Bourgeois Mourning - Baudeliare (Benjamin's Arcades)

As for the garb, the outer husk, of the modern hero...is it not the necessary garb of our suffering age, which wears the symbol pf perpetual mourning even on its thin black shoulders?  Notice how the black suit and the frock coat possess not only their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul - an endless procession of hired mourners, political mourners, amorous mourners, bourgeois mourners.  We are all of us celebrating some funeral.

Baudelaire - Oeuvres, ed. Le Dantee, v. 2, p.134

cited by Benjamin [p. 285] in