s-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?

Viens; nous serons un jour de pauvres feuilles mortes.
Viens; deja la nuit tombe et le vent nous emporte.

Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?

"Le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes"--such indeed must be, at
the last, the wisdom of this great harvester of human passions and
perversions.

"Feuilles mortes," and the sound of feet that go by; that go by and
return not again!

Remy de Gourmont leaves in us a bitter after-sense that we have not
altogether, or perhaps even nearly, sounded the stops of his mystery.
"The rest is silence" not only because he is dead, but because it
seems as if he mocked at us--he the Protean critic--until his last hour.

His remote epicurean life--the life of a passionate scholar of the
Renaissance--baffles and evades our curiosity.

To analyse Remy de Gourmont one would have to be a Remy de
Gourmont.

He is full of inconsistencies. Proudly individualistic, an intellectual
anarchist free from every scruple, he displays an objective patience
almost worthy of Goethe himself in his elaborate investigations into
the mysteries of life and the mysteries of the art that expresses life.

Furiously enamoured of thrilling aesthetic sensations he can yet
wander, as those who know his "Promenades" can testify, through
all manner of intricate and technical details.

Capable in his poetry and prose-poems of giving himself up to every
sort of ambiguous and abnormal caprice, he is yet in his calmer
hours able to fall back upon a sane, serene and sun-lit wisdom,
tolerant towards the superstitions of humanity, and full of the magic
of the universe. Never for a single moment in all of his writings are
we allowed to forget the essential wonder and mystery of sex. Sex,
in all its caprices and eccentricities, in all its psychological masks
and ritualistic symbols, interests him ultimately more than anything
else. It is this which inspires even his critical work with a sort of
physiological thrill, as though the encounter with a new creative
intelligence were an encounter between lover and beloved.

Remy de Gourmont would have sex and sex-emotions put frankly
into the fore-ground of everything, as far as art and letters are
concerned. He would take the timid hyperborean Muse of the
modern world and bathe her once more in the sun-lit waters of the
Heliconian Spring. He would paganize, Latinize and Mediterraneanize
th