Charles Baudelaire

Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, in the Seine-Maritime department... of Upper Normandy, in northern France. He was the second son of Achille-Cléophas Flaubert , a surgeon, and Anne Justine Caroline . He began writing at an early age, as early as eight according to some sources. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. and did not leave until 1840, when he went to Paris to study law. In Paris, he was an indifferent student and found the city distasteful. He made a few acquaintances, including Victor Hugo. Toward the close of 1840, he traveled in the Pyrenees and Corsica. In 1846, after an attack of epilepsy, he left Paris and abandoned the study of law. From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet; his letters to her survive.
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Thomas Penson De Quincey was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . De Quincey was born in 86 Cross Street, Manchester, England. His father was a successful merchant with an interest in literature who died when he was quite young. Soon after his birth the... family went to The Farm and then later to Greenheys, a larger country house in Chorlton-on-Medlock near Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now a widow, moved to Bath and enrolled him at King Edward's School, Bath. De Quincey was a weak and sickly child. His youth was spent in solitude, and when his elder brother, William, came home, he wreaked havoc in the quiet surroundings. De Quincey's mother was a woman of strong character and intelligence, but seems to have inspired more awe than affection in her children. She brought them up very strictly, taking Thomas out of school after three years because she was afraid he would become big-headed, and sending him to an inferior school at Winkfield in Wiltshire.
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Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, theologian and Christian mystic. He termed himself a "Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ" in True Christian Religion, one of the works he published himself. Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741, at the age of... 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he eventually began to experience dreams and visions beginning on Easter weekend April 6, 1744. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, whereupon he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his spiritual eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons and other spirits. He said that the Last Judgement had already occurred, in 1757, although only visible in the spiritual world, where he had witnessed it. That Judgement was followed by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which occurred, not by Christ in person, but by a revelation from Him through the inner, spiritual sense of the Word to Swedenborg.
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Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre was a French-speaking Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat. He defended hierarchical societies and a monarchical State in the period immediately following the French Revolution. Despite his close ties with France, Maistre was a subject of the King of... Piedmont-Sardinia, whom he served as member of the Savoy Senate , ambassador to Russia , and minister of state to the court in Turin . Maistre, a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, saw monarchy both as a divinely sanctioned institution and as the only stable form of government. He called for the restoration of the House of Bourbon to the throne of France and argued that the Pope should have ultimate authority in temporal matters. Maistre also claimed that it was the rationalist rejection of Christianity which was directly responsible for the disorder and bloodshed which followed the French Revolution of 1789. Maistre was born in 1753 at Chambéry, in the Duchy of Savoy, which at that time was part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, ruled by the House of Savoy.
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