Dickens, Benjamin and the City: The "Object Riddled with Error"

Because we are in Paris, I want to put this Dickens whose problematic texts, so apparently easy, yet with the power of bringing reading to a crisis-point, into comparison with Baudelaire, the source of the word modernité. [...]the writer is melancholic, out of a sense that what is seen cannot quite be confronted, or comprehended. [...]writing is alienated from the city, which does not mean that it stands apart from it, but sees it in its strangeness. Bleak House describes the new Paris of Baudelaire, giving it a crisp articulation, as being more public, more full of discrete spaces, more urbane than any description that could be given of London: the Dedlocks rattle "out of the yard of the Hotel Bristol in the Place Vendôme, and canter between the sun-and-shadow chequered colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli and the garden of the ill-fated palace of a headless king and queen, off by the Place of Concord and the Elysian Fields, and the Gate of the Star, out of Paris" (182; ch. 12) .