He was born in a château in Normandy on 4th April 1858. Among his ancestors was Gilles de Gourmont, a learned printer and engraver of the fifteenth century. He has himself collected old woodcuts, and in _L’Ymagier_ amused himself by setting the most ancient specimens of the craft, among which he is proud to show some examples of the work of his family, side by side with drawings by Whistler and Gauguin. He came to Paris in 1883, when he obtained a post in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Huysmans was “sous-chef de bureau à la direction de la Sûreté générale,” and M. de Gourmont, who made his acquaintance through the dedication of a book, used to call for him between four and five of the afternoon, and walk with him across the river to a café, that has since disappeared, where he listened to the older man’s rather savage characterisations of men, women, movements and books. A few years later he was held to be lacking in patriotism, and relieved of his post on account of an article urging the necessity of Franco-German agreement. He wrote incessantly. _Merlette_, a rather naïve and awkward little novel, published in 1886, did not promise the work he was to do. It was no more than an exercise, well done, but no more, the work of a good brain as yet uncertain of its personal impulse. But about this time he was caught in the stream of a movement for which he had been waiting, for which, indeed, the art of his time had been waiting, the movement that was introduced to English readers by Mr. Arthur Symons’s admirable series of critical portraits.[10] In 1890 he published _Sixtine_, dedicated to Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who had died the year before. In 1892 appeared _Le Latin Mystique_, a book on the Latin poets of the Middle Ages. He has always been “a delicate amateur of the curiosities of beauty,” though the character that Mr. Symons gave him has since become very inadequate. He edited Gérard de Nerval, _Aucassin et Nicolette_, and Rutebeuf’s _La Miracle de Théophile_, and wrote _Lilith_, 1892, and _Théodat_, a dramatic poem in prose that was produced by my friend M. Paul Fort at the Théâtre d’Art on December 11th of the same year. Several other curious works of this period were united later in _Le Pèlerin du Silence_. I extract from the bibliography by M. van Bever, printed in _Poètes d’aujourd’hui_, a list of the more important books that have followed these very various beginnings: _Le Livre des Masques_, 1896; _Les Chevaux de Diomède_, 1897; _Le II^{me} Livre des Masques_, 1898; _Esthétique de la langue française_, 1899; _La Culture des Idées_, 1900; _Le Chemin de Velours_, 1902; _Le Problème du Style_, 1902; _Physique de l’Amour_, 1903; _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_, 1906; besides four volumes of literary and philosophical criticism, and four volumes of comment on contemporary events.