Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, Your mother, your sister, or your brother? I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother. Your friends? Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known. Your country? I do not know in what latitude it lies. Beauty? I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal. Gold? I hate it as you hate God. Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger? I love the clouds the clouds that pass up there Up there the wonderful clouds!

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.