#decadents

© 2003 Man Ray Trust

Philippe Jullian - Dreamers of Decadence - Pall Mall - 1971 [on cover "Mysteriosa" (aka Mme Stuart Merill, nee Claire Rion) by Jean Delville, 1892]

Houghton Library, Harvard University

“It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him ... It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own ... The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming“

source

John Milner - Symbolists and Decadents - Studio Vista I Dutton - designed by Gillian Greenwood - 1971 (frontispiece Jan Toorop - The Three Brides 1893 detail)