Page:Poems of Baudelaire Sturm.djvu/21

 xviii CHARLES BAUDELAIRE:

hopelessness of the profession of letters. The future author of T lze [flowers of Evil, however, was now his own master and in a position, so far as monetary matters were concerned, to follow out his own whim. He took apartments in the Hotel Pimodan, a kind of literary lodging-house where all Bohemia met; and where Gautier and Boissard were also at that period installed. Then began that life of uninterrupted labour and meditation that has given to France her most characteristic literature. for these ‘poems of Baudelaire's are not only original in them- selves but have been the cause of originality in others; they are the root of modern French literature and much of the best English litera- ture; they were the origin of that new method in poetry that gave Mallarmé and Verlaine to France; Yeats and some others to England. It was in the Hotel Pimodan that Baudelaire and Gautier ﬁrst met and formed one of those unfading friendships not so rare among men of letters as among men'of the world; there also the “Hashish-Eaters” held the se’antes that have since become famous in the history of literature. Hashish and opium, indeed, contribute not a