Unlike Verlaine whose work was directly influenced by Baudelaire, especially on the psychological side, in his insidious nuances of thought and skilful quintessence of sentiment, Theodore Hannon especially descended from the master on the plastic side, by the external vision of persons and things.

His charming corruption fatally corresponded to the tendencies of Des Esseintes who, on misty or rainy days, enclosed himself in the retreat fancied by the poet and intoxicated his eyes with the rustlings of his fabrics, with the incandescence of his stones, with his exclusively material sumptuousness which ministered to cerebral reactions, and rose like a cantharides powder in a cloud of fragrant incense toward a Brussel idol with painted face and belly stained by the perfumes.

With the exception of the works of these poets and of Stephane Mallarme, which his servant was told to place to one side so that he might classify them separately, Des Esseintes was but slightly attracted towards the poets.

Notwithstanding the majestic form and the imposing quality of his verse which struck such a brilliant note that even the hexameters of Hugo seemed pale in comparison, Leconte de Lisle could no longer satisfy him.  The antiquity so marvelously restored by Flaubert remained cold and immobile in his hands.  Nothing palpitated in his verses, which lacked depth and which, most often, contained no idea.  Nothing moved in those gloomy, waste poems whose impassive mythologies ended by finally leaving him cold.  Too, after having long delighted in Gautier, Des Esseintes reached the point where he no longer cared for him.  The admiration he felt for this man’s incomparable painting had gradually dissolved; now he was more astonished than ravished by his descriptions.  Objects impressed themselves upon Gautier’s perceptive eyes but they went no further, they never penetrated deeper into his brain and flesh.  Like a giant mirror, this writer constantly limited himself to reflecting surrounding objects with impersonal clearness.  Certainly, Des Esseintes still loved the works of these two poets, as he loved rare stones and precious objects, but none of the variations of these perfect instrumentalists could hold him longer, neither being evocative of revery, neither opening for him, at least, broad roads of escape to beguile the tedium of dragging hours.

These two books left him unsatisfied.  And it was the same with Hugo; the oriental and patriarchal side was too conventional and barren to detain him.  And his manners, at once childish and that of a grandfather, exasperated him.  He had to go to the Chansons des rues et des bois to enjoy the perfect acrobatics of his metrics.  But how gladly, after all, would he not have exchanged all this tour de force for a new work by Baudelaire which might equal the others, for he, decidedly, was almost the only one whose verses, under their splendid form, contained a healing and nutritive substance.  In passing