Charles Baudelaire

French poet tormented by religion and the struggle between good and evil in man, suffused with his deeply Catholic sense of sin and remorse. His "Flowers of Evil" was condemned as immoral in 1857, confiscated by authorities for offending public morals. He was a Catholic and a Satanist, a debauchee and mystic, cynical sensualist and yearner for purity. Sexually morbid and a sadist, he sought the unbathed women "of the streets."

In his extraordinarily complicated life, he had a suffocatingly intimate relationship with his bewildered mother, who lovingly nurtured and then callously ignored his lifelong dependence on her which reached classically Oedipal proportions. He was the son of a lapsed Catholic priest, a roué and cultured epicurean who passed on to his son his love of art. After his dad died in 1827, his mom married Col. Jacques Aupicki, a dour career diplomat who, disgusted by his high-strung stepson's eccentricities, tried to impose military standards of discipline and conduct, values that Baudelaire disavowed in a rebellion that lasted the rest of his life.

By the time he came into his inheritance from his birth father in 1842, he was already exorbitantly precocious and foppish, squandering over a half of his considerable fortune in 18 months. His taste ran to elegant fashion, and he would have gone through the entire amount had not his stepfather brought the spending spree to a halt with legal intervention. Much to his humiliation, Baudelaire was then forced to petition an attorney for his funds, cap in hand, living on a meager monthly allowance.

His spending spree was the only time in his short and miserable life that he was ever without financial stress. His writings were not only scandalous, but paid poorly, and he once remarked that his income for years was the equivalent of the price of two cigars a day.

He lived in dilapidated fleabag hotels, eking out a precarious existence as a poet, art critic and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.