Christa Giles

224
be quiet at all until she had had a mouthful of
the Chevalier. Claude, seizing his chance,
dived under the table and came up the other
side just under the queen’s couch, and before
she could say ˝One!˝ he was taking his coffee
˝aux deux colonnes,˝ Clair was furious at his
friend’s success, and sulked for the rest of the
evening. 564
Perversity becomes a form of cerebral aestheticism, a
means of deploying the intellect within a circumscribed
world of fantasy. The crux of this interest in pornography
was based on the fascination with the idea of sin. The
interest was therefore cerebral, a product of the
imagination, and in the decadent view constituted a
superior vision. Beardsley’s visions, by his own admission,
occurred exclusively on paper, and Huysmans maintained
that those artists who are truly obscene are always chaste:
…l’artiste qui traite violemment des sujets
charnels, est, pour une raison ou pour une
autre, un homme chaste. 565
Huysmans begins his essay on Rops, the Belgian
pornographer, with this idea. Rops’ prints become
associated with Decadence primarily because of their
subject matter. His prints focussed on the diabolic or erotic,