Walking with Baudelaire in Paris, it is tempting to think of Wilde’s inspirational assurance that ‘we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” and understand how for Baudelaire the lure of stars and gutter acted on him as a tidal ebb and flow.

Like his English contemporary Dickens, Baudelaire read the city as a state of mind too, as place personified into mind and, hot on the heels of that, like a reverse-angle shot in film – mind de-personified into place.

It is absolutely compelling to set alongside him the no less disquieted Rilke’s habit of going for succour to Baudelaire’s prose-poems about Paris as bed-time comfort reading. Rilke had discovered that Baudelaire’s gloriously unselfcensored voice  chimed with his own revulsion for the place. For Rilke