The Eurostar from London to Paris takes just over two hours and in that time the elderly man in the seat opposite consumes a bottle of Côte du Rhône. He’s an academic going to what he calls a ‘mumbo-jumbo’ two-day conference. I get the impression the train trip is going to be the best part of his weekend. My time in Paris is partly to be spent finding out what is left of the nineteenth-century city that created and shaped France’s greatest poet, Charles Baudelaire. More importantly I want to try and throw light on the central mystery of Baudelaire’s life: his long and passionate affair with the woman he called his Black Venus, Jeanne Duval. The most unlikely lovers in literature lived together for twenty years from 1842 in a relation- ship which destroyed Baudelaire as a man but made him a great poet.

The woman who became such a creative and disruptive force in Baude- laire’s life was a voluptuous Creole beauty whose origins are as mysterious as the hypnotic effect she had on the young poet.
Most historians conclude that she came from the Caribbean, possibly Haiti, the progeny of a mixed race marriage, perhaps between a French planter and a slave. What we do know is that she arrived in Paris in 1840 when she was about twenty years old.

Baudelaire first saw his Black Venus on stage in a small cabaret club at the bottom end of the Champs Élysees one night. She only had a one line part but it was enough. He was captivated. The next day she agreed to move into his apartment on the Île Saint-Louis.

It was not long before Duval introduced her lover to opium, then fashion- ably taken in liquid form as laudanum. He rapidly became an addict and the two lovers embarked on a lavish lifestyle that quickly depleted the substantial fortune Baudelaire had inherited from his father. Duval also started a long series of affairs in which she betrayed him both with his friends and complete strangers.

Why then did Baudelaire remain with her? Why did he say, as he was dy- ing, that he had had only two responsibilities in his life – to his art and to his Black Venus?

Above all what was it in Jeanne Duval that inspired the poet to place at the heart of Les Fleurs de Mal, the cycle of sensuous poems which are all about her and describe her in explicit terms?
Was it just lust for a voluptuous woman who attracted the attention of all who saw her? His poems tell us he was enraptured with her sensuality, by her prominent breasts, her tresses of long black hair, and by the dark eyes that he described as ‘black chimneys that vent fire and smoke from the furnace of her soul.’

History has not been kind to Jeanne Duval. She has been dismissed as a wanton, a slut and little more than a thief and prostitute by literary critics and Baudelaire’s biographers.
But to his dying day Charles Baudelaire remained loyal to his Black Venus. Even when on his death bed he was trying to borrow yet more money to pay for her medical bills.

Why?

That is the question that has brought me to Paris.

We reach the Gare du Nord station where in 1864 Charles Baudelaire had taken the train to Brussels in a futile attempt to find some respite from cred- itors, illness and artistic failure. Paris was then at the height of its Second Empire fame as Europe’s City of Light. The poet returned from his self-imposed exile two years later, a hollowed out, shrunken figure known only, if at all, for his translation into French of Edgar Allan Poe. As his life drew to a close Baudelaire found only darkness in a city that he had loved from childhood and that had inspired much of his great poetry. In lines dedicated to the great Victor Hugo he described Paris as:

Pulsating city overrun with dreams
Where phantoms tug your sleeve by day
And the city’s deepest secrets stream
Like the lifeblood of a sleeping giant.*

Paris was Baudelaire’s lifeblood, his passion, his paradise of pleasure as a young man and, as he grew up, the source of the artistic genius that gave us Les Fleurs du Mal, a slim volume of poems that is as breathtakingly original and shocking today as it was when published – and banned – in 1857. Yet Paris was also the poet’s downfall. The teeming slums of the left bank in the 1840s when the poet reached his majority were notorious for brothels whose women were riddled with venereal disease. In the bars and cafés opium and hashish were taken openly and sexual favours exchanged for a glass or two of wine. Baudelaire, like most of the writers and artists of the days, loved the sleazy charms of the tangle of streets and alleyways on the Left Bank. Their evenings were spent in cafés such as Le Procope in the Rue de L’Ancienne Comédie in the 7th Arrondissement.

To my surprise Le Procope still exists. It was there I head first to find a fash- ionable tourist restaurant adorned outside with national flags and promi- nent claims that Robespierre, Napoleon and Balzac are among former pa- trons. But when I enquire about Baudelaire, the smart young Frenchman on reception denies that the poet had ever visited the establishment.

Wondering at such nonsense – how could he possibly know? – I walk the short distance to Baudelaire’s birthplace, No 17, Rue Hautefeuille, in the 6th. The street is still there but it was bisected in the 1850s by Boulevard Saint-Germain when Paris was brutally but brilliantly remodelled by Baron Haussmann. The house where Baudelaire was born is long gone. There is not even a plaque to mark where it once stood.