Charles BAUDELAIRE organizes the Fleurs du Mal sale from Brussels.

Charles Baudelaire (1821.1867)

Autograph letter signed to Julien Lemer.

Four pages in-8° on letterhead from the Hôtel du Grand Miroir, Brussels

[Brussels] October 13, 1865.

“My diabolical situation can hardly drag on much longer…”

Long and important letter from Baudelaire, penniless but combative, trying to organize the sale of Fleurs du Mal , Poèmes en prose and Le Spleen de Paris from Belgium, just a few months before his tragic accident.

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“My dear Lemer, My diabolical situation can hardly drag on any longer. I would therefore ask you, before Mr. Garnier's return , to advise of the sale of the book on Belgium ^* , of which I will send you tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, an analysis, or a very detailed ( as well as 'a note relating to the new Fleurs du mal , and a considerable packet of prose poems , with a letter for Yriarte ^** or for Calonne ^*** , from whom you will ask for money, on my behalf).

I am always afraid of boring you, my dear friend, and it is only with a certain reluctance that I charge you with errands. Indiscretion horrifies me. Yriarte gave me money several times for depositing manuscripts. Between now and the end of the month, I will deliver to you fifty prose poems, complementing Le Spleen de Paris , (There are some from Charpentier, and it is impossible for me to know whether this old madman takes them or rejects them.) Now, supposing that, out of these last fifty, there are twenty unintelligible or repellent to the public of a newspaper, there will always be enough material to be able to ask for a good sum.

I only write very slowly, because the impossibility of finding a good copyist here forces me to write in pencil, with tracing paper. As for Belgium , I hardly see on the horizon that Mr. Dentu or MM. Faure. I admit that I would lean more towards the latter. To obtain the largest possible sum, I am inclined first to deliver the completely new , then to sell it for a fairly considerable number of copies, or rather for a specific period of time!

There's no point, isn't it, in immediately sending you the revised copy of Les Fleurs , with inserts? I am missing documents which are in Honfleur, and I have neither the time nor the money for the trip. — I told you, I believe, that the letter found from Sainte-Beuve is very important and very extraordinary . The other letters are from Deschamps and Custine; the articles are by Gautier, d'Aurevilly, Thierry, etc. ^****

What suddenly pushed me to write to you this morning is that I have just seen in a Belgian newspaper that the new edition of the Deschamps brochure has been made. On the 4th, the day after the day your letter reached me, a Mr. Crabbé left for Paris, with a note for you, relating to Mr. Deschamps and Casanova. I believe that in his capacity as a Belgian, Mr. Crabbé will have excused himself from carrying out the commission.

There are Casanovas, chez Rosez, 6 vols., 16 fr. 5o (discount made). 1 fr. by volume, for smuggling; — unless a friend, passing through Brussels, takes care of it. ^***** Total: 2 copies: 16.50 – 16.50 – 6 – 6 / 35.00. I don't know the price of Deschamps. All yours. Baudelaire. »

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In April 1864, heavily in debt, Baudelaire left for Belgium to undertake a lecture tour, but his talents as an enlightened art critic met with little success. He then settled in Brussels and prepared a pamphlet against his short-lived host country which, in his eyes, represented a caricature of bourgeois France. The fierce Poor Belgium will remain unfinished.

Cornered financially Baudelaire bases a lot of hope on the activism of Julien Lemer, journalist, bookseller and director of the Centrale bookstore in Paris. The latter acting for Baudelaire as a literary agent during his stay in Belgium.

Only five months after this letter, during a visit to the Saint-Loup church in Namur, on March 15, 1866, Baudelaire lost consciousness in the square. This collapse is followed by brain disorders and aphasia. The resulting hemiplegia prevented the poet from writing correctly and from March 23, 1866, his letters were only dictated.

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^* Undressed Belgium , an unfinished pamphlet of which the first extracts were published posthumously in 1887, then published in full in 1952 under the title Pauvre Belgique .

^** Charles Yriarte, director of Le Monde Illustré , who paid tribute to Baudelaire two weeks after his death in 1867, through a publication highlighting not only his poetic genius but also his talents as a prose writer and translator.

^*** Alphonse de Calonne, director of the Revue contemporain in which Baudelaire published in 1858 and 1860 the texts which would later become the two parts of Artificial Paradises , under the titles Le Poème du Haschisch and Un mangeur d'opium .

^**** Baudelaire seeks to assert his support. He attached great importance to the judgments of Sainte Beuve, despite the latter's lukewarm support. On the letter from Sainte Beuve and the letters and articles mentioned Cf Correspondance Pléiade. Volume II, pages 534 and 934.

^***** Julien Lemer had asked on the 4th of the same month if there were copies of Casanova's Memoirs at the Brussels bookseller Rozez.

Bibliography:

Correspondence. Pleiades. Volume II, page 534.

Charles Baudelaire – Letters 1841 – 1866, Mercure de France.

Charles Baudelaire, a micro-history, Raymond Poggenburg – José Corti 1987.