Baudelaire's stepfather, a capable and resolute man, rose to the rank of general, was named minister to Turkey in 1848 and ambassador to Spain in 1851, and in 1853 became a senator. But his nature was different from Baudelaire's, and he took a very dim view of his stepson's desire to be a poet.
Baudelaire was expelled from the Lycée Louis le Grand in 1839 before receiving his baccalaureate degree, but he managed to obtain it later that year. He registered for legal studies in Paris and for a time led a dissipated, bohemian existence in the Latin Quarter, where he probably contracted syphilis, which later caused his death. He may also have begun taking opium and hashish during these years. In 1841 his worried parents arranged a sea voyage to India to draw the young poet out of his dissolute environment. His ship sailed from Bordeaux but was damaged in a storm, and Baudelaire apparently went no farther than the island of Mauritius, to the east of Madagascar. He returned home, however, with ineffaceable memories of exotic lands and seas.
When he was 21, Baudelaire inherited a modest fortune from his father's estate, but his extravagance soon led to the appointment of a legal guardian whose conscientious control of his finances drove the poet nearly to despair.
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