April 9, 1821

Charles Baudelaire, (April 9, 1821 to August 31, 1867) remains a topic of interest in both his life and his writing. Some reasons for this are clearly stated in a new book, La Folie Baudelaire (2012) by Robert Calasso. From a review in the New Statesman we highlight this definition of Baudelaire's:

... poetry, a gripping mix of aesthetic refinement, physical torment and mystical self-transcendence... The prose meanwhile opens a window on mid-19th-century Paris – life on the streets is rendered in the kind of minute detail ...

The mingling of beauty and horror, of the pathetic and the obscene, became Baudelaire’s aesthetic trademark. He was the first flâneur, the city-dweller who is “interested in the whole world”. That quote is from what Roberto Calasso rightly deems Baudelaire’s finest prose work, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). His marvellous evocation of the painter Constantin Guys is of a dandy, a café-goer, a man who dislikes being called an artist and doesn’t sign his drawings but whose curiosity is the source of his genius. He is, Baudelaire writes, “a great lover of the crowd and of going incognito . . . who pushes his originality to the point of modesty . . . [R]ecently he asked me . . . to leave out his name ”.

...Baudelaire... was the prototype middle- class drop-out: self-impoverished, at war with his army general father, living rough and fond of dope. He took a gorgeous, voracious black mistress, a relationship that tormented him. He customised his clothes to show he was not bourgeois – he used sandpaper to give them a worn look. He was like some overdressed Francis of Assisi whose self-appointed to task was to love the ruined and the abandoned, the sick characters he found on Paris streets, women mostly. ...

Baudelaire was a famous lover of cats, also; it is not surprising then to find this quote in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). Baudelaire references:

"[C]ats running away to eat afar off the morsel you have given them, having learnt to be distrustful of man. This is certainly a delightful way of passing your time."

The last sentence in our quote is an ironic pointing to the impossibility of conveying the pathos of love.