Progress, this great heresy of decay.

When Baudelaire returned from Belgium after his stroke Manet and his wife were frequent visitors at the nursing home and Charles Baudelaire would play passages from Wagner for Baudelaire on the piano. Like Poe Baudelaire believed in the doctrine of original sin denounced democracy and the idea of progress and of man's natural goodness and Poe held a disdainful aristocratic attitude similar to Baudelaire's dandy. "


Pleasure
"Personally I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil.

His most famous work Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others.