Published posthumously in 1869, Le Spleen de Paris, also known as Petits poèmes en prose, was conceived as a "during" at Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire experienced a "poetic, musical prose without rhythm and rhyme, sufficiently flexible and struck enough to adapt to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of dreaming, to the sombresauts of consciousness". Exploring the meanderings of the city and the darkness of the human soul, the poet captures the vivid scenes of urban life, crunching the saltimbanks, the elegant bourgeois and the workers, the women of the world and the prostitutes. Beyond the various facts or anecdote, in turn lyrical and cynical, resigned and revolted, the poems of the Spleen of Paris celebrate the paradoxes of modern metropolis, illuminated by the fantasy of distant shores and lost paradises.