There is but a single second in a man’s life who’s mission is to bring good news – the good news, which strikes such inexplicable terror into everyone. Yes, Time rules again; he has resumed his brutal tyranny. And he drives me on, as if I were an ox, with his duplicate threat: ‘Get on with it, churl! Sweat, slave! Live, and be damned!

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.