The satanic name of the book, Les Fleurs du Mal,
suggested that the author felt neither guilt nor remorse
about his sinfulness, and that was what horrified Frenchmen
when it appeared, except a few admirers among the literary
set. The sources of inspiration were too sordid and seamy,
in spite of the poetry’s lyrical refinement, the force of
the vocabulary, the ingenuity of the rhymes. The mood of the
day was one of middle class moralizing – reacting against
the libertinage of the revolution - and these poems were
seen as heresy.
The censor condemned Baudelaire for indecency and a
heavy fine was levied on him, which the Empress Eugénie had
reduced by five sixths, when he wrote to her asking for
clemency because he was too poor to pay. It is hard to
imagine the paganistic poet going on his knees before the
very Catholic wife of the very autocratic Napoleon the
Third, and it is hard to imagine her attending to him so
mercifully, pious prude that she was!
The poems singled out for condemnation were later
published in Belgium, under the name Les Épaves, "The
Derelicts". Although they contain no obscenities, they could
not be printed in France for almost a century, until just
before I arrived there. One of them was Les Bijoux, which I
thought so beautiful that ever since, when recalling similar
scenes in my own life, I recite to myself its opening lines,
the ones I have just quoted.
Baudelaire fanatically believed that "le mal" – by
which he meant amorality, rather than evil – was something
which superior spirits should cultivate rather than
overcome. He was so contemptuous of right-and-wrong that, to
show he could write beautifully without morality, he would
boast, "Give me mud and I will turn it into gold".
It is understandable that his staid 19th
century countrymen would feel threatened by his elegies of
encounters with street walkers, by his fascination with
freaks, even if the final product was so perfectly
transformed into poetry that it no longer owed much to the
raw material. They rightly sensed that such a Merlin might
all too readily turn their gold into mud, if he ever had a
taste of it. Even across the Channel, where a few copies of
Les Fleurs du Mal made their way, Tennyson righteously
warned his compatriots against "this poisonous honey from
France".
But what I admired was not his courage in defying
convention, but simply the way he wrested the truth from
life, whatever kind of life. That was what made Baudelaire’s
poetry shine like a beacon of clarity, in a time which
favoured lofty principles and bons sentiments.
It was his excessive civilization, not depravation,
which outraged les bourgeois, just as Voltaire under
the monarchy provoked the arrogant aristocrats with his
lampoons. But when Voltaire cried out "Écrasez l’infâme!"
against the Catholic church, he was aiming at an easy target
whose corruption was known to all, and one in which he had
no vested interests.
Baudelaire went further by accusing, not an
institution or a social class of corruption, but all
mankind, himself included: we are all equal in mediocrity.
"You hypocrite, my reader, my fellow, my brother!" he lashed
out in the versified foreword of Les Fleurs du Mal:
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!
He was prosecuted at the same time as Flaubert for his
novel Madame Bovary, which it was feared would encourage
women to be unfaithful to their husbands. But while Flaubert
was acquitted and saw his sales soar as a result of the
accusations, Baudelaire, who was by far the poorer of the
two, was ruined by the fine and the seizure of the entire
edition of his first collection of poems.
He later got revenge of sorts, at least in the eyes of
posterity, by comparing the mentality of his bourgeois
critics to that of a whore he had befriended named Louise
Villedieu. The anecdote, tersely related in "My Heart Laid
Bare", says more about bigotry in a few lines than all of
Flaubert’s overworked tome.
Hoping to improve the poor woman’s depraved mind, in
other words to civilize her, Baudelaire took it upon himself
to invite her to the Louvre Museum, where unsurprisingly she
had never set foot. One can imagine her fully bustled and
bonneted for the occasion, to create as lady-like an
impression as possible.
But to her benefactor’s astonishment the experience
had the opposite effect, for, he wrote with pity and
disgust, "this five-franc prostitute was horrified at the
bare bodies she saw in the gallery’s timeless works of art.
She blushed, covered her eyes and pulled indignantly on my
sleeve, asking me how such obscenities could be put on
display."
The streetwalker, like his judges, was a champion of
public morality!
Baudelaire joined the workers’ revolt of 1848 which
drove the constitutional monarch Louis Philippe into exile,
and was even said to have urged the rebels, unsuccessfully,
to kill his hated stepfather, who commanded a division of
government troops. Three years later and disillusioned with
the "fake" republic which briefly took over, he went back to
the streets to protest against the coup d’état which
elevated Napoleon’s nephew from President to Emperor of
France.
But he was not a genuine political revolutionary, with
his patrician prejudices. He shared the anti-bourgeois
convictions of the day’s intellectuals, but he was really
waging a personal vendetta against his narrow-minded
stepfather, and, by association, the ruling oligarchy of
which he was a prominent member.
The real reason for Baudelaire’s misery was his
mother. A year after his doting old father died, when young
Charles was just six, she had replaced him with a dashing
young military stepfather, whom he was bidden to call
"papa".
There is no sign that he was bereaved by his real
father’s death, rather he was given to blaming his mental
instability on the large age difference between his parents.
What devastated him was the readiness with which his adored
mother, whom he had hoped would now be "all his", replaced
the old husband with a young one.
Later, in his fury, he would accuse her of having
"sold herself " to another man. "When a woman has a son like
me, she cannot remarry", he wrote in a letter to her, after
she had once more become a widow. In Freudian terms, he was
both Oedipus and Hamlet.
Baudelaire’s family was just as ambiguous historically
as psychologically, placing the poet uncomfortably astride
the old regime and the new. His father came from a family of
vintners in Normandy wealthy enough to send their boy to the
city to become a priest, a common thing before the
Revolution.
The young François had no real vocation, by nature
being attracted to the ideas of Voltaire and Diderot, as
well as to painting, which he practiced as a gifted amateur.
Among his enlightened friends was the great Condorcet, the
visionary of modern education. After Louis XVI was executed,
which was the point of no return for the revolutionary
government, François left the clergy and threw in his lot
with the new regime as a high-ranking administrator.
Baudelaire’s well-born mother, Caroline, belonged to
an émigré family that, in 1793 – the same year that François
joined the Revolution - fled to England, where she was born.
She was not brought to France until the monarchy was
restored, and after the death of her parents she was taken
in by a wealthy Parisian family.
Having nothing of her own, she consented to marry a
man twice her age, François Baudelaire, who since Napoleon’s
defeat become a private tutor with an aristocratic family.
By that time he had inherited the family vineyards, so he
was what was called "un bon parti" - a good match for a girl
who had looks and class but no fortune of her own.
Soon after, Charles-François was born. His good father
devoted himself to educating the infant, who sat by the
easel watching him work on his own paintings and was shown
the masters in the city’s collections, which since the
Revolution were open to the people. The seed was planted
which would bring Baudelaire the only meagre acclaim he ever
gathered during his lifetime, as an art critic.
But this enlightened early education was cut
prematurely short when his father died, at age 60. Before
the husband’s body was cold in the grave, as the saying
goes, his young widow was carrying on with a handsome
officer a few years older than herself, then Colonel, soon
to be General, Jacques Aupick. Within a year she was
pregnant and a hasty marriage was performed, although the
baby was stillborn.
So it would seem that she had little affection for old
François, in spite of his kindness. She had him buried on
the cheap, and when the five-year lease on the plot expired
his remains were disposed of. In stark contrast, when after
thirty years of marriage Aupick died, she purchased a plot
with an elegant gravestone in Montparnasse Cemetery for him,
where her son and she, in that order, are buried on op of
him to this day.
As well as being more sexually attractive, Aupick was
a rising star at the court of King Louis-Philippe, and
before long was made an Ambassador, first in Constantinople
and then in Madrid. Caroline must have felt that this was
the husband she really deserved, while the first one had
been a stopgap solution to the problem of penury, and the
son he left her a baleful reminder of it.
For the seven-year old boy, it was as if he had been
orphaned, or worse, jilted. He would describe the short
interlude between her two marriages as one of sheer bliss.
When after the sudden wedding he saw the new man in bed with
her, he was so furious that the next day he locked up their
room and threw the key out the window, so they couldn’t get
back in.
At first Aupick tried to make the boy like him and may
have succeeded, because there are letters which Charles
wrote, when the family had to move to Lyon where Aupick was
posted for some years, lovingly describing a Christmas gift
he gave "papa" of a set of ivory toothpicks. But like a good
soldier, Aupick frowned on the boy’s passionate worship of
art and philosophy which had been instilled by his
predecessor, and tried to persuade him to forget poetry and
become an Ambassador. Fortunately for poetry, and for
France’s foreign affairs, Charles wasn’t interested!
He was a rebellious student at the boarding school for
soldier’s son they put him in at Lyon, but the real trouble
started a few years later when they returned to Paris.
Charles was a precocious 14 years of age and the city a
seething hotbed of revolutions, both political and artistic.
Finally released from his provincial prison – any place
outside of Paris being a sort of Siberia - he ran wild.
It must be said that most fathers or even stepfathers
in Aupick’s position, then and today, would have done what
he could to stop Baudelaire’s madness. He was barely twenty
but he seemed bent on self-destruction, roaming the bas-fonds
of Paris in search of whores, alcohol, opium dens, and a
legion of shady companions.
Aupick was so horrified that, making full use of his
paternal authority, he forced Charles to leave Paris and
France altogether. He sent him on a long journey aboard a
ship bound for Calcutta, from whence he should proceed to
"the East and the West Indies", Aupick wrote in a letter.
His argument was that the experience would make the
boy come to his senses and return home "to be a poet
perhaps, but one who finds better sources of inspiration
than the sewers of Paris", as he said in a letter to
Baudelaire’s elder half-brother. The General may have been a
philistine, but he could defend himself with a pen as well
as with a sword, il faut le dire!
Some provisions were made to assist the deportee in
going into business for himself in India supplying beef to
the British Army, but it seems unlikely, on the face of it,
that Aupick thought this might happen. Since it was common
then for families to ship their embarrassments off to the
colonies, he probably just wanted to get his stepson out of
the way, forever if possible.
As it was, the bad boy never reached India. After
several months circumventing Africa, during which time he
told the captain everyday – as the man testily reported back
to Aupick - that he wanted to go back to Paris, he left ship
on the island of Réunion. After a few months hanging out
there and on Mauritius at a planter’s home, he found another
ship home. When he finally disembarked at Bordeaux he hadn’t
been out of the General’s whiskers for much more than a
year.
Several of his most romantic poems were inspired by
his stay in the Indian Ocean, but he was only there as an
unwilling tourist, a captive of paradise. Baudelaire was no
fugitive from civilization, like Gauguin!
Years later, he received an offer to work as a tutor
by the planter he had stayed with on Réunion Island, which
for a brief moment he considered accepting, to bail him out
of his debts. When he told his mother of it in one of his
money-scrounging letters, as if he were about to sell
himself into slavery, he decried "the horrible boredom of
the hot, blue countries, where the intellect withers".
It was in the tropics, though, that he acquired a
taste for exotic women. Immediately after returning to his
beloved Paris he began his legendary liaison with the
mulatta Jeanne Duval, whom he saw performing half-naked in a
cabaret. She inspired Baudelaire’s most sensuous and, by his
caustic standards, amorous poems.
She was sketched by Baudelaire himself in a tight
blouse thrusting her bosom forward provocatively, very much
the "Black Venus" of her stage name. That, at least, was the
image Baudelaire fancied, although one of his friends wrote
that she was very light-skinned and couldn’t have been more
than a quadroon, as they called one-quarter negro girls
then.
She was strangely both loyal to her distinguished
keeper, whose strange tastes she could scarcely understand,
and sexually unfaithful at the same time. At one time she
asked him to let her brother from Martinique stay with her,
until Baudelaire discovered that he was not a relative of
hers at all but a lover.
That same year of his return to Paris he turned 21 and
came into his father’s inheritance. The prospect of
squandering it must have been what made him so anxious to
come home!
A reasonable lad would have lived on this sum decently
until he became self-sufficient, and a shiftless one would
have eked it out to live the rest of his days as a
threadbare rentier. But being neither of those
things, Baudelaire resumed the orgiastic life which had been
interrupted by the journey to, or towards, India.
But this time he had the money to pay for all the
opium dens and brothels he wanted. He set up court in an
elegant townhouse on the Ile Saint Louis, installing his
Venus noire in a room around the corner on the
suggestively named Rue de la Femme-Sans-Tête, and played
host to all the riff-raff of Paris.
Then General Aupick struck again, even more
devastatingly than the first time. He was deeply disgusted
with his stepson’s wastefulness, not to mention the public
spectacle he was creating. For a time Charles even walked
about the streets with green hair! The legend being created
around him was taking on a life of its own, however, for it
seems that the green hair was not another eccentric gesture
but, rather, because of a botched attempt to dye his hair
black.
To cut the evil off at the source, Aupick obtained the
consent of Charles’ mother and half-brother to obtain a
court order placing his inheritance in trust. A notary was
appointed to eke out a minimal allowance to Charles, with
the purpose of preserving the principal for as long as
possible.
This meant that the hapless young man was plunged into
poverty. He was forced to give up most of his extravagant
expenses such as buying artworks and furniture and suits of
clothes, and, inevitably, to devote much of his time to
wrangling with the notary and his mother about how much he
could draw from his account. His despair was such that he
wrote a farewell note and ineffectually stabbed himself.
Since he couldn’t give up living like a dandy
altogether, he had to move constantly from one end of Paris
to the other, just to shake off his creditors. Thus, for a
full half of his life, from the time his inheritance was
embargoed at age 23 until he died of syphilis and
frustration at age 46, Baudelaire was reduced to begging
money from his mother, often in writing. This was, while the
General still lived, he refused to let her see him, and,
after his death, because she retired to a villa on the
seaside, near Le Havre.
The tone of these hair-raising letters is that of a
jilted lover, swinging wildly from pitiful pleading and
declarations of filial devotion to sarcastic bullying and
emotional arm-twisting. Some of them sound like the ravings
of a madman, for example when to assure her that he can
return the amount he is demanding to pay off his tailor, he
boasts that he is now embarking on "a new art, that of
novel-writing", which for him will be "like child’s play".
Publishers are paying a ten-chapter novel at 500
francs, h assures her, and since he can easily knock off two
in four months, he will be certain of earning 1,000 francs
for his work, which is far more than he will need to cover
her loan. In the next letter, he complains that she only
sent him half the amount he asked for, never doubting that
she had not made a mistake with the figures, and instructs
her on the fastest way of sending the remainder…
Aupick forbade her from helping him so, one assumes,
she had to do it discreetly. It was not until the death of
the "general", as Baudelaire contemptuously referred to him
in his letters with a small g, that he could devote the last
ten years of his life to hounding her unrestrainedly.
Curiously, he wanted money from her and adored her at
the same time. But since he in a famous aphorism defined the
greatest joy of loving as having someone to hurt, he must
have felt that tenderness and exploitation were not only
complementary but indispensable to one another.
So it was with Baudelaire’s women, who were
prostitutes or semi-prostitutes, dumb, uncomprehending
cattle willing to cater to his most curious desires, with
whom – as he moaned to his mother in one of his wretched
letters - it was impossible to have a civilized
conversation. He even wondered why women were allowed into
churches, since they were incapable of talking with God!
Since he judged that his own mother had twice sold herself
in marriage, he assumed that all her sisters were merchants
of their beauty, too.
He despised women but formed lasting attachments to
them, and indeed was not known to have had a single
brother-like male friend he could count on. He must
therefore have been terribly lonely, since he insisted that
women were stupid animals with small, vulgar minds.
Precisely what he liked about them, he said and wrote
again and again, was that they only cared about what things
look like, never about what they are. And the more they
painted themselves up and drenched themselves in perfume,
hung themselves with cheap costume jewellery, the more
exciting he found them. Nothing inspired him to write more
beautiful verses than a thick coating of face powder, a
wanton pose!
The wrapping was worth more than the gift, because it
creates an illusion of reality. Just as what we know of
Baudelaire may well be mostly illusions he created, behind
which the reality was either very different or simply did
not exist.
The photographer known by the nickname Nadar, who took
some of the most striking portraits of his tormented face,
was a Latin Quarter crony of Baudelaire’s who saw many a
dawn break in his company. Long after Baudelaire died, Nadar
– who in spite of being a pioneer of balloon flying and
suffering terrible accidents lived into the 20th
century – remembered him in a memoir revealingly entitled
The Virgin Poet.
Nadar and the other "artistes" of the gang were
persuaded that Baudelaire’s reputation as a skirt-chaser was
unjustified and that he was never the real lover of Jeanne
Duval or any of his other acquaintances. He lived like a
monk in an apartment where no women were ever seen, he
pursed his lips prudishly whenever the conversation got
bawdy and would even leave the room if his cronies described
their conquests in too much detail.
If not a virgin strictum sensum, Baudelaire
certainly derived his pleasure from contemplating rather
than consummating. All this is said, chastely couched in
allegorical allusions, in the confessional poem Sed Non
Satiata – in Latin, "unslaked thirst". The title speaks for
itself, since Jeanne Duval was known to be a sort of
leopardess who gave herself to the premier venant.
The first verse sings the praises of this "bizarre
deity, this witch with ebony thighs, this child of the
blackest midnight".
The second passionately declares "I prefer the elixir
of your trembling lips to opium and to wine… when the
caravan of my desires lurches toward you, my sorrow drinks
from the oasis of your eyes".
In the third, sensing that he is unequal to the task,
he desperately cries, "Fiendish creature, turn away your
flames!", and in a Dantesque reference to the river which
winds its way around Hades, pleads pitifully, "I am not the
Styx to embrace you nine times"…
In the fourth and final verse, he admits defeat and
ruefully laments "Alas, shameless shrew! I cannot break your
spirit and bring you to heel, in the inferno of your bed!"
