Actual libertinism is no necessary concomitant of nympholeptic longing. There is a striking difference in this respect between Poe, for example, and his translator and disciple, Baudelaire. Nothing could be less suggestive of voluptuousness than Poe’s nostalgia. “His ecstasy,” says Stedman, “is that of the nympholept seeking an evasive being of whom he has glimpses by moonlight, starlight, even fenlight, but never by noonday.” The embodiments of his dream that flit through his tales and poems, enhanced his popularity with the ultra-romantic public in France. These strange apparitions nearly all of whom are epileptic, cataleptic, or consumptive made a natural appeal to a school that was known among its detractors as _l’école poitrinaire_. “Tender souls,” says Gautier, “were specially touched by Poe’s feminine figures, so vaporous, so transparent and of an almost spectral beauty.” Perhaps the nympholepsy of Gérard de Nerval is almost equally vaporous and ethereal. He pursued through various earthly forms the queen of Sheba whom he had loved in a previous existence and hanged himself at last with what he believed to be her garter: an interesting example of the relation between the extreme forms of the romantic imagination and madness.[158] The pursuit of a phantom of love through various earthly forms led in the course of the romantic movement to certain modifications in a famous legend--that of Don Juan. What is emphasized in the older Don Juan is not merely his libertinism but his impiety--the gratification of his appetite in deliberate defiance of God. He is animated by Satanic pride, by the lust of power as well as by the lust of sensation. In Molière’s treatment of the legend we can also see the beginnings of the philanthropic pose.[159] With the progress of Rousseauism Don Juan tends to become an “idealist,” to seek to satisfy in his amorous adventures not merely his senses but his “soul” and his thirst for the “infinite.”[160] Along with this idealistic Don Juan we also see appearing at a very early stage in the movement the exotic Don Juan who wishes to have a great deal of strangeness added to his beauty. In his affair with the “Floridiennes,” Chateaubriand shows the way to a long series of exotic lovers. I said to my heart between sleeping and waking, Thou wild thing that always art leaping or aching, What black, brown or fair, in what clime, in what nation, By turns has not taught thee a pit-a-pat-ation? These lines are so plainly meant for Pierre Loti that one learns with surprise that they were written about 1724 by the Earl of Peterborough.[161]