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.