Baudelaire called Paris a whore. But this whore--with her murky underbellyand seamy backalleys--was a woman the poet was madly in love with. He celebratedher squalor and stench, setting sail on a voyage of verse that made him dig intolanguage to extract that quintessential experience in which commonplace urbandecadence is transformed into sublime poetics of concrete, steel and blacksmoke-spewing chimneys.