Baudelaire the manuscript of _Les Martyrs ridicules_ of Léon Cladel, who was so excited as he read it, so intrigued by his antithetical constructions and by the mere singularity of the title, and so amazed by this writer's audacity, that he made his acquaintance, went over his proofs, and helped to teach him the craft of letters. So, in his sombre and tragic and passionate and feverish novels, we see the inevitable growth out of the hard soil of Quercy, and out of the fertilizing contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of this whole literature, so filled with excitement, so nervous, so voluminous and vehement, in whose pages speech is always out of breath. And one finds splendid variations in his stories of peasants and wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes: something at once epic and morbid.

Baudelaire, in his preface, points out the solemn sadness and the grim irony with which Cladel relates deplorably comic facts; the fury with which he insists on painting his strange characters; the fantastic fashion in which he handles sin with the intense curiosity of a casuist, analysing evil and its inevitable consequences. He notes "la puissance sinistrement caricatural de Cladel." But it is in these two sentences that he sums up, supremely, the beginning and the end of realistic and imaginative art. "The Poet, under his mask, still lets himself be seen. But the supremacy of art had consisted in remaining glacial and hermetically sealed, and in leaving to the reader all the merit of indignation. (_Le poète, sous son masque, se laisse encore voir. Le supreme de l'art eût consisté à rester glacial et fermé, et à laisser au lecteur tout le mérite de l'indignation._)"

[Illustration]

Certain of these pages are ironical and sinister and cynical; as, for instance, in this sentence: "Quant aux insectes amoureux, je ne crois pas que les figures de rhétorique dont ils se servent pour gémir leurs passions soient mesquines; toutes les mansardes entendant tous les soirs des tirades tragiques dont la Comédie Française ne pourra jamais bénéficier." And it is in regard to this that I give certain details of an anecdote related by Cladel of Baudelaire, which refers to the fatal year when he left Paris for Brussels.

Both often went to the Café de la Belle-Poule; and, one night, when Cladel was waiting for Baudelaire, a very beautiful woman seated opposite him asked him to present her to Baudelaire. He laughed and they waited, and Baudelaire was presented, who, after giving them the usual drinks, at the end of an hour went away. This went on for a whole month; when Baudelaire, after her incessant assiduities to him, brought her home with him, Cladel also. They talk. The woman becomes lascivious. Baudelaire answers that he has a passion for beautiful forms and does not wish to expose himself to a deception. She undresses slowly. She is magnificent, and her tresses are so long that, with leaning over a little, she could put her naked feet on the ends of them. She assumes, being probably aware of it, the exact pose of Mademoiselle de Maupin when she stands naked before d'Albert. Cladel goes out. He has not quite closed the door when he hears Baudelaire, prematurely old and worn out, say: "Rhabille-toi." Still vital, he has no more the abstract heat of rapture of the passionate lover in Gautier's famous self-confessions; for, in that wonderful book, there is nothing besides a delicately depraved imagination and an extreme ecstasy over the flesh and the senses. And he also realized, as Baudelaire did not always, that the beauty of life was what he wanted, and not the body, that frail and perishable thing, that has to be pitied, that so many desire to perpetuate.

Yet never in Baudelaire, as in Gautier, did the five senses become articulate, as if they were made specially for him; for he speaks for them with a dreadful unconcern. All his words are--never Baudelaire's--in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have no recollection. Yet neither were absolutely content with the beauty of a woman's body: for the body must finally dwindle and expand to some ignoble physical condition, and on certain women's necks wrinkles will crawl, and the fire in one's blood sometimes loses some of its heat; only, one wants to perpetuate the beauty of life itself, imperishable at least in its recurrence.

In his preface Baudelaire compares Murger with Musset, both Bohemian classics, only one spoke of Bohemia with a bitter bantering, and the poet, when he was not in his noble moods, had crises of fatuity. "All this evil society, with its vile habits, its adventurous morals, was painted by the vivid pencil-strokes of Murger; only he jested in his relations of miserable things." Yes, Murger is a veracious historian; believe him, if you do not know or have forgotten, that such are the annals of Bohemia. There, people laugh just so lightly and sincerely, weep and laugh just as freely, are really hungry, really have their ambitions, and at times die of all these maladies. It is the gayest and most melancholy country in the world. To have lived there too long, is to find all the rest of the world in exile. But if you have been there or not, read Murger's pages; there, perhaps, you will see more of the country than anything less than a lifetime spent in it will show you.

IX

In April, 1864, Baudelaire left Paris for Brussels, where he stayed in the Hôtel du Grand-Miroir, rue de la Montagne. Before then his nerves had begun to torment him; they played tricks with his very system; he wrote very little prose and no verse. It was with a kind of desperate obstination--a more than desperate obstinacy--that he strove to prevent himself from giving way to his pessimistic conceptions of life, to his morbid over-sensibility that ached as his flesh ached. Unsatiated, unsatisfied, for once in his existence irresolute in regard to what he wanted to do, watching himself with an almost casuistical casuistry, alone and yet not alone in the streets of Paris, he wandered, a _noctambule,_ night after night, sombre and sinister. So a ghost self-obsessed might wander in desolate cities seeing ever before him the Angel of Destruction.

Did he then know that he was becoming more and more abnormal? This I ignore. This, I suppose, he alone knew; and hated too much knowledge of his precarious condition. He was veritably more alone than ever, before he plunged--as one who might see shipwreck before him--into that gulf that is no gulf, that extends not between hell and heaven, but that one names Brussels.

[Illustration: manuscript]

Still he frequented his favourite haunts, the Moulin-Rouge, the Casino de la rue Cadet, and other cabarets. He saw then, as I saw many years afterwards, pass some of his Flowers of Evil--some who knew him and had read his verses, most of whom he ignored--macabre, with hectic cheeks and tortured eyes and painted faces; these strange nocturnal birds of passage that flit to and fro, the dancers and the hired women; always--so Latin an attitude of their traditional trade!--with enquiring and sidelong glances at men and at women.

I can see him now, as I write, sit in certain corners of the Moulin-Rouge--as I did--drinking strange drinks and smoking cigarettes; hearing with all his old sensuality that adorable and cynical and perverse and fascinating _Valse des Roses_ of Olivier Métra: a maddening music to the soundless sound of the mad dances of the _Chahut_--danced by dancers of both sexes, ambiguous and exotic and neurotic--that, as the avid circle forms hastily around them, set their fevers into our fevers, their nerves into our nerves.

It was in May, 1892, that, having crossed the streets of Paris from the hotel where I was staying, the Hôtel Corneille, in the Latin Quarter (made famous by Balzac in his superb story, _Z. Marcas_,) I found myself in Le Jardin de Paris, where I saw for the first time La Mélinite. She danced in a quadrille: young and girlish, the more provocative because she played as a prude, with an assumed modesty; _décolletée_ nearly to the waist, in the Oriental fashion. She had long, black curls around her face; and had about her a depraved virginity.

And she caused in me, even then, a curious sense of depravity that perhaps comes into the verses I wrote on her. There, certainly, on the night of May 22nd, danced in her feverish, her perverse, her enigmatical beauty, La Mélinite, to her own image in the mirror:

"A shadow smiling Back to a shadow in the night,"

as she cadenced Olivier Métra's _Valse des Roses._

It is a fact of curious interest that in 1864 Poulet-Malassis was obliged to leave Paris--on account of his misfortunes as a publisher, in regard to money, and for various other reasons--and to exile himself in Brussels: still more curious that Baudelaire--drawn, perhaps, by some kind of affinity in their natures--followed him sooner than he had intended to go. Malassis lived in rue de Mercedes, 35 _bis,_ Faubourg d'Ixilles. In those years both saw a great deal of the famous, perverse, macabre Félicien Rops.

Malassis, naturally, was obliged, in his expedients for living as he used to live, to publish privately printed obscene books; some no more than erotic. As Baudelaire hated, with his Parisian refinement, that kind of certainly objectionable literature, on May 4th, 1865, he writes to Sainte-Beuve: "As for Malassis, his terrible affair arrives on the 12th. He believes he will be condemned for five years. What there is grave in this is that that closes France for him for five years. But that cuts him for a time from his ways of living. I see in it no great evil. As for me, who am no fool, I have never possessed one of these idiotic books, even printed in fine characters and with fine engravings." As a matter of fact, Malassis was condemned in May, 1866, to one year's imprisonment for having privately printed _Les Amies_ of Paul Verlaine--a book of sonnets, attributed to an imaginary Pablo de Herlaguez.

Baudelaire, as I have said, had many reasons for going to Brussels. Among these was his urgent desire of finding a publisher to print his collected works--having failed to find any publisher for them. Another was that of giving lectures--a thing he was not made for--and for two other reasons: one of making immediate money, one of adding to his fame as a writer. Then, to write a book on Belgium.

He writes to Manet (who has written to him: "Do return to Paris! No happiness can come to you while you live in that damned country!"): "As for finishing here _Pauvre Belgique,_ I am incapable of it: I am near on dead. I have quite a lot of _Poèmes en Prose_ to get printed in magazines. I can do no more than that. _Je souffre d'un mal qui je n'ai pas, comme j'étais gamin, et que je vivais au bout du monde."_

His book was to have been humorous, mocking, and serious--his final separation from modern stupidity. "People may understand me, perhaps, then." "Nothing," he confesses, "can console me in my detestable misery, in my humiliating situation, nor especially in my vices."

In February, 1865, he writes: "As for my present state, it is an absolute abdication of the will. (_C'est une parfaite abdication de la volonté._)" What reason, I wonder, was there for him to "abdicate" the one element in our natures by which we live at our greatest, the very root of our passions (as Balzac said), "nervous fluids and that unknown substance which, in default of another term, we must call the will?" Man has a given quality of energy; each man a different quality: how will he spend it? That is Balzac's invariable question. All these qualities were always in Baudelaire.

Had he finally, after so many years in which his energy was supreme, lost some of his energy, struggling, as he seems to do, against insuperable difficulties that beset him on either side, like thieves that follow men in the dark with the intention of stabbing you in the back? Does he then try to conjecture what next year might bring him of good or of evil? He has lived his life after his own will: what shall the end be? He dares neither look backward nor forward. It might be that he feels the earth crumbling under his feet; for how many artists have had that fear--the fear that the earth under their feet may no longer be solid? There is another step for him to take, a step that frightens him; might it not be into another more painful kind of oblivion? Has something of the man gone out of him: that is to say, the power to live for himself?

In the summer of 1865 Baudelaire spent several days in Paris, seeing Banville and other friends of his. They found him unchanged; his eyes clear; his voice musical; he talked as wonderfully as ever. They used all their logic to persuade him to remain in Paris. He refused, even after Gautier had said to him: "You are astonishing: can one conceive your mania of eternalizing yourself in a land where one is only bored to extinction?" He laughed; promised to return: he never did; it was the last day when his friends possessed him entirely.

In his years of exile he printed Poe's _Histoires grotesques et sérieuses_ (1864); _Les nouvelles fleurs du mal_ in _La Parnasse contemporaine_ (1866). In 1865 Poulet-Malassis printed _Les épaves de Charles Baudelaire._ Avec une eau-forte de Félicien Rops. Amsterdam. A l'enseigne du Coq. 1865. 165 pages.

"Avertissement de l'Éditeur.

"Ce recueil est composé de morceaux poétiques, pour la plupart condamnés ou inédits, auxquels M. Charles Baudelaire n'a pas cru devoir faire place dans l'édition définitive des _Fleurs du mal._

"Cela explique son titre.

"M. Charles Baudelaire a fait don, sans réserve, de ces poëmes, à un ami qui juge à propos de les publier, parce qu'il se flatte de les goûter, et qu'il est à un âge où l'on aime encore à faire partager ses sentiments à des amis auxquels on prête ses vertus.

"L'auteur sera avisé de cette publication en même temps que les deux cents soixantes lectures probables qui figurent--à peu près--pour son éditeur bénévole, le public littéraire en France, depuis que les bêtes y ont décidément usurpé la parole sur les hommes."

I have before me two copies of this rare edition, printed on yellow Holland paper; one numbered 100, the other 194. The second has inscribed in ink: _A Monsieur Rossetti pour remplir les intentions de l'auteur avec les civilités de l'éditeur A. P. Malassis._ This was sent on the part of Baudelaire to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is superbly bound in a kind of red-purple thick leather binding, with pale gold squares, in the form of the frame of a picture; done, certainly, with great taste.

On January 3, 1865, Baudelaire writes a letter to his mother; a letter that pains one as one reads it: so resigned he seems to be, yet never in his life less resigned to his fate. He fears that God might deprive him of even happiness; that it is more difficult to think than to write a book; that if only he were certain of having five or six years before him he might execute all that remained for him to do; that he has the fixed idea of death; that he has suffered so much already that he believes many things may be forgiven him (sins of concupiscence, sins of conscience, sins one never forgets) as he has been punished so much.

I pass from this to the beginning of March, 1866. He stays with Rops at Namur, where (certainly by bad luck) he enters again l'Église Saint-Loup, which he had spoken of as "this sinister marvel in the interior of a catafalque--terrible and delicious--broidered with gold, red, and silver." As he admires these richly sculptured confessionals, as he speaks with Rops and Malassis, he stumbles, taken by a kind of dizziness in the head, and sits down on a step in the church. They lift him up; he feigns not to be frightened, says that his foot had slipped accidentally. Next day he shows signs of a nervous trouble, not a mental one; asking them in the train to Brussels to have the window opened; it is open. That is the first sign of his loss of speech, and the last letter that he ever wrote (dated March 30th, 1866), ends: _Je ne puis pas bouger._ It is strange to set beside this Balzac's last words, that end a letter written June 20th, 1856: _Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire._ It is written to Théophile Gautier.

Swinburne, having heard the fatal news in regard to Baudelaire, added to his book on Blake these magnificent words: as pure, as fervent a tribute to the memory of a fellow-artist as Baudelaire might have wished to have been written on himself, as Swinburne might have desired to have been written on himself: "I heard that a mortal illness had indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of Charles Baudelaire. We may see again as various a power as was his, may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as tragic a manner of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at least in part expressed, brought him near to me by way of written or transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal words which too often return upon our lips:

_Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!"_

And I, who have transcribed these words, have before me a book that Swinburne showed me, that he had richly bound in Paris, and that I bought at the sale of his library on June 19th: _Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris._ Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, 1861; with, written in pencil, on the page before the title-page, these words:

"_A Mr. Algernon C. Swinburne. Bon Souvenir et mille Remerciements. C. B._"

From April 9, 1866, to August 31, 1867, Baudelaire endures the slow tortures of a body and a soul condemned to go on living; living, what else can it be called, than a kind of living death? To remain, in most senses, himself; to be, as always, Charles Baudelaire; to have in his mind one desire, the desire, the vain desire, of recovery; to be unable to utter one word; to think, to sleep, to conceive imaginary projects, for his near future, for his verse, for his prose: to walk, to eat, to drink; to be terribly conscious of his dolorous situation; to be, as ever, anxious for a new edition of _Les fleurs du mal;_ to mark a date in an almanac, counting three months, when he imagined he would be in a state to superintend the impression of his final edition; to have finally given up all hope, all illusion; to have gazed out of his wonderful eyes, at his friend's faces, eyes shadowed by an expression of infinite sadness, eyes that endured his last tragedy: that is how Baudelaire survived himself to the end.

He died on Saturday, August 31, 1867, at eleven o'clock in the morning, at the age of forty-six and four months. So died, simply and without any trace of suffering, this man of genius. Had he been thoroughly understood by the age in which he lived? Blake, who said the final truth on this question: "The ages are all equal; but genius is always above the ages:" was not understood in his age.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES

1. _Salon de_ 1845. Pax Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Jules Labitte, 1845. 72 pp.

2. _Salon de_ 1846. Par Baudelaire-Dufays. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1846. 132 pp.

3. _Histoires extraordinaires._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Michel Lévy, 1856.

1. Edgar Poe, La vie et ses œuvres, pp. vii-xxxi. 2. Translations, 323 pp.

4. _Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires._ Par Edgar Poe. Traduction de Charles Baudelaire. Michel Lévy, 1857.

1. Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, pp. v-xxiv. 2. Translations, 288 pp.

5. _Les fleurs du mal._ Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 4 rue de Buci, 1857. 252 pp.

1. Dédicace. 2. Au Lecteur.