In 1857 the French state prosecuted a poet for offending public morals, fined him, suppressed six of his poems and did not reverse the conviction until 1949. This episode explores the life of Charles Baudelaire, the writer who turned his back on Haussmann's shiny new boulevards to find beauty in the gutters and coined the concept of modernity. We begin with an unstable foundation: a 62-year-old father who died when Charles was six, a brief window of his young mother's undivided attention, and her remarriage to the rigid military man Jacques Aupick.

We follow the debts, the syphilis, the aborted tough-love voyage to India that ended with Baudelaire jumping ship in the Indian Ocean and inventing elephant-riding stories, the inheritance burned through in two years, and the humiliating legal conservatorship that pushed him toward suicide yet fo ...