But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor Hugo, in such tales as _Hans of Iceland_, and Balzac, in _The Wild Ass's Skin_, _Seraphita_, and _Louis Lambert_, both employ supernaturalism to a great or less extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and daemonic intensity which characterises the born artist in shadows. It is in Theopile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mastery which, though not continuously used, is recognisable at once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like _Atavar_, _The Foot of the Mummy_, and _Clarimonde_ display glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure, tantalise, and sometimes horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in _One of Cleopatra's Nights_ are of the keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of aeon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and uttered once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs, where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable summons. Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like _The Temptation of St. Anthony_, and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and fantasists of the symbolist and decadent schools whose dark interests really centre more in abnormalities of human thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle story-tellers whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of cosmic unreality. Of the former class of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the psychological novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the eighteen nineties, is at once the summation and finale. The latter and purely narrative class is continued by Prosper Merimee, whose _Venus of Ille_ presents in terse and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas Moore cast in ballad form in _The Ring_.