Belgium Stripped Bare

In April of 1864, Baudelaire departed Paris for Brussels with something of a massive shipwreck in his wake: his major work, Les fleurs du Mal, had been condemned and censored a decade earlier, many of his other works were out of print, and he pawned his prized Poe translations to gain much needed survival money. Fearful of being imprisoned for debt, the poet who was an outcast in Paris would soon become a pariah in Brussels. Not long after his arrival, rumors spread that he was a spy report...