With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower, Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells, Where evil comes up softly like a flower. Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain, Not for vain tears I went up at that hour; But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain To drink delight of that enormous trull Whose hellish beauty makes me young again. Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full, Sodden with day, or, new appareled, stand In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful, I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and Hunted have pleasures of their own to give, The vulgar herd can never understand.

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.