The life of Baudelaire, like the lives of Balzac and of Villiers and of Verlaine, was one long labour, in which time, money, and circumstances were all against him. "Sometimes," Balzac cries, "it seems to me that my brain is on fire. I shall die in the trenches of the intellect." It is his genius, his imagination, that are on fire, not so much as his sleepless brain. This certainly Baudelaire never felt. Yet, in one sentence written in 1861, I find an agony not unlike Balzac's, but more material, more morbid: "La plupart des temps je me dis: si je vis, je vivrai toujours de même, en damné, et quand la mort naturelle viendra, je serai vieux, usé, passé de mode, criblé de dettes; ajoute à cela que je trouve souvent qu'on ne me rend pas justice, et que je vois que tout réussit à souhait pour les sots." This, with his perpetual nervous terrors, his hallucinations, his drugs, his miseries, his women, his wine, his good and bad nights, his sense of poisonous people, his disorders, his excitability, his imagination that rarely leaves him, his inspiration that often varies, his phrase, after a certain despair: "Je me suis précipité dans le travail: alors j'ai reconnu que je n'avais perdu aucune faculté;" his discouragements, his sudden rages, not only against fame, but when he just refrains from hitting a man's face with his stick; after all this, and after much more than this, I have to take his word, when he says--not thinking of these impediments in his way--"What poets ought to do is to know how to escape from themselves." In 1861 he writes: "As my literary situation is more than good, I can do all I want, I can get all my books printed; yet, as I have the misfortune in possessing a kind of unpopular spirit, I shall not make much money, but I shall leave a great fame behind me--provided I have the courage to live." "Provided "That word sounds a note of nervous distress. He continues: "I have made a certain amount of money; if I had not had so many debts, _and if I had had more fortune, I might have been rich"_ The last five words he writes in small capitals. And this lamentable refrain is part of his obsession; wondering, as we all do, why we have never been rich. Then comes this curious statement: "What exasperates me is when I think of what I have received this year; it is enormous; certainly I have lived on this money like a ferocious beast; and yet how often I spend much less than that in sheer waste!" VIII