Wealth & Money Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Baudelaire is handing you the modern city as both drug and diagnosis: an environment so saturated with spectacle that it becomes invisible. The line turns on a sly paradox. Paris is "rich in poetic and marvelous subjects", yet the very abundance of stimulus produces numbness. You are "enveloped and steeped" in wonder the way you might be steeped in perfume or smoke: sensually, involuntarily, a little suffocating. Marvel isn’t rare anymore; it’s atmospheric. And when the marvelous becomes the weather, you stop looking up.

The intent is polemical as much as lyrical. Baudelaire, writing in the mid-19th century as Paris accelerates into modernity (crowds, commodities, newspapers, gaslight, later Haussmann’s renovations), is arguing for a new kind of poetic attention: the artist as flaneur, trained to extract meaning from the street’s churn. The subtext is a rebuke to two audiences at once. To the bourgeois city-dweller: you walk through a daily theater of coincidences, faces, and small tragedies, and you treat it like background noise. To the poet clinging to pastoral ideals: you’re missing the real myth-making machine, the metropolis.

It works because it names a mechanism we still live by: habituation. Baudelaire doesn’t say the city lacks enchantment; he says our perception fails. The marvelous isn’t a property of monuments but of noticing. His irony is tender but unsparing: the modern citizen is surrounded by material for revelation, and yet lives as if nothing is happening.