Charles Baudelaire's grave lies in Montparnasse Cemetery, smack in the middle of Paris' sixth arrondissement. The winter months are a sheet of gray, with an endless roof of clouds hanging close overhead. Built high, the walls of the cemetery are speckled...
[more]Charles Baudelaire's grave lies in Montparnasse Cemetery, smack in the middle of Paris' sixth arrondissement. The winter months are a sheet of gray, with an endless roof of clouds hanging close overhead. Built high, the walls of the cemetery are speckled with moss; the rain splatters across the cracked pavement, runs down the gutters, and stains the centuries-old concrete. On the weekends, visitors come to watch their relatives sink into the ground. A smattering of tourists might ponder the grave of Sartre, de Beauvoir, or Beckett; but this would be rare, for most foreigners cluster at the other side of the city, at Pere Lachaise, where Marcel Proust, Jim Morrison, and Gertrude Stein rot under trampling feet.
Baudelaire's body is filed between that of his mother, whom he dearly loved, and that of his stepfather, whom he detested. The stepfather, Aupick, was a decorated man: a general, politician, and starched monarchist. He enjoyed a life of high society, and thus felt great shame in his newly adopted son. Unruly and rebellious, Baudelaire managed to get expelled from school for having bad taste in literature. Aupick attempted to send the young man away to India: the future poet, who would write so gloriously of the voyage, could travel no farther than Marseille.
Upon returning to Paris, Baudelaire came into a small fortune via an inheritance from his biological father. He immediately rented a lavish apartment, went to the best tailors, bought great works of art, and combed the bustling boulevards in the dandiest of fashions, with flower in lapel and cane in hand. He took up a mistress, among others, and contracted syphilis. After Aupick had his inheritance removed from his control, Baudelaire shut himself up in his garret and systematically deranged his senses (a phrase of Rimbaud's, his disciple). And through it all, he wrote.
"Flowers of Evil" is perhaps the most influential book of poems of the nineteenth century. The title, like the poems themselves, establishes a dialectic between beauty and sin. A flower usually evokes the beauty of innocence -- of nature in fragile, expectant bloom. But, the poet posits, is there not beauty as well in the excesses of nature, in the ugly aspects of being, in an amoral life? Is not even -- or especially -- the freshest flower always on the verge of decay? Baudelaire adored lust, ennui, and avarice. He opens his collection of poems with an address "To the Reader," which announces both his own and his addressee's propensity for falseness: "You -- hypocrite reader -- my twin -- my brother." Within us all lie the flowers of evil.
Baudelaire was the first in a long line of Symbolist poets, from Mallarme to Apollinaire to Eliot. He marked a turning away from the Romantic tendency to vent pure emotion; instead he embraced a lyric of symbol and suggestion. His often opaque imagery revolves around the evil that he saw shuddering, gloating, and weeping inside us.
Is there salvation? In one of his magnificent prose poems, he offers this: "One must always be drunk. On wine, poetry, or virtue. As you choose. But get drunk." The inventor of the bohemian life as a rejection of all things bourgeois (he was the first artist to dress all in black), Baudelaire is in many ways the father of modern poetry.
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