I wanted to tell a little story about one of the most fascinating Parisian muses of the 19th century:

Jeanne Duval.

She was known in her time as "the Black Venus."

Very little is known about Duval for certain, but she inspired some of the most famous—and scandalous—poems of the era, written by her lover, the bad boy poet Charles Baudelaire. (If you put sunglasses on his statue in the Luxembourg gardens, he looks a bit like Bono).

Now, I should say, am not an expert on Jeanne Duval. There is an amazing book that you really, truly must read called "Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-century France" by @ParisNoire. Go buy it. It came out last year. It's 💯

Baudelaire's poems about Jeanne were pretty racy for the time. In "Les Fleurs du Mal," his physical and emotional obsession with her is on full display. The fact that she was Black, a Creole woman from Haiti (he says), made them even more scandalous to White Parisian society.

The reaction to Baudelaire's poems about sex and death were so extreme that he was even prosecuted for creating "an offense against public morals." He was fined, but not imprisoned.

Here's one of his poems about Jeanne, original title "Sed non satiata" ("but not satisfied").