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Could Edgar Allan Poe be a progenitor of French syphilitic literature? Poe was not diagnosed with syphilis in his lifetime, though retrospective cases have been made when examining his symptomatology. Others consider “non-conclusive state epilepticus […] encephalitis, delirium tremes, pneumonia, rabies, head trauma, or diabetic coma.” We do know that Poe received mercurial treatment for exposure to cholera, though mercurial treatment was more often prescribed for venereal disease. Poe’s brain lesion and later paresis do implicate tertiary syphilis, though this has been understudied. While Poe’s psychosexuality has been explicated alongside congenital and non-congenital syphilis, most notably by Pruette, Young, and Tuft, neurosyphilis has not been located within a specific text. Pruette does identify Poe’s sexual displacement with syphilitic infection, but neglects to determine neurosyphilitic psychosis within Poe’s oeuvre. This may be due in part to the polymorphism of the infection, whereby its pathogenesis is misdiagnosed. Indeed, Phillipe Ricord outlines the pathogenesis in his 1836 Practical Treatise on Venereal Disease, explaining that “the more the disease penetrates into the system,” the more it loses its “specific nature” and “[undergoes] the transformations which tend to assimilate it to diseases of another nature.” Syphilis was likewise “a predisposing cause to pulmonary tuberculosis,” motivating the regulation of prostitution to “diminish the danger of venereal infection” as a “public prophylaxis of consumption.” That Poe’s biographical and textual pathologies are indeterminate, or misdiagnosed for pulmonary tuberculosis as in the case of Madeline and Berenice, is to be expected. Yet a diagnostic reexamination of the text locates Poe within the circulation of syphilitic literature.

Moreover, could Charles Baudelaire’s reintegration of the syphilitic body within French literature rely on Poe’s neurosyphilitic developments? Charles Baudelaire, who underwent neurosyphilitic paresis and aphasia, openly identifies with Poe’s textual pathologies. Syphilis, to Baudelaire, is a precondition to poetry; that Poe may exhibit a neurosyphilitic pathogenesis demands a reappraisal of Poe’s effects on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Neurosyphilis may likewise inform Baudelaire’s examination of Poe’s oeuvre, which he first published in 1852 though later supplemented in 1856 and 1857. Although Baudelaire contracted syphilis in November or December of 1839, his condition progressed to neurosyphilis by 1858. Baudelaire’s pathogenesis, alongside his education under venerologist Charles Lasègue, predisposes him to syphilitic readings of Poe as early as the onset of his infection. Yet if these textual pathologies exist, where are they located? “Berenice” has been selected as a case study for Baudelaire’s attentions to Egæus’ monomania, yet “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been located as a subsidiary text for its hereditary or congenital transmissions of disease. The presupposition of Madeline Usher’s pulmonary tuberculosis likewise contextualizes “Berenice” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” within the discovery of tubercle bacillus, demonstrating how neurosyphilis was misread for consumption.

Yet Roderick, too, exhibits neurosyphilis within “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Congenital neurosyphilis is implicated by hereditary pathogenesis once Roderick admits that “much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness […] of a tenderly beloved sister.” This disease, “a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy,” is reduced to a “a mere nervous affection.” Yet it “displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations,” such as “morbid acuteness of the senses,” wherein

the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

Incest likewise qualifies hereditary syphilis once the narrator learns that “the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain.” Yet Madeline’s pathology is periodically diagnosed as consumption, as Madeline exhibits “a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character.” Yet “before the discovery of the tubercle bacillus,” in 1882, “the diagnosis between pure syphilis and tuberculosis of the lung was difficult, and syphilitic patients who developed an affection of the lung were usually considered to have consumption, to which they had been predisposed by syphilis.” Madeline’s speculative diagnosis of consumption does not negate the likelihood of a syphilitic infection, but instead increases it. Yet Roderick indicates neurosyphilis dissimilarly as his “action […] alternately vivacious and sullen.” His voice “[varies] rapidly from a tremulous indecision […] to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance,” observed in the “periods of his most intense excitement.” In 1789 a “rudimentary description” of the neurological as well as psychiatric conditions of the disease was published, associating the disorder with “grandiose thinking, disorganized behavior, emotional outbursts, and flights of wild fantasy culminating in some sort of grand collapse, a repaid dementia and paralysis.” Roderick’s “superstitious impressions,” “tremulous quaver,” and “inexplicable vagaries of madness,” are psychopathologically compatible with tertiary or neurosyphilis, as is Madeline’s paresis. Madeline’s paralytic dementia imparts neurosyphilis rather than tuberculosis, though, again, comorbid pathogeneses may be present. That the cause-effect of paralytic dementia with neurosyphilis was not confirmed until the 1880s may explain Madeline’s inconclusive diagnosis. It is further curious that Roderick does not receive consumptive diagnoses, despite the hereditary transmission of the disease. If Madeline’s pathogenesis is a “constitutional and family” illness, then why not apply the same retrospective diagnostic methods to Roderick? When examining Madeline and Roderick’s symptomatology as variations of the same infection, hereditary or congenital syphilis is categorically appropriate.

While we now know that congenital syphilis is contracted through female syphilitic infection during gestation, nineteenth-century physicians incorrectly assumed the hereditary transmission of syphilis through conception. Yet not only could syphilis be contracted at conception, but a syphilitic fetus, if infected by the father, could infect a nonsyphilitic mother. Nineteenth-century physicians likewise presupposed the possibility that hereditary syphilis could “skip” generations, justifying asymptomatic conditions of individuals within syphilitic families. The misconception of hereditary syphilis informed nineteenth-century syphilitic literature despite its inaccuracy. That the pathogenesis of Madeline or Roderick’s disease does not accommodate contemporary venereal pathology is inconsequential. Venereologists of the nineteenth-century were unaware of syphilitic aetiology, as they were its physiological and psychiatric perimeters. Neurosyphilis, referred to as “dementia paralytica,” or general paresis of the insane (GPI), resulted from neuropsychiatric disorders rather than caused them.

Antoine Bayle, a French physician and student of René Théophile Hyacinthe

Laënnec, presented in 1822 what he found to be the three stages of GPI: “The first, a mild paralysis, particularly affecting speech, and a monomania with grandiose ideas. The second stage […] a generalized mania and a worsening spastic paralysis, and the third […] dementia and severe paralysis.” Bayle’s attentions to monomania, which he catalogued the “results of inflammation of the arachnoid lining and an outpouring of serous fluid which pressed on the brain,” pathologize Roderick’s “gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound.” Yet Bayle’s medical thesis deviated from his predecessors as he believed “madness is due to a physical lesion, most often a chronic inflammation of the meninges, but sometimes a specific or sympathetic irritation of the brain.” The thesis was met with controversy, and Bayle withdrew from psychiatry. Monomania as a symptomatic or diagnostic sign likewise received conflict, with Hughlings Jacksons much later stating that “he who has justifiably concluded that a patient’s nervous symptoms are ‘caused by syphilis,’ has not come to a conclusion on which he can rest; he is in most cases only at the starting point of a pathological inquiry.” Yet the speculative location of monomania within syphilitic pathogenesis had an unequaled impact on syphilitic literature. It moreover necessitates a reexamination of “The House of Usher” as well as Poe’s “Berenice,” wherein tuberculosis has been presupposed.

The syphilitic’s “grandiose mood,” and “change in personality,” likewise maintained the idea of neurosyphilis as a “middle-class illness,” which “struck at the heart of class interests – property.” The pathogenesis of the House of Usher is as material as the pathogenesis of its inhabitants, as the syphilitic infection “had everything to do with property and little to do with sex.” The degeneration of the syphilitic indicated the degeneration of lineage as well as propertied social states, with individual neurosyphilitics sabotaging entire familial estates. The House of Usher’s “mighty walls rushing asunder” upon the deaths of Madeline and Roderick, however allegorical, is an uncanny analogue within social and psychiatric syphilitic pathology.

Although “Berenice” does not integrate property with pathogenesis, Egæus and Berenice both exhibit neurosyphilitic pathologies. Egæus’ symptomatology specifies monomania directly, making a syphilitic infection self-evident:

my own disease — for I have been told that I should call it by no other appellation — my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and, aggravated in its symptoms by the immoderate use of opium, assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form — hourly and momentarily gaining vigor — and at length obtaining over me the most singular and incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania — if I must so term it — consisted in a morbid irritability of the nerves immediately affecting those properties of the mind, in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood — but I fear that it is indeed in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied, and, as it were, buried themselves in the contemplation of even the most common objects of the universe.

Yet if Egæus’ monomania is an inconclusive neurological condition, Egæus displays GPI once a “total […] inversion [takes] place in the character of [his] common thoughts,” and the “realities of the world [affect him] as visions, and as visions only.” The “wild ideas of the land of dreams” become “in turn, — not the material of my every-day existence — but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.” Egæus, Poe’s supreme candidate for neurosyphilis, decides his “pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties” bid “defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.” Yet his pathogenesis follows Bayle’s proposed stages of GPI wherein monomania, general mania, and dementia sequentially occur. Although Egæus begins as a monomaniac, he does experience dementia during his extraction of Berenice’s teeth:

On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box of ebony. It was a box of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, it being the property of the family physician; but how came it there upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for.

Berenice’s teeth arouse Egæus’ monomania only to become the center of his neurosyphilitic psychosis. Baudelaire, in an 1852 essay on Poe’s oeuvre, outlines that “the wretched man, in a moment of mental aberration,” has gone to the “grave of his cousin, who had been buried after an attack resembling death,” and has “snatched from her jaws the object of his obsession.” Baudelaire’s synopsis incorporates Egæus’ monomania and GPI while also inferring Berenice’s paresis. Berenice’s paresis, “a species of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself – trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most instances, startlingly abrupt,” matches status epilepticus or absence seizures wherein those with status epilepticus experience trancelike conditions before regaining consciousness. Status epilepticus or absence seizures are likewise pathologized by their quick recovery time. As status epilepticus is a “presenting sign” for neurosyphilis, Berenice’s condition may qualify a diagnosis.

Berenice’s “species of epilepsy,” follows syphilitic pathogenesis moreover as status epilepticus precedes dementia within preantibiotic syphilitic pathology. Status epilepticus, imparted by her post-seizure trances, may likewise occur in otherwise asymptomatic neurosyphilitics. Neurosyphilitic paresis is further implicated once Berenice is discovered to have been buried alive: “a violated grave — of a disfigured body discovered upon its margin — a body enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!” Although Berenice’s emaciation has been located throughout criticism as a consumptive signifier, pulmonary tuberculosis contributes to the possibility of a syphilitic infection. Notwithstanding, her “lifeless […] lusterless” eyes are incompatible with consumptive symptomatology wherein the consumptive’s eyes are “large [and] expressive,” or “bright [and] shining.” Indeed, “uncommonly large or full” pupils were so symptomatic of pulmonary tuberculosis that belladonna extract was admitted to the eyes to achieve “consumptive beauty.” That Berenice’s eyes are instead “lifeless” or “lusterless” problematizes a consumptive diagnosis.

Although Baudelaire does not name neurosyphilis in his synopsis, he does acknowledge Berenice as an “admirable example” of the “maladies of the mind.” Baudelaire continues that “nothing is more logical and possible than this terrible story,” discounting a supernatural interpretation. His own account of Berenice is as follows:

Berenice is attacked by a mysterious and horrible malady mentioned somewhere under the strange name of distortion of personality. It might be said that it is a kind of hysteria. She also suffers epileptic arracks, frequently followed by a trance closely resembling death from which her recovery is usually startlingly abrupt. […] As for Egaeus, his illness, for so, he says, it was called in everyday language, is even more strange. It consists in a highly exaggerated development of the meditative powers, a morbid stimulation of the attentive faculties.

Egæus’ monomania, to Baudelaire, is the “distinctive characteristic of [the] illness,” recalling Antoine Bayle’s 1822 “Nouvelle doctrine des maladies mentale.” Although it is uncertain if Baudelaire read Bayle’s treatise, Baudelaire’s mentorship under French physician Charles Lasègue makes it likely. Lasègue became Baudelaire’s private tutor in 1839, and in 1853 wrote his professorship thesis on general paresis. This thesis was largely informed by Bayle’s earlier works, wherein Bayle showed “that a form of dementia, general paresis of the insane, was associated at autopsy with a meningo-encephalitis,” linking mental psychosis with organic brain abnormality. Although it wasn’t until 1879 that Jean Alfred Fournier would discover parasyphilis, joining paresis with the syphilitic infection, both Bayle and Lasègue can be considered early syphilogists. GPI is, again, now synonymous with tertiary or neurosyphilis. In 1856, Baudelaire, in “Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres,” gave peripheral attention to these pathologies, speaking of Poe’s women as “all luminous and sickly, dying of strange diseases.” These women, to Baudelaire, “share the nature of their creator,” suggesting contemporary analogues between male artists and the syphilitic female. Although the analogue applied specifically to prostituted French women with whom men found “both identification and repulsion,” it could refer to diseased women at large. As the prostituted female became a surrogate for syphilitic discourse, the ubiquity of the prostituted female in French literature was “attributed to phobias about disease and […] the spread of syphilis throughout the century.” Although Baudelaire does not specify if the “shared nature” is syphilitic, his correlation between Poe and his “sickly” women is contextualized within the “venereal peril” of nineteenth-century France. Yet Poe’s diseased women are, unlike Baudelaire’s, familial. They are not the “commodified cultural icon” of the city, but are instead of “Poe’s interior décor.” This could be in part to venereology of nineteenth-century America wherein the moral etiology of the disease informed print culture, situating syphilis as a “non-material disorder” of immorality, or it could have a biographical impulse. Poe’s avoidance of a sexualized female body is likewise located within American puritanism or religiosity, providing a clear limit between French and American syphilitic literature.

Despite these dissimilarities, Poe’s influence on Baudelaire is maintained by Baudelaire himself, who had “discovered an American writer who arouse[d] in [him] an unbelievable sympathy.” Baudelaire’s celebration of Poe even included, quite remarkably, various pathogeneses. To Baudelaire, no other than Poe

has told about the exceptions in human life and in nature with more magic, – the enthusiastic curiosities of convalescence […] hallucinations, first appearing doubtful, then convincing and as rational as a book; the absurd establishing itself in one’s mind and controlling it with a frightful logic; hysteria usurping the nerves and the mind, and personality so out of joint that it expresses grief by a laugh.

Baudelaire specifies Poe’s attentions to monomania and GPI, even locating them within Poe’s “unemployed vital energy.” Baudelaire later advances his explication, suggesting that the preoccupation with the grotesque is “sometimes the result of a stubborn chastity” or the “profound damned-up sensibility.” American puritanism, even if culturally imbued rather than religiously motivated, informs Baudelaire’s readings of Poe without discouraging his identification with the American poet. That Poe isolates the female body rather than allows her to become the “perfect image of the savagery that lurks in the midst of civilization” can be contextualized within competing female iconographies of the transatlantic divide. The female body did, for both, however conclude in decomposition. Indeed, for Poe, “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” For Baudelaire, too, the “decomposition of the female body,” became the “precondition for artistic composition.” Poe’s “necrologic aesthetic” would therefore have had a profound effect on Baudelaire’s “literature of psychosexual mania.” Baudelaire could transfigure Poe’s abject bodies through a register of prostitution and contamination, resituating the female within the circulation of French syphilitic literature.

Baudelaire likewise identifies Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” as the prototype of his own oeuvre, suggesting in a letter to Auguste Poulet-Malassis that Poulet-Malassis reread Poe rather than Baudelaire: “You tell me that you’ve reread my poems. You’d have done better to have reread Edgar Poe’s Philosophy of Composition.” In a letter to Caroline Aupick, Baudelaire goes as far as to say that although “not actually highly pronounced,” there is a “close resemblance” between Baudelaire’s own poetry and “those of [Poe], once you make allowances for temperament and climate.” Baudelaire here may also refer to transatlantic differences of censorship, implicating Poe’s choice to confer diseases which are familial rather than urban.

Yet Poe’s preoccupation with familial diseases does manifest within Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Although Baudelaire more often identifies pathology with urban contagion, such as with “Les Métamorphoses du vampire” or “Tu mettrais l’univers entire…,” pathology within “À Celle qui est trop gaie” is both rural and incestuous. The female figure, who “dazzles” the “gloomy drudge” with her “vibrancy” is as “scenic as the countryside.” Yet the figure’s brother wishes, while she sleeps, “the time for sensuality / Towards [her] body’s treasury / Silently, stealthily to creep.” The poem concludes in the transmission of a “venom” between brother and sister, though Baudelaire has maintained that “venom” refers to a “splenetic temperament.” That Baudelaire claims Ernest Pinard interpreted the “venom” as syphilis is curious, as is Baudelaire’s insistence that “venom signifying spleen or melancholy was an idea too simple for the criminalists.” As it has been noted, Pinard did not read “venin” as syphilis, therefore “Baudelaire’s later note can hardly be taken as a caution against misreading.” This “paratextual intervention” is, as William Olmsted advances, “double-edged”:

On one side, the remark operates as a vindication of the 1857 Fleurs du Mal by insisting that the work’s seriousness ruled out obscenity and that the venom in question was but a figure of speech for the splenetic mood of the speaker. On the other hand, the note introduces a meaning the judges never specified by attributing to them the notion that the venom was sexual. By raising this interpretation, Baudelaire not only undercuts the first part of the note but nudges the reader of Les Épaves toward a meaning that is indeed “bloody and obscene.”

Baudelaire’s “textual duplicities” have been examined by William Olmsted, and require no further commentary. Yet if “À Celle qui est trop gaie” affects a syphilitic infection, Baudelaire may impart Poe’s preoccupation with the familial transmission of disease. For Baudelaire, this is a forced transmission rather than hereditary. Yet hereditary syphilis would later become a leitmotif of nineteenth-century France, such as within Eugene Brieus’s Les avariés and Emile Zola’s Nana. This leitmotif may be in part to texts such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or to Baudelaire’s derivations.

Baudelaire’s own syphilitic infection is, of course, a curious indication of Poe’s textual and biographical pathologies. When Baudelaire speaks of his “debauchery and instability” in a letter to Caroline Aupick in 1853, he asks, “Now do you understand why in the midst of the terrible solitude that surrounds me, I was able to understand so well the genius of Edgar Poe, and why I wrote such an excellent biography of his abominable life[?]” In 1854, he again speaks of “how close a resemblance there is, although it’s not actually highly pronounced, between [his] own poems and those of [Poe],” before informing M. Méryon in 1860 that he “knew better than anyone” the stories of Poe, and “had good reason for doing so.” Although Baudelaire could refer exclusively to his work as translator, this is problematized by his 1865 letter to Michel Levy wherein he states that he has “devoted a lot of time to Edgar Poe, because he resembles [Baudelaire] a little, but [Baudelaire] is not a translator.” Baudelaire’s 1864 letter to Théophile Thoré provides clarity to his identification moreover as he asks

You doubt the truth of this? You doubt that such amazing geometrical parallels can exist in nature? Well, I myself am accused of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I’ve translated Poe so patiently? Because he was like me. The first time I opened one of his books, I saw, with horror and delight, not only topics I’d dreamed of, but sentences I’d thought of, and that he had written 20 years before.

A. G. Gordon’s “The death of Edgar Allan Poe – a case of syphilis?,” advances Baudelaire’s identification, writing that Baudelaire, who he deems “Poe’s kindred spirit and great champion,” had, “like Poe,” syphilis. Gordon recites Pruette’s earlier syphilitic diagnosis of Poe before, too, deciding that Poe exhibited the “beginnings of paresis.” Yet Gordon’s most convincing evidence is Poe’s tinnitus:

I have recently reviewed the literature on musical hallucinations, concluding that they arise out of tinnitus in a hyperactive inner ear and underlie creativity in composers and poets, where there is a strong auditory or rhythmic basis to their work. […] The most striking finding is a very high rate of syphilis, which in its early stages irritates the ear. […] Poe is particularly interesting, as he precisely anticipates this otogenic theory: “True! — nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad?” (The Tell-Tale Heart).

Although these diagnostic cases remain controversial, Poe does not require a neurosyphilitic infection to participate in the circulation of syphilitic texts. That Baudelaire, having undergone both neurosyphilitic paresis and aphasia, identifies with Poe’s pathological discourse is enough to qualify Poe within discussions of French syphilitic literature. Pathogeneses within “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Berenice” had irrefutable impact on Baudelaire, who celebrated Poe’s incorporations of monomania and GPI. It may therefore be helpful to explicate Poe’s symptomatology when outlining Baudelaire’s reintegration of the syphilitic body into poetry. Poe’s symptomology may likewise inform the pathogeneses marked within his oeuvre, allowing for transatlantic intertextualities within Baudelaire studies. To pathologize “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Berenice” within neurosyphilitic discourse of nineteenth-century France is to instate Poe as a progenitor of French syphilitic literature accordingly. Yet this account neglects a biographical examination of Edgar Allan Poe, leaving space for reconstructions of Poe’s pathogenesis. It likewise leaves space for Poe’s effects on French syphilitic authors other than Baudelaire, such as Eugene Brieus and Emile Zola.

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