ABSTRACT
Baudelaire sits with his head tilted slightly, looking straight at us. His hair is long and grey and he wears a coat different from the one in Nadar’s daguerreotypes: no longer is he a dandy; no longer is he young; worse still, he’s in Belgium, a country he detests but where he will live until a stroke fells him and he must return, aphasic, to Paris. In a year, he’ll ask his mother for a photograph of her, stipulating its size and who he wants to do it: only Parisian photographers know how.
