Kathryn Mills argues that despite the enduring celebrity of Baudelaire and Flaubert, their significance to modern art has been misunderstood. Millsplaces Le Spleen de Paris and Trois contes, their authors' relatively less well-known but last published works, in relationship with the times and artistic goals of Baudelaire and Flaubert, showing that these seminal authors literally sought to "come to terms with" the changes transforming the nineteenth-century into the modern age by forging a new form for literature.