wn world,
revealing to him the contours of new conjectures, agitating the
nervous system by the violent deliriums, complicated nightmares,
nonchalant or atrocious chimerae they induced.

Among these were some executed by an artist whose genius allured and
entranced him: Gustave Moreau.

Des Esseintes had acquired his two masterpieces and, at night, used to
sink into revery before one of them--a representation of Salome,
conceived in this fashion:

A throne, resembling the high altar of a cathedral, reared itself
beneath innumerable vaults leaping from heavy Romanesque pillars,
studded with polychromatic bricks, set with mosaics, incrusted with
lapis lazuli and sardonyx, in a palace that, like a basilica, was at
once Mohammedan and Byzantine in design.

In the center of the tabernacle, surmounting an altar approached by
semi-circular steps, sat Herod the Tetrarch, a tiara upon his head,
his legs pressed closely together, his hands resting upon his knees.

His face was the color of yellow parchment; it was furrowed with
wrinkles, ravaged with age. His long beard floated like a white cloud
upon the star-like clusters of jewels constellating the orphrey robe
fitting tightly over his breast.

Around this form, frozen into the immobile, sacerdotal, hieratic pose
of a Hindoo god, burned perfumes wafting aloft clouds of incense which
were perforated, like phosphorescent eyes of beasts, by the fiery rays
of the stones set in the throne. Then the vapor rolled up, diffusing
itself beneath arcades where the blue smoke mingled with the gold
powder of the long sunbeams falling from the domes.

In the perverse odor of the perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of
the temple, Salome, her left arm outstretched in a gesture of command,
her right arm drawn back and holding a large lotus on a level with her
face, slowly advances on her toes, to the rhythm of a stringed
instrument played by a woman seated on the ground.

Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences the
lascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod.
Diamonds scintillate against her glistening skin. Her bracelets, her
girdles, her rings flash. On her triumphal robe, seamed with pearls,
flowered with silver and laminated with gold, the breastplate of
jewels, each link of which is a precious stone, flashes serpents of
fire against the pallid flesh, delicate as a tea-rose: its jewels like
splendid insects with dazzling elytra,