Editing Comte de Lautréamont (section)

===Death===
During spring 1869, Ducasse frequently changed his address, from 32 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre to 15 Rue Vivienne, then back to Rue Faubourg Montmartre, where he lodged in a hotel at number 7. While still awaiting the distribution of his book, Ducasse worked on a new text, a follow-up to his "phenomenological description of evil", in which he wanted to sing of good. The two works would form a whole, a dichotomy of good and evil. The work, however, remained a fragment.

In April and June 1870, Ducasse published the first two installments of what was obviously meant to be the preface to the planned "chants of the good" in two small brochures, ''Poésies'' I and II; this time he published under his real name, discarding his pseudonym. He differentiated the two parts of his work with the terms [[philosophy]] and [[poetry]], announcing that the beginning of a struggle against evil was the reversal of his other work:

{{blockquote|text=I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with certainty, despair with hope, malice with good, complaints with duty, scepticism with faith, sophisms with cool equanimity and pride with modesty.}}

At the same time Ducasse took texts by famous authors and cleverly inverted, corrected and openly plagiarized for ''Poésies'':

{{blockquote|text=Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author's sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.}}

Among the works plagiarized were [[Blaise Pascal]]'s ''[[Pensées]]'' and [[François de La Rochefoucauld (writer)|La Rochefoucauld]]'s ''Maximes'', as well as the work of [[Jean de La Bruyère]], [[Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues|Luc de Clapiers]], [[Dante Alighieri|Dante]], [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] and [[Jean de La Fontaine|La Fontaine]]. It even included an improvement of his own ''Les Chants de Maldoror''. The brochures of [[aphoristic]] prose did not have a price; each customer could decide which sum they wanted to pay for it.

On 19 July 1870, [[Napoleon III]] declared war on Prussia, and after his capture, Paris was [[Siege of Paris (1870–1871)|besieged]] on 17 September, a situation with which Ducasse was already familiar from his early childhood in Montevideo. The living conditions worsened rapidly during the siege, and according to the owner of the hotel he lodged at, Ducasse became sick with a "bad fever".

Lautréamont died at the age of 24, on 24 November 1870, at 8 am in his hotel. On his death certificate, "no further information" was given. Since many were afraid of epidemics while Paris was besieged, Ducasse was buried the next day after a service in [[Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, Paris|Notre-Dame-de-Lorette]] in a provisional grave at the [[Montmartre Cemetery|Cimetière du Nord]]. In January 1871, his body was put into another grave elsewhere.

In his ''Poésies'' Lautréamont announced: "I will leave no memoirs", and as such, the life of the creator of ''Les Chants de Maldoror'' remains for the most part unknown.