Autograph letter signed by Charles Baudelaire, addressed to Antoine Arondel, written in black ink on a single sheet of blue paper.
Folds typical of mailing; minor losses expertly restored without affecting the text; a small tear on the signature discreetly repaired. This letter is transcribed in Correspondance I of Baudelaire (Pléiade, p. 277) and dated by Claude Pichois to May 1854.
In it, Baudelaire sends theatre tickets to his art dealer Antoine Arondel — a notorious and unscrupulous character who exploited the poet’s boundless taste for fine arts and encouraged his collecting obsession.

Baudelaire, endowed with the genius of poetry but not of business, had rapidly spent much of his paternal inheritance of 70,000 francs, received upon reaching his majority in 1842. His correspondent, the painter and art dealer Antoine Arondel, lived at the same time with Baudelaire at the Hôtel de Lauzun, then known as the Hôtel Pimodan, on the Île Saint-Louis. On the ground floor, Arondel’s curiosity shop, set up in the courtyard, was a “veritable place of perdition for the prodigal” (Marie-Christine Natta, Baudelaire): he provided the poet with numerous “painted dreams on canvas” - Spanish works in the manner of the Baroque painter Zurbaran, Italian in the style of Bassan. The poet paid dearly for his antiquarian mania, “incurring debts through promissory notes and bills, the earliest dating 5 November 1843; several others predated the judicial assignment of 21 September 1844. The moneylender worked so shrewdly that his client soon realised he was being deceived, yet could not free himself. Hence a satirical attack under anonymity in Les Mystères galans des Théâtres de Paris (1844) and half-mocking mentions in the Salons of 1845 and 1846.” (Claude Pichois, Lettres à Charles Baudelaire, 1973, p. 13).
Baudelaire took his revenge in a scathing paragraph of Les Mystères galans, which also targeted Baron Pichon, from whom he rented apartments at the Hôtel de Lauzun: « N'avez-vous pas aujourd'hui MM. Hiéronyme Pichon, lord Arundell et pas mal d'amateurs de rosses plus ou moins arabes, qui lésinent sur leur débauche, et grapillent sur le revenu du rat qu'ils paient, on ne fait aujourd'hui que de la débauche pot-au-feu »  [“Do you not have today, Messrs. Hiéronyme Pichon, Lord Arundell, and a number of amateurs of nags, more or less Arab, who scrimp on their debauchery and pinch the income of the rat they pay; nowadays one only practices stew-like debauchery.”] On reading this insult, Arondel demanded that Baudelaire apologize to Pichon. Under threat, the poet even recorded his retraction in writing.

At the time this letter was written, in 1854, Baudelaire was still indebted to Arondel: “As the years went on, the poet renewed his promissory notes, now burdened with growing interest. Arondel sought repayment and resorted to various stratagems yet faced the persistent refusal of Ancelle [the court-appointed trustee].” (Claude Pichois, ibid.) One of these manoeuvres consisted in reselling the promissory notes to front men. In despair, Baudelaire here implores Arondel - in a cryptic and dramatic passage - for help in appeasing one of those unpleasant figures demanding payment:

« Je vais vous écrire une lettre, dès ce soir, où je vous expliquerai très clairement ce que je puis faire, ce que je désire, - le possible, et l'impossible, puis vous m'écrirez pour me donner un rendez-vous pour voir votre Perducet, dont il faut absolument que je triomphe,- avec votre aide » [“I shall write to you this evening, setting out very clearly what I am able to do and what I wish to do -  what is possible and what is not. You will then write to me to arrange a meeting with your Perducet, whom I must, with your help, absolutely overcome”]. According to Pichois, “nothing of the sort happened,” and Baudelaire never wrote another letter to his correspondent.

To win Arondel’s favor, Baudelaire offers him theater tickets: « Je vous engage, si vous voulez voir mes merveilleux Chinois, à aller là-bas de bonne heure, car si vous vouliez esquiver le drame précédent, vous risqueriez fort de ne pas trouver de places, - le papier que je vous laisse étant un simple mot du directeur, et n'impliquant pas la retenue de places numérotées» [“I urge you, if you wish to see my marvellous Chinese, to go there early, for if you tried to skip the preceding play, you would run a great risk of finding no seats available - the note I am leaving you being merely a word from the director, and not implying the reservation of numbered places”].

This troupe of acrobats had pleased Baudelaire’s taste for the exotic. The following year, during his visit to the Universal Exhibition, he would praise “the divine grace of cosmopolitanism” and “the Chinese product - strange, bizarre, contorted in its form, intense in its color, and sometimes delicate to the point of faintness”. Théophile Gautier enthusiastically praised the performance of these acrobats in La Presse on 25 April 1854. An attentive spectator of both tragic drama and vaudeville performances, Baudelaire aspired to become a playwright - he had obtained the tickets through Marc Fournier, director of the Porte Saint-Martin, where he hoped to stage his play L’Ivrogne.

Baudelaire was also occupied with publishing his translations of Edgar Allan Poe: « J'avais totalement oublié qu'aujourd'hui et demain il faut que je dîne chez la même personne, le chef de l'administration du Siècle [Charles de Tramont], et vous savez si je suis intéressé à le tourmenter » [“I had quite forgotten that today and tomorrow I must dine with the same man, the chief of administration of Le Siècle (Charles de Tramont), and you know how keen I am to torment him”]. That same year saw the publication of his translation of Poe’s Philosophy of Furniture by the future publisher of Les Fleurs du Mal, reflecting his passion for collecting both objects and works of art.

An intriguing letter, bearing Baudelaire’s fine signature, from the painter of modern life whose aesthetic tastes led to his ruin and inspired his poetry.

Provenance: Ronald Davis collection.