No More Learning

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. The young Frenchman first became infatuated with Poe's
writings in 1846 or 1847--he gave these two dates, though several
stories of Poe had been translated into French as early as 1841 or 1842;
L'Orang-Outang was the first, which we know as The Murders in the Rue
Morgue; Madame Meunier also adapted several Poe stories for the reviews.
Baudelaire's labours as a translator lasted over ten years. That he
assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe, is a commonplace of literary
gossip. But that Poe had overwhelming influence in the formation of his
poetic genius is not the truth. Yet we find such an acute critic as the
late Edmund Clarence Stedman writing, "Poe's chief influence upon
Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry. " It is precisely the
reverse. Poe's influence affected Baudelaire's prose, notably in the
disjointed confessions, Mon coeur mis a nu, which vaguely recall the
American writer's Marginalia. The bulk in the poetry in Les Fleurs du
Mal was written before Baudelaire had read Poe, though not published in
book form until 1857. But in 1855 some of the poems saw the light in the
Revue des deux Mondes, while many of them had been put forth a decade or
fifteen years before as fugitive verse in various magazines. Stedman was
not the first to make this mistake.