Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude

302 Pages·1986·11.547 MB·English

by  Charles Baudelaire, Rosemary Lloyd

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Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/selectedlettersoOOOObaud
SELECTED LETTERS OF
Charles Baudelaire
The Conquest of Solitude
Translated and Edited by
ROSEMARY LLOYD
WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON
London

Contents
Translator's Note ix
Introduction xi
Suggested Reading xxv
Chronology xxvii
Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire
1 Childhood: 1832 — 1839 3
2 Vie de bohème: 1840—1847 20
3 The Republic: 1848—1851 35
4 The Flowers of Evil: 1852—1857 43
5 Parisian Scenes: 1858—1861 106
6 The Spleen of Paris: 1861 —1864 180
7 Poor Belgium!: 1864-1867 203
Index 255

Introduction
Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821, less than a month before
the death of Napoleon, twenty-two years after Balzac was born, nineteen
after Victor Hugo.1 It was the year that saw the birth of Flaubert, whose
novel Madame Bovary was to go on trial in the same year as The F lowers of
Evil\ the death of the German Romantic writer, E. T. A. Hoffmann,
whose works Baudelaire admired; and the publication of De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which Baudelaire was to translate
and adapt as part of his study of intoxicants.
In the biographical and bibliographical notes that he assembled at the
request of a journalist friend, Watripon, in 1852, Baudelaire indicates
three phases in his childhood. The first of these, brought to an abrupt
end by his father’s death and his mothers subsequent remarriage to
Jacques Aupick, were years when his mother was both an idol and a
comrade to him (letter 131), and when the seeds were sown for that
permanent love of art that he himself stressed and that dominates his
articles of art criticism: “old furniture in the style of Louis XVI, an¬
tiques, the consulate, pastels, the society of the eighteenth century.”2 In
1832, Baudelaire and his mother moved to Lyon, where Aupick was
stationed. They remained there for four years, returning to Paris in
1836. In both cities, Baudelaire, in accordance with contemporary
middle-class custom, attended boarding schools, whose spartan condi¬
tions and harsh regulations intensified his sense of separation from his
mother. The letters dating from his school days indicate a complex
character already settling into the mold that would determine his future
development and behavior: a love of color, a restless energy, a sense of
revolt, a feeling of failure created both by his parents’ demands and by
his own longing to obtain the marked and ticketed success of school
prizes. The letter to Watripon mentions the “heavy melancholy” of this
period, and elsewhere he notes a “sense of solitude, beginning in child¬
hood. Despite my family—and particularly among my schoolmates—a
sense of an eternally solitary destiny. And yet a very intense taste for life
1. For a detailed biography, see Enid Starkie, Baudelaire (Harmondsworth: Pen¬
guin, 1971).
2. Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols. (Paris: Pléiade, 1975—76), 1:784.
xi
revealing in the light that it sheds on Baudelaire’s character; the mixture
of frustration and courtesy; the longing to convince Ancelle (represen¬
tative here of the French public in general) of his poetic genius and to
instill in him a sense of true beauty, combined with the conviction that
such a task was impossible; and finally gratitude for Ancelle’s desire to
help him find a publisher, yoked to the unshakable belief that Ancelles
bungling attempts would only worsen matters. Much later, in a letter to
his publisher and staunch friend Auguste Poulet-Malassis, he was to sum
up the financial situation caused by the conseil in tones of resigned
dignity:
when you find a man who, free at the age of 17, with an excessive
taste for pleasure, and with no family, sets out on his literary career
owing 30,000 francs and after almost 20 years has increased that
debt by a mere 10,000, and, what’s more, is far from feeling the
intelligence crushed out of him, introduce him to me, and I’ll
salute him as my equal.8
Although the biographical notes speak of his “long-lasting difficulty
in being understood by the editor of any magazine,” Baudelaire did
manage to publish poems, the novella La Fanfarlo, and literary and
artistic reviews during the 1840s, and it was at this stage, too, that he
first came across the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, to which he was to
devote so much attention as translator and critic. His letters reveal his
attempts to find congenial editors, his enthusiasm at the thought of
being put in charge of a periodical (to the extent that he even asked his
mother to get her friends to subscribe), his growing friendships with
such leading literary figures as Banville and Sainte-Beuve, and his plans
for future literary projects. But they also reveal the degree to which
Baudelaire, however busy or harassed, sought to help his friends, urging
Chennevières, for instance, to take advantage of Baudelaires relationship
with the editor Lepoitevin Saint-Alme to get his own short stories
published in Le Corsaire-Satan. Later we will find him providing a key to
Champfleury’s novel Mademoiselle Mariette, trying to arrange for Poulet-
Malassis to publish Gautier’s Le Roman delà momie, and devoting hours of
his time to helping the young Léon Cladel polish his novel Les Martyrs
ridicules.
Few letters have been found from the period immediately before and
after the Revolution of 1848, and Baudelaire’s intellectual and physical
involvement is a subject of dispute among critics. A note in My Heart
Laid Bare (Mon cœur mis à nu) speaks of his “intoxication of 1848,”
8. Baudelaire, Correspondance (Paris: Pléiade, 1973), 2:94.
xiv