Christa Giles

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extinction, and by definition desire can only exist by
remaining unfulfilled – a typically decadent paradox.
Symons captures this quality in Beardsley’s work:
His world is a world of phantoms in which
the desire of the perfecting of mortal
sensations, a desire of infinity, has overpassed
mortal limits, and poised them, so faint, so
quivering, so passionate for flight, in a
hopeless and strenuous immobility . . . It is
the soul in them that sins, sorrowfully
without reluctance, inevitably. Their bodies
are faint and eager with wantonness; they
desire more pleasure than there is in the
world, fiercer and more exquisite pains, a
more intolerable suspense. 562
Des Esseintes, viewing the painting of Salomé, responds in
a manner which in some ways recalls Symons’ description
of Beardsley’s work. He is ˝haunted by the symbols of
superhuman passions and superhuman perversities, of
divine debauches perpetrated without enthusiasm and
without hope.˝ 563 Wilde had Beardsley make a set of
illustrations for the play; in them, the French influence was
evident. In the illustration of ˝The Toilette of Salomé˝ such
volumes as those of De Sade and Baudelaire are
surreptitiously inserted into the piece. Beardsley had read