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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, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the

various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed,

loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men

have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions

that wise men still call sin. 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.