This article is taken from the
Figaro Hors-Série "Baudelaire, le spleen de la modernité"
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Figaro Hors-Série "Baudelaire, the spleen of modernity" Le Figaro.
“Being a useful man has always seemed to me something very hideous,”
Baudelaire liked to say.
By giving all his interest to these little things, often invisible to the eyes of the vulgar but which distinguish him in an elegant crowd, the dandy first proclaims his contempt for the useful and the necessary.
So, George Brummell, the archetypal dandy, could afford to spend an entire morning in his Mayfair home properly tying his tie and the rest of the day choosing the shade of white that would match his waistcoat while leaving to think, obviously wrongly, that these two essential pieces of his cloakroom could have been cut from the same piece of material.
What could be more artificial and more vain
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