Autograph letter signed by Charles Baudelaire to Narcisse Ancelle, written in black ink on a sheet of blue paper.
Folds from mailing, three minute pinholes not affecting the text.
This letter was transcribed in the Complete Works volume 11 published in 1949 by L. Conard.
A moving letter from Brussels addressed to the celebrated family notary who became in 1844 Charles's legal guardian, charged with managing his annuity and his exponential debts. A complex relationship developed between the poet and his guardian, mingling necessity and mistrust, yet nonetheless bearing witness to genuine mutual respect between the two men.
This correspondence, devoid of the emotional quality of his letters to his mother or the circumlocutions in his exchanges with creditors, constitutes one of the most precious biographical sources on the poet. Indeed, Baudelaire's financial dependence constrained him to great transparency with his guardian, and each of his letters to Ancelle admirably summarizes his wanderings.
Thus, this letter evokes the terrible mire in which the poet found himself in Belgium and his constantly postponed return to Paris. When he writes, Baudelaire is still in Brussels at the Hôtel du Grand Miroir, "28 rue de la Montagne" (but one must not write the hotel's name, otherwise letters do not reach him directly), where he is dying of boredom, illness, and resentment toward a country in which he innocently believed he would find glory. This announcement of imminent departure for Paris, "Two or three days after your reply I will leave," echoes all the similar promises the poet has made for nearly a year to his correspondents. This one will be aborted, like all the others, for as he confesses to Ancelle a few months earlier, Paris fills him with "a dog's fear." It is only in August 1865 that he will make a final and brief stay in France before his fatal stroke.
His return, "I am eagerly awaited in Paris and in Honfleur," was nevertheless motivated by a compelling reason: to negotiate with a publisher, through Manet's intervention, the publication of his collection of reflections on his contemporaries which he had already titled My Heart Laid Bare (Mon cœur mis à nu) and whose manuscript is partly at his mother's house in Honfleur. Another failure—the work would not appear until 1897, thirty years after Baudelaire's death.
But it is undoubtedly the reference to the "two large paintings [he wishes to] send to Honfleur" that gives this letter all its significance. Baudelaire evokes his wish to repatriate paintings from his collection that he left with various lenders or restorers, of which he had already sent a list to Ancelle a few months earlier. Among these, which ones did he want to bring back to his mother? His father's portrait, the Boilly, the Manet, a Constantin Guys? There is no mention in other letters of this art shipment and of the "remainder" to which the paintings were to be joined. This desire to "send to Honfleur" his precious belongings nonetheless testifies to the weakened poet's wish to settle permanently in his mother's "jewel-house" in Honfleur, an island of serenity where Baudelaire dreamed of a peaceful retreat where all would once again be "order and beauty, luxury, calm and voluptuousness." He would indeed return there, paralyzed and mute, but for a final year of agony after his syphilitic crisis. The Hôtel du Grand Miroir would remain his last true dwelling, as noted on Tuesday, April 3, 1866, in the register of admissions at the Saint-Jean Clinic: "Name and first names: Baudelaire Charles. Address: France and 28 rue de la Montagne. Profession: man of letters. Illness: apoplexy."
A fine letter to the man who was both Baudelaire's persecutor and protector. He accompanied the poet until his death, before becoming executor of the family estate.
