present tortures, the past fills with loathing
and the future frightens and menaces with despair.

And the more Des Esseintes read Baudelaire, the more he felt the
ineffable charm of this writer who, in an age when verse served only
to portray the external semblance of beings and things, had succeeded
in expressing the inexpressible in a muscular and brawny language;
who, more than any other writer possessed a marvelous power to define
with a strange robustness of expression, the most fugitive and
tentative morbidities of exhausted minds and sad souls.

After Baudelaire's works, the number of French books given place in
his shelves was strictly limited. He was completely indifferent to
those works which it is fashionable to praise. "The broad laugh of
Rabelais," and "the deep comedy of Moliere," did not succeed in
diverting him, and the antipathy he felt against these farces was so
great that he did not hesitate to liken them, in the point of art, to
the capers of circus clowns.

As for old poetry, he read hardly anything except Villon, whose
melancholy ballads touched him, and, here and there, certain fragments
from d'Aubigne, which stimulated his blood with the incredible
vehemence of their apostrophes and curses.

In prose, he cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmoved
even by Diderot, whose so greatly praised _Salons_ he found strangely
saturated with moralizing twaddle and futility; in his hatred toward
all this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusively to the
reading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bourdaloue and Bossuet
whose sonorously embellished periods were imposing; but, still more,
he relished suggestive ideas condensed into severe and strong phrases,
such as those created by Nicole in his reflections, and especially
Pascal, whose austere pessimism and attrition deeply touched him.

Apart from such books as these, French literature began in his library
with the nineteenth century.

This section was divided into two groups, one of which included the
ordinary, secular literature, and the other the Catholic literature, a
special but little known literature published by large publishing
houses and circulated to the four corners of the earth.

He had had the hardihood to explore such crypts as these, just as in
the secular art he had discovered, under an enormous mass of insipid
writings, a few books written by true masters.

The distinctive character of this literature was