Charles Baudelaire

Born in Paris on April 9, 1821, to a sixty-year-old father who had been a priest before the Revolution and a mother thirty-four years younger, Baudelaire was six when his father died and seven when his mother married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, a rigid military man whom the boy despised for the rest of his life. At twenty-one he came into an inheritance of nearly 100,000 francs and proceeded to burn through half of it in two years on tailored clothes, paintings, hashish, and opium, until a court placed his finances under a legal guardian who doled out a monthly allowance. He fell in love with Jeanne Duval, a Haitian-born actress who became the muse behind the "Black Venus" cycle of poems and his tumultuous companion for twenty years. Les Fleurs du mal (1857), his only verse collection published in his lifetime, was prosecuted for obscenity; six poems were banned, a prohibition not lifted in France until 1949. He spent years translating Edgar Allan Poe into French, almost singlehandedly creating Poe's European reputation. His prose poems, published posthumously as Le Spleen de Paris (1869), invented a form that would dominate the next century. Syphilis, contracted in his twenties, finally caught up with him: a massive stroke in 1866 left him aphasic and paralyzed. He died in Paris on August 31, 1867, at forty-six, penniless and under legal guardianship to the end.