We have seen him at the age of nineteen taking part in the battle of “Hernani” in his scarlet satin waistcoat; we see him at the same age leading the art students in mocking dances about a bust of Racine in a public square of Paris. After that we see him for forty-two years diligently following the art for art’s sake formula. He declares that he has no religion, no politics; he has no concern with any moral or intellectual question, he is purely and simply an artist, devoting himself with passionate fervor to the production of works of pure beauty. His fastidiousness is shown by the law he lays down, that a young artist should write not less than fifty thousand verses for practice before he writes one verse to be published. And what is the content of this art? Gautier believes in one thing, the human body. He believes in it, not as an instrument of the mind, a house of the spirit, but as a thing in itself, to be fed and pampered and perfumed, and clad in silks and satins, and taken out to engage in sexual adventures. The pretensions of art for art’s sake turn out to be buncombe; the reality of the matter is art for orgy’s sake. At the age of twenty-four Gautier published a novel, “Mademoiselle de Maupin,” which might be described as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” rewritten by the devil. A young lady of beauty and fashion goes wandering in the costume of a man, and this affords endless possibilities of sexual titillation; women fall in love with her, thinking she is a man, and men fall in love with her by instinct, as it were; the orgies thus postponed are especially thrilling when they finally occur. Some men have written this kind of depravity at twenty-four, and learned something better as they grew older; but Gautier learned absolutely nothing. To the end of his long life he continued to produce novels and tales of which the sole purpose is to glorify the orgy, to make it romantic and thrilling by the elaborate squandering of wealth, the heaping mountain high of the apparatus of luxury. The device fails, for the simple reason that the senses are limited. When you are hungry a dinner interests you, but ten thousand dinners appall; and the same thing applies to coition. The men and women in these orgies remind us of people in a besieged castle, living in deadly terror of an enemy who never fails to get them in the end. The French have made a word for that victorious enemy: _ennui_.