Far from the bourgeois entrée-main-dessert service, the penniless poet of Paris eats according to chance and purse: black coffee upon waking to tame the sleepless night, the frugal snack swallowed standing in a Latin Quarter dive, the rare feast of oysters on the day a publisher deigns to pay, and the occasional sweets of artists' cenacles. The structure is not that of the hours, but of money and spleen.

Baudelaire's gustatory thread is bitterness — that of black coffee drunk without milk, echoing his entire aesthetic that seeks beauty in evil and melancholy. For him, bitterness is not a flaw to be corrected but a flavor to be savored.