n fruits of love, its
suffocations, its instinctive caresses and natural attitudes.

With Baudelaire, these three masters had most affected Des Esseintes
in modern, French, secular literature. But he had read them so often,
had saturated himself in them so completely, that in order to absorb
them he had been compelled to lay them aside and let them remain
unread on his shelves.

Even now when the servant was arranging them for him, he did not care
to open them, and contented himself merely with indicating the place
they were to occupy and seeing that they were properly classified and
put away.

The servant brought him a new series of books. These oppressed him
more. They were books toward which his taste had gradually veered,
books which diverted him by their very faults from the perfection of
more vigorous writers. Here, too, Des Esseintes had reached the point
where he sought, among these troubled pages, only phrases which
discharged a sort of electricity that made him tremble; they
transmitted their fluid through a medium which at first sight seemed
refractory.

Their imperfections pleased him, provided they were neither parasitic
nor servile, and perhaps there was a grain of truth in his theory that
the inferior and decadent writer, who is more subjective, though
unfinished, distills a more irritating aperient and acid balm than the
artist of the same period who is truly great. In his opinion, it was
in their turbulent sketches that one perceived the exaltations of the
most excitable sensibilities, the caprices of the most morbid
psychological states, the most extravagant depravities of language
charged, in spite of its rebelliousness, with the difficult task of
containing the effervescent salts of sensations and ideas.

Thus, after the masters, he betook himself to a few writers who
attracted him all the more because of the disdain in which they were
held by the public incapable of understanding them.

One of them was Paul Verlaine who had begun with a volume of verse,
the _Poemes Saturniens_, a rather ineffectual book where imitations of
Leconte de Lisle jostled with exercises in romantic rhetoric, but
through which already filtered the real personality of the poet in
such poems as the sonnet _Reve Familier_.

In searching for his antecedents, Des Esseintes discovered, under the
hesitant strokes of the sketches, a talent already deeply affected by
Baudelaire, whose influence had been accentuated later on,