The metropolis creates increasing quantities of desirable objects, but also of material rubbish, as the increased rhythms of selling demand an increased rhythm of disposal. Baudelaire identifies with the rag-picker, collecting the curious flotsam of the new Babylon
(P. Collier: 1985 p.26)

When the new industrial processes had given refuse a certain value, ragpickers appeared in the cities in larger numbers. They worked for middlemen and constituted a sort of cottage industry located in the streets. The ragpicker fascinated his epoch. The eyes of the first investigators of pauperism were fixed on him with the mute question as to where the limit of human misery lay.
(W. Benjamin: 1983 p.19)

In one of his preferred self-images as rag-picker, hunting out his rhymes in the debris of city life, Baudelaire positions himself as a poet firmly at the end of the cycle of the production, consumption, disposal and recuperation of material objects, which is the cycle that so deeply preoccupied nineteenth-century writers, and, perhaps, Balzac most of all.
(B. Rigby: 1993 p.88) Baudelaire's city poems are characterized by a fascination with figures who inhabit the margins of Paris, the `heroic' figures of the city's bas-fonds. Amongst the beggars, prostitutes and scavengers, it is the rag-picker that seems to fascinate Baudelaire the most. Rag-pickers were the men who would sift through the detritus of the city streets - les débris d'une journée de la capitale - in search of objects of value - des objets d'utilité ou de jouissance - which they then might sell to make a living. Baudelaire's fascination with the rag-picker - like his fascination with so many other Parisian marginaux - is inward-looking. Baudelaire sees in the rag-picker a double of the poet. He makes this explicit in `Le Vin des chiffoniers':
   On voit un chiffonnier qui vient, hochant la tête,
   Butant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poète,

What links the rag-picker to the poet is their marginal status with regard to the main economic activity of society and their largely nocturnal, and some might say, parasitical existence on the edges of modern life. The poet, like the rag-picker, is not, nor can ever be, totally removed from society's workings. More important still, the poet, like the ragpicker, is a connoisseur of the intimacies of human leftovers, fascinated by aspects of life from which others avert their gaze. The poet delves into the refuse of the city's dark neglected crevices to discover something of value.

Contemplons un de ces êtres mystérieux, vivant pour ainsi dire des déjections des grandes villes; car il y a de singuliers métiers. Le nombre en est immense. J'ai quelquefois pensé avec terreur qu'il y avait des métiers qui ne comportaient aucune joie, des métiers sans plaisir, des fatigues sans soulagement, des douleurs sans compensation. Je me trompais. Voici un homme chargé de ramasser les débris d'une journée de la capitale. Tout ce que la grande cité a rejeté, tout ce qu'elle a perdu, tout ce qu'elle a dédaigné, tout ce qu'elle a brisé, il le catalogue, il le collectionne. Il compulse les archives de la débauche, le capharnaüm des rebuts. Il fait un triage, un choix intelligent; il ramasse, comme un avare du trésor, les ordures qui, remâchées par la divinité de l'Industrie, deviendront des objets d'utilité ou de jouissance. Le voici qui, à la clarté sombre des réverbères tourmentés par le vent de la nuit, remonte une des longues rues tortueuses et peuplées de petits ménages de la montagne Sainte-Geneviève. Il est revêtu de son châle d'osier avec son numéro sept. Il arrive hochant la tête et butant sur les pavés, comme les jeunes poètes qui passent toutes leurs journées à errer et à chercher des rimes.