In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K. Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries; indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming and industrious functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour, yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the irascible among decorated philistines! "Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and a miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, and amused look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility." This tiny etched portrait is by Mr. Arthur Symons, who practically introduced Huysmans to English-speaking letters.