In music it was the same choice. He saw the consummate art and artificiality of Wagner, and preferred it to all other music, at a time when the German master was ignored and despised by a classicized musical world. In perfumes it was not the simple fragrance of the rose or violet that he loved, but musk and amber; and he said, "my soul hovers over perfumes as the souls of other men hover over music." Besides his essays and sketches, Baudelaire published in prose a novelette; 'Fanfarlo,' 'Artificial Paradises,' opium and hashish, imitations of De Quincey's 'Confessions of an Opium Eater'; and 'Little Prose Poems,' also inspired by a book, the 'Gaspard de la Nuit' of Aloysius Bertrand, and which Baudelaire thus describes:-- "The idea came to me to attempt something analogous, and to apply to the description of modern life, or rather a modern and more abstract life, the methods he had applied to the painting of ancient life, so strangely picturesque. Which one of us in his ambitious days has not dreamed of a miracle of poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, and to the assaults of conscience?" Failing health induced Baudelaire to quit Paris and establish himself in Brussels; but he received no benefit from the change of climate, and the first symptoms of his terrible malady manifested themselves--a slowness of speech, and hesitation over words. As a slow and sententious enunciation was characteristic of him, the symptoms attracted no attention, until he fell under a sudden and violent attack. He was brought back to Paris and conveyed to a "maison de santé," where he died, after lingering several months in a paralyzed condition, motionless, speechless; nothing alive in him but thought, seeking to express itself through his eyes. The nature of Baudelaire's malady and death was, by the public at large, accepted as confirmation of the suspicion that he was in the habit of seeking his inspiration in the excitation of hashish and opium. His friends, however, recall the fact of his incessant work, and intense striving after his ideal in art; his fatigue of body and mind, and his increasing weariness of spirit under the accumulating worries and griefs of a life for which his very genius unfitted him. He was also known to be sober in his tastes, as all great workers are. That he had lent himself more than once to the physiological and psychological experiment of hashish was admitted; but he was a rare visitor at the séances in the saloon of the Hotel Pimodau, and came as a simple observer of others. His masterly description of the hallucinations produced by hashish is accompanied by analytical and moral commentaries which unmistakably express repugnance to and condemnation of the drug:--