In one letter, this essayist noted that he had little musical training, besides having heard a bit o
In one letter, this essayist noted that he had little musical training, besides having heard a bit of Beethoven and Weber, but nonetheless glowingly reviewed the title composer's work. This writer attacked the "empty words... we often hear fall" when people dismissed decadent literature in some "New Notes" on a certain author. Another of this writer's essays opens by mocking tourists who walk quickly to the Louvre and "come to a rapturous halt" before a "Titian or a Raphael", and praises the work of "Monsieur G," a Crimean War correspondent named Constantin Guys. This author of "Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris" produced early French translations of Poe and wrote an essay called "The Painter of Modern Life" that includes a description of a "passionate spectator" for whom "the crowd is his element", the flâneur. For 10 points, name this French author who included the section Spleen and Ideal in his poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal.