Collectibles

1864 · 59356 — Biponti Deux-Ponts 1864. Fine. Biponti Deux-Ponts Dimanche matin 14 août 1864 13.40 x 20.60 cm 3 pages sur un feuillet remplié N. p. Bruxelles Sunday morning 14 August 1864 134 x 206 cm 3 pages on a folded leave Autograph letter signed in black ink addressed to his mother and dated “Sunday morning the 14th.” A few underlinings deletions and corrections by the author. Formerly in the collection of Armand Godoy n°188. A fading Baudelaire: “The state of disgust in which I find myself makes everything seem even worse.” Drawn by the promise of epic fame Baudelaire went to Belgium in April 1864 for a few conferences and in the hope of a fruitful meeting with the publishers of Les Misérables Lacroix and Verboeckhoven. The meeting didn't happen the conferences were a failure and Baudelaire felt boundless resentment for “Poor Belgium”. Nonetheless despite numerous calls to return to France the poet would spend the rest of his days in this much-castigated country living the life of a melancholic bohemian. Aside from a few short stays in Paris Baudelaire floored by a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side would only return to France on 29 June 1866 for a final year of silent agony in a sanatorium. Written barely a few months after his arrival in Brussels and his initial disappointments this letter shows us all the principal elements of the mysterious and passionate hatred that would keep the poet definitively in Belgium. In his final years in France exhausted by the trial of The Flowers of Evil humiliated by the failure of his candidacy to the Académie Française a literary orphan after the bankruptcy of Poulet-Malassis and disinherited as an author by the sale of his translation rights to Michel Lévy Baudelaire was above all deeply moved by the inevitable decline of Jeanne Duval his enduring love while his passion for la Présidente had dried up her poetic perfection not having withstood the prosaic experience of physical possession. Thus on 24 April 1864 he decided to flee these “decomposing loves” of which he could keep only the “form and the divine essence.” Belgium so young as a country and seemingly born out of a Francophone Romantic revolution against the Dutch financial yoke presented itself to the poet phantasmagorically as a place where his own modernity might be acknowledged. A blank page on which he wanted to stamp the power of his language while affirming his economic independence Belgium was a mirror onto which Baudelaire projected his powerful ideal but one that would send him tumbling even more violently into the spleen of his final disillusionment. Published in the Revue de Paris in November 1917 without the sensitive passage about his cold enemas this emblematic letter evokes all of Baudelaire's work as poet writer artist and pamphleteer. The first such reference is via the reassuring mentor-like figure of the publisher of The Flowers of Evil Poulet-Malassis: “If I was not so far from him I really think I'd end up paying so I could take my meals at his.” This is followed by a specific reference to the “venal value” of his Aesthetic Curiosities: “all these articles that I so sadly wrote on painting and poetry” . Baudelaire then confides in his mother his hopes for his latest translations of Poe which to his great frustration “are not getting published by L'Opinion La Vie Parisienne or in Le Monde illustré”. He concludes with his Belgian Letters which Jules Hetzel had just told him had been after negotiations with Le Figaro “received with great pleasure.” Nonetheless as Baudelaire literally underlined they were “only to be published when I come back to France.” His perennially imminent return to France is a leitmotiv of his Belgian correspondence: “Certainly I think I'll go to Paris on Thursday.” It is nonetheless always put off “I'm putting off going to Paris until the end of the month” he corrects himself eight days later and it seems to stoke up the poet's ferocity towards his new unknown