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Thomas Dunne
May 2013
On Sale: May 7, 2013
Featuring: Charles Baudelaire; Jeanne Duval
368 pages
ISBN: 1250014239
EAN: 9781250014238
Kindle: B009LRWJ4S
Paperback / e-Book
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Historical
For readers who have been drawn to The Paris Wife, Black Venus captures the artistic scene in the great French city decades earlier, when the likes of Dumas and Balzac argued literature in the cafes of the Left Bank. Amongst the bohemians the young Charles Baudelaire stood outβdressed impeccably thanks to an inheritance that was quickly vanishing. Still at work on the poems which he hoped would make his name, he spent his nights enjoying the alcohol, opium, and women who filled the seedy streets of the city. One woman would catch his eyeβa beautiful Haitian cabaret singer named Jeanne Duval. Their lives would remain forever intertwined thereafter, and their romance would inspire his most infamous poemsβleading to the banning of his masterwork Les Fleurs du Mal and a scandalous public trial for obscenity. James MacManus' Black Venus recreates the classic Parisian literary world in vivid detail, complete with not just an affecting portrait of the famous poet but also his often misunderstood, much-maligned muse. A vivid novel of Charles Baudelaire and his lover Jeanne Duval, the Haitian cabaret singer who inspired his most famous and controversial poems, set in nineteenth-century Paris
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