American collectors of art Huysmans treated as brigands. In the matter of the classical painters and sculptors he manifested himself intransigent. He adored the Flemish primitives, the School of Cologne and a few of the Italian primitives, but with the exception of Fra Angelico found their types detestingly androgynous. (He employed a more pungent term.) In the Low Countries are the true primitives, he declared, as the only mysticism is that of John of the Cross and Saint Teresa. Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion is his idol. Huysmans's opinion of Puvis de Chavannes in Certains is stimulating though inconclusive. For him Puvis tries to dance a rigaudon at a Requiem mass! But as a descendant of Cornelis Huysmans, the Parisian sees with almost an abnormal vision, and in prose paints like a veritable Fleming. Little wonder De Gourmont called him an "eye." His prose is addressed to the eye, rather than to the ear. Sumptuous in colouring, its rhythmic movement is pompous, its tone hieratic; and he so manipulated it that it was a perfect medium to depict the Paris of his time. Huysmans did not think too highly of his brothers under the same literary yoke. His opinions are concise. Coquiot prints them. Despite his affiliations with Zola and the naturalistic group, Huysmans soon tired of his chief, tired of his theories, his crude notions of art and life. He definitely broke away from him in his famous preface to Là Bas. And it should not be forgotten that he was the first to celebrate in fiction, if celebration it may be called, the prostitute of modern Paris. Marthe appeared a year earlier than either Nana or La Fille Elise, the latter by Edmond de Goncourt. But he sickened of the sewer fiction only to dive deeper in the mediæval vileness of Là Bas. He met Goncourt through the offices of Léon Cladel, a writer little known to our generation. Huysmans was a friend in need to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and frequented the eccentric company of Barbey d'Aurévilly, in whose apartment he said that Paul Bourget was apt to pop out of a closet or a cloak. He did not care for that "Cherubin of the Duchesses of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."