Christa Giles

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rebours Huysmans describes Moreau’s painting of Salome
with particular reference to the jewels which adorn her:
her breasts rise and fall, the nipples
hardening at the touch of her whirling
necklaces; the strings of diamonds glitter
against her moist flesh; her bracelets, her
belts, her rings all spit out fiery sparks; and
across her triumphal robe, sewn with pearls,
patterned with silver, spangled with gold, the
jewelled cuirass, of which every chain is a
precious stone, seems to be ablaze with little
snakes of fire, swarming over the mat flesh,
over the tea-rose skin, like gorgeous insects
with dazzling shards, mottled with carmine,
spotted with pale yellow, speckled with steel
blue, striped with peacock green. 313
Redon found that Moreau’s paintings were filled with
˝entirely too much jewelry,˝ and concluded that Moreau
produced the works of an elegant bachelor
strictly sealed up against the shocks of life; his
work is the fruit of it, it is art and nothing but
art and that is saying a good deal. 314
In the same vein, Pater’s flame is ˝gem-like,˝ for the
moment is experienced in all its flame-like intensity, but is
transmuted in the mind into art, which is ˝gem-like,˝ that is
to say eternal. It was his means of expressing the concept of