This is a biography of the French poet Charles Baudelaire. When Charles Baudelaire was six, his father died. His mother's remarriage to an army officer, Jacques Aupick, had a disastrous effect on his life, and his intense, equivocal devotion to her largely explains his failure to form a stable relationship with any other woman. He suffered not only from profound emotional problems, but often from poverty. For most of his adult life he had no settled home. He contracted syphilis in his youth and died at 46. He moved, however, among the distinguished Frenchmen of his age. He was a friend of Nerval, Gautier, Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle; he knew but he disliked Victor Hugo. His relations with contemporaries were fruitful and illuminating, if sometimes bitter; his influence on the next generation - Mallarme, Rimbaud, Verlaine - was profound. A lifelong admirer of Delacroix and Manet, both misunderstood in their time, he was also among the earliest, most passionate supporters of Wagner. Baudelaire is a figure in the history of French culture.