Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des
Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman
Salome that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing-girl
who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears a cry of desire
from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating
body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a
king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the
goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among
many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has
hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,
insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to
her, all that look upon her, all that she touches.

It is in such a 'Palace of Art' that Des Esseintes would recreate his
already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion
is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This
one episode of action, this one touch of realism, in a book given over
to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected
voyage to London, a voyage that never occurs. Des Esseintes has been
reading Dickens, idly, to quiet his nerves, and the violent colours of
those ultra-British scenes and characters have imposed themselves upon
his imagination. Days of rain and fog complete the picture of that _pays
de brume et de boue_, and suddenly, stung by the unwonted desire for
change, he takes the train to Paris, resolved to distract himself by a
visit to London. Arrived in Paris before his time, he takes a cab to the
office of _Galignani's Messenger_, fancying himself, as the rain-drops
rattle on the roof and the mud splashes against the windows, already in
the midst of the immense city, its smoke and dirt. He reaches
_Galignani's Messenger_, and there, turning over Baedekers and Murrays,
loses himself in dreams of an imagined London. He buys a Baedeker, and,
to pass the time, enters the 'Bodega' at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli
and the Rue Castiglione. The wine-cellar is crowded with Englishmen: he
sees, as he drinks his port, and listens to the unfamiliar accents, all
the characters of Dickens--a whole England of caricature; as he drinks
his Amontillado, the recollection of Poe puts a new horror into the
good-humoured faces about him. Leaving the 'Bodega,' he steps out again
into the rain-swept