A whole ten years before Baudelaire published his great masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil (1857), the great poet penned the only prose fiction of his great career: La Fanfarlo. The novella describes the torrid real-life affair the poet had with Jean Duval, a dancer whose beauty and sexuality Baudelaire came to obsess over. The outcome is a work of raw emotional power and a clear distillation of the Parisian's poetic genius. As Baudelaire himself said, 'Always be a poet, even in prose.'
