‘You know,’ says Theophile Gautier’s best-known hero, in a letter to a friend, ’you know the eagerness with which I have sought for physical beauty, the importance I attach to outward form, and how the world I am in love with is the world that the eyes can see:  or to put the matter in more conventional language, I am so corrupt and blase that my faith in moral beauty is gone, and my power of striving after it also.  I have lost the faculty to discern between good and evil, and this loss has well nigh brought me back to the ignorance of the child or savage.  To tell the plain truth, nothing seems to me to be worthy either of praise or blame, and I am but little perturbed by even the most abnormal actions.  My conscience is deaf and dumb.  Adultery seems to me the most commonplace thing possible.  I see nothing shocking in a young girl selling herself.’...  ’I find that the earth is all as fair as heaven, and virtue for me is nothing but the perfection of form.’  ’Many a time and long,’ he continues farther on, ’have I paused in some cathedral, under the shadow of the marble foliage, when the lights were quivering in through the stained windows, when the organ unbidden made a low murmuring of itself, and the wind was breathing amongst the pipes; and I have plunged my gaze far into the pale blue depths of the almond-shaped eyes of the Madonna.  I have followed with a tender reverence the curves of that wasted figure of hers, and the arch of her eyebrows, just visible and no more than that.  I have admired her smooth and lustrous brow, her temples with their transparent chastity, and her cheeks shaded with a sober virginal colour, more tender than the colour of a peach-flower.  I have counted one by one the fair and golden lashes that threw their tremulous shade upon it.  I have traced out with care in the subdued tone that surrounds her, the evanescent lines of her throat, so fragile and inclined so modestly.  I have even lifted with an adventuring hand the folds of her tunic, and have seen unveiled that bosom, maiden and full of milk, that has never been pressed by any except divine lips.  I have traced out the rare clear veins of it, even to their faintest branchings.  I have laid my finger on it, to draw the white drops forth, of the draught of heaven.  I have so much as touched with my lips the very bud of the rosa mystica.

’Well, and I confess it honestly, all this immaterial beauty, this thing so winged and so aerial that one knows well enough it is soon going to fly away from one, has never moved me to any great degree.  I love the Venus Anadyomene better, better a thousand times.  These old-world eyes, slightly raised at the corners! these lips so pure and so firmly chiselled, so amorous, and so fit for kissing! this low, broad brow! these tresses with the curves in them of the sea water, and bound behind her head in a knot, negligently! these firm and shining shoulders! this back, with its thousand alluring contours! all these fair and rounded outlines, this air of superhuman vigour in a body so divinely feminine—­all this enraptures and enchants me in a way of which you can have no idea—­you the Christian and the philosopher.