‘Wicked thoughts come into my soul in every place, at all hours, in the height of my work.... I listen in spite of myself to the infernal tones which vibrate in my heart where Satan knocks; and although I have a horror of vile saturnalias, of which the mere shadow suffices to anger me, I listen in spite of myself to the infernal tones.... The phantom of crime across my reason prowls around (in my skull).... Murder, rape, robbery, parricide, pass through my mind like fierce lightnings....’ The spectacle of death and corruption has a strong attraction for him. He delights in putrefaction and revels in disease. ‘My ghostly belovèd, snatched by death, played before me livid and purple.... Bony nakedness, chaste in her leanness! Hectic beauty as sad as it is ardent!... Near her a coffin ... greedily opened its oblong jaws, and seemed to call her....’ (_L’Amante macabre_). ‘Mademoiselle Squelette! Je la surnommais ainsi: Elle était si maigrelette! ‘Crachant une gouttelette De sang très peu cramoisi... Elle était si maigrelette!... ‘Sa phthisie étant complète;... Sa figure verdelette... Un soir, à l’espagnolette Elle vint se pendre ici. ‘Horreur! une cordelette Décapitait sans merci Mademoiselle Squelette: Elle était si maigrelette!’ _Mademoiselle Squelette._ ‘That I might rescue the angelically beautiful dead from the horrible kisses of the worm I had her embalmed in a strange box. It was on a winter’s night. From the ice-cold, stiff and livid body were taken out the poor defunct organs, and into the open belly, bloody and empty, were poured sweet-smelling salves....’ (_La Morte embaumée_). ‘Flesh, eyebrows, hair, my coffin and my winding-sheet, the grave has eaten them all; its work is done.... My skull has attested its shrinking, and I, a scaling, crumbling residue of death, have come to look back with regret upon the time when I was rotting, and the worm yet fasted not....’ (_Le mauvais Mort_). This depravity of taste will not seldom be observed among the deranged. In Rollinat it merely inspires loathsome verses; among others it leads them to the eager devouring of human excretions, and, in its worst forms, to being enamoured of a corpse (_Necrophilia_). Violent erotomaniacal excitement expresses itself in a series of poems (_Les Luxures_), which not only celebrate the most unbridled sensuality, but also all the aberrations of sexual psychopathy. But the most conspicuous are the sensations of undefined horrors which continually beset him. Everything inspires him with anguish; all the sights of Nature appear to him to enclose some frightful mystery. He is always expecting, in trembling, some unknown terror. ‘I always shudder at the strange look of some boot and some shoe. Ay, you may shrug your shoulders mockingly, I do shudder; and suddenly, on thinking of the foot they cover, I ask myself: “Is it mechanical, or living?” ...’ (_Le Maniaque_).