I would accept neither his fame nor his fortune

Never meet your heroes

Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo (Photos: Etienne Carjat/Historical Picture Archive/Corbis via Getty Images)

French poet Charles Baudelaire was eighteen when he wrote the first of these two letters—a gushing tribute to his literary hero, Victor Hugo. Awestruck and eager, he poured out his admiration, desperate to express how profoundly Hugo’s work had moved him. At that moment, Hugo was a giant in his eyes and an untouchable genius.

Fast-forward twenty-five years, and Baudelaire’s tone had soured spectacularly. Now a celebrated poet himself, he writes to his mother with disdain for the man he once worshipped—dismissing Hugo as tiresome, his latest book as dull, and his family as fools. All despite Hugo publicly defending Baudelaire when Les Fleurs du Mal was put on trial for obscenity.

Gratitude, it seems, has its limits.

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25th February 1840

Dear Sir,

Recently I saw a performance of Marion de Lorme: the beauty of the play filled me with such delight and happiness that I long with all my heart to meet the author and thank him personally. I'm still a schoolboy and it may be that I'm committing an unprecedented piece of impertinence, but I'm completely ignorant of social niceties and I thought that you'd be indulgent towards me. A schoolboy's praise and thanks can't affect you deeply, in comparison with the praise and thanks that have been heaped upon you by so many men of taste. You've probably received so many people that you're not likely to be very eager to attract yet another irksome individual. Still, if you only knew how sincere and how true is the love of the young! It seems to me (perhaps this is just my pride) that I understand all your works. I love you as I love your books; I believe that you are good and openhearted, because you've undertaken to rehabilitate several people; because, far from yielding to general opinion, you've often reshaped it, with pride and dignity. I imagine that by your side, sir, I'd learn numerous good and great things; I love you as one loves a hero, a book, as one loves all beautiful things, purely and without self-interest. Perhaps I'm very bold to send you, willy-nilly, these praises through the post, but I wanted to tell you intensely and simply how deeply I love and admire you, and how I tremble to think that I may be making a fool of myself. And yet, sir, since you've been young yourself, you surely understand this love for an author that a book sparks off within us, and that imperious need to thank him face to face and to kiss his hands in all humility.

Whether or not you are so kind as to reply, please accept my everlasting gratitude.

Charles Baudelaire

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[25 years later]

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3rd November 1865

My good dear mother,

[…]

Victor Hugo, who stayed for some time in Brussels, and who wants me to go and spend some time on his island, bored me and tired me very much. I would accept neither his fame nor his fortune, if with them I had to take his frightful absurdities. Madame Hugo is half an idiot, and her two sons are great fools. If you would like to read his last book, I will send it you at once. As usual, enormous success as to sales, but a disappointment to all intelligent people who read it. He had meant this time to be light and joyous, in love and rejuvenated. It is horribly heavy.

I only see in such things, as in so many others, another occasion for thanking God for not making me equally stupid.

What are you doing? How are you? Do not bear me a grudge, and answer me, my dear mother. How are your days filled, and what do you think of your health?

I embrace you with all my heart.

C. B.

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The first letter, from Baudelaire to Hugo, is reprinted in Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude. The second letter, to his mother, comes from The Letters of Charles Baudelaire to His Mother, 1833-1866.

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