The poet’s rather lowly spot toward the back of the procession may seem surprising. But although Baudelaire was already known to the young, literary Bohemians, and was a friend of Nadar’s, his masterpiece, Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) would not be published until 1857, the same year as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Both of those monuments of the century’s literature became preludes to famous and far-reaching trials. Two years before his Pantheon, this is how Nadar introduced Baudelaire in the “Lanterne magique” column of the Journal pour rire (Humorous Newspaper) : “a nervous, bilious, irritable and irritating young poet who is often entirely unpleasant in his private life […] amongst those rare minds currently walking in the solitude of the self, he is, I believe, both the best and the one who is most sure of where he’s headed.”