Editing Comte de Lautréamont (section)

===Youth===
Ducasse was born in [[Montevideo]], [[Uruguay]], to François Ducasse, a French [[Consul (representative)|consul]]ar officer, and his wife Jacquette-Célestine Davezac. Very little is known about Isidore's childhood, except that he was baptized on 16 November 1847 in the [[Montevideo Metropolitan Cathedral]] and that his mother died soon afterwards, possibly due to an epidemic. Jean-Jacques Lefrère suggests she may have committed suicide, although concludes there is no way to know for certain. In 1851, as a five-year-old, he experienced the end of the eight-year [[Great Siege of Montevideo|Siege of Montevideo]] in the [[Uruguayan Civil War]]. He was brought up speaking three languages: French, Spanish, and English.

In October 1859, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to high school in France by his father. He was trained in French education and technology at the Imperial [[Lycée]] in [[Tarbes]]. In 1863 he enrolled in the [[Lycée Louis-Barthou]] in [[Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques|Pau]], where he attended classes in rhetoric and philosophy. He excelled at arithmetic and drawing and showed extravagance in his thinking and style. Isidore was a reader of [[Edgar Allan Poe]] and particularly favored [[Percy Bysshe Shelley]] and [[Lord Byron|Byron]], as well as [[Adam Mickiewicz]], [[John Milton|Milton]], [[Robert Southey]], [[Alfred de Musset]], and [[Charles Baudelaire|Baudelaire]] (see the letter of 23 October 1869 cited extensively below). At school he was fascinated by [[Jean Racine|Racine]] and [[Pierre Corneille|Corneille]], and by the scene of the blinding in [[Sophocles]]' ''[[Oedipus Rex]]''. According to his schoolmate Paul Lespès, he displayed obvious folly "by self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible death images" in an essay.{{citation needed|date=September 2020}} After graduation he lived in Tarbes, where he started a friendship with Georges Dazet, the son of his guardian, and decided to become a writer.