Novelists have often shown how a love passion brings misery, despair, death, and ruin upon a life, but I know of no story of the good or evil influence awakened by the chance reading of a book, the chain of consequences so far-reaching, so intensely dramatic.  Never shall I open these books again, but were I to live for a thousand years, their power in my soul would remain unshaken.  I am what they made me.  Belief in humanity, pity for the poor, hatred of injustice, all that Shelley gave may never have been very deep or earnest; but I did love, I did believe.  Gautier destroyed these illusions.  He taught me that our boasted progress is but a pitfall into which the race is falling, and I learned that the correction of form is the highest ideal, and I accepted the plain, simple conscience of the pagan world as the perfect solution of the problem that had vexed me so long; I cried, “ave” to it all:  lust, cruelty, slavery, and I would have held down my thumbs in the Colosseum that a hundred gladiators might die and wash me free of my Christian soul with their blood.

The study of Baudelaire aggravated the course of the disease.  No longer is it the grand barbaric face of Gautier; now it is the clean shaven face of the mock priest, the slow, cold eyes and the sharp, cunning sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness of temptation.  “Les Fleurs du Mal!” beautiful flowers, beautiful in sublime decay.  What great record is yours, and were Hell a reality how many souls would we find wreathed with your poisonous blossoms.  The village maiden goes to her Faust; the children of the nineteenth century go to you, O Baudelaire, and having tasted of your deadly delight all hope of repentance is vain.  Flowers, beautiful in your sublime decay, I press you to my lips; these northern solitudes, far from the rank Parisian garden where I gathered you, are full of you, even as the sea-shell of the sea, and the sun that sets on this wild moorland evokes the magical verse:—­

    “Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique
    Nous echangerons un eclair unique
    Comme un long sanglot tout charge d’adieux.”

For months I fed on the mad and morbid literature that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence.  The gloomy and sterile little pictures of “Gaspard de la Nuit,” or the elaborate criminality, “Les Contes Immoraux,” laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the unfortunate Dora remain.  “Madame Potiphar” cost me forty francs, and I never read more than a few pages.