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although À rebours presents such a perfect image of the Decadent anti-hero that it is hardly necessary to preserve others – but also because he recanted so conspicuously and transferred himself to the side of the angels. This was an option not open to all; Jean Lorrain’s literary indulgence of homoerotic themes was correlated with a more-or-less open acknowledgement of his own homosexuality from which there was no going back.
    It should be noted, though, that a generalized moral disapproval of Decadence (such as one still finds in some historians of the Movement) is insensitive to certain aspects of Decadent fiction, and tars some very different writers with the same brush. A good deal of Decadent prose is far from earnest; some is exuberantly playful and some of it very witty. Many of the authors who adopted the Decadent pose in the mid-80s were content to wear it flippantly as a gaudy costume. It was for some a thoroughly liberating kind of fiction, which allowed them to escape from the straitjacket of conventional moral expectations to celebrate infidelity instead of fidelity, lust instead of love, and idiosyncratic fantasy instead of sanctified desire. For some, this was an opportunity to cultivate a new intensity, but for others it was an amusing game – nor were these two alternatives entirely incompatible.
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    The pace was set for the writers of Decadent prose by Elémir Bourges’ lurid novel Le Crépuscule des dieux (1883), in which the evil mistress of an aristocrat of the Second Empire encourages his three children to taste the fruits of their inherited degeneracy, leading to an orgy of incest, murder, suicide and traumatic insanity. Having indulged these excesses, however, Bourges did not long remain a Decadent, having grander ambitions for his work; he rapidly recovered a sense of the heroic ideal, and his later tragedies, including Les oiseaux s’envolent et les fleurs tombent (1893), became increasingly pretentious.
    Joséphin Péladan was infinitely more consistent than Bourges, but he too had grander ambitions. Though Decadence remained his subject-matter throughout the twenty-odd volumes of a series collectively entitled La Décadence latine , which began with Le Vice Suprême (1884) and ran until 1925, his intention was to deplore it. Péladan’s central thesis was that the Decadence of the Romans was caused by the decay of their religious sensibilities, and that the modern world was similarly threatened. His work would have been more tedious than it was had his recipe for salvation been more orthodox, but the faith which he recommended for investment was a mystical Rosicrucianism whose champions are superhuman mages; this added a note of endearing eccentricity to the series in question, though most critics still refer to it as “unreadable”. The success of the early editions was probably enhanced by the fact that they carried erotic frontispieces by Felicien Rops, the most celebrated illustrator associated with the Movement.
    Péladan was not a particularly influential writer in France, but it is worth noting that the basic formula of his work, carefully sanitised by the removal of the specifically Decadent elements, is recapitulated in Marie Corelli’s absurd account of the failure of neurasthenia redeemed in A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), which set her on the path to becoming the best-selling English author of the 1890s. No one was ever such a diehard opponent of Decadence as Miss Corelli, but she was obviously prepared to study her enemy fairly closely, as evidenced by her feverish exposé of the absinthe dens of Paris, Wormwood (1890).
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    Among the more wholehearted Decadents, there was none more wholehearted – at least on the printed page – than the one female contributor to the boom, Marguérite Eymery, who signed herself Raehilde. A frequent contributor to Le Décadent , she was proudly self-conscious of her own corruption by the allure of artifice and neurosis,