The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) Read Online Free

condemned.
    Baudelaire became the first writer to express the Decadent sensibility in such wholehearted and uncompromising terms because he was the first to experience it so fully and so sharply. The cruelly paradoxical forces which thus shaped his character are easy to read in his biography. His father, born in 1759, and his mother, born in 1793, came from different worlds. From his father – who had been tutor to an aristocratic family and had absorbed enough of their elegance and refinement to have sided with them against the Revolutionists – Baudelaire inherited refined tastes and the expectation of a considerable legacy of money which, though long anticipated and partly spent, was ultimately withheld from him (save for an inadequate dole) by his step-father and half-brother, whose standards of respectability he had begun to disappoint while he was still a clever but troublesome schoolboy. When he expressed his intention to be a writer he was packed off to India in the hope of removing him from evil influences, but he never reached his destination, returning to France in 1842 after spending a few weeks in Mauritius. This seems to have been construed by his relatives as evidence of his irresponsibility, which was soon compounded by the extravagant lifestyle which he attempted to take up on his return to Paris; they quickly took measures to ensure that he spent the rest of his life in unnecessary poverty. His attempts to make a consistent living with his pen were always resentfully half-hearted.
    Baudelaire’s relationships with women provided little solace and much heartache, and the love-poems which he wrote are redolent with pain and frustration, whether they refer to his sexual liaison with the “Black Venus” Jeanne Duval, or to his attempts to pursue sanitized Platonic love with the uncaringly capricious actress Marie Daubrun and the Salon-keeper Mme. Sabatier. Nor could he find any real release from his misery in his experiments with drugs; Flaubert complained of his book on hashish and opium, Les Paradis artificiels (1860), that what had begun as a pioneering exercise in natural science had been sidetracked by a preoccupation with the spirit of evil supposedly incarnate in these substances, and Gautier later commented that Baudelaire had been initially reluctant to involve himself in the “experiments” undertaken by “le Club de Haschichins” – which included Gerard de Nerval as well as Gautier – on the grounds that a flight from necessary sorrow must be inherently Satanic. Baudelaire declared on his own account that he wrote Les Paradis artificiels to demonstrate that seekers after artificial paradises inevitably create private hells.
    Baudelaire’s miseries were further compounded by the fact that his work was not well-received by his contemporaries – at least, not openly. He was a candidate for the Academy in 1861 but was forced to withdraw. Sainte-Beuve, whom he idolized – in 1844 Baudelaire wrote an “epistle” in verse proclaiming that he had imported the story of Amaury into his heart, absorbing all its “miasmas” and “perfumes”, and that he had become a practitioner of the same “cruel art” – ignored him save for an off-hand remark condemning his work as “folly”. Gautier, who understood him far better, carefully hoarded his own praise until after Baudelaire’s death, at which point he belatedly added an enthusiastic Notice to the 1868 Les Fleurs du Mal. Others were openly scathing, including Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose own cynical dandyism was saved from being thoroughly Decadent only by his devout Catholicism; he remarked that the only two possibilities open to the man whose soul was revealed in Les Fleurs du Mal were conversion to Catholicism and suicide. (Baudelaire had already wounded himself attempting suicide in 1845, and appears always to have regarded himself as an “incorrigible”, though permanently lapsed, Catholic.) It seems probable, in