On January 3, 1865, Baudelaire writes a letter to his mother; a letter that pains one as one reads it: so resigned he seems to be, yet never in his life less resigned to his fate. He fears that God might deprive him of even happiness; that it is more difficult to think than to write a book; that if only he were certain of having five or six years before him he might execute all that remained for him to do; that he has the fixed idea of death; that he has suffered so much already that he believes many things may be forgiven him (sins of concupiscence, sins of conscience, sins one never forgets) as he has been punished so much.
I pass from this to the beginning of March, 1866. He stays with Rops at Namur, where (certainly by bad luck) he enters again l'Église Saint-Loup, which he had spoken of as "this sinister marvel in the interior of a catafalque—terrible and delicious—broidered with gold, red, and silver." As he admires these richly sculptured confessionals, as he speaks with Rops and Malassis, he stumbles, taken by a kind of dizziness in the head, and sits down on a step in the church. They lift him up; he feigns not to be frightened, says that his foot had slipped accidentally. Next day he shows signs of a nervous trouble, not a mental one; asking them in the train to Brussels to have the window opened; it is open. That is the first sign of his loss of speech, and the last letter that he ever wrote (dated March 30th, 1866), ends: Je ne puis pas bouger. It is strange to set beside this Balzac's last words, that end a letter written June 20th, 1856: Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire. It is written to Théophile Gautier.
Swinburne, having heard the fatal news in regard to Baudelaire, added to his book on Blake these magnificent words: as pure, as fervent a tribute to the memory of a fellow-artist as Baudelaire might have wished to have been written on himself, as Swinburne might have desired to have been written on himself: "I heard that a mortal illness had indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of Charles Baudelaire. We may see again as various a power as was his, may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as tragic a manner of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at least in part expressed, brought him near to me by way of written or transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal words which too often return upon our lips:
Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!"
And I, who have transcribed these words, have before me a book that Swinburne showed me, that he had richly bound in Paris, and that I bought at the sale of his library on June 19th: Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris. Par Charles Baudelaire. Paris, 1861; with, written in pencil, on the page before the title-page, these words:
"A Mr. Algernon C. Swinburne. Bon Souvenir et mille Remerciements. C. B."
From April 9, 1866, to August 31, 1867, Baudelaire endures the slow tortures of a body and a soul condemned to go on living; living, what else can it be called, than a kind of living death? To remain, in most senses, himself; to be, as always, Charles Baudelaire; to have in his mind one desire, the desire, the vain desire, of recovery; to be unable to utter one word; to think, to sleep, to conceive imaginary projects, for his near future, for his verse, for his prose: to walk, to eat, to drink; to be terribly conscious of his dolorous situation; to be, as ever, anxious for a new edition of Les fleurs du mal; to mark a date in an almanac, counting three months, when he imagined he would be in a state to superintend the impression of his final edition; to have finally given up all hope, all illusion; to have gazed out of his wonderful eyes, at his friend's faces, eyes shadowed by an expression of infinite sadness, eyes that endured his last tragedy: that is how Baudelaire survived himself to the end.
He died on Saturday, August 31, 1867, at eleven o'clock in the morning, at the age of forty-six and four months. So died, simply and without any trace of suffering, this man of genius. Had he been thoroughly understood by the age in which he lived? Blake, who said the final truth on this question: "The ages are all equal; but genius is always above the ages:" was not understood in his age.