Women played a commanding role in his life. They always do with any poet worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging this as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with Woman than the individual. The legend of the beautiful creature he brought from the East resolves itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne Duval. He met her in Paris, after he had been in the East. She sang at a cafe concert in Paris. She was more brown than black. She was not handsome, not intelligent, not good; yet he idealized her, for she was the source of half his inspiration. To her were addressed those marvelous evocations of the Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious dawns on strange far-away seas and “superb Byzant,” domes that devils built. Baudelaire is the poet of perfumes; he is also the patron saint of ennui. No one has so chanted the praise of odors. His soul swims on perfume as do other souls on music, he has sung. As he grew older he seemed to hunt for more acrid odors; he often presents an elaborately chased vase the carving of which transports us, but from which the head is quickly averted. Jeanne, whom he never loved, no matter what may be said, was a sorceress. But she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; he left her a dozen times only to return. He was a capital draughtsman with a strong nervous line and made many pen and ink drawings of her. They are not prepossessing. In her rapid decline she was not allowed to want. Madame Aupick paid her expenses in the hospital. A sordid history. She was a veritable flower of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like music, would be colorless, scentless, if it sounded no dissonances.
—from Egoists: A Book of Super Men by James Huneker (1857–1921). Huneker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although mostly remembered as a music critic, Huneker was also an important literary critic who introduced American readers to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, George Moore and Baudelaire.