POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis

Excerpt from Baudelaire chapter:

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, just as we have the pox in our bones. We are democratized and syphilised.
Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poetry Les fleurs du mal—Flowers of Evil, so scandalized his contemporaries with its theme of beauty and corruption that he was charged with obscenity, and six of the poems having to do with lesbians and vampires were suppressed by the French Public Safety Section of the Ministry of the Interior. Gustave Flaubert wrote a deeply indignant letter of sympathy to the young man, asking against what had he offended: religion? public morals? It was something new, Flaubert wrote, to prosecute a book of verse. To his mother Baudelaire explained that Les fleurs du mal was a witness to his disgust and hatred of everything. The poet Paul Verlaine called him le poète maudit (the cursed poet).

How much of this disgust and hatred was related to his knowledge of being syphilitic? (Mal means both evil and malady.) Baudelaire never made any public statements about his disease, although he did speak of it in letters to his family. He confessed to his mother (6 May 1861): “You know that when very young I caught a venereal infection, which I later supposed to be totally cured. In Dijon after 1848 it erupted again. It was made to subside once more. Now it is returned in a novel form, marks on the skin, and extraordinary stiffness in all the joints. You may believe me; I know about it. Perhaps in the state of sadness in which I am plunged, my terror makes it worse.” This sadness contrasts with Baudelaire’s famous statement of bravado: “On the day that the writer corrects his first proof, he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just caught his first pox.”