Baudelaire, as I have said, had many reasons for going to Brussels. Among these was his urgent desire of finding a publisher to print his collected works--having failed to find any publisher for them. Another was that of giving lectures--a thing he was not made for--and for two other reasons: one of making immediate money, one of adding to his fame as a writer. Then, to write a book on Belgium. He writes to Manet (who has written to him: "Do return to Paris! No happiness can come to you while you live in that damned country!"): "As for finishing here _Pauvre Belgique,_ I am incapable of it: I am near on dead. I have quite a lot of _Poèmes en Prose_ to get printed in magazines. I can do no more than that. _Je souffre d'un mal qui je n'ai pas, comme j'étais gamin, et que je vivais au bout du monde."_ His book was to have been humorous, mocking, and serious--his final separation from modern stupidity. "People may understand me, perhaps, then." "Nothing," he confesses, "can console me in my detestable misery, in my humiliating situation, nor especially in my vices." In February, 1865, he writes: "As for my present state, it is an absolute abdication of the will. (_C'est une parfaite abdication de la volonté._)" What reason, I wonder, was there for him to "abdicate" the one element in our natures by which we live at our greatest, the very root of our passions (as Balzac said), "nervous fluids and that unknown substance which, in default of another term, we must call the will?" Man has a given quality of energy; each man a different quality: how will he spend it? That is Balzac's invariable question. All these qualities were always in Baudelaire. Had he finally, after so many years in which his energy was supreme, lost some of his energy, struggling, as he seems to do, against insuperable difficulties that beset him on either side, like thieves that follow men in the dark with the intention of stabbing you in the back? Does he then try to conjecture what next year might bring him of good or of evil? He has lived his life after his own will: what shall the end be? He dares neither look backward nor forward. It might be that he feels the earth crumbling under his feet; for how many artists have had that fear--the fear that the earth under their feet may no longer be solid? There is another step for him to take, a step that frightens him; might it not be into another more painful kind of oblivion? Has something of the man gone out of him: that is to say, the power to live for himself?