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“There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”

The greatest early photographer's portraits of Hugo, Manet, Dumas, and more

Charles Baudelaire didn’t have a word to describe the strange experience of being alive in the middle of the 19th century — “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent” existence in growing cities amidst wild technological and cultural change. Franz Liszt had captured hearts and imaginations as the most charismatic musical performer of the 1830s and 1840s — his concerts were compared to a “demon trying to play his soul free.” By 1886, he was much more frail than he had been in his heartthrob days, but you can still see the light in his eyes: After a brief, turbulent stint at the prestigious Comédie-Française (she left after smashing an umbrella over a doorman’s head and slapping a more experienced actress in the face), she traveled around Europe and conceived a child with Prince Henri, a Belgian nobleman, in 1864.

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