These pages, numbering nine, had been extracted from copies of the two first Parnassian books; it was printed on parchment paper and preceded by this title: _Quelques vers de Mallarme_, designed in a surprising calligraphy in uncial letters, illuminated and relieved with gold, as in old manuscripts. Among the eleven poems brought together in these covers, several invited him: _Les fenetres_, _l'epilogue_ and _Azur_; but one among them all, a fragment of the _Herodiade_, held him at certain hours in a spell. How often, beneath the lamp that threw a low light on the silent chamber, had he not felt himself haunted by this Herodiade who, in the work of Gustave Moreau, was now plunged in gloom revealing but a dim white statue in a brazier extinguished by stones. The darkness concealed the blood, the reflections and the golds, hid the temple's farther sides, drowned the supernumeraries of the crime enshrouded in their dead colors, and, only sparing the aquerelle whites, revealed the woman's jewels and heightened her nudity. At such times he was forced to gaze upon her unforgotten outlines; and she lived for him, her lips articulating those bizarre and delicate lines which Mallarme makes her utter: O miroir! Eau froide par l'ennui dans ton cadre gelee Que de fois, et pendant les heures, desolee Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs qui sont Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au trou profond, Je m'apparus en toi comme une ombre lointaine! Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta severe fontaine, J'ai de mon reve epars connu la nudite! These lines he loved, as he loved the works of this poet who, in an age of democracy devoted to lucre, lived his solitary and literary life sheltered by his disdain from the encompassing stupidity, delighting, far from society, in the surprises of the intellect, in cerebral visions, refining on subtle ideas, grafting Byzantine delicacies upon them, perpetuating them in suggestions lightly connected by an almost imperceptible thread. These twisted and precious ideas were bound together with an adhesive and secret language full of phrase contractions, ellipses and bold tropes.