Comte de Lautréamont

French-Uruguayan poet, known as the "black romantic."

In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to high school in France by his father. He was trained in French education and technology at the Imperial Lycée in Tarbes. In 1863 he enrolled in the Lycée Louis Barthou in Pau, where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy. After a brief stay with his father in Montevideo, Ducasse settled in Paris at the end of 1867.

His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror (1868) and Poésies (1870), had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. Les Chants de Maldoror, a booklet of thirty-two pages, is considered by many to be a bold, taboo-defying poem concerning pain and cruelty. Poésies includes parts of texts by famous authors, cleverly inverted, corrected and openly plagiarized by Ducasse.

Lautréamont died of TB at the age of 24, on 24 November 1870, at 8 a.m. in his hotel in Paris.