Before a toilet-table that shone like the altar of Nôtre Dame des Victoires, Helen was seated in a little dressing-gown of black and heliotrope. The Coiffeur Cosmé was caring for her scented chevelure, and with tiny silver tongs, warm from the caresses of the flame, made delicious intelligent curls that fell as lightly as a breath about her forehead and over her eyebrows, and clustered like tendrils round her neck. Her three favourite girls, Pappelarde, Blanchemains, and Loureyne, waited immediately upon her with perfume and powder in delicate flaçons and frail cassolettes, and held in porcelain jars the ravishing paints prepared by Châteline for those cheeks and lips which had grown a little pale with anguish of exile. Her three favourite boys, Claud, Clair, and Sarrasins, stood amorously about with salver, fan, and napkin. Millamant held a slight tray of slippers, Minette some tender gloves, La Popelinière--mistress of the robes--was ready with a frock of yellow and yellow. La Zambinella bore the jewels, Florizel some flowers, Amadour a box of various pins, and Vadius a box of sweets. Her doves, ever in attendance, walked about the room that was panelled with the gallant paintings of Jean Baptiste Dorat, and some dwarfs and doubtful creatures sat here and there lolling out their tongues, pinching each other, and behaving oddly enough. There you have a Beardsley drawing transfused into words. The same is true of his description of the woods of Auffray. The same is true of the wonderful supper served on the terrace to Helen and her guests amid the gardens. To find such another supper in literature one has to turn to some French author, or, better still, to the ‘Cena Trimalchionis’ of Petronius himself. From this it will be seen that Beardsley’s literary work,[7] like his black-and-white, though the embodiment of the spirit of his age, is also of the noble order of the highest things in art. It is for this reason, indeed, that I have selected Beardsley as the centre-piece of this brief sketch of a movement that is dead and gone. He was the incarnation of the spirit of the age; but, when the fall of Wilde killed the age and the Boer War buried it, neither of these things disturbed or changed the magic spell of his art. His age may die, but he remains. Even now he has outlived the fad period, while many of the books that were written at that date by others and decorated by him are only valuable to-day because of his frontispiece or wrapper. One has not forgotten those wrappers, for as one will not forget the work of William Blake, one will not forget that of Aubrey Beardsley. His enthusiasts treasure the smallest fragment. [7] _In The Influence of Baudelaire in France and England_, by G. Turquet-Milnes, pp. 277-280 (1913), there is an interesting study of his Baudelairism. II