litterature.

Des Esseintes had followed him with delight in his most diversified
works. After his _Romances sans paroles_ which had appeared in a
journal, Verlaine had preserved a long silence, reappearing later in
those charming verses, hauntingly suggestive of the gentle and cold
accents of Villon, singing of the Virgin, "removed from our days of
carnal thought and weary flesh." Des Esseintes often re-read _Sagesse_
whose poems provoked him to secret reveries, a fanciful love for a
Byzantine Madonna who, at a certain moment, changed into a distracted
modern Cydalise so mysterious and troubling that one could not know
whether she aspired toward depravities so monstrous that they became
irresistible, or whether she moved in an immaculate dream where the
adoration of the soul floated around her ever unavowed and ever pure.

There were other poets, too, who induced him to confide himself to
them: Tristan Corbiere who, in 1873, in the midst of the general
apathy had issued a most eccentric volume entitled: _Les Amours
jaunes_. Des Esseintes who, in his hatred of the banal and
commonplace, would gladly have accepted the most affected folly and
the most singular extravagance, spent many enjoyable hours with this
work where drollery mingled with a disordered energy, and where
disconcerting lines blazed out of poems so absolutely obscure as the
litanies of _Sommeil_, that they qualified their author for the name
of

Obscene confesseur des devotes mort-nees.

The style was hardly French. The author wrote in the negro dialect,
was telegraphic in form, suppressed verbs, affected a teasing
phraseology, revelled in the impossible puns of a travelling salesman;
then out of this jumble, laughable conceits and sly affectations
emerged, and suddenly a cry of keen anguish rang out, like the
snapping string of a violoncello. And with all this, in his hard
rugged style, bristling with obsolescent words and unexpected
neologisms, flashed perfect originalities, treasures of expression and
superbly nomadic lines amputated of rhyme. Finally, over and above his
_Poemes Parisiens_, where Des Esseintes had discovered this profound
definition of woman:

Eternel feminin de l'eternel jocrisse

Tristan Corbiere had celebrated in a powerfully concise style, the Sea
of Brittany, mermaids and the Pardon of Saint Anne. And he had even
risen to an eloquence of hate in the insults he hurled, apropos of the
Conlie camp, at the individuals