The Tragic Obsession of Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval
Poet involved
What happened
The avant-garde French poet Charles Baudelaire met Jeanne Duval, a Haitian-born actress and dancer of mixed French and African descent, and embarked on a stormy, agonizing love affair that lasted two decades. Duval, whom Baudelaire called his 'Black Venus', came to personify exoticism, dangerous sensuality, and financial ruin to the poet's highly conservative family, who eventually placed his inheritance under legal guardianship. Their volatile relationship was marked by constant breakups, poverty, and the ravages of syphilis.
Literary impact
Duval served as the profound muse for some of the most hauntingly beautiful and controversial poems in Baudelaire's landmark 1857 collection 'Les Fleurs du mal' (The Flowers of Evil). This deeply troubled relationship catalyzed the transition from traditional Romanticism to the Symbolist and Modernist movements, permanently changing the course of European lyric poetry.
Source: Wikipedia
