Product Description

Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poetnot to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-townThophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature.

In Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautiers career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of The Adolescent through The Poet, a piercing recollection of the mad genius Grard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautiers youth, celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris? Gautier wonders. He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some nave provincial

Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.