In the one done in 1865, the pride of youth, the dandy, the vivid profile, have disappeared. Here, as if in an eternal aspect, Baudelaire is shown. There is his tragic mask; the glory of the eyes, that seem to defy life, to defy death, seems enormous, almost monstrous. The lips are closed tightly together, in their long, sinuous line, almost as if Leonardo da Vinci had stamped them with his immortality. The genius of Manet has shown the genius of Baudelaire in a gigantic shadow; the whole face surging out of that dark shadow; and the soul is there!
In the portrait by Carjat, his face and his eyes are contorted as if in a terrible rage; the whole face seems drawn upward and downward in a kind of convulsion; and the aspect, one confesses, shows a degraded type, as if all the vices he had never committed looked out of his eyes in a wild revolt.
It is in the mask of Baudelaire done by Zachari Astruc that I find almost the ethereal beauty, the sensitive nerves, the drawn lines, of the death-mask of Keats; only, more tragic. It looks out on one as a carved image, perfect in outline, implacable, restless, sensual; and, in that agonized face, what imagination, what enormous vitality, what strange subtlety, what devouring energy! It might be the face of a Roman Emperor, refined, century by century, from the ghastly face of Nero, the dissolute face of Caligula, to this most modern of poets.