of Huysmans it has the further interest of being a portrait of the real des Esseintes, the hero of that singular and remarkable romance of the Decadence, A Rebours. It is scarcely likely that many of the people, or indeed any of the English people who saw the picture, knew that it was also the portrait of a poet, the poet of the bats, Les Chauves-Souris, an enormous volume of five hundred closely printed pages.
The Comte de Montesquiou, though living, and a personage, and of late a fait divers in the papers for purely mundane reasons, is none the less a legendary being, of whom all the stories that are told may very likely be true, of whom at all events nothing can be told more fantastic than the truth. Has he, or had he, really a series of rooms, draped in different tones, in one of which he could only read French, in another only Latin? Did he really gild the back of the tortoise, and then inlay it with jewels, so that it might crawl over the carpet in arabesques of living colour, until the poor beast died of the burden of its unwonted splendour? Did he really invent an orchestra of perfumes, an orchestra of
