Literary Rogues (10 page)

She proceeded to have affairs with many famous men, including poet Alfred de Musset and composer Frédéric Chopin. “
There is only one happiness in life
, to love and be loved,” she wrote. Baroness Dudevant was rumored to be involved with actress Marie Dorval. “
In the theater or in your bed
, I simply must come and kiss you, my lady, or I shall do something crazy!” Dudevant wrote to the actress.

Baroness Dudevant published her debut novel,
Rose et Blanche
(“Pink and White”), in 1831. The book, cowritten by one of her lovers, Jules Sandeau, appeared under the name “Jules Sand.” The first novel she wrote entirely on her own,
Indiana
, was published a year later under the name “George Sand,” a moniker she assumed for the rest of her life. A few years later, in 1835, she legally separated from her husband and took her children with her.

Although Sand had her critics (who despised her as much for dressing in men's clothing and smoking tobacco as for her work), she also had her fans and supporters. “
She has a grasp of mind
which, if I cannot fully comprehend it, I can very deeply respect,” her more conservative contemporary Charlotte Brontë wrote. Balzac, a close friend of Sand's who called her his “
brother George
,” passionately defended her work against critics.

One of her closest platonic friendships was with Flaubert. She was more than a decade and a half older than him, and Flaubert playfully addressed her as “Master” in their letters. Sand was more relaxed than the uptight Flaubert, and frequently tried to get him to lighten up. “
Spare yourself a little
, take some exercise, relax the tendons of your mind,” she wrote, later adding some romantic advice: “
Not to love is to cease to live
.” Flaubert would have none of it. He attributed his physical aches and pains and social awkwardness to the “
charming profession
” of writing. “That is what it means to torment the soul and the body,” he wrote to her.

Both Sand and Flaubert stood aligned against a world hostile to writers. “
I believe that the crowd
, the common herd, will always be hateful,” he wrote to her. “The only important thing is a little group of minds always the same—which passes the torch from one to another.” Sand passed away in 1876, and Flaubert died four years later.

Sand saw herself as a trailblazer for other female authors—and women in general. “
The world will know and understand
me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter,” she wrote in one of her novels. “I shall have opened the way for other women.”

“Men and women know from birth that
in evil lies all pleasure
.”

—
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

F
rench poet
Charles Baudelaire
(1821–1867) was a harsh critic of George Sand—and of female authors in general. “
Women write and write
, with an exuberant rapidity; their hearts speak and chatter in reams. Usually they know nothing of art, or measure, or logic; their style trails and flows like their garments,” he wrote. Sand “
dashes off her masterpieces
as if she were writing letters. Has it not been said that she writes her books on stationery?” Baudelaire reserved his worst criticism for Sand on a more personal level, calling her stupid, heavy, and garrulous. “The fact that there are men who could become enamored of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation.”

Baudelaire's dislike for Sand may be partially attributed to her ignoring his request to put one of his friends, the beautiful but untalented actress Marie Daubrun, in one of her plays in 1855. But another, more insidious, reason for his hatred can be traced to his jealousy of her voluminous creative output that far overshadowed his own slim volume of work. Baudelaire was a brilliant poet and critic who suffered from many addictions (laudanum, expensive clothes, prostitutes) and whose story is a case study of wasted talent.

As a young man, Baudelaire was expelled from school close to graduation. He would later take the exams to graduate, but for the moment had nothing to do. The eighteen-year-old bounced around Paris between relatives' couches, but found the idle lifestyle untenable. “
At school I read
, I cried, sometimes I fell into a rage; but at least I was alive, which is more than I am now,” he wrote to his mother. “I'm lower than a snake's belly, and bad, bad, and no longer bad in a pleasant way. There is nothing now but lassitude, glumness, and boredom.”

His stepfather, worried about Baudelaire's directionless lifestyle, tried to turn the young boy into a man by sending him to India. “
The moment has come
when something must be done to prevent your brother's utter ruin,” his stepfather wrote to Baudelaire's half-brother, Alphonse. Unfortunately, the trip (cut short by Baudelaire, who was bored with the sea) only served to solidify Baudelaire's taste for a bohemian lifestyle. His stepfather, a high-ranking government official, offered to pull strings for Baudelaire and get him a cushy office job in Paris.

Baudelaire refused.

He had made up his mind: he would be a writer or he would be
nothing
! His stepfather at first thought he was joking. When it became apparent that Baudelaire was seriously considering a career that would lead to certain poverty, his stepfather became angry and refused to ever speak to Baudelaire again. They would never reconcile.

Baudelaire left home. The first thing he did upon securing his own bachelor pad was to procure himself a prostitute for the night. The second thing he did was to ask his half-brother how to treat the raging case of gonorrhea that he picked up from her.

This early mishap in his sex life did little to scare him away from women of the night. He once quoted an idea for an epitaph for his own gravestone to his friends that read, “Here lieth one whose
weakness for loose ladies
cut him off young and sent him down to Hades.”

Baudelaire's twenties and early thirties were an unending string of mishaps. He contracted syphilis from another prostitute. He blew through his inheritance of more than 100,000 francs. He ran up numerous debts. He petitioned his parents and, later, his financial guardian for more money to buy the expensive clothes he so
desperately
needed. He drank wine like it was going out of style. He attempted suicide. And, somehow, he managed to find the time in his busy schedule to write and publish a handful of poems.

It was, of course, a woman who provided the inspiration for most of the poetry Baudelaire was able to write. Jeanne Duval, a Haitian actress and dancer, was the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute. Her illicit ancestry provided an extra layer of allure for Baudelaire. Although he considered Duval his “
mistress of mistresses
,” their relationship was rocky, and he referred to her as a “vampire,” a “black witch,” and “Beelzebub” in his poetry.

They lived together off and on, in lodgings that Baudelaire used his dwindling inheritance to pay for. He could only write his poetry at night, he said, “
so as to have peace and quiet
and escape the unendurable pestering of the woman I live with. Sometimes, in order to write at all, I go and hide in a public library or reading room” to escape Duval. “The result is that I live in a state of permanent irritation. Certainly this is no way to bring to fruition a sustained piece of writing.”

He dreamed of committing violent acts against her. “
I am truly glad
I have no weapon in the house,” he wrote. Baudelaire sought out other romantic interests to play the role of muse, but he always returned to Duval.

Finally, after ten years together, they parted ways for what looked like the last time. As he wrote to his mother, his once beautiful muse “
had some qualities
, but she has lost them.” He could no longer tolerate “a creature with whom it is impossible to exchange the least conversation on politics or literature, a creature WHO DOES NOT RESPECT ME, a creature who would toss my manuscripts into the fire if it brought her more money than letting them be published.” The final straw, it seems, was when she threw his beloved cat out of the house and replaced it with a litter of dogs. “The very sight of dogs makes me ill,” Baudelaire wrote.

Yet the dysfunctional couple reunited once more, against everyone's better judgment, and Baudelaire learned to live with her and her dogs ... for a short time. In 1856, after fourteen years together, they split permanently.

Baudelaire could see salvation on the horizon: after twenty years of writing and publishing only a few short pieces in newspapers (as well as a poorly received novella), he made his poetry debut with a book of 101 poems in 1857. The collection,
Les fleurs du mal
(“The Flowers of Evil”), was partially influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, whose work Baudelaire had been translating into French.
Les fleurs du mal
was the culmination of twenty years' worth of poetry. He had been saving his talent, he claimed, for a full frontal assault on French audiences.

Baudelaire married the dark imaginative works of Poe with the beauty he saw in the world, added a few odes to lesbianism, shook it all up, and spilled the resulting cocktail onto an unsuspecting literary establishment. “Une Charogne” (“A Carcass”), wherein a young couple on a lovers' walk encounter a rotting corpse, is typical of Baudelaire's trademark style: “
Her legs were spread out
like a lecherous whore / Sweating out poisonous fumes / Who opened in slick invitational style / Her stinking and festering womb.”

“You have found
the way to rejuvenate Romanticism
,” Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire. French poet Paul Verlaine later said Baudelaire had found a way to represent the “modern man, made what he is by the
refinements of excessive civilization
, his brain saturated with tobacco, his blood boiling with alcohol.”

While fellow writers offered words of praise, critics were not so kind. In the words of one journalist, Baudelaire had invented
littérature charogne
—
carcass literature
. “
Never, in the space of so few pages
, have I seen so many breasts bitten—nay, even chewed!” one reviewer wrote. Even Baudelaire's more straightforward love poems were groundbreaking in their rejection of sentimentality.

Les fleurs du mal
was too dark and erotic for the reading public, at least according to authorities. They took Baudelaire, the publisher, and the printer to court on charges of blasphemy and corrupting public morals, using the same laws that had been (unsuccessfully) applied to Flaubert. This was the minister's chance to get back at the artistic class and avenge the judicial system's loss in the
Madame Bovary
case.

Officials confiscated copies of the book from a warehouse in preparation of the trial. When a reporter saw Baudelaire on the streets wearing a solemn black suit, the reporter sarcastically quipped that the writer was “
in mourning for
Les fleurs du mal
; it was seized yesterday evening at five o'clock.”

The atrocities in his poems were no different from what newspapers published every day, Baudelaire protested. “
It is impossible to scan any newspaper
, no matter the day, month, or year, without finding on every line evidence of the most appalling human perversity,” he wrote. “Every newspaper, from first line to last, is a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, lewdness, tortures, crimes by princes, crimes by nationals, crimes by individuals, a debauch of universal atrocity. And this is the disgusting appetizer that civilized people take at breakfast every morning.”

Although his mother praised his book in a letter to Baudelaire's half-brother, she must have said something to Baudelaire about the tawdry content: Baudelaire responded to her with a venomous letter. “
Always you join with the mob
in stoning me,” he wrote. “All that goes right the way back to my childhood, as you know. How is it that you always contrive, except in money matters, to be for your son the reverse of a friend?”

Baudelaire and his publisher were found innocent on the charges of offending religious morality, but the judge ruled that six of the poems offended public decency. They were forced to remove the offensive poems and pay a fine of 300 francs, which was reduced upon appeal to 50 francs (still more than Baudelaire had made from the book's sale, before it was banned). The removal of the poems meant the book would have to be reprinted. To justify the second printing, Baudelaire set out to write a new batch of poems to replace the ones that were pulled.

His stepfather passed away the same year
Les fleurs du mal
was released. Baudelaire attended the funeral and tried to mend relations with his mother, to no avail. For years she had supported him emotionally and financially, and she was disappointed with how he treated her.