19 makes no secret of Baudelaire's little weaknesses and his own. "With an air quite simple, natural, and perfectly disengaged, he advanced some axiom satanically monstrous, or sustained with an icy sang-froid some theory of a mathematical exactness; for there was a vigorous method in the development of his absurdities." In a word, it is not denied that Baudelaire was that most unsympathetic of all beings, a cold sensualist, and that he carried into all his pleasures (until they slew him) the dandyism and the self-possession of a true child of Mephistopheles.
After a youth spent in wanderings in the East, and in acquiring, as Gautier naïvely says, "that love of the black Venus, for whom he had always a taste," Baudelaire returned to Paris, rented a little chambre de garçon, and assumed all the privileges of a literary life in the most debauched city of the world. His reading, which seems to have been of a very limited nature, developed his already singular disposition into true literary monstrosity, and the morbid nature of his tastes may be gathered from the fact that his first public effort was a translation of the American Tales of Edgar Poe. To Poe he seems to have borne an extraordinary resemblance, both in genius and in character. Equally clever, affected, and cold-blooded; equally incredulous of goodness and angry at philanthropy; equally self-indulgent and sensual, he lived as useless a life, died as wretched a death, and left for his legacy books even more worthless—the very dregs of his unhappy and sunless moral nature. Like Poe and Swinburne, he affected innovations in verse, and sought out the most morbid themes for poetical treatment. Encouraged by Poe, he tried to surpass him on his own ground—to triumph
