1. One day, Baudelaire, hatless, was sunbathing on the quai d'Anjou [outside his apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis, so the date is the middle 1840s], and enjoying fried potato slivers that he extracted one by one from their newspaper wrapping. Along came, riding in a carriage, some very grand ladies who were friends of his mother, the ambassador's wife. It amused them to see him pecking at such a democratic foodstuff.

One of them, a duchess, had the driver stop and called for Baudelaire.

-- “Is it nice, what you're eating there?”
-- “Do try some, madame,” said the poet, handing over his paper cone of fries with supreme graciousness.

And they were so enchanted by this unexpected feast and by his conversation that they would willingly have stayed there until the end of the world.

A few days later, encountering Baudelaire in the salon of an aged relative of hers, the duchess asked him if she would again have the pleasure of eating fried potatoes with him.

-- “No, madame,” said the poet delicately, “for although they are indeed good to eat, they're only good the first time one tries them.”

[From Henry Frichet.]

-- “You don't notice anything unusual about me?”
-- “No.”
-- “But I have green hair, and that's not a common thing.”
-- “Everybody's hair is green, more or less. If yours were sky-blue, that might surprise me, but there's plenty of green hair under the hats of Paris.”

[From Eugène Crépet, who contends that Baudelaire had his hair dyed in order to compensate for the alopecia that struck him as a symptom of his fatal syphilitic infection.]