BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES PIERRE French poet, was born in Paris on April 9, 1821. Baudelaire's fa ther died in 1827, and his mother married Lieut.-Col. Aupick, who was afterwards ambassador of France at various courts. Baude laire was educated at Lyons and at the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris. The irregularities of his life after he left college induced his guardians, in 1841, to send him on a voyage to India. Mr. Arthur Symons declares that there is "something oriental in Baude laire's genius, a nostalgia that never left him of ter he had seen the East." When he returned to Paris in 1843 he was of age; but in a year or two his extravagance threatened to exhaust his small patrimony, and his family obtained a decree to place his property in trust. He wandered from one address to another in Paris, spend ing much of his time in the studios of Delacroix, Manet, and Daumier, and the first books he published, Le Salon de 1845 and the Salon de 1846, showed his real critical genius. He took part with the revolutionaries in 1848, and for some years interested himself in Republican politics, but his permanent convictions were aristocratic and catholic. Baudelaire was a slow and fastid ious worker, and it was not until 1857 that he produced his first and famous volume of poems, Fleurs du mal. Some of these had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes when they were published by Baudelaire's friend Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who had inherited a printing business at Alencon. The consummate art displayed in these verses was appreciated by a limited public, but general attention was caught by the perverse selection of mor bid subjects, and the book became a by-word for unwholesomeness among conventional critics. Victor Hugo, writing to the poet, said, "Vous dotez le ciel de l'Art d'un rayon macabre, vous creez un frisson nouveau." Baudelaire, the publisher, and the printer were successfully prosecuted for offending against public morals. The obnoxious pieces were suppressed but printed later as Les Epaves (Brussels, 1866). Another edition of the Fleurs du mal, without these poems, but with considerable additions, appeared in 1861.
Baudelaire had learnt English in his childhood, and had found some of his favourite reading in the English "Satanic" romances, such as Lewis's Monk. In 1846-47 he became acquainted with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, in which he discovered romances and poems which had, he said, long existed in his own brain, but had never taken shape. Poe was to him "the master of the horrible, the prince of mystery." From this time till 1865 he was largely occupied with his version of Poe's works, producing masterpieces of the art of translation in Histoires extraordinaires (1856), Nou velles Histoires extraordinaires (1857), Aventures d'Arthur Gor don Pym (1858), Eureka (1864), and Histoires grotesques et serieuses (1865) . Two essays on Poe are to be found in his Oeuvres completes (vols. v. and vi.). Meanwhile his financial difficulties grew upon him. He was involved in the failure of Poulet-Malassis in 1861, and in April 1864 he left Paris for Bel gium, partly in the vain hope of disposing of his copyrights. He had for many years a liaison with a coloured woman, whom he helped to the end of his life, in spite of her gross conduct. He had recourse to opium, and in Brussels he began to drink to excess. Paralysis followed, and the last two years of his life were spent in maisons de sante in Brussels, and also in Paris, where he died on Aug. 31, 1867.
His other works include : Petits Poemes en prose; a series of art criticisms published in the Pays, Exposition universelle; studies on Gustave Flaubert (in L'artiste, Oct. 18, 1857) ; on Theophile Gautier (Revue contemporaine, Sept. 1858) ; valuable notices con tributed to Eugene Crepet's Poetes francais; Les Paradis arti ficiels, opium et haschisch (186o) ; Richard Wagner et Tannhauser a Paris (1861) ; Un Dernier Chapitre de l'histoire des oeuvres de Balzac (188o), originally an article entitled "Comment on paye ses dettes quand on a du genie," in which his criticism is turned against his friends H. de Balzac, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard de Nerval.