La Fanfarlo

The Baudelaire who wrote this curious novella in the mid-1840s was not yet that more famous Baudelaire who would create the poems of Les Fieurs du mal; nor was he a writer with sensibilities entirely alien to those that produced the poems. La Fanfarlo-part bitter fictionalized autobiography, part parody, part ambiguous poetic exploration, and the poet's only completed work of fictional prose- is very much the work of an apprentice beginning to find his way. In terms only of plot, the story is slender enough: trying to help an acquaintance reclaim her husband from an infatuation with La Fanfarlo, the young poet Samuel Cramer himself falls in love with the exotic dancer and slides from the pursuit of his poetry into the commercialized world of advertising and politics.