veined with carmine, dotted
with yellow gold, diapered with blue steel, speckled with peacock
green.

With a tense concentration, with the fixed gaze of a somnambulist, she
beholds neither the trembling Tetrarch, nor her mother, the fierce
Herodias who watches her, nor the hermaphrodite, nor the eunuch who
sits, sword in hand, at the foot of the throne--a terrible figure,
veiled to his eyes, whose breasts droop like gourds under his
orange-checkered tunic.

This conception of Salome, so haunting to artists and poets, had
obsessed Des Esseintes for years. How often had he read in the old
Bible of Pierre Variquet, translated by the theological doctors of the
University of Louvain, the Gospel of Saint Matthew who, in brief and
ingenuous phrases, recounts the beheading of the Baptist! How often
had he fallen into revery, as he read these lines:

But when Herod's birthday was kept, the
daughter of Herodias danced before them, and
pleased Herod.

Whereupon he promised with an oath to give
her whatsoever she would ask.

And she, being before instructed of her
mother, said: Give me here John Baptist's
head in a charger.

And the king was sorry: nevertheless, for
the oath's sake, and them which sat with him
at meat, he commanded it to be given her.

And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.

And his head was brought in a charger, and
given to the damsel: and she brought it to
her mother.

But neither Saint Matthew, nor Saint Mark, nor Saint Luke, nor the
other Evangelists had emphasized the maddening charms and depravities
of the dancer. She remained vague and hidden, mysterious and swooning
in the far-off mist of the centuries, not to be grasped by vulgar and
materialistic minds, accessible only to disordered and volcanic
intellects made visionaries by their neuroticism; rebellious to
painters of the flesh, to Rubens who disguised her as a butcher's wife
of Flanders; a mystery to all the writers who had never succeeded in
portraying the disquieting exaltation of this dancer, the refined
grandeur of this murderess.

In Gustave Moreau's work, conceived independently of the Testament
themes, Des Esseintes as last saw realized the superhuman and exotic
Salome of his dreams. She was no longer the mere performer who wrests
a cry of desire and of passion from an old man by a perverted twisting
of her loins; who destroys the energy and breaks the will of a