No More Learning

There were guests
present. After some words Charles bounded at the General's throat and
sought to strangle him. He was promptly boxed on the ears and succumbed
to a nervous spasm. A delightful anecdote, one that fills with joy
psychiatrists in search of a theory of genius and degeneration. Charles
was given some money and put on board a ship sailing to East India. He
became a cattle-dealer in the British army, and returned to France
years afterward with a Venus noire, to whom he addressed extravagant
poems! All this according to Du Camp. Here is another tale, a comical
one. Baudelaire visited Du Camp in Paris, and his hair was violently
green. Du Camp said nothing. Angered by this indifference, Baudelaire
asked: "You find nothing abnormal about me? " "No," was the answer. "But
my hair--it is green! " "That is not singular, mon cher Baudelaire; every
one has hair more or less green in Paris. " Disappointed in not creating
a sensation, Baudelaire went to a cafe, gulped down two large bottles of
Burgundy, and asked the waiter to remove the water, as water was a
disagreeable sight; then he went away in a rage.
It is a pity to doubt
this green hair legend; presently a man of genius will not be able to
enjoy an epileptic fit in peace--as does a banker or a beggar. We are
told that St. Paul, Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, Dostoievsky
were epileptoids; yet we do not encounter men of this rare kind among
the inmates of asylums. Even Baudelaire had his sane moments.

The joke of the green hair has been disposed of by Crepet. Baudelaire's
hair thinning after an illness, he had his head shaved and painted with
salve of a green hue, hoping thereby to escape baldness. At the time
when he had embarked for Calcutta (May, 1841), he was not seventeen, but
twenty years of age. Du Camp said he was seventeen when he attacked
General Aupick. The dinner could not have taken place at Lyons because
the Aupick family had left that city six years before the date given by
Du Camp. Charles was provided with five thousand francs for his
expenses, instead of twenty--Du Camp's version--and he never was a
beef-drover in the British army, for a good reason--he never reached
India. Instead, he disembarked at the Isle of Bourbon, and after a short
stay suffered from homesickness and returned to France, after being
absent about ten months. But, like Flaubert, on his return home
Baudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the East; over there he had
yearned for Paris. Jules Claretie recalls Baudelaire saying to him with
a grimace: "I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung
up by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of
glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find
at the same time strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious. " Is it
necessary to add that Baudelaire, notorious in Paris for his love of
cats, dedicating poems to cats, would never have perpetrated such
revolting cruelty?

Another misconception, a critical one, is the case of Poe and
Baudelaire.