Failing health induced Baudelaire to quit Paris and establish himself in Brussels; but he received no benefit from the change of climate, and the first symptoms of his terrible malady manifested themselves—­a slowness of speech, and hesitation over words.  As a slow and sententious enunciation was characteristic of him, the symptoms attracted no attention, until he fell under a sudden and violent attack.  He was brought back to Paris and conveyed to a “maison de sante,” where he died, after lingering several months in a paralyzed condition, motionless, speechless; nothing alive in him but thought, seeking to express itself through his eyes.

The nature of Baudelaire’s malady and death was, by the public at large, accepted as confirmation of the suspicion that he was in the habit of seeking his inspiration in the excitation of hashish and opium.  His friends, however, recall the fact of his incessant work, and intense striving after his ideal in art; his fatigue of body and mind, and his increasing weariness of spirit under the accumulating worries and griefs of a life for which his very genius unfitted him.  He was also known to be sober in his tastes, as all great workers are.  That he had lent himself more than once to the physiological and psychological experiment of hashish was admitted; but he was a rare visitor at the seances in the saloon of the Hotel Pimodau, and came as a simple observer of others.  His masterly description of the hallucinations produced by hashish is accompanied by analytical and moral commentaries which unmistakably express repugnance to and condemnation of the drug:—­

“Admitting for the moment,” he writes, “the hypothesis of a constitution tempered enough and strong enough to resist the evil effects of the perfidious drug, another, a fatal and terrible danger, must be thought of,—­that of habit.  He who has recourse to a poison to enable him to think, will soon not be able to think without the poison.  Imagine the horrible fate of a man whose paralyzed imagination is unable to work without the aid of hashish or opium....  But man is not so deprived of honest means of gaining heaven, that he is obliged to invoke the aid of pharmacy or witchcraft; he need not sell his soul in order to pay for the intoxicating caresses and the love of houris.  What is a paradise that one purchases at the expense of one’s own soul?...  Unfortunate wretches who have neither fasted nor prayed, and who have refused the redemption of labor, ask from black magic the means to elevate themselves at a single stroke to a supernatural existence.  Magic dupes them, and lights for them a false happiness and a false light; while we, poets and philosophers, who have regenerated our souls by incessant work and contemplation, by the assiduous exercise of the will and permanent nobility of intention, we have created for our use a garden of true beauty.