Biography
Alas, human vices, however horrible one might
imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite
expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that
often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all
culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.
— Baudelaire
French poet tormented by religion and the struggle between good and
evil in man, suffused with his deeply Catholic sense of sin and remorse.
His "Flowers of Evil" was condemned as immoral in 1857,
confiscated by authorities for offending public morals. He was a Catholic
and a Satanist, a debauchee and mystic, cynical sensualist and yearner for
purity. Sexually morbid and a sadist, he sought the unbathed women
"of the streets."
In his extraordinarily complicated life, he had a suffocatingly
intimate relationship with his bewildered mother, who lovingly nurtured
and then callously ignored his lifelong dependence on her which reached
classically Oedipal proportions. He was the son of a lapsed Catholic
priest, a roué and cultured epicurean who passed on to his son his love
of art. After his dad died in 1827, his mom married Col. Jacques Aupicki,
a dour career diplomat who, disgusted by his high-strung stepson's
eccentricities, tried to impose military standards of discipline and
conduct, values that Baudelaire disavowed in a rebellion that lasted the
rest of his life.
By the time he came into his inheritance from his birth father in 1842,
he was already exorbitantly precocious and foppish, squandering over a
half of his considerable fortune in 18 months. His taste ran to elegant
fashion, and he would have gone through the entire amount had not his
stepfather brought the spending spree to a halt with legal intervention.
Much to his humiliation, Baudelaire was then forced to petition an
attorney for his funds, cap in hand, living on a meager monthly
allowance.
His spending spree was the only time in his short and miserable life
that he was ever without financial stress. His writings were not only
scandalous, but paid poorly, and he once remarked that his income for
years was the equivalent of the price of two cigars a day.
He lived in dilapidated fleabag hotels, eking out a precarious
existence as a poet, art critic and translator of Edgar Allan Poe. He
changed his address in Paris about 30 times during his adult life, once
moving six times in a single month in 1885, seeking to evade
creditors.
Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal," came out in 1857,
unleashing a fire storm of criticism and nearly a century of acrimonious
litigation.
Addicted to ether capsules and laudanum (opium), he sought to numb
himself to the ravaging effects of syphilis, contacted in the Paris Latin
Quarter as a young man. He was a cynical voluptuary, an amoral aesthete
who shocked his friends by dying his hair green and sprinkling his
conversation with non sequiturs. He referred to "the intoxicating
pleasure of displeasing," as he refused any semblance of
conventionality but formed a lifelong liaison with Jeanne Duval, the
"Black Venus" of his "Fleurs," a mixed-race
drug-addicted prostitute.
The first signs of insanity appeared in 1862. In his final years his
skin was discolored and his joints affected. He collapsed in March 1866
while admiring an architectural point of beauty with friends in Belgian.
He returned to Paris in a private railroad car some months later and over
the next 12 months suffered a slow death from syphilis GPI (General
Paralysis Insanity). By early 1867 he scarcely remembered his own name; by
April he had lost his will to live and on 8/31/1867, he died in his
mother's arms in Paris.
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