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“Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?”
From Homer in classical Greece to Milton in the English Renaissance, epic poets have invoked the sacred muses for inspiration. In a perverse rejection of this noble tradition, Baudelaire and Nietzsche did not seek inspiration from the goddesses, embodiments and sponsors of art, but pursued destructive women who tormented and humiliated them. The women they loved were foreign, exotic beauties. Charles Baudelaire's Jeanne Duval was West Indian, Friedrich Nietzsche's Lou Salomé was Russian. Both women followed the same destructive-yet-creative pattern. They made the writers suffer, suffering inspired their art and their art portrayed the malicious muses who made them suffer. Though permanently scarred, they wrote two of the most important works in modern literature: The Flowers of Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Baudelaire's mulatto mistress, Jeanne Duval, had many traits in common with another muse, Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets. She has dark skin and black hair, and causes exquisite pain in love: “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head” (Sonnet 130). Like the Dark Lady, Duval is mendacious: “When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies” (138). Both are described as satanic women who drive their lovers to damnation: “To win me soon to hell, my female evil” (144), and as beauties who end up as carrion: “Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, / Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?” (146).