“Heavens! heavens! how few books are really worth re-reading,” sighed Des Esseintes, gazing at the servant who left the stool on which he had been perched, to permit Des Esseintes to survey his books with a single glance.

Des Esseintes nodded his head.  But two small books remained on the table.  With a sigh, he dismissed the old man, and turned over the leaves of a volume bound in onager skin which had been glazed by a hydraulic press and speckled with silver clouds.  It was held together by fly-leaves of old silk damask whose faint patterns held that charm of faded things celebrated by Mallarme in an exquisite poem.

These pages, numbering nine, had been extracted from copies of the two first Parnassian books; it was printed on parchment paper and preceded by this title:  Quelques vers de Mallarme, designed in a surprising calligraphy in uncial letters, illuminated and relieved with gold, as in old manuscripts.

Among the eleven poems brought together in these covers, several invited him:  Les fenetres, l’epilogue and Azur; but one among them all, a fragment of the Herodiade, held him at certain hours in a spell.

How often, beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silent chamber, had he not felt himself haunted by this Herodiade who, in the work of Gustave Moreau, was now plunged in gloom revealing but a dim white statue in a brazier extinguished by stones.

The darkness concealed the blood, the reflections and the golds, hid the temple’s farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crime enshrouded in their dead colors, and, only sparing the aquerelle whites, revealed the woman’s jewels and heightened her nudity.

At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines; and she lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicate lines which Mallarme makes her utter: 

                            O miroir! 
    Eau froide par l’ennui dans ton cadre
      gelee
    Que de fois, et pendant les heures,
      desolee
    Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs
      qui sont
    Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au
      trou profond,
    Je m’apparus en toi comme une ombre
      lointaine! 
    Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta
      severe fontaine,
    J’ai de mon reve epars connu la nudite!

These lines he loved, as he loved the works of this poet who, in an age of democracy devoted to lucre, lived his solitary and literary life sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity, delighting, far from society, in the surprises of the intellect, in cerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting Byzantine delicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions lightly connected by an almost imperceptible thread.

These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesive and secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and bold tropes.