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artist were to influence Pound and Eliot. Pound even translated Gourmont’s curious treatise
The Physiology of Love
, a study of the sexual mores of animals and insects. He brought this analysis to bear in his stories, which are often erotically charged and play once again on the ambivalence of sexual desire—deploying a knowing, unillusioned attitude common, as we have seen, among the Decadent writers. His fables included here, taken from
Histoires magiques
(1894)—‘The Faun’, ‘Don Juan’s Secret’, and ‘Danaette’—retell myths and legends, and are injected with a dose of his own fairly sulphurous fantasy. From
Sixtine
, his novel of the ‘cerebral life’ (1890), on, Gourmont’s work pits Schopenhauerian idealism (and atheism) against Christian respectability. His materialist leanings enable him to write
Le Latin mystique
(1892), a study of the neo-Latin poetry of the early Church, entirely for what he deemed its aesthetic qualities. For Gourmont, the artist was an aristocrat of the spirit. He himself was descended from the nobility, and he too, like his friends Villiers and Huysmans, despised the blurring of difference and distinction brought about by an age of universal suffrage. His unrequited passion for the lesbianwriter and salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, whom he called his ‘Amazone’, opened up new angles on his otherwise fairly conventional, though subtly handled and highly self-conscious, brand of male fantasy. The fourth story here, the Gothic fable ‘On the Threshold’, is very different, and cuts deeper, recounting a life blighted—two lives, in fact—by infernal pride and a misapplied philosophy of inaction. The Marquis de la Hogue, who owns the crumbling Chateau de la Fourche, is yet another version of the frigid dandy, but this time he is tortured by remorse for his own aloofness.
    A different kind of failure, a remorse that comes too late, is at the heart of ‘The Time’ by Georges Rodenbach (1855–98), a story about a coddled, pernickety, middle-aged batchelor, Van Hulst, who develops a passion for collecting time-pieces from the antique-dealers of Bruges. The passion for collecting, cast as a symptom or as a form of fetishism, fascinated Maupassant, as we have seen, and Huysmans’s Des Esseintes is nothing if not a querulous and exigent collector of fine books and
objets d’art
. It is one obvious refuge from mass commodification and vulgarity. Rodenbach was Belgian, and a friend of Maeterlinck. He is best known for the famous portrait of the city he loved,
Bruges-la-Morte
(1892). But he also lived in Paris, and there his wide network of friends included Mendès, Mirbeau, Villiers, the Goncourts, and Mallarmé, who all appreciated his refined manner and his deep, melancholy sensibility. Here, Rodenbach employs great finesse in embroidering into his story the allegorical or even parabolic figures that start to shine through more clearly as it progresses; there is nothing heavy-handed about the way he lays his snare.
    The dazzling but cruelly curtailed career of Jules Laforgue (1860–87) is well known, largely thanks to Eliot and Pound, the great Modernist poets, who quickly fastened upon this extraordinary ironic intelligence. Eliot especially fell under his spell, having discovered the poet in Arthur Symons’s seminal little book
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1899). Symons described Laforgue’s poetry and prose as an ‘art of the nerves’; 18 it is also an art of ascetic, almost inhuman self-consciousness—this well-mannered, polished young man, who looked rather like a benign monk, was in fact crippled by shyness. The invention of the ‘Pierrot’ persona in his
Complaintes
(1885) wasan act of genius that allowed him to escape the sub-Baudelairean gloom of his early poetry. As a penurious young man in Paris, Laforgue would work in the unheated ‘extension’ of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and would then retire to his bedsit, eat a boiled egg, and read