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The Good Song (originally La Bonne Chanson) was the third book of poetry written by French poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896). Originally published in 1870, The Good Song¿s theme is love. More particularly its theme is love for, and anticipation of marriage with, his future child-wife, Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. It includes all the concomitant feelings one might expect from the poet: love, joy, elation, doubt, fear, nuptial desire or passion, to name only a few. Their romance took place with the Franco-Prussian War in the background. Having appeared during the war, it was according to Victor Hugo "a flower in a shell." It represented, according to Edmond Lepelletier, a "transformation," a "change in poetic matter" and "a transition piece... the passage from objective, descriptive, plastic, externalized poetry to personal expression, to a confession of the soul, to the notation of battles of the heart or excitations of the brain."Included with this translation, in the appendix, is an extant excerpt of chapter VII, "Marriage - The Good Song (1869-1871)" from Edmond Lepelletier¿s "official" biography of Paul Verlaine: Paul Verlaine: His Life, His Work.

Fêtes Galantes & Songs Without Words are the 2nd and 4th books of poetry by French poet and author Paul Verlaine.Fêtes Galantes (Fêtes Galantes in French) was originally published in 1869. A common theme running through these poems is the scenes, characters, and props of French comedy, semi-civilized pastorals, and commedia dell¿arte, - figures like Harlequin, Colombine, Pierrot, Leandre, the Innamorati, etc., against natural backdrops and dreamy Watteau-like landscapes, with all the appurtenances that one might expect: mandolins, lutes, masques, moonlight, prettily-clad women, moss-covered benches... - interfused with the poet¿s feelings, melancholy, amorous longings, joys, and regrets.Songs Without Words (Romances sans paroles in French) was originally published in 1874. The common theme in these poems is the amorous and sentimental love lost, found, and lost again between the poet and his childhood female cousin, or his child wife, or his new-found friend and fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud against a backdrop of the Ardennes, the Belgian countryside, Brussels, and London. It includes perhaps Verlaine¿s most famous poem: "Il pleure dans mon c¿ur..."

Blood of the Poor (originally Le Sang du pauvre), by Catholic writer Léon Bloy, is perhaps the hardest to read of Léon Bloy¿s writings, as it goes straight to the heart of the matter of what is wrong in the world. It is hard to read, emotively, because it gives the honest reader no room for cover, no space for shelter, no shadow of a tree to hide under. With avarice as its subject, it is a dark poem in prose, a sermon in the style of Savonarola, with the biting satire of a Jonathan Swift."The Blood and the Flesh of the Poor are the only aliments that can nourish, the substance of the rich being a poison and a putrefaction. It is therefore a necessity of hygiene that the poor be devoured by the rich who find that very good, and who ask for it again. Rich children are fortified by the juice of the poors¿ flesh, and the rich man¿s cuisine is endowed with concentrate of the poor.""You believe yourselves to be innocent because you have not slit somebody¿s throat, as yet, I want to believe; because you have not forced open somebody¿s door nor scaled his wall in order to despoil him of his possessions; because finally you have not transgressed human laws too visibly. You are so gross, so carnal, for you do not conceive of a crime that cannot be seen. But I say to you, my very dear brother, that you are a plant, and that that assassin is your flower.""It is true that there are refuges: drunkenness, prostitution of the body, suicide, or madness. Why would the dance not continue?"

Constantinople and Byzantium by Léon Bloy (1846-1917) was originally published in book form in 1917, itself a "definitive re-printing of The Byzantine Epic and Gustave Schlumberger, published in 1906 by the Nouvelle Revue." This book is a summary and interpretation then, à la Bloy, of Schlumberger¿s "trilogy" with its focus on the Macedonian dynasty of Byzantium from the middle of the tenth century to the middle of the eleventh. It covers the rise and fall of such warrior emperors as Nicephorus Phocas, John Tzimiskes, and Basil II, the "Bulgar Slayer," under whom the Eastern Roman Empire experienced a kind of Renaissance, after a long series of wars with Bulgars, Rus (Russians), Saracens, and later Normans, to name only a few peoples, in the years and decades immediately preceding the Crusades. The last chapter treats of the two Porphyrogenita ("born in the purple") empresses, Zoe and Theodora, "last branches of the Macedonian oak.""It is proven that God has no need of anyone¿s ¿day after,¿ and that his eternal today satisfies him. Pettiness is no less asked for than Greatness in the laboratory of prodigies. Disparate or desperate successions operate inexpressibly in a mysterious and adored way, in view of compensations or ineffable recuperations. So it is very simple that a series of mediocre or abject emperors should succeed a personage like the great Basil in order to destroy his work. Thirty years after his death, in 1055, his empire was ruined forever."

The first things that come to minds and lips, when thinking about Paul Verlaine¿s poetry, are music and nuance. It is through his heightened employment simultaneously and regularly of those two attributes, of those two mesmerizing attributes of his often absinthe-like poetry, that Paul Verlaine, the poet, really shines, - brightly, not incandescently, but fluorescently, like the greenish-blue polestar on a winter¿s night. But the poetry found in Songs for Her (1891) and Odes in Her Honor (1893) is somewhat contrary to the commonly held ideas of what Paul Verlaine¿s poetry is or "should be," in terms of nuance; it is just as musically virtuosic or experimental as his earlier poetry was, which we all know and love. Because these are poems of mostly physical love, but also emotional love, between a middle-aged man and a woman (two women actually, just not à trois) - there is arguably little need for, and little use of, nuance. They are paeans to physical love.Paul Verlaine didn¿t set out to be Petrarch in these two books of poetry. And neither Philomène, the tantalizing tart at least twenty years his junior, the "her" in Odes in Her Honor; nor Eugénie, his practical and good-hearted if not somewhat ugly and thick-necked bed partner, the "her" in Songs for Her, - neither of them, those two muses, are like Laura.

She Who Weeps (Our Lady of La Salette) by Léon Bloy (Celle qui pleure, in French) was originally published in 1908. This is an English translation of a work that is arguably a keystone of religious thought in Bloy¿s canon, given the author¿s strong belief in, and promotion of, not only Mariology but also Millenarianism, both which beliefs permeate his work. Originally begun in 1879, before his articles written as a scatalogical demolitionary pamphleteer for the Chat Noir journal, before his ground-breaking first novel, The Desperate Man, which was, by the author¿s own admission, the beginning of the "conspiration of silence" against him - She Who Weeps was surprisingly abandoned at first. It was only later when Pierre Termier, a lay "ambassador of Mary," and close friend of the author in his later years, approached Bloy about the work, that the latter, encouraged, and with rekindled interest, picked it up again and brought it to completion.It discusses the story of Mélanie Calvat, and also Maximin Giraud, two children-shepherds in the French Alps, witnesses to the Apparition of the Very Holy Virgin Mary on September 19, 1846, - twelve years before the more famous Marian Apparition at Lourdes - and the consequences that the event had on the lives of the two children - particularly Mélanie, who devoted her life to promoting the message."Pass it on to all my My People, the Mother of God had said to the Shepherds, having announced to them the Great News..."

Poems Saturnian by French poet Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) is the first book of poetry that the "Prince of Poets" wrote. This is the book that launched his career. First published in 1866 under the title of Poèmes Saturniens, the influences are clearly Romantic and Parnassian: Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle principally, but also Théophile Gautier, Catulle Mendès, Théodore Banville, and Albert Glatigny even.The poetry speaks for itself.Memory, memory, what do you want from me?In the fall, thrushes fluttered through the atonal air,And the sun was shooting a monotonous arrowThrough the yellowing woods where the bise blared.We were alone, and we were walking while dreaming,Our hair and our thoughts to the wind, she and I.When, turning her face to me, she said, suddenly,"What was your finest day?" in a voice golden and lively.Her sweet and sonorous voice, with its angelic timber.A discreet smile of mine gave her the answer, andDevotedly, I kissed her pale white hand.- Ah! the first flowers, how sweetly scented they are!And what a charming sound the first "yes" makesWhen it exits the lips and mouth of the beloved!

Rhymes of Joy (Rimes de joie in French) was Belgian poet Théodore Hannon's second book of poetry. Originally published in 1881, the book has the distinction of containing a preface written by J.-K. Huysmans who, three years later, in his ground-breaking decadent novel, À Rebours, said this about Hannon¿s poetry:Its charming corruption corresponded fatally with the inclinations of Des Esseintes, who, on foggy days, on rainy days, locked himself up in the imagined hideaway of that poet and his eyes got intoxicated on the shimmering of his fabrics, on the incandescences of his stones, on his sumptuosities...As a painter, artist, scenarist, theatrical-parodist, and poet, Théodore Hannon (AD 1851-1916) was influential in the Belgian modernist artistic circles of his day. He helped found the influential progressive Belgian society La Chrysalide in 1875. And as the editor in chief of l'Artiste, a weekly literary review based in Brussels, he helped promote the then-fledgling French Naturalist movement. His good friend Félicien Rops contributed four illustrations and the frontispiece to the original publication of Rhymes of Joy.

Ten Years a Bohemian (Dix ans de bohème in French), first published in 1888, is the autobiographical account of a young man, Émile Goudeau, who moves to Paris from the French countryside in the mid- to late-1870s, with high ambitions of becoming a poet. Would that it were so easy! Whimsical and endearing, it tells the story of the Bohemian life of not just one young man, but countless other struggling artists in the Belle Epoque period of Paris, many of which artists are now famous (and more not) - a whös who of sculptors, painters, musicians, performers, poets, writers, and comedians, you name it - living, struggling, drinking, laughing, - somehow managing to survive, with stiff upper lips and on shoe-string budgets - in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre.Émile Goudeau, a recognized poet, is best known today as the founder the Hydropaths Club, a wildly-successful literary club in Paris from 1878-1880, and subsequently as the influential editor-in-chief of the Chat Noir journal, eponymous mouthpiece and vehicle for the world-famous cabaret, which he helped found with Rodolphe Salis. Rodolphe Salis, the "gentleman cabaret owner," often gets the credit for the idea of the Chat Noir journal and cabaret - but after one reads this story, one will quickly realize that the true genius behind both of them is probably... Émile Goudeau, poet, editor, journalist, novelist, and finally... shepherd, in Asnières.

A Silver-Grey Death (¿¿¿¿¿ in Chinese) and Drowning (¿¿), both by Yu Dafu (¿¿¿), are short stories written and published in 1920 and 1921 respectively. Both tell the story of a young man, a Chinese national, living and studying in Japan in the early 20th century. Both are based (in part) on experiences in the author¿s life.Yu Dafu is perhaps unique, among Chinese writers of the period, as an author of decadence - in the literary sense, and in ways that should interest (if not please) Western readers. In both stories are themes of loneliness, desire (for the opposite sex), frustration, heavy drinking, and (in at least one of the stories, if not both): death. Both are succinct in their descriptions and both are beautifully written, sometimes hauntingly so. The narratives move at a clip.Drowning is hands-down Yu Dafüs best-known work (in the West and in the East). It is the story of a young Chinese national who leaves his motherland, China, to study abroad in Japan. A loner by temperament, he soon finds himself "feeling pitifully lonely..." A self-styled poet, he recurs to nature, taking long walks in the countryside outside Nagoya. But dwelling frequently in nature and reading books all alone only go so far for a young man who regularly practices onanism in his room, immediately regrets it, fantasizes about his landlord¿s daughter, and is sexually attracted to just about every girl he meets. It is only a matter of time before he finds himself in a Japanese "tavern" where a young Geisha girl with bad breath serves him too much sake. You can imagine the rest, or you can read the story.

Sylvie and The Chimeras are two of French author Gérard de Nerval (AD 1808-1855)¿s best-known works.Sylvie, a novella, is by all accounts his masterpiece; it was first published in July 1853 in the Revue des Deux-Mondes, a periodical. It is a Romantic tale of the love of a young man from Paris for two women, one a childhood sweetheart from Valois, and the other a stage actress in Paris. It is a tale of longing, misgiving, and nostalgia for the past, with the dreamy landscape of Valois as the backdrop. Immediately before having written the novella, Nerval had suffered several bouts of mental illness. After its publication, he was again seized, but more seriously this time, rushed off to the nearest hospital, and put into a straitjacket. In 1854, Sylvie was published in book format, in the collection entitled Les Filles du Feu.The Chimeras is a collection of poems, all in sonnet format. They were written over the course of several years, from as early as 1843 and as late as 1854, a year before the author passed away. Of them "El Desdichado" and "Christ in the Garden of Olives" (itself a collection of five sonnets) are the most famous. Although some of the poems were published in magazines previously, the entirety of them were published as part of Les Filles du Feu.In the appendix is a short excerpt from the biography by Henri Strentz, published in 1911, which includes a discussion of the events leading up to Nerval¿s mental illnesses, his writing of Sylvie, and the squalid details surrounding his death by hanging by his own hand.

The Ride of Yeldis & Other Poems by Francis Vielé-Griffin (AD 1864-1937) was originally published in 1893 in France (under the title of Le chevauchée d¿Yeldis et autres poèmes). This is the first English-language edition of the work, by the pre-eminent French Symbolist poet, whose dreamy style recollects Rimbaud, and also, strangely, Wallace Stevens. Griffin was born in the U.S., but emigrated with his mother to France at the age of seven or eight, not long after the Civil War ended.The poetry speaks for itself:The turrets that covered Her with their shadowRose like organ pipes against the sky,Those evenings in June, with countless voices;And, really, all the musicThat vibrated on the terraces rich in honey,Throughout that slow, sun-drenched June,Was like one long canticle,Of many voices, filled with wonder...* * *In an odor of tossed hay,In a murmur of the rustic ford,Through the diaphanous shade,Come: oblique shadow,The hay smells of love,The water¿s song is tender, silent, graveLike a distant canticle- The year has made its round.

The Desperate Man (first published in 1887) is arguably the French decadent novel par excellence of the 19th century. It is also Léon Bloy¿s first novel and a seminal work which, as such, planted the seeds of just about every other important theme or topic that the author would later develop in subsequent works throughout his life and career. Life is rain water for talented writers; and habitual poverty for Bloy acted as the mulch.There is in The Desperate Man the seed of satire, which was actually a small tree by the time The Desperate Man came out, the seed having been sprouted earlier in his career, in the articles for newspapers, predominantly the Chat Noir journal, - such satire as to rival Jonathan Swift¿s; there is also the seed of apocalyptic Catholicism in The Desperate Man, and the nuts of the exegeses of commonplaces, not to mention the germs of the blood of the poor; there is the kernel of the constant attack on contemporaneous clergy and Bloy¿s self-professed fondness for cenobitism. There is the spore of the eulogy for sainthood, and the embryo of the denunciation of the proxenetism of the press, Parisian high-society and the bourgeoisie. There are the negative grains of anti-Republicanism, and anti-German sentiment. There are the positive grains of pro-conservativism, pro-Medievalism, pro-Monarchy, and pro-Merovingian French Dynasty.

Meditations of a Solitary in 1916 was written by Léon Bloy in 1916 in France, during World War I, and published in 1917, the same year that the author passed away. The themes are mostly theological, with sustained meditations on both the Christian soul and the lack of soul of Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany. Indeed, although biographical in nature, one might consider this less a follow up to On the Threshold of the Apocalypse in the Ungrateful Beggar series and more a companion piece to The Soul of Napoleon, but in a Bizarro sort of way, with a candidate alternative title of The Bizarro Soul of Wilhelm II, or Wilhelm II¿s Lack of Soul, - such was the rage, frustration, contempt, sadness, heart-rending compassion of the author at the time of writing."How to accuse Wilhelm alone? That fellow at best is nothing more than an imbecile, as frightening an imbecile as you like, but an imbecile all the same...""¿So,¿ someone asks me, ¿what remains?¿ Absolutely nothing but the Eucharist in the Catacombs and waiting for the unknown Liberator whom the Paraclete must dispatch, when the blood of countless torture victims and the tears of some elect will have sufficiently purified the earth... God is preparing to start over again... the fulfillment of that apocalyptic prophecy is near."

Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne: 1900-1904 by Léon Bloy (originally Quatre ans de Captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne) is the third diary in the Ungrateful Beggar series.The autobiography, edited for publication, covers four years in the artist¿s life after he and his family moved back to France from Denmark, to Lagny on the Marne, about 40 kilometers outside Paris. It runs the gamut from gut-wrenching grief and sorrow, as the family lives on the edge of utter poverty while constantly being harassed by creditors and landladies; to full outrage against the pettiness, avarice, and hypocrisy of the bourgeois and wealthy; to uplifting praise for God for all that is adorable in life in spite of the suffering; to out-and-out satire and comicalness that will make the reader laugh before he can dry the tears."Terrible day! The lack of wine and fortifying alimentation, the threat of a lack of coal, the human certitude of being unable to feed our children tomorrow, the impossibility of continuing to live here and the impossibility of escaping, the apparent abandonment of everyone and the evident hostility of so many people; finally, and above all, that infinitely dolorous expectation of a liberator who never comes; all that together puts us two steps away from despair. While we stiffen our wills, our house is shaken by a tempest and the sky is sad like death without God. For whom then do we suffer thus?"

Dark Minerva by Giovanni Pascoli was first published in 1898. (The original title in Italian is Minerva Oscura.) It is an impassioned, often poetic, but also scholarly and critical investigation into Dante Alighieri¿s Divine Comedy. As Pascoli says in the Prolegomena, "To know and to describe Dante¿s thought, will it ever be possible? He eclipses in the profundity of his thought: he intentionally eclipses. I have already set my heart on following him in one of those disappearances in which, after having said ¿Look,¿ he immediately leaves us in the dark. This time I said to myself, if I see, I will always see; if I understand him in this place, I will understand him everywhere else."Giovanni Pascoli (AD 1855-1912) was a poet and Italian classical scholar, fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian and also English. He was a student of Giosuè Carducci, the Italian classicist poet and Nobel prize winner.

What is Fascism is a collection of essays, newspaper articles and interviews, discourses and polemics on the subject of fascism by Giovanni Gentile (AD 1875-1944), the "philosopher of Fascism." The collection was written (or spoken and later transcribed) over the course of several years prior to its publication in book format, in 1925, under the Italian title of Che cosa è il fascismo.Trained as a philosopher, Giovanni Gentile spent many years as an academic, writing books and teaching. He held multiple posts as professor of philosophy, at various Italian universities including the University of Rome. Later, he served as the Minister of Public Education during the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. His major contribution to the history of philosophy includes his own brand of absolute idealism, or new-Hegelianism, known as "actual idealism."Readers new to Gentile, or to fascism in general, may be surprised, if not shocked, depending on their political leanings, to understand how close fascism is or was to the liberalism of the 19th century. "Seeing that, in part, fascism is liberalism: at least the liberalism of men who sincerely believed in freedom, and had however an austere concept of it... liberalism, as I understand it and as the men of the glorious Right of the Risorgimento understood it, the liberalism of freedom in the laws and consequently in the strong State and in the State conceived of as an ethical reality."

The Words of a Demolitions Contractor (originally Propos d'un Entrepreneur de Démolitions), published in 1884, is a collection of articles written by French author Léon Bloy, previously published in the columns of various Parisian journals between the years 1882 and 1884 - the Chat Noir journal principally, but also the Gils Blas, the Figaro, the Nouvelle Revue, and Le Petit Caporal. Selected by the author himself, they represent Léon Bloy at his earliest and fiery best as a thunderous, irascible, intransigent Catholic pamphleteer and polemicist. These are the articles that earned him his reputation, and these are the articles that essentially torpedoed his career. So maligned and hated was he from the start, that his reputation as an author still suffers. But as the dust settles after nearly 150 years, in retrospect, Léon Bloy stands out as a beacon of righteousness, a Parisian Diogenes, shedding the light of his genius and rancor on the ills plaguing Paris and France at the time - during the Belle Epoque and the years leading up to the two world wars.It is hard to discover a writer of such intensity, love and disgust, pathos, anger, and parody - in any language, at any period of time, in the history of Western literature. Imagine the gloom and despair of Dostoevsky, mixed with the prophesy and thunder of an Old Testament prophet, throw in the biting wit of Jonathan Swift - shake it up and let it sit for a minute - and there you have him: Léon Bloy.

Fanchette's Pretty Little Foot (originally Le Pied de Fanchette in French), a novel by Restif de la Bretonne, was first published in 1769. The story is a cross between the fairytale Cinderella, from 1697, and Samuel Richardson's moral story (actually libertine novel) Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, from 1740. Now, Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper was originally a folktale dating back at least 2000 years ago to a similar tale from Greece or Egypt, but it was made famous in the modern era (at least for Western audiences) with the 17th-century publication of French writer Charles Perrault's version of the tale, and more recently still by the 20th-century release of Walt Disney's animated movie. ¿But one does not have to be a scholar of French fairytales, Hollywood movies, or 18th-century English libertine novels to appreciate this simple, but delightful tale about a young and virtuous bourgeois girl, the daughter of a wealthy fabric merchant, whose parents die while she's still a teenager, leaving her to fate's fortune in then-naughty Paris. She is pretty as a belle [sic] and even more virtuous, but it is her prettier little foot in especial that gets her into all kinds of trouble. Who would have thought that a girl's foot, embellished by a rich slipper, could be so attractive and seductive? Leave it to the French to capitalize on that. Or leave it to Restif de la Bretonne in this charming story, which is really a comedy, to bring it front and center. Interestingly, this novel was the first to give a name to a sensual preference called shoe fetishism, or "retifism" in French (after the author's name).