Christa Giles

200
In Flaubert’s case, there was a series of vast,
imposing scenes, grandiose pageantries of
barbaric splendour in which there
participated creatures delicate and sensitive,
mysterious and proud, women cursed, in all
the perfection of their beauty, with suffering
souls, in the depths of which he discerned
atrocious delusions, insane aspirations, born
of the disgust they already felt for the
dreadful mediocrity of the pleasures awaiting
them.
The personality of the great writer was
revealed in all its splendour in those
incomparable pages of La Tentation de Saint-
Antoine and Salammbô in which, leaving our
petty modern civilization far behind, he
conjured up the Asiatic glories of distant
epochs, their mystic ardours and doldrums,
the aberrations resulting from their idleness,
the brutalities arising from their boredom… 520
Another element which Flaubert and Moreau held in
common was the elaborate use of detail in such a way that
the detail was invested with an independent life of its own.
This resulted in works which were exceedingly concerned
with their own surface and therefore highly decorative and
self-referential. Huysmans himself notes how the paintings
haunt the memory, resolving themselves into detail: