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Charles Baudelaire Autograph Letter Signed

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:7,500.00 - 10,000.00 USD
Charles Baudelaire Autograph Letter Signed

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Auction Date:2021 Apr 14 @ 18:00 (UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT)
Location:15th Floor WeWork, Boston, Massachusetts, 02108, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
ALS in French, signed “Ch. Baudelaire,” four pages on two adjoining sheets, 6 x 8, July 20, 1859. Lengthy handwritten letter concerning his lack of money and delays in his work. In full (translated): "I’m writing you very briefly. I found your two letters at the Revue française, and if I haven’t answered you sooner, it’s because I sometimes go three or four days without going there. My business is mostly going well—except for the terrible question of the expenses—I’ve paid a thousand francs of urgent debts, but I’ve received much more. And since I’ve attained the status of a provincial, I suffer horribly from this need to spend twenty or thirty francs a day. I won’t leave Paris until after I’ve resolved the question of the drama. I’ll write you again on that subject.—If I hadn’t been really forced to come to Paris, I would never have come. It’s not only the expenses that afflict me, but what’s worse, the impossibility of seeing clearly and concentrating my thoughts. I’m deafened, stunned, turned into a beast; you know that I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking slowly and patiently, the habit of happy days.

As you will easily understand, I can’t describe to you in great detail how I spend my days. What has to be acknowledged is that in this accursed city, flooded with heat, with light, and with dust, it’s necessary to return several times to visit each person one needs in order to find them in. So work has disappeared, and my longing to come back is excessive—for if the monstrous expenses torment me, there’s something that torments me quite a bit more, and that’s the waste of days spent stupidly. Your second letter touched me deeply! You know that I don’t distinguish myself (at least in appearance) for my sensibility, so you can take the words I write you as truthful. It’s truly a sweet thing, amid so many real vexations, so many discouragements, to feel that one has close by a goodness and a charity that is keeping watch. All the maternal foolishness that you wrote to me about, even your cider (which is not my favorite thing) moved me. How does it happen that with so good and so delicate a heart, you are sometimes so clumsy?

The last ten days (for I will manage so as to come back at the beginning of August, and I’ll let you know four days or three days in advance) will be spent in obtaining, for the third time, a large sum of money and in entering into new engagements with a Swiss review in Geneva. The future director of the Cirque is unfortunately in Normandy. You can guess the inevitable delays. It has to do with the big affair. To top off the misfortunes, politics are in a state of upheaval, of anguish, of disquiet. You can have no idea of the disorder created in everyone’s disposition by the emperor and of the disastrous effect caused by the conclusion of the peace. There have been some misfortunes at the Revue française; you’re going to receive two issues, one right after the other, one of which will contain all the rest of my salon. I love you and I embrace you, and I thank you again for your last letter. I’m staying until the end of the month at the Hôtel de Dieppe, rue d’Amsterdam. I’m as badly lodged here as it is possible to be." In fine condition, with slightly irregular light toning.

In the closing paragraph, Baudelaire makes mention of his reviews of the Salon of 1859, published in the Revue Francaise, Paris, June 10-July 20, 1859, essays now famous for his bitter denouncement of the emerging medium of photography as an art form. Though struggling financially—a problem that afflicted Baudelaire for most of his life—he found inspiration for his poetry, and wrote the greatest of his 'Paris poems' in 1859. A superb, scarce letter by the esteemed French writer.