than any other, seems to express, in its exquisitely
perverse charm, all that decadent civilisation of which Des Esseintes
is the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the fine perfume,
the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that great poet
(forgetting, strangely, Arthur Rimbaud) he places two poets who are
curious--the disconcerting, tumultuous Tristan Corbiere, and the painted
and bejewelled Theodore Hannon. With Edgar Poe he has the instinctive
sympathy which drew Baudelaire to the enigmatically perverse Decadent of
America; he delights, sooner than all the world, in the astonishing,
unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is
in Stephane Mallarme that he finds the incarnation of 'the decadence of
a literature, irreparably affected in its organism, weakened in its
ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the
curiosity which fevers sick people, and yet hastening to say everything,
now at the end, torn by the wish to atone for all its omissions of
enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest memories of sorrow on its
death-bed.'

But it is not on books alone that Des Esseintes nurses his sick and
craving fancy. He pushes his delight in the artificial to the last
limits, and diverts himself with a bouquet of jewels, a concert of
flowers, an orchestra of liqueurs, an orchestra of perfumes. In flowers
he prefers the real flowers that imitate artificial ones. It is the
monstrosities of nature, the offspring of unnatural adulteries, that he
cherishes in the barbarically coloured flowers, the plants with barbaric
names, the carnivorous plants of the Antilles--morbid horrors of
vegetation, chosen, not for their beauty, but for their strangeness. And
his imagination plays harmonies on the sense of taste, like combinations
of music, from the flute-like sweetness of anisette, the trumpet-note of
kirsch, the eager yet velvety sharpness of curacao, the clarionet. He
combines scents, weaving them into odorous melodies, with effects like
those of the refrains of certain poems, employing, for example, the
method of Baudelaire in _L'Irreparable_ and _Le Balcon_, where the last
line of the stanza is the echo of the first, in the languorous
progression of the melody. And above all he has his few, carefully
chosen pictures, with their diverse notes of strange beauty and strange
terror--the two Salomes of Gustave Moreau, the 'Religious Persecutions'
of Jan Luyken, the opium