L'Art Moderne was published between covers in 1883. It deals with the official salons of 1879, 1880-81 and the exposition of the Independents, 1880-81. The appendix, 1882, contains thumbnail sketches of Caillebotte, whose bequest to the Luxembourg of impressionistic paintings, including Manet's Olympe, stirred all artistic and inartistic Paris; Gauguin, Mlle. Morisot, Guillaumin, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley, Claude Monet, "the marine painter _par excellence_"; Manet, Roll, Redon, all men then fighting the stream of popular and academic disfavour. Since Charles Baudelaire's Salons, no volume on the current Paris exhibitions has appeared of such solid knowledge and literary power as Huysmans's. Admitting his marked prejudices, his numerous dogmatic utterances, there is nevertheless an attractive artistic quality backed up by the writer's stubborn convictions that persuade where the more liberal and brilliant Théophile Gautier never does. "Théo," who said that if he pitched his sentences in the air they always fell on their feet, like a cat, leaned heavily on his verbal magic. But even in that particular he is no match for Huysmans, who, boasting the blood of Fleming painters, sculptors, and architects, uses his pen as an artist his brush. Take another bit from his study of Moreau's Salome: "A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath innumerable arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman pillars, enamelled with varicoloured bricks, set with mosaics, encrusted with lapis-lazuli and sardonyx in a palace like the basilica of an architecture at once Mussulman and Byzantine. In the centre of the tabernacle surmounting the altars, fronted with rows of circular steps, sat the Tetrarch Herod, the tiara on his head, his legs pressed together, his hands on his knees. His face was yellow, parchmentlike, annulated with wrinkles, withered by age; his long beard floated like a cloud on the jewelled stars that constellated the robe of netted gold across his breast. Around this statue, motionless, frozen in the sacred pose of a Hindu god, perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of vapour, pierced, as by the phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire of precious stones set in the sides of the throne; then the vapour mounted, unrolling itself beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled with the powdered gold of great sun-rays fallen from the dome."... And of Salome he writes: "In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman Salome that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing girl ... she had become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible Beast, poisoning like Helen of old all that go near her, all that look upon her, all that she touches."