Take, for instance, _A Transaction of Hearts_ (1887), one of the queerest novels ever written and written with a kind of deliberate malice. Gonfallon, who becomes a bishop, falls passionately in love with an ardent and insolent girl who is his wife's sister; and before her beauty everything vanishes: virtue, genius, everything. "For a second that was an eternity he was conscious of her emollient mouth on his, her fingers intertwined with his own. For that second he really lived--perhaps he really lived." One wonders why Saltus uses so many ugly phrases--a kind of decadent French fashion of transposing words; such as the one I have quoted, together with "Ruedelapaixia" (meant to describe a dress), "Rafflesia, Mashed grasshoppers baked in saffron;" phrases chosen at random which are too frequently scattered in much too obvious a profusion over much too luxurious pages. I read somewhere that Oscar Wilde said to Amélie Rives: "In Edgar Saltus's work passion struggles with grammar on every page," which is certainly one of Wilde's finest paradoxes. I "cap this"--as Dowson often said to me in jest--with Léon Bloy's admirable phrase on Huysmans: "That he drags his images by the heels or the hair upside down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax." _Imperial Purple_ (1906) shows the zenith of Saltus's talent, not in conceiving imaginary beings, but in giving modern conceptions of the most amazing creatures in the Roman Decadence, and in lyrical prose, which ought to have had for motto Victoria's stanza:-- _Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la décadence, Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs, En composant des acrostiches indolents, D'un style d'or où la langueur du soleil danse._ Only Saltus is not Tacitus, in spite of having delved into his pages. RECOLLECTIONS OF RÉJANE NOTES ON THE ART OF THE GREAT FRENCH ACTRESS