The poems of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), collected in the collection Les Fleurs du Mal, challenged the literature and readership of their time with their uncompromising individualism, their keen attention to the 'trash' of urban everyday life, and the chaos of spiritual impulses that trampled all norms. The poet, who strove for official recognition and never sought to be known as a revolutionary, became, by the will of history, the inventor of modernism, the author of the very concept of modernity that formed the basis of 20th-century worldview and culture. Literary historian Antoine Compagnon (b. 1950) attempted to capture the kaleidoscopic universe of Baudelaire's personality and poetic imagination in a series of 'snapshots' from various angles. The chapters of this book, originally presented as short broadcasts on France Inter radio, show the 'poet of modern life' as a dandy, a socialist, a Catholic, a connoisseur of painting and photography, and find him in the company of friends, enemies, eminent contemporaries and lovers, and also, of course, in front of a mirror and a sheet of paper.