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Updated: May 20, 2025
Most comfortably, most happily seated at a little table in dear Madame Gautier's cabinet, with a view of soft acacias seen through half-open Venetian blinds, with a cool breeze waving the trees of this hanging garden, and the song of birds and the cheerful voices of little Caroline Delessert and her brother playing with bricks in the next room to me, I write to you, my beloved friend.
Perhaps it was less his ennui than the curiosity for new sensations which caused him to accept Gautier's invitation to pass an evening with Baudelaire and one or two others, at the Hotel Pimodan, for the purpose of eating hashish.
Turning, I saw emerge from the door of Gautier's little café, across the street, the tall figure of an erstwhile friend of mine, Jack Dandridge, of Tennessee, credited with being the youngest member in the House of Representatives at Washington and credited with little else.
There are sugar-tongs in this house, which I have seen nowhere else except at Madame Gautier's. Salt-spoons never to be seen, so do not be surprised at seeing me take salt and sugar in the natural way when I come back. Carriages come round about twelve, and we drive about seeing places in the neighbourhood afterwards go to our own rooms or to the salon, or play billiards or chess.
In Gautier's saying, for instance, "I am a man for whom the visible world exists," which I have quoted as expressing the key-note of the romantic epoch, it is to be noted that the visible world is taken as a spectacle simply significant, suggestive or merely stimulant, in accordance with individual bent. Gautier and the romanticists generally had little concern for its structure.
It is restrained, impersonal, and polished to the highest degree. The bulk of it is not great; but not a line of it is weak or faulty; and it possesses a firm and plastic beauty, well expressed by the title of Gautier's volume, and the principles of which are at once explained and exemplified in his famous poem beginning
In these stories we may see the influence of Gautier's enamelled style already at work, operating with more precision than it was later to show, more fearful of the penumbra than his later ghost stories, and with a certain hurried air which may be largely set down to the journalistic pressure of writing weekly for newspapers.
One spring day in 1604, a band of Bohemians, such as are described in Gautier's Le Capitaine Fracasse, might have been seen journeying through the smiling country of Lorraine on their way to Florence to be present there at the great Fair of the Madonna.
He was paid like the humblest of unknown scribblers; not even illustrations were given to the obscure romance running in dim inner pages of the periodical, and it appears that, as Théophile Gautier's editor said about one of his narratives, "the abonné was bored with the style."
Theophile Gautier's words should prove to the modern reader, the debt of gratitude he owes to the inaugurator of a completely original system of fiction. They have nevertheless one little quality which Oswald lacked they live, and with so strong a life that we have met them a thousand times." The men play whist placidly by the light of candles with little green shades.
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