Christa Giles

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frowned and looked very severe, for he did
not approve of children dreaming. 358
Moreau’s popularity among decadent artists was in
part due to his evocation of dream worlds. Occasionally,
this took an obvious form. In Moreau’s ˝The Dream of an
Inhabitant of Mongolia,˝ an old man lies sleeping on a
couch. From open windows Constantinople can be seen in
the distance. Two large floating bubbles contain the old
man’s dreams. The entire composition is done in light
shades with almost transparent watercolours. Of course,
Moreau was greatly influenced by Flaubert’s La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine, and in this novel, infused with an aura of
exoticism, the saint’s visions and hallucinations are
prompted by his own subconscious fears and desires,
encompassing the fantastical and hallucinatory. Indeed
many of the themes of La Tentation de Saint-Antoine recur in
decadent fiction: exoticism, Sphinxes and Chimeras,
yearning, the juxtapositon of paganism and Christianity.
The Byzantine Empire particularly held a great fascination
at the fin de siècle as it was associated with complex
symbolism and language–a kind of modern sophistication.
Therefore Des Esseintes sought in a novel not only the
quality of strangeness but also