"This book, whose title: Flowers of Evil, – says all, is clothed [...] with sinister and cold beauty; it was made with fury and patience. Moreover, proof of its positive value is in all the evil that is said of it. The book puts people in fury," wrote Baudelaire to his mother, on July 9, 1857. In 1861 the second version of the collection appeared. The poems that compose it are the crucible of "magic operations", unexpected correspondences: the most charming creatures are alongside abominable monsters, the sublime emanates from the trivial... Magnifying damned and carrion, the poet-alchemist gives pain and ugliness an aesthetic dimension, giving his collection a brilliant modernity: "You have given your mud and made gold."