his spirit
and when, hands trembling, body alert, like the desolate Usher he was
haunted by an unreasoning fear and a secret terror.

Thus he was compelled to moderate his desires, and he rarely touched
these fearful elixirs, in the same way that he could no longer with
impunity visit his red corridor and grow ecstatic at the sight of the
gloomy Odilon Redon prints and the Jan Luyken horrors. And yet, when
he felt inclined to read, all literature seemed to him dull after
these terrible American imported philtres. Then he betook himself to
Villiers de L'Isle Adam in whose scattered works he noted seditious
observations and spasmodic vibrations, but which no longer gave one,
with the exception of his Claire Lenoir, such troubling horror.

This Claire Lenoir which appeared in 1867 in the _Revue des lettres et
des arts_, opened a series of tales comprised under the title of
_Histoires Moroses_ where against a background of obscure speculations
borrowed from old Hegel, dislocated creatures stirred, Dr. Tribulat
Bonhomet, solemn and childish, a Claire Lenoir, farcical and sinister,
with blue spectacles, round and large as franc pieces, which covered
her almost dead eyes.

This story centered about a simple adultery and ended with an
inexpressible terror when Bonhomet, opening Claire's eyelids, as she
lies in her death bed, and penetrating them with monstrous plummets,
distinctively perceives the reflection of the husband brandishing the
lover's decapitated head, while shouting a war song, like a Kanaka.

Based on this more or less just observation that the eyes of certain
animals, cows for instance, preserve even to decomposition, like
photographic plates, the image of the beings and things their eyes
behold at the moment they expire, this story evidently derived from
Poe, from whom he appropriated the terrifying and elaborate technique.

This also applied to the _Intersigne_, which had later been joined to
the _Contes cruels_, a collection of indisputable talent in which was
found _Vera_, which Des Esseintes considered a little masterpiece.

Here, the hallucination was marked with an exquisite tenderness; no
longer was it the dark mirages of the American author, but the fluid,
warm, almost celestial vision; it was in an identical genre, the
reverse of the Beatrices and Legeias, those gloomy and dark phantoms
engendered by the inexorable nightmare of opium.

This story also put in play the operations of the will, but i