Sometimes things are much worse than they appear. A corpse in repose, dignified and dressy, is a very grave thing indeed. But a patina of prosperity, of success even, also holds the attention–the business of life has been correctly concluded, and now it is for others to gnash their teeth and mope around in sackcloth dumping ashes on their heads. You lie there in your finest suit, unperturbed, the eye of the grieving storm.
That, finally, is how Baudelaire seemed to me. A final and perfectly respectable totem of a life fully lived; the man on the wedding cake was lying down, his days of doom and despair turned tidy as a prom photo–which is so popular with the youngsters today.
His last days had been wordless (though not soundless, for he emitted muffled moans and snotty tears at regular intervals), as if ravening syphilis had eaten the fat sack of language that had been his brain, leaving behind only an inarticulate rind. And yet, there was some apprehension in his glance–a distinct anger that nailed you to the doorway if you were moved to visit him in his last rooms.
One day I had walked in on him, his hair white and greasy, hanging like a broken albatross’ wing from his soapstone dome. His large head was nodding with an uncontrollable twitchy nod, as if forced by God to agree to all the torment heaped upon his thin poet’s shoulders. He held his book in his hands, a sky-blue early edition of Flowers of Evil. He reviewed the page before him silently, unable to speak. It was a somber thing to see one so effortlessly elegant in his mode of expression, so spontaneous and pointed in all his remarks, so silent. He had been untongued, unable even to write a sentence, unable to understand what was said, it seemed, or perhaps, flambeyed in his own inferno, he was simply beyond anything I could do to reach him. He seemed to understand his own situation well enough. Defeat without resignation; it was an horrific punishment visited upon him, perhaps the only punishment to which he could muster no baying response.
A cloud broke away from the sun through a large Spanish window. It was then, in the renewed light, that I noticed. Beneath his hand the book lay open to the poem Cythera, and a single tear drooled down his cheek.
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