Translator’s Note
If there is such a thing as a decadent right today, Baudelaire should be one of its patrons. Implacable enemy of bourgeois democracy, habitué of the night worlds of the metropolis and the mind, wounded healer, truthful illusionist, priest of the cult of energy and spirit in a dawning age of Last Men, martyr to the middle-class hatred of excellence, as disdainful of social convention as he was rigorously obedient to the laws of poetic form, detested by the puritanical communists of Sartre and his school, and cherished by the pious aesthetes around Eliot, this tormented wanderer deserves to be acclaimed as the Vespucci of the psychogeography of the modern megacity and the Amundsen of the icy wastes of the modern soul.
