Charles BAUDELAIRE organized the sale of "Les Fleurs du Mal" from Brussels.

Charles Baudelaire (1821.1867)

Autographed letter signed to Julien Lemer.

Four octavo pages on letterhead from the Hôtel du Grand Miroir, Brussels

[Brussels] October 13, 1865.

"My diabolical situation can hardly continue much longer..."

A long and important letter from Baudelaire, penniless but combative, attempting to organize the sale of Les 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 much longer. I would therefore ask you, before Mr. Garnier's return , to consider the sale of the book on Belgium ^* , of which I will send you tomorrow, or the day after, an analysis, or a very detailed ( as well as a note relating to the new Flowers of Evil , 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 bothering you, my dear friend, and it is only with some reluctance that I entrust you with commissions. Indiscretion horrifies me. Yriarte has given me money several times upon depositing manuscripts. By the end of the month, I will deliver fifty prose poems to you, supplementing *Le Spleen de Paris *. (There are some at Charpentier's, and it is impossible for me to know whether that old madman accepts them or rejects them.) Now, supposing that, of these last fifty, twenty are unintelligible or repulsive to the readership of a newspaper, there will still be quite enough material to be able to ask for a good sum.

I write very slowly because the impossibility of finding a good copyist here forces me to write in pencil, using tracing paper. As for Belgium , I see little choice but Mr. Dentu or Messrs. Faure. I confess I would lean more towards the latter. To obtain the largest possible sum, I am inclined first to deliver the entirely unpublished , then to sell it in a considerable number of copies, or rather, for a specific period of time!

It's pointless, isn't it, to send you the revised copy of the Flowers , with the inserts? I'm missing some documents that are in Honfleur, and I have neither the time nor the money for the trip. — I told you, I believe, that the rediscovered letter from Sainte-Beuve is very important and quite extraordinary . The other letters are from Deschamps and Custine; the articles are from Gautier, d'Aurevilly, Thierry, etc. ^****

What prompted me to write to you this morning is that I just saw in a Belgian newspaper that the Deschamps pamphlet has been reprinted. On the 4th, the day after your letter arrived, a Mr. Crabbé left for Paris with a note for you concerning Mr. Deschamps and Casanova. I believe that, being Belgian, Mr. Crabbé will have refrained from carrying it out.

There are Casanova novels at Rosez's, 6 volumes, 16.50 francs (discount applied). 1 franc per 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 the Deschamps edition. Yours truly, Ch. 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 adopted country, which, in his eyes, represented a caricature of bourgeois France. The scathing " Poor Belgium" would remain unfinished.

Facing financial hardship, Baudelaire placed great hope in the activism of Julien Lemer, a journalist, bookseller, and director of the Librairie Centrale in Paris. Lemer acted as Baudelaire's literary agent during his stay in Belgium.

Just five months after this letter, during a visit to the Church of Saint-Loup in Namur on March 15, 1866, Baudelaire collapsed on the church steps. This collapse was followed by cerebral disturbances and aphasia. The resulting hemiplegia prevented the poet from writing properly, and from March 23, 1866, his letters were dictated only.

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^* Belgium Undressed , an unfinished pamphlet whose first extracts were published posthumously in 1887, then published in full in 1952 under the title Poor Belgium .

^** Charles Yriarte, director of Le Monde illustré , who paid a strong 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 contemporaine in which Baudelaire published in 1858 and 1860 the texts which would later become the two parts of Paradis artificiels , under the titles Le Poème du Haschisch and Un mangeur d'opium .

^**** Baudelaire sought to highlight his supporters. He placed great importance on Sainte-Beuve's opinions, despite the latter's lukewarm support. For Sainte-Beuve's letter and the letters and articles mentioned, see the Pléiade edition of his correspondence, Volume II, pages 534 and 934.

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

Bibliography:

Correspondence. Pléiade. Volume II, page 534.

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

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