Here, the hallucination was marked with an exquisite tenderness; no longer was it the dark mirages of the American author, but the fluid, warm, almost celestial vision; it was in an identical genre, the reverse of the Beatrices and Legeias, those gloomy and dark phantoms engendered by the inexorable nightmare of opium.

This story also put in play the operations of the will, but it no longer treated of its defeats and helplessness under the effects of fear; on the contrary, it studied the exaltations of the will under the impulse of a fixed idea; it demonstrated its power which often succeeded in saturating the atmosphere and in imposing its qualities on surrounding objects.

Another book by Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Isis, seemed to him curious in other respects.  The philosophic medley of Clair Lenoir was evident in this work which offered an unbelievable jumble of verbal and troubled observations, souvenirs of old melodramas, poniards and rope ladders—­all the romanticism which Villiers de L’Isle Adam could never rejuvenate in his Elen and Morgane, forgotten pieces published by an obscure man, Sieur Francisque Guyon.

The heroine of this book, Marquise Tullia Fabriana, reputed to have assimilated the Chaldean science of the women of Edgar Allen Poe, and the diplomatic sagacities of Stendhal, had the enigmatic countenance of Bradamante abused by an antique Circe.  These insoluble mixtures developed a fuliginous vapor across which philosophic and literary influences jostled, without being able to be regulated in the author’s brain when he wrote the prolegomenae of this work which could not have embraced less than seven volumes.

But there was another side to Villiers’ temperament.  It was piercing and acute in an altogether different sense—­a side of forbidding pleasantry and fierce raillery.  No longer was it the paradoxical mystifications of Poe, but a scoffing that had in it the lugubrious and savage comedy which Swift possessed.  A series of sketches, les Demoiselles de Bienfilatre, l’Affichage celeste, la Machine a gloire, and le Plus beau diner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind.  The whole order of contemporary and utilitarian ideas, the whole commercialized baseness of the age were glorified in stories whose poignant irony transported Des Esseintes.

No other French book had been written in this serious and bitter style.  At the most, a tale by Charles Cros, La science de l’amour, printed long ago in the Revue du Monde-Nouveau, could astonish by reason of its chemical whims, by its affected humor and by its coldly facetious observations.  But the pleasure to be extracted from the story was merely relative, since its execution was a dismal failure.  The firm, colored and often original style of Villiers had disappeared to give way to a mixture scraped on the literary bench of the first-comer.