Roberto Calasso (b. 1941) focuses on the founders of 'modernism'—the writers and artists who lived in Paris in the nineteenth century. Calasso describes the life of the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who captured the ephemeral nature of the metropolis and the artist's place within it in his works. Calasso's book is like a mosaic of the author's own stories, Baudelaire's poems, and commentary on paintings by Ingres, Delacroix, Degas, Manet, and others. These details create a dramatic image of Baudelaire's Paris.