From: Luan Rama

Whenever we talk about French poetry, we always remember Charles Baudelaire, the author of the world-famous volume, Le fleurs du mal, (Flowers of Evil), which was recognized by the Albanian reader much later, starting from the translations of the 30s of the XX century. Fan Noli's translation had immediately conveyed the majesty of his verse:

"... Like an angel, like a living statue, it shines.
How chastised and disheveled I am
From her eye like a sky that shields a storm
Honey-sucking that fascinates, deflation that tears. "

(To the one who went)

Even this very translation was read and put in his notepad by a young and unknown Albanian poet, Vilson Blloshmi, who in the totalitarian times, in the years of the dictatorship, had dared to say that he worshiped the French poet Charles Baudelaire. But that would cost him dearly. In addition to "anti-revolutionary propaganda", the name of the "decadent and forbidden" poet, Baudelaire, was added to the indictment against him in the court process. And the poet would be punished by firing squad. It was a sin to read the poems of the great Baudelaire... This poet who was shot cannot help reminding us today of the French poet, whose poems made entire generations of Albanians fall in love.

From the first edition of the poetic volume Flowers of Evil,[1] who shook the literary world not only of France, but also of the entire globe, 150 years have passed, but his "revolution" in the field of poetry and arts would continue. This was "le poète maudit", or "the accursed poet", as his neighbor, the poet Paul Verlaine, called him. And it was not for nothing that he called it that: 150 years ago, Baudelaire's poems were taken to the censorship court on the charge that those poems were an "insult to ecclesiastical morality" and "insult to public morality and good manners". Not a few months ago, in the same year, a similar trial was made to the other French writer Gustav Flaubert, (Gustave Flaubert), for his masterpiece Madame Bovary. The conservative state accused Baudelaire of "unwoven" verse, and many of his poems were condemned to never see the light of publication. "The flowers of evil challenges the laws that protect religion and morality", "as an insult to public morals and good customs" was written in the police documents, while the General Prosecutor requested the immediate ban of the book's circulation. Baudelaire was fined and so was his publisher Poluet-Malassis.

Some time before, on July 11, 1857, sensing the impending danger, Baudelaire had written to his publisher, Poulet-Malassis:Quickly delete all copies of the book as soon as possible. I took 50 specimens and hid them in a safe place". Famous poems like The pearls, Lesbos, To which she was very happy, Lethe, apo Vampire metamorphoses, it would take many years before they could be reprinted, then when the fame of a great poet like him would be universally known. But Baudelaire was aware that one day those poems would find their appreciation. "My book has enraged people everywhere, - he wrote to his mother Karolina or Madame Aupick, as he often called her. – But I know it will make its way alongside the best poems of Hugo, Goethe, and even Byron.".

Although the press of the time did not echo this book, (some even vented against it), it would still be talked about the courage of the poet who wanted to challenge the censorship. "Baudelaire resembled a man before the guillotine", the well-known critics the Goncourt brothers would write in their diary. While Baudelaire wrote: "No, I don't feel guilty, on the contrary, I am proud that my book has the horror of evil". From forced exile at the time, far from the shores of England, Victor Hugo would write to the lynched poet: “Flowers of Evil they shine and dazzle like the stars." While the critic Saint-Beuve would add: "You took the secrets from the demons of the night". These lines alone gave Baudelaire the courage to continue on the unknown adventure of his poetic verse.

Who was this man who, unlike the realists and romantics, wrote another painful verse, metaphorical and symbolic, obviously driven by his great resentment of a miserable and sad world? Who was this poet who, unlike others, discovered the dark and painful life, the "flowers of evil" in a poetic way? Do you also find human misery, poverty, madness and abandonment?...

"Remember, O soul, what we saw
That beautiful summer morning?
At the turn of a path, full of stones
Send a corpse…”

(a carrion)

Deciphering the life of this giant and forerunner of modern poetry is not easy. Maybe the biographies written about him are not enough, not only his books, but you also need to find the places where he lived, where he wrote, where the murdered heart of this man who in a short life created a work monumental. In fact, you have to travel to the places where this Parisian was sent, to the countless hotels he was unable to pay for, to the houses, cafes and bars of the artists. You have to go through turbulent times of revolutions and recreate in your imagination that character who knew from this life nothing but pain and protest, who knew drinking, cabarets, prostitutes, misery, delirium and hunger, who experienced the lack of love. This was the popular "underground", where together with misery, there was also human feeling, the explosion of human joy, love, intoxication with beauty, tears and longing. Thus, treading his Parisian streets, from the house of his birth to his hotels, to his last abode in the cemetery of Montparnasse, the man of today succeeds in creating the complete picture of the poet, the portrait of that man in the flesh. of blood, angry love, screams and excitement that high society held for a "damned poet". Various biographers do not fail to write about a detail of his youth when, on a very cold day in December, under a blanket of snow, he went with Vallain to watch the arrival of Napoleon's coffin, which the French state had taken with a ship from the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic to bring him to the coast of Normandy and from there through the Seine to Paris, to bring him to where he wanted to be buried: in the church of the "Hôtel des Invalides". Victor Hugo had been in the crowd that day, and the crowd was electrified as Napoleon's coffin passed by.

Charles Beaudelaire, was born on April 9, 1821 in Paris, at 13, rue Hautefeuille and was baptized in the church of Saint-Sulpice. His mother was 27 years old and beautiful, while his father, a former priest, was in his sixties. He left her an orphan at the age of 6. From adolescence, Baudelaire was distinguished for his tastes in literature. Raised mostly in boarding schools, with his mother chasing after his military stepfather, his life began to experience the loneliness and hardships of life. Expelled from high school, he sought to travel, even going as far as the Indian Ocean, on a strange adventure to the shores of L'Ile Maurice. After graduation, however, he enrolled in law school, but soon dropped out. The first experience with the Jewish prostitute Louchette, who infected him with syphilis, shook his soul and he tried to console himself, spending for a short time all his father's inheritance, drinking opium and hashish.

Bohemia of love

Baudelaire was a bohemian of love. From his first love with Louchette, so called because his eyes went somewhat crooked, other names and portraits would enter his world: actresses, singers, ordinary prostitutes. It was this life that also made him sing, write and weave hymns to love. In Baudelaire's notebooks, later biographers found written by the poet's hand the names of his lovers, and even their respective addresses: Adele, 17, Boulevard Saint Denis; Anna, 36, Pigalle Street; Celine, 5, Breda Street; Gabrielle, 17, street Neuve-Breda; Fanny, 10, Jambert street; Rosa, 19 St. Lazare street... Today some streets have changed their names and many buildings no longer exist. Bohemia and its girlfriends are long gone. Apart from their names, the imaginary image of the poet who went from one beloved to another, drowned in his sadness, because Baudelaire at that time, even throughout his life, was one of the saddest poets and tragic of that time.

Miserable and always without money, separated from his mother who lived with his stepfather, a political functionary and then a diplomat, cut off from the real world, the only thing he had left was poetry, poetic verse. However, one woman would accompany him for a long time in his painful human adventure, a mulatto named Jeanne Duval, who had landed in Paris from Haiti in 1842. She was a charming, curmudgeonly, voluptuous but loyal mestizo. to his love. Zhanë, (Jeanne), this actress who had played several roles in the theater, would soon become his muse, or "Black Venus", as he would call her in his poems. In one poem he even compared her to a "a ship that goes out to sea with its sails unfurled". The poet's friend, the painter Edouart Manet, painted him in the painting named Baudelaire's lover. Many poems of the poet are dedicated to her The balcony, Exotic perfume, locks, The dancing snake, Cutting after death, or A carrion...

Years would pass and Zhane would no longer be the first. She had already gained weight and did not have her former graces. Métis was always irritated with Baudelaire, describing him as "a loser who is not good at earning a living" and that "she is already forced to sell herself to feed him too"... Life for the poet was becoming a hell really. In 1848 he took Jeanne home but after ten years he got bored of her. In a letter sent to his mother, he wrote: "Jeanne has become an obstacle for me, not only for my happiness, which would be a little, but more for my spiritual perfection. She used to have some qualities which she has now lost, while my eyes have been opened. To live with someone who will not know about your efforts and who considers you as property, with whom you cannot talk about anything political or literary, who is a creature who does not want to learn anything and not interested in my studies, ready to throw my manuscripts into the fire, if it brings money, who drives away my cat that was one of my pleasures at home, is it possible to continue living with him? Writing this brings tears of shame and anger to my eyes. I'm actually glad there aren't any firearms in the house because if my reason left me for a moment I would have shot him in the head some terrible night. But now I have decided...” But even though he left Jeanne, he still returned to her. And again swearing, quarrels. In another letter written in 1853, when he always went to help her so that she would not be left on the streets and homeless, Baudelaire wrote to his mother: "You mother know how much it has caused me to suffer. But in the face of such destruction and such deep melancholy, my eyes fill with tears. It was she who once sold her ornaments and furniture to me. .. How much I have made him suffer. Can't I not feel sorry for him?… Two years later, Baudelaire would complain to his notary that the family had appointed to take care of Baudelaire's life: “My relationship of 14 years with Jeanne is over. From a humane point of view, I did what I could to prevent this separation from happening, but since fifteen days it has been a pain in the soul. She complains about my character and that I don't listen to her. But she is my only pleasure, my only friend, and in spite of our spiritual storms I did not think of parting from her. For a long time I thought that work would give me the satisfaction I neededI…”

Before he finally separated from her, the situation between them had become very serious. "Life with Zhanna has become unbearable", he wrote to his mother, that she "is at the height of despair and that only one weapon is missing", that "she throws my writings into the fire and brings the dogs into the room". And Baudelaire was terrified of dogs…

Muses of the poet

Besides Zhanna, other women would enter his poetic cycles. In a literary salon, in August of 1847, he met a woman of the world, Madame Sabatier, as Gotié called her, although she was a young lady, a theater actress. From the night he saw her, he fell in love with her and immediately sent her an anonymous poem and then another, even though she knew where these fiery lines came from: A very happy woman, Hymn, Living flame... Other poems will follow this beautiful adventure of his. But very soon she will leave him and Baudelaire, who realized that she wanted others, rich bourgeois, would write:A few days ago you were a deity, that which is so beautiful and inviolable. And now, you are an ordinary woman... "[2] His letter has great pain.

Two years later, another woman entered his poetic world: it was the actress Marie Daubrun, a blonde with green eyes, who at that time performed at the theaters of the Odeon and the Gaité of Montparnasse. A short love, although the poet's poems seduce and tease her soul. Finally, she leaves. Perhaps Baudelaire had nothing to cheer his girlfriends up with, except poetry. The poet was poor, a bohemian suffocated by debts, who often had to spend the night outside. He only knew how to sing and love, to write crazy love verses, as he would write to his other girlfriend, Elisa Neri. Perhaps this erotic poetics kept him as a kind of opium, with the hope of a new tomorrow.

"We will have beds, filled with aromas
Deep sofas, heavy as graves
And strange flowers bloomed for us under the most beautiful skies...

.........

Then an Angel opening the gates
Faithful and joyful will come to us
Give life to mirrors and dead flames".

And again his life followed the cafes and bars of Paris, the bohemian life, drinking and solitude. Lonely, he turned back to his eternal love, who was called Jeanne. He felt sorry for her, because she was already sick, half-paralyzed, and could not cope with life. He had to help her. The poet had a big heart. Even when Baudelaire was in the last years of his life, even when he felt that death was approaching, he always thought that everything should be done with his Jeanne. Who would feed and medicate him? In a letter he sent to Emma, ​​he wrote: "What will happen to Zhanna when I die? Who will take care of it??” No, he did not want to abandon her even in his last throes.

The missing love

A strange relationship existed between him and Mother Karolina: an extreme love mixed with hate, a love that was absent. Perhaps why she had abandoned him and run off with Officer Aupick, who would later go on to become ambassador in Madrid and then senator? Perhaps… However, whenever Baudelaire fell into the deep well of his life, the only cry of salvation he uttered was addressed to his mother. And this would continue until the end of his life. In one of the last letters he addressed to his mother, he wrote: "Every time I take the letter to write and tell about my condition, I'm afraid of wounding and destroying your already fragile being. As for me, I am in my doubts and always on the verge of suicide. I believe that you love me with a blind passion, because you have an extraordinary character. While I love you very much, since childhood. I know that after my death, you will not live anymore. In the situation we are in, one of us will kill the other and eventually we will kill each other.". [3]

Who else wrote these lines about his mother? Screaming love, until death. For Baudelaire, years would pass without seeing his mother. Once, when she settled near Paris, in Neuilly, he wrote her a letter and asked to meet her. There was longing. But surprisingly, that day at the hotel, at the meeting place, she would not find her son? Why hadn't he come? What happened to the soul of the poet? Did he feel unworthy of a mother like her? Didn't she have the right to live with her husband in peace?

A series of photographic portraits in the studio of the photographer Felix Nadar, one of the first pioneers of world photography, brings back to our time the true portrait of the poet and the world that was conceived within him, brings back Baudelaire with his dispassionate gaze, as if he wants to decipher the puzzles of this world. It is an honorable question, pending, without an answer, a sad question that every person finds out when he is in front of his photographs. And Nadari at that time wrote:Dressed in black trousers and polished boots, unshaven and wearing a stiff blue blouse, Baudelaire sauntered through the city's neighborhoods with a rhythmic, nervous stride, like that of a cat picking at each cobblestone, as if he was afraid he would crush an egg. "

Poor bastard

Like Balzac and Alexander Dyma, Baudelaire would experience the ordeal of moneylenders demanding his money. Balzac hid in secret addresses and under false names, Dyma disappeared in the suburbs of Paris to avoid being found, while Baudelaire, like Verlaine, wandered from one hotel to another. The only salvation for him was always his mother, who sent him money to pay for hotels or cafes. "Dear mother... you don't know what the life of a poet is", - he wrote, asking for money as usual. It was precisely this miserable situation that pushed him to commit suicide. "In a letter to his mother, he wrote that "I see suicide as the easiest solution of all the other terrible things that surround me

It was June 30, 1845. Curious about this event, following the itinerary of Baudelaire's Parisian life, from the Hotel Voltaire to the Hotel Pimodan, on the Quai d'Anjou, from L'Ile Saint Louis to the Rue Angouleme, I went to the rue Richelieu , exactly where, after leaving a brewery, at the height of his despair, with a knife in hand, Baudelaire had stabbed himself in the chest. He wanted to die. People had gathered, holding the bloodied and unconscious man who could possibly die at any moment. In the letter he left before committing suicide, he wrote: "I'm killing myself. I am killing myself, because I can no longer live like this, because I am unnecessary for others and dangerous for myself. I kill myself because I feel that I am eternal... I leave everything to Jeanne, as she is the only being where I have found some rest. Can someone curse me to pay the tribute of the rare entertainments I had in this terrible world?... This testament is an expression of what remains humane in me: the love and sincere desire to serve this creature that several times it was my joy and rest".[4]

Baudelaire was a poet of despair. He who once did not believe in God, now believed that there is finally an extraterrestrial being... Sometimes he thought that one day society would put him on its pedestal and he asked for this as long as he was alive. This is what happened when he submitted his candidacy to be elected to the French Academy. True artists knew that he should deserve that place, but the authorities and official academics would decide otherwise. How could they choose a coffeehouse poet between them? And Baudelaire's disillusionment with this earthly world became even greater, as it happened to him later when for a moment he thought that he could be elected the director of the Odeon Theater and thus he could throw off the cloak of misery once and for all. But no, all these were just dreams, hopes, pains and disappointments. Among his few friends was the great Hygoi, to whom he sent the poem one day Swan, with an inscription of his own: "Here are the verses I wrote for you and thinking about you. You must not judge him with your harsh eyes, but with a fatherly eye”…

The poet of "bistros"

There is a picture of Baudelaire in cafes, "bistros" or bars in Paris. Everyone knew that he could not do without them. They were his "refuges": there he rested, drank, sometimes got drunk and wrote poetry. Then he moved to another bar. The geography of its cafés and bistros covers a large part of Paris, from "Brasserie des Fleurs" on the boulevard Clichy, to the tavern of "St.Augustin" at the train station St.Lazare, to "La Taverne Flamande" on the street Provence, in the Brasserie des Martyrs, "Café Robespière", near the opera "Quartier Latin", etc. So Baudelaire traveled from one cafe to another, from one pain to another. Sometimes among friends, poets and artists, sometimes in the sadness of his loneliness, drowning in alcohol, in his favorite "absinthe", the drama of a dark and joyless life. "We must always be drunk, - he wrote in the piece We get drunk nonstop. - This is all, the only and important thing. In order not to feel the terrible burden of time that crushes your shoulders and bends your back... We must get drunk. But what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as your heart desires. But just get drunk!”...

Often his desperation was to the point, as described by one of his friends, when one evening, the writer Maxime Du Camp would find his friend Baudelaire in a bistro and wanted to offer him something: ” – Do you want a beer, a tea, a poncho? - Thank you, but I only drink wine, - replied Baudelaire - Burgundy or prison wine? – If you allow me, both!…Then they brought two bottles, a glass and a can of water. During an hour he drank both bottles with big gulps."

Sometimes Baudelaire was invited to cafes where he drank hashish and where Nerval, Balzac, Gotie and others were in his company. In a letter sent to his girlfriend Hanska, Balzac wrote about these evenings, adding that "I resisted hashish and didn't have the discomfort it brings".

But not infrequently, a work of art, a novel, a concert or music, Baudelaire enjoyed immensely and in artistic intoxication he wrote his aesthetic criticisms and essays, written in an extraordinary style. "Balzac, the most heroic, the most unique, the most romantic and the most poetic", he wrote enthusiastically. With the same nerve and sympathy he wrote about the paintings of Delacroix or Manet in the "Autumn salons" of Parisian painting, as he would write in poetry. seed, where through poetic verse he defined the essence of the genius of Rubens, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Goya or Delacroix, where Rubens, according to him, resembles a "river of oblivion", Goja "a nightmare full of unknown things", while Delacroix, "a lake of scattered blood of evil angels"... In 1861, with extraordinary enthusiasm, he would also write the article Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris, for the Wagner concert and the performance of Phantom ship, when he came to the French capital. Many people then did not understand Wagner's music. Critics criticized him for mystical music, even hissed at him so much that his concerts were suspended, but it was exactly this music that Baudelaire liked, a mystical, symbolic music, which was in the "waters" of his verses. And the poet, through a letter, sent his article to the great composer: "No musician manages to color the material and spiritual space and depth like Wagner. At times, listening to this fiery and despotic music, we seem to find colored in it the depths of darkness, tinged with reverie and the dizzying conceptions of opium.". Wagner was amazed by this late letter and this assessment, by the thoughts of a man who had managed to pinpoint exactly what he wanted to express through music. He claimed that his work was never encouraged by a man". "Dear Baudelaire. I came to you several times but I couldn't find you. How much pleasure you gave me with your article. Your writing honors me and gives me courage more than what has been said about my talent... Believe me, - he wrote to Baudelaire, - that I am proud to call you a friend". 

With the same pathos and pleasure, in his poetic prose, Baudelaire would also write about Liszt's concerts: "Dear Listz. Through the mists, across the rivers, above the cities Where the pianos play to your glory, Where the printing presses translate your wisdom, Wherever you are, in the wonders of the immortal city Or in the mists of those dreamy sights that Cambrinus comforts, if you are composing song of unspeakable pleasure or pain, or trusting to white paper your elusive thoughts, psalm of pleasure and of Anxiety, philosopher, poet and artist, I salute you in immortality!…” And the poet continued with his verses: "To plunge into the depths of loss, in Hell or heaven, what does it matter? To plunge into the depths of the unknown to find something new". This was the creed of the poet, that regardless of life's circumstances, traumas and tragedies, in painful fogs, he had to find what was new, modern and innovative in art, just as Edgar Poe had written in America.

Yes, he felt himself close and equal to the recently deceased American writer Edgar Poe, whom he did not know but whose works prompted him to translate and publish his poems in Revue des deux Mondes, (then and Histoires extraordinaires), and convey them to the French reader. "Edgar Poe taught me to reason!”, he would write.

Poets met beyond their death, in the glory and wonder of artistic creation. Baudelaire was a poet of bohemian life. Poet of women and human pain, of the sea and travel, poet of the flight of the soul to other seas and worlds:

Often for fun, sailing sailors,
They catch a lot, these big seabirds
That as slow fellow-travellers they follow the ships
And lead to endless sad losses.

(albatross)

Republican poet

Baudelaire was not a man of politics. He even hated it. According to him, politics and poetry could not have things in common. But it was misery and poverty that drove him against the monarchy and to become a partisan of the Republic. When the February Revolution broke out in 1848, it was surprising how this cabaret man would appear at the popular barricades with weapons in hand; how this man, with the song "Marseille" in his mouth, would go down the street and join the people who wanted the overthrow of the monarchy. No, he did not tolerate violence, so he called out those days against violence in the "Café de la Rotonde" or in the square of the Basilica of Saint-Sulpice, when the crowd shouted "Aux armes!" ("Take away the weapons!"). On February 24, he and other intellectuals joined the mob against the monarch Louis Philippe, who was none other than Napoleon's nephew. The revolution and the socialist ideas of the era intoxicated him. As Baudelaire wrote that day, he put on a red tie and went out to the Rue Buci, where at the first barricade he grabbed a gun. He believed that the revolution would change the life and history of France. "Baudelaire's hands smelled of gunpowder", - his biographers would later write. It was Baudelaire who asked to create a newspaper to inform the people, and he even gave it the title: Hello public (Salvation of the people). The revolution gave him a taste for journalism. On the other hand, Gustav Kurbe would draw on the front page of the newspaper an insurgent on the barricade with a raised rifle in one hand and a flag in the other, which read: "The voice of the people, the voice of God!". But after the monarch's flight, in June of that year, the revolutionary adventure would end in violence and bloodshed, and the poet was disappointed by the violence of it all; of the insurgents and the government: "The madness of the people! The madness of the bourgeoisie! Natural love of crime!”… Disappointed, the poet would return to the cafe and his misery. The former monarch, Napoleon III, returned again, this time he was elected president of the republic.

Years passed. The poet wandered through the different districts of Paris, from one corner to another. His residences were different, strange, and therefore he always had to ask his mother for money. The poet's only peace was poetry, poetic creation. He sang to Paris, the street, the crowd, the blind, the drunken beggars or the bent old women as in the poem Little old lady. He sang to the women who passed by with their graces. Right on the street, one day he had seen a negro to whom he sang in the poem Seven elders. Hot-blooded as he was, one day he caught up with another writer in a cafe. The other shot him in the shoulder and Baudelaire demanded a duel. They even appointed the witnesses and got ready to fight the duel. But the witnesses judged that such a duel was futile. They did not show up and therefore the duel did not take place...

In his verses, Paris is gray, the popular neighborhoods where prostitutes roam are sad, the lights of the street lamps are dim, and the frosty houses moan in the rain: "in the moonless night/ we sleep the pain in a boyish bed"...In poetry swan, he adds:

"Paris changes, but not my melancholy/ The new palaces, the piers, the stone blocks, the old quarters, everything seems to me an allegory/ my memories are heavier than the rocks."

On February 19, 1866, his hand wrote: "I am very pleased with my book Spleen. Ultimately this book is again like Flowers of Evil, but looser, with details and sarcasm". To express deep melancholy, Baudelaire had chosen the English word "spleen", which meant an "anxious soul". Was not his soul like that?”…

In the end, inspired by a book by Edgar Poe "My heart laid bar" (My heart laid bar), he started to write something autobiographical about his revolts and disappointments in life and in art, but he did not manage to finish it.

The death of the poet

The death of Baudelaire, like the death of Rimbaud or Verlaine, was one of the most painful and tragic deaths in the world of artists of that century. Sick, ravaged by syphilis and long illness, cursed by high society, half in life and half beyond life, they perished as miserable men without experiencing their glory, although they were aware that art and poetry theirs was another poem, another art.

In the years 1866-1867, Baudelaire was sent to a hotel in Brussels, far from Paris, at first alone and then accompanied by his mother. He had been withdrawn from the literary world for some time and no longer wrote, although his publishers, one in Paris and the other in Brussels, financed future works and reprints of his works. Meanwhile, he was suffering from terrible headaches. He was constantly vomiting and the doctors who visited him told him that he was suffering from hysteria. One day he had gone to take the tram and when he had boarded he insisted that the gate be opened, which was actually open and people were surprised by his request. Slowly he began to lose his memory and slurred speech. He fell unconscious on the street. He knew that he would die before his mother, and this was a real nightmare for him. His legs could no longer support him and then, a paralysis prevented him from speaking. His end seemed very near and inevitable. And yet he continued to work to finish the book "Parnasse contemporaine" but on March 30 he suffered a cerebral stroke. Victor Hugo was at that time in exile in Brussels and Baudelaire was friendly with him. Upon being notified, Victor's son and his wife Adele immediately appeared at the poet's bedside to help him. They immediately took him to a Medical Institute of the Augustinian Sisters even though there was little hope. Next to the bed appears his publisher who wanted to publish as soon as possible the new and complete version of "Flowers of Evil". In Paris, meanwhile, it was written that "the poet Baudelaire is in a serious condition" while his friend, the poet Banville, claimed in a newspaper that "Baudelaire is still alive. Thank you, God!" Only then did Baudelaire's mother realize how much poets and publishers respected her son, how much they talked about "Flowers of Evil", a book that Baudelaire had once given her very happily, as soon as he had read a few poems she had given him back. as he called them unworthy. It was at this time that Baudelaire could no longer stand his mother, so much so that the publisher begged her to leave as it caused health problems. But after two months they inform him that Baudelaire is very serious. Baudelaire was at his wits end.

In an almost lethargic state, his mother and a few friends accompanied him by train to the Gare du Nord in Paris. It was June 30, 1867. When he alighted, leaning on a stick and carried by his friend Alfred Steven, he surprisingly let out a few shouts of joy so much so that his friends waiting for him at the station thought he had gone mad. Unable to move him, they put him in the first hotel near the station, in the "Hotel Terminus". Baudelaire was completely white and could not speak. Even his other publisher, Michel Levy, who wanted to reprint the book The flowers of evil, he spoke to him in signs. A few days later they took him to doctor Duval's clinic where Nerval had been before, but his days were numbered. To help him, his friends writers and artists such as Prosper Merimé, Saint-Beuve, etc., petitioned the Minister of Education to give the great poet a pension, but this pension was ridiculous enough to pay for a month his bed in the clinic. In front of his bed he always looked at a reproduction of Francisco Goya. It was a portrait of Maya. Surely he must have remembered his "black Venus", Zhanna. Soon the poet would fall into agony.

Charles Baudelaire died on August 31, 1867. A few days earlier he had asked to hear Wagner and two of his female friends came to play music. He could not say a word to the priest who went to him. He only moved his eyelids. Would he accept now to go to heaven, next to the Great God?! His friend Asselineau announced to the literary world: "Baudelaire died after a long but painless illness. He could not fight. Mass will take place on Monday..." Meanwhile, his mother had said: "At last, I was left alone and I have nothing to connect me with life. Oh, my poor son! Adored son that I no longer have you!" At the mass held for him in the church of Saint-Eyleau, Nadar, Manet, Banville, Verlaine and his publishers had come. His body was accompanied by a group of poets and friends, headed by Verlaine, and taken to the cemetery of Montparnasse, under a dark sky full of clouds, where a strong wind was blowing. Had he not previously written about the death he foresaw as in poetry Traveling?

“O death, old captain, let us raise the anchor!
It's time to leave this place that annoys us!
The sky and the sea are like black paint!
While the hearts that know us, are full of light!
Give me your poison that he may comfort us!
And we want the fire to light our minds
To be lost in perdition, in Hell, Heaven or wherever,
At the end of the Unknown to find the new one! "

Even dead, for a long time, official criticism and high society would leave the great poet in silence, just as they would leave Rimbaud or Verlaine in silence a little later. Even the first days of his death, the newspapers would only tell stories of cabarets, lovers, brawls, accusing the poet of being "immoral" and "a man of the devil". But true artists who understood his value felt the pain of losing one of their colossus. Baudelaire's death was truly painful as this man, in his lifetime, did not enjoy the appreciation of the society in which he had lived and created. That's why he felt himself as a "stranger" within this society and his frustration, in a natural way, would be conceived in some of the lines he wrote in poetic prose Spleen,[5] in the fragment The stranger:

"- We said, who do you love more, O mysterious man, - your father, your mother, your sister or your brother? - I have no father, no mother, no sister and no brother. - Then beauty? Gold? – I love the clouds… the clouds that cross the sky over there… the wonderful clouds! "

The only award he received from the living was "Knight of the Legion of Honor", which his mother could now be proud of.

"I love clouds. The wonderful clouds"... These words today sound tragic for the short and dark life of such a great poet.

Today we meditate on Baudelaire and his work and remember the Albanian intelligentsia of the 20s and 30s when his poems began to be translated. We remember the Albanian lyceum students of the Lyceum of Korça or the Albanian students of Parisian universities, such as Dhimitër Shuteriqi who published his translations from Baudelaire.

Walking today through the streets of Paris, following the Baudelaire route, those old stools, those forgotten windows and hotels where the unstoppable human river overflows, these places bring back to our imagination the man who so beautifully carved the verse with his pez, the cry and his joy. When a friend of ours came from Canada to visit Paris, on her way back she didn't want to leave this city without seeing Baudelaire's tomb. Of course, she surprised me with her insistence on meeting her favorite poet, many of whose poems she knew by heart. And under the beautiful sun of the cemetery of Montparnasse, alone, she and the poet stood, while someone approached to recite before the grave the poem of Unknown. As she ran away, she reached out and left a cigarette on the grave. A sign, a semiology of love and nostalgia, a trembling memory, a sign that she had also come there to greet him in a friendly way. And so, after a long silence, her legs moved slightly, with one last look, as if to say: "Au revoir mon cher Baudelaire!"...

There was sunshine, a golden peace, even though the life of the great poet had been a loss in the sea of ​​mourning and the cry of love, a life on the stage of great art!

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[1] At first Baudelaire had thought of calling this volume poetry lesbians, (Les Lesbiennes), even though he knew it was a provocative title.
[2] Charles Beaudelaire, Ed. La Pleiade, Gallimard, Paris.
[3] Baudelaire, Claude Pichois, Jean Ziegler, Ed. Julliard, 1987.
[4] Baudelaire, Henry Troyat, Ed. Flammarion, Paris.
[5] Translated by Besa Kadare.