My Fantoms (New York Review Books Classics)

Théophile Gautier is a dominant figure in nineteenth-century French literature and a complex and alluring one. No one so epitomized the “Bohemian artist” as this friend of Victor Hugo and Baudelaire who is credited with coining the slogan “Art for Art’s Sake.” At the same time, Gautier was one of the first French professional men of letters, a masterful journalist as well as an inspired proponent of the short story.

Seven samples of Gautier’s genius–all exploring themes of love and death–have been brought together in My Fantoms, a book that brilliantly illuminates the subtlety and range of his singular imagination. Compiled and translated by Richard Holmes, whose investigations into the Shelley, Coleridge, and Dr. Johnson have established him as the modern master of the art of biography, My Fantoms is not so much a collection of stories as a unified work spanning the whole of Gautier’s career and revealing his subtle and many faceted sensibility. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through the beautiful lament for the mad genius Gérard de Nerval that Gautier offers in “The Poet,” these are tales that celebrate the senses and investigate the spirit with style and wit. “What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial . . .”

Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life, young men dream their way into ruin, and through it all Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”