The poet retired further and further into him. The more he rhymed (and in the last years with morbid frequency), the fewer poems were produced. Now and then one came, when pose and impulse joined in minutes of sad (or drunken) melancholy, and when the mysterious fluid of the unconscious and great indefinite emotions made him silent, simple and timid. Otherwise he alternately turned erotic incidents and adventures in alcoves into rhyme, and wrote literary mockeries and parodies of Paul Verlaine, and for purposes of contrast, verses in praise of Catholic saint days. Every artistic pride was soon forgotten in the need for money. He sold his poems at one hundred sous apiece to his publisher Vanier, who cruelly printed them often against the active protest of the poet; recently again a volume of "Posthumous Works," which easily may be denominated as one of the most disagreeable and worst books published in France. This portion of the tragedy of his life no one has as yet fully told. During his last years he wrote two books which must not be ignored even though they do not fit in the customary picture of the _bon enfant_. These were _Femmes_ and _Hombres_. They could not appear publicly but were sold in five hundred numbered copies each. In them Verlaine broke abruptly with the tradition of agreeable nastiness of a Grecourt, in order to produce works of an unheard-of subjective shamelessness. In form the poems are smooth and in structure they are clever, but their subject matter and the poet's self-revelation is such as to place these volumes among the most unhappy that have ever been produced. They are naked and obscene. From an æsthetic point of view this publication, even if it was clandestine was without excuse, and it was the deepest descent of the poet. The effect of this depravity of an old man writing down with unsteady hand vices and nakednesses on prescription blanks for the sake of a few francs with which to buy an absinthe, is tragic. The existence and the spread of these books must destroy absolutely the legend of the "guileless fool." This is the only value which can be attributed to them.