Identified early on by literary historians as one of the petits romantiques, or minor French Romantic writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, and acknowledged for his leadership in the Petit Cénacle--a smaller version of Charles Nodier's and then Victor Hugo's literary group of the same name (Cénacle), recalling the room where Christ and his disciples had the Last Supper--Pétrus Borel has rarely escaped, in the eyes of his critics, the negative connotations of a persistently diminutive designation. Yet no less a judge of artistic excellence than Charles Baudelaire--whose work owes much to Borel--recognized his importance: "Sans Pétrus Borel, il y aurait une lacune dans le Romantisme" (Without Pétrus Borel, there would be a gap in romanticism). The author of Les Fleurs du mal (1857; translated as Flowers of Evil , 1909) admired Borel's uncompromising opposition to bourgeois vulgarity...