Baudelaire’s poem, “The Eyes of the Poor,” presents an overwhelmingly poignant overview of Paris in the 19th century, touching on all of the key characteristics of Haussmannization. The poem opens with a couple on a date, having spent their whole day wandering around the newly minted Paris, they decide to rest at a recently built café on a freshly designed boulevard. So recently built, in fact, that the boulevard was “still littered with rubble.” This is not the only reference that Baudelaire makes to the remodel of Paris. He goes on to describe “the new gas-jets [which] cast their incandescent novelty all round…brightening…dazzling…the gilt of the moldings.” This description mirrors the account that Kirkland gives of Haussmann and Napoleon’s