Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. His father died when he was six, and the following year his mother married an officer who later became a general and an ambassador; Baudelaire's relations with his stepfather were always strained. Expelled from school for indiscipline, he led a bohemian life in the Latin Quarter. To reform him his family put him on a ship bound for India, but he turned back halfway. On coming of age he inherited his father's fortune and squandered half of it in under two years, so that his family had a legal guardian appointed for him; for the rest of his life he lived on the monthly allowance the guardian paid him, always in debt. A keen art critic, he also spent more than ten years translating Edgar Allan Poe. In his forties he suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak, and he died at forty-six.