meditated on that disquieting
problem--to write a novel concentrated in a few phrases which should
contain the essence of hundreds of pages always employed to establish
the setting, to sketch the characters, and to pile up observations and
minute details. Then the chosen words would be so unexchangeable that
they would do duty for many others, the adjective placed in such an
ingenious and definite fashion that it could not be displaced, opening
such perspectives that the reader could dream for whole weeks on its
sense at once precise and complex, could record the present,
reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls of the
characters, revealed by the gleams of this unique epithet.

Thus conceived and condensed in a page or two, the novel could become
a communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a
spiritual collaboration agreed to between ten superior persons
scattered throughout the universe, a delight offered to the refined,
and accessible to them alone.

To Des Esseintes, the prose poem represented the concrete juice of
literature, the essential oil of art.

That succulence, developed and concentrated into a drop, already
existed in Baudelaire and in those poems of Mallarme which he read
with such deep joy.

When he had closed his anthology, Des Esseintes told himself that his
books which had ended on this last book, would probably never have
anything added to it.

In fact, the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in its
organism, enfeebled by old ideas, exhausted by excesses of syntax,
sensitive only to the curiosities which make sick persons feverish,
and yet intent upon expressing everything in its decline, eager to
repair all the omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath the most subtle
memories of grief in its death bed, was incarnate in Mallarme, in the
most perfect exquisite manner imaginable.

Here were the quintessences of Baudelaire and of Poe; here were their
fine and powerful substances distilled and disengaging new flavors and
intoxications.

It was the agony of the old language which, after having become moldy
from age to age, ended by dissolving, by reaching that deliquescence
of the Latin language which expired in the mysterious concepts and the
enigmatical expressions of Saint Boniface and Saint Adhelme.

The decomposition of the French language had been effected suddenly.
In the Latin language, a long transition, a distance of four hundred
years existe