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makes a pact with the devil in order to achieve his heart’s desire. Whereas Dorian Gray had desired physical beauty and eternal youth, Florentian desires poetic genius and supremacy in the arts. In return for this, the devil demands the blood sacrifice of Florentian’s wife. Florentian removes the crucifix from the altar, treads the prostrate cross underfoot and places a bust of Virgil in its place. He then murders his wife on the altar of Art. His wish is granted, but, as with Dorian Gray, it brings nothing but misery and despair. At the very last, as the unbarred gate of hell looms menacingly, he is granted a glimpse of lost innocence:
I met a child today; a child with great candour of eyes. They who talk of children’s instincts are at fault: she knew not that hell was in my soul, she knew only that softness was in my gaze. She had been gathering wild flowers, and offered them to me. To me, to me !
    In many respects, the figure of Francis Thompson stands symbolically as a unifying force between the Decadent converts of the 1890s and the decidedly non-Decadent converts of the Edwardian and Georgian era, such as Chesterton, Benson, Baring, Noyes and Knox. Throughout the 1880s Thompson had led a life of penury, squalor and opium addiction. Homeless, hungry and befriended by prostitutes, his experiences inspired his most famous poem, “The Hound of Heaven”, written in 1889. Although Thompson was a cradle Catholic, the poem, with its potent and poignant depiction of a reluctant soul’s final acceptance of God’s relentless and fathomless love, remains a classic of conversion literature.
    Maurice Baring was another writer whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced, at least in part, by Huysmans. In the early years of the twentieth century, when Baring was grappling with the tenets of Christianity, the line of reasoning in Huysmans’ En Route struck him very forcefully. It was, however, another Frenchman who would have the greatest influence on Baring’s conversion. In 1898 he had met Hilaire Belloc for the first time, and the two men formed a friendship that would last the rest of their lives. Two years later Belloc and Chesterton met for the first time in a restaurant in Soho, and through Belloc, Chesterton became friends with Baring several years later. The friendship of these three men would later be immortalized in Sir James Gunn’s group portrait, which can still be seen in the National Portrait Gallery. Belloc, Baring and Chesterton, both singularly and collectively, represented the dominant force in Catholic literary circles throughout the first third of the twentieth century. Baring is the least known of the three, and his own literary achievement is sadly neglected today. His Collected Poems , published in 1925, included many of considerable merit, most notably the sonnet sequence “Vita Nuova”, written to commemorate his reception into the Church in 1909. Yet he was known principally as a novelist. His first novel, Passing By , was published in 1921 when he was already almost fifty years old, and his last was published fifteen years later, when his literary vocation was tragically cut short by the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease. In between he commanded a small but passionate readership and enjoyed much critical acclaim. His novel C, published in 1924, was highly praised by the French novelist André Maurois, who wrote that no book had given him such pleasure since his reading of Tolstoy, Proust and certain novels by E. M. Forster. If anything, Baring was to enjoy greater success in France than in England. Ten of his books were translated into French, with one— Daphne Adeane —going through twenty-three printings in the edition of the Librairie Stock. Others were translated into Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish and German.
    Although Chesterton and Belloc were great admirers of Baring’s work, others failed to share their enthusiasm. Virginia Woolf, taking the