Cats
They are alike, prim scholar and perfervid lover:
When comes the season of decay, they both decide
Upon sweet, husky cats to be the household pride;
Cats choose, like them, to sit, and like them, shudder.
Like partisans of carnal dalliance and science,
They search for silence and the shadowings of dread;
Hell well might harness them as horses for the dead,
If it could bend their native proudness in compliance.
In reverie they emulate the noble mood
Of giant sphinxes stretched in depths of solitude
Who seem to slumber in a never-ending dream;
Within their fertile loins a sparkling magic lies;
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam,
Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.
Charles Baudelaire was born in 1821 in Paris in the family of a senior civil servant. His father died in 1827 and his mother re-married an officer who later worked as ambassador in different countries. Baudelaire received his education in Lyon and Paris . In the following years, Baudelaire leads an irregular life, believed to be sick with syphilis at the time. To get him on the right path, his guardians send him on a journey to India. After returning to Paris, Baudelaire is already full-grown, but continues his extravagant life, and as he is threatened with ruin, his family puts his property under custody. During this period, he met the young man named Joanna Duval, whose relationship continued until the end of his life. In 1845 and 1846, Baudelaire published critical reviews of contemporary art that drew attention to the courage of the views expressed. He took part in the Revolution of 1848 and for some time was interested in politics, but his views go through the anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the story of Raise d'État by Giuseppe Ferrari to the ultramountain critique of liberalism by Joseph de Mestre. Meanwhile, Baudelaire's financial difficulties intensified, especially after the bankruptcy of his friend and publisher Auguste Pulee Mallasis in 1861. In 1864 he moved to Brussels where he hoped to sell the rights for his works. During this period, besides his addiction to opium, he started drinking too much. In 1866, he was hit by a paralyzed parachute. The last two years of his life he spent in sanatoriums in Brussels and Paris, where he died in 1867.