too, who loved literature for its own sake, was forced, amid cries of indignation and horror, to withdraw his book from the reach of a public that was rooting then amid the garbage of the Yelverton divorce case.  I think of these facts and think of Baudelaire’s prose poem, that poem in which he tells how a dog will run away howling if you hold to him a bottle of choice scent, but if you offer him some putrid morsel picked out of some gutter hole, he will sniff round it joyfully, and will seek to lick your hand for gratitude.  Baudelaire compared that dog to the public.  Baudelaire was wrong:  that dog was a ——.

* * * * *

When I read Balzac’s stories of Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempre, I often think of Hadrian and the Antinous.  I wonder if Balzac did dream of transposing the Roman Emperor and his favourite into modern life.  It is the kind of thing that Balzac would think of.  No critic has ever noticed this.

* * * * *

Sometimes, at night, when all is still, and I look out on that desolate river, I think I shall go mad with grief, with wild regret for my beautiful appartement in Rue de la Tour des Dames.  How different is the present to the past!  I hate with my whole soul this London lodging, and all that concerns it—­Emma, and eggs and bacon, the fat lascivious landlady and her lascivious daughter; I am sick of the sentimental actress who lives upstairs, I swear I will never go out to talk to her on the landing again.  Then there is failure—­I can do nothing, nothing; my novel I know is worthless; my life is a weak leaf, it will flutter out of sight presently.  I am sick of everything; I wish I were back in Paris; I am sick of reading; I have nothing to read.  Flaubert bores me.  What nonsense has been talked about him!  Impersonal!  Nonsense, he is the most personal writer I know.  That odious pessimism!  How sick I am of it, it never ceases, it is lugged in a tout dropos, and the little lyrical phrase with which he winds up every paragraph, how boring it is.  Happily, I have “A Rebours” to read, that prodigious book, that beautiful mosaic.  Huysmans is quite right, ideas are well enough until you are twenty, afterwards only words are bearable ... a new idea, what can be more insipid—­fit for members of parliament....  Shall I go to bed?  No....  I wish I had a volume of Verlaine, or something of Mallarme’s to read—­Mallarme for preference.  I remember Huysmans speaks of Mallarme in “A Rebours.”  In hours like these a page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of some exquisite and powerful liqueur.

“The decadence of a literature irreparably attacked in its organism, weakened by the age of ideas, overworn by the excess of syntax, sensible only of the curiosity which fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening to explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle souvenirs of its suffering on its deathbed, is incarnate in Mallarme in most consummate and absolute fashion....